Summer 2023 program

Opening performance
Paulina Ołowska: Slavic Goddesses and the Ushers
July 7, 2023

For the glamorous inauguration of the summer exhibition program, Kestner Gesellschaft is delighted to present the German premiere of Slavic Goddesses and the Ushers, an acclaimed performance-cum-tableau-vivant by Paulina Ołowska (1976, Gdansk, Poland). Ołowska’s enduring position of reinterpreting modernism – and especially modernist utopias, Russian Constructivism, and early 20th-century European Avantgarde – includes folkloric storytelling, witchcraft, medieval knowledge, fashion, applied arts, feminism, socialism and the exploration of a connective ability of nature. She is known for her paintings, sculptures, performances, and collages, most of which are inspired by remembrance and nostalgia.

Having often addressed questions of female alchemy and cultural convention in her work, and placing (mainly female) figures that have fallen into oblivion or function at the fringes of the world of art and culture in a contemporary context, Ołowska revisits in her performance the work of the visionary Polish artist Zofia Stryjeńska (1891, Kraków, Poland – 1976, Geneva, Switzerland). A leading light of the Polish cultural scene in the interwar period, later consigned to oblivion by the Communist regime, Zofia Stryjeńska created a multidisciplinary oeuvre (painting, graphic and stage design), influenced by her country’s rituals and folklore. In Ołowska’s performance, the narratives concerning the rituals around death/birth and winter/spring are conveyed via costume, movement, sound, and lighting. This is the artist’s powerful commemoration of the “great reverence for mysteries and gifts of nature.“

An original score was composed by American artist Sergei Tcherepnin.

The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor: El Lissitzky—Self-portrait as the Kestner Gesellschaft
July 8–October 1, 2023

With this exhibition, Kestner Gesellschaft traces the founding moments of its history and the avant-garde mission. Presented only seven years after the Kestner Gesellschaft’s establishment in 1916, the exhibition El Lissitzky in 1923 was the very first institutional solo show of the Constructivist artist, marking his groundbreaking position as the announcer of the new vocabulary which revolutionised the formal language of art and well as his role as a constructor of an institutional thinking, based upon the scientific and experiential perception and innovative approach to exhibition’s architecture, strategies of display and a total understanding of artistic creation.

The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor celebrates the centenary of this exhibition by paying a tribute to this significant fact in the Kestner Gesellschaft’s institutional history, a fact which planted a seed for a vast variety of experimental and progressive ideas, reflected in the future program and the institutional identity of the Kestner Gesellschaft. Moreover, it investigates the long-lasting legacy of that period, and its impact on the museum’s discourse, especially in regards to Dorner’ term of the “living museum“ and Lissitzky’s “imaginary spaces“ where the art experience was meant to become more personal, intense, and multidimensional, fitting the life of a new, modern man, inhabiting a constantly changing world, full of contrasts.

Conceived as an institutional self-portrait of a prophetic artist, this exhibition consist of the archival materials and historical positions, set up in a confrontation with the deconstructive and revisionist reading of the modernist paradigm by the contemporary artists. 

With Michelangelo Antonioni, Willi Baumeister, BEASTER, Johanna Billing, Martin Boyce, Max Burchartz, Heinrich Dunst, the next ENTERprise Architects, Fernanda Fragateiro, Assaf Gruber, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Lajos Kassák, Marlena Kudlicka, Marysia Lewandowska, El Lissitzky, Felipe Mujica, László Moholy-Nagy, Paulina Ołowska, László Peri, Prince Gholam, Florian Pumhösl, Susanne Sachsse, Wieland Schönfelder, Kurt Schwitters, Katja Strunz and Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin.

The exhibition architecture by Vienna-based the next ENTERprise Architects (Marie-Therese Harnoncourt-Fuchs and Ernst J. Fuchs).

Project Space Shifting Present
Ella Walker: Chorus
July 8–October 1, 2023

In her first institutional solo exhibition, Walker combines a variety of historical and cultural motifs and figures in painterly and thematically complex works that become stages for human interaction across time. She creates flat pigmented backgrounds and heavily textured foregrounds in which she adroitly blends allegories. Her works are dynamic, theatrical, and pointed, and weave historical images and themes with contemporary ones. Using chalk, pencil, ink, and tempera, Walker depicts female figures unlike in mediaeval iconography where they often appear as sacred and worshipped: the artist distorts and places them in various dialogues with other figures, fusing them with garments or showing them in contemptuous positions. Present in almost all of her works is a strong sense of intimacy. However, gestures of tenderness and communion appear next to the aggressive and violent gestures. Pain and beauty are close in many arts, such as the art of ballet, as well as in religious paintings. On the stages of Walker’s paintings, the characters become actors in timeless explorations of closeness, tenderness, love, community, exclusion, violence, and pain. 

Chorus, the title of the exhibition and the large central work, comes from the theatre of ancient Greece. Chorus refers to a group of  singers, dancers or performers, usually characterising the common people and their voice (vox populi). In a sense, the chorus also functioned as an abstraction of society making it the “ideal spectator“according to Schlegel.

Ella Walker (1993, Manchester, UK) earned her Bachelor in Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art in 2015. She  completed the Drawing Year Postgraduate Program at the Royal Drawing School in London (2018). Walker lives and works in London.

Facade
John Wood and Paul Harrison: something on the front of a building
July 8–October 1, 2023

We love the unspectacular, the mundane, the flatness of things. We love the thing that undoes itself even before that thing is done“, say the British artists John Wood and Paul Harrison who placed one or two things horizontally and vertically in the outdoor space in front of the Kestner Gesellschaft and developed a humorous tabula rasa of the everyday.

For the exhibition something on the front of a building, the new neon installation words on the front of a building was installed on the facade. Next to the Kestner Gesellschaft’s building, in the park of the old St. Nikolai Cemetery, the artists placed the green park signs 10 Signs for a Park (2022). The public sculptures are in direct dialogue with each other and show Wood and Harrison’s ongoing engagement with the overwhelming universe of things, time and boredom, the sober language of everyday life, as well as the tragedy of metaphysical existence, and at the same time question the identity of the site. John Wood (1969 Kowloon, Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (1966 Wolverhampton, UK) live and work in Bristol, UK. Both artists studied at Bath College of Higher Education and have been working together since 1993.

Café Tender Buttons
Marlena Kudlicka: one more than 1o
July 8, 2023–July 7, 2024

Marlena Kudlicka explores mathematical and linguistic structures in her work, focusing on the mechanics of spatial and semantic relationships between the communication, language, and space. Her carefully crafted, often rigorous sculptural and relief-like constructions of steel, glass, and enamel, reflect the thought processes behind patterns, systems, equations, and formulas. She is questioning to what degree “precision tolerance“is allowed in order to transform thoughts into physical form. On her journey  between precision and error, Kudlicka draws from the tradition of the historical Avantgarde, particularly Russian Constructivism, including Suprematist painting, as well as the utopian architecture of Constructivism, and the legacy of Constructivist film  experiments.

For the Kestner Gesellschaft, Kudlicka developed a massive though filigree looking, elegant wall sculpture: on a connecting line of 17 meters, three large circles in dark red, black, and pearl white are arranged at different distances from one another, accompanied by smaller characters like brackets, quotation marks, percentages, numbers, and letters such as an inverted 1, a capital A, and a lowercase t. The individual figures act more on a level of sensation, composed of resonances or musical points and counterpoints, like a dance choreography or musical composition. The “scientific predictability,” implied by their vocabulary, becomes a poetic dramaturgy of sculptural form.

Marlena Kudlicka (1973, Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Poland) received her Master of Arts in Painting and Drawing at the Faculty of  Painting, Graphic Arts and Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland, (1993-98). She lives and works in Berlin.