Veronika Eberhart
IKOB, Belgium
10 December 2023 – 10 March 2024
The history of Europe and its division into East and West – the consequences of which continue to resonate today – is the subject of this year's exhibition programme presented at IKOB – Museum for Contemporary Art, in Eupen, Belgium. Located in the German-speaking part of the country that borders both the Netherlands and Germany, the museum is ideally positioned to reflect on questions around national identity.
Veronika Eberhart’s exhibition at IKOB, inspired by the biography of Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, forma the conclusion to this exhibition cycle. Born into an education-orientated bourgeois family in 1898, Eisler was a close friend of Bertolt Brecht, and is most widely remembered today for having composed the national anthem of the GDR (the former East Germany).
After 1933, Eisler's music and Brecht's poetry were banned by the Nazi Party. Both artists went into exile. While Brecht settled in Denmark, Eisler traveled and worked in Prague, Vienna, Paris, London, Moscow, Spain, Mexico and Denmark, before settling in Los Angeles in 1938. There, he was wrongly accused by the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) to be a spy for the Soviet Union. Eberhart takes Eisler’s turbulent biography – his time in Los Angeles especially – as a starting point for her new film Garten sprengen (Watering the garden), named after a poem of the same name by Brecht from 1942, for which Eisler composed the score. In the film, Eberhart thematizes notions of exile as a catalyst for creativity. This subject is further explored through a new series of photographic works, as well as sculptures and a publication.
Veronika Eberhart (born 1982 in Bad Radkersburg, Austria) works with a transdisciplinary approach that combines video, sound, performance and sculpture. Eberhart studied sociology before finding her path towards the visual arts. Her work unfolds through rigorous research, often interpreting a specific historical reference into complex arrangements encompassing video, sculpture, and installation. While her works are frequently rooted in specific places, their sense of time remains ambiguous. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including Belvedere 21, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wien; Kunstraum Niederösterreich and CalArts, Los Angeles. This will be her first collaboration with Phileas.
