The focus of Antonia Low’s (born 1972 in Liverpool, lives in Berlin) artistic practice is placed on spaces and their potential as abstract storages of history and narratives. Hidden, forgotten and overlooked areas elude the customary lines of sight, permitting new possibilities as regards their use, purpose and charge. The functional, cultural, symbolic and architectonic characteristics of these “other” spaces and how they can be altered or emphasised through strategies of displacement or revealment are central questions in her exhibition in Braunschweig.

Low does not show individual autonomous works but reacts instead to the purposes of the exhibition spaces that have been made available to her. Her installation in the Remise – mews converted into an exhibition space – is likewise site specific: The garbed sculptures of the four Roman deities Minerva, Vesta, Pax and Concordia – made around 1805 for the Villa Salve Hospes, where they are situated in the foyer – have been occasionally patched up over the past two centuries. They have now been transferred from the conches in the rotunda to the Remise, where they will be professionally restored over the course of the exhibition. Through the initial cleaning process, layers that have built up on these figures over time will be revealed. Sections that have perhaps been falsely added and the material residue removed in conjunction with the procedure will be displayed as found objects in a separate room. A large-format fabric-print of tilted architecture, laid out on the floor of the Remise that has now been turned into a conservation workshop, marks the new spatial planning. The artist removes temporal and material layers from their entire frame of reference, creating an intersection of symbolic and architectonic constants that, at the same time, exhaust their object – the space. The complexity and interrupted temporality of the reconstructed spatial structure can only be comprehended fragmentarily.

Antonia Low completed the two-year Dorothea Erxleben Grant at the HBK Braunschweig last year. The Städtische Galerie Nordhorn dedicated a solo exhibition to her work in 2011. She has been awarded the 2013 Bonner Kunstpreis followed by a solo presentation at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. A comprehensive publication will be published in October 2014 in a cooperation between the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Kunstverein Braunschweig.

The exhibition is supported by:
StifungKunstfonds
Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
CreditSuisse

Download floor plan (german)