YESTERDAY TODAY TOMORROW

Ladies and Gentlemen,

YESTERDAY TODAY TOMORROW is an exhibition that feels somewhere between a snapshot and a long-distance run.
We are showing new works by our artists Anja Michaela and Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov, which are stylistically very different and yet have a great deal in common. The artists are interested in exploring and describing a central phenomenon of our existence - memory. In other words, something that can be imagined as an event in YESTERDAY like a point on a timeline and that then continues to have an effect into TODAY and TOMORROW, into the future.
I would like to tell you a personal story about this:
I spent wonderful years of my childhood in a sleepy village on the Baltic coast. There was only one road there, unpaved, with water in front of the house and hills with heather behind it. There was a sawmill where it smelled wonderful and where big horses pulled the logs across the road. In the herring season, the cutters would sail past the house and the fishermen's wives would stand in long orange smocks in little stalls by the water and pulp the fish out of the nets. I haven't visited this place since my grandmother died over 20 years ago. When I spoke to my father some time ago about this place and how I could go there again, his reply was: "Don't bother. It looks like Blankenese."
So I decided not to visit this place. It left its mark on me, still defines a scenic ideal, defines my ideal of childhood and also of family. I don't want my inner image of this place, its smells and its atmosphere to be overlaid by the new circumstances.
Memory is what remains of a life lived. It is a treasure, sometimes also a burden. Both can change and take on a life of their own.
Anja Michaela and Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov focus on precisely these processes in their work: How exactly does it work, memory? And how can it be brought into a form, the fading, the glorification, the blurring, the additions and the omissions?
The first thing that catches the eye in Anja Michaela's exhibition is the brand new series of musical instruments. Anja Michaela is currently enjoying a one-year residency scholarship in Paris. She met a musical instrument maker there. The company provides her with parts of brass instruments. She uses them to mould her own instruments. Always with at least two funnels, it is always about communication, about a relationship between two or more voices. The only work with only one funnel is called DIVA - here the communication really only seems to run in one direction.
Have you ever tried to draw a trumpet off the top of your head? Why don't you do it, you'll be surprised how little accuracy you have in your memory of such an object. Mouthpiece and funnel, somehow curved in between... Very few people will remember much more. What about more complex arrangements? Or with causal relationships or even feelings? We usually only have a few set pieces - funnel, mouthpiece - and their connection is unclear, often changeable or strange. Anja Michaela finds surprising and plausible forms for these multi-layered processes. Her works are characterised by a clear artistic statement and delight the eye with their grace and precise craftsmanship. Anja Michaela learnt the goldsmith's trade in a previous life - mastery of materials and technique is always highly gratifying.
The same can be said for the work of Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov (MNP). Their core medium, if you like, is painting, which they have mastered with virtuosity. They are also excellent at drawing, they work sculpturally, they make spatial installations and, more recently, they also make films.
Over a year ago, MNP rediscovered old photographs and films from their childhood. They document summers with their beloved grandparents in Pabaltys, a tiny village in Lithuania, in the middle of the forest.
The desire to see this place again after decades quickly arises. A project takes shape: We are travelling to Pabaltys - a journey into the unknown, into yesterday and today.
MNP choose drawing as their artistic technique, a medium that is as fast as it is versatile. Before, during and after the journey, they create a total of over 3000 drawings that offer different perspectives. MNP draw with watercolour chalk on semi-transparent polyester drawing film, which almost looks like film material. Some sheets are treated with water and have a translucent, blurred look, almost like old film material. Others have a very clear, dry line and appear much more real and clear, almost documentary. This allows them to depict different temporal and emotional levels: the present-day memory of childhood, the real images of childhood, the images of the journey experienced and, with all of this, the feelings that are associated with this place and this period of life
The two of them have made their very first film from over 3,000 hand drawings and have brought us as a gallery to show our very first video work.
I cordially invite you to watch the film and the entire exhibition away from the hustle and bustle of the vernissage and find your own Pabaltys. Then you are sure to hear the vibrations associated with Anja Michaela's work - perhaps even music!

Dr Kathrin Reeckmann