KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

Window Display

Max Hattler

Serial Parallels
Hong Kong & Germany 2019
9:00 min

Serial Parallels is an experimental portrait of one of the most vertical cities in the world: Hong Kong. More than 9000 high-rise buildings divide up the valuable property of its densely populated coast today. In the 1950s it was necessary to accommodate refugees who fled communist China, so Hong Kong adapted the modernist philosophy of affordable mass architecture to create monumental public housing areas, fueling an industrial boom.
German-born and Hong Kong-based artist Max Hattler examines these self-similar housing structures by traversing photographs of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories with an artificial camera. In his precise cinematographic dissection, he reveals stroboscopic effects within the repetition and multi-layered illusory perspectives — while structural variations of the architecture become animated in themselves. Each floor of a high-rise building corresponds to a singular frame of a celluloid film strip, ingeniously merging technological as well as conceptual timelines of modern architecture and experimental film.

Max Hattler *1976, lives and works in Hong Kong
www.maxhattler.com

The on-going screening series Phantom Horizons
presents digital as well as analogue works that question the paradigm of linear perspective, seeking a new kind of “status perspective” [Bedeutungsperspektive]. The latter was a development of ancient and medieval painting, in which the size of figures is determined by their hierarchical significance. Extending this approach using the methodology of deconstruction and the possibilities of contemporary film creation, the presented works open up multifaceted, unseen horizons.

Curated by Robert Seidel | www.robertseidel.com

Exhibition
29.10. – 13.11.2019
Gallery window at
Kottbusser Str. 10
Daily: 4 pm – 2 am
Admission free