During the evening hours of 01-14 March 2021, the artists Susanne and Nina Langbehn, Johannes Rudloff, Eileen Farida Almarales Noy and Julius Anger will make contact with the outside world through different approaches.
The exhibition is free of charge and takes place as part of the event series "SILBERSALZ meets". With "SILBERSALZ meets" we are establishing a monthly event platform in which the respective festival themes of the year can be negotiated and experienced in a refreshingly different way. In addition to selective cooperation with other institutions in Halle and specially invited guests, we want to use the rooms of Passage 13 and the outdoor space of the Halle Neustadt district for this purpose.
The exhibited works:
Julius Anger - KMPLXSHOW
"Fragmentary scraps of a language of nothingness." This is the first statement of the protagonist in the video KMPLXSHOW. In it, a news anchorman, deliberately mounted into the picture more badly than well, comments on the state of the world with the help of poetic alliteration. The background, with which the figure seems to constantly blur, is an overwhelming collage of images and sequences that are quickly assembled. On view are scenes of a densely packed world, always in motion, which man seems to shape at will. The Dada-like verses expose life in this world on fast-forward as what it ultimately is: a doomed dystopia that seems to devour everything that gets in its way with the "mantra of violent excess".
The sculptor and painter Julius Anger remains true to his central working principles in this work as well. "The works are urban-looking assemblages that emerged from an intuitive working process. The idea should not be too concrete or deliberate in the artistic realisation, says Anger himself about his working method, because nothing slows him down more than the compulsion to achieve a given goal." (Karolina Drigoda, 2018)
Julius Anger, born 1992, 2014-2020 Studies at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art Halle, Sculpture/Figure course with Prof. Bruno Raetsch. October 2020 Diploma. Lives and works in Halle (Saale).
Nina Langbehn - Owner of this house lives here
The video shows footage of a movement through the ghost town of Prypyat. It was founded in 1970, in addition to the construction of the Tschnernobyl nuclear power plant, as a place to live for the workers who worked there and was once a Soviet model city. Today, more than 35 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the town, which was cleared at the time, has become a memorial to the long-term effects of radioactive contamination and is considered one of the strongest visual symbols of the anti-nuclear movement. The place, which by its preservation as a ghost town evades the common practice of banning communist symbols (decommunisation) in Ukraine, has become a magnet for extreme tourists from all over the world in recent years.
The film was made as part of the research and exhibition project DECOMMUNI_ATION, which was organised in 2018-19 in cooperation with the National Academy of Art and Architecture in
Kiev, the Shoshenko 33 in Kiev and the Weißensee School of Art, Berlin. The results were exhibited for the first time in 2019 at the Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Berlin Weißensee.
The footage was exposed on Super8 film, of which the last two rolls had already expired since 1981 and had to be developed by hand.
Nina Langbehn, born in 1991, studied at the Weißensee School of Art until 2019. She was a master student of Pia Linz. In addition to numerous exhibition participations, especially in Berlin, she has completed several work scholarships and stays abroad in recent years, including in Mexico City, Kiev, Kasterlee in Belgium and Hanover. She lives and works in Berlin.
Susanne Langbehn - Calcium
What do we do with human legacies? Susanne Langbehn intensively studied this question after the death of her grandfather. He unexpectedly left behind 10,000 glass ampoules, each filled with 10 ml of calcium solution, in addition to a garden full of trees made from seedlings from his old home. She took them, cleaned them and brought them to the sea. There she broke their shells and released the contents. But why did she do that?
The oceans are the largest CO2 reservoir on earth. The oceans absorb more than half of the CO2 produced by humans every year. But the rising CO2 content causes the water to become over-acidic, which lowers its pH value. This particularly affects invertebrate species with calcareous shells, such as mussels, corals or sea urchins. They are prevented from producing the vital calcium needed to form their shells.
Can grandfather's calcium bind our anthropogenic CO2? Can it give marine life a new shell? What can this mountain of ampoules do? Is it more than a mountain of drops and tears?
The artist answers this as follows: "We are not only responsible for what we do, but also for what we don't do. I will never know what my actions ultimately achieve. What remains is the will, the trying and always the question: what do we want to leave behind when we go?"
Susanne Langbehn - Found for all, 2016
Photograms on baryta paper
The unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the need to use findings and discoveries to make human coexistence with each other and with the environment more understandable, easier and more bearable are the fuels that drive science and researchers. At least this is the ideal of the artist Susanne Langbehn.
"Found for All" is an archival documentation of the found and inherited glass ampoules that can be seen in the video work "Calcium". In the video, the calcium contained in the ampoules is returned to the general public by being emptied into the sea. The ampoules are depicted using the photogram technique. This is a photographic technique in which objects are photographed on light-sensitive baryta photographic paper and thus undergo a 1-to-1 reproduction.
With "Calcium" and "Found for All", the artist implies that science and the results of her research should be accessible to all. Illegal ownership and patent secrets should not determine or impede the supply of important common goods such as medicines in a globally interconnected world. Even the smallest elements, such as Ca+ ions, we have ultimately only borrowed from nature.
Susanne Langbehn, born in 1990, has been studying at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle since 2014 in the Image/Space/Object/Glass programme with Prof. Christine Triebsch. In addition to numerous exhibition participations in Halle, Leipzig and Havana, Cuba, among other places, she also studied abroad with Erasmus funding at the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana. She lives and works in Halle
Eileen Almarales Noy with Disbel Roque Bolano - Simulacro de cooperativización Forzada (The Forced Cooperatives), 2018.
The video performance Simulacro de cooperativización Forzada is a still shot scene with a fixed camera. In it, Eileen Almarales Noy with Disbel Roque Bolano literally go under a traditional Cuban yoke. They carry it together, but try to strive away from the other with full physical strength.
The performance challenges old notions of social cooperation. It also symbolises the mechanisms of physical submission to a larger idea. The yoke that symbolises forced animal labour metaphorically turns the two protagonists into meekly broken farm animals as their last powers of resistance fade.
This play has a sad irony. It shows, with the simplest of means, that resistance to subjugation is often directed against the co-oppressed, as it were, and not against the mechanisms of subjugation or the oppressors themselves.
Cuban agriculture has been in crisis for a long time. Several agricultural reforms since the 1980s have not been able to prevent the fact that today "around seventy percent of the calories consumed on the island have to be imported - some sources even speak of 85 percent." Neither the environmentally destructive, Soviet-style agro-industrial model nor the conversion of the agricultural sector to resource-saving farming, in which about 20 % of the Cuban population still work, have been able to change anything about this so far. (Source: "Between marabú and crop failure - Cuba's agriculture has long been in crisis" in nd, 02.08.2018)
Eileen Almarales Noy, born in 1995 studied at the Vicentina de la Torre Art School in Camagüey and the ISA in Havana, Cuba from 2010 to 2019. Her work has been shown in the US, Mexico, Germany and at events such as the Havana Biennial, the New Media Festival Miami and the 7th Salon of Contemporary Cuban Art.
Johannes Rudloff - trip on a train, 2018
The video collage trip on a train takes the viewer on a short journey that turns into an associative "cognitive process".
The phenomena of "time", "being" and "meaning" are examined for their transformative potential using original quotations from German-speaking intellectual greats from the disciplines of physics, psychology, literature and philosophy. The quotations used also provide information about the respective self-understandings of the thinkers and the resulting subject perspectives.
With the video, basic questions can be asked, such as: What needs and drives do we humans have and how can the sciences serve us in this? What does scientific progress mean for us and where should it ultimately lead us? And of course, the crucial question: In which society do we actually want to live and how?
The film is not intended to provide clear answers to these questions. Rather, it creates a reflexive resonance space through the uncommented confrontation with different ways of looking at things. The viewers are encouraged to relate to what they hear and see.
In the collage, original sounds can be heard from:
Hannah Arendt, Vera F. Birkenbihl, Ernst Bloch, Pope Benedict XVI, Rudi Dutschke, Paul K. Feyerabend, Heiner Flassbeck, Viktor Frankl, Erich Fromm, the Green brothers, Gerald Hüther, Harald Lesch, Julian Nida - Rümelin, Richard David Precht, Peter Sloterdijk, Jürgen Todenhöfer, Tatjana Schnell, Erwin Schrödinger.
Johannes Rudloff, born in 1988, has been studying at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle since 2015 in the Image/Space/Object/Glass programme with Prof. Christine Triebsch.
After study visits to Edinburgh (Scotland), Laas (Italy) and Leeds (England), he has participated in numerous exhibitions in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Halle and other cities.