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27/8/2010

Oliver van den Berg

Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin

From August 28 through October 16, 2010 Kuckei + Kuckei presents Oliver van den Berg‘s new work "Set". For this exhibition, van den Berg transformed the gallery into a kind of ersatz film set. Purposefully distributed replicas of recording devices, dollies, carts, and lighting equipment mimic the setup of a film or television crew, whereas their accomplishment clearly show their artificiality . Van den Berg’s works derive their uncanny presence from the tension that arises between form and function, between mass-produced original and handcrafted copy. As one looks closer, however, the set-up’s artifice becomes apparent. There is no "real" object at the center of this hypothetical stage. In van den Berg’s gallery-as-location shoot, it is the space, the visitor, and indeed the objects themselves that are the actors of the setting.

Earlier this year, Oliver van den Berg's installation "Set" was presented by the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan (UMMA), curated by Jacob Proctor. Currently a catalogue is being published on behalf of the exhibition.

Belinda Grace Gardner
From the exhibition catalog "Rückkehr ins All"
(Return to Space), Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2006

Part of the utopia of endless progress is the idea of an almost superhumanly perfect high technology: a myth that Oliver van den Berg dismantles with often complex means and sly questions. In the imitation and new invention of futuristic-technoid objects, the Berlin artist follows the traces of the perfidies and idiosyncrasies that are always inherent in products made by people. He is also involved in a more extensive investigation of the system-immanent (control) mechanisms inscribed into technical vehicles – in space and air travel as well as in war waging. His artistic interest here focuses equally on the individual "face" and on the collective relevance of technology, including in its function as a storage medium for memory. Sketch, prototype, model, and experimental set-up are van den Berg’s central sculptural-conceptual methods. The artist has repeatedly taken interest in airplanes, satellites, and radar constructions; his spectrum ranges from individually designed, rudimentary rockets through the design for a one-atom submarine (1996) and the radar screen ICO (1999) to artistic reconstructions of the National Socialists’ V1 ("Retaliation 1") rocket in accordance with sketches from memory prepared by citizens of London.
On the basis of these sketches in the latter project, titled Vn (1999), out of which the ICO and other projects developed, the artist produced precise, wooden "wind tunnel models" comprising a broad palette of completely divergent and absurd formal variations. The relativity of memory, but also of the technical instrument, and thus of results and knowledge that can be achieved with it, play a decisive role in this.
This idea is expanded in the artist’s work for the current exhibition "Return to Space", a star projection taking up four meters of "airspace", constructed on the model of the apparatus of the same name that serves to project an accurate, controllable image of the night sky in large planetariums. With his sculpture, constructed as a hollow wooden object, van den Berg returns to the projector’s original functional method: instead of radiating light from the inside outward, light and one’s gaze fall into the apparatus. The sculpture represents the projector’s capacity to function as a storage medium holding and able to depict our knowledge of the night sky.

Image: Set, installation view, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 2010

Opening reception 28th August, 19:00 - 21:00 h

Kuckei + Kuckei
Linienstr. 158 D - 10115 Berlin
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Friday 11-18 h
Saturday 11 - 17 h

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