NOMADS + RESIDENTS
Rabea Eipperle (Berlin/Germany) and Kim Schoen (Los Angeles/USA)
6.00 PM – Screening of ‘Panjandrum’
7.30 PM – Artist talk, moderated by Hugo Hopping of ESL
NOMADS + RESIDENTS – A forum for visitors in the arts: making connections, supporting networks, exchanging ideas and initiating dialogues. Corinna Schnitt, an artist based in Cologne temporarily living in Los Angeles, organized the event.
Rabea Eipperle was born in Mutlangen, Germany and studied at the University for Fine Arts (HfBK) in Hamburg. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Rabea operates with the notions of identity as formed by the kind of realism presupposed by the media imagery surrounding us. Her work processes the banal and the stereotyped in a way that seems to verify these cliches, while at the same time their falseness is made ever more obvious. These contradictions effect ridicule and absurdity. The fact, however, that Rabea Eipperle includes herself in the picture renders a disturbing twist to these expositions of prefabricated trivialities. (B.C.)
Kim Schoen is more of a nomad than a resident. Born in Princeton, she currently lives and works in Los Angeles, having recently graduated from CalArts. She will be beginning a post-graduate program at The Royal College of Art in London in the fall of 2005.
The project of history is ongoing, and the past is anything but fixed. This is the point of departure for Kim Schoen’s photographs and video installations, which often address constructions of memory, identity and human interaction. Her interest in inclusion and exclusion, or what it means to be vulnerable, does not simply rest in a personal or psychological context, but pushes us back to look at the social, political and institutional mechanics at play. Employing visual tactics of displacement and repetition, the work refuses any easy social or ideological categorization in favor of more wide-ranging scope that draws on our desire to catch a glimpse, even if for just a moment, of something real. (K.L.)