ASHLEY HANS SCHEIRL UND JAKOB LENA KNEBL

In the gaudy and colorful installations by Austrian duo Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl, nothing is as it seems: in a mix of fashion, painting, sculpture, photography and film, they create walk-in, seductive worlds in the aesthetic of the 1970s that captivate visitors.

In these "spaces of desire", Knebl and Scheirl question hierarchies of art and design as well as stereotypical gender identities: they take bodies apart, reassemble them and play with fetishism to create diverse works and beings that challenge the boundaries of good taste and conventional representations of identity. The duo draws on a wide range of references - from Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace to Barbapapa, Hans Bellmer and Luigi Colani, from Hector Guimard to cyber aesthetics.

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl work both separately and as a duo. They exhibited together at the 15th Biennale de Lyon (2019) at the invitation of the Palais de Tokyo and at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2020). They represented Austria at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, where Knebl & Scheirl's exhibition DOPPELGANGER! was on view from October 2023 to January 2024. The installations from the Palais de Tokyo will also be shown in modified form in the Falckenberg Collection. Further works and installations developed specifically for the exhibition at the Falckenberg Collection will expand the exhibition, which will occupy all floors of the collection building in Harburg.

The exhibition will be complemented by works by students from Prof. Angela Bulloch's Time Based Media class at the HFBK and works by students from Jakob Lena Knebl's Transmedia Art class at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In addition, works selected by the artists from the Falckenberg Collection will be on display.