Berlin’s red lights turn into art hub
A shabby area of Berlin best known for its curb-crawling prostitutes and drug dealers is recovering some of the Bohemian allure of its glory days in the 1920s as low rents and its central location lure art galleries.
Art lovers are surprised to discover such a wealth of galleries on and around Potsdamer Strasse, a long artery stretching southwest from the revamped and now-glitzy Potsdamer Platz to the traditional gay stronghold of Schoeneberg.
The galleries, numbering nearly two dozen, are often tucked away in quiet courtyards or hidden in grand 19th century buildings.
Peaking Lights @ Festsaal Kreuzberg
June 12, 2012.
[via Peter Harton]
Guggenheim Lab to offer more than 100 free events
The BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin— a temporary public space and online forum encouraging open dialogue about issues related to urban life—will present more than one hundred free events and a broad range of public programs from June 15 to July 29, 2012. Located in the Pfefferberg complex in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, the Lab will host lectures, discussions, and hands-on workshops, as well as off-site tours of the urban environment throughout Berlin.
The BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin will explore new concepts and designs for city life. The Berlin program is focused on the importance of making one’s own city, with programs designed to empower residents with tools and ideas to proactively participate in city change. Berlin is the second stop on the Lab’s six-year, nine-city global tour, which began in New York last August.
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Roman Ondák: Do Not Walk Outside This Area
April 26–June 18, 2012
Roman Ondák was selected by Deutsche Bank as Artist of the Year 2012. With his installations, performances, and drawings, the Slovakian artist, who was born in 1966, investigates the borders between art and everyday life. The basis for his subtle, sharp-witted works is paper— the medium on which he drafts and documents his projects. Ondák’s art occurs in various places, be they museums and galleries, art biennials or art fairs, streets, or his home environment. He uses found situations, but changes or stages them such that expectations and conventions begin to totter.
Traveling, moving through space and time, is a continuous theme in Ondák’s work. This is the case in do not walk outside this area, a project the artist conceived specifically for his Artist of the Year exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim. The path through the installation leads via the original wing of a Boeing 737-500, which enjoins two exhibition rooms like a bridge. In both rooms, works on paper and installations are devoted to themes such as “travel.” One of them is Balancing at the Toe of the Boot (2010), a series of 7 postcards and 16 fictional newspaper articles based on a trip to Calabria.
To reach the second part of the exhibition, the visitor walks over the wing in the area marked “Do not walk outside this area,” entering the unreachable surface that otherwise can only be seen out of the window of an aircraft cabin. Ondák plays not only with a reversal of inside and outside but also with the conventions of the art industry. Everyone knows the prohibitions, barriers, and boundaries that lend artworks a valuable, exclusive aura and thus fetishize them: Please do not touch! Do not come too close. No photographs. But Ondák’s wing is not a hallowed sculpture. It is an object of use that we are supposed to enter and touch. This footbridge serves as a runway for our ideas, memories, and fantasies. In the age of global mobility, Ondák invites us to take an inner, imaginary journey.
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder – ein Ausschnitt seines Schaffens
Rainer Werner Fassbinder lebte von 1945-1982 und hat zwischen 1965 und 1982 mehr als 50 Filme, Fernsehserien, Theaterinszenierungen und Hörspiele meistens nach eigenen Vorlagen, Stoffen und Bearbeitungen hergestellt. Unter den Regisseuren des Jungen Deutschen Films war er der vielseitigste und produktivste Autor und verstand es wie kaum ein anderer vergangene Geschichte und die Zeichen seiner Zeit filmisch zu interpretieren und diese mit einer Vielfalt von Darstellungsformen, vom Volkstück bis zum (amerikanisch-französischen) Gangsterfilm zu verbinden und alle Formen menschlicher Existenz, beeinflusst von Politik, der Geschichte, dem Alltag, den Wechseln und den Kontinuitäten im Lebenszusammenhang Deutschlands zu zeigen. Wir zeigen leider nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt seines Schaffens und empfehlen allen, sich auch das Zeughauskino-Programm anzusehen.
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DMY International Design Festival 2012
Get your day or festival pass for the central exhibition (June 06-10 2012) and the Designpreis der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2012 at Airport Berlin Tempelhof.
The festival pass will give you access to the central exhibitions at Airport Berlin Tempelhof as well as the showcases of the Designpreis der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2012 from June 6 to 10. Below, you can also buy tickets for single events such as the symposium or the special performance by trend union’s Gert van de Keuken.
[Source]
DZ Deathrays @ Comet Club
June 1, 2012.
Anthony McCall @ Hamburger Bahnhof
For the first time, the work of the New York-based artist Anthony McCall will be presented in a solo exhibition at a German museum. McCall’s unique projections, which he has been developing since the 1970s, exist at the boundaries between cinema, sculpture and drawing: animated lines are projected in a dark room filled with a light haze, allowing viewers to step into the beam of light and change its appearance.
The Hamburger Bahnhof will be showing works that McCall created beginning in 2003 after a 20-year break. While the early works are shown on 16 mm film, his more recent works are digital projections whose complex forms can only be created with the aid of computers. McCall’s horizontal works will be exhibited for the first time alongside his more recent vertical works, which bathe the exhibition space and the viewer in sculptural light.
John Cage @ Akademie der Künste
John Cage was more influential and highly regarded as a composer, musician, philosopher, writer and thinker than hardly any other artist in the second half of the 20th century. But his work as a visual artist and his influence on art are much less known than his music. As part of the year long programme “A Year from Monday“, that the Akademie der Künste is dedicating to the avant-garde artist on his 100th birthday, the exhibition “John Cage and …“ focuses on Cage as a visual artist. Curated by Wulf Herzogenrath, the exhibition links Cage’s visual work with the history of art of the 20th century, throwing new light on the influence of the European modern on Cage and outlining mutual inspirations.
The exhibition unites the sound environment, statements and works by Cage since the 1930s with those who inspired him and his friends and pupils – from Richard Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp, Nam June Paik, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and others. With works on paper, media and sound artistic works, installations, notations, photographical and film documentaries, the most important influences and inspirations on John Cage as a visual artist are reflected in a concentrated space, e.g. Rauschenbergs Black Painting No. 1, which Cage had in his apartment until his death 1992. There is a new discussion of cultural interplays, such as the tension between Asia, Zen and White Writing (Mark Tobey), European art and synaesthesia, Cage’s influence on Happening, Fluxus, Zero and conceptual art.
For the first time there is a special focus on the relationship between John Cage’s development as a visual artist and the departures of the classic modern in Europe. It is little known that Cage attentively followed these developments, acquired a Jawlensky picture at the age of 22 and organised exhibitions by Klee – originals by Jawlenksy, Klee, Moholy-Nagy and Anni and Josef Albers demonstrate these influences.
Parallel to the exhibition a “DuMont Dokumente” volume published by Wulf Herzogenrath and Barbara Nierhoff-Wielk is appearing. Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung and Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung helped to realise the exhibition and the book. The exhibition will be shown from July 14, 2012 in parallel to the Salzburg Festival in the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg.
[Source]
Larry Clark @ C/O Berlin
Larry Clark
26 May to 12 August 2012
Adolescent beauty, sexuality and drug-induced action – Larry Clark radically and realistically documents the everyday life of US teenagers, transgressing bourgeois moral concepts. From the drug scene in his hometown of Tulsa in the early 1960s to contemporary skaters in Los Angeles his works capture extremely intimate moments. The authenticity of Clarke’s images expose the consequences of a dysfunctional society and question the social responsibility and moral stance of its members.
The revolutionary and unique aspect of his photographs is – to this day – the closeness and intimacy between him and the documented persons and situations. As opposed to a classical photo-journalist who views an unfamiliar world from the outside, Larry Clark does not only take an interest in the life of his protagonists. Far removed from any form of voyeurism, he himself is a fundamental part of the scene he photographs. It seems as if he has a familiarity with the persons portrayed rather than just observing them. Without Larry Clark, photography would not have freed itself from the constraints of objectivity. Hardly any other photographer has ever achieved the same degree of intensity with which he immerses himself in his subject. It is here that the artist revives his own youth – each time with new protagonists.
Advice Individual art works in this exhibition might offend your moral sensibilities. Young persons under 18 must be accompanied by an adult.
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