Istanbul Modern is currently hosting an exhibition titled "The Event of a Thread" and as part of the show, German artist Judith Raum will give a special talk about Bauhaus artist Gunta Stölzl's work on May 30.
Artist and weaver Gunta Stölzl was the first and only female master at the Bauhaus and directed the textile workshop during the Dessau period from 1927-1931. Berlin-based artist Judith Raum has long been planning for the recreation of a curtain fabric by Gunta Stölzl to be integrated into her installation "Bauhaus Space," which is part of the exhibition "The Event of a Thread." With the support of the German Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) it became possible to realize the reweaving of a fabric that references a specific, quite early phase in Stölzl's work, in which horizontal stripes played a major role.
The reweaving was executed by Katharina Jebsen in Leipzig. In her two-part presentation, Judith Raum will officially welcome this fabric in the installation, talking about the aesthetic context and the institutional politics in which it was originally designed, as well as the conflicts played out in the two realms. She will then provide insight into her artistic research on the Bauhaus textile workshop. Her talk will be followed by the screening of two of her recent video essays which focus on the input of Otti Berger and Lilly Reich into the Bauhaus textile workshop and on Reich's ongoing exhibition design after the National Socialist takeover in Germany
Born in 1977, Judith Raum is a Berlin-based artist and author. She studied visual arts, philosophy, art history and psychoanalysis in Frankfurt am Main and New York. In her paintings, objects, lecture performances and installations, she explores tensions between societal and economic research and questions of artistic desire and abstraction. Her work on German economic colonialism in the Ottoman Empire was exhibited at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, at Salt Istanbul and at the Heidelberger Kunstverein, among others. Her lecture performances and paintings about the social history of textiles have been presented at Piano Nobile, Geneva, the Chert Gallery, Berlin, the Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, and at Ludlow 38, New York. Over the last decade, she has taught at a number of European art institutions, including the University of the Arts in Berlin. In 2015, she was awarded a fellowship at the Villa Romana in Florence. The event is free. The talk will be held in English.
