The video “SHELTER-BONE (To Anna and Lawrence Halprin at The Sea Ranch)” is a series of 5 drawings and a 28-minute one-shot video at the rough Pacific coast. It is a dialog of movement between Asef behind the camera and Burckhardt in front, both navigating dense fog and heavy wind, between attraction and resistance. Asef-Burckhardt search for a sensitive language with and within landscape and become part of it: as mimicry with land, wind and plants in constant motion.
Asef-Burckhardt‘s video work was inspired by the couple Anna and Lawrence Halprin, who worked at The Sea Ranch: He as a landscape architect and she as a dancer with a focus on “embodied healing“. Interestingly, Mario Asef studied architecture before studying art (where he first heard about The Sea Ranch) and Kirstin Burckhardt is both a performer and a psychologist. The artist couple Halprin made a strong commitment to their surroundings through their joint artistic activities. Not to isolate themselves as a „duo of lovers“, but to strengthen each other in order to work together for community building and ecology, is also the inspiration for Asef-Burckhardt‘s present project.
Links
Gabriele Brandstetter
Duo-exhibition by Mario Asef and Kirstin Burckhardt
Artist talk moderated by Gabriele Brandstetter
Guest artists Dania Burger and Peder K. Bugge
Gabriele Brandstetter is Germany’s first female professor of dance studies. She gained an international reputation as a gender researcher. She successfully developed a new course of study. Dance studies was recognized as a university discipline in 2003 and was integrated into the regular curriculum of the Freie Universität Berlin (FU). In 2026 she was awarded with the Deutscher Tanzpreis for outstanding performance.
Elena Engelbrechter
SHELTER-BONE handelt um ein multimediales Kunstprojekt des Künstlerduos Mario Asef und Kirstin Burckhardt, das sich mit Architektur, Natur und “Schutz” in Zeiten globaler Krisen befasst.
Die Arbeit basiert auf Forschungen in der “Sea Ranch” in Kalifornien, einer Siedlung aus den 1960er Jahren, die ökologische Architektur und Natur verbindet.
Die Ausstellung thematisiert die Transformation natürlicher Ressourcen, Liebe in Krisenzeiten und hinterfragt die Relevanz dieser utopischen Siedlung angesichts von Waldbränden und Umweltkrisen.
Die Ausstellung SHELTER-BONE Lieben in Krisenzeiten wurde von Stephan Klee für den Kunstverein Göttingen kuratiert.
Elena Engelbrechter kommt vom Kunstmuseum Wolfburg, um mit dem Kunst–Duo und Paar Asef–Burckhardt ein Podiumsgespräch zu führen. Elena Engelbrechter ist Kuratorin und Leiterin der Sammlung in Kunstmuseum Wolfburg und zusammen mit Andreas Beitin bekamm für “Re-Inventing Piet. Mondrian und die Folgen” den Preis für die Ausstellung des ART-Kuratorenpreis des Jahres 2023.
