New Viewings #8
Curated by Anne Schwanz
As much as the artists Anna Ehrenstein, Dennis Buck, Jack Burton and Marta Vovk differ in their artistic approach, there is one thing that unites them all: somehow they are all storytellers – whether it is actually through the format of storytelling, as in Ehrenstein, Burton and Vovk’s work, or precisely through the refusal of the narrative, as in Buck’s artistic practice. Through their own very personal, subjective way of seeing things and transforming their thoughts into art, all of them raise our awareness to the big questions of life.
Marta Vovk
Marta Vovk, *1989 born in Lviv, Ukraine,
lives and works in Berlin
In Vovk’s Viewing Room „Powerful Daily Affirmations“ we see her painting „carpe diem“ which is part of her „tabooed hobby art material“ series. In this work, Vovk counteracts the established, elitist „painting ethos“ by using Window Color.
In the text installation „Powerful Daily Affirmations“, Vovk playfully responds to all the positive affirmations that we constantly encounter on the internet and which fill numerous „self-help“ bookshelves. Instead of the regular positive life-affirming, self-improvement version we’re used to, we are now confronted with self-criticism and self-hate statements, which are often deeply integrated in many peoples thinking patterns. The wall installation „B for Business“ is to be understood like a large drawing, where the individual components and parts can be moved as required. In this way, the entire installation – and thus also the course of the whole story – can be retold over and over again.
Dennis Buck
Dennis Buck, *1989 in Germany,
lives and works in Berlin
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The floor installation “New Times (Monday through Sunday)” of Dennis Buck plays with the idea that artists are normal „businesses“. But whereas businesses usually have fixed opening hours, artists often work around the clock, „Monday through Sunday“.
This of course also fits the current situation: a lot of things have now been moved to the digital world and, as we all know, the internet is also „open“ Monday through Sunday – just like this exhibition.
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Jack Burton
Jack Burton, *1988 in Wales,
lives and works in Brussels
3 available works
on this platform
Jack Burton presents us with a relationship between two bodies. The first body is that of the planet Europa, which we might read as a platonic ideal of Europe, living in the heavens.
The second body is that of an earth bound rock we could see as an incarnation of the European Project in reality; weathered, beaten, but still marked with the sign of peace and advertising its hospitality. The planet looks lovingly at the rock, which smokes, and keeps going, lighting the way.
In all the work there is a play between the fragility of hope and the effort to overcome destruction and disunity. Jack Burton’s work uses ideas from Economics, Historical reference points, and the European Project in particular, as subject matters.
Anna Ehrenstein
Anna Ehrenstein, *1993 in Germany,
lives and works in Berlin, Cologne, Tirana and the cloud
Anna Ehrenstein’s work complex „A Lotus Is A Lotus“ attempts to understand „affect“ and „society“ in the past and present by carefully studying and observing physical, virtual and material objects.
Ehrenstein understands affect as the „stickiness“ of values, ideas and emotions circulating between objects. Inspired by this, she plays with new artistic techniques that she would have liked to try out earlier, but which was not possible due to barriers such as physical laws or the contemporary level of technology – such as breaking up the gallery floor and filling it with the sticky, green „affect material“.
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