Astra Gröting’s individual show at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein is the artist’s first international exhibition in Berlin. The exhibition emerged in cooperation with Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, which until May 9 will be holding the largest solo show of work by the artist to date in Austria.

Gröting, born in 1961, now lives in Berlin and teaches at Hochschule der Künste in Braunschweig. She studied at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie under the influence of Joseph Beuys. Since the 1980s, her sculptures have enjoyed international recognition, and beginning in the 1990s her work expanded in terms of media use, now incorporating video and performance.

The exhibition at n.b.k. shows 15 recent works and thus points to a broad oeuvre. In her sculptures, the most varied materials are used, such as pearls, magnets, bronze, glass, cable, or motors. The work Käfig (Cage, 1995) is a floating cube made of 2,000 glass pearls, which are hung on nylon threads. In so doing, despite a minimal use of material a large volume emerges. In Einen Funken Leidenschaft (A Spark of Passion, 2008), every few seconds a spark leaps between two cables that are installed in a 2cm large hole in the wall. Gröting’s sculptures combine what is apparently visible and the invisible, and explore human corporeality. Gröting understands this less individually, as in a field of tension between the self and the community. In her sculpture, she thus refers to various forms of subjectivation.

In the filmic block of works The Inner Voice (1993-2004), Gröting developed a video series with ventriloquists around the world and select authors such as Tim Etchells and Deborah Levy. The dummy, in dialog with the ventriloquists and the audience, reflects the unsaid, the suppressed as well as the trivial. In the foreground of this series are everyday psycho-social acts as artistic material, contrasting with the materiality of the sculptures.

The live performance Abbaya (2010) by Asta Gröting will take place daily from May 1 to June 13, except for Mondays, between 4 and 6 pm.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.

Program

Thursday, May 6, 2010, 7 pm

Sculpture Today

Discussion with Asta Gröting (artist and professor in sculpture, Berlin/Braunschweig) and Jan Hoet (artistic director, documenta 9 [1992], Brussels)

Moderation: André Rottmann (chief editor Texte zur Kunst, Berlin)

Thursday, May 20, 2010, 7 pm

Exhibition Tour with Sophie Goltz (communication/education n.b.k.)

Thursday, June 3, 2010, 7 pm

Artist talk with Asta Gröting (artist) and Marius Babias (director n.b.k.)

Sunday, June 13, 2010, from 5 pm

Summer Party

Cooking performance with Hocine Bouhlou, Sebastian Stöhrer (artists, Frankfurt am Main)

Concert with Dirty Mirrors (Frank Lutz, John Miller, Greg Parma Smith, Aura Rosenberg, New York/Berlin)