Artist: Lisa Hofmann and Olaf Metzel
Curated by: Nina Holm and Constanze Metzel
Venue: Kunstraum München, Munich, Germany
Date: March 22 – May 7, 2023
Photography: All images copyright of Thomas Splett and Kunstraum München
For 2023, Kunstraum München has developed a special program that refers to the history and future of the institution: We invite artists who have been represented at Kunstraum München since the 1970s to develop an exhibition project together with other artists or in relation to each other.
Olaf Metzel has already exhibited three times in the history of Kunstraum München: in 1982, his first solo exhibition took place in the rooms of Nikolaistrasse 15 and a former gas station at Landsbergerstr. 193, followed in 1990 by another at Viktor-Scheffel-Strasse 20, showing drawings. With painter Günther Förg, he showed various collaborative works as expansive installations at Zieblandstrasse 8 in 2002.
Together with Berlin-based artist and documentary filmmaker Lisa Hofmann, Olaf Metzel will now focus on socio-political areas of tension surrounding housing issues, displacement processes and discrimination structures.
The exhibition documents and negotiates social realities and urban situations from both historical and contemporary perspectives: for this, Metzel revisits his 1982 project “Türkenwohnung Abstand 12 000,- DM VB” – an examination of everyday racism in the treatment of ‘guest workers’ in the Federal Republic of Germany – for which he rented an apartment in Berlin-Wedding that had shortly before been terminated for a family of Turkish origin. He there realized a sculptural and cinematic intervention. Almost forty years later, Lisa Hofmann’s film is just as unsparing in its reflection of violent intrusions into private space: “Auszug aus” (2021) is an emphatic long-term observation which follows in intimate scenes the fate of two protagonists who are evicted from their apartments – also in Wedding. It makes the absurd logics of the housing market and politics visible in pointed images visible without falling into polemical patterns.
Even if connotations have shifted in recent decades – structurally, hardly anything has changed. In juxtaposition, the different artistic strategies and development moments sharpen the view of virulent debates, their medial mediation and effects on the lives of individuals and society. Housing shortages, housing rights, exclusion, displacement, and discrimination are ubiquitous topics, not only in cities like Berlin, that struck a chord then as now.
Lisa Hofmann (*1992 in Berlin) graduated in 2021 from the Universität der Künste in Berlin as a master student of Prof. Ursula Neugebauer. In her documentary essayistic films and photographs, she reflects on precarious living environments and networks of relationships marked by alienation. “Excerpt from” was awarded the Grand Prix – Documentary at the Concordia Film Festival in Montreal in 2022. Most recently, her work was on view as part of this year’s European Month of Photography in Berlin.
Olaf Metzel (*1952 in Berlin) studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. From 1990 to 2019 he was a professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. Today, he is one of the most important contemporary German sculptors, whose multi-layered work ranges from sculptures and reliefs to assemblages, collages, photographs, video works, and drawings. In addition to numerous solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad, he has participated in documenta 8 (1987), Skulptur Projekte Münster (1987 and 1997), and the Istanbul Biennial (1991, 1995, and 2017), among others. Metzel has also received a number of prizes and awards.
