The Good Without The Bad & The Ugly: Berlin Art Week 2024
I bring you my highlights including a soccer match on LSD, angelic performances, a wild banquet, surreal pillowtalk, and a monster cage fight.
Guys, what did I say after that Mike Kelley review? I want something nice. All I wanted was to restore my lost brain cells with some well-curated, thoughtful exhibitions. The clown who hoped to get that with this year’s Berlin Art Week is sitting on the train back to Cologne right now… I ate Lidl sushi in line for the Julia Stoschek Foundation opening. I sacrificed my favorite shoes to appease my step count and FOMO. I collected press releases of every show I stepped into. After all that I’m left with one thought: The Fuck was that?
How could Berlin go from hero to zero in one year? I loved the Berlin Art Week 2023. This year though, the art fair Vienna Contemporary stole the spotlight. And you can tell. Major Berlin gallerists and institutions chose Schnitzel over Currywurst, the cool kids left right after the Art Week Opening party (if they even went at all). What signal does that send if art professionals go outwards instead of supporting the home match?
I’m leaving the hot takes and rants for Instagram, so follow @thegenzartcritic for those breakdowns. Here right now, I want to share with you the shows that I truly loved in Berlin.
Alexandra Pirici: Attune
I’m not a performance art girly. But Alexandra (Millennial, Romanian) absolutely slayed. I arrived in the halls that once were a train station, the high ceiling mixed the whispers, laughs, and chit-chats of the people underneath. The performance was already underway. The space didn’t demand silence, nor did the performers fight against the noise. Both coexisted peacefully.
Four performers moved across a sand dune, crawled onto a spiraling pedestal, and sat underneath a metallic tree laboratory growing chemical gardens. They moved in synch, stumbled, and ran in synch. With gentle gestures, they helped each other move the air from one to another, convincing me that I was breathing something weighty. They invited visitors to come closer and follow their journey. I observed how (un)willing people were to cooperate, how much distance they kept or broke. When they sang in harmony, it sounded sacred. They imitated wildlife sounds and the clicks and buzzes of machines. Gleaming flames came from their phone flashlights. Artificial and prehistoric life passed in front of my eyes. And after what felt like an hour, maybe less, the performers slowly left. Still singing, their echoes stayed in the hall.
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, through October 6, 2024. Stauffenbergstraße 41, 10785 Berlin
Marianna Simnett. Winner
Marianna’s (Millennial, British) video works are arthousily-disgusting and smartly uncanny. And I mean that as a compliment. Also at Hamburger Bahnhof, she presents her new work Winner (2024). Several grainy video installations fill a dark room. The motto of the theme party is soccer, specifically on the occasion of this year’s UEFA Soccer World Championship.
In one video, I can see the Berlin Television Tower in the distance of a soccer field. Babies and kids sit in the arena as the new hooligans - You gotta start them young. They lip-synch songs with overlaid adult mouths while pyrotechnics explode all around. There’s fights, games, parties, chaos, passion, a female referee getting herself together in the ventilation room after a breakdown. I almost hear the SCHLAAAAND in the back of my head. It all boils down to the uniting ecstasy of soccer, the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school football.
If you’re tired, you can sit down on a podium adorned with balls. Not soccer balls. The shapes of actual testicles. And you sure need balls to be a winner. Did I fully grasp what Winner is about? Nuh-uh. And maybe I wouldn’t have even if I spent more time than I did on my tight Art Week schedule. But I surely vibed with it.
My favorite part was the Imbiss Lady. In between the slow-motion shots of people violently clashing while playing soccer, a woman opens the shutters of her snack bar, preparing fries and currywurst while singing a soothing, comforting song. I think of those memes of the Kebab man or Imbiss woman turning into an angel sent from God when trying to get something to eat at 4 am on a crazy night out. Her unusually deep voice, rough appearance, and lipstick and cigarette residue smudged across her teeth (yikes!) stand in stark contrast to the lines she recites. You can be a wrecking ball in the next life. I doubt whether I can believe her kind words. Because as she ends her song, she pulls down the shutters again, leaving me with myself. Bro, I didn’t even get my order, TF…
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, through November 3, 2024. Stauffenbergstraße 41, 10785 Berlin
Lia Darjes: Plates I-XXXI
Lia presents a series of photographic still lifes. She updates the lavish table arrangement paintings that gained popularity from the 17th century on for a 2020s audience. Lia brings the table outside, turning the trees and scrub into the wallpaper. Although Lia takes the pictures by day, the flashlight looks like a spotlight thrown onto a dark stage. This theatrical light contrast is what still life painters traditionally loved to play with.
They also loved to add animals to the wine, dishes, produce, and fine silver they depicted. Hunted animals most often. Instead of presenting animals as dead trophies, Lia invites them as participants. Although they bring nothing to the table, they sure feast on it. A squirrel is caught in 4K grabbing a watermelon. Wasps enjoy some fruits while snails get into a glass of juice. Insects infesting the produce were employed as symbols of death and decay in between luxurious celebrations of life. Minus the luxury in this case, as Lia switches fine china and silverware for simple cups and Tupperware.
I was surprised to learn that Lia is a Millennial because her aesthetic reminds me a lot of Gen Z styles: the curated fake chaos with messy tablecloths and leftovers, the harsh flashlight, the overall focus on imperfection. Just like an Instagram dump of the post-party impressions.
Robert Morat, through October 19, 2024. Linienstrasse 107, 10115 Berlin.
Emma Adler: STRG-Z
I can try to show you a bunch of pics but nothing will do her justice. You have to see her show in the flesh. Emma (Millennial, German) built a cage. I walk through a narrow way, surrounded by grey metallic grids topped with spikes. There’s actual spider webs in between. I can’t look outside, the gallery windows are covered with a gradient window foil. And there’s a shitload of smoke. As I get deeper into the cage, there are animal wildlife sounds, feels like a freaky zoo in here. But there aren’t any animals. Am I the animal? Is this like a human zoo thing? Oh lord, it’s getting spicy. I see wooden pegs attached to the columns. Am I heading into a cage fight against a vampire?
Well, kinda. From the cage center, I see a TV screen on the wall behind. It plays a video of beige linen & polo-shirt wearing rich kids inside the same cage. I get paranoid trying to spot if there are actual cameras around. There aren’t. They drink champagne, they laugh, they fix their perfectly gelled hair. It must have been so ironic to see (or be) this very same type of person at Emma’s exhibition opening. One of the guys in the video waves, absolutely not realizing that he’s the one being watched, not the other way around.
A blonde woman wears a Midsommar-coded flower crown. Now here’s a twist: With some AI help, they turn into monsters, zombies with hanging flesh and dripping blood. This is some The Image of Dorian Gray type shit. In between, the footage turns black and white like in some Paranormal Activity movie. The tree trunk I walk around appears on TV, gaining life on its own and turning into meat as it grabs for the camera. I am not sure how I feel about the wood piece because there’s kind of no way around a Giuseppe Penone (Baby Boomer, Italian) reference. Emma said she ironically connected the dead trunk to health and nature cults and that’s where we get to her inspiration.
While I was good to go with a general class critique, Emma is refering to the current political shift. She saw AfD ads inviting for a “German BBQ 🤨” with monstrous AI-generated models. Isn’t it odd how an official ad was not only blatantly fake but extremely creepy in its look as well? That’s what she’s referencing in her engraving /the deceit//II (2024) of a raised hand with six fingers, writing Die Wahrheit [The Truth] underneath. Even though I wouldn’t have come up with that take on my own, I sure enjoyed this different perspective. Maybe evil isn’t in our entire code. But as Emma shows, pressing STRG-Z or Ctrl-Z surely isn’t enough to undo fascism.
Anton Janizewski, through October 19, 2024. Weydingerstrasse 10, 10178 Berlin.
The Houses Of The Serpent Bearer. The 3rd House.
It was relatively dark in the gallery. Structures covered with old-fashioned eggshell-colored bedsheets, lace, and frills reminded me of childhood pillow forts, although these are made more carefully than my friends and I used to do. A black and white video is projected onto the center of each piece: Human figures wearing vintage dresses and enlarged Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011, British-Mexican) type masks appear in them. They make soap bubbles and recite poems. The subtitles claim they speak coherent words, but the sound is played backward. It feels like trying to decode my senile grandma’s cryptic childhood stories. The speech is layered with light, slightly dissonant sound. There’s something both scary and soothing about this setup.
The exhibition was a group effort by Gen Z and Millennial artists: musician and puppeteer Yara Asmar (Lebanese), artist/writer/curator Pina Bendfeld (German), and artist Yevgeniya Kuzmenko aka Atelier Planeta (Ukrainian) created the show as part of the series The Houses Of The Serpent Bearer. The press release explains: “Conceptually, the series refers to the myth of the 13th sign of the zodiac; the Serpent Bearer. It acts as a symbolic guide and stands for that which we do not (want to) see – but which nevertheless influences us.” Wouldn’t have guessed that on my own, but cool concept nevertheless. Two books were lying out but I wasn’t sure if that’s untouchable art or “please-touch-reference-help”. Maybe those were the keys to solving the riddle, but I’m fine with staying in the mystery.
Galerie Noah Klink, through October 5, 2024. Kulmer Straße 17, 10783 Berlin.
Berlin Art Week took place from September 11 to 15, 2024. Get more info on the next edition on their official website.
Nevertheless, Berlin was fun. I hope you enjoyed this small selection and that you’ll get the chance to see the shows yourself! Don’t forget to subscribe: As a subscriber, you can like my post and push my visibility, and leave comments. And if you’d like to, I’d appreciate you sending this review to someone who might enjoy it as well!
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic