These three art spaces have partnered to showcase for the first time in Berlin the work of the amazing Franco-Austrian artist Gisèle Vienne, with two exhibitions and a performance and film program, the latter happening at Sophiensælen on November 14-16, 2024.
Haus Am Waldsee, a quiet museum located on the shore of a lake, presents This Causes Consciousness to Fracture — A Puppet Play. Vienne’s teenage puppets welcome us to a world of disturbance and unsettlement, exploring the repressed, the subconscious and the traumatic in ourselves. Bodies impacted by the society they live in — troubling and troubled at the same time — are in a stunning contrast to their peaceful surroundings. You get a similar unsettling feeling at Georg Kolbe Museum, another relaxing location in the middle of a peaceful garden, where the second exhibition on the artist is presented. I know that I can double myself pairs her work with a selection of avant-garde women artists that also used puppets as a revolutionary tool of expression and rebellion against societal limitations during the 1900s: an open dialogue between eras and generations of women that is definitely worth seeing.
Meanwhile, another first for the city is the retrospective on the photographer Sabine Weiss, presented by f3 — freiraum für fotografie, a small art space in Kreuzberg. The photographer used to work with the press agency Rapho, documenting the life of people all over the world through her remarkably sensitive eye. As Vienne, she decided to tell her stories through the eyes of two specific moments of life, not teenage years this time, but elder people and children. All the difficulties and tenderness of the working class lie bare in front of our eyes, showing us that humanity can easily face incomprehension but surely needs our empathy.
KINDL with The New Subject. Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies shows us bodies as battlegrounds, through a collective exhibition of artists from all over the world that depicts how unfair and painful the impact of societal rules can be on us. Crossing different scenarios and places, bodies are limited, judged, tortured, studied, left in pain, disassembled.
On the first floor of the building, Nina E. Schönefeld’s Ride or Die installation and video projection, tries to react to this. Imagining a not so distant world where a totalitarian regime has taken control of society, a resistance is spontaneously formed to fight back, stimulating our inner selves to consider it as a possible scenario for our life.
Another form of abuse — the excavation process of metals from western countries at the expense of the rest of the world and the consequential net of human exploitation — is showcased by Alfredo Jaar in his exhibition The End of the World. An extremely minimal but challenging installation, where we are left alone with ourselves, questioning how our privileges are taken for granted but should always be put into question.
Samuel Fosso is also present in the museum with a survey on his work from the beginning of his practice until now, using self-portraiture to investigate humanity and its icons.
C/O Berlin covers this important theme — the mistreatment of people and places for economic issues — as well through its new exhibition program. The project After Nature. Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize, showcases this year the work of two young artists whose work talks about nature and the human relationship with it.
Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick does it by examining the exploitation of the Bengal region, done during the colonization of the area by the English empire. Creating a mining system with railroads connecting them, they used the land and then abandoned it, leaving behind the traces of this unfair and traumatic past.
The Colombian filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán takes the chance to talk about her land and people using as an underlying topic the coca plant. The controversial herb, that got stripped of its curative and ascetic origins and became associated with drug trafficking and its consequences, is the fil rouge to discover a different perspective, its original and positive use in the former communities of the Andes region. Curanderxs, a Spanish inclusive word to say “healer”, represents various groups of people that were affected by this, giving them a possible new territory for expression and rebirth.
The main exhibition is dedicated to the city of Berlin, with Dream On — Berlin, the 90s, covering its evolution from the fall of the wall to the 2000s, when the city was transformed in the vibrant capital that we know of today. The story is told by the reporter agency OSTKREUZ, a collective of German photographers that understood the importance of the historical moment and covered it through the stories of its people: from a reportage on the daily life of a neo Nazi, to a theatrical group created by homeless people, to the development of the techno club scene, up to the beginning of the informatics revolution that brought us to this day.
Galerie Buchkunst Berlin in Mitte is presenting the work of the Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ogawa through two of his series, Into the Silence & Into The Dreaming. A short selection of his pictures throws us into the quiet and desolated spots of Japanese landscapes, with their calming yet lonely ambiances. Dreamy landscapes that make us remember how much we long for a connection with nature, something that can feel lost but very much needed.
All these Berlin exhibitions draw an invisible line between a long series of dots, bringing us all over the world, and asking us to question our core being, taking us from where we were to where we are going, and giving us an insight on humanity in all its shades and contradictions. Don't miss the chance to experience these thought-provoking exhibitions — plan your visit to Berlin’s galleries this fall and see where the journey takes you.
