About

FILTER Detroit is a research residence for artists, makers, musicians, architects and thinkers in and out of Detroit. The invited guest(s) live in a residential home in a neighborhood and have the opportunity to research, work and interact in the city. FILTER Detroit is a destination providing living and workspace and the possibility to dwell into the cities’ fabric – while exchanging and networking with Detroit artists and cultural institutions.

Why Filter Detroit

Inspired by the artistic movement, community activities and urban transformations in the city of Detroit the curator Kerstin Niemann established FILTER DETROIT in 2010. The residency and its adjacent activities are a long-term contemporary art platform that is shaped in cooperation with inhabitants, residents, neighbors and the city of Detroit.

Since 2010 FILTER Detroit hosted about 30 artists and student groups.Research residents have been networked well into the cultural landscape of Detroit. Curator and FILTER Detroit director Kerstin Niemann included residents as well as Detroit artists and makers in a series of exhibitions, presentations and publications such as Kunstverein in Wolfsburg, Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, the Gängeviertel in Hamburg or Sulivan Galleries in Chicago.

MISSION

FILTER Detroit is a house in a state of constant progress - a space where artistic practices and interdisciplinary research activities meet. It is a hub of investigations and knowledge concerning urban, social as well as cultural movements from Detroit.  The architecture of the house as well as the immediate neighborhood and its activities allow it at times to become a communal place of sharing and gathering knowledge.

Each invited resident is asked to leave something behind, which is added to the constantly transforming “Living Archive” of site-specific knowledge, art and activity. FILTER DETROIT is building up a living archive, a constantly transforming archive of information, documentation, knowledge, activity and space about urban culture(s), spatial interventions as well as social and artistic movements in Detroit and particularly on Moran Street.

Artistic Director and Founder of FILTER Detroit

Hamburg (Germany) and Detroit based Kerstin Niemann is a curator and initiator of contemporary art projects with a particular interest in urban transformation. Since 2016 she is a Research Assistant for Cultural Heritage and Museums Studies in the department of Metropolitan Culture at HafenCity University Hamburg. In the context of writing her PhD she researches visual arts and its connection to real estate and urban development in Detroit.

After a sound vocational training as a real estate administrator Kerstin Niemann studied Cultural Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg. From 2006 to 2010 Kerstin was research curator at the Van Abbemuseum, among others she co-curated ‚Academy. Learning from the Museum’ and the interdisciplinary exhibition project ‘Heartland’, in collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art University of Chicago or „Learning from Detroit“ at Kunstverein Wolfsburg.

In 2010, she purchased a single-family home in Detroit by auction and turned it into the FILTER Detroit research residency.