O.T.

Curated by Kiki Seiler-Michalitsi

The non-thematic group exhibition brings together representatives of a young international art scene who, despite differences in artistic practice and artistic behavior, meet in an exhibition in which both the specifically individual and the inevitably common are presented. By constantly regenerating and reinventing itself throughout its creation, the exhibition mutated into an experimental model of open dimensions.

Raphael Hefti
Born in Biel in 1978, Raphael Hefti, who now lives and works in Zurich and London, studied photography at the Ecole Cantonale d'Art in Lausanne and at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London after training as an electronics engineer. In his work, he deals with industrial production processes and the technical creation of everyday objects. By transforming or changing conventional production processes and excessive, bold treatments, he attempts to reveal the often unexpected properties of materials and their particular aesthetics. Raphael Hefti experiments with materials such as glass, steel, magnesium, pyrotechnic light and photographic paper. In an alchemical manner, he creates sculptural objects and images of dazzling aesthetics that question our industrially conditioned perception. This also applies to his work presented in the exhibition (Various threaded poles of determinate length potentially altering their determination, 2015) with rods made of various metals, which, when heated to 1100º, were given a glassy fragility, but whose surface in part has a broken, eroded structure reminiscent of charring caused by the harsh procedure.

Rodrigo Hernández
Born in Mexico City in 1983, Rodrigo Hernández is currently living in Basel on a scholarship from the Laurenz-Haus Foundation. He studied at the BFA Escuela National de Pintura in Mexico City, the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe and the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht. His work consists of drawings, objects and sculptures, which are often the result of intensive research and engagement with the anarchic art strategies of Dadaism and Surrealism, or with literature, and are brought together in complex, minimalist-looking concept installations. Man made out of clouds, 2015, his work in the exhibition, a hanging, rudimentary, archaic-looking humanoid figure in bas-relief, is a further development of Rodrigo Hernández's "Sonderlingen", an archetypal, idol-like figure with high identificatory potential that is based on art-immanent systems and interferes with the viewer of the work.

Michael Pfrommer
Michael Pfrommer, born 1972 in Leonberg (Germany), studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule in Frankfurt a. M. and at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo. He lives and works in Frankfurt a. M. Michael Pfrommer's preferred media are painting, drawing and illustration, with which he works on narrative structures, historical narratives and fantastic stories. This results in humorously whimsical paintings and drawings, enigmatic, disturbing worlds of their own with open plots and unfinished narrative threads. Fragmentary narratives are created, inspired by music, films, song lyrics, comics and the artist's direct personal environment, as well as his fascination with some artists of the past (Francisco de Goya, James Ensor and others); surreally alienated mythologies with often absent protagonists are repeatedly reworked and transferred into ever new contexts.

Mandla Reuter
The artist Mandla Reuter, who was born in 1975 in Nqutu (South Africa) and now lives in Berlin, studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at the School of Design in New York. His spatial concepts and interventions deal with real and fictitious places, with interior and exterior spaces, their functions and their transformations. Through subtle or radical interventions, spatial and temporal shifts, de- and recontextualizations take place. Local conditions are often reorganized or questioned, charged with new meanings, made perceptible differently. Mandla Reuter designs, composes or restructures new spaces with existing objects and natural or industrially manufactured materials. His works in the inner courtyard and inside the Kunst Raum Riehen are a loose combination of objects that form a coherent construct. While in the inner courtyard two seemingly abandoned objects, a rough block of marble and a pipe curve, mutate into references to fountains or parts of larger urban irrigation systems or settlement projects, inside the house one encounters a reference (framed letter) to a piece of land, an unlocated place, but presumed to be in Los Angeles. An expansive light work consisting of a sodium vapor lamp and neon tubes that switch every hour bathes the same room in intense yellow or pale daylight and thus addresses the time of twilight, when a city's outdoor lighting is usually switched on or off. At the same time, it refers to different time zones. The collage-like arrangement of objects removes the space from the context of the exhibition venue.

Hannah Weinberger
Hannah Weinberger, born in Filderstadt (Germany) in 1988, studied media arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. She lives and works in Basel. The creation of sound works, music and sound performances, often developed and co-produced by a collective, is an essential part of Hannah Weinberger's artistic practice. Because of her open way of working, she is not only an important representative of contemporary collective creation, but also a representative of a young generation that, in an age of unlimited availability of information and media, is gaining access to constantly perfecting technology (music and film productions) in order to create new compositions taken from various online platforms and other sources, assembled on the computer. Hannah Weinberger's sound works in the art space, reduced, subtle sounds, simulate background music as it is used in shopping centers, stores, elevators, lounges and other public places to underline consumerist behavior through feigned discretion. Transferred to the exhibition space, its function is stripped bare, it appears intrusive, but at the same time it animates. Hannah Weinberger's participatory sound concepts of social relevance thus emerge as a model that has long since become a strategy for consumer-oriented worlds; a sensual experience.