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11/10/2007

I Know The World 2

Sparwasser HQ, Berlin

Group show

Matti Blind, Tamar Guimaraes, Antonia Low, Tanja Nellemann Paulsen/ Grete Aagaard, Amalia Pica, Tommy Støckel, Markus Willeke

How do we manage to understand, when traveling? When investigating a local context? And how do artists transform this process into something else? These are the questions asked throughout the series of I Know the World.

Traveling in time/space as well as research stimulates Tamar Guimaraes’ work. Out of archival material grows a narration, which carries historical material into the present – ghosts of long buried colonial times, amnesia, racism and national romanticism show their faces with new present authenticity.

Similar to the amateur theatre re-enactment from Skagen that Tamar Guimaraes includes in her work, does the artist Amalia Pica create collective actions in the city of Amsterdam. With her performance she help us to experience historical moments through déjà vu.

With their work for the window front Tanja N. Poulsen and Grete Aagaard stand up and insist on a clean consciousness and political correctness. We are happy to be presented with other aspects of the human character and not only dwell at the ruin of national dreams – the dreams of modernity stranded.

Stranded dreams and fictional decline is what we find in the room of Tommy Støckel. Curated around his own sculpture of a pillar in decline, he has chosen Matti Blind's photograph of the decaying model of a never realised modernist building; Markus Willeke's trashy watercolours of Hollywood logos and Antonia Low's long forgotten drawing of a pop-stardom dream.

The exhibition:

The Brasilian artist Tamar Guimaraes (living in Denmark, pt at Wittney Program in NY) involves herself in the research on Nordic colonialism. In the first room she shows a document in fiction form, Jan Leton and the Archive, a narrative in which a researcher attempts to find out more about a man, who was given as a gift to the bailiff of Skagen and lived there, as the bailiff’s slave, until his death in 1827. Born in the West Indies, Leton’s death record is the only official document in which his presence in Skagen is marked in writing during his 'lifetime'. Apart from his death record Leton is mentioned periodically in local newspapers and local history accounts from 1877 onwards. The images, the slides are reproductions from Skagen’s local history archive collection, and were taken in 1989 during a performance of the local theatre group (Egnspil) re-enacting Jan Leton’s arrival in Skagen.

Next to Jan Leton and the Archive, a second work A Man Called Love, made in 2007, is shown on a monitor A MAN CALLED LOVE is a research based on Francisco Candido Xavier (1910 - 2002), a Brazilian psychic medium and psychographer, who used a technique of channeling spirits in order to write - and who dedicated his life to notating the words spoken to him by disembodied spirits. He is described as 'the biggest and most prolific psychographer worldwide at all times', having written over 400 books. Xavier, reaching his greatest popularity over the military dictatorship lasting from 1964 to 1985, goes with the novel "Our Home" on to narrate a tropical vision of social democracy, this city 'situated in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro'. The video documentary carries out a materialist reading of the phenomenon of Francisco Xavier and a ’spiritualist’ reading of the Brazilian left.

In the same room, the 16 mm film work "To everyone that waves" is projected, where as the other two art works "Island" and "Drained" of Argentinean artist Amalia Pica are installed outside and in the basement of Sparwasser HQ. The three works of the artist are all based on performance and her relationship to a local placement (in Amsterdam). But a performance put on to film material does not always equal a documentation. The film "To everyone that waves" was shot during an event ("Good Bye") where white handkerchiefs were distributed with no further instructions to people waving at and from a departing tall ship. The film however portraits a generic image of departure in a time set that is hard to establish at first glance.

The work "Islands" is a sequence of 35 mm slide images (projected small sized on the wall in full daylight). The artist is walking in deep snow, her path drawing the image of a tropical island. The piece "Drained" refers to the nostalgia of a certain vitality of a community. A string of colorful fiesta light bulbs is hanging outside on the facade and on the trees, and corresponding with the surrounding 'Kneipen' (pubs) it promise party atmosphere for people passing by. The string continues into the gallery room, here drained the color giving a pale white light.

A window installation "SET UP TOURS - navigations in the periphery of freedom" is shown with the help of a digital newspapers which is a running text, and a poster. The work is done by the Danish artists Tanja Nellemann Paulsen/ Grete Aagaard, who during the next two months will be around Sparwasser HQ, with the help of an AIR (artist-in-residence).

"SET UP TOURS" presents alternative ways to navigate in the current and increasing travel and 'life style industry'. The two artists comment critically and with humor on the concept of travel in connection to exotic holiday destinations, the free cosmopolitan life, the ability to navigate in every possible city - no daily commitments – hotels – restaurants – a mobile life where you network - make agreements - get inspired or/and relax.

Though for many 'to travel' is a privilege and something only others have the opportunity to do!
Since 2005 Tanja Nellemann Poulsen and Grete Aaagaard have been collaborating and working together on the project "Set Up Tolerance" which embeds and contains for example "Speak Up! - The Magazine" for manifold remarks and unlike identities - holding and organizing workshops. During the residency period in the autumn in Berlin the artists will produce a series of short video productions and do research to the third issue of "Speak Up!". For the back room of Sparwasser has Tommy Støckel chosen fellow artists working with fiction, history and decay to show pictures-on-the-wall around his sculpture “Broken Pillar (for Berlin)”.

This sculpture has taken on the appearance of a central pillar supporting the ceiling of this small room. The pillar has the colour of the black painted walls and ceiling and reveals its inner structure by being in a staged state of decay: Where the surface of the fake pillar seems to peel and crumbles away further materials appear, such as paper and polystyrene – poor materials similar to the ones used for Hollywood film sets. This is a pillar made for Berlin and its fading authentic history.

Markus Willeke’s watercolours reflect the Hollywood aspects of Støckel’s fictional decay with their painted film company logos from carefully chosen films. Trashy science fiction and horror films are only hinted at in the titles of the works, but the associations that they give are emphasised in the rough brushstrokes and the all but glamorous treatment of Hollywood iconography. “Burned 20th Century Fox (Alien)” is one such example, where in Willeke’s painting the building on the company’s famous logo appears as a run-down old monument.

Antonia Low has contributed with an example of faded glamour in form of a drawing made in 1985, when the artist was 13 years old. The drawing “Candy” is a design for an LP cover for a fictional pop band with everything that a 1980s record cover ought to have: The band – sophisticated clothes, hair and make-up – depicted playing in an futuristic landscape of hard-edge patterns and neon colours. Now, years later, the dream of the teenager longing for pop-stardom seems as faded as the New Romantic dream – and as old and worn as the drawing itself with its faded neon colours.

Matti Blind shows the photographic work “Sediment of Time”, which depicts a model of a never realised building by Mies van der Rohe. This building, which was very similar to the one designed for Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, was to be used as the headquarters of the rum producer Bacardi in Cuba, but was never built due to the Cuban revolution. Matti Blind has through studies of building plans and photos of an original model reconstructed a new architectural model of this building. But here has been added the speculations into what might have become of the building had it actually been built before Bacardi left Cuba – and if the building had been left to decay ever since.

Image: Tamar Guimaraes

Opening Friday October 12. at 7 PM - 11 PM

Sparwasser HQ
Torstrasse 161- Berlin

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