Displays: On the Surface

About

Displays: On the Surface
Friedrich Andreoni, Isu Donggeon Kim, Yun Kima, Lukas Liese, Qing Lu, Aiko Shimotsuma

Opening: October 13. 2023 18:00 – 21:00
Exhibition: October 13 – November 11. 2023
Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin
Curator: Congle Fu

Different kinds of displays increasingly characterize contemporary forms of viewing and ways of exposing objects. From user interfaces on mobile terminals, screens, or designed surfaces in exhibitions, displays fulfill various functions shaped by their cultural and historical usage, which are rooted in heterogeneous contexts. Furthermore, these displays can impact not only technological apparatuses and exhibition design but also discursive modes of framing as well as critical practice.

Exhibition Displays: On the Surface brings together six artists to delve into diverse dimensions of the notion of display, with a particular focus on surface aesthetics. In his On Route (2023), Lukas Liese revisits a road to the quarry originally constructed by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century by employing contemporary mapping technology. An interactive display screen is materialized as solid marble, imbuing the surface with depositional and historical qualities akin to canonical sculptures.

Yun Kima’s Under Your Skin (2021) assembles the industrialized products and human skin and cells into a slippery and visceral surface. These skin-like modular synthetic shells, along with an array of industrial readymades, create a hybrid yet nearly sterile landscape that explores the intricate entanglements of organisms and technology in the context of late liberal capitalism. Here, the display serves both as a surface for mediating and interacting and as an ethereal presence, detaching from its solid form while filling the architectural space like vapor.

Sharing the same focus on surface and interaction, Aiko Shimotsuma’s site-specific sculpture Feeling is All (2019/2023) emphasizes the haptic experience. An ostensibly ordinary painting gains material depth on its surface through interaction with human touch. Above the surface, a hazy climate emerges, creating another spatial dimension within the architectural space, where viewers can haptically sense the materiality of the surface, much like feeling the atmosphere itself.

Friedrich Andreoni’s Erinnerung + Zeit (Memory + Time) (2018) resonates this haptic spatiality by exploring the texture of sound. This ambient space is established through the texture formed through sonic vibrations on the water’s surface. Moreover, steeped in exoticism and ornamentation, the Moroccan tiles–often used as delicate surface displays in furniture, gardens, and architecture–add another layer of texture to the surface, evoking a distinct understanding of time and memories.

A critical approach to the notion of display can be observed in ½ μαζός (½ Mazo) (2022) by Isu Donggeon Kim, which sheds its habitual appearance and investigates the tension around the surface of the body. It performs and envisions the Amazons of ancient Greek mythology through its transitioning body, revealing that this body perpetually resembles a site under construction, filled with friction.

In Qing Lu’s The Moving Berlin Wall (2023), the fixed exhibition space is transformed into a mobile entity that traverses various locations across the city of Berlin. His education in China and Germany translates into a sort of hybridized past, which he intentionally displays on the mobile, partial white cube. The performance serves as his exploration of the selective framework of display, embodying the intersections of his experiences.

Text by Congle Fu. Congle Fu is a PhD researcher based in Zurich.