A retrospective of tomorrow's artists

Opening the 22nd of June at 19.00 hrs.

Exhibiting from the 23rd of June untill the 4th of July at the Schillerpalais, Schillerpromenade 4, 12049, Berlin.

Curators Karin Anzivino and Ferial Karrasch.

The exhibition, A Retrospective of Tomorrow’s Artists, is the result of a research undertaken within the Art Academies of Amsterdam, Berlin and Karlsruhe. The decision to work with art students from these different academies was triggered by the curiosity of getting an impression of what is happening in our immediate surroundings and to discover and present the work of artists of our own generation. In order to orient ourselves in the current art scene, it is important not only to look at the exhibitions of well-established artists in galleries, museums and Kunsthallen, but also at what is happening inside the art academy itself – an institution that claims to train and ‘make’ artists.The main Leitmotiv that connects the different works on display is the concept of traces. Traces can leave physical indications, such as wear and tear on an object, the remnants of a time gone by, or indications of a search. At the same time, they also can be intangible, like the effect on someone’s life after an encounter, a reference to someone, an omen, or a soupcon of a past feeling or memory. Leaving traces behind is inevitable. Whether produced consciously or unconsciously and despite their material or immaterial consistency, traces function as indications. They reveal ‘the absence of a presence’. This leads to their specific relation to time: coming from the past, they transfer this past to the present and project it onto the future. Traces attract our attention because they are attached to the past. This link to the past indicates a future goal, an interesting story, or something that has not yet been discovered.Leaving or discovering traces already presupposes an inclination towards the personal: traces do not present themselves as traces, they imply a personal connection and depend on an individual interpretation and experience in order to be identified. However, even though a trace is open for different kinds of interpretation, its specificity does not allow a complete arbitrary interpretation, for it always refers back to a particular story, an event, or a person. Thus, a trace opens up a margin of freedom and variation, but always only within the limits of story of the trace itself. In exhibition terms, a retrospective enables a spectator to look back at the body of work of an artist, as it is a view onto the past, of something that has been made previously. The works are thus traces of one artist’s life, process working, and development.A retrospective of art students is somehow paradoxical, but embodies exactly the oscillation that traces continuously set among past, present and future.