artspleen: solo show

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giovedì 26 novembre 2020

Katharina Grosse, It Wasn’t Us until 10 January, 2021 / A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Katharina Grosse, It Wasn't Us * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag
A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin by Elda Oreto Katharina Grosse turns the world into a canvas and everything into a work of art, the exhibition "Katharina Grosse: It Wasn't Us", curated by Udo Kittelmann and Gabriele

venerdì 7 settembre 2018

SIMON FUJIWARA ~ EMPATHY I ~ ESTHER SCHIPPER ~ until September 30, 2018

Simon Fujiwara Empathy I, 2018 5D simulator installation (with video, sound, motion, water, and wind) Duration 3:49 min Outer dimensions of box: 3,71 x 7,6 x 5,35 meters. Edition of 3.
Courtesy: the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin
Photo: © Andrea Rossetti

SIMON FUJIWARA
EMPATHY I
ESTHER SCHIPPER
until September 30, 2018

How many times have I found myself sitting at the table in a Café, imagining the life of the person
sitting next to me.

So many other times I ignored how people I care could feel when I was hurting them!

But thinking further on: Can we actually feel how someone else is feeling when is deported and
starved on a boat in the middle of the sea? Is cruelty linked to control the last form of pleasure?

Well, in both cases, what we are talking about is called EMPATHY! This means to get under someone
else's skin.

The first solo show at Esther Schipper, by the londoner Simon Fujiwara, naturalized Berliner, is
evolving around this topic.

In the exhibition space is reproduced a waiting hallway, with chairs put in square around a table, a
ticket dispenser for a take-a-number system, the the red numbers to show when is your turn, a water
distributor and even a wifi free connection spot. On the table are several copies of the book “50
shades of gray” by E. L. James. The shallow but best seller novel about a refined as much as boring
pseudo-sadomasochistic love story.

The waiting room is not just a waiting-for-waiting situation. Even though that would have been cool
enough. But it’s the access before the ‘real’ artwork: an experience-simulation video in a dark room
created in the gallery.

Only two people at times get into the room.I went in together with a nice stranger and sympathetic
curator.

We were in for about 10 minutes. A guide told us to sit in the chairs and fest our belt. Then the show
begun: a scrumbeled and exciting collection of several experiences simulations, the kind you can find
in some theme-parks.

We were forced into the POV of someone else. I smashed into a window for start, flew against the
wind, splashed into the water… so much fun!

Fujiwara built a genuine artificial experience of feeling through the other under the supervision of the
Big Brother ( who? Fujiwara himself ?). I felt a little bit like in one of those sci-fi fiction where my
conscience was embodied in a robot. A little bit like in Westworld. But at the same time, it seemed to
me a sort of fetish-feeling, as the copies of the books in the waiting room and the waiting room itself.
We shared something together though...and I thought it was real!

The simulator room is a disavowal. This mechanism is contesting the right of a thing to be what it is.
What Freud describes as a fetish is the frozen image through which a men deny the absence of a
penis in a woman. “This is the last moment in which one could still believe” using Deleuze words. If
we could steal from Deleuze once more we could call it a ‘neutralization for protection’ that idealize,
suspending the reality to protect us from the consequences that knowing it would carry.

As in the experience proposed by Fujiwara, we are forced into an all-costs-amusement of which we
have lost the real pleasure. More than slaves, it seems to me, we are prisoners of it. However it is
unclear of whom we are prisoners.

Exhibition view: Simon Fujiwara, Empathy I, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2018
Courtesy: the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin
Photo: © Andrea Rossetti

mercoledì 6 dicembre 2017

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