The Air in Between

The Air in Between is an exhibition project based on an ongoing postal exchange of art works between the artists Claudia Hausfeld (*1980, East-Berlin, lives in Reykjavik) and Detel Aurand (*1958, West-Berlin, lives in Berlin). They met for the first time in Iceland in 2017. Shortly after, they began a postal exchange, sending each other letters and works of art, sharing their impressions and thoughts, and always also their artistic work. They encouraged each other to respond to their work, to comment on it, to question it, to add to it, to intervene. This game, this dialogue took place without any time pressure or goal, and was exclusively between the two of them. In this way, drawings, paintings, collages, photographs and objects flew back and forth between Reykjavik and Berlin, dealing with themes of life here and there, then and now. Over the years, this dialogue has meandered through many colors, materials and ideas.

The exhibition The Air in Between as well as the accompanying artists’ book collect traces of this conversation and open it up to outsiders for the first time. By embedding selected works from the previous correspondence in a joint installation on site, the exhibition deals with questions of collective and individual artistic practice, proximity and distance, commonality and demarcation. 

The Air in Between is neither a conclusion nor an end point of the project. It focuses instead on the very “in-between” that ultimately connects everything: the elapsing and expectant time between the mailings, the distance between Reykjavik and Berlin, the mental or intellectual space between the two artists, or, as Hausfeld put it in one of her letters, the gap “between thinking and doing”. Sometimes the gestures and style of one artist or the other remain clearly recognizable, sometimes they blend into something completely new. Ultimately, as it becomes clear when reading the letters, Aurand and Hausfeld understand their collaborative work as something fluid, unfinished, even non-linear, allowing for recourse and overlap, as well as different approaches and interpretations by the viewer.   An artists' book of the same name will be published alongside the exhibition.