(Berlin.) Welcome back after this rather extensive winter break, suddenly it’s 2020, and so many things have changed! Already we think of 2019 with a lot of nostalgia - ‘member the summer of ‘19, when online banking was still fun and simple? Before autumn came, and the EU bureaucrats introduced PSD2, causing oh so many cases of PTSD among their subjects? By now it sounds like a dream of the Golden Age, yet only months ago you did indeed not need to enter five passwords and ten PIN codes, then scan three barcodes, no it didn’t even matter if you’d left your phone in the bathroom, were charging it in the kitchen, or had no clue where tf it might be once again, as you were sitting at your desk and all you wanted was to check your balance. No,...
(Berlin.) Apart from Cevdet Eret’s musical trip to Bergama, and not officially part of the series Works of Music by Visual Artists, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof is showing a second exhibition to engage the patron’s sense of hearing these days.
We’ve met with the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan before, on the occasion of Berlin ART Week 2018 at DAADgalerie, a German foreign exchange student programme with a branch in contemporary arts. Back then, it was a group show and his contribution all about walls and sound, it was memorable. Today’s solo is rather small, and the best part stands at the beginning: A series of works under the title Disputed Utterance, that - not without a pinch of dark humour - inquires into the m...
(Berlin.) It’s almost the end of November again, meaning any Americans among you will probably feel in the mood for some... well, here’s Cevdet Eret, artist from Turkey, and maybe even Turkish. Although of this we cannot be sure: there is his name which could point at the conclusion, but then again, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum avoids every mention of nationality - Wherever you look or listen, it’s only “lives in Istanbul”. Odd. Might be Kurdish? Or just not keen on Erdogan? Bergama, Eret’s project for Bahnhof, has been coproduced by, and first shown at, the performing arts festival Ruhrtriennale, and not even their promo brochure's short bio will divulge his place of birth. This is getting more mysterious by the m...
(Berlin.) Twenty-nineteen being history soon, it’s about time to visit a Bauhaus centennial show should you not have done so yet. Quite a few of those have popped up in Berlin and beyond over the past months, and why not pick original bauhaus at Berlinische Galerie?
This one wants to remind us that the trademark was in first place not a style, an artistic movement, but a school, established by Walter Gropius in Weimar, 1919. For the following fourteen years, Bauhaus, relocating first to Dessau, then to Berlin, exerted a considerable and lasting influence on architecture, art, and design. To celebrate the big anniversary, three main events take/took place in these same three cities, one of which you will have heard of, and as regar...
(Berlin.) Please, have a seat, make yourself comfortable, grab a cuppa green tea and a snack, Poodle, Siamese, or Black Bear maybe; everything’s good with that new liver of yours? – yeah, ha ha, that one won’t be protesting again so soon, oops, sorry, forget what I've just said, and follow me on a visit to three new exhibitions in Berlin that focus on Chinese art and artists (on those mighty Chinese investors, too?).
Anything goes in China, everything’s possible in the Middle Kingdom, everything except, well, human rights, civil liberties, freedom of expression, trifles. In art, we’re not fussy, or not in every instance, it feels at least as if the ever political, notoriously critical, do-goodie-good art world would stay remarkably cal...
