21 January 2022 – 6 March 2022
Soft Opening: Friday 21 January 5 – 8 p.m.
In this exhibition, artist and filmmaker Lena Ditte Nissen shows works that were created in the context of dealing with her family’s involvement in National Socialism. Video, language, photography, and text reveal historical contexts that are set in connection with reflections from the present. Thus, in ever-expanding and contracting circles, the work revolves around the subject of personal confrontation, in which the subjective gaze keeps changing its position, keeps refocusing.
The center of the exhibition is the polyphonic 3-channel video installation TAKE IT AS IT IS, produced by Lena Ditte Nissen in 2021 as part of her Art & Theory Fellowship at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen. Also on view are a series of new photographs taken at the former Nazi doctors’ leadership school.
The Danish-German artist and filmmaker Lena Ditte Nissen studied film and media art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Her individual and partly collaborative films, performances and installations have been shown in international institutions and film festivals, including the Museo de Arte Moderno Rio de Janeiro, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Museo del Banco de la República Bogotá, the film museums in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf, KAI10 Arthena Foundation, Rubenstein Art Center, CCA Center for Contemporary Art Tbilisi, the International Film Festivals in Edinburgh and Belo Horizonte, DOK Leipzig, CPH: DOX, WNDX Festival of Moving Image, 25FPS Zagreb, Festival de nouveau cinéma Montréal and the Anthology Film Archive NYC.
Lena has been in residence at SOMA Mexico, LIGHTCONE Paris and <lugar a dudas> in Cali, Colombia. In 2019/20 she was a fellow of the international Art&Theory Program at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck, Austria. She is a 2021 Berlinale Talents Alumna and currently a selected participant of DOK ART, a development programme for debut documentaries, for which she also received funding from the Film und Medien Stiftung NRW. In 2020/21 she is a scholarship holder at the Paul Klee Summer Academy in Bern, Switzerland. In 2022 she was selected for the Doc Station of the Berlinale Talents Program.
Funded by
Danish Arts Foundation
Sommerakademie Paul Klee
Culture Department of Cologne