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until 25.05. | #4199ARTatBerlin | Sexauer Gallery shows from 15. March 2024 the exhibition USE THE EXIT AS AN ENTRANCE by the artist Alexander Iskin.
From the very beginning of his career as an artist, Alexander Iskin was concerned with transformations – metamorphoses and metamorphoses – and with different realities (i.e. physical and virtual reality). Iskin called the space between these realities Interreality, and his art movement based on it Interrealism.
In his seventh exhibition at SEXAUER, Iskin now brings the world of spirituality and spirits into his painting in addition to virtual and physical reality. In recent years, the digital world has increasingly merged with the physical world. For Iskin, this increasing fusion evokes associations with 19th century spiritualist writings.
In 2022, Iskin worked as a Pollock-Krasner fellow in New York. There he became acquainted with the spiritualist teachings of Pestalozzi’s student Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, better known as Allan Kardec. In 1857, he published his “Book of Spirits”. Kardec postulated a world of multidimensionality and spirits alongside the physical world. According to Kardec, these could incarnate as souls and wander between dimensions (metempsychosis).
In “USE THE EXIT AS AN ENTRANCE”, Iskin’s interrealism unfolds into an exploration of three dimensions: the material, the virtual and the spiritual, interwoven with stories from Mesopotamian, Hindu and Jewish myths as well as family tales.
And to anticipate the point: The artistic multidimensionality of the exhibition between the physical and the spiritual, combined with myths, serves Iskin as an attempt to find a protected space beyond all the opposites, antagonisms, dichotomies, friend-foe schemes and black-and-white images of current, emotionally charged discourses. Iskin’s search for plurality, light and hope is always interwoven with his biography and family history.
Alexander Iskin was two years old when his parents moved from Moscow to Germany as Jewish quota refugees in the 1990s. His maternal grandfather had fled from Ukraine (Kherson) to Moscow during the Second World War, his paternal grandfather from Lithuania (Vilnius) to Russia and his maternal grandmother from Kharkiv (Ukraine), also from the Germans. Thus, within two generations, Germany became a place of refuge. USE THE EXIT AS AN ENTRANCE.
Iskin himself grew up in Germany. But he still has family in Ukraine and Russia. The Russian invasion unintentionally made a complex family history fraught with suffering virulent and a burden that Iskin had not previously focused on at all. He was always interested in the future.
Immediately after the war began, he moved from Berlin to Munich, where he found a place of peace and stability. This is also where the pictures in the exhibition were created. Away from the “politically charged” Berlin, Iskin succeeded in developing a series that stands for diversity, different perspectives and intermediate spaces as well as subtle transitions, in contrast to the current global triumph of bipolar friend-foe thinking.
Image caption: Foto: Vasilisa Neznamova, 2024. Vasilisa Neznamova, Courtesy SEXAUER Gallery
Just as Iskin artistically explores the spaces in between, he himself is also a wanderer between worlds. In recent years, Iskin has worked in a wide variety of places. Each location also shaped the respective series of works on which Iskin worked. In his last studio in Munich, Iskin worked directly in Leopoldstrasse, the boulevard-like extension of Ludwig I’s boulevard. At the beginning of the last century, Munich’s bohemian scene had already celebrated in his studio. Feuchtwanger, George, Fanny zu Reventlow and even Franz Marc, at the invitation of the writer and translator Karl Wolfskehl.
The exhibition title “USE THE EXIT AS AN ENTRANCE” reflects Iskin’s diverse working worlds and encourages us not to look nostalgically at the past, but to look openly at what is to come and to shape the future positively. The exhibition title also seems to echo Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return, ultimately based on a cyclical way of thinking that existed in a polytheistic and animistic world even before the emergence of the Abrahamic, monotheistic, linear-historical and exclusive religions. In this cyclical thinking, no salvation (from the outside) is expected, rather everyone must always find a new exit as an entrance for themselves. There is no getting out. There is a beginning to every end.
By the way:
When Iskin visited Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy in London at the beginning of 2024, a security guard asked him to leave the building in the evening and explained: YOU CAN USE THE ENTRANCE AS AN EXIT. Iskin would have liked to stay. So he was forced to leave the building, but he turned the request to leave into the title of his exhibition – USE THE EXIT AS AN ENTRANCE.
Notes on the illustrated works:
Naivigator said: „Clouds are prison”
is a complex, multi-perspective image that is both light and transparent. The title is doubly paradoxical. The assertion “Clouds are prison” initially seems paradoxical, because clouds are actually symbols of freedom and constant change, and therefore the opposite of a prison. On the other hand, because the quote does not come from a navigator, but from a naïve navigator, a person who wants to lead, but is naïve and simple-minded. However, the naivigator’s statement is anything but naive, but rather far-sighted. For although clouds allow virtual access from anywhere and therefore initially appear to be free, they are also prisons – this is the anti-naïve insight – firstly because they store data without their use being able to be checked from the outside, secondly because they make people dependent on the respective operator, the ruler of the computer, and last but not least because they can be misused for constant surveillance. The hell of Bentham’s panopticon in virtuality! In Iskin’s picture, a person seems to be striding purposefully from left to right. A naivigator? – Or perhaps not?
Jupiteriyaki
One of Iskin’s word creations takes us back from the ancient Hindu texts to the spirit world of Allan Kardec. Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. Teriyaki – the last four syllables of the picture title – refers to a method of preparation in Japanese cuisine in which food is marinated and fried, giving it a shimmering and shiny surface. Allan Kardec assumes that there is life on other planets and that incarnated souls and spirits can develop morally. The higher they evolve, the better habitats they open up. Of all the planets, Jupiter is the most highly developed. Materialistic and egoistic aspirations no longer have any room here. A life in harmony with nature and other spirits and beings. A world that shines like Iskin’s colors. A utopia? Never achievable? – No way? … or maybe: USE THE EXIT AS AN ENTRANCE.
Opening: Friday, 15. March, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 15. March until Saturday, 25. May 2024
Image caption: Naivigator said: ‘Clouds are prison’, 2024, Oil on canvas , 160 x 140 cm. Marcus Schneider, Courtesy SEXAUER Gallery
Exhibition Alexander Iskin – Sexauer Gallery | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
