The spatial installation The Virgin, the Cleaver and the Martyr consists of a six-channel sound piece and various smaller material-based objects like textiles and window pieces. It is devoted to the writings and biography of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. Born between 912 and 935 during the Ottonian dynasty she lived as a canoness in the monastery of Gandersheim in what is now Lower Saxony in Germany. The artistic work focuses on one of her dramatexts called Dulcitius – The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Agape, Chionia, and Hirena. There the story of three young women is told, who hold up their heads against their emperor and eventually die as martyrs. The sound piece retells the key-scene of the play–taking place in a kitchen at night – and partakes in its most absurd moment hovering between horror, violence and the grotesque, the fringes of symbolism, various ways of gazing and questions of showing and not-showing.
Written by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim & Tatjana Stürmer, composition by Lukas Rehm, vocalised by Anette Wanner, Stine Marie Fischer, Clare Michelle Tunney, installation photographs by Alexandra Ivanciu, commissioned by GfZK Leipzig, "Looking For a New Foundation" (11.3.–20.08.2023), curated by Franciska Zolyóm and Hanar Hupka. Language: English, 13:12 min.
Creation of the scenography for the exhibition "Looking For a New Foundation" at GfZK Leipzig with Alexis Blake, Cihan Çakmak, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Pennie Key, Tatjana Stürmer and Leyla Yenirce. Scenography together with Diane Hillebrand.
The human body remembers and tells stories, adapts and resists in various ways. In interaction with others, it constantly changes and (re)forms itself. However, people are constrained far too often by societal expectations that conflict with their self-image, needs and desires. The exhibition, accompanying events and co-operations focus on the search for new, resistant interpretations of the body and the agency that arises from self-determined attitudes, statements and gestures. Each artistic position is accompanied by a Textkörper-object carrying individual quotes by the artists in their surfaces. Their necks, they bend and move. Their relief-surface speaks to the tactile desires of our hands. Teardrop shaped weights press down on the fabrics and distort the text as a result. They are remnants on how deficient language can be sometimes.
Curated by Hanar Hupka and Franciska Zólyom, in cooperation with Julia Gerke. Silkscreenprint on textiles with Monochrome Leipzig.
Publication design for artist Lukas Rehm, 2022. Borrowing its form and structure from that of a graphic novel, "333" interweaves moving image works by Lukas Rehm with textual fragments from transcripts, retrospective descriptions or referential sources that inform the artist’s process into a narrative of new interdependencies. Sensing for threads such as affect, barriers, memory, knowledge production or post-human timescales, this publication transposes still images and quotes into an analogue sequence echoing the temporal, spatial and sonic dimensions of installative and filmic experiences. Lukas Rehm (DE, 1989) is an artist and musician working in the field of new media, installation art, documentary, experimental fiction and (music) theatre. His works examine the conditions and theatrics of social structures, the impact of new technological artefacts as well as the role of affect. His practice is informed by collaborative performative methodologies and their respective dispositives and incorporates reflections on cross-historical and -cultural narratives and psychology. Design/editing together with Rudy Guedj, published by Building Fictions, ISBN: 978–90–827712–9–9 *Selected as one of the Best Dutch Books 2022, launched at REDO festival in October 2022.
Artwork for Zoë Mac Pherson's released new EP "Pitch Blender", © SFX 2023. Written, performed, recorded, and engineered by Zoë Mc Pherson, Mixed by James Ginzburg, Mastered by Joker, Cut by Lupo Lubich.
"The Berlin Key" (2022) is part of a series set in an expanded universe based on David Rudnick's TOMB Series. As a fictionalized adaptation of Bruno Latour's text "How to do Words with Things", it is a proposal to recover and excavate other NFT components from the Tomb Series. The three NFTs are conceptually derived from the three components of the Berlin Double Key System described by Latour. The three keys are accompanied by a text by collaborator and artist Gilbert Again.
If death in Death by Landscape is conceived as a very specific form of life, not like life before death, but as another – transformed – form of life, the processes of dissolution visit places of the grotesque and the uncanny. The film was shot partly in infrared in the Pyrenees, where Lisa Fittko helped Hannah Ahrend and others escape in the 1940s, and in color in the man-made geometric groundwater rivers in the dry dunes of the Dutch North Sea. For the production of the film I collaborated with Lena Reitschuster (performer) and Lukas Rehm (camera).
The installation "Death by Landscape" (2021) at Bundeskunsthalle Bonn is dedicated to the principles of dissolving and dissappearing as recurring motifs of female imagination. The title refers to the short story of the same name by Margarete Atwood and is also the title of the installations's two 14 min long looped films. In ancient myth Daphne transformed into a laurel tree to escape Apollo and the aforementioned story by Atwood tells of the disappearance of a young woman without a trace, preceded neither by an act of violence nor by a dubious event. Maybe she has transformed into earth, tree, lichen, fungus. A friend of the protagonist, who accompanied her to the forest at the time of the inexplicable event, later remembers the dissapeared woman trhough landscape paintings. Here, material assemblages gather traces and hints. Woodwork realized in collaboration with Diane Hillebrand and Verena Zenker.
We – Lisa Ertel, Jenna Kaes, Hannah Kuhlmann, Delphine Lejeune, Juliana Maurer, Anne-Sophie Oberkrome, Clara Schweers, Kurina Sohn, Tatjana Stürmer – formed a temporary working collectives (Genius Loci/Multilogue/Many-to-Many). Destined to search for new approaches of figuration, interdisciplinary exchange and collective learning we start our journey at the foot of the meandering Moselle, where we bring together our different realities and thoughts for the first time and continued at Schloss Hollenegg. > more information on 101PS and collide24.org
"Other Reflexes" (2022) by Diana Gorgiou, published by Bookworks, in collaboration with James Langdon.
"C at the End of A Line is A Whisper" shows the critical, feminist appropriation and distorted mimicry of forms and patterns from a handwritten medieval book. These forms are made visible in the three dimensional space by assigning different materials like clay, wool, metal or fabric. Taking the artifacts' own agency seriously the radical incorporation of the visitors bodies is necessary to complete the process of translation or nachdichtung. During the exhibition in which the space turns into a metaphor of a »big lying book« once more a radically situated handmade copy is crafted. An experience of the intimacy of tactility is shared in this undisclosed associative space – acknowledging the yearning of the material. In collaboration with Corinne Riepert, with who I worked together on the textile, Manuel Sekou, who made the score of the video work, Lukas Rehm, DOP of the moving image work and Lena Reitschuster, performer and co-thinker.
The two curtains "Escaping Countours" & "Bread of Dreams" continue to imagine the stories that led to their reprint. Installation views at Kunsthalle Basel (2021/22; Installation view, Regionale 22, … von möglichen Welten, Kunsthalle Basel, 2021, view on Remy Erismann, Breakdancer, 2021 (front); Tatjana Stürmer, Bread of Dreams, 2020 (left), and Escaping Contours, 2020 (right). Photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel) and Ornamenta Pforzheim (2022).
Materially-haptically decoupled from the manuscript, the traced forms are carried forward into the video work "Rire et lécher". The empty archive of rolling shelves in the basement of the pavilion is actively anticipated in its functionality. As a double-bottom of the installation, it welds sign and space inseparably together. It is dominated by unstable systems of order. The speculative and the (female) imaginary become wanderers through forms of speech and their of speech and its writing down, through bodies and signs. In collaboration with Corinne Riepert, with who I worked together on the textile, Manuel Sekou, who made the score of the video work, Lukas Rehm, DOP of the moving image work and Lena Reitschuster, performer and co-thinker.
The "Bad Reading Group" (initiated by Diane Hillebrand) came together in preparation for the exhibition "Bad Readings" (2020) at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany. For this occasion a 15m long table was developed that serves as a conference table but also carefully interveaves the regulations for encounter during Covid. Through the playful use of ornamental shapes and the dimensions of the piece of, we were able to come together during the reading group safely but physically. At a distance of 1,5 meters, up to fifteen people can be seated in the irregular indentations. In the exhibition the table then transformed into the scenographic element and exhibition display. The table surface carefully rests on historical furniture pieces and peasant chairs. > Read more: Passe-Avant: How to Become a Bad Reader by Benedikt Seerieder
The exhibition by Diane Hillebrand "Constructions of an Invite / Citation" (2020/21) in the old baroque castle in Bruchsal collects and recontextualizes forms, lines and fragments of the bourgeoisie and architecture. The content on the tiles is detached from the form, as is the case today with the historical replica of the castle and its contradictory functionality – used as a space for representation in the past, the space of the castle is nowadays used for the organs of the democratic parties in Bruchsal, there is a kindergarten and also the mai policestation. We made use of vernacular and public parts of plants, scraps of paper, pencil notes and demographic signs. In our work we wanted them to act like punctuation marks from everyday life, giving syntax to the semantics of the artificial signs. Collaboration with Diane Hillebrand on tiles, image and print.
The music theater "Castor&&Pollux" combines the well-known ancient myth about the love of the twin with current posthumanist and transhumanist fabulations from the tech utopias of Silicon Valley and research on neuromorphic computer systems. Via essays by Fahim Amir, Janina Loh, and Dirk Baecker, among others, the publication accompanies and expands the contexts of opera. Textile prints activated the formal language on stage. In it, images of production combine with graphic derivations from blueprints to prototypes of new computer architectures, scientific representations of machine intelligence as well as primary forms between mathematics and myth. The music theater production was conceived by Lisa Charlotte Friederich, Lukas Rehm and Jim Igor Kallenberg, and premiered at the International Music Festival of the Heidelberger Frühling. The publication was co-edited & designed by Tatjana Stürmer in collaboration with Lena Thomaka, published by Wolke-Musikverlag.
