Umweltbundesamt
APIS REGINA - Bienenarbeiten (bees’ work) is the name of a new exhibition opening on 11 June 2009 at the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) in Dessau-Roßlau. The Berlin artist Bärbel Rothhaar, who has devoted her art to bees for about ten years, sees her work as a kind of dialogue between man and nature.
Rothhaar places various objects—drawings, bones, metal objects- into bee houses and lets the bees change and build their honeycombs on them. The exhibition at UBA sheds light on a number of Rothaar’s different bee projects and cooperations and seeks to arouse the visitor’s interest in the unique world of the honeybee with interactive installations and a live broadcast from within a beehive. Due to years of experience with bee colonies the artist became increasingly aware of the problem of the abrupt disappearance of bee colonies. This threatening aspect of an as yet little known environmental disaster is an important springboard for this presentation.
The process of assembling and dismantling the bees’ works is not entirely in the artist’s hands. Allowing rank growth means allowing autonomy of natural processes, which makes Rothhaar’s works exciting examples of sustainable processual art that grows out of a dialogue with nature as it adapts to the speed of natural processes. Bärbel Rothhaar has demonstrated this operating principle in many domestic and international exhibitions.
UBA Vice President Dr. Thomas Holzmann opens the APIS REGINA - Bienenarbeiten exhibition on Thursday, 11 June 2009, at 6:00 p.m. in the Forum of the Federal Environment Agency Dessau-Roßlau, Wörlitzer Platz 1. The artist will give a personal introduction to her works, followed by a lecture by Berlin’s own beekeeper Erika Mayr about beekeeping on brownfields.
The exhibition is open Monday - Fridays, 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., from 12 June - 28 August 2009. Admission is free.
Information on ”Art and Environment” at the Federal Environment Agency is available under "Links".
The UBA’s motto, For our environment (“Für Mensch und Umwelt”), sums up our mission pretty well, we feel. In this video we give an insight into our work.
