Raimund Kummer.
Sublunar interference April 27, 2017 - October 29, 2017
Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of the Present

The exhibition Raimund Kummer. Sublunar interference in the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for Contemporary Art - Berlin shows four large-scale sculptural works by the Berlin sculptor from different phases of his work. The works, created between 1979 and 2017, deal with the topic of seeing and are being presented together for the first time in a retrospective.

“Every place can be a possible place for art.” Raimund Kummers (born 1954) interventions in urban space since the end of the 1970s as well as the forms of presentation he developed are due to an understanding of art that no longer separates the place of creation and the place of publication of the work of art separates. The associated works - temporary installations, sound, photo productions, sculptures and photographic and film works - can be traced back to the starting point of Kummer's work: real space.

The title “Sublunar Interference” is a poetic reference to the question of light and seeing as possible forms of knowledge. “Interference” is an action term that is translated into the cosmic by the attribute “sublunar”. This describes the limitless field of activity of art and the cross-genre framework of Kummer's oeuvre. Essential to his sculptures is a question derived from the experimental material relationship and its practical answer, not the theoretical discourse of conceptual designs.

The exhibition begins with the photo projection Sculptures in the Street (1978/1979) from the National Gallery collection, which consists of photographs of random constellations of stored materials, construction sites and processes. As a criticism of the academicization of conceptual art and minimal art at the end of the 1970s, the work refers to the strategy of an aesthetic found in real space.

In More Light (1991), also from the Nationalgalerie collection, Kummer addresses seeing, but also blindness, as influential processes of gaining and losing knowledge. The floor sculpture is composed of transparent-crystalline glass objects reminiscent of eye prostheses and a diagram of an eye disease transferred and disassembled into glass panes. Kummer introduced the material glass into sculpture in the form of monumental floor sculptures.

The space νόστος – ἄλγος (2012) takes up the “nostalgic” (Greek: nóstos álgos) quality of progressive thinking in the sense of the dialectic of memory and utopia. This projection machine, which consists of 81 slide projectors, is concerned with both the sculptural dimension of artificially generated light and issues of content.

The permanent ambivalence of the projection between shadow and light and their random, indefinable appearances opens up an unobstructed space for the viewer's thoughts. Light is traditionally associated with ideas that lead irreversibly out of the darkness (“light at the end of the tunnel”).

The continually expanding body of work On Sculpture (1979–2017) shows Kummer's comprehensive field of reflection on possible forms of sculpture. The stacked archive boxes form a sculptural viewing device in which over 400 photographs are brought together.

Under the title on the move / out and about, Raimund Kummer and Eugen Blume, curator of the exhibition, met at places of biographical significance for the artist, which are inspiring for central works, where interventions took place or where public sculptures were permanently realized. The resulting short films aim to create a connection between the location, the artist, the art historian and the exhibition visitor. on the go / out and about conveys the artist's motifs, forms of action, perspectives and attitudes.