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22/3/2006

The Three Cities- Berlin: The Apartment

Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Berlin

Alex Cecchetti, Lucile Desamory, Paul Kos, Gedi Sibony, Andreas Slominski and Tony Swain
invited by Gyonata Bonvicini, Anna-Catharina Gebbers and Paolo Zani

Part of the tripartited exhibition project
The Three Cities: Berlin, Milan, London

Borrowing the title from an Emile Zola series of novels, the project involves three curators (GYONATA BONVICINI - London, ANNA-CATHARINA GEBBERS - Berlin, PAOLO ZANI - Milan). Three Exhibitions will take place in three different countries, linking the project to events that make people from all over the world come to see and join the spectacle - a metaphor for the hype currently going on in the art world. Borders in the age of Globalisation seem to become less of a problem politically and in terms of travel or economy - but obviously still are in terms of wealth, health, treasures of the soil. And borders between reality and fiction aren't only discussed in art, but also regarding public/political propaganda.

The fact that the three curators are respectively based in one of the three cities, will create a fluid balance between a deeper knowledge of the local territory and the openness to different realities such as the ones brought by the two other curators in each venue.


Berlin - The apartment

The intimate environment of the apartment epitomizes the continuous intertwining between private and public dimension. Furthermore the peculiar location of the venue marks several borders of different origin and predestines it for a privileged position of observation.

The library apartment of the curator Anna-Catharina Gebbers is facing Friedrichstadtpalast, which used to be the largest stage for GDR-spectacles/events, dance revues etc. and, before it was rebuilt here, was formerly directed by the german theatre legend Max Reinhard. The apartment is also situated near theatres like Berliner Ensemble, Metropol Theater, Deutsches Theater , Cabaret Distel and right across Tranenpalast, a building that had lived a long history that always involved borders. Built in the same time as the Berlin Wall, until 1989 Tranenpalast used to be the customs clearance room at the station Friedrichstrabe. Here the East-Berliners had said their good-byes to their visitors from the West, it was a checkpoint between two worlds.

But Friedrichstrabe also used to be the famous promenade of the Roaring Twenties, the entertainment spot of the metropolis. An opening night in the Apollo theatre was one of the most important society events. The Wintergarten - the quintessence of variete' - witnessed the birth of cinema with the world premie're of Max Skladanowskis “Theatre of Living Photographs". Whether you loved the luxury or rather the folkloristic way - the Friedrichstrabe would have been the place to entertain you, and the station Friedrichstrabe (built in 1882) was a border crossing between the reality of daily life and a glamorous time out.

The apartment in Ziegelstrabe is also located between Reichstag, Bundestag, Bundeskanzleramt, Brandenburger Tor on the one hand side, and the area of the galleries in Berlin Mitte and the institutions at Museumsinsel on the other side. This location defines the venue’s condition as a privileged point of observation. It yearns/demands for witty comments on the theatrality or sometimes painful reality of art and politics.

The exhibitions regularly organized by Anna-Catharina Gebbers here, always take place for only four hours. Due to this fact those events are more performances of exhibitions than normal exhibitions. They expose the extravagant, mannered quality of the current artworld, with its fleetingness, the crossing of art and capital, the clash of utopia and reality, the fear to miss something, and involve also the Berlin tradition of Salons and apartment exhibitions.

Some of the different and more ore less successful ways of feeling or making yourself comfortable at home will be shown in the apartment. Making up or tearing down borders between realities represented a fundamental issue for the selection of artists for this chapter of the tripartited exhibitionproject.


BERLIN: THE ARTISTS

ALEX CECCHETTI
born 1976, Terni, Italy. Lives in Milan.
Paintings, Videos

The film „Farinacci“, 2004, shown in the exhibition in Berlin is portraying to a man from Umbria. Following the oral history told by Farinacci, the past reality of his hometown with all its sometimes ugly facts is revived.

In his video works and drawings, Cecchetti pairs harsh violence with a visionary and poetic aesthetic. His works play successfully on the effect of ambiguity. The short feature films show “losers as protagonists, characters coming from the ‘province’ who made their revolution, combating against the central power: St. Francis (a trilogy is dedicated to him), Don Quixote, Christ, Jean of Arc, become for Cecchetti the vehicle through which it becomes possible to read and re-interpret reality, by using continuous metaphors and shifts of meaning" (press text, Gallery Isabella Bertolozzi, Berlin). The landscape paintings and drawings give a gloomy and shadowy vision of nature, emphasizing the loneliness of the spectator before a falsely static atmosphere, where in reality we get the sensation that something is always just about to happen.

Alex Cecchetti, coming from advertising and music video, touches upon new experimentations, suspended between cinema, communication, and contemporary art, where language contamination, combined together by the ever-present music, conveys a surreal and visionary aesthetic.


LUCILE DESAMORY
born 1977, Brussels. Currently living in Berlin.
Films, Collages, Music Performances.

The films “3. Clone Zone", 2000, and “a' l’ombre de l’hyperboloide", 2004, present an ambiguous, surrealistic world in the twilight zone at home between dream, fiction, reality, utopia, humour and serious fear.

Desamory creates an audiovisual world mixing paper collages, stop motion and musical films. Working with found material such as stock sport photography and encyclopaedic illustration Desamory produces rich and dreamlike pictures which in total create a document to sensitised human corporeality. Her silhouette works on paper formally bring together the attitude of stop motion and visual art. Often three dimensional they play with the aesthetics of picture-books, sculptures, galanty shows and the pre-stages of filmmaking.

Formerly running a night club in Brussels, Desamory has shown her films and performed live across Europe. “Jigsaw (jeu de socie'te')" currently shown at Galerie Meerrettich, Berlin, presents a collaboration by Lucile Desamory, Lucy McKenzie and Birgit Megerle.


PAUL KOS
born 1942, Rock Springs, Wyoming. Lives in San Francisco.
Installations, Videos, Perfomances.

Featured in the show in Berlin is a video work from 2004. The film shows Kos using an ice lens to switch a fire - one of the oldest symbols shelter and home for the human beeing.

Kos is known for his special entry of the poetry of material. One of the artist's best-known work is an installation from 1970, where Paul Kos placed about a dozen standing microphones around two blocks of ice. He called the work “The Sound of Ice Melting". The photograph documenting the event is a fine absurdist image: It calls to mind the old photographs of politicos speaking into a bristling array of microphones, only here the microphones resemble birdlike creatures craning to hear what the blockhead will say.

Paul Kos has been a highly influential artist in the Bay Area for well over three decades. In the late 60s and early 70s he was one of the major figures on the early conceptual art scene, notable especially for his early experimental video works and seemingly simple but technically innovative sculptural installations, which generally featured evocative audio or video components. He was one of the first to incorporate video into interactive installations.


GEDI SIBONY
born 1973, New York City. Lives in New York.

“The World is Neither Not Nor", 2005, occupies a whole room in the apartment by using a door leaf, a piece of carpet and spray paint to deconstruct an apartment and to divide space.

Sibony’s so called “guerilla formalism" works with materials he finds in places like supply closets, mail rooms, cubicles, which he turns into rough-hewn, weirdly elegant sculptures. In his works arte povera, Richard Tuttle, and formalistic methods assonant. “I want to convey a kind of discovery by moving through things the way allegory incorporates various energies in a harmonious environment. This might be understood as an alignment of symbolic thinking and material tactility." (ArtForum, Sept. 2004). Sibony seems concerned with tracing the process by which ‘pure’ form transmutes itself into symbol. But rather than conceive of this process as the basis for referential gamesmanship or as a dreaded entropic slippage, he posits it as the opening up of new realms of possibility. His works keep with them always a sense of fragility and precariety.
An installation by Gedi Sibony is currently shown at the Whitney Biennial, New York.


ANDREAS SLOMINSKI
born 1959, Meppen, Germany. Lives in Berlin and Hamburg, Germany.
Installations, Sculptures, Performances, Photographs, Paintings, Drawings.

Dedicated to the special location of the apartment and on the specific occasion of the exhibition, Andreas Slominski has invented a performance - gone by, as always, when the spectators arrive.

Slominski is known for works which announce him as a trickster and points up the ludic element which runs through his projects. A common thread is the role of narrative and in many instances the object exhibited is the culmination of an elaborate sequence of events. Slominski often covers his tracks, chapters of the narrative vanish, leaving only some very perplexing signs. Slominski considers the relationship between figures and quantities, between the present and the past, between the facts and the made up, between the small every day live and the unconceivable from a variety of perspectives - as abstractions, as mathematical elements and as the components of communities and society as a whole.

Andreas Slominski’s new, again perplexing, polystyrene works will be shown in a solo exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York, in May.


TONY SWAIN
born 1967, Lisborn. Lives in Glasgow.
Drawings, Collages, Music.

The exhibition present a series of new paintings on newspaper and collages, which seem to transfer urban surroundings and housings to a strange, fantastical and private worlds.

Swains works on paper derive their material source from newsprint and magazines. His paintings have a strange air of familiarity. Seemingly random patterns are produced from a starting point as oblique as a shadow or colour on the newsprint. The final result being at times a surreal, fantastical landscape or a depiction of an intimate, but unrecognizable object. When you study the works, it seems as though Swain is involving you in his private surreal world, with influences from music and from the built environment. The original print and Swain’s finely painted transcription become indistinguishable. It is through this process that Swain manages to invert the print material with unusual and unassociated surreal attributes. The resulting collage has a part fantasy painting and part realist ‘photoprint’ quality.

The musician and artist Tony Swain transforms in his paintings the specific character of music, which is depending on or only existing in time, and the momentariness of the up-to-dateness of the daily news.


Upcoming:
Milan (September 2006, “Start"-weekend), London (October 2006, “Frieze Art Fair"-weekend)
with Shannon Bool, Ulla von Brandenburg, Lali Chetwynd, Matthew Darbyshire, Daria Martin, Dirk Stewen, Nicole Wermers a.o.

The Curators would like to thank David Green/Artprojx, Art:Concept, Paris and all the participating Artists.

23 - 25 March 2006, 11am - 3pm
Anna-Catharina Gebbers | Bibliothekswohnung
Ziegelstrasse 2, Apt. #06.03 | D-10117 Berlin-Mitte

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