Kirstine Roepstorff's Scorpio's Garden offers an alluring and telling snapshot of contemporary Berlin. The "Scorpio" in the title is Berlin itself, because Berlin was "re-born" under the Scorpio astrological sign. And although not all of the 30 artists on view are based in Berlin, the internationalism of Roepstorff's selection expresses the essence of Berlin as a city where expats thrive. At the same time, the image of a garden also complies with criticism of Berlin as an increasingly gentrified city where an image of wild creativity is being cultivated instead of allowed to remain unmolested. This duality is captured by Roepstorff's impressive use of the vast exhibition space, which is as elegant as a French garden with work arranged on and in a curved white ramp and careful clusters elsewhere in the gallery, while the temperament of the art maintains a feral integrity and often a rough aesthetic closer to the city's actual abundant unmanicured and inspiring vegetation.
In connection with the German embassy in London, Berlin-based husband and wife artist duo Awst & Walther will erect an 11.5-foot high precariously positioned wall of ice at a roadwork site. Under industrial strength lights, the couple will enact performances representing the buildup to the fall of the Berlin Wall while the ice gradually melts. Although the installation is a literal play on the frigid wall of the Cold War, Awst & Walther want the work to demonstrate the continuing process of reunification and their optimism about divisions between people dissolving.
Maxime Ballesteros
Unfinished Realities
Sven Johne´s documentary Tears of the Eyewitness at Koln´s Galerie Christian Nagel investigates the disconnect between real memories and the act of memorializing history. In the 30-minute film, a motivational trainer and an actor go through a Method-acting exercise in preparation for a fictional documentary about the fall of the wall. The actor painfully digs through his personal memories of life in the GDR while attempting to summon up appropriate emotions for his forthcoming role.
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Harald Hauswald was a photographer living in East Germany and photographing life around him. The black-and-white images that he took of people's dissolute life under communism possess poignant empathy, humor, dignity, and integrity in contract to the Communist propaganda designed by the state. In 1987, the year of Berlin's 750th anniversary, he published a book of his photos titled Ost-Berlin (East Berlin) in West Germany. The book earned Hauswald admirers but also a harsh response from the Stasi, who branded him an enemy of the state. The Stasi detailed their criticism of Hauswald's work in an official report which refuted the veracity of every image. The report essentially criminalized the images yet Hauswald courageously refused to accept this condemnation. He republished the book with the Stasi's commentary next to each image. The comments actually read like critiques but inadvertently highlighted instead of undermining the strength of Hauswald's vision. At Pool gallery, a selection of the original images will be shown in time for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Die Spiegel (Physik), 2009
Thomas Baldischwyler´s
Yesterday's Paper Telling Yesterday's News at Hamburg´s
Galerie Conradi is a portrait of the artist´s emotional recollections of his adolescence and young adult life in East Germany. The show includes an installation of a roughly cut mirror, a series of autobiographical collages overlaid with glitter-flecked and blistered resin and a program of colored lights flashing under glass inserts in the floor, which provide a faint echo of the excitement produced by disco when it arrived from the West to East Germany.
Die Spiegel (Stein 1), 2009
Die Segel, 2009
Peruvian-born artist Kenno Apatrida lived in Berlin squats for the past 18 years as an involuntary resident, gathering detritus and discarded artifacts thoughout the city for his extraordinary, ornate, collaged sculptures, installations and paintings. Individual sculptures contain dolls, puppets, phonographs, antique ceramic tiles, tear-outs from political magazines and propaganda from the Third Reich, old stamps, vintage family photographs, warped canvases clotted with paint, clusters of framed paintings, devotional icons and burning candles dripping red and cream-colored wax. His work acts as a time capsule for the city, as the items he collects increasingly reflect his envirinment´s gentrification and rising wealth. Despite the chaotic appearance of his sculptures, installations and paintings, Apatrida strives to make sense of Berlin´s fragmented society and creates works of profundity from the city´s cultural debris.
Wilde Gallery
Communism Never Happened at the Feinkost Galerie presents work by Ciprian Mureşan, David Levine, Julian Bismuth, Luchezar Boyadjiev and fellow artists who seek to make sense of their necessarily limited abilities to understand and properly represent history.
