Bielefelder Kunstverein

The relationship of art and its audience plays a central role in the work of Christian Falsnaes (*1980 in Copenhagen, DK). He uses performance, painting, music or dance to develop theatrical and partially absurd situations, which involve spectators actively in a working process. Social conventions, power relations, gender roles and the artistic potential in every individual become the subject of his works. Human bodies as a collective are the most important working material for his surprising, usually unannounced performances, which are documented on video. Here, the artist takes on the role of a director, whose way of proceeding both shifts and dissolves the aesthetic boundary between artist, stage and audience.

Falsnaes is not planning any new performance for his first solo exhibition »The Title Is Your Name« in a German institution. He is, much rather, making a start by conceiving an interactive spatial installation, which shifts the performative potential of looking at art into the spotlight. The exhibition, based on a specially developed app, thus becomes itself the application of an activating relationship between artwork and spectators. It is not simply display, but documents individual reactions accompanying the reception of the works. With the support of their viewers, it will generate a variety of new video-based works, which can, in fact, be shared, but are mostly only familiar to the respective spectators and remain a mystery to all the others.

Christian Falsnaes, born in Copenhagen (DK) in 1980, lives and works in Berlin. In the recent years the following institutions have shown solo exhibitions of the artist, among others the DREI in Cologne (2013), the 21er Haus in Wien (AT) (2012), the OSLO10 in Basel (CH), the Rohde Contemporary in Kopenhagen (DK) (2011) and the Skånes Konstförnening in Malmö (SE). Furthermore she was represented by works in group exhibitions, among others, in the Reykjavik Art Museum, in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, in the Museum Bärengasse in Zürich, in the Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Auckland (NZ) (all 2014), the KW Institute of Contemporary Art Berlin, the Serra dei Giardini, Venedig (IT), the Salzburger Kunstverein (AT) (all of them 2013), the W139 in Amsterdam (NL) (2012) or the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warschau (PL) (2011).

To mark the exhibition, a 32-page brochure was published (German/English).