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. Since 2022, Tina Haber, Thomas Ravens and Birgit Schlieps 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. That exhibition created a symbolic and aesthetic landscape around the topic of bread and interweaving it with economic and political contexts. During their residency, artists Tina Haber, Thomas Ravens and Birgit Schlieps set up a temporary BREAD LABORATORY to engage in an exchange on the topic of bread with residents of Narva and Estonian artists. 

This is what the artists say about their final events: On the last weekend of our stay, we presented various forms of collaboration that we had developed within the framework of the BREAD LABORATORY in an exhibition entitled “Хлеб всему голова – Bread is the head of everything”. The venue was located on the first floor of a former brick administration building next to NART. The results were based on three sources: what we discovered in Narva, what people sent us from far away, and what we carried with us in our luggage.

Speaking of bread – Exchange with people of Narva. The first part features an interview film that shows what we learned about bread in Narva through discussions with people from Narva. The topic bread can be a key to conversations about daily life, historic shifts, social and religious habits and horizons. We learned a lot about the role bread plays in people’s lives, what kinds they like, where they buy it, what social role it plays, and what expressions and stories come to mind. And we have learned that bread culture is changing and being preserved at the same time. https://youtu.be/D0RMTHngjec

Mail Art buttered bread / võileib / бутерброд. The second part presents the arrivals from our Open Call for Mail Art – a format popularized in the 1970s in the wake of conceptual art that was intended not only for artists, but for everyone. Mail Art was a strategy to overcome borders and censorship. Robert Filiou coined the term “eternal networks”. For the current Open Call people from Europe and beyond were invited to send postcards and letters inspired by their associations with: buttered bread / võileib / бутерброд. We received letters, postcards, and packages from around fifty people. Their artistic responses enabled us to create a vibrant and wild tableau for the exhibition, a contribution from a group of people largely unknown to us.

Multiples and other portable small works. The third part was based on the exhibition we curated for the Zwinger Gallery in Berlin in early 2023, the initial moment for our project.
 Most of the artists, as well as some newly invited Estonian artists, are represented with “transportable contributions”.  Art works by Cécile Dupaquier, Alexander Gürten, Ulvi Haagensen, Tina Haber, Thaddäus Hüppi, Iréne Hug, Maarten Janssen, Archiv Laura Mars, Jorge Lopes, Johanna Mangold, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Franziska Nast, Reinold Oster, Thomas Ravens, Susanne Ring, Birgit Schlieps, Stefanie Seufert, Erik Steinbrecher

During the exhibition, there was also a room with books about bread, a small glass display case with an original bread coin issued by the Kreenholm factory for its workers in the early 20th century, some postcards from workshops with stamps and stories about bread that we had done with architecture students from EKA Tallinn and with schoolchildren, and a table with bread, which we shared with the visitors and continued to talk with them about bread and other important things in life.