22 Sep 2015

OPEN HOUSE - A Group Show on Hospitality / Anca Munteanu Rimnic at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Haus Salve Hospes
OPEN HOUSE – A Group Show on Hospitality

12 September – 22 November 2015

For the first time since 2007, the gallery spaces in the Villa Salve Hospes are being filled with a thematic group exhibition: OPEN HOUSE – a group show on hospitality brings together eleven international artistic positions whose works provide commentaries on hospitality as a social, cultural and political phenomenon.

The very inscription 'Salve Hospes' (lat. 'Be welcome, guest'), which stands like a motto above the main entrance of the exhibition building, already suggests the dedication of a show on hospitality in the Kunstverein Braunschweig. And indeed, the original distribution of the rooms arranged by architect Peter Joseph Krahe provides for several rooms that are intended for hospitality: reception area, ceremonial hall, guest rooms. But beyond concrete reference to this particular location, hospitality in general can serve as a characteristic feature of the art world, where artists are invited to stage on-site exhibitions. An atmosphere has to be created, where the artist-guests feel 'at home', where they feel comfortable, so that they can develop their work and ultimately present it at an exhibition.

OPEN HOUSE is furthermore intended as an invitation to artists and public alike to engage in questions of what it means to be a guest or a host and to deal with the specific perspectives and contexts that result from this difference. The many facets of hospitality unfold between hotel room walls, linguistic differences and bridging gaps, traces left behind by guests in addition to references to exile, colonialism and refugee policies. OPEN HOUSE depicts hospitality – which is per se tied to conditions and consequently in contradiction to the central idea – in its ambivalence between welcoming warmth and exertion. The theme demonstrates its multidimensional nature and its complexity in installations, sculpture, video and photographic work, which for the most part have been produced especially for this exhibition.

Participating artists:

Bianca Baldi (*1985, Johannesburg, ZA), Yael Bartana (*1970, Kfar-Yehezkel, IL), Kasia Fudakowski (*1985, London, GB), Philipp Grünewald (*1989, Frankfurt/Main, DE), Sven Johne (*1976, Bergen auf Rügen, DE), Peles Empire (Katharina Stöver, *1982, Gießen, DE & Barbara Wolff, *1980, Fogaras, RO), Thomas & Renée Rapedius (*1975/*1973, Niedersachsen, DE), Ani Schulze (*1982, Frankenberg, DE), Slavs and Tatars (gegr. 2006 in Eurasien), Florian Slotawa (*1972, Rosenheim, DE), Heimo Zobernig (*1958 in Mauthen, AT)

The exhibition OPEN HOUSE is generously sponsored by: Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Volkswagen Financial Services


Remise
ANCA MUNTEANU RIMNIC
NEST

12 September – 22 November 2015

Anca Munteanu Rimnic's works derive from the aesthetic potential of the visible world's things and systems. They make it possible to not only see connections vis-à-vis logic and historicality but also to grasp relationships in their brittleness. Her objects, photographs, videos and installations link personal and social stories and identities, allowing them their fragility by leaving them open-ended and negotiable. Anca Munteanu Rimnic finds a visual or allegorical access to objects and situations in everyday encounters. She develops ideas that always address biographical aspects, both ragarding her native country that she had to leave at an early age and her life as an artist in Germany. Her works take up experience and recurrent recollection as aesthetic and identificational concepts yet they never lose their sketchiness, they rather transform it into strength.

Anca Munteanu Rimnic also operates with precise sculptural gestures in her Braunschweig exhibition, for example when she covers the exhibition space with ten tons of loam, leaving the floor its uncertainty. While the material undergoes changes over the course of the exhibition, begin and completion coincide, thus focussing attention on processuality and production. The loam floor veers between presence and emptiness, forming the foundation for an unusual inlay – a carpet made of glazed white ceramics featuring a geometrical pattern based on Romanian kilims. Edged in the loam ground it appears – similar to the soft knocking that can be heard in the small room of the Remise – like a fading memory.

'Nest', the title of the presentation, points to the extensive installation as well as the exhibition space as fragile, alterable and temporary structure. At the same time the title also references a very personal understanding of nest as a privately experienced conflict of home between grounding, incompleteness and loss.

Anca Munteanu Rimnic (*1974, lives in Berlin) was born in Romania; at the age of six, she immigrated to Germany with her parents. She studied art at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and studied under John Baldessari at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Mike Kelley and Jack Goldstein at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She has been internationally represented in several international group shows, among others at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2011), at the 4th Moscow Biennale (2011), and at the Kunsthalle Vienna (2014). A comprehensive monograph was recently published by Distanz Verlag, Berlin. 'Nest' is Anca Munteanu Rimnic's first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.

Anca Munteanu Rimnic's exhibition is supported by: Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony


SUPPORTING PROGRAMME

PUBLIC GUIDED TOURS
Sunday 3 pm, Thursday 6 pm

IT'S NOT LATE IT'S EARLY #5
7 October, 7 – 11 pm
with Anca Munteanu Rimnic

IT'S NOT LATE IT'S EARLY #6
14 October, 7 – 11 pm
with Bianca Baldi, Philipp Grünewald, Peles Empire, Thomas & Renée Rapedius, Ani Schulze

IT'S NOT LATE IT'S EARLY #7
21 October, 7 – 11 pm
with Sven Johne and the Institute of Design and Structure Lore (Institut für Entwerfen und Gebäudelehre, Leibniz Universität Hannover), Welcome Dinner (Hamburg) et.al.

IT'S NOT LATE IT'S EARLY #8
11 November, 7 – 11 pm
with Kasia Fudakowski, Florian Slotawa and Raimar Stange (publicist and curator, (East-)Berlin)

LECTURE PERFORMANCE
1 October, 7 pm
Slavs and Tatars

TALK
5 November, 7 pm
Prof. Dr. Beatrice von Bismarck (HGB Leipzig), Anna Goetz (curator, Frankfurt am Main)