Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg is pleased to announce a group exhibition, Tempo. Tempo! Tempo? opening 10 June 2023. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Landesmuseum Hannover and PS.SPEICHER Einbeck, in which a contemporary art museum, historical museum and technical museum each present overlapping, individual exhibitions on the topic of ‘speed’. The Landesmuseum will organize a study of speed from a perspective of natural and cultural history, while the presentation by PS.SPEICHER in Einbeck will focus predominantly on technical aspects of speed.
Exploring the concept of “speed” through several thematic lenses and media, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg will present over forty contemporary artworks by approximately thirty internationally renowned artists working in sculpture, painting, installation, and new media. The interpretation of “speed” as a study of the rate at which something moves or operates has been adapted by diverse fields including evolutionary theory, sociology, technology, and economics. In the arts, image-making over the last fifty years has also revealed fascinating and existential questions. At Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Tempo. Tempo! Tempo? presents artworks by artists who have responded to a proliferation of mass-produced images and to widened access to information in what German sociologist Hartmut Rosa coined our “high-speed society.”
Large-scale works by the artist Mona Hatoum, who was born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, address themes of migration and displacement, its consequential design and destruction, as well as the constancy and repetitive potential of time. Her sculptures are celebrated for their poetic inferences, often contrasting old and new, the natural and the manufactured. In the kinetic sculpture + and – (1994-2004) mechanically drawn lines are erased and redrawn on a circular bed of sand. The steady and continuous motion reflects the cyclical component to how we experience time and its natural constancy, notwithstanding the development of our accelerated society.
Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky’s photographs illustrate the overlapping roadways and densely populated residential areas of Los Angeles. In Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, USA (2009), the idiosyncratic traffic culture of the city is reduced to miniature scale from an aerial perspective. By characterizing the city through its concrete and industrial elements, Burtynsky highlights its infrastructure. Introduced as a means of improving daily life, California roadways were meant to offer high-speed options to drivers. Today, however, they are overcrowded and result in levels of traffic that inhibit any intrinsic promise of quicker commuting while having a palpable and deleterious impact on the environment.
British-born painter Malcolm Morley was also inspired by man’s relationship to speed. In the large-scale painting, Hubris (2008), motorbike racers are depicted turning a bend on the raceway. The deft maneuver requires skilled riders to lean heavily to one side to maintain their speed and offset centrifugal force. Morley pairs the realistic portrayal of the bikers with one that is abstracted, perhaps illustrating the inherent danger of the sport as well as the difficulty of the human eye to follow riders moving at significant speeds.
The exhibition at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg will also include a theatrical video screening in the converted silo barn. The Dutch filmmaker Guido van der Werve is known for self-performing acts of physical endurance. In the nearly hour-long film, Nummer veertien, home (2012), van der Werve completes a 1,500-kilometer triathlon (swimming, biking, and running) between Warsaw and Paris. The journey is documented with soundtracked intervals, and poetically interweaves the artist’s own personal narrative with tales of Alexander the Great and the death of Frédéric Chopin. Musical accompaniment in the background joins van der Werve both indoors and outdoors along his route, the tempo varied to the pace of the journey. At the film's center are cycling vistas, beginning outside Görlitz as the artist crosses into Germany from the Polish border and continuing until he reaches France. The rural landscapes mirror our neighboring Landkreis Hildesheim where Schloss Derneburg is located.
