Working the Land
Duration
Thu – Sun
23rd – 26th Nov 2023
Opening
Thu 23rd Nov 2023
from 6 pm
+ a casual talk at 7 pm​
​
Visiting hours
Fri –Sun
24th – 26th Nov 2023
12 – 6 pm
The artist Christl Mudrak works on the site of the Zum Waldsee campsite in Havelland, which has been abandoned since 1995 and exudes an atmosphere of abandonment, desolation and contamination by human decision or omission. In the past, over a hundred campers, some of them illegal, had settled there, often leaving behind their self-built huts for recreation after being ordered to leave.
In the meantime, these huts, the rubbish and fencing left behind have sunk into the earth, which has led to a change and preservation of the material through the co-operation of the various creatures on the site. Territories overwritten and reclaimed by nature make a temporal progression visible through the vegetation and material decay.
Mudrak uses this terrain as a working space. She values the work on the supposedly ruined, digs up material, digs in pictures, plants trees, improves the soil, observes wild animals, has a deep well drilled, builds, documents, sorts and disposes.
There is a lot of material available, material that has been altered by nature. In order to achieve a change of perspective and reinterpret the objects brought into the forest by humans, she spends part of her time at Changing Room to reflect on her working methods with others.
Christl Mudrak's (*1972, DE) artistic work deals with spaces that influence the viewer physically and psychologically. She creates expansive, mostly painterly works that test the viewer's perceptual capacities. Intoxication and excessive demands play an essential role in overcoming familiar thought patterns and breaking new ground outside one's own comfort zone. Interactive processes with collaborators and passers-by as well as equally with animals and plants serve her to reveal authorship as a connecting and communicative element in the deep understanding that a satisfying description of reality can only be developed collectively and across species.
