Nathalie Grenzhaeuser
THE ARCTIC SERIES. PART II
17.04. – 29.05.2016

The exhibition “The Arctic Series. Part II” is the continuation of a cooperation between the Städtischen Galerien Delmenhorst and the Kunstverein Bremerhaven, which together present the artistic work of the artist Nathalie Grenzhaeuser (*1969, Stuttgart) in the northwest region. The collaboration began in January 2016 with the exhibition “The Arctic Series. Part I” in Haus Coburg in Delmenhorst. “The Arctic Series” describes the complex of topics to which both exhibitions are dedicated: photo and video recordings that result from the artist’s various stays on Spitsbergen. The immediate reason for this was her most recent stay as a fellow of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Delmenhorst at the German-French AWIPEV station in Ny-Ålesund in April 2015 as part of the “Expedition Science and Art” project, a cooperation that began in 2012 with the Alfred Wegner Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven.

Against this background, Delmenhorst and Bremerhaven were the ideal exhibition venues for the artist’s photographs from the polar region. At the beginning of her exploration of the Arctic, Nathalie Grenzhaeuser’s photo series were still in the tradition of artists who once documented and visualized the journeys of the “great” explorers to previously unknown regions of the world with their drawings, watercolors, paintings or black and white photographs in a supposedly neutral manner. Since 2007, her interest has increasingly focused on interventions in the ecologically sensitive Arctic landscape and our culturally influenced ideas of the Arctic. She uses analogue and digital imaging techniques to transform these unequal appearances into her own visual language. She does not pursue a documentary approach, but rather frequently edits her images and, most recently, video sequences. For example, she puts her images together from several shots of the same motif, in different lighting conditions or from different perspectives. The images, which appear so natural and obvious, are therefore not classic photographs. Rather, the images created were filtered from a compositional and content perspective and were condensed in a way due to the distance in time from the actual time of recording. This is also the case with the images for the current exhibition in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, which are being shown there together with older photographs of an abandoned mining settlement.

Curated by Dr. Kai Kähler.