Claudia Kapp, Michael Rieken – Mary hat ein kleines Lamm

28 January – 19 March 2006
Opening: Friday, 27 January 2006, 7.30 p.m.

Welcoming speech: Waltraut Steimke, executive director
Introduction: Susanne Pfeffer, artistic director

Mary had a little lamb Its feet were white as snow And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go

When Thomas Alva Edison was involved in the first experiments with his new invention, the phonograph, in 1877, he was very taken by the first verse of the children's nursery rhyme Mary had a little lamb. It is said of Edison that for decades he worked on appliances that were intended to enable people to communicate with the dead. He was not alone in this. At the time, many researchers and inventors exploring physical and chemical phenomena made no strict distinction between the transcendent and the real. They used new methods in their attempts to investigate the supernatural, and worked on techniques which they hoped would provide access to the realm of the magical, the unreal and the extrasensory. The memory of such experiments and their imaginative potential are what formed the points of departure for the space installation developed by Claudia Kapp and Michael Rieken for the Künstlerhaus Bremen.

Claudia Kapp, born in Freiburg in 1972, first trained as a dressmaker, then studied art at the HfK Bremen and image and sound at the Königliche Akademie für Bildende Künste in The Hague, 1998-2005. Recently she received the HfK Bremen prize and the City of Bremen's award for video art.

Michael Rieken was born in Wilhelmshaven in 1953. After an apprenticeship as an office clerk, he started working as a fine artist and musician, always in cooperation with other artists.

PROGRAM

18 February 2006,  8 p.m. Monitoring the Phenomena – A phonographic filmnight
2 March 2006, 7.30 p.m. Hausbesuch # 6 guided tour through the exhibition and ateliers of Norbert Bauer und Patricia Lambertus
9 March 2006, 7.30 p.m. Schleimstoffgebilde. Anekdoten von alten Medien. Lecture by Dr. Joseph Imorde, Kunsthistoriker und Publizist, Berlin/Rom

Guided tours: 2 February 2006 , 7 p.m.; 16 February 2006, 7 p.m.; 16 March 2006, 7 p.m.