Kaya (Kerstin Braetsch & Debo Eilers)

KAYA collaboratively traverse the boundaries between painting and sculpture, fusing both genres into an altogether new, hybrid artistic approach. Containers for a kind of inter-subjectivity that both retains and sublimates the artists’ individual hands, the works also offer a geologic logic, an organic history of their own making, as they preserve and pulverize or retool the former KAYA performance objects and ephemera into upcoming works, and re-use from KAYA’s past into a multiple, ever-becoming body. More recently KAYA has moved beyond the figure of Kaya Serene and has become a collaborative platform that reaches beyond the artistic output of “Brätsch and Eilers” to incorporate the creative energies of the community that it builds around itself for each iteration of the project. Often times this includes fellow artists, as well as students, curators, academics, and the institution that plays host to the many KAYA projects. KAYA is a collaborative project established by painter Kerstin Brätsch (b. 1979, Hamburg, Germany) and sculptor Debo Eilers (b. 1974, Texas, USA) in 2010. ...

Deborah Schamoni is a contemporary art gallery based in Munich, Germany. Situated in a 1970s villa, the gallery is able to offer its artists a spacious white cube, flooded with daylight and opening up to a greened outdoor area, as well as an independent smaller room. Since its founding in 2013, the gallery has focused on showing and supporting emerging international artists and it presents an exceptional program that unites international positions with a subversive and self-reflexive approach to art making considering the complexity of human coexistence. The gallery often stages the first shows of upcoming international artists in Germany. The program is developing a distinct profile with artists like Maryam Hoseini, Yong Xiang Li, and Flaka Haliti, who investigate the sociopolitical conditions of queer identity and gender, and share a diasporic experience in their works. Beyond its international focus, the gallery has been playing an important part in establishing Munich as a prominent destination for contemporary art and its discourses. ...