Group exhibition

OPENING:
April 13, 2018, 7 p.m.
EXHIBITION:
April 14, 2018 ? May 05, 2018
FINISSAGE & CATALOG PRESENTATION:
May 05, 2018, 7 pm
LOCATION:
Gallery Axel Obiger | Brunnenstraße 29 | 10119 Berlin

Juliane Duda, Tatjana Fell, Jörn Gerstenberg, Fernando Nino-Sanchez, Mariel Poppe, Inken Reinert, Birgit Schlieps, Sencer Vardarman, Gabriele Worgitzki
Installation | Photography | Video | Text | Audio

The exhibition brings together nine positions of contemporary art with a broad media spectrum that explore the city as a phenomenon of social interaction. They negotiate the specific patterns and interconnections of historical, cultural, political and social events and discourses in urban space. Particular attention is paid to the opportunities for individual and community participation and the effects of urban life on its actors.

With reference to Berlin’s current history, the overlapping of different lifestyles and linguistic and cultural diversity, Fernando Niño-Sánchez’s installations and objects abstract urban life into complex symbols. Gabriele Worgitzki’s video installations and photographs deal with the speed of cities, in which the time of the protagonists and their places passes asynchronously: A rapidly changing urban space is home to people who seem to have fallen out of time and yet have been shaped by it. Juliane Duda’s photographic works focus on traces of change in converted buildings; buildings that seem strangely out of place. Mariel Poppe, on the other hand, comments on urban planning dynamics using model building blocks that form spatial ornaments when assembled into modular architectures. Drawings, photographs and objects become the sculptural material for an installation with which Birgit Schlieps addresses increasingly lost inner-city wastelands and their spatial potential. Jörn Gerstenberg’s prints testify to the artist’s fascination with urban phenomena of dissolution. Between fantasies of growth and images of decline, both problems and possibilities of living together in the city emerge. Inken Reinert shifts the question of past visions to interiors that tend to remain hidden and asks with subtle irony about possible new constellations of GDR living culture.

The structures of order and reference that Tatjana Fell questions also operate at the limits of visibility. By means of resonances, reflections and transparencies, her photographic works explore the transformations of individual and social influence on the city. Finally, Sencer Vardarman’s long-term artistic study looks at political, religious and geopolitical influence: in his home city of Istanbul, the increasing loss of buildings and the changing course of the coastline are evidence of the power games taking place in this regard.