Artist: Laura Ziegler
Exhibition title: Kartoffel Jazz
Venue: Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany
Date: February 25 – April 30, 2023
Photography: ©All images copyright the artist and Philipp Kurzhals/Neuer Essener Kunstverein.
Laura Ziegler’s practice is structured around a comprehensive preoccupation with the social historiography of public, urban and social spaces. Her videos, puppet shows and allegorical scenes follow the tradition of genre painting, i.e. the aesthetics of the ‘lowest class’, whose carnivalesque qualities she crosses with contemporary issues. The leitmotif for this is Ziegler’s preoccupation with Bruegel’s painting “Man with Moneybag and His Flatterers” (ca. 1592), which runs as a leitmotif equally through the exhibition and her oeuvre. Among others, it appears in “die-arbeit.info TV” (2021), a puppet TV show based on conversations between Ziegler, as well as members of the former Munich city politics magazine Hilfe. The video work deals with political organization in the 1990s, self-organization in the cultural sphere, and the value of arguing, but transfers the conversation into a playful, accessible form by means of Ziegler’s aesthetic of impromptu. This is all the more the case as the studio set-ups of the video are given an afterlife as lamps, which is typical of the artist’s dynamic, meandering understanding of the work, which likes to adapt content and/or decline it through several media. In doing so, Ziegler repeatedly succeeds in placing her strong involvement in diverse forms of cooperative self-organization (including the agit-prop film collective PairiDaenzaClub or the Hamburg neighborhood project Park Fiction) in a productive dialogue with her own artistic project – for example, the exhibition contains numerous collaborations and works by artist friends and family members, namely Dean E. Stephanus, Nabila M. Attar, Merlin Reichard, Aurel Moussa, and Frederik Ziegler-Rehms.
Moreover, the exhibition shows for the first time Ziegler’s new episodic video “Hot Jazz & Icy Feelings” (2023), which tells the story of German-American cultural exchange along musical influences in an anecdotal and in parts also very personal form, which subtly touches on the question of identity formation in general. A central role in the film is played by the US Army Forces stationed in Germany after the war, one of whom is Ziegler’s grandfather.
Laura Ziegler (*1990) lives and works in Hamburg. She has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including Haus der Kunst Munich, Madre Museum Naples, Kunstverein Munich, Kunstverein in Hamburg, and in a duo exhibition (with Maximiliane Baumgartner) at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof. „Kartoffel Jazz“ is her first institutional solo exhibition.
