randomasawayofbeing

Where to start – Berlin – one of my favorite European cities – the most unhinged, random truly-out there place. I was there for Berlin Art Weekend with my son Bob Bicknell Knight who had a show at Number 1 Main Road Gallery. Cycling through the city examples of casual, spontaneous acts opened up in front of me – my favorites were the insane huge mass barbecue in Lichtenberg Park on a sunny day, the seemingly 24 hour club on wasteland in the Elsenbrucke Bridge and the I-think-I-will-live-here-settlement along the Flutgraben, a tributary of the Spree in the Lohmuhleninsel district - glorious. I saw so many extraordinary works of art in fantastic places steeped in layers of history – just space for the highlights as I went to around 20 spaces - where to start….. Gropius Bau had an inciteful group show Re-navigating the Afrasian sea and Notions of Diaspora. A stunning VR experience by Sim Chi Yin allowed me to light up the digital space whilst watching the world collapse. Daniel Boyd created an unbelievable experience by covering walls and windows with mirrors and holes that both revealed and concealed as you walked through the rooms.  Salome Chatriot’s paintings at Office Impart disturb in all the right ways, the video We Empty Ourselves and Accelerate the Hatching’ is mesmerizing. Photography during the Holocaust at the Museum of photography was, as expected fairly harrowing. The line that stayed with me was on a Nazi poster – Entry for Jews is Forbidden….Isn’t it wonderful to be just by ourselves!’ – all a little Brexit familiar. La Horde at the Julia Stoschek Foundation was an opportunity to re-think dance, the videos were full of energy. Cao Fei at Spruth Magers was truly mind blowing – the whole experience got me rethinking what I know. MatryoshkaVerse the video exploring the Russian/Chinese theme park on the Inner Mongolia border was extraordinary. The VR experience RMB City has amazing detail and the ability to pick up objects and examine them closely. Human Is, the group show at the Schinkel Pavillon, a stunning space, had Ian Cheng’s Emissary Sunsets The Self – just fantastic. Win McCarthy, Karen Lamassonne and Martin Wong at KW Institute had some highlights. Karen’s very odd novella type film was eccentrically bizarre. Martin’s history and excessive body of work was so insightful and disturbingly necessary today. Win had a great concept set out in such a stylish way. 

germanartartartinberlin

So 4 days in Berlin - it still feels like London in the 80s - whole areas wonderfully lost and left alone but others full of cranes and in development. A short walk can encompasses tightly politicised areas around embassies, through currywurst tourist spots and back out to neighbourhood shared spaces. Went for the 10th Berlin Biennale http://www.berlinbiennale.de/ but saw lots of other work in both private and government spaces - much of which was better, the 10th biennale was not a patch on the 9th. 

So much was seen but the real treasure was often the building the work was in, something that is always a pleasure - artists carving out access to interesting spaces.. 

The cavernous Hamburger Bahnhof https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/hamburger-bahnhof/home.html has a wonderfully all encompassing complex show using work from their collection. It’s always a real joy to check out the permanent Beuys and Newman piece my soul left out, room that does not care. as part of their education work they have a room full of work contextualise within speech bubbles - I feel a visual research projection coming on at some point. Philip Parreno at Gropius Bau was stunning. https://www.museumsportal-berlin.de/en/museums/martin-gropius-bau/ It was a series of spaces and events all controlled by the data collected from yeast. no words could really describe it but the image of a shoal of floating fish reflected in a dark pool rippling from sound waves will stay with me for a long time. 

wolfgang georgsdorf had an extraordinary smell machine which was as very powerfully firing smaller that took you to a number of spaces Proustian like. 

 Some Biennale 10 highlights - 1 from each space. At Akademie der Künste Lynette yiadom-Blakey Victoria video piece recon-deconstruction of an incident in a supermarket halted you in your tracks - acting as a mirror to one's own inherent prejudice. https://www.adk.de/en/academy/index.htm

At KW institute Cinthia Marcelle had an uplifting video of a choreographed band at a crossroad - lovely.  https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/

Tony Cokes overwhelming text-speech-music-videos in the basement of ZK/U felt like being punched in the face with obvious bad news. http://www.berlinbiennale.de/artists/T/tony-cokes excellent.

The private view at Tanya Leighton threw up a smirkingly excellent video piece in the cellar by John Smith https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Bm2UZN4NDI a real highlight. FORTS video the shining at Wedding was spookily disturbing- worth a look and also great to get out that way. 

The total all encompassing most excellent experience was going out to Kindl. http://www.kindl-berlin.com/ The space is totally awesome, an old brewery, the stills are in place within the magnificent brutal industrial cathedral like architecture. The show Defying Gravity by Tanya Onorato and Nico Krebs was thoughtful, well crafted, conceptually tight with stunning use of materials- it is a space which also has a great view back into Berlin - it’s a must go to place.

I’ve missed out Spruth Magers, Berlinische Gallery, Neuer Berliner, the art bunker https://www.sammlung-boros.de/boros-collection.html?L=1  and many more as I thought that I would mention just the amazing!!!

coveringbooks

reviewing the photos from Berlin - here are a couple of architectural textiles for the collection covered buildings. meanwhile if you like your revenge sweet and twisted you have to watch Wild Tales http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3011894/ - 6 stories of people sort of getting it. George Clooney brings it home in Money Monster  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2241351/  as the film relentlessly moves towards its depressingly obvious conclusion.

I've been doing some reading at the moment which is informing my teaching for next year - both The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and other clinical tales - Oliver Sacks http://selfdefinition.org/science/25-greatest-science-books-of-all time/18.%20Oliver%20Sacks%20-%20The%20Man%20Who%20Mistook%20His%20Wife%20for%20a%20Hat%20and%20Other%20Clinical%20Tales%20(1985).pdf and Design as Art - Bruno Munari http://www.shawncalvert.com/images/uploads/munari_whatisdesign.pdf are informing the thinking behind a new set of workshops that I hope to run on the textiles design course at NUA. The idea of thinking about the object without context, lateral thinking around brain mapping, the idea of 'open sculptures' in relation to audience, involvement, iterations of organic 'growth' patterns and deconstructing an objects memory. This along with Joseph Beuys thoughts on art making....thinking forms - how we mould our thoughts. spoken forms - how we shape our thoughts into words. social sculpture - how we mould and share the world in which we live: sculpture as a social sculpture. Linking this thinking to an excellent video in the exhibition Das Kapital - it shows a great happening - We Have No Art, a 1967 documentary about Sister Corita Kent, directed by Baylis Glascock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HtiQFQTFPM

berlinspastisalwaysthere

as anticipated the highlight of the Biennale  was the all engaging work of Jon Rafman. His VR watched over the Brandenburg Gate and square was harrowing and just extraordinary. http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/participants/rafman/ Cécile B. Evans was a close second - would you do increasingly bad things to make things better - the phrase from the film is still ringing around in my skull. http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/participants/evans/ Her work explored our relationship to our 'now'. The Biennale really engaged with the issue of how to display digital work physically (beyond a screen) Watching it in a room while sitting floating in water on a wooden platform accentuate this.  Many others including the work of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch with their 'adult child play areas' have addressed this, although the work itself continues to perplex and be as confrontational as ever. http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/participants/fitch/ All the spaces the work was shown in also provided glimpses into Berlin's history and as ever delivered contextual baggage to deconstruct at every turn. The boat ride was a great way to see art and watch Berlin drift by. Last seen in Rome in a show about refugees I have to recommend the work of Halil Altindere - the videos content and text are challenging and give voice to the voiceless. here's his work about Istanbul https://vimeo.com/78545350

There was a monumental show of Carl Andre's work at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - lots of excellent examples of the 'stuff stacked up following simple repetitive systems' but also some early cut pieces and a selection of the material that he collected which informed the work. http://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/carl-andre-sculpture-as-place-1958-2010.html There was also a highly crafted curated visual essay around Joseph Beuys work The Capital Space 1970–1977. This created a web of connections which played off each other. http://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/das-kapital.html The huge show of Beuys work shown in a building that used to be a railway station was just awesome. I am a massive fan of the work and ideology and have seen a lot of his work but this blew me away and I felt I understood the work and the man in new and layered ways. Maybe you can only see Beuy's in Germany to really get him. http://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/die-sammlungen-the-collections-les-collections.html  Berlin appeared to change and recontextualised every piece I viewed over 4 days.

The Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art had a okayish show of Erwin Wurm's work (the house was fun!) but their permanent collection was astounding and reanimated my love of Naum Gabo. It is a highly curated focused exhibit with excellent examples and as ever the wars and devastation is never far away and in fact frames the curation. They also had an exhibition titled Dada Africa which reframed the connections and made new sense to my understanding.

Of all the 'tourist spaces' visited I was most moved by the holocaust memorial at ..... one starts off chatty and breezily entering low blocks from a bright busy street and then you find yourself engulfed within the regimented towering blocks providing space to get lost but there is also no hiding. The Jewish Museum was less so and felt it was trying too hard to elicit emotion, although the spaces created were physically dynamic.  A quick shout out to the Medical Museum http://www.bmm-charite.de/en/index.html There is a room within the permanent exhibition “On the Trace of Life” that has exhibits similar to those that used to be shown at the Hunterian Museum in London before it was realigned to be 'family friendly'. https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums It was life affirming to see such devastating and difficult exhibits.

Berlin itself is such an extraordinary city - it feels as if everywhere you look is being built or refurbished. Trams and trains are efficient and there is no litter on the wide open streets which are full great, cheap places to eat and drink with friendly people - what's not to like.