Author: Ulrike Wiedensohler

Exit Athena

———— Filed under: Art ⁄⁄ Artist ⁄⁄ Exhibition

Author:
Publ. 10.11.2020

From November 19, 2020 Selma’s solo exhibition Exit Athena can be seen at the Museum Folkwang in Essen. With her surreal-looking multimedia installations, Selma Köran questions traditional power structures and gender relations. For her first institutional exhibition, Exit Athena. the young artist has taken a canonical text of European culture and transformed it into an exuberant cinematic spectacle: Hesiod’s Theogony tells the story of the Greek deities. The artist adds a fictional final chapter to this text, in which she turns the hierarchy of the world of gods upside down. The heroine in Köran’s feminist new version is the wise and rebellious Athena, who competes against her own father Zeus. Selma Köran creates her alternative mythology in a visual language of exaggeration. She brings out the sensuality and aggressiveness in Hesiod’s cosmos and stages it in a colorful and anarchic way. The linear narrative structure of the text gives way to a fragmentary juxtaposition of grotesque film scenes and animated sequences with clay figures.

Selma has been part of the Your Art Beat network from the very beginning and took part in the accompanying program of events at the 2019 group exhibition in Berlin Kreuzberg as part of an “audiovisual dialogue”. She holds a Master’s degree of fine arts and design from the Dirty Art Department, Sandberg Institute Amsterdam.

The I Ballet

———— Filed under: Artist ⁄⁄ Artwork

Author:
Publ. 06.3.2020

“The I Ballet” by Martin Henkel
Description of the installation:
The entire installation was first visualized in a 3-D program to get an exact idea of the character of the installation. The procedure for designing in a 3-D program is based on vectors and surfaces and in this case on animation. The same procedure was used in reality and in material. That means, first a wireframe model was created in original size, then the whole thing was covered with clay and modeled. The resulting figure was then cast in plaster and taken taken out of the mould, animated or changed in shape, cast again and so on. From these negative moulds, reproductions made of paper were created and copied. Thus, a dance formation was created, called “The I Ballet”, since they all descended from one figure.
The figures themselves consist of an arm, an implied body and a head.

Meaning of the installation:
The implied body has something floating and flowing, in contrast to the arm, which symbolizes power and strength. In a figurative sense this means that processes and goals are not necessarily realizable despite one’s own will.
The small head stands for limited and – on itself – limited thinking.
The figures are captured moments of movement, such as frozen stages of a person’s life or efforts of self-fulfillment.
Placed on poles, with a thin cross-section, the figure has a flexible floor connection, but unstable grounding.
The movement efforts of this one multiple figure create an I ballet, a beautiful, active, but also absurd life form.

Exhibition Introspective in Perspective

———— Filed under: Art ⁄⁄ Artist ⁄⁄ Artwork ⁄⁄ Exhibition

Author:
Publ. 05.10.2019

Lita Poliakova
Introspective in Perspective
WerkStadt Kulturverein Berlin e.V.
May 5 through June 9, 2019

Lita Poliakova’s portraits exceed all expectations regarding the genre. Each single work turns both inwards and outwards. We are able to recognize the sketch of a face looking at us like an expressive character in a science-fiction comic. At the same time it seems to turn its interior soul toward the outside at each point of its shaping and color rendering: Like some kind of psychogram which merges associations of different moods and expressions.

On another level, the exhibition is constantly blending humans and nature like some sort of hologram. It is an astonishing and fundamental common ground that comes into view: the elements that all organisms are composed of and dissolve into. These elements are the same in humans and plants. The artist makes use of these micro-components in her splendid organic recycling: She extracts color pigments from organic materials, such as left-over fruits, and applies them to her paintings. There might be unpredictable further variations of these organic colors. Finally, it is the solid, yet expanding crystal structure that could be understood as an anorganic and dynamic complement of the paintings.
Thus, between screen and crystal, the colors continue the play of depiction on a material level.

Is this a human face, whose sense of self, affections, facets and transformations shows up in the emergence of colors? Or is it a landscape or even a singular plant that can be depicted as a human with the help of our gaze? Do we identify the ongoing metamorphosis of a single individual or rather a huge family album or chemistry of humans, flora, and fauna?

Jule Böttner
WerkStadt Kulturverein Berlin e.V.

The Cut In

———— Filed under: Art ⁄⁄ Artwork ⁄⁄ Design

Author:
Publ. 04.17.2019

»The Cut In« is a duo project formed by an artist, Saverio Tonoli, and a designer, Nona Schmidt, from Berlin.
Between Art and Design – collage is a common topic between the work of the two of them. They paint, cut and compose their images using analogue and digital techniques as part of their creative procedures.

This project investigates glass and its possibilities, not only as a material but as a medium to explore colours, forms and structures.

»Cut In« reinterprets traditional leaded windows and their immersive quality by juxtaposing different layers of coloured glass and integrating the glass collages in the architecture.

»Cut In« are in fact thought to be installed in the space, where transparent and coloured glass shapes blends, overlap and transform themselves under the intervention of light.

A starting point of the project has been the exploration of colours, discovering combinations of harmonic and disharmonic colours in relation with Runge’s theory of colours.

The collages are made out of one painted image on glass. Through different breaking techniques which they call the »Bruchtest«, the painted image is exposed to an unknown factor creating new situations to work with and finally arranged and repainted into one single piece.

YOUR ART BEAT MEETS MUSIC

———— Filed under: Allgemein ⁄⁄ Artwork ⁄⁄ Exhibition

Author:
Publ. 04.5.2019

Kühlspot Social Club is a venue for creative music, theatre, art and culture in Berlin Weissensee. They emphasize “social” in their perspective on cultural development and try to promote an inspiring community of artists and art lovers. In the field of music, the main focus is on improvised music, jazz, dance music of all kinds, including improvised dance music, tango, balfolk, and everything always live. In the course of the season – there is a break in late summer and in winter – they have one to three events per week, two to four art exhibitions per year and occasional dance parties. Performance art, theatre events, and action painting with improvised music are also part of the spectrum of the program. The room can accommodate up to 70 people.
Kühlspot is the former studio of the Berlin artist Siegfried Kühl, who died in 2016. His son, the artist Christoph Kühl, runs the Kühlspot. The art of Siegfried Kühl is permanently exhibited and contributes essentially to the great ambiance.
For more information see www.kuehlspot.com/kalender.html
YOUR ART BEAT is happy to be part of the Kühlspot community and exhibit some of its artists, among them Christoph Kühl.

Group exhibition of YOUR ART BEAT artists

———— Filed under: Allgemein

Author:
Publ. 03.6.2019

Where the digital becomes physical: Galerie Salon Halit Art in Berlin-Kreuzberg presented artists of YOUR ART BEAT, February 14 through 28, 2019
The group exhibition displayed a selection of artworks of some of YOUR ART BEAT’s unique and versatile international artists. For the prints, different materials were used such as glass and aluminium, but also FineArt Paper.
The visual artist Lita Poliakova (Life Is Torturing Awesome) portrays mental and physical transfiguration and recycles paper agents in order to catalyse the novelty. Her digital collages were printed on glass. She also presented a video on the creation of her work.

Dryden Roesch is an artist and graphic designer from Edmonton, Canada. Most of his recent work depicts architectural environments in vibrant and surreal ways to create an imagined (and sometimes disorienting) sense of place.

Sonia Bensouda is exploring the notions of time and space. She is an Interior Architect and Collage artist. Through digital collage and photography, she intends to explore the notions of Time and Space in the Urban environment. Her digital collages with old photography are printed on FineArt Paper.

Natalia Poniatowska is swinging between the digital and analogue photography, still and moving image. Project White is her investigation into the notion of absence of colour. She wanted to investigate what happens when we take out the colour of food. She painted the fruits white and they became completely new objects that are no longer associated with food and taste. She wants to make others notice how beautiful our senses are.

The London-based photographer Imogen Davis believes that photography is used to capture moments of peoples’ lives, moments that would otherwise be lost in our memories forever. For MY BREATH she learnt how to blow her own glass, making physical recreations of her breath that now have memories of their own. The MY BREATH series I-X was printed on glass.

Christoph Kühl’s works are almost exclusively collages, i.e. they are made of painted paper by using various techniques. The viewer is taken on a journey through three-dimensional spaces. Christoph’s collages are the projection surface of these sensational sites. Found image pieces are put together to convey new impressions.

Renate Marschner (1953-1990) was an artist from Lower Saxony and worked as a painter and broadcasting author in Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Switzerland. She has displayed her works in Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York. Her works deal with the issue of getting used to understanding things we don’t see.

For Zsolt Gyarmati, Art is Confrontation. The objective of his art is some sort of status report. Art should make people conscious of unconscious things. He showed the video DIOXINDAUER in Berlin.

Selma Köran (video) and Jonathan Rosenberg (music) have created an audiovisual dialogue with Renate Marschner that was shown for the first time. It is based on Renate Marschner’s drawing SPERRUNG (BLOCKING), oil chalk on school board lacquer. Selma Köran made a stop motion film with knead and Jonathan set it to music.

Lita, Dryden, and Christoph attended the opening of the exhibition. Thank you for this.

Audiovisual Ventures

———— Filed under: Allgemein ⁄⁄ Art ⁄⁄ Artist

Author:
Publ. 11.22.2018

Akiko Nakayama is a Japanese painter. She felt that her past paintings were dead, so she started Alive Painting by combining the energy of movement and the vibrance of colours. She uses a multitude of kitchen basters loaded with paint and water to add, mix, tilt, blow and add all sorts of extraneous effects to her paints, recording and projecting it all onto a large screen. The result is a fascinating show of organic movements. In recent years, she has also added sound as another dimension to her work, and has collaborated with different musicians in live performances.

On November 4, 2018 she performed at THE KÜHLSPOT SOCIAL CLUB with Uproot, an electroacoustic music group (curator Kriton Beyer). The trio works with the use of both the natural sounds of the acoustic instruments as well as with preparation of these instruments, the use of objects and extended techniques.

It is always inspiring to visit the KÜHLSPOT SOCIAL CLUB. The ambience is very private, and performers and audience get in touch and discuss music, and art and life.

Memory and memories

———— Filed under: Allgemein

Author:
Publ. 08.15.2018

The pleasant experience or its opposite are the backbone of our memory, the connection of our episodic memory with our semantic memory.

Do I remember my first visit to a museum? It was in New York City in 1976, at the Museum of Modern Art. What do I remember? The impressive collection of modern and contemporary art in a fantastic building with a beautiful sculpture garden.

A painting by Mark Rothko, Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, painted in 1949. The painting shows his strict attention to detail, composition, depth, balance, color, and scale.

However, was I there or did I internalize stories of a friend who told me about his visit to the museum that made me think I was there myself?

How does the memory actually work?

Roughly, there are three sections of memory: perception memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. All information is initially stored in the perception memory and at the same time, the brain decides what to assign to the short-term memory and what to ignore. People are actually not able to store or process everything. They need to distinguish. The short-term memory is the working memory where all information is processed. Here, information remains for less than a minute. When people get older, their short-term memory becomes more susceptible. Short-term memory determines which information is fed into long-term memory. Whether the pieces of information are actually embedded there and retraceable depends on the codes they have been provided with. The long-term memory is dependent on information being sufficiently coded, either by adherent emotions or by special learning techniques. Nothing is lost from the long-term memory; forgetting is just a failure to retrieve content from memory. Therefore, stored data must be searched for, since it is usually not immediately available.

However, commemoration can be tricky. Because when we remember, we form fragments that we have experienced at different times and places into recollection or something that feels like recollection. Moreover, every time we remember something, when we dig out memory content, we modify it again. By the mood we’re in right then, by new information we didn’t have then. This is like a file that is modified repeatedly, and only the latest version is available. Therefore, we may have false memories, or there may be details in it that are not right. The memory is flexible and cannot objectively reflect the past, but adapts to the present identity of a contemporary witness.

So it becomes clear that a strong distinction has to be made between personal memories and reality, since our remembrance may be pure fiction, fantasy and perhaps a dream.

“In Search of Lost Time” is a novel about time, about forgetting and remembering.

How can one escape the incessant elapsing of time? Proust’s answer: Only by remembering the panorama of the past in special moments, for example by enjoying the famous Madeleine or the scent of lilac. These are moments of sheer beauty, great sensuality and pure happiness.

Back to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Rothko’s painting has burned itself into my memory as an image; in fact, I did see it there.

Faces. Places

———— Filed under: Allgemein ⁄⁄ Art

Author:
Publ. 07.5.2018

An unusual couple: Agnès Varda who just turned 90, a filmmaker and star in France since the 1950s. And JR, the street art and photo artist, who never takes off his sunglasses.
When they meet, they decide to do something together. What exactly, they don’t know, “a new kind of images” is the rough idea. Together they go on a journey cross-country with no clear aim and destination.
The only clear thing is: It had to be a real documentary. A film about other people. It seemed clear that his passion for sticking huge portraits of people to walls to honor them, and her way of listening to them and bringing their stories to the fore, would lead to something.
JR’s truck plays a leading role in the film: a mobile instant photo machine that transforms photos into huge black and white posters. They drive through the villages. Most people approached by JR like to be photographed. These encounters give rise to the wonderful documentary: “Faces. Places.
Agnès Varda is looking for people who once dug for coal in the mines and descendants of those miners. Jeannine is the widow of a miner and to be resettled, but she wants to stay: “I will not be driven out. I have too many memories here.”
JR and his people transform the whole settlement into a kind of stage, with old photos, in memory of the miners of that time. Jeannine also appears on the façade. She’s speechless.
Some lose their composure when they see themselves in JR’s pictures. The small, inconspicuous life suddenly becomes visible and significant – also for them. “Every story becomes a work of art. I mean not only stories between Jeannine, and us but also between Jeannine and the viewers. The audience should love those portrayed. That was the plan. Jeannine as well as the postman, who was very proud of his giant photo! By enlarging the portraits, we make small moments big in the lives of people who are not in the spotlight,” says street artist JR. “Everyone in the village knows them, but all of a sudden you look at them with different eyes. They are talking about their picture. That is what the movie is about. That’s what art is about.”
Agnès Varda and JR stop where no tourist will ever get lost. They just follow the road, trust chance. Then stop in the right place – this is art, too. In a remote chemical factory, they get the entire staff to pose for a group photo. The people from the day and night shifts have little to do with each other – in the photo they are united. An employee can hardly believe it: Employees from all departments and shifts are mixed. You can also see some from the executive level. “So we do get along sometimes!”
JR and Agnès Varda’s film is not just about the charm of inconspicuous places and ordinary people. It is the story of a touching relationship between two artists who are separated by an age difference of half a century and yet find a common language.
The film also deals with this: time that can only be captured for moments. Moments that cannot be big enough because they are over so quickly.