The exchange program "Exchange Bremen/Dortmund" is an initiative between the Künstlerhaus Dortmund and the KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Since 2024, the artists' houses have been facilitating artistic exchanges between the cities and regions. What began as an initiative of the two houses has developed into a fruitful cooperation that enriches the artistic landscape.
The "Exchange Bremen/Dortmund" program offers artists from both houses the opportunity for a conspiratorial exchange, which is juried by the respective host from a carefully selected shortlist. This program supports the planned living and working stipend for artists in the host studio, financed by the associations of the two artists' houses.
For artists, the exchange is an opportunity to discover new perspectives, receive creative impulses and gain experience.
In her artistic work, Sara Foerster questions the permanence of photographic image units and their perception. In the increasingly rapid viewing of photographs in our everyday lives, she makes the original material visible and encourage a decelerated viewing. Through manual alteration of the analog photo material, the material is transformed and the underlying carrier material is made visible. In her works, the material becomes the content of the image and raises questions that go beyond the original motif.
Sara Förster has been working with a wide range of analogue photographic materials for many years. Always in search of what is hidden within. And how she can transform the material to make it visible in its own diversity. The artworks are often transformed into installations that interact with the space.
For her artworks she uses found slides, Polaroids as a material, cyanotype for explorations with light, paper and textiles, photograms and luminograms to explore the material in a new way.
Corporealities as expression of systems (societal, biological, artistic etc.) are the focal point of my artistic practice. I am particularly keen to dissect the body (human, animal, plant, fungi, virtual, architectural) and reassemble it in awkward new versions (functional or non-functional) and without species-limitations (can buildings be counted as species?), in order to question normative visions, as well as consider (utopian) versions of inter-linkedness. Systems and networks are scrutinised on a basis of norm versus mutation/outtake/growth.
I am a sculptor and approach bodily expression through various different materials and mediums, including installation, sculpture, video, drawing or sound, which I am keen to assemble into extended sculptural works. Different mediums thus become elements or aspects of sculpture. Not all, but many of my works remain „in flux“, which means they are the result of temporarily assembled elements, that are often "recycled" in new works. Certain colours, gestures and visual elements, such as black hairs or elements of games, re-appear throughout my work. Aspects of repetition, squeezing or hiding are examples of said gestures. I work with both stable and unstable materials. Transformation, shape-shifting and decay are fundamental aspects of bodies and minds, just as much as systematic reconfiguration.