Calendar
Calendar
The HUM calendar features exhibitions & events by New Zealand arts practitioners working or living abroad.
Matthew Cowan, Believing the Backdrop
LABOR Projektgalerie, Cologne, Germany
02 September —
23 September 2022
The collaboration between visual artists Matthew Cowan (NZ) and Jana Müller (GER) is concerned with the role of museums and archives in the representation of identity and history, as well as the question of identity and its staging, both virtually and in reality.
The beginnings of this exhibition is artistic research of painted backgrounds in 19th century photographic studios, in use in Europe and New Zealand. Especially in the times of the pandemic, the background has come to prominence in digital encounters. The question then arises, what do backgrounds mean in today’s cultural field with a renewed understanding of how we present ourselves on Zoom, Instagram and other forms of image-based media? Matthew Cowan is a New Zealand artist, based in Berlin and Helsinki.
The collaboration between visual artists Matthew Cowan (NZ) and Jana Müller (GER) is concerned with the role of museums and archives in the representation of identity and history, as well as the question of identity and its staging, both virtually and in reality.
The beginnings of this exhibition is artistic research of painted backgrounds in 19th century photographic studios, in use in Europe and New Zealand. Especially in the times of the pandemic, the background has come to prominence in digital encounters. The question then arises, what do backgrounds mean in today’s cultural field with a renewed understanding of how we present ourselves on Zoom, Instagram and other forms of image-based media? Matthew Cowan is a New Zealand artist, based in Berlin and Helsinki.
Dane Mitchell in KölnSkulptur #10
Skulpturenpark Köln, Cologne, Germany
01 August 2020 —
31 July 2022
ÜberNatur – Natural Takeover, the 10th biannual KölnSkulptur exhibition of contemporary outdoor sculpture, addresses notions of "nature" and the complex ways it is represented and examined, domesticated and despoiled. Inspired by the location of the public park, wedged between the Rhine, the Cologne Zoo, the Flora and the adjacent Botanical Garden, this latest iteration of KölnSkulptur includes eight new artworks in the Skulpturenpark Köln, a unique exhibition venue featuring loaned works from past KölnSkulptur exhibitions, interspersed amongst the permanent collection amassed by Michael and Eleonore Stoffel. These eight new works disrupt and destabilise ideas of "nature" through interventions and core concerns that decenter the primacy of the human and open up vistas of communal ecology and care. Curated by Tobias Berger. Dane Mitchell’s work, the largest of the group, features two artificial trees designed to camouflage mobile data antennae and surveillance equipment, originally mass-produced in China and presented in the New Zealand exhibition Post hoc at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
ÜberNatur – Natural Takeover, the 10th biannual KölnSkulptur exhibition of contemporary outdoor sculpture, addresses notions of "nature" and the complex ways it is represented and examined, domesticated and despoiled. Inspired by the location of the public park, wedged between the Rhine, the Cologne Zoo, the Flora and the adjacent Botanical Garden, this latest iteration of KölnSkulptur includes eight new artworks in the Skulpturenpark Köln, a unique exhibition venue featuring loaned works from past KölnSkulptur exhibitions, interspersed amongst the permanent collection amassed by Michael and Eleonore Stoffel. These eight new works disrupt and destabilise ideas of "nature" through interventions and core concerns that decenter the primacy of the human and open up vistas of communal ecology and care. Curated by Tobias Berger. Dane Mitchell’s work, the largest of the group, features two artificial trees designed to camouflage mobile data antennae and surveillance equipment, originally mass-produced in China and presented in the New Zealand exhibition Post hoc at the Venice Biennale in 2019.