Fall/winter exhibition program 2023/24

Kestner Gesellschaft is thrilled to present its fall/winter exhibition program, drafted in four acts:
Act of Seeing: Rebecca Ackroyd, Period Drama
Act of Listening: Samson Young, situated listening
Act of Loving: Tracey Emin, It’s Different When You Are In Love
Act of Thinking: The World of Dew And Within Each Dewdrop A Wold of Struggle

Rebecca Ackroyd: Period Drama
Rebecca Ackroyd’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, Period Drama, reveals dream-like landscapes somewhere between the corporeal and the ethereal, the tactile and the intangible. Rooted in both apocalyptic fantasies and a sense of reality, Ackroyd’s new works delve into subtle examinations of human bodies, memory of the subconscious, and dimensions of sexuality in space. In her nuanced exploration of the feminine and spirituality, she intertwines elements of boldness with vulnerability and seduction with repulsion, piecing together an ongoing narrative that explores identity, mental symbols, and patterns.

In Period Drama, the artist presents alongside her monumental turbine paintings and gouaches of dreaming eyes, cast sculptures of body parts, replicas of her own body, and everyday objects. Through a thematic spectrum that spans from the realistic to the surreal and from the corporeal to the ghostly, Ackroyd creates works that challenge foundational aspects of human experience—time, memory, femininity, and fertility—against the backdrop of spatial and architectural constructs.

Rebecca Ackroyd, born 1987 in Cheltenham, UK, lives and works between Berlin and London. She received her Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy of Arts, London and her BA from Byam Shaw School of Art, London.

Samson Young: situated listening
Samson Young’s aesthetically powerful and scientifically precise works, with historical and social references and conflicts, are situated at the intersection of philosophy, literature, performance, and the recent history of audiovisual convergence. Young composes multidisciplinary spaces that oscillate between sound and image.

His exhibition in the Kestner Gesellschaft consists of two multichannel sound and video installations and 3D-print sculptural works, investigating a phenomenon of the so-called “situated listening”. The Travellers and the Listeners, 2023, is a collage of six musical films, based upon the Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners (1912). Young not only thematises the figure of the traveller who knocks on the door with an urgency, but he also refers to the intangible, the unrequited and yet attentive, which stands behind the door. In Young’s work, the photographic negatives evoke ghosts and phantoms that conjure up the traces of the unconscious, the private and social repressed images. A spectral negative image, together with the act of listening, creates a double non-being: a hidden silence. The sound and video installation Variations of 96 Chords in Space (feat. William Lane), 2023, presents a colour-sound-action scheme consisting of 96 colours. Each color is transformed into a chord. Software reassembles the recordings of these actions in endless combinations, largely systematic, partly arbitrary, according to the logic of analog and complementary colours. The scheme underlying the work is logical in method and transparent in mechanics. For the viewer, however, it may seem like a belief system implemented in a ritual.

Samson Young, born in Hong Kong in 1979, works with sound, performance, video and installation. He studied music, philosophy and gender studies and received his Ph.D. in music composition from Princeton University, NY in 2007. In 2017 he represented Hong Kong in the Hong Kong Pavilion of the 57th International Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Hong Kong.

Facade
Tracey Emin: It’s Different When You Are in Love
It’s Different When You Are in Love (2016) is a fine example of Emin’s iconic neon works that incorporate the artist’s own personal handwriting, reminiscent of private notes or scribbles in the margins of a sketchbook. When translated into a luminous industrial symbol, the poetic message gains meaning and illuminates an individual yet universal critical voice. Direct, unfiltered and forceful, Tracey Emin’s work explores fundamental human experiences such as femininity, love, longing, loss and grief.

Born in London in 1963, Emin came to prominence in the 1990s as a member of the Young British Artists (YBA), a loose group of visual artists who first exhibited together in 1988. Over the years, she has participated in numerous international group and solo exhibitions at renowned institutions. In 2007, she represented Great Britain at the 52nd International Venice Biennale.

Project Space Shifting Present
A World of Dew And Within Every Dewdrop a World of Struggle

Kestner Gesellschaft presents a fine selection of traditional Japanese scroll paintings (the so called kakemonos) from the period of the last five centuries. The title of this exhibition appropriates one of the most beautiful haiku in the history of Japanese poetry, written by a distinguished master of this literary form, 18th century poet Kobayashi Issa. Joy, sadness and hardship as well as the empathy for the weak and powerless make Issa’s poetry universal and relevant today. In A World of Dew, Issa is contemplating the meaning of life, its ephemerality and impermanence, and the beauty of a surrounding nature.

The exhibition comprises over 40 Japanese scroll paintings with a focus on the seasons of the year and the most popular natural motifs - landscapes with flowers and animals, including birds and insects, emphasising both the transience and resilience, as well as the fragility of nature and its relationship towards humans. To intensify a dialogue between the past traditions and today, this exhibition includes sculptural works by Japanese artist Morio Nishimura (born 1960, Tokyo) and a cinematic work Sonata for Smoke, 2020 by Samson Young.

The art works belong to the collection of Dr. Christiane Hackerodt Art and Culture Foundation which, with its focus on Japanese art, aims at building up a bridge between the cultures of East and West.