Franziska Nast

(WHO STAYS BACK WILL BE LEFT BACK Tour 2012/2013)

A select group of six young international artists have currently loaded the High-Cube container with their materials and are on tour with us. As part of our tour, we will be driving to at least four art clubs in Germany and hijacking, taking over and performing in them for a short period of time. The load of the container forms the basis from which we develop a setting in relation to the provided spaces of the art associations. There is the possibility to expand the set parameters in the course of the tour with site-specific actions and materials.
With the selection of the artists, the broadest possible field of different content-related and formal artistic approaches is represented. The traveling works have an autonomous character in the broadest sense.
The four art associations (Langenhagen, Leipzig, Heidelberg and Westwendischer Kunstverein) each offer new qualities and problems for our undertaking through their geographical location, architecture and management.
Just as we as an art association have to deal with different forms of organization and communication at each stop, the artists and their works will also examine each time again which connections arise through the different contexts, spaces and constellations and how the own functions in the common.

It is our intention, by means of our takeover strategy, to create a temporary space within the cultural enterprise of the Kunstverein landscape, in which a free working is possible, which reserves an openness. Contrary to many current exhibition concepts, whose result is already decided and predictable in advance, we want to try to find ways on site and on the road, by deviating and detouring, to develop results from the fundus at our disposal.

The container as black box/trip recorder and darkroom will contain documentation material of the trip in addition to the bar operation and will be used at regular intervals to carry out a complementary live program. An accompanying booklet will be published for each of the four exhibitions.
The functionality of the container has been and will be expanded at the stopovers of our journey, including the festival "Five thousand generations of birds" in Fitjar/Norway, the Plateau of the Kunsthalle Hamburg and the Emscherkunst in Essen. It serves as a stage, cinema, bar, library and thus also as a mediator for the structures and backgrounds of artistic development processes, as well as a resonance body for sound installations.

We fundamentally reject mediation in the classical sense, as we do not want to prescribe and offer a clear reading. Rather, through our activities we try to provide as much space as possible for direct contact with the artists and initiators and to create a variety of approaches and perspectives for and on contemporary art.