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Julia Benz presents a new site-specific installation that transforms the unique space of Berlin's Hošek Contemporary Gallery into an immersive art experience. Titled Floating Spheres, the artist invites not only to look at the presented objects, but also to see our surroundings and ourselves in a new light.
Visitors become participants in a kind of impromptu performance. Iridescent acrylic panels open up a multi-dimensional image through their different shapes and partial transparency, creating a kaleidoscope of light reflections that permeate the entire space through the incident light. It is as if one were wandering through a painting in which the boundaries between viewer and artwork become blurred. As you move through the space, you yourself become part of the installation and see others merge with it. The view changes constantly and the colors make the visitors dance even when they are standing still. You are taken on a journey where space, light and movement come together in a fascinating interplay.
Perspective, graduation and the choice of geometric shapes are classic means of painting, which dissolve here in a site specific installation, can be easily and playfully walked. They test boundaries for their flexibility - a further development of the new series of Julia Benz’s works on canvas, which has already elevated these very reflections from pure painting to objects. Areas of color lie at our feet, streaking across walls and gifting the chosen space with a composition that never repeats itself. Despite the sometimes powdery hues, the effect is not quiet, but powerful and reflects not least the artist herself. Her passion for colors, shapes and playing with the senses permeate every aspect of this installation, giving it a unique mood.
Julia Benz encourages us to reinterpret space and dimensions and to overcome the limits of our own perception: With her installation she leaves the usual boundaries of the two-dimensionality of painting and creates a formative experience for the audience. The play of light on the gently moving panels and the positions of the viewers moving steadily through the space creates a dynamic art experience that challenges our senses. It is an invitation to see and experience the world around us in a whole new way.
This two-part program brings together artistic positions that have one thing in common: a “twist,” or, a tipping point after which, just like in real life, nothing is ever the same again. Yulia Arsen’s work revolves around a whip in all its symbolic meanings. In tiny steps, Tatiana Chizhikova and Roman Malyavkin deconstruct folk dance in all its ambivalence among virtuosity, bravura and despair. Their work embodies danced resistance to shame and anger, and represents acts of survival in times of upheaval. Both choreographers belong to the younger generation of artists from Russia who currently find themselves in transition in every sense of the word. In their works, they take on disturbing narratives, questioning them, subverting them, and complicating them through embodied practice. Both projects had their European premiere at ImPulsTanz, the Vienna International Dance Festival, in August 2023, initiated by the independent project Institute of Theatre.
The climate crisis is here. Artists have not gone extinct.
Humanity needs to act collectively and urgently. Everyone of us would need to individually accept the necessary changes to survive as a group: the collective must drastically reduce forever its fossil way of life. Fridays for Future put it on a banner: There can't be infinite growth on a finite planet. However the worldwide body politic and its many voters refuse this idea. We hang on to the idea of green growth, but it is not a thing. Even green growth puts a break on the transformation that is necessary.
Parts of the collective know the solutions: keep fossil fuels in the ground. Rethink our extractive, materialist way of life. Rehabilitate nature: land and marine forests absorb carbon the best of all. Nature knows how to generate equilibrium. Nature as our friend, our ally, not a subjugated slave to human beings' consumption frenzy.
What does a contemporary human society look like that is not dependent on fossil fuels and a growing extraction of ressources? This demands a revolution in how we imagine our lives and our place in the world. The arts can function as a space to think the changes that humanity experiences, to put words and images to emotions, to offer new perspectives, visions and utopias, even. In an ongoing work of dialogue with other artists in exhibitions, Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat proposes to explore exactly this.
What iconography does contemporary art develop to represent, express and respond to this new human condition, the Anthropocene? What images, narratives and experiences can art offer to contemporary discourse and debates on this subject?
Betty Böhm's Tethys cycle ''The Lament of Tethys'' and ''The Wrath of Tethys'' effectively combines the observation of changing landscapes with elements of mythology to mirror and put in context the emotions that many of us feel in front of the crisis. Stefanie Loveday's work ''To Sink and to Cave'' explores and draws our attention to the fragility that develops in previously more resilient landscapes, at the same time inviting us to re-experience wonder. Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat and Oliver Walker explore our relationship to the material detail of our everyday lives: how changing significance is to be found in the mundane objects that surround us. Tafelmacher-Magnat observes her children interacting with the world. Walker does this with dialogue and performance around the emergence of new technologies, laying bare the process of invention with its ups and downs, failures and exhilarations.
This show proposes to show a couple of entry points into the above questions. One of them shows the dire state of our relationship to Nature. Another invites us to open ourselves up to emotions of anger, grief and wonder. Another explores our relationship to the Material: how we use materials, what they come to mean in our societies. The ongoing goal is for these shows to stretch, train and fire the public imagination.
VIKENTI KOMITSKI’s exhibition THE VELOCITY OF STONE at IN THE RACK ROOM navigates a world where nature and industry are constantly transforming, highlighting the dire consequences of relentless resource exploitation and ecological degradation. The exhibition features assemblages and installations in which he fuses natural elements with discarded materials.
It addresses the conflict between nature and culture, exploring humans’ insatiable desire to control nature and its consequences. In the exhibition space, nature, displaced from its habitat, becomes a ghostly presence, finding solace in mechanical remains. At the same time, the objects almost present a frozen moment of time, a moment that is in the past or perhaps a possible future yet to come.
For his installation, he placed several motherboards dissolved in crystals in an aquarium. The work is presented in conjunction with a grid of light, enhancing the crystals’ vibrant structure. By blending nature with technology, the artist challenges the distinction between the organic and the artificial. They are brought together by several assemblages, for which KOMITSKI drew inspiration from The pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria, a book by the mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria that gives descriptions of machines that work by air, steam or water pressure. The images stem from an 1851 translation and illustration of the book, which the artist transformed and assembled into a new work on paper. The works are brought together with sculptures that each convey KOMITSKI’s artistic language of combining 20th-century avant-garde movements with science fiction and dystopian narratives and aesthetics.
While the mechanical objects and computer hard drives in the exhibition space symbolize industrialization and resource extraction, grid structures here allude to the rationality of modernism, whereas text elements introduce discourse. By removing objects from their urban environments and reshaping them as site-specific structures, KOMITSKI allows viewers to enter a world that offers a critical yet philosophical reflection on the Anthropocene, where the boundaries between natural and artificial are blurred. At the same time, the exhibition is an invitation to prompt us to reflect on our role in shaping this era. (Sarie Nijboer)
An inland dune is set against the backdrop of a coniferous forest. A corroded shell fragment is partially buried in the sand. Are we transported to a distant region?
The exhibition Two Unequal Winds by Nadine Hattom features a series of landscape photographs captured in military training areas across Germany.
The series examines why the military, both past and present, has occupied these particular landscapes for their operations, raising the question: what role does sand play in the imagination of exercising force and projecting conflict?
Nora Turato’s solo exhibition NOT YOUR USUAL SELF? at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, will debut a series of new enamel panels featuring a custom typeface as well as a site-specific wall painting that cut through the cacophony of everyday life and reflect on the vernacular of present-day visual culture and zeitgeist. By combining bold, eye-catching questions such as “NOT YOURSELF?” that evoke the overbearing tone of self-help culture with a lowercase (possibly inner) voice, Turato analyzes our tools for making sense of the world around us.
“I’m using things around me to compose something new. I use it the same as language. It’s a lot about sentences, melody, shape, and logo. Single units of creative power, and I am working with those.” –Nora Turato
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