Ripe time - between departure and nightmare

June 28 - September 12, 2020

exhibition
In a playful and irritating way, the eight artists in this exhibition create and comment on their own interior views of departure, questioning and participation.

Works
The range of works from the fields of painting, sculpture, video, performance and photography provides surprising and sometimes contradicting insights into the mental states and ways in which young people come to terms with life. They are about crises, narcissism, confrontation with physicality, insecurity, rebellion and fatalism in an increasingly insecure present.

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Theme
I will stay young, youthful and alive as long as possible! My life doesn't end as long as I stay creative! Between this often hardly realizable, high self-claim and their often failing redeemability due to the circumstances, young people in particular can existentially despair - or, in the case of artistic productions, transform this situation into something future, critical, deviant. While hundreds of thousands of adolescents in Germany and large parts of Europe are increasingly politicizing themselves at Fridays for Future and thus demonstrating a maturity that is surprising for many adults, tendencies of extreme uncertainty have not only been observed among young people since Corona at the latest. The range of emotional sensitivities of the “young generation” in particular is shaped by permanent self-observation on Snapchat, Instagram or Youtube.

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In a playful and irritating way, the eight artists in this exhibition create and comment on their own interior views of departure, questioning and participation. In doing so, they test our ideas of adolescence in the broadest sense. Artists are used to exploring and expanding their own life with their works like an eternal, never-ending MATURITY. The range of works from the fields of painting, sculpture, video, performance and photography provides surprising and sometimes contradicting insights into the mental states and ways in which young people come to terms with life. They are about crises, narcissism, confrontation with physicality, insecurity, rebellion and fatalism in an increasingly insecure present.

Michael Kroeger

Participating artists

- Nevin Aladag
- Marco Castillo
- Monica Czosnowska
- Clemens Krauss
- Simone Lucas
- Carlos Martiel
- Britta Thie
- Tobias Zielony

Curator

- Michael Kroeger
- Elisabeth Lumme

With kind support

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Participating artists

in detail

Nevin Aladag, "Top View", Photo: video still, 2012 Courtesy the artist and Wentrup, Berlin, © VG BILD KUNST BONN 2020

Nevin Aladag * 1972 Van / Turkey

works in the medium of installation and performance and lives in Berlin

In a fast-paced sequence of dancing pairs of feet, "Top View" creates an almost physically perceptible feeling of freedom, desire for movement and a quick sense of rhythm. In the dance rhythms that each person's two feet perform, the light-heartedness and lightness of an early phase of life can be felt: a time in which everything seems possible.

Her work is about self-determination, role reversal, external perception and multiple perspectives. (cited after: Sabine Maria Schmidt, Kunstforum 262)

Marco Castillo, “Generación”, 2019, video, color, sound, 16: 9 HD, 6:45 minutes, © Courtesy of the artist and KOW, Berlin, Madrid; Video still: Marco Castillo

Marco Castillo * 1971

Lives and works as in Havana and Madrid

The video “Generación” (2019) focuses on the wounds that state repression mechanisms have inflicted on the generation of Cuban millennials since the 70s. The gathering of young people from today's intellectual scene in the 70s architecture reflects the tension between the modernist utopias of the early revolutionary years and the loss of aesthetic freedom due to censorship.

“In a way, I want to transfer the viewer to the role of the person concerned, in order to make him aware of the profound damage that extremist and stigmatizing opinions cause in people.” - Marco Castillo, in “Greetings from Havana, Contemporary Cuban Art in an International Context.

Monika Czosnowska, “Kristian”, 2006, “Helena” 2006, C_ Print 40 x 60 cm, from the series “Portraits”; © the artist

Monica Czosnowska * 1977 Stettin / Poland

The two portraits come from Monika Czosnowska's series "Portrait" (since 2005)

Both the boy and the girl look at their surroundings with an almost adult-looking seriousness. It is precisely in this time between childhood and the beginning of “maturity” that young people experience themselves for the first time as beings who are able to recognize themselves as people who have their lives and their future ahead of them.

Clemens Krauss, “Selbstportrait als Kind”, 2017, silicone, oil paint, own hair, © the artist; Photo: B. Borchardt

Clemens Krauss, * 1979 in Vienna

lives in Berlin and works in painting, installation and video. * 1979 in Vienna, lives in Berlin and works in painting, installation and video.

One of the most emphatic memories of one's own adolescence is the discovery of one's own developing physicality, which not infrequently triggers existential insecurity, fears and feelings of shame.

“Self-portrait as a child” (2017) was created using “20 photos of me between the ages of 11 and 13” (CK) and tries to capture memories of the emotional world of one's own childhood in a hyper-realistic body structure.

Simone Lucas * 1973 in Neuss, lives and works as a painter in Düsseldorf

Simone Lucas * 1973 in Neuss

lives and works as a painter in Düsseldorf

Simone Lucas stages a young fantasy figure in the uncertain zone between existence and appearance. The peculiar "rose devil", readable as an angel and as a devil, touches a painted brief note "I don't exist" with his left foot and thus reminds of the beginning of existential doubts, which are not atypical in puberty.

“Depth” contrasts a seemingly lost figure on a springboard with flat color fields - is the fear of jumping perhaps also an image of the desire to enter the unknown, painted world of art?

Carlos Martiel * 1989 Havana / Cuba

lives and works in the medium of installation and performance in New York

The video “Prodigal Son” (“The Prodigal Son”) arouses associations with extremely body-related initiation rites and at the same time raises questions about autobiographical and political references. On his knees, the artist staples medals that the Cuban state has given his father as a police officer directly onto the skin of his upper body.

Whether this painful act is a rebellion by the artist against the revolutionary willingness to make sacrifices demanded by the state or an attempt to approach the oversized father figure remains open.

Britta Thie * 1987 Minden

lives and works as an artist, model and actress in Berlin

The video “Powerbanks” (2018) creates a scenario in a consumer temple for electronic devices, an “autofictional Big Brother” (Britta Thie), in which the young protagonists indulge their uninhibited consumerism and generational coolness at the same time.

The expansive piece of furniture that the artist designed as an oasis with digital resources for a young audience is correspondingly cool.

Photo credit: Tobias Zielony, 1. TZ / PH 2018_9, Gabriel, 2018, Archival pigment print, 69 x 46 cm, 6 + 2AP, Courtesy Galerie KOW Berlin

Tobias Zielony * 1973

lives as an artist, filmmaker and photographer in Berlin

One focus of his work as a photographer is the sympathetic, “documentary” appearance of youthful subculture. His photographic work shows young people in all their coolness, hardness and vulnerability, lust for life and existential border movements. His pictures reveal empathy and affection.

In his new “Golden Series” (2018), Zielony continues his work on underground culture in post-Soviet societies in the Latvian capital Riga. The protagonists in Zielony's pictures use fashion, piercing, tattoos and graffiti to rewrite intimate and shared identities.

Sponsor

Sievert Foundation for Science and Culture

Duties of the foundation are the promotion of research and teaching, education, art and culture as well as international understanding. The foundation realizes its projects in particular in connection with the University of Osnabrück and the University of Osnabrück. Artistic and cultural events are primarily supported in the Osnabrück region and should have an international connection.

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