**Leonie Brandner, Antje Dahte, Itsthevibe, Daria Jelonek, Lukas Liese, Lena Policzka, Anton von Heiseler, Cindy Wegner, Lina Zacher**

  
It is the aim to develop a meaningful symbiosis between ecology, globalization and artistic practice. Contemporary art can therefore work as a wake-up call for climate and environmental protection, which makes devastating images of climate catastrophes and destruction visible.With this in mind, the exhibition title “Biopsy” refers to the Greek words bíos “life”, and ópsis “seeing”. To conduct a biopsy means to examine tissue samples of a living body. In the manner of pathology, where the removed bioptates are examined under a microscope, the selected artists aim to analyse a certain aspect with the help of art. The spectator should be activated to discover the presence, cause, or extent of the disease.It is essential to use the tension between catastrophe and aesthetics in a productive way. Art and culture can take responsibility in this debate by addressing problems in an artistic way, pointing out visions for a sustainable future.

Biopsie (by artburst berlin e.v.)

metal prints of sculpture for sale @ $225.00

  
See original at https://youtu.be/DfhLwyhGSTo?si=DaTgOEJNqs8t7n4H

Rythm n Blues

Metal prints of art work Sculpture. $225.00

  
https://youtu.be/pHHU94wm2TA?si=J8diziXOLVCpUCJi

Hunter and the Hunted

Metal prints from original art sculpture. Original sculture not ofr sale.

Serenity

Bon Appetite

metal prints forsale $225.00

  
Sculpture forsale $ 2200.00

  
https://youtu.be/TDILJ\_k8oTM?si=zw2x-0g9bJd7TkB6

Ocean Blue

On October 19, 1983, Galerie im Körnerpark opened in the middle of idyllic Körnerpark as Neukölln’s first municipal gallery. Numerous exhibitions, events and projects reflect the cultural life beyond the city’s borders. The 40th anniversary of the gallery is a reason to celebrate and at the same time an opportunity to reflect on past projects.

  
_La Bonanza_ was a Thank you to all the artists, curators, contributors, supporters and visitors who have shaped Galerie im Körnerpark over the last four decades – into a place of art, creativity and cultural enrichment for everyone.

  
In collaboration with the collectives _LaLoVe’s Kitchen_, _Soy Division_, and _African Acid Is The Future_, artist Lalo Gomes conceived a performance evening of three acts that translates the gallery’s interdisciplinary and rich history into a contemporary context: through the interplay of interventions, narratives, sound, dance, and food, a communal experience unfolds on the terrace in front of the gallery that also invited to think about future artistic and social visions. The three culinary performative elements did not succeed each other chronologically, but were dramaturgically intertwined.

  
**Soy Division** 

Inspired by various plants used as culinary ingredients, Ariel W. Orah and his collective _Soy Division_ choreograph movement and sound. The audience is invited to connect with the plants, learn from their wisdom, deepen their own understanding of themselves and the world, and work towards a fairer society.

  
**LaLoVe’s Kitchen**

For Lalo Gomes and his collective _LaLoVe’s Kitchen_, cooking is a communal experience. To this end, the audience is invited to share rice, beans and plantains, cook and eat together, and reflect on food as nourishment in the spirit of a collective consciousness during a time of abundance.

  
**African Acid is the Future** 

Dauwd Al Hilali and Maryisonacid of the collective _African Acid Is The Future_ fuse an experimental DJ set with fish and seafood delicacies for an aesthetic delight. The music leads into the final part of the evening in which all bodies warm up dancing together, while a birthday cake is served by Vava Dudu.

La Bonanza

Metal prints for sale $ 225.00

  
Sculpture forsale at $4,500.00

  
https://youtu.be/DfhLwyhGSTo?si=DaTgOEJNqs8t7n4H

Ryhthm n Blues

 Back view of my scuplture ( Metal print ) 16x24

Red Coral

**Stacie Ant, Lou Bessemer, Elisa Jule Braun, Christina Koch, Stefan Mildenberger, Lee Negris, Miriam Poletti, Jana Maria Schneider, Corinna Radakovits**

  
One important subject within the exhibition will be the involvement with sexual pleasure and desire. In which ways is the personal desire shaped by social norms and defined by the supposedly “normal”? How sophisticated and reflecting are we when it comes to communicating our own needs – especially if it deviates from the alleged norm? Separately from gender or sexual orientation – sexuality means proximity and intimacy as well as the exploration of one’s own or someone else’s body. Shame, taboos or a disturbed perception of the own body can have an impact on how we enjoy sexuality and limit our experience of pleasure. The exhibited works are putting the focus on a new, positive understanding of sexuality. 

It’s my pleasure is set to offer an open and unprejudiced space to present and discuss different sexual preferences, which will hopefully encourage a critical discurs – be it on pornography, masturbation or polygamie, homo- or bisexuality, fetishes or the dissolution of classic gender roles during sex.

It’s my pleasure (by artburst berlin e.v.)

As part of the Berlin-wide initiative “DRAUSSENSTADT,” the Department of Culture of the Bezirksamt Neukölln is organizing a festival around the Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch from August 19 to 21, 2022\. Over the course of three days artists and artists’ collectives will present sound, dance and movement performances, a jam session and an interactive theater performance. 

The starting point for the festival is the location itself: the gallery, which is located under the Wildenbruch Bridge, has always been a space on the threshold, a place of “in-between”. The historic toilet facility was exposed to decay for decades and thus became an urban canvas for the surrounding creative scene. The projects are take a balancing act and react to this special place in multiple ways – on the threshold of up and down, above the gallery, on the bridge as well as along the former dock on the canal. What bridges have we already burned behind us? Can art bridge our differences? 

  
Full Programme: https://kunstbruecke-am-wildenbruch.de/en/events/auf-der-schwelle-unter-der-bruecke

Under the Bridge = On the threshold

**Fanny Gicquel, Adi Liraz, Zoë Claire Miller, Nelson Morales, Liz Rosenfeld, Aliza Shvarts, Agrina Vllasaliu**

  
_An Imagination of Bodily Autonomy_ is an exhibition project that looks at the way we treat our bodies. The body with which we move through the world not only determines our perception of the world, but also how others perceive us and treat us, and which rights are granted or denied to us.

Only 57% of all women worldwide are able to make self-determined decisions about their sexual and reproductive health, according to the United Nations’ annual State of World Population Report of 2022\. The body is thus a crucial site into which patriarchal structures are inscribed. However, not only women, but also queer, trans, BiPoc, and people with disabilities all know what it means to live in this world with a body that deviates from the purported norm.

The long-standing slogan of feminist movements in the struggle for the right to safe and freely accessible abortion, “My Body, My Choice,” serves as the starting point for a subjective, fragmentary investigation of the concept of bodily autonomy. The exhibition bringts together seven artist:s who have reclaimed their bodies performatively, taking up space in this world and are living bodily self-determination already in the present. Between fragility and resilience, this is not an escape from reality, but a self-confident statement: the artists take what is theirs.

For the duration of their exhibition visit, the audience of Galerie im Saalbau enter an alternative space in which they can imagine what it would be like if everyone could decide freely and without restrictions about their bodies.

Accompanying the exhibition we are happy to present a publication, containing the photographic exhibition documentation and work texts in German and English as well as three additional guest contributions, which explore the topic of bodily autonomy in different ways. The guest contributions include texts by Amaranta Gómez Regalado (Mexican Muxe social anthropologist and political activist), Franzis Kabisch (Abortion TV) as well as an interview by Aliza Shvarts with Viva Ruiz (Thank God for Abortions).

An Imagination of Bodily Autonomy

**Nadine Byrne, Cecilia Granara, Mazen Kahhdaj, Aneh Ondare, Paloma Proudfoot, Claudia Reinhardt, Mathilde ter Heijne, Jaan Toomik, Melanie Wiksell**

  
Loss and grief are inevitable and universal experiences that nevertheless each of us encounter unexpectedly sooner or later. The exhibition “Contours of Grief” explores this tension and examines the different emotional states of mourning through various artistic media.

We don’t know how we grieve until we grieve, notices Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Grief is a nonlinear process in which ambivalent emotional states collide. We feel detached and cut off from the world, with pressure on our chest and emptiness in our heart. At the same time, painful memories keep catching up with us, piercing through the indifferent protective layer like hot needles. Anger is followed by despair, loneliness by exhaustion, guilt by resignation. Even though each loss is unique, through sharing our pain we develop understanding for each other and can heal together.

In Western culture, mourning often still has negative connotations and is considered a taboo. People who are grieving are under social pressure to ‘function’ again as quickly as possible. Pauline Boss’ concept of “ambiguous loss” describes a shift in perspective that allows a more comprehensive personal and societal approach to grief. Ambiguous loss remains unclear, elusive, and therefore cannot have closure. In addition to the death of loved ones, Boss names many other experiences of ambiguous loss, physical and psychological. The result of her many years of research is the realization that grief cannot be controlled, but must be expressed and lived. Understanding grief as a process that can never be fully completed allows us to integrate it as a development in our identity and to continue a relationship with the objects and persons we have lost. The time we need to grieve is the transitional period before we adapt to our new reality. In doing so, we can learn to understand grief not as an end, but as a process of transformation. Following this example, the exhibition aims to create a space for the ambivalences of grief.

Contours of Grief

Before the Wind Blows

Adrenaline 

Conformity

Endurance

Antarctica

Earthly Elements

Birthday Package

Opening the Gate

 Nagypapa es kis Erika a fürdőben

Nagypapa's Flask

Reaching For Oliver

This painting shows a magical moment when autumn just begins, a warm wind blows yellow leaves, nature slowly falls asleep. It’s time for mild weather with a taste of a strong coffee.

Golden fall

I was born in a mountainous area. I love to be in the mountains. There is freedom, wind and snow.

Blue mountain

I wanted to show a landscape from my point of view with different colors and different textures. You never know what's around the corner.

Multicolored hills

mples  in the diffrent interior. 

Artwork:

Kreo de la Mondo: Tago 7
Creation of the World: Day 7
Сотворение Мира: День 7 

Size 80*80

By N.Rassen @nina_rassen

Creation of the World: Day 7

5:05 Artwork: 
Kreo de la Mondo: Tago 5
Creation of the World: Day 5
Сотворение Мира: День 5

Size 70*70

By N.Rassen @nina_rassen

Creation of the World: Day 5

Artwork:

Kreo de la Mondo: Tago 6
Creation of the World: Day 6
Сотворение Мира: День 6

Size 80*80

By N.Rassen @nina_rassen

Creation of the World: Day 6

Artwork:

Kreo de la Mondo: Tago kvara
Creation of the World: Day 4-th
Сотворение Мира: День 4-й

Canvas, Acrylic
Size 70*70

By N.Rassen @nina_rassen

Creation of the World: Day 4-th

Paintings and drawings in synthesis art style

Synthesis Paintings and Drawings

oil paintings and drawings by Nina Valetova

Oil paintings and drawings by Nina Valetova

'Menagerie'; a masquerade of bird portraits in watercolour inks and collage, created with the subtle but provocative intent to evoke the relationship between society and animals. Using images of clothing as a symbolic material to cover the head and body of the bird, there is a discontinuity in the involvement between viewer and animal. The work deals with the repositioning of identity and the reassessment of the notions of 'fashion', display and allure.

Menagerie

De assemblage  is onderdeel van het " Het konijnraam"  project. Dit project bevat schilderijen, literaire teksten, film en objecten die zijn gemaakt tijdens de quarantaineperiode. Het algemene concept is om naar mij als kunstenaar te kijken, hoe ik reageer op het isoleren van mezelf van de buitenwereld. Elke dag tekenen door de ramen, schilderen  van eigen masker, emotionele rust die later verandert in het ritme van de gevangenis en de droom om deze conclusie te overwinnen met behulp van een  " Aeroceen". De assemblage die ik presenteer is een boek met miniatuur potloodtekeningen die zo klein lijken vanaf de hoogte van een ballon - " Aeroceen" die van maskers over de hele wereld is genaaid. Het is een Dialoog tussen lucht en dingen. Ook in het boek staan ​​teksten van dialogen van dingen op aarde tijdens isolatie - tussen schoenen, wijnglazen... Er zijn handschoenen bevestigd waarmee je door de pagina's van het boek kunt bladeren en de tekeningen van planten , kledij aan een touw kunt drogen, een balkon, een brancard, cipres, enz. kunt bekijken.  Het getekende boek heeft 47 pagina's - 47 dagen zonder netwerk, ambitie, competitie en is een voortzetting van het oude boek. 

Dialoog tussen lucht en dingen

MULTIVERSE
or (Take) All Of Me
psychical cosmology.
reshuffling of our collective memory
The snapshots of our fluid reality.

 
"The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of possible universes, including the universe in which we live. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, and the physical and psychical laws and constants that describe them.
The various universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "other universes" or
"alternative universes".From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
'The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.' Carl Yung

 Inspiration comes in many forms and indeed through various sources none of which, as I am consistently reminded through my work, are entirely synchronic nor operate within a vacuum. The very nature of daily global and biopolitical narratives, which form the fabric of our consciousness are in a sense revisitations of ‘past’ wounds and glories set to contemporary melodies/cacophonies. These evolutionary overlaps, which articulate the multifaceted nature of the human condition and our socio-cultural relations, have enthralled me to the point of deep fascination generating a will to construct works that act as grounds for hope and optimism. This meta-narrative, which ripples throughout these captivating projects, has come about by exploring these synergies within different mediums over time. As the following overview makes clear, the journey of residual effects is ongoing and evolutionary gaining momentum through the provocation of unchartered frontiers.... read more at www.ninasumarac.com

MULTIVERSE


Hands of snakeskin, unsteady. The skin around cuticles tearing,
pulled back, as dull knuckles fold like dry desert lips from bitter
(or thick, or thin or not at all there) air from artificial sleep,
anesthesia.

The space between finger, after human symmetry has been
traded for silicone scar jelly and fine blue threads

that will never quite leave the skin of a hip (buried under,
covered over) by healing. The cuts and mini-cam that came

through bellybutton. Because tiny notches on busy fingers tell
more of fate than the life line

lengths, telling nothing of living life on the pointed edge of a
scalpel. A hangnail prognosis. Or how tummies expand
with medical grade carbon dioxide when—

Most people believe Baroque artists painted portraits of
women with one of their hands resting on the rounded

contours of a belly to suggest a lady expecting. Instead
of it being a mere prediction, or promise, for blessing. How

life can be explained by a single hand. A vast imagery, (did you
know they are the most frequently drawn symbol of the human

body?) like rays of a Celtic sun. Michelangelo painted God to give
birth to Adam through the touch of mortal hand. Hands,

on both sides of an orange and iodine tummy, nervous, in agnostic
palm-up prayer, hands on a hospital mattress, as blood drips into
a catheter for alien, underbelly bulge (a tumor).

Aftercare

It was light in the operating theatre. Bright. Two large disks cast white rings on a patient’s torso. My torso, trapped in the sterile amber of surgical lighting. Three cords stuck on my body. Two on my breastplate. One on my rib. My arm was velcroed to a black padded table with a pulse oximeter chewing my nail. Everything I saw was slow. Measured. To the hibernating beat of the beep, beep. An anaesthetic breathing mask hung over my nose, my lips, until it went foggy. And again came the beep, beep. Then nothing. 

When I think of the time I lost while I was under, I see the closing stanzas of an Anne Carson poem. In ‘The Glass Essay’, the female narrator contextualises the appearance of apparitions by grieving through the literature of Emily Brontë. ‘Very much like Nude #1. / And yet utterly different. / I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air… I saw it was a human body’. I imagined that these visions were mirror images of herself, radiating through different dimensions, finding what she needs in a body of text written by another. The narrator’s visions of bodies are distant, but they remain recognisable, familiar. Like if I were to look down at the operating table and see my own body.

I woke up from my artificial slumber feeling as though I was at the bottom of a pool. An empty pool. Looking up, looking out. It was a lost feeling—I remember thin air. It was bitter in my mouth, breath, veins. I lifted up the polycotton gown to look at my abdomen. It was round and orange, from the gases pumped into my diaphragm, from the iodine applied to my skin. The shape was unknown to me. It didn’t belong to me. My underwear had been removed, replaced with mesh post-op panties carefully pulled up by someone else. And my body was distorted, warped as though seen in the mirrors of a funhouse. Utterly different. 

I peeled off the bandage that covered my belly button. In my mind, the poem continued: ‘trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. / And there was no pain’. I felt nothing. I pulled on the white gauze and elastic adhesive and felt nothing, no pain, besides the tiny white hairs tearing off with the tape. There was a cherry-red incision in the depths of my naval cavity, and clear wires were knotted to keep the skin from peeling away. Trying to stand against the winds so terrible that the flesh. I continued, searched in the hollows of my hips for more wounds, man-made cuts unfamiliar to me, cut into me by someone behind a cloth mask.

In The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison distinguishes cuts, the wounds she inflicted on herself, from interior damage: ‘While wounds open to the surface, damage happens to the infrastructure—often invisible, often irreversible’. I could not see the damage, the reason, the cells multiplying beneath my skin, so I substituted it with the stitches. Like most wounds, cuts heal and scars form and become symbols for the damage they cover, whatever may lie beneath. Something deeper. Like how a doctor, my surgeon, believed my ovary was probably too damaged to produce any more eggs. Even if they could save its delicate structure, my body would never be symmetrical. My mirror was broken. ‘Not my body, not a woman’s body’, continues Anne Carson, ‘it was the body of us all. / It walked out of the light’. Still I feared losing the architecture of my body, the ropy scaffolding cradling my pain.

As soon as I was more conscious, they pushed me back to my hospital room. There were three corners to the journey. Left, another left, then right, but all I could see were the lights. As the nurse steered my tall bed, I counted the ceiling tiles. One, two, three, an LED light. One, two, three, another LED light. All the way back. Then she locked the bed’s wheels and excused herself, turned, resumed her regular pace. I was left to rest—that’s what she instructed—but a metaphysical awareness weighed upon me, made it hard to breathe. A body-shaped dent formed on the plastic foam mattress. Rest seemed inconsequential to my body. Not since the beginning of time, not for 4.6 billion years, when Earth started spinning, has anything been at rest.

For centuries it was thought that an object’s natural state was one of rest, because of Aristotle’s theory of gravity, the one about a heavy object falling faster than a lighter one. This hypothesis went uncontested until Galileo’s thought experiment seventeen centuries later: if someone climbed to the top of the tower of Pisa and dropped two objects, their speeds as they fell would increase at the same rate, regardless of their weight. Heavy as a hammer or light as a feather, those were their governing laws of motion.
 
It took something like another hundred years from then for us to understand how these laws of physics really worked, for our perception to alter. Time was more abstract. In the end, what advanced our understanding of time was our knowledge of light. It was Einstein who first understood that the speed of light was the standard, whether the object was in motion or not, based on the theory of relativity. He proposed that time was no longer universal. And with that came the phenomenon of time dilation: if two hypothetical observers are under two different gravitational pulls, the passage of time will be different. And since then, time has been something personal, perceivable. Still, intangible. 

I needed this theory to understand my own experience as I drifted further into the ether of hospital gown shadows. Still I tried to make myself ready for the nurse when she came to check on me, came to escort me to the toilet, as was routine. I pulled the white sheets away from my legs and tried to get out of the platform bed, jerking my body to the bed’s edge. It was the first time I had moved significantly with the stitches in my body. Gravity seemed to be working harder than I remembered, so I rocked into a seated position. My movement pulled something out of my side. Blood. I saw it a moment later, filling the catheter, extending from my body. The liquid that was sucked into the drainage bag was still vibrant and fresh, diluted only slightly by some surgical antiseptic. With my legs dangling from the bed, like two hands of a clock jammed in a loop, I waited for the blood to stop. 

Hours passed like days as I reconfigured my internal clock to a new routine of sleeping and waking. My phone read 04:05, but it was not the screen’s blue light that woke me. There was a woman screaming. Her voice echoed down the hallway. It was sudden and the voice was deep, as if it had a life all of its own. Or maybe it was my own pain that had woken me. My body wanted so badly to join in and scream. I wondered if she must have been giving birth, for the screaming continued. We were mirror images of each other, inverted, flipped, and she sounded both close and far away from me. It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all. I tried to suppress my own pain as if it would help her. And I bit my tongue in fear of overburdening the nurses on the night shift. 

Yes, it was still night-time, I could see it through the vertical blinds, the darkness in the sky, and the city lights on the horizon. I did not know then how many million times faster the lights were moving than the cries, but it struck me as a paradox to call the early morning tranquil. Yet somehow it was, as if time were standing still for the infant’s life to begin, and for me to wait and listen while it happened. 

I once read that it takes four light years for the stars in outer space to reach our field of view. It was in the last chapter of a book—a fictional world constructed for the character Hilde Møller Knag—once on my school’s reading list. I remember it only because that summer I became fascinated by the stars in the evening sky. Stargazing made me feel as if I were in a sci-fi universe, time-travelling, and the sense of my smallness humbled me, made me feel unbelievably young in comparison. It was also the summer my abdominal pain began. Weeks later my parents sat me down to share their hypothesis of my aching. They thought it was pregnancy. They were wrong. I dismissed it as paranoia and continued to ignore my symptoms. 

It seemed like a long time until I called for a nurse, but my phone told me otherwise. The pain came from wounds deep inside me. It was a different pain than what I was used to, the pain I lived with since high school. It was sharper, and pinched with every word. So I spoke only on inhales, small wheezes, and sour gasps.

The nurse arrived swiftly and wheeled the intravenous stand from the corner of the room to my bed, then left to get a bag of clear liquid. She might have said it was paracetamol or some other sedative as she hung it like an hourglass on the stand. I watched gravity pull the fluid down and saw it disappear into the exposed veins of my hand. With my bed still in its lightning-bolt position, I tried to synchronise my breathing with the IV drip to try to make the sun rise faster. 

I walked down the same corridor I had walked the day before, when I was awaiting surgery. It had been just twenty-four hours since, like the Sylvia Plath poem, I’d ‘given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses / And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.’ What I remember most is the surgeon rushing through the hallway in his crisp white coat. When he saw me, he hesitated for a moment, unsure if it was really me or just a reflection. He said I looked better, like a visitor, said that he almost didn’t recognise my form no longer resting on the operating table. There was a figure like me in the window and in it I saw that I still wore the IV cannula, now a splitter, under the skin of my left hand. He, too, must have seen how the bruise around it spread.

I suppose he was complimenting his own handiwork as much as he was me; as if we were now somehow related, proximal. We were only five floor tiles apart. Yet we were caught in our own perceptions, with light years between us. Reflecting on the moments the solar system’s only star was concealed by the moon, Annie Dillard writes in Total Eclipse, ‘My mind was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies recede to the rim of space.’ Could the surgeon and I have been looking at the same entity but receding in different directions? It was as if we were looking at two different versions of my body: one recovering and one already accomplished. Something was lost in the speed with which he worked. Something to do with sight. And it could not span the hospital tiles of the gynaecology ward.

When I was back in the tall bed, a young nurse held up the plastic bag attached to the catheter to see how much blood had left my abdomen. A hundred millilitres. No more since the day before. She said I could leave, be discharged, and locked a section of the tube to remove my drainage pocket. My fear grew when the tube was removed. Droplets of blood from the catheter fell onto the white sheets. It was just four little droplets. Next, she removed the large white bandage for me to see where the clear tube entered my body, so that I could see how my skin had already started to close its aperture on the synthetic object. She said I should exhale on the count of three, but she couldn’t see that my breath was not strong enough to do so. Or she chose not to see. I couldn’t resist, and she likely had more patients to attend to, so she began to count. One. I tried to speak. Two. My eyes expanded. Three—a weak exhalation. I felt every millimetre of the plastic tubing rub past my skin, but the catheter was only halfway out. It sounded like an untimely laugh, but I could not breathe otherwise. Then without hesitation, without counting, she pulled again. Then placed a new gauze on my hip.

It was about a week later when I went to the gynaecologist for a check-up. She remarked on how well I was walking, still hunched over but able to lift up my feet. She instructed me to sit in a familiar chair, the one with wide stirrups. Next to it was the monitor I had grown accustomed to reading. When she was ready, I could see the black and white shapes that indicated my womb. She started by examining the healthy ovary, filled with brilliant beads of glowing light. I had seen pictures from the camera sent through my belly button, but in this abstraction, my ovary was more beautiful than I remembered. On the grainy monitor, I could see each egg, all at different stages of development, growing like healthy bulbs inside my body. Bright. But as she moved the ultrasound to the left, a familiar pain came over me. I dared not breathe and strained to look. The ovary seemed withered, weak, and small. They were stars on the monitor, already burnt out. I wondered if they would cycle back into my body and grow. I could make out no glowing little eggs and neither could she. A constellation lost to poor health. 

In the closed system of the hospital, time slips and spills in different magnitudes, different measurements. It matches itself to the structure of the head nurse’s schedule and the swift pace of a paramedic’s call, but also to the even spaces between heartbeats and the long pain of misdiagnosis. Time is a body all its own, with an equally complex anatomy, delicate and unstable. 


Anatomy of Time

'The Garden' takes on the subject matter and form of 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450), using analogue collage to explore our contemporary relationship to pleasure, longing, belonging and morality. It was due to be exhibited at collective exhibition mOstra 2020 in Lisbon, Portugal, set to open on 13th March. The Private View was cancelled and the exhibition has been made available to view online and through appointment, although distancing restrictions prevented this so far.  The duration of the exhibition has been extended until mid June.

The Garden

I would like to show my project “Recognize - Overcome – Touch” (“Erkennen – Überwinden – Berühren”) in the context of the ARTCONNECT open call “Unseen”.

My project was designed for the art competition „Kunst im Schaufenster“ – altonale Kunstpreis 2020 as part of the altonale 2020, a culture festival in Hamburg, Germany. The topic for this year´s altonale art competition was diversity (Vielfalt). altonale 2020 should have taken place in June this year. The festival was cancelled due to the corona pandemic. The art competition „Kunst im Schaufenster“ – altonale Kunstpreis 2020 is postponed indefinitely. 

My project “Recognize - Overcome – Touch” (“Erkennen – Überwinden – Berühren”) in the context of diversity in words:

The topic: My work addresses the diverse possibilities of cultural identities that coexist with each other. Unfortunately, on the one hand, different ways of being, often enough, lead to severe conflicts. On the other hand, my work is inspired by the process of change by rapprochement as an answer to the question how communication and mutual respect can arise and how this can be promoted. Only if I am aware of my own prejudices, I can, in a second step, grow beyond them, observe other people openly and interact with them without judgment. In turn, this is a prerequisite for an appreciative and respectful approach and a way of life based on participatory cooperation. My artwork should convey these three steps in terms of content and structure.

Implementation idea: In cities, I perceive urban planning as a clear expression of culturally negotiated identities. Identity and the environment interact. In the self-image of people, city silhouettes can remind us of the places we call home. For many people this triggers deep feelings. City skylines and landmarks of a city thus become the emblem of one's own identity. But urban planning is never a mere cultural expression. It is an aesthetic and symbolic visualization of social agreements in connection to time. Buildings and streets are redesigned, for example, in the course of immigration. Communication and diversity therefore play a central role in every single city. In one way or another, communication becomes the path to innovation. 

Design: I show the process of negotiating between people with different cultural backgrounds in three paintings with different city skylines. In my pictures I use text fragments from different languages. The first picture (“Recognize”) with the Hamburg skyline represents one´s own, still insufficiently reflected, cultural starting point. Language fragments appear only in German language. In the second picture (“Overcome”), a multicultural city is created through a lively juxtaposition of different sets of international skylines and international attractions. The text fragments originate from common languages. In the third picture (“Touch”), a utopian fantasy skyline is created through recombination and new creation; the previously recognizable boundaries have dissolved and been redesigned. Text fragments of different international languages are positioned together. 

The previously indicated development of a self-reflective, empathetic and interested attitude as a prerequisite for a peaceful and respectful life style of cooperation is reflected by the chosen perspective. While the Hamburg skyline looks very close in perspective, the fantasy skyline, which represents the last step in the process of rapprochement, appears more distant to the viewer. 

ARTCONNECT Open Call "Unseen":  “Recognize - Overcome – Touch” in the context of diversity

This collage is a reflection of craving. Being locked inside we are left with our imagination. Especially our children. When the outside world closes down, the inside adventures surprise us with their limitless beauty. For my only daughter, it is a time of venturing down the forests of her inner worlds. 

Children Inside

It’s been 25 days since we’ve been kept indoors. We don’t have a garden or even a balcony. We keep the windows open and sun bathe at the strips of sun in our bedroom. We take care of each other, we play foolish games. We challenge the laws of our apartment, we laugh and cry, we shout, squeak and whisper. We shower together, we cook and eat together. We face all the challenges but it’s nothing comparing to those at the front lines fighting for their own lives and the lives of others. We all share the same job: Trying our best :) We are in this together.

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Nina Altmann

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