BERLIN.- With the exhibition series “Rundgang 50Hertz” the Nationalgalerie shows its support of artists who have recently finished their studies and taken their first steps in the art world. Until 2019, a yearly summer exhibition will present selected final year projects created at art academies in Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig.

The exhibition space is a pavilion designed by Florian Stirnemann (raumlaborberlin), which will be temporarily housed in the headquarters of the transmission system operator 50Hertz, located next to the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin. The kick-off exhibition this year includes work by Emma Adler (graduate of the kunsthochschule weissensee berlin), Asana Fujikawa (graduate of the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg), Susanne Keichel and Cosima zu Knyphausen (graduates of the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig).

Emma Adler (b. 1980 in Saarland) creates room installations in which real, virtual, and medially transmitted spaces interlace. In her thesis work “EEEEF#GE” (2015), Emma Adler demonstrates that first impressions and outward appearances are not always reliable. She touches thereby on an old theme in art history – the yearning for acheiropoieta, for a direct connection between a real occurrence and a visual representation – and updates it by placing it in a contemporary context, troubled by conspiracy theories and fake news.

From a different perspective, Susanne Keichel (b. 1981 in Dresden) is concerned with images circulating in the media. Xenophobia and migration movements are the central subjects of her artistic practice. The Dresden-based artist sought conversation with refugees, went to refugee shelters and Pegida demonstrations, and captured her impressions in photographs. She created an open archive, titled “Fluchtlinien” (since 2015), which she continues to work on.

The starting point for Cosima zu Knyphausen's (b. 1988 in Houston, Texas) final year project “El Gran Cuadro” (since 2016) was a genre painting, made by the Augsburg painter Johann Moritz Rugendas in 1835 in Chile, which later became the country's national icon. She painted numerous variations of the painting, concentrating on details or single colours, concerned with the question: how can paintings trigger and pass down the process of national identity-building?

Asana Fujikawa's (b. 1981 in Tokyo) work is concerned with processes of transformation, which recall the mutations that superheroes routinely undergo, but which are actually the result of shame and guilt. In her master thesis work “Waldmenschen” (2016) she uses the mythologically loaded theme of metamorphosis, in order to explore the very basic question of how humans deal with changes.