Lucie Strecker und Klaus Spiess | P53-VMAT2 hasenblut

The current collaboration between Lucie Strecker (Berlin/Vienna) and Klaus Spiess (Vienna) raises questions about the relationship between presence and representation within the tension between art and the natural sciences. The exhibition showcases the differing understandings of nature held by the two collaborators in their engagement with genetic and immunological data.

While the physician Klaus Spiess perceives nature as an entity that requires constant active and cultural shaping, the artist and director Lucie Strecker sees inherent patterns in nature that provoke performative and artistic principles.

In their work, the artists explore the differences and similarities between humans and animals, between humans and their bodily substances, between the familiar and the foreign, and between physical impressions and representations through a series of experimental setups. The highly ambivalent relationship between humans and nature, as introduced in conventional immunology and genetics, becomes the subject of performances until nature increasingly takes on the role of an actor in these performances.

The exhibition P53-VMAT2 hasenblut specifically engages with the genetic data of the hare's blood used by Joseph Beuys, creating a molecularly subversive being from it. As the artists extract DNA from a historical artwork, they confront questions of authorship and ownership in the context of such appropriations of historical works mediated through DNA.

cubus-m | Pohlstraße 75 | 10785 Berlin

Vernissage: August 21, 2014, 7 PM | Performance lecture part 1
Lucie Strecker and Klaus Spiess

Open studio: August 22 – August 30, 2014
Tuesday – Saturday 5 – 8 PM | u.n.V.

Finissage: August 30, 2014, 5 PM | Performance lecture part 2
Lucie Strecker and Klaus Spiess