2023 KESTNER GESELLSCHAFT
Installation and opening performance views, The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor, El Lissitzky: Self-Portrait as the Kestner Gesellschaft
Group show, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
Curated by Adam Budak in collaboration with Robert Knoke and Alexander Wilmschen
July 8 – October 1, 2023
Installation photos by Volker Crone & Katrin Mundt
Performance photos by Henning Scheffen
Participating artists: Michelangelo Antonioni, Willi Baumeister, BEASTER, Johanna Billing, Martin Boyce, Max Burchartz, Heinrich Dunst, The Next Enterprise Architects, Fernanda Fragateiro, Assaf Gruber, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Lajos Kassák, Marlena Kudlicka, Marysia Lewandowska, El Lissitzky, Felipe Mujica, László Moholy-Nagy, Paulina Ołowska, László Peri, Prince Gholam, Florian Pumhösl, Susanne Sachsse, Wieland Schönfelder, Kurt Schwitters, Katja Strunz and Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin.
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Press release excerpt: “With the exhibition The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor, the Kestner Gesellschaft traces the founding moments of its history and the avant-garde mission. Presented only seven years after the Kestner Gesellschaft’s establishment in 1916, the exhibition El Lissitzky was the very first institutional solo show of the Russian artist, marking his groundbreaking position as the announcer of the new vocabulary which revolutionized the formal language of art and well as his role as a constructor of an institutional thinking, based upon the scientific and experiential perception and innovative approach to exhibition’s architecture, strategies of display and a total understanding of artistic creation.
The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor celebrates the centenary of this exhibition by paying a tribute to this significant fact in the Kestner Gesellschaft’s institutional history, a fact which planted a seed for a vast variety of experimental and progressive ideas, reflected in the future program and the institutional identity of the Kestner Gesellschaft. The exhibition emphasizes the pioneering and visionary aspects, developed around this time by then director and curator Alexander Dorner and other representatives of the avant-garde, active in Hannover at the beginning of the 1920s. Moreover, it investigates the long-lasting legacy of that period, and its impact on the museum’s discourse, especially in regards to Dorner’s term of the “living museum” and El Lissitzky’s “imaginary spaces” where the art experience was meant to become more personal, intense, and multidimensional, fitting the life of a new, modern man, inhabiting a constantly changing world, full of contrasts.
Conceived as an institutional self-portrait of a prophetic artist, The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor consists of the archival materials and historical positions, set up in a confrontation with the deconstructive and revisionist reading of the modernist paradigm by the contemporary artists.
The exhibition architecture is being developed by the Vienna-based architecture office the next ENTERprise (Marie-Therese Harnoncourt-Fuchs and Ernst J. Fuchs).
Curated by Adam Budak in collaboration with Robert Knoke and Alexander Wilmschen.”
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Árboles imaginarios (Curtains 1-6), 2023
Sustainable cotton (98% cotton – 2% Spandex), embroidery cotton, and threadwork
234 x 154 cm each
Courtesy of the artist and von Bartha, Basel & Copenhagen
Photos by Felipe Mujica
Work produced while in residence at OSMOS Station, Stamford NY
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“The imaginary man
lives in an imaginary mansion
surrounded by imaginary trees
on the banks of an imaginary river”
(Nicanor Parra)
This new group of curtains was produced for the exhibition The New Man, The Constructor. El Lissitzky: Self-Portrait as the Kestner Gesellschaft, curated by Adam Budak in collaboration with Robert Knoke and Alexander Wilmschen.
The title, Árboles imaginarios (Imaginary Trees), comes from a poem by Nicanor Parra, a Chilean poet and physicist, who passed away a few years ago, over 100 years old. The connection, or play, in relation to Lissitzky, is through his ideas on imaginary space, the 4th dimension, time. And time is present in the curtains, in their dialogue with space, as they gently and constantly move, spinning slowly, time as movement; and in their fabrication, as each line was made with handmade embroidered chain stitches, manually and slowly overlapping and interlacing each other, repeating a simple gesture until a line is formed. It took me almost 4 weeks to produce the work, from the purchase of the fabric until its shipping. I had a routine, I had a system (always a system) and I was able to work every day surrounded by real trees and real rivers in a real artist residency called OSMOS Station, in Stamford NY (my most sincere thanks to them!).
Last but not least, the curtains are permeable and temporal architecture, they intend to create a dynamic and hopefully poetic experience. They adapt to and comment on their inhabited space. They are also just drawings, floating in space. But they are also more than drawings, they are signs, lost parts of a possible alphabet, some kind of futuristic and ancient language.
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