Exhibition visit to the Liaison Office of the German Bundestag
Participation for EU civil servants and ministerial officials from the Permanent Representations to the EU and interested parties
The Goethe-Institut, together with the Liaison Office of the German Bundestag, invites you to a vernissage "Blickwechsel - Échange de regards" Christoph Brech Video and Photography on Wednesday, 29 November from 12:30 - 14:00 in the premises of the Liaison Office of the German Bundestag.
After a short introduction by Dr Andreas Kaernbach, curator of the art collection of the German Bundestag, Christoph Brech will answer your questions and then guide you through the exhibition, which includes video installations as well as photographs - in particular from his Rome/Vatican and Johann Gottfried Schadow series.
The video installation "Blickwechsel" is the first time that an art-in-architecture project with video art will be represented in the buildings of the German Bundestag: In 2011, artists Christoph Brech and Nicola Borgmann won an art-in-architecture competition for the extension to the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders House. The installation is due to be installed in April 2024.
The installation stages a 1:1 reproduction of reality with the help of video cameras. The restaurant in the basement of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus facing the Spree would only allow visitors a view of the concrete walls of an inner courtyard, but not of the higher Spree promenade or the Spree itself. A restaurant on the Spree without a window overlooking the river? The artists have responded to this uninviting situation with their design: two large-format screens in the restaurant room allow a view of the Spree's waters via a live stream. Four video cameras film the Spree and transmit the images to the monitors in real time. The perspective of the cameras is set up so that they only show the water level directly in front of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus, i.e. no surroundings - the flowing past of the Spree, its longitudinal movement, is shown in the restaurant room, whereas in the neighbouring visitor group room, the Spree can be seen flowing towards the camera.
The installation creates an immediate site-specific reference: the video walls act as windows, so to speak, opening up a view of the natural surroundings - a view that is actually denied to visitors.
The water mirror in turn becomes a mirror of the surrounding buildings as well as the weather, the time of day and the sky in its sunniness or cloudiness, the morning brightness or the evening light reflections from the illuminated buildings all around. The reality of the city and nature is refracted in the water mirror - a water mirror that also reflects the history of the location, as it was precisely at this point that the Spree once divided Berlin into a zone of freedom and one of bondage. Other installations in public spaces, such as the glass windows for the Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche in Munich, complement the presentation of the design for the German Bundestag.
Christoph Brech also applies this principle of indirect reproduction of references to meaning and place to his photographs and video works. These are photographs and video sequences that also illuminate the time horizon of centuries in seemingly incidental observations and bring seemingly dead things mysteriously to life. The exhibition includes photographs from the rooms and archives of the Vatican Museums in Rome as well as three video films.
Christoph Brech (* 1964 in Schweinfurt, lives in Munich) is considered one of Germany's most important video artists and has created numerous installations in public spaces.
His themes are time, transience, transitions and memory, often in close connection with musical motifs.
Text: Andreas Kaernbach, Curator of the Art Collection of the German Bundestag.
We kindly ask you to register by 24 November at:
europanetzwerk.deutsch-bruessel@goethe.de
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