Artists’ talk | BERLIN – LOS ANGELES: SEEING AS PROCESS

with Veronika Kellndorfer und Steve Rowell, Introduction and moderation: Drew Hammond (in english)
A cooperation with the Senate Chancellery Berlin as part of the City Partnership Berlin—Los Angeles

Veronika Kellndorfer is a Berlin-based artist who frequently works in Los Angeles; Steven Rowell is a Los Angeles-based artist who has lived and worked in Berlin and who will be returning to Berlin as a Villa Aurora fellow in 2015.

Both artists treat locations and structures that could seem benign in their overt aspect, but which in fact belie disconcerting implications that both enhance and transcend their aesthetic interest. As these implications reveal themselves to the viewer, the mere appearance of these works recedes into their accruing status as metonyms for narratives of potentially dark aspects of contemporary history.
Kellndorfer often integrates formal and conceptual aspects of a work by means of her emphasis on semi-transparent and semi-reflective layers inherent in her subjects—a strategy that simultaneously achieves and symbolizes this integration. Rowell’s research-based projects invariably generate tensions between their themes and the formal aspects of their revelation, an attribute that both reinforces their expressive affects, and invests them with aesthetic criteria that transcend conventional research or documentary.

Veronika Kellndorfer (born in Munich, 1962) started her studies of art in 1982 at Hochschule für angewandte Künste in Vienna. Moving to Berlin Kellndorfer pursued her studies of Art at Universität der Künste until 1990. She is most renowned for her artistic examinations of architecture, which appear as a transla-tional junction between architectural objects, their history and emerging (social) space, as well as between various techniques of capturing, preserving and transmitting these observations and reflections. Veronika Kellndorfer has received numerous grants since then, which comprise a Stiftung Kunstfonds grant in Bonn (1998), an Akademie Schloss Solitude artist residency in Stuttgart (2000), a Villa Aurora residency in Los Angeles (2003), a Villa Massimo residency in Rome (2005), as well as a Goethe-Institute Villa Kamogawa artist residency in Kyoto (2012), among many others. In 2014, Kellndorfer was Senior Fellow at IKKM, Bauhaus Universität Weimar. Kellndorfer‘s work (collaborative and solo) has among others been exhibited at the following galleries and museums: Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Veronika Kellndorfer lives and works in Berlin.

Steve Rowell is a research-based artist who works with still and moving images, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts. Currently based in Los Angeles, he has lived in Berlin, Chicago, and Washington DC, over the past 20 years. His transdisciplinary practice focuses on overlapping aspects of technology, perception, and culture as related to ontology and landscape. Rowell contextualizes the built environment with the surrounding medium of nature; appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archeologist. In addition to being Program Manager at The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles) since 2001, he has collaborated with SIMPARCH (Chicago) and The Office of Experiments (London). Steve's work (collaborative and solo) has been exhibited internationally at a range of galleries and museums, including: The 2006 Whitney Biennial and PS1, New York; Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, San Francisco; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Temporäre Kunsthalle and NGBK, Berlin; The Barbican Art Centre and the Frieze Art Fair, London; The John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Ballroom Marfa; The Center for PostNatural History, Pittsburgh; The Institute for Visual Art, Milwaukee; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2013 he received awards from Creative Capital and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Berlin | June 22, 2015 | 7pm
Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle | Unter den Linden 13-15 | 10117 Berlin