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BOUCHE À OREILLE

YINGMEI DUAN – VERENA KYSELKA


SAVVY CONTEMPORARY, Richardstr. 43/44, Berlin-Neukölln
Curator: Dr. Bonaventure S. B. Ndikung

Vernissage: 17.04.10, 8.30 p.m.


Exhibition: 18.02.10 - 15.05.10
Opening hours: Thursday – Sunday, 4 – 8 p.m.

Yingmei Duan

At the centre of Yingmei Duan’s performance art is her exploration of human instincts,
longings, and dark desires. She examines the processes of society and questions its
conventions and behaviours. Born in 1969 in China, Yingmei Duan is part of the Chinese
avant-garde, and worked as a painter for many years, living in the legendary art district of
Beijing’s East Village. In 1995 she participated in the performance “To add one meter to an
anonymous mountain”, which is considered to be one of the classics of Chinese modern art.
She became a pure performance artist under the influence of Marina Abramovic, with whom
she studied at the HBK Braunschweig in Germany from 2000 to 2004. There, she also worked
for one year with the film-maker and action artist Christoph Schlingensief. In the last fifteen
years Yingmei Duan has made her name in numerous national and international exhibitions,
festivals and workshops through her performance art. Yingmei is an inquisitive observer who
asks questions of all facets of life in order to continuously learn and develop. She often
impulsively and spontaneously develops performances as situational experiments. On the
other hand she can also plan her performances with intense attention being paid to the last
detail. Her artworks are works in progress, and are often stretched over long periods of time.
She often performs sleeping in a melancholic dream world, or as someone sick or dead.

Verena Kyselka

Her artistic work was developed in the underground art scene of East Germany at the end of
the 1980’s after her education as a restorer of paintings at the Church-Studio Workshop in
Erfurt. During this time painting, music and performance, in her opinion, intrinsically
belonged together. The figurative works at that time focused on a strong female view that had
developed while working within the female artist group Exterra XX. Together with this group
she founded the Kunsthaus (Arthouse) Erfurt in 1990 where she curated and worked on
intercultural performance, studio exchange and exhibition projects. From 1997 to 2003 she
studied art at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Since that time her work has been space
orientated for video and installation art. She has created numerous international projects with
intercultural exchange in eastern European countries such as Albania and Armenia as well as
Taiwan and Australia. It has been her intention to take up experiences of contemporary
history and to put them into an artistic context. Verena Kyselka lives and works in Berlin.

SAVVY CONTEMPORARY – THE LABORATORY OF FORM-IDEAS


DR. BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG / STEFAN FUHRMANN
RICHARDSTR. 43/44; 12043 BERLIN

WWW.SAVVY-CONTEMPORARY.COM

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