Moments - Artist Talk

Channa Horwitz’s conceptual series Sonakinatography comprises drawings, performances and musical compositions. She includes sound and movement, in other words temporal structures, in her minimalist notational system. By means of a mathematical order based on the sequence 1‒8, Horwitz extends the rigid structures of seriality to infinite variation possibilities. The linear logic, the monosyllabic rhythm of which can be modulated and multiplied in an infinite variety of ways, Horwitz has also repeatedly staged in concrete performative musical acts. Moments shows two of these earlier realizations and a new interpretation, as well as a selection of minimalist drawings on which these are based. Horwitz’s work in the performance field, originating in a strictly spatial system, has an aesthetic concept.

Short Biography

In her works, the North American performance and conceptual artist Channa Horwitz (*1932 in Los Angeles, USA) has been experimenting since the beginning of the 1960s with numbers, rhythms, movements as well as spatial and temporal structures: she records diagrams temporally, which may be read as musical scores; movements are translated into colored schemes. The compositions thus created are, to some extent, designed as choreography or augmented in multimedia interpretations. As performance artist, Horwitz works together, among others, with Allan Kaprow. Horwitz’s minimalist-structural work, which could be viewed at the beginning of 2010 at Solway-Jones Gallery (Los Angeles), is currently experiencing international rediscovery and re-evaluation as the work of one of the most important North American artists of her generation.

Since her first appearance in the context of the “New Art Practice” in Yugoslavia of the early 1970s, in her works Sanja Iveković has transformed the medial construction of images and the constellations of power which they conceal. Here the artist is primarily concerned with the exploration of images and spaces attached to women. Iveković also extended critical reflections of the media to the analysis of the institutional conditions and rituals of the art scene. The series of three performances from this period and presented in Moments, actively brings the public into the interplay of media presence, as well as real presence and absence.

Sanja Iveković is one of the first artists in former Yugoslavia to have combined performance and video art. Over the course of the 1990s, she gave her work greater political accentuation and, as feminist activist, also initiated important projects. Her performance Practice Makes a Master will be re-enacted by Sonja Pregrad as part of the exhibition opening on March 17, 2012 and March 18, 2012 at 4 pm.

Short Biography

Sanja Iveković (*1949 in Zagreb, Croatia, former Yugoslavia) studied from 1968 to 1971 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Her photo montages, videos, performances and installations emerging since the early 1970s have been characterized by a critical questioning of the mass media and their identity-forging potential. By personally entering into public discourse ‒ whether in the form of photographic representations in the media, or as the actual protagonist of performances ‒ Iveković brings out into the open the collective social codes of behavior based on gender-specific standardized patterns in mass media. As one of the first explicitly feminist artists in Croatia, she has also been the facilitator and founder of a large number of political initiatives including the Women Artists’ Center Elektra and the Center for Women’s Studies in Zagreb. Iveković participated in numerous international exhibitions including documenta 11, and 12 and Manifesta 2. In November 2011, her retrospective Lady Rosa of Luxembourg took place at the MoMA New York.

In 1968 Graciela Carnevale took part in the Ciclo de Arte Experimental, organized by the art group of the same name, with “Acción del Encierroa”: without being informed in advance, the public was locked in the exhibition space for over an hour. In other words, she took prisoners. A glass front facing outward provided a view into the inside of the neutral space, structured as a White Cube, to the incarcerated visitors. Carnevale, who had been working with minimalist works from the radius of the “primary structures” since the mid-1960s, later increasingly turned to a practice of art understood as emancipatory and political; for example, in the capitalism critical movement “Tcamán Arde”, the archive of which Carnevale had organized.

In Moments, Carnevale’s work not only stands for a radical concept of the construction of public and witness, but, together with the archives, no less for a radical questioning of the possibility to present actions and political art in the museum context, accessible to the present.

Short Biography

As member of the artist’s group “Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia”, Graciela Carnevale (* 1942 in Marcos Juárez, Argentinien) participated in conceptual exhibitions and demonstrations against established art in the years between 1965 and 1969. Carnevale also worked in connection with the political-activist movement “Tucumán Arde”, and archived their actions. From 1994 in the collective “Grupo Patrimonio” she has held exhibitions, actions and interventions in urban spaces. Her artistic approach – represented by works in major collections in Latin America, as well as in MoMA, New York or MACBA, Barcelona and that, among others, could be viewed at the documenta 12 in Kassel – focusses on social questions and art as an ethical attitude.

In her earlier solo pieces, Reinhild Hoffman confronted concrete materials which at once limit and accentuate her movements. By way of a sculptural, artistic access to the material of dance, Hoffmann composes movements like picture sequences. A precise language of forms compresses the content of her solo choreographies. Whereas, in Bretter she exposes herself to a body extension of extreme dimensions and shifts of focus, in Steine she wrestles with centrifugal and gravitational forces. Intensionally she used the sounds of the material as a musical composition. Both works, created in 1980, have been fully documented on video. From a contemporary perspective on these works, Hoffmann elaborates the essence of the dance pieces through a specific selection of video stills in the exhibition; in the choreographic transformation, the artist compresses and reinterprets the iconographic and semantic readability of these works in an image plate.

Short Biography

The dancer, choreographer and director Reinhild Hoffmann (*1943 in Sorau/Silesia) received her training from Eleonore Härdle-Munz in Karlsruhe and from Kurt Joos at Folkwang University in Essen. From 1978 till 1986 she directed the Bremer Tanz Theater, for the first three years in co-direction with Gerhard Bohner. Thanks to their aesthetic lucidity, Hoffmann’s pieces developed in Bremen and afterwards at Schauspielhaus Bochum made a contribution to the international recognition of German dance theater. She resides in Berlin and primarily directs the local Musiktheater since 1995. She stages Wagner’s Lohengrin at the same time as Moments at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe.

Topographic reading points, which Simone Forti noted when travelling through urban areas, encouraged her to produce the work Face Tunes in 1967. In this work, she transfers the outline of human portraits in codified contoured lines. As musical scores, these scaled lines embody movement, whereby the scales are wandered through by following the traces recorded in a score with a flute. Face Tunes stands for a phase in the work where the choreographer propagates her minimalistic scores as applied to the analysis of movement with music. Forti’s systematic method of working also reveals itself in the archiving of her works for which she makes use of a many-sided historical approach: she began documenting her works in sketches and in artist’s books early on in her career. Today, she develops training videos which facilitate specific and authorized live transmission of her performances. During the exhibition, Simone Forti reenacts Face Tunes thereby conveying the ability to restage the performance to the witnesses.

Short Biography

The artist Simone Forti (*1935 in Florence, immigrated to the USA in 1939) works in the media of dance, text and drawing. As co-founder of the Judson Dance Theater, she played an important role in the new orientation of dance in New York during the 1960s. In pieces such as Huddle or See-Saw, she united the methods of improvisation she learned from Anna Halprin along with the conceptual freedom and precision through which John Cage exercised his influence at that time. In the reconstruction of works such as Dance Constructions, produced in 1961 and shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009, the contemporaneity of approach continues to be perceptible.

Since she was created in 1972 by Lynn Hershman Leeson, the figure Roberta Breitmore moves and reproduces herself much like the ghostly double of the artist through the various realities and media formats. One could say Roberta Breitmore, performs media realities: she appears in films or in reality at vernissages, meets with men on dates, materializes in three-fold form, wanders onto the Golden Gate Bridge like on a film still of the American Independent Cinema, or becomes a victim of exorcist ritual. Roberta is a comic heroine; it is possible to communicate with her in cyberspace through the interface of a puppet which has her features and meet her in the virtual world of the “second life”. Her dress, her glasses, a wig are traces of this existence. Roberta owns an insurance card and is congratulated by the President of America on her virtual birthday. The media documentation of Roberta’s performance, which will be exhibited in Moments, are at the same time evidence of the most various formats in which a performance can represent itself: from Vintage Print, original photography, exhibition copy, poster or an advertisement, film, video, eye-witness account and art criticism etc. through to the copy of a film from the Internet on a Home-Printer. Lynn Hershman Leeson will develop this process of media duplication of the documents herself during her stay in Karlsruhe.

Short Biography

Since Lynn Hershman Leeson (*1941 in Cleveland Ohio, USA) began her career in the late 1960s as award-winning American media artist and filmmaker, she has received wide recognition for a body of work combining art with social commentary, particularly with regard to the relationship between humans and technology. A pioneer in New Media, she has been internationally acclaimed for her use of new technologies and her early investigations of issues such as identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. Hershman Leeson was awarded the ZKM Siemens Media Art Price in 1995 and the d.velop digital art award in 2010. Her work is, among others, in the collections of the MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and the Hess Art Collection. A major exhibition of her work will be presented at the Kunsthalle Bremen, in 2012.