2022, video essay 9’18’’; closed caption „[echoes gliding through the water]„ on reflective folie; spot light

2021, single-channel video

Maria Karpushina is represented in the exhibition by a two-part work. Here, she plays in areas at the edge or outside of the actual exhibition space - the glass door of the emergency exit to the dyke in the Large Gallery and the large, tripartite window directly beside the entrance to the Städtische Galerie - and thus expands this space and opens up the institution. In both situations, Maria Karpushina establishes a clear connection between inside and outside through her work, for which she uses a video projection whose openness is essentially created by projecting writing onto a narrow horizontal section of the window, the only area that does not allow a view through. This writing can also be read from the outside, which further reinforces the openness of the gallery.Formally, the artist takes up a procedure familiar from films, in which not only the spoken language is made legible via subtitles or, as in this case, supertitles, but also all the relevant back- ground noises and background music.

The fact that this creates an inevitable discrepancy between legible information and subjective appropriation as an auditory impression is a starting point of her interest, which Maria Karpushina uses to employ writing as a means of sensual imagination and reflection on content.
In addition to a sonic interpretation, a visual idea, occasionally perhaps even an olfactory level, inevitably emerges when certain supertitles appear on the window panes.

It becomes clear that the artist on the whole relies on rather general descriptions and associations, and that a slight distinction can be discerned in the two places: while in the entrance window, actions are described with mostly single verbs, in the door to the dyke, situations seem to be found which also remain mostly unspecific. Nevertheless, it seems as if there is an assignment to the different characters of the passageway in front of the gallery and the dike‘s recreational area behind it. The top titles are created in a found footage process, a well-known form of video art. They refer at the window beside the entrance to very early examples from the early days of film and at the glass door to documentaries on ocean liners from Bremen. In each case films without language, visualized by means of memorable short descriptions of the film content.

The artist reflects generally about who tells which story from which perspective and, above all, which images emerge when this story is again taken out of its context. Thus, due to the reference to place, the typesetting develops a part of its visual interpretation by subsuming the view into the spaces and everything and everyone in it.

Text by Ingmar Lähnemann

2021, single-channel video

2020, performance, installation with three glass panels from the natural history and ethnographic museum - Überseemuseum in Bremen, Germany; Brass, rubber coated wood, porcelain pipes and whistles. Three glass panels with rubber coated steel frames, 77 x 123 x 2.5; 77 x 123 x 2.5; 70 x 123 x 2.5 cm.

In Meisterschüler project she deals with the power relations between different regimes of knowledge. With this comprehensive thematic context in mind, the artist creates an installation of modified objects which have been removed from institutional contexts for forming and distributing knowledge, weaving them into a network of meaningful references.

The central objects are three windows left over from the renovation of the building housing Bremen’s Übersee-Museum in the year 2018. On the one hand, Karpushina regards these windows as placeholders for museums of natural history or ethnography in general and thus for epistemological claims, which she interprets as a “delegitimization of various types of non-Western knowledge”. On the other hand, she uses the functional aspects of the windows, such as their transparency and qualities of re- vealing and of showing, to intensify the field of her exploration. The artist modified the windows by integrating elements of different pipes, such as smoking pipes or whistles, which make reference to the museum’s collection and their link to trade and seafaring, at certain points in the window frames. The windows therefore potentially offer to be played through the whistles within.

The artist thus references the term “whistleblowing”, and with it the thought of whistling, as a critical act: “Whistling as a non-violent method to uncover hegemonic traces within epistemological traditions”, Karpushina states. In the ambivalent moment between implicit references and conceptual associations on the one hand and acting and working through whistling on the other hand, the artist develops the socially critical potential of her work.

Text by Alejandro Perdomo Daniels; Translated from German by Kate Andrews

2020, performance score overview