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Opening

Thursday, 25 April 2024 | 6 pm

Words of welcome: María Linares, Executive spokesperson Deutscher Künstlerbund

Introduction: Verena Freyschmidt, Curator and artist


Gallery Weekend
Friday, 26 April 2024 | noon – 9 pm
Saturday, 27 April 2024 | 11 am – 7 pm
Sunday, 28 April 2024 | noon – 5 pm


Closing event
Thursday, 25 July 2024 | 6 pm

»Interbeing – New Forms of Cooperation. Perspectives for artistic practice as seen in the Malaysian art platform Lostgens'«

The curators and artists Verena Freyschmidt, Maike Häusling and Sarah Schoderer in conversation with Yeoh Lian Heng, director of Lostgens' Contemporary Art Space (joining the event live from Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia)
in English.


Moderation: Andreas Schmid, artist


Opening hours
Tuesday – Friday, 2 – 6 pm and by appointment


About the exhibition

The exhibition »Interbeing« shows works by Verena Freyschmidt, Maike Häusling and Sarah Schoderer made between 2013 and 2019 during residencies in Kuala Lumpur, together with more recent works referring to their time in Malaysia. What the three artists’ very different visual idioms share is the use of traditional techniques from the Southeast Asian region, as found in the country’s various cultures.

During their three-month stays in Kuala Lumpur as part of the residency programme at Goethe Institut Malaysia, organized in cooperation with the AIR Programme of the City of Frankfurt am Main, Lostgens' Contemporary Art Space offered the artists a home, a place to work and exhibit, and above all a place for wide-ranging encounters. Founded in 2004, Lostgens' is an artists’ collective that acts as a public platform for artistic and cultural dialog, with a strongly political and critical approach. Although the three artists were in the city at different times, their encounters in this very international city led them all to reflect both on the very different conditions for artistic work and practice, and on culturally specific modes of perception. Their focus was on the question of the importance of collective, communal action with regard to artistic practices and their potential impact on the global social challenges of our times.

Verena Freyschmidt works with drawing, painting and installation, her preferred material being paper. The exhibition features the works she made in Malaysia, the results of her experiments with various types of fabric and paper. Inspired by her engagement with plangi, a traditional Malaysian textile dying procedure, she created free-form works, large-format papercuts, and echoes of nature. They are accompanied by a film documenting an installation Freyschmidt made and exhibited in Kuala Lumpur that reflects her interest in a diversity of religious and spiritual encounters.

Maike Häusling shows an installation made out of hand-coloured sheets of Chinese rice paper and a video featuring a selection of the photographs she took in Kuala Lumpur in 2018. While making field recordings around the city, in addition to many site-specific sounds, she found a striking accumulation of very different architectural styles in close proximity. Her pictures show a meeting between the remains of the colonial era, various religious sites, and ultramodern buildings, capturing the city’s tightly-woven urban fabric. In the religious sites in particular, the artist experienced a wealth of colour that she channelled into the colouration of the works on Chinese paper. In the exhibition space, the photographs and works on paper are intertwined, reflecting a constant interplay of stillness and movement.

During her stay, Sarah Schoderer experienced everyday life in Kuala Lumpur as a world of extremes: constant destruction of the environment by slash-and-burn, the impact of a fascinating and artificial consumer society coupled with religious sites and craftspeople keeping traditional techniques alive. For the exhibition, she transformed the resulting impressions into a wall installation comprising a painted triptych as well as wall drawings and experiments with self-dyed fabrics: while the painting offers a vision of the future, the other works draw on batik motifs from Malay crafts.

The exhibition »Interbeing« is intended as the starting point for joint work by the three artists. It was curated by Verena Freyschmidt in cooperation with Maike Häusling and Sarah Schoderer.



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