NOTAM AT ULTIMA 2023 – ART FILMS

At this years Ultima Notam is part of the program at the Deichman Main Library in Bjørvika. Notam will be showing video works by artist Kris Kuldkepp and artist collective WET crew. 

When: September 23, 2023, 3:30 PM – 5 PM
Where: Cinema at Deichman Bjørvika 

WET crew 
The WET crew was founded in 2020 and over time began to take shape into its current form and number of five members. In the beginning, they were mainly connected by graffiti, but they also devote themselves to a lot of other things, such as poetry, painting and video.

Wetcation 
As part of their residency at Notam, WET crew created a video work for their presentation at the 12th Momentum Biennale. The project is about low-cost adventure travel, ripping the mind and body out of its captive daily stereotypes. The origin of the choice of their main means of transport stems from the 20th century, from American hobos – pilgrims who, due to the Great Depression, began to wander in this way in search of work and a potentially better life. Nowadays, for many riders, the freight train is more like an escape, therapy and meditation. The main thing is to enjoy the journey and experience it fully with all its sorrows and joys.

With a poetic video from a month-long journey of more than five thousand kilometers through Europe they will guide the audience through their story. In small details, the viewer learns where the girls are at the moment, and with the help of music, the feelings they are experiencing at that moment are amplified.

Kris Kuldkepp
Kris Kuldkepp is an experimental musician and performance and multimedia artist based in Hamburg, Germany. She explores the rich traditions of the double bass to discover sonic experiences featuring rich harmonic textures, noise music as well as elements from pop and doom ambient. In addition to the double bass, she uses found objects, motors, and DIY electronics to create musical experiences that deconstruct meanings and forms of musical structures.

Disturbed Spaces — the Ruins of Nostalgia and Passivity
It was a sunny day in the spring of 2022, and Kuldkepp had taken upon a task to conduct a sightseeing trip in Hamburg – her cultural and political location for the last couple of years. This journey mapped the appearance of, what Kuldkepp calls, the hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon, and the uncanniness of female sculptures in public spaces. 

We frequently encounter monuments preserving a particular memory. For example, Otto von Bismarck and Karl the Great in Hamburg, in various appearances. These monuments have their agencies – names and stories – that are commonly known, and easy to access information about in an internet search or tourist guidebooks.

However, the focus of “Disturbed Spaces” is not to explore these stories, regardless of how curious and relevant they might be. Instead, the sculptures that do not appear to expose any agency and predominantly depict naked nameless female figures, are the subject matter of this research. They often have neither a name nor a story, and represent a generic activity or a character rather than a memory of world making. For example, “die Hockende” or “die Liegende” are familiar to Hamburg inhabitants, but appear neglected in terms of their semi-interpersonal significance and impact on the accidental human counterparts of the sudden encounter with a naked body.