The exhibition "The Helsinki
School – A New Approach" - a cooperative project
between the Künstlerhaus Bethanien GmbH and the TaiK: University
of Art and
Design Helsinki - is a touring exhibition due to travel all over
Europe. It intends to show a wider international audience the
working methods of 22 artists trained in the field of contemporary
photography at the Helsinki School.
On the basis of the diversity and formal range of these works,
the presentation aims to illustrate the atmosphere of freedom
and the open and cooperative teaching methods at the acclaimed
and influential academy.
www.thehelsinkischool.com
Studio 1, 16th September thru 23rd October 2005, Wednesdey - Sunday,
2pm - 7pm, Opening: Thursday, 15th September 2005, 7pm
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With a sly wink and a certain sense of comedy
and irony Lisa Strömbeck reflects on the hirtory of former
GDR.
She documents the personal stories of eight former GDR citizens,
with whom she spoke at length about their life in the GDR and
the period after the Wende. Entirely different evaluations of
the political and private changes experienced by the protagonists
emerged; changes triggered by the dramatic process of transforming
a socialist social structure into capitalism and all its inherent
implications.
Disillusionment and hope thus occupy equal places in this work,
which contains no spoken commentary by the artist, but leaves
any statements to the people interviewed.
Studio 2, 16th September thru 2nd October
2005, Wednesdey - Sunday, 2pm - 7pm, Opening: Thursday, 15th September
2005, 7pm
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Germaine Koh stages her art as a
form of apparently casual, yet calculated theatre. In her hands,
everyday places and objects, familiar situations and actions are
trans-
formed into astonishingly salient scenarios, and the audience
must make sense of these. They are obliged to work out for themselves
how the objects and actions confronting them came to be where
they are, and what conceivable intention lies behind them. The
absurd demands an answer. In Koh’s work, passers-by are
tempted to speculate.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the artist has developed into
a specialist for public space, who often even relates gallery
works to the world outside or uses them to focus on the transition
into public space. Her exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien
brings this process to a head, presenting a piece of outdoor space
in the middle of the enclosed studio.
Germaine Koh has placed a section of urban wasteland found in
the city of Berlin into the studio. The clumps of ground, laid
out to fill the room as if they were a huge carpet, are grown
over by grass and weeds and populated with the usual tiny creatures.
The artist will be watering, cultivating and caring for this transferred
biotope during the exhibition, meaning that her art can grow and
flourish beneath the visitors’ feet.
This metaphor of slow growth may have an ironic appeal in an artists’
residence, but Koh leaves it entirely up to the public to make
points and draw conclusions. Gradually, visitors discover that
they are walking on a section of the “death strip”
beside the Wall - which was once close by - and that grass has
now grown, quite literally, over this chapter of history. But
above all, they watch a vegetative change that takes place quite
naturally, completely disregarding art and its viewers, who will
nonetheless see the usual gaps and empty spaces in the city with
different eyes in future.
Studio 3, 16th September thru 2nd October
2005, Wednesdey - Sunday, 2pm - 7pm, Opening: Thursday, 15th September
2005, 7pm
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From Berlin into the World - for
the tenth time ART FORUM BERLIN shows contemporary art, fresh,
energetic, full of quality - the best artists and their galleries
from Berlin, Germany, Europe, the USA, Latin America, Asia and
Australia, and for the tenth time Künstlerhaus Bethanien
will participate at the fair.
This year our ART FORUM stand will be staged by Lisa Raskin. The
Miaimi born artist who lives in New York invents psychic sites
of an alarming future and a disastrous just-past. She begins with
concrete imagery and narratives of landscape and terror-- bunkers,
radioactive test sites, portals-- and then pushes this imagery
through a set of distortions and projections as though through
a psychic funhouse mirror. The work finally converges in entropic,
disorderly, materially charged spaces of dirt and bodily play.
The installation that Raskin creates for ARTFORUM Berlin is a
what-if scenario of inconceivable destruction scaled according
to a formless, yet palpable childhood memory. Set in an art fair
office space, Raskin's sculptural event is made from pieces of
extruded foam and wall paint merging with melted plastic army
men. Through the act of melting, these elements are transformed
into blobs of color that simultaneously create a topographical
landscape and model atomic war plan skirmish.
29th September - 03rd October 2005, 12 - 8 pm –
Opening: 28th September, 4 - 9 pm
art-forum-berlin.de |
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