Programme for the Year 2011

Mircea Cantor
Holy Flowers
Until 6 Feb. 2011
The works of Rumanian artist Mircea Cantor (*1977) tell of social utopias and individual dreams in our globalised world, where promises are not always kept and realities are often contradictory. Frequently, Cantor employs astonishingly simple gestures and means to create forceful, poetic images which concern the existential questions of life such as happiness, freedom, security or independence. In the video projection Tracking Happiness (2009), seven women dressed in white walk around in circles. Each one sweeps away the tracks of her predecessor with a broom, only to leave her own footprints in the fine sand.
In this careful, ceaseless laying and erasing of tracks, Cantor conceives a poetic image of the search for happiness, but leaves the viewer space for his own interpretations and ideas.
The new series of photographs, Holy Flowers, from which the exhibition takes its title, provides no clear answers, either. Twelve forms resembling stars or frost patterns are depicted, arranged like the images in a kaleidoscope.
It is only after looking more closely that one realises the star-shaped motifs are created from parts of machine-guns ...
In addition to film and photography, Cantor employs a wide spectrum of different media, ranging from simple materials and old craft techniques to drawings made in candle soot, lipstick or fingerprints on the wall.


Silvia Bächli and Eric Hattan
Snow until May
19 Feb.–1 May 2011
Opening: Friday, 18 Feb. 2011, 8 pm
Silvia Bächli and Eric Hattan spent four months in the small port Seydisfjördur in eastern Iceland during the spring of 2008. In a wood-panelled room painted in a faded green, Silvia Bächli worked on the first sheets for her presentation in the Swiss pavilion of the 53rd International Art Biennial in Venice (2009). During those months, Eric Hattan collected recordings for his video installation All the While, which he had been invited to produce for the Féstivale de création contemporain, Le Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse. Hattan filmed the surrounding snow-covered landscape for this installation through the windows of the small wooden house. The Kunsthalle Nürnberg will now be presenting the artistic output of this stay in Iceland: drawings by Silvia Bächli which were produced in Iceland but not shown in the context of the Biennial, a new construction of the Biennial presentation, the installations All the While and Coin coin de loin en loin (Pêcheurs d’Islande) by Eric Hattan, and a selection of their series of photographs Blindhaedir. These photographs do not constitute a narrative illustration of a successful journey, but a distillation of landscape comprising snow and ice, as there was an awful lot of that on Iceland during those months. The Icelanders say the winter was the severest since the 1960s. With Snow until May.


“Among Heroes”.
Role-Models in Contemporary Art
26 May–24 July 2011
Opening: Wednesday, 25 May 2011, 8 pm
In contemporary art one finds frequent use of citations, variations, adaptation and sampling, as well many references. Reference to other artists or artistic epochs has become a popular and common working method. Marcel Duchamp painted a beard onto the Mona Lisa in 1919 and so made mockery of an incunabulum of Renaissance art. In 1951, a 27-year-old Robert Rauschenberg enquired of Willem de Kooning whether he might erase one of his drawings and subsequently declare it his own work. What may seem to resemble an act of material destruction was intended rather as a tribute to the painter he admired.
The group exhibition Among Heroes. Pre-Images in Contemporary Art sets out to explore current examples of artistic reference. Thus, for instance, Marcel Duchamp’s joke endures in a series of photos by the Danish artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who give works by classicist sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen a rucksack to carry or dress them in tennis socks or jeans shorts. These exhibits shown in the Kunsthalle Nürnberg are not a matter of romantically transfiguring the past; they are subjective new interpretations of art-historical myth with a decidedly fresh, independent quality.


Michael Sailstorfer
01 Oct.–20 Nov. 2011
Opening: Friday, 30 Sept. 2011, 8 pm
Sculptor Michael Sailstorfer (*1979) likes to work with objects from everyday reality, which he demolishes or cuts up and then transforms. In turn, the new forms represent objects or devices from everyday contexts. They have in common the aesthetics of something hand-made and a change in function: vehicles and aeroplanes, for example, are turned into immobile shelters, a cement mixer metamorphoses into a popcorn-machine, or a police bus becomes a full set of drums. Michael Sailstorfer’s concept of sculpture is very broad-based and also includes smells, noises and movements. While Rocket Tree takes up where Fluxus and happening left off, the Reactor works shoot kinetic art into the 21st century. His understanding of sculpture and space, extended by the process of acting and a performative quality – and also incorporating all the laws of physics and social processes – seems close to that of Joseph Beuys. But where Beuys charged the qualities of his materials with metaphysical significance and symbolism, Sailstorfer avoids the mystic level and backs conceptual clarity, profound exaggeration and playful experimentation. A catalogue offering a first overview of his work will appear for the exhibition – published in cooperation with the Kestnergesellschaft (Kestner Society), Hanover, and the SMAK, Ghent (Distanz-Verlag).


Susan Hiller
10 Dec. 2011–19 Feb. 2012
Opening: Friday, 9 Dec. 2011, 8 pm
Susan Hiller (*1940 in Tallahassee/Florida), who has lived in London since 1969, is one of Great Britain's most influential artists. In retrospect, this could be because she was always ahead of her time. She had already investigated collective experiences such as dreams and memory using innovative and participatory methods in the 1970s, and later she also looked at encounters with UFOs and near-death experiences. Hiller works with a wide spectrum of media such as language and drawing, film and photography, found and other objects, and audio and video installations. Her frequently employed method of collecting, archiving and analysing material made her one of the first generation of artists to work conceptually, but from the very beginning she also employed various means of Surrealism such as 'ecriture automatique' or empirical research, and her projects investigate people's supernatural or visionary experiences. Susan Hiller's work centres on man and research into the cultural and social phenomena that influence his identity in an uncanny or subconscious way. The artist has already contributed key works from her oeuvre to exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Nürnberg: to This Land is my Land in 2006 (with J. Street Project, 2005) and to our project Romantic Conceptualism in 2007 (with Dedicated to the Unknown Artist, 1972–76). It appears quite logical, therefore, that Susan Hiller's first major individual exhibition in Germany is taking place in Nuremberg.

Mircea Cantor
9th December 2010 to 6th February 2011 Opening: Wednesday, 8th December 2010
To conclude the exhibition year 2010, the young Rumanian artist Mircea Cantor has been invited to present his installations, photographs, objects and video films in the Kunsthalle. Cantor captures social, economic and political themes in his poetic and sometimes ironic pictorial language. Many of his works attempt to find symbols with which to express life and its conditions: for example, Mircea Cantor locks a wolf and a deer into a gallery space in his video work Deeparture (2005). It is a work reminding one of Josef Beuys' performance I like America and America likes Me (1974), in which Beuys locked himself into the New York gallery René Block for a week, together with a coyote. In Deeparture the wolf and the deer wait passively, yet all their senses are continually fixated on one another. Cantor finds a striking metaphor for coexistence in a state of latent threat with this image of tense cohabitation. Inevitably, the situation of danger also leads to control and surveillance and thus highlights the thematic focus of this young Rumanian's art. For a state of (actual or potential) threat develops into a political and social belief in security, which – according to Cantor – has become our new dominant religion. Cantor finds poetic images in his work for this complex of themes – security, control, surveillance, protest –, taking a critical look at currently existing political power structures and the illusions of a neo-liberal society.