Eleonora Bourmistrov’s practice explores issues around transience, precariousness, instability, time, place, perception, dislocation and ruins. She uses deconstructive techniques, such as illusion, simulacra, parody of building processes, mixing genuine and imitation materials to treat themes that are disorienting, ambivalent and challenging, in works including site-specific, audio-visual installations, film, video, painting and sculpture. Her focus is physical and human worlds at the point where things break down, collapse and fall apart – the moments that demonstrate most powerfully the finality of all things. The work is dark, dramatic and disorienting. It reveals the power of ruination and inevitability but also the beauty of the flux of time and of transitoriness.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, based in Munich and London, www.eleonorabourmistrov.com

Myra Brooklyn’s art has a transient, unrestful and daunting quality, hovering on the edge of ‘black humour’. It reflects her deep awareness of her personal mortality, vulnerability and non-belonging, which she expresses in a variety of media ranging from sculpture, installation, drawing to printmaking and video. A dark energy seems to form the centre of all her works, which are extremely physical and expressive, yet delicate and fragile; they are often made on site with materials taken from other pieces in acts of rearrangement to form new works. Contemporary materials, such as industrial and technological detritus, electric appliances, wires and lightbulbs, are used in some installations to replicate her own physiognomy and nervous system in some kind of obscure tabletop landscapes: the plug of an electric lead could be disconnected which can be seen as a metaphor for physical breakdown at the end of life.

 Postgraduate Diploma Sculpture, Academy of Visual Arts, Munich, based in Munich and New York,  www.myrabrooklyn.com 

Nicholas Cheeseman uses making as a form of thinking. His material investigations use craft-related processes to challenge the integrity of the form being created or deconstructed. The element of failure is often deliberately visible and present. Contrasts between materials and objects are used to create tension between opposing themes that arise within the work.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, based in London,  www.nicholascheeseman.co.uk

Hans Diernberger works across a variety of media, including performance, video, photography and installation, in a very personal and experimental way, often mixing contradictory and controversial, taboo themes to create a meditative-disturbing, bordering on painful, yet colourful, environment. In his films and performances, the artist aims not only to build an emotional bond between himself as a maker and the object, but, through the making process, to test himself to the limits of endurance and the possible.

MFA in Art Practice, Goldsmiths College, London; MA Diploma in Media Art, Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, based in Munich, London and Cologne, www.hansdiernberger.de

Alfred Görig aims to create sculptures for our time, a time of fast information, through engagement with the very opposite — slowness. He creates slow sculptures, sculptures that in their archaic nature hold a secret. Granite, for Alfred Görig, represents eternity, revealing in its innermost depths a wound, an injury, which is then replaced by another material, iron, which rots and rusts… this contradiction of being united in stone and iron, nature and civilization, raw and cooked, evokes questions which each viewer must resolve for themselves.

Postgraduate Diploma Sculpture, Academy of Visual Arts, Munich, based in Munich,  www.alfredgoerig.de

Risha Gorig works in variety of media, including film, experimental video, performance, composing, dance, poetry and site-specific installation to create a surreal and hauntingly lyrical world of decay and rebirth – work that takes the viewer on a journey of provocative and challenging imagery and motifs of multi-layered meaning, and that mirror our complex environment and the artist’s states of existence. By mixing technology with the fragility of humanity, and often using images of elements such as water, fire and the wind in her pieces, she creates visual metaphors of time, death and life — evoking feelings of otherworldliness and melancholy.

Experimental film-maker, composer and choreographer, based in London and New York, www.rishagorig.com

Monika Kita’s recent art practice is concerned with the subject of loss, with a strong emphasis on space, time and history. Memory as a psychological journey inwards adds an important dimension to her work. The artist explores fractions of past moments, which often elicits a study of the place and a recording of the passing of time. This allows her to ‘freeze the present’ and to contemplate upon its relationship with the past. This process has its extension in the mind. She is particularly interested in derelict buildings in the context of historical events, such as atomic power stations and disused military objects. Alongside the rather personal nature of such inward contemplations about time and loss, Monika’s works could be also viewed as time documents that record, remind and warn of the dangers of global alienation and destruction.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, based in London,  www.monikakita.com

JC Leopold’s practice aims to get to the bottom of dualisms and contradictions such as soft material and raw treatment, strength and vulnerability, above and below, inside and outside, human and non-human, hand and foot. He prefers working with found materials, especially if they show traces of usage and wear, but also utilizes contemporary materials such as foam and polystyrene in his installations and sculptures. JC Leopold’s his work deals with the futility and ephemerality of existence. Material, from which human extremities are cut out, will fall to dust in the course of time, just as human beings themselves, or the buildings that were built to protect us from the environment and danger. Knowing all this, he nevertheless tries to encounter the absurdity of the world with resilient humour.

Trained as a stone mason and sculptor, Lake Constance, based in Munich, www.jcleopold.de

Anna Levy’s work is concerned with the concept of space as psychological construct. She understands space as an entity experienced with the outline of our skin as a borderline  to the whole outside of our body. Scrutinizing the inner workings of the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious’ is as important to the artist as exploring the notion of psychological and physical time-spaces. In particular, she interrogates how they relate to each other and influence our perception and conceptualization of the world, especially with regard to time and place. Light, whether changing, deteriorating or increasing, is very important in Anna’s videos, and can be viewed as a metaphor for the passing of time.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, based in London,  www.annalevy.co.uk 

Milena Michalski creates work around themes of place and perception, site and sight. She uses translucency, transparency and layering to construct images, as well as fragmentation or obscuring of images, to deconstruct them, and to treat issues of representation and abstraction. Milena works in a variety of media, including installation, film, video and print-making. Through an emphasis on the materiality of the media, her practice interweaves memory and trace, combining subjective and objective elements and experiences of time and place.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, based in London, www.milenamichalski.com 

Despina Olbrich-Marianou uses media performance, textile-work, land-art, installation and drawing, to explore her inner self, whilst also relating this to the more general, socio-critical reflections concerning her perception of the world. Through her work she aims to get what she sees as a ‘purifying power’ that would set her mind and soul free, beyond conventional understanding of space and time.

Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, Academy of Visual Arts, Munich, based in Munich   www.myway.de/despina 

Brigitte C. Reichl responds to the fact that in nature everything follows a specific, recurring rhythm. The changing seasons, the heartbeat, birth, decay, re-birth. Her work is inspired by nature, the human experience, and its connected recurring cycles. In her sight-specific installations she transforms a space from pure location to an atmospheric environment. This is achieved by making lighting, smell, temperature and/or sound an integral part of the installation. She aims to bring the viewer into another world. A world, of inner possibilities (and realities), which the viewer may not always be conscious of, yet which exists beneath the surface. Thus the viewer is not faced with something completely foreign; he/she encounters the more or less familiar, however, from a different or unexpected viewpoint.

MA Fine Art,  Chicago Art Institute, USA, based in Munich, www.karton@art.de