The
Art
of
Emergency

Maria Arzt

Maria Arzt is an artist with a background in care-work and social science. S[he is studying Fine Arts at HfK Bremen since October 2020.

A goal of t[her artistic practise is sketching new fields of action, togetherness and imaginaries through tracing their current barriers and layers, examining their permeability by touch.

For this s[he is employing installation, sculpture, writing, sound and video in engaging with representability and materiality, subjectivation and culture production as well as dis-placements and signs.

Since March 2022 s[he is co-organizing the international, student-run project space “Circa 106” and is involved in volunteer and activist spaces in Bremen. Emancipatory cultural work is part of the artistic practise s[he is aiming to build, understanding t[her art-works to be part of a politics of culture.


Sometimes in the same place

For the duration of the residency, Maria Arzt wants to explore the thealit workroom as a multi-functional and connective space. The constant flow of violent imagery and messages of ever-approaching catastrophe is to be slowed down and examined for its mediality and its material and physical effects. Some of the materials on hand are projection, sound, text, frequencies, encounters, urgencies, multiplicities, hypervigilance.

In a media field that normalizes crisis as a permanent condition, eroding more complex questions of solidarity and forms of life to a mere question of survival - can a form hold tensions as well as multiplicities and can a collective approach hold urgencies as well as complexity? How much time[space is left in it and does that mean – time[space for how many?

I saw you see a person drown and do nothing about it.

Yes, of course, that was on the news.

Not

              here

Sometimes in the same place

………………………………………………

Art Residency #4
Maria Arzt
16.01.-09.02.2023

Maria Arzt will start her Art Residency #4 at Arbeitszimmer thealit Monday, Jan. 16—until Thursday, Feb. 9—with her project Sometimes in the same place. It is not only about the tremendous shock in emergency situations, but also about violence in the form of its representation and its concealment. Because the violence can not always be considered as located somewhere else, but is "sometimes in the same place" as you, at the latest when the own security must be vehemently emphasized. De facto, 'crisis' tends to be normalized as a permanent condition. Questions of solidarity and life design quickly erode into a mere question of the best possible survival.Maria Arzt is "concerned with simultaneities of different perceptions of security, as well as their coincidence in medial mediation. A flow of media representations of violence proclaims a permanent state of crisis that questions the meanings of 'war', 'stability' and 'elsewhere'.

This flow will be slowed down and examined more closely, as well as tensions and different modes of mediation. "Sometimes in the same place is exploring its possibilities as a physical space to hold, connect or superimpose different urgencies, priorities and frames of reference. It is a space that is both public and private. Maria Arzt will start working with tensions, densities, and frequencies of different kinds—to make tension tangible as something to work and interact with, not merely bear, hold or stage. As she puts it, "The goal is to have something with which we can confront in a concrete way issues such as the transmissibility of violent medial landscapes, frames of reference to different 'folds,' and 'our time,' which is assumed to be expiring but historically held in recursivity. If 'history is a loop,' 'the future' is tubular-but whose time is it?"

February, 8
CREATING TENSIONS



13-15 h & 17-21 h
Open Studio Day

17 h
Performance >Atlasbefreiung< and Talk

Here comes an invitation to the Open Studio Day at the end of Maria Arzt's Residency #4 at Arbeitszimmer thealit, St. Jürgen Str. 157/159, Bremen.

On Wednesday, February 8, Maria Arzt will open the space for visitors under the title "Creating Tensions", from 13:00-15:00, continuing at 17:00 with the performance Atlasbefreiung and talk. End of the Open Studio Day will be at 21:00. "It is a space with different gradients of tension/pressure and the possibility of negotiating this," be communicated, and thus there is something to "do" actively, in this space … in THE ART OF EMERGENCY.


Other work by Maria Arzt

Auswahl →