Lucky For You That's What I Like! Two Days In Hamburg
Unlike back in February, most exhibitions in Hamburg weren't giving what they were supposed to give. I did see some exciting works all across the city though, so come along!
It seemed as if pressed soil pillars prevented the ceiling at Galerie Borchardt from collapsing. These pieces by Susi Gelb (Millennial, German) are actually rolled-up mesh, the earth reduced only to a printed pigment image… although the earth looks kinda weird, it might be extremely zoomed in or AI. The gallery is unusual in itself, it’s partly an office. I tried to make myself invisible walking past the people working behind their desktop screens.
In the very back, I saw fevery seascape paintings by Niko Abramidis & NE (Millennial, German). They were giving children-book-ocean-discovery-game, but in a good way. Ships, storms, sea monsters, gaming interfaces, and maps mingle on the canvas, interrupted by textures ranging from paint to spray, glitching between analog and digital.
Leda Bourgogne (Millennial, Austrian) contributed two black velvet blobs hanging on the wall. They look like black holes from some cartoony universe. I really want to touch that soft velvet but Leda attached a lock to one and metal rods to the other. That’s not very inviting if you ask me. I mean, come on, that lock isn’t gonna stop me from stealing the piece if I really wanted to. And the metal reminds me of hostile urban design that keeps unwanted people from lying down on benches. Really sending me mixed signals over here…
Arriving at Gruppe Motto, I first saw a FOR RENT sign right outside the building, written in bloody red letters. Odd, I thought. Not only is the gallery located in an apartment, the house and its connotations are at the center of the exhibition. Walking through, I noticed a phone lying around. Did the photographer taking the installation shots leave it there? I get a little closer and notice a video playing: It’s Toni Mosebach’s and Nora Strömer’s (both Gen Z, German) work 4 Zimmer, Küche, BAD BAD BAD (2024), adapting a classic rental description, the German word “Bad” for “bathroom” getting a twist in English.
The short video imitates a house tour which for some reason happens at night. And the realtor got lizard eyes but anyway. I take on the POV of the person interested in renting the place. The realtor walks me through the rooms and we arrive in the bathroom. I open the door to back out again only to find myself in another bathroom. Huh? I turn back to the first bathroom. I try to get out: another bathroom. I frantically try to find a way out of this bathroom circle of hell while my realtor keeps on yapping about the apartment’s features.
I had a throwback to when I was zapping through the TV program as a kid and there was some French (?) psycho-horror movie playing. The protagonist was stuck in some castle or the like and as she was moving from one corridor to another, she always found herself stuck at the same spot. There was no way out, the windows were just a slit in the concrete. But Toni’s and Nora’s protagonist eventually jumps out the window, ending up back in front of the apartment building with the realtor handing in the keys.
I love how Nora and Toni are picking up a genre of videos that gained momentum on TikTok during the pandemic. Those surreal videos start out fairly normal, often imitating a social media trend or a Snapchat story that then takes absurd plot twists and changes from psychothriller to reality show to comedy in the blink of an eye. Creators that mastered this genre include @grantbeans and @jercho1. I love this making its way into art.
While watching, I heard a scream. Was it in the video or somewhere outside? I keep on watching. It started over. As I moved on, I heard the scream again. I looked outside: It was just three girls fooling around across the street.
I was on my way back to the train station as I passed by Galerie Carolyn Heinz. She’s currently presenting Gabriele Basch (Baby Bomer, German) and Claus Georg Stabe (Millennial, German). Gabriele’s work caught me with her complex technique: Colorful splashes reminding me of marbling try to find space on cut-out paper. The bright hues made me think of Kerstin Brätsch’s (Gen X, German) marble pieces.
I didn’t even realize at first that the paper had holes in it because of the neon in between. As I looked closer, I noticed that the backs of the works are spray painted with neon, which reflects back onto the white wall and adds depth. I haven’t seen anyone working like that yet! Claus’s pieces, too, play with cut-out forms, taking on a rather collage/drawing/print direction. The shapes he collages onto and in between his drawing layers remind me of sewing stencils (my mom’s a seamstress, so I see them lying around a lot). One work, Separation of the First Stage III (2019) only imitates collage, though: By alternating between wider and tighter gaps, Claus uses only ballpoint pen lines to create the illusion of physical shapes on paper.
At the Politics of Love exhibition at Kunsthaus Hamburg, I was intrigued by Anna Ehrenstein’s (Albanian-German, Millennial) work The Balkanization of the Cloud (2022). At first I hated it. Hang on, hang on, let me explain. So there’s this lounge chair and VR goggles. I lay down and put them on. The VR experience lasts around 10 minutes: In The Hypnotization of the Cloud, the artist appears in a tight short bodysuit, speaking in a calm soothing voice as she takes me on a journey to “unlearn imperialist cyber-fascism”.
Girlypop tried to put me into hypnosis, she did guided meditation with me, showed me pretty beaches, and played relaxing spa resort music. All that time, she was reciting mantras and affirmations, encouraging me that I, too, can reject imperialism and feel good about myself. You are a good person. After those ten minutes, I supposedly underwent a radical change in my mindset. Girl, what the actual fuck. Yeah, as if me doing some breathing in and out for a couple of minutes is gonna secure world peace. I first believed she was deadass with her whole learning-unlearning-BS vocabulary. But I was wondering (and hoping) if maybe that’s all satire.
I started looking for clues: The greenscreen around her avatar is messy. When she’s speaking, she’s sometimes looking away from me as if she’s reading from a teleprompter. In between, she’s fixing a hair strand. In short: It’s chaotic. And seeing the second part of the work after I put away the VR goggles confirmed my suspicion: She (THANK GOD) is being ironic! It’s so obvious: So many people don’t actually want to do the work to make this world a better place. They just hope for someone to soothe their self-doubt and affirm they are good. Anna knows damn well that ten minutes of cyber-meditation aren’t doing anything to the deeply rooted oppressive structures we are all entangled in. If anything, she’s mocking the idea that radical change could ever be a pleasant, comfy process: Reconciling how you’re complicit in violence and oppression isn’t pina colada at the beach.
What was that second part that made it click for me? It was a video, The Nation State as an Influencer. Btw, I forgot to mention that this work is a collab with Jonathan Omer Mizrahi (Millennial, Israeli). It’s a sequence of videos, I started watching when Jonathan appeared: He’s on a bus driving through the West Bank, doing a vlog. His voice and mannerisms are so 2010s Valley Girl Youtuber. He explains that the bus is going to a vineyard to try “authentic Jewish wine”. Jonathan tilts the camera, pointing out the military surveillance on the route. He says “We own this land” with pouty selfie-ready lips. Who’s we? He sounds as if he’s not playing himself, but somebody entirely else on vacation. Whose claims are readily accepted and whose are doubted?
The final part I saw featured Anna again. She’s in Albania at the house of her grandparents. Just like Jonathan, she puts on an Influencer persona. Anna set herself a goal to civilize the Albanian people and make them “real white Europeans” (Jody, you need to see this). The European Union flag peeks out through a pixelated Augmented Reality filter. Anna is teaching her grandpa proper European values, making him read affirmations out loud in English such as White people take and not deal cocaine. White people bribe politicians and call it lobbying. She then happily congratulates him in Albanian on doing such a good job. Europe really is the best country in the world!
At LEVEL ONE, Juran Landt (Millennial, German) presents a wall piece of drawings on 100 sheets of paper. what is a man? (2024) asks the title, offering a frightening glimpse into the incel manosphere. The sheets are filled with text and images. Judging by the many text breaks and color changes, it appears to be a conversation between two or more parties, a timeline indicating that it’s a transcript. Maybe from an online group chat? You know those memes that go “Me and the boys are going to jail if our Xbox party chat ever gets leaked”? Many guys are fine with saying a whole lot of horrible stuff in secrecy. But since the pandemic, the Xbox party chat and locker room talk are casually streamed and shared for the entire world to hear and see. Podcasts bros really became the last straw for the downfall of political consensus. People on TikTok are satirically demanding men to be banned from accessing microphones and I can’t say they’re wrong…
What is that transcribed convo about? Juran is sneaky with it, inverting the text as if I somehow ended up on the wrong side of the computer screen. It might be cheating, but I took some pics and inverted them back to normal: One person is asking the other if they plan on staying in Romania… Oh lord. That’s Carlson Tucker and Andrew Tate on that damn podcast. Juran drew some stills from the video version on the very right edge of the work, or should I say on the far right?
What other pictures are there? The film still of Matrix (1999) where Neo takes the red pill to find the truth (for my non-chronically online readers: That’s where the Red Pillers got their name from). I recognize Peter Paul Ruben’s (1577-1640, Flemish) The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (c. 1618), art history proves the whole Your Body, My Choice rhetoric has been around for eternities. There’s Pablo Picasshole’s (1881-1973, Spanish) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), some guy whose face gets screen-light more frequently than actual sunlight, a guy in a fedora (which is traumatic enough in itself), a formal presidential portrait of Ronald Reagan, I think there was also a screenshot from GTA. Nothing has changed since James Brown said it: This is a man’s world…
But Juran gets a plottwist in. Two pictures of iconic paintings made it into the madness: Judith slaying Holofernes (1614-18) by the one and only Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654, Italian) and Judith with the head of Holofernes (c. 1530) by Lucas Cranach the Older (1472-1553, German). The story and its art historical versions have become a symbol of feminist liberation. How do these symbols work here, though? Is escalation the only way out? Or is taking out one dangerous figure after another just insufficient to make the world safe?
#/media/Datei:Lucas_Cranach_the_Elder_-_Judith_with_the_Head_of_Holofernes_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg){kind=link}
Every detail here is a drawing. Drawing’s an intriguing choice: It’s not a quick solution, but rather the polar opposite of AI-generated imagery that’s so easy to get. I can’t imagine how much painstaking work that must have been. And how long that must have taken. By the time you finished researching the incel rabbit hole, it already morphed into something new. Is it even possible to keep up?
All shows mentioned:
NATURE IS NEVER FINISHED at Galerie Borchardt, until December 20, 2024
HAUS at Gruppe Motto, until December 15, 2024
Trompe-l’œil at Carolyn Heinz, November 8 until December 7, 2024
Politics of Love at Kunsthaus Hamburg, until February 2, 2025
Transcripts at LEVEL ONE, until December 21, 2024
If you’re curious about other shows I’ve seen and reviewed in Hamburg, you can access those here.
Thanks for reading the recap! I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please leave me a like or share a comment. And I’d be happy if you shared this one with someone. :)
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic