Andreas Greiner is the fifth Kaiserring Scholarship holder to exhibit at the KWS Art Lounge NEWCOMER in Goslar's Mönchehaus immediately after the award ceremony. The Goslar Kaiserring Scholarship has been awarded by the “Verein zur Förderung Moderner Kunst” since 1984 and has been sponsored by the AKB Foundation in Einbeck since 2014.
KWS Executive Board member Dr. Felix Büchting opened the exhibition and welcomed the fact that science and art enrich each other in Andreas Greiner’s art. "We at KWS find this approach extremely exciting, of course, and are very curious about your conceptual world“. Greiner had done extensive research, visited KWS several times, looked at laboratories and got expert tips on plant care.
Andreas Greiner was born in Aachen in 1979 and lives and works in Berlin. He is a graduate of the Institute for Spatial Experiments at the Berlin University of the Arts and a master student of Ólafur Elíasson. After studying medicine, anatomy and sculpture, his focus is now on time-based, living and digital sculptures.
With a certain poetry that mobilizes words, voices, images and living beings, the Kaiserring Scholar offers viewers an opportunity to rethink their own attitudes towards the environment.
In NEWCOMER's dark blue first room, the first work to be seen is "Aussaat", a visual installation by the artist, which is musically accompanied by a composition by Páll Ragnar Pálsson to Ingeborg Bachmann's poem "Sterne im März" (March Stars).
While the self-playing piano plays the composition recorded by the pianist Tinna Þorsteinsdóttir over and over again, scanning electron microscope images of bacterial minimal cells, which carry a minimal genome completely synthesized in the laboratory of the John Craig Venter Institute, can be seen on a large-format screen.
In the second room, Andreas Greiner uses artificial intelligence to answer the question how landscapes will look when most organisms have died.
The computed images could be memories of dead forests, but in reality they are the digital representation of a forest, based on a data set of more than 100,000 images, including those from the Hambach Forest and the Białowieża forest in Poland, the last virgin forest in Europe. In another installation, four tree seedlings illuminated by growth light hang from the ceiling in baggy containers, alluding to the utopian idea of replanting other planets should the resources of our earth be exhausted.
In an interview with Dr. Bettina Ruhrberg, director of the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar, Andreas Greiner explained the selection of works in "Signs of Life".
While a forest image was being computed, he was made aware by the programmers that computer centers necessary for art with artificial intelligence consume a lot of energy, Greiner reported. As an ecologically-minded artist, he is therefore currently campaigning for the planting of over 1000 trees near Goslar. With sponsorships and in cooperation with the schools in the area, he wants to contribute to offsetting the negative CO2 balance. Such initiatives were also part of Greiner's artistic work, who wanted to have an impact on society, said Ruhrberg.
A brochure with information about the artist and his works in this exhibition is available at the KWS Art Lounge NEWCOMER for 5 euros. The artist will receive the proceeds for further projects. Andreas Greiner will soon publish a book on the complete work "Signs of Life". An artist talk will take place on April 15, 2020 at 6.30 p.m. in the Art Lounge.
"Signs of Life" can be seen at the KWS Art Lounge at Tiedexer Straße 20 in Einbeck until April 18, 2020: Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Fridays from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
