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.

The dream of life in the magical reality of Petrit Halilaj - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine - 08/20

The dream of life in the magical reality of Petrit Halilaj * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

The artistic research of Petrit Halilaj (born in Kostërrc, Skenderaj-Kosovo, in 1986) could be considered part of the artistic and literary current of the magical realism where reality and imagination, political and folklore elements, personal and collective memory are mixed.

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

Isa Genzken ISSIE ENERGIE @ König Galerie, Berlin

"Street's like a jungle

so call the police

following the herd

down to Greece..."

Blur, Girls and boys

A group of dummies dressed with a sort of waterproof plastic mantles and two children's 

dummies with extra large T-shirts are the first bodies to emerge distinctly from the horde of 

objects that fills up the nave of the former Brutalist-style church now home to the König galerie.

The dummies or Schauspieler are, one could say, a peculiar element of Isa Genzken practice. 

The puppets are standing, as if conversing among themselves. On the wall near them are hanging 

metal panels on which there are clippings of newspapers, photographs of the artist, of her life, of 

works, of other exhibitions etcc. The collages are crowded by images like in one of those 

movies where a detective is hunting a serial killer and pins all the clue on a board.

Adhesive tapes in bright colors coverü other panels. The stripes come and go from one side to 

the other; they are an obstacle to the vision, containment tapes, which obscure the shimmering 

surface of the metal. The tape is the restraint but also its own end. From this grid, however, 

what transpires is not a glint of life but an irrepressible flow of energy.

The panels run around the space of the nave.  All the other works are contained in it: sculptures 

made of blocks of cement piled on one another or cut like scalar pyramids with strange steel 

antennas, fake busts of Nefertiti with sunglasses and the dummies, which seem to compete with

visitors to gain space in the crowded monumental nave of the ex-church, built by Werner Düttmann
 and restored by Arno Brandlhuber. Two dummies are laying on each other, as if  making love.

At the bottom of the nave, in right corner, there is a photograph portrait of the artist 

Isa Genzken. "This foto was made at my first trip in New York 1971" is written on it.

She is the beginning of it. The starting point of the motion of energy. It crosses all things and 

connects them to each other. The flow of desire generated by a young Issie overwhelms 

everithing around her even herself. The  energy does not come from an inner withdrawal of 

the artist in her consciousness, but is the drift of the world around it. It cannot be triangulated.

Every work is a station, a ring, a conjunction, which stands for itself, indipendent, but also 

together with the others.

A flow of desire is not always an idyll. The masked dummies, the actors, are the revealed 

fiction, but also a transformation. Each identity is simulated.

The dummies are placed inside a forest of other images and sculptures like the vertical 

blocks made of cement, this amorphous material at the base of most of the current buildings. 

Cement, too, is a sign of transformation, in a sense it can become anything and be nothing. 

Then there are the nefertiti with sunglasses that are a joke, a declassation.

The artist is often defined as a heir to constructivism but seems to overcome all definitions.

All the works in the exhibition are born in different moments of the artist's life. They are a 

horde without control, pure desire, liberated, seen together like this; Those works placed in a

former church, symbol of the extreme repression exercised on the society by ideology they are  

an explosive element.

This aspect of the exhibition impressed me very much.

The gallery is a place of folding up of the reality, often to propose a synthetic experience, 

intensified of reality.

In this former church, the ideas of ​​elevation, repression and sublimation, which belong to the 

sacred place on one side and on the other the intensified experience of the artwork, slide on 

another level. The emptiness of a form is turned into a "concrete" weight, bouncing ambitions, 

desires and dreams, on a real dimension that brings back the flow of desire.

The church - gallery is not the place of perfection or of unfulfilled aspirations, projected on an 

other-life that never comes. It is the ‘here and now’ of desire under the experience of art: the 

endless stream of energy that always produces new axioms, that absorbs everything, 

incorporates everything and everyone and of which Isa Genzken's horde is the interminable 

external limit.

Isa Genzken ISSIE ENERGIE

11.11.17 - 7.1.2018

König Galerie, Berlin

www.koeniggalerie.com