Opening of both exhibitions: Thursday, October 7, 7 pm

Gitte Villesen
It changed radically: grew fur again, lost it, developed scales, lost them
8.10.–5.12.2021
 
With a contribution by Beverly Buchanan. In cooperation with Dental, Chiara Figone, Joerg Franzbecker, Emma Wolf-Haugh and Saidou Ndiaye
 
Badischer Kunstverein presents Gitte Villesen (*1965, DK) in a solo exhibition accompanied by a special programme of education and events. The exhibition focuses on current projects, including two new works produced for the Kunstverein.
Until a few years ago, Gitte Villesen developed her primarily filmic and photographic works as situational encounters with protagonists who are present not just through the moving images of the video footage, but also as important dialogue partners. Villesen’s practice of telling and re-telling as forms of manifold montages of the encountered, the staged, and the archival is continued in her recent projects, but extended through pervasive references to feminist science fiction. In the video installation There is an Affinity (2019), Villesen combines a drawing of greatly enlarged soil organisms by the botanist R. H. Francé (1874–1943) with a quotation from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler.
Another explicitly audiovisual affinity unfolds in the newly-produced video work that gives the exhibition its title: A ramble through real and fictional landscapes tells the story of how languages are created and signals transmitted. The recordings point toward fragility, sensitivity, but also strength; characteristics that can be found in phenomena as diverse as mimosa or dyslexia. Through references to the activist practices of the artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, The Flyers of Lucy and Suzanne (2021; together with Joerg Franzbecker) demonstrate how prevailing assumptions concerning eccentric, non-male persons can be deployed as the basis for conspiratorial practices. Particular noteworthy are the presentation of works by Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015), which have accompanied Villesen’s artistic practice for several years.

Curated by Anja Casser

PROGRAMME OF EDUCATION AND EVENTS

Thursday, 21.10.2021, 6 pm
Curator’s tour through the exhibition

7 pm
A meeting between Chiara Figone, Saidou Ndiaye & Gitte Villesen
 
Friday, 12.11.2021, 6 pm
Guided tour through the exhibition
 
7 pm
The Flyers of Lucy and Suzanne
A Lecture Performance in form of a Materialsichtung by Joerg Franzbecker & Gitte Villesen
 
Saturday, 13.11.2021, 3–5 pm
Readings & Re-tellings from feminist sci-fi
Workshop mit Emma Wolf-Haugh & Gitte Villesen
 
7 pm
Talk with Jennifer Burris & Park McArthur on the works by Beverly Buchanan
Introduction: Gitte Villesen

Wednesday, 24.11.2021, 6 pm
Guided tour through the exhibition

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

Atrium

Emma Hedditch, Lili Huston-Herterich & Jean-Paul Kelly
With a view to a later date, or never
8.10.–5.12.2021

Bricolage has its origins in anthropology, with the bricoleur identified as someone who develops a practice via process, understanding their environs by using what is at hand. In an art historical context, bricolage has no single strategy, methodology, or trajectory. This exhibition identifies contemporary practices by Emma Hedditch (*1972, Somerset, UK), Lili Huston-Herterich (*1988, Chicago, USA), and Jean-Paul Kelly (*1977, London, CA) where the limits of one’s own body and its attendant vulnerabilities become a vital material for, and opening into, each of their works.

The power of their projects rests not in the provenance of a unified medium or a single gesture. Instead, it is found in the accumulation of time and the potential for a practice imbricated with everyday life––situating the historical and social context of the bricoleur in relation to the viewer at the moment of encounter. For Emma Hedditch, this includes making manifest via photos and found objects the demarcation of property boundaries that we both access and enforce each day. In close proximity to her home in Rotterdam, Lili Huston-Herterich has sourced fibres from the detritus of the textile industry as the foundation for sculptures that are knotted or felted, thus marking the passage through multiple generations of hands. Finally, Jean-Paul Kelly appropriates image documents we can instantly access electronically, interpreting and transforming what and how they depict. Here, through sculptural panels of perspex and rusted steel, he reshapes and hardens our gaze away from our screens and into other screens that fasten the flesh and choice of sight to material.

With all three artists, accumulation is not synonymous with accretion. Here, accumulation also impels attenuation.
 
Curated by Jacob Korczynski

PROGRAM

Glass Sculptures Workshops by Lili Huston-Herterich
Friday, 1.10.2021, 3–7 pm
Saturday, 2.10.2021, noon–4 pm
Please reserve for the workshops at: workshop@badischer-kunstverein.de. For questions please contact us at: +49 (0)721 282 26. The same workshop takes place on two days. You are welcome to attend one or both dates. The workshops are free of charge.
 
Preview: Curator’s tour with Jacob Korczynski
Thursday, 7.10.2021, 6 pm

Guided tours through the exhibition
Wednesday, 3.11.2021, 6 pm
Wednesday, 1.12.2021, 6 pm

Due to its historical building structure, the Badischer Kunstverein is only partially accessible. Exhibitions in the atrium are accessible with no step barrier. A gender-inclusive washroom with step barriers is located on the second mezzanine  oor of our building. For further information and your suggestions regarding accessibility at the Kunstverein, please contact us: info@badischer-kunstverein.de or
+49 (0)721 28226.

Jacob Korczynski and Jean-Paul Kelly would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Jean-Paul Kelly’s contribution was produced with the support of the City of Toronto through Toronto Arts Council.For more information on the exhibitions, and our program, please visit us on our Website, on Instagram and Facebook.

Under the new Corona Ordinance, as of Thursday, September 16, all visitors (6 years and older) will be required to show proof of 3G (vaccinated, recovered or tested) or 2G (vaccinated or recovered), depending on the warning level in order to visit the exhibit at the Kunstverein. Masks are mandatory and the general distance and hygiene regulations apply. The contact details of the visitors are documented via a contact form or with the luca app.

The Corona Ordinance of the state of Baden-Württemberg can be found here.