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27/4/2007

Hardcore Glamour

Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin

Group show

Curated by: Niels Betori Diehl and Barbara Prokop

Berlin is rough and dirty, constantly crashing into its own limits and celebrating a kind of glamour that doesn’t have much in common with what the term usually gets associated with. In a volatile, sweaty manner, the dreamt-to-death clichés of the New York of the sixties get reanimated by cheap means, long enough until the real New Yorkers add themselves to the mix. Eventually, nobody knows who’s imitating whom anymore and everyone starts to believe in this image of the alleged metropolis, the way it appears in the magazines, at least until they are sober again.

However, in rare, reflected moments it can happen that the glamour of the new Berlin – which is hardcore because it has no other option - reveals itself as a survival strategy developed by those trying to evade from the maelstrom of brutal provincialism and cosmopolitical daydreaming, all the while knowing that they can’t ever entirely escape it. This strategy is a balancing act between conscious critique and a less conscious celebration of what already exists and of what could potentially exist.

With Hardcore Glamour Niels Betori Diehl and Barbara Prokop try to grasp this "feeling" by means of connecting art praxis and performative curatorial work. With contributions from different artists’ positions, a multifaceted statement on Berlin will be created, in which past and present are reconsidered and new possibilities are conceived.

Thematically and emotionally bound to Berlin, Hardcore Glamour is realized in collaboration with Ivan Boskovic, Friederike Hamann, Moritz Hirsch, Heinz Peter Knes, Malte Lochstedt, Christian Meier, Angie Reed, Sabine Rein, Pola Sieverding, Ulrich Urban, Christine Woditschka and Rommelo Yu – artists who have all chosen to live and work in Berlin.

One could understand Hardcore Glamour as a reportage from the grey zones between global subcultures and local mainstream, influenced by a certain glamorous gaze and produced using various, often mimetic and appropriative strategies. Ambiguities and contradictions that emerge from the exhibited works and performances or from their interaction and dialogue expose the political moment of the project, which lives on the posing of questions rather then on the providing of answers.

Consequently, Hardcore Glamour understands itself on one hand as a counterproposal to the superficiality and the mannerisms of market-compatible, office-friendly and “slick” art products from the age of the boom. On the other hand it questions a predominant, simplistic and leftist-conservative logic of boycott, that reduces political comments to either/or patterns and draws a strict dividing line between the intellectually valuable and the intellectually worthless.

In this sense Hardcore Glamour represents a militant way of being sexy.

Participating artists:

Niels Betori Diehl, Ivan Boskovic, Friederike Hamann, Moritz Hirsch, Heinz Peter Knes, Malte Lochstedt, Christian Meier, Barbara Prokop, Angie Reed, Sabine Rein, Pola Sieverding, Ulrich Urban, Christine Woditschka, Rommelo Yu.

For further information:
http://www.hardcoreglamour.de
info@hardcoreglamour.de

Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2 - Berlin

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