Sabrina Torelli, Durante il giorno non vediamo le stelle, 2012
Rachel Maclean, It's What's Inside That Counts, 2016
Lucy Pawlak, We Eat the Earth / The Earth Eats Us, 2016, Videostill
5 September 2021 – 14 November 2021
Fiction? Better than Reality!
Opening: Sunday, 05 September 2021, 11 am
Jacqueline Forzelius, Gabriela Friðriksdóttir, Rachel Maclean, Laurel Nakadate, Lucy Pawlak, Laure Prouvost, Mika Rottenberg, Sabrina Torelli and others
The exhibition ‘Fiction? Better than Reality!’ presents various positions of contemporary art exploring the dynamic field between reality and the symbolic worlds of the divergent and the foreign. The selected works focus on transitions, metamorphoses, transcendence and threshold experiences. What narrative means are employed to describe the unknown? What contradictory relationship exists between everyday experiences and fictitious, narrational contents? What attempts are made to undermine customary patterns of storytelling? Disrupting habitual narrative structures is turned into a veritable discipline. The artistic productions on display resist linear interpretations and are replete with breaks, fragments and contradictions. Through a multiplicity of artistic approaches ranging from surreal staging past thematisation of the interpersonal realm all the way to spiritual activities, a broad spectrum is opened up for an investigation of these areas.
The works thereby unfold their poetical character and indicate a path into another world. The selected works include videos, performance, drawings and spatial installations; they give contentual expression to the borders between fiction and reality, between the visible and the invisible. How much reality is actually contained in fiction? Does there exist in this context a function whereby we are easily disposed to give ourselves over to utopias and dystopias? The selected works of art point to borders as well as to transitions between fiction and reality, between what we can see and what remains hidden from view.
23 September 2021 – 14 November 2021
Ungeordnete Koordinaten
Students of the postgraduate "Weißenhof programme of Fine Arts" of the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design:
Kuo Hsin-Hui, Min Bark, Leif Kauz-Zeller und Tino Kukulies
16 May 2021 – 15 August 2021
Gabriela Oberkofler –
Api étoilé / A growing archive
Start of research: 1 April 2020
Opening: Sunday, 16 May 2021, 11 am
Gabriela Oberkofler - Api étoilé / A Growing Archive is an artistic project on forgotten crops and new forms of coexistence.
Api étoilé brings diverse actors and institutions from different fields such as research and science, agriculture, folklore, visual arts, cultural promotion into a collaborative exchange at eye level. After a phase of transcultural cooperation with farmers, seed specialists or various seed archives and after a phase of plant cultivation, Api étoilé culminates in an exhibition in the Villa Merkel in Esslingen, which also plays host to a cultural-historical rural stage in the Freilichtmuseum Beuren. With an opulent accompanying programme of lectures, artist talks or even Slow Food tastings of traditional useful plants, Api étoilé turns Villa Merkel and the Freilichtmuseum Beuren into places of cultural and social encounter, of togetherness, into places for people, plants and animals. Gabriela Oberkofler appears as an artist and as a networker who involves a wide variety of actors in a participatory way.
Experience and knowledge are successively added on highly diverse levels.
We thank our cooperation partners: the Freilicht Museum Beuren and the Kunsthaus Dresden.
Because it is currently not possible to visit the exhibition, the first net-based formats on the project will start on 16 May. The digital offer on the project homepage is constantly being expanded.
Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt – Förderung von künstlerischen und kulturellen Projekten