Map of Berlin (Detail), Thomas Behling
The exhibition “Sehnsucht” (Longing) at SCOTTY – Space for Contemporary Art and Experimental Media shows selected works from this year’s Open Call on its annual theme “Longing”. The theme seems to have struck a nerve, as the project space, which is run as a registered association, had 237 applications. With so many interesting works, it was not easy for SCOTTY to limit the number to 32. The theme of “longing” is reflected in various media such as painting, installation and photography. The personal starting point of the theme and thus of the respective works of the artists opens up an imaginary space for the viewers. Longing – as a very subjective feeling that can nevertheless be felt universally – appears here in various interesting perspectives and interpretations.
With works by:
Hannah Becher, Thomas Behling, Ina Bierstedt, Ulrike Dornis, Bartbara Duisberg, Ellinor Euler, Claudia Grande, ,Ulli Grötz, Stephan Groß, Ulrike Hannemann. Stefanie Hillich, Janne Höltermann, Andrea Huyoff, Lisa Junghanss, Steffi Jüngling, Sabine Kinast, Hannah Lansburgh , Anett Lau, Laura Leppert, Oliver Möst, Isabell Pauer, Franziska Peter, Mari Poller, Beate Selzer, Kerstin Serz, Eva Stenram, Maria Vedder, Mara Wagenführ, Ivo Weber, Catrin Welcher, Marcelina Wellmer, Daniel Wiesenfe
Annual theme at SCOTTY – Sehnsucht (Longing):
Longing has flared up again and is expressed today in the most diverse forms: in love of nature, the escape from everyday life, longing for social contacts, for normality, for the distant, for a homeland and even in conspiracy theories or again the idea of salvation by the political extreme right.
The concept of longing as an image in which the seemingly absent becomes an individual but also collective projection surface. Motifs such as Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscapes, a sandy beach with a palm tree at sunset, the idyll of the Alps or the bourgeois paradise of one’s own garden have become ciphers for sensations and places of longing for the neo-romantic viewer over the centuries. Do they still function unchanged today?
Longings as a subjective, elusive and yet powerful inner driving force seem to lie apart from rationality, pragmatic compromise and reason. And yet longings also point to essential questions about sustainable content, life choices that prove true in the long term and acting with integrity. Can longing be seen as an intuitive impulse for authentic action and self-empowerment? As something worth listening to because it contains relevant information about the direction to take? How can we distil and realise the utopian potential of our primal longings? How far can we trust longings like a seismograph and to what extent is it at all justifiable to rely on a kind of inner naturalness or ‘compass’?
In this exhibition cycle, SCOTTY follows different artistic, cultural and socio-political facets of longing,
cultural and socio-political facets of SEHNSUCHT: How can imaginary space be represented? Which artist myths circulate with corresponding social expectations, self-images and realities of life? Longing as the pure, adventurous desire to discover the vastness of the world for oneself? Radical artistic and social positions that do without too much compromise? How can we manage in everyday life to practice real communities, to remain in solidarity in the omnipresent capitalism?
Opening: Friday, 13.08.2021, from 7 pm
Exhibition: Saturday, 14th August to Saturday, 25th September 2021
SCOTTY Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst und experimentelle Medien
Oranienstraße 46
10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg
U-Bahnhof Moritzplatz
Do-Fr 3-7 pm
Sa 2-6 pm
