Nina Tobien // Avertissement

For her artist book Advertissement, Nina Tobien draws on a specific historical event in 1777, when the magician Philadelphus Philadelphia, admired by Goethe and Schiller, was supposed to perform in Göttingen. Working from this historical encounter, Nina Tobien develops narrative constructions in a series of delicate black and white collages and installations that are based on an underlying system of order. A formal and conceptual structure underlying her work is the Möbius strip, a topological object discovered in Göttingen by Listing. Nina Tobiens uses the structure of the Möbius strip to suggest themes of inversion, mirroring, and the correspondence between the two worlds of science and magic. (Laura Schleussner)