Annika Kahrs
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18.01. – 01.03.2015

Since September 1st, the Hamburg artist Annika Kahrs (* 1984) has been a new scholarship holder of the Kunst & Nutzen e.V. association in Bremerhaven. The performance and film artist, who studied with Andreas Slominski and Jeanne Faust in Hamburg and Harun Farocki in Vienna, will live and work in the port city for six months.

In her artistic work, Annika Kahrs primarily combines the media of video, installation and performance to create strange narratives and blurs their media boundaries. The conceptual working method of the Hamburg artist is characterized by a process-based and at the same time experimental method. In doing so, she often turns against expectations and focuses on circumventing rules and systems.

The focus of Annika Kahrs’ narrative productions is often on themes and questions in the tension between fiction and reality. This is also the case in her latest video work »Solid surface, with hills, valleys, craters and other topographic features, primarily made of ice”, which will be presented at the Produzentengalerie Hamburg from the end of November.

Many of her works deal with the transformation of language and sound. In the 14-minute poetic video work »Playing to the Birds« (2013), which refers to Saint Francis’s Sermon to the Birds, different forms of language are repeatedly transformed, returned and merged into one another:
In a light-flooded hall of the Jenisch-Haus in Hamburg, a pianist, surrounded by bird cages with budgies, zebra finches and canaries, plays Franz Liszt’s piano piece Légende No. 1 - »St. Francis of Assisi - The Sermon to the Birds«. In its composition, Liszt’s Sermon to the Birds lets a whole flock of birds sound through trills and high tones. In this way, the music tries to imitate the language of birds. The artistically demanding piece, played with virtuosity by the pianist, is not presented to the usual audience, but rather returned to its original addressees, the birds, who are now allowed to listen to the human interpretation of their language. In a grotesque way, the songbirds do not become the main actors of their musical ability, but rather they become listeners to a musical performance of their communication.

Annika Kahrs’ works have been presented both nationally and internationally, including at the Bienal Internacional de Curitiba, Brazil, in the Hamburger Kunsthalle and in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, as well as at exhibition projects such as the Art Weekender in Bristol, Great Britain, and in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The results of her residency in the port city will be on display at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven from January 18, 2015.

Curated by Klaus Becké.