RESIDENCY
Katja Aufleger
Artist
06.03.2023 - 15.04.2023
Following a 6-weeks residency, Selebe Yoon presents Orange Money by artist Katja Aufleger (b. 1983, Oldenburg, Germany) for one night only. This project consists of a new film, an ephemeral installation and small bronze sculptures. Through her work, the artist explores power relations, tension dynamics, and the latent possibility of destruction and creation. In her videos, the artist documents actions that are initially harmless and which, through repetition, are transformed into an abstraction and bring out the humorous, poetic quality and double meaning of the gesture.
In the first video, the artist films orange vendors in the streets of Dakar meticulously peeling the fruit. The multiple sequences focus on this gesture: a tension appears between the roundness of the orange, the delicacy of its skin and the sharp steel of the knife.
The spherical sculptures made of bronze were created from oranges bought in the street. Like small planets, each one reveals a particular cutout on its surface. 1% of the price of each sculpture sold will be sent via Orange Money (pioneer of the mobile payment system established in several countries in Africa) to each seller filmed, echoing the 1% retained by the French company. An ephemeral installation with the remnants of the orange peels become a musical composition on the wall.
A second video, started during a residency in Casamance in 2022 is also displayed along the project Orange Money. Several successive sequences present a game of billiards: here too, it is the positioning of the hands against the stick, the collision with the billiard balls, the acceleration between certain sequences that give this game a quasi-absurd and interminable character.
*Orange Money,Dakar, 2023
Artist Bio
© Selebe Yoon
Katja Aufleger is a Berlin-based artist whose artwork functions as a metaphor or an analogy for talking about a number of diverse yet interlinked topics. At the core of her artistic work lies the question of power relations, which function both as a creative and destructive force. Her artworks become a multi-layered experience where the viewer’s consciousness and subconsciousness participate. Aufleger completed her master's degree at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg in 2013, she has patiently honed an arts practice that uses form and content to open up new spaces of thought. At first glance, her sculptural and cinematic works are aesthetically seductive, but they often come with a conceptual twist. There is potential destruction and danger inherent in her works, either as pure theory or as a visual experience, yet they are within reach. The pleasure – and also the danger - of her art comes with the realization that although the artwork is stable, as with any system, one small crack can destroy it. Subtle humor travels with Katja Aufleger’s work. And often it goes beyond the portrayed, unfolding as a premonition of the spectator’s imagination. It is often triggered by the title of the work, such as "BANG!" for glass flacons whose chambers contain substances that would cause an explosion if they came together.
Katja Aufleger has a Master of Fine Arts, HFBK Hamburg. Her work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including Museum Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin (2022), Amant Foundation New York (2022), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (2021); Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen (2021); Museum Tinguely, Basel (2020); Kunstverein Hamburg (2015); and Stadtmuseum Oldenburg (2014). Recently, her expansive installation THE HUDDLE in front of the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum attracted much attention as part of the Ruhrtriennale. Aufleger's work has received many awards - among others, she received the Berenberg Prize for Young Art, the Art Prize of the Kulturstiftung der Öffentlichen Oldenburg, grants from the Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn, an artist-in-residence program in Zurich, the Rupert Residency in Vilnius.