On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Ingo Gerken draws a personal essence from the shelves of the library housed here and combines a selection of publications that have become historical with objects currently found on site. The free forces on the scale of reference and value start to shift through pictorial and spatial interaction between these trivial objects and catalogued art images. Reconstruction and deconstruction of the institution’s own art historiography are only a blink of an eye away from each other. Collective visual knowledge gets retrieved and activated from the Bethanien archive, not to remember, but to open up and measure itself against a real situation conceived as sculpture.

Ingo Gerken (*1971 in Lippetal) lives and works in Berlin. From 1995 to 2000 he studied Fine Art at the Muthesius-Hochschule in Kiel and Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art. His work has been honoured several times (e.g. Stiftung Kunstfonds, Akademie der Künste, Neuköllner Kunstpreis) and shown in numerous international solo and group exhibitions. Participation in biennials and residency programmes, including Havana, Moscow, Johannesburg, Bangalore, Kolkata. 2005 co-founder of the Berlin discourse and action space WestGermany / Büro für postpostmoderne Kommunikation. His interventions, sculptures and photographs reject a fixed materiality and favour the purely condensed moment. In 2022 he published his ongoing project OFFENES BUCH with Hatje Cantz Verlag, which deals artistically and conceptually with (de-)constructive methods of (re-)presenting art in catalogue images and art publications.
Solo exhibitions (selection): MZIN / Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (2023), Galerie Daniel Marzona, Berlin (2022), Kunstverein Ingolstadt (2022), Mezzaterra Gallery, Belluno (2021), Galerie Oel-Früh, Hamburg (2020), European Month of Photography, Berlin (2020)