Art Transponder, the gallery and project space dedicated to contextual and social-embedded art, opened last week an exhibition by the art group Reinigungsgesellschaft (‘Cleaning Association’ or possibly ‘Purification Society’). Promoting themselves as operating in the spaces between art and social reality, for this exhibition, the group has drawn on research time within the German consumer [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Exhibitions/ Artworks’
August 13, 2008
La vieillesse
Recently I visited the actual NGBK’s exhibition, that reflects on the social topic of oldness, or old age, or getting older under the title “Ein Leben lang / All your life”. The exhibition grouped international and generation-wide artists, mostly working with the documentary aspect of photography or installation. It wasn’t a thunderstruck topic, as it [...]
August 8, 2008
Control: Drawing and Re-Drawing
Larissa Fassler, Hallesches Tor (2007)
The current show at Wendt + Friedmann Galerie, entitled Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, reflects upon the experience of living in a foreign country, surveying the work of eleven international artists living and working in Berlin, and one German artist now based in New York. As such it was in part [...]
July 29, 2008
A bit of matter and a little bit more
Same location than the previous Monodramas, but different setting.
Two or three floors up in the ‘House of the Children’, that has been refurbished and standardised into European luxury standards, is the private collection of Axel Haubrok to be visited, again only on Saturday. The hallway, the elevator that offered a quick look into some marble [...]
July 29, 2008
Stan Douglas’ Monodramas
“I’m not Gary” : Stan Douglas, Monodramas (1991)
On the ground floor of what used to be the House of the Children on Strausberger Platz, a small office with a wide view on the Karl-Marx-Allee and its left-overs pedestrians has been used recently as viewing point for contemporary art. Opened on Saturday only, to allow former [...]
July 14, 2008
Art Day-Trips
I have been to two art events recently which I felt had a “day-trip” aspect to them, in that they involved a certain commitment of time and effort to travel to a never visited before aspect of the city. I think the sentiment above reflects more (my) lazy neighbourhood-centrality, something that can easily set in [...]
May 3, 2008
The Real Thing
(after the title of Midnight Oil’s 2000 album).
Brutal Youth, furniture, door, plastic bones, record covers;
How to make a monster?, ink on paper;
both 2008, Daniel Guzmán
“The responsibility and the autonomy of the citizens should be developed through a socio-cultural animation, through culture, arts and even education.” So was the idea of the Houses for the Youth [...]
May 3, 2008
On Quotations
Werkbund Ausstellung Cöln, 1914, exhibition plan
Many dislocations, replacements, translation processes and relocations can be observed at this year’s berlin biennale. A good third of the works shown are somehow related to a strenuous site-specificity, if not made for the space, then referring to the space in its larger sense (geographical location, historical parameter, etc.); one [...]
May 1, 2008
Icelandic Love Corporation at Ard Bia Berlin
The Tent Lady’s Hospitality, video still, 2008, Icelandic Love Corporation
It is said Heinrich Boll’s love-letter to the west coast of Ireland, Irisches Tagebuch (1957), brought innumerable numbers of Germans to the region in the latter part of the last century to “play truant from Europe”. Different, but commonly pervasive myths about the particularities of place, [...]
April 30, 2008
Wunderkammer
Lars Laumann’s video work Berlin-Muren (2008), was without a doubt one of my favourite pieces in the Berlin Biennale. Even still, I always had certain reservations about it, which were confirmed by my developing unease while watching the artwork.
Laumann’s 27 minute long video traces a part of the life of Riitta Berliner-Mauer, who professes [...]
