www.tank.tv
Vertrautes Terrain
A collaboration between www.tank.tv and ZKM
21st May 2008 – 30th June 2008 / 14th September - 30th September 2008

Artists Include: Bankleer, Com&Com, Danica Cakic, Sven Johne, Dias & Riedweg, Alexandra Gerbaulet, Laura Horelli, Korpys/Löffler, Macellvs L., Antje Majewski, Sascha Pohle, Özlem Sulak and Florian Thalhofer.

tank.tv is pleased to collaborate with ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany) to exhibit film and video work from their forthcoming exhibition ‘Vetrautes Terrain’. tank.tv will open its show simultaneously with ZKM, on May 21st, to become part of the ‘resonance space’ of the exhibition. Bringing video work out of the gallery space and making it available to an international audience we hope to widen the scope of this timely focus on national identity.

"German Art" or "Art from Germany", a label that has exhibition tradition, is a fiction – owing to the fact that, in most cases, national political determinations have little or anything to do with artistic practice. In spite of this, country-specific questions relating to the search for history, genealogies or tendencies represent a constant factor in art history and the art business: the general exhibition is its most common format.

Local backgrounds and national events are beginning to be seen as essential and identity defining whilst national identities appear to be levelling out. The place of the ‘national’ is becoming confused and fraught with tensions in contemporary culture, not least because no formal, measured thematic-cultural analysis of the idea of ‘Germany’ has taken place.

It is against this background that the project ‘Vertrautes Terrain – Contemporary Art in/about Germany’ conceives itself, namely, as a resonance space within which the differentiated examination of works by international artists, who reflect on Germany in distinctly different ways as a historical, art, and social sphere can be carried out. The focus on the German context refers to an "imaginary cartography", which seeks to trace those concerns dealing with form and content, the symptoms and the virulent features in art as set against the backdrop of their socio-political presence.

‘The exhibition is characterized by shared and changing images of what the concept "Germany" signifies.

Vetrautes Terrain is curated by Gregor Jansen and Thomas Thiel.