Sophie Bueno-Boutellier's sculptural work combines material and references from different sources. Due to her selection and combination of divers forms and delicate materials, the French artist evokes different horizons of meaning and gives way to the emergence of new formal and conceptual entities. In a poetic play with indication and fragment she creates spaces, which leave the spectator confronted with a myriad of possible interpretations while opening up new sensual experiences. Working on the series of „Kind of Paintings“ she radicalizes the attempt to rediscover a purely sensual / visual approach, by reducing “painting” to gesture and colour in canvas foldings.

Rive Gauche is based on the concept of repetition, inspired by Gertrude Stein and Gilles Deleuze. It seeks "the possibility of reinvention, that is to say repetition dissolves identities as it changes them, giving rise to something unrecognisable and productive".

Sophie Bueno Boutellier (*1974) projects wooden frameworks, as well as ceramic and bronze forms, that she groups to fragile ensembles for her solo show at Kunstverein Langenhagen. In addition she will present works of the series “kind of paintings”. Due to the delicateness of the works and the artist's minimalist approach to the exhibition space the installation forms a counterweight to the functionalistic architecture.

Kunstverein Langenhagen is delighted to present Sophie Bueno-Boutellier`s first institutional solo show. The French artist living in Berlin studied at Villa Arzon, Nice, France and participated in several shows in Europe and USA. Until 25th of September she is part of the group show Lumière Noire at Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.

In her photographic works, Natalie Czech examines the interrelationship between text and image and explores the question of how words evoke and interpret images. She uses concepts of authorship, subjectivity, documentation and the production of contexts of meaning.

In 2010 she received the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Award for Contemporary Photography for her ongoing series, Hidden Poems. Illustrated pages from magazines, newspapers or picture books provide the raw materials for this series. Natalie Czech highlights individual letters and words in the respective texts that produce a formerly 'hidden' poem. The poems come from, among others, E.E. Cummings, Jack Kerouac and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Like a quick thought - a literary snapshot - they appear within the context of the page and rattle the 'rationally' established, coordinated text and image structure. The result is a text within the text that stimulates new meanings in dialogue with the already existing images and texts.

For the series, A Small Bouquet, produced for the Kunstverein Langenhagen, Natalie Czech uses calligrams as an attempt to confront and intertwine text and image, she reverses the process established for Hidden Poems of inscribing into an existing text structure. The source material is not pre-existing text fragments, but a picture poem. Natalie Czech invited seven writers - Andrew Berardini, Julien Bismuth, Maia Gianakos, Leslie-Ann Murray, Mick Peter, Nathania Rubin and Alix Rule - to each write a text that contains the same calligram of the American poet, Frank O'Hara (1926 - 66). The texts develop precisely around the calligram, embed it in the text flow and thereby, however, dissolve its iconicity. Natalie Czech presents the texts as photographs of book pages and re-presents the calligram through marking words in the photographs.

Natalie Czech (b. 1976) lives and works in Berlin. She has received numerous awards and scholarships, her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the USA. This year her work can be seen in exhibitions at, among others, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Kunstverein Rhineland and Westphalia Kunstverein / Schaufenster, Düsseldorf and at C / O Berlin

Shannon Bool (* 1972, Canada), Alex Müller (* 1969, Germany) and Niels Trannois (*1976, France): one male and two female artists from three countries with different educational backgrounds and languages, live and work in close proximity to each other in the Berlin district of Neukölln, and produce joint exhibition projects.

Painting and collage are common focal points, using materials such as silk, photography, carpet, wood, glass and ceramics, etc. Another facet of their work is the design of objects that they fit into spatial installations. References from literature, art and cultural history, film, psychology, music, and everyday life are an important aspect of their work. Bool, Müller and Trannois use them to poetically create personal mythologies, and as a reflection on the traditions of the image, its horizons of meaning and usage.

The paths of artists cross again in the Kunstverein Langenhagen: pour vous, Les trois saisons presents recent work from each of them in this jointly presented exhibition.

Since 2009 Judith Raum (*1977) has collected image material and correspondence from archives in Germany, England and Turkey, which document the diffusion of capital and the language and image policy connected with German semi-colonial efforts in Anatolia during the early 20th century. Raum’s interest lies in finding out how power and its subversion appear through the materials and sites she studies. She offers alternative views of some of these histories through the way she uses the same materials and language, only to make process transparent and to highlight the provisional in the construction of sense and in the treatment of material.

Jean-Pascal Flavien will present architectural models at the Kunsverein Langenhagen, each of a house that has been realized in the last 4 years: the viewer in Rio de Janeiro 2007, the no drama house in Berlin in 2009 and the two persons house in Sao Paulo in 2010.

The exhibition focuses on the no drama house and unfolds some of its elements. The no drama house was thought out as a layout of spatial problems (the house is one meter wide, one entrance door is upstairs, ...) around which specific gestures, and forms of activity were developed. Built in the summer of 2009 in the front garden of Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch at Kurfürstenstrasse 12, the no drama house was the site of several events until it was closed in March 2012. These included the performance PLAy which was staged both at the house and at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht) in 2010, and Cinonema no drama cinema, a multiple films projection which was first shown projected on the house itself in March of this year, and will be presented again at the South London Gallery in early May. The house was also the site of a continuous stream of quotidian activities by the artist, who used it as a workspace, while filming his interactions with its "problematic" layout.

The elements presented are the furniture of the house, some models, the P-lay-outs (a series of graphic lay-outs), the books which Flavien published in relation to this project, and the micro-films which he produced in the house. During the course of the exhibition the furniture of the no drama house will be presented in different sequential configurations. In doing so, Flavien presents the furniture sequences as phrases or sentences in which the individual pieces function both as furniture, and as potential linguistic markers. Each piece of furniture refers back to its related action (sitting, sleeping, eating, working, daydreaming), actions whose order and sequence is constantly shifted and recast by the fluid contingencies of life in the no drama house.

The exhibition will also introduce the two new house projects that Flavien is working on at the moment: the breathing house he is currently building at the Centre d'Art du Parc Saint-Léger in France and the statement house (provisory title) a project for a roof in New York.

Langenhagen’s 700th anniversary gives us the opportunity to look at the past, present and the future of a town, which can be the example for many other towns: Where do we find public space and how do we interact with it? How do we tell the past? How we live in a globalised world? How would we like to live? How does an urban environment and nature interact with one another? How do we cope with traffic? How do we communicate? How do we consume? Which places would we rather not know? And what is hard to remember? In interaction with these questions the Kunstverein Langenhagen presents the international group exhibition An_Eignungen with artworks around the town.

Whilst some artists have been invited to develop their artworks on-site, other artworks have been chosen and enter into a dialogue with their locations. They show different approaches to the central questions of the exhibition. It proposes a variety of perspectives on contemporary experiences. The exhibition is focusing on ‘everyday living environment’ and corresponds with urban and rural structures. It relates to contemporary scope of action and topics. Topics include amongst others economical and ecological questions as well as exemplary examination of history.

The artist Silke Schatz (*1967), based in Cologne dedicates her work to special places and their history and creates her own form of artistic archaeology. Next to biographical elements and (cultural) historical sources, the examination of reminiscence work as well as literature are important parts in a variety of her projects. Schatz’s interest for territorial arrangements influences her works. Drawings and models quote architectural presentations and are combined with very colourful spray pictures. Silke Schatz confronts and connects different perspectives, time levels and associations to create more dimensional spatial constructions.

In her solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Langenhagen Silke Schatz examined the local park, Eichenpark. Today Langenhagen’s Mental Hospital is located there. It was founded in 1862 and developed into a fenced and tabooed place and existed as such until the 1980’s. There are still historical traces to be found but these traces do not give any insight into its history.

Christian Haake builds models of everyday objects and spaces with meticulous precision. The alluring virtuosity that he shows in the small details of his miniature and life size models draw the viewer’s attention and have them believe they are perceiving reality. Though suspicions will be aroused and then the initial perception altered. Haake does not intend to imitate. His works emanate from of his memory; impressions with small changes.

Alongside working with objects and installations Haake also works with drawings, film and photography, which focus on everyday surroundings and the well-known architecture of half-public and public places. They tie in with images of the collective memory and turn into a melancholic overview of the “inhospitality of cities”. While doing so Haake does not use the attention seeking staging of the weirdness. His works rather enlighten the experience of the “strangeness of the everyday”, as Janneke de Vries writes. Christian Haake’s work is newly commissioned for the Kunstverein Langenhagen.

Christian Haake (*1969 in Bremerhaven) lives and works in Bremen. He studied Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Bremen (HfK Bremen) and Science of Art as well as Philosophy at the University of Bremen. He won the Bremen Art prize (2007), the Prize of the Friends of the University of the Arts Bremen (2009) as well as the Paula Moderson Becker Prize (2010) and the working scholarship of Stiftung Kunstfonds (2011). His first institutional solo exhibition was in 2011 at the GAK, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen. Haake took part in a number of group exhibitions and projects amongst others at Künstlerhaus Bremen, Cuxhavener Kunstverein, Riga Art Space and Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung as well as “Nordlichter – 84. Autumn Exhibition of Lower Saxonian Artists” of the Kunstverein Hanover.

This group exhibition includes works by artists already active in the 1960s and 70s in the women's movement together with works by artists born in the 1970s and 80s. Thematically they negotiate the relationship of the body to space and address the use of specific forms of the female body in mass culture. What the artists have in common is that they have all organised networks and amongst other things developed action-based and performative practises and further, that they have worked across disciplines and draw on different educational backgrounds in order to experiment with hybrid forms of authorship. The question of access to public space stands alongside proposals for intimate experiential spaces, provocative displays of the feminine next to enigmatic portraits. The artists each design their own claiming of space and visual strategies.

We are proud to announce Katarina Burins first institutional exhibition in Germany. The exhibition Nová Strana revolves around some of the seminal periodicals from the early 20th century, such as Devetsil, Stavba and Nová Strana, which acted as important platforms for the dissemination of designs and ideas. The exhibition weaves these publications together with objects and materials that were reproduced in their pages, including projects and drawings for hotels sanatoriums and storefronts, as well as objects, furniture and period photographs. It was during the time of her greatest involvement with these important journals that Czechoslovakian architect Petra Andrejova-Molnár (1899-1985), designed her iconic Hotel Nord-Sud, and also helped organize the small Brno shop, Zijeme. Run by her colleague Hana Kucerova-Zaveska this shop became a frequent meeting point for the designers and patrons of the group. The exhibition in Langenhagen includes a screen structure and several pieces of display furniture from the store as well as some never before exhibited objects designed for Hotel Nord-Sud. Surveying more than 14 years through the lens of these magazines and the surviving objects associated with them, Burin presents a speculative and loose history of a time and place, contextualizing both well known and little known figures of this marginalized Eastern European modernist scene. Katarina Burin’s current and ongoing project focusing on Petra Andrejova-Molnár, probes the shifting aspect of historical knowledge, addressing the canon and undercutting structures of mythmaking that surround "genius" architects. P.A.is inserted into the discourse as an exemplar of female designers working in the early 20th Century. Participating in the examination of marginalized figures, both current and historical, the project opens up conversations around the authority of museum display, blurs boundaries between fact and fiction and questions the significance of authorship, authentication and the copy.