Falling Fictions

About

This is the fourth time that the Olbricht Foundation has invited young curators to develop their own ideas and perspectives on the Olbricht Collection and to curate a show for me Collectors Room Berlin as part of their final-degree module.

Previous exhibitions in the series have probed the uncanny, the act of play, and the individual as a cabinet of curiosities. In the latest instalment of the collaboration, the three-strong student team – Amy E. Brown, Alejandro Alonso Diaz, and Rosie Snaith – have chosen the theme of metafiction.

Metafiction is originally a literary device, a story about the writing of a story that makes its readers a simultaneous part of the story as it unfolds. In an exhibition context, metafiction purposefully encourages the viewer to form their own conclusions and connections, reacting to their environment and the artworks surrounding them. For the three young curators metafiction is a strategy to approach the objects in the Olbricht Collection, as a fine line between reality and fiction, and to reveal the way they incarnate stories within stories.

‘Falling Fictions’ takes its shape from a commissioned text by artist and writer Francesco Pedraglio. In his story an object begins to fall. As it falls, it falls through thirteen Heavens and nine Underworlds before coming to rest, finally, on Earth. Throughout the process of falling, and in each layer, the object changes form, shifting to become something else, both physically and conceptually, gathering new meaning. Told in three voices – The Voice of the Room, the Chorus and The Voice of the Night – the tale gradually picks up pace, reaching a crescendo akin to the collision an object might make on the floor of the exhibition room, where it lands fully-formed.

Featured artists:
Doug Aitken, Joseph Beuys, KP Brehmer, Bazon Brock, Al Chang, Hansjoachim Dietrich, Marcel Dzama, Slawomir Elsner, Claire Fontaine, Imi Giese , KH Hödicke, John Isaacs, Ragnar Kjartansson, André Kertész, Imi Knoebel, Bernd Lohaus, Konrad Lueg, David Ostrowski, Blinky Palermo, Francesco Pedraglio, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Diter Rot, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Gerhard Rühm, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tomas Schmit, Gavin Turk, Wolf Vostell, Lawrence Weiner, Stefan Wewerka, Lambert Maria Wintersberger, WOLS and objects from the Wunderkammer