Catherine Biocca, Milky Seas / PSM, Berlin - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Catherine Biocca, Milky Seas / PSM, Berlin * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

The methods of verbal communication allow for an aggression that permanently affects our feelings. Even when these words are not directly addressed to us. Catherine Biocca in the solo-show Milky Seas presented at the PSM Gallery in Berlin, investigated the mechanisms of fear, aggression and violence that are continuously and more or less subtly part of our daily life.

Émilie Pitoiset / MANIAC - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Émilie Pitoiset / MANIAC * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

In the MANIAC exhibition, at the gallery Klemm's in Berlin, from 10 September to 24 October 2020, the French artist Émilie Pitoiset investigated the way in which the control over our body movements, and particularly dancing, are the manifestation of the acceleration linked to mechanisms and relations built by the expansion of a capitalist system.

K.H. Hödicke at Palais Populaire - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

K.H. Hödicke at Palais Populaire * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Frantic flashing neon signs overflow from the gray facades of concrete buildings and intertwine in a constellation of advertising posters and glimpses of underground life in Berlin, almost a ghost town, sweet and dark, this is the scenario created by Karl-Horst Hödicke in his inexhaustible artistic practice.

Interview with Johan Holten, Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Interview with Johan Holten, Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Johan Holten, Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim since 2019 and formerly Director of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden since 2011, reacted to this moment of crisis, since the beginning of the lockdown, with determination and promptness, proposing a series of online guided tours through the Live platforms of Instagram and Facebook.

The Upside-Down world of Yngve Holen | Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine | 02/2020

The Upside-Down world of Yngve Holen * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

by Elda Oreto When I entered the world of Yngve Holen, I had the impression men were hybrids of flesh and synthetic material. It's as if the artist dreams of clandestine experiments in which the brain is injected with substances that induce hallucinations and excruciating headaches.

Sonia Gomes I Rise – I’m a Black Ocean, Leaping and Wide | Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Sonia Gomes I Rise - I'm a Black Ocean, Leaping and Wide * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Sonia Gomes never considered a career as an artist. She discovered her vocation by accident, long after she thought herself established in another occupation. Almost as if she had found her way after a long off-piste run.

PHILIP KOJO METZ | THE BLACK KWADRAT @ KWADRAT, BERLIN | 11.11.2018 - 07.12.18

 

Philip Kojo Metz, The Black Kwadrat, Installation view, © KWADRAT-Gallery und Fotos by: Markus Georg

PHILIP KOJO METZ 
THE BLACK KWADRAT 
KWADRAT, BERLIN 
11.11.2018 - 07.12.18 

A  monolithic Black Box is filling up the space of Kwadrat gallery. It is almost impossible to walk in but for a narrow corridor that let the visitor surround the mysterious object.

Philip Kojo Metz ’s third exhibition at KWADRAT crisscrosses several forms of art. It also builds a multilayered structure which reminds a bit of the Chinese box system. It starts from Malevich to finish with the poet Alexander Pushkin, via the use of Social Media. Philip Kojo Metz, a German-Ghanaian artist resident in Berlin, focuses on overdrafts between forms of arts and topics with a strong performative attitude.

Near to The Black Kwadrat sculpture, there is a black hollow room. In fact, the two installations, the full box, and the empty space are complementary.

Visitors take place in the middle of the black room to get a photo portrait. This image is then posted on Instagram.

The Black Box installation is an homage to Kazimir Malevich, the Russian painter who lived at the beginning of 1900 and revolutionized the idea of Painting ( and Art ) with the Black Square, literally a black square painted on a white canvas.

Malevich’s paintings were a statement: painting as a representation of nature was over. The media of painting was free by the necessity of representing something.

It was the time to move in a new direction: abstract painting. That’s where it starts Modern Art.

Now, the Black Kwadrat is ironically provoking a possibility of change too. The social experiment, with the Instagram, it shows the possibility to free the Art from certain ‘social’ constrictions. Differently, from other art projects which used Instagram as an experimental channel, for example, Richard Price or Amalia Ulman, Kojo Metz’s project works like a magic tool that swallows the visitors to project their virtual self into the web.

Near the black walls, it is hanging a painting: a piece of wall with a gunshot hole in it.

The gallerist Martin Kwade told me that the idea was to shot a wall inside the gallery, but of course, this was not possible. The shooting is a direct quotation to a Pushkin short novel, The Shot, which is connected to the tragic duel that caused the writer’s death.

The last deathly shot eternalized him while the shooting in the gallery is harmless but delivers the visitors image into the perpetual flow of social networks.

In front of the Black Box, the visitor is almost a primitive hominid in front of the Monolith in Kubrick’s movie “2001: A Space Odyssey", from the novel of Arthur C. Clarke.

In the original story, the strange object came from nowhere, from the depth of the space. No one knows what it is and no one knows what is it for. But it does something: it triggers the primitives men to use the weapon.

Philip Kojo Metz, The Black Kwadrat, Installation view, © KWADRAT-Gallery und Fotos by: Markus Georg