Champagner im Keller (engl. Champagne in the basement)

When Nina Röder‘s grandparents died three years ago, the family

had to clear out and finally sell their house within a week. Most of

the grandparents‘ belongings were packed up at random - only a

few mementos were deliberately chosen and stored in a basement

room in the house of Röder‘s mother in the little town Windsbach in Germany.

The door of this room was opened again for the first time at the

beginning of 2020. With an ambivalence of amazement and melancholy

all objects, furnishings and especially the grandmother‘s clothes

were examined.

It was in this basement room that Nina Röder and her mother staged

portraits, self-portraits and still lifes with these belongings for the camera during the

Corona lockdown, thus creating a stage for an Absurd Theatre.

The series CHAMPAGNER IM KELLER follows Röder‘s work about

her family, in which she encounters loss and grief in a performative

and humorous way. As in her previous series, Röder deals with individual

abilities to act and explores questions about the influence our

family and our origins, as well as losses and inherited traumas, can

have on our thoughts and actions. With the potential of photographic

staging, the process of letting go of family members in Röder‘s

works is thus experienced as a changeable construction of contemporary

reality.

The title of the series is based on a quotation from Röder‘s grandfather.

On the occasion of his 90th birthday he was given several

bottles of champagne as a gift. As a modest man he brought those

into his basement and said: „When the beer is empty, we‘ll drink the

champagne in the basement.“