"Screenplay" by Gruppe Stumpf transforms the NEWCOMER KWS Art Lounge into a multiverse

Dr. Felix Büchting, CEO of KWS, promised visitors at the opening of the exhibition that they would be surprised when glancing through the spyholes: "Look forward to the insights." Art needs space for expansion and inspiration in order to open up new perspectives.

Visitors to the exhibition should not come to the gallery with too much information, they should make their own experiences, advised Dr. Thomas Becker, cultural scientist at Humboldt-University in Berlin, at the vernissage. "Senses build on each other, and that is the topic here," said Becker. The so-called distance senses or intelligence senses of sight and hearing complement each other. What you hear is not what you see in the rooms. Likewise, you can see through the spyholes without hearing anything. Visitors are expected to move around. "They have to bend down to see something, and they have to go inside to check what they have seen," said the cultural scientist, who has known Gruppe Stumpf since his time at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. " You see something and you have an experience on the basis of what you see." Only the interaction of the senses leads to perception.

The interplay of inside and outside is recognizable at first glance as the gallery spaces are not visible to passers-by from the outside as usual. All the windows at NEWCOMER were coated with buttermilk according to an old artist's principle, making them opaque. From the outside, only seven spyholes allow visitors a glimpse into what is supposedly the inside of the gallery. In some places, this requires effort: the view inside, for example, is only accessible via a platform ladder or a step. Visitors are almost encouraged to adopt a voyeuristic position to take a look inside. However, such a spyhole does not lead into the familiar gallery space, but to a digitized, virtual version of the respective room section as a video loop on a monitor – a game with the screen, "screenplay". Just as the moving image is only visible from the outside, the sound from the audio tracks of these videos can only be experienced inside.

Jan Neukirchen and Christian Lohre are Gruppe Stumpf. Both studied at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig, the Facultad de Bellas Artes of the Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife), the Czech Technical University in Prague as well as Furtwangen University and graduated as master students. They have been working together since 2014 and operate in the field of tension between sculpture, installation, sound art and performance. Currently, they live and work in Hanover and Paderborn. They have been exhibiting their work in solo and group exhibitions since 2016 and repeatedly present their skills in the fall exhibition of the Kunstverein Hannover, one of the most important exhibitions of artists from Lower Saxony in the federal state. Prizes and awards are not to be missed, such as the Link Masters Planning Grant from the Lower Saxony Foundation in 2021.

The NEWCOMER KWS Art Lounge is open on Wednesdays from 10 am to 1 pm, Fridays from 3 pm to 6 pm and Saturdays from 10 am to 1 pm, with an extended opening time until 4 pm on Advent Saturdays.