BERLIN.-Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin presents WerkRaum. 23 - Matthew Buckingham - Everything Has a Name, on view through 19 August 2007. An Exhibition by the DAAD / Artists-in-Residence Program in collaboration with the National Gallery in the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin.

Matthew Buckingham’s work is devoted to the historical enquiry into names and their origins. His film, Muhheakantuck – Everything Has a Name, investigates how the river now known as the Hudson was named by different peoples. Filmed from a helicopter following the riverbank from Manhattan to Sleepy Hollow and back again, a voice-track recounts the story of the Hudson. Images, texts and biographies are simultaneously the subject-matter and the means by which Matthew Buckingham’s work achieves its form.

This is also the case in his latest work Everything I Need, dedicated to the story of Charlotte Wolff, a Jewish doctor and psychologist. Wolff emigrated from Berlin, worked in Paris and London and finally, in August 1978, returned to Berlin. By juxtaposing texts and images of an empty passenger airplane interior from the 1970s Matthew Buckingham in this work comments on the different stages of Charlotte Wolff’s life.

Finally, his third large video-work, which was made in 2006 for the Liverpool Biennale, deals with Herman Melville’s short tale Daniel Orme and his novel Redburn. This film, entitled Obscure Moorings, is shown in a wave-like cinema construction.

The voyage theme - the retelling of historical facts using symbolic images - is discernable as a leitmotiv in Matthew Buckingham’s work. The exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof leads the viewer to different places and sites in cities and landscapes. The knowledge of what lies behind a name corresponds to images that suggest a two-fold theme of voyage: both as a journey to these various places and as a point from which to enter the story of our culture.

Matthew Buckingham was born in Nevada, Iowa in 1963. He lives and works in New York. He has participated in international group exhibitions since the late 1990s. Comprehensive solo exhibitions have taken place in the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna in 2003 and in the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster in 2005. Until 1 July 2007, Matthew Buckingham’s most recent work can be viewed in his solo exhibition “Play the Story” at the Camden Arts Centre London.