Catalogue presentation

In the context of Eccentric 80s: Tabea Blumenschein, Hilka Nordhausen, Rabe perplexum, and Contemporary Accomplices

left: curator’s team, photo: Pablo Lauf


Thursday, 11 May 2023, 8 pm
at Kunsthaus Hamburg
Catalogue presentation with Burcu Dogramaci and Mareike Schwarz

Free admission. 
At 7 pm Burcu Dogramaci and Mareike Schwarz will guide through the exhibition. 


As part of the curatorial team of the exhibition Eccentric 80s Burcu Dogramaci and Mareike Schwarz will present the accompanying catalogue. The book contains extensive visual material and texts by the editors as well as Elfe Brandenburger, Sabeth Buchmann, Rachel Mader and Eva Meyer. It was designed by BüroBüro and published by b_books, it can be bought at Kunsthaus Hamburg for € 22.

Tabea Blumenschein (1952–2020), Hilka Nordhausen (1949–1993), and Rabe perplexum (1956–1996) acted ex-centrically in several senses: outside the centre of attention, deviating from social norms and often also from institutionalised art. The results of their productions – performances, readings, films, concerts or murals – were sometimes fleeting, ephemeral and thus less marketable at the time. Blumenschein, Nordhausen and perplexum worked in the cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. At the time, they represented non-recognised gender and identity images and lived sexual orientations non-conformably. The exhibition and publication project focuses on themes such as subculture, queerness, performative and collaborative ways of working. It tells a different story of the art of the 1980s in the Federal Republic of Germany; beyond the great male master narrative that has dominated the narrative of these years until now.


Burcu Dogramaci is Professor for Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary global art and photography, exile and migration. She has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project METROMOD (2017–2023), which focuses on exile metropolises for modern artists. She is co-director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg global dis:connect. Selected publications include “Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century” (2020, co-ed.), “Textile Moderne / Textile Modernism” (2019, ed.), and “Fotografie der Performance: Live Art im Zeitalter ihrer Reproduzierbarkeit” (2018).

Mareike Schwarz works at the intersection of public art and public interest with a focus on commons, memory culture and atmospheres in contemporary art. She studied economics, literature and art history in Berlin, Cambridge, Buenos Aires and Munich. Her master’s thesis on commoning atmospheres of art in public space was awarded the University Prize of the City of Munich. In 2020, she conducted an oral history project on curating at memorial sites at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is currently a PhD student with the METROMOD research group at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.