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DEUTSCHE PRESSEMITTEILUNG HIER HERUNTERLADEN
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MISSING LINK
10 March – 28 April 2013
Vernissage: 10 March 19:00 – 22:00
Osvaldo Budet, Mariana Hahn, Hannu Karjalainen, Shonah Trescott
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch and Cassandra Bird
MISSING LINK is an exhibition showcasing new work by 4 international artists in the MOMENTUM Collection. Coming from Australia, Puerto Rico, Germany, and Finland, the link between the 4 artists in this exhibition is the Nordic landscape. MISSING LINK is an exhibition of artist’s expeditions, both to and from the far north: an exploration of the environmental impact of human hubris.
Traveling to Norway and the Arctic, the white stage few of us are privileged to see, MISSING LINK shares stories woven in ice, testaments of a very real, very new and ever changing environment. The scenic vistas and harsh realities the artists find there tell of a brave new world and remind us all of the heavy human ties we all hold with this fragile and irreplaceable part of the world. And traveling from Finland to Shanghai, the artist unearths a story of architectonic memories in the urban landscape. On the site of China’s historical revision, urban upheaval, and the endless drive to modernity, the artist records a vista reminiscent of the colours and rhythms of the Nordic landscape.
MISSING LINK
MISSING LINK is the void in our knowledge which needs to be filled.
MISSING LINK is action.
MISSING LINK is inaction of the world general political systems to communicate vital information about how to deal with a world in the throes of climate crisis,
MISSING LINK is the space where we can make a shift; to engage creativity to address the causes of climate change and our technocratic society’s addiction to fossil fuels.
MISSING LINK is the place where we can inspire one to think differently about the natural system and world we inhabit.
MISSING LINK is a space in MOMENTUM where we can all take part in an imaginative, insightful and meaningful dialogue to conjure new and resilient futures.
MISSING LINK is a story woven in ice far in the North that is shrouded in secrecy and corruption
MISSING LINK is a group of people dealing with a cultural response to our surroundings
MISSING LINK is the silence of the break in a chain of climatic events which effect us all
MISSING LINK is the term for the necessary condition the artist has to find themselves in, in order to be able to investigate. It is a proposition to the artist. If nothing would be missing, one wouldn’t have to make art.
Born in 1978 in Puerto Rico, Osvaldo Budet graduated with a Bachelors in Painting from Escuela de Arts Plasticas, then earning a Masters of Fine Arts in the US. Coming from a colony (Puerto Rico) in Post-Colonial times has given Osvaldo a unique perspective on the relationship between authorities and the powerless. This new body of work explores what happens when Colonization is used to impose control on the resources and land which belong to nobody or everybody. Osvaldo sees his role as art maker as a colonizing force, and coupled with his fascination for political conflict, this drives his documentary film practice. It is the desire to create and inhabit ‘truthful’ storytelling which compels him most. These worlds of politics and poetics, of fiction and truth are tightly intertwined. During Osvaldo’s recent artist in residence high in the Arctic circle on the Archipelago of Svalbard with the the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, he began to explore the notion of the expedition as an interrogation of the scientific, social and economic realities which lead to climate disruption as nations simultaneously explore and exploit this landscape. Osvaldo’s recent film, paintings and photographs examine this landscape of tundra and ice, a place which belongs to nobody, a land colonized by many and a fragile region which until now has been keeping this world in balance. Works shown courtesy of Walter OTero Contemporary Art (Puerto Rico).
Born in 1982, Australian artist Shohan Trescott graduated with a degree in painting from the National Art School in Sydney, subsequently moving to Leipzig and Berlin. Her work focuses on how humans create, interact with and impact the material and cultural landscapes we inhabit. She uses painting as a medium of communication of desires to explore the nature of the appearance of things and the capacities of vision between narrative and abstraction. Here Shonah questions beauty and terror; hope and disaster; serenity and unease; and what lies beneath. Her intention through painting is to highlight contradictions and connections, continuities and breaks. The tactile and rich quality of the surfaces she creates are often a contradictory experience to the harsh reality of the stories she seeks to evoke. In 2012 Shonah was invited by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Researchas as Artist in residence to the high Arctic where she lived and worked with the scientific community at the German/ French AWIPEV Koldeway Station, Ny-Alesund, Svalbard. Probing the meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory, here in the most northerly settlement of the world she observed the ecological and human impact caused by anthropogenic environmental negligence and climate disruption. Works shown courtesy of Eigen + Art (Berlin/Leipzig).
Born in Helsinki in 1978, Hannu Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School with a Masters in Photography. He has works in many museums and private collections. Nanjing Grand Theatre (2012) explores the memory inherited in an architectonic site. The Nanjing Grand Theatre, a western classical style building designed by Chinese architects originally housed western cinema in the 1930s Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution the building was dedicated to Beijing Opera and temporarily called Revolution Concert Hall. Now renamed Shanghai Concert Hall, the building is a prime location for classical music concerts. A decade ago, this building was moved 70 meters from its original location. The video work is shot on the original site of the concert hall, where an elevated highway now passes through the city. Passing lights and shadows take human forms as we hear snippets from the soundtrack of the very first film screened in Nanjing Grand Theatre, Broadway (1929). The film adaptation of the musical is now deemed lost in its original form, with only an edited version made from separate silent and talkie versions existing. Work shown courtesy of Gallery Taik (Berlin / Helsinki).
Mariana Hahn was born in the mid 1980s in Schwaebisch Hall in the south of Germany. She did Theatre Studies at ETI in Berlin, and has a degree in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in London. The work “burn my love, burn” (2013) is a series of stills, artifacts, and a video artwork created from the footage collected during a live performance enacted outside of Oslo. Inscribing text upon a shroud which burns on the frozen ice, the artist consumes and covers herself with the ashes of her words. “burn my love, burn” positions the body as the carrier of historical signature. The body does so by will: it inscribes, devours the story, becoming a container that vibrates and lives within a narrative. The shroud becomes the elementary signifier of such a historical narrative; it has been impregnated by the story, acting as the monument, the burning of which can become part of an organic form in motion. The ritual becomes the form through which this transformation can be made, the body eats the body, destroys and paints again, another image. Again this is done by the word, it creates the flesh, gives it differentiating coloration, its plausible point of view. The body acts as a paper, it is inscribed by those murmurs of history, becoming a living artifact of its own history.
Artist Dossiers designed by Laura Beltran
