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28/6/2007

Beneath the Concrete

Zak Gallery, Berlin

Arion Gabor Kudasz | Szymon Kobylarz | Anna Orlikowska

There is something precarious about being in the city. Traffic speeds between high-rises, dogs tug on short leashes, scaffolding leads to open windows, gated parks and communities lock their doors at night: created spaces present incongruenties with the presence of humans within them. The three artists in this exhibition fixate on the moments in which one consciously experiences their exclusion from a built, and specifically urban space. Each artist identifies an aspect of the modern human fear that the most threatening structures are the ones we have created ourselves - even with concrete foundations and with concrete supports, both the buildings and the values, which shape shared contemporary space, risk ungroundedness. The recurring absence of humans accentuates the incompatibility of these spaces with what might be a deeply buried, or built over human need.

The concept lying beneath each artist's work shares concern with the uninhabitability of city and urban space. Each artist asks us to try to look underneath and beyond the immediate landscape to one in which we feel ourselves settled. But where should we look? Kudasz's photographs look in the empty space beneath a spread yellow tarp, a deserted subway tunnel, a distant lighthouse - spaces that seem to invite entrance, but refuse company. Orlikowska's installation looks at what's down the stairs in a strange basement where heating pipes tangle across the floor - along with the subtle threat posed by an underground room, a fear of tripping and falling down encroaches upon the viewer. Kobylarz's photographs look beneath the beams and floors of ruined high-rises - his models predict the deterioration of architecture not made to last.

These spaces work to unsettle us even as they try to ask why, in our built spaces, we are still looking for somewhere to call home. The unheimlich or "unsettled" and "un-homelike" nature of the works takes on a darkly ironic meaning in the context of the apartment buildings, parks, highways that are the works general subject matter. We have tried to create environments and landscapes suitable to our needs, but seem to be obscuring them with supposedly concrete structures. We find ourselves out of place and searching for something new to call solid ground.

Opening reception on Friday, 29th of June, 7 pm

Zak Gallery
Linienstrabe 148 - Berlin
Free admission

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