Debutant*Innen 2021: Hyesun Jung / Sophia Mainka / Janina Totzauer

Hyesun Jung uses everyday objects and found objects in her sculptures and spatial installations, which she brings into an interplay with the exhibition space and the visitors through small, often unexpected gestures. Jung's installations need the visitor: they demand time and attention in order to unfold their effect, they want to be discovered and often also used. And they play with the architecture of the respective place, for example, they investigate how the character of a room can be shown or revealed. In the exhibition, Jung positions a constellation of egg cartons containing eggs formed from the same stone as the historical floor slabs of the exhibition space, thus telling a discrepancy between the delicate, fragile form and the weight of the natural stone, but also the history of the place. In another installation, Jung constructs a kind of architecture out of Leitz folders, which now structure the space like empty office buildings. The folders, which all come from different municipal institutions, such as the Munich City Archive or various museums, carry their own history through the labelling, but also through the traces of their earlier use. Jung rededicates their functionality, but without losing their references, for example to archiving means and methods, German bureaucracy, or (Munich) art and cultural history.

Text by Anja Lückenkemper

The starting point of Sophia Mainka's artistic practice is often an interest in living space, security and the (partly permeable) border between interior and public space. Mainka's exploration begins with her own positioning and therefore a view from the Western European, suburban middle class, which is directed towards more general questions and the larger social contexts of our time. For the installation I beg Your Pardon? Mainka has created a parkour that transfers the logic of home security and its systems into sculptural objects, such as fences, alarm systems and security keys. The movement through the various stages of this illusion of domestic self-protection raises questions about the human need for security.
The movement through the various stages of this illusion of domestic self-protection raises questions about the human need for safety and security, but also about societal mechanisms of protection and defence. The video work SHTF [when shit hits the fan] takes the search for a security solution to an extreme: four female figures (prepper, video game heroine, chameleon and post-apocalyptic warrior) depict different versions of a dystopian vision of the future. Mainka allows supposedly fixed entities to become fragile and deprives the protagonists of a clear assignment. In this way, she maintains the complexity of a fear of the future - which is staged here as the end of the world, but is oriented towards current topics such as climate change, corona deniers and right-wing conspiracy myths - and avoids simple solutions.

Text by Anja Lückenkemper

Janina Totzauer's artistic practice is characterised by intensive research into nature as a mediator of knowledge, but also by (life) experience in different cultural circles and a longstanding preoccupation with customs and traditions as well as their oral traditions in these cultures. By focussing on ceremonial acts, the computer game-like video Omega to Alpha shows something unifyingly human despite all cultural differences: the need to open "protective spaces" through rituals. In her works, Totzauer highlights lines of connection, not only interculturally, but also as a cohabitation of different species. The video Eye to Eye uses close-ups of the animals on her farm in Mozambique. The animals' eyes reflect not only the artist herself and her environment, but also the environment, but also the trust and communication that takes place here on an equal footing. Totzauer takes up the idea of de-hierarchising the human relationship to the world in the sound work Planet Earth Symphony, which she presents for this exhibition as an asynchronous soundtrack to Eye to Eye: on her version of the record that was shot into space in 1977 to present our planet to extraterrestrials, the emergence of human sound, analogous to our emergence on earth, takes up only a fraction of time and world history. The exhibition is also accompanied by a new multi-part spatial installation, the tent constructions of which take up the human need for a physical shelter here.

Text by Anja Lückenkemper

DEBUTANT*INNEN 2021
HYESUN JUNG
SOPHIA MAINKA
JANINA TOTZAUER

Opening:
07.09.2021 / 13 - 19 

Opening speech:
07.09.2021 / 18.00 / Felix Burger
(Exhibition Commission of the BBK Muc & Obb)

Insta Live Walk:
07.09.2021 / 18 Uhr / @galeriederkuenstler

Performance "Human Nesting"
Janina Totzauer & Performer*innen:
07.09.2021 / 16 - 19
24.09.2021 / 18 - 21
25. & 26.09.2021 / 15 - 18

Open Art:
24.09.2021 / 18 - 21 
25. & 26.09.2021 / 11 - 18

07.09. - 02.10.2021

GALERIE DER KÜNSTLER*INNEN

Maximilianstr.42, 80538 München