The exhibition PAINTING AS PRESENCE / This is not a love song is aimed at visitors who are curious and interested – parallel to the BERLIN BIENNIAL - in getting to know positions of painting with very different references and origins, the majority of which nonetheless emerged in Berlin.

On the basis of selected examples, PAINTING AS PRESENCE seeks to demonstrate Swedish, Danish, Finnish, German, Polish and Spanish artists’ shared interest in the material of painting and in painting’s intrinsic quality. The exhibition refers to the essence of the phenomenon of painting, whereby it also involves certain elements critical of the media.
The subtitle "This is not a love song" should be understood as a rejection of self-indulgent, “romantic gawping”. In this respect, the exhibition does not operate on a narrative-literary level, but is allied to a (pop) cultural, cool and distanced approach.

In addition, PAINTING AS PRESENCE takes up a text and a past exhibition by the curators Mika Hannula and Kari Immonen (published by NIFCA, Helsinki, 2002), which already used an "extended" concept of painting in order to clarify the principles of slowness, of a frozen interval of time and of tangible intervention in space.

In a ping-pong process, the staging of reality and a presence that is tangible through the surface of painting - the reality of painting – expand on the issue of "Realism" and help to distinguish "realisms" (in the sense of portrayal technique) and "realities".



Painting as Presence / This is not a love song, Studio 1,
March 24th – April 23th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 23. March 2006, 19 h

If you devoted yourself to art because science was never one of your strong points, you are now being given a second chance to develop a deeper, heartfelt relationship to physics. Michel de Broin’s exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien is an entertaining, educational presentation about the second main thesis of thermodynamics and how the insights of physics can offer us more freedom.

While even as late as 1865 Rudolf Clausius remarked pessimistically that no cyclic process was possible without frictional loss - meeting with the applause of Max Planck, for example -, de Broin optimistically strives for a reversal of entropy. He aims to reverse precisely that state with which physicists describe a system’s sinking energy level and thus to transform a useless potential into a positive quality.

De Broin, an expert in metaphors of resistance, not only uses this concept of 'reverse entropy' to oppose the melancholy of modern physics; above all, he wishes to put an end to the dictatorial cycle of profiteering and the exploitation that results from it. "Like the sun, which radiates and distributes its energy without demanding anything in return, this energy released from work is a kind of letting-go“, the artist explains, "something like free time or a holiday, a liberation that cannot be revoked."

Among other things, De Broin illustrates this utopian claim at the Künstlerhaus with the help of a bicycle with an added exhaust pipe; steam is released from this when pedalling. Viewing the two installations and a series of drawings, even those who are not quantum mechanics will grasp how a holiday away from frictional loss is conceivable – or that ultimately our socio-economy does not have to be a perpetuum mobile.



Reverse Entropy, Studio 2,
March 24th – April 9th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 23. March 2006, 19 h

For Yoshiaki Kaihatsu, art is not an object, but interaction. It permits itself to be used, demands dialogue, can transform itself into services and makes offers to the audience. Kaihatsu’s recipient is a user and not just an observer. This also applies to his project at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

Here, Kaihatsu will appear as operator and reporter of a fictive TV station. In Studio 3, Yoshiaki Kaihatsu has erected a cabin with no door or windows that serves as a recording studio; the artist can only enter it from above, by means of a ladder. The events in Kaihatsu's 'Studio' are directly transmitted by camera onto monitors placed in the room, and before these the audience will experience a very personal model for the construction of media reality.

In addition, a table-tennis table is installed in the room. It remains unclear whether the artist will comment on the visitors’ table-tennis tournaments from within his recording cabin, or indeed what other programme developments his broadcasting concept will undergo.

At the opening event, a table-tennis performance with the motto Coffee & Milk & Sugar will take place, featuring Yoshiaki Kaihatsu, Yukihiro Taniguchi and Norio Takasugi.



Development TV, Studio 3,
March 24th – April 9th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 23. March 2006, 19 h

Live Performance: At the opening, on March 24th, 25th and 26th an on 8th and 9th of April.