Event location: Bird Street Gallery, Nelson Mandela University
Event date and time: 02/08/2022 00:00:00
Geography of Belonging
an exhibition by visiting artist/lecturer Beatrix Reinhardt
02 August 2022
17h30 for 18h00
Bird Street Gallery
20 Bird Street, Central, Gqeberha
Beatrix Reinhardt's artistic production has been focusing on the politics of space.
The works look at interior and exterior spaces exploring the relationship between space, memory and history, and increasingly the notion of the trace.
The Geography of Belonging extends these investigations into linguistical and mental spaces.
Contextual statement: When working with interior spaces I am observing the way individuals express themselves through how they organize, use and decorate their spaces, and how this can be seen as an expression of cultural values, histories, ideals, beliefs, individual taste and sensibilities. My focus is on how demarcation can be achieved through decoration, and how architecture and decoration can reflect temporary liberation from everydayness. When working with exterior spaces, I am interested in looking at what I call charged sites - spaces that endure(d) drama and/or tensions. However, my images offer little or no discernible evidence of these histories. The implications being that significance can only be materialized by human experience. In several works weeds and plants are identified as authors, historians and witnesses having imaginary conversations. While my past work more often than not omitted the object, the relevance of the object in different contexts and production has regained importance. Objects stir recollection. They inspire stories, and retelling these stories constitutes memory. For individuals, as for communities, it may be said that memory is identity; at the very least it is an essential part of it. To lose your memory is, quite literally, to no longer know who you are, and I believe we have all witnessed the consequences of such loss. Since memory is constantly on the move, so too are the narratives in which the meaning of objects is embedded. Forever evolving and reshaped in order to make sense of our present, this history coheres in a desired future.
Reinhardt grew up in Jena, former East Germany. After the completion of her undergraduate studies in New German Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin she planned to study at the New School for Social Research in New York for one year. The one became two and Reinhardt graduated with M.A. in Media Studies. During her studies at the New School she started her studies of photography, which she continued at Illinois State University. Since the completion of a Master of Fine Arts degree, Reinhardt has been living, working, curating and teaching in different parts of the world. She has been invited as artist-in-residence to universities and galleries in Finland, India, South Africa, Australia, China, Turkey, Vietnam and the US, amongst others. In 2005 she was appointed at City University of New York/CUNY and lives and works the majority of the year in Queens, N.Y.
open to view:
01 - 22 August 2022
09h00 for 16h00 (weekdays)