Exhibition: Nibelungen Imagine Worlds

This year's exhibition season at Kunst Meran opens on 23 February at 7 p.m. with a collaborative project with the Akademie Meran and the Sonora Festival, Nibelungen: die rückkehr, in which the exhibition curated by Harald F. Theiss
At the centre of this interdisciplinary project between art, literature and music is an ancient manuscript of the Song of the Nibelungen, which was found in South Tyrol (Latsch in Vinschgau) and is now in the possession of the Berlin State Library.

The Song of the Nibelungs is the most important literary epic of the German Middle Ages. Created in the 1200s from various legends passed down , it combines two different storylines.
With contemporary works of art and a collaborative project, it allows critical reflections, contextualisations and re-enactments of more than just traditional narratives. It questions collective memory and the relationship between the construction and deconstruction of Eurocentric myths in times of a post-colonial and post-migrant reorganisation of the world. In the context of social concepts, ideas about how something could have been, was later or is now are thematised. It is also about the emergence of new images of self and others. Above all, the ideal of courtly love represents a value system that still characterises social norms today and whose deeper examination can provide information about more recent cultural actions, including queer-feminist institutional critique and gender-specific attributions and perspectives.

Imagine Worlds is more of an associative mind game than a reproduction of the epic with new images. With the art of hinting and referencing, the exhibition rather speculates on the ambivalence of myths, on the disappearance and emergence of new stories or myth formations. On a kind of walk-in stage, new artistic creations appear that retell variants on cultural change and concepts for shaping societies. By means of the works, which do not only come from language, the exhibition has the courage to create empty spaces. These can be considered further in a reorganising reality on the basis of text-based and media art, but also on the basis of the project, paintings, drawings and sculptural objects. In this way, Imagine Worlds enables a diverse perspective on myths and refers to the significance and transformation of (manuscript) writing and authorship as well as to the history and aesthetics of reception and gender constructions - then, later and today...


Artists: Astha Butail, Julia Bünnagel, Andrea Canepa, Zuzanna Czebatul, Margret Eicher, Nadine Fecht, Philipp Fürhofer, Jeppe Hein, John Isaacs, Kubra Khademi, Alexander Kluge & Jonathan Meese, Oliver Laric, Kris Lemsalu, Philip Loersch, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Mirja Reuter und Florian Gass (Künstlerisches Beteiligungsprojekt), Nasan Tur.