Richard Grayson’s most recent work may present
a painful musical challenge to friends of traditional performance praxis.
After all, the British artist has applied himself to an almost holy cultural
relic and is presenting a new Country and Western adaptation of Handel’s
“Messiah”. Grayson is primarily interested in the libretto,
which propagates a messianic interpretation of the Bible. In the context
of his country adaptation, this seems to refer to a conservative American
political tradition. 4th –
20th June 2004
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Jan Zakrzewski has made it his aim to investigate
the full complexity of the relations - still characte-
rised by a range of emotions - between Poland and Germany. The
great distance that he has developed from his home country –
he has lived in the USA for twenty years – permits him
to take a relaxed view of the Ger-
man- Polish relationship beyond existing stereo-
types, and to view the two countries in the context of several
centuries of European history.
Zakrzewski’s installation confronts
the visitor with political and national citations and slogans
from the past.
The artist has symbolically divided
the space into two parts: he represents Germany in one half
of the studio, Poland in the other. Mirrors set up opposite
each other - the visitor passes between them - reflect the German
and Polish quotations fixed to them. The viewer is therefore
offered a mirror-inverted view of the nations’ “typical”
identities; they have been interchanged.
In addition, Zakrzewski transforms historical
and political facts into abstractions. The audience is not only
able to walk, symbolically, along the Polish border. They can
also view a “German-Polish” night sky in the apse
of the exhibition space, an experience of unity between the
merging facts of national-political identity.
29th April – 30th May 2004, Studio 1 |
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Operation Swanlake is the documentation
of a research project by the London Institute of Militronics
and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) and a colleague
involved in this, Rosalind Brodsky, which Suzanne Treister is
now presenting to the Berlin public. IMATI is a government institute
which develops technologies for time travel and tests their
use for military purposes.
In order to develop a completely new kind of hardware generation,
Operation Swanlake mobilises every conceivable resource, and
obviously this also includes synaesthetic approaches to research
and employs cultural-historical materials.
This means the exhibition not only enables
the public to access information about links between military
shipbuilding technologies and the work of Richard Wagner. Its
visitors are also confronted with the universal military imperatives
of our civilisation.
4th – 20th June 2004 |
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Performances and actions,
photo-
graphy, multi-media installation, music and text – there is
an impressive diversity in the artistic techniques and methods with
which Genesis P-orridge has sought to bring art closer to life over
the last thirty years. The artist, who lives in New York, attacks
the establishment, petit-bourgeois mentality and social immobility
using methods that include radical performances and pioneering achievements
in the field of industrial music. And when the “cultural engineer”
P-orridge constructs sculptures from used tampons at the ICA London,
his flustered audience is in a state of turmoil. |
| One year after the first
large exhibition on the entire artistic oeuvre of Genesis P-orridge
in London, Künstlerhaus Bethanien is especially pleased to be
able to give an insight into the comprehensive creative work of this
almost legendary artist with “Painful But Fabulous” in
Berlin.
A particular highlight of the evening on 3rd June will be Harald
Fricke’s presentation of one of the exhibition’s special
features; the motto is “Disco-Wreckage – acoustic travel
through industrial landscapes, 1976-2004”.
4th – 20th June 2004
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