Through the Eyes of a Child

Dave Ball | Linda Blüml | Sebastian Diaz | Hannah Goldstein | Daniel Schieferdecker | Pilvi Takala | Katharina Ziemke

9 – 18 August 2024

Opening: Friday, August 9, 6–10 pm

Through the Eyes of a Child brings together a group of works that thematise the relationship between artists and children. Whether through collaborating with children, representing children and their world, or responding to a reshaping of the world brought about by having children, the artists in the exhibition take a variety of approaches to exploring the interconnectedness of the worldviews of adults and children.

Steering clear of clichéd ideas of childlike creativity such as Picasso’s claim that it took him “four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”, the works in the exhibition stage a more critical and complex coming-together of the perspectives of the artist and the child.

When a children’s toy is metamorphosised into a prestige object of luxury, when an artist-mother relives the moment she lost her child in a crowd by dutifully cutting out children from photographs, when the memory of an artist’s own childhood is re-presented as a haunting image divested of adults and their political chatter, when a proud artist-father enterprisingly finishes off his five-year-old son’s drawing of a unicorn by colouring it in, when an artist embarks on a crazed attempt to document his children responding to every word in the dictionary beginning with F, when the most fitting narrative about the impact of climate change an artist can find to animate her image-making comes from her own teenage son, and when an artist wins a lucrative artworld award and hands over the prize money to a group of children to spend entirely as they wish – then the distinction between the world of adults and the world of children no longer seems quite so clear.

Curated by Dave Ball

*Disclaimer*

As a collective HilbertRaum is made up of a diverse group of artists. It grants its members full freedom and responsibility in curating their allotted exhibitions. Any political statement or opinion expressed as part of a show is the individual position of the curating member in charge and not HilbertRaum as a whole.

_________

This exhibition has been curated by Dave Ball in solidarity with the stance of Pilvi Takala, who is currently striking against cultural institutions in Germany repressing free speech and the right to protest. As a humanitarian crisis unfolds in Gaza, voices critical of Western complicity must not be silenced. Only dialogue, discussion, and negotiation offer hope for our children.