BERLIN.- In her work, the artist Franka Hörnschemeyer engages with architecture and space as mediums for exploring contemporary history, social structures, and specific arrangements of the visible. Her oeuvre includes expansive installations and objects, as well as works with sound, video, photography, and paper, or minimal, site-specific interventions that prompt new perspectives on familiar places and spaces. A recurring feature of her practice is the use of materials such as plasterboard, formwork elements, and other building components – fundamental to the built environment and omnipresent in exhibition contexts, yet rarely consciously perceived. Hörnschemeyer regards material structures as both expressions and repositories of information, capable of opening up different temporal and historical associations depending on the perspective.

For her solo exhibition Die Ökonomen (Singspiel) in the n.b.k. Showroom, Hörnschemeyer has developed a new ensemble of works conceived specifically for the space. Using found objects, materials from the context of her earlier artistic works, as well as interventions in the floor and walls, she transforms the exhibition space into a kind of stage on which visitors move among object-like characters.

The context evoked by Hörnschemeyer – the Singspiel, a pared-down form of opera, and the economy, which, as seen recently in Berlin, is most often a question of budget cuts or savings – inevitably introduces a certain degree of comedy. The titles of the works, which function as names for the characters – Information Source, Critical Noise, The Channel, Volume of Uncertainty, and Slight Discrepancy – refer to concepts from information theory, particularly as developed by American mathematician Claude E. Shannon. According to Shannon, information is not defined by semantic content but measured by the range of choices that could be transmitted.

Visitors to the exhibition are invited to imagine what kinds of communicative processes within the Singspiel might unfold between these materially and formally distinct characters. At the same time, visitors themselves take on shifting roles – transmitter or receiver, coding or decoding agent.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist publication (German / English, with color illustrations).

Franka Hörnschemeyer (*1958 in Osnabrück, lives and works in Berlin) has been featured in national and international solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990s. Solo exhibitions have been shown at: Museum Schnütgen, Cologne (2023); Albertinum Dresden (2011); Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens (2008); Henry Moore Institute, Leeds / UK (2007); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2002); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2000). Recent group exhibitions have been presented at: Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023); Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2022); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2017); Kunstverein Hannover (2015); Marta Herford (2011); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2002); National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (2001). Her works in public space can be found at the Paul Löbe House, German Bundestag, Berlin; at the Altmarkt in Dresden; and along the kunstwegensculpture route in Neugnadenfeld / Germany. From 2009 to 2015, Hörnschemeyer was a professor at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen; from 2015 to 2024 she held a professorship in sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.