Philipp Kremer’s paintings are conflict-laden – not only in the subject matter, but also on a formal level, and in the interplay between the two. In his formal approach he often seems to oppose the narrative element, like choosing colors randomly when showing a utopian community, or approaching the subject of an orgy as if it was a monochrome abstract painting. While all his subjects, be it girls with horses, communes, crying or sex, are social situations, and as such, issues of power are an important element, in his most recent series Soft People they become the main focus.

After Gatherings, where a group of people is shown harmoniously engaging in sexual acts, Soft People is portraying humans in scenes of physical violence and domination. Often two, at most three or four, people or bodies interact in oppressive power relations, in a context that remains mostly unspecific. The paintings are executed with bright colors and light gestures on white canvas, which makes them appear playful and almost seems to insist on highlighting the joyful aspect of painting.

The provocation lies in the question of why to bring lightness and violence together: If choosing to depict something means giving it a certain affirmative importance, and painting something means engaging with it emotionally, how is it possible to paint something hurtful, without finding pleasure somewhere in the process? Hence, the paintings need to be executed with joy, and artist and viewer find themselves in the perverted situation of having to deal with the joyful and the hurtful at the same time.

Philipp Kremer (*1981) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Universität der Künste in Berlin with Georg Baselitz (2000-2004) and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2011-2012). Recent solo exhibitions include Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles and Bucharest; Kazachenko’s Apartment, Oslo; Apice for Artists, Amsterdam and Galerie Lena Brüning, Berlin. In 2013 he won the Royal Dutch Painting Award. In 2014 he was granted the support by the Mondriaan Fund (Stipendium Established Artist).

On the invitation of Kunstverein Langenhagen, Estonian artist KroOt Juurak (Tallinn, 1981) takes over the space and context of this very art institution. Instead of mediating through objects, she works with other ways of transmission: she communicates through movements, language(s), moods, misunderstandings, assumptions or physical sensations. Her work is ephemeral and often stimulates other senses than sight. Yet it is very communicative. It often interrogates and focuses on clichés and expectations within day-to-day communication. One of the questions that are at the root of her work is: what do you mediate (as an artist) and for whom?

During the exhibition KroOt Juurak changes her name into KroOt. With this act, her name becomes a venue to be rented out to other artists, several of whom will use KroOt as a platform to perform. When KroOt Juurak curated the V NU Performance Festival in 2014, she wrote that when she sees a work she really appreciates, part of her imagines it to be her own work. This is precisely what happens by changing her name and letting it inhabit by other ‘users’ – an act that questions at the same time who is producing and who is consuming. The exhibition presents performances that are not really performances, artists that may or may not really be artists, performers who may and may not be performing. There aren’t many occasions where you can “sit down and see” – because the performances also take the form of a workshop, a mood, a conversation or a movement. Each of the works could represent the whole exhibition. In other words: the exhibition is not made up of works, it is in each work.

In addition to a number of temporary events, discussed more in depth below, your visit during the exhibition is accompanied by an audio guide and an external mood, thus addressing the exhibition as an ongoing performance.

An audio guide is a well-known devise used in art institutions, where it provides the visitor with extra information about the works on view. In KroOt, the audio-guided visitor becomes the main protagonist in a non-visual ‘exhibition’. Bad Mood, also on view for the whole duration of the exhibition, will perform itself, by inhabiting the people who staff the Kunstverein, therewith affecting every visitor as well.

KroOt Juurak (b. 1981, Tallinn) is a choreographer and performer whose work, which comprises of performances, presentations, texts, workshops, mood shifts, challenges fixed definitions of choreography and performance. She graduated in dance and choreography from ArtEZ, Arnhem in 2003 and obtained an MA in Fine Arts from Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. She has presented her work in a variety of forms at venues including Tallinn Art Hall (2017), International Figurentheater Festival Erlangen (2015), Stromereien Festival, Zürich (2014), Tanzquartier Wien (2013) Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (2013), Venice Biennale “oO” Pavillion (2013), Mindaugas Triennial, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius (2012), ImPulsTanz, Vienna (2012), de Appel Art Centre, Amsterdam (2012), Super deLuxe, Tokyo (2011), Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck (2010) and deSingel, Antwerp (2008).

How can one, as an artist, resist while continuing to produce work? How can one work within an art world that they despise, but in which they nonetheless function? Central to Stefano Calligaro’s practice, from the start of an idea or gesture to its physical outcome, are the questions of WHY and WHAT one produces as an artist. For Calligaro, answers lie in absurdity and in his rejection of a certain virtuosity. The so-called products that come from Calligaro’s hands are the result of ‘quick thoughts coming from other quick thoughts transferred quickly on various surfaces.’ By doing so, he circumvents the all too finished, polished product. The entire project presented at Kunstverein Langenhagen, which also includes a publication consisting of e-mail correspondence on the above-mentioned topics between Caligaro and artists Kurt Ryslavy and QS Serafijn, evokes the dynamic between so-called artistic freedom and power relations that is constantly at stake.

Downloads: KVLBulletin01Calligaro

Jack Jaeger (1937-2013) began making “art things”, so he wrote in one of his few statements, after having left behind a career as a film editor, cameraman, producer, and director for commercials, television, and feature films. His artistic output began around 1978, “while thinking about photography and the then current discourse with Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.”

Jaeger’s work is a playful investigation into the nature of photography. His technique and choice of materials are disconnected from artistic virtuosity. He used ordinary, unheroic objects found in his everyday surroundings, or colored surfaces that he photographed and made into assemblages. These objects refer as much to themselves as to the ambiguity and illusion of the photographed image. He frequently treated his created photographs as objects, applying them as repetitive elements, shaping them in different relations and positions. Often, his pieces are assembled with bolts, nuts, or cables, a conscious addition of visual elements.

In addition to his activities as an artist, he worked as a curator and editor. His network of interests and contacts was broad. Together with his partner, artist Lily van der Stokker, he was an avid traveller and was present at many exhibitions and events. As a curator he was driven by a curiosity for new developments, not by a wish to theorize or to indicate trends. His pioneering and idiosyncratic exhibitions revolved around the medium of photography or focused on work by artists who didn’t restrict themselves to visual art. Despite his curatorial disregard for convention, he was well informed and often introduced works by later well-known artists such as Elke Krystufek, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeremy Deller and Philippe Parreno. Examples include Mechanichal reproduction with artists Sylvie Fleury, Henry Bond, and Liam Gillick (Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam, 1994); Please don’t hurt me, an exhibition around violence, including Krystufek, Van der Stokker, and Bob Flanagan (Gallery Snoei, Rotterdam and Cabinet Gallery, London, 1994); or Bring your own walkman with works and performances by artists like Martin Creed, Bob & Roberta Smith, and The Red Krayola (W139, Amsterdam, 1997). Next to his activities as an artist and curator, he brought together an extensive collection of photographs dating from the late nineteenth century until recent, which can be seen as a representation of his way of looking. During the nineties, Jaeger was also active as reporter for Zapp magazine, a seminal art magazine on VHS.

While he took his work and occupations very seriously, his objects and projects form an antidote for practices that ascribe themselves great importance. His assemblages are generous objects that seek to initiate a dialogue about moving and still images, modernism, and the work of other artists. Even though his later work, that mainly took the form of lamps, is literally illuminating and figuratively shines a light on the nature of photography, Jaeger’s modest oeuvre is also quite private. He exhibited relatively little and not many were aware of his activities as an artist. In this exhibition at Kunstverein Langenhagen, made together with Mieke van Schaijk, Jaeger’s work forms the core of the presentation, to which works of a number of equal-minded artists are added as ‘conversation partners’, among them Anne Collier, Wjm Kok, Rachel Harrison, Aloïs Godinat, Anne Daems, B. Wurtz, Steel Stillman, Michaela Meise and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Downloads: KVLBulletin02Jack Jaeger

Kunstverein Langenhagen is a project space that can best be described as a 'visibility institution': it wants to show; it offers artists and their work an open platform. A similar motive lies at the foundation of an artistic practice: an artist engages with the world through his/her work. Through this process of visibility, the artist and institution take a non-neutral, subjective position.  The Extended View revolves around the politics of visibility and considers strategies of presentation and representation. What is the scope of an exhibition? How and where are normative forms destabilized? What are the positions of and relations between the various “actors” within an exhibition? And what does the “act of looking” mean for the position of the viewer?   The Extended View can be understood as an activity, in that it will change during the exhibition period, and as works are repositioned, added, or disappear. The principle of movement forms also the core of most of the works – they are mobile, light or are subject to change. Furthermore, during the show run, artists are invited to react on it. These “actions'” - with or within the works - emphasize that an exhibition is open and mobile, and therefore meanings, like our gaze, are changeable. 

Downloads: KVLBulletin03Der erweiterte Blick

“An object is not so attached to its name that we cannot find another one that would suit it better.” René Magritte in Words and Images, 1929

The Changing Appearance speaks of the ambiguity of artobjects and the ubiquity of this equivocalness. Ambiguity does not only reside in a work of art, but is also present in the eyes of the viewer and can be reinforced by the context in which a work is shown. The reception or the act of seeing, just like the object itself, is open-ended.

Although an art object has a desire to communicate and become an active part of the world, it doesn’t do this in an unambiguous way. It is multiple. In addition to the individualized ambiguity of objects, there exists the possibility of a network of relationships between art objects, and through exhibitions, thereby opening up new readings and meanings. Henri Matisse once said: "The object is an actor, a good actor can play a role in ten different pieces, an object can play a role in ten different images." Objects change through and while they interact with the context and objects around them.

The Changing Appearance is a reference to The Extended View, the previous exhibition, in which the emphasis was on visibility, the transformation within the artwork itself and the metamorphosis of the exhibition as a whole. In the text accompanying The Extended View the artist René Daniëls was quoted: “An exhibition is always part of a greater whole.” In line with this one might wonder: What is an exhibition and - for this presentation an even more important question - what is in that case the next exhibition?

Downloads: KVLBulletin04Die wechselnde Erscheinung

The new season in Kunstverein Langenhagen opens with a solo exhibition by artist Isabel Nolan (Dublin, 1974). One Foot In The World is the third in a sequence of exhibitions that previously took place at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin (Calling on Gravity, 2017) and the Grazer Kunstverein (Curling Up With Reality, 2018). In each the focus is on how the world is brought into meaning through human activity.

In One Foot In The World. Four Thoughts, (a text written for this occasion and published in our bulletin), the artist examines the habit of perceiving our environment and organising our experiences in hierarchies of lower and higher, up and down. This differentiation manifests itself not only in belief systems and their attendant symbolism (one example being the cathedral wherein height brings one closer to God and thus further away from one’s physical, unworthy self) – but also in social biases. Our status, moods and cultural tastes are all expressed in terms of high or low. Nolan connects these tendencies directly to the simple fact of our physical uprightness which we connect to our capacity for goodness, divinity and reason. The desire to always elevate the human, to transcend our animal nature, cheat death and even resist gravity, runs through the technologies, stories and artworks passed from generation to generation.

In the exhibition, Nolan’s appreciation of the 'low' plays out in a subtle way. Her work, which includes suspended and floor-based sculptures; paintings; photography and the aforementioned text, lifts the low and brings it literally and figuratively to another plane. Photographs portray both human and animal feet, the part of the body that is closest to the earth. Nolan depicts the ground itself too, in both embellished and neglected states. Decoration here reads as an attempt to elude earthly uncleanness and to deny that we occupy the same ground as inhuman (and apparently spiritless) beings.

The exhibition title focuses on feet, the part of the body which both anchors us to the world and keeps us upright and mobile. However, it refers also to our consciousness of death, knowledge of which seems to somehow drive us harder to circumvent this inevitability. In a text that was part of the exhibition Calling on Gravity Nolan writes about man's desire to transform unbound sensations into matter, to give them structure, a votive object, an artwork, or perhaps even an ritual, to affirm their validity. In contrast to this, desire in this body of work seems to be for intimacy, for contact with the world, with animals and other people. Grand abstraction is countered with a colourful tomb, handmade dust, a fallen non-functional chandelier and with portraits of three individuals who tried, in different ways, to love the world and people, and one who did not. An uncomplicated desire of the artist to somehow love a complicated world. In the pastel painted gallery spaces these elemental themes are addressed with an inquisitive approach and a certain characteristic lightness.

One Foot In The World takes place not only in the former bowling alley in which Kunstverein Langenhagen is located, but also in the former chapel in the Eichenpark, Langenhagen. This location has previously served as a context for exhibitions as well. It seems appropriate to use this specific building in the Eichenpark, the location of a psychiatric institution since1862, first only for children, then also for adults, a largely self-sufficient institution where the chapel served also as a mortuary. In the presentation in the chapel, links are woven confusing the high and low with works which take one’s attention back, always to ones surroundings. In the place where these unenviable people in all confinement were laid out and committed to the earth (and in the merciful hands of god), the distinction made between above and below, between privileged and pitiable, is now put into another perspective.

Downloads: KVLBulletin05Isabel Nolan

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who was born Else Hildegard Plötz in Świnoujście, Germany in 1874 and moved from Berlin to the United States in 1910, is often described as an agent provocateur, as a proto-punk poet and artist, even as an iconoclast. During her lifetime she wrote poetry, created body ornaments, sculptures and self-designed garments (‘dada couture’), with and in which she also performed. The Baroness’ practice provoked scandals by raising uncommon questions: what constitutes poetry and performance? What are their intentions? Where are their limits? Her oeuvre, both her (performative) poetry and her visual works, questions, among other things, the role and value of women and sex in a modern society.

The exhibition 'She Is The Future' is an activation of her position and her textual and visual output. The work of different contemporary artists, graphic designers and writers will refer to different aspects of the Baroness’ work, such as her (proto-) performances, her treatment and use of clothing as a common denominator for a hybrid personality, her intermingling of gender roles and the development of modern identities, her promiscuity and the attitude of seeing her body as a work of art, even as an exhibition platform.

Downloads: KVLBulletin06Sie ist die Zukunft

Six artists come together to create two large murals, in two locations, under the joint title GIANT. GIANT will span between the Kunstverein at Walsroder Straße and the former chapel in Langenhagen's Eichenpark. 
Both will be painted in a week-long collaboration in the days leading up to the opening. The characters and themes of both murals might differ slightly. We won’t fully know the content or style until February 21, when the results are shown.

Downloads: KVLBulletin07RIESE

Urination is an - essential - biological function that has been subjected to a great degree of social control. But keeping this level of control is for some harder than for others. For many people, disappearing public toilets is a massive problem. Older people and pregnant women don’t have the luxury of a stoic bladder. Unless you’re not male (who are able to find their “public toilets” at numerous places in the public realm) or in perfect health, it’s difficult to imagine the mental energy expended on assessing whether or not it is possible to find a toilet in the next five minutes.

As a (symbolic) response to the current lack and continual vanishing of public toilets, Kunsthalle3000 will turn a toilet inside Kunstverein Langenhagen into a free and unisex public toilet. A sign on the outside wall announces this new service of the Kunstverein and provides a place for those who need one. In the exhibition space a small sculpture entitled “A corner for relief” can be found, which can be seen as the counterpart to the new public toilet: an imprint of Langenhagen’s most popular peeing-corner – an “anti-monument” to male dominated street urination which is also the predictable outcome of a lack of public toilet infrastructure.

*Kunsthalle3000 is a project by German artist Thomas Geiger - who is a guest at the Kunstverein for one year. As an intervention within the institution, Kunsthalle3000 creates a series of situations located in the gap between institutional-, private- and public space.