The 9-euro ticket made Germany-wide regional train travel popular in summer 2022. For many years, I have been traveling between Berlin and Munich mostly in this way: exclusively with regional trains, several changes and many stops on different routes through the eastern German states. From Hof, I usually take the Alex-Bahn to Munich.
Extensive photo and video material was created on these journeys, which was used in five self-published books by 2013: Wochenend-Ticket, Quer durchs Land Vol. 1 to 3 and Regio Reisen Berlin – Chemnitz. In addition to annotated photo series and graphic photo editing, research on the places passed and the events associated with them was included in the illustrated books.
This material and footage from later trips forms the basis for the video Reisefreiheit. The title refers to both the time of reunification and the restricted conditions during the pandemic. Places, names and signs are repeated on the respective routes specified by the train timetable. Traveling in this way is very time-consuming in two respects: it takes a long time and the time can be experienced intensively in confrontation with the visual sensations that emerge. Such tour de force trips through East German and Bavarian provinces offer revealing insights into the sometimes “blossoming” landscapes, the state of the railroad stations, industrial and commercial facilities and what can be called the backyards of Germany.
From an artistic point of view, there are a variety of themes and challenges, from photographing from and in moving trains to reflections, blurring, image cropping and their subsequent design as image sequences-and their subsequent design as image sequences. Repetition in variations emerges as a basic motif. Photographic momentary perceptions, perspective, temporal conditions, subjective perspectives constitute the travel-film sequence. What has already been photographed is very likely to be reactivated from visual memory and photographed again, but in a different way. In the video, the montage condenses and contrasts the documentary with painterly-graphic interpretation or alienation. The video was started in fall 2020 and can be seen as a whole or as a sequence of 33 short films.
PoDo – Performance Art Festival at studio im Hochhaus September 1 – 8, 2023
In performance art, practices can be grouped that do not quite fit into other genres. Therefore, each artist’s practice is unique and has its own goals and priorities. Moreover, performance art often involves risk-taking, both in terms of the artistic risks, both in terms of artistic choices and the physical demands of the performance requirements themselves. Risk and “care” can, at their best, lead to powerful and transformative experiences for both the actors and the audience. September 1-8, 2023, the “studio im Hochhaus” will once again showcase contemporary performance art developed by local and international artists for this event and location. We are particularly looking forward to the studio im Hochhaus, because it offers interesting and challenging framework conditions, especially in the interplay of indoor and outdoor space. There will be a close collaboration with Grüntaler9 in Wedding, the respective formats (workshops, discussion rounds, etc.) will be distributed between the two locations.
Artists: Lan Hung (Taiwan/Germany), Myriam Laplante (Canada/Italy), Sylvie Tourangeau (Canada), Boris Nieslony (Germany), Aleks Slota (Poland/Germany), Marta Bosowska (Poland), and others
Anja Ibsch, who is curating here again, is collaborating with Adri Disman this time. Both place particular importance to create spaces of exchange and encounter, which since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic are significantly less available. They are keen to encourage the willingness to take risks and to experiment on the part of the artists they invite.
Picture: Sebastian Pöllmann
Lines Fiction Auswahl, Länge / Length 53 Min. compiled by Bettina Munk
Our project brings together illustrators who see their drawings as equal to their animations. We show how both media inspire and complement each other.
The selection for this programme is limited to short animations: Much more and longer pieces can be viewed online at linesfiction.de, where you can also find all further information about the films shown here and of course our newsletter.
Filmprogramm:
Manon Bovenkerk
Eden, 2011, 1:44, no Sound
eine Animation in der Tradition der frühen Zeichentrickfilme.
Juliane Ebner
Knallerbsenbusch, 2012, 4:30, Text gesprochen von Juliane Ebner
Juliane Ebner erzählt aus ihrer Kindheit und Jugend in der DDR und der Zeit der Wende.
Simon Faithfull
19 Planes Landing, 2020, 1:00, no Sound
Simon Faithfull zeichnet seine Vorlagen für Animationen im Handy und lässt in Coronazeiten 19 Flugzeuge landen.
Tina Haber
Interieur 0303, 3:22, no Sound
Tina Haber wandert in ihren Aquarellierten Innenräumen durch Zimmer und Treppenhäuser, wie in Online Room Tours, und es entsteht eine gleichzeitig vertraute wie unheimliche Atmosphäre.
Aline Helmcke
16:9 clockwise anti-clockwise, 2017, 1:15, no Sound
Ein Faden nimmt in der Screenweite des Bildschirms alle ihm möglichen Positionen ein.
Kakyoung Lee
Dance, Dance, Dance, 2011, 2:20, Sound
Die Standbilder eines Videos werden von Kakyoung Lee in Kaltnadelradierungen übersetzt, und dann für die Animation übereinander montiert, so dass alle Tanzbewegungen sichtbar werden.
Jakob Kirchheim
Sternenstaub, Linofilm, 2012, 3:10, Text gesprochen Von Teresa Delgado
Mit Linoschnitten von Jakob Kirchheim entstehen in Zusammenarbeit mit Teresa Delgado poetische Animationen, Poetry Films.
Simona Koch
Abiotismus 4 / Körper 1, 2014, 1:22, Animation mit Plastillin, no Sound
Mikroskopische Einblicke, wie in Simona Kochs Animation gezeigt, reflektieren ihre Beschäftigung mit Wissenschaft und Kunst.
Betina Kuntzsch
Reise, 2014, 1;43, Computeranimation, no Sound
Aus kleinen Fehlern und Störungen in Computerprogrammen entstehen die Animationen von Betina Kuntzsch.
Sarah Jane Lapp
Catherine’s Rabbi, 2016, 3:49, Skyjelly
Musik von Skyjelly mit Animationen von S J Lapp
Jennifer Levonian
The Oven Sky, 2011, 4:42, Aquarell und Montage
In detailreichen Zeichnungen montiert Jennifer Levonian einen Film über Gentrifizierung in ihrem Kiez in einer amerikanischen Stadt.
Petra Lottje
Ohne meinen Anwalt, 2018, 2:14, 21 digital bewegte Portraits
Im Strafgericht Moabit beobachtet Petra Lottje die Gesichter der Anwesenden und gibt deren Stimmung im bewegten Bild einen lebendigen Ausdruck.
David Mackintosh
Precipice/Abgrund, 2019, 1:29, Aquarell
In schnell aquarellierten Zeichnungen zeigt uns David Mackintosh Bilder von persönlichen und politischen Abgründen.
Miodrag Manojlovic
House, 2012/13, 1:27, Sound
Mit Bild und Ton schafft Miodrag Manojlovic eine surreal unheimliche Atmosphäre.
Serge Onnen
Break, 2007, 2:09, Sound
Wir sehen, wie vergnüglich man elektronische Geräte zerbrechen kann!
Sebastian Pöllman
the way of life, 2008, 1:13, no Sound
Liebe, Geburt, Tod, Verlassen: alles das in einer Minute.
Peter Radelfinger
Animation 1, 0:38, no Sound
Was alles rund um unsere PET-Flaschen passiert.
Matthias Reinhold
domino, 2013, 0:43, no Sound
Dominosteine fallen trickreich um.
Robert Seidel
abogar | people part I, 2019, 3:47
Eine Computeranimation zur Musik, als retro-futuristisches Hybrid aus Pinselschwüngen und Programmierung.
Norbert Trummer
Stadtkino Wien, 2015, 2:19, Musik: der schwimmer
Der ausführliche Blick ins Stadtkino im Zeichentrick.
Nicole Wendel
The Circle, 2017, 5:32, Kamera: Jérôme Ballack, Musik: Yohei Yamakado
Zeichnungsperformance im Espace d’Art Contemporain André Malraux, Colmar
Bild: Alastair MacLennan, Foto: Jordan Hutchings
In the Centre of one’s own Periphery
Five Performances 2021
At the centre of its own periphery 2021 will come to an end on Thursday 18 November 2021 at 6 pm with a review of the past years.
After four years and 18 performances the series “In the center of one’s own periphery” ends. The studio im HOCHHAUS was entered as space-time and moved centerly as a fringe. The curators Anja Ibsch and Teena Lange invite to a performative reflection. Together with performers and various documentation materials, memories will be exchanged and diagnoses ventured, in short: there will be a celebration.
Since 2018 the artist Anja Ibsch and the curator Teena Lange have curated and realised a series of 13 performances, specifically developed for the communal gallery studio im HOCHHAUS.
The series will be continued in 2021 with five further extraordinary artists.
When you move in the centre of your own periphery you focus on the distance to your own self. Thus, not every act, not every (performative) gesture has to focus on the self. The invited artists are asked to deal with this perspective in performance-as-art, taking into account the specific location, topicality and history of the studio im HOCHHAUS.
A discourse evolves about (not) happening, (not) seen acts.
What is at core, what is in_adequate and where does the periphery actually begin?
As in 2018, 2019 and 2020 the subsequent joint reflection, the Artist Talk, will be an essential component of the program. The gallery space could and will always be left peripherally.
Born in 1927, the architect Balkrishna Doshi has decisively shaped the Indian city of Ahmedabad with his architectural work and his social commitment. In addition to his work as an architect, he is an urban planner, professor, theorist and founder of the Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University in Ahmedabad.
Since 2009, Leonard Wertgen and Jens Franke (in collaboration with Niklas Fanelsa, Marius Helten and Björn Martenson) have been investigating the city of Ahmedabad with their continuing research. Their interest is to understand the city’s built environment in its diversity and contradictions and to make perceptible the parallelism of spatial concepts that always include social, political and historical moments. In 2016, they had the opportunity to talk to Balkrishna Doshi about his work and the city of Ahmedabad. This conversation forms the starting point of the exhibition “Doshi Doshi”. In addition, as a further part of the research project, film footage and photographs of the following buildings from Ahmedabad by Balkrishna Doshi will be shown: Institute of Indology (1962), Central Bank of India (1967), Premabhai Hall (1972), LIC Housing (1976) and Sangath (1981).
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Annette Kisling’s photographic work is dedicated to a very well-known building by Balkrishna Doshi, the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore (1963 to 1983). In the winter of 2014, she had the opportunity to walk through and photograph the campus of the Institute of Management during the day and at night over the period of two weeks. The place is designed in such a way that interior and exterior spaces correspond with each other, merge into each other. For the exhibition, mainly photographs were selected that provide insights into precisely these in-between areas, in addition to some interior spaces, for example the library of the institute.
All Videos: Uwe Jonas, Pictures: Thomas Bruns
Raum 1
In this video, the first room of the exhibition, but also the whole concept is explained by the artists.
Raum 2
Architekturraum
Heike Baranowsky,
Veronika Kellndorfer
und Mirjam Thomann
Wand an Wand an Wand
exhibition from September 1 to January 13, 2021
In the exhibition “Wand an Wand an Wand (Wall to Wall to Wall),” artists Heike Baranowsky, Veronika Kellndorfer, and Mirjam Thomann work with the specific exhibition situation in the ‘Studio im Hochhaus,’ which is housed in the former offices of the ‘Volkssolidarität’, the organisation for senior citizens’ welfare. The particular historical, architectural and socio-political features of this location – a ground-floor gallery in a high-rise complex built in the late 1980s where 50,000 people still live today – serve as the starting point for the works shown in this exhibition. These works are placed in relation to the site itself and to each other by means of a collectively implemented spatial intervention – the removal of the ceiling panels. The revealed aluminium grid, the pipes and cables, and the concrete skeleton of the ceiling all create the impression of an archaeological dig; however, the difference is that instead of excavating new layers of soil, an unhindered view of unexpected heights is revealed here.
Veronika Kellndorfer deals with this reversal of the usual directed perception in her works that were conceived specifically for this exhibition. She projects an image of the 20-storey building as a small-format slide, in miniature size, onto a wall just above the skirting. A two-way mirror reflects the grid-patterned façade of the building in the form of a multiple refracted projection through the grid structure and onto the ceiling structure. The perspective in this slide, which allows us to appreciate the height of the building, is underscored by our view of the ceiling: the exterior is connected to this ground-floor space – a projection of the location onto itself.
In Kellndorfer’s second work, Interior, Corner, a slide projector beames onto a number of objects. A sculpture consists of a constructivist arrangement of simple – geometrical figures – made from dichroic and screen-printed glass, together with a wooden pedestal. Beside this, there is a stone block that supports a spotlight and a plant that Kellndorfer borrowed from Heike Baranowsky for the duration of the exhibition. The interaction of the light source with the glass objects and the plant creates a cinematic combination of complementary color effects, shadows and projections. Monstera deliciosa, is a reference to the jungle-like atrium of Lina Bo Bardi’s ‘Casa de Vidro’ in São Paulo, the screen printed image in the center of the sculpture. Synonymous with bourgeois interiors thus creates a link between an East German housing project in the outskirts of Berlin and Bo Bardi’s tropical modernism.
182 ½ consists of camera obscura shots of the course of the sun from its highest to its lowest position over a period of six months. The photographs by Heike Baranowsky are on display in the rear exhibition room. The cameras were positioned at various locations that have a personal significance for the artist, such as her home, her work place and her studio. The cameras used a large-format b/w negative film sheet that recorded the course of the sun’s light from east to west in the form of parabola-shaped paths. The highest zenith indicates the summer solstice, while the lowest zenith exposes the winter solstice. As well as showing the sun’s path, these architectural-like patterns also reveal information about weather conditions. Long exposures compress a period of time into a single moment, just as if an entire film was reduced to a single image. Nevertheless, the temporal aspect and, in particular, its overall duration can still be discerned.
The Snake Plant or African Spear (Sansevieria cylindrica) is positioned on a pedestal made of ceiling panels that the three artists removed. In this way, the plant can show off its arcing forms, and the stack of panels and the plant itself both become (living) sculptures. The conceptual approach in Baranowsky’s work lies in changes of perspective: the position of the silent observer of phenomena does not exclude the activity of shaping visual realities.
Mirjam Thomann is showing two works that she positions at the peripheries of the exhibition room, at the entrances, transitions and exits of the space. The text that appears on a window pane, mirror-inverted from the inside and legible from the outside, was inspired by the poster “I AM THE DOOR” by artist Milena Muzquiz, which Thomann saw in the living room of a mutual friend while visiting Los Angeles in 2019. The phrase used by Muzquiz is taken from words spoken by Jesus Christ, while the slightly modified version “I AM A DOOR” directly refers to the architectural characteristics of the exhibition space: the transparent threshold between the inside and outside, the visitors and passers-by reflected in this phrase, the paradoxical situation of being included or excluded and simultaneously totally visible, and the transformative potential of doors.
The three drawings in the first exhibition room are part of a series that was created using the “Light Flesh,” “Medium Flesh,” and “Dark Flesh” pencils produced by Faber Castell. So-called “flesh colours”, which make reference to the bodily and the living, are used in various materials and forms in Thomann’s works and, in this particular case, reflect the movement of the bodies in the space.
All pictures: Thomas Bruns
Picture: Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
Berit Myrebøe
Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
Artist conversation on Sunday 23 August between 14 and
6 pm with Berit Myrebøe and Jan-Peter E.R. Sunday
Exhibition until 26 August 2020
Due to the Covid 19 pandemic, only a maximum of five people wearing mouthguards (please bring your own) can visit the exhibition at the same time. But don’t worry, we have plenty of space outside to stand and sit.
Berit Myrebøe
“The artist, who lives in Berlin, paints seascapes inspired by stays in her native Norway, among other things. The monochrome, brittle material of aluminium undergoes a metamorphosis and changes in the surface through the power of her graphic traces, through light and reflection, into an organically moving, nature-identical projection.
The smoky, cool, almost monochrome colourfulness of the works enters into a symbiosis with the silvery picture background and contributes to the unique, strangely distanced and at the same time intimate atmosphere of the depictions. It varies between different shady and misty shades of grey and black, up to a palette of strong blue and green tones, which seem to remind us of the kilometre-long depths of the sea, the fjords and the unique light of the polar sky. (Spuren, Musikzeitung für Gegenwart, May 2014 issue, Klangspuren Schwaz, Tyrol)
Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
“In Travemünde on the Baltic Sea in the Niobestraße where I grew up, the painter Linde lived. I sometimes saw him going to the nearby steep bank with painting utensils. Next to the house where my father’s ENT practice was, there was an art gallery which had almost only pictures of the sea – sea pieces without people and boats in the shop window. I often wonder what it would be like if, instead of feeling the open ends of modernism, I would simply devote myself entirely to the genre of seascapes? (Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag)
Raum 1 (alle Bilder: Thomas Bruns)
In the Centre of one’s own Periphery
Picture: Emma W. Howes, Im Zentrum der eigenen Peripherie, 2019 (Foto: Uwe Jonas)
In the Centre of one’s own Periphery
Six Performances 2020
Since 2018 the artist Anja Ibsch and the curator Teena Lange have curated and realised a series of 12 performances, specifically developed for the communal gallery studio im HOCHHAUS. The series will be continued in 2020 with six further extraordinary artists.
When you move in the centre of your own periphery you focus on the distance to your own self. Thus, not every act, not every (performative) gesture has to focus on the self. The invited artists are asked to deal with this perspective in performance-as-art, taking into account the specific location, topicality and history of the studio im HOCHHAUS.
A discourse evolves about (not) happening, (not) seen acts.
What is at core, what is in_adequate and where does the periphery actually begin?
As in 2018 and 2019, the subsequent joint reflection, the Artist Talk, will be an essential component of the programme. The gallery space could and will always be left peripherally.
There will be moderated discussions with the artists after the performances, always Tuesdays at 7pm
With the kind support of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Exhibition Fund Municipal Galleries
#1 Dienstag, 17. März 2020 Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat
Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat develops her artistic work between performance and visual arts. The performance „Winter Sleep of Storks“ is part of her research project „Stork migrations“. It combines narration with film as an aesthetic experience in the process of creating a growing image. In 1822 a stork was caught in Mecklenburg with an arrow stuck in its neck. This arrow came from the African continent and was now regarded as proof for the theory of bird migration. Previously, it was assumed in Europe that storks were not migratory birds, but would be hibernating under the ground or under water. However, not all of them came back and so it was discussed what happened to those who did not wake up with the first sunrays.
