HFBK TOUR PROVOKES THOUGHT AND INSPIRATION
By Holly Todd
For some time now, AWCH Art Group members have headed to the annual student show at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste( HfbK), Hamburg’ s fine arts university, every February to check out what young artists are up to these days. This year’ s visit was especially fun as we were joined by a number of our members’ offspring. A couple of us had met our American guide, Felice Barkow, volunteering at Hanseatic Help. As a first-year student in the sculpture department, Felice showed us mainly sculpture where upcycling and assemblage of found or discarded objects and materials reigned supreme.
Disturbingly fascinating were a series of beautifully designed and polished, artfully skewed circular“ terrazzo” wall plaques incorporating found animal bones by Helli Müller. Another group favorite, not just with us AWCH swimmers, was a large and exuberant orange and turquoise wall hanging consisting of creatively stitched together lost and found items from public swimming pools. Felice introduced us to the affable artist, Franziska Koepsel, who had grown up on a farm. She told us she had been inspired by the regional swimming pool which was the center of summertime childhood and youth social life in her village. A vivid reminder of the enormous plastic waste we thoughtlessly generate every day, the work also reassured us that kids in the cell phone age still can have fun face to face and moving outdoors.
The relationship between high art and commerce was another focus of the show. One artist had twisted, buckled, and lightly spray-painted scraps of aluminum into glittery floral forms and presented them on a kind of counter. A locked display case elsewhere contained a model of the department’ s studio and exhibition spaces furnished with miniature clever and humorous jewelry pieces and objets d’ art that were for sale. We were handed a price list and learned that quite a few items had already been sold. A nearby wall had been transformed into a delicate play of pastel shimmer and gentle shadow by our guide Felice and fellow classmate Lara Nina-Weber. Their installation consisted of a few wire coat hangers bent into whimsical shapes and each hung with three or four precious objects, reminiscent of baby shoes, frilled award ribbons, and children’ s enigmatic craft creations mostly sewn from satiny and velvety fabric scraps or fringed with safety pins.
We ended our tour in the university’ s studio building where graduate student Jianan Ning from Nanjing exhibited two segments of what resembled industrial barred fencing, brutally ripped apart and incongruously cast in fragile, traditional Chinese porcelain. One was painted with traditional visual symbols of peace and the other with excerpts from peace treaties, evoking how threatened and tenuous these symbols and treaties and peace itself are today.
42 HAMBURG HAPPENINGS