Feature

Berlin Spring/Summer Treats

25 Apr 2018

by Sandy Di Yu

Berlin has a reputation for being a haven for artists and creatives. While it boasts artsiness all year round, this coming weekend is when art meets institution as we get ready for another Gallery Weekend in Berlin.

The 14th annual Gallery Weekend sees a strong selection of participating galleries with special opening hours and opening receptions for the occasion. While several galleries are presenting object-focused exhibitions, we are delighted to see that a variety of video, performance, and installation works are also featured.

Hitting every venue over the weekend is the goal, but in case you can’t dedicate the entire weekend to hopping from one exhibition to another, or if you’re in Berlin at another time, we’ve selected our favourites for Gallery Weekend and beyond so that no matter what your schedule, you’ll get your dose of quality art.

Christian Falsnaes: Self

This video installation features two videos, one of synchronized anonymous body movements in a collective, and another of the individuated anonymous body, both moving through the bustling city of Berlin. Viewers are confronted with questions of their own physicality, synchronicity, and bodily affiliation with movement and the external world.

Senga Nengudi

This solo exhibition of Senga Nengudi’s works features four recent sculptures from Nengudi’s celebrated R.S.V.P series, which the artist first began in the late 1970s in response to her changing pregnant body. Using nylon stockings, sand, and metal objects, Nengudi generates delicate, webbed and knotted forms that stretch across walls, from one wall to another, or from the wall to the floor. Catch the opening for this show as well as Kara Walker and Andro Wekua during Gallery Weekend at Sprüth Magers.

Rebecca Ackroyd: The Mulch

Deflecting meaning but ever bulging with recognisable motifs, Rebecca Ackroyd’s sculptures tiptoe the line between absurdly humourous and undeniably appropriate. Her giant human limbs and colourful explorations of material promises to give way to darker, sleeker forms in Mulch. Be sure to read the quality exhibition text by Matthew Maclean.

Floating Utopias: Balloons, Bubbles, Barricades

‘Floating Utopias’ presents the broad range of pneumatic media in an exhibition and accompanying interventions in urban space. The project explores both historical and contemporary works and raises questions as to their potential for artistic and activist practices. Until today, inflatable objects serve as tools for aesthetic and political interventions: artists and activists situate their works between surreality and functionality, fiction and fact. Inflatables invite us to be playful and disobedient, they forge communities and prompt participation, generate attention and agency.

Loris Gréaud, Ladi Rogeurs: Sir Loudrage - a still life

Any exhibition touching on our favourite 70’s Soviet film Stalker is an exhibition we’d like to see, and Gréaud certainly does it justice by bringing in elements from around where the film was shot. Mud, sand, liquid, and waste from the site in Tallinn fills the cracks in the floor and purple lights emanate against hanging spores in this work that explores the very nature of exhibitions.

Andreas Greiner: Hybrid Matter

Part of Gallery Weekend, Dittrich & Schlechtriem's Andreas Greiner solo show in Mitte features an exploration of how humans have manipulated nature through genetic engineering, this multidisciplinary exhibition features new photographs, sculptures, and a sound installation in collaboration with Tyler Friedman.

Frank Thiel: Quinceañeras

One of four shows that will be on during Gallery Weeknd at Blain|Southern, Frank Thiel returns to portrait photography for the first time in over 20 years. Quinceañeras examines the tradition of the often lavish coming-of-age celebrations around a young woman’s fifteenth birthday in Cuba. Known for extensively researched projects that survey places in transformation, Thiel uses the quince tradition in Cuba as a metaphor for a culture in flux, creating a portrait of a generation of young women alongside that of a city rich in heritage yet coming to terms with change and decay.

Louise Bourgeois: The Empty House

A selection of Bourgeois’ sack forms will be the focus of this solo exhibition. The sack, for the artist, is both an architectonic structure and a representation of the female body in its various aspects of growth and decay, plenitude and incompleteness. The empty sack may suggest an empty house but also symbolize an infertile woman or the bad breast that does not provide milk. The story told is a universal entanglement with the cycle of life and death as well as a self-portrait in essence.

Emiliano Maggi: Spettro Sound System

On display at the Kuboraum Flagship studio and store, 2 years of research by artist Emiliano Maggi results in Spettro Sound System, a sound and sculpture installation that explores links between form, sound and function.

Hello World. Revising a Collection

The Hamburger Bahnhof presents “Hello World. Revising a Collection”, a critical inquiry into the collection of the Nationalgalerie and its predominantly Western focus: What could the collection look like today, had an understanding characterised its concept of art, and consequently also its genesis, that was more open to the world? More than two hundred works - paintings, sculptures, installations, videos and films – from the holdings of the Nationalgalerie are supple­mented with roughly one hundred fifty works on loan from other collections are collated to question and redefine art collections beyond the occident.

Gallery Weekend Berlin 2018

The 14th annual Gallery Weekend in Berlin boasts a colourful array of exhibitions to keep you busy all weekend long. Check out the full program below, and plan out your route so that you can have a productive and fulfilling gallery hop.