FLOAT. In-Between as Strategy - Part I

FLOAT. In-Between as Strategy - Part II

    März 2023
  • 26 03 2023 14:00 Sunday
    26 03 2023 18:00 Sunday
    26 03 2023 14:00 Sunday
    26 03 2023 18:00 Sunday

    Opening

    FLOAT. In-Between as Strategy

    The speakers on that day will be Susanne McDowell (Head of Department of the City of Celle) and Lorenza Kaib (curator). Artists involved in the exhibition will be present. Admission is free.

    April 2023
  • 22 04 2023 11:00 Saturday
    22 04 2023 12:30 Saturday
    22 04 2023 11:00 Saturday
    22 04 2023 12:30 Saturday

    Junges Gemüse

    Tragbar, groß und bunt. Kunst für die Straße

    Kunstworkshop für junge Künstler*innen von 6 bis 12 Jahren: Nach einer spannenden Erlebnisreise durch die Ausstellung wird munter drauflos experimentiert und gestaltet. Dauer: 90 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Kosten: 5 Euro pro Kind. Anmeldung bis zum Freitag vor der Veranstaltung an kunstmuseum@celle.de oder telefonisch.

  • 26 04 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    26 04 2023 20:00 Wednesday
    26 04 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    26 04 2023 20:00 Wednesday

    Langer Mittwoch

    Langer Mittwoch (17 - 20 Uhr) mit Abendführung (18 - 19 Uhr)

    Das Haus ist an diesem Tag durchgehend von 11 bis 20 Uhr geöffnet. Ab 17 Uhr ist der Eintritt kostenlos. Um 18 Uhr bieten wir eine ebenfalls kostenfreie Abendführung an.

    Mai 2023
  • 03 05 2023 12:00 Wednesday
    03 05 2023 12:30 Wednesday
    03 05 2023 12:00 Wednesday
    03 05 2023 12:30 Wednesday

    Museum am Mittag

    Kunst im Dazwischen. Die Ausstellung FLOAT als Experimentierfeld

    Die erfrischend andere Mittagspause: Erst ein anregender Kurzvortrag, dann eine Mittagsmahlzeit in netter Gesellschaft. Dauer: 30 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eintritt inkl. Imbiss und Getränk: 9,50 Euro pro Person. Anmeldung unter kunstmuseum@celle.de

  • 07 05 2023 11:30 Sunday
    07 05 2023 12:30 Sunday
    07 05 2023 11:30 Sunday
    07 05 2023 12:30 Sunday

    Sonntagsführung

    Die öffentlichen Führungen sind kostenlos. Museumseintritt: 8,00 Euro. Treffpunkt ist das Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

  • 13 05 2023 11:00 Saturday
    13 05 2023 12:30 Saturday
    13 05 2023 11:00 Saturday
    13 05 2023 12:30 Saturday

    Junges Gemüse

    Kunstworkshop für junge Künstler*innen von 6 bis 12 Jahren: Nach einer spannenden Erlebnisreise durch die Ausstellung wird munter drauflos experimentiert und gestaltet. Dauer: 90 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Kosten: 5 Euro pro Kind. Anmeldung bis zum Freitag vor der Veranstaltung an kunstmuseum@celle.de oder telefonisch.

  • 24 05 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    24 05 2023 20:00 Wednesday
    24 05 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    24 05 2023 20:00 Wednesday

    Langer Mittwoch

    Langer Mittwoch (17 - 20 Uhr) mit Abendführung (18 - 19 Uhr)

    Das Haus ist an diesem Tag durchgehend von 11 bis 20 Uhr geöffnet. Ab 17 Uhr ist der Eintritt kostenlos. Um 18 Uhr bieten wir eine ebenfalls kostenfreie Abendführung an.

    Juni 2023
  • 07 06 2023 12:00 Wednesday
    07 06 2023 12:30 Wednesday
    07 06 2023 12:00 Wednesday
    07 06 2023 12:30 Wednesday

    Museum am Mittag

    In the cloud. Digital trifft analog

    Die erfrischend andere Mittagspause: Erst ein anregender Kurzvortrag, dann eine Mittagsmahlzeit in netter Gesellschaft. Dauer: 30 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eintritt inkl. Imbiss und Getränk: 9,50 Euro pro Person. Anmeldung unter kunstmuseum@celle.de

  • 11 06 2023 11:30 Sunday
    11 06 2023 12:30 Sunday
    11 06 2023 11:30 Sunday
    11 06 2023 12:30 Sunday

    Sonntagsführung

    Die öffentlichen Führungen sind kostenlos. Museumseintritt: 8,00 Euro. Treffpunkt ist das Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

  • 17 06 2023 11:00 Saturday
    17 06 2023 12:30 Saturday
    17 06 2023 11:00 Saturday
    17 06 2023 12:30 Saturday

    Junges Gemüse

    Selfie für Fortgeschrittene. Digitale selbstbilder analog weitergemalt

    Kunstworkshop für junge Künstler*innen von 6 bis 12 Jahren: Nach einer spannenden Erlebnisreise durch die Ausstellung wird munter drauflos experimentiert und gestaltet. Dauer: 90 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Kosten: 5 Euro pro Kind. Anmeldung bis zum Freitag vor der Veranstaltung an kunstmuseum@celle.de oder telefonisch.

  • 21 06 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    21 06 2023 20:00 Wednesday
    21 06 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    21 06 2023 20:00 Wednesday

    Langer Mittwoch

    Langer Mittwoch (17 - 20 Uhr) mit Abendführung (18 - 19 Uhr)

    Das Haus ist an diesem Tag durchgehend von 11 bis 20 Uhr geöffnet. Ab 17 Uhr ist der Eintritt kostenlos. Um 18 Uhr bieten wir eine ebenfalls kostenfreie Abendführung an.

  • 29 06 2023 19:00 Thursday
    29 06 2023 20:00 Thursday
    29 06 2023 19:00 Thursday
    29 06 2023 20:00 Thursday

    Konzert Moritz Götzen Trio

    Konzert Moritz Götzen Trio

    Juli 2023
  • 02 07 2023 11:30 Sunday
    02 07 2023 12:30 Sunday
    02 07 2023 11:30 Sunday
    02 07 2023 12:30 Sunday

    Sonntagsführung

    Die öffentlichen Führungen sind kostenlos. Museumseintritt: 8,00 Euro. Treffpunkt ist das Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

  • 05 07 2023 12:00 Wednesday
    05 07 2023 12:30 Wednesday
    05 07 2023 12:00 Wednesday
    05 07 2023 12:30 Wednesday

    Museum am Mittag

    Grenzen schmelzen. Zum Schaffen von Cassils

    Die erfrischend andere Mittagspause: Erst ein anregender Kurzvortrag, dann eine Mittagsmahlzeit in netter Gesellschaft. Dauer: 30 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eintritt inkl. Imbiss und Getränk: 9,50 Euro pro Person. Anmeldung unter kunstmuseum@celle.de

  • 17 07 2023 9:00 Monday
    19 07 2023 13:00 Wednesday
    17 07 2023 9:00 Monday
    19 07 2023 13:00 Wednesday

    Junges Gemüse Deluxe

    Sommerkunst-Workshops für Kinder zwischen 6 und 12 Jahren

    August 2023
  • 19 08 2023 12:00 Saturday
    19 08 2023 17:00 Saturday
    19 08 2023 12:00 Saturday
    19 08 2023 17:00 Saturday

    Performances Guda Koster & Frans van Tartwijk

  • 23 08 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    23 08 2023 20:00 Wednesday
    23 08 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    23 08 2023 20:00 Wednesday

    Langer Mittwoch

    Langer Mittwoch (17 - 20 Uhr) mit Abendführung (18 - 19 Uhr)

    Das Haus ist an diesem Tag durchgehend von 11 bis 20 Uhr geöffnet. Ab 17 Uhr ist der Eintritt kostenlos. Um 18 Uhr bieten wir eine ebenfalls kostenfreie Abendführung an.

  • 26 08 2023 11:30 Saturday
    26 08 2023 13:00 Saturday
    26 08 2023 11:30 Saturday
    26 08 2023 13:00 Saturday

    Junges Gemüse

    Kopflose Kunst. Vom Verschwinden in Skulpturen

    Kunstworkshop für junge Künstler*innen von 6 bis 12 Jahren: Nach einer spannenden Erlebnisreise durch die Ausstellung wird munter drauflos experimentiert und gestaltet. Dauer: 90 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Kosten: 5 Euro pro Kind. Anmeldung bis zum Freitag vor der Veranstaltung an kunstmuseum@celle.de oder telefonisch.

  • 27 08 2023 11:30 Sunday
    27 08 2023 12:30 Sunday
    27 08 2023 11:30 Sunday
    27 08 2023 12:30 Sunday

    Sonntagsführung

    Die öffentlichen Führungen sind kostenlos. Museumseintritt: 8,00 Euro. Treffpunkt ist das Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

    September 2023
  • 06 09 2023 12:00 Wednesday
    06 09 2023 12:30 Wednesday
    06 09 2023 12:00 Wednesday
    06 09 2023 12:30 Wednesday

    Museum am Mittag

    Museum am Mittag: Wer ist „Wir“? Wichtige Fragen von Lerato Shadi

    Die erfrischend andere Mittagspause: Erst ein anregender Kurzvortrag, dann eine Mittagsmahlzeit in netter Gesellschaft. Dauer: 30 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eintritt inkl. Imbiss und Getränk: 9,50 Euro pro Person. Anmeldung unter kunstmuseum@celle.de

  • 10 09 2023 11:30 Sunday
    10 09 2023 12:30 Sunday
    10 09 2023 11:30 Sunday
    10 09 2023 12:30 Sunday

    Sonntagsführung

    Die öffentlichen Führungen sind kostenlos. Museumseintritt: 8,00 Euro. Treffpunkt ist das Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

  • 16 09 2023 11:00 Saturday
    16 09 2023 12:30 Saturday
    16 09 2023 11:00 Saturday
    16 09 2023 12:30 Saturday

    Junges Gemüse

    Mit Grenzen spielen. Überschneidungen mit Filzer & Folie

    Kunstworkshop für junge Künstler*innen von 6 bis 12 Jahren: Nach einer spannenden Erlebnisreise durch die Ausstellung wird munter drauflos experimentiert und gestaltet. Dauer: 90 Minuten. Treffpunkt ist im Foyer des Kunstmuseums. Kosten: 5 Euro pro Kind. Anmeldung bis zum Freitag vor der Veranstaltung an kunstmuseum@celle.de oder telefonisch.

  • 20 09 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    20 09 2023 20:00 Wednesday
    20 09 2023 17:00 Wednesday
    20 09 2023 20:00 Wednesday

    Langer Mittwoch

    Langer Mittwoch (17 - 20 Uhr) mit Abendführung (18 - 19 Uhr)

    Das Haus ist an diesem Tag durchgehend von 11 bis 20 Uhr geöffnet. Ab 17 Uhr ist der Eintritt kostenlos. Um 18 Uhr bieten wir eine ebenfalls kostenfreie Abendführung an.

  • 20 09 2023 18:00 Wednesday
    20 09 2023 20:00 Wednesday
    20 09 2023 18:00 Wednesday
    20 09 2023 20:00 Wednesday

    SOLANGE: Feministischer Mitmach-Workshop

    mit Künstlerin und Initiatorin Katharina Cibulka

  • 22 09 2023 18:00 Friday
    22 09 2023 19:30 Friday
    22 09 2023 18:00 Friday
    22 09 2023 19:30 Friday

    Queerness and Asian Diaspora in the USA and Germany

    hybrid Screening and Talk with TT Takemoto & Dr. Kien Nghi Ha

  • 24 09 2023 11:00 Sunday
    24 09 2023 17:00 Sunday
    24 09 2023 11:00 Sunday
    24 09 2023 17:00 Sunday

    Finissage

    11:30 - 12:30: Führung mit Kuratorin Lorenza Kaib, 15:00 - 16:00: performative Lesung mit Frank Schablewski

About

Who exactly am I? What sets me apart? Where do I stand?

Our (Western) culture demands localization, classification, intensification, definition. We live in a world of "brands", which also forces persons under the umbrella of "labeling". Whether in public life or on private terrain: a clear identity is required.

The exhibition FLOAT counters this cultural "pressure-space" with the relaxing concept of the "in-between". Because the reality is: we are more complex and diverse than "labels" suggest. We are more than the addition of defining criteria. Life is a process that fundamentally defies static fixation. Life situations, social contexts, relationships, bodies, experiences and interests change. We are many and many things. And we are always in flux.

Following the strategy of the in-between means perceiving and acknowledging plurality. In concrete terms, this means trying out different ways of looking at things, combining approaches, opening up to multilingualism, and curiously exploring the potential that blurring, ambiguity, and fluid transitions hold.

The title of the exhibition project and the symbol for the exploration of the strategy of the in-between is the floating buoy. The buoy floats, but it floats with a purpose. A drifting buoy collects data for scientific analysis. Equipped with sensors, transmitter and receiver, it is in exchange with its near and a distant environment and communicates continuously. A multifocal, dynamic image emerges from the networking of data and signals.

The exhibition FLOAT invites you to become such a buoy and to let yourself drift. To dive in, to let go, to change glasses and filters. And to discover new questions, new answers, new ways of perceiving and describing reality.

The participating artists lay out traces and suggestions for this with their works. With their work, their person, their biography and other aspects, they oppose unambiguous categorization. Neither they themselves nor their works fit into the usual pigeonholes. The question even arises: Are the objects, installations and actions really "just" art - or what else?

Participating artists: Cassils, Ji Su Kang-Gatto, Kapwani Kiwanga, Guda Koster, Murat Önen, Aslı Özçelik |Nina Paszkowski, Christiane Peschek, Johanna Reich, Marleen Rothaus, Lerato Shadi.

Curated by Lorenza Kaib
Curatorial assistance: Helena Grebe

The project is sponsored by Stiftung Niedersachsen, Volksbank Celle and VR Stiftung der Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken.

The opening will take place on March 26, 2023, starting at 2 p.m. at Kunstmuseum Celle.

Aslı Özçelik

Aslı Özçelik, Bild aus dem Fotobuch „Sıhhatler Olsun“, 2022

Aslı Özçelik

Over a period of two years, Aslı Özçelik accompanied her mother photographically, documented her everyday life and traced her history in conversations. The resulting, often intimate, photographs and texts are like puzzle pieces that make up an overall picture that always remains unfinished. Özçelik’s mother came to Germany at the age of 20, leaving behind her familiar surroundings and social network in northeastern Turkey.

The resulting photo book Sihhatlar Olsun (Turkish: “Good health”, a phrase said after a haircut or shower) is an empathetic attempt to put oneself in the place of a counterpart from a different generation, with a different biography, who is indissolubly connected to oneself. The question of rootedness resonates just as much as the feeling of homesickness. Long-distance relationships, multilingualism and more than 20 years of passed time: all of this is condensed into 176 pages.

Thanks to the analog photographic technique Özçelik uses to take her pictures, the time planes also merge visually: which photo was taken in 1980 and which in 2021 is not clear at first glance. Pictures from the family album, postcards – sent by the family from Turkey – and photographs made by the artist mingle in Sihhatlar Olsun and they combine to form a whole.

The short film Özçelik shot in 2022 during her first visit to her family in many years feels more present, the analog veil lifted here. Produced for the crowd-funding campaign aiming at the realization of the photo book, the film bears traits of reportage, yet is also poetic in its fragmentary nature.

The story of Özçelik’s family would be enough material for a literary realization and would strengthen this perspective, which is often hidden in German majority society. What Özçelik does, on the other hand, is to erect a big tent of images and create a world in which the viewer can empathize. Her photographs are rich in narrative elements, but do not provide explanations. Özçelik lets us participate in her family history – and we may automatically ask ourselves questions about our own network of relationships.

“Many personal circumstances led me to want to explore who my mother was in her early 20s, what experiences shaped her, and what emotions she had to deal with. In my project, I let these things intertwine. I want to show that the past cannot be dismissed as the past, but that we carry every time within us and our experiences shape who we are now. My mother’s words shape my words and my words shape hers. I want to show what things live in her, regardless of where she lives and with whom she lives.”

Aslı Özçelik
Cassils

Cassils: Tiresias”, Video Still No. 7 Performance for Camera, 2013, Photo: Cassils with Clover Leary, courtesy of the artist

Cassils

Drip, plop, drip, shh, plopplop. Water changes its state of aggregation, from solid to liquid. The trigger for this elementary change is human body heat. Cassils’ body causes the ice to melt.

But it is not only H2O that is transformed. A look at the form made of ice is worthwhile: Cassils stands behind a neoclassical Greek torso made of ice. This torso is muscular, corresponding to a male ideal of beauty in antiquity.

As is particularly visible in this recorded performance, Cassils persistently works with their art to dissolve fixed notions of gender, consciously taking a stand and creating (visual) space for transgender- and non-binary people.

Teiresias (Latin: Tiresias) is a figure from Greek mythology with clairvoyant abilities, who changed sex several times in the course of their life. In Cassils’ (re)reference to antiquity, already implied in the title “Tiresias”, one thing becomes clear: genders and gender roles are not set in stone but change with the societies that produce them.

Within the installation, visitors are confronted with a (larger than life) projection of Cassils. There is a counterpart, but no interaction – we are thrown back on ourselves. Who am I beneath the surface? It is an invitation to look inward and to compare: Which parts of me are “masculine”, which are “feminine”? And to ask oneself: Does this distinction make any sense at all?

Cassils’ performances, of which we see only a 15-minute excerpt here, last four to five hours. They are energy-sapping and require stoic perseverance. The location of the perfor-mances is significant: Cassils melts the torso, for example, in the immediate vicinity of historical oil paintings in which men are shown as the respective conception of masculinity and power. The environment is in ten-sion with the content and aesthetics of Tiresias, where the transformation, the dissolution of precisely these ideal-typical images is in the foreground.

Christiane Peschek

Christiane Peschek: Blush Tales 2

Christiane Peschek

Breathe in. Breathe out. Guided meditation, thought travel, progressive muscle relaxation: Christiane -Peschek’s recorded instructions may sound quite familiar if you have tried a relaxation technique or are trying to expand your own consciousness using these and other methods.

But where do we expand our consciousness to in her sound and space installation of Eden, newly conceived for FLOAT, what are we being prepared for? Peschek wants to tune us into the digital.

In contrast to the use of relaxation techniques to escape from our increasingly digital daily lives, Eden is an invitation to immerse ourselves even more deeply in virtuality, to let go of our analog bodies, to allow and feel our virtual selves.

Peschek calls Eden an “online retreat” – it is meant to be a digital retreat that you can go to when you need to. Instead of digital detox, a time-out from social media and Internet—enabled devices, the practice here is to reflect on one’s smartphone. In the new version, visitors can fully concentrate on the audio track of Eden with the help of noise-canceling headphones.

Another work by Peschek exhibited in FLOAT is BLUSH TALES – Avatar 2 – altered state, which at first glance seems to be more quickly grasped than Eden. But here, too, questions arise – in this case about technology – about the analog-digital relationship and shifts that occur in this structure. Are we standing in front of a painting that shows a young woman? A blurred photograph? While Gerhard Richter used painterly techniques to blur his motifs in his photorealistic creative phase, Peschek does so by means of digital image processing. Up to 100 times her cell phone photos go through a filter until the final work is created.

“We live in at least two bodies, the given and the chosen one. I un-spaced these bodies, streaming my breath, fluid floating within my multiplied self. Dematerialized from physical manifestation, myself becomes an architecture devoted to pleasure embedded in polymorphous worlds – mesmerizing, tempting, ungraspable. My lips, sticky, whisper of youth, inescapably eternal. I’m muted inside. Still, I embody that space of disembodied presence, where living obliquely is made uncomfortable, if not impossible. My retouch treated skin, rather undefined, inflates, transists into the species we tend to become.”

Christiane Peschek
Guda Koster

Guda Koster: Wandering-Mind, 2020, Foto: Guda Koster

Guda Koster

How long is my arm? What shape is my face, my head? Can you read my biological sex from my calves?

Engaging with the human body and its forms can be playful, as Guda Koster’s works make clear. From geometric abstraction to clearly recognizable human outlines, everything can be encountered in them.

Koster works with many different media and materials: performance, textiles, sculpture, photography. In the perception of her works, it is striking that Koster reaches deep into the colour palette, creates high-contrast com-positions and also likes to work with patterns. Equally prominent are the titles she gives her works: Superhero, Wandering mind, A perfect match, In love with Imi, Invisible green.

The anchor point of Koster’s works is always the human body. In most cases she uses her own body, while in sculptures and permanent installations she uses mannequins. The sculpture Starchild exhibited in FLOAT is based on a child’s mannequin; in the photographs shown, she herself is present – the carrier material of the illusion, so to speak.

Through the covering with paper, fabrics and plastic foils new forms are created – the body is changed in such a way that the (person of the) artist recedes behind it. The un-am-bi-guity of which gender the depicted person has is blurred. About whether it is a young, middle-aged or old human body, we can say just as little: The face is turned away from us or covered, the skin shielded from view by pantyhose and strips of fabric.

“Floating is not above or below but it is in between. It is a comfortable situation, a pleasant standstill. A vacuum in which you don’t have to make a decision. You don’t know what is going to happen or when something is going to happen. If the balance of floating is disturbed, you have to decide: Do I go up or down? When I make art, pretty much the same thing happens. An idea ‘floats’ through my head, and can nestle itself there, it looks fantastic. But you know that when you eventually get started, the original idea can change. Not standstill but progression, where chance can play a role. Both the drift and the action are needed.”

Guda Koster
Ji Su Kang-Gatto

Ji Su Kang-Gatto, Recipes and Identities Staffel 1, Videostill

Ji Su Kang-Gatto

The pan is hot, the oil is throwing bubbles. Noodles and vegetables boil in a pot of water, chili peppers cut into rings are added by a hand coming into the picture space.

Ji Su Kang-Gatto’s video works are initially easily accessible. At first glance, one encounters the familiar and is sucked in by a colorful design, finding surprise in fun and irritating visual elements and situations. Kang-Gatto uses the Internet for her artistic practice on several levels. In terms of content, she takes up widely used formats such as vlogs and cooking tutorials; to disseminate her work, she makes them available to the public for free on the platform Youtube.

The videos in the series Identities and Recipes are not instructions that can be followed one-to-one in order to end up with a tasty meal. Pink rubber hands appear, first scraping the pan in miniature size and finally used as plates in a larger dimension. Rubber fingers, wooden utensils shaped like feet, a bowl full of little gray heads. The cooking sequences are repeatedly interrupted by scenes in which the artist can be seen, for example, lying on a kitchen island or performing shadow plays.

On an underlying level, experiences of exclusion, everyday racism, anti-Asian resentment and prejudice are addressed. This is particularly evident in Kang-Gatto’s work Vlog #8998 I Korean Carrot Cake & Our Makeup Routine (2021). In a vlog, people show what they experience in everyday life – it is a video log. In addition to a visit to a café with her younger sister, Kang—Gatto’s childhood memories of a racially motivated attack on her by a group of teen-agers also make it into the video diary. Not a unique situation, as a conversation with her sister Ji Hoe Kang makes clear. It is precisely the weaving of these experiences into an everyday-seeming vlog and the casualness of the conversation between Kang-Gatto and Kang that make people who have not had to go through such experiences aware of what they are spared every day.

“Twenty years ago, I was annoyed and partly ashamed of my parents. They mixed up articles, sentence structures and German never came as easily to them as Korean. But they also completed their master’s and doctorate degrees. In German. To be able to speak fluently was, in my parents’ opinion, a compliment. Over the years, as my -German was commented on very frequently and in a wide variety of situations, I began to hear from the supposed praise: ‘You are different,’ ‘You don’t belong,’ ‘You are not German.’ Language creates community. Language excludes. I am not German, but I am also not Korean. I am Korean, but I am also German.”

Ji Su Kang-Gatto
Johanna Reich

Johanna Reich: Corinne Michelle West, 2019, aus der Serie RESURFACE II, Foto: Johanna Reich

Johanna Reich

A pair of eyes looking upward into the distance, a headdress over curly hair, from left to right through the pictorial space an angled hand. The facial features of Corinne Michelle West can be guessed at, appearing washed out and blurred at the same time – as if in a dream. One can only recognize them if one has already dealt with her or comes across the original portrait through a Google search.

Like Corinne Michelle West, Reich’s two other works also shown in FLOAT, featuring Frances B. Johnston and Jessie Tarbox Beals, seem intangible. Those depicted seem to drift, their faces and bodies repeatedly submerging and yet finding their way back to the surface. This aesthetic characterizes Johanna Reich’s series Resurface 2 for which she developed her own technique: the Lighting Scan. Reich made Polaroids of existing portraits taken during her lifetime, and captured the moment when the Polaroid develops through a scan.

But who are these women meandering through the pictorial space here? Corinne Michelle West was an American artist, she lived in the 20th century and her works are classified as abstract expressionism. Frances B. Johnston and Jessie Tarbox Beals both lived in the 19th and 20th centuries and worked in photojournalism. They are considered two of the first female photographers in the United States.

Through her works, Reich makes it possible to experience sensually what happened to these women: (art) historiography allowed them to be forgotten – precisely because they were women. Johanna Reich gives visibility to women artists, brings them (back) into cultural institutions. Known during their lifetime, these creatively active people were erased from the collective memory in the course of the canonization of art history, which was necessary to establish the subject at universities. For over ten years, Reich and her team have been working to ensure that these women artists can also be found on the Internet by writing and posting Wikipedia entries or adding to existing ones. During this time, she has worked with over 400 female artists.

Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga: Glow #11, 2021 (links im Bild), Exhibition view, “So wie wir sind 3.0”, Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Weserburg (DE), 2021, Photo: Tobias Hübel, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin

Kapwani Kiwanga

Smooth surface polished to a high gloss – as impenetrable to our gaze as social structures seem incomprehensible to us.

The black marble used by Kiwanga, interspersed with white stone veins, is aesthetically pleasing and at the same time repellent. You want to touch it and feel the cold, perfect texture of this high-end stone that we associate with luxury. Marble is also a classic material that artists have been using to create sculptures for centuries – but white marble is the most commonly used.

The sculptures in the #Glow series, two of which are on view in FLOAT, stem from Kiwanga’s preoccupation with the “Lantern Laws.” Enacted in New York (USA) in 1713, the discriminatory “A Law for Regulating Negro and Indian Slaves in the Night Time” saw indigenous and black people forced to stay home after dark, only being allowed outside while accompanied by a white person, with a candle or lantern in hand. We see this single light source here in the modern form of an LED light fixture.

Kiwanga’s sculptures do not reproduce the human body in an naturalistically-idealized way like marble statues of antiquity or the Renaissance. Instead of round, curved forms, our gaze encounters slabs of rock and collides with hard corners and edges. Due to their human-like height, they nevertheless have a human presence.

The sculptures unfold their effect especially at night and can be viewed around the clock, even from the outside, due to their placement in the foyer of the Kunstmuseum. The topic of surveillance in public space in this day and age by cameras also comes into focus. It is worth taking a look behind the façade of society, which appears perfect and thus untouchable: structural challenges that stand in the way of lived equality and realized democratic justice are only recognized when they are viewed from all sides.

Lerato Shadi

Lerato Shadi: Batho ba Me, Installation (2020–2023), Foto: dewil.ch (CC BY-NC-ND), Courtesy of the artist and blank projects, Capetown

Lerato Shadi

Law texts such as the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America begin with the statement “We the people”. But not all people living on the territory of the USA in 1776 were protected by the law. Black people and women were not considered citizens of the United States. Slavery had not been abolished yet, there were free citizens and slaves.

Lerato Shadi’s work unequivocally articulates a recurring question. By adding three letters ARE and a neon question mark, the statement “We the people” becomes a question: Are we the people?

By establishing a “we”, the group of “others”, who are not included in the “we”, is created at the same time. The term “othering” refers to this distancing of the group to which one feels oneself to belong from other people or groups. Othering is often accompanied by the unequal treatment of persons or groups perceived as different.

Who enjoys what rights today, who has privileges? Who is still not included? Who has a voice in political decisions and can have a say in social discourse, who is left out?

Even today, many people live in Germany who, for various reasons, can only participate in social and cultural life to a limited extent or not at all. For example, 14 percent of the adult population of Germany does not have the right to vote.

The positioning of Shadi’s work in the foyer of the Kunst-museum brings the question to the outside: it is visible to all passers-by and is not only accessible to museum visitors. The foyer is also a place where the outside meets the inside, a liminal space. Here, the permeability of a cultural space can be experienced – who steps over the threshold, who stops in front of the glass front?

Who is “the people”? We have to ask ourselves this central question again and again – and it is always being renegotiated by every society.

Marleen Rothaus

Marleen Rothaus: me the witch, 2019,Foto: Antonia Rodrian

Marleen Rothaus

With oil and canvas, Marleen Rothaus reaches for established materials that have been valued for centuries, especially in Western art. Instead of framing the finished paintings in the classical way, the works are braced, fixed to the wall with nails or fastened between two squared timbers – and carried through public space during feminist demonstrations.

Combative messages meet vulnerability. Anger and love are not a pair of opposites, but part of the human emotional spectrum that Rothaus works on in her art. Her paintings hover somewhere between striking and multilayered. Soft, pastel hues meet deep black, bright yellow, and signal red.

In her work cycles, Rothaus campaigns for the visualization and recognition of care work, which even today is often performed by women without pay. Social debates about female and queer self-determination also find their way into the museum with her paintings. In terms of content, the artist refers to early modern depictions of witches, to be found for example in the “Compendium Maleficarum”. Anyone who outwardly or behaviorally opposed the prevailing gender roles could quickly be labeled a witch, persecuted, and in the worst case, killed. 

Above the picturesquely integrated lettering “Don’t you fuck with my energy!” me the witch shows such a “witch”, riding on a billy goat, hurling thunderclouds. She is dressed in a robe adorned with images of vulva orchids and bloodthinning plants – references to naturopathic knowledge that has been passed down orally by women for centuries and used, among other things, to prevent conception.

In Coven, we are invited to take a seat, to further engage with the history of persecution and resistance of generations of women and queer people. And last but not least: to be in solidarity with each other.

“‘Flowing’ means for me the dissolution of the illusion of fixed, divisible states and rigid categories. It is about the recognition of a continuous change of things in their temporal dimension, but also regarding the simultaneity of different and also contradictory meanings we give them. In my artistic work, I am interested in how the social structures we find today have been able to consolidate and how images have contributed to this. In order to show the growth and thus also the changeability of existing structures, I often take up images from our collective memory in my paintings, which I tell in a new and different way through a change of perspective. ‘Flow’ thus also describes for me an anarchic concept that makes any kind of hierarchy as a form of suppression of freedom impossible.”

Marleen Rothaus
Murat Önen

Moving Stack, 2022, Foto: Nick Ash

Murat Önen

Planned chaos, coincidence, a game, breaking out of order, a human picado. Stillness, lifelessness, frozen dynamics, human flotsam. Do people lie here voluntarily? How do they get there, who ordered them – and why? Do we see a lustful, joyful situation? Or a context from which the figures cannot break free, in which they are crammed?

The ambiguous mood is also rooted in the color scheme of Murat Önen’s compositions: Earthy tones, bright blue, yellow and white – lots of black. The feeling of being crushed imposes itself, the men seem to drown in their own fleshiness. Creating space for oneself, wanting to get air would be possible (physical) reactions to the painted situation. Where is the individual?

On the other hand, what we see could also be touch, tenderness, desire – triggered by the bodies, close together and on top of each other. We see muscular arms, legs, buttocks, grasping hands, dark locks of hair. Again and again sneakers appear in the melee of human limbs.

The works by Önen shown here all belong to the -Haystacks series. With this designation, the artist refers to Claude Monet’s 23-part series of the same name, in which the Impressionist repeatedly painted haystacks in various light situations.

It is not clear which part of the body belongs to whom here – but does that even matter? It is much more interesting that our compulsion to assign, the human desire to bring order into a confusing situation, to understand it, to categorize it, becomes clear in the contemplation of the Haystacks. But there is also the possibility of leaving all these questions, the apparent contradictions, as they are and simply immersing oneself in Önen’s paintings.

“As a seeker, I use the series Haystacks to question painterly intuition and wrestle with breaking down ‘identity’ - be it queer or male. The composition of the image is dependent on nothing other than the bodies depicted. The bodies – these braided, chaotic men, piled up, stacked, and heaped – say as much about figurative painting today as they do about performative masculinity. I want my work to introduce viewers to the perspective of an open, non-deterministic ending: We don’t know where we’re going, we have no ground beneath our feet – just piles, piles, and matter of complexities in the midst of change.”

Murat Önen
Nina Paszkowski

Danae, 2020, Foto: Alexandra Nikitina

Nina Paszkowski

Where does one organism end and the next begin? Nina Paszkowski’s art is connected and communicates with its surrounding, yet every work maintains its independence. 

She works with materials that differ greatly in their nature and artistic treatment. Smooth ceramic surfaces meet ephemeral paper constructions, while monochrome design blends with naturalistic coloration. 

Dualistic categories dissolve in network-like structures, giving life to hybrid beings with fluid transitions. Mouths disappear into openings as increasingly more gullets emerge, leaving the viewer to ponder whether they are seeing a creature in decay or something being (re)born. In Danaë, Paszkowski freezes movement as cream-colored pearls tumble into a catch basin already filled with more pearls.

Punctum Stans, a seven-by-two-meter cutout, fills the room and resembles a Portuguese galley with tentacles that draw the viewer in. The luminous blue paper evokes images of the ocean and deep sea, prompting questions about what life could be like underwater and how having a tentacular body affects perception. 

Paszkowski’s preoccupation with hydrofeminism, a theory that identifies water as a unifying commonality among all living things, is evident in Punctum Stans. The work Vampyrotheuthis Infernalis (1987) by Vilém Flusser, attempted to describe life from the perspective of a vampire squid and served as an inspiration for the creation of this cutout. In Reservoir, water-like qualities are present in the basin of the ceramic piece, which simultaneously resembles a heart and a bone, inviting viewers to enter with their gaze.

“In my work I explore alternative forms of relating and bonding, interspecies solidarity and alignment with more-than-human entities such as bodies of water. The concept and anatomy of what we mean by ‘human’ is questioned and transformed in continuous organic mutations. What emerges are unruly hybrid beings and deities, who invite us to question the outline of a singular body or isolated existence.”

Nina Paszkowski
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Imprint

Kunstmuseum Celle mit Sammlung Robert Simon
Schlossplatz 7, 29221 Celle
Tel. (0 51 41) 12 45 21

kunstmuseum@celle.de

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Kunstmuseum Celle mit Sammlung Robert Simon

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Lorenza Kaib

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