Niche Berlin´s Guide to Gallery Weekend for Stil in Berlin
Photo: Mary Scherpe for Stil in Berlin
Of course you can spend your weekend squeezing in with hordes of people at the major galleries – we’ll be there, too. But there are many other fun things happening this week that ought not to be missed - take a look which exhibitions we’re most curious about…
For the playful:
Hunting down art: Berlin-based artist Renata Kaminska hosts the annual Bel Etage-project, which takes place around Rosa-Luxemburg Platz. This year’s group intervention with artists such as Kinga Kielzynska, Martin Kohout, Antje Majewski and Ignacio Uriarte is titled In The Shadow Of The Sun and will be on display at Babylon cinema and Kunstverein at L40. (The Ordnungsamt didn’t quite appreciate last year’s site-specific installations and had them “dismantled” quite quickly – we loved them though. And we’re curious to see what happens this year.)
Kunstverein at L-40 & Babylon, Linienstraße 40 & Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 10178 Berlin, Opening: 26.4., 6 pm
Artists exhibiting their students’ results: For the project Neue Klasse artists Christian Jankowski and Gregor Schneider curate the works of their mutual students. The selected installation works, videos, sculptures and performances will be on display at Wiensowski & Harbord this weekend. We like the idea, let’s see about the art.
Wiensowski & Harbord, Lützowstrasse 32, 10785 Berlin, Opening: 25.4., 7 pm
For the nerds:
Machine aesthetics and industrial sound: Tokyo-based artist and muscian Ujino Muneteru gives new life to discarded technology by constructing odd apparatuses and sound landscapes. For his exhibition duet at PSM he samples his robot spirits with traditional elements of Noh theatre. Sounds weirdly intriguing to us.
PSM, Strassburger Straße 6-8, 10405 Berlin, Opening: 27.4.2012, 6 pm
Exploring the unchallenged possibilities of e-waste: The project ReFunct Media #4 by Benjamin Gaulon, Niklas Roy, Karl Klomp, Tom Verbruggen and Gijs Gieskes hosted by LEAP consists of multi-media installations with various digital and analogue media players and receivers, which are misused and re-contextualized in order to provoke thoughts about planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. However, there are plenty of gadgets to play around with!
LEAP - Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance, (Berlin Carré, first floor), Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 13, 10178 Berlin
For the socialites:
Two (more or less) must-see openings next week: Michael Sailstorfer at Berlinische Galerie and Roman Ondák at Deutsche Guggenheim, both prize-winning artists, open their respective shows: Local hero Sailstorfer presents Forst, which includes a tree installation in BG as well as his work Black Forest consisting in the life-stream of a blackened square of forest as it slowly regresses to its natural state. Roman Ondák’s project do not walk outside this area promises to draw the spectator into an imaginary journey questioning the arbitrary conventions of the art industry that – for instance – often draw a fine line between object and fetish.
Berlinische Galerie, Alte Jakobstraße 124-128, 10969 Berlin, Opening: 25.4., 6 pm
Deutsche Guggenheim, Unter den Linden 13-15, 10119 Opening: 25.4., 6 pm
For the thinkers:
Articulated: CHERT presents London based artist Lucy Coggle (1981) with her show A.A.A.A, including drawings, a video and the book An Argument Against A/R/T/I/C/U/L/A/T/I/O/N – together forming a monologue about language, its delimitations, and its possibilities for manipulation or divulgence. We’re curious, as the artists of Chert usually have quite some humour.
Chert, Skalitzerstr. 68 10997 Berlin, Opening: 27.4., 6 pm
Art of story-telling: Tanya Leighton shows New York-based artist Alejandro Cesarco (1975) with The Early Years an investigation of the ways we deal with our own story, where the pieces - ranging from unwritten books to textual communication - explore various manifestations of personal narratives. And yes, we admittedly like that conceptual touch…
Tanya Leighton, Kurfürstenstraße 156, 10785 Berlin, Opening: 27.4., 6 pm
For those who like it detailed:
Taking a breath: Johnen Galerie presents Glasgow-based artist Martin Boye (*1967). In Praise of Shadows features new works of 2011’s Turner-prize winner that refer once again to architecture and modern design, questioning the respective utopian potential. His objects and installations fuse architecture and nature into melancholic pairs. Clear, beautiful and smart: relaxing, we say!
Johnen Galerie, Marienstraße 10, 10117 Berlin, Opening: 27.4., 6 pm
Some like it weird – just like us: At KOW Berlin-based artist, writer, and curator Alice Creischer (1960) presents the multipart installation The Establishment of Matters of Fact on the regime of the factual, examining the conditions of knowledge-production and dissemination: Family trees, scientific classifications, and genetic codes of lab mice serve as subjects for Creischer’s various images, collages, objects and encoded poems, while the central piece refers to a vacuum pump, which scientist Robert Boyle used in the 1660’s to prove the existence of a vacuum – by suffocating lab mice.
KOW, Brunnenstraße 9, 10119 Berlin, Opening: 27.4., 6 pm
Go have fun!
Niche Berlin for Stil in Berlin
California in Wedding
Nothing new; the art space Essays & Observations has always been dedicated to a theoretic angle on art production and reception. But their current show is brilliant: Another Decade of California Color: Suitable for Framing questions the mechanisms of canonization.
Specimen - Philip Topolovac
by Hendrik Lakeberg
Es liegt eine Kälte in den Arbeiten von Philip Topolovac. Geschmolzenes Glas, das während der Bombenangriffe am Ende des zweiten Weltkriegs im Berliner Schutt zurück blieb, präsentiert er auf schlichten weißen Platten wie antike Schmuckstücke in einem anthropologischen Museum. Gewöhnliche Sandhügel fotografiert er als handele es sich dabei um ferne Gebirgszüge – bis man die Bierflaschen entdeckt, die jemand in sie geworfen hat. Von eben jenen Sandhügeln erstellt Topolovac in der Serie „Landschaftsformen“ Abformungen aus Fiberglas als materielles Negativ der Natur. In der Objekt-Serie „Modulite“ erfindet Topolovac zwecklose technologische Gebilde, von denen einige partiell zerstört sind, als wären sie die Kollateralschäden der Klonkriege in Star Wars – Ruinen einer Sci-Fi-Welt.
Need a rest?
by Kate Dillman
The days in Berlin are becoming longer and brighter, and spring seems right around the corner. If you’re in need of an escape, an adventure, or both, there’s a place on the outskirts of Berlin that should do the trick. The abandoned Grabowsee Sanatorium has a strange history and an even stranger present. The first thirty patients of the Grabowsee Sanatorium arrived in April of 1896 to receive treatment for tuberculosis but the beautiful, sprawling complex ceased operating after 1945. Afterwards the many decaying brick buildings were taken over by Soviet soldiers as a military hospital, and only truly abandoned in 1995. Grabowsee, though, seems like it’s been abandoned forever.
Cultural Crematory
Seems like we are facing a new sacral trend in Berlin. The crematory at Gerichtstraße in Wedding is going to be turned into – surprise – “something cultural”. The Kulturpark Wedding Gmbh bought the 8.500 m2 big estate. Other than the recently posted plans of Johann König to convert the St. Agnes church into a gallery there is something odd about this new project.
Keep looking up
by Kate Dillman
A quiet street that houses mostly Humboldt University buildings, the aptly named Universitätsstrasse holds a few lighthearted secrets. Slightly above eye-level, one stately University-owned building is mysteriously missing a few bricks. In their place sit small clusters of brightly colored Lego blocks, lending an air of playfulness to an otherwise imposing building.
Right next door, a commercial building of modern construction has set out planters along its concrete walls, allowing green tendrils to climb their colorful way up the drab background. Among the vines, a coterie of pink and brown spray-painted beetles explores their concrete home, breaking up the monotony of the gray structure.
Plastic bricks and neon beetles: Two small reminders from Universitätsstrasse to keep looking up, down, and all around the city.
Photos: Kate Dillman
Dash Snow – Contemporary Fine Arts
by Kate Dillman
Dash Snow’s work displayed against the crisp, white coolness of CFA’s gallery space seems, at first, an aberration. Pure walls and airy windows serve to accentuate the total contrast of Snow’s Polaroids. In rows they fill white frames with white backgrounds, their diminutive inner square the only punctuation of color in never-ending blankness.
The space seems to ask whether we can reconcile these pristine surroundings with Snow’s blurred and intoxicating renderings of nights in New York. Each frame reads like a memory bank for exploits long forgotten, capturing stills of fitful sleep, eerie self-portraiture and the dim gazes of repetitive drug usage.
too far west
Two weeks ago we found ourselves in Charlottenburg, where a young crowd, rather bourgeois than hip, had gathered for the opening of new Salon Dahlmann, which claimed its cultural ambitions with the group show »THAT«. The location, a posh Wilhelminian style house in the sometimes shabby part of the West close to Kurfürstendamm, was promisingly absurd and the exhibition/brunch event itself was nice and relaxed, but so were the works of the artists presented: Clear, discrete and – albeit the underlying humour – disturbingly handy. Turned out the exhibits were for sale.
Not that we didn’t like them. Paula Doepfner’s fragile drawings are beautiful; Pablo Alonso’s canvases interesting. But the ensemble provoked the urgent desire for something edgy, complex or at least conceptual to disturb the idyll of the salon. Thankfully, Benja Sachau provided some relief with his systematically unsystematic works.
Johann König´s new sacred art space
Gallerist Johann König recently bought the St. Agnes church at Alexandrinenstraße 118 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. His gallery is going to move there in early 2013. Next to the church-turned-gallery, the former community centre is going to host works spaces for the creative industries and a low-key restaurant.
Black holes at REH Kunst
This thing just has to make you smile. Among all the innovative ideas GDR architects have come up with, the Raumerweiterungshalle is certainly one of those that display their practicality best. It is a room that you can stretch or diminish manually as needed: Up to eight segments fit into each other telescopically and form a curvy room, the size of a caravan expandable to a maximum of 82 sqm.
This flexible hall was invented in 1959 by Helmut Both and pretty popular in the GDR wherever sheltered space was needed temporarily. Just last year, a private investor has enabled art historian Valeska Hageney to revive one of them for hosting art shows.
