Realities Left Vacant

About

Artists: Nadja Abt, Tekla Aslanishvili, Marianna Christofides, Silvina Der Meguerditchian, Christian Diaz Orejarena, Sofia Duchovny, Ahu Dural, Cornelia Herfurtner, Göksu Kunak, Isaiah Lopaz, Alina Schmuch

Curators: Layla Burger-Lichtenstein, Arkadij Koscheew

Realities Left Vacant presents works by the 11 international artists awarded the 2022 visual arts work stipend of the Berlin Senate. The exhibition shows the diversity of their individual artistic approaches while highlighting the broader social issues and contemporary image politics that shape them.

Realities Left Vacant brings together works that explore the infrastructures of seeing and experiencing. They critically examine habits of seeing that shape our perception, as well as material and immaterial structures that play host to both coexistence and conflict. For the artists of Realities Left Vacant, these conditions are always politically informed.

The artworks address questions of origin, belonging, and the relationship between collective and individual memory and investigate the influence of geopolitical conflicts and the global climate crisis on access to infrastructures. Drawing on documentary and investigative practices, archive-based research, biographical narratives, and the image politics permeating the mass media, they call for an engagement with power structures, colonial legacies, and mechanisms of value creation.

The title of this exhibition is borrowed from a line in the song The Question Is to See It All (2021) by the US band Darkside. Realities Left Vacant thus acts as a framework uniting the works of these 11 artists, who, while acting individually, nevertheless pursue a common understanding that reality can be manipulated.