Berit Jäger was born in 1971 and she lives and works as a freelance artist near Mainz. She completed her studies in fine arts in the class for media art with Prof. Dieter Kiessling at the Kunsthochschule in Mainz. After receiving her diploma, she studied for two semesters as a master student artistic photography with Professor Judith Samen. In 2010, Berit Jäger received the sponsorship award of the Rheinland-Pfalz Bank. This was followed by the Balmoral Scholarship with a 6-month stay in Paris, project scholarships Fokus Kultur, and a grant from the BBK-Bundesverband. Berit Jäger works on the current topics of the time, she designs entire rooms or stages on a theme using the entire range of media. The spatial structure of media images is of great importance to the artist. For example, in videos she plays with image planes by combining different projection surfaces. Photographs take place in space as well, so that viewers have to position themselves in relation to them, between tiny format or large arrangements.

Schleierhaft – Photo series
Here, the female body stands in the foreground as a cultural sign: the woman as a self-sacrificing worker in the household, as a saint, as an erotic object. Jäger takes the respective attributes to absurdity through exaggeration and surprising combination.
 

Website: https://jaeger-arts.com

Credits: Eda Temucin

The painter and object artist Charlotte Rahn (born 1989 in Florsheim am Main) completed her diploma in art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach 2020.
After graduation followed several exhibition projects, such as the first
solo exhibition at the saasfee* Pavilion in Frankfurt (2021), as well as collaboration with the project-based gallery XPINKY in Berlin. She was also active as a member of the collective KlimaKriseKlitoris in 2020 and 2021, and has already collaborated on a film and an art and performance festival (2021) in Berlin.
Since 2018 she has been active as a freelance artist, as well as an art course instructor at workshops for children and young people, a photo assistant for various photo productions and a graphic designer for artistic projects.

Credits: Moritz Bernoully

ERWECKE DIE GOTT* IN DIR

(AWAKEN THE GOD* WITHIN YOU)

In the work ERWECKE DIE GOTT* IN DIR Charlotte Rahn makes direct reference to a
campaign of the Gilette company, which alludes to one of the most famous paintings in art history
Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”. The slogan of the eponymous women’s razor, “Awaken the goddess in you,” suggests the supposedly desirable ideal: a smooth, pure and flawless female body. The modified advertising slogan is adorned with a bulging shell, in the art historical context a symbol of femininity and virginity. Charlotte Rahn, however, plays with gender clichés by almost provocatively choosing a color scheme of pink and blue tones and adding a gender asterisk* to the title of the work. The shell thus becomes a hermaphroditic creature that seems to dissolve itself in its identity as well as painterly in its materiality.

(Text: Vivien Kämpf, 2021)

Born in New York

Education:

• 1982 – 87  Braunschweig University of Art with Hermann Albert, Peter Voigt
• 1987 Meisterschüler HfBK Braunschweig/MFA HfBK Braunschweig
• Fellowships/Grants: Arbeitsstipendium Hessische Kulturstiftung
• Brückenstipendium Hessische Kulturstiftung
• Stipendium Stiftung Kunstfonds
• Atelier Stipendium für Bildende Kunst 2020/2023 der Stadt Frankfurt am Main

Works and lives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Runs since 2018, together with Eva Weingärtner, the art project Atelier Orbit24.

Last Drop

The installation Last Drop thematizes the last drop of blood of the female Homo sapiens before they enter menopause. Once this state has occurred, the irretrievable phase of infertility begins for the female being. We humans know about this phase.
And we also know that we use fertile time to reproduce. For Last Drop, I used the activity of embroidery historically assigned to women. Using red embroidery thread, I stitched a last drop on sanitary pads and let it spill out into a precious red glass bead drop. On the back of each embroidered pads, the original adhesive strip on the back has been removed and replaced with a fragile permeable strip of tissue paper printed with abstracted plant weaves. On the one hand, sanitary pads as catch-all items serve as a symbol of the fertile phases that take place in secret. On the other hand, they are also extremely disposable items that are shown in the installation as representative of the careless and careless handling of our planet’s resources. As social living beings, we are integrated on earth and beyond in a gigantic cosmos of fragile relationships that are based on one another and mutually dependent.

Questions arise about the conditions of fertility and awareness: how we have to act in certain periods of time. Through scientific research we know that our soils, which we ruthlessly exploit through monocultures, are becoming increasingly infertile. We are depriving ourselves of our own basis of life. Obviously, our thinking is also still guided by a monoculture of profiteering, with which we destroy our own “habitat”. My basic topic “interconnectedness” has led me in this context to the Gaia – hypothesis, which was already developed in the 1970s by the scientist and biophysicist James Lovelock and the biologist Lynn Margulis. Named after the Greek goddess of the earth, Gaia does not mean an esoteric being, but the scientifically based thesis that Gaia means living earth, the constant interaction and networking of all biosystems on this planet. This should result in the realization that we as living beings on this earth are merely part of a huge interconnected network and at the same time we bear responsibility for it. Symbiosis instead of overexploitation. Because if we are not mindful, we will miss the moment of reversal.

Credits: Anne Scheidemann

Karen Rémy was born in France in 1984, and she currently lives in Germany. She has been researching and creating since 2004 in the fields of physical theater, site-specific performance, sculpture, Butoh dance, contact improvisation, holistic healing of body, mind and spirit, as well as meditation, consciousness, sensuality, ritual, Eastern and Western metaphysics. All these areas merge in AIM – Arts in Movement. The media used by AIM are site-specific live performances, performance-based video works, and nature-inspired sculptures and stage designs.

www.karenremy.de

SOUL TREE Sculptures

A SOUL TREE grows in a long meditative transformative process. Each wire is twisted hundreds of times until the straight cold metal wires appear as a natural coils of a tree in trunk, branches as well as roots entwining the base stone. This is how a new being is created from the components – a soul tree.
All my life I have had a deep connection to trees & stones. I feel their energy and the incredible slow dance of the seasons that has allowed them to become what they are now.

Trees are silent companions of our souls
The tree exhales the air (O2) you need to live. Your exhalation gives it back what it needs (CO2).
The trees and you are connected since the beginning of your life through the breath.
Stones carry the ancient wisdom of the earth within them….
They store knowledge, send out vibrations. They react on an energetic & chemical level with our body, spirit, subconscious & mind. They also have effects on the entire surrounding.
In my performance, I also work with nature: trees and stones are enormously important to me.

Der Film SOUL TREES – Steady in the Winds of Change 

Documentary film of site-specific performance and sculpture on the theme of rootedness.

A touching dance that slows down time and keeps approaching the core from different perspectives:
“How long are two years in the life of a tree? How long do they seem to be for a human being?
Being in nature and with trees was a great support for me in times of pandemic. When the world turned upside down. In those times of change that swept over the world like a storm, how could we stay rooted to ourselves?”
“If a tree encounters an obstacle, it grows to onother free direction. If it falls, it forms new brenches. Its focus is not on the problem, but on the possibility to stay alive. But for that, it needs to be rooted in the earth as well.
What confidence and rootedness can we, as humans, receive from nature contemplation and the primal power of trees?
The period of lockdown has fostered both a connection to the parallel digital world and a return to nature. What strength can a person draw, especially at this time, from stepping away from digital media for a while and encountering the nature?”

Michelle Patricia Röhl grew up in Southern Germany in a gastronomy family. Influenced by her mother, who expressed her creativity through both drawing and cooking, she began expressing herself as a child through the characters she put on paper.

Her first solo exhibition at Galerie Plattform Garten in Rot an der Rot, was about the sensibilities of young mourners. In 2021, she completed her graphic design diploma with a focus on illustration. She currently works for the cultural association protagon e.V. international performing arts, studies fine arts at Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach and aims to learn the craft of puppetry.

“The drawn ones” are paper dolls of characters who are missing something, and who are sometimes in search of something.

The photographs in the series “Skin is my paper” were taken in collaboration with the women potrayed. In a personal conversation, Michelle asked them what the “knots” of their life thread were. What has shaped them? Inspired by this, she made drawings and put them as tattoos on the skin of her subjects.

Life is full of traps of distractions. A young girl feels herself through many soft mattresses and blankets that there is a pea under them and sleeps badly because of it. “What’s under my blanket?” describes the feeling when you go to bed at night, suddenly everything goes completely quiet and only a certain uneasy feeling remains inside you. What’s your pea? Go on a journey and see what there is to “discover”

The draws are paper dolls of characters who are missing something, and who are sometimes in search of something.

The photographs in the series “Skin is my paper” were created in collaboration with the women depicted. In a personal interview, Michelle asked them what were the “nodes” of their life thread. What has shaped them? Inspired by this, she made drawings and placed them as tattoos on the skin of her subjects.

Razan Sabbagh’s work deals with identity and socio-political issues, and it questions oppressive power structures, for example by examining the political infrastructure of prisons. The artist often collects orally transmitted narratives and stories or takes existing texts, interviews or testimonies as a starting point for her work. Her minimalist installations, videos, and performances often explore the relationship between art, activism, aesthetics, and power.
She has participated in numerous exhibitions around the world, including at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Kampnagel and Talia Theater in Hamburg, Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates, Goethe-Institut in Paris, and Casino Display in Luxembourg.

Keep an eye on you

Video Performance, 6:00 min, loop 2022

This video performance is a reaction to the biased and discriminatory way in which some Western media portray the suffering of some groups of people as more significant by citing their European appearance as a factor. It aims to challenge the viewer’s perception of the function and purpose of the question: “How do I look?” in its dual meaning, by featuring a close-up of Sabbagh’s eye as she attempts to put green lenses on it, but repeatedly fails.

The repetitive act not only deconstructs the functionality of the eye, revealing it as an object but also evokes thoughts about how politics can shape our understanding of beauty, identity, and worth.
The questions raised about the purpose of the act—whether it is to look better, see better, or be looked at in a “better” way – challenge the viewer’s assumptions about the relationship between appearance and acceptance.

The video performance raises broader questions about how we perceive and interact with the world around us and how our identity can be shaped by external factors such as media representation and social expectations.

Eva Weingärtner was born in Worms in 1978. She studied at the HFG Offenbach from 2000-2006 and has been working as a freelance visual artist with national and international exhibitions since 2007. She discovered her work focus in the Performance Arts during her studies and keeps it until today. She received, among others, a scholarship from the Künstlerhilfe Frankfurt, a scholarship from the Stiftung Bonner Kunstfonds and the ZONTA Prize for Modern Art.

Performance for her is, among other things, an approach, a moment of special concentration, a way to stretch time. Since 2018 Eva Weingärtner (together with DeDe Handon) runs the art project ATELIER ORBIT24.

Ahnen ( hier: Urgroßvater), Fotoserie ( Kamera: Ivan Labalestra)

Ancestry

I projected faces of my ancestors onto my own face and made performative photographs of them. I myself sat in the light of the projector and told the cameraman the respective story of an ancestor, his/her. In a further step of the work, I coated my face with healing earth and projected the same ancestors again on the white face. Photographs were also taken of this.

“(…) this is my great-grandfather,” Weingärtner says, pointing to a color photograph. The likeness of the ancestor, who ultimately died as a result of his injury, can be glimpsed there as a black-and-white projection falling on a ghostly and statuesque-looking figure. The image comes from Weingärtner’s series “Ahnen” (Ancestry), which shows photographs of her great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers projected onto her, and, according to the artist, it represents the first stage of a larger artistic project.

Eva Weingärtner speaks of a “performative form of reconciliation work” with her family. Among other matters, she is concerned with the question of the inheritability of what has been experienced by previous generations, but also with the “coming to terms with their involvement in the second world war” – therefore, ultimately with the legacy of an average German family. “I often experience a lack of reference in families in this country,” complains the 1978 graduate of the offenbach university of design. That’s why she tries to “understand it and find a reference. (…) “. Eugen El, FAZ, 11/3/2022.

Sara Nahid Abtahi was born in 1979 in Tehran, Iran. In 2004, she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from Azad University in Tehran. Since 2008, she has been living in Germany, where she completed her second degree in Art/Communication Design at the Offenbach University of Art and Design (HfG Offenbach). 
Today, she lives and works in Offenbach am Main as an illustrator, and she works on various art projects, including in collaboration with her sister Maryam Abtahi, where they explore their common creative interests.

www.saraabtahi.com

Madar’s Tales

Madar’s Tales is a collection of traditional Persian stories that have been passed down through generations within our maternal family.

As the last storyteller in this chain, our mother Mehrnoush wrote down these stories in her Telegram app and made them available to us in digital form.

These fairy tales originate from a female storytelling
tradition, and the wishes and hopes of the authors are
reflected in the content of the stories.
Currently, we are in the process of crafting a book that will present these enchanting tales alongside our illustrations.
This effort aims to maintain the legacy of our family’s storytelling tradition through new medium and formats, and to share it with a broader audience beyond our family circle.

Book Reading:
On Saturday 23 September 2023 at 6:30 PM, we cordially invite you to ORBIT24 to hear one of the stories told/read in Persian and German by artist Sara Abtahi. For all above 5 years old. Approx. 30 min.

Galerie ORBIT24
Orber Straße,
60386 Frankfurt
(in front of the Protagon space)

Born in Tehran in 1979, Maryam Abtahi is a visual artist who has been based in Oslo since 2013. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication from Azad University in Tehran. Recently, she earned a master’s degree in Aesthetics, specializing in Art in Society, from Oslo Metropolitan University. Her works have been showcased in a variety of solo and group exhibitions held across multiple countries.

www.maryamabtahi.com

Madar’s Tales

Madar’s Tales is a collection of traditional Persian stories that have been passed down through generations within our maternal family.

As the last storyteller in this chain, our mother Mehrnoush wrote down these stories in her Telegram app and made them available to us in digital form.

These fairy tales originate from a female storytelling
tradition, and the wishes and hopes of the authors are
reflected in the content of the stories.
Currently, we are in the process of crafting a book that will present these enchanting tales alongside our illustrations.
This effort aims to maintain the legacy of our family’s storytelling tradition through new medium and formats, and to share it with a broader audience beyond our family circle.

Book Reading:
On Saturday 23 September 2023 at 6:30 PM, we cordially invite you to ORBIT24 to hear one of the stories told/read in Persian and German by artist Sara Abtahi. For all above 5 years old. Approx. 30 min.

Galerie ORBIT24
Orber Straße,
60386 Frankfurt
(in front of the Protagon space)

Tanjana Tsouvelis is a German-Greek writer // directress ( last: Whiteout – Theater/Filmessay – by Tanjana Tsouvelis – at Gallus Theater/ breakingsilence – by Tanjana Tsouvelis – at Frankfurt Autorentheater ) // Filmmaker ( Nea Zoi- best Greek documentary and honorable mention for editing documentary Kalamata Festival, international film festivals, cinemas and television broadcasting ) // actress ( Landestheater Eisenach, freelance actress in Berlin, Hamburg, London, Athens ) // studied philosophy at the University of Hamburg/ acting training ‘Ernst Busch’ in Berlin/ studies of scenic writing at the Berlin University of the Arts// guest lecturer at the UdK Berlin, Filmuniversität Babelsberg

Portrait 1-12

In an increasingly contactless society, the society needs strong survival strategies. Especially if you move on the fringes of the masses.

With the portraits, I lift women of different ages, from different contexts and neighborhoods of Frankfurt, out of their anonymous everyday life.
Each of them is a personality. A color.
The exhibition creates the space to let these individual characters shine in their individuality and strength. To put them in the center of attention.

The photos are flanked by fragments from the conversations held with the portrayed, fragments of dialogues and questions. Images and words are not assigned to each other.
In this way, questions can be provoked in the viewers, prejudices questioned, and discussions stimulated.