HELENA HAFEMANN
TEXTS (SELECTION)
Exhibition TIME GOES BY
Jarmuschek + Partner | December 10, 2022 – February 4, 2023
Whether shopping bags, leftover fruit, old shoes or cooking utensils - Helena Hafemann finds countless things in our consumption-oriented society that are useful and yet mean little to us. Throwaway articles, discarded items and those doomed to be ignored she emphatically brings into our field of vision through meticulous handicraft interventions. With a multitude of threads, she „spins“ together a whole series of ornate porcelain plate fragments into tension-filled abstracted images. It almost seems as if the paint pours out of the tableware narrative and as if at the same time it is visually traced how the plate fragments move away from each other - the vapor trail of a supposed fall. The artist has also embroidered a good dozen rolls of kitchen crepe with red patterns, creating a fragile, wall- and room-filling installation. Repeatedly, she uses zippers to sew her found objects together in places where it particularly hinders their original function.
Subliminally reminiscent of the refrain of a Madonna song, Helena Hafemann‘s exhibition title „Time goes by“ once again celebrates the time- intensive editing process that is characteristic of her work. In the center of the gallery space, she presents the variable, performative installation Von_Zeit_zu_Zeit (From_time_to_time): numerous fluffy, white-red objects, reminiscent of pills due to their shape and bicolor, cavort around a gray children‘s chair. Crocheted from scrub sponge wool, these oversized capsules of various sizes seem alive in a whimsical, almost parasitic way on the one hand, but on the other hand, with their haptically appealing surface, they set a cheerful design impulse in the viewer to touch them, play with them, or even bathe in them. Meanwhile, the work „Weder Märklin noch Fleischmann“ (Neither Märklin nor Fleischmann) is able to transport the viewer into the world of model railroads without the need for a fleet of vehicles. A large scale spatial drawing made of discarded rail parts attached to the gallery walls allows the eye to wander and the ear to almost hear the sounds of toy steam locomotives - despite the undeniable problem of gravity in the case of a ride. For her latest series of works, The mapping project, Helena Hafemann has collected a large number of used paper targets and stuffed them with yarn. Image injuries and evidence of destruction are here subjected to a healing process and at the same time become part of a lasting process of change that ends with their existence as a work of art. Depending on the size and quantity of the bullet holes, the repaired areas appear like dots, islands, or entire continents on an enigmatic map.
In the context of this artistic upcycling, Helena Hafemann takes the previous purpose of the objects ad absurdum and thus makes us intensely aware of their pictoriality, materiality and formal nature. She does not even stop at the most dreary „non-places“: In front of Mainz‘s main railway station, she has just transformed an old bridge pillar into a temporary merry-go-round and given the grey concrete part a reflective, colourful shine.
Helena Hafemann was born in Wiesbaden in 1997 and has been studying at the Kunsthochschule Mainz since 2017. Her work has already been presented in numerous exhibitions, including several times at the Nassauischer Kunstverein, at the International Festival of Ephermeral Art, in the Polish town of Sokolowsko and during the Venice Biennale in the exhibition „Let them weave“ at Studio Cannaregio. In 2020, she showed her works in her first solo exhibition at the Kunstraum Wiesbaden, followed by a solo presentation in the Opelvillen Rüsselsheim in 2021.
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