Private View: 1 December 2004, 7:00PM - 9:00PM

Exhibition Run: 2 December 2004 - 23 January 2005

Curated by David Bussel

Cubitt is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Nina Könnemann, who will show a selection of new and recent video work.

Könnemann looks at the transitional margins – the ‘down time’ – of cultural activity to investigate the relationship between work and leisure. She has filmed the social interactions of participants of the Love Parade in a tube station in Berlin (Unrise, 2002); the comings and goings of groups of women on a night out in rainy Blackpool (Pleasure Beach, 2001); the aftermath of an outdoor music festival (M.U.D., 2003); as well as a hallucinogenic walk through a harshly lit subway in Hamburg at night (Castles in the Sand, 2004). Each of these ‘non-places’ shot in a deceptively formless, random style that over time becomes both acute and technically accomplished. Like her subjects, one effectively gets lost in the work, where a sense of fiction and reality intermingle, and where traditional notions of time and space become unmoored and indeterminate. The pleasure-seeking people in her videos often react abruptly to the camera, reluctant to come to terms with their own ineluctable return to reality. The works reveal an unexpected insight into the way we define and construct our sense of self through the limits of time and space. They also reveal how art, as a form of de-centred intoxication, can act in productive tension with the harsh brutality of the quotidian.

Könnemann is an artist based in Hamburg, Germany. She recently has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Karin Guenther Nina Borgmann, Hamburg, as well as Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and participated in group shows at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne and Kunstverein Frankfurt. This will be her first solo exhibition in the UK.