Heide Nord (born 1980) focuses in her installations on painting in the broadest possible sense, opting for very different variants of the medium. She incorporates various materials into her installations and alternates in her work between abstraction and figuration. Her projects reference scientific themes and persons, theorists and discoverers in the fields of psychology, anthropology, biology, chemistry, not to mention politics, music and the visual arts.

The pieces on show in the MMK relate to the subjects of avant-garde and utopia. On display are painted portraits of mainly Russian artists and theorists who pursued an idea or a notion of utopia. They stand for those people who sought to revolutionize our world, but were overtaken by the passage of time and other developments. The installation concentrates among other things on Russian Lev Sergeyevich Termen, who called himself Leon Theremin in the West. He was a physicist and the inventor of the legendary musical instrument named after him, which is widely considered a precursor of today’s synthesizers and drum computers. At the time, it was the very first electronic musical instrument and has remained unique to this very day, the only instrument that does require touch to be played. The theremin was first used in a concert in 1927, in Frankfurt/Main.

The works of Falke Pisano (born 1978) explore contexts relating to the relationship of artwork and viewer in various different ways. Her installations arise out of an interest in abstraction and the viewer’s perception, as well as out of a wish to generate forms that do not convey narrative or figurative elements and yet for all their limited repertoire are highly diverse. She specifically addresses issues relating to the nature of sculpture not from the vantage point of the sculptural object but instead of the aesthetics of the reception of the medium. At the sculptural level, and by drawing on new media such as performance or video installations, Falke Pisano endeavors to enable us to grasp abstract objects in language, thus changing how we perceive them. The MMK Zollamt will showcase Falke Pisano’s installation Figures of Speech II, Diagrammed, 2009, which she exhibited at the Venice Biennial.