The Kunstverein Braunschweig is bringing the internationally acclaimed artist Matti Braun (*1968) back to Braunschweig, the site of his artistic roots. For in the early nineties, he studied at the Braunschweig College of Fine Arts. The exhibition, which can be viewed from September 4 to November 14, 2010, at the Haus Salve Hospes, includes spatial installations, objects, photographs, batiks, a video, and furniture.

The title of the exhibition is characteristic of Braun’s artistic strategy of exploring cultural and intercultural contexts and reintegrating historical and personal truths. Salo implies several layers of meaning: in France, where at the end of the year parts of this exhibition will be presented, it has an insulting connotation; in Finland, which accounts for a part of Braun’s biographical background, it means “solitude” and is also the name of a town there. At the same time, it is the title of Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), which makes reference to events in the northern Italian city of Salò shortly before the end of World War II, which as the capital of the Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic enjoyed ambivalent fame.

In Braun’s oeuvre, perspectives are shifted and opened up, facts reassembled and in their combination filled with ambivalent meaning. Braun’s works range from smaller objects that in part suggest folkloristic pieces, such as ceramics, batiks, or mouth-blown glass objects, to photography and space-consuming installations. His approach condenses for the most part heterogeneous facts, meanings, images, and forms into a complex network of associations in which each object, each of the materials used transcends itself. Parts of this is research in which he pursues historical, cultural, or biographical contexts that are joined together associatively. Braun’s telling and assembling of individual “stories” impressively present the development of history as a fragile process of the cultural production of meaning. In doing so, his associations are always consciously speculative and unstable, without fixing contexts.

The subject areas and materials presented in the exhibition in Braunschweig are equally as multifaceted. These include Indonesian batiks, archeological finds from Turkey, butterfly collections, and a room displaying burnished brass plates. Braun has the Gartensaal filled with centimeter-thick screed, and illuminates the phosphorescent paint on the wall with a black light, resulting in a surreal atmosphere. Another work is the ten-part series of black-and-white offset prints (Pierre, Pierre). It features motifs from different sources. The photograph of an African mask is a poster motif for the first Festival des Arts Nègres that took place in 1966 in Dakar and makes reference to the ambivalent character Léopold S. Senghor. As early as the thirties, Senghor, a lyricist and from 1960 to 1980 the first president to be elected in Senegal, had a formative influence on the world-wide movement of the so-called négritud, which is also exemplary of the diverse mutual and contradictory influences between Europe and Africa.

Matti Braun, born in 1968 in Berlin, lives and works in Cologne. He studied at the Städel School in Frankfurt am Main and at the Braunschweig College of Fine Arts, among others with Emil Cimiotti.

Download floor plan

The Buchhandlung Walther König is publishing a catalogue (German/French) in conjunction with the exhibition with contributions by Sarah Frost, Paola Jacoub, Marianne Lanavère, Abdellah Karroum, Jakob Vogel, Janne Marniemi, Rudolph Smend, Mika Hannula, and Hilke Wagner. Beginning in December 2011, the Kunstverein Braunschweig is presenting Matti Braun within the scope of the German-French exchange project Thermostat at La Galerie—Centre d’Art Contemporain Noisy-le-Sec near Paris.