Saturday, February 12, 2011

Exhibition with International Media Artists: Nikita Neufeld & Guests

Nikita Neufeld & Guests 
2 – 13 February 2011
at Kunsthalle Göppingen

An exhibition with international media artists:
Viktor Alimpiev, Clare Langan, Dirk Meinzer, Nikita Neufeld, 
Astrid Nippoldt, Julia Oschatz, 
Susanne Weirich

The main theme of the new exhibition by the media artist Nikita Neufeld in Kunsthalle Göppingen is fiction. The exhibition presents fictional elements in photography, video and film. Even the artist herself is a fiction.
From 2 February to 13 February 2011, Nikita Neufeld is showing installations that include the media photography, video, film, slide projection, and sound. Neufeld’s artworks narrate scenes from everyday and parallel worlds operating between realistic possibility and fantastical fiction. However – Nikita Neufeld, as a real person, does not exist. 
She is a fiction herself, an invented artist (played by Inga Busch) from the film
ART GIRLS (directed by Robert Bramkamp),  whose catastrophe scenario invaded Kunsthalle Göppingen last weekend along with the German Red Cross, the Federal Agency for Technical Relief and other aid organisations, and plenty of Göppingen extras. Among the invited guests are media artists such as Susanne Weirich, in whose work 'Silent Playground' (2005) Nikita Neufeld also appears, and, in the course of the story, becomes an avatar, a character in a video game appears and, in the course of the story, becomes an avatar,  character in a video game. In 'Summer Lightning' (2004) by Victor Alimpiev, small girls drum up a storm on tabletops. In Clare Langan's 'Trilogy' landscapes are transformed into apocalyptic images. Additional guests are Dirk Meinzer, Astrid Nippoldt and Julia Oschatz. All play with the fantastical: an unknown element breaks into familiar scenes opening up other unforeseeable imaginative worlds. 

The exhibition also includes film clips from works that have just been produced while Kunsthalle Göppingen was briefly turned into a large and complex film studio. These are film sketches from the experimental film workshop of the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HfbK). With their Professor Robert Bramkamp and Göppingen actors, young artists took part in an open workshop to explore, with fantastical film material, what is possible in film and what can be created with images, the seductive power of fantasy, which takes us beyond the limits of the real into fictive stories.
Lounge: Film excerpts by Marlene Denningmann, Joachim Glaser, Alexander Hatchl, David Jahn, Hana Kim, Tim Liebe, Eibe Maleen Krebs, Michael Steinhauser, Hannes Stimmann, Paul Thalacker and Heiko Volkmer.

Info:  werner.meyer@kunsthalle-goeppingen.de  I Kunsthalle Göppingen I
Marstallstraße 55 I D-73033 Göppingen I www.kunsthalle-goeppingen.de
Opening hours:  Di bis Fr 13-19 Uhr,
Sa, So 11-19 Uhr (bis 13. Februar).

Text: Eva Maria Manz / Photos: Eibe Maleen Krebs


To view more work by Susanne Weirich: www.susanneweirich.com