For four years now, the Arthur Boskamp Foundation has been making a significant contribution to the advancement of young art in the region with its grant for young artists from northern Germany. This year’s grant recipients, Björn Beneditz (1978 in Husum) and Daniel Müller-Friedrichsen (1975 in Hannover), both conceive of space as a lived stage, yet each in his own individual way.

Björn Beneditz is concerned with “social spaces”. Places, in particular, are permanently unfinished in light of their functions and interactions with the people that use them. Beneditz is interested in opening up spaces and dissolving the barriers between supposed high culture and pop culture. His grant project “VII Spots” thematizes the stage and the spotlight. The working process takes visual form in a site-specific ensemble consisting of an imposing stage construction, posters and a fanzine.

Daniel Müller-Friedrichsen adapts ‘matte-paintings’, an early film industry invention used to produce spatial illusions. He generates spaces in oil on glass panes, which function not only as backdrops in his films but also as works of art in their own right. Aside from these paintings, two films will be shown in the exhibition. The films weave text, space and performance into a paradoxical mesh of love, desire and the impossibility of representing these verbally without getting trapped in platitudes.

curated by Katja Schroeder