Project Outline
From August 26 to September 6, 2009, the festival for international contemporary art, subvision. kunst. festival. off., fathomed artistic strategies beyond the established art business. Artists’ initiatives from around the world presented their artistic work and their unique art presentation and mediation forms that manoeuvre outside established institutions and disregard commercial exploitability to a broad audience. On the invitation of curator Brigitte Kölle and artistic director Martin Köttering, more than 30 artists’ groups, independent project spaces and off spaces from more than 20 countries gathered in Hamburg to create a tension-filled and varied presentation platform with exhibitions, artist’s talks, performances, concerts, readings, and video screenings. A temporary exhibition architecture made of freight containers and scaffoldings formed the unusual framework for an unconventional endeavour. The design of the yet undeveloped Strandkai in HafenCity was oriented toward urban models and cited them, not without irony..
While the scaffoldings and containers have long been dismantled and are being used again in their original function, the ideas and events of the festival continue to resonate: What remains is the memory of an extraordinary situation of exhibiting and gathering, of numerous interesting encounters between artists and visitors, many of whom made use of the mediation programme developed for subvision by students of the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) Hamburg. A stocktaking of around 400 international project spaces took place – a unique endeavour regarding its scope – and is made available on this Website along with links to the homepages of the artists’ initiatives. We hope that this research effort will form the foundation for further projects in this area. The catalogue and our festival pictures convey a vivid impression of the unusual atmosphere and the events on site. But what remains, above all, are the newly established contacts and connections among the participating artists’ groups, which will lead to exciting exhibition projects and cooperations in the future.
.
