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Rundgang 05 10 July 05

Section: article

Categories: Exhibition

This Rundgang (meaning tour) is the yearly exhibition of students’ work at the HFG in Offenbach am Main, Germany. (Offenbach College of Visual Arts)

I spent about five hours going through the dozens of rooms of individual students’ work, mostly students of Heiner Blum, Frank Schumacher and Heike Selmer.

There was so much beautiful work: I was particularly impressed by a piece called beautiful place by the Chilean artist Viviana Bravo Botta. Her work, a small room installation, was comprised of a video documentation and slide show running next to each other and simultaneously, simple photos, and a small model of the apartment which was the center point of the project. The apartment is in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel, the part of the city known mostly for prostitution and narcotics, and her project deals with looking into the world of these prostitutes and involving some of them in the renovation of the large, old apartment that Viviana managed to rent. The apartment was intended to serve as a kind of refuge, a place away from the rest of their world, a beautiful place.

Viviana was kind enough to share many of her experiences with me, much of what she has learned in researching this milieu.

I also had an interesting and helpful talk with the Argentinian artist Tania Lescano on, to oversimplify here, the possible, or sometimes impossible, relationships between art and politics in this society. She also had an excellent piece in the exhibition intersecting art and fashion in which she placed various styles of skirts on the floor — but skirts that had been hardened in the form they would take on a woman’s body. As free–standing objects they take on the form of volcanoes. Later, as I was riding my bike away from the exhibition, the visual impact took effect on me: the “empty” forms of the skirts transformed into unleashed volcanic passion of women.

I look forward to following their work.

Title: Rundgang 05 (Student exhibition at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach am Main)

Location: Offenbach, Germany

  • Title: Rundgang 05