News |Natascha Süder Happelmann represents Germany at the Biennale di Venezia 2019
Sculptor and Villa Aurora Fellow Natascha Sadr Haghighian will represent Germany at the 58th Venice Biennale under the pseudonym Natascha Süder Happelmann. Franciska Zólyom, curator of the German Pavilion 2019, announced the collaboration with the artist on Thursday.
Natascha Süder Happelmann, the pseudonym is part of the artistic concept, is an important voice in the contemporary art world. "In her work she unfolds the poetic, imaginary and critical potential of art. It stands for an artistic positioning that not only analyzes or comments on aesthetic and scientific concepts, social or political conditions, but also actively changes them and re-establishes their role understanding and their behavior for the respective process", it says in the explanatory statement for their selection. Since 2014 Happelmann holds the professorship of sculpture (thinking as body, shape, form, formation) at the HfK Bremen.
For the contribution in the German Pavilion 2019 Happelmann works with her personal spokeswoman Helene Duldung. Happelman has adapted her name to the special task at the Kunstbiennale. The artist has evaluated a collection of names she has been using for the last thirty years. After careful consideration of the available variants, which came about through auto-correction and absenteeism on the part of public authorities, she chose the appropriate name Natascha Süder Happelmann with the help of algorithmic parameters and societal protocols: an optimal form of integration.
The release of the artist subject from representative roles or political instrumentalizations is always part of the artistic practice of Natascha Süder Happelmann. Already with the CV exchange bioswop.net founded by the artists in 2004, concepts such as identity, representation, fact and self are being put to negotiation and the fetish >artist biography< has been undermined.
Natascha Süder Happelmann works predominantly installatively and performatively as well as with text and sound. As an individual or collective artistic position, she allows her practice to be incorporated into political and social processes repeatedly. In doing so, she thematizes the activist aspect of artistic work and re-measures the conditions and spaces for aesthetic research and artistic action.
