Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Born in Oldenburg in 1976, lives and works in Berlin

Michael Beutler's sculptural installations often resemble imaginary architectural interventions that he creates out of locally available, often ephemeral materials, using witty but nevertheless simple engineering. Even the equipment that he needs for the production of each component, he designs and builds himself. Thus, small temporary workshops emerge during the construction work, reminiscent of medieval building lodges and their equipment. Likewise the final results are fascinating in their peculiar combination of simplicity of means and conceptual sophistication. At the same time, the results are both specific and aesthetically precise responses to specific local conditions.

Born in Schwalmstadt in 1979, lives and works in Hamburg
Stefan Marx is a draftsman, typographer and graphic designer. His work offers a seemingly simple do-it-yourself aesthetic that effortlessly bridges the gap between subculture, life’s realities and art. His texts and drawings derive their inspiration from observations of everyday life and accidentally overheard quotes, whose deeper meaning often only becomes identifiable on closer examination. The ambiguity of his work unfolds not only on posters but also on T-shirts, magazines and record covers. They exude the spontaneity and rawness of situations that seem to be gleaned directly from the moment. In the endless stream of impressions, thoughts and fragments of speech, individual motifs and phrases become memorable, opening space for further thoughts. This permits the individual to encounter social stereotypes, enabling observations to be made with a certain remove.

Born in Bochum in 1982, lives and works in Amsterdam
David Jablonowski’s art is situated at the interface between a highly technologized world, industrially manufactured products and artistic interventions which nevertheless remain analog. It is centered on communication. He is as equally interested in the media that are utilized in the distribution of information as he is in the aesthetics of their design. Contemporary reality is addressed, and likewise its history, in installations combining sculptural elements with video and media hardware from different decades. Frequently virtual forms of communication, for example video imagery and language, are juxtaposed with the devices of their distribution, such as scanners and monitors, as well as with autonomous sculptural elements. These are the surfaces of our contemporary era, in the form of glass, aluminum and Styrofoam.

Born in Wasserburg am Inn in 1981, lives and works in Vienna
The art of Anna Witt largely concerns actions in which she intervenes in specific contexts that tend primarily to be public spaces. These interventions and activities, frequently preserved in the form of documentary videos, aim to demonstrate mandatory and compulsory relationships between the individual and society. The socio-economic issues which Anna Witt addresses, range from questions of democracy to the structure of our working environment, perceptions of personal dreams and desires as well as the political contextualizing of conventional social attitudes and habits. Anna Witt depicts individual people directly without any staging, but nevertheless with great empathy. Within a representational framework of larger social issues and institutions, Witt makes clear how clumsy and improvisational individual confrontations with these are. Additionally, it also becomes clear that a humane and democratic society must necessarily orientate itself specifically towards the short-term needs and insecurities of the individual.

Born in Bergen (Rügen) in 1976, lives and works in Berlin
East-West German history, Germany’s reunification and its consequences are frequently situated at the center of Sven Johne’s work. His research traces individual fates, gathers personal histories and narratives and combines these with imagery, whose documentary origin may remain questionable, but whose atmospheric tone is precisely matched by the visuals he employs. So precisely in fact, that his work frequently raises the fundamental question of the relationship between image and text, between subjective emotion and objective narrative, as well as the question of which suppositions the viewer will automatically bring to this relationship.

Born in Brühl in 1978, lives and works in Düsseldorf
Manuel Graf’s works derive from the medium of film and frequently develop into large-scale installations. Architecture, archeology and music are combined in his work in a network of often associative correlations. Large issues are referred to in titles such as Where Does Art Come from? Or: About the blossoming of human kind and About time flowing from future. The style of his films is often reminiscent of educational films from the 1970s, and in some cases a teacher does actually appear, leading through the "learning material." Essentially, Graf’s videos for the most part are computer animations of architectural models that do not involve people. Generally speaking, architecture, namely the history of its development as well as the principles of the design of early utilitarian objects, frequently serves as a guide, a deeper understanding of which, as Graf suggests, will hopefully provide answers to the questions raised. The answers themselves however will always be constrained by the viewer’s own intellectual horizons.

Born in Katowice, Poland, in 1979, lives and works in Berlin
Alicja Kwade is a sculptor who combines sculptural ideas on the form of things with a conceptual approach. In her work, abstract notions, such as the question of ascribing value to objects and the mental construction of perceptions of reality become endowed with material form. Above all, frequently irrational conventions, based on cultural patterns, traditions and codings, but not necessarily manifestly connected to reality, are located at the center of her work.

Born in Schwedt an der Oder in 1977, lives and works in Dresden and Berlin
His own childhood and growing up in the GDR are the main topics in the works of Jan Brokof. He connects them with general issues like the search for identity in the transition between childhood and adulthood. In his works, figures and symbols of youth culture meet naivety and imagination of the childhood. Repeatedly, this mixture meets also the current political and economic realities of life in the reunited Germany.

Anna Jandt, born in Bremen in 1980, lives and works in Berlin

Jenny Kropp, born 1978 in Frankfurt, Germany, lives and works in Berlin

Alberta Niemann, born in Bremen in 1982, lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg

The artist trio FORT was founded in 2008. The three artists have specialized in creating situations in which utopian, improbable occurrences turn into reality. Often social conventions and own expectations are revealed by small interventions. FORT often refer to the language of film, using bits of deeply rooted images and habits to conjure up emotions and forebodings which again are transformed into the source of material of their works.

Born in Velden (Vils) in 1979, lives and works in Berlin
Michael Sailstorfer creates installations and sculptures from objects which are part of our everyday life. He uses the obviousness of their contexts and their universally recognized connotations as a space for play in his works. A rotating car wheel shredding itself against the wall may therefore suddenly represent the stationary instead of speed and movement. A tree, a typical German symbol of peace and continuity, becomes, with the addition of an explosive charge, a rocket.

Born in Stuttgart in 1969, lives and works in Berlin
Ulf Aminde works with local people and their ways of life as they appear on the street, beyond the formulas of mass media. He is particular interested in differing life stories and the point at which enough pressure is generated by a complex network of interdependent realities for the individual to react to them. The individual lives which Ulf Aminde repeatedly depicts in his works, become an existential-creative configuration, whereby each and everybody develops very specific strategies to deal with the conditions of everyday life. In order to be able to reflect on questions of role-finding, identity and crisis that are related to a society of “others,” Ulf Aminde frequently employs a form of theatrical appropriation of reality. The distance created by acting supplies space, in which reflection can become possible.

Born in Rosenheim in 1972, lives and works in Berlin

Born in Wuppertal in 1978, lives and works in Berlin

Born in Berlin in 1979, lives and works in Berlin
Fiete Stolte has made his own life an art project, living according to a calendar of his own devising. Consequently he has divided his week into eight instead of seven days, counting time outside the conventional model. This has enabled him to escape the patterns that organize society’s everyday life, and he now lives in a reality that belongs entirely to the sphere of art. In doing so, he is questioning such collective rituals and habits as the division of work and leisure, but equally such natural rhythms as sleep along with daytime activities.

Kerstin Brätsch & Adele Röderer
Live and work in New York since 2007
DAS INSTITUT (DI; THE INSTITUTE) is the collaborative concept of the artists Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röderer. It serves as a platform for collaborations with other artists as well as to publicize less common strategies of artistic production. Ideas for images and design can be provided to the institute and be appropriated by others. Strategies of individualization and self-marketing are withdrawn in favor of an "open-source"-like exchange and advancement of ideas. In that way, designs can wander through different media, and at the same time, level traditional value ratings, like the downward slope between painted canvas and printed poster for example.

Born in Frankfurt (Main) in 1976, lives and works in Paris and Berlin
Katinka Bock’s works capture fixed states of elements in motion. The chosen materials are frequently in a process of transition and therefore are not anchored in any final state. They recurrently consist of found objects that refer to the history and the place of their origin. Contrasts and unexpected connections are a part of works creating a fragile balance.

Lives and works in Berlin
Matthias Fritsch is the author of numerous shorts, feature films and media installations. In his most recent work, he has examined increasingly collaborative approaches of the World Wide Web, and its influence on opportunities for cultural production in the future. Fritsch’s films also address the relation between ownership and authorship under the conditions of digital channels of distribution.

For his ongoing series of works titled Music from the Masses, Fritsch created a number of video clips with a length similar to that of the average music video. These were made available for download by musicians, composers and sound designers worldwide and free of charge, and for which they could produce their own soundtrack. Each participant who contributed a soundtrack, was allowed to make use of the HD-clips for their own purposes without paying a fee either for commercial or non-commercial use.

Born in Leonberg in 1970, lives and works in Karlsruhe

Born in Halle an der Saale in 1983, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main
In Schwarwarma Paul Wiersbinski explores with a collage of interviews, found footage scenes and performative inserts the cultural foundations of concepts and ideas that originate from the field of swarm theories. The focus of these theories lies on classifications of collective behavior.

born in Annweiler am Trifels in 1980, lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt
Orchids is a story told by a 72 year old woman. It focuses on her relationship with her homosexual friend, Peter, who she had married a few years earlier. In a straightforward approach to simple human emotions, the narrative makes clear that relationships do not necessarily have to be lived out in the form of conventional social patterns. Instead, friendship and empathy are presented as a basis for freely deciding to enter into a union. That the marriage is not merely an alliance of convenience is made clear in the narrative through a vivid description, of how both of them struggle for a form of cohabitation that is nevertheless tailored to their own individual needs.

Born in Munich in 1974, lives and works in Berlin
Individualization does not belong to Björn Dahlem’s topics at first glance. His sculptures and installations rather deal with the inexplicable, the spiritual and the metaphysical. In a loose reference to models in astronomy, physics, philosophy and theology, he creates objects and compilations which are oscillating between science, faith and everyday life. Often he uses mundane objects from the daily life and transforms these to seemingly liturgical objects.