Tag Archives: Morgenstraße

Deuxpiece, an art space in Basel, invited us to do a project, and we arrived on the 2nd of June with a “five in a row” programme ready – a format we had already tried out in Karlsruhe three times before. For Basel, we brought a mix of very different genres and exhibition types, from performance to classical white cube. The evening started with a joint exhibition by Rodrigo Hernandez and Maika Hassanbeik – two takes on formal reduction. Then, Alexander Basile arrived, via bike from Cologne (or not), and presented the audience with a presentation of his trip (or not) – “photography is at best a well-meant illusion”. Third in the row was Brad Alexander with an exhibition including several sound objects and himself, sitting at a table and painting – or writing – slides for a projector in front of him. A quite exemplary white cube show followed with a sculpture and a drawing by Henry Staschik, and the show finally ended by turning the space into a black box (and into white again) for Matt Calderwood’s video “Strips (vertical)”.

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Our art space has still no home in May, but designers Special Machine have just recently initiated their co-working/social space The Commodore Room in Karlsruhe. They not only have a great lounge and bar, but also hadn’t yet moved in their gear, so we “gallerified” their workspace for an exhibition of Frederik Busch‘s project BUSINESSPLANTS. Frederik made a series of portraits of plants as we find – or rather ignore – them in offices; a neglect that both tells us much about our attitude towards our fellow creature, and can be read as a metaphor for life (and suffering) in the office – a de-objectification of the business plant.

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In June 2010, our first “five in a row” started with a show by Julian Fickler; now, a year later, Julian is back with new works. While last year’s paintings were expressive, gaudy pieces in oil, Julian’s new works are muted, seemingly introspective, produced with watercolour on cloth, with the shapes of supplemental stretcher bars subtly poking through the cloth from behind. What they share is Julian’s commitment to the painterly experiment, to the expressive or constructive treatment of the panel.

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About one year after the first one, we held a third five in a row at the Kunstraum: Morgenstraße. The evening opened with a performance by Felix Grünschloß, who had invited five Zen students to hold a meditation session in the Kunstraum. With their faces towards the gallery wall, the Buddhists were on one hand subjected to the gaze of the visitors, and on the other hand somehow protected from the “spectacle” of the art show opening on which they had turned their back on. For the next show under the title “you are invited”, we asked three artists from the Art Academy to not only show a work of their own, but to also invite one more artist each – the resulting “group show” covered all possible genres from painting to a very ephemeral site-specific performance/installation. At nine, we had a introspective installation and drawings by Sebastian Winkler, which was followed by a show of five photographs by Frederik Busch – portraits of bouncers, larger than life and uncannily corresponding with the evening’s first event. The final show was a performance and installation by Nele Gräber & Julia Sinner, which in the end dissolved into a quite nutritious social sculpture.

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The corresponding exhibition to “Touching the Void” opened one day later in Mannheim – here, we showed works by eight artists which in one way or the other dealt with the image as a space, and the transfers and transgressions between dimensions. Gregor Gleiwitz‘ and Enrico Bach’s oil paintings  created space within – or beyond? – the canvas; Markus Zimmermann‘s objects where takes on both the minimalist tradition and a negative construction of space, while Chul-Hyun Ahn merges minimal aesthetics with the illusionist approach of op-art. Matt Calderwood and Annabel Lange take on the white cube itself with poetic and humorous twists, and Joe Merrell presents us with the city as a graphic, while simultaneously supercharging both the temporal and three-dimensional experience of a nightly promenade. Finally, the piece by Andreas Lorenschat shows us that the creation of an imaginary space cannot solely rely on objects, but also on words, and memories.

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For 2010/11, the Kunstbüro Baden-Württemberg (a state foundation for the arts) has set up an interesting exchange programme for regional art spaces – over a dozen artist initiatives and independent exhibition spaces have been invited to choose a partner and produce a show in their space – with friendly support from the Kunstbüro. While the Kunstraum: Morgenstraße was visited by the great people from CoCAO in March, our partner was zeitraumexit in Mannheim, were we realized a exhibition on the spatiality of images. The show in Mannheim had a counterpart in Karlsruhe, where we juxtaposed works by Enrico Bach and Dennis Feddersen; Enrico’s paintings, which evoke a both painterly and illusionist spatiality within the boundaries of the canvas, stand in contrast to the installation by Dennis – a three-dimensional snapshot of matter breaking and expanding, which, with its black shapes and lines, might just as well be a spatial rendition of weird scientific diagram.

We invited LESSSER feat. Maika Hassan-Beik to produce an installation for the Kunstraum: Morgenstraße in February. LESSSER’s works are highly self-referential, creating an entire universe of biographies and authors and authors’ biographies. Yet, the atmosphere provided by the installation itself and the artists’ performances is enough to draw you into this universe; the opening evening was a very unique experience, with everyone talking in hushed tones as if they were suddenly trapped in a stranger’s room.

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Gregor Gleiwitz‘ exhibition in the Kunstraum is a first for us, as we have up till now never used architectonic elements so prominently. His idea was to create situations in which only one of his paintings can be focussed on; the only possibility to compare the individual paintings or to put them in a specific order – or narrative – is to recreate them from memory. This, of course, made the exhibition also quite hard to photograph. But this is good, as Gregor’s paintings should be seen in original, and not via installation shots. Our friend Roland Meyer wrote a fine introduction (“Vom Werden der Bilder”) as to why.

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Daniel Kiss and Sebastian Tröger from Nürnburg turned the Kunstraum: Morgenstraße into a paraphrase of an exhibition with their installation “Déformation Professionnelle”, the objects being less exhibition pieces than pieces of an exhibition. I wrote an introduction for the opening.

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Another five in a row after the summer break at Kunstraum: Morgenstraße. Again, we had a very heterogeneous programme, starting with a video by Nina Olczak (you can view the entire video here, although it is of course meant to be screened life-size). Then, we had paintings and a cut-out by Maria Kropfitsch, a media installation by Tobias Wyrzykowski, and two performance pieces: An action by a seminar on “Traps” from the HfG, which cleverly left everyone thinking that the art is elsewhere, and they, by chance, have lost the opportunity to see it; and an coal piece by Michael Schmitt, which transformed the art space into a 30m² installation.

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