Graz → Berlin (via Stockholm)

About

The exhibition will feature artists from both cities, and of several different nationalities. From HilbertRaum, three members will take part, sharing a highly personal and poetic approach to art making. All three, Feriel Bendjama, Kuno Ebert and Tobias Sternberg, have strong and original opinions that can be clearly seen in their art, although without writing it on anybody’s nose. Their selection for this collaborative show, will feature photography, sculpture and painting. We happily acknowledge that we can see many exciting parallels and meetings, both aesthetic and emotional, with the work of our visiting colleagues.

The Berlin Perspective

As anyone knows who frequently visits the Art World, it possesses it’s own geography. Partly overlapping and extending into the mundane world of immaterial political entities - some cities, such as Berlin for example, is considered a capital in both of these worlds. The capital of radically different entities of course. If politically, Berlin is known for directing itself and its neighbours along a stern and austere course of united financial and industrial discipline, it’s importance in the Art World couldn’t be of a more different nature. Here, in our sphere, Berlin has for many years been attracting the very artists who would most abhor unity and discipline, and who instead relish in particularity and freedom. Furthermore, as the capital of Self-organization, the art scene of Berlin is so decentralized, autonomous and overlapping, that it could almost be considered a gigantic cluster of regional art hubs, with groups, networks and collaborations moving over and beside each other with ease. Being part of just one of these many hubs, HilbertRaum is if anything more interested in connecting to regional centres of similar scale elsewhere in the world, rather than looking too closely at what happens just around the corner.

Striking up a friendly acquaintance during Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, a link of aesthetic liking has led two artist run spaces to establish a slow moving but far reaching express transit. HilbertRaum starts out by inviting Kunsthalle Graz from eastern Austria, to come and show together with us in our project space in Berlin, artistic positions with the power to entangle and rub off on us. We expect to reciprocate in 2018, but then on their home turf.