The videos, photographs and installations by the young Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðjónsson (born 1975, lives in Reykjavik/Iceland) are atmospheric seductions. They guide the viewer into a mysterious world, to dark places full of mystical figures.

Guðjónsson's works seem to combine the old topos of his native country's Nordic natural mysticism with the morbid, sinister side of Vienna, the city where he studied for several years.

In his videos, the artist plays on the deliberately utilized cut and superimposing techniques to seize the viewer emotionally. But it is especially the equally important simultaneous interplay of film and sound elements that create an atmospheric arena.

While Guðjónsson's videos depict persons acting in specific sites, his works repudiate a linear narrative or unambiguous legibility. What remains are physically and emotionally experienceable fragments that are joined to form a cryptic visual and acoustic symphony. Attention is given to the grotesque actions of the players and the unnoticed bystander, the viewer, who seems to become a witness to mysterious rituals. The mystical, almost spiritual mood appeals in a non-verbal and non-illustrative manner to states of mind on a universally experienceable level.

Sigurður Guðjónsson conceived a new video for the Kunstverein Langenhagen, "Bleak 2006": Two grotesque people in two different rooms are at the center of the grotesque situation. The communication between them regulates itself entirely on the emotional level of the viewer. In "Bleak", Gudjonsson has largely omitted the transcendentalizing musical elements used in his most recent works. The sound consists almost entirely of material recorded while filming.

Once more, Guðjónsson refuses to present the view with a rational access. Seduced by a subtle ambiance, the viewer is left to confront his own emotional world.

Erla Haraldsdóttir began to manipulate photographs of her familiar environment over five years ago. With subtle interventions, she transformed pictures of the main street in her hometown Reykjavik, for example, into a kind of Chinatown for the project "Here, There and Everywhere" (together with Bo Melin, 2001). Other pictures recall an oriental bazaar. The known architectural features of the Icelandic capital remain recognizable. But upon closer examination, the signs, posters, and Southern European-looking people and goods that cannot necessarily be found in Iceland leads to a considerable disorientation of the viewer as migrants from Southern Europe are usually not found Iceland's small monocultural cities. There are no fruit stands on the streets and the advertisements found in public spaces are by no means as aggressive as they are in Western Europe. In further projects realized in small Swedish and Norwegian cities, Erla Haraldsdóttir (in collaboration with Bo Melin) tracked down the atmosphere of each town and drastically altered them.

In her most recent computer animated film "Sad with Satie" (2006), she makes the emotional torments of a woman crossed in love by portraying the protagonist's everyday life sensuously comprehendible.

For the exhibition "Langenhagen", she produced a series of photo collages and a computer animation that cast an analytical view of a typical small German city and its heterogeneous architecture. The project for the Kunstverein Langenhagen is her first project of this type to be realized in Germany. For these works, she utilized photographs and drawings after pictures she took in Havana/Cuba, Berlin, and Reykjavik. She seamlessly combines the pictures from completely different worlds together, which we do not notice at first sight. Erla Haraldsdóttir consciously thwarts our patterns of perception. She thus created playful possibilities of alternative ways of seeing our familiar surroundings.

The works by Annika Eriksson (born 1956 in Malmö, lives in Berlin) are created with the participation of persons or groups to whom she offers the opportunity to present themselves. This can entail brief theatrical or musical presentations, the description of one's own work or simply the presentation of one's self by means of name and profession. The presentations are filmed in front of a live camera and subsequently shown as videos. All presentations are based on a specific concept that determines their form and content. At the same time, a certain amount of free space is intentionally left available to the performers. Annika Eriksson, for example, invited various orchestras to play a free interpretation of the song »Sour Time« by the pop group Portishead. Because none of them had ever played pop music before, the task meant the prospect of creatively and radically dealing with a new challenge. In all of her projects, Annika Eriksson handles the question regarding the possibilities of authentic self-representations within pre-determined frameworks. For the Kunstverein Langenhagen, the artist will stage a situation during the exhibition opening in which selected persons will rehearse a performance in front of the camera. The visitors can observe this.

With his project "Every day at dusk ..." (1999/2007), Olaf Nicolai (born 1962) will start the annual programme of the Kunstverein Langenhagen. Under the title "Große Gefühle ..." (Great Emotions..."), it will discuss artistic positions in which emotional states themselves, their various manners of expression and perception will be contextualised. The title implies well-known media clichés from heartbreak, great love, and the seemingly unavoidable loss of reason. Feelings and experiences on an emotional level, however, often form the prerequisites of rational knowledge. "Great Emotions" as a synonym for "great love" is a central theme within the entirety of art history. This is true for the representation of feelings as a pictorial motive as well as motives that trigger emotions when being viewed.

Olaf Nicolai's project adapts the idea of a shooting gallery at a fairground: According to the standard cliché, the idea of the hero shooting a rose is a central element his visit to a shooting match. His beloved anxiously receives the rose as proof of his love and affection. The situation could not be any more ambivalent: Only by shooting the sweet trophy does it seem possible to offer living proof of one's great feelings. The ambivalence contextualised in Nicolai's works also points out the complex correlation between violence and creative processes.

In her new installations "Motocalypse Now", conceived for the Kunstverein Langenhagen, Tea Mäkipää visualises fundamental questions about the ecological condition of our earth. The ideology of never-ending freedom earlier associated with driving is no longer visible in the overgrown auto entitled "Petrol Engine Car, 1860s–2010 R.I.P." on the Kunstverein's courtyard. The dramatic installation "Micro Climate" inside shows a wrecked automobile from which people are apparently trying to free themselves. The putting forward of Ten Commandments for the 21st century offers simple suggestions for more a vigilant treatment of our environment.

When we speak about love, we unhesitatingly get pathos-filled sensations of enraptured abandonment, sweet romanticism and glowing adoration. We simultaneously also associate the counter-images linked to anguished desperation, pain, and coldness. These ambivalences belong to the essence of the human being: While we experience joy and lust as unlimited, we face pain and listlessness as limitations or violations of boundaries. We often find critical dealings with the medial clichés of unfulfilled desires and the sell-out of love in an age of conspicuous consumption in connection with the great emotion of "love" in contemporary art. The exhibition draws together very personal works that allow us to experience existential borderline states and forms of obsession in an immediate an sensual manner as well as works that deal with the question of perspective and the mental frame of a supposed ideal image.

In her videos, Jannicke Låker’s takes up topics as racism, sexual violence, and power games. Her protagonists find themselves in extremely unpleasant situations. Låker’s often unbridled stories give the viewer a feeling of extreme discomfort because he is shown exactly what he really does not want to see. The films are based on simple scripts with a setting that intended to provoke authentic a response from the performers. Jannicke Låker’s newest film »Sunday Morning« (2007) will be shown in the exhibition. The video is about a woman coming home after a night of carousing. Seemingly comic at first, the situation gradually takes on a particularly frightening dimension.

In photographs, texts, and films, the artist Claudia Reinhardt deals with her own childhood and adolescence in the small German city Viernheim in Southern Hessen. She photographed previously familiar places sites in her old home town: the house in which she lived with her parents and five sisters, her uncle’s butcher shop, the cemetery, her parent’s bedroom – uninhabited places which seem to have remained unchanged over the course of time. The provincial idyll appears sinister and nightmarish in the photographs. A series of photographs from Claudia Reinhardt’s project as well as her newest film »No Place like Home« (2007, 10 Min.) will be shown in the exhibition. In it, she calmly and objectively relates her recollections. But the ostensibly ideal world starts showing deep cracks that indelibly etch themselves into the viewer’s memory.

The possibilities of her protagonists seem to be just as sheerly endless in them as her own when she uncovers our prejudices, stereotypes, secret wishes and feelings with much humor and irony in them. The viewer gets directly caught up in the role of a fascinated accomplice of bizarre acts in a crazed world by naturally being able to follow and understand the things as if they were reality, even though they are in fact staged fictions.

Bjargey Ólafsdóttir's newest installation, which she conceived for the Kunstverein Langenhagen in Chile, is also effective on an emotional level: She seduces the viewer with drawings, videos, and sound into a world full of laughter. The exhibition forms the conclusion of this year's program which stood under the motto »Great Feelings.«

How will wars be fought in the future? And what does Stargate, the Brocken, and the British military have to do with each other?

Rosalind Brodsky lives in the year 2039 and is a time traveler for the "Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality" (IMATI) on behalf of the British military. Her mission is to obtain new information for research on non-lethal weapons. In doing so, she meets up with the American military, the CIA, and occultist groups with contact to politics, the Hollywood film industry as well as witchcraft. The groups and persons involved in a complicated network are linked to each other by way of the development of mind control technologies.

In 1995, the artist Suzanne Treister (born 1958, lives in London) created the fictitious figure Rosalind Brodsky who plays the main role in her science fiction adventures and becomes her alter-ego as it were. Suzanne Treister studied at St Martin's and Chelsea Schools of Art. She works in various media and materials; she draws, for example, creates video installations, and executes performances.

With the exhibition "Hexen 2039", the Kunstverein Langenhagen opens its annual program for 2008: "Can this be true?" Aspects of perception will be examined in five exhibitions. How do we perceive things and why do we believe that they are true? The Kunstverein Langenhagen will get to the bottom of these questions this year.

Suzanne Treister deals with the nexuses between identity, history, power, and hallucination in her works. How can we make meaning out of history and warfare? Did everything really happen as the books say they did or are there inconceivable links between people and places? How do historic moments render themselves authentic for us?

Steffi Prange Translation: Dr. Michael Wolfson

Anna Meyer painted buildings of symbolic importance as well as individual persons and groups in various comic book-like text-andimages sequences with lush and brilliant oil paints on 35 transparent Plexiglas panel. As a direct participant in the hair-raising events, the artist does not omit herself from the pictures. In doing so, she assumes the role of a participant, as well as an observer and an observed. The artist is in no way concerned with a representation of the truth. It is rather the case that Anna Meyer very deliberately reflects in »WHITE CUBE • SITCOM« on various perspectives and points of view on the topic of truth and its conveyance in the media.

Anna Meyer (born 1964 in Schaffhausen/Switzerland, lives in Vienna/Austria) studied at the design schools at Zurich and Lucerne. She devotes herself to the global consumer culture and the resulting conflicts and shifts in living conditions in her paintings and largeformat billboards in public spaces. Together with the Tokyo-based fashioned designer Edwina Hörl, the artist contributes to collections in the form of co-operations.

Rosebud in film is a dream, a longing. In »Citizen Kane« (USA, 1941) this leads the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane to attain immeasurable wealth and drives him to a life-long unfulfilled search for childlike harmony.

Rosebud in the exhibition remains an unanswered question dealing with the diametrically opposed relationship between opulence and emptiness. In how far does the visible convey the intended content, or does it rather disguises, hides, and distract it? Does the absent dictate the image? Our perception? What is the relationship in this context between such means of expression as figuration and abstraction or ornament and baroque?

These questions will be examined based on selected positions. The works will be placed in a relationship to each other in the exhibition. In doing so, the taking will attempt to create references and put statements in a nutshell. The experience of the artworks and the exhibition is in the foreground.

Tilo Schulz Translation: Dr. Michael Wolfson

The Danish artist Tommy Støckel (born 1972 in Copenhagen, lives in Berlin) is fascinated by objects that pretend to be something else than they really are. He uses the simplest materials such as printed paper, Styrofoam or imitations from construction supply firms for his highly sophisticated geometrical sculptures. He meticulously shapes multi-part architectonic Sculptures out of these materials. He generates the graphic models of the form and placement of the parts with the help of a computer program. Traces of natural transitoriness are not recognizable in his sculptures, but visible solely as imitations. His works cannot be clearly defined in terms of time and style due to their model-like character. Tommy Støckel has designed a new, twenty meter long sitespecific work for the Kunstverein Langenhagen. Tommy Støckel studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad.

Christof Zwiener precisely measures spaces with yarn, joins the individual lines to form a fine net that he in turn subdivides into blackened routes. Perspective weavings develop while striding through the spaces. Drawings emerge, peter out, and constantly change. Ludwig Seyfahrt describes them “as visual images at the border of disappearance,” as “attempts to bestow mental imaginations or characterizations that one defines as recollective images with a suitable ephemeral clearness.”

Christof Zwiener in fact often works with art historical and contemporary references. The piece “Starting at Zero” in the Bonn Kunstverein (2007) for example makes reference to “WTC Tapestry,” a tapestry commissioned from Joan Miró in 1974 in the entrance hall of the World Trade Center. In this case, Zwiener is interested in the reconstruction of the vanished, a flared up recollection of something that is no longer tangible which has returned in a ghostly fashion. His precarious constructions appear as fragments of memory, as a haunting “intermediate stage” on the rocks, as the quiet echo of a vaguely perceived sound. The chain of associations suggested in the title lays down (false) clues by setting an origin. It appears as a picture puzzle of a concrete topographical location, a terrain steeped in history inscribed in consciousness and as a ground zero, the place of obliteration and new beginning at which the past shines through.

The piece “textum” developed for the Kunstverein is aimed at this very fusion of levels of meaning and again reflects upon his own artistic practice. The title plays with the common etymology of the words textile and text from the Latin word “textum” meaning “woven fabric.” It is the material as well as linguistic fabric that Zwiener’s piece enmeshes. Panels of fabric form the background, the two-dimensional texture of the space. Unrestricted threads are braced in front of it forming three-dimensional textiles, form new spatial textures that interweave with the cultural references into a textual space that can open up while striding through it.

Christof Zwiener (born 1972) studied from 1998 to 2004 at the HBK Braunschweig under Prof. Raimund Kummer. Solo exhibitions in the Kunstvereins in Bonn (2006/07), Ulm (2005) and Ravensburg (2004) as well as numerous European group exhibitions. Christof Zwiener’s works can presently also be seen in the Galerie Elly Brose-Eiermann and the Schürmann Collection in Berlin.