Event ID # 74608
Date:
Thursday, 30 April 2009
Thursday, 2 July 2009
 Time:
14:00 - 19:00
14:00 - 19:00
Event:

Solo Show Katherine Newbegin: NO ROOM SPACES - Behind The Scenes
Host:

Galerie OPEN
Location:

(Kreuzberg-Mitte)   Google Map
Legiendamm 18-20
Contact:
Alexandra Rockelmann		 Phone:
030 27582810
Email:
galerie-open@galerie-open.net
Website:
http://www.galerie-open.net
Price:
free
Full details:
Solo Show  Katherine Newbegin in Berlin30. April – 02. July 2009OPENing 30. April, 19 pm galerie OPEN is pleased to present the second solo show „NO ROOM SPACES - Behind The Scenes“, of the American photographer Katherine Newbegin in Berlin. The artist will be present at the opening. What’s behind it? Behind the Scenes is the result of this question of the history of the places, and its title describes an aspect of the artist’s work. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1976 Katherine Newbegin majored in photography and English Literature at Hunter College in New York as well as at Yale University. Newbegin was assistant to the German artist Candida Höfer, whose photographs of interiors differ greatly from Newbegin’s. Katherine Newbegin has been travelling throughout Eastern Europe since 2005, and has also traveled in communist Cuba and US states such as Oregon. The American artist depicts the outside world, a world dominated by the past, a world which people use and discard, and which reflects human fallibility in its rooms. A worn-out, lifeless world is presented, whose attributes are isolation, shabbiness, neglect, and emotional emptiness. Newbegin is interested in what is behind the façade. She has to overcome locked doors for her research and often has to sneak into buildings like a thief. Nothing is arranged in her works, nothing is specifically illuminated or staged. Persistently, she circles the object of desire until that one perfect moment has arrived for her to take her photograph. The artist searches for traces. With a large backpack and her camera equipment in tow, the young woman goes on a search for isolated places to track down visual clues which are easily overlooked in this fast paced world. Through her lens she discovers a world long forgotten by today’s consumer. Newbegin chooses locations that have inherited their looks from politics, as it were. Soviet architecture of the 1960s, whose monumental concrete constructions were shaped by the need to prove presence and modernity, is one of the artist’s targets. Melancholy descends on the viewers of  Katherine Newbegin’s color photographs. Emotionally empty rooms, hotel rooms, floors, staircases and bathrooms testify to a harshness, a type of reality which is usually hidden or quickly suppressed. In her work, Newbegin investigates these stories and this momentum, thus also analyzing universal conditions for being sheltered or unsheltered. Katherine Newbegin explains her choice as follows: “… set against the western idea of an affluent middle-class family driving to Disneyland, it is this stark contrast which acts as the crux of my fascination with these hotels. One of the most compelling aspects of the vacations offered to the ‘best workers’ of the Soviet regime was the element of control and monitoring which took place during the trips.” In correspondence to the exhibition will be a publication „Behind The Scenes“. Released by Sasa Hanten with an Essay of Barbara Steffen, head of collection Albertina Vienna, it is publicized in the Revolver-Verlag, Berlin.