Berlin Unplugged: The Ultimate Guide to 8 City's Hot Art Events I MAY #4 WE

WHAT: "HEART CORE" - FRIEDA TORAZO JAEGER

WHERE: GALERIE BARBARA WEISS

WHEN: UNTIL 3.06.23

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(...) "Hearts, car interiors, books, motors, Christian iconography, flowers and embroidery are juxtaposed, endeavoring to build a new symbolism. As a central theme of the exhibition, Toranzo Jager takes up the motif of the heart: the ubiquitous icon of love and affection. The symmetrical, scalloped shape has been used to symbolize devotion since the Middle Ages – and today carries the sum of centuries of shifted nuances.

(...) Toranzo Jaeger’s practice opens a space that looks beyond society’s current confinement within the capitalistic and exploitive structures that have shaped it – often reframing them visually to advocate for radical thought and social progress. Using the historical practice of painting, itself a restrictive space with a discriminating history, Toranzo Jaeger subjects the medium to détournement and criticism from within. Along with her liberal allusions to history painting – from unknown Flemish masters, to Lucas Cranach, to Diego Rivera – many of her canvases are punctuated by embroidery. In doing so, Toranzo Jaeger interweaves craft into a sacrosanct space that always attempted to set itself apart from vernacular forms of making. This act of disobedience questions not only the placement of value in art history, but also suggests that history is a fabrication of those in power."

‍WHAT: "ANIMA, Archetypes of women we carry within" - LISA BURDENIUK

WHERE: BACKHAUS PROJECTS

WHEN: FROM 26.05 TO 28.05

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"The project deconstructs common archetypes of women that influence the perception of women in society.

It is an attempt to rethink and redefine their meaning in the modern world.

For this purpose, 20 archetypes of women are studied - characters from Greek, Roman and Slavic mythology, religious figures, literary heroines and common labels used to describe women. "

WHAT: "THE GEMINI SHOW + Birthday Party" - GROUP EXHIBITION

WHERE: WIR WIR BERLIN

WHEN: FROM 26.05 TO 28.05

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"An exhibition with a simple concept, all of the invited artists are Geminis.

A performative birthday party, with cake and party favors will take place during the opening.

The following Gemini artists will be included: Heather Allen, Ola Bielas, Susanne Bürner, Hannah Dougherty, Elise Gardella, Geoffrey Garrison, Anne Gathmann, April Gertler, Lise Harlev, Verena Issel, Maureen Jeram, Joe Neave, Heiko Pfreundt, Ivan Seal, Tommy Støckel, Christof Zwiener."

WHAT: "MATTER OF FLUX" - GROUP EXHIBITION

WHERE: ART LABORATORY BERLIN

WHEN: UNTIL 09.07.23

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"The group exhibition MATTER OF FLUX brings together three art projects by WhiteFeather Hunter, Lyndsey Walsh and Shu Lea Cheang with Ewen Chardronnet.

The exhibited artworks critically reflect about nature, matter and health of female and nonbinary bodies through artistic and scientific research – exploring the use of menstrual serum for tissue culture, proposing new modes of care within the context of female and nonbinary health and discussing both traditional forms and new possibilities of reproduction. (...)

The project The Witch in the Lab Coat (since 2019) by artist and researcher WhiteFeather Hunter is a PhD research-creation and scientific research project (in progress) that explores the intersection of feminist witchcraft and tissue engineering through the development of a body- and performance-based laboratory practice. (...)

Lyndsey Walsh’s project Self-Care explores the personal journey of the artist and reconciliation with their BRCA1 gene mutation diagnosis and the implications of preventative care measures on their sense of body image and notions of self-care. (...)

Shu Lea Cheang together with Ewen Chardronnet will show the project UNBORN0x9. The art project questions the development of foetuses in artificial wombs outside of the body (ectogenesis) and the cyborg future of parenting. (...)

WHAT: "HAPPY - GO - LUCKY" - KATHARINA STADLER

WHERE: JARMUSCHEK + PARTNER GALLERY

WHEN: UNTIL 17.06.23

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"The high-contrast, bold colors of shadowy shapes and surfaces run along the fabric fields delimited by seams in Katharina Stadler's object-like paintings. Each play of color and form is able to reach the viewer immediately on an emotional level and evoke rorschach-like associations. Yet in their interconnection, the sewn and painted cotton pieces are complex collages that challenge and puzzle. Each lot is not only special and unique as a surface, but also works in a specific pictorial depth, as its own pictorial universe in which one can immerse oneself, and which nevertheless interacts and connects with the whole in a mysterious way.

Katharina Stadler's large-scale compositions are capable of evoking moments of contemplative tranquility and, at the same time, feelings of joyful lightheartedness. She imagines the colors of her works at the beginning and then lets thoughts, memories and dreams flow into the multi-part painting process. From image-formed streams of consciousness she finally puts together something new, something different. Deconstruction and re-creation can be read here as a reference to human processing with what is experienced, imagined and felt.

Not systematic or static, but consciously and visibly manual, intuitively and individually man-made, the color-intensive works of Katharina Stadler are able to touch us as viewers. The artist deals freely and unconstrained with her chosen medium as well as with the genre of painting. When she sews a frame around the color surfaces with unpainted pieces of cotton, she seems to playfully, almost cheekily, make us aware of our acquired habits of seeing and trained expectations of images. She thus creates an image around the actual picture. Background, empty space and frame at the same time, these "edge pieces" may also point us to the indispensability of the image carrier for painting, to the materiality of images in general and their multidimensionality. Despite the fact that the individual seams at least form sovereign and clearly ordering internal boundaries, one may doubt the boundaries of the whole in view of its fragmentary nature. And yet Katharina Stadler is not concerned with the conceptual. Rather, with her seemingly light, balancing compositions, she ingeniously succeeds in finding images for our often diffuse and sometimes chaotic inner worlds."

WHAT: "DAS GESCHÄFTSJAHR 22/23" - GROUP EXHIBITION

WHERE: MICHAELA HELFRICH GALERIE

WHEN: UNTIL 14.06.23

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"Scheinbar wahllos sind über 100 Portraitzeichnungen in einer Glasvitrine platziert, die sich gegenseitig überlappen, verdecken, aber manchmal noch unter Stapeln von anderen Bildern hervorlugen und Relevanz einfordern.
Es sind Personen des Zeitgeschehens, an denen wir nicht vorbeikommen: Entscheider, Täter, Opfer.
Hoffnungsträger oder Nullnummern, die sich übereinander schieben und von immer neueren Akteuren überschattet werden, welche dann eine weitere Schicht bilden.
Letztendlich geht es um eine Tektonik der Gegenwart."

Jens Kloppmann

WHAT: "TALES FROM THE DxCOLONIZER"- ANTOINE LORTIE

WHERE: ROSALUX BERLIN ART SPACE

WHEN: UNTIL 23.09.23

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"Antoine Lortie questions the role of the artist and his future in a society of leisure, virtual interactions, surveillance, privatization of the imaginary, the grip of algorithms and polarizations.Anchored in a context where creation in contemporary art is mostly dependent on public funding, he examines the pitfalls that the ideological and normative shackles underlying the regulation of competitions can represent for the blossoming and circulation of new practices, and underlines the need for each new generation of creators to invent its own codes and to demand new contracts.Nothing could be more natural for this post-digital artist than to be accompanied by the muse Basiops, the princesses Institutiona and Politica and his avatar Agrophobe for this first solo exhibition in Europe. It will be an opportunity to observe how he diverts the driving force of the main diktats within public funding networks: decolonialism, social justice, climate responsibility (among others) to set in motion a whole machinery made up of appropriations of vessels and characters that seem to come out of Japanese cartoons, 3D objets trouvés, recycled environments from video games and virtual realities. A teeming digital arsenal, nourished by an alchemical humus made up of refusal letters and real cases of censorship, which we will not be surprised to find in painting and sculpture. Disciplines whose codes he handles with as much dexterity and predilection as his mouse and keyboard, and which the artist uses to depict hybrid and transmaterial collective daily lives, marked by the growing interpenetration of virtual and physical worlds.An original approach and a force of proposition, driven by philosophical reflections on cybernetics and posthumanism and a desire for exchange relayed by a series of diagrams, which seek to clear paths towards freedom, lightness and futurity."

Tiny Domingos

WHAT: "YOUR INNER CHILD" FESTIVAL

‍WHERE: MAHALLA BERLIN

WHEN: FROM 26.05 TO 29.05