Klara Hobza • ZUSTAND: DURCHLÄSSIG – DEM WASSER FOLGEN (Prolog) • Kunsthalle Bielefeld • 29.01.–15.05.2022

In the summer of 2022, Kunsthalle Bielefeld will present an exhibition dedicated to water. Based on its collection of 20th and 21st century art, it follows the questions: What do we see when we look at water? What themes, objects, and contexts emerge when we turn our gaze to water in art? In the exhibition, representations of the sea, lakes, rivers, and harbors combine with works that use water as artistic material and with more recent works that revolve around current debates. Some selected artistic interventions and lectures have already been preparing the exhibition in a prologue since summer 2021.

In her artistic practice, Klara Hobza (*1975, lives in Berlin and Paris) deals with phenomena of the natural and animal world as well as the limits of human abilities around perception and understanding, which she constantly explores in an aesthetically playful way. Her work encompasses video, drawing, sculpture and performance. At the center of the presentation at the Kunsthalle is Hobza’s project “Diving Through Europe,” which was initiated in 2009 and continues to this day. The artist dives through the waterways of Europe in stages along a predefined route, starting at the mouth of the Rhine in the North Sea and ending in the Black Sea. Hobza documents the individual stages of this journey with videos, supplemented by photographs, drawings and objects related to her experiences. Her view of the journey reflects anecdotally, critically, and aesthetically on the hidden historical, political, ecological, economic, and even mythical aspects of the European (under)water world.

Klara Hobza reports in a lecture on 23 02 22 at 18.00 among other things about her transnational diving project “Diving Through Europe”, the documentation of which is the focus of the foyer exhibition. In addition to giving the background to this project, which is planned to last 25 to 30 years, she will also discuss other thematically related “concerns of immersion”, such as her works “Die grosse Basler Gipfelbergung”, “Animaloculomat” and “Das Ohr”.