THE PRESENT IN DRAG | 9TH BERLIN BIENNALE

Wu Tsang, Duilian (production still), 2016.

“The Present in Drag,” 9th Berlin Biennale

VARIOUS LOCATIONS, Berlin

June 4—September 18, 2016

by TRAVIS DIEHL

“Advertisting … is the only art form we [in the United States] ever invented.” Gore Vidal (1)

The fourth floor of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste overlooks Pariser Platz: the Brandenburg Gate, the French embassy fringed with barricades, a teeming Starbucks. Tourists mill around the square, while up on the mezzanine, between a set of marble statues of animals improbably swallowing other animals, a queue forms behind an Oculus Rift rig: Jon Rafman’s View of Pariser Platz (2016). At first the rendered scene in the headset matches the architecture and sculptures. A dog gags on a lion, an iguana gulps a sloth. Slowly, the animals start swelling, expelling, gyrating; the view fills with fog. Human figures blow upwards like flapping skins. Soon the pavement and building break apart; the viewer freefalls among the debris, landing, after a moment, among ranks of featureless mannequins… Rafman’s technical hallucination takes roughly three minutes. For three minutes, the setting in all its very real paradox—a symbolic gateway between West and East, Reagan and Gorbachev, also known as the place where Michael Jackson dangled his baby from a balcony—falls away beneath an encompassing, scripted but nonreactive spectacle. Thus the city rebrands itself: a new ad on a dirty bus stop, trendy clothes on a chipped mannequin, a twenty-first-century ideology on a pockmarked prewar building.

The digital media platform DIS comes to Berlin as four curators programming a biennial and as young New Yorkers interpreting a foreign town—but also as an image all its own. Accordingly, many of the works in the 9th Berlin Biennale seem not to disturb their context so much as augment, sex up, imitate, and artify. At the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), one of five official venues scattered throughout the city, Katja Novitskova has installed acrylic standees printed with horns and flames; one group, superimposed on a first-floor window, appears to lick at a thicket of nearby construction cranes (Expansion Curves (fire worship, purple horns), 2016). This much, at least, satirizes more self-satisfied didactic art, while still managing to raise the specter of a gentrifying city. Most other works are more ambivalent. At the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the fashion label 69 has reupholstered a few hanging chairs in denim (69 R&R, 2016); even if visitors notice, the material is unlikely to evoke, as the artists would have it, everything from blue collar jobs to sweatshops to the hipsters that wear designer workwear to biennials. A clip from Amalia Ulman’sPRIVILEGE (2016) provides an even more vacant take on the exhibition’s title, “The Present in Drag”: an “old crone” effect overlaid on the artist’s eternally youthful face.

Jon Rafman, L’Avalée des avalés (The Swallower Swallowed) Rhino/Bear, 2016.

While little here presents as substantive, let alone sacred (the video What the Heart Wants [2016], a gauzy cyber romance by Cécile B. Evans, is one exception), the DIS brand itself offers the Berlin Biennale’s most forceful proposition. Add to the art in the official venues: a series of lightboxes (“LIT”); several musical collaborations (“Anthem”); a thoroughly designed web and social media presence; and a dense, intelligent catalog. Listed in exhibition materials as “Not in the Berlin Biennale” are the paratexts and ads and other finishing touches that make the Biennale a coherent, even compelling brand experience. (Roe Ethridge, for instance, shot the photos in the brochures.) Under DIS, gestures that would tip into banality or plain narcissism in another context—Josephine Pryde’s photographs of hands and devices (Hands “Für mich,” 2014–16) at the Feuerle Collection, or Wu Tsang’s meta-Orientalist, quasi-revisionist video installation (Duilian, 2016) at the KW—feel like profound emblems of the zeitgeist. Never mind how ironically consumerist, sincerely complicit, and cynically new-agey that zeitgeist is. Advertising’s immemorial claim remains: if you’re not buying, you don’t get it.

Yet this entrepreneurial confidence rests like denial on the old world. ForBlockchain Visionaries (2016), installed at the ESMT (once an East German government building, now a management school), Simon Denny has mounted a miniature trade show for three actual companies promoting blockchain technology—from privatized, bespoke security for existing financial markets; to a Bitcoin-based centralized protocol; to a decentralized, nodal anarchism. A fourth element dominates the room: an extant Soviet-era steel relief of a cooling tower, a dove, two stalks of grain. Indeed, the blockchain promises the same nonhierarchical, impartial security as the Communist state; yet where Stalin refused to wither away, Bitcoin is already headless. At the AdK, a video installation by Christopher Kulendran Thomas (New Eelam, 2016) makes a similar case in the guise of an ad for a fictitious but plausible “housing subscription” service. Paraphrasing existence as capital, the narrator extolls a “liquid form of citizenship”: no citizens, but subscribers; no nations, but brands. The name references the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, an armed utopian group in Sri Lanka violently crushed in 2009 by the Western-backed government. Investors in the cultural sector next waged what the narration calls a “soft ethnic cleansing.” Might technological revolution succeed where the militant fails? Maybe—but no brand of collectivity is without an agenda. More to the point: ironic or not (and we’re not sure it is), to spin ethnic cleansing as a lifestyle choice is spectacular bad taste.

Camille Henrot's Office of Unreplied Emails, 2016.

Here lies the danger in shelving an aspirational future in favor of a self-evident, inevitable now: if the future is just the present in drag, future thinking may as well be totally outmoded. A precious few works explore what it means to take a progressive position. The top floor of the KW is given over to Camille Henrot’sOffice of Unreplied Emails (2016); scattered between breathy, bright paintings of kissing animals are dozens of silicone prints of thoughtful but exhausted replies to the likes of the Sierra Club and Uber. In the KW’s bunker-like basement, Josh Kline’s video Crying Games (2016) stages a wishful kind of propaganda. Actors digitally masked as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Bush Jr., and Tony Blair sob in regret over the Iraq War. “I’m so sorry,” they moan, “all those people…” Here, technology achieves exactly this: a simulation of the apology we deserve but will never get—and that wouldn’t help anyway.

How much easier, says DIS, to embrace our complicity. Each of the five hangs more or less parallels the expectations of its host institution—cueing that their codes have been understood, not scrambled. At the AdK, ad-like works occupy the ancillary spaces of advertising and signage. A Blue-Star tour boat on the Spree, decorated by artists Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, is still a tour boat. At the Feuerle Collection, a waterfront bunker barely converted for art, Yngve Holen presents a series of “evil eyes,” artisanal blown-glass airline windows in powder-coated Apple-type settings. Stretched out in a row spaced to match the layout of a Boeing 787, a work such as Window seat 42–43 F (2016) looks like collector bait—and it is. Forget the droll stakes, or lack thereof, for whatever jet set precariat. When things get too urgent, too specific, too earnest—all that advertising really proposes is that you buy in. For Suprem(e), a fashion line by Bjarne Melgaard in collaboration with skateboarding clothing brand Supreme, the covers of even such left-justified Semiotext(e) tracts as The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection (2007) become embroidery on puffy streetwear. Brands subsume brands like Russian dolls, with DIS as the outermost layer.

View of "LIT" at Akademie der Künste, Berlin Biennale, 2016.

But then you leave, and you fly straight home from TXL in an aisle seat, or you walk around a postmodern Berlin suffused with lifestyle adverts as caustic and beautiful as anything in a reality augmented by DIS. DIS understands art’s redundancy. It would therefore rather be something else. Yet theirs is less a critical position than a bid for self-preservation—a final return to future thinking. In this, too, DIS synthesizes a sense of gagging optimism, like an image lewdly trying to python a city but unable to swallow, that feels nothing if not now.

(1) Gore Vidal, from an interview with David Barsamian for The Progressive (October 2006), http://www.progressive.org/mag_intv0806.



Travis Diehl lives in Los Angeles. He is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He edits the artist-run arts journal Prism of Reality.

Thanks to : http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/%E2%80%9Cthe-present-in-drag%E2%80%9D-9th-berlin-biennale-2/

EDEN EDEN | BEPI GHIOTTI

Bepi Ghiotti
Inside Carol Rama, Eden Eden, Bülowstraße 74, Berlin

09.02.16 - 05.03.16

HAMBURGER BAHNHOF | BERLIN

Photo: Thomas Bruns.

      Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin

2016 exhibition preview  February 10–August 31, 2016 Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin Invalidenstrasse 50/51 10557 Berlin Germany Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10am–6pm, Thursday 10am–8pm, Saturday–Sunday 11–6am www.smb.museum Facebook

Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto  February 10–July 10, 2016 Julian Rosefeldt (b. 1965) has risen to international prominence above all with his elaborately staged film installations. Manifesto unites 13 films, running in parallel, in one installation. For each film, Rosefeldt has collaged historical original texts from a wealth of manifestos by artists, architects, choreographers and film makers—including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Kazimir Malevich, André Breton, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Reiner, Sturtevant, Sol LeWitt and Jim Jarmusch. These texts have been abridged and combined to create 13 poetic monologues, which are delivered and embodied by the actress Cate Blanchett in various roles. Through costumes, masks and locations, and above all through her multi-faceted performances, Blanchett transforms herself into figures as diverse as a primary-school teacher, a puppeteer, a broker, a funeral speaker and a homeless person. In the role of these protagonists, Blanchett conveys the topicality of the texts. The exhibition is made possible by the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie. Carl Andre: Sculpture As Place, 1959–2010 May 5–September 18, 2016 Encompassing more than 300 works, Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1959–2010 is the largest solo show to date of this major US artist. Carl Andre's oeuvre is presented in works from over five decades: Approximately 50 sculptures, over 200 poems, a group of rarely exhibited assemblages known as Dada Forgeries and a selection of photographs and ephemera allow audiences to trace the historical and aesthetic shifts and evolutions in his artistic production. From the mid-1960s onwards, Andre pioneered a fundamentally different concept of sculpture. For the artist, sculpture becomes place and thereby redefines the role of the public and its experience of the artwork. On view are a unique selection of Andre's signature floor sculptures made of building and industrial materials, which the artist arranges into grid structures and linear trajectories. Likewise, the poems Andre composed from the 1950s onwards can be understood as a conceptual extension of his sculptures. This body of work forms another focal point of the exhibition. Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1959–2010 is organized by Dia Art Foundation in partnership with the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The international tour of the exhibition is made possible by lead support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional tour support is provided by the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte; The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston; the National Endowment for the Arts; and Sotheby's. Gülsün Karamustafa. Chronographia June 10–October 23, 2016 Gülsün Karamustafa (b. 1946) is regarded as one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century in Turkey, where her work has exerted a profound influence on younger generations of artists from the 1990s until today. Internationally, her artworks have already appeared in numerous exhibitions. Chronographiaat the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin is the first comprehensive solo show of Karamustafa's oeuvre presented in a museum context outside Turkey. Karamustafa's artistic production extends from the 1970s to the present day and encompasses a variety of media, including painting, installation, performance art and video. Migration, politically-induced nomadism, popular culture, feminism and gender are central themes of her work, which also takes a critical look at the Western view of the countries of the Middle East. The exhibition facilitates a dialogue between these themes and thereby highlights the connections that have arisen between them across time, as well as pointing to their relevance to current discourses. Supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds. Das Kapital July 2–November 6, 2016 The exhibition revolves around Das Kapital Raum 1970–1977 (The Capital Room 1970–1977) by Joseph Beuys, a whole-room installation which the artist first created in 1980 for the Venice Biennale. This monumental composition is one of the largest environments in Beuys's oeuvre and sums up his artistic work of the 1970s. During those years a new definition of the term "capital" took shape in Beuys' mind, one going far beyond the bounds of economics. His statement that "Art=Capital" describes the creative process of artistic praxis as an expanded way of thinking. In Beuys' view, art becomes the true capital of humankind only in this expanded sense. He understood the resulting, necessary reform of all social relationships as "social sculpture." The exhibition is devoted to this positive, creative concept of capital and to the work on shaping the future that Beuys accomplished publicly in an unmatched experiment. The same re-evaluation of the concepts of art, capital and money is shown in corresponding works by various artists as well as in artefacts and documents from different epochs.

RUM, SODOMY, AND THE LASH | EDEN EDEN

Rum, sodomy, and the lash| group show: Catharine Ahearn, Contemporary Art Writing Daily, Tony Conrad, Karl Andersson, Morag Keil, Bjarne Melgaard, Steve Reinke, Stephen G. Rhodes, Simon Thompson, Peter Wächtler

Organised by Ed Atkins and James Richards
Opening: Saturday 17.10.2015, 6- 9 pm
20.10.2015 — 16.0.2016
Eden Eden, Bülowstraße 74, 10783 Berlin

Rum, Sodomy, and the lash cites a trail of accrued quotes, beginning with Churchill’s sardonic (and more than likely misattributed) comment on the Royal Navy: “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.” In 1985 it became the title of The Pogues second album because, according to drummer Andrew Ranken, it pretty bluntly summed up what being in the band entailed. The similarities between the two — the Royal Navy and a punk band — are consistent in both their circumstance and their subsistence: isolated communities of vital practical, emotional, and sexual co-dependence. Similarly, both communities are also parodies — more or less camp in their performance of the rules of the establishment. They are pragmatically, necessarily transgressive — and also intensely romantic in their promise and their aspiration. Both solicit to the fantasies of young men — both offer states of exception that not only afford transgression, but also actively adjure it. Hans Turley’s 1999 book, Rum, sodomy, and the lash: piracy, sexuality and masculine identity, discusses those ostracised, even, from the Navy: Pirates. Those sailors who never wanted to come back to traditional society, had given themselves over to a life of liberal deviancy, of re-describing their identities set adrift from a punitive and lopsided law. Never returning to society means the founding of another, defined antagonistically, parodically, fantastically, in relation to its parent. The primary object of piracy’s antagonism (property) is determined by the common law of the prevailing society, its image of society’s defining tenets. In Rum, Sodomy, and the lash, legality is practical recourse to order and the chastening of deviance as much as it is the dangerous retarding of desire. The moral imperative is retentive; pirates, punks, adolescents, queers, sub- and counter-cultural proponents relax the œconomy of the state.

The exhibition title’s enigmatic maxim is carried through the murk of deviation within and apart from the strictest limits of society (the military, education, the making of a prime minister) — it is also society’s burlesque, its punk

Rum, sodomy, and the lash | Eden Eden | 17.10.205

KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Mircea Cantor, Shooting, 2005. Courtesy the artist and Dvir Gallery. © Mircea Cantor.

FIRE AND FORGET. ON VIOLENCE  14 June–30 August 2015 Opening: 13 June, 17–22h KW Institute for Contemporary Art Auguststraße 69 10117 Berlin Hours: Wednesday–Monday noon–7pm, Thursday noon–9pm www.kw-berlin.de Facebook

"Fire and forget" comes from military jargon, and is a term for weapons systems that are no longer used in direct combat with an enemy but are launched from a safe distance. The group exhibition FIRE AND FORGET. ON VIOLENCE takes the military expression as the starting point for an examination of the conventional ideas about war and force. It is oriented towards the most visible agent of violence: weapons. FIRE AND FORGET. ON VIOLENCE applies the means of contemporary art to address the long-term effects of these new weapons on the human psyche. The loss of a direct, physical confrontation and the danger for one's own life it had created, separates the violent situation itself from affects like reluctance for killing or overreaction, sympathy or hate. What may this mean for the arguments and evidence of political action? Which meaning does this context of the story receive: the memory and forgetting of an outburst, escalation, or the prevention of violence? And which interest does art have in all this? The publication accompanying the exhibition, as well as its public and education program, illuminate the theme from other disciplinary perspectives: The book FRIENDLY FIRE & FORGET (Matthes & Seitz Berlin) collects literary texts produced for the occasion by German and international authors, including Schorsch Kamerun, Wladimir Kaminer, and Kathrin Passig. On selected dates, guests who have been personally effected by violence or who deal with it professionally lead tours through the exhibition, or discuss possible ways of engaging with it from theatrical, film, or musical points of view, among them Antonia Baum, Ulrich Matthes, and Rosa von Praunheim. Curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Daniel Tyradellis With works by Marina Abramović and Ulay; Ron Amir; Julius von Bismarck; Roy Brand, Ori Scialom, and Keren Yeala Golan; James Bridle; Luis Camnitzer; Mircea Cantor; Jota Castro; Chto Delat; Marcelo Cidade; Jem Cohen; Martin Dammann; Öyvind Fahlström; Harun Farocki; Daniil Galkin; Rudolf Herz; Damien Hirst; Clara Ianni; Emily Jacir; Hunter Jonakin; Joachim Koester; Korpys/Löffler; Barbara Kruger; Robert Longo; Jazmín López; Kris Martin; Ana Mendieta; Michael Müller; Timo Nasseri; NEOZOON; Katja Novitskova; Jon Rafman; Pipilotti Rist; Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert; André Robillard; Julian Röder; Martha Rosler; Hrair Sarkissian; Santiago Sierra; Timur Si-Qin; Tal R; Javier Téllez; Sharif Waked; Gillian Wearing; He Xiangyu; Amir Yatziv; and Ala Younis. The exhibition FIRE AND FORGET. ON VIOLENCE is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). With thanks for the financial support of: KW Friends e. V. as well as Rivka Saker, the collector Uli Sigg, Mr. Xue, Peng Pei-Cheng, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, KOW Berlin. The publication and event and educational program are funded by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb (German Federal Agency for Civic Education). The cultural programs of KW Institute for Contemporary Art are made possible with the support of the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs. Further information: KW Institute for Contemporary Art Henriette Sölter T +49 (0) 30 2434 59 42 / press@kw-berlin.de

JULIUS VON BISMARCK | STUDIO VISIT

Article by Jessyca Hutchens; Studio Visit Photographs by Conor Clarke

http://www.berlinartlink.com

It’s easy to feel far removed from the city in this place. I’m looking out of a window over a large grassy field, the scene is quiet but for the low drone of a doom band rehearsing in a nearby studio.Julius von Bismarck’s studio, which he shares with a number of close peers, is a large industrial hall, filled to the brim with the detritus of art production; scraps of metal, wood and plastic litter the floors. Situated in the Malzfabrik, a former malt factory turned cultural complex, the scale of the studio space is impressive, even by Berlin standards. The only discernible artwork I pick out is a photograph from von Bismarck’s Punishment I series, an image of him vainly “punishing” the landscape, striking an oncoming wave with a large black leather whip (the real-life whip sits on a shelf just below the framed picture). The faint doom music, the chaotic industrial space, the menacing whip and the artist’s own metal-band-worthy beard all contribute to the sense that this will be one epic studio visit.

Fulguration of “the Magritte Dove” on the Mao Zedong Portrait at Tiananmen Square (2008), Beijing

Von Bismarck originally attracted widespread attention with his work using the Image Fulgurator(2007-2008), a self-invented device which allows an image to be surreptitiously added to another person’s photograph. Onlookers taking photographs of the Mayor of Berlin, the Pope and Barack Obama were astonished to find new symbols transposed into their snapshots, and the resulting images predictably went viral. Works employing a similar knack for technological innovation have included the Perpetual Storytelling Device (2008); a machine that draws an endless series of pictures from the U.S Patents database and The Space Beyond Me (2010); a UV light projector that tracks the original camera movements of a film, leaving behind a glowing trace on the walls of a circular room. The innovation evident in such works makes them immediately impressive, but what takes them beyond mere novelty is in their dedication to strong visual output, the technological and aesthetic elements form a cohesive whole. The most circulated image from the Fulgurtaor series is of a simple transparent white dove transposed onto the famous portrait of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Square. The image, strong and simple, provides an elegant access point into the broader context of the work (and the ideal re-blogging fodder).

Perpetual Storytelling Device (2008)

It is not surprising then, that in 2012, von Bismarck was chosen to be the first ever artist-in-residence at CERN—the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. As a place associated with the most obtuse and philosophically abstract ideas that science can produce, von Bismarck, an artist skilled at creating visual cohesion from technological complexity, seems a particularly suitable choice. Indeed, the main work he produced for the residency seems almost a meditation on this. The work, Versuch Unter Kreisen (2012), consists of four lights hanging from a ceiling, swinging in apparent chaos before suddenly appearing perfectly in harmony. What seems at first random reveals itself as carefully pre-meditated and technically precise. The work both exploits technology and allegorizes the role it plays—to reach beyond our perceptual and mental capabilities and strive for greater perfection.

In more recent work, von Bismarck has moved away from his reliance on technology, turning his attention towards the natural world. In Punishment I, von Bismarck travelled the world, seeking epic landscapes upon which to enact his whipping performance, repeatedly striking until physically exhausted. For some pigeons are more equal than others (2012), von Bismarck and artist Julian Charriere took ordinary grey pigeons and dyed their feathers, releasing the birds back into their original urban environments in Berlin, Venice and Copenhagen. As with his former work, there is a strong sense of intervention. The artist places unexpected new information into our field of vision. When we spoke about this, Julius described how most of his works have two kinds of audiences: one with prior knowledge and one without. A person walking down a Copenhagen street may have been amazed to see an exotic bright blue bird amongst a group of plain pigeons, while another may have roamed the city searching for such a sighting. The artworks address different spectators at different times, and it is this enlarged scope and context that interests von Bismarck. In a recent work, von Bismarck planted a sculptural replica of a birch tree in a forest near Berlin. While I was initially skeptical about the literalness of such an intervention, I was later convinced by its simplicity—those that stumble across it are likely be both confounded and intrigued by the false tree.

some pigeons are more equal than others (2012); in collaboration with Julian Charriere, Copenhagen, Venice.

For the second-half of the studio-visit, Julius took us up onto the rooftop of one of the more dilapidated buildings in the Malzfabrik. Through dark rooms of disintegrating factory equipment and inside one particularly sketchy elevator, we made it onto the roof for panoramic views of Berlin and a closer look at one of von Bismarcks most impressive public artworks: Public Face II (The Fühlometer). The sculpture is an eight metre high smiley face constructed from steel and neon tubing. Formerly installed on a lighthouse in Lindau (2010), the face does not wear a constant saccharine smile, but continually changes its mood. Using software that analyses facial expressions, the sculpture was designed to reflect the emotions of passing citizens, beaming the results for all to see. When I first saw a video of the sculpture in action, I was amazed at the emotional resonance that could be wrought from this giant smiley in the sky—I really felt a little deflated whenever the smile turned down. The effect is similar to that of von Bismarck’s futile whipping exercises inPunishment I—after a time the absurd and humorous begins to feel almost profound–because there is something truly epic about the gesture.

“Punishment 1″ (2011/2012); Video, Germany, Swizerland, Brazil, USA.

Up on the roof we talk more about ideas and interests than individual works, which strikes me as rather pertinent. People are now far less likely to discuss an artist’s style or technique than they are to inquire as to what currently holds their interest, usually in some field outside of art; politics, history, sociology, biology, particle physics. Von Bismarck may be particularly emblematic of this trend, he studied under Olafur Eliasson at the Institut für Raumexperimente, and his work is reflective of current research-based approaches to art-making. His latest series, currently on display at Alexander Levy Berlin, characteristically involves an intervention in the “real world” and then employs a variety of visual strategies to document the event and elucidate its conceptual basis. The work, Unfall am Mittelpunkt Deutschlands, tells the story of a car crashing into a tree in the precise centre of Germany, documented through photographs of the event, local news stories and a police report. The work thus involves an expanded field of inquiry; one where individual artworks serve as project documentation. When I ask Julius about this, he says that such a mode of working comes naturally to him—explaining that as he feels he is not particularly skilled with language, his ideas are best articulated visually. The result is a kind of project-based conceptualism, not an art of ideas, but an art that expands upon ideas in a multi-dimensional way.

“Unfall Am Mittelpunkt Deutschlands” (2013)

Unfall am Mittelpunkt Deutschlands seems the perfect coalescence of many of von Bismarck’s ideas, depicting a literal collision between man, technology and nature that is loaded with political symbolism (von Bismarck explained how he has lately become interested in issues around national borders). The work actually made me recall the rather naf title of the CERN residency: “Collide@CERN: Creative collisions between the Arts and Science.” Everything that is wrong about this title is defied in von Bismarck’s work, which is never a simplistic coming together of art and science. Von Bismarck’s collisions are far more complicated and infinitely more poignant. Instead of didactically illustrating science, von Bismarck uses technologies that best compliment his interests, whether exploiting complex software and engineering to build a city-wide emotional barometer or using a simple black whip to defy nature.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Additional Information:

See more of Julius von Bismark’s work:

Artist Website:
www.juliusvonbismarck.com

Ongoing exhibitions:

ALEXANDER LEVY
“Unfall am Mittelpunkt Deutschlands” – JULIUS VON BISMARCK
Exhibition: Apr. 27 – Jun. 15, 2013

http://www.berlinartlink.com

GALLERY WEEKEND | BERLIN

Gallery Weekend Berlin May 1-3, 2015

Once again, the national and international art world is getting ready for the eleventh year of Gallery Weekend Berlin. On the first weekend of May, 47 of Berlin’s leading galleries – most of which you know from abc 2014 – will open their doors with new exhibitions showcasing established as well as emerging artists.
 

Galerie NEU
Photo: Marco Funke

Challenging the notion of the modernist white cube, this year’s participating galleries present works in unlikely settings ranging from industrial warehouses and boiler rooms to private apartments or office buildings. Diverse locations mirroring the multifaceted art scene in Berlin will become sites of engagement, bringing together all actors of the contemporary art market.

See the full list of participating galleries and the program of special events at www.gallery-weekend-berlin.com.
 

OTTO PIENE | ARNDT

OTTO PIENE Solo exhibition at ARNDT Berlin March 24 - April 18, 2015  Opening | Saturday | March 21, 2015 | from 3 - 6pm | at ARNDT Berlin  ARNDT Berlin is pleased to present its inaugural solo exhibition by Otto Piene. Otto Piene, co-founder of the renowned ZERO group, was a visionary artist of the twentieth century avant-garde who reinvented his multidisciplinary practice over a career spanning five decades. Founded in 1957 along with fellow contemporary Heinz Mack, and later joined by Günther Uecker in 1961, the ZERO group was a European art movement established in the aftermath of World War II. Seeking new beginnings, with idealistic and utopian ambition, the group strove to produce a radical and optimistic global art that dissolved boundaries and embraced elemental forces of nature. Embodying a newly defined artistic freedom, the ZERO group worked across a wide range of media, exploring ideas of light, space, movement, structure, colour and art’s experiential possibilities. Exhibitions were often presented in the form of immersive installations employing painting, film, kinetic sculpture and performance. Such conceptual underpinnings were maintained within Piene’s own practice manifest in the interconnection between art, nature, science and technology. Known for his process driven, experimental approach, Piene aimed to produce genre-defying works that investigated notions of ephemerality, synaesthesia – the blending of the senses – and aesthetic experience. Early in his career Piene created letter reliefs, perforated grid-light boxes and grid pictures that offered resistance to light. At the end of the 1950s Piene developed his first smoke drawings and mechanised light sculptures. In 1957 Piene created the Grid Pictures – stencilled paintings made from half-tone screens with regularly arranged points in single colours (yellow, silver, white or gold) – such as his work Pure Energy (1958; New York, MOMA). Continuing to evolve his practice in a variety of forms, The Lichtballette ("light ballets") involved light from moving torches projected through grids, intended to alter the viewer's perception of space. Otto Piene’s pioneering large-scale public projects and environments began in the late 1960s. His Sky Art Events comprised inflatable air sculptures that conveyed ideas concerning the cosmos and environmental awareness. Most notable was Piene’s monumental 700 metre-long rainbow created in 1972 for the closing ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich. The artist’s active collaborations with technicians and natural scientists helped to provide new perspectives for art and today find resonance in the work of contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Tomás Saraceno. From the early 1980s Piene combined his seminal smoke and fire pictures with the grids from his ZERO group period. From 1998 onwards he developed immersive light rooms, utilising projections to alternate light intensity, colour and form for various museums such as the Kunsthalle Bremen. In 2008, Otto Piene founded the international ZERO foundation with Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack and Mattijs Visser. The foundation houses the ZERO group archives from the three Düsseldorfer artists as well as documents and photos from other related artists that include: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. Within this solo exhibition, a selection of works in a range of media will be presented dating from 1969 to 2004, from fire gouache on board to gouache on paper and oil on canvas, to a programmed pneumatic inflatable sculpture and site-specific light room installation. Otto Piene’s solo exhibition at ARNDT Berlin coincides with the group exhibition “ZERO The International art movement of the 50s and 1960s” at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin from March 21 – June 8, 2015. This simultaneous exhibition presents works from the ZERO movement by artists that include Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker. Otto Piene (b. 1928, Laasphe, Germany - † 2014, Berlin, Germany) studied painting and art education at the Academy of Art in Munich and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. From 1952 to 1957 he studied philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 1964 he was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1968 to 1971 he was appointed the first Fellow at the newly founded Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1972 he became a professor of Environmental Art at MIT.  In 1974 he was appointed as the Director of the CAVS and held this role until 1994. Otto Piene represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1967 and 1971 and exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1959, 1964 and 1977. In 1985, he exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial. In 2014 the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle and the Neue National Galerie in Berlin presented the exhibition "Otto Piene: More Sky". His works are housed in numerous international museum collections that include: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the National Museum of Modern Art (MOMAT), Tokyo; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. ARNDT Berlin Potsdamer Strasse 96 10785 Berlin info@arndtberlin.com

Arndt

DANNY MC DONALD | ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI | BERLIN

The Beads (That Bought Manhattan)

February 24 – April 2, 2015

Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com

ED ATKINS | RIBBONS

Ed Atkins,  RIBBONS

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

22.11.14 -- 24.01.15



























http://bortolozzi.com/exhibitions/ed-atkins-ribbons-galerie-isabella-bortolozzi/

GER VAN ELK | LUTTGENMEIJER

Artist: Ger van Elk

Venue: Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Seven Automatic Landscapes

Date: September 14 – November 2, 2013

Full gallery of images and link available after the jump.

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com

ART BERLIN CONTEMPORARY

Nina Canell at Konrad Fischer

The Art Berlin Contemporary (ABC) is said to be, as director Maike Cruse doesn't tire to highlight, "not a business model". But why would an fair not want to be a business model? Or, to put it in other words, how can an art fair NOT automatically turn into a business model? The ABC generates itself as an art exhibition, with the aim to "serve the gallery system and to add something to the arts and culture at large" (see artinfo.com). Once again, in its current sixth edition, the fair only allows solo-presentations and the galleries needed to be invited to participate – applications are out of the question. What's new this time, is the fact that the fair includes lots of performative pieces and that the booths are designated by the artists and not their galleries.

120 artists are represented by 133 galleries, out of which several collaborated to show one artist. The single positions are impressive: Tony Oursler, Hermann Nitsch, Tomas Saraceno, Thomas Zipp or William Tucker. And also the well known young contemporaries such as Julius von Bismarck,  Ulrich Vogl, Andrew Kerrand Thea Djordjadze received much space to get the attention of the visitors.  On the other hand, the use of space in the three halls at Station Berlin is less impressive: With a lack of structure and a lack of clearly designated booths, the fair got a chaotic character with little guidance through the hallways. As most works are site-specific and installation-based, large conceptual pieces are placed next to each other without having any relation with one another. 

The complicated part with officially withdrawing a fair its business character, is that the curation of the fair suddenly moves to the spotlight. And since there is no overall curation, the exhibition turnes into a confusing labyrinth. While many single presentations, as for instance Nina Canell's minimalist object-based ensemble at Konrad Fischer (Düsseldorf), Daniel Gustav Kramer at Sies + Höke (Düsseldorf) or Mie Olise at Duve (Berlin) are outstanding in their booth curation and their composition of architecture and art, the silver upside-down pyramid by Tomas Saraceno at Esther Schipper (Berlin) is dominated by the sight of other large-scale installations and the rough architecture of the space. A similar fate hit the strikingly surreal installation by Danilo Duenas at Galerie Thomas Schulte (Berlin),  that cannot be experienced the way it should be, as it grows into the uneven ceiling. 

Others are a bit more lucky with their booth's location. Timo Klöppel presents an accessible window-house with Galerie KWADRAT (Berlin), which is not only glowing in the middle of the hallway, but also allows the visitors to enter and rest inside. A sculptural work, which are otherwise hardly represented at ABC, by William Tucker with Buchmann Galerie (Berlin) is fortunate too, as the booth is located in a minimalist niche of the building. Two of the most convincing representations were Ulrich Vogl's three poetic cloud and light pieces at the booth of Galerie Opdahl (Stavanger) and Andrew Kerr's paintings, which he presented on a wooden construction next to a men's suit at the booth of BQ (Berlin).

Since the downfall of the former Berlin art fair Art Forum, people have been discussing why Berlin, as the so called capital of art and creativity, doesn't manage to create a fair that is able to compete with Art Cologne, Frieze Art Fairor Art Basel. The ABC, with its slightly pretentious image as a non-commercial art fair, exactly represents what Berlin is known for: very good art and very chaotic business skills.

Art Berlin Contemporary

STATION BERLIN


Luckenwalder Strasse 4—6


10963 Berlin (
U-Bahn Gleisdreieck (U1, U2)
 )

Opening Hours: Friday, 20 September – Sunday, 22 September – noon – 7 p.m.
 


Daily 10 € | Reduced Ticket 8 €

 Luca Trevisani at Mehdi Chouakri Andrew Kerr at BQ Berlin  Ull Hohn at Galerie Neu Mie Olise at Duve Julius von Bismarck at alexander levy Timo Klöppel at KWADRAT Tony Oursler at Aviskarl Gallery
all images: Courtesy the galleries, photos by artfridge

Ulrich Vogl at Galerie Opdahl Thea Djordjadze at Sprüth Magers Daniel Gustav Kramer at Sies + Höke Marie Letkowski at Galerie M + R Fricke Muntean / Rosenblum at Galerie Zink David Lynch at Galerie Karl Pfefferle Eva Berendes at Sommer & Kohl Danilo Duenas at Galerie Thomas Schulte Mark Flood at Peres Projects Tomas Saraceno at Esther Schipper Diana Sirianni at Figge von Rosen Galerie Hermann Nitsch at Studio Morra / Alnitak Art Agency William Tucker at Buchmann Galerie Tilo Schulz at Jochen Hempel Thomas Zipp at Galerie Guido W. Baudach Andreas Fischer at Johann König 
all images: Courtesy the galleries, photos by art fridge

©  http://www.artfridge.de