Alumna Klara Hobza ’05 in 3 International Exhibitions

Alumna Klara Hobza '05 featured in international exhibitions In Aller Munde and Alles Im Wunderland in Germany and Animaloculomat in Switzerland. 

Hobza is a Czech Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1975. Her sculptures, videos, photographs, drawings, and projects are characterized above all by the fact that they have an adventurous and obsessive nature. Many of her artistic projects are located at the threshold between art and science, between slapstick and theory as well as between subjective and collective experience. She studied in Germany, England, and the US. She received a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University, New York, USA where she lived until 2009. 

Hobza is featured in the group exhibition In Aller Munde: Von Pieter Bruegel Bis Cindy Sherman, roughly translated to On Everyone’s Lips: From Pieter Bruegel to Cindy Sherman. Curated by Uta Ruhkamp, On Everyone’s Lips explores the motif of the oral cavity. “The oral cavity is a literally stimulating bodily zone. Not only have science and medicine always been involved in the exploration of the oral cavity, but also art and cultural history, from antiquity to the present,” according to the gallery. 

“As the scene of a highly infectious disaster, the mouth and throat area is currently receiving the greatest attention worldwide, since its mucous membrane provides the ideal substrate for the survival and spread of the coronavirus—a topicality that was not foreseen during the preparation of the exhibition. The oral cavity has thus moved to the center of social, political, and media debates.

The broadly conceived exhibition is devoted to dental culture, in turn, is illuminated in a variety of ways. On Everyone’s Lips comprises paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, drawings, prints, and video art, juxtaposed with individual exhibits from ethnological and scientific collections, film and advertising, music, and literature.”

Visitors to the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg will experience this emotional spectrum from disgust to empathy on the diversified thematic tour through the exhibition.

The exhibition is also accompanied by a comprehensive, richly illustrated publication. With specialized thematic essays, it offers not only in-depth content, but also extends beyond the exhibition itself. The mouth is thus also examined with regard to its various components and capabilities within the fields of cinematic history, ethnology, literary studies, and architecture. 

In Aller Munde runs at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany from October 31, 2020 through April 5, 2021.

Work from "Alles Im Wudnerland"

Hobza is also part of Alles Im Wunderland, a group exhibition in Nassau, Germany. 

The exhibition directs attention straight to animals that the man finds annoying, harmful, disgusting, or unwelcome. Anything one is reluctant to encounter in everyday life and that are often perceived as not relevant to the system and therefore "dispensable" in the man-made hierarchy between living beings.

“In search of this limit, humans undertake further categorizations and hierarchizations that derive relationships. In fact, it is humans who unquestionably turn out to be the greatest pest on the planet, while slowly becoming more and more aware of the (eco)system-preserving importance of the innumerable, mostly smaller, living beings,” the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden press release stated. 

In the works of the international group exhibition, the separation and/or distinction boundary between the human-made categories “animal” and “human” is questioned, in particular invertebrates, and eventually becomes a symbol of the current mood of the approaching apocalypse - or they show hopeful alternatives. 

The exhibition is part of the cooperation Artentreffen along the RMV S-Bahn line 8 with the Art and Culture Foundation Opelvillen Rüsselsheim and the German Leather Museum in Offenbach am Main. Alles Im Wunderland is open from October 2, 2020 through July 2, 2021. 

Finally, Hobza also has an interactive photo-booth exhibition titled Animaloculomat, which tours around several Natural History Museums, including the current one at Naturama Aarau in Switzerland. 

The booth takes a portrait of the subject as if seen through the eyes of a selection of animal species. Some animals are a bat, snake, squid, horse, dragon fish, jumping spider. Originally built for an exhibition at Naturkundemuseum Berlin, it then traveled to Landesmuseum für Tier und Mensch Oldenburg, Kunstverein Oldenburg, Galerie Soy Capitan Berlin, Naturhistorisches Museum Basel and Naturama, Aarau.

With the Animaloculomat, Hobza balances scientific method with artistic plausibility and puts herself into the tradition of the “artists visualization“. She uses scientific insight into the visual apparatus of animals as raw material to then weave in her artistic interpretation and personal intuition about these species.

Animaloculomat runs through August 2021.