galerie burster Frankfurt

For the first time, Nina Röder shows works from her long-term project in which she uses the Czech spa town Marienbad as the backdrop for a play with biographical and fictional identity constructions. In the late 1920s, Röder’s great-grandfather worked as a concierge at the hotel then called Bayerischer Hof in Marienbad; his family lived in the neighboring village of Chodský Újezd. Since her childhood, Röder has regularly traveled with her family to the place her grandparents called home. Accordingly, alluding to Shakespeare and Bachmann, Marienbad is stylized as a utopian place of longing whose neo-kitsch aesthetic can be seen as ‘too decadent for today’s taste’. In the apparent light-heartedness of the place, Röder repeatedly stages her mother in absurd and bizarre situations, in addition to erotically connoted motifs. With this series, Röder ties in with earlier works on family narratives that follow the quest for knowledge about one’s own origins.

Nina Röder (b. 1983 in Neuendettelsau, Germany) lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg. She studied Media Art and Design from 2006 – 2009 with a focus on photography at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Since 2017, she has been a professor of photography at the European University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. In addition to her artistic work, Röder completed a doctorate in the field of artistic research.

Artist Talk with Miriam Zlobinski & Nina Röder: Saturday, 1 April 2023, 3 pm