Time Without End

About

How does one exhibit absences and pasts that are only latent in the present? And how can engaging with buried histories render one’s own position visible?

As part of Berlin Art Week, Fluentum presents the group exhibition Time Without End, bringing together new commissions, loans, and one work from the Fluentum Collection. The video works, multimedia installations, and site-specific pieces intertwine time, history, and narration, reflecting on the fundamental tenets of time-based media.

Contrary to the apparent neutrality of exhibition spaces, Fluentum’s architecture is marked with absent narratives and material traces that bear witness to the turning points of the 20th century. The historically saturated building originated in the years of National Socialism and subsequently was part of German post-war history and the Cold War. Shortly after its last political utilization as a US military headquarters had ended, the venue was repeatedly reactivated as a film set from the 1990s on. In its role as a supposedly authentic setting for historical productions, the site provided international film projects with a material reference to another time. These superimpositions of narratives and historical relics in the medium of the moving image are central to the works in Time Without End, following the characteristic feature of Fluentum’s exhibition spaces, namely of allowing the past to appear in the present.

The exhibition Time Without End uses time-based media as a membrane for stories, people, contexts, and processes to break through to the here and now. Via the artistic use of methods of documentation and fiction, montage and research, duration and presence, the works illustrate how narratives attach themselves to specific locales. 13BC,Klaus vom Bruch and Loretta Fahrenholz, as well as D’Ette Nogle, who is showing a new production, embed their works in contemporary infrastructures of film production and “creative economy” to investigate their narrative processes and the visualization of time and historical references. Florian Wüst will contribute an archival presentation of documents and films specifically developed for Time Without End, taking the former political use of Fluentum’s exhibition spaces as a chronological anchor point to tell the story of the moving image in post-war Berlin.

By historically locating the building and its immanent idiosyncrasies, Margaret Honda’s new site-specific commission and Valerie Snobeck’s video work attempt to materialize temporal conditions. For Keren Cytter and Richard Sides, who has created a new video installation for Time Without End, it is precisely the cinematic dialogue between times and places that becomes the starting point for the narratives of dissolution, haunting, and repetition the characters navigate in their works.

With Time Without End, Fluentum inaugurates the program series In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving, curated by Dennis Brzek, Guest Curator, and Junia Thiede, Head of Exhibitions and Programs. The program comprises three exhibitions as well as a four-part series of publications forming the first cohesive discourse on the site’s history. The first issue, entitled In Medias Res #1: Histories Read Across, will be published concurrently with the opening of Time Without End.

Following the group exhibition Time Without End, the program In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving will feature an exhibition by artist and filmmaker Anja Kirschner in April 2022, and a solo presentation by Loretta Fahrenholzin September 2022.

Curators: Dennis Brzek and Junia Thiede