INTERVIEW: ULRIK MØLLER

Ulrik Møller in his Berlin studio, 2021, photo by Anna-Lena Werner

In a typical industrial Berlin backyard, close to the little river Panke in the busy district of Wedding, the Danish artist Ulrik Møller found a bright space to create landscape paintings of his Danish home in Fyn and many other rural places. This opposition, between what he paints and where he produces the work, is inherently embedded in each single work as a longing for what is not around. Referencing and employing traditional techniques of painting, his art is always a manifestation of the endless travel between home and distance, between the comfortable and the exploration of the unknown. While visiting him in his studio, we talked about honest art, romanticism and Ulrik's current exhibition "Happy Together" at Faaborg Museum in Denmark.

INTERVIEW: MARIANA HAHN

Mariana Hahn, photo © Philippe Chancel

Through photography, video, installation and imprinting Mariana Hahn investigates the modes of image making, the processes of archiving and transmission. Mariana digs the memory of her body, of her own genealogy and she depicts the transfer of knowledge from one body to another, from a woman to another. But she also tracks the recurrences and survivals (Nachleben) of collective memories and traumas. "Eros and Thanatos Made a Child" is a multifaceted installation by Mariana Hahn presented by Display, Berlin, at the photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles, from July 4 to August 29, 2021. In that framework, it was shortlisted for the Prix Découverte Louis Roederer curated this year by Sonia Voss.

INTERVIEW: ALPER TURAN

Alper Turan, Photo: Maurine Tric, Protocinema, Istanbul

Alper Turan is a curator from Istanbul currently based in Berlin. Despite the challenges caused by the pandemic, he curated the group exhibition, "A Finger for an Eye", commissioned & presented by Protocinema within Protocinema's Emerging Curator mentorship series, at Poşe in Istanbul (until the 23rd of March), focusing on queer positioning as a response to the ongoing attacks on queer representations, symbols from the Turkish government. We talked about how Alper's curatorial practice has developed throughout the years and what it was like to curate a physical exhibition that needs and calls physical interactions during a pandemic. 

INTERVIEW: BASIM MAGDY

Basim Magdy "Renegade Dreams Hanging from the Clouds" at König Galerie, Berlin. Photos © Roman Maerz, Courtesy the artist and König Galerie, Berlin

"What if the sky is giant mirror reflecting our fantasies?" the movie "New Acid" by Egyptian artist Basim Magdy asks. Hosting his exhibition "Renegade Dreams Hanging From The Clouds" at König Galerie Berlin currently presents the artist's film work together with eight of his paintings. In our e-mail interview, I chatted with the Switzerland-based artist about what it was like to organise an exhibition during a global pandemic and lockdown restrictions, as well as the various sources of his inspiration for the works in the show and his practice in general. 

INTERVIEW: NEHA KUDCHADKAR

Neha Kudchadkar "Handjob",  2018, Image © Stashia D'souza for Mumbai Art Room

Neha Kudchadkar works at the intersection between ceramics, installation and photography. While in the making she often uses her own body as a tool, she also implies it as a site of investigation with materiality, spatiality, identity and otherness. Neha Kudchadkar’s ceramic work Handjob will be featured in the exhibition “Love Letters: Stories of Distant Proximities” at Horse and Pony, Berlin, from the 24th of October until the 22nd of November, 2020. The curators of the show, Lea Schleiffenbaum and Marie DuPasquier took the opportunity to discuss with the artist on her work presented in the show, her process, and her thoughts on intimacy, touching and caring in times of social distancing. 

INTERVIEW: MELANIE AND STEPHANIE HAUSBERGER

© Melanie and Stephanie Hausberger

Art is always a joint endeavour for Melanie and Stephanie Hausberger. Since their studies at the New York School of Visual Arts, the Austrian-born identical twin sisters have been creating all their works – especially drawings and paintings – together. Their visual language reveals the influence of art from the era of classical modernism – Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and above all, Egon Schiele shine through. Although their works are figurative and representational, they display a high degree of abstraction. After finishing their studies, Melanie and Stephanie Hausberger travelled a lot, but they have also set up a small studio in the Tyrolean Alps.      

INTERVIEW: AILBHE NÍ BHRIAIN

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain “Inscriptions of an Immense Theatre “, Film Still, 2018 © the artist

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is presenting “Inscriptions IV”, her fourth solo exhibition at Domobaal Gallery in London, including her photographic, tapestry and sculptural works. In our interview she spoke about her collaboration with an algorithm and her recent video works selected for the Artists’ Film Festival.  

INTERVIEW: ANDY GRAYDON

Andy Graydon, "The Transect in Three or Four Modes of Observation" (2018), courtesy and © the artist

Andy Graydon works with sound, performance and video. In his works he often questions and analyzes the coherence and compatibility of art and science, which I find most intriguing in terms of our understanding of nature. Andy and I met in Berlin a few years ago, and since then continued exchanging ideas on displacement, islandness and the role of fiction for future imaginaries. A short excerpt from our long lasting conversations to be continued… 

INTERVIEW: MARIANNA SIMNETT

Marianna Simnett, The Bird Game (film still), 2019. Courtesy: the artist, FVU, the Rothschild Foundation and the Frans Hals Museum

In 2018, just after the New Museum in New York, the Museum für Moderne Kunst / MMK Zollamt, in Frankfurt hosted an exhibition that presented Marianna Simnett's immersive five-channel video installation Blood in My Milk (2018). I visited this work more than five times with different friends and colleagues. Rewriting narratives grotesquely, this work of Marianna Simnett stayed with me for months, causing flashbacks to multiple references in the 73-minute film, such as its sensual and often shocking images, sounds and dialogues. In her practice, she plays with barely-visible borders between reality, fiction and politics, while Simnett places herself into the scripts not only as the storyteller, but also the sorcerer, the observer and, eventually, the artist. Simnett’s current solo exhibition My Broken Animal continues at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem until 23rd of February. We had a conversation about how fables and tales, processes of excess and Surrealism play into her practice, and about how she became to be an artist in the first place.

INTERVIEW: HELL GETTE

Hell Gette manages to perform the balancing act between analogue and digital media effortlessly: while travelling, she works on plein air watercolours, paints on the iPhone or iPad and creates abstracts from depictions of nature with Photoshop. She paints the resulting images in oil, photographs them and inserts emojis via mobile apps. Finally, these pictures are transferred back to the canvas in oil paint. Hell calls the results "#Landscape 3.0". At the age of five, she arrived in Germany from Kazakhstan. She studied painting with Markus Oehlen at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2012 to 2017. At the end of her studies, she was awarded the debutante prize of the Bavarian Ministry of Culture.

INTERVIEW: TAL R

Tal R "Natten (The Night)", 2019 (Detail); ": Men Who Can't Sit on Horses" at Magasin III Jaffa, Photo: Noam Preisman

Tal R is one of Denmark's most influential artists, known particularly for his unique use of colour. Recently his show “: Men Who Can’t Sit On Horses” opened at the Museum Magasin III Jaffa in his birth city Tel Aviv. The exhibition includes only one commissioned painting, which has the exact same measurement as Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” from 1937: 3,49 meter high and 7,77 meter wide, "Natten" (The Night) took Tal R about 9 months to finish. A conversation about bittersweet tragedies.

INTERVIEW: AHMET ÖĞÜT & BURAK ARIKAN

To make visible the ongoing call-for-action for equal rights and fair payment in the arts, the researchers and artists Ahmet Öğüt and Burak Arıkan founded the outstanding online platform Code of Acquisitions. The website allows users to submit experiences and cases they had with an arts organisation and from the collected data it visualises complex mappings showcasing the institutions's or gallery's practices. These personal and disquieting experiences between artists, art practitioners and institutions are usually discussed in small, closed networks and they are often considered as unprecedented local system malfunctions. The platform, however, shows how these unspoken issues are embedded in the core of the global art system and how we can have alternative possibilities of collective discourses and support methodologies.