Nora Schultz at Kunsthalle Bremerhaven

Artist: Nora Schultz

Exhibition title: Ganz grosse Flüsse laufen unter der Erde (Major rivers running underground)

Venue: Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Bremerhaven, Germany

Date: April 28 – July 21, 2023

Photography: Fred Dott / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Kunsthalle Bremerhaven

Nora Schultz’ multidimensional practice includes not only sculptural, filmic and appropriative elements but also typographic, performative and linguistic ones. For her shows, she assembles them to expansive installations, setting individual parts in relation to each other. Her works mostly refer to the space, so that they can be understood as a kind of speaking with and about the space, for example, by inscribing themselves in it, taking up its structures or completely occupying it. Key moments consist in shifting, destabilizing and transforming. Therefore, her pieces frequently appear to be in a precarious and fragile state—somehow out of balance, swaying or hovering. But only to the extent that they still “hold.” Nora Schultz is not intent on destroying things, but instead on softening, unsettling, questioning, and disorienting them—be it architectures, structures, surfaces, borders, or realities. For only when something is dissolved can it be exposed, thus allowing it show itself from a different, unknown perspective. Although Schultz’ works use the exhibition space, a very specific space, as a starting point, they refer beyond it and weave innumerable threads that raise a physical, sensual, social, and political awareness of relations, systems, structures, circumstances, and conditions.

Nora Schultz graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt, in 2005 and also studied in the MFA programme at Bard College, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include, Fished by Fish, Dépendance Brussels (2023, Two-Chambered Ears, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (both 2021) and would you say this is the day?, Secession, Vienna (2019). She has realised solo performances at the Whitney Museum, New York (2017) and the Tate Modern, London (2014) and took part in Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017. Schultz currently teaches as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, having previously held a professorship in sculpture at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard.