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until 31.07. | #2105ARTatBerlin | Grimmuseum currently shows the group exhibition Games with Eternity (Spiele mit der Ewigkeit) with works by twelve artists from Berlin and Seoul, curated by Keumhwa Kim.
Group Exhibition with following artists: Carla Cabanas, Andrés Galeano, Ka Hee Jeong, Nam Hoon Kim, Shinae Kim, Yuni Kim, Jenny Michel, Jong Oh, Sophia Pompéry, Euan Williams, Seok Hyun Han, Thomas Zipp
The group exhibition ‘Spiele mit der Ewigkeit’ (Plays with eternity) brings together twelve artists from Berlin and Seoul whose work engages with time and its infinity, with space and its boundaries, with forces of reality and the freedom of the unreal. Since prehistoric times people have dealt with the question of eternity, addressing the phenomena of time and eternal life.
This search is present in the exhibition. The works ask for what could be and what could happen, even besides our limits of perception. Their artistic strategies are based on everyday observations, on collecting scientific data, on traditions and rituals. The exponates revolve around visibility and invisibility, flirting with the ephemeral, and strive for eternal art, following their playful impulse: towards infinity and eternity.
The exhibition opens with the performance “Pathologies of the Image” by Andrés Galeano. As in a requiem, two opera singers (Vannessa Lanch & Anastasia Nikolova) rhyme and sing about physical dangers that artworks are exposed to, about pollutants, pests or climatic conditions. The song deals with the mortality of artworks, at the same time emphasizing their immateriality and plays with the ephemeral in art, which seems to be transient in every moment and yet claims its eternity.
Euan Williams (lives and works in Berlin)
This is beyond you (2013)
Euan Williams’s (* 1984) sound installation “This is Beyond You” deals with the visualization of the time that has passed. On 11000 stacked papers that can be taken, Williams points to the sound installed in the room that an adult visitor can not hear. The installation has a frequency that only toddlers hear. With reference to this acoustic “ability” that gets lost with the adult, Williams invites visitors to become aware of the past. His sculpture creates an immaterial “contemplation space”. A sound that can not really be heard changes the consciousness of the visitors.
Jong Oh (lives and works in New York / Seoul)
Room Drwaing (Objects) (2018)
Jong Oh’s (* 1981) sculptures deal with the visibility and invisibility of spaces that are explored through space inventions and spatial experiences. The starting point of his In Situ sculptures are architectural texture, the light and the shadow. With a minimal choice of materials such as wire, thread, wood or Plexiglas and after an intensive, almost meditative stay on-site, Oh develops new spatial situations whose vertical and horizontal compositions irritate our perception. His “Room Drawing” is a dialogue between lines and surfaces, materials and light. Oh dreams of an infinite expandability of spaces and our environment.
Sophia Pompéry (lives and works in Berlin)
Frequency (2018)
Sophia Pompéry’s (* 1984) new video work captures a fleeting moment, namely the moonlit swell. The surface of the water, set in motion, plays with the deceptive glow of reflection: is it the image of the reflected surface of water alone or an optical illusion manipulated by filmic means? The longer you look at the work, the light seems to detach from the black background and get into vibration. Swarmy, the video image is formed again and again and reminiscent of insects or characters of a foreign culture. Pompery artfully explores optical laws and physical phenomena, finding metaphors for time and space. Using minimal interventions, she associatively questions the conditions in our daily lives and offers us seductive variations.
Nam Hoon Kim (lives and works in Seoul)
Cicatrize Vol. 1 (2017)
1118911 Enumerate death (2017)
On a hot summer day in the rainy season, Nam Hoon Kim (* 1971) discovers hundreds of dead small flies on the windowsill of his studio. With a wipe, the dead bodies would have crumbled like dust, but Kim collects them and painstakingly and meticulously applies them to papers – 18911 small insects, a register of deaths. Because of the lightness of the insects, Kim guides us through the endlessly repeated “gluing “The dead body metaphorically the weight of life and death in mind. With “18 911 Enermerate Death” he creates a picture of the “unbearable lightness” of being and the “eternal return of the same”.
Seok Hyun Han (lives and works in Berlin / Seoul)
Balance (2015/2018)
Iron Fresh (2018)
Two Hanfpflanzen tries to bring the Korean artist Han (* 1975) in vain to balance. Through a wooden balance constructed by the artist, two pots of hemp plants are set in motion according to their growth: the one plant that has grown more lowers down on the scale, bringing the water supply up to the weaker plant, the Now it grows better until it goes down. With hemp, an ancient cultivated plant that has been used for 10,000 years as a beneficial and medicinal plant as well as intoxicants, which is now gaining importance again in business and medicine, Han tells of the power of nature and of human intervention, healing and destruction are in an eternal cycle.
Shinae Kim (lives and works in London / Seoul)
sforzando / very stressed (2018)
Shinae Kim’s (* 1984) site-specific work deals with the perceptibility of spaces. For them, a room has no fixed form, but changing descriptions, which can be deciphered from an infinite number of imaginable events and based on mathematical or physical formulas. In her new works, Kim captures space through triangles as the smallest unit. It deconstructs the space from an infinite number of conceivable relations of these triangles to one another. The angles create transitions between the second to the third dimension. The space swings, tilts, moves and invites to a journey of discovery to experience the seemingly inexhaustible possibilities of a space.
Yuni Kim (lives and works in Berlin)
Sunken area (2017 to the future)
Silent life (28.5.2018)
Based on everyday observations, Yuni Kim (b. 1984) tries to make the invisible visible and capture fleeting moments. The “Sunken Area” is a bowl filled with old oil that will fill more and more with dead flies during the show. In connection with her photograph “Silent Life”, in which only a pack of silicates can be seen on a large empty wall, she refers as playfully as profoundly to presence and absence, everyday life and vanity, life and death. By means of simple everyday objects, Kim’s art senses gaps in our lives and involves our thoughts in a subtle play about the transience of all being.
Thomas Zipp (lives and works in Berlin)
10 PINK PILL (Magic Square of Four) (2018)
“Pink Pill” by Thomas Zipp (* 1966) is based on his examination of the mathematical model of the “Magic Square of Four”, which Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866-1946) describes in Higher Space Theory (A Primer of HigherSpace). The treatise of the American architect, author and theosophist deals with the fourth dimension as a principle of growth and change of time and space. Created in 1913, it is inspired by Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity of 1905 and the thoughts on the space-time continuum. Zipp’s installation consists of a cube and a bottle. The cube shows Bragdon’s “Magic Square of Four”, which suggests an expansion of space. By placing the pink-painted gas cylinder on the cube, reminiscent of a miracle pill or drug, the expansion of space, of human thought and also of the universe is being metaphorized.
Jenny Michel (lives and works in Berlin)
Fallen Gardens (2013-2017)
A sea of adhesive tape hangs from the ceiling of the room. On them cling text fragments, which were torn out line by line from dictionaries. Like a rain of thought, the accumulated encyclopedic knowledge dissolves before the eye of the beholder. Among them are the Paradise Vehicles, which are eaten away by decay, tattered with technical drawings and blueprints, stranded in a junkyard, vaguely reminiscent of means of transport stuck on the way to paradise. Jenny Michel’s (* 1974) installation explores people’s longing for a new world based on Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. It is about the human urge for knowledge, the closed paradise and the contradictions of our reality.
Andrés Galeano (lives and works in Berlin / Barcelona)
Pathologies of the image (2018)
Music and scores of sopranos
Vanessa Lanch & Anastasia Nikolova
Sound mixing and editing: Johannes Schäfer
In analogy to his earlier series Al Sol and Unknown Photographers, Andres Galeano (* 1980) in his performance “Pathologies of the Image” deals with the interplay of genesis, decay and the eternal cycle of the cosmos. In a requiem, two opera singers (Vannessa Lanch & Anastasia Nikolova) rhyme and sing about the physical dangers a work of art is subjected to – pollutants, pests or climatic conditions. Her singing deals with the mortality of a work of art, while at the same time underlining the immateriality of the works and playing with the fleeting nature of art, which at any moment is ephemeral yet claims eternity.
Guided tour with curator Keumhwa Kim: Friday, 13th July, 6.00 pm
Exhibition period: Saturday, 7h July – Tuesday, 31st July 2018
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Image caption: Installation view, Thomas Zipp, Yuni Kim, Shinae Kim, Spiele mit der Ewigkeit, 2018, Berlin, Courtesy of Artist, Grimmuseum, Keum Art Projects, Foto: Andrés Galeano
Exhibition Games with Eternity – Group Exhibition – Grimmuseum – Contemporary Art – Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | ART at Berlin
