FORT consists of Alberta Niemann (*1982 in Bremen) and Jenny Kropp (*1978 in Frankfurt am Main). Since 2008, they have been creating installations, performances, and video installations (until 2013 with Anna Jandt). As of 2023/2024, FORT has held the professorship for sculpture (sculpture/installation/spatial conception) in the Fine Arts program at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel.
The group of artists FORT, made up of Alberta Niemann (1982 in Bremen) and Jenny Kropp (1978 in Frankfurt am Main), moves like a seismograph through our contemporary everyday world, tracing current social, political, and economic events and developments. A key part in their artistic practice is played by the assimilation, transformation and staging of different situations that they either find or create for themselves. On occasion their detailed arrangements – which are often produced in connection with performative interventions – resemble stages or experimental set-ups.
They start out from these to examine and disclose mechanisms of consumer society and the art mar-ket, the conditions of current art production, or the prevailing ideas about a place. It is frequently possible to discern borrowed forms or content from film, literature and music, which are subtly interwoven in the group’s works. In their inter-ventions, performances and installations, on the one hand FORT respond to existing structures and conditions; at the same time, the artists add alien aspects to their found situations and play with our perception and a re-contextualising of the apparently familiar. (Lotte Dinse)
Selected institutional exhibitions and prizes: MGK Siegen (solo, 2023), Kunstverein Ruhr (solo, 2020), Kunsthalle Gießen (solo, 2019), Kunstverein in Hamburg (solo, 2019), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2019), Langen Foundation (2017), Cremer Prize (2016), kestnergesellschaft (solo, 2015), New Positions Award with Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman at Art Cologne (2014), Karl H. Ditze Preis (2013), Neues Museum Weserburg (2009), KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin (2008).
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