Foto: Maan Barua, An Amphibious Urbanism, 2023-2024.
Dagmar Keller / Martin Wittwer
Real World Theater – Closed For Remodeling
The spatially expansive video installation “Real World Theater – Closed for Remodeling” (2005/06) is part of the artist duo’s comprehensive confrontation with the cinematic image. As the last act before diving into the world of projections in the double sense, opening the theater curtain becomes an eternally repeating event in “Real World Theater – Closed for Remodeling”. And in its primary expectations marked by medial conventions, it throws the observer back to his or her own power of imagination.
The Irish composer and Solitude fellow Andrew Hamilton wrote the music for the video installation.
Dagmar Keller (*1972, Donaueschingen) and Martin Wittwer (*1969, Lucerne, Switzerland) have worked together since 1997. The duo’s video installations, photographs and videos have since been exhibited in renowned festivals and numerous solo and group exhibitions domestically and abroad. They are 2006/2007 fellows of the Akademie.
This work was sponsored by the NRW Foundation.
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Vlad Nanca
Dream of Bucharest
“Dream of a city where cars can fly; where cars are more important than anything else… Cars are on the street, on the pavements, in the gardens, everywhere. A million cars is a sign of prosperity… life is not so bad. Dream of Bucharest.”
With its constantly growing number of vehicles, the traffic situation in Bucharest – as well as the form of the Romanian national vehicle, the Dacia 1300 – inspired Romanian artist Vlad Nanca to create a graffiti series: auto contours, drawn in a childlike manner, are presently visible all over Bucharest.
The artist continues this work in his installation “Dream of Bucharest”. While the visual presence of graffiti in the city evokes criticism, in the installation it is the sculptural object of the automobile itself that places the viewer into the quotidian reality, through which pedestrians have to maneuver through traffic and parked cars (a situation not unlike that of the Stuttgart Talkessel!). “Dream of Bucharest” is, however, not the story of a nightmare, but rather the artist’s view into a situation that exists in many cities.
Vlad Nanca (*1979 in Bucharest) studied photography and video at the University of Art in Bucharest. His works were shown in numerous European cities, including Oxford, Bucharest, Belgrade, Luxembourg, Brno and in Stuttgart at the exhibition “On Difference #1”. (Württembergischer Kunstverein). Nanca was an Akademie fellow in 2006 under the auspices of the Romanian Exchange Program in the Galeria Noua in Bucharest.
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Marzena Nowak
Johanna / Shua Group
The Polish artist Marzena Nowak shows two new video works that address the topic of dance, movement and spatial experience. The video film “Shua Group, first rehearsal 1E42/Crowded Action at the Taiwan Cultural Center, NY” is a documentation of the first rehearsals of a dance-theater group. With improvised movement sequences, the dancers develop their positions in the space. Here, Nowak vividly visualizes the spatial play that emerges between the dancers’ movements and the architecture.
The motif of the woman at the window, the waiting woman, the woman who looks into nothing, have all been motifs in art since the Renaissance, a topic addressed in the film diptych “Johanna” from today’s point of view.
Marzena Nowak (*1977 in Piasenczno/Poland) studied art at the Akademie of Visual Arts in Warsaw. She has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2006, Marzena Nowak was an Akademie fellow in the framework of the Poland Exchange Program with the Center for Contemporary Art Schloss Ujazdowski in Warsaw.
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During the exhibition opening on Thusday, January 25, Chris Heenan (improvisational musician from Los Angeles, and an Akademie Fellow in 2005/6) and Michael Vorfeld (experimental musician and artist from Berlin) present a concert for synthesizer and light bulbs.
The exhibition runs from Friday, January 26, to Sunday, March 11, 2007.
Hours: Tues-Thurs 10–12 & 2-5:30pm, Fri 10–12 & 2-4pm, Sa–So 12–5:30pm
The exhibitions take place under the auspices of the Eastern European exchange program of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, which is supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and Art of the Land Baden-Württemberg, the Allianz Cultural Foundation and the Robert Bosch Foundation.
participated in