NORTH BY NORTHEAST

A graphic-performative dialogue

in which the relationship between movement, space and time is reframed by the line

The exhibition sets a course for the elementary forms of drawing. Based on an understanding of the body as an instrument for seismographic recording and as an intelligent storage medium for complex knowledge, »NORTH BY NORTHEAST« explores central issues in drawing: Which stimuli and conditions are relevant for drawing processes? What part do physical action and movement play? What is the role of chance and how is temporality visibly inscribed into the drawing?

In their individual practice, the artists Nikolaus Gansterer, Stella Geppert, Katja Pudor, Christian Schellenberger, Nicole Wendel and Saskia Wendland pursue various performative strategies of logging, recording and archiving. Nikolaus Gansterer, who equates graphic procedures and thought processes, turns a school blackboard into a dynamic resonance chamber for knowledge transfer. Stella Geppert’s constructivist sculptures serve as a framework for social interactions, becoming pictorial spaces for graphic traces of conversations and readings. Katja Pudor continually expands, reorders and overwrites her own drawing-based archive in site-specific installations and performances, creating a layered ›archaeology of the present‹ that reveals various sediments of memories, meanings, and references. Christian Schellenberger transforms encounter and change into large-format cartographies of abstract marks. In her choreographed and improvised work, Nicole Wendel uses shifts between physical and pictorial awareness to explore the relationship between motion in space and the making of a two-dimensional image. In Saskia Wendland’s work, the repetition of identical movement sequences and ritualized processes involving the entire body give rise to clear geometrical shapes resulting from minimalist gestures of line, point, and stroke.

As they meet in the exhibition, the various works allow previous notions of drawing and how drawings are read to be reviewed, encouraging the exploration of unknown forms of graphic notation and provoking an expansion of each artist’s individual repertoire. The exhibition space at the Deutscher Künstlerbund acts as a laboratory where performances, installation and video screenings both examine and demonstrate the performative and processual potential of drawing.

Artists Talk 
5 June 2020
PD Dr Angela Lammert, Director Special Interdisciplinary Projects, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in conversation with the artists

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