ART CITIES:Berlin-Out of the Dark II

Most artworks stay in the dark. It slumbers in storage, rests in graphic-art cabinets, enjoys the climate-controlled environment in free port warehouses and museum basements, or catches dust up in the attic. Now and then a few pieces come to light, but what feels like 90 percent of the art in public and private collections is under lock and key, most of it permanently.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: ΚΟW Archive

KOW is no exception to the rule, though the art is kept at three locations and stored on numerous hard drives shouldn’t actually be there, That is why, in 2016, KOW retrieved works from its storage rooms that had not seen the light of day quite some time and reanimated them in the eyes of thevisitors. The exhibition was titled “Out of the Dark”. Now, as a months long lockdown on the entire art world comes to an end,  After what we’ve been through these past months, as Covid-19 brought social life to a virtual standstill, KOW asked thirteen artists to contribute to a reunion with art in “Out of the Dark II”. Turning the spotlight on art, “Out of the Dark II” should not gloss over the fact that much remains in the shadows of public attention despite, or in fact especially because of, a crisis in which we’re focused on our own situation. For a little while, such self-centeredness is understandable, but then we must open our eyes again to challenges, and to visions, that go beyond our personal or even national horizons. As art reclaims its public presence, critical perspectives on what is happening in our world also demand to be heard again. For art is not what’s already manifest or loudly announces itself. The mission of cultural production is to serve as a check on the global attention economy, to rebalance the discursive system, to publicly comment on social and political developments, to raise objections, to rethink problems and challenge our thinking, to spur debate.

Candice Breitz is best known for her moving image installations. Throughout her career, she has explored the dynamics by means of which an individual becomes him or herself in relation to a larger community, be that community the immediate community that one encounters in family, or the real and imagined communities that are shaped not only by questions of national belonging, race, gender and religion, but also by the increasingly undeniable influence of mainstream media such as television, cinema and popular culture. Most recently, Breitz’s work has focused on the conditions under which empathy is produced, reflecting on a media-saturated global culture in which strong identification with fictional characters and celebrity figures runs parallel to widespread indifference to the plight of those facing real world adversities.

Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in 2003 in Petersburg by a working group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. The group’s name recalls the first socialist workers’ self-organizations in Russia, which Lenin portrayed in his “What is to be done?” (1902). Chto Delat as a collective operates in different media such as video films, graphics, and murals, learning theater, newspaper publications, radio plays, and militant theory. The artistic activities of Chto Delat are orchestrated by four member artists (Tsaplya (Olga Egorova), Nikolay Oleinikov, Glyuklya (Natalia Pershina), and Dmitry Vilensky) who often cooperate with Russian and international artists and researchers in joint projects realized under the collective name of Chto Delat.

Alice Creischer studied Philosophy, German literature and Visual Arts in Düsseldorf. As one of the key figures of German political art movements in the 1990’s, Creischer contributed to a great amount of collective projects, publications, and exhibitions. Her artistic and theoretic agenda within institutional and economical critique has evolved over 20 years, more recently focusing on the early history of capitalism and globalization. As co-curator of such paradigmatic exhibitions Creischer has developed a specific curatorial practice that correlates with her work as an artist and theorist, including her extensive practice in archive research.

Heinrich Dunst creates spatial interventions and performances that navigate the gap between what can be seen and what can be said, the untranslatability of one form into another, and the contextual nature of spatial presentations. Dunst’s conceptual approach is rooted both in the work of artists like Marcel Broodthaers who scrutinize the systems underlying the perception of words and images, and in the Viennese scene of the 1980s and its characteristic ambition to extend abstract painting into the exhibition space. He lends these complex issues fresh interest by developing forms into correlations and pointedly questioning the seemingly unequivocal meaning of the elements through variation, superimposition, and changes of direction.

Barbara Hammer was born in Hollywood in 1939. Her documentary and experimental films are considered among the earliest and most extensive representations of lesbian identity, love, and sexuality. Accompanying her career as a filmmaker, Hammer has time and again worked with performance and installation.

The Cabinet of Ramon Haze is a unique collection and 20th century art document. It brings together more than 150 key works by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andreas Baader, Ruth Tauer and Jeff Koons, and traces the developement of their Ouevre and its conceptual foundations. Ramon Haze’s historical research reconstructs lost knowledge of the development of the art of the past century, and in doing so paints a picture of the political and social upheavals that have been reflected in the artistic production of the last cultural epoch. Since 1996, Ramon Hazes collection curators Holmer Feldmann and Andreas Grahl have been in charge of the “Cabinet”, and they have been instrumental in making it accessible to the public and helping to understand the lost notion of art.

Hiwa K was born in Kurdistan-Northern Iraq in 1975. His informal studies in his home town Sulaymaniyah were focused on European literature and philosophy, learnt from available books translated into Arabic. After moving to Europe in 2002, Hiwa K studied music as a pupil of the Flamenco master Paco Peña in Rotterdam, and subsequently settled in Germany. His works escape normative aesthetics but give a possibility of another vibration to vernacular forms, oral histories, modes of encounter and political situations. The repository of his references consists of stories told by family members and friends, found situations as well as everyday forms that are the products of pragmatics and necessity. He continuously critiques the art education system and the professionalization of art practice, as well as the myth of the individual artist. Many of his works have a strong collective and participatory dimension, and express the concept of obtaining knowledge from everyday experience rather than doctrine.

Since 1988 Frédéric Moser  and Philippe Schwinger have been collaborating, directing first an independent theatre company “l’atelier ici et maintenant” in Lausanne. Between 1993 and 1998 they studied at the Geneva University of Art and Design. They won the Swiss Art Award 3 times in a row (1998-99-2000) as well as the Providentia Young Art Prize. In 2001 they received the 6 month Scholarship from the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and in 2002 the One Year Studio in Berlin from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture. In 2003 they were invited to the first residence program at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. They represented Switzerland at the 26th International Biennal of Contemporary Art of São Paulo in 2004.

Oswald Oberhuber, since the 1960s has greatly influenced the Austrian art world with a remarkably diverse practice as artist, curator, gallery owner, rector of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, collector, designer, critic, theorist and editor. His artistic oeuvre spanning a period of seven decades is not determined by a particular style or language but follows a principle of permanent change. While his early works are informed by abstraction, surrealism and informalism most prominently, he likewise explores the figurative and, with a strong emphasis on lines, shows a careful and sympathetic regard of modernism. His practice includes painting, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation and in a later period came to embrace even furniture design and fashion. Oberhuber represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 1972

Mario Pfeifer was born in 1981 in Dresden, Germany. His work explores representational structures and conventions in the medium of film, in locations ranging from Mumbai to California to the Western Sahara. Conceiving each project out of a specific cultural situation, he researches social-political backgrounds and weaves further cross-cultural art historical, filmic and political references into a richly layered practice, ranging from film and video installations to photographs and text installations. Often, Pfeifer collaborates on publications that reconsider these projects, offering research materials and critical investigations by writers and thinkers of related fields, concerning issues suggested in his projects for a wider social-political discussion. After his studies in Leipzig (HGB) and Berlin (UDK), Pfeifer graduates from Willem de Rooij’s class at Städelschule Frankfurt in 2008. He is a Fulbright fellow in Los Angeles (California Institute of the Arts) in 2008/09.

Dierk Schmidt, born in Unna, Germany, in 1965, studied art history and visual arts in Düsseldorf and Amsterdam. He takes on the genre of history painting to investigate politics of representation, critically redescribing the production of the historical past and present. Dierk Schmidt has repeatedly worked on issues of colonial history, on restitution politics, international law, and on abstraction in painting, a main project being “The Division Of The Earth“ for documenta 12 in 2007. His analytical approach makes use of painting’s conceptual methods, self-reflexive on the issue of painting and capable of rationalizing representational gaps.

Michael E. Smith was born in 1977 in Detroit, MI, USA. His objects and pictures as well as his videos seem like physical reconstructions of emotional disfigurement, his exhibitions like an archeology of humanity. He counters the ecological and economic disaster of our era with a materialism of basic needs, displayed as a layout of ruined bodies. Smith studies at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit from 2004 until 2006. In 2008 he graduates from Jessica Stockholders’ class at the Department for Sculpture at Yale University, New Haven.

Franz Erhard Walther was born in 1939 in Fulda, Germany. Between 1957 and 1961 he studies at the Werkkunstschule in Offenbach and the Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt. In 1962 he transfers to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he graduates from Karl Otto Goetzs’ class in 1964. Walther lives in New York between 1967 and 1971. He participates in Documenta 5, 6, 7 and 8. From 1971 until 2005 he holds a chair at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (class for sculpture), where he leaves behind a big legacy. Among his students are Martin Kippenberger, Christian Jankowksi, Santiago Sierra, John Bock, Lilly Fischer, Jonathan Meese, Andreas Slominski. Since 2006 he lives and works in Fulda again.

Clemens von Wedemeyer, born in 1974 in Göttingen, Germany, currently lives and works in Berlin and holds a professorship for media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. The artist and filmmaker studied photography and media at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and graduated as Meisterschüler of Astrid Klein in 2005.

Tobias Zielony studied Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, before he continued with artistic photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig under Timm Rautert in 2001. Tobias Zielony is known for his photographic depiction of juvenile minorities in suburban areas – a subject he already set out with during his studies in Newport. For his first book project “Behind the Block” (2004) he then extended his research to a total of four European cities to observe adolescents in public spaces often during night times. Themes and social realities his research touches upon include structural change, migration and drug abuse, as well as sexwork as shown in “Big Sexyland” (2006-2008) and “Jenny, Jenny” (2013). For “Manitoba” (2009-2011) Tobias Zielony spent time with adolescents of indigenous origins living in Winnipeg and the province of Manitoba, Canada. His critical approach to documentarism manifests in a specific aesthetic and relationship with fiction. People are often portrayed in a casual fashion that is sensitive of the visual language, gestures and poses a person uses to set their stage.

With works by: Candice Breitz, Chto Delat, Clegg & Guttmann, Alice Creischer, Heinrich Dunst, Estate of Barbara Hammer, The Cabinet of Ramon Haze, Hiwa K, Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Oswald Oberhuber, Mario Pfeifer, Dierk Schmidt, Santiago Sierra, Michael E. Smith, Franz Erhard Walther, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Zielony, CATPC, Anna Ehrenstein and  Christoph Schäfer

Info: KOW Berlin, Lindenstr. 35, Berlin, Duration: 23/5-15/7/20, Days & Hours: Fri& Sat 12:00-18:00 and by appointment, www.kow-berlin.com