Cao Fei
11 Dec. 2008-15 Feb. 2009
Born in Guangzhou in 1978, Cao Fei is one of the most important Chinese artists of her generation. She grew up with the advertising and electronic entertainment world developed in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and in her video films and sculptural installations she combines the influences of a global post-Pop culture with traditional elements of Chinese opera, theatre or dance. Since the turn of the millennium, she has been deftly employing the technical possibilities of film, animation and the Internet to depict the equally rapid and radical social and cultural changes in China. Very quickly, Cao Fei developed a pictorial language entirely her own, in which she superimposes reality and fiction, and history and the present day. In her "docu-dramas" like Nu River Project (2007) or Cosplayers (2004) she consciously adopts a perspective that mediates between the inside and the outside viewpoints, interlocking documentation and fiction. The exhibition also presents the latest projects such as RMB City and I Mirror, which Cao Fei has been developing online since 2007 – for "Second Life" – as her avatar China Tracy.
The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Nürnberg is the first comprehensive individual exhibition of the Chinese artist's work in Germany. It has been organised in collaboration with Le Plateau, Paris and Vitamin Creative Space, Peking/Guangzhou and is accompanied by the artist's book Journey.

Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven. Nothing More Natural
12 March-24 May 2009
Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven (*1951 in Antwerp) has been producing computer-based animations, films, texts, music and drawings, and presenting them in multimedia installations since the early 1980s. She was a prominent member of the Belgian underground scene of the 1970s and 1980s, which exploited exhibitions and performances to question socially accepted cultural norms and conventions regarding desire, power, politics and sexuality. In her projects, she combines an investigation of scientific-technological systems and terminologies with philosophical concepts such as Sigmund Freud's theory of (sexually determined) subconscious repression and her own authentic experiences as a woman and an artist.
The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Nürnberg shows a representative selection of around 120 drawings, as well as films and installations. The exhibition – which will be planned individually for each venue – and the joint retrospective catalogue including essay contributions by Susanne Neubauer, Gertrud Sandqvist and Dirk Snauwaert (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne) are being produced in collaboration with Lucerne Art Museum and the Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels. In Nuremberg, the exhibition will be supplemented ideally by a film night in cooperation with the Filmhaus Nürnberg on 23rd April, and by an installation on the 1st floor of the Künstlerhaus.


André Butzer
Viele Tote im Heimatland: Fanta, Sprite, H-Milch, Micky und Donald!
Paintings 1999-2008
18 June-23 Aug. 2009
The Kunsthalle Nürnberg will be focusing on a selection of large-format paintings by André Butzer (*1973 in Stuttgart) dating from the years 1999 to 2009. During the 1990s, the artist – who now lives in Rangsdorf near Berlin – was a founding member of Akademie Isotrop, a self-organised teaching institute that existed in Hamburg from 1996 to 2000. Butzer himself describes his paintings as "Science-Fiction Expressionism", and they cite elements of the comic and of Pop culture, combining trivial and historically significant references. Butzer alternates fluently between figurative motifs and monochrome abstraction: on the one hand, for instance, his pictures investigate the non-representational painting of Albert Oehlen; on the other hand, he is deeply interested in artists like Edvard Munch (I am Munch, 1999) or Asger Jorn. Abstract and sometimes apparently ornamental elements thus emerge in his paintings together with representational, childishly grotesque figurations. Another central motif is repetition, for Butzer often works in series and attempts "to repeat his paintings as often and as well as possible, in order to make them less bad, just as Warhol or Pablo Picasso did before me – so what I produce is mass culture [...]" (André Butzer, 2005). Butzer's paintings resemble intensely colourful visions of failed technical utopias or they generate figures and heads that seem to be mutating constantly. He subdivides these works into different groupings such as "Friedens-Siemense", "Schande-Menschen" or "Nasaheim".
The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Nürnberg will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue (German/English), which will provide the first compact survey of his work and its development over the last ten years.

El Dorado
On the Promise of Human Rights
17 Sept.-15 Nov. 2009
El Dorado, the legendary land of gold in South America, provides the title for an international group exhibition concerned with the world promise to recognise and implement human rights, which is still far from being fulfilled. The occasion for this exhibition is Nuremberg's International Human Rights Award, which will be presented to Abdolfattah Soltani in October 2009.
The United Nations issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10th December 1948, meaning that for the first time, a community of nations – on the foundation of a shared understanding of human dignity – agreed on human rights that should be valid all over the world. In 30 articles, the General Assembly proclaimed classic rights to freedom, but also economic and social rights. Although their acceptance has increased continually since then, human rights are still violated every day. Their implementation world-wide seems to be a paradisal state which, like the legendary golden country El Dorado, will probably remain a utopia.
The group exhibition El Dorado sets different emphases: on the one hand, the Kunsthalle Nürnberg is showing works by MARTHA ROSLER, KARA WALKER and JOTA CASTRO that examine obvious violations of human rights through war, torture, expulsion or racism. On the other hand, many works are devoted to "subtle" violations of human rights. For, as author Juli Zeh writes, violations of human rights may be rather like images on big billboards: we can only make them out from the other side of the street. Indeed, it is often easier to criticise the poor state of political and social affairs in other countries than to recognise violations of human rights on our own doorstep. Even though the safeguarding of human rights in Europe is relatively effective by comparison to some other parts of the world, and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg provides an instance for the presentation of individual grievances, human rights are disregarded constantly in Europe as well – in the guise of social exclusion, the violation of equal opportunities, or contempt of the right to social welfare. Works by DANICA DAKIC, DIONISIO GONZÁLES and TOBIAS ZIELONY focus on such "subtle" violations of human rights.
Another focus in the exhibition is on artworks devoted to the so-called "battle against terrorism" and the attendant restrictions on public freedom imposed by state intervention. Since the terror attacks on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001, the desire for security has increased all over the world. In the context of this battle against terror, however, human rights are being systematically reduced. In its annual report in 2008, for example, Amnesty International saw blatant violations of the right to protection from arbitrary arrest or inhuman treatment.
This desire for inner security leads – in Germany as well – to an increase in control. In order to create the utopia of physical, political and state integrity, we are subject to surveillance, checking and data verification. Stricter checks when entering a country, dragnet investigations, telephone surveillance, control over money transfers, or tougher security checking in potentially endangered areas: these measures not only appear to contradict the basic right to self-determination, but also violate article 12 of the declaration of human rights. This article guarantees citizens protection of their intimate sphere and makes arbitrary interference in their private lives taboo. Works by EVA GRUBINGER, U.R.A. FILOART and KORPYS/LÖFFLER examine today's omnipresent surveillance and reflect on an ominous change in social awareness.
Over the Mountains / of the Moon
In the ballad Eldorado published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1849, a nobleman is looking for the legendary country El Dorado. After searching unsuccessfully all his life, he asks a wandering shadow where he will find the legendary country and receives the following reply:
Over the Mountains/ of the Moon/Down the Valley of the Shadow/Ride, boldly ride, / The shade replied-/ "If you seek for Eldorado!"
To find a country in which happiness, tolerance and social and cultural prosperity are everyday reality, we obviously need to travel far, but also on a journey calling for great courage. The path to world-wide recognition and implementation of human rights calls for no less endurance. The works exhibited in the Kunsthalle NŸrnberg go one step further along this path by drawing attention to serious deficiencies. For works of art in particular may be powerful enough to pinpoint the discrepancy between social ideals and reality. According to György Konrád, artists have "third sight": taking a step backwards, they develop a clearer view of (negative) social conditions from this aesthetic and intellectual distance. In a productive way, they thus succeed in combining their inner perspective and intimate knowledge of local living conditions with the view from the outside.
Artists in the exhibition: Oliver Boberg (DE), Berlinde De Bruyckere (BE), Jota Castro (PE), Danica Dakic (BA), Dionisio Gonzáles (ES), Eva Grubinger (AT), Özlem Günyol/Mustafa Kunt (TR), Mathilde ter Heijne (NL), Korpys/Löffler (DE), Thomas Locher (DE), M+M (Marc Weis/Martin de Mattia) (DE), Jens Pecho (DE), Martha Rosler (US), Katrin Ströbel (DE), U.R.A. Filoart, Kara Walker (US), Tobias Zielony (DE).
The group exhibition El Dorado will be accompanied by a comprehensive bilingual (German/English) catalogue with essays by Olaf Arndt, Gabriele Mackert, Harriet Zilch and Juli Zeh.

Juergen Teller
10 Dec. 2009-14 Feb. 2010
Photographer Juergen Teller (*1964 in Bubenreuth/Erlangen, lives in London) began his artistic career with commissions for English fashion and zeitgeist magazines like I-D, The Face and Arena at the end of the 1980s. In 1991, he accompanied the US American grunge singer Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana on their Nevermind tour. Since that time Teller has worked with great success in the fashion and advertising business. Among others, he has portrayed supermodels Kate Moss and Linda Evangelista as well as musicians including Sinéad O'Connor, Courtney Love, Björk and Patti Smith. Teller also created scenarios with Boris Becker and Claudia Schiffer for the fashion label Strenesse in 2004. Staging images that appear authentic and convincing is part of Juergen Teller's individual style and has become his artistic trademark as a commercial and fashion photographer. In his photo series Versace-Heart, for example, commissioned by the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1996, Teller broke with the cliche of perfect beauty prevalent in the fashion industry. In unembellished, quasi documentary nude shots of supermodel Kristen McMenamy, he focused on the sheer physical drudgery of a photo shooting. These photos are not perfectly exposed and McMenamy is neither wearing make-up nor designer clothing. There is no iconic stylishing of the photo models portrayed in the fashion shots of the following period, either. Teller shows them exhausted, and does not hide their scars and physical "flaws". He also captures them in awkward-looking poses that contradict the usual staged scenarios of fashion photography. This new, "more honest" view revolutionised the fashion scene in the 1990s and made Teller into a sought-after photographer for well-known fashion labels such as Hugo Boss, Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein or Marc Jacobs. But Juergen Teller's photographic work cannot be reduced to fashion photography. Other images reveal a strong autobiographical influence, being concerned with the photographer's identity and origins. Most recently, in the context of the group exhibition Das Gelände (The Site) organised by the Kunsthalle Nürnberg in summer 2008, Teller showed photographs of his daughter Lola (2007) as well as the series of images Nürnberg (2004-2005): in these shots of the crumbling Zeppelin grandstand that was once a centre of self-staging for the National Socialists, Teller rejects any form of dramaturgy and tells the story of gradual decay and the cycle of nature with a sensitive eye for detail.