Tina Haber, Thomas Ravens, Birgit Schlieps (Germany)

Bio

Tina Haber is a German artist and social worker based in Berlin. In the 1990s, she studied Fine Arts at the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin, later, she participated in the Goldrausch Artists’ Project scholarship and worked as a lecturer at UdK Berlin. Currently, she assembles color fields into images of unstable spaces and abstract objects. In her short stop-motion loops, the visual space begins to shift and expand, creating the impression of surreal, remembered, or dreamed architecture.

Thomas Ravens, born 1964 in Western Germany, studied Philosophy and Linguistics in Bielefeld, then Visual Arts in Berlin till 1995. He considers himself in a broader contemporary sense as a landscape artist. He lives and works in Berlin.

Birgit Schlieps is an artist from Berlin, Germany. She is co-founder of the artist group Stadt im Regal / City on Shelves and works with space as a phantom, myth, and construction. Her work includes artistic and scientific research, curatorial activities, and teaching. She received her doctorate in urban photography from the HfbK Hamburg, which resulted in the publication: Image phenomena of a prefabricated city in the Kazakh steppe, Hamburg: Materialverlag HFBK 2020. She studied sculpture, multimedia and architecture at the UdK Berlin, AA London and Cooper Union New York.

Project

Bread is a staple food. Depending on the production process, it can be more than that. F.M. Dostoevsky once said: “Nothing is as positive as bread.” “There is no piece of bread in the world that has not been baked by religion, politics and technology.” H.E. Jacob: “Six Thousand Years of Bread“, 1954. During the residency, artists Tina Haber, Thomas Ravens and Birgit Schlieps will set up a temporary BREAD LABORATORY to engage in an exchange on the topic of bread with residents of Narva and Estonian artists. Since 2022, they have been working as artists and curators on the BREAD project. The first group exhibition SLICED BREAD took place in January 2023 at the Zwinger Galerie in Berlin. The exhibition created a symbolic and aesthetic landscape around the topic of bread and interweaving it with economic and political contexts. The BREAD LABORATORY in Narva is intended to be a temporary space where people are invited to participate in various events on the topic of bread. These events can explore bread as a family tradition, its meaning in specific social and political contexts, its role in art, the craft of traditional bread baking or the high- tech process of industrial bread making. The BREAD LABORATORY aims to bring together and document these different perspectives and personal stories. The resulting documentation will be presented at the end of the residency at NART and will also be part of the next group exhibition SLICED BREAD, which will take place in Estonia.