The current exhibition brings together works by NADIA BELERIQUE, JENEEN FREI NJOOTLI, and KATHY SLADE in the Villa Salve Hospes and the grounds of the Kunstverein.

In her artistic work, Nadia Belerique (born 1982 in Toronto, Canada) examines the relationship between object and (photographic) representation as well as the possibilities of subtle manipulations of perception in space. Using deliberately distorted everyday objects and invoked symbols, she lays narrative trails that allude to various, sometimes contradictory narrations. Moments of intimacy and retreat are explored against the backdrop of blurred boundaries between private and public space and between psychological and physical space.

Jeneen Frei Njootli’s (born 1988 in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada) interdisciplinary practice with performance, sound, and installation is inspired by their cultural background and personal experiences. Njootli is a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin, a Canadian indigenious community that is self-governing to this day. They interrogate traditional materials and objects, which are closely interwoven with the memory of their ancestors, in terms of their relation to trade, ceremony, politics, and the body.

Kathy Slade’s (born 1966 in Montreal, Canada) expansive, multidisciplinary practice moves across genres from visual and popular cultures to gendered labours through the use of textiles, sculpture, publication, sound, film, and video works. Spanning a breadth of Slade’s practice over the last two decades, the exhibition focuses on reading and publishing, offering meditations on the role of the artist, publisher, and teacher.


Curators: Franz Hempel, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Julia Lamare (CAG)



GUEST ROOM

We welcome DOKUARTS and the Braunschweig International Film Festival as guests with a selection of films by Andreas Lewin thematically linked to Canada.

Curator: Andreas Lewin


Download Exhibition booklet


The exhibition is developed in partnership with the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), Vancouver. The exhibition is part of the culture program related to Canada’s Guest of Honour presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2020/21 and is supported by Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada (Embassy of Canada), British Columbia Arts Council and the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony.

Kunstverein Braunschweig e.V. is supported by City of Braunschweig – Department for Culture and Science.

Art education is supported by

The Guestroom is made possible by:

Nadia Belerique is interested in how physical and mental states can be stabilized in objects – or, more precisely, in specific constellations of objects – and thus made perceptible to third parties. Conscious and unconscious needs, desires, and moods influence her works, while doors, keys, lights, and blinds form regular references to objects and symbols from the domestic environment. Combined in the exhibition space, Belerique’s objects develop a life of their own, creating moods and narrative threads that change in interaction with the beholder. Belerique’s work is closely linked to photography as a practice – it is particularly sensitive to the conditions of its production and (digitally mediated) perception, but also its potential for manipulation. The artist regularly overcomes the limitations of the photographic medium with spatial interventions: “I think about installations – but also photographs – in three dimensions. The space you are in is thus a photograph that you can enter directly.” (Nadia Belerique, 2020)

With How Long Is Your Winter (2020), Belerique presents a newly developed kinetic installation where animated blinds – following a secret choreography – meet and turn away from each other in their own individual rhythm. Mostly situated away from the existing window openings and thereby freed from their original function, the slats define frames and new views of the wall and window behind them. The result is a sequence of images and unpredictable elements produced in situ that develop an almost cinematic character: Changing gazes towards an alternative temporal and spatial reality that subtly distort our every-day reception.

Daniella Sanader about Nadia Belerique’s HOLDINGS (Ongoing), 2020

The blinds, or rather the conscious act of closing the blinds, is associated with severing the connection between inside and outside, a moment of intimacy and retreat. This similarly influences the photographs Doors (2018), in which two perspectives of a closing (or opening?) door look out at the viewer like a pair of eyes. The rooms separated by the door remain undefined, it is more the desire for something intangible or not yet tangible behind the door that is seemingly portrayed here. Zones of transfer are highlighted, thresholds that hint at the transition between different physical and psychological spheres. The stickers on the door evoke quiet childhood memories, nostalgic feelings of security, fantasy, but also concealment. The placement of the stickers on the inside of the framed glass also emphasizes the mediated perception, in which glass (camera lens) slides between the photographer and observed reality, but also between the photographic image and physical perception (frame).

The series HOLDINGS (Ongoing) (2020), presented at Kunstverein for the first time, can be understood as an “open collection of possible and entangled scenarios” (Nadia Belerique, 2020). Standing alone in the space or grouped together to form a loose wall, we encounter a series of industrially produced plastic barrels whose surfaces bear traces of on-site handling, and of their previous (and possible future) uses, thus revealing different temporal references. They have been partially filled with rainwater, indicating a cycle of flooding and being flooded. Protected by the milky casing, forks, knives, and clothing can be seen inside the barrels – mundane everyday objects, which all share a connection to our hands and sense of touch. Barrels of this kind are originally used for the transport of food and are often repurposed for the shipment of personal items in migration or re-settling contexts. This way, they remind us of the desire to own and to preserve, a desire that constantly shapes our relationships to subjects and objects but also the photographic practice itself, where the longing to conserve ephemeral moments is the key.

The series HOLDINGS (Ongoing) (2020), presented at Kunstverein for the first time, can be understood as an “open collection of possible and entangled scenarios” (Nadia Belerique, 2020). Standing alone in the space or grouped together to form a loose wall, we encounter a series of industrially produced plastic barrels whose surfaces bear traces of on-site handling, and of their previous (and possible future) uses, thus revealing different temporal references. They have been partially filled with rainwater, indicating a cycle of flooding and being flooded. Protected by the milky casing, forks, knives, and clothing can be seen inside the barrels – mundane everyday objects, which all share a connection to our hands and sense of touch. Barrels of this kind are originally used for the transport of food and are often repurposed for the shipment of personal items in migration or re-settling contexts. This way, they remind us of the desire to own and to preserve, a desire that constantly shapes our relationships to subjects and objects but also the photographic practice itself, where the longing to conserve ephemeral moments is the key.

With the sculpture Everything, All The Time (2020), Nadia Belerique finally finds a form to address her own physical absence. Like a pair of lovers or a Rubin vase, the split halves of a baluster – another familiar architectural detail from the domestic environment – face each other. The inner sides, which would otherwise remain hidden, are elaborately adorned with glass elements; the silhouette of two hands emerges as a shadow of the artist, who otherwise remains invisible in the exhibition space.

A thumping sound, one that we not only hear, but feel vibrating deep inside ourselves. In between, clear tones, vibrations, scratches, loops – the acoustic material of crushed into these feet (2018) by Jeneen Frei Njootli was partially created through a contact microphone that was attached to a sewing machine. Presented outdoors, this work interweaves with the sounds of the street and the everyday refusing to be contained.

Such openness and freedom are important for Frei Njootli, and are also characteristic for the second work that is installed – or rather takes place – in the square, Fighting for the title not to be pending (2020). Innumerable tiny glass beads line the external border of the large stone plates leading up to the stairway of the villa. At several points in front of and inside the exhibition building, the beads fill in gaps and joints, are piled up in corners and along walls. Many of them will gradually disappear from sight, others will still be there for years to come. The initial number of glass beads mirrors Frei Njootli’s body weight, an artistic gesture that foregrounds physical presence and absence at the same time. The material and its specific staging make it impossible to ever completely reproduce the work, evoking the notion of irretrievability and ephemerality. How body and work are connected here refers to the relationship between land and its dispossession, a relation that conditions the past (and the present) of many Indigenous populations, and is a central aspect of Frei Njootli’s own life experience. The body, in this sense, could be understood as the utmost expression of that self-possessed territory that is always threatened by colonial, economic and sex-related powers.

The video Epistemic leghold trap¹ (2020) shows slender, graceful hands moving downwards through the screen and holding earrings with a long, interwoven chain made of black glass beads. Through the series of small, swift cuts, a falling movement is discernible and interrupted with other close-up shots. These images are as fragmentary as the accompanying audio track, in which the sounds of shots being fired, snippets of conversations and a smoky singing voice glide into one another. The disconnected sound, rapid cuts of images and the soft focus in parts of the video function not only as formal techniques, but also disrupt the gaze of those watching the video. The detailed focus of the video denies a view of the whole body, preventing viewers from exerting an uncontrolled, overly powerful gaze and as a gesture of refusal, protection and reclamation. Frei Njootli thus remains the sovereign authority that shapes their image. The beads bear significance because their production and processing has a deeply embedded and rich meaning in the history and culture of the Vuntut Gwitchin Community² to which Jeneen Frei Njootli belongs. The land, the body, traditional practices are of too great significance for Indigenous communities to surrender.







¹ Steel animal trap with two catch bars, holding the living animal‘s legs. Associated with this kind of trap, there have been discussion about the right balance between indigenous tradition and animal welfare.
² A self-governing indigenous community in the northern Yukon near the border to Alaska.

Untitled (2017), a baseball cap adorned with beads and long fringe hanging down, is another work in which Frei Njootli shows an accessory with cultural significance, allowing for a reflection on the gaze as a gesture endowed with power. The fringe elements create a protected space that simultaneously attracts the gaze and repels it.

In a similar manner to the cap, the hooded jacket of More than medicine should burn for you (2020) refers to the question of presence and absence of the body. This work was made as an immediate reaction to the murder of Chantel Moore, a young Indigenous woman who was shot and killed by a policeman on the 4th of June 2020, and is a fundamental indictment of the “continuing genocide of indigenous peoples and the police violence against BIPOC³ communities.” (Jeneen Frei Njootli, 2020)






³ BIPOC stands for Black / Indigenous / People of Color.

"Textere", the Latin root of text, means to join, to construct, to build or quite literally to weave. It is this relationship, between art and text, text and textile that is central to Canadian artist Kathy Slade’s practice and deftly present in the exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig. Through the use of textile, printed matter and video, the works consider and query the notion of books, reading and publishing, and offer meditations on the role of the artist, publisher and teacher. Taking up strategies of copy and repetition, Slade looks to moments or events in history and popular culture from which she extracts ideas, visual content and language. As curator Jordan Storm aptly describes, “Foregoing gestures of her own hand, the artist chooses instead to illuminate existing imagery.”¹

Slade often draws on particular moments of convergence between art and literature, and in After Agnolo Bronzino Portrait of a Young Man (2020) and After Agnolo Bronzino Portrait of Laura Battiferra (2020) she points to poet and painter, Agnolo Bronzino, who between 1527 and 1569 was known to repeatedly paint portraits which depicted a figure gesturing to a book. The two large-scale woven tapestries recreate fragmented portions of Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1530), in which a finger is suggestively slipped between the pages of a book, and Portrait of Laura Battiferra (c. 1560), where her fingers point to two sonnets in Francesco Petrarch’s book of poems, Il Canzoniere. This signaling of the hands in relation to books evoke a manicule: a punctuation device that first appeared in books in the 12th century as a small illustration of a pointing hand to draw a reader’s attention to particular texts. In describing this device, author and scholar Whitney Anne Trettien states that “the manicule forces us to ride the rim between reading and writing, between textual consumption and textural production.”² It is at this threshold moment that the reader becomes a maker of meaning.






¹ Jordan Strom in Kathy Slade: This is a chord. This is another., 2018 Surrey Art Gallery. p. 11.
² http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/2009/03/more-cut-ups-hands- in-early-printed.html

Alas, poor YORICK! (2002) – a recreation of the black page in Laurence Sterne’s epic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – brings the viewer’s attention to another moment in literature. In the novel, the death of Yorick (a fictionalised self-portrait of the author) is announced by means of Sterne’s citation of the famous utterance from Hamlet. On the following page (recto and verso) rather than readable text, the reader finds the type rendered as a swathe of black ink. In Slade’s rendition, the page is instead embroidered; setting the histories of gendered labours in textile arts against the male-dominated history of the monochrome in art.

The top floor of the Villa Salve Hospes intimately gathers a selection of artists’ books and records by Slade as well as publications she has authored, edited and published. The variety and expansiveness of these objects offer a moment to reconsider how we understand the notion of a book: the literary book, the book object, the artist book. Alongside the books, a series of jacquard-woven blankets – For the Readers (2018) – on the furniture and walls. With simplified line drawings or texts, the four blankets, each with a duplicate in the same room, bear reference to literature or books. As the name suggests, the blankets are for the viewers, the readers, both to regard and to make use of. This dual function insists on upending the relationship between viewer and reader, domestic and gallery space, utility and aesthetics.

Projects Class (2015) marks a moment in Slade’s career where her teaching practice began to merge with her art practice. This work is a recreation of David Askevold’s Project Class, which was held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design beginning in 1969. In both projects, the instructors (Askevold and Slade) asked twelve artists to send a text – instructions, proposals or projects – for their students to enact, make or interpret. Projects Class became a semester-long experimental artwork that was made in collaboration with the invited artists, the students and their professor, radically changing how students and the institution engaged with education. Through Projects Class teaching and learning became art making and the class itself became artwork.

Closing the exhibition – a sort of precis of Slade’s practice – is Ulises Carrión: The New Art of Making Books (2015). Across three screens, Slade’s former students orate conceptual artist Ulises Carrión’s 1975 text of the same title, resurfacing it in a new, contemporary context. Through this act of repetition, re-presentation and re-imagination, Slade creates doublets, excavating and activating unlikely histories, to generate new meanings and ways of understanding.