2025
KIZ, Giessen, DE
Kunstnergruppen Guirlanden på Antikensammlung JLU i Giessen, Tyskland.
The artworks are based on and correspond with objects from the JLU Giessen’s Collection of Antiquities, showing how site-specific works of contemporary art can create dialogues with the thoughts and ideas of antiquity and mirror them into the present.
The X in “Xammlung” stands for an interface where antiquity and modernity meet ancient objects and contemporary perspectives intersect and interact with one another. This encounter engages with antiquity across the boundaries of time, medium, and per-spective.
As a prelude to the exhibition, the artist group organized several workshops that resulted in both collective and individual works. The JLU Collection of Antiquities is integrated in different ways, along with Margarete Bieber’s research projects on Greek clothing and theater. In 1919, Bieber was the first woman in Germany to qualify as a professor of archaeology at the University of Giessen, where she worked until her dismissal by the National Socialists in 1933.
“Xammlung” is like a journey through time, in which the ancient, the enigmatic, and the distant are interpreted through our con-temporary materials: ceramics, ink paintings, paper cut-outs, fab-ric-like sculptures and draperies, photographs, light projections and shadow play, sound, video stills, 3D scans, and ChatGPT. Guided by artistic intuition and curiosity, the exhibition explores themes such as the alphabet, architecture, image, color, clothing, gender, metamorphosis, sculpture, columns, theater, and time – opening up new perspectives on the world of antiquity, and on our own.
Guirlanden 2025
