Artists Anna Bochkova, Naama Salzberg, Helena Müller, Young Valley Soil, Laura Mahnke, Alexandra Tretter, Priska Engelhardt, Marthe Fock, Sara Mikkelsen, Elisabeth Moch
Venue Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
All images Maik Gräf / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof and Bildende Künste Hamburg
In these five dialogue-based exhibitions, ten artistic positions not only encounter each other but also the respective characteristics of the exhibition venues. Here, the exhibitions deal with the themes of visibility, friendship, feminism, organisation and care and allow relationships to develop between each other behind the windows and between the showcases.
In such, the showcases transform into a dialogical platform – between the inside and the outside as well as the KVHBF and the HFBK – in which it examines its feminist usability in various forms.
The five exhibitions are accompanied by five podcast episodes, intended to bridge the spatial distance between the HFBK and the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof and expand the discourse. In five dialogues, they deepen the feminist dimensions of mutual togetherness.
The respective episodes correspond to the themes of the exhibitions:
Visibility | Astrid Mania & Bettina Uppenkamp; Friendship | Inga Barth, Mona Hermann, Pauline Jacob and Lisa Florentine Schmalz; Feminism | Federica Bueti & Karolin Meunier; Nothing Worthwhile is Done Alone: On Friendship and Feminist Organising | Feminist Duration Reading Group.
All Podcast episodes can be found on our Soundcloud Account “KVHBF”.
Anna Bochkova (*1995) and Naama Salzberg met in a close dialogue between private and public spaces through their respectively sculptural and painterly works. Bochkova’s architectural models became displays for Salzberg’s prints and focused on the sensitive interface between the city and the home, as well as the society and the individual. This connection appealed to, or even promoted, a sense of care and a utopian understanding of the city and state as structures of care.
The second showcase exhibition presents the work of the artist Helena Müller and the collective Young Valley Soil (Elina Saalfeld, Elisa Nessler, Francisca Markus and Cristina Rüesch). They discuss the processes of visualization through gender stereotypes, coded meanings and the random permanence of interpersonal encounters, or alliances. In doing so, the artists defied their spatial limitations and used the glass showcases from inside and outside. They expanded them aurally, but also performatively as mediators of showing and concealing.
Alexandra Tretter and Laura Mahnke explored their roles as mothers and artists. Their different approaches to female corporeality and their dialogue about similar experiences and different ways of dealing with them turned the public space of the showcases into an arena for appreciating both physical and emotional female strength.
While the two artists showed their own works in the KVHBF showcases, drawings and paintings by their children were on display in the HFBK showcase. Thus, Mahnke and Tretter conceptualized changes and connections between womanhood and motherhood, as well as the joint journey through life of a mother and a child.
The current collaboration between Priska Engelhardt and Marthe Fock uses a specific and ambivalent material: cooling/heating pads. With their blue liquid wrapped in plastic, they do not exactly embody the epitome of what comfort, care and concern commonly represent, and yet this function is outsourced to them. Priska Engelhardt and Marthe Fock choose different forms for their examination of the cooling/heating pads in the KVHBF showcases and the showcase in the foyer of the HFBK and expand the potential of material and colour as a space for reflection on care and its complex socially functional entanglements between care and isolation.
