Nina von Seckendorff
DAS MUSS IRGENDWANN IM SPÄTMITTELALTER GEWESEN SEIN IN DER ARKTIS ODER IN NORDFRANKREICH, JEDENFALLS WAR DER EINE HELL UND RUND UND DER ANDERE KLEIN UND DUNKEL UND SIE HABEN BEIDE SEHR LAUT GESCHRIEN
22. September – 5. November 2017

A young woman stands in a dark room by the window. Smoking. Talking on the phone. Little more than her silhouette can be made out, when she lights a cigarette, or takes a drag, the ash glowing. The thoughts and questions she voices seem urgent, but the reactions from whoever she is talking to remain inaudible. She is not alone.

Nina von Seckendorff adds a new group of installative and situative elements, videos and animations to her novel and diverse artistic practise, which deal with the human condition and communication. In her works we meet people and animals, who encounter each other without sharing a common language, and people who speak the same language without finding a way to understand each other.

Animals and strange objects and beings regularly turn up in Seckendorff’s work. Often as pictures, perhaps indeed the embodiment of an apparent speechlessness, incomprehension and instinctiveness. Central to Seckendorff’s investigations, however, are humans; their relationships to one another, to the world, to knowledge, logic and feeling, to themselves and other forms of life. What is humanity, and who assigns it to and agrees on it with whom? Who determines how one person perceives the other, and how they interact with each other? Seckendorff constructs absurd connections, reaching across each of the works in the exhibition and the perception of the visitor. Narration takes place where communication is absent, links appear where they surprise, and rather than being the search for an answer are more like a search for questions. Questions which enable a calling into question of what claims to be right but doesn’t feel right. That which runs counter to the idea of a human instinct.

How would our everyday life change, if for just one day we were not to follow the known order of things? If we were to break out of the habit of making sense of the things we encounter according to a predetermined logic, stepping outside of it to be able to make new observations and connections? If the borders between beings and things become blurred, and and our senses are presented with the challenge of inventing new images, a new perspective from the same position?