Artist Talk - Ein Abend mit hannah goldstein und Claire Laude

hannah goldstein and Claire Laude in dialogue and reflection on their inspiration and their creative process.

Two artists in the exhibition Controversy & Paradoxes 2, or How to Re-Enchant the WorldHannah Goldstein and Claire Laude enter into dialogue to reveal the inspirations that fuel their works and their respective creative processes. Some of their works are currently on view at the Alice Guy Gallery as part of the same exhibition.

In resonance with the exhibition, they will explore a central question: How to create, build and design in a world that seems to be falling apart and in which so much seems destined to disappear? How can photography open cracks, create sparks of hope and enable the imagination of a possible re-enchantment of the world? What (political) role do you ascribe to photography and your own images? They will also talk about how their works - despite very different approaches, media and aesthetic forms - enter into dialogue with one another within the gallery.

The encounter also offers the opportunity to expand the discussion to their broader artistic practice: their current projects, what drives their work, their sources of inspiration and anything that will arise naturally in the course of the conversation.

Hannah Goldstein (1981, Stockholm, Sweden) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She works with photography, collage and video and moves between autobiographical documentation, narrative portraits and research into archives. Her work, deeply rooted in feminist thought, aims to destabilize dominant social norms and narratives.

Her collages often juxtapose just two images and bring to light fears - fears of disappearance, of the destruction of the planet and water, of losing one's own son in bodies of water or in public spaces. The collage medium offers her a certain freedom to intervene in the image, sometimes almost violently, to deconstruct its perfection or even to “punish” it.

Her series Where is it going? / Où allons-nous?, shown at Alice Guy Gallery, asks what an “elsewhere” might look like if the world as we know it became uninhabitable.

Hannah Goldstein completed a bachelor’s degree in photography and human rights from Bard College (New York) and a master’s degree in art education from the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam). Her work has been exhibited in France, Italy, Great Britain, Australia and Germany. She also published a book, family business.

Goldstein is a member of the feminist art collective The Evil Mösen with Thérèse Kristiansson and co-founder of Kaetha, a curatorial collaboration with Katja Haustein. She is represented by Jacob Hoerner Galleries in Melbourne.

Claire Laude is a French artist and architect who has lived in Berlin since 1997. Her work moves at the intersection of photography, installation, drawing and writing. She deals with existential questions such as the transience and fragility of existence. Whether landscapes or built or natural spaces - in places marked by war or threatened with disappearance, she looks for traces of lived stories.

As an architect, she examines and decontextualizes traces, transforms places and creates ephemeral installations from found material, which she then photographs. This approach aims to question the image of the perception of a place - located between reality, memory and fiction.

Laude has published three books, including A Silentio (2021, Éditions Essarter), and has taken part in artist residencies in Greece, Italy and Tunisia (Villa Salaambô, 2023). Her work has been recognized, among other things, with a nomination for the Allegro Prize 2021 and the Urbanautica Institute Award (1st prize, 2019). International exhibitions, etc. in the H2 Center for Contemporary Art (Augsburg), in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin), in the MACRO Museum (Rome) and in the Galerie Binôme (Paris). She has been a member of the Pilote Contemporary Berlin collective since 2020.