Astrid Nippoldt - Grutas

About

Andrew Mummery and Wolfram Schnelle are pleased to announce the opening in September 2007 of Mummery + Schnelle, a new gallery in central London that will exhibit international contemporary art. The artists showing all make work that demonstrates an awareness of the culture, history, traditions, conventions and genres of their chosen medium combined with an ability to re-examine these in the light of contemporary art practice and theory. Mummery + Schnelle is developing an exhibition programme with a critical and curatorial consistency and will present the work of its exhibiting artists in its proper context and with a clear understanding of its concerns.

The gallery's opening exhibition will be Grutas, a trilogy of films by Astrid Nippoldt. The film footage for this work was shot in Grutas Park in Lithuania home to a collection of Soviet era monumental sculpture made obsolete by the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989 and gathered together in a landscape that is part historical theme park, part recreation of the Gulag. Nippoldt's three films take this landscape as the starting point for an investigation into the relationship between art and cinema and the psychology of place, history and memory.

My working process is basically divided into two steps. First there is a confrontation with reality, a situation, a place, a scenario. Sometimes in the form of a spontaneous shot, sometimes as a planned observation and sometimes things happen accidentally by circumstances and I become aware of their pertinence at the moment of doing, or even afterwards. The second step is post-production. My approach is non-linear, intuitive: with sketches, notes and a collection of related elements. The editing itself is a bit like an experimental laboratory, where ideas get focussed and precise in a long process of evaluation.
Astrid Nippoldt in conversation with Ilaria Gianni, 2006

The whole of this interview, plus a text about Grutas, 'An Examination of the Absolute, or, the Mosquitoes of Mnemosyne' by Mirjam Schaub, are available as downloads on the gallery website www.mummeryschnelle.com.

Astrid Nippoldt was born in Germany in 1973 and lives and works in Berlin. Grutas was first shown at the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti in Rome at the end of 2006. A booklet published on the occasion of this exhibition is available from the gallery. The work was also shown in the exhibition 'Made in Germany' at the Kunstverein Hannover (May ' August 2007).