Sam Vernon: Alter-Reservoir / Jakob Spengemann, Akinori Tao: While We’re Gone

Sam Vernon: Alter-Reservoir
With her site-specific installations, Sam Vernon creates dynamic visual worlds. She explores questions of representation with regard to the issues of labour, gender and cultural diversity, turning a critical lens on institutional histories. The artist scans, prints and copies her own drawings and mixed media works on paper alongside found materials, which she assembles into large-format wall collages.

In her first solo exhibition in Germany, which is realised as a cooperation of the Kunsthaus Hamburg and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme, Sam Vernon explores the impending relocation of the Kunsthaus. She personally has already moved over 30 times and is quite familiar with the challenges involved. In her newly developed photomontages, the artist combines autobiographical experiences with historical material such as exhibition posters, filed artist portfolios, found objects and documents from the storage of the Kunsthaus Hamburg. She forms meaning and connection to place through the process of speculating over such forgotten ephemera as an attempt to illustrate archival history. Once a market hall for flowers, fruit and vegetables, the building in which the Kunsthaus Hamburg is located today was a place characterised by communal labour. Correspondingly, the new installation Alter-Reservoir focuses on the significance of working practices and the transmission of knowledge and history.

Curated by Anna Nowak (Kunsthaus Hamburg) and Melanie Roumiguière (DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme).
Supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme with funds from the Federal Foreign Office.

Jakob Spengemann, Akinori Tao: While We’re Gone
In their exhibition While We’re Gone, conceived especially for the Kunsthaus Hamburg, the artists Jakob Spengemann and Akinori Tao convert apparent voids into explicit statements. At first sight, it seems as if the exhibition space has been abandoned in the midst of being remodelled. It is only a moment later that sculptures, objets trouvés and sound arranged into subtle compositions draw attention to the peripheries of the space, to its flaws and shortcomings. In an atmospheric play with ambiguities, the exhibition hall serves as a link between the visible and the invisible as well as between production and presentation. The site itself remains a “work in progress”.

The project refers to the transience of the staged space and enquires into the temporal potential of architecture. It addresses the uncertain future and ongoing loss of useable space for many art and culture professionals in Hamburg. Thus, it also reflects on the current state of limbo of the Kunsthaus Hamburg, which was relocated from its original location to the former market hall in 1993. Long-pending renovation work on the building and the expansion of the neighbouring concert hall have necessitated another move in the near future.

Curated by Anna Nowak (Kunsthaus Hamburg).
Kindly supported by Claussen-Simon-Stiftung.