NEID ('ENVY') develops in a constantly shifting constellation of international artists, musicians, photographers, etc. NEID is a transmedial project. NEID realizes shows, performances, parties, music events, and readings. Seven issues of the magazine NEID have been published since 1992.
NEID #8 appeared in the form of a CD-ROM documenting NEID's activities over the last seven years and including new contributions.

For 2001-2002 NEID plans this exhibition project:

<representin'>

The titel of the show <representin'> is refering to amerikan slang as performers use it in afro-american rap music. Here rappers used to 'represent' afro american perspectives in the U.S.- mainstream media where afro-american culture and politics play a subordinate role as a minority.

The exhibition project <representin'> is a cultural context that manifests the possibilities of constructing identity apart from the mediatized mainstream. The exhibition project <representin'> brings together artists who use art as a cultural free space for independent research. Their work belongs to the field of visual studies; it includes photography and artworks that use found photo and film material that is exposed for critical view and comment. The works address questions of social positioning and trace the constructs of representation identity at the boundary between public and private bodies.

Using processes of re-representation, combinatorics or seriality, manipulation and mixing, the artists roll back the parameters of individualization that the media production of worlds of images operate with. The analytic glance uncovers prototypes and traces ideological formulas that often remain concealed in everyday use. The aim is to make visible the simultaneity, contradictions, and complexity of relationships and structures in which the representatives of the media world of images takes place: bodies are the munitions on the media battlefield.

Following artists with specific contributions to the project are taking part: Andreas Gram, Berlin; Johan Grimonprez, Gent/New York, Tara Herbst und Nicolas Siepen, berlin; gerd Holzwarth, berlin, Art Jones, New York, Peter Piller, Hamburg, Hinrich Sachs Basel/Hamburg; Katja Reichard, Berlin; Bettina Sefkow, Hamburg; Ina Wudtke, Berlin;

In connection with the show there will be published a reader with the titel <representin'>.

Kontakt: Ina Wudtke/Katja Reichard, ina@thing.de / +49/30/440 551 41

The Artists / The Projects

Bettina Sefkow's research deals with structures of representation in the field of public print media. She works with photographs taken from newspapers and magazines. For the portrait series "Men" and "Image Politics", she has blacked out the faces in photographs to sharpen awareness for their context. Body language, gestures, attributes and sites reveal the photographic construction of power.

Johan Grimonprez shows his video: 'Lost Nation, January 1999'. It is not only a possible metaphor for globalisation, but is also the name of the perfect example of things local: a small unsightly village, literally in the middle of nowhere - Lost Nation, Iowa. Johan Grimonprez went to visit it, armed with a video camera, and were received by the mayor of this village of 467 inhabitants.

In his performances Gerd Holzwarth is focussed on his body. A discourse on the limits and possibilities of a desire that is satisfied through the radical act of putting one's own skin, blood tears and sexualtity at stake. For the opening of <representin'> he'll spread a 100 black and white foto copies in a circle on the floor. These fotos show Holzwarth in different periods of his life: as a kid with his parents, at school, at parties, during his military service and so on. Holzwarth will cut out everything that corresponds to his skin with a scissor and eat it. This procedure lasts between 1 and 2 hours.

Tara Herbst and Nicolas Siepen show their videofilm "Moi je suis au Mois de Mai" meaning "me in the month of may" produced 2000. Representation in filmproductions is building itself up on various levels. The regisseur is representing the film, the film represents the actors and the actors represent the personalities they are playing. The level of the 'film making' is usually clearly seperated from the film itself. -Most successfull if no trails of the production-conditions are visible. Therefore the backside of the picture is the money: Sony meets may 68!

Art Jones is an image/sound manipulator working with film, digital video, and hybrid media. His documentaries, experimental music videos, cd-rom's, live videomixes, and installations often concern the inter-relationships between music,visual culture, history, and power. For <representin'> he plans to show 3 videos:
1) "making the video/mama said"-12 minutes, 2000 A documentary about the process of re-making LL Cool J's classic 1992 music; video "mama said knock you out" shot for shot, minus LL Cool J. music by LL Cool J.
2) "nurture"-4 minutes, 2000; A musical meditation on nihilism and animal identification in commercial hip-hop culture. "where my dawgs at?" music by Ol' dirty bastard.
3) "over above"-3 minutes, 2000; The distance from social reality measured by airplane, helicopter, and bus simultaneously. music by Cibo Matto.

Peter Piller is archivist. His archive contains about 4000 pictures - a collection of newspaperphotos from regional papers dealing with about 60 subjects. Instead of collecting dpa-pictures (german press agencies-pictures) he is concentraiting on better amateur photography. In <representin'> two of his collections will be showen: 'Ehrungen' ('acts of honorary', 'Pokale' ('goblets').

Andreas Gram's contribution to <representin'> is an artifical flower-bed inside the showroom. He is refering towards the french garden tradition of the 18. century, where it was a highly respected art to order plants under formalistic principles in direct context to the castle.

Katja Reichard's video-lecture 'Bewaffnete Ärzte im Sozialpalast' (armed doctors in the social palace) is dealing with collective phantasmal of fear, ghetto-discourse and control of areas. It's about the stigmatization of urban quarters by a specific social way of talking -where politics and science play an equal role as the media. Ghetto-discours procedures of in- and ex-clusion are working with the help of collective symbolism, who is getting close to scenarios of catastrophes and therefore is a violent social practise.

Hinrich Sachs specializes in occurences, both social and intellectual, and he only makes what is necessary to set those off, not much more. "That we know" is an ongoing project since 1994 -dealing with the shifting female image in different cultural contexts. Sachs reproduces a complete set of all the international Elle-issues of one month. The black and white photocopied samples reveal the cultural variety of an originally french esthetic concept. The installation is always accompanied by an evening with guests: Hinrich Sachs will invite professionals from the fashion and publishing field.

Ina Wudtke photographs people who can be assigned to a particular social group: army soldiers, fan groups, residents of a neighbourhood, red cross nurses, or members of religious communities. From these, she develops photographic series that reproduce, as well as subvert, the aesthetic principles of the respective group. The ornamental presentation intensifies and subtly comments on the phenomena of the individual's subsumation through aesthetic codes. For <representin'> Wudtke will install a free standing fence construction with photographies of 'German soldiers'. The soldiers are members of germanies 'representative troup' 1999. The second work will be the serie 'benedictine monks' photographed in 2001.

Additionally the NEID@HOME CD-Rom will be showen. The CD-ROM will be projected with the aid of a beam; the visitor can scroll through the CD-ROM.

The show is supported in many ways by: Evan R. Franco and Cantürk Kiran.
As well there are 30-40 artists who did contributions which are documented on the NEID@HOME CD ROM.