Neun Kelche presents on the 13th. December 2024 the duo-exhibition To want the world in a glass hat with works by the artists: Bethan Higes and Dominique Hurth.
Image above: Bethan Huges und Dominique Hurth, “To want the world in a glass hat”, courtesy by Neun Kelche.
Bethan Hughes and Dominique Hurth both draw on many years of research-based practice and critically engage with social norms, marginalised voices and the materiality of objects. In this joint exhibition, the artists connect through the title To want the world in a glass hat – taken from the poem New Year on Dartmoor by Sylvia Plath – and reimagine the project space as a resonant space.
In a literal sense, they engage with the project space and its architecture: the large glass fronts support a site-specific sound installation. In a metaphorical sense, they thematise structural questions about normativity, who is heard and in which space, what is visible and what remains hidden.
The joint project To want the world in a glass hat. brings together the two art spaces/initiatives Display (Marie DuPasquier) and Neun Kelche (Kira Dell and Laura Seidel) with the artists Bethan Hughes and Dominique Hurth. The core of the project is the network of solidarity with power-critical and collaborative perspectives that connect us in our curatorial work.
About Bethan Hughes
Bethan Hughes’ audiovisual installations, sculptures and texts interweave archival research and speculative narratives to explore the unnatural ecologies created by industry, commerce and technology. Her work has been exhibited at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (SP), gnration, Braga (PT), Kunstpavillion, Innsbruck (AT), nGbK, Berlin (DE), Ars Electronica, Linz (AT), Haubrok Foundation, Berlin (DE), and HAUNT/frontviews, Berlin (DE), among others. In 2023 she was a fellow of the European Media Art Platform and in 2024 she completed an Art & Ecology Residency at MuseumsQuartier Wien.
She studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art and Media Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar and completed a PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. She is currently working on her first monograph, which will be published by K. Verlag in early 2025. Entitled Elastic Continuum, it traces the material and symbolic transformations of a rubbery plant better known as the Kazakh dandelion.
About Dominique Hurth
Dominique Hurth is a visual artist who works with installations, sculptures and editions. The starting point for new works is often a narrative that is present in places or images, and although her installations often focus on form, extensive and detailed research is firmly anchored in the development of this form. Her works have been exhibited in international museums and art institutions (e.g. Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fundació Tapies, Barcelona; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; l’appartement 22, Rabat) and are part of several collections.
She has received numerous awards and residency grants, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016-17), the Berlin Senate / Governing Mayor of Berlin Award at the ISCP, New York (2014), the Berlin Artistic Research Grant in the years (2022-23) and Villa Kamogawa, Kyoto (2025).Her latest book titled “Stutters”, published and commissioned by Printed Matter (NYC), was released in July 2021, based on several years of archival research in the photo collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
In 2025, a solo exhibition in two chapters at the Ravensbrück Memorial will conclude its long-term investigation into the textile history and cultural appropriation of the female guard uniform (of the former Ravensbrück concentration camp) with the support of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
About Neun Kelche
Neun Kelche is a project space curated by Kira Dell and Laura Seidel at Pasedagplatz in Berlin-Weißensee. Since May 2024, artist Neda Naujokaitė has joined the team in the field of press and public relations and as assistant curator. Since the beginning of 2021, local artists have found a space for exchange and encounters here. The programme is shaped by the local community and developed further in collaborations at a national and international level.
Neun Kelche works mainly with FLINTA* artists. In solo or duo exhibitions, they create site-specific installations that are expanded through performance or with film/video/sound. The curatorial work of Kira Dell and Laura Seidel is based on a fundamentally power-critical and intersectional perspective. Thematically, they focus in particular on utopias of the planetary coexistence of human and non-human actors, ideas of collective love, social perspectives on parenthood and the potential for action of artistic materials.
Instead of prescribing a rigid curatorial programme, thematic overlaps are found with the artists in a collaborative negotiation process and through extensive studio visits, and the exhibitions are developed together. The team at Neun Kelche takes a critical look at the working structures in the art world and the starting point for the curatorial work is the development of an exhibition programme.
WHEN?
Opening: Friday, 13. December 2024, 5 pm.
Exhibition dates: Friday, 13. December 2024 – Sunday, 02. March 2025
WHERE?
Neun Kelche
Pasedagplatz 3-4 (Zugang über „An der Industriebahn“)
13088 Berlin
