Words of Greeting

The focus of the online-publication Wette auf die Zukunft („Bet on the Future“) is on objects, installations, video works and photographs by Malte Bartsch from the years 2013 to 2021 which the artist presented in the extensive spaces of the Kunsthalle Wilmelmshaven from May 22 to July 4, 2021. The exhibition and online-publication were realized in the framework of the New York Stipend 2020, which was awarded by the Ministry for Science and Culture in the State of Lower Saxony together with the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung to Malte Bartsch in acknowledgement of his outstanding artistic work.

The artist was born in Braunschweig in 1984; after studying human geography and economy at Utrecht University, he studied free art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, where he completed his studies in 2016 as a master student of Manfred Pernice.

Both the exhibition and the same-named online-publication Bet on the Future convey insights into fundamental themes to which Malte Bartsch has been turning his attention for several years: beginning with the impacts of technological developments and the ambivalent relationship between human beings and machines, all the way to our altered perception of time which, according to a statement by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, is based on a “technically or economically induced acceleration.”

Furthermore, the online-publication also directs its focus towards the artistic strategies with which Malte Bartsch approaches these issues. For example, it presents his perspective of attributing new functions to everyday objects, as in the work Holzautomat (2021), for which Bartsch filled a formaly used vending machine at Ramstein Air Base not with snacks, but with pieces of wood for a campfire. In addition to sculptures with which Bartsch invites the visitors to his exhibitions to engage in performative activities, past years also gave rise to films and photographs that document the artist’s performances and series of experiments. Several examples are the video Rakete (2019), for which Malte Bartsch ignited at night in a field several fireworks that he had previously attached to a 100-meter long elastic band; or the photograph Schneehaus (2021), in which he recorded the blazing and gradual subsiding of a campfire inside an igloo. A further, no less spectacular part of his oeuvre is based on the construction of machines which—in similarity to the aforementioned Holzautomat are made available for use: for example, the large-scale, participatory project Time Machine (since 2013) or Zeppelin W-ADZ 21 (2021), which is being presented for the first time at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven and with which interested persons can view the exhibition around the clock on the internet.

In its totality, the online-publication Bet on the Future presents Malte Bartsch as the representative of an artistic practice which on the one hand reflects upon current social issues and on the other, through performative and participatory elements, playfully and humorously expands sculptural concepts even as it delights in repeatedly shifting the borders between work and viewer that are so clearly defined in traditional sculpture.

The New York Stipend of the State of Lower Saxony and the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung was awarded from 2000 to 2020 to promising young artists from Lower Saxony. In addition to a financial grant, the stipendiaries were given the possibility of living and working for twelve months in New York City. As a consequence of the restrictions in place since the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, Malte Bartsch—to our deep regret—was able to make use of his stipend during the year 2020 only to a quite limited extent. So we are all the more pleased that the artist nevertheless seized the chance, in the framework of the stipend, to concentrate for an entire year on his artistic work and is now presenting for the first time in the present online-publication the works that were developed during that period.

In the future, the State of Lower Saxony and the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung will be awarding the traveling stipend “Lower Saxony in Europe.” It is linked to the newly-conceived Sprengel Prize and enables Lower Saxonian artists to live and work for up to six months in a European country of their choice. Subsequently their artistic works and sojourn abroad will be presented in a solo exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover as well as in an accompanying catalogue. Moreover, the traveling stipend “Europe in Lower Saxony” will be awarded; it will offer European artists the opportunity to work for up to half a year in Lower Saxony and subsequently to present their works at a Kunstverein in Lower Saxony and in a catalogue.

For their support of the final New York stipendiary, we would like to thank all the colleagues of the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, especially Susan Hapgood, the director of the Studio House. Our thanks go to Petra Stegmann, the director of the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, for the trustful collaboration in realizing the exhibition. We would like to thank Veronika Olbrich, Ulrich Beran and Luis Hemme from the Ministry for Science and Culture and Ulrike Schneider from the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung for their supervision of the stipend and the online-publication.

A special expression of gratitude goes to the dedicated members of the jury for the New York Stipend 2020: Prof. Dr. Annette Tietenberg (HBK Braunschweig), Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg (Kunstmuseum Bonn), Gerrit Gohlke (Brandenburgischer Kunstverein Potsdam) and René Zechlin (Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen am Rhein).

In conclusion, our thanks go to Malte Bartsch for the impressive presentation of his works at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven; we wish him all the best for his further artistic work.

Björn Thümler
Lower Saxonian Minister
for Science and Culture

Thomas Mang
President of the
Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung

Endure Freedom!

Claude Shannon, the originator of information theory and a pioneer of today’s communication theory (a shannon is a unit for the mass of information in a message) was also a talented tinkerer. At the bench in his workroom, he built machines that could calculate with Roman numerals, solve the Rubik’s cube or perform juggling acts. The most famous machine that Claude Shannon ever built is simultaneously the simplest that can be imagined; it is called the “Shannon machine” or “ultimate machine.” It consists of a box with a switch. If one moves the switch and flips it from 0 to 1, a mechanism starts, a lid opens and a hand appears which returns the switch to 0 and disappears beneath the lid. A machine whose only function is to turn itself off: the ultimate machine.
I am reminded of this whenever I draw out of Malte Bartsch’s Time Machine a serial work of art which, through the incorruptible time indication, takes on the character of a unique object. A piece of art for eternity, were it not printed on thermal paper that fades over time through light irradiation. A machine that resembles a fuse box spits out, for free and in as large a quantity as desired, works of art that consist of nothing other than their value as unique items, just as technical and senseless as a sales slip from the supermarket. “Ouch!” said the Benjaminian aura of the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility when it has been treated roughly with a taser.

Most of Bartsch’s works function as practical jokes. Recognizing this fact does not mean detracting from the seriousness of this approach. On the contrary—Bartsch thereby takes his place in a club of superlatives in the field of contemporary visual art, as Jörg Heiser elaborates in his book with the title Plötzlich diese Übersicht (“Suddenly This Overview”) borrowed from Fischli and Weiss. In Germany, a country tending towards the idealistic, moralistic, essentialist and solemn, it cannot be emphasized often enough that many of the most complex and dazzling positions of our era—beginning with John Baldessari and Fischli and Weiss past Paul McCarthy and Jenny Holzer all the way to William Kentridge—work with an element of disarming humor, slapstick and surprising intensification. The common denominator among the genres of silent film, comedy and art is the punchline—the sudden flash of recognition when paradoxes are resolved on an unexpected, next-higher level, when overlapping quantum states of significance collapse into a surprising piece of information about the state of the world—Schrödinger’s cat is either dead or alive—and thought can now proceed in a new direction. Thus the punchline makes it possible to smuggle in uncomfortable and subversive ideas. For this reason, humor has always been a means utilized by the oppressed and marginalized: the punk contained within the punctuation point, the point of the joke. Or, as we say in Latin: in cauda venenum (“the poison at the end”). Sometimes Bartsch uses dry humor—unfortunately (and revealingly) there is no corresponding expression in German for the Anglo-Saxon specialty of deadpan humor—as in the case of the New Year’s Eve rocket which, after a stirring skyward start, is compelled back downwards by a rubber band and bleakly explodes right above the ground: a majestic, pitiful nonstarter. Other points are more subtle—“tongue in cheek,” the English would say, again with no German correspondence—such as the film of clouds in super slow motion: the deceleration of deceleration. This punchline poetics, one could say, oscillates between politics and poetry.

Malte Bartsch has studied economics—that is quite noticeable. The themes of his works are free from all inwardness or individual sensibility. Instead—and in spite of the aesthetic-sensual quality that they achieve almost casually as a necessary prerequisite—they aim at the fundamental issues of contemporary discourse and at the foundations of a future social contract: climate change and consumer culture, algorithms and artificial intelligence, financial economics and monetary policy. The Marxist-materialist, million-dollar question “What is value-adding”? or “How does added value arise?” constitutes the ramp from which Bartsch takes off and, with a backward somersault, lands right on the bull’s eye of contemporary artistic discourse: “Where does a work of art begin and end?”, „When is something art?“ and “What has a continued existence today?”

Arising more out of the Anglo-Saxon school of Pragmatism than from German Idealism and Romanticism, Bartsch’s works are neither enigmas and mysteries such as were presented by one part of postwar West-German art with its mystical and shamanistic inclination, nor are they artistic-Minimalist antics typical of Formalism such as were propagated by the other part that had set its sights on the Minimalistic void cycle and new beginning. These are substantial and well-informed bets: “Bets on the Future,” as is formulated with excessive clarity in the title and web domain of the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven. But there is a punchline therein as well: The omnipresent phrase “Bet on the Future” is, just like “Investment in the Future,” a pleonasm that certifies the speaker as a pompous windbag. Just as every investment is oriented towards the future, so can there be no bet that does not involve the future. The essence of a bet is to favor one scenario over the prevalent one assumed by the majority to be valid. Whoever makes a bet deems himself, because of the advantage of possessing insider information or intuitive knowledge, to be more clever than the market, because the essence of a functioning market is that all available information has been factored in at every point in time. Pertinent books on economics state that “the price includes all information available to market participants at a point in time X.” Thus it tends to be improbable that someone could “beat the market,” even if naive, optimistic investors repeatedly try to do just that. Bartsch’s works in the series Risk Averse thematize precisely this phenomenon: They are chutes for virtual products—invisible ice cream just as in Sesame Street or perhaps NFTs—whose digital price tags fluctuate wildly in the manner of algorithm-controlled, dynamic yield pricing. The paradox of the feedback loop, which is also behind what are known as “flash crashes” on the stock exchanges: “When everything is always connected to everything else, nothing ever gets settled.”

In addition, there is namely the complication that the British economist John Maynard Keynes summarized in the image of the beauty contest: The stock market resembles a distorted beauty competition in which each person does not choose the contestant that appeals most to him but instead the one who is assumed to correspond most closely to the average taste. The “animal spirits” (Keynes) that drive the market instead follow more the laws of the mob and of mass psychology than rational judgement and common sense. This provides an explanation not only for “irrational exuberance” in the markets but also for the booms of certain “blue-chip” positions in the art market that rise exorbitantly in auctions, just as formerly, near the end of the sixteenth century, was the case with bulbs in the so-called “tulip mania.” Malte Bartsch’s works tend not to fit those paradigms. There are inherently no bets in the art market, but instead they are often bulky objects that require care and maintenance. As for marketability, they are mostly positioned in the lower quintile of the bell curve. It is rather the case that Bartsch’s “Bets on the Future” are something like the wild cards in the scenario technique: extremely improbable scenarios which nonetheless occur with dramatic effect and give a new direction to the course of history. The business philosopher and investment strategist Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls them “black swans,” which in the Anglo-Saxon context was for a long time a synonym for something that is impossible—until, at the end of the eighteenth century, black swans were in fact discovered in Australia. These are events characterized by the facts that they a) are extremely improbable, b) have a massive impact on the present, and c) subsequently are claimed to have been seen by everyone—just not in advance.
Already before the Corona pandemic, it seemed as if these black swans were occurring on a scale previously unknown in history. The hyperinterconnectedness on the financial markets, the accumulation of extreme-weather situations because of climate change, and the vulnerability of our intensively cultivated informational infrastructure to viruses and attacks by hackers have focused a spotlight on these “fat tail” risks: the recognition that, at the improbable edges of the normal distribution curve, things are brewing that should receive more attention. VUCA is the time-diagnostic acronym with which an endeavor is being made to put the genie back in the bottle: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. We are receiving signals from an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous future. And we don’t know how we should interpret these signals. Therein lies the ambiguity. It is at this point that art comes into play—especially that of Malte Bartsch—with its capacity for teaching us one thing in particular: namely a tolerance for ambiguity. “Endure Freedom!” written in embossing black lettering on yellow, sheet-metal signs was a popular souvenir of radical protesters in the 1980s. That is precisely the issue at hand.

The most catchy and instagram-enabled works by Malte Bartsch imitate and appropriate what has recently come to be practiced in scenario technique under the name of speculative design: show-and-tell artifacts from the immediate future, such as could appear in near-future science-fiction series such as Black Mirror. The vending machine that emits firewood (Holzautomat, 2021) corresponds to the automated teller machine (EC, 2018) whose insides have been removed and whose casing now serves only as an oven for firecrackers. We immediately find ourselves to be in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario in which paper money has been reduced to its meager calorific value and we spend ten million bitcoins for a piece of wood.

Just as the stock market makes constant reevaluations of the current inventory of material and immaterial assets in accordance with plausible suppositions regarding the future, so is art history a constant reevaluation and revision of the massive body of historical art production and intention. But contemporary art—squeezed into the narrow gap between the millstones of the past and the future—can only liberate itself by turning the play with the “reevaluation of all values” into a commercial activity. It is precisely that which makes Malte Bartsch’s machine art for us contemporaries “so different, so appealing” (Richard Hamilton).

Holm Friebe

Romanticism with other Means

How will we live and operate economically in the future? What visions will we pursue and what is the price for our dreams of the future? The title of the exhibition Wette auf die Zukunft (“Bet on the Future”) mirrors Malte Bartsch’s fascination with the absurdities inherent to economic life. At the same time, it alludes concretely to Wilhelmshaven as the site of the exhibition, a city that sacrificed its sandy beach for a container terminal, with which are linked great hopes and an expensively acquired utopia. Will in fact the longing for an improved economic situation be fulfilled in the future? In any case, there are no plans for a return according to the motto “beneath the pavement lies the beach.”

When one encounters the objects and installations of Malte Bartsch, sophisticated technical details quickly present themselves to view: roberts, machines built by the artist, equipment altered to perform new functions, flickering displays both small and large. But Bartsch is not concerned with technological gadgetry—in spite of all the pleasure he apparently derives therefrom. The focus of his works is on an investigation of social issues and economic circuits (including irrational and speculative elements). In this endeavor, he achieves an extraordinary fusion of a highly technologized present with the conceptual world of Romanticism.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the era of Romanticism initiated a turning away from the rationality and rigor of the Enlightenment, which was rooted in Antiquity; this new age emphasized emotion, passion, individuality and soul—a term that runs as a leitmotif through the oeuvre of Malte Bartsch. The artist animates objects and installations with elaborate technology. For example, there is the Rakete (“Rocket”) of his same-named video work, which becomes a tragicomic protagonist denied any opportunity for soaring flight. Instead of ascending into the beckoning expanses of the sky, it is guided by a rubber band back to earth, where its flying sparks are spread across the fields like a starry downpour. We contemplate the rocket with empathy—and likewise recognize the beauty of its failure.

The installation Agave also takes up a Romantic topos that is present here as a “century plant” done in delicate aluminum casts. This plant, which belongs to the asparagus family, stores energy over decades in order to bring forth blossoms and thereupon immediately to die. It thus becomes the symbol of a masterpiece created with heart and soul and inevitably causing the death of its creator. An irresolvable contradiction is contained in the industrial material aluminum (derived from recycled automotive wheel rims), which turns the delicate blossoms into a death mask and permanently preserves their fragile beauty.

One also has the impression of encountering veritably supernatural elements in the exhibition: namely in price indications—leaping like a will-o`-the-wisp, guided by ghostly hands—of the sculptures Risk Averse and Risk Lover which, with their shapes reminiscent of empty goods shelves, point towards an increasingly abstract commercial world that is haunted by immateriality and impalpability in the form of highly speculative cryptocurrencies.

One of Malte Bartsch’s works that has already become a classic is the Time Machine, whose name initially promises temporal travel but which ultimately proves to be a producer of perfect alibis. It proves a person’s presence at a particular place and, with the receipts it issues, simultaneously produces one work of art after another. But it also includes a communal element inasmuch as it is part of a network of time machines situated at more than fifty places (https://tm.maltebartsch.de) which, from New York to Wilhelmshaven, are connected with each other and materialize the ephemeral traces of human presence at various locations.

The element of fire acquires a special significance in the exhibition: In the photograph Schneehaus, for example, fire and ice encounter each other. When a fire emitting heat in an icy landscape threatens to melt its protective accommodations, it gives rise to an energetic cycle without a happy end. And the Holzautomat (“Wooden Vending Machine”) promises fire when, in return for an inserted dollar, it offers for sale individual pieces of wood and matches for a campfire-to-go and thereby issues an implicit invitation to burn part of a work of art even as it simultaneously evokes the communal gathering around an archaic, romantic campfire, a theme that Bartsch also takes up in his Vorschlag für eine Feuerstelle (“Proposal for a Fireplace”).

Finally, Bartsch realizes the dream of flying with a robot-guided Zeppelin W-ADZ 21 that issues a worldwide invitation to a sightseeing flight through the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, thereby overcoming physical distances and connecting various places. Moreover, the Zeppelin W-ADZ 21 becomes the means for a dialogue achieved in an unusual manner: Visitors to the exhibition see the movement of the dirigible and know that it is being guided externally, but they do not know by whom. For their part, the remote pilots can observe persons and events even as they draw attention to themselves through movements or choose to hover in one place. An interplay between visibility and invisibility gives rise to an asymmetrical communication that is occasionally imbued with an element of uncanniness.

The Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven would like to thank the artist Malte Bartsch for a cooperative, pleasurable collaboration and for an exhibition that seems as light as the draft of air caused by the Zeppelin W-ADZ 21 on its floating path through the Kunsthalle. We are especially pleased by the possibility of a virtual visit to the exhibition by means of the Zeppelin W-ADZ 21 which, now towards the end of the third Corona lockdown, offers an interesting contrast to the physical lending of works of art that took place in the Kunsthalle during April 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

Our expression of heartfelt gratitude goes likewise to the Ministry for Science and Culture, especially to Veronika Olbrich, as well as to the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, here in particular to Ulrike Schneider, for the fruitful, friendly and flexible collaboration that led to the creation of an out-of-the-ordinary exhibition in the dynamic field between the poles of technology and humankind, progress and Romanticism.

Petra Stegmann

On Value-Ghosts and Reference-Illusions

“Bet on the Future”—the phrase sounds promising and somewhat glamorous. The title that Malte Bartsch has given his exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven seems to be tailor-made for art. Because the fact is that from time immemorial artists—exclusively the male specimens thereof—have been considered to possess prophetic qualities. This is the case when avant-gardists break with representational conventions and traditional lifestyles that in any case will not enjoy a long duration, or when such artists seek to improve the world and are able to offer convincing alternatives to a misdirected present or, through the unleashing of sensual pleasures, promise access to an earthly paradise. Not only does Malte Bartsch refrain from perpetuating this myth of the artist that has now reached a ripe old age; the future that he presents to the visitors to his exhibition also looks anything but rosy.

Things already get underway with a New Year’s Eve fireworks display that has a perturbing impact because it does not cause any splendid blossoms to magically appear in the nighttime sky. In the twelve-minute video Rakete (“Rocket,” 2019), failure is the repeated outcome of the pyromanic endeavor to ward off evil spirits with the help of magic. One rocket after another rises hopefully but then, a few seconds later, shortly before the joyfully anticipated, colorful culmination, sinks dismally to the ground. If the rockets explode at all, they do so while they are already on a downward trajectory.

The failure of the grand hopes placed in dirigibles at the beginning of the twentieth century is narrated by a cigar-shaped, helium-filled balloon named Zeppelin W-ADZ 21 (2021), which can be navigated through the exhibition space via a robot. In conformance with exhibition parameters in pandemic eras, the flying model can also be guided by a home computer; the camera attached to it provides bodiless views of the situation in the Kunsthalle. As Malte Bartsch discovered, there is also a local reference. In the year 1916, during the First World War, a Zeppelin, the LZ 32, hovered over Wilhelmshaven. At that time, it took over the air defenses for the battlecruiser Seydlitz, which had been damaged upon colliding with a mine. In retrospect, the history of the zeppelin reads like a succession of washouts, bad luck and breakdowns. Emergency landings, engine failures and crashes are part of the story—as is a collective resistance to the multiple failures. When in 1908 the end of dirigibles seemed imminent, a fundraising campaign took in more than six million marks that served as the basis for the Zeppelin Foundation. Right down to today, the vision of worldwide, nation-uniting aviation continues to provide ample material for novels and films, but also for technological developments such as the Cargolifter and the hybrid airship.

In the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Malte Bartsch’s shiny, silvery Zeppelin W-ADZ 21 flies over a gloomy scenario consisting of two flower starks made of cast aluminum and supported by tripods. Agave (2021) does not resemble the same-named, decorative, succulent houseplant but instead refers to its starks which, in Central and South America, can grow as high as eight meters. After decades this sort of plant, also known as the century plant, blooms one single time—and then dies. The crowning achievement of its existence, long yearned for, is simultaneously also its death sentence.

The artist offers visitors who wish to be involved in interaction the opportunity to set his Time Machine in motion. All that is needed is to press a button. But the journey through time ends in quite a mundane manner when the vending machine emits a sheet of thermal paper upon which is recorded how many seconds the participants pressed the red button. Not only does the piece of art, authenticated by a certificate and delivered into their hands, look like a sales receipt; the material of which it consists also leaves no doubt as to the fact that this work of art, in spite of asserting its intrinsic value, will not long endure.

With the sculptural arrangements Risk Averse (2021) and Risk Lover (2021), Malte Bartsch likewise investigates the phantom of the economy. Whereas Joseph Beuys once stored packaged foodstuffs on goods shelves in order to give concrete expression to the Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980) of West and East Germany, Malte Bartsch now puts empty metallic shelves on display. Something that from a distance is reminiscent of Haim Steinbach’s arrangements of everyday objects proves upon closer inspection to be a reference to the turbulent ebb and flow of the global financial markets. Will-o’-the-wisp price tags that change perpetually as if by magic celebrate the mutable value of immaterial goods.

Whoever feels a cold shudder because of incalculable price fluctuations finds with Holzautomat (“Wood Vending Machine,” 2021) all utensils that are necessary to start a warmth-providing campfire: firewood, matches and a piece of paper: or more precisely, a dollar bill. One can suppose that Marcel Duchamp, who compared the ongoing rotation of the Roue de Bicyclette (“Bicycle Wheel,” 1913) in his studio to the flickering flames in a fireplace, would have taken pleasure in so preposterous an automatic gadget.

A connecting element in the works of Malte Bartsch is the paradox. On the one hand, they seem perfectly produced, ideally placed and coolly staged; on the other hand, they are suffused with the experience of failure, the absurdity of the ideology of progress, and the futility of all action—yet they are utterly free from irony, even from cynicism. It is likewise surprising that they reject traditional symbolism and metaphor even as they generate narratives. They unleash an unexpected dynamism at the triple intersection between history, the social practices of financial economy, and art. They tell about the collective powers of the imagination, about speculations regarding a better future which, for their part, have the power to actually bring about political, ethical and aesthetic movements. And they provide an indication of what connects art and economics: short sales, futures trading, “in other words, a contract that obligates the signatories to enjoy the gains or endure the losses of a contingent future.”¹ From this perspective, artists today appear to be not prophets but instead fearless tamers who are capable of juggling with value-ghosts and reference-illusions, who have an inkling as to where there could be free spaces for a possible future. And there is an extreme need of precisely that. Because in the meantime, computer scientists have lost their belief in such potential spaces. As Jaron Lanier acknowledges: “I miss the future. Today we have such low expectations regarding it.”²

Annette Tietenberg

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₁ Joseph Vogl: Das Gespenst des Kapitals. Zürich 2010, p. 91.
₂ Jaron Lanier: Wem gehört die Zukunft? Hamburg 2014, p. 456.

Impressum

Die Online-Publikation Malte Bartsch – Wette auf die Zukunft erscheint anlässlich des New York-Stipendiums 2020 der Niedersächsischen Sparkassenstiftung und des Landes Niedersachsen im Anschluss an eine Ausstellung in der Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven und in Verbindung mit einer Präsentation der Ausstellung auf der Webdomain www.wetteaufdiezukunft.de.

The online-publication Malte Bartsch – Wette auf die Zukunft (“Bet on the Future“) is being presented along with the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven on the occasion of the awarding of the New York Stipend 2020 by the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung and the State of Lower Saxony on the web domain www.wetteaufdiezukunft.de.

Malte Bartsch – Wette auf die Zukunft
Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven
21. Mai – 4. Juli 2021

Malte Bartsch – Wette auf die Zukunft (“Bet on the Future“)
Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven
21 May – 4 July 2021

Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung
Schiffgraben 6 - 8, D - 30159 Hannover
Telefon +49 (0) 511 / 36 03 489
sparkassenstiftung@svn.de, www.nsks.de

Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
Leibnizufer 9, D - 30169 Hannover
Telefon +49 (0) 511 / 120 25 99
pressestelle@mwk.de, www.mwk.niedersachsen.de

New York-Stipendium New York Stipend

Organisation Organization: Veronika Olbrich, Ulrich Beran, Luis Hemme, Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur Lower Saxonian Ministry for Science and Culture Ulrike Schneider, Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung

Jury 2020: Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg, Gerrit Gohlke, Prof. Dr. Annette Tietenberg, René Zechlin

Partnerinstitution Partner Institution: ISCP, International Studio and Curatorial Program, 1040 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11211, USA

Geschäftsführende Direktorin Executive Director: Susan Hapgood

Programm- und Ausstellungsleitung Director of Programs and Exhibitions: Kari Conte

Direktorin für Entwicklungen und Programme Director of Development and Programs: Juliana Cope

Ausstellung Exhibition

Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven
Adalbertstraße 28, D – 26382 Wilhelmshaven
Telefon +49 (0) 4421 / 41 448
info@kunsthalle-wilhelmshaven.de
www.kunsthalle-wilhelmshaven.de

Direktorin Director: Petra Stegmann

Online-Publikation Online Publication

Herausgeber: Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung und Land Niedersachsen in Zusammenarbeit mit der Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven

Editor: Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung and the State of Lower Saxony in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven

Gestaltung Graphic Design: David Liebermann, Benjamin Maus, Malte Bartsch

Übersetzung ins Englische Translation into English: George Frederick Takis

Fotografien Photos: Edward Greiner

Alle Rechte vorbehalten All rights reserved

Bibliographische Information: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.de abrufbar.

Bibliographic information: Published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.de.

© 2021 Malte Bartsch, Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Land Niedersachsen, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Autorinnen und Autoren the authors