Juan Arata, Sarah Dale, Louise Gibson, Elin Ryd, Samantha Sethi & Madeline Stillwell

STRATEGIC ACTS OF SEEING, AND KNOWING, AND NOT

03 - 12 July 2015

Curated by Andy Holtin

Organized by Hilbert Raum member Andy Holtin, this exhibition brings together three Berlin-based artists and three visitors. Though the forms that the works of these six artists take are varied, they share a core strategy of artwork as inquiry, a curiosity about cause and effect in the systems of the world that works itself out in the studio. They also share a willingness, or maybe a need, to overlap media and processes in the pursuit of their inquiries, letting the nature of the query at hand set the terms of each work's presence in the world. Together their works present a spectrum of hypotheses and tests, ends and means, and worries and desires.

This exhibition has grown out of the activities of American University's graduate summer program, MFASTUDIOBERLIN. The Berlin-based artists, Madeline Stillwell, Juan Arata, and Louise Gibson, have, along with many others, opened their studios to and shared their time with the members of the program. Each was asked to select one member of this summer's program to participate with them in this exhibition. The selected artists from the program are Sarah Dale, Elin Ryd, and Samantha Sethi.

Originating from Scotland, Louise Gibson graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009 and in 2013 relocated her studio to Berlin. She is currently on a long-term private residency placement in a metal recycling yard on the outskirts of the city in Lichtenberg. Exhibiting mainly in Europe, Gibson's activities include The Grove Artistic bursary (London) where she was commissioned to create a public sculpture to coincide with 2012 The Olympic Games, nomination for the berlin art prize 2014 and a runner up for the Warsteiner Blooom Award 2014 (ART FAIR cologne), and an exhibition with the Rebel Angels in Venice, a independent group show currently running at The Venice Biennale 2015.

Juan Arata, a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina is a multimedia artist living in Berlin who works in the fields of installation, video, sculpture, writing and painting. He sometimes performs and acts as curator of self developed projects, which usually involves a networking mode of work or cooperation. His work is most centered in history and its most outstanding makers, not because of their merits, but for the position they represent in time, as inflector vectors of repetition. Through his artworks, Arata studies the different paradigms which shaped our actual state of mind and its consequent life structure.