The panorama of the galleries in Berlin is really wide and it’s not always easy to extricate oneself. Many exhibitions are proposed every month and that’s why Art & Tours Berlin has decided to offer the possibility to visit the 4 most important and interesting shows selected by its experts in a single tour.
Here is a small extract of the exhibitions included in the May TOP 4 tour; a very intense month, during which the Berlin art scene has really indulged thanks to the Gallery Weekend.
Meeting point: Nach Osten featuring the young German artist Alicja Kwade, transforming the space of the church of St. Agnes (Kreuzberg) in an audio-visual installation. (see article)
Nach Osten, 2011
Courtesy Alicja Kwade and Johann König, Berlin
Photo: Roman März
Two of the other exhibitions were inside the Galerienhaus Lindenstrasse 34/35. By now one of the most attractive and in ferment spots in Berlin. It is located in Kreuzberg near the Judisches Museum, a short walk from the Berlinische Galerie, one of the main centers affected by the phenomenon of the gentrification. The gallerist Claes Nordenhak, along with a Swedish collector, bought four years ago this palace dating back to 1912. This building, like many others in Berlin, has a very rich historical background: behind the new façade, which was designed by the architects Gonzalez & Haase, it hides a very intense story. Here once stood the Kaufhaus Merkur, then the headquarters of Lufthansa and in the nineties it was used as a reception center for political asylum. In Berlin this recycling of buildings is on the agenda, each of them, behind these icy façades typical of the German capital, hides a multitude of small and big stories. ŻAK | BRANICKA, contemporary art gallery in the Galerienhaus, hosted Valie Export with Bilder der Berührung (Images of contingence). This work consisted of 24 light bulbs, hanging from the ceiling, which in offset rhythm plunge into the cylinders below, filled with liquids such as used oil, milk and water. Valie Export alluded to the 24 frames per second present in a film. The entire installation evoked a film in black and white: the black made through the oil, the white through the milk and the perforations in the transparent celluloid through the water.
The rhythmic motion was also recalled in a second installation Die un-endliche/-ähnliche Melodie der Strange. In this work, the video and audio recording of the movement of sewing machines was even more penetrating than in the previous installation.
VALIE EXPORT, Fragmente der Bilder einer Berührung [Fragments of Images of Contingence], 1994, installation, installation view at ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery, Berlin, 2013 © VALIE EXPORT
Essential was a visit to the Jarla Partilager. The gallery belongs to the Swedish collector Gerard de Geer, who owns a gallery in Stockholm and in 2011 opened an office just inside the Galerienhaus of Lindenstrasse.
Gerard de Geer proposed an exhibition of the German artist Thomas Schütte: With Tears in My Tears. The exhibition included works from 1989 to 2011. From the first drawings of the late Eighties, its gruesome “Innocents” photographs to a series of sculptures which consist of a series of bronze heads. And his latest work Walser’s Wife, a bronze bust made in 2011.
Thomas Schütte. With Tears in My Tears 1988-89
Photo: © Mathias Johansson, Courtesy Jarla Partilager
As last stop we chose the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Till July 1 it will be hosting The whole earth, an exhibition that pushes us to face many questions, trying to find out what was the role of the technology in the cultural, social and ecological development and especially what has been its influence on globalization. Starting from this Californian ideology formed in 1968, where the hippie culture meets cybernetics, and psychedelia meets computer culture and nature lovers become allies of the worshippers of these enormous changes.
Photo: Copyright © Galerie Andreas Binder und Philipp Lachenmann in The whole Earth at HKW
Preview: in the June TOP 4 Tour we’ll start with the exhibition held in Kunststiftung Poll, a foundation dedicated to the promotion and exploration of the figurative art of the 20th century. RE: VISION Season of Visual Anthropology and Photography is a project that explores the art of photography and film not on the Western tradition, but rather on indigenous cultures. From 19 April to 27 July three different artists are exhibiting: Juan Orrantia, Chiapaneco and Florence Aigner, who through movies and photos will tell us stories of ethnic groups, indigenous peoples and exile, all reported in a documentary spirit.
Azzurra Pettorossi
Art & Tours Berlin 