Heal the World
Master students of the University of the Arts Bremen. Karin Hollweg Prize 2016
Heal the World – the title of the exhibition is as catchy as a pop song. But can and should art be healing at all? Does it have a social mission? Or must it not insist on its freedom and independence? With ironic ease, the exhibition raises uncomfortable but necessary questions right at the beginning. After all, it is about the relevance of artistic work. This year, eleven master students present their latest works, which are on public view at the Weserburg for the first time. A conspicuous focus is on elaborate, sometimes multi-part video works, as well as installations and space-related concepts. Photography, drawing, and sculpture will also be on display. A highlight on the opening evening is traditionally the awarding of the Karin Hollweg Prize, endowed with a total of 15,000 euros and thus one of the most important promotional prizes at German art colleges. Half of the prize money is reserved for an institutional solo exhibition in Bremen.
Six positions exemplify the artistic range of the exhibition. Daniel Neubacher presents a black sculpture that fills the room
sculpture that slowly rises to the sound of a loud fan. Fun and spectacle announce themselves, but the impressive castle in the air collapses again and again and thus remains a cryptic promise that waits in vain for fulfillment.
Henrik Nieratschker himself locates his working method at the interface of art and design, technology and science, fiction and theory. For his new installation, he uses various forms of representation from digital, Internet-based platforms. The progressive promises of Silicon Valley culture are reflected upon and become the starting point for his own critical aesthetic.
The 4k video “state of the art” by Julian Öffler does not only want to be on the cutting edge of technology. Öffler is concerned with nothing less than the state of art. He sends an artist friend on a grotesquely funny journey of discovery that leads him through a Spanish sewer. In his relentless résonnement, which is repeatedly broken by the media, the inner necessity, but also the possibilities and limits of contemporary art production are questioned.
With the simplest of means, Matthias Ruthenberg succeeds in creating poetic gems. They are delicate, usually non-representational drawings of various formats and sizes. With groping, sometimes seemingly clumsy strokes and rulings, he creates impressive forms and structures, which he likes to combine with sentence fragments, allusive ciphers and everyday wisdom.
In her sober and very precisely staged photographs, Silvia Keppler enables surprising perspectives on ordinary objects. The back of a wooden clock, a multiple reflecting basin made of glass become special perceptual events that make seeing itself a subject.
Riccardo Castagnola experiments with new forms of composition and sound production. His sound installation responds to individual gestures and movements in space. The visitor is invited to try out the interactive and performative possibilities of artistic participation.
The exhibition is accompanied by a magazine that contains photographs and texts on all the exhibited works as well as individually designed pages by the artists. Concept and realization: Leon Lothschütz
A cooperation with the University of the Arts Bremen
Artists
Riccardo Castagnola, Sebastian Dannenberg, Katrin Heydekamp, Silvia Keppler, Daniel Neubacher, Henrik Nieratschker, Julian Öffler, Claudia Piepenbrock, Matthias Ruthenberg, Ilka Wietzke, Shuling Yuan
Karin Hollweg Prize 2016
Jury statement: “The Karin Hollweg Prize for Master Students of the University of the Arts 2016 is awarded to Claudia Piepenbrock. With her work Seitengang: 2 angepasste Wände, spiegelnd und lautlos (2016) Piepenbrock convinced the jury. Using steel-framed foam elements, she created a narrow, five-meter-long corridor that can be walked through. The origin of the foam as the inner life of used mattresses remains visible, without this aspect being used here in a narrative way. It is identifiable by means of slatted bar impressions and similar markings, but the artist has eliminated all other traces of previous use.
Moving between the two walls, one is immediately struck by the acoustic experience of swallowed sound. The haptic experience and physical confinement are complemented by the intense color of the foam. Claustrophobic fears are cited and heightened by the visibility of the plastic manufacturing process. Claudia Piepenbrock has cut the mattresses with irregular cuts. On the one hand, this procedure corresponds to a traditional sculptural treatment, but on the other hand, it creates tangible relics of a brute dismemberment. Despite their unconnectedness, the two walls cut up in this way ultimately reveal themselves as a unity, since they could be put back together again with a perfect fit.
Claudia Piepenbrock also uses the special quality of the material for the exterior view of her installation, in which one can recognize an allusion to a large panel-like format reminiscent of painterly settings. The jury found very convincing how consciously the artist related her work to the existing exhibition space and literally fitted it there. She lends the space and the position of her work within the exhibition dynamism by letting the two walls run out in a curve that ends in a corner of the Weserburg.
In Claudia Piepenbrock’s multi-layered sculptural work, the jury sees the convincing expression of a consistent artistic development that has already become clear in earlier works with regard to sculptural setting, sensual materiality, and corporeality, and which here not only undergoes a particularly precise implementation, but can also be experienced physically in an impressive way.”
The jury of the Karin Hollweg Prize 2016, Bremen, June 16, 2016.
Curriculum Vitae Claudia Piepenbrock
Claudia Piepenbrock was born in Paderborn in 1990 and first worked there with a freelance artist and theater painter. Seven years ago she moved to the north to study art, studied painting with Jochen Stenschke for a year at the Ottersberg University of the Arts, and in 2010 moved to the Bremen University of the Arts. There Piepenbrock studied in the class for sculpture and installations with Franka Hörnschemeyer and Fritz Balthaus, with whom she graduated in 2015. This period is characterized by longer stays abroad, international exhibitions, artist residencies and own art projects in Germany, Canada, USA, Bolivia and New Zealand, among others, as well as funding by the Paula Modersohn-Becker Nachwuchspreis, the Förderpreis “Junge Kunst” Paderborn and a scholarship from the DAAD.
Jury
Dr. Eva Fischer-Hausdorf (Kunsthalle Bremen)
Peter Friese (Weserburg | Museum of Modern Art)
Fanny Gonella (Künstlerhaus Bremen)
Wolfgang Hainke (artist)
Dr. Arie Hartog (Gerhard Marcks House)
Dr. Andreas Kreul (Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation)
Dr. Ingmar Lähnemann (Municipal Gallery Bremen)
Dr. Annett Reckert (Municipal Gallery Delmenhorst)
Dr. Frank Schmidt (Böttcherstraße Museums)