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.
Susanne Britz has focused on photographs, pigment prints, and installations of everyday objects. The working process behind these works is exciting and is based on each other, so Susanne Britz runs through different phases during her creative process: it probably starts with an idea, then a spatial installation follows. Here she uses everyday objects from the household, sports equipment, tools from the studio or children’s toys. Once the installation is finished, she takes a photo of this work. Afterward, the photo gets digitally overdrawn.
I like the strong colors and the general idea behind this artwork. It’ s funny to see all the things and to realize what you can do with everyday objects.
#stayhome
What do I see immediately? Two people wearing different textiles and always several of them. The textiles look like old towels, shirts, tablecloths or window curtains. In both pictures, the faces are covered. In my opinion, this gives the photographs anonymity and something mysterious.
I take a look at the titles of the photographs. They are called “Strangers 1” and “Strangers 2”. The exhibition has the title “transformer” and the gallery manager Eva Hübner tells me that the textiles are garments. Clothes that were once worn by the artist’s mother and grandmother. Several generations are thus connected, quite inconspicuously. Thus the photos express the following for me: Even if some of them are no longer with us, we still carry them with us throughout our lives. They are a part of us.
I’m in the house Schwarzenberg visiting the Neurotitan Gallery. First of all, I walk through the first large room to get into another, a little smaller one. In front of me, there are three overhead projectors. On top of them, white objects that at this point I can’t quite make out yet. I walk closer to the installation. Many small pieces of paper are spread on the floor. I stand directly in front of them and realize that different sentences are written on them. Questions, answers, quotations – it reminds me of a dialogue.
In the performance, the objects are also meant to become actors, a game with perspectives takes place: am I looking at the objects? Are the objects looking at me? Since overhead projectors were used in the Neurotitan Gallery for the first time (normally the objects were always at the eye level of the viewer), I have the feeling of “looking down from above” – which makes me feel more superior.
