Reproductive Matters at KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen

Artists: Lucy Beech, Zuzanna Czebatul, Julia Lübbecke, Ana Navas, Daniel Poller

Exhibition title: Reproductive Matters

Curated by: Nadja Quante

Venue: KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Date: June 15 – August 18, 2024

Photography:  all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and ©KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen

The group show Reproductive Matters takes the concept of reproduction as a starting point to reflect on its multiple meanings and their intersections through five artistic positions.

In her sculptures, Ana Navas explores the history of the creation and development of design and art objects. Her works Una fuente iluminada por luces de colores [A fountain illuminated with colored lights] (2022) and Mozo con smoking (2022) play with the transformation and imitation of works of art: Their original forms and visual language(s) flow through numerous translations into design and everyday objects. Navas sees her work as a ‘manual imitation of this industrial labor’ and as a return to the (original) materiality. Her practice negotiates ideas of accessibility, commodification, imitation and appropriation of images.

In Zuzanna Czebatul‘s tapestries from the series A Trillion Threads Still Weaving (2023), the artist has reproduced excerpts from historical tapestries from the 15th to 17th centuries from images found in books or on the internet. The excerpts chosen by the artist highlight rather incidental details, such as the folds of robes, hands or feet, and refer to the hidden power-political meanings of cultural symbols. The translation from the original to the two-dimensional image and back to the three-dimensional emphasizes the historicity and the illusion of the aura of the original.

In his photographic practice, Daniel Poller reflects on moments of historiography in public space with a particular focus on the reconstruction of historical buildings. His works from the series Frankfurter Kopien (2022) show photographs of historical building elements, so-called spolia, of the historic old town in Frankfurt am Main, which was reconstructed between 2012 and 2018 as the New Old Town. Poller overprinted the photographs using manual interventions with colors from the color guide that was created for the façade design and which is based on questionable sources such as postcards of hand-colored photographs or descriptions from sketchbooks. On what basis do we refer to historical moments and attempt to reproduce the ephemeral?

In her series Kleber und Falten (2023), Julia Lübbecke focuses on the material and tactile qualities of political archives. The sculptural installation features reproductions of archival documents from feminist or labor archives. The precarious status of the archives is highlighted by the blown-up reproduction of the back of a document, which has been eaten away by glue. The surface of the paper becomes the skin on which the folds are visible. Do the archives reproduce the conditions they represent? In the triptych Délire du toucher, Lübbecke places photographs from the Archive for Social Movements in Bochum in relation to the body of the artist or researcher by bringing the hand and the act of touching the photograph into the picture.

Lucy Beech‘s film Reproductive Exile (2018) explores the experience of a cross-border patient receiving biomedical pharmaceutical treatment in the commercial surrogacy industry. Occupying an uncomfortable space between reality and fiction, the film slips between a road movie and film essay, linking research on the cultural, social and economic agendas of the assisted reproduction industry with the experience of the film’s protagonist. The work opens up themes of intimacy, multi-species pharmaceuticals and the redistribution of reproductive labor.

The selected works shed light on various aspects of reproduction – be it the relationship between original and copy with its implicit attributions of value, or the means of human and social reproduction.

Curated by Nadja Quante

The exhibition was developed in dialogue with Anna Voswinckel.