Künstlerhaus Bremen

LINA HERMSDORF
Vantage Point
20 May – 13 August 2017

With contributions by: Casper-Malte Augusta, John Latham
Sound design by: Marian Mentrup

Lina Hermsdorf ́s exhibitions unfold as time-based processes that place the experience of the viewer at their centre. Their non-linear, polysemous narratives often materialize in installations and performances, with a particular focus on biological phenomena relating to the corporeal and temporal texture of technologically infiltrated bodies. Frequently taking into account the specific histories of her performers, Hermsdorf combines biographical material with a multitude of voices, forming avatar-like characters that meander between virtual and physical realities.

At the Künstlerhaus Bremen, Hermsdorf (b. 1985 in Hamburg) presents Vantage Point, a new sonic and architecture-based project that revolves around the figure of the Doppelgänger and its relation to transparency as a fantasy of unlimited access to all forms of information.The term Doppelgänger, which first emerged in German Romantic literature and art, acts here as an opaque foil to the omnipotent gaze of the systematizing, information-gathering machines and corporations of today ́s world. Prefigurations of the Doppelgänger can be found in ancient mythology where they represent a loss of the past and an externalization of the soul, which becomes separated from the body and exists at the threshold of the visible and invisible worlds. The performance on the opening weekend operates within the gap between the externalized and visible, the internal and elusive, with the performer Casper at times blending into their voices through movement and lipsynching. Casper ́s recalling of their former lives, which will remain as a decorporealized shadow within the audio piece, explores the experience of a schism and alludes to a multitude of possible selves.

The exhibition takes place in collaboration with Flat Time House in London, formerly the home and studio of the late artist John Latham whose work is included in the exhibition in the form of hospital x-ray images of his chest, documenting an accident he had. The second chapter of the project will open there in October.