11 Sep 2014

Clemens von Wedemeyer / Kevin Schmidt at Kunstverein Braunschweig

CLEMENS VON WEDEMEYER
EVERY WORD YOU SAY

September 13 – November 16, 2014
Opening: Friday, September 12, 7 p.m.

Clemens von Wedemeyer (born 1974 in Göttingen, lives in Berlin) examines the complexity of places and their history in media-reflexive films. In his impressive dOCUMENTA (13) contribution Muster (2012), he episodically traced the vicissitudinous history of the former Benedictine monastery at Breitenau near Kassel in a 3-channel video installation. In the process, his filmic re-enactments distance themselves from the documentary as well as the dramatic, opening up spaces of perception that focus on the contingency of history and time instead.

Clemens von Wedemeyer is planning an almost purely acoustic presentation for his solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig. It is dedicated to the history of the Deutsches Spracharchiv (German Language Archive), the work of its founder, the linguist and neurologist Eberhard Zwirner, and the ideas behind phonometry, which he decisively influenced. The archive once temporarily resided in the Villa Salve Hospes – the present home of the Kunstverein. The exhibition brings together historical, scientific and fictional narratives on their same premises. Von Wedemeyer has developed an audio parcours through the building that explores the voice as an acoustic phenomenon as well as the constitutive characteristics of the human speaking apparatus. Interactive acoustic pieces make the permeation of architecture and history tangible and simultaneously negotiate the future of language as a means of communications and as an identificational factor. Historical audio documents and installations featuring computer-based sound syntheses developed especially for the exhibition will be presented alongside each other, sketching out a non-linear history in the blend of fact and fiction. The sound – generated by speech and noises – constructs a filmic space and forgoes traditional images.

Clemens von Wedemeyer studied at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. He has received numerous international prizes and grants for his short films, videos and installations, including the main prize at the Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage Competition (2006), the Villa Romana Prize (2008) and the grant of the Deutsche Akademie Rome, Villa Massimo (2013). He has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York (2006), the Barbican Centre, London (2009) and MAXXI, Rome (2013). He has had a professorship for media art at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig since 2013. A publication documenting the elaborate project will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.

Every Word You Say is an artistic collaboration with Moritz Fehr and Lukas Hoffmann.

The exhibition is supported by: Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Braunschweigische Landessparkasse

With special thanks to: Institut für Deutsche Sprache



KEVIN SCHMIDT
HARMLESS HIGH ALTITUDE BALLOON
AMATEUR RADIO EQUIPMENT

September 13 – November 16, 2014
Opening: Friday, September 12, 7 p.m.

Kevin Schmidt (born 1972, lives in Vancouver and Berlin) not only deals with the functionality, production and criticism of diverse forms of mass entertainment in his films, installations and actions but also with idealised notions of nature. Schmidt captures for example spectacular natural events or phenomena on photographs or in films that then find their way into the exhibitions space while electronic beats, light effects or artificial patches of fog are transferred to an unspoiled and seemingly unimpressed nature. In equally radical and clever as well as humorous displacements of the spectacle – on occasion in a protracted and highly effective DIY manner – Kevin Schmidt inevitably poses questions concerning entertainment's value, strategies and manipulative potentials. In the process, the viewer is always also the consumer of an event that challenges him to question his own reception habits.

Kevin Schmidt now presents his most recent experiment Harmless High Altitude Balloon Amateur Radio Equipment (2013/14) in the Remise of the Kunstverein Braunschweig. A wall-filling projection shows a photograph of the stratosphere that is so large that the viewer almost feels himself floating in outer space. Schmidt presents his equipment in the adjoining space: a weather balloon and a self-made large-format camera. The artist constructed the camera from such materials as duct tape, polystyrene, wooden picks and rubber bands which, driven by a weather balloon, was able to capture the convex curvature of the earth in a nearly immaculate large-format image at an altitude of 35,000 metres. This is in turn presented by means of a hand-made slide Projector. An artist's book will be published during the exhibition in which Kevin Schmidt provides detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to emulate the project and produce one's own image of the world. By doing so, Schmidt not only questions art's already long-democratised production methods in question but also his own role as an artist.

Kevin Schmidt was the 2013 Artist-in-Residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and is presently the BS Projects grant holder at the HBK Braunschweig. His works have already been presented internationally in solo and group shows, for example at the Kunstverein Hannover, the Bielefeld Kunstverein, the Power Plant in Toronto and most recently at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.


The exhibition is supported by: Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Embassy of Canada