Fabian Knecht | Nite Art

Known for setting the roof of the Neue National galerie Berlin alight in 2014, Nite Art brings Berlin based artist Fabian Knecht to present for one night.

This July Nite Art is occurring for one night in Melbourne, part of a global shift happening alongside other art cities such as Berlin and London. Working with national and international artists, the art event explores the potential of art for shaping and stimulating new perspectives and understandings of daily life.

A major artist invited to the event, Fabian Knecht was born in Magdeburg, Germany and lives and works in Berlin. His most recent ISOLATION series challenged what constitutes a gallery or museum space by situating the white cube in unforgiving, wild and remote landscapes. Created for one evening around a segment of a remote landscape: a riverbed and a base of a vanished monument in Ukraine, a frozen sea in Vladivostok, wasteland in Berlin and an uprooted tree in a forest near Arnsberg. In ISOLATION, nature in all its complexity is elevated to the status of an artwork and exhibited in situ.

Travelling to Australia for the first time, Knecht worked in response to his visit to Karlu Karlu – The Devils Marbles Conversation Reserve located 100km south of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.

Continuing his practice of staging fictitious enactments as he did in his ISOLATION series, Knecht’s work SPLIT engages with the ancient geological history of Australia and the authority it holds. The artwork questions the process unto which the millions of years old formations have occurred by claiming the natural separation of a particular rock as being an artwork intervention created by the artist himself.

Playing with the conventions of truth, and who constitutes it, Knecht’s outlandish works in scale and concept challenge paradigms of popular thought and who has the power to dictate it.

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic artist and Knecht’s professor at Berlin University of the Arts, says of this project “Fabian is remarkably capable of taking sensitive, political and zeitgeist-informed ideas, and translates the living parts of those ideas into his work in very emotional, sometimes provoking and critical ways. He’s constantly travelling, moving and producing. To come to Melbourne and to resonate with the context there will inspire new works and grant new perspectives”.

Creating temporary interventions or enactments, the artist is provocative aiming to challenge dominant modes of thought through his practice stating, “My hope is that art is a means to break power and authority, and that by questioning art we can take paths beyond convention”.

While in Melbourne, Knecht will present a series of public forums, workshops and symposia with artists at the University of Melbourne, the VCA – Centre of Ideas and RMIT – Art in Public Space, and will lead a CoM Arts and Culture – Test Sites program working with artists to test and realise their ideas in public spaces.

Nite Art 2017
Thursday 27 July, 6pm ’til late
Across Melbourne
niteart.com.au 

Fabian Knect | Lecture Performance
Nite Art Thursday 27^th July 2017
8.30PM – 10pm
University of Melbourne
148, Royal Parade, Parkville VIC 3052
Forum Theatre Art West, Professors Walk

Images courtesy the artist and Nite Art, Melbourne.