STUDIO KUHLMANN IS RUN BY HANNAH KUHLMANN (*1989 COLOGNE) AN INTERDISCIPLINARY DESIGNER AND CURATOR WITH A FOCUS ON CONTEMPORARY AND COLLECTIBLE DESIGN.
SINCE 2015 SHE CURATED SEVERAL EXHIBITIONS ESPECIALLY DURING THE PASSAGEN COLOGNE. IN 2020 SHE SUMMARIZED HER CURATORICAL WORK UNDER THE NAME 101PS AND FOUNDED A PROJECT ROOM IN COLOGNE.
THE EXHIBITIONS SHOWED ARE BASED ON PROJECT WORKS OF NEWLY FORMED TEMPORARY COLLECTIVES WITH THE AIM TO BRING LOCALS AND INTERNATIONALS TOGETHER TO CREATE A PLATFORM FOR CONNECTION AND EXCHANGE. IN 2018 THE EXHIBITION „HOMO LUDENS“ WON THE PASSAGEN PRIZE FOR BEST EXHIBITION DESIGN AND CONCEPT.
101PS is on a mission to build a global network of artists, designers and free minds. It is a non–profit institution with a focus on exchange, research, inspiration and education. It is an extension of what an artistic exchange for contemporary art can be by taking advantage of the freedom that comes with running an independent practice.
101 PS aims to promote new and investigative approaches – to cross boundaries between different creative disciplines, cultural identities, geographical locations, political economies, crafts and new technologies. By emphasizing open dialogues, it aims to encourage experimentation, collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange within the workgroup but also to the audience.
The exhibition program is therefore not guided by a singular curatorial line, but represents a diverse constellation of artistic interests. It’s structure is based on self-organization and the equal participation of all people involved.
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„Et les rites sont dans le temps ce que la demeure est dans l‘espace.” – Antoine de Saint–Exupery
Thus the writer attributes to the ritual a potential for conveying a feeling of security and defines it further as a symbolic technique of containment. „They transform being in the world into being at home. They make the world a reliable place. They are in time what an apartment is in space. They make time habitable. Yes, they make it walkable like a house. They arrange time, furnish it.“ (*Byun Chul Han, 2019)
In uncertain times, people usually conjure up history, tradition and cultural heritage. Thus a ritual can also be understood as a reflection on a common identity.
The design of the >ritual habitus< is constantly bound to social influences. They transmit and represent those values and orders which carry a community. Rituals often amortize a community without linguistic communication, but through their very own semiotic system. With a view to a society that is growing together more and more, but at the same time individualized, which allows the individual to be isolated from himself and his environment, new forms of community life - new rituals - are needed. As soon as the constitution of space changes, the home must be adequately adapted.
In the ritual framework, things are not consumed or consumed, but needed. Ritual practices ensure that we deal and resonate not only with other people, but also with things. Rituals possess the ability to make accessible the unmistakable aura of earthly material that radiates incessantly from its core. Conversely, the earthly material gives the ritual an anchor to which transcendent experiences can be tied. Thus the ritual connects man and material, space and time.
If we want to understand rituals as „cunstrui humanitas“, spaces must be created in which ritual forms can be spoken about. The exhibition „Pantheon Phantasma“ revolves around the many varieties of our identitary obsession in inhabited space: from rediscovered rites and invented rituals to inflation from the irrational idealization of living and back to the absolute authenticity and originality of the home.
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The theme of this year‘s exhibition builds on the recent publication of Byung-Chul Han essay “Vom verschwinden der Rituale” where the philosopher discusses societal and individual isolation processes caused by technical progress and the colonization of time. Increasing egocentrism and narcissistic authoritarianism are causing the urgent necessity to build spaces to explore new forms of shared life and social cohesion.
PANTHEON PHANTASMA DEPENdance, is a microcosm of artistic-experimental togetherness, located right in the underpath gallery space Gold+Beton under the “Ebertplatz”. In contrast to the object focussed main exhibition (which is based in an old fire station only 300 meters away) this venue relies on body based performances, physical- and emotional matters. At this location, interdisciplinary performance art is linked with the retrieve of ritual practices to explore new visionary narratives and socio-political discourses. Doing so Gold+Beton transforms for a week into a temporary territory for an experiential antithesis to normative instructions for action, contemporary production and consumer behavior.
The cultural program invites artists and performance makers from 12 different disciplines to explore the sphere of the ritual as a physical practice. The public will be actively involved in the programme through workshops and participatory actions. Through spoken word and poetry, dance and movement practice, short film screenings, sonic acts, music shows and reading salons, the gallery space and its urban surrounding will alter into a venue for transdisciplinary and participative performance art in the broadest sense. Performers* and audiences become inevitably the shaping factor for various social scenarios in space.
With a focus on the search for a redefinition of social coexistence in the public urban space of Cologne, Ebertplatz with its current socio-political situation is the ideal location for a one week show, dealing with the emergence of new narratives. The aim is to give space to non-binary realities and to explore other forms of community living to facilitate moments of collective dreaming of alternative futures.
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