Showroom Helsinki proudly presents TEASER
Showroom Helsinki proudly presents TEASER – a selection of works by the most influential young Finnish contemporary artists. Founded in 2008, the gallery Showroom Helsinki is showing the highlights of its programme at Salon Dahlmann Berlin. Combining a critical perspective and meticulous craftsmanship with a humorous and aesthetic treatment, the works of Jiri Geller, Mari Keto, Jani Leinonen and Aurora Reinhard explore the boundaries between constructed, commercial culture and individual, materialistic addiction. TEASER presents these prominent Finnish artists by composing a strong body of works from international private and institutional collections. By including elaborate sculptures, accusatory installations and tenacious imagery, the exhibition provokes observant attention to the prevailing phenomena of society. [Source]
Platoon Kunsthalle
Today, PLATOON KUNSTHALLE Berlin is opening its doors. the mobile building, consisting out of 34 cargo containers, will stay at Schönhauser Allee 9 for the next two years.
PLATOON and invited curators designed the program, which will feature symposiums, workshops, lectures and events. the opening will be in the tradition of our legendary PLATOON DONNERSTAGSBAR. we invite all members, friends and supporters to celebrate with us this thursday.
the program for the first two weeks
thu 19th july · PLATOON KUNSTHALLE opening
fri 20th july · Culture Talk: Sellout? the relation of culture and brands
mon 23rd july · Movie Night: Berlinized – Sexy an Eis
wed 25th july · Berlin Legends: Dimitri Hegemann
thu 26th july · Donnerstagsbar
sat 28th july · Chessboxing: who is the smartest toughest guy in Berlin
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.
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.
[Source]
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.
[Source]
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.
Mike Hentz @ Peppi Guggenheim
Mike Hentz
FLATWARE FROM CHINA
Malerei, Siebdrucke, Grafiken
01.06. – 30.06. 2012
Tagesöffnungszeiten demnächst hier
www.peppi-guggenheim.de
Eröffnungskonzert/Vernissage:
31.05.2012, 20:00
Mike Hentz Maultrommel Gesang
Kersten Ginsberg Percussion
Mark Boombastik Sampling Beatbox
Spe©ialgalerie Peppi Guggenheim International Berlin
Kneipe vs. Galerie
Weichselstrase 7
12043 Berlin
+49 30 62724310
+49 176/50307656
www.peppi-guggenheim.de
Blixa Bargeld exhibition in Berlin
From March 23 – May 19, 2012, the Galerie Hunchentoot will be showing “Einschüsse”* – serial works by Blixa Bargeld.
Black spots and lines are spread out on white image surfaces and vice versa. Harsh contrasts focus on abrasions to the surfaces of façades, on patterns left behind by rapid gunfire. If patterns are brought to mind here, then it is because the bullet holes caused by gunfire draw irregular patterns on the façades that seem like deliberately created images, specifically in their fortuitousness. This is due to a method of viewing trained to see abstraction.
The combination of the subject (the fragment of a façade) and of a work’s title (the name of a street or a square in Berlin-Mitte + the street address) appears to speak for a documentary nature of the series, and this suspicion seems all the more justified since they are based on photographic images. What can be seen was or is there, and is exactly where the title localizes it. That much is correct. The conclusion that it concerns documentary work, however, is false. It is necessary to bridge the gap between the title and the work, which clearly separates the concrete from abstraction in the image. The black of these images is actually black; the white is actually white. There are no gray tones. Accordingly, Blixa Bargeld’s works exhibited in the series “Einschüsse” have just as little to do with anything documentary in the category of black-and-white photography. Instead, their tendency is more comparable to abstract painting, in which it is not so much an anti-realism that can be seen, but as Siegfried Kracauer put it, the realistic revelation of a prevailing abstractness. What Blixa Bargeld translates into images is an aesthetic practice. More generally, it should be perceived as an approach towards the world; in fact, it is just one productive mode of existence that Blixa Bargeld has made in his diverse artistic works. In this respect, the patterns of the “Einschüsse” also continue beyond the provisional limits of the image surfaces.
Maria Zinfert, January 2012
* “Einschüsse” = bullet holes; shots
Galerie Hunchentoot, Choriner Str. 8, 10119 Berlin
