Opening Reception: Sat. 23rd of September, 7pm

Zentrale Verwaltung – performative Reading, Friday, 13. Okt., 9pm

until Sat. 11. November 2023

Zentrale Verwaltung – Norbert Bauer / Ralf Tekaat, Ausstellungsdetails, Herbstausstellung Kunstverein Hannover 2022

Administrations create an idealized, formalized version of other areas of social life.
social life. They express the processes there in numbers, ratios, procedures, or regulations, and at the same time have an effect on them. Administration and reality generate each other, but are not congruent.
The work Zentrale Verwaltung by the artists Norbert Bauer and Ralf Tekaat deals with institutions and forms of expression of an “administered world”: Authorities, forms, documents, service instructions, organization charts, administrative buildings, etc. are as familiar as they are incomprehensible as constitutive elements of social life. The artists attempt to express this ambivalent relationship in their collaboration with the means of drawing. The aim of the series is not to create clarity, but to get lost in corridors, service rooms, outbuildings, regulations, optimization strategies and responsibilities.
So far, the Central Administration series consists of 270 drawings in A4 format. Zentrale Verwaltung continues to grow and has so far been shown in exhibitions in Hamburg at the Nachtspeicher, in Bremen at the Güterbahnhof in the art associations of Speyer, Hannover and Fischerhude. This summer she has now been awarded the Heitland Foundation Prize. The multi-part work reflects and evokes, in addition to its free representational force virtuously, the sensitivities associated with bureaucratic and administrative processes. Emotions lurk in the rows of leaves; indeed, the central administration, with its conceptual, cooperative strategy, quite aptly bundles social as well as personal situations of the viewer. With just one, or even several Di A 4 drawings, the whole drama of a stressful tax settlement, the despair in the face of a nerve-racking ink-guzzling printer, or other existentially stressful stories can be told. But at the same time, because it is bold and free-associated, Central Administration relieves us and we can smile again and distinguish, because really existential, administration is not.