«Hello, Spaceboy»
The «Universal Metabolism» exhibition at Kraftwerk Mitte
Thomas Oberender
Between the two festival weekends of the Atonal Festival for Sound Art at Berlin’s Kraftwerk Mitte, an exhibition with a duration of four days was held for the first time on all floors of the former cogeneration plant and its 8000 square metres of event space, which was both lavishly short and lavishly rich.
As a prelude, a free-standing installation of six tapestries by the artist Livia Melzi beamed at its visitors from the darkness of the hall, a glimpse of hell as designed by European illustrators in the 16th century, when they set the accounts of sea voyagers and missionaries from the New World and their encounters with indigenous cultures in terrifying images showing people torturing and eating people. These black and white historical engravings woven into fabric say more about our own view today than they do about these cultures, and they lead directly into the theme of the exhibition, Universal Metabolism, the metabolism of our species, which is part of a much larger Gaia organism that also digests us.
Just beyond the carpets is an area covered in rubble stones in the dim light of the windowless hall. A moment later, it is bathed in a mild working light and, amidst the stones, one sees the artist Bridget Polk building column-like sculptures from these rubble before the visitors’ eyes. Their individual components are held together only by gravity. We know this from the small pebble pyramids on the beach or mountains, but Bridget Polk’s material comes from the ruins of human buildings. She places bricks, railing columns and concrete blocks on edge and stacks them high. This creates a magical standstill of objects and watching Bridget Polk perform these balancing acts is a glimpse into the artist’s workshop and at the same time a performance and meditation.
A little lower in the hall, the lime mud on the surface of a five-metre-high textile sculpture by Mire Lee drips into a floor tub. The Korean artist’s sculpture «Black Sun» has the ragged structure of an exposed fascia mesh and is reminiscent of an eviscerated animal hide. Mere Lee’s installation, which seems organic and at the same time technical, could be part of her current exhibition at the New Museum in New York and it is a great luck to discover it in Berlin as well. Adriano Rosselli, the co-curator of this exhibition at Kraftwerk Mitte, has gathered many such discoveries in this show, from Florentina Holziger’s Glockenspiel «Etude» on the first weekend of the show to new works by Cyprien Gaillard, Marco Fusinato, Actress or Romeo Castellucci.
The Atonal Festival is probably the only music festival in the world that employs a visual arts curator year-round. This may be due to its founding history, which goes back to the early 1980s in West Berlin, when Dimitri Hegemann founded the festival as a platform for sound art and visual art and resurrected it in 2013 under the new direction of Laurens von Oswald at Kraftwerk Mitte. Since 2017, the visual artist Adriano Rosselli from Sydney has been part of the team and, together with von Oswald and co-director Harry Glass, has designed very unusual exhibition concepts, not only within the framework of the festival there. They are loved by artists but rarely noticed by the art world because they happen off the beaten track. But fortunately for the art world, the Atonal Festival is now taking place parallel to Berlin Art Week.
The exhibition, which can be experienced in the huge building of the Kraftwerk Mitte, basically behaves like a performance. It plays with the passage of time and, in its running time, constantly creates new constellations between the works of almost thirty artists shown in it. «Universal Metabolism» is on the one hand an exhibition, but also a festival in itself that brings many art forms together seamlessly. In this respect, Adriano Rosselli’s exhibition resembles those of artists such as Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyge, Tino Sehgal or Anne Imhof, for whom it is not the individual objects but the exhibition itself that is the work.
Many artists today work as curators, creating «exhibition organisms» that change with time and the moment of their perception. And this is also shaping the work of a new generation of curators. Adriano Rosselli, Raimundas Malašauskas or Pablo Wendel and Helen Turner not far from the E-Werk Luckenwalde build poetic experience machines that bring works, places and the presence of the audience into an aesthetic resonance in a new way.
Lured by sounds or changes of light, visitors in «Universal Metabolism» move again and again to new places, forming a temporary audience around works that become visible for moments and then disappear again into the dark. At a certain moment, the performers Tot Onyx and Yuko Kaseki appear under the organ columns by Valerie Export, which hang freely in the room, lengthening their limbs with metal pipes or making them sound with a violin bow. Again and again, in the midst of the permanent installation of sculptures, graphics and films, new stages are created without seats, the artists mingle with the audience and dissolve the boundary between work and visitors.
The fact that life is based on the process of «metabolism», on the transformation of substances into energy, is at the same time the operating system of the exhibition itself in this exhibition, which bears the title «Universal Metabolism». Here, the exhibition is not regarded as a product that has been put to rest, but is understood and made tangible as a living process.
Our entire culture, as the writer W.G. Sebald remarked in view of the lagoon landscape of Venice illuminated by countless lights, is based on burning. Every oil lamp on a fishing boat, every computer and even the motorways of Belgium, which are illuminated by lanterns at night and are visible from space, are based on the combustion of fossil energy. A series of exhibitions in a place like the former combined heat and power plant Mitte, which generated energy from fossil plants, is a great connection of this concrete place with the involvement of our species in the metabolism of a much larger life on this planet.
Berlin Atonal’s exhibition «Universal Metabolism» does not raise a finger at climate policy, but dives deep into the metabolic relationships of our species with this planet, within our society and our own bodies. Anyone who can be touched poetically can feel it in each and every one of the works on display, but above all in the encounter with this «exhibition body» itself. He still lacks the ability to see and hear his audience himself, as many of the exhibitions by Philippe Parreno or Anne Imhof can, which pay attention to the movements and reactions of the audience live and change accordingly in real time, react to the sounds of the audience’s footsteps with the circles of the waves in the black water of a basin or make performers appear in another corner of the room.
But what does «missing» mean – «Universal Metabolism», as a choreographed parcours of encounters with works of art, makes so many offers to engage with the unexpected appearance of works of art, their living presence as a performance, installation and the associated movement of the audience, to follow the stream of guests in the direction of the sounds and lights, that the apparent inexhaustibility of the simultaneous that can be experienced in this space, actually leaves a very individual encounter with excellent works of art.
The overused and at the same time symptomatic word of the art world, which likes to speak of the «activation» of objects and social relationships, rarely makes more sense than in «Universal Metabolism». Everyone sees and discovers something different in this time-based exhibition. It’s like the view of Alexanderplatz from the TV tower – you only see what you see when you were there. This exhibition has hundreds of hours of time behind it. «Universal Metabolism» as a format abandons the idea of being able to show «everything», instead it makes the showing and the moment of the event itself the theme. In contrast to the classic white cube of the exhibition space, the objects in the show do not wait in apparent neutrality, but become active, appear and disappear, blurring the boundary between work and audience, as the individual rhythm of the visitors meets their time code when looking at the works.
A good half of the works of around thirty artists can be seen throughout «Universal Metabolism», meticulously illuminated from the darkness of the hall you can see a large series of graphics on the first floor, which the gynecologist and popular author Fritz Kahn commissioned in the 20s as illustrations of the metabolic processes in the human body. They are works of art that seem surreal, imaginative and at the same time scientifically educational. These classically exhibited objects are surrounded by installations in which, among others, films by Deborah Stratman or Sonia Boyce or James Richard and Steve Reinke can be seen. And again and again of performances that create their own world without notice.
At the edge of a stage, a figure moves in the twilight, lighting a candle. Her dancing movements suddenly freeze in a gesture of listening into the hall, whereupon the language ignites on the screen behind the figure. This moment is the prelude to Romeo Castellucci’s work «The Third Reich», probably the most haunting work in the exhibition. It makes appear on a huge screen a constantly accelerating stream of all the nouns of a dictionary, that is, of everything that has a name in the world. This flow of words follows the beat of Scott Gibbon’s music and is in the range of a twentieth of a second per word. Soon the pace exceeds the limits of human perception and becomes a hypnotic intoxication, an experience that Arthur Jaffa has created similarly vividly with his stream of images «Apex».
After the last word on the screen has faded away, the group of visitors disperses and a few minutes later meets a dwarf-like little space girl whose entire body and head are covered by a Spiegelstein costume. In the light of two flashlights, this tiny giant sparkles like a star, sending its rays in all directions until this choreography unites with the singing of an opera aria before the live broadcast of a floor-to-ceiling screen. This hourly repetitive performance by Laxlan Petras and Yasmin Saleh mingles with the guests, comes out of the darkness and disappears back into it.
«Universal Metabolism» presents a wealth of encounters between visual art and sound art, reads the brutalist concrete room of the Kraftwerk Mitte itself as a sculpture, illuminates its openings and stages the views into inaccessible basement rooms in the basement as the «natural» frames of H.J. Huwman’s drawings, which are accompanied by the ambient music of Ain Bailey. Thus, we usually experience art at home, with friends, but almost never in exhibitions.
What does it mean to be «contemporary»? Berlin’s Schaubühne once said to enjoy the time. In contemporary art, on the other hand, the formats in which it is realized are questioned. «Universal Metabolism» changes the system of exhibiting or makes it possible to experience the changes in the system in which we live. The white cube or black box of the theatre was once an invention of something new and so is «Universal Metabolism», it opens that box. For this leap out of the traditionally ready-made experience of art, places like Kraftwerk Mitte are needed in Berlin.
Leaving the building, visitors encounter Cyprien Gaillard’s metallic red illuminated sculpture of a weeping Buddha with his head bent forward in his hands. Like almost all of Cyprien Gaillard’s works, his «absorbing figure» is based on the transformation of a material with a history and countless references. A similar figure of unknown origin, discovered by Gaillard in a museum in Rotterdam, is associated in the British Museum with the interpretation that those who touch this weeping Buddha experience relief from their sorrows. It was similarly fortunate to visit this absorbent exhibition.
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