FINAL - 18 September 2009 - for on-line publication
at http://www.kwag.on.ca
Building Berlin
by
Germaine Koh, exhibition curator
The
history of Berlin is one of successive reinventions. In parallel with its
changing role on the world stage, it has had several incarnations as a
pre-eminent destination for artists and thinkers, whether as an epicentre of
science and culture in the cabaret era of the early 20th century, as a
counter-cultural refuge during and after the Wall, or most recently as the
latest destination for the international art elite. In the decade and a half
after the Wall came down, the increasing number of art galleries opening in
Mitte contributed significantly to the gentrification of that district, and in
the past few years that process has spread exponentially through the rest of
the city, with dozens of commercial galleries relocating from other cities,
young commercial galleries opening, and dozens of artist initiatives launched.
Throughout, the residency programs of the Kźnstlerhaus Bethanien and DAAD
(Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, the German Academic Exchange Service)
have continued to bring prominent international artists into the city, many of
whom have stayed on for the affordable living situations available in the economically
depressed city.
Of course, in some eras
Berlin's role in the global imagination was as a point of political exodus or
expulsion rather than as a destination. It is therefore interesting to reflect
that its patterns of migration have been inverse to those of New World
settlements such as the other Berlin under consideration here: the town in
Ontario renamed Kitchener during the First World War. Rural North America
received many European migrations, and the local cultures reflect these global
processes of movement and production, in the traces of various cultures of
origin that remain or are sustained. Whether tied by traditions as specific as
the specialized trade of die-making that exists in the Kitchener-Waterloo area
via its German immigrant population, or more general cultural practices, a
region such as southern Ontario has in common with the global city of Berlin
this condition of having been shaped by patterns of migration, displacement and
opportunity-seeking.
Historically
a
trading city without a dominant industry, Berlin's current rebuilding has been
largely fuelled by a political will to see it succeed as the capital of the
reunified Germany. These rebuilding processes have been artificially sustained
in a city that is otherwise almost bankrupt. Yet Berlin's present financial
hardship is one of the factors that now make it a desirable destination for
artists; many are
there for economic reasons as much as for the cultural attractions. This is
normal for artists, the prototypical advance troops for urban redevelopment and
gentrification processes. In fact, there are thinkers who believe that the
city's governors could make better use of its cultural capital by recognizing
the economic and social potential of the creative industry.[1]
The expectation is that
artists will prove to be the harbingers of gentrification and economic
development in Berlin, as has happened in other cities around the world.
Indeed, some cities – including Kitchener-Waterloo – are now
adopting planning recipes that specify development of "artist lofts,"
as a hoped shortcut to the vibrant urban atmosphere that comes with the
presence of a critical mass of artists. Yet the process of turning a wasteland
into a vibrant scene is neither passive nor automatic; it unfolds gradually, as
certain people in those cities gather together, claim and rehabilitate space,
create a demand for services and supplies, and build audiences for the things
they do — all of which help shape the emergent cultural space.
This
exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists active in Berlin who have
all helped build what is now an attractive scene, whether by organizing or
founding institutions, teaching or curating, or otherwise contributing to the
public discourse around art in the city. They are producers rather than
consumers of community, in other words, and in keeping with their concern for
developing cultural infrastructure, these artists have all also produced work
that intersects with social themes of urban space, migration, economics, and
trade.
Some of these artists have delved deeply into questions of
urbanism and cultural policy in Berlin specifically. Architects by training and
co-founders
of the vital art-design-architecture bookstore Pro Qm, Jesko Fezer and Axel
Wieder are experts on questions of Berlin's urban development. Included in this
exhibition, their
video interviews with other urbanists about changes in reunited Berlin formed one strand of their Urban Conditions project, organized for
the Berlin Biennale 3 in 2004. The overall project also included a collection
of magazine special issues devoted to this instance of Berlin's development,
and presentations of an unconventional variety of statistics that showed
perhaps-unexpected links between diverse tendencies.[2]
Lars Ramberg, a Norwegian
artist living in Berlin since 1998, has made something of a specialty of
negotiating bureaucratic mazes – and in the process of gaining approvals
for large-scale projects has succeeded in enlarging the place for art within city
space and the official and public imagination. Contrarily, the new neon sign in
this exhibition features a phrase that is poignant for its inability to negotiate: "Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof" (I
only understand train station) was the response of weary World War I German
soldiers when they received commands that did not relate to returning home. It
is still a phrase used to express a lack of understanding.
Other
works evoke productive gaps between official administrative systems and
reality. The Pan-National
Flag (2009) by
Pia Fuchs – the German identity of Canadian artist-producer Patricia
Reed, living in Germany since 2003 – is suggestive of the irrelevance or
futility of national distinction. It is a flag printed with outlines of all
recognized national flags. Laid on top of each other, the large amount of
information renders individual designs illegible. Instead, what becomes evident
is the relative commonality of repeated design motifs such as central icons and
crosses. This focus on patterns of use appears elsewhere in her artwork, and
could perhaps also be said to relate to the adaptive character of other
activities in her practice, such as organizing a response to the cancellation
of the Manifesta 6 biennale in 2006.
Concerned
equally with utopian architectural forms and temporary structures, Daniela
Brahm's art practice seems to carry an understanding of the provisional
character of built space. The painted elements of her works present an
essential function of posters and placards: that is, turning official space
towards vernacular, unplanned use. Her painted posters and fragments of
painting on other structures feature slogan-like text fragments and always the
same cast of characters (from a found group of ID photos of international TV
professionals). Within the lexicon of her work, these elements seem to
represent the actors and private concerns that inhabit city space. Brahm
herself is an active citizen: a principal in the art/architecture/design group
Soup, she was also an organizer of the ExRotaprint group that, in a highly
publicized effort, successfully took over control of a factory building and had
it rezoned for mixed use including artists' studios, social work and local
businesses.
Ingo
Gerken's work is suggestive of the deus
ex machina that sometimes seems to operate in urban planning. The
photographs of his City Works present
the city as a model that is repeatedly reconfigured at the whim of a larger
authority – represented in his work by the artist's hand reaching into
the picture frame to meddle with or highlight interesting details in city
space. For this exhibition Gerken – co-founder of the art and music space
WestGermany – will show new interventions made in the construction sites
that have become a fixture of Berlin's cityscape.
Some of the works in the
exhibition demonstrate the complexities around migration, presenting cases in
which colonial relationships of power and cultural influence no longer hold.
Thom Kubli's new Sri Lankan Monument
is a sort of altar paying tribute to the supposed Sri Lankan national handball
team – in fact a group of 23 intrepid men who in 2004 conned the German
authorities and a non-governmental organization into supporting their tour of
Germany, during which they disappeared, absorbed into the immigrant population
in a superbly orchestrated overturning of the expected power relationships
between migrants and host state. Kubli, a Swiss artist in Germany since 1999
who also works as a radio producer and musician, first conceived the sound
track as a radio play.
Nevin
Aladag's video Voice Over (2006) also
evokes the richness of cultural hybridization. The video intercuts night-vision
shots of a young man singing traditional Turkish songs, with shots of a drum
kit being beaten by a heavy rain. The title's reference to co-extant types of
meaning is in keeping with a concern for co-existing in different cultures that
we can see in much of Aladag's work. Born in Turkey and raised in Germany,
Aladag has often worked with collaborators – even co-authors, it could be
said – from different communities. Dance and music are often the
languages that her films and videos use to communicate.
There is also an emotional
content to movements in, out and through the city. Rui
CalŤada Bastos' work also looks poetically at the rhythms and patterns of urban
space. His video Events – Life in a Bush of Ghosts (2008) is
a poetic series of vignettes of visual details and urban moments, while the
print Love Map (2003) – a
meticulous amalgam of the street maps of Budapest, Paris, Berlin, and his
native Lisbon, with invented street names bridging the different quarters – suggests how cities' shapes
persist in the memory and affection. Like other artists in the exhibition, CalŤada
Bastos' care for the city manifests itself by making things happen; he has also
co-founded a gallery, Invaliden 1, one of the first co-operative
"producers' galleries" (Produzentengalerien).
Daniel
Seiple's artwork has focused on the mutual effects of mapping, migration,
travel, and the imagination, and his work as an organizer also shows a concern
with questions of place. In the few years since relocating from the United
States, he has co-founded the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, which uses a
wasteland on the site of the former Berlin Wall as a sculpture park, and Homie,
an intimate gallery in his apartment. For Building Berlin, he has made a new work around the obscure
Kitchener-Waterloo border. In this 20th anniversary year of the fall of the
Berlin Wall, he encouraged residents living on the K-W border to tear down their
own fences, whether for symbolic or whimsical reasons, eventually producing a
moving study of neighbourliness.
Finally, there is work in the
show that acts, snapshot-like, to record a situation in time. Artist and
teacher Karin Sander has a multi-disciplinary practice that often
intersects with public space, and has regularly used techniques of mapping and
measurement to convey the human dimensions of the lived environment. In both of
her works in this exhibition, the use of accurate and relatively inexpressive
techniques shifts interest – not without emotional effect – to the
great cultural and visual interest of the subjects depicted: the city of Berlin
scrolling panoramically by the windows of the TV tower in one, and the 2005
German women's football team scanned in three dimensions and presented as
rapid-prototyped scale models in the other. Despite the 'documentary' character
of the technology, the viewer is aware of the passage of time inevitable in
capturing these depictions; in other words, they also record the process of
building themselves.
This exhibition, too, aims only to
present a few of the ever-growing number of artists working in Berlin. Rather
than arriving to partake of a ready-made art scene, however, these artists have
helped to develop it. They evidently share an interest in the shape of the city
and a personal will to contribute to an evolving milieu, and it is through the
example of committed individuals such as these that we can observe the culture
of the city actually being built.
Vancouver, September 2009[3]
Notes
1. See for example Adrienne
Goehler, Verflźssigungen. Wege und Umwege
vom Sozialstaat zur Kulturgesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag,
2006). Goehler, Berlin's former Senator for Science, Research and Culture and
former curator for the Hauptstadt Kulturfonds (cultural capital fund),
discusses the economic relevance of the arts and sciences and their ability to
effect change, with reference to Richard Florida's ideas about the utility of
the creative class.
2. This statistical view
"ranges from micro-observations, like price trends for centrally located
properties, to social theories on subjects such as the zeitgeist of routes for
protest demonstrations through the city, or on the gentrification of neighbourhoods
by nomadic troupes of artists ('Sohoization'). [...] Fezer and Wieder are
always concerned with interlinking developments since 1990. What role, for
example, did the planning of media centres, consumer centres and tourist
attractions play at what point in the 'post-ideological' politics of the
capital? According to what criteria were architectural highlights distributed
throughout the city? How have approaches to non-conformist lifestyles changed
(unpaid occupation of space, mobile housing, camping and so on), and how are
the homeless and their relevant structures of solidarity and aid treated
today?" -- Holger Kube Ventura, "hub: Urban Conditions", alt.berlinbiennale.de/bb3/eng/
3. For their assistance with
my curatorial research, I am indebted to the artists in the show, as well as to
colleagues Sabrina van der Ley, Patricia Kohl, Christoph Tannert, and Rodney
Latourelle. I am also grateful to the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery for
administrative support and to Markus Miessen and Magnus Nilsson for their
insightful text.
–––
Germaine Koh
Now based in Vancouver, Germaine Koh is a Canadian visual artist and curator
who lived in Berlin in 2004-05 as a resident at the Kźnstlerhaus Bethanien. Her
work has been presented in the biennials of Liverpool, Sydney and MontrŽal, and
at other prominent international venues such as BALTIC (Newcastle), the
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Bloomberg SPACE (London), The British Museum (London),
le MusŽe d'art contemporain de MontrŽal, The Power Plant (Toronto), the Contemporary
Art Gallery (Vancouver), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), and the Art
Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). Formerly Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at
the National Gallery of Canada, she is also an independent curator and
co-founder of the independent record label weewerk.
www.germainekoh.com