Nina Könnemann

What’s New

For many years, Nina Könnemann has placed a camera before a billboard situated in the suburb Neukoln in Berlin. The silent film exposes both banal and paradoxical passages of time and space of the passers-by highlights the transformation of public space. The surface of the exhibition—the billboard—becomes a wall behind which the fascination of the artwork concentrates. The video shows individuals going behind the billboard to urinate, take drugs, meet—masked behaviors behind the object intended for observation, the billboard. The audience does not explicitly see what is happening behind the billboard, only the before and after. The public space is transformed into an intimate place that the artist does not try to reveal, thus increasing the fantasy about the possible: simple urinal, place of dealings, and places of exchanges, meetings. The apparent neutrality of the objective makes it possible to relate to different spheres: those of the visible and the invisible, the real and the fantasies, the intimate and the public, the objective object and its subjective representation. By a mirror parallel to the presentation of What’s New, the projection screen in the exhibition space doubles as a figure of the billboard in the public space.