Driving a car is the epitome of relaxation for artist Carola Uehlken. In a Guided Car Performance, she will drive through the streets of Potsdam with visitors on October 31, 2021. During the ride, guests will listen to a site-specific sound work while Sanssouci Palace and other monuments of Potsdam's architectural history pass by outside. The subtitle "Guided Tour" is reminiscent of guided walks and bus rides, which purposefully complete a mandatory program of prominent buildings along the shortest route. In Carola Uehlken's case, the "tour" first leads back into her own biography. The passengers learn about an accident that almost took the artist's father out of his life in his Opel Manta in the 1980s. Since then, the animal that served as the sports car's emblem and namesake, the Manta ray, has become a kind of patron saint for Uehlken, motivating her to explore biomimetic architectures. What inspiration does nature convey to us, and how do we give it language and sound? What characters contribute to the making of places? How can we stop repressing the ghosts of the past and learn from them? The manta ray is one of the most spectacular inhabitants of the oceans and has found its way into numerous cultural contexts, such as science fiction narratives. So far, the artist has identified 261 architectures worldwide that are modeled on its shape. And so the Potsdam tour is also dedicated to the manta ray.


The Palliative Turn

Simon Blanck, Kasia Fudakowski, Anna Gohmert, Annemarie Goldschmidt, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen, Per Hüttner, Nina Katchadourian, Alex Kwartler, Karin Kytökangas, Keith Larson, Mathias Lempart, Dafna Maimon, Carima Neusser, Michael Norton, Rattelschneck, John-Luke Roberts, Xavier Robles de Medina, Lydia Roeder, Nala Tessloff, Carola Uehlken, Olav Westphalen

Initiated by Olav Westphalen
BKV Potsdam, 2021

Carima Neusser, Carola Uehlken and John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal
Helsinki, Finland, 2021




During the first Nordic Art Lab, an interdisciplinary group of artists will work to create the piece “Sensing Landmarks” over a two-week period. The three artists are Carima Neusser (Sweden), John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal (Norway), and Carola Uehlken (Germany).

The piece “Sensing Landmarks” brings together dance, visual art, architecture, music, and poetry with the aim of creating a guided tour that is specific to Suomenlinna’s nature, architecture, and history. During their residency, the artists will develop texts and scripts, choreography, music, videos, and scenography to guide the audience through an interdisciplinary experience with an emphasis on the senses. The work will be an opportunity to find new perspectives on Suomenlinna’s unique architecture and history in a creative and innovative way. The group will also invite people to participate in the creative process who have specific knowledge about or who feel a sense of love for the place. The work process is thoroughly transparent, with ample scope for improvisation.

At the end of the residency period, the public will be invited to participate in one of two guided tours organised by the artist group in Suomenlinna on Friday 8 October and Saturday 9 October 2021. The project was kindly supported by the Nordic Culture Point.

Carima Neusser and Carola Uehlken




Carima Neusser and Carola Uehlken stage a still life performance inspired by a guided tour into the underworld as described in the famous 17th century baroque poem "Stage of Death.” Living and dead material merge to create a tableau vivant. Bodies lie and move in and around a derelict car near a busy market scene selling fruits and vegetables. The audience is invited to witness the various physical processes between life and death as they picnic. Stage of Death is a continuation of her ongoing multisensory research project Sensing Landmarks, which has been incorporated into a wide variety of artistic presentations since 2019.

Solo Market

The exhibition series "SOLO Markt" took place on various weekly markets in Berlin. Market stalls and self-constructed stands were transformed into mobile, temporary spaces for installative and performative works. In addition, guided tours and mobile performances took place.

Ambassadors of Disappointment, Lou Hoyer, Superfiliale, James Brewster, Lee Stevens, Carima Neusser and Carola Uehlken, Das Helmi, Temporary Art Platform and Franziska Pierwoss, Bettina Scholz, Julia Frankenberg, Sumugan Sivanesan, Tide Fam, Nschotschi Haslinger, Sonder (Anton Steenbock and Peter Behrbohm)

Curated by Lola Göller and Johanna Landscheidt
Berlin, 2021

Curated by Carola Uehlken
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2021





In landscape architecture, "Desire Lines" are the imprints of illicit paths that emerge when predetermined patterns of movement are not adhered to and spaces are accessed contrary to their planning. Planned lines start from conventional navigation methods that become inscribed in everyday life over time through repetitions of norms and rituals. To deviate from these lines is to become disoriented.

With Post Impalpable Rites, Theo and Daki celebrate a divorce from the virtual reality that populates our private and public spaces. Visitors currently experience and develop "Desire Lines" mainly digitally, with body extensions such as their smartphones. In the window front of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, the artists transform an architecture that was once constructed virtually but is now brought into the exhibition space in real terms. The structure represents the already built part of a building, a future space and at the same time the outline of a ruin from the past.

"Lines are both created by being followed and followed by being created." – Sara Ahmed


Theo and Daki have been working together for the past two years. The duo is interested in site-specific responses to space and the exploration of open forms of audience participation. Ritual, ideology and architecture are displaced and analysed in order to be able to create formulations about selfhood and desire.

OPEN WINDOW was a series of presentations by the artists-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, who currently don’t have the chance to show their work in the usual Open Studios and exhibitions. Their works can be seen from the window front, Kottbusser Str 10 each day. Initiated by Arthur Debert.

Sara Gurevitsch, Carima Neusser, Carola Uehlken and John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal

Old Mine Residency, Outokumpu, Finland, 2020

Workshops investigating the effect of microorganisms on human behaviour

Elias Arnér (Professor in Biochemistry), Giada Lo Re (PhD, Industrial and Materials Science), Carola Uehlken (Curator/Artist), Carima Neusser (Choreographer), MaiBritt Giacobini (Child psychiatrist MD, PhD), Per Hüttner (Visual artist/Musician), Oskar Gudmundsson (Writer), Adriaan Samson (Writer), Freddie Ross (Art Historian), Emil Krog (Visual Artist), Simone Bang Jørgensen (Visual Artist) and Saber Rhaleb (Musician)

Stockholm, 2019
Italienske Palatset, Växjö, Sweden 2020
Östersund, Sweden 2021
Copenhagen, Denmark, 2021




The project has been started and is maintained by a pan-Nordic group of artists from many disciplines of different ages who work together with established academics from the Natural Sciences. Together they share a fascination for microbes and how humanity’s increased knowledge about them is changing the understanding of who we are and our place in the world. The group takes its starting point in contemporary medical research on microorganisms and people like researcher Stig Bengmark who promotes eating habits that support the human microbiota (the microbes whom we live in symbiosis with), biologist Lynn Margulis who has shown that symbiosis is just as important as competition in evolution and political theorist Elizabeth Povinelli who discusses the humans relationship to living and non living organisms. All three underline that our understanding of how our bodies function and what a human being is, is changing rapidly. Human beings can no longer be considered to be individuals, they need to be perceived as ecosystems who live in symbiosis with a very large number of microbes.

Every human being has over one kilogram of microorganisms in his/her gut. We live in symbiosis with them and they are necessary for digestion and other life support processes. They affect our mood, energy and probably also to what extent we are curious and social. They help to facilitate communication between gut and brain. So far we know only around two per cent of their functions and capabilities. But one thing is certain: they can live without us, but without them we die.

The interdisciplinary group that runs this project has met numerous times in different places in Sweden in 2019-20. They have organised both private and public events. They will continue to meet and to go deeper into our individual and collective research and at the same time spread their knowledge and experiences in the Nordic region in 2020-21. They will also interact with a broader network of artists and researchers and they have made contacts with new collaborators in Norway, Finland and Denmark.

The project will both take the shape of further private and public events in Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany. In order to make the most of these meetings, the group will start by developing the publication “Governing Bodies: An Interdisciplinary investigation into microbes and their effect on human identity,” which will also be a central tool in the public and private workshops.

MORE INFO HERE

Janine Eggert and Ash Moniz

Curated by Carola Uehlken
KELDER, London, 2019





"The attempt to liberate people from the dead hand of bureaucracy has led to the rise of a new and increasingly controlling system of management driven by targets and numbers." Adam Curtis in "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom"

KELDER is pleased to host Glossary of Rotating Actions, a collaborative project by Janine Eggert and Ash Moniz that explores the politics and aesthetics of maritime trade within a larger system of global logistics. This project forms part of a series of collaborative acts where KELDER invites other cultural practitioners to realise a project. Our second guest curator is Berlin based, Carola Uehlken who searches for possibilities to understand global relationships through her curatorial practice.

The cargo ship is a contentious vessel with its birth in European colonial expansion and current position harbouring geopolitical tensions. This delicate legacy, and the agents bound up in this trajectory, are explored by Eggert and Moniz in contrasting ways through their respective practices. Both artists follow different threads that stem from the abstraction of the cargo ship and in doing so confront us with that which is rarely witnessed but heavily present through its absence: the protection of global trade.

Within the history of cargo ships, the security of goods has taken many forms, requiring solutions of technological nature as well as traditional policing. In 1798, theft onboard ships on the Thames led to the formation of the Maritime Police. Using this as a starting point, Ash Moniz explores the Wapping Coal Riots which took place that same year. Through their multimedia installation we are introduced to the character of Elizabeth Forester and her account of a fatal shooting during the riot, prompting us to question the value of evidence and testimony. Using this historic account, Moniz investigates the value of identification: the importance of creating a visual identity of a criminal to be used not only to convict of past crimes, but also to prevent future criminal activity. This use of composite photography to generate images of imagined criminals are hugely problematic and the ramifications of this failed early technology are felt today.

Janine Eggert also investigates technologies used to protect goods and returns to the contemporary cargo ship and the use of ‘rat racks’. These objects have been developed to protect the goods from damage caused by vermin onboard ships and their aesthetic and formal qualities belie their utilitarian purpose. Informed by the artist’s observations during her time onboard these vessels, Eggert presents us with sculptural works that explore the tension between ornamentation and the repetition of mass-manufactured industrial structures. Building on her research into how natural geometric forms and layouts inform industrial manufacturing, Eggert plays with these qualities and creates sculptural objects which in its origin are elements of a larger industrial environment.

MORE INFO HERE

Sketch Up, single channel video, 18 minutes 31 seconds, 2019


Installation view, Part One, Cologne, 2019

The Value of Flowers
Daniel Kiss, Manuela Leinhoss, Carola Uehlken, Adriano Costa
Part One, Cologne 2019

The exhibition was kindly supported by Ford


MORE INFO HERE

Attaque sur le Monde Réel - Film Program on Activism and Fantasy
Curated by Arthur Debert and Carola Uehlken

Video works by Ismail Bahri, Ma Ming, Shana Moulton, Pilvi Takala, Wermke Leinkauf

Musique Volantes, Metz, France 2018


Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 10, 2016, videostill

Interdisciplinary Festival, Hangzhou 2018
Initiated by Arthur Debert, Lola Göller, Carola Uehlken and Benjamin Zuber

aaajiao, ESA, Awu, Arthur Debert, Deyi Studio (Xia Yilan and Paul Devautour), Wu Ding, Lola Göller, Chen Hangfeng, Da Mian, Maming, Cheng Ran, Hu Renyi, Bi Rong Rong, Jessie Yingying Gong, Ecole Offshore, Guan, Dropdown, Kenneth Dow, Alisson Schmitt, Alban Diaz, Pauline Lecerf Li Siyi, Bruno Siegrist, Zhang Lehua, Carola Uehlken, Song Xi, Lilli Kuschel, Elisophie Eulenburg, Li Xiaofei, Wang Xin, Ma Yongfeng, Yuan Yuan, Wang Zhibo, Benjamin Zuber, Ning Zuohong, Leng Yue and Xiao Xiao, DMT Tattoo Department, Fanny Paldacci, Marine Calamai, Yao Qingmei

Art Spaces: SPZ Prague, Babel Berlin, Ecole Offshore Shanghai, I: Project Space Beijing, Martin Goya Business Hangzhou, 2018

The Festival was kindly supported by IFA Institute for Foreign Relationships


Performance by Alisson Schmitt and Pauline Lecerf, Babel-Lelab, Hangzhou 2018. Photo: Lola Göller

BABEL - LELAB was an interdisciplinary, collaborative art festival bringing together artists of all medias from China, Germany and France in order to communicate about transfer, migration, exchange and the potential of misunderstanding.

An artist studio built in a former military space was turned into a laboratory. We created situations, screenings, concerts, performances and installations reflecting on constructions in language, taking minor and major misunderstandings as a potential for communication. How do concepts and objects change their meaning as soon as they move from one place to another?

Telling stories and bringing them from one place to another is the oldest cultural form existing. Babel - Lelab was meant to provide experimental conditions in which artistic research was performed. As part of our communication, especially as artists, language becomes an important tool for play. We don’t use language to express what we already know; we learn to know differently by using language to express. And that expansion of knowledge re-shapes our understanding of the world.


Installation View, Babel-Lelab, Hangzhou 2018. Photo: Lola Göller

Niklas Goldbach, Verena Issel, Marion Orfila, Martijn in 't Veld

Curated by Carola Uehlken
House of Egorn, Berlin 2018  


Marion Orfila, Orée Delocalisée, (Delocalized Forest edge), HD video, 9‘31, 2015

"The Mobile House Turns with the Sun" is a quote from Ivan Chtcheglov's "Formulary for a New Urbanism" written in 1953 under his pseudonym Gilles Ivain. This text, both poetic and theoretical, foundational to the Situationist International movement, was consequently published in 1958. The visionary text set the tone for Guy Debord and the Situationists in their early phase: aspects of urbanism, urban space, transit and flexible forms. The manifest asked for a total transformation of everyday life and structural elements of social environments of individuals.

The exhibition brings together four distinctive perspectives regarding landscape and urban structures. Niklas Goldbach, Verena Issel, Marion Orfila and Martijn in 't Veld develop sensible questions throughout the mediums photography, video, print, text and installation. References range from the over 2000 years old Nazca Lines carved into the rocky landscape of Peru and end with today's traffic lines in California City being remnants of one of the world's biggest failed urban planning projects on the planet. How can we imagine ourselves in illogical circumstances?

„We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun.“
Ivan Chtcheglov


Niklas Goldbach, Land of the Sun, video still, 11:35 min loop, Full HD, Stereo, 2015



MORE INFO HERE

Project Space
Artistic Director, Construction Coordinator
With Arthur Debert

Invited artists: John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal,  Daniel Bickett,  Arthur Debert, Kyoung Jae Cho,  Isak Han,  special guest Soja Juretschko, Brad Henkel,  Nana Pi Aabo Larsen,  Andreas Hoem Roysum,  John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal, Capucine Vandebroeck, Marion Orfila,  Dietrich Meyer,  Lola Göller, Michael Pohl, Sara Björg Bjarnadóttir (performing artists: Chloe Kwiatkowski, Guðrún Benónýsdóttir, Ingileif Franzdóttir Wechner, Michael-David Blostein, Sigurrós Eiðsdóttir, Sigrún Gyða, Simon Bittner), Ma Yongfeng,  Anne Brujean (Club Sandwich), Tiphaine Calmettes,  Hanwei Li, Vincent Scheers, Chen Hangfeng, Saverio Tonoli, Franziska Klötzler

Babel Berlin, 2017 - 2018  

Performance for 3 volunteers, 3 VR glasses, 7min 30sec
Arthur Debert and Carola Uehlken
Nachrichten aus der Gegenwart 2 (News from the Present 2)

Initiated by Sabine Huzikiewiz / Depot 4.9
Kunsthallen Rottstrasse, Bochum, 2016  


Neuschwanstein, 2016, Performance, Nachrichten aus der Gegenwart 2, Kunsthallen Rottstr, Bochum. Photo: Carola Uehlken

Following precisely the instructions inside virtual reality glasses 3 volunteers from the audience realize a performance visible for the other spectators.They perform text, movement as well as they describe and interprete images with their own ways of perception and knowledge creating a theatre piece that they discover while playing for the first time.

The content of the play is based on the idea that humankind already have a precise image of the future through anticipation. Written in novels, realized in science fiction movies buildings reappear and develop a second future, the image of urbanity. The theater play reflects especially on architectorial projects which rised especially in the cultural and museal environment.


Neuschwanstein

The mad king hated people living in capitals.
He preferred caves, forests and mountains to cities.
Painters and Artists were asked to draw many castles,
but none convinced him. None was big enough for his dreams.

In his palace, he was the king.
Old poets whisper he was the only real king of his century.
Architect of his own life, he had built a boundless place
where there is an office for each illusion, a room for each dream
and a kitchen for every taste in the world.

Passing by the flying bridge you could see
the three towers of the past facing the gate of stars.
A wonderful stairway of concrete trees leads to thousands of
suites where Sultans, Emirs and Legends lived by his side.
Every night you could hear the valkyries singing and running
through the woods, surrounding the crystal dome.

Operas succeeded to ballet endlessly, protected and forced
by the greatest, - the only spectator.
He was never frightened by new technologies.
In his place you could see machines, people wouldn't have ever believed.

Every day, the king went to sleep, as soon as the sun rose.
His blanket woven by his ideas for the days to come.
His bed floating slowly through the empty corridors.

People from the city, jealous of this king reality couldn't stop.
They called the king mad and straightened him for his dangerous mind.
They forced him to live like them. At least for one day.

Berndnaut Smilde
Curated by Carola Uehlken
LIAN Contemporary Art Space, Shanghai 2015-2016



Berndnaut Smilde, False Firmament, Installation view, LIAN Contemporary Art Space, Shanghai 2016


The solo exhibition False Firmament by Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde features among new works also works that the artist developed during his residency stay in LIAN Contemporary Art Space, Shanghai. The show includes his youngest research on breaking light and centers on the site of LIAN Contemporary Art Space, its surrounding as well as its counter part, its antipode, the direct opposite location on the world.

In history the firmament was conceived as a vast solid dome, where sun, stars and moon were arranged in the atmosphere. Nowadays a lot of different proto-scientifical models try to describe how we perceive the blue heaven above us and natural phenomenons related to it differently. Technologies allow us views onto almost every surface on earth. But our imagination about the view into and out of the sky is still personal, related to our knowledge, narrations and myths, that we have. How do we perceive nature, images and arrangements in nature? False Firmament is referring to Berndnauts interference with these phenomenons in nature and questions the matter of truth in our view.

Catharina Cramer, Nicholas Grafia, Susanne Griem, René Haustein, Niklas Heidemann, Philipp Höning, Daniel Hundt, Seungyho Jung, Sumi Kim, Christian Klement, Luisa Kömm, Johannes Leßke, Sebastian Liebl, Ill Jong Park, Jan Partke, Roman Podeszwa, Hanna Schneider, Meike Schulze-Hobeling, Stephanie Sczepanek, Katharina Siemeling, Vakho Sikharulidze, Kyoung Jae Cho, Manuel Talarico

Curated by Carola Uehlken
V ART CENTER and LIAN Contemporary Art Space, Shanghai 2015 

With the kind support of V Art Center, CAC Chronus Art Center, Goethe Institute Shanghai, Academy of Fine Arts Münster and SIVA Shanghai Inistitute for Visual Arts



Performance "Happy Hour" as part of Drinking a Drink, Sinking a Ship, 2015, V Art Center, Shanghai
Drinking a Drink, Sinking a Ship, 2015, Installation view, LIAN Contemporary Art Space, Shanghai

 

Gao Shan, Gisa Pantel, Rene Haustein, Inga Krüger, Wang Hongfeng, Wu Ding, Zhang Mei, Daniel Kiss, Katy Roseland, Jiang Jun and Wong Dan, Song Xi

Curated by Carola Uehlken and Sun Qidong
Bazaar Compatible Program, Shanghai 2015



Katy Roseland, Olo Method, 2015, bazaar compatible program, Shanghai
Song Xi, 16th Room - The Gift, 2015, bazaar compatible program, Shanghai

Ash Moniz, Felix Kalmenson, Hu Weiyi, Wang Man, Double Fly Art Center, Wang Xin, Ruben Gaehrken, Sören Beineke, Mai Mai 

Curated by Carola Uehlken
bazaar compatible program and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai 2014  



Watch Your Steps, 2014, bazaar compatible program and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Within a one-day art-event artists from Canada, Germany and China are showing their works in the Minsheng Art Museum and at the bazaar compatible program in Shanghai. The distance between the spaces is about 700 meters. The audience is asked to go back and forth, in order to discuss about the value of art in these two very different venues.

The Minsheng Art Museum is one of Shanghai‘s oldest art spaces. It opened about in the 1980s and is owned by the first privatised bank Chinas, the Minsheng Art Bank. The BCP bazaar compatible program is a project space on a traditional Chinese market, where one can buy meet, fish, vegetables, go to the shoe maker or the hair cutter and get everything one could possibly think of. The crossover between an art space in a commercial market building and a white cube financed by a bank served as a platform for the group show Watch Your Steps. We shared works and thoughts about the professionalisation as artists and money in general.

The show included a lecture performance by ADL (The Association for the Dematerialisation of Landscapes) about the value decrease of money clips on online sales platforms at the Art Museum, which in video format then was sold through an auction on the way to the market venue. Fake money was produced to celebrate the 6th anniversary of the art collective Double Fly Art Center, a video by Wang Man pushing a weapon bullet back and forth while kissing his partner demonstrated the power of sex and relationships, paintings by Sören Beineke were installed like towels hanging from the ceiling at the market. Wang Xin installed an art and psychology driven installation, and an actrice performing the „sexy“ art market through songs, pills and games. We had a painted canvas cut into name cards to be puzzled by Ruben Gärken reacting on the business driven communication in Shanghai while a performance by Hu Weiyi endangered the audiences' entrance into the exhibition. The moving night ended with a post rock concert by Mai Mai.



ADL performing at Watch Your Steps, 2014, bazaar compatible program and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
Wong Man, Bullet, 2014, video still

Tim Woodward

Curated by Lejla Aliev, Jan Enste, Carola Uehlken and Manuel Talarico
Geological Museum, Münster 2014  

A priest explains the religious ceremony of profanation, in a video portrait of the Donald Judd sculpture Untitled [1977] as it exists in 2014. The shooting took place at the Donald Judd sculpture at Lake AA, which was installed in 1977 for the first Sculpture Projects in Münster. For nearly forty years this work of art has been part of the public space of the city. In the eleven minute video RING AROUND THE DOWSER, a priest explains from a personal point of view the process of profanation.

The work‘s title references both a technical detail of a film apparatus, and on the other hand „dowsing“ is a method to locate secret, hidden or missing things. Complimenting the video, a sculptural work titled MARTHA SUN DECK was created as a seating area in the exhibition space of the Geomuseum.



Tim Woodward, Ring Around the Dowser, 2014, Geological Museum, Münster

An exhibition between Balls, Bimages, Birls, Bymnastic, Brojektions, Beer, and Bymposium

Bettina Dettmer and Willi Kramer, Ivan Geddert, Betsy Flock (Daniel Hundt) and Jan Partke, Gisa Pantel, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Anne Staab, Benjamin Zuber

Curated by Clara Napp and Carola Uehlken
In collaboration with the specialist conference Inside. Outside. Others. The body in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Academy of Fine Arts, Münster 2013  








Goys and Birls, 2013, Academy of Fine Arts, Münster

Bahar Taheri

Curated by Lejla Aliev, Jan Enste, Carola Uehlken and Manuel Talarico
FAK Förderverein Aktuelle Kunst, Münster 2013

Bahar Taheri intended to demonstrate the historical, political and social events in her homeland Iran by using the symbolic object of the crown to represent the potions of power in relation to what has been going on behind the scenes, either in favour of or against, the established source of authority in the form of monarchies and royal dynasties.

The artist used the flag as an object representing national identity that conveys the historical background of a nation. The flag, through which she intended to show several overlapping layers of social events and evolutions in the history of her country, was tattered, in pieces of fabric, or was used in a way in which is was composed. The audience acted as the dominant outsiders, who have been always influential in the shifting situation of Iran. They were invited to assemble sheets of fabric in a way they imagined or prefered it to be.



Bahar Taheri, Marz-e por Gohar, 2013, FAK Förderverein Aktuelle Kunst, Münster