Viewpoints

What kind of gesture can you see here?

Monica Bonvicini has made a cast of her forearms. This cast was the model for this sculpture. Walk around the work once. Have you noticed the reflection in the dark glass? This means you can even see the underside of the sculpture. How finely crafted the arms are.

The title of the work alludes to protest and resistance: “Up in Arms” roughly means “standing in arms”. But do the delicate color and fine lines of the work match?

That seems to be a contradiction. Glass is fragile. The sculpture must not fall down. These arms can be tender. But just as combative!

The Italian artist Monica Bonvicini examines power relations and gender roles in her works. It addresses dependencies and resistance. It also often intervenes in the architecture of exhibition venues and questions the power structures associated with them – architecture is still a predominantly male-dominated field today, think of the so-called ‘star architects’.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Matthias Albrecht
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

What does this picture say? What do you think?
A screen was punctured several times. THAT is the picture.

Have you ever thought about what is behind the canvas of a painting? This is exactly what the Italian artist Lucio Fontana wants to make visible. He doesn’t need a brush for this. But a knife or a pair of scissors. He thus extends the surface of the traditional panel painting into the third dimension: the space becomes visible. This was revolutionary for art at the end of the 1940s. Someone is doing something completely new here. Not an illusion, not an image of an object. Not even color.

Take a closer look. How did Lucio Fontana proceed? Were the holes cut into the canvas in quick succession? Or perhaps slowly, with caution? The arrangement does not look random, but describes a loose circular grouping with an uninjured canvas area roughly in the center. Fontana is not interested in provocation or a spontaneous gesture. It is not about destruction. It’s about expanding the possibilities of art. And about bringing light into the space behind the screen.

By the way: ‘Concetto Spaziale’ means ‘spatial concept’ in German. This is how the artist has titled almost all of his works since 1949. The 51 stands for the year of creation 1951, B 11 is the number 11 and the B stands for ‘Buchi’, the Italian word for ‘holes’.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Nadine Kleinken
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

Here we take you to Italy, to the small harbor town of Pirano near Trieste. A carefree gondola ride in bright sunshine? A summer idyll?

Max Beckmann spends his summer vacation here with his first wife and their son. But it doesn’t look like fun and relaxation. Look at the people in the boat. You will notice that they do not speak or sing together. They are turned away from each other. The man on the right of the sail, Max Beckmann himself, stares and sings into space. How do the other people affect you?

The impressions are underlined by the colors. As can be seen particularly well in the depiction of the sky, the artist clouds all the colors by adding black. This takes away the summery, luminous impression of the depiction. The unusually narrow portrait format of the picture also contributes to a depressed, oppressed atmosphere, as does the distorted architecture of the location. The chosen artistic means emphasize the message of the picture.

The picture was painted in 1925. Max Beckmann is still married, but the lady in the green dress in the painting is already his future wife Quappi. And not the woman he is still married to. A tricky situation. Apparently the artist did not feel comfortable in it.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

A whole wall full of pictures and yet this is only a small part of the 366 drawings that the American Robert Longo produced for the Magellan project. Longo has selected a photo from his personal photo collection every day. By transforming the colorful originals into uniform shades of gray and image formats, Longo merges collective and individual experiences into a common sequence of images that seem familiar to us as a whole, but are nevertheless alien.

Have you noticed the picture with the many human skulls?
In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia. In just four years under the communist dictator Pol Pot, thirty percent of the population was killed: Intellectuals, journalists, people with foreign language skills and anyone designated as a foreign agent. This picture comes from reports about it.

Another picture on the wall shaped the collective memory of the time. From a distance, it looks like a strangely shaped, leaning tower. However, if you find it and take a closer look, you can see the wreckage of an airplane on it.
On July 17, 1996, a Boeing of the US airline Trans World Airlines took off from New York-JFK under flight number TW 800. After only 13 minutes of flight, there was an explosion and the debris crashed into the sea off the coast of Long Island. All 230 occupants died. Various conspiracy theories about the cause of the explosion quickly emerged, in which many people took part directly via the relatively new medium of the Internet and some of which still persist to this day despite the investigation being completed.

Longo captures the collective everyday experience that our culture and opinions are shaped by media products. They influence our behavior and emotions and create relationships. We kiss, live, cry like in a movie. As fans, we react with sadness, joy or anger to things that happen to our idols, even though we have never met them in person.

Do you recognize any other pictures? Which motifs probably come from which type of source? Can you find the Undies from a fashion magazine, Bernadette or the comic strip?

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Audio by: Nadine Kleinken
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

They are part of a series of 68 variations, C-prints, glass, wooden frames

Are we looking at different people here? Or are they the same facial features, sometimes leveled out by bright white light and sometimes strongly emphasized by red shadows? Katharina Sieverding repeatedly uses portraits of herself and alters or alienates them in order to pose questions about identity and mechanisms of presentation. This is also the case in the Nachtmensch series.

With the clearly artificial lighting and rigid facial features against the empty, black background, these portraits do not create a closeness to an individual personality, but rather distance. Facial expressions, make-up and lighting create the effect of a mask. It is not a person who introduces himself, but a production.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Sieverding thus drew attention to something that is now deliberately part of everyday life for many on Instagram and co: the targeted influencing of media self-presentation. Aren’t Sieverding’s pictures a little reminiscent of the various ready-made effects and filters that we can apply to any photo with just a few clicks?

Sieverding’s art draws attention to the fact that every form of self-expression always has something political about it. It is co-determined by the rules of our society. On social media, at family celebrations, at school or among work colleagues: depending on the situation and topic, we express our convictions in different ways and more or less clearly – or not. We emphasize certain parts of our personality – or hold them back.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Audio by: Matthias Albrecht
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

At first glance, it seems very clear why this work is called Unfinished Obama; after all, the white, pre-sketched but unfilled areas are hard to miss. Or are they rather an expression of what lies in Obama’s downcast eyes? Is ‘unfinished’ the buzzword for regret that Obama was unable to run for president of the USA again after two terms and that it was now in the hands of his successor Donald Trump to decide how the social changes he had begun would develop? At least the director of the Kunsthalle at the time had discovered the picture on an internet blog in which artists were reacting to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. However, the unfinished form also places Obama in the line of historical US politicians. Haendel’s work is reminiscent of Gilbert Stuart’s painting ‘George Washington unfinished’ (The Athenaeum) from 1796. This portrait of Washington adorns the one-dollar bill, but in the original it is surrounded by a lot of unpainted canvas. You will find both images on your display.

Politicians have to take a more or less public stand every day and they are constantly asking us to take a stand on them, especially during election campaigns. They use a wide variety of media: posters, newspaper interviews, debates and promotional videos on television. However, personalized news channels are currently the most important: Facebook, Tik Tok, X and co. In his 2008 election campaign, Obama was the first to make use of their power. He won over his many and above all young voters and donors by addressing them personally by email, text message, on Facebook, etc. By 2016, others had also learned from this example. This election campaign was characterized by fake news about candidates and campaign topics on social media. Parts of it were part of a targeted disinformation campaign that presumably originated in Russia. Donald Trump used micro-targeting to woo voters. In other words, he used social media algorithms to reach very small target groups with precisely tailored political advertising. All of this is currently being exacerbated by the increasing spread of texts, images and videos created using artificial intelligence. Especially when it comes to forming political opinions, we are constantly faced with the question: How do I personally and how do we as a society deal with the influence of the media?

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Audio by: Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.