Pizza? Reis? Suppe? Trinität
Elisa Ewert, Martina Janßen, Ismail Karayakupoglu, Barbara Müller, and Elma Riza will be improvising at Kunstverein Neukölln. Insights into the experiment will be shared during the opening on Friday, November 10, 2017, at 7:30 PM.
Refrigerator open – what do we have, what can we cook? This is roughly how the starting point for the five artists looks as they prepare for the cooperative improvisation experiment at Kunstverein Neukölln, meeting four days before the opening without a fixed plan and only moderately familiar with each other, yet mentally present. They have half a week to intertwine their different artistic approaches, juxtapose them, bend them towards each other, or let them grow together in the space. Nothing more, but also nothing less: it will certainly be days of intense presence and unpredictable confrontations.
What connects them is their interest in one another and their curiosity about artistic strategies that transcend individual limitations. They each bring different experiences with forms of collaboration. All of them come from various stages of life and have professional backgrounds that inform their actions. They were invited by Kunstverein Neukölln in response to a public call to improvise together during the regular setup time and possibly beyond. The collaboration will be supported by curatorial moderation. The only explicit preparation for their joint work was a meeting in September, where the artists got to know each other and decided on the exhibition title. Everything else will be played out from the situation.
Their artistic identities are highly diverse:
Berlin-based Elisa Ewert, a master’s student at UdK, works with traces and surface impressions in clay. Transformations, volume and structure, forensic detail, and the dynamics of change are connotative building blocks that take shape in her amorphous sculptures, associatively presenting possible forms in the space.
Martina Janßen, on the other hand, situates her work interdisciplinary between scientific and artistic approaches, exploring synergies between these disciplines. As a trained artist and social educator, she develops mutually influential texts and situationally bound installations, paintings, and choreographies.
Ismail Karayakupoglu, who moved from Turkey to Germany only at the end of 2014, engages with photography, painting, and experimental film, exploring overlaps between media and ways of life. He investigates connecting elements between materials and working methods, intertwining content and formal levels in his work.
Barbara Müller’s installations play with duplications, reflections, and reconstructions. However, she focuses not on the significant but on the trivial – what has been left behind, what might be needed right now. In this way, she develops unsettling scenarios and actions that provoke unfamiliar aesthetic experiences.
In the work of Elma Riza, who hails from France, the visible seems to refer to the invisible space. Her delineations through real spaces, along existing separations and their optical extensions, and her associated spatial creations through markings aim to sensitize perception and thus expand realms of possibility.
"Pizza? Rice? Soup? Trinity" continues the exhibition series "Surprise!" in which Kunstverein Neukölln explores the potential of cooperative improvisation in the visual arts. Once again, it’s about expanding individual approaches and content through improvised artistic work in a group. With Elisa Ewert, Martina Janßen, Ismail Karayakupoglu, Barbara Müller, and Elma Riza, a very heterogeneous, age-diverse team with different working methods and nationalities comes together anew, all currently residing in Berlin.
The exhibition is curated by Antje Gerhardt and Dr. Martin Steffens.