This publication is being issued on the occasion of the 15th edition of Neue Kunst in Hamburg e.V.’s travel grant: the association, founded in 1986, has been biennially awarding this funding program since 1996 to support and promote up-and-coming artists who studied in Hamburg and/or live there, in collaboration with varying invited guest curators. It covers travel expenses and subsistence allowances for a stay abroad of several months, a joint exhibition and nally a publication to present the artistic inquiries produced during the grant period to the widest audience possible. The call for entries of this edition in the fall of 2019 met once again with a gratifyingly positive response. Though, given the high level of the approximately 100 applications, it was not easy to make a nal selection, the outstanding works of art (and the destinations developed in dialogue for this purpose) by Karimah Ashadu, CONNY, Nina Kuttler, Fion Pellacini and Nina Zeljković convinced in the end.

In mid-February 2020, the travel destinations and research inquiries were presented jointly with the grant recipients to the members of the association in Hamburg. At the latest with the beginning of the lockdown that followed shortly thereafter, however, it became clear that travel would be difficult for this edition of the grant. Instead of journeys to distant places, new encounters, experiences, exchange and mobility, the grant recipients, too, like all of us for the most part stayed home during the subsequent months, while the COVID-19 pandemic spread dramatically. Travel plans to Brazil, Trinidad, Nigeria, to the deserts of California, Croatia and Turkey – to name a few, were abbreviated, postponed repeatedly, or, if they had already taken place by the time of this volume’s release, were without exception shaped by the conditions of the global pandemic.

Similarly, the series of publications accompanying the project reflects this situation inasmuch as, beyond a series of travel reports and introductions to the artists’ works, the individual volumes reflect the specific concomitant travel circumstances during a global pandemic, ways to artistically and mentally cope with a lockdown and about access and exclusion, about changing planes and about staying home waiting. What emerged is a series of five travel notebooks which, besides journeys across the continents, include mental journeys through a drastically changing present.

Karimah Ashadu, Conny, Nina Kuttler, Fion Pellacini, Nina Zeljkovic

Eva Birkenstock is the current director of the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst Aachen. After her studies in art history and cultural anthropology in Cologne, Havana, and Berlin, she worked in various positions at Kunstverein Hamburg, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg and Kunsthaus Bregenz. Favoring collaboration and dialogue between diverse discourses and modes of working, throughout the past fifteen years of her curatorial practice she has regularly initiated summer academies, conferences, performance series, research-based group exhibitions, and publication projects.

Karimah Ashadu (b. 1985 in London) is a British-Nigerian artist living and working between Hamburg and Lagos. Ashadu’s practice explores labour, patriarchy and notions of independence pertaining to the socio-economic and socio-cultural context of Nigeria and West Africa. Ashadu has received awards, such as the ars viva prize.
The text is written by Leonie Radine. She is a curator based in Cologne. Together with artist Maria Eichhorn and curator Yilmaz Dziewior, she is currently working in the capacity of assistant curator on the German Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.

CONNY is a performative collaboration consisting of Niclas Riepshoff (Bremen, 1992) and Tanja Nis-Hansen (Faxe, 1988). In 2020 she received the Neue Kunst Hamburg travel grant curated by Eva Birkenstock; in autumn 2021 she will be showing the outcome of the travel grant at Galerie [NAME] in Hamburg. The text is written by Viktor Neumann. He is an art historian and curator. Since 2020, he is Guest Professor for Curatorial Studies at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Designs.

Nina Kuttler is an artist and writer based in Hamburg. Her multi-disciplinary practice revolves around ecological awareness, the approaching anthropocene and a sense of interconnectedness between species, time, self and outer space. In her work, cultural knowledge and mythologies are entangled with historic approaches to natural science as well as contemporary methods of research. The text ist written by Adomas Narkevičius (b. 1992 in Vilnius, Lithuania). He is a curator and art historian based between London and Vilnius. Currently he is working on the notion of untimely art, reconsidering the ‘belated’ art in the Baltics during the 20th century.

Fion Pellacini (b. 1986 in Homburg) is a visual artist, musician and composer of German, Brazilian and Italian nationality. His sculptural, performative and musical works refer to and embrace different social groups, reflecting physical, spatial and social conditions. The text ist written by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz. He is a Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher based in La Paz, Bolivia. His texts and cultural critiques have been published in Spanish, German, English, Portuguese and French, in various formats in catalogues, magazines, and international newspapers in Europe, Africa, the USA and Latin America.

Nina Zeljković (b. 1985 in Belgrade, Serbia) works in expanded painting and video. Her work is inspired by the attitudes that Byzantine painting held towards images, taking into account the body moving through space, prompting/activating the experience of immersion. The text is written by Daniel Falb. He is a poet and philosopher and lives and works in Berlin. Falb has put out four volumes of poetry with publisher kookbooks, most recently »Orchidee« und »Technofossil« (2019). Current work online at danielfalb.net