2.12.2024, Monday 14:30 Uhr
Symposium: The Elephant in The Room – Sculpture today, Day 1
Venue:
- Aula, HFBK Hamburg
The two-day symposium at the HFBK Hamburg is dedicated to current questions and developments in the field of sculpture. International artists, curators, and theorists will come together to discuss how sculpture is used today to make both aesthetic and social discourses visible.
Conceived by Pia Stadtbäumer and Martin Boyce
Programme on Monday, 2 December 2024, 2:30 pm
Welcoming: Martin Köttering (DE)
Introduction: Pia Stadtbäumer, Martin Boyce (DE/EN)
- Sculpture & Context (EN)
Presentations by Katinka Bock, Tarik Kiswanson and Gabriel Kuri, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock. - 5 pm
Anna Viebrock im Gespräch mit Thomas Demand (DE) - 6:30 pm
Exhibition opening The Elephant in the Room, in the Room the Elephant
with works by sculpture students Omid Arabbay, Alexis Brancaz, Michael Bremner, Anna de Courcy, Victoria Stigkjær, Jule Heinrich & Mie Rygh Reianes, Ning Jianan, Raffaele Pola, Pia Pospischil, Charlie Spiegelfeld, Ko Sin Tung, Sudabe Yunesi
at ICAT of the HFBK Hamburg, duration: 2.-13.12.2024, daily except Mondays 2 to 6 pm
Followed by music and drinks, organised by the Stadtbäumer and Boyce classes.
The language of the contribution as marked: English (EN), German (DE), without interpretation. Contributions to the discussion are possible in both languages.
Speaker
Pia Stadtbäumer
Pia Stadtbäumer fasste in den 1980er Jahren während ihres Studiums den Entschluss, die künstlerische Arbeit an etwas jedem Gegebenes, nämlich den menschlichen Körper zu binden und nicht etwa an abstrakte Formen, an Objekte oder Ideen. Der menschliche Körper, die traditionellen Bildhauertechniken, gepaart mit einer Erfindungslust, die keine Tabus kennt, sind im Laufe ihrer Arbeit zu einem komplexen Instrumentarium geworden, um sich mit der conditio humana der Jetztzeit auseinanderzusetzen. Rief eine Ausstellung in den 1990er Jahren vorschnell ein Zeitalter des „Post Human“ aus, dann zeigt ihre Arbeit, dass weit verwickeltere, weniger eindeutige und dennoch mit dem konkreten Körper verbundene Menschenbilder möglich sind. Von 1996 bis 1998 unterrichtete sie an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. Seit 2000 ist sie Professorin für Bildhauerei an der HFBK Hamburg. Für ihren Abschied an der HFBK 2025 veranstaltet sie gemeinsam mit Martin Boyce das Symposium „Der Elefant im Raum – Skulptur heute“.
Pia Stadtbäumers Arbeiten wurden in zahlreichen Einzel- und Gruppenausstellungen gezeigt. Darunter u.a. Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, 2023; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2021; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 2019; Carl- Ernst- Osthaus- Museum Hagen, 2019; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, 2018; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2013; Denver Art Museum, 2008.
Martin Boyce
Martin BOYCE (b. 1967, Hamilton) lives and works in Glasgow. His poetic installations comprise a vocabulary of images, typography and interconnected forms which emerge across his sculptures, wall paintings, and photography. Collectively, these conjure liminal spaces which explore the aesthetic and political legacy of Modernism, the collapse of nature and culture, and the boundary between the real and fictional. Under Boyce’s handling, ubiquitous objects – such as fireplaces, ventilation grills and chairs – are rendered unfamiliar and ghostly. These inflected and altered phantoms often form part of imagined cityscapes: gardens, municipal parks, courtyards. Boyce traces the way Modernism’s optimism and revolutionary concepts have changed over time and examines how its legacy has affected urban space and our aesthetic imagination. He represented Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2011. Boyce’s recent projects include ‘A Thousand Future Blossoms’ commissioned by Galeries Lafayette, Paris (2019), and a major outdoor commission in the landscaped grounds of Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2019). In 2024, Boyce presented a major solo exhibition of work spanning 30 years, restaging select pieces to create new installations at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh.
Katinka Bock
Katinka Bock’s work is rooted in a discursive thought of sculpture and language. The shape is often a result of a working process where the rational and the unforeseen meet each other. She develops a body of work in sculpture, installation and photography that dialogues with architecture, uses and environments. She creates dialogues between materials, their stories and those of the encountered contexts. She takes care of the balances and imbalances of spaces and atmospheres, fully integrating the dimension of scenography into her work. Each of her installations defines a space and often seems to wrestle against the claustrophobia of the exhibition spaces; tending to open doors, windows, walls, holes by which to escape, or to let in rain or air.
Katinka Bock (1976, Frankfurt/Main, Germany) has presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as Light society, Beijing, 2024; Crac Occitanie, Sète, 2023; Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, 2023; La Loge, Brussels, 2022; Artium Museum, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2021; Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, 2020; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, 2019; Pivo, Sao Paulo, 2019; Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, 2018; Common Guild, Glasgow, 2018; Mudam Luxembourg, 2018; Kunst Museum Winterthur, 2018; Mercer Union, Toronto, 2017; Kunstmuseum Luzern, 2016; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2014 and Mamco, Geneva, 2013. Her work has been presented by the Public Art Fund in New York, and is on view in the city of Shanghai in the Jing’an Sculpture Park. Katinka Bock was a resident of the Villa Médicis in Rome. In 2012, she won the Prix de la Fondation d’entreprise Ricard and the Dorothea von Stetten Kunstpreis. In 2015, she obtained the Visual Arts Grant of the Fondación Botín. In 2019, she was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. Since 2013 Katinka Bock publishes the series One of Hundred, in cooperation with Louis Lüthi. She publishes regularly with Roma Publications, Mer Paperkunstalle, Abäke, Paraguay Press and Distanz and often collaborates with Morepublisher. She is represented by Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, Meyer Riegger Berlin and Greta Meert, Brussels and 303 in New York. Katinka Bock studied in Berlin and lives and works in Paris.
Tarik Kiswanson
For over a decade, Tarik Kiswanson has explored notions of rootlessness, metamorphosis, and memory through his interdisciplinary practice. A legacy of displacement and transformation permeates his works and is indispensable to both their form and the modes of sensing they produce. While retaining an attachment to the intimate and personal, his work speaks to universal concerns and to social and collective histories of rupture, loss, and regeneration. Kiswanson’s oeuvre can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, and polyphony through their own distinct language. Tarik Kiswanson was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2023 at Centre Pompidou. His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions at institutions, most recently at Kunsthalle Portikus, 2024; Oakville Galleries, 2024; Bonniers Konsthall, 2023; Salzburger Kunstverein, 2023; M HKA-Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, 2022; Hallands Konstmuseum, 2022. He has participated in group exhibitions and biennials at institutions such as Centre Pompidou, Kunsthalle Münster, Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ural Biennial, Performa Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, and MUDAM-Museum of Contemporary Art Luxembourg. Kiswanson received his MFA from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2014) and BFA from Central Saint Martins-University of the Arts London (2010). He holds four nationalities and speaks and writes in five languages. He serves as advisor on the scientific committee of the Edouard Glissant Art Fund.
Gabriel Kuri
Gabriel Kuri was born in 1970 in Mexico City, Mexico. He studied at Goldsmiths College in London and at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, UNAM in Mexico City. The artist lives and works in Brussels. Gabriel Kuri’s œuvre encompasses diverse media including sculpture, collage and installation, often using repurposed natural, industrial, and mass-produced objects (insulation foam, shells, soda cans, stones, or ticket receipts, for instance) to craft eloquent works of art. Kuri’s works often include traces of past human activities, such as empty bottles or cans, cigarette butts or ticket stubs. They function as signs of spent time, energy or currency — a recurring theme in the artist’s work. Kuri’s solo exhibitions include: Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2023; Saint-Martin Bookshop, Brussels, 2021; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2020; WIELS – Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, 2019–20; Aspen Art Museum, 2014; The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2014. The artist’s work was included in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2011, as well as in the 2008 Berlin Biennale. Recent group exhibitions include: Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream, Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva, 2023; 3th Geneva Biennale, Sculpture Garden, Geneva, 2022; Kunsthalle Basel, 2022; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, 2022; Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2020; GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, 2020.
Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock
Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock is co-executive managing director at S A V V Y Contemporary Berlin and is part of the participatory archive project Colonial Neighbours. She received her MA in Post- colonial Cultures and Global Policy at Goldsmiths University of London and moved to Berlin in 2013. In her work within the permanent collection of S A V V Y Contemporary she looks for colonial traces that manifest in our present. She assisted the management for the documenta14 radio program in Berlin (June - July 2017) and supported the artist Bouchra Khalili with several projects and exhibitions (May 2015 – May 2016 / June 2021 -May 2022). In 2018 she produced Agnieszka Polska´s commission for the Germany’s National Gallery Prize show in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She worked on research projects on Julius Eastman in a collaboration between SAVVY Contemporary and the Maerzmusik festival and co-curated the exhibition program HERE HISTORY BEGAN in 2019-2022. Lately she curated the yearlong project Monumental Shadows – Rethinking Heritage, a participatory project in public space. In 2023 she co-curated Wer Wir Sind in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn as well as the 2023 edition of the Lantz´sche Skulpturenpark exhibition in Düsseldorf.
Anna Viebrock
Anna Viebrock arbeitet als Bühnen- und Kostümbildnerin und Regisseurin. Seit langem verbindet sie eine Zusammenarbeit mit dem Regieteam Jossi Wieler/Sergio Morabito sowie dem Regisseur Christoph Marthaler. Sie wirkte u.a. an der Volksbühne Berlin, am Schauspielhaus Hamburg, an der Oper Frankfurt, der Staatsoper Stuttgart, der Bayerischen Staatsoper, der Wiener Staatsoper, der Opéra national de Paris, am Teatro Real Madrid, an der Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam, bei den Salzburger und den Bayreuther Festspielen, am Opernhaus sowie am Schauspielhaus Zürich, dessen künstlerischem Leitungsteam sie von 2000 bis 2004 angehörte. Anna Viebrock war bis 2021 Professorin an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. Ausstellungen ihrer Werke wurden in Rotterdam, Prag, Frankfurt/Main, Madrid, Brüssel, Gent, Avignon, Helsinki, Basel, Giessen, Venedig und Neuss gezeigt. Neunmal wurde ihr die Auszeichnung „Bühnenbildnerin des Jahres“ und achtmal „Kostümbildnerin des Jahres“ zuerkannt.
Thomas Demand
Thomas Demand ist seit 2011 Professor an der HFBK Hamburg im Studienschwerpunkt Bildhauerei mit Schwerpunkt Fotografie. Seine Arbeiten wurden in zahlreichen internationalen Ausstellungen präsentiert und befinden sich in wichtigen Sammlungen. 2017 stellte er gemeinsam mit Anna Viebrock und Alexander Kluge in der Ausstellung The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied in der Fondatione Prada in Venedig aus.