Eleven artistic positions from the Kassel School of Art
Under the title ECHO The Museum for Sepulchral Culture presented artistic works from the Kassel School of Art and Design. Various themes and individual perspectives were explored and presented within an associative context. Traces of the past were followed, symbioses and metamorphoses were revealed, and memories were (re)constructed. The spectrum of works ranges from painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography to installation and video. The selection was made by the Coucou Gallery and the museum. What unites all the works is the personal exploration of life, death, and memory.
At work SEPULTURA (port. = grave) In Caroline Bernhardt's work, tobacco hornworms, which serve as research subjects, are fired into small porcelain shells. During the firing process, the outer shell hardens, and a transformation takes place inside. Bernhardt, who studies both art and biology, returns the moths to their cocoons.
The filigree LINOLEUM OBJECTS Valeria Abendroth's work plays with the act of cutting lines into the material. The raised linocuts create an interplay of light and shadow that reveals feminine facial features.
The work UNDER THE FIRMAMENT Paul Diestel's work stems from his exploration of Celtic burial mounds near Ostheim vor der Rhön. The concave interior becomes the firmament, the deceased's own world. The artist transforms emptiness into form.
Eric Schäfer embarks on a journey with his installation OT (ANAGRAM) embark on a dark journey through the abyss of the human psyche. Pop-culturally familiar, distorted photographic works, drawings with a mythological-occult feel, and neon lettering evoke fragments of memory and create an eerie, delusional atmosphere.
For the video installation THE VALLEY OF THE FALLEN Marina Rengel Lucena walks along the Francoist memorial site, the cult and burial ground of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and the tens of thousands who fell in the Spanish Civil War, buried here in mass graves. To this day, the Spanish government prevents a reckoning with the historical facts. A sign of reconciliation remains elusive.
PARASITARY SYMBIOSIS Dominic Fey's work shows the bodies of aquatic insects inside carnivorous plants. Do the organs and structural similarities of the organisms truly represent a symbiotic relationship, or is it the slow demise of the host?
Silke Kleine Kalvelage found countless discarded plastic flowers in a cemetery. The seemingly ageless plastic flowers raised questions, questions about what ultimately remains. In her work CYCLOPENTAN Images and stories intertwine to form a song about transience.
In the video MIKA Clara Winter is processing the violent death of a close friend. She interweaves her diary entries with images that seem to have been taken in a kind of self-defense, a desire to act.
The Belgian forced laborer Frans had to work at the Junkers aircraft and engine works in Kassel-Bettenhausen during the Second World War. Leonie Liora Fischer reconstructs this in her work. That's where great-grandfather Frans jumped over the wall. his daily commute from the residential camp to his workplace.
The filmmaker Julia Johanna Geiß sets out in FOUR AFTER She sets out to find the four fathers who died as a result of an HIV-contaminated hemophilia medication. She discovers more than just a legacy of monthly compensation payments from the pharmaceutical industry.
In Thilo Jenssen's serial work RIGOR The paintings portray icons or representatives of various ideologies and beliefs. Jenssen's work enters the space between intoxication, lust, and death, creating new perspectives for the viewer in their encounter with the portrayed figures.
