Marine Hugonnier (*1969 in Paris; lives in London) became known internationally with her series Towards Tomorrow (International Date Line Alaska), which photographically documents the International Date Line in the Bering Strait and depicts a moment in the future: from Alaska, the artist took a photograph in the direction of Siberia, which due to its geographic position is twenty-four hours ahead of Alaska.

Landscape, for the most part viewed as aesthetic topography in its relation to history and ideology, also continues to be a central theme in later works, such as, among others, the film trilogy Ariana (2003), The Last Tour (2004), and Travelling Amazonia (2005): in The Last Tour—a fictitious future scenario of the closing of part of the Alps—the camera accompanies the last flight of a hot-air balloon over the Matterhorn region. It is the reversal of the great narratives of modernity, which deal with discovery, conquest, exploitation, and cartography: the return of blank areas on the map. For TravellingAmazonia, Hugonnier took to the jungle in the Amazon region. The film follows the six-thousand-mile long trans-Amazonian highway that transverses the rain forest to join the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is reminiscent of the megalomaniac pioneering spirit that manifests itself in this colonialist project of the seventies. The photographic works Wednesday and Thursday attempt to reproduce the discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral in the Holy Week of 1500. Hours of colonial history that are still reflected in the name Monte Pascoal (in English: Mt. Easter). The Western tradition of appropriating places by means of naming them contradicts the “anonymity” of the mountains that Hugonnier reflects in the series Mountain with No Name. The photographs show nameless mountains that surround the Pandjshêr Valley in the northeast of Afghanistan and thus make reference to a history that exists alongside Western history.

The Restoration Project, on which Hugonnier has been working since 2006, deals with landscapes of another kind. It investigates the restoration of old landscape paintings as an endeavor to connect two moments in time: the production of a work of art and its reception.

This is Marine Hugonnier’s first solo exhibition in Germany. The artist made a name for herself through solo exhibitions at, for instance, S.M.A.K. Ghent (2007), at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva (2007), at the Kunsthalle Bern (2007), and at the Kunsthalle Malmö (2009). A comprehensive catalogue will be published in December 2009 by JRP Ringier in collaboration with the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne and the Kunsthalle Malmö. It will include text contributions by Martin Herbert, Christian Rattemeyer, et al., and will be edited and include a forward by Florence Derieux and Hilke Wagner

Download floor plan (german) and Texts (german)