Paola Malavassi – författare

Employed as an office manager in the former GDR, and working as a self-taught artist, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt used her typewriter to create patterns and abstract compositions with characters and letters at the junction of Concrete Poetry, Dada, and Minimal Art. Her linguistic explorations that she developed further into collages later on, are often based on ambiguity.Published on the occasion of the large retrospective at MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam, NICHTS NEUES explores her typewritings, prints, collages, and paintings in thematic episodes. Although Wolf-Rehfeldt discontinued her artistic practice after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her art has lost none of its relevance. In a poetic, idiosyncratic, and often humorous way, the nonconformist artist explored themes such as environmental issues, intellectual freedom, community, and communication. Her sometimes subtle, sometimes more literal play with words, meanings, and forms continue to reveal the unexpected.

Textile art and political powerSoft Power celebrates the ability of textiles to store and communicate a multiplicity of (hi)stories that act as a disruptive force against dominant social and cultural narratives. The political entanglements inherent to the medium demonstrate the power of textile art to move people, things, stories, and ideas in and out of visibility. Soft Power does not focus solely on textiles as hand-crafted or industrially-fabricated objects, but understands them as being a part of systems. This includes the webs of production and trade that continue to connect textiles and people across the globe as well as the histories, cartographies, cosmologies and rituals that unfold around fabrics. With works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Caroline Achaintre, El Anatsui, Leonor Antunes, Rufina Bazlova, Edith Dekyndt, Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, William Kentridge, Joanna Louca, Rosemary Mayer, Malgorzata Mirga-Tas, Sandra Mujinga, Otobong Nkanga, Willem de Rooij, Gabriele Stötzer, Sung Tieu, Rosemarie Trockel, Johanna Unzueta, Hamid Zénati a. o.