EVENT: Finissage LARISA SITAR . “Hope swapping, fixed “. Performance von FINJA SANDER & Musik von MATTI GAJEK

To conclude the exhibition Hope swapping, fixed by this year’s KVOST scholarship recipient and Claus Michaletz awardee, Larisa Sitar, KVOST invites you to a performance by the artist Finja Sander and music by Matti Gajek.

About

Finja Sander chooses the medium of performance as a recurring constant in her works. She looks for breaks and ambivalences in the everyday, for disregarded automatisms that she picks out, isolates and brings into new contexts within multi-part processes. Currently, the artist is deeply engaged with the concept of a memorial, embedded in her artistic research on German memory culture and monument history. Her own body serves as an initiating catalyst, a sort of seismograph.

Her performances have been showcased in various venues, including the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne (2023), Barlach Museums, Güstrow (2023), the Skulpturen Triennale in Bingen (2023), the Museum for Photography, Berlin (2021), and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2021). Sander completed her studies in Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts in the summer of 2022, as a master student of Valérie Favre. She is this year’s recipient of the UdK Berlin Art Award. 

Matti Gajek produces and performs electronic music under the pseudonym Gajek. From an East German perspective, Gajek inscribes himself into the progressive mythos of “Krautrock” and Western modernity. He shifts the focus onto a side of German (musical) history marked by the material traces of the Cold War.

The musician draws from evolving textures of high-energy digital production. Vibrant rhythms, strings, and synthesizers, along with endless chains of pitch shifters and ring modulators, create an oscillating atmosphere in combination with penetrating lyrical compositions. His music has been played in various venues, including Trauma Bar and Kino, Berghain, and Printworks London, among others.