2015 exhibition program

Viktoria Binschtok 
Cluster
January 11–February 22
Viktoria Binschtok’s (b. 1972) work addresses the complex status of the contemporary photographic image. Following series using Google Street View and appropriated news photography, her “clusters” offer an incisive look into the visual logic shaping contemporary screen-based culture. The groups of images are sourced from entering her own photographs in internet searches and then restaging and altering selected results. The bright-color aesthetic of personal snapshots and product photography predominate in this cross-section of the web’s seemingly endless pool of images. Compiled by the scanning, mathematical “eye” of the search engine in concert with the artist’s subjective choices, the clusters explore how context and content are crystallized within the processing of visual metadata—both online and off.

Moment!
March 15–May 3
bankleer, Sarah Burger, Aleksandra Domanović, Isa Genzken, Christian Jankowski, Oliver Laric, Mahony, Christiane Möbus, Carla Zaccagnini 
Inspired by a public monument recently commissioned from Christiane Möbus for Göttingen, the exhibition looks as the culture of commemoration in public urban space. The selected works in the exhibition address the historical legacy of the public monument and its social implications. They examine the role of public art as a witness to processes of political upheaval and change. What are the implications of the “lasting” tradition of the monument in contrast to the “performative” act of protest and revolt? What conditions determine the individuals and events that are chosen to be remembered—or forgotten?

Fiete Stolte: Hotel Absence
June 21–August 2
Fiete Stolte (b. 1979) has developed his own temporal rhythm by dividing the week into eight days, each with 21 hours, thus using himself as an object of observation and experimentation. He created a specially designed clock to keep his unique time, and he has drawn on the somnambulant nature of his experience and altered sleeping cycles in Polaroids and videos infused with dusky light. Simultaneous absence and presence is the theme conveyed by works dealing with traces or impressions of the body, as with a graphite cast of his own hand, in which the smooth-rubbed forefinger becomes a worn-down “pencil.” Time and space are conveyed in his works as compacted yet permeable. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published in cooperation with Sieveking Verlag.

Julius von Bismarck
July 5–August 23
The works of Julius von Bismarck (b. 1983) span the fields of art, science, and technology. With his inventions, videos and installations he probes the human perceptive apparatus and the collective views of a society undergoing rapid change. From his dramatic whipping of the oceans and mountains documented in the video series Punishment (2012) to his staging of a bizarre car accident at the geographical center of Germany (2013) and his invention of the subversive Fulgurator (2007), a camera/image projector for which he received a Prix Ars Electronica, his work is a relentless investigation of the scientific and conceptual models that we have inherited. The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first comprehensive catalogue.

Lea Porsager
November 1–December 21
Lea Porsager’s (b. 1981) haunting videos and installations suggest fascinating parallels between social reform movements, technology, and aesthetics. Interested in the ideas of 20th-century thinkers such as Rudolf Steiner, Helena Blavatsky, and G. I. Gurdjieff, she has staged reenactments of some of their practices for the camera, using these hypnotic performances as the basis for pared-down works in the idiom of early modern abstraction. Her installation in Göttingen deals with radical forms of psychological experimentation carried out in the 1960s and 1970s and their carry-over into scientific research in the field of quantum mechanics and its applications in data transfer and surveillance systems. 

The exhibitions of Viktoria Binschtok, Moment!, and Lea Porsager are curated by Kordula Fritze-Srbic, guest curator for 2015.