Eine künstlerische Transformation durch Studierende der weißensee kunsthochschule berlin
Teilnehmer:nnen: Louie Blaser, Anna Eigner, Sophia Henry Brown, Cora Jarchow, Jung A Lee, Daria Pashchenko, Stella Severson, Friederike Toeppe
Leitung des Projekts: Prof. Nader Ahriman und Nora Kapfer
Tutorin und Organisation: Anna Eigner
The built world is a jumble of industrially produced objects; materials that have been stretched, ground apart, rearranged, and converted into cash by countless hands and machine processes. This amalgamation of stuff is not the product of a single mind, but a collective intelligence that continuously creates and transforms. In the winter semester of 2023/2024, the 7 artists in the class of Nader Ahriman decided to mimic this process by putting their own artwork through an assembly line. Coming from different departments and stages of study, each artist provided their own associations with production, excessive wealth, the exploitation of animals, and the hierarchies of labor. Like a musical improvisation, they worked intuitively and responsively to each other, relinquishing control over the outcome. Before long, a kind of factory had emerged at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee. Together, they pulled the image through multiple stages of transformation. They began by creating a large analogue collage from thrown-away materials; paper, fabric, panty hose, old paintings, and three-dimensional objects. Throughout the image, they painted, drew, embroidered, printed, cut, glued, and stapled.
Afterwards, the collage was photographed and converted into a digital image. This allowed the group to expand and multiply the collage, and weave in their own digitally created artwork. In the third phase of transformation, the digital image was printed onto fabric. From here, the final print could once again be worked on top of using analogue forms, and eventually curated in the space of the Willy-Brandt-Haus
The outcome is a direct reflection of the process in which the collage was made. The play between differing artistic viewpoints created a particular kind of dynamic and multilayered chaos. The resulting image, without collective effort, could not have existed.
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