Hamlet Within

An Exhibition of Cinematic Art

15th April- 30th April 2023

Opening screening Saturday 15th April

MPHQ Project Space presents the first gallery screening as a motion picture artwork of Ken McMullen’s ‘Hamlet Within’ starring Ian McKellen, John Shrapnel, Ben Turner, Lex Shrapnel, Gabriella Wright, Jacques Derrida, Dominique Pinon and Martha Parsey. Written and Directed by Ken McMullen. Produced by Art Cinema, Scape Productions and Twenty One Productions. The film is in English, German, French, Mandarin, Italian and Russian with English subtitles.

Hamlet Within is a radical cinematic investigation into the myth of Hamlet, its origins and its enduring appeal across cultures and systems of beliefs. Drawing on post-modernist movements in Art, History, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis the work asks the question ‘why Hamlet?’ and indeed ‘why now?’.

Trailer ‘Hamlet Within’

German / Deutsch: MPHQ Project Space präsentiert die erste Galerieaufführung als Filmkunstwerk Deutschlandpremiere von Ken McMullens “Hamlet Within” mit Ian McKellen, John Shrapnel, Ben Turner, Lex Shrapnel, Gabriella Wright, Jacques Derrida, Dominique Pinon und Martha Parsey. Buch und Regie: Ken McMullen. Produziert von Art Cinema, Scape Productions und Twenty One Productions. Der Film ist in Englisch, Deutsch, Französisch, Mandarin, Italienisch und Russisch mit englischen Untertiteln.

Hamlet Within ist eine radikale filmische Untersuchung des Hamlet-Mythos, seiner Ursprünge und seiner anhaltenden Anziehungskraft über Kulturen und Glaubenssysteme hinweg. Unter Rückgriff auf postmoderne Bewegungen in Kunst, Geschichte, Philosophie und Psychoanalyse stellt das Werk die Frage “Warum Hamlet?” und in der Tat “Warum jetzt?

Screening of ‘Hamlet Within’ at MPHQ Project Space London I Cologne

Press release ‘Hamlet Within’:

In June 1891 Paul Gauguin landed in Tahiti with a romantic image of an untouched paradise. After six years settled on the island, and crippled by self-doubt and unable to paint for six months, Gauguin vowed to paint his final masterpiece, inscribed with the questions:
D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?


The press release for the exhibition with all available work can be downloaded here:

All enquiries please contact us by email on info@mphqprojectspace.com

Walter Dahn

‘Die Schwimmende Tasse’. 16mm. Walter Dahn / Johannes Stüttgen / Boscher Theodor. 1992

Walter Dahn is a German painter, photographer and sound artist, who is one of the most important ‘Jungen Wilden’ of the 1980s and taught Painting at the Art School in Braunschweig. From 1971 to 1979 Dahn studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf as a Master Student of Joseph Beuys. His first works were drawings and installations in Room 19 of the Academy. The focus of his work rests largely in drawing, photography, and making Super 8 and 16mm films. From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of the Artists Collective Mülheimer Freiheit, along with Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger. Walter Dahn lives and works in Cologne.

http://www.spruethmagers.com/artists/walter_dahn@@overview

Ken McMullen

Ken McMullen is an award-winning film director and artist living currently in London. His feature films are distributed world wide, his documentaries broadcast extensively and his art works exhibited in leading contemporary art galleries in Europe, The United States and the Far East. Whilst his primary studio is in London he has been working in the CERN Prototype Workshop in Geneva and in Greece and Lisbon. Ken McMullen is an artist who became a filmmaker, and his films are both cinematic and painterly. He works intuitively and visually, with his films grounded in philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and literature.  McMullen’s exhibition Signatures of the Invisible brought together artists and scientists working at CERN, the European particle physics facility near Geneva, and was shown at Centre de Edition Contemporaine, Geneve, the Museu Gulbenkian, Lisbon and at PS1 MOMA New York.

https://kenmcmullenfilms.wordpress.com/

Photo: Oliver Abraham

Roxana Halls

Eye Candy. Limited Edition print. 2017

Frequently employing dark glamour and a wry deliberate humour, her paintings, depicting female impropriety, work within the tradition of feminist art to offer a riposte to self-censure. Drawn to investigate the meaning of cultural trends she invites the viewer to reflect on the ways in which gender, class, sexuality and spectatorship slyly intersect to circumscribe the repertoire of legitimate actions available to women.

While sceptical of straightforward narratives of empowerment, the paintings depict the differences between private and public selves, as well as the adoption of protective guises as a form of subterfuge, often discomfortingly at odds with the inner self.

https://roxanahalls.com

Krzysztof Honowski

Krzysztof Honowski’s work is concerned with misunderstandings, tangents, agglomerations of information, the re-interpretation of pop cultural iconography – especially the points where it becomes opaque.

Honowski studied at the University of Cambridge, Slade School of Fine Art London, and Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His work has been presented extensively in Europe, including at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Zabludowicz Collection London, the Barbican London, Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal, Jewish Museum Berlin and Athens Museum of Queer Arts.

Krzystof Honowski lives and works in Cologne and Berlin

http://www.honowski.com

Regine Schumann

‚Colour Rainbow Pink Toronto’. 2018. Acrylglas, flourescent. 65 x 45 x 10 cm.

Regine Schumann is a light and installation artist who studied from 1982 to 1989 at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. In 1989 she was acknowledged as a master student of Roland Dörfler. From 1986 to 1994 she was a member of the artist group Freiraum, consisting of Frank Fuhrmann, Dieter Hinz and herself. Aside of numerous scholarships (amongst others a DAAD-scholarship for Italy in 1990 and a grant from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for Japan in 2000) and contracts for public art, she received the Leo Breuer Prize in 2006. Regine Schumann lives and works in Cologne.

http://www.regineschumann.de