Fremde Kinder

group show at Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel (CH)

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9 February 2025 – 9 March 2025

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with Finn Curry, Kerstin Mörsch, Geneviève Morin, Leah Nehmert, Benoît Schmidt, Philipp Schwalb​

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Friendships, shared learning experiences and mentorships are the basis for the Fremde Kinder exhibition. We want to strengthen our connections and continue the process of creating together; an exhibition about painting that is based on the meaning of relationships. At the centre of Fremde Kinder is a collaboration and the different nuances and poetics of individual painting processes. The multi-dialogical preparation should create the space to continue and intensify collaborations, to see and establish new neighborly connections and to be challenged by them.

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The focus of the exhibition is not on the presentation level of the works, but on the attempts at joint planning, collaboration, networking and exchange through images. The process of creating the exhibition is an essential part of the presentation form and is therefore given a long preparatory period. In this preliminary phase, images became doors, windows, hinges - but also intersections, transitions, junctions and sometimes barriers, signs, or obstacles to collective exhibiting. The exhibition-choreography of Fremde Kinder reflects the group's commitment to sharing knowledge and insights and becomes a game precisely where imagination and reality meet.

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Especially in a group exhibition, an image can be experienced in different barrier forms. Paintings can be boundaries. Fremde Kinder specifically seeks them out, reveals them, plays with them, tests them, and questions them.

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«What's the use of a Bild if it is a/for a fremdes Kind?» To what extent is the addressing of images considered in their creation and discovery processes? If artworks are made to be exhibited, questions arise at the latest during the exhibition’s preparation: Who are they addressing? How do they communicate? And who can actually see them? Painting, which was painted as a form of communication, is part of a social figuration in an exhibition. The moment in which Fremde Kinder get to know each other becomes a motif. Finding a motif is similar to getting-to-know-you games. The image shown in play can be experienced in an exhibition as an economic, discursive, social, spatial or physical barrier. Image barriers are rarely made visible. In the exhibition The Child as an Artist, Alfred Lichtwark presented artworks created by children for the first time in 1898. However, the exhibition was intended for adults. The 1990s television documentary Fremde Kinder, on the other hand, focused on boys and girls up to the age of 14 living in often difficult circumstances, advocating for them and giving them a voice. Who are the images dedicated to and who do we depict? Let's put ourselves in the shoes of Fremde Kinder to experience the exhibition.

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Images © Finn Curry

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