Extra Time. Heather Phillipson

In the organizer's words:

To mark the 100th anniversary of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, British artist Heather Phillipson is transforming the Kunsthalle St. Annen into a walk-in work of art from September 13, 2024. For her solo exhibition, she draws significant inspiration from the motif of time and social change, which play a central role in The Magic Mountain. The novel is about the individual experience of time against the backdrop of epochal upheavals before the First World War.

Heather Phillipson (* 1978, UK) is an award-winning artist and poet. In 2022 Phillipson was nominated for the Turner Prize. Her recent projects include a new commission for Art Night 2023 in collaboration with the Art Fund's Wild Escape program and the BBC Archive, a commission for the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, London (2021-22), commission for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London (2020-22) and a large-scale project Art on the Underground at Gloucester Road station (2018). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Serpentine Galleries, Whitechapel Gallery London, New Museum New York, Palais de Tokyo, Schirn Frankfurt, Sao Paulo Art Biennial (2016), Athens Biennial (2018) and Sharjah Biennial (2019). Phillipson is also a renowned filmmaker and received the Film London Jarman Award in 2016 and was selected for the European Short Film Festival of the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018 as well as several awards for her poetry. In 2024 Phillipson will realize a new commission for the Imperial War Museum's 14-18 Now Legacy Fund in collaboration with the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, and a new permanent commission for Hospital Rooms, United Kingdom.

In Extra Time, the former church of St. Anne's Abbey becomes a portal for dreams and visions of an alternative present and possible futures. The main protagonists of the artistic staging are crow-like characters that populate the entire exhibition space. Crows are considered to be one of the most intelligent bird species. Their mysterious and prophetic call has also made them the subject of numerous myths and legends, often appearing as harbingers and instigators of great upheavals. In the exhibition, they come together in mass gatherings, swarm out, observe, consult, protest and dream. "As the title 'Extra Time', a term borrowed from soccer for the stoppage time at the end of a game, suggests, the exhibition attempts to convey a sense of overflowing time, an excess of time, a time outside the allotted time in which it passes differently and challenges our sense of time," says the artist.

Phillipson's scenes also refer to the city of Lübeck, which, alongside Mann's novel, is another important reference for Extra Time. As is characteristic of her working method, Heather Phillipson immersed herself in the city and allowed its images, sounds, smells and stories to take effect. The crows that populate the city and its playgrounds and sports fields, especially in the early hours of the morning, motivated the artist to translate this mysterious atmosphere into richly detailed spatial collages and surreal environments. Visitors to the Kunsthalle St. Annen stroll through soccer pitches strewn with oranges, between protest camps, playgrounds and skies, through four-dimensional images, as it were.

Heather Phillipson developed the exhibition, which leads through the individual rooms as a course, especially for the Kunsthalle St. Annen and only here can it be experienced in its entirety. The artist incorporates the ascending architecture of the exhibition building, which can be climbed by visitors over three floors, symbolizing the Magic Mountain.

In her expansive installations, Phillipson combines a variety of different media - from video, collage, sculpture, music and digital media to murals, drawings and texts. In Extra Time, she succeeds in creating a sensual connection between her art and central motifs from Mann's novel and the urgency of our present.

The Extra Time exhibition is accompanied by a wide-ranging program of events and educational activities. Among other things, visitors can look forward to dialogical tours and workshops with artists. You can also look forward to joint parties and popular formats such as the Art Dinner and the St. Annen Talk, which offer space for encounters, music, culinary delights and conversation.