Review

Charlotte Bastian, Simone Häckel, Karen Linnenkohl, Christine Niehoff, Mariel Poppe, Claudia Schoemig, Annette Sonnewend, Linda Weiss

In the exhibition Review, the artists Charlotte Bastian, Simone Häckel, Karen Linnenkohl, Christine Niehoff, Mariel Poppe, Claudia Schoemig, Annette Sonnewend, and Linda Weiss take a critical look at the borders of the European Union; as they inquire into the European idea, they question the authority it exerts on the world stage.
Bastian’s collages are based on cut-outs of photographs she took on journeys all over Europe; made from the 1990s to the present, the pictures are reassembled to create new images. Poppe’s video Paravent reflects on the nature and construction of national boundaries; the work formulates a plea for more permeable borders. Sonnewend’s fictional photographic work European Borderline explores Europe’s ‘borderline personality disorder’: negative and sometimes seemingly paradox behaviour and a troubled relationship with its own identity. In Weiss’s video work Life/Death/Utopia, places, events, and interviews – such as Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, the suicides that followed in the wake of the real estate crisis, the memoirs of Formula 1 test driver Maria Villota – function as metaphors for cause and effect in Europe.