Nature Is Ancient, But Surprises Us All, 11–26 November 2023
Participating artists: Sara Agudo Millán, Natalia Domínguez, Sergio Monje, Barbara Sánchez Barroso
Opening: 10 November at 7 pm, with a live performance by Baal & Mortimer
Curated by Marenka Krasomil
visiting hours: Thu - Sat from 4 to 8 pm
The exhibition Nature Is Ancient, But Surprises Us All examines the artistic and everyday treatment of what is commonly conceived as landscape and delves deeper into it. Landscape as a surrounding space can never be equated with nature; beyond flora and fauna, it always also contains the built and the designed. Its own narratives are formed. Historical processes, climatic, social, political, geographical, and philosophical references are deeply inscribed in it. Landscape is an ever-changing habitat in which the past and the future meet. Interventions, interactions, and the human gaze are always included in the term. Nevertheless, a dichotomy between nature and culture has long persisted, involving hierarchies and creating (neo-)colonial relations of exploitation. Today the effects of these can be felt in climate change, resource scarcity, and the extinction of species, among other things. Demands for a reorganization of the relationship between humans and nature, while taking into account the global distribution of power and access to resources, are becoming increasingly visible, not least thanks to the struggles of eco-feminist movements.
The title Nature Is Ancient, But Surprises Us All is taken from Björk’s song “Nature Is Ancient / My Snare.” The exhibition brings together works that reflect, reject, or create new tensions around the binary separation of nature and culture. Generating landscape images with AI technologies, these works place themselves in the field of vision, mirror perceptions in words, question the difference between the natural and the unnatural, and reveal a range of concepts of nature.
The exhibition is the result of the SAC International Curatorial Residency Programme, the residency programme of Sant Andreu Contemporani, organised jointly with the Institut Ramon Llull and in collaboration with Fabra i Coats - Fàbrica de Creació de Barcelona, aimed at international curators.
Berlin Art Week 2023 / Project space Award:
Rachel Monosov - Dead Earth, A Place of No Escape
15 September - 1 October 2023, opening on Thursday 14 September from 6 to 10 pm
visiting hours: Fri - Sun from 12 to 6 pm
Rachel Monosov questions power structures, the meaning of freedom, and space in relation to movement in her multidisciplinary practice with a focus on the relationship between body action and stillness. Her background as a Soviet-era child, her family’s immigration to Israel in 1991, and her move to Europe upon reaching adulthood fuels her focus on the relationship between the Body and the Nation-state.
In Dead Earth, A Place of No Escape Monosov threads together how geopolitical power struggles take shape by control of land and resources, implementing nationally or racially segregated labor, manipulating locations of ruins, transforming them into forests, and denying recognition of native land rights through legal means. The work comments on the broader notion that certain actions require a period of stillness and contemplation, even if it means letting go of existing crops and methods to pave the way for new growth of alternatives. As Mahmood Mamdani wrote, "One can be only the oppressor or the oppressed, the majority or the minority, the nation or the other’’. This new performative work by Rachel Monosov brings to the forefront the lasting impact blind beliefs have on our personal and natural environment.
Performances
Thursday 14 September, at 19:45 & 20:45
Saturday 16 September, at 16:30 & 17:30
Sunday 17 September, at 16:30 & 17:30
Performers: Camilla Brogaard, Rachell Bo Clark, Julia Shelkovskaia
Curator: Jorgina Stamogianni
Rachel Monosov (b. 1987) lives and works in Berlin. She holds two MFAs in Filmmaking and Fine Art from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium, and a BA from Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, Israel. Monosov’s work has been included in exhibitions at Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Art Institute of Chicago, Palazzo delle Espozitioni in Rome, 11th Bamako Biennale, 13th Biennale of Dakar, and the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2019 she was awarded the Praxisstipendium of German Academy Rome Villa Massimo. Her work has been acquired into the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Monosov is a co-founder of the CTG Collective.
The exhibition Dead Earth, A Place of No Escape is part of Berlin Art Week 2023 and realised with the generous support of Catinca Tabacaru Gallery.
Berlin Art Prize 2022:
Melanie-Jame Wolf - Sarcasm Expires Quickly
3 September - 14 October 2022, opening on Friday 2 September from 6 to 9 pm
visiting hours: Friday to Sunday from 3 to 7 pm
Centrum is excited to be among the eight partner venues of Berlin Art Prize 2022, hosting a solo exhibition by nominee artist Melanie-Jame Wolf.
Abstracted arcs of flowing blue fabric translate the usually sterile white walls of an exhibition space in a meta-theatrical register. And beyond this choreography of textiles, Melanie-Jame Wolf places a video, which itself allows us to look in front of and behind a stage. Two anachronistic, archetypal comedian personas - Stand Up Ron and Pierrot the Clown - amuse an audience in the eternal loop of the two-channel video work. You can hear them laughing, but the theater auditorium's rows are empty. The film Acts of Improbable Genius (2021) celebrates a certain type of comedian, recently deceased: the mythologies he represents and the violence perpetuates. But it also pays respect to the highly specialised skill set of professional performers, usually rendered invisible as part of the act.
In Melanie-Jame Wolf's exhibition Sarcasm Expires Quickly at Centrum, the stage becomes the venue of a temporal and psychological entanglement of representation and performer. Where does performance begin, where does it end? And who does the social machinery of desire allow to entertain others? The dichotomous body, as seen by oneself and as seen by others, becomes a political enigma in this exhibition. The humor in Melanie-Jame Wolf's texts, performances, films, and installations is a strategy for subliminally posing this riddle.
Melanie-Jame Wolf (b. Launceston, Australia) is a visual artist and choreographer who lives in Berlin. She works solo and with friends, making interdisciplinary pieces about power, flows of capital, and the phenomenon of 'show business'. She examines these economies and entanglements in works for gallery, theater and screen spaces. Coming from a background in contemporary performance she approaches installation and moving image as an expanded choreographic practice. She is invested in humour as a strategy for critical possibility, and in working with language in subliminal and surprising ways. Spaces that have presented her work include: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kunstmuseum Basel - Gegenwart, KW - Institute of Contemporary Art, HAU - Hebbel am Ufer; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, nGbK, The National 2019: New Australian Art biennial, VAEFF Film Festival NYC, Arts Santa Monica, Schwules Museum, Sophiensaele, Münchner Kammerspiele, & Institute of Modern Art Brisbane.
Sarcasm Expires Quickly is realised as part of Berlin Art Prize 2022.
Sheila Chukwulozie & Jasminfire - OBSIDIAN, 13 - 26 June 2022
soft opening on June 12th, at 6 pm
visiting hours: Saturday to Sunday 4-7 pm and by appointment
Centrum and CTG Collective are pleased to announce OBSIDIAN, an exhibition curated by Raphael Guilbert in collaboration with Tushar Hathiramani.
Over the duration of two weeks, Sheila Chukwulozie and Jasminfire occupy Ajasa-hFACTOR in Lagos, Nigeria and Centrum in Berlin, Germany. Connected by a live video stream that is projected onto life-sized screens, Sheila Chukwulozie in Lagos and Jasminfire in Berlin interact through this portal creating a new dynamic performance work that examines the power of emotion.
OBSIDIAN builds from two sound and movement works created by Chukwulozie and Jasminfire individually. Sheila Chukwulozie takes us through a ceremony of personal yantras using the tones of seven singing bowls, while Jasminfire offers viola and cello meditations. Drawing from their personal experiences of working through repression and release, the two artists address how suppression in a society of niceties can shape an individual into a shadow self.
Taking their audiences through an array of emotional states, Chukwulozie and Jasminfire will activate Centrum and Ajasa-hFACTOR spontaneously, creating a collaborative performance played out as a series of fiery releases essential to living within balance.
OBSIDIAN makes use of everyday technologies in public space in order to bridge the global north and south. The shared virtual space allows the two artists to explore the limitations of separate physicality caused by our new post-COVID era, but also regularly faced by many people who are living without the privilege of a western passport.
Between 13 - 23 June Jasminfire and Sheila Chukwulozie will be present during opening hours, creating impromptu performances and holding organic open format discussions between the audiences in Berlin and Lagos.
OBSIDIAN is part of 48 Stunden Neukölln in Berlin with scheduled performances:
June 24 |
19:00-22:00 in Berlin, 18:00-21:00 in Lagos
June 25 |
15:00-21:00 in Berlin, 14:00-20:00 in Lagos
June 26 |
15:00-19:00 in Berlin, 14:00-18:00 in Lagos
Jasminfire is a solo music artist and a seasoned Grammy nominated string arranger known for expressive violin, viola, cello, and vocal compositions.
Sheila Chukwulozie explores the politics of “behaving oneself” in a Catholic-colonial body through juxtaposing local rituals, modern technology, traditional myths, and movement styles.
Jura Shust - Amber Hum, 14 - 29 May 2022
soft opening on May 13th, at 7 pm
visiting hours: Saturday to Sunday 4-7 pm, and by appointment
This monotown located in mid-Russia is surrounded by leftovers of an ancient forest.
The whole city’s infrastructure originated around a steel plant that was founded in the middle of the 18th century, at the time when the protracted baptism of this deeply pagan region was finalized. Back in the day, forests of this region were used as firewood for cast iron production.
Nowadays the city is in charge of armored vehicle manufacturing. Every spring, the Victory Day parade takes place here, where the procession of military vehicles and ranks of soldiers passes through the city accompanied by an orchestra that triggers townspeople's exсitement. The final accord of the celebration is fireworks.
The repetitive character of hostility and the circular nature of life depicted in the LED light dance of may-bugs, capture the tense profile of this biopolitical landscape. Rethinking archaic constructs such as dominance, trance, and spiritualism, the project attempts to release the tireless hum stored in fossilized pine resin.
Jura Shust (b. 1983, Maladzyechna, Belarus) explores the relationship between ritual and escapism through a multidisciplinary approach, focusing mainly on video and installation. Intrigued by modern polysemy, informational intoxication, and natural desire for oblivion — he reflects on how the mythological overlaps with the technological. The sacral concept of the human mind's incorporation in a global system, with its modern intentions for decentralization, inspires Shust to rethink the idea of spiritual ecology. Since 2012 Shust has collaborated with the Museum of Contemporary Art GFZK (Leipzig, DE), Contemporary Art Museum S.M.A.K. (Ghent, BE), Museum de Domijnen (Sittard, NL), Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, UA), Calvert 22 Foundation (London, UK), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe, DE), Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, Texas, US), among others. He participated in the 5th Biennale for Young Art (Moscow, RU), 14th Baltic Triennial, CAC (Vilnius, LT), and 4th Art Encounters Biennial (Timișoara, RO). Jura Shust lives and works in Berlin.
Amber Hum was comissioned by Centrum and curated by Rachel Monosov.
Dora Đurkesac - Sea Soma, 9 - 30 April 2022
soft opening on April 8th at 7 pm
visiting hours: Thursday to Sunday 2-7 pm, and by appointment
The sea squirt swims freely in the sea until it finds a place on a rock where it remains for the rest of its life. It digests its nervous system as it doesn’t need it in its static form. This creature provoked a theory that the brain evolved among species following the complexity of bodily movement. The collaboration between the mind and algorithm is evolving, while soma acquires the anatomy of sitting, hunched back, tech neck, or text claws. In flat encounters, humans experience each other through the infosphere and cycles of data. How do we return to the idea of touch as vision, which is known to be our earliest mode of interaction and feeling of the world? How does dance intertwine the inner and outer stimuli and how does skin become the interface between them? To be in society, one first needs to know how to be alone, perhaps think through liquidity, sea creatures, contradictions, changes.
Sea Soma is a fictional ecosystem that strives to understand bodily intelligence, touchscreens, and the potential of water and digital objects as healers. It functions through cycles of media transformations, content generators, and mobile apps that capture dancers’ embodied knowledge. It encompasses exploration of the sea, dance, and UX design in the shape of transparent foils, phones, videos, text animations, touch-book, and online diagrams.
The project is a part of the ongoing practice "Ecosystems - Rehearsing Collectivity" based on exploratory communities regenerating human structures by looking into natural and digital processes (rehearsing-collectivity.com).
Created in collaboration with Ixchel Mendoza Hernandez, Stella Krämer Horta, Lukas Hondrich, Sarah Baron Brljević, Nina Gojić, Seán Marrett, Louise Borinski.
Dora Đurkesac (b. 1988, Croatia) works in the fields of contemporary dance, new media art, and design research. Her work is shaped through archival, performative and methodological explorations of social choreographies and hybrid ecosystems. In 2020, Đurkesac was the art director of the digital publication exploring changes in the art institution Everything is New at De Appel, Amsterdam. She participated in the Research Academy at ZHDK in Zurich in 2015 and 2018. Her work and performances have been shown in numerous institutions, such as Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin; Neu Now, Amsterdam; Kreuzberg Pavilion, Berlin; Spike Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; La MAMA Theatre, New York; and Tjarnarbíó, Reykjavik. She was a part of the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt in 2021. Currently, she develops practices and methodologies in the frameworks of "Ecosystems - Rehearsing Collectivity". She lives and works in Berlin.
The project is curated by Rachel Monosov and funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media.
Mathias Weinfurter - Collapsing Memories, 10 September - 3 October 2021
soft opening on September 9th at 7 pm
visiting hours: Thursday to Friday 4-8 pm, Saturday & Sunday 1-6 pm, and by appointment
Centrum is excited to announce the solo exhibition Collapsing Memories by Mathias Weinfurter, one of the artists selected during our last open call.
Mathias Weinfurter’s work is characterised by an interest in monumentality and a meticulous study of formal and informal ways of remembering. For his exhibition at Centrum he will be presenting an installation influenced by a series of current events shaping the public space and historical narrative of the city of Berlin.
In recent decades, an increasing societal desire for representation and participation in decisions about politics of remembrance can be observed. As various groups partake in the process of negotiating social identity, a disagreement arises between contemporary knowledge and symbolic monuments such as statues, buildings, street names, and other. The demolition of the Palace of the Republic, the erasure of street names bearing traces of racism and colonialism and their replacement with others contributing to a more sanitised culture of public memory -as in the case of the African Quarter in Wedding, M-Straße, or May Ayim Ufer-, are witnessing an evident shift of perspective.
These phenomena pose questions about the dynamic processes of shaping history, the linearity and solidity of the latter, as well as the undercurrents influencing the formation of the public landscape. A monument is thought of as something solid and everlasting; a legitimate and objective witness of historical facts. But is that really the case? Mathias Weinfurter invites us to think on the ephemerality of monuments, their relationship towards the structures of power, and the hidden layers below contemporary expressions of public memory.
Mathias Weinfurter (*1989) lives and works in Cologne. He studied art with a focus on sculpture at HfG Offenbach and Bezalel in Jerusalem (ISR). In recent years he has shown his work in exhibitions at BPA (Cologne), Bistro 21 (Leipzig), Salon Comunal (Bogotá, COL), POP;68 (Cologne) and participated in AiR programs in Jeju (KOR), Bogotá (COL) and Kramatorsk (UKR), among others. Among other things, he regularly organizes projects promoting international artistic encounters. In 2021 his work was honoured with a grant by the Stiftung Kunstfonds.
Download the exhibition publication here.
Collapsing Memories is commissioned by Centrum and curated by Jorgina Stamogianni.
Bethan Hughes - Hevea Act 2: Devil's Milk, 27 May - 27 June 2021
visiting hours: Thursday to Sunday from 13:00 to 19:00 and by appointment
*Pre-registration required*/ Book a free slot here
Centrum presents Devil’s Milk, the second act in Bethan Hughes’ ongoing artistic research project, Hevea.
Initiated in 2020, Hevea is a multidisciplinary material investigation into the relationship between natural rubber – a botanical substance intertwined with the rise of capitalism, imperialism and modernism – and humanity.
Still primarily ‘tapped’ from Hevea Brasiliensis or para rubber tree plantations but similarly found in thousands of plant species worldwide, latex flows through and connects vast and violent histories of colonialism, extractivism and labour exploitation with the development of globalisation, information technologies, fashion and fetish. Today, processed for use in myriad commercial products, the ever increasing demand for natural latex accelerates deforestation across Southeast Asia and China while multinational corporations scramble to cultivate species that offer alternatives to Hevea rubber.
Devil’s Milk aims to make these unseen interconnections visible through a site-specific installation that interweaves research into the violent histories and plant-based origins of natural rubber with the manifold cultural roles it inhabits as a material of ritual and transformation. Temporary sculptures, machine-learning animation, and text are used to tell the story of how latex rubber and humanity are intimately intertwined, tapping into a broader narrative of how people manipulate, abstract and are ultimately tethered to the natural world.
As part of the solo exhibition Hevea Act 2: Devil’s Milk, Centrum will offer a two-hour outdoor workshop where participants are invited to explore the botanical origins and material histories of rubber through a curated walk with the artist in the neighborhood of Neukölln, and a hands-on making session.
Bethan Hughes (b. 1989, Wigan, UK) studied Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art and Media Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar. In 2020, she received a doctorate from the University of Leeds for her thesis, “Against Immateriality: 3D CGI & Contemporary Art”. Between 2019-20, she was a BS Projects fellow. Recent presentations include If Everything is Connected, Everything is Vulnerable at HBK Braunschweig, 2020; TAPPING, DRESSING, a duo exhibition with Laura Schawelka at Diskurs Berlin, 2020; Re-shift, Re-calibrate, hosted by Pavilion / Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds. She is currently a participant of the Goldrausch project for women artists (Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt).
The exhibition and soft opening can be visited only in compliance with the known hygiene measures. Before your visit, we ask for a short pre-registration by following this link or, alternatively, by contracting us at info@centrumberlin.com.
Devil’s Milk is commissioned by Centrum and curated by Jorgina Stamogianni. The project is funded by the District Cultural Fund of Neukölln.
Download the press release here. Download the exhibition publication.
Spaces of Faux Intimacies: Act One, 5–21 February 2021
Participating artists: Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Lou Drago, Farah Hazim, Jessika Khazrik, Claire Tolan
Visiting hours: Thursday – Friday from 2 to 6pm, Saturday & Sunday from 12 to 4pm and by appointment
fauxintimacies.online
In “The Faux Intimacy of Capitalism” an article which dates back to 2006, David Beer, Professor of Sociology at the University of York, highlights how capitalism has infiltrated the affective registers of our social life. It’s the year 2021 and the capitalist forces that we were trying to abstain from 15 years ago seem to have grown smarter and stronger as our dependency on Internet technology grows. Screened semblances of intimacy are promised to us within only a few swipes away. The user as a flâneur browses through a vast collection of online profiles to find their next better match or even their longing for a new meaningful connection. Against the backdrop of today’s neoliberal, hyper-connected society, relationships are treated more like transactions, and speed profile viewing has come to replace our desire for physical and emotional connections.
This social transformation seems to be part of a larger shift in contemporary culture; hauntingly similar to online shopping, the user is promised the fantasy of emotional abundance: by being reduced to commodity value, individuals can be seen as easily upgradeable, replaceable entities in an endless network of trade outs. At the same time, online policing and mass surveillance has rapidly taken a darker turn. It is indeed poignantly true that we voluntarily produce an overwhelming amount of highly sensitive information which in turn, and under zero cost is granted to the Internet and tech monopolies. Our most intimate disclosures are surrendered to algorithms that are subtly operating in the background, turning our profiles, preferences, demographics, and conversations into ciphers which are then being forwarded to advertisers and corporate conglomerates to “customize” and improve our next intimate experiences.
As the pandemic and the accompanying social distancing measures are driving us even further apart, and amid the already existing environmental, economic, social, and political turbulence around the world, how can we work together to produce new channels of care, social resilience, and affective solidarity? How can we refocus our attention and reappropriate the use of technology to resist the increasing individualization, commodification, and subjugation of ourselves and others in a more truthful-to-our-emotional-complexities way? And, lastly, how can we actively practice and engage in true intimacy instead of accepting a given, faux, capitalistic, intimate “pretense”, as David Beer in his closing remarks tellingly points out?
Spaces of Faux Intimacies brings together artists from various disciplines to reflect and contribute to the discussion through individually commissioned auditory works. By using the spatial layering of the facade of Centrum as a mediator of the interior and exterior space, the auditory pieces will be broadcasted in a loop. Visitors can experience the works exclusively from the exterior of the space during the aforementioned visiting hours, and also by appointment. In addition to in situ or passerby visits, the exhibition will also be presented online at fauxintimacies.online so that the audience can listen to the auditory pieces from anywhere in the world.
Spaces of Faux Intimacies is curated by Katerina Gnafaki. The exhibition is part of the Vorspiel program of the CTM and transmediale festival 2021 and made possible with the generous support of Musikfonds, by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Konstantinos Doumpenidis - The Fascist Virus, 29 October - 15 November 2020
visiting hours: Thursday - Friday from 5 to 9pm, Saturday & Sunday from 2 to 6pm
In one of his unpublished articles entitled The Fascist Virus (1934); Austro-Hungarian political economist and social philosopher Karl Polanyi refers to the contagion of fascism within the working class, and to the minorities it seeks to exterminate. Polanyi identifies fascism as a virus that, during normal times, remains latent within capitalism. At times of systemic crisis, however, it becomes virulent.
By juxtaposing two hotly debated terms, and with Polanyi’s homonymous text as a starting point, Konstantinos Doumpenidis weaves an allegory on the pathology of contemporary societies and the rise of right-wing extremist voices within Europe. He examines phenomena of the past where ecology and the love of nature were utilized by the Ethnosocialists as a vehicle for the protection of the Land and for propagating an organic, unquestionable sense of belonging, through an ideology known as Eco-fascism.
Eco-fascists place the blame for climate change on population demographics. They ignore the intertwining relationship between capitalist profits and environmental devastation, presenting an extremist rhetoric with an emphasis on diminishing those who identify as marginalized and non-white, while at the same time redefining the subject away from climate protection (Klimaschutz) towards homeland protection (Heimatschutz).
The COVID-19 pandemic has been linked with awakening ecofascist ideologies in a sense that it advocates the protection of the environment over the loss of thousands of human lives. “We are the virus” statements assume that humanity and the planet are mutually exclusive. During the pandemic, various internet users appeared to be republishing misleading photos of clear water in the canals of Venice, likening the virus to the "Earth’s vaccine". Contemplating on the evolution of Eco-fascism and its current manifestations, The Fascist Virus is a dystopian fairytale about a history that tends to repeat itself.
Konstantinos Doumpenidis (b. 1984, Xanthi, Greece) holds a Master’s degree in Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. His practice is multidisciplinary, stretching between video art, photography, sculpture, publications and social experimentation. Selected exhibitions: When You Say We Belong To The Light We Belong To The Thunder, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn (2019); L’ Autre Europe Avec Jean, in the context of the residency programme Emergency at Vevey, Switzerland (2018); Island, MEME Athens (2017); Medphoto Photography Festival, Rethymno, Greece (2017); 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015); PhotoBiennale Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (2014); By necessity, Athens Photo Festival (2013).
The Fascist Virus is commissioned by Centrum and curated by Jorgina Stamogianni.
Download the press text here.
Mila Panic - Tante aus Deutschland, 11 - 27 September 2020
Visiting hours: Thursday to Sunday 6 - 9pm, Reuterstr.7, 12053 Berlin
Opening: Thursday 10 September at 7pm
Artist talk: Friday 18 September at 7pm, in conversation with Nikola Njavro (registration required)
Tante aus Deutschland (Aunt from Germany) is a semi-fictional character and a central figure in contemporary folk narratives of southeastern Europe. She is the goddess of migration, the symbol of success, money and a good life somewhere else. Almost every family has a "Tante" or knows one, and the stories that circulate create the contemporary migration myth that most often takes place in Germany.
For her solo exhibition at Centrum Mila Panić weaves a rather humorous and self-referential narrative in relation to the persona of the Tante, juxtaposing her current reality as a migrant to the experiences of her aunts that arrived in Germany 26 years ago. She comments on issues of identity, status, integration, and nostalgia while bringing to the surface the complexity of personal fulfilment and the deeper layers of belonging.
On Friday 18.09.2020 at 19:00 Mila Panić will give an artist talk in conversation with Nikola Njavro. In order to attend, a registration at info@centrumberlin.com is required.
Mila Panić (b. 1991 in Bosnia and Herzegovina) studied at the Academy of Arts - University of Banja Luka in Republic of Srpska, Bosnia. In 2017 she gained a Master Degree at the Bauhaus - Universität Weimar, department of Art in Public Space and New Artistic Strategies. In her artistic practice, her background and personal experiences are vividly expressed through subjects such as migration, identity, and belonging which she then transforms into relatable, universal narratives. Her works have been exhibited internationally at Kunsthaus Dresden, the Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Künstlerhaus Wien (Austria), and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje (North Macedonia) among others. Mila Panić has participated in various residencies, festivals, lectures and talks. She is the initiator of 'Fully Funded Residencies', a platform for faster and easier overview of art residences, mobility funds, and grants as well as for sharing experiences and critical reflection on AIR models. Currently, she lives and works in Berlin.
Download the press text here.
The exhibition will take place in compliance with current hygiene measures and precautions. Please note that the gallery's indoor capacity will be limited. All visitors are requested to wear a mask and will be asked to provide their contact details at the entrance. Tante aus Deutschland is curated by Jorgina Stamogianni.
AFTERHOURS
May to October 2020
Participating artists: Monira Al Qadiri, Magdalena Fischer, Elise Guillaume, Linda Lamignan, Kosmas Nikolaou, Damir Očko, Larissa Sansour
It was late. The streets were empty and the city was quiet. You were walking home almost half asleep. And there it was, a pulsating light reflecting on the pavement, a strange sound coming out of the glass facade. You slowed down. You stood still.
Afterhours is a ghost project consisting of a series of video works which are being shown unannounced between May and October 2020 through the glass façade of Centrum, overlooking Reuterstraße. Perceived as an urban oasis or a dream-like moment disrupting the linear nature of reality, the project comes alive during the late hours of the night. The viewing is based exclusively on chance encounters and cannot be scheduled in advance.
Towards the end of the year Afterhours will culminate in a public event where all the works will be exhibited during opening hours. The exhibition is curated by Jorgina Stamogianni.
OPEN CALL | OPEN FLOOR 2020 - 2021
Deadline: May 31st, 2020
A time of crisis is also a time for contemplation and realignment. While the world stands still, creativity thrives and new ideas undoubtedly emerge.
Centrum is excited to announce an open call for artists working in a wide range of disciplines including visual art, film, music and sound, as well as creative thinkers and practitioners who would like to share their work with the public. We especially welcome applicants who would like to work site-specifically, bearing in mind the size, location & architectural characteristics of Centrum.
Focus:
Our glossary and thematic focus for 2020 revolves around the ideas of labor, nationalism, the performativity of the self, socio-political turmoil, bodies, physicality, and future narratives.
Submissions will be evaluated according to presented projects or subjects of research, their relevance to our curatorial focus, and the feasibility of the proposal considering the COVID-19 outbreak, as well as potential budget restrictions.
Format:
Apart from artistic work, proposals can refer to presentations, artist talks, performances, workshops, screenings, ephemeral events, site-specific works and other.
Please send us your application by email in PDF format including the following:
- Project proposal and a brief description of your practice (2 pages maximum)
- Short biography (150 words maximum) and cv
If relevant, please provide us with a portfolio or samples of your work in JPEG format with caption information, and links to video or sound files for film and sound-related submissions.
Timeline:
Please submit your proposal by email at info@centrumberlin.com (subject line: Open Call) until Sunday, May 31st. Selected proposals will be actualised according to the protocol that will be indicated by the general guidelines for public safety, and in parallel to Centrum's planned program for 2020-21.
Centropia, 17 - 26 January 2020
Opening: Thursday 16 January, 6 pm
Participating artists: Grinderteeth, JD Zazie, Vera Chotzoglou, Eli Cortiñas, Maria w Horn, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, Maya Shenfeld
Centropia is a series of events inaugurating a new experimental era of Centrum. Inspired by the concept of Entropy -a situation defined by lack of order or predictability, disorder, and chaos- Centropia is a liminal zone, an in-between moment, where perceived space and time disentangle revealing fragments of a new reality.
Centropia is a Rite of Passage.
Come. Join the dance.
Opening up the new era of Centrum, Centropia was conceived with the intention to stir things up, to question, to imagine and to re-define. The selected works and ephemeral events are bound together by a common thread, adding up to our concept of Entropy, sparking a certain neurological and psychoacoustic response. They have stimulated our eyes, ears, and brain. They carry within them fragments of the thematic and aesthetic that is going to shape the program of Centrum for this coming year.
Thinking of the things that could make sense for us, in this particular time and place, our language is in the process of being redefined. We are trying to construct nuances of previous norms and thought patterns. Our glossary is informed by previously known terms, conditions, and word arrangements such as:
labour
technology
hypercapitalism
nationalism
bodies
vulnerable bodies
abused bodies
transformed bodies
an army of bodies
conquered bodies
rebellious bodies/bodies as sites of resistance
the performativity of the self
(human) nature
the politics of noise
hauntology
sonorous resistance
biopolitics
the unnatural and the “Other”
conflict zones
in-between spaces
cracks.
PROGRAM:
Thursday 16 Jan. *Opening night*
18:00-20:00 Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner
Bilateria, 2019, video projection, loop
20:30-22:00 Grinderteeth, Dj Set
Friday 17 Jan. 18:00-21:00
Eli Cortiñas
Walls Have Feelings, 2018, video projection, loop
Saturday 18 Jan. 18:00-21:00
Maria w Horn
CDR/Cyanine, 2015, audio visual installation, loop
Sunday 19 Jan. 19:00-22:00
Vera Chotzoglou, Rausch, 2018, video, loop
Maya Shenfeld, sound performance
JD Zazie, sound performance
Thursday 23 Jan. 18:00-21:00
Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner
Bilateria, 2019, video projection, loop
Friday 24 Jan. 18:00-21:00
Eli Cortiñas
Walls Have Feelings, 2018, video projection, loop
Saturday 25 Jan. 18:00-21:00
Maria w Horn
CDR/Cyanine, 2015, audio visual installation, loop
Sunday 26 Jan. 18:00-21:00
Vera Chotzoglou
Rausch, 2018, video projection, loop
Centropia is co-curated by Katerina Gnafaki & Jorgina Stamogianni and realized under the umbrella of CTM Vorspiel 2020. Download the press release here.
Keegan Luttrell – For Joan, 29 November - 15 December 2019
Opening: Friday, 29 November, 7pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, 5 December, 7pm
As a final exhibition in 2019, Centrum is happy to present Berlin based artist Keegan Luttrell with her exhibition For Joan. In her sculptural and performative work, the artist examines two different explorations of the meaning of armour, one that explores a narrative where armour fuses with the body to create a singular entity, highlighting the implications of this action, while the other perceives armour as a metaphor for building something that does not exist.
The title and theme of the exhibition were inspired by the iconic figure Jeanne d'Arc – Joan of Arc – who led the French army to war against England in the 1430s, but who finally experienced how her male allies turned against her after several defeats, and sold her to the opponents. In 1431, d'Arc was burned at the stake as a witch. In her work, Luttrell uses the story of Joan of Arc to highlight what happens when the protection of the self becomes a symbolic element of power and also when it becomes obsolete. Shedding armour removes the restrictive rigidity of the public facade as it reveals the vulnerable truth of human nature.
On the occasion of the exhibition there will be an artist talk, taking place on 5 December at 7pm.
Levi Orta
LEVI ORTA, THE FIRST ARTIST TO RECEIVE A FEE FROM THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS OF CUBA TO PARTICIPATE IN A SHOW
13 - 15 September 2019
Opening: Thursday 12 September, 6pm
On the occasion of participating in this year's Berlin Art Week, Centrum presents Levi Orta's installation LEVI ORTA, THE FIRST ARTIST TO RECEIVE A FEE FROM THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS OF CUBA TO PARTICIPATE IN A SHOW (2017).
After having received an invitation to participate in an exhibition in the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba in Havana, Levi Orta asked the museum to pay him a fee for his participation. However, Cuban legislation currently – although a communist state advocating the end of the exploitation of labour – does not include the payment of fees to artists, so the museum had to find other legal ways to make the payment effective.
Orta's aim by installing his gesture-work was to generate attention for the lack of paid work for contemporary artists who do not participate in the market, as well as to propose an update to artists' labour rights in Cuba. Furthermore, the work encourages a complicity between artists and cultural institutions serving as a vehicle to support and promote contemporary art practices that are not part of the market.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetexts hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
Ali Sayah & Siavash Dodeir – Carved, 20 July - 4 August 2019
Opening Friday 19 July, 7pm
Centrum was founded in 2009 on premises which before had been used as a brothel since the mid-1990s. Around the same time, in 1993, just across the street, the Imam Riza Berlin Islamic Centre was founded. 2009 saw their expansion into a three-floor building. The Centre created a space that catered to the spiritual needs of Shia Muslims; while the brothel provided sexual services for the low-income inhabitants of the not-yet-gentrified Neukölln. The people frequenting the religious centre and those visiting the brothel were completely unaware of what went on across the street during the fifteen years of their coexistence. The exhibition title Carved thus refers to the various and different spaces and niches, which different groups and communities carve out for themselves within a pluralistic society. In an uncanny, site-specific and immersive installation Ali Sayah and Siavash Dodeir imagine those worlds merged together.
Using sound and colours inspired by Ashoura, the most elaborate Shia ceremony, the space is made to look, smell and sound like spaces similar to Imam Riza Centre, which the artists have experienced during their life in Iran. Decorative elements on the walls of the former brothel are reconstructed as a band of images, texts and videos about the brothel, Shiism and its rituals, and the history of Centrum. The main work in the centre of the space incorporates elements from both aesthetic worlds, of Shiism and prostitution. When they moved in, the founders of Centrum tore down a black painted wall with a small window shielding what occurred inside the brothel from passers-by and replaced it with a large shop window. In Carved the artists reinstall this barrier, but replace the small window with a video. Shia Muslims traditionally make a saffron rice pudding called Shole Zard, decorate it with calligraphy or patterns made out of cinnamon powder, and serve them out to their neighbours and relatives on special occasions. During the opening, the same ritual will be performed with an artistic twist for all visitors to taste.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetexts hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
Patricia Sandonis – Das Kiez Monument, 8 - 22 June 2019
Opening: Saturday 8 June, 7pm
48 Hours Neukölln Festival: 14 - 16 June
Lecture and Artist Talk by Brinda Sommer: Saturday, 15 June, 5pm
Finissage: Saturday 22 June, 6-8pm
Das Kiez Monument is an art installation that includes a group of monuments dedicated to the Flughafenkiez – the central one being made in collaboration with Centrum's direct neighbourhood. The project aims to highlight the complexities of the Flughafenkiez, its history, population and different languages. The neighbours get to decide about the content and execution of the monuments, tackling the underlying question: how do they want to be remembered in the future? Thus, the artist Patricia Sandonis with her project wants to give a voice to the people who usually don't have a say when it comes to writing (their own) history. Moreover Das Kiez Monument is also intended as an "ecological" work of art which reflects on the materiality of our surroundings today, using the banal materials of our daily lives.
KARMA – ODALISQUE, 9 March - 13 April 2019
Opening hours: Thurs - Sun, 3 - 7pm
Opening: Friday, 8 March, 7pm
Presentation by Livia Valensise (Ban Ying e.V.): Friday, 22 March, 7pm
Finissage & Performance: Saturday, 13 April, 8pm
With her exhibition, ODALISQUE, the artist KARMA relates the traditional art history genre to the continued commodification and exoticisation of the non-western female body through modern slavery, pornography and prostitution. In doing so, the artist opens up a discourse about the continuity of white, male, heterosexual hegemony within and with the help of the art world and promotes a decolonisation of our collective, aesthetic consciousness.
The origins of the word Odalisque, lie in the Turkish term ‘odalik’, from oda, chamber, which in turn refers to women who worked as chambermaids at the Ottoman court. In popular artistic consciousness, Odalisques are ornate, sensual paintings of beautiful concubines in various states of undress. Although an established genre, for KARMA, the Odalisque is a derogatory visual celebration of the colonisation of women and perhaps the pinnacle of woman as object of the male gaze: “The Odalisque is in actuality the colonialised eastern ‘other,’ often depicted with milk-white skin. She is the property and sexual bounty of a powerful, non-Caucasian man, the Sultan. In this sense, Odalisques are hybridised, perverse colonial fantasies that precede the racist storylines found in contemporary pornography. She is the symbolic essence of female subordination.“
Inspired both by the history of the Odalisque, but also by that of Centrum, which once was used as a brothel, KARMA presents her paintings as part of an encompassing installation, in which soft, intimate structures are used to signify the female body. The artist has also integrated actual sex toys and bondage props into the installation as visual reminders of the tools of domination once used on slaves that are now integral part of the fantasy world of BDSM role-play. Thus, ODALISQUE creates a semantic link between contemporary BDSM and the power structures of master-slave-relationships of the past, which – when it came to female slaves – often involved acts of domination and sexual abuse.
In our contemporary culture, BDSM practices are readily available through online pornography and social media. Many women choose to inhabit the role of “the slave” to their partner’s role of “the master,” as a form of personal choice – a phenomenon which might play a part in what leads many to believe that we live at a time when women have gained complete freedom of choice in terms of personal volition, sexuality and work. Yet, according to the statistics of Human Rights organisations that monitor contemporary forms of bonded labour and sex trafficking, countless women, who do not have the economic and educational privileges of our culture, continue to be forced to work as slaves. By revealing the inherent racism, sexism and commodification of canonised art to be the same as our ubiquitous, contemporary visual culture, KARMA seeks to highlight the sustained struggle that women today still face with regards to their own autonomy, be it bodily and sexually or metaphorically in the creation of their own images and identities.
The project was supported by the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetexts hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
Matthew Crookes – When Vikki met Kristeva, 26 October - 25 November 2018
Opening Friday, 26 October, 7pm
Matthew Crookes in conversation with Heiko Pfreundt: Saturday, 24 November, 7pm
Matthew Crookes is an artist who alternately assumes the identities of two women; one based on a living person, the other a live construct, an extension of the artist himself. Vikki Chopper and the Kristeva Project are episodic, fragmented creatures that exist on social media – one on instagram, the other as a blog – each giving only a partial narrative at a time. In his exhibition at Centrum Crookes presents these two projects, which over several years have gradually grown together, and in many ways mirror one another. One a complete work fragmented, the other a series of fragments which summe up to an ‘identity’. One a text on the abject, the other a bid to present as something Other.
Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror - An Essay on Abjection from 1982, explores the notion of rejection and how that which is rejected creates a kind of ‘portrait’ of the one doing the rejecting. Since 2015 Crookes has been transcribing Kristeva’s text onto ephemeral surfaces, bits of rubbish, mirrors, blackboards as a form of tribute; acting-out or living through the work. The language becomes material when scrawled in felt-pen onto detritus, windows, or on the backs of foil packaging and soiled tissues. Vikki Chopper, on the other hand, is Crooke’s alter-ego, his Rrose Selavy, and began as a shadow practice. Vikki is the compliment, the previously unseen. Abject also means that which we fear and which we internalise.
Who reflects on any of this, however, while scrolling along? Who will attempt to decipher the scrawled fragments of Kristeva’s book, or genuinely care if Vikki’s arse is cisfemme? The difference between the curated space, digital or physical, and the world at large has long since become blurred, but we are still socialised to follow conventions, when encountering something in the world, say in the street, as opposed to something in a dedicated space.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetexts hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
Emma Waltraud Howes – The Nine Returns to the One, 14 - 30 September 2018
Opening: Friday, 14 September, 7pm
Workshop – Twisted Buoys: Saturday, 22 September, 4pm
Finissage: Sunday, 30 September, 5pm
The Nine Returns to The One consists of three scores, one for each performer, and a separate score for the spectators. This Tether for an Engagement is a written agreement that accompanies the performance exhibition to highlight the relationship between all parties involved: THE ART WORK (Object(s)) / PERFORMER(s)(Subject(s)), SPECTATOR(s), and THE INSTITUTION, that supports the presentation of this collective encounter. Visitors are invited to engage with the performance exhibition by following this notation as their guide. The soundtrack accompanying the exhibition, Children for or Against the Destruction of Birds, is a translation of the accumulative scores.
Emma Waltraud Howes desires to invent methods to participate in relation to boundaries – to draw attention to what is anticipated (projected) and what is present (concrete). She wants to explore the reciprocal expectations contained within these real and imaginary constraints – a cathartic and intimate negotiation between bodies and the structures that contain them. The Nine Returns to the One was developed as a performance/exhibition methodology to explore these interdependencies – techniques for the comprehension of internalized borders, methods for translation and magnification to an external site, and an oscillation between interior and exterior dynamics. Interested in notation as a method of translation to communicate the intentions of this labour, Howes is attracted to the theatrical potential of the floor plan, both for its similarities to notation, or scores as compositions representative of a stage in the development from concept and intention to depiction and effect. A stage is a place of theater and a moment in the development of a social process.
Emma Waltraud Howes works as a translator between movement and form. Her interdisciplinary works manifest as multiple reconfigurations of the body and space informed by her background in dance, performance theory, and the visual arts within the framework of a conceptual art practice. Her labour is guided by observations of gestures with a focus on the development of an expanded choreographic practice incorporating public interventions, kinaesthetic and architectural research, and an underlying drawing component in the form of graphic scores for performances that can be interpreted by orchestras, dancers, and the public.
The project was supported by the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetexts hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
Martin Blake – Was it a cat i saW, 13 - 28 July 2018
Opening hours: Thurs - Sat, 3 - 7pm
Opening: Friday, 13 July, 7pm
What would happen if the ground was up? What if we were grounded from above? A possible answer might be levitation, where gravity still holds but in another way; something between the free-floating flux of total freedom in generic abstraction and the pull of gravity in realism of matter. Such balancing acts were performed through a variety of elements in Martin Blake’s previous paintings. Using pieces of torn paper on canvas as part of the composition created points of gravity within the rectangular space, a limitation that opened up a space for dialog. Another method used by the artist is wide brush strokes: between the largely empty white background of the canvas and thin lines of colour that have to obey the defined laws of matter and motion, a space opens up for a play of fore- and background, for a temporary balancing of the mythical and the human, for the risky practice of making transient acts permanent in matter and static pigments transient in movement, for what is called “painting”.
For his latest project at Centrum, Martin Blake achieves a similar balance using an altogether new and different method in which the frame itself sets the limits. The shape of two large wooden panel paintings was originally found at Centrum, as an arched architectural element separating the exhibition space from the space next door. An arch on top of a painting bears the responsibility of containing all the colours and shapes inside (while also bearing the weight of the building). As the points of attraction in the two paintings are at their tops, they are grounded from above, or simply “up-lifted”. Just as the material necessity and gravity of the physical structure influences the colours, the colours acknowledge the ever-present structure by moving vertically towards the arch. Deep greys in one of the paintings send out a feeling of inner calm. The motionless colours find opportunity to ascend, descend and glide in waves. The bright yellow and purple in the other painting jump up towards the arch, while the arch pulls the colours to its embrace.
Linking the two wooden panels, the third work in the exhibition is a smaller painting with a tiger. The poised large cat figure is filled with colours from the two arcs in a kind of transitional spectrum. In another dimension, the striped in-between animal stands between the red-grey frame and the red and grey floor that visitors are standing on.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetexts hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
Installation views: Alberto Stievanin
Sophia Domagala & Dagmar Schürrer – SEHR GUT, 22 April - 13 May 2018
Opening: Saturday, 21 April, 7pm
SEHR GUT goes Babes Bar @ Agora Collective: Friday, 4 May, 9pm
Centrum is pleased to present the exhibition SEHR GUT with works by Sophia Domagala and Dagmar Schürrer. The two artists first met in 2016, and despite the obvious disparity in their different approaches and choices of medium got intrigued about each other’s work and interested in collaborating on a joined project.
Less is more. The work of Sophia Domagala is defined by simplicity. Combining flowers, words or fragmented sentences with simple abstract shapes, the artist creates cheerful, or sometimes gloomy compositions, in a naive way. She explores the essential, often overlooked aspects around simplicity: the complete and the incomplete, the full and the partial figure, permeability, movement and stasis. Thus, omitting any narrative elements, Domagala in her work relies on the human ability to grasp meaning through the eye without the need for additional information. In her work process the artist challenges the established parameters of painting and instead treats the canvas like a sheet of paper: Focusing on immediacy and spontaneity, the artist creates a space devoid of preconceptions – a sensual world, in which through our eyes we feel the rough texture of the canvas or taste the red sweetness of a ripe cherry.
Dagmar Schürrer likewise pushes the boundaries of her medium video and combines found footage with 3D elements and specially generated short animations into complex moving collages accompanied by an equally multi-layered soundtrack. Fragments of text appear and disappear, blending in with the various moving elements to become part of the video’s dynamic choreography. Breaking with traditional narrative techniques, Schürrer turns the screen into a canvas on which she composes and juxtaposes language – her own poetic phrases – and the moving images, showcasing both their inadequacies: it is in the eye of the beholder to decide if “smooth” relates to a clip of a hand rubbing cream onto a leg or to the movements of a photo-real computer generated white fabric blowing in the wind. And do we find the heart pumping in the ribcage in a blue-tinted X-ray “beautiful like marble”? Thus, Schürrer, like Domagala, focuses on the beholder’s own sense of intuition and challenges the sleek aesthetic and alleged objectivity of scientific and computer generated imagery.
Alongside the exhibition there will be an event in cooperation with AGORA COLLECTIVE at Babes Bar on May 4 from 9pm presenting the installation BIEST by Sophia Domagala and Dagmar Schürrer; music by DJ Stubby Holden (Aussie Punk).
The exhibition is supported by Österreichisches Kulturforum.
Installation views: Ute Klein
From the Aesthetic of Administration, 11 August - 17 September 2017
Joshua Schwebel with Pauline Püschel and Anne Wesolek
Opening: Friday 11 August, 7pm
Panel Discussion: Sunday 27 August, 7.30pm
Artist Talk: Friday 1 September, 7.30pm
For a new project proposed for Centrum, From the Aesthetic of Administration, Canadian conceptual artist Joshua Schwebel invited employees of the Berlin arts funding administration, the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, to propose and realize their own artworks. The respondents, Pauline Püschel and Anne Wesolek, have each composed works reflecting on their tasks at the Senat and their relationship to art. The exhibition takes its title from Benjamin Buchloh’s seminal article, in which he claims that the aesthetic identity of the middle class is one of administrating labour and production. The resulting exhibition reverses the roles of administrator and producer, delegating the production of artistic content to those who normally manage the financial structures underpinning the production of art. The project invokes questions of how funding initiatives determine artistic activity, as well as how divisions between artistic production and cultural administration establish the value and even status of what is recognizable as art.
Joshua Schwebel is a conceptual artist interested in the division of labour in cultural work, and especially in the bureaucratic activities that predetermine and produce art's visibility. He often works on the border between art and art administration, occupying the positions that invisibly subtend the production of contemporary art. Schwebel’s work has been exhibited and circulated nationally and internationally, and supported by both the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. The project realized at Centrum is generously supported by the Canadian Embassy.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetextes hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
Installation views: Ute Klein
Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth, 30 June - 23 July 2017
Martin John Callanan / Max Grau / Emma Waltraud Howes / Jae Kyung Kim / Erkan Öznur / Benedikt Partenheimer
Opening: Friday, 30 June, 7pm – with a performance by Kirstin Burckhardt, 8pm
Smell Transplant: Friday, 14 July 6-9pm – Olfactory Workshop by Klara Ravat
Finissage & Film Screening: Sunday, 23 July 5pm – All That is Solid (2014) and Lettres du Voyant (2013) by Louis Henderson (films start at 8pm)
The concept of distorted representations and perceptions of reality may date as far back as Plato's allegory of the cave. However, in light of Brexit and Trump's election, the manipulation of information seems to have reached new heights (Oxford Dictionaries dubbed ‘post-truth’ as 2016’s word of the year). Amidst the confusion between true facts and fake news, heightened by 24-hour news cycles, social media and a populist rhetoric, artists play a pivotal role in warning and reminding of reality's different shades and how they can be exploited by those in power. For Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth, Centrum have invited a group of artists to shed light on this issue through a series of sound, scent, text-based, and video installations, and a suite of events.
The group exhibition Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth opened on the 30th of June with a performance by Kirstin Burckhardt: Grow a Body (2017) centres around a rhythmic, pulsating reading of a text which poses the question: When is your body complete? This question is echoed in the feeling of some people who disidentify so strongly with a ligament that they self-amputate ('Body Integrity Identity Disorder'). In the performance, in which the artist works with another performer, Gloria Höckner, this feeling is carefully embedded within the sensation of completely dissociating from your body when in a traumatic situation, raising questions about subjective and alternative truths, the relationship between alienation and violence, and the prevalence of emotion over reason – questions considered to be at the core of our post-truth era.
To support and expand on the exhibition in Centrum’s physical space, our Tumblr is a virtual space to further develop and explore notions of post-truth and for six weeks we posted starting points for further research here.
Download the full press text here. / Zum Herunterladen des Pressetextes hier klicken.
Installation views: Ute Klein / Performance pictures: Evanthia Afstralou
Ulla Nolden – PURE MOVEMENTS, 6 - 21 May 2017
Opening: Saturday 6 May 2017, 7pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday 17 May 2017, 7pm
Finissage: Sunday 21 May, 5-8pm
In her exhibition at Centrum, Ulla Nolden showed works that are informed by the artist’s fascination with the beauty of subtle yet intricate movements at the margins of everyday reality. In PURE MOVEMENTS Nolden consolidates the two main lines of her artistic enquiry of the past few years: translations of observed behavioural rules of movement into computational instructions and her photographic project EVERYDAY. As part of the latter, Nolden since 2006 has taken, selected, and subsequently published one photograph per day on nolden.com as a means and method to explore her own visual perception. The photographs capture particular elements or details of stasis within the artist's daily surroundings. Over the years certain motifs reappear and patterns of perception and selection have emerged revealing a unique personal aesthetic. The immediacy of the perception is met by the instantaneousness of the photograph. By contrast, Nolden experiences the visual perception of movement as accumulative. Over time, observations of similar movements are layered to form one complete percept. As part of the process of perception, the rules governing the movement are clarified. Nolden translates those behavioural rules into computational instructions.
In this exhibition two works of the PURE MOVEMENTS series were presented using a Raspberry Pi computer constantly generating the movement we observe in real-time. The movement we perceive is created because each animated entity follows a set of behavioural rules: “align with the movements of your neighbours, move toward the average of your neighbours’ positions, keep at a distance from your neighbours, move towards a specified point in space, wander aimlessly.” The beauty we find in watching the infinite and complex movement of the swarm may be explained by the fundamental paradox of our own existence. Our condition is one of ubiquitous and determining connectedness and relation. Yet, by definition, every member in the swarm is autonomous. There is no leader. As individuals we feel we are self-ruling and unique. Another work was displayed as a series of video loops generated by an algorithm describing the movement of spiders. Fusing photographs of marks left by previous events on the fabric of the gallery space with the visualisation of algorithmic movement, this installation explores the intersection of the physical and the digital with a focus on the everyday.
Download the press text here. / Zum Herunterladen der Presseerklärung hier klicken.
Installation views: Ute Klein
Joseph Craig – Home is Where the Hearth is, 8 - 23 April 2017
Opening: Saturday 8 April 2017, 7pm
Finissage, Publication launch & Readings: Sunday 23 April, 7-10pm
Humans have been sitting around fires for thousands of years – 300,000 in fact. The mastery of fire marked an evolutionary turning point, and over time, humans began gathering around fires to eat and socialise. Today, while fire is no longer necessary for our survival, the fireplace still has a presence in the contemporary western home – physically and emotionally. Acting as the spine of a household, this archaic structure ties us to nostalgic scenes of domestic bliss, and acts as a monument to the nuclear family. Home is Where the Hearth is examines the ways which fireplaces cinch us to dated traditions and histories, obscure outliers, and prevent us from moving forward. Within Joseph Craig’s installation, a contemporary fairy tale unfolds, through which he inserts himself into the dormant passages that anchor us to festive traditions, cinematic illusions and our great aunt's ashes. These cavities no longer scorn at party pashes or laddered fishnets, they become an entrance to something higher.
Joseph Craig is a London based multidisciplinary artist, he flips social norms on their head by utilising methods of play to explore the various taboos which manifest once an individual finds themselves in territory where their body feels alien. The artist probes his own childhood as a way to understand the factors which have shaped both his identity and his work. He collects objects and materials based on their potential to be repurposed in opposition to their intended function. These assemblages become retaliations against the social and political narratives which shape one’s identity.
Download the press text here. / Zum Herunterladen der Presseerklärung hier klicken.
Have you seen this bird? an exhibition about the dodo – 19 February - 26 March 2017
Opening: Saturday, 18 February 2017, 7pm
National Mauritius Day – curator's tour & live painting by Jono Gooley: Sunday, 12 March, 1-7pm
Finissage with Mauritian buffet: Sunday, 26 March 2017, 2-5pm
curated by Lisa Gordon
Was the Dodo a real or a mythical creature? Representing much more than just ornithological interest, even dodologists continue to debate its true appearance and character today. The obscurity surrounding this famous bird has been both an age-old and a contemporary enigma. Introduced through its native home, Mauritius, this exhibition of Dodo-related artworks, documents, books, souvenirs, products and ephemera goes on to recount and revive some diverse and contradictory narratives depicting the Dodo. Delivered back to us largely through colonialist practices, the tangible evidence we have concerning the bird and much of its iconic imagery often illustrates ideas to do with expansionism and obsolescence. Curiously, it was these same imperialist measures which gave rise to portrayals of the bird as being comical, dumb, slow and lazy.
Have you seen this bird? aims to bypass traditional value judgements normally associated with collections. Be it souvenir, painting or game, all objects on display bear a metaphorical relationship to one another as they all reside within an active, sociocultural context. The connections they form will be illuminated, allowing them to continue to interact through their own material language. Visitors will experience objects delivering scientific, artistic, poetic and consumerist associations.
The collection belongs to Rainer Dombrowsky, proprietor of the former ‘Dodohaus’ (International Dodo Society, Berlin). Having grown up on Mauritius, he developed a fascination with the national symbol of the island and has been collecting for about 15 years. The Dodohaus served as a storage and display solution whilst also providing an intercultural meet-up point for artists, allowing them to exhibit, perform music and give talks – more often than not, Dodo-themed! Due to commercial development in the area the organisation was forced to close and the collection which once hung in the venue is now in archive. Curator, Lisa Gordon, reinterprets some of these unique objects in a temporary exhibition at Centrum.
Zum Herunterladen der Presseerklärung hier klicken.
Installation views: Ute Klein
Rob Blake – PMSL: msgs n msundrstndngz, 14 January - 10 February 2017
Opening: Saturday 14 January, 7pm
Performance "Mantric phonemes": Saturday 28 January, 7.30pm
Finissage: Friday 10 February, 5pm
In his first solo show at Centrum, Rob Blake presents a series of new works that deal with the symbiotic relationship between technology and social spheres, considering how it functions in our daily lives amid increasing social and economic inequality. The exhibition and accompanying events were part of the transmediale & CTM Vorspiel festival.
In his painting FUCK MY LIFE, an impasto of texting acronyms are written in full, layering expressions of despair, hopelessness and anger, which jostle on the canvas. The expanded phrases such as ‘oh my god’, ‘what the fuck’ and ‘fuck my life’ casually describe feelings of fear, as complex emotions and scenarios are reduced to an apathetic, nonsensical static. This reflects the multiple voices and confusion of today’s online world. Questions are triggered about the role of technology as a social connector but also a facilitator of passive-aggressive behaviour, highlighting the fine line between freedom of speech and the legitimization of hate speech. GRAN VALS sees worms slithering over a landscape of muddied mobile phones. As the handsets begin to ring simultaneously, the worms try to bury themselves, escaping the numerous melodies and vibrations that continually repeat. In a visceral and repulsive scene, we are confronted with the contrasting textures and movements of the living creatures and the plastic handsets. In the video FUCK ME OR FUCK OFF, Blake treats the McDonald’s jingle ‘I’m loving it’ as a self-perpetuating entity. The theme tune is released into the wild, crying out to animals of the forest. It attempts to entrench itself within the vocabulary of local wildlife, to be accepted, copied and duplicated by the birds, living on as a quasi life form. Heard by this new audience, its original connotations are lost; accepted and repeated as a meme in its own right, its cheery hyper-capitalistic origins go unquestioned and undenounced. In the companion piece CITY BIRD the artist presents an interactive sculpture comprising a rotating wheel and two mobile phones. These phones are engaged in a perpetual phone call with one another. Through this endless conversation, surrounding sounds are captured, distorted and repeated; the wheel’s movement, visitor’s voices, and importantly, the jingle from FUCK ME OR FUCK OFF. This cacophony of sound creates an unsettling atmosphere, suggesting the overload of information in our daily lives. Messages become so compounded that they are impossible to separate, their original intention confused and lacking meaning through hyperactivity.
Download the press release here. / Zum Herunterladen der Presseerklärung hier klicken.
Installation views: Ute Klein
triangularities, 4 - 18 September 2016
Isabelle Borges, Amelie Grözinger, Janine Eggert & Philipp Ricklefs, Christopher Sage
Opening: Saturday 3 September 2016, 7 pm
Three points connected through three lines - the triangle is a simple but important and versatile construct not only in mathematics, but also in science, religion, architecture, and art history. In nature triangles occur in their strictest geometrical form only in crystalisation, in the growth of branches, and in the shape of several of the joints in the sceletons of humans and animals. The triangle is the basic element of all polygones, and both a dynamic and variable figure, which contains both the dynamic of its different angles, and the balance that can be struck by dividing it by the mid-perpendicular into two symmetric halfs.
The work by Amelie Grözinger takes the shape of a triangle constructed from a multitude of hexagons of folded paper. Its shimmering golden surface reflects the surroundings. Through the fractured surface of the hexagons, however, the mirror image gets symmetrically fragmented like in a kaleidoscope. The two sculptures XEROX petit (2011) by Janine Eggert and Philipp Ricklefs, are in the tradtition of concrete art and all about the interaction between shape and colour. The first sculpture takes the shape of a star tetrahedron, the second, that of its deconstruction. The lacquered surface puts an emphasis on irregularly sawn edges; the unpainted inside and steel brackets are visible. Eggert/Ricklefs’ performative intervention makes visible the production process which preceded the sculpture seeking to sensitise the beholder for the correlation between colour, shape, and space. The wall drawing by Isabelle Borges consists of lines in dark blue which divide the surface of the wall into triangles of various shapes, some of them tinted in light blue. In contrast to the works of Concrete art, which focus on the purity of geometric forms and primary colours, Borges’ works are site-specific; influenced by the architecture and surroundings. Often her poetic wall drawings are complemented by and interact with the geometric forms of paper collages. Christopher Sage’s Space & Time rotary (2016) is a cinetic sculpture constructed to explore our shifting perception and changing relation towards an object. The surface of the sculpture is divided into six identical squares, which themselves are each divided into two triangles. Using isometric perspective, Sage’s disguises the two-dimensional nature of the sculpture, which almost imperceptibly turns on its own axis within twelve hours. The differently coloured planes rotate, and seem to shift and transform into kaleidoscopic new shapes.
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Installation views: Merve Terzi
The Beach – Nicky Broekhuysen / Joseph L. Griffiths, 22 July to 14 August 2016
Opening: Thursday, 21 July 2016, 7pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday, 27 July 2016, 7pm
Closing Reception: Sunday, 14 August 2016, 5-8pm
curated by Sarah E. Davies
The Beach is an exhibition of site-specific works by Nicky Broekhuysen [Berlin] and Joseph L. Griffiths [Melbourne]. The exhibition takes Guy Debord’s poetic adage «Sous les pavés, la plage!» [Beneath the paving stones, the beach!], as a starting point to consider the significance of the beach and its potential in our current social, political and material environment. Centrum's exhibition is the first iteration of The Beach, with the second planned at BUS Projects, in Melbourne Australia in January 2017. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
Broekhuysen works with the binary numbers 1 and 0, hand stamped onto paper, objects, environments and cities to shape complex organic worlds of data, information and meaning. Binary numbers, coded, carry information. By re-appropriating and scrambling the code the artist shifts its meaning, forming and perpetuating new connections and perspectives. Just as a marble tile is in part made up of sand particles, and is a natural formation utilised to form civic structures, it can similarly be returned at any moment to The Beach. Joseph L. Griffith came directly from time spent at the British School at Rome’s residency, where the artist engaged with archaeologists and their site work. Griffith’s work condenses the ancient and the present, the natural and the cultural, growth and decay. His Fountains assemble travertine, marble, water, moss, light and sound to form an ecosystem – a fragile network of relations between water, the geological formation of travertine and the acoustic territory of church bells, with cycles of entropy and regrowth.
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Installation views: Anna Olthoff
Jungwoo Lee – My Name is Red, 7 - 22 May 2016
Opening: Saturday 7 May, 7pm
Artist Talk: Sunday 8 May, 5pm
Additional Screenings: Friday 13 May, 8pm / Friday 20 May, 8pm
Finissage + Book Presentation: Sunday 22 May, 5pm
curated by Jasmin Meinold
Do you know someone from that far-far away land called North Korea? That place where communist dictatorship rules and everyone is dressed the same? Where you are not allowed to wear jeans and it’s forbidden to watch western media?
In his 5-channel video installation My name is Red Jungwoo Lee questions the public image of North Korea as a chimera shrouded in myth, heavily influenced by pop culture and the media. The secretiveness of the state has made it an easy target for the so-called West to project various stereotypes about Asian people and about dictatorship onto the country. In his work Lee examines how one constructs „the other“ as a more-fictional-than-factual counterpart to ones own culture. In an interview setting 20 young people talk in monologues about their relationship with the communist country. Their stories overlap, fray, and get fragmented by the editing. In their diversity and peculiarity it becomes obvious that these are tales rather than experiential reports, that the interviewees impersonate fictional characters. As the narratives mainly focus on stereotypes, prejudices, concepts of „otherness“, and the feeling of being alienated, they reveal more about the speakers themselves and their personal experiences as foreigners in Germany, than any objective truths or serious observations about North Korea.
The exhibition is generously supported by Stiftung Braunschweigischer Kulturbesitz.
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Cornelia Baltes / Jean-Philippe Dordolo – Gone fishing, 8 - 24 April 2016
Open Studio: Friday, 1 April 2016, 7pm
Opening: Thursday, 7 April 2016, 7pm
Centrum is looking forward to hosting an exceptional collaborative project of the artists Cornelia Baltes and Jean-Philippe Dordolo. For the duration of two weeks the artists will transform and use the project space for their residency and for an artistic experiment: the two artists, who previously have not been in close contact, but for several years have appreciated and followed each other’s work and progress, get together for an intense exchange about their techniques and shared themes and interests. Both artists’ works have in common elements of humour and playfulness; while Dordolo’s works are often sculptural, Baltes works mainly on canvas or wooden panels. Whether their cooperation will result in a two-person presentation or also lead to works with joined authorship at this point remains to be seen. Before the official opening on the 7th of April, when the artist will present the results of their collaboration, there will be an open studio event on the 1st of April giving visitors the opportunity to participate and get an insight into the work process of Cornelia Baltes and Jean-Philippe Dordolo.
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Rachel Alliston – Property of a Private Collection, 20 February - 20 March 2016
Opening: Saturday, 20 February 2016, 7pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday, 24 February 2016, 8pm
Finissage & Book Launch: Sunday, 20 March 2016, 5pm
With the exhibition Property of a Private Collection, Rachel Alliston presents three new works, products of the artist’s recent research into philanthropist, horticulturalist and art collector Bunny Mellon (1910-2014). Mellon was perhaps best known for her design of the Rose Garden at the American White House. Together with her husband, she also founded the Yale Center for British Art and funded a significant extension to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The central work of the exhibition is Alliston’s 2016 video, which draws from diverse sources including Mellon’s rare interviews, her husband’s published memoirs Reflections in a Silver Spoon (1992) and the autobiography of her father, All Out of Step (1956). The video was filmed on the premises of Decad, Alliston’s not-for-profit art space in Berlin. A computer-generated female voice provides a narrative thread recounting factual information on Mellon’s life, while two actresses embody the semi-fictional character as rendered by Alliston. An accompanying artist book is comprised of various image materials, photographs documenting Mellon’s life as well as the personal possessions which were sold by Sotheby’s following her death, arranged into four auctions: fine art, jewelry, furniture and real estate. Alliston’s third artwork takes the form of a print based on botanical drawings in Mellon’s collection. In Property of a Private Collection, Rachel Alliston creates a link between worlds, between the sites of her own production as a contemporary artist in Berlin and the legendary wealth and high society of her protagonist. Questions arise around the power structures in which artists and collectors are embedded, a right through ownership, philanthropy as political intervention, privacy and publicity, authority through knowledge acquisition and the historical role of women in both artistic production and art collecting. An exhibition catalogue will be presented on the closing day of the exhibition. In it, a number of essays written by different authors will elaborate on, and depart from, these themes of the exhibition.
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Jaimini Patel – Measure , 21 January - 14 February 2016
Opening: Thursday, 21 January 2016, 6pm
Jaimini Patel’s experimental approach to the vitality and agency of objects and materials serves to investigate and re-evaluate our relationship with the material world. For her new installation Measure, Patel uses the outline of one of the distinctive red tiles from the gallery floor as a device to explore particular meditative sets of actions in the studio. The evidence of these repetitive performances is made available in the exhibition. Whilst certain actions are explicit and visible, others are more reticent. In Measure the artist creates poetic material encounters that suggest the possibility of a misalignment between evidence and experience: a disjuncture between the record and the private performance and observation of the action.
One of the new works created for her exhibition at Centrum has been inspired by a passage in John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear (2007), in which he describes how he lets a roll of tape that he had stuck to the edge of the table, fall to the floor and allows it to hang there. Patel, who has recreated the scenario in the exhibition space, describes her fascination with that image as being one of a 'precarious stillness'. A state of equilibrium is reached as the roll makes contact with the floor. Although it touches the floor lightly, it is enough to temporarily inhibit movement. The quietness of the tape is in contrast to the loud and swift movement that preceded it, which transforms its discreet form through a simple, single action.
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Chloe Brooks – PARLOUR, 14 November - 13 December 2015
Opening: Saturday 14 November 2015, 6pm
Film Screening: Sunday 29 November 2015, 5pm
Dial M for Murder, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1954), selected by Chloe Brooks
Finissage: Sunday 13 December 2015, 4 - 8pm
In her work British artist Chloe Brooks engages with architectural histories, integrating historicising elements into given architectural surroundings. Through partly subtle changes and partly bold gestures the artist creates ambivalent often absurd situations, which allow the beholder to perceive new and previously unexpected or hidden sides to their environment.
For her exhibition at Centrum Chloe Brooks has developed a site-specific work with several elements, with which the artist addresses the history of the architecture and the previous use of the project space and relates it to the history of the parlour. First used during medieval times, the term parlour (from French parler, to speak) was used to describe the parts of a monastery – often closest to the main entrance – which were used for communication and trade with the outside world. Later in the 18th and 19th centuries, the parlour or drawing room became the ‘window to the world’ within the private homes of the upper and middle classes, where visitors were received and where the family presented itself and their social status through the display of their best furniture, works of art, and other status symbols. The extravagance and aura connected with the historical meaning of the term is rendered ambivalent in the exhibition through a distinct use of material: the historicising architectural elements typical of a parlour are covered in black shiny vinyl and are set in contrast with peach-coloured walls, a direct reference to Centrum’s previous history, which before its transformation into an exhibition space served as the bar and anteroom of a brothel. Another important part of the installation is a series of four etchings, each depicting a building in 20th century American neoclassicism. A typical characteristic of this kind of architecture is archaising columns, which evoke the temples of ancient Greece, together with modern green glass curtains. The combination of a historicising vocabulary of architectural forms with modern building materials was chosen to transmit a certain image: symmetry and balance as a symbol for strength, longevity and wealth as well as progress and transparency. For the etchings, the artist first produced digital drawings of the buildings which were photo-etched onto a metal plate and hand-printed. Again, modern means meet with tradition: the preliminary drawing executed with digital technology is subsequently printed on paper using a printing technique which is outdated and nowadays rarely used. In a similar way as the installation in which they are presented, the etchings, and the buildings depicted in them, reference a historical pomposity, which is skewed and exaggerated through the distinct use of material and technology.
Through making classicist architectural elements meet with historical reconstruction, in her installation PARLOUR Chloe Brooks creates within the space a tension between private and public, where visitors have to reorient themselves and where the subtly induced previous use of the exhibition space also evokes the more contemporary and more sleazy connotations of a massage parlour.
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Zufall und Liebe – Rike Horb / Matthias Krieg / Eva Vuillemin, 9 October - 1 November 2015
Opening: Friday 9 October 2015, 7pm
curated by Jagoda Kamola
With the advent of modern art, chance became the creative 'spark' which excites artistic imagination and causes non-predictable but feasible material results; a practice that left chance a continuous paradox. This exhibition approaches chance as 1. a definable beginning 2. furthered by repetition, consolidated in 3. continuity which unfolds against the backdrop of spontaneity in continuous interaction with the world. In this sense, we refer to Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of Tychism; rather than postulating the importance of determinism in cosmology and in socio-economic Darwinism Peirce claimed that the origin of species is triggered by evolutionary love or 'agapeism', when one entity is prepared to sacrifice its own perfection for the sake of the wellbeing of another.
The exhibition brings together photography (Eva Vuillemin), performative sculpture (Rike Horb) and a sound installation (Matthias Krieg). The exhibition will be accompanied by a screening of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s movie Przypadek (Blind Chance) and lectures on chance as understood by philosophy and physics.
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Image: Rike Horb, Numerik Raster, 2014, felt pen on paper, 29,7 x 21 cm
Installation views: Ute Klein
Adrian Melis, 25 August - 20 September 2015
Opening: Tuesday 25 August 2015, 6pm
Artist Talk: Wedndesday 26 August 2015, 7pm
as part of this year's PROJECT SPACE FESTIVAL BERLIN (exhibition open from 5pm)
Adrian Melis in his work poses questions about the conditions and the cultural and social value of work both under socialism in his native country Cuba and in Europe’s current neo-liberal societies. The projects, which the artist has realised in Cuba, centre on the working conditions and people’s attitude towards their workplaces at state-run enterprises. The failing of the communist promise of wealth for all and the isolation and stagnation of the Cuban economy, have as a result, led to a loss of identification of workers with both the economic and political system and in consequence to estrangement with their specific job tasks. For Melis the widely felt tedium caused by the lack of productivity, becomes the incentive and the premise for the creation of a series of paradoxical situations made possible by the complicity and solidarity shared among workers.
Since 2011, the focus of the works has shifted, as the artist has left Cuba for life in Europe. While Melis’ projects still rely on the collaboration with people, the roles which both artist and participants play in these projects are different under the rules and conditions of a competitive market under current conservative governments. In exhibitions, Melis shows the results of his investigation of the conditions and the value of labour as videos, photographs, or installations. Often providing the works with a factual realism through the display of names and number of his collaborators, Melis creates works, which are paradoxically both serial and personal. Melis’ installation at Centrum was his first exhibition project in Berlin.
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Sebastian Bartel – Positioning Project #3: Constellations, 5 - 14 June 2015
Opening: Friday 5 June 2015, 7pm
curated by Yvonne Scheja
Positioning Project
Framed by Centrum’s large window to the street, the Positioning Project aims to highlight artist’s approach to inside/outside and subject/object.
For his exhibition Constellations Sebastian Bartel, who holds this year’s Schloss Ringenberg scholarship, will develop a site-specific installation for Centrum’s window, which will include some of his most recent works in painting and drawing. The main element is the translucent curtain with crystalline structures and circle-shaped cut outs which descends upon the works like a scenery. Again and again it allows insights at the drawings and paintings and in this context plays with the perception of close and distant similar to a lens. Besides geometrical forms celestial bodies come up as if the viewer could explore a new cosmos through a telescope.
In his work Bartel is interested in scientific imagery and its potential to render spheres visible, which to the bare human eye are imperceptible. Having before concentrated on the microcosm (microscopic images), he currently focuses on the macrocosm (telescopic images): While we attempt to explain certain phenomena in the universe with the help of tools like photography and simplified geometric, graphic forms, many of these occurrences still remain fundamentally abstract to us. Nevertheless man seems to be a "homo investigans" (engl. exploring human) who searches for explanations his whole life regardless of how complex or obscure the topic is. Often it is not crucial for him if his attempts of an interpretation are rationally comprehensible but rather if they help him to oppose the abstraction of things. But finally they again result in an abstract construction in spite of all the technical achievements and possible forms of expression.
Sylvain Baumann – a Climate of Trust, 18 April - 10 May 2015
Opening: Saturday 18 April 2015, 6pm
Open during Gallery Weekend: 2 - 3 May 2015, 11am - 6pm
a Climate of Trust is Sylvain Baumann’s first exhibition project in Berlin. Working in a variety of different media including sculpture, found objects as well as design items, photography, drawing, audio recordings, and text, Baumann arranges spatial installations that provoke questions about the design and shape of contemporary architecture. Baumann understands architectural design to be a political and ideological means of contemporary society and is interested in the motivations, ideas and mechanisms that produce this society: How does our physical environment – private and public – inform and transform us as individuals, our habits, our perception and experience, our ways of thinking and our desires, and how we form relationships with others. Rather than focussing on an analysis of human behaviour, Baumann sees his installations as an analysis of and a comment on the work of contemporary architects, urban and interior designers which aims at the development and elaboration of the ‘world of tomorrow’.
In his exhibition project at Centrum Sylvain Baumann is specifically interested in the idea that we currently live in what the artist calls a Climate of Trust. Baumann claims that in the more and more complex, multi-layered and mediated world of today, it is no longer possible to rely on our comprehension and reason as the basis for decision making. Our accelerated environments which are regulated through an increasingly complex and opaque network of rules and regulations, terms and conditions, require that we trust in our intuition. Baumann explores how contemporary design strategies and media imagery are used to speak directly to our instincts and asks, in a Climate of Trust, is there any space left for doubt and are individual thought and agency still possible at all?
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Dagmar Heppner – Stories, 26 February - 23 March 2015
Opening: Thursday 26 February 2015, 6pm
Dagmar Heppner recently worked with and around textiles or garments with attention to the unstable relations between objects, or between individuals and bigger structures. For her exhibition at Centrum, 'Stories', the artist has worked site-specifically focusing on the characteristics, the quirks, and oddities of the exhibition space. To that end, Dagmar Heppner has designed and sewn two ‘garments’ for both the larger and the smaller of the two bow-shaped pieces of fake wall sitting next to each other on one of the long walls protruding from it taking the form of textile sculptures. Presented on a plinth we find another of Heppner’s works, a bundle of loose woolen strands, formerly a piece of clothing, whose threads the artist has carefully untangled for the garment to be forever altered beyond recognition and repair.
Studying the vast variety of complex weaving patterns, the different structures and textures of fabrics, Dagmar Heppner is interested in textiles and garments for their potential as metaphor to explore the theme of the exhibition - 'Stories'. Heppner is interested in stories as our social fabric and underlying texture of our worlds, and in how narratives affect our perception by offering patterns of recognition. The artist thus understands stories not as coherent, linear narration with beginning, middle, and end, with progress to and regression from a climax. Instead, Heppner treats stories and storytelling as social phenomena and as means of making sense of the world and relating to it through negotiating it with others; stories thus existing as a living dynamic thing in a state of continuous flux. Placing her works in the space like subtle and poetic suggestions, as hints and clues inviting our attention and interpretation, Heppner encourages us to read the works as volatilising structures and to see them for their precarious contexts.
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Joe Clark – Polychroming, 22 January - 19 February 2015
Opening: Thursday 22 January 2015, 6pm
In Conversation: Wednesday 4 February 2015, 7pm - with independent curator Michael Birchall
Polychroming is a new project by English artist Joe Clark and his first exhibition in Berlin. At the centre of the installation is a video work in which an abstract chrome figure set against a shifting field of colour similarly waxes and wanes, continually re-rendering the image. The title refers to the traditional technique of hand-colouring the surfaces of stone or wooden sculptures in order to mimic life and alludes to echoes of it in the production of contemporary images.
Working from a position of both fascination and deep-distrust, Clark’s practice pulls from the contemporary photographic idiom, exploring and exposing the explicit and implicit rules of photography; its techniques and mechanisms; its effects and our perception of them. For Polychroming Clark has mimicked a process often used in the production of photo-real CGIs (computer generated images), producing the video component of the installation in-camera via a physical apparatus in his studio, thus pushing information through an established workflow in an unfamiliar direction. Reminiscent of Plato’s cave from the famous allegory, the subject of the image has been enveloped by a screen-rig which allows the projection of an environment around it. Navigating through a spherical image of a desert plain the artist causes the light from that distant place to dance across the multifaceted surface, thereby grounding it in a reality, but at the same time rendering it as legible to the viewer as the shadows on a cave’s wall.
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Sybella Perry – stone-twice-fire, 4 - 18 December 2014
Opening: Thursday 4 December 2014, 6pm
Film Screening: Sunday 14 December 2014, 4pm
Robinson in Ruins, dir. Patrick Keiller (2010), 101 min., selected by Sybella Perry
The search for the missing formula for artificial stone leads the disembodied voice of a psychic to question three historical monuments still standing due to the material’s unweatherable quality. Through a series of cold-readings her journey across England finally arrives at a street in London, where each house bears an enigmatic symbol. Could they be the key to the secret code for stone?
With her slideshow, stone-twice-fire, Sybella Perry (1986, UK) presents a new work, in which the artist explores human relationships to symbolic objects and analyses how we place meaning through situating statues and buildings within a specific environment and context. Borrowing elements of documentary and fiction formats, Perry combines photographic slides, which similar to the historical monuments they depict carry the idea of the possibility of freezing moments in time, with the by contrast time-based flux of the narrative voice. stone-twice-fire thus puts to the test the relationship between photography and story-telling, visual thinking and literacy and explores our constant struggle to try to make sense of things, and how the meaning we create over time corrodes and transforms as landscapes change and as the objects we give meaning to are moved, partially replaced, or preserved.
On occasion of Sybella Perry's exhibition at Centrum there will be a screening of Patrick Keiller's feature-length essay-fiction film Robinson in Ruins (2010), in which the eccentric and mysterious protagonist Robinson leads the viewers on a trip through London and Oxfordshire. Exploring Britain's industrial heritage and residual romanticism at times of economic crisis, he discovers that the British industry has moved away from the cities to the countryside, into a hinterland of motorways and complex logistic systems operated almost without staff.
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Annabel Hesselink – Towards a New Moon, 24 October - 1 November 2014
Towards a New Moon is a video installation by Annabel Hesselink (NL, 1987) in which through a range of video-experiments, the artist seeks to regain a wondrous image of the moon; an image that detaches itself from that of a grey and dusty surface which has become so deeply embedded in our cultural memory ever since its first appearance flickering on the television screens in 1969. The artist asks, if there was the possibility to doubt this generally accepted, scientific image of the moon, could we wonder again? Hesselink’s video-experiments thus are a leap into the dark, towards a condition of not-knowing, doubt and questions seeking ways to depart from what constitutes the established image of the moon. Hesselink has collected video-interviews in which she asks people around the world about their memories of the first moon landing, and their own ideas of the moon. Next to this Hesselink also digs within history for remarkable facts and fictions around the moon. Through video, building models, digging craters, and rolling snowballs the artists puts to the test the limits of what can be rationalised and imagined creating an alternative portrait of the moon.
Towards a New Moon was presented as part of NACHT&NEBEL cultural festival in Berlin-Neukölln.
Julie Myers, 1 May - 30 June 2014
Live performance: 27 + 28 June 2014, 8pm
For her site specific compositions for three corners in Neukölln Julie Myers adopts the role of a stranger or outsider in order to initiate a response, or make sense of a specific place. She finds a place to sit and to watch, to get to know her environment. She hears the ‘sizzle’ of food being made, the timbre of a voice, the cry of a child, the hum of the traffic. Her texts, like graphic scores, are presented in the gallery for interpretation by improvisor Simon Rose on baritone saxophone.
Jefford Horrigan – die Nacht Pfau, 12 - 27 May 2014
Freitagabendessen: Friday 16 May 2014, 8pm
Screening: Sunday 18 May 2014, 8pm
Performance: Friday 23 May 2014, 8pm
Jefford Horrigan works with furniture, drawing, sculpture, ritual, absurdism, intrinsic logic (and Beckett), humour, the outline of things (the recognition of objects, and also how they travel), narrative (literary), artist's process, mesmerism, labour and fate. He lives and works in London.
Ute Klein – Positioning Project #2: Kaskade, 6 - 12 December 2013
Opening: Tuesday 6 December 2013, 7pm
Finissage & Artist Talk: Tuesday 17 December, 8pm - with independent curator Mareike Spendel
Positioning Project
Framed by Centrum’s large window to the street, the Positioning Project aims to highlight artist’s approach to inside/outside and subject/object.
Ute Klein’s recent photographic works often relate to a particular site and to objects found within a site. Through a repetitive process of being photographed and re-photographed, the found objects and their images are arranged in order to explore pictorial space and composition. Within this process the objects often take on a new set of associations in relation to the site. Ute Klein will be developing a site specific work, Kaskade, reflecting the particularities of Centrum’s space.
Ute Klein studied photography at Folkwang University of the Arts Essen and the Royal College of Art in London. Her works have received several prizes, such as the "gute aussichten young german photography award 2009/2010", "Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011" and the Photography Art Award 2011, Munich. In 2012 she was invited to quartier21, artist in residency programme at the Museumsquartier in Vienna. She has exhibited Europe-wide and her work has been shown in several publications.
Catriona Shaw – A Gilded Age That Glitters, 18 October - 2 November 2013
Opening: Friday 18 October 2013, 8pm
Clémentine Roy Homeostasis (video projection) / Hank Schmidt-in-der-Beek, The Dark Spot of Joy(poem) / Viola Thiele, War Kills (costume)
A Gilded Age That Glitters - Performance Festival: Saturday 2 November 2013, 6 - 12pm
Andrea Lui, Ayaka Okutsu, Mimosa Pale & friends, Hank Schmidt-in-der-Beek, Catriona Shaw, Jes Walsh
A night of exhibition(ism), performance and market stalls, fun activities, things to buy, eat and drink, listen to, watch or take part in as part of Nacht&Nebel Kunst- und Kulturfestival Neukölln.
Using drawing, performance, music and video Catriona Shaw creates interactive or set environments which engage audiences throughout the creative process. As her main starting point, Shaw's drawings connects her different creative outputs and makes visible her interest in popular culture, anthropomorphism, absence and social politics. As the live performer, Miss La Bomb, her stage shows draw the audience mentally and physically closer, investigating public expectation, pop myth and the ‘star’ as a consumer item. For her project residency at Centrum she will develop the use of her drawings as a tool for curation and collaboration.
From 1999-2004 Catriona Shaw co-founded and ran Club le Bomb, a platform for music and happenings. In 2002 she co-founded "Anville" a monthly event in a mirrored gay bar in Vienna, an attempt to explore unchartered underground music territory and bad taste. In 2004 she initiated her online gallery project 'Galeri Baberton' which found itself in 3-dimensions during 2006-2007 in Post 26, Berlin and Artklub, Vienna. She also collaborated as editor on the Swiss music/film magazine Elend und Vergeltung with Isabel Reiss and Juerg Tschirren. In 2009 she co-founded the cultural education initiative gooeyTEAM and between 2010 and 2012 she devised the engagement programme 'Kombiticket' at Berlin's NGBK.
Alanna Lawley – Positioning Project #1, 13 - 19 September 2013
Opening: Friday 13 September 2013, 8pm
Positioning Project
Framed by Centrum’s large window to the street, the Positioning Project aims to highlight artist’s approach to inside/outside and subject/object.
Taking the influence of spatial and architectural relationships on the individual within the private realm of the home as a starting point, Alanna Lawley mediates the experience of the temporary, representational environments that she constructs. By isolating space, Lawley investigates how deliberately fragmented spaces can generate experiences of disassociation, anxiety and isolation that deny the viewer the freedom ever to fully orientate themselves in a specific time or place.
Lawley graduated with a BA in painting from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London in 2005. Since then she has exhibited internationally including the UK, Germany and the US.
The Edge of Real, 14 - 30 June 2013
Angela Ender, Stefanie Seufert, Kate Squires, Nicoll Ullrich
Opening: Friday 14 June 2013, 7pm
Open for 48 Hours Neukölln: Sat 15 / Sun 16 June 2013, 2 - 6pm
A group show of works installed by four artists who’s work can be seen as indeterminate – between realism and abstraction. Starting with images, objects, signs, everyday objects and found materials, these artists create, extract, obfuscate and change histories, functions and associations in order to create a new view – one that is both familiar and unrecognisable.
Angela Ender makes assemblages and installations from discarded items or cheaply bought objects. She is concerned with the formal aspects of these things; the colour, material, scale and shape. The histories and former functions are extracted to create new associations and ideas.
Stefanie Seufert’s photographic pictures are of commonplace objects (conifer trees, wire baskets, eggs, plastic clothes tags etc.). Her conceptual and experimental approach to the photographic process ensures a careful transformation to the object – it stays true to itself but somehow our way of seeing it changes.
Kate Squires makes sculptural or installation based works which are often flat, or two dimensional. She is concerned with the space between reali
Opening: Saturday 18 April 2015, 6pm
Open during Gallery Weekend: 2 - 3 May 2015, 11am - 6pm
a Climate of Trust is Sylvain Baumann’s first exhibition project in Berlin. Working in a variety of different media including sculpture, found objects as well as design items, photography, drawing, audio recordings, and text, Baumann arranges spatial installations that provoke questions about the design and shape of contemporary architecture. Baumann understands architectural design to be a political and ideological means of contemporary society and is interested in the motivations, ideas and mechanisms that produce this society: How does our physical environment – private and public – inform and transform us as individuals, our habits, our perception and experience, our ways of thinking and our desires, and how we form relationships with others. Rather than focussing on an analysis of human behaviour, Baumann sees his installations as an analysis of and a comment on the work of contemporary architects, urban and interior designers which aims at the development and elaboration of the ‘world of tomorrow’.
In his exhibition project at Centrum Sylvain Baumann is specifically interested in the idea that we currently live in what the artist calls a Climate of Trust. Baumann claims that in the more and more complex, multi-layered and mediated world of today, it is no longer possible to rely on our comprehension and reason as the basis for decision making. Our accelerated environments which are regulated through an increasingly complex and opaque network of rules and regulations, terms and conditions, require that we trust in our intuition. Baumann explores how contemporary design strategies and media imagery are used to speak directly to our instincts and asks, in a Climate of Trust, is there any space left for doubt and are individual thought and agency still possible at all?
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Dagmar Heppner – Stories, 26 February - 23 March 2015
Opening: Thursday 26 February 2015, 6pm
Dagmar Heppner recently worked with and around textiles or garments with attention to the unstable relations between objects, or between individuals and bigger structures. For her exhibition at Centrum, 'Stories', the artist has worked site-specifically focusing on the characteristics, the quirks, and oddities of the exhibition space. To that end, Dagmar Heppner has designed and sewn two ‘garments’ for both the larger and the smaller of the two bow-shaped pieces of fake wall sitting next to each other on one of the long walls protruding from it taking the form of textile sculptures. Presented on a plinth we find another of Heppner’s works, a bundle of loose woolen strands, formerly a piece of clothing, whose threads the artist has carefully untangled for the garment to be forever altered beyond recognition and repair.
Studying the vast variety of complex weaving patterns, the different structures and textures of fabrics, Dagmar Heppner is interested in textiles and garments for their potential as metaphor to explore the theme of the exhibition - 'Stories'. Heppner is interested in stories as our social fabric and underlying texture of our worlds, and in how narratives affect our perception by offering patterns of recognition. The artist thus understands stories not as coherent, linear narration with beginning, middle, and end, with progress to and regression from a climax. Instead, Heppner treats stories and storytelling as social phenomena and as means of making sense of the world and relating to it through negotiating it with others; stories thus existing as a living dynamic thing in a state of continuous flux. Placing her works in the space like subtle and poetic suggestions, as hints and clues inviting our attention and interpretation, Heppner encourages us to read the works as volatilising structures and to see them for their precarious contexts.
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Installation views: Ute Klein
Joe Clark – Polychroming, 22 January - 19 February 2015
Opening: Thursday 22 January 2015, 6pm
In Conversation: Wednesday 4 February 2015, 7pm - with independent curator Michael Birchall
Polychroming is a new project by English artist Joe Clark and his first exhibition in Berlin. At the centre of the installation is a video work in which an abstract chrome figure set against a shifting field of colour similarly waxes and wanes, continually re-rendering the image. The title refers to the traditional technique of hand-colouring the surfaces of stone or wooden sculptures in order to mimic life and alludes to echoes of it in the production of contemporary images.
Working from a position of both fascination and deep-distrust, Clark’s practice pulls from the contemporary photographic idiom, exploring and exposing the explicit and implicit rules of photography; its techniques and mechanisms; its effects and our perception of them. For Polychroming Clark has mimicked a process often used in the production of photo-real CGIs (computer generated images), producing the video component of the installation in-camera via a physical apparatus in his studio, thus pushing information through an established workflow in an unfamiliar direction. Reminiscent of Plato’s cave from the famous allegory, the subject of the image has been enveloped by a screen-rig which allows the projection of an environment around it. Navigating through a spherical image of a desert plain the artist causes the light from that distant place to dance across the multifaceted surface, thereby grounding it in a reality, but at the same time rendering it as legible to the viewer as the shadows on a cave’s wall.
Download the press text here. / Zur Presseerklärung bitte hier klicken.
Sybella Perry – stone-twice-fire, 4 - 18 December 2014
Opening: Thursday 4 December 2014, 6pm
Film Screening: Sunday 14 December 2014, 4pm
Robinson in Ruins, dir. Patrick Keiller (2010), 101 min., selected by Sybella Perry
The search for the missing formula for artificial stone leads the disembodied voice of a psychic to question three historical monuments still standing due to the material’s unweatherable quality. Through a series of cold-readings her journey across England finally arrives at a street in London, where each house bears an enigmatic symbol. Could they be the key to the secret code for stone?
With her slideshow, stone-twice-fire, Sybella Perry (1986, UK) presents a new work, in which the artist explores human relationships to symbolic objects and analyses how we place meaning through situating statues and buildings within a specific environment and context. Borrowing elements of documentary and fiction formats, Perry combines photographic slides, which similar to the historical monuments they depict carry the idea of the possibility of freezing moments in time, with the by contrast time-based flux of the narrative voice. stone-twice-fire thus puts to the test the relationship between photography and story-telling, visual thinking and literacy and explores our constant struggle to try to make sense of things, and how the meaning we create over time corrodes and transforms as landscapes change and as the objects we give meaning to are moved, partially replaced, or preserved.
On occasion of Sybella Perry's exhibition at Centrum there will be a screening of Patrick Keiller's feature-length essay-fiction film Robinson in Ruins (2010), in which the eccentric and mysterious protagonist Robinson leads the viewers on a trip through London and Oxfordshire. Exploring Britain's industrial heritage and residual romanticism at times of economic crisis, he discovers that the British industry has moved away from the cities to the countryside, into a hinterland of motorways and complex logistic systems operated almost without staff.
Download the press text here. / Zur Presseerklärung hier klicken.
Installation views: Ute Klein
Annabel Hesselink – Towards a New Moon, 24 October - 1 November 2014
Towards a New Moon is a video installation by Annabel Hesselink (NL, 1987) in which through a range of video-experiments, the artist seeks to regain a wondrous image of the moon; an image that detaches itself from that of a grey and dusty surface which has become so deeply embedded in our cultural memory ever since its first appearance flickering on the television screens in 1969. The artist asks, if there was the possibility to doubt this generally accepted, scientific image of the moon, could we wonder again? Hesselink’s video-experiments thus are a leap into the dark, towards a condition of not-knowing, doubt and questions seeking ways to depart from what constitutes the established image of the moon. Hesselink has collected video-interviews in which she asks people around the world about their memories of the first moon landing, and their own ideas of the moon. Next to this Hesselink also digs within history for remarkable facts and fictions around the moon. Through video, building models, digging craters, and rolling snowballs the artists puts to the test the limits of what can be rationalised and imagined creating an alternative portrait of the moon.
Towards a New Moon was presented as part of NACHT&NEBEL cultural festival in Berlin-Neukölln.
Julie Myers, 1 May - 30 June 2014
Live performance: 27 + 28 June 2014, 8pm
For her site specific compositions for three corners in Neukölln Julie Myers adopts the role of a stranger or outsider in order to initiate a response, or make sense of a specific place. She finds a place to sit and to watch, to get to know her environment. She hears the ‘sizzle’ of food being made, the timbre of a voice, the cry of a child, the hum of the traffic. Her texts, like graphic scores, are presented in the gallery for interpretation by improvisor Simon Rose on baritone saxophone.
Jefford Horrigan – die Nacht Pfau, 12 - 27 May 2014
Freitagabendessen: Friday 16 May 2014, 8pm
Screening: Sunday 18 May 2014, 8pm
Performance: Friday 23 May 2014, 8pm
Jefford Horrigan works with furniture, drawing, sculpture, ritual, absurdism, intrinsic logic (and Beckett), humour, the outline of things (the recognition of objects, and also how they travel), narrative (literary), artist's process, mesmerism, labour and fate. He lives and works in London.
Ute Klein – Positioning Project #2: Kaskade, 6 - 12 December 2013
Opening: Tuesday 6 December 2013, 7pm
Finissage & Artist Talk: Tuesday 17 December, 8pm - with independent curator Mareike Spendel
Positioning Project
Framed by Centrum’s large window to the street, the Positioning Project aims to highlight artist’s approach to inside/outside and subject/object.
Ute Klein’s recent photographic works often relate to a particular site and to objects found within a site. Through a repetitive process of being photographed and re-photographed, the found objects and their images are arranged in order to explore pictorial space and composition. Within this process the objects often take on a new set of associations in relation to the site. Ute Klein will be developing a site specific work, Kaskade, reflecting the particularities of Centrum’s space.
Ute Klein studied photography at Folkwang University of the Arts Essen and the Royal College of Art in London. Her works have received several prizes, such as the "gute aussichten young german photography award 2009/2010", "Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011" and the Photography Art Award 2011, Munich. In 2012 she was invited to quartier21, artist in residency programme at the Museumsquartier in Vienna. She has exhibited Europe-wide and her work has been shown in several publications.
Catriona Shaw – A Gilded Age That Glitters, 18 October - 2 November 2013
Opening: Friday 18 October 2013, 8pm
Clémentine Roy Homeostasis (video projection) / Hank Schmidt-in-der-Beek, The Dark Spot of Joy(poem) / Viola Thiele, War Kills (costume)
A Gilded Age That Glitters - Performance Festival: Saturday 2 November 2013, 6 - 12pm
Andrea Lui, Ayaka Okutsu, Mimosa Pale & friends, Hank Schmidt-in-der-Beek, Catriona Shaw, Jes Walsh
A night of exhibition(ism), performance and market stalls, fun activities, things to buy, eat and drink, listen to, watch or take part in as part of Nacht&Nebel Kunst- und Kulturfestival Neukölln.
Using drawing, performance, music and video Catriona Shaw creates interactive or set environments which engage audiences throughout the creative process. As her main starting point, Shaw's drawings connects her different creative outputs and makes visible her interest in popular culture, anthropomorphism, absence and social politics. As the live performer, Miss La Bomb, her stage shows draw the audience mentally and physically closer, investigating public expectation, pop myth and the ‘star’ as a consumer item. For her project residency at Centrum she will develop the use of her drawings as a tool for curation and collaboration.
From 1999-2004 Catriona Shaw co-founded and ran Club le Bomb, a platform for music and happenings. In 2002 she co-founded "Anville" a monthly event in a mirrored gay bar in Vienna, an attempt to explore unchartered underground music territory and bad taste. In 2004 she initiated her online gallery project 'Galeri Baberton' which found itself in 3-dimensions during 2006-2007 in Post 26, Berlin and Artklub, Vienna. She also collaborated as editor on the Swiss music/film magazine Elend und Vergeltung with Isabel Reiss and Juerg Tschirren. In 2009 she co-founded the cultural education initiative gooeyTEAM and between 2010 and 2012 she devised the engagement programme 'Kombiticket' at Berlin's NGBK.
Alanna Lawley – Positioning Project #1, 13 - 19 September 2013
Opening: Friday 13 September 2013, 8pm
Positioning Project
Framed by Centrum’s large window to the street, the Positioning Project aims to highlight artist’s approach to inside/outside and subject/object.
Taking the influence of spatial and architectural relationships on the individual within the private realm of the home as a starting point, Alanna Lawley mediates the experience of the temporary, representational environments that she constructs. By isolating space, Lawley investigates how deliberately fragmented spaces can generate experiences of disassociation, anxiety and isolation that deny the viewer the freedom ever to fully orientate themselves in a specific time or place.
Lawley graduated with a BA in painting from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London in 2005. Since then she has exhibited internationally including the UK, Germany and the US.
The Edge of Real, 14 - 30 June 2013
Angela Ender, Stefanie Seufert, Kate Squires, Nicoll Ullrich
Opening: Friday 14 June 2013, 7pm
Open for 48 Hours Neukölln: Sat 15 / Sun 16 June 2013, 2 - 6pm
A group show of works installed by four artists who’s work can be seen as indeterminate – between realism and abstraction. Starting with images, objects, signs, everyday objects and found materials, these artists create, extract, obfuscate and change histories, functions and associations in order to create a new view – one that is both familiar and unrecognisable.
Angela Ender makes assemblages and installations from discarded items or cheaply bought objects. She is concerned with the formal aspects of these things; the colour, material, scale and shape. The histories and former functions are extracted to create new associations and ideas.
Stefanie Seufert’s photographic pictures are of commonplace objects (conifer trees, wire baskets, eggs, plastic clothes tags etc.). Her conceptual and experimental approach to the photographic process ensures a careful transformation to the object – it stays true to itself but somehow our way of seeing it changes.
Kate Squires makes sculptural or installation based works which are often flat, or two dimensional. She is concerned with the space between reali