calendario eventi  :: 

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9/11/2001

Soft boys for hard times

Sparwasser HQ, Berlin

Karl Holmqvist (S), Lars Ramberg (N) and Knut Ã…sdam(N)

This seventy's generation of scandinavian artists prove that masculine identity can also be about soul searching, identity politics and general comfort.

Holmqvist seeks in his work varying public response to ambivalent masculine attributes and icons and through his performing and writing strategies he considers how music can create identity, how physical appearance can be a protest and how text can be a sound of freedom.

Knut Ã…sdam turns to even deeper psychological experiences, he considers the city to be an apparatus, exemplified by the (dark club) room, a place where the borders between personality, bodies an surroundings float together to be one subconsciousness.

The idea of freedom and sociability is the link to the artist Lars Ramberg. His artistic practice is bound to a more material and formalistic structure based on socialistic architecture, that seeks to create space for equal human beings - where politics and culture are parallel matters for the big organism - the mass. He constructs a monument of doubt, based on the questions : can one power structure be replaced by another, without any intermezzo - of freedom?

WORKS

Ã…sdams contribution to the exhibition is a 9 minutes audio-narrative, installed in a small constructed dark room in SW, where the audience can lay down and listen. "Legendary Psychasthenia 1999 reedit" seeks to deal with an idea of the urban unconscious through the conventions of the radio play, experimental audio and a reference to Beat poetry. The piece reveals architecture or space as imbedded with fantasy and sexuality, and functions as a sort of audio-collage of topical monologues, a love story and a narratively textured audio.

With Karl Holmqvist is the possibility of a reference library of audio recordings published during 2001 (Metronome, Paletten, Make It Happen, oVER) the poster project SlimVolume initiated in London and to pick up the most recent issue of wall journal Aesthetic Movement portraying a collection of men with long hair and beards among others; Marx, Darwin, Lennon, Jesus and Maharishi.

Lars Ramberg is showing a huge digital manipulated photograph, the first sketch to the project : "Palast der Republik" as a monument of Doubt, a project questioning, whether it is possible to change/replace, manually, the history from one day to the other. The City Berlin has after 89 renamed or demolished several east German icons and therefore a movement of resistance has arousen. The question is, if Berlin /Germany is able to keep balance of a democratic pluralism. And - Is Berlin able to keep that, what makes the place so interesting, namely the historic authenticity of its changing ideologies.

The exhibition is supported by the Norweigen Embassy in Berlin and Norwegian International Program for Visual Art (NO ART)

PS. greetings also from solvej and henrikke !

Opening the November 10 from 7 to 11 pm

From November 14 to December 15

SPARWASSER HQ
OFFENSIVE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART AND COMMUNICATION
TORSTRASSE 161, D - 10115 BERLIN
TELEPHONE: +49 30 21803001

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