Jeff Burton, Kevin #2, 2003 Courtesy Jeff Burton und Casey Kaplan, New York

Sprengel Museum Hannover Kurt-Schwitters-Platz 30169 Hannover Germany (city map) Send E-mail tel +49-(0)511-168 - 4 38 75 www.sprengel-museum.de

IMAGES of human beings are always images of the world. They relate the circumstances and situations in which the process of ,being human" takes place. They relate social history, they tell of the economic and utopian potential that conditions human existence, and they tell of human perception and of the visual pleasure which the human being takes in images of the human body. SOCIAL CREATURES. How Body Becomes Art is an exhibition of the works of thirteen internationally renowned artists who approach this theme from as many different angles and aspects. The photographer Jeff Burton, for example, draws on the film sets of California's pornographic industry for his subject matter, while in another series of images he thematicizes a very worldly Ecco Homo. Pierre Bismuth and Pierre Huyghe have the imaging process as their theme, starting out from existing, media-generated Hollywood myths, such as Marlene Dietrich, and examining our perception of images in the context of their presentation in public. Stephen Shore's books recontextualize the icons which he himself produced, revealing the circi stances of their production in a whole cosmos of casual perceptions and observations. Boris Mikhailov offers both an archaically utopian symbiosis of the human being and his natural environment and an irritatingly banal description of urban normality in the fringe areas of spent affluence. Carlos Nader documents erotic obsessions that have their origin in the fantasies of political and religious redemption. The Iranian artist Ghazel, who today lives and works in France, pointedly illustrates the absurdity of everyday existence between different cultures and thematicizes, casually yet most impressively, the production of cultural stereotypes. Likewise through the medium of the video, Ben Judd quotes works by Cindy Sherman in exploring the creation of identity, turning the female body into a projection screen for desires and memories. Max Baumann examines the value of human life against the background of medical technology and its ever increasing complexity, while Santiago Sierra drastically demonstrates the utility value of the human being and his capacity for work. Gillian Wearing explores the meaning of the sentence I love you within the bounds of what appears to be a secure, middleclass environment. For his part, Francis Alys uses the camera to measure the distance between man and animal, while, last but by no means least, Erwin Wurm transforms, in his One Minute Sculptures, the human being into a social sculpture and also affords visitors to the exhibition the opportunity to experience this transformation for themselves.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (German /English) costing 20.00 Euro.