Vergangene Veranstaltungen

The Diploma festival of the Master in Contemporary Arts Practice of the Bern University of the Arts brings together works by a young generation of ambitious artists keen to experiment. The artistic approach of the graduates is manifested in different media such as performance, video, installation, painting, literature or music and focuses on current issues.

The exhibition at Kunsthaus Pasquart brings together for the first time a comprehensive overview of Melanie Manchot’s (b. 1966, Germany) work responding to the landscape, community and tourism-led economic infrastructure of the Swiss mountain valley Engelberg.  It marks ten years of producing both photographic and video works relating to this alpine region, forming a sustained enquiry into our complex relationship with mountains as spaces of real and imaginary exploration of our place in the world.

The Kunsthaus Pasquart is showing the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the work of the Flemish artist Philippe Vandenberg (1952-2009, BE), in collaboration with the Hamburger Kunsthalle, where the exhibition was presented from 16.11.2018 to 24.2.2019. It is the first institutional exhibition of his work in both Switzerland and Germany. Highly acclaimed in his home country of Belgium as one of the most important artists of the last few decades, Vandenberg produced a radical and uncompromising œuvre that is just now achieving greater international acclaim. The extensive retrospective comprises some 70 paintings and 80 drawings and prints from the period 1995 to 2009.

Florian Graf (b. 1980, CH) examines in his work themes connected with architecture and landscape architecture and thus investigates the psychological and emotional impact of spaces. Via sculpture, installation, drawing, video or photography he creates moments of poetic density, in which the borders between reality and imagination are dissolved. In the garden of the Kunsthaus Florian Graf has installed three concrete sculptures, each constructed from three very different basic forms. A circle, an L-form and a jagged figure also function as the building blocks of ceramic models, a photographic work and a series of drawings. Applied in a variety of ways, these structures differ from each other in terms of their composition, size and placement and make reference to the artist’s considerations of new modular social structures. Finally, he has connected these three forms to create large-scale sculptures in aluminium, staging these spectacularly in the monumental Salle Poma. The further exhibition spaces are transformed by the artist into a living situation, in which his seemingly documentary films are presented alongside the other works. In these Graf plays his alter ego, the action artist Graphenheim, thereby parodying himself. Between conceptual logic, visionary power and subtle humour, Florian Graf examines the appropriation of bodies, role models and living spaces, creating a lively construct from imagination, materiality and temporality.

Zara Idelson’s (b. 1987, CH) approach to painting is based on intuition and direct observation as well as a clear set of parameters consisting of small-scale works and a limited palette. Texture is created through thin layers of paint, vital with brushwork over bare priming, where colour is used less to depict than to create a sense of movement. The exhibition focuses on the series of figurative paintings begun in 2017, when the artist moved to London, and reflect her curiosity for her new surroundings. Employing line drawing and intimations of detail, Idelson depicts the places and incidents she comes across in her everyday life, such as the back of a public building seen from a cycle path, underground station entrances and children’s chalk drawings on pavements. Dusky scenes of the city at night are quietly atmospheric, while a preoccupation with framing devices is evident in the frequent depiction of views from windows. Ultimately, however, these images are an exploration of the medium of painting itself.

Maija Luutonen (*1978, FI) exécute principalement ses peintures grands formats aux couleurs vives sur papier, qu’elle choisit pour son adaptabilité à toutes sortes d’expérimentations ainsi que pour la nature immatérielle des espaces «négatifs» blancs qui apparaissent à sa surface. Tirant profit de la qualité transitoire de ce matériau, elle analyse la relation entre temps et mouvement et traite ses œuvres comme un ensemble d’images en constante interaction plutôt que comme des objets accomplis et autonomes. Cette apparence inachevée est soulignée par la présentation de ses travaux tantôt appuyés contre le mur, empilés, pliés ou encore placés contre une porte ou contre une fenêtre. Réunissant couleur et lumière, en référence aussi bien à l’environnement construit qu’à la nature, Luutonen explore la possibilité de créer l’illusion d’une immersion spatiale à travers une surface plane. Elle conserve des éléments dérangeants ou laissés en suspens dans ses peintures, lesquelles restent néanmoins fascinantes et dynamiques.

Linus Baumeler, Amedeo Baumgartner, Zora Berweger, Karin Borer, Tashi Brauen, Julian Burkhard, Nicolle Bussien, Raffaella Chiara, Céline Ducrot, Marco Eberle, Carina Emery, Remy Erismann, F&D Cartier, Beat Feller, Fernando F. Fonseca, Petra Frey, Marcel Freymond, Laura Grubenmann, Niklaus Manuel Güdel, Stefan Guggisberg, Béatrice Gysin, Ronny Hardliz, Monika Loeffel, Maya Hottarek/Joelle Neuenschwander, Tamara Janes, Alexander Jaquemet, Anna Malina Jaun, Flo Kaufmann, Manuel Köchli, Lea Krebs, Jérôme Lanon, Brigitte Lustenberger, Selina Lutz, Renée Magaña, Anna Neurohr, Christina Niederberger, Pat Noser, Philip Ortelli, Laurent Perret-Gentil, Fiona Rafferty, Andrea Rickhaus, Christoph Rihs, Nora Schmidt, Julia Steiner, Reto Steiner, Strotter Inst.allation, Jonas Studer, Miriam Sturzenegger, Vera Trachsel, Matthias Wyss, Sinae Yoo, Wolfgang Zät, Zukunft_Schoch

Opening: Sat 8.9.2018, 5pm URSULA BIEMANN - DORA BUDOR - ROMAN BUXBAUM - JULIAN CHARRIÈRE - DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER - MARTIN CREED - PETER DREHER - ELMGREEN & DRAGSET - CÉCILE B. EVANS - FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES - RODNEY GRAHAM - DAVID HORVITZ - TEHCHING HSIEH - SOPHIE JUNG - ON KAWARA - KAPWANI KIWANGA - RAGNAR KJARTANSSON - KRIS MARTIN - AGNIESZKA POLSKA - POPE.L - BARBARA PROBST - LAURE PROUVOST - PILAR QUINTEROS - RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE - SOPHY RICKETT - MIKKO RIKALA - DIETER ROTH - STÉPHANIE SAADÉ - MICHAEL SAILSTORFER - TARYN SIMON - SLAVS AND TATARS - SMUDGE STUDIO - GERNOT WIELAND - PEDRO WIRZ

Manuel Burgener’s (* 1978, CH) installations, objects and images give an impression of being unfinished and precarious. For his new installation spanning five rooms, the winner of the 2018 Manor Art Award combines video, sound and space. Armed with two mobile cameras in a remote seaside house, the artist captured the temporality and fleetingness of the present moment over a period of twenty-four hours. The duration of the project corresponds exactly to that of the video, which will run continuously throughout the exhibition.

Bharti Kher (*1969, GB, lives and works in New Delhi) exploits the drama inherent in objects, tapping into mythologies and the diverse associations of things. Her painting, sculpture and installation often incorporate bindis (a popular fashion accessory that marks a symbol of the third eye and is reclaimed by Kher as a deliberate sign of gender). She assembles, juxtaposes and transforms found objects. In stripping these of their meaning, she explores cultural misunderstandings and social codes.

Vernissage: Do 14.6.2018, 18:00 Die Diplomausstellung des Masters in Contemporary Arts Practice der Hochschule der Künste Bern ermöglicht einen Einblick in die vielseitigen Arbeitsweisen junger, aufstrebender Kunstschaffender. In Medien wie Performance, Video, Installation, Malerei, Literatur oder Musik untersuchen die Abschlussarbeiten gegenwärtige Themen und verweisen auf eine Generation, die in ihrer künstlerischen Praxis aktuellen Fragestellungen auf den Grund geht.

The work of the artist duo from Biel, Linus Bill + Adrien Horni (both b. 1982, CH) is the result of a dynamic process which is particularly evident in the most recent series Heredity Paintings. Inspired by works they have rejected in the past, the artists take details from these paintings and transfer them to the computer.

This group show explores how Indian classical music has inspired modern and contemporary artists. The exhibition traces a long history: from early Indian miniature painting (Ragamalas) through to drawings, animations and video works from the present day. Including works by pivotal Indian and Pakistani artists, it features a number of works previously unseen in Europe, including new commissions. It also explores the influence of Indian classical music on important American artists in the 1960s, and its wider influence on western popular and counterculture.

The work of Anna Barriball (*1972, GB) moves between the parallel languages of drawing, sculpture and video. She finds mystery and hidden meaning in the overlooked and ordinary: graphite rubbings of walls, doors and windows become heavily material objects while trees or a fireplace are subtly altered and reconfigured as moving images. The exhibition brings together work made over the last 15 years and is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland.

Known for her expressive, fantastical visual worlds, Klodin Erb (b. 1963, Switzerland) plumbs the limits of painting and simultaneously questions definitions of gender and identity. The alienation of images from their original contexts and playful interpretations of classical genres, styles and motifs characterise her gestural figurative works.

Hand signals engraved in stone, Bibles clamped between false teeth, blurred chalk marks on blackboards, school benches turned into birdhouses. Kemang Wa Lehulere’s (*1984, SA) many-sided work produces haunting, suggestive images, founded in the past of his native country South Africa.

The novel Der einzige Ort by Thomas Stangl tells the story of two men who at the beginning of the 19th century blaze a trail to the city of Timbuctoo, shrouded in legend. As a representative of the super power Great Britain the Scotsman Alexander Gordon Laing travels from Tripolis through the Sahara. The Frenchman René Caillié, a baker’s son, crosses Guinea and Mali. Will they reach their destination and at what price? During four evenings Ariane Gaffron and Stefan Liebermann’s dramatised version for four actors invites us to immerse ourselves in an unpredictable and compelling world. The field reports bring captivating figures to life, make cultures clash and connect mythology with the history of Africa. The Lausanne artist, Sandrine Pelletier (b, 1976, CH) is creating an all-encompassing installation for the project, which will develop further between the four performances.

IRWIN is the name of a five-person Slovenian artists’ collective that has been collaborating on numerous groundbreaking projects both within and outside the group since 1983. How to Read a Map is the fourth and last part of a project spanning several countries, highlighting various aspects of their collaboration, which encompass a wide range of media such as photography, film, installation, interventions in the public space, painting and publications. From the beginning IRWIN has focused on the relationship, interplay and forms of representation of art and ideology.

Livia Di Giovanna’s (b. 1984, CH) video installations, photographs and objects subtly eliminate the boundaries between reality, projection and reflexion. Her investigations of space, time, architecture, movement and light are based on decisions concerning dimensions, scale and volume, the production and direction of light, the character of surfaces and spatial relationships.

MARIE JOSÉ BURKI In her first comprehensive retrospective the internationally renowned artist Marie José Burki (*1961, CH, lives and works in Brussels) highlights the relationships between image, language, narration, identity and time. Through video and photography she questions and deciphers visual codes of images that surround us on a daily basis and influence the ways in which we interpret the world. Her videos show the apparently unspectacular – we see a young woman lying in the sun or people at a convivial picnic. These are moments frozen in time, fleeting impressions of a permanent present. Through the underlying soundtracks and theatrical structures Marie José Burki cleverly nurtures doubt about the reality presented. Her reduced visual language communicates in sober, ironic, even humourous ways a sense of hidden connections. Caught in the artificiality of images, the protagonists make it possible for us to experience our role somewhere between accomplice and voyeur. Her latest video, Un chien sur la route, au passage du promeneur (2017), which was made for among others the Kunsthaus Pasquart, completes the selection of work from the last 22 years.

RACHEL LUMSDEN Rachel Lumsden (b.1968, GB; lives and works in St. Gallen) makes paintings that are at least as big as the artist herself, ensuring both her own physical relationship with the work and a direct engagement of the viewer. They communicate a strong sense of how they were created, of an artist sensitive to the character of her material and how it operates. Lumsden’s paintings are too open-ended and ambiguous to be clearly read as narratives; instead they depict charged atmospheric environments, bristling with energy. Her compositions are inspired by a variety of visual sources, from newspaper photos, art historical images and dream pictures to circuit diagrams and advertising material. Combining the overlooked paraphernalia of the everyday with the fantastical and autobiographical fragments with those from the collective unconscious, Lumsden’s themes often coincide with the Zeitgeist in painting as well as with current social and political issues. The exhibition includes work from the last ten years and is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date. It is a collaboration with the Fondation Fernet-Branca in St. Louis, France and the Kunst(Zeug)Haus in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland.

Degree exhibition MA CAP Bereits zum sechsten Mal werden die Abschlussarbeiten des Masters in Contemporary Arts Practice der Hochschule der Künste Bern im Rahmen der Diplomausstellung präsentiert. Die Absolventinnen und Absolventen des spartenübergreifenden Studienganges zeigen Werke unterschiedlicher Medien wie Performance, Video, Malerei oder Literatur. Das vielseitige Ereignis gibt einen einzigartigen Einblick in das Wirken junger, aufstrebender Kunstschaffenden. Marta Margnetti‚ Ecken, 2016, Holz, Holzlasur / bois, lasure pour bois; Diplomausstellung MA CAP, 2016 Foto / Photo: Sebastien Verdon

EXHIBITION: DIETER APPELT, FRANK BADUR, SAMUEL BECKETT, SONIA BOYCE, STAN BRAKHAGE, JANET CARDIFF, SAMUEL EMDE. WILLIAM ENGELEN, ELLEN FELLMANN, TERRY FOX, CHRISTOPH GIRARDET & MATTHIAS MÜLLER, GREGOR HILDEBRANDT, LEO HOFMANN, HIROMI ISHII, BARBARA KASTEN, IDRIS KHAN, BRUCE NAUMAN, CARSTEN NICOLAI, RAHA RAISSNIA, HANS RICHTER, SILVA REICHWEIN, NORA RINGGENBERG, MIKA ROTTENBERG, MARIATERESA SARTORI, JOACHIM SCHÖNFELDT, SUSANNE SCHURICHT, SIMEON SIGG, BILL VIOLA CONCERT WILLIAM ENGELEN, FRANK FIEDLER, BABAK GOLESTANI, MICHAEL HARENBERG, CHRISTINE HASLER, LEO HOFMANN, ROLF LAUREIJS, ERNESTO MOLINARI, MUSICIANS FROM THE DEGREE COURSE MASTER OF ARTS IN SPECIALIZED MUSIC PERFORMANCE, HKB BERN Sat 6.5.2017, 8pm: HKB, Schweizer Opernstudio, Jakob-Rosius Strasse 16, 2502 Biel/Bienne Project initiator, curator: Ellen Fellmann

GUILLERMO KUITCA Guillermo Kuitca (* 1961, Argentina) is one of Latin America’s leading contemporary artists. His painting skillfully reconciles various abstract styles with an illusionist form of figuration and investigates ways in which absence, movement and silence can be expressed on a two-dimensional surface. The exhibition brings together earlier work from the 1990s and 2000s, inspired by architecture, theatre seating plans and cartography, with recent paintings incorporating images of portals, doorways and transitional places. It also marks Kuitca’s return to representing the human figure, primarily female forms which occupy the threshold between the picture plane and the indeterminate realm beyond. Real space will be presented for the first time in Kuitca’s canvases in the form of a free-standing winged altar painting. Guillermo Kuitca’s work has been the subject of exhibitions in major European and American museums. He represented Argentina at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The presentation at Kunsthaus Pasquart is the most comprehensive exhibition of his work to date in Switzerland.