Nilbar Güreş

• Kunstforum Montafon, Schruns (AT)
• 08.12.2024–02.02.2025

Juxtapositions have a very long tradition at the Kunstforum Montafon, most recently ‘Looming at the Horizon’ with Johanna Tinzl and Andreas Werner in 2023. It is always very exciting to see how the two personalities react to each other artistically and then together in the exhibition space.

The art of Nilbar Güres (*1977 in Istanbul) fascinates with its unique poetic and humorous inventiveness, which always has a critical and political underside. In her photographs, collages, objects and videos, Güres explores the clichés of the social visibility of women in various cultural fields. She designs and stages wittily challenging counter-images and figures in which she undermines the usual role categorisations. At the same time, she subtly brings into play Western society's defensive attitude towards the dress codes of religiously influenced cultures. Her pictures and objects are of a highly sensual materiality, strangely enigmatic, often charged with erotic content and lead into a multi-layered, contradictory and also thought-provoking other reality.

Nilbar Güres was given the freedom by curator Roland Haas to decide with whom she would like to organise this exhibition. She chose Marlene Hausegger, who is no stranger to the Kunstforum Montafon: she was represented in the memorial exhibition ‘A Tribute To Gunter & Karl-Heinz’ in 2017 and in the summer exhibition ‘NACH_HALT.IG’ in 2023.

Unlike other artists who need the solitude of the studio for the creative process, Marlene Hausegger (*1984) relies on her nimble feet and muscle power to set her body in motion, to transport it from a ‘here’ to a ‘there’ or an ‘in-between’ and to perform a movement that is not committed to linearity or circularity, but which flickers back and forth between emotion, idea, form and desire. She allows her artworks to take shape by reinterpreting multifaceted strands of thought in such a way that they serve to articulate more than just personal crises and questions of belonging or identity. (Rosalyn d'Mello)

Kunstforum Montafon