WRITTEN

         The beauty of public art is that one-day it magically appears in a community, like a new neighbor. Where did it come from and why? In the case of the Schadensorge sculptures by Tobias Sternberg, it was at first a curious occurrence, which quickly became a steadfast icon within the Mitte Kiez. Passersby saw glimpses of the creatures’ fabrication and this only peaked interest in what was going on at the recently opened MMX Open Art Venue at Linienstrasse 142. The Metropolitan primary school across the street witnessed the whole build up and it was these students who instantly adopted the animals and integrated them into their daily lives.

          In many ways, the three creatures in the garden of MMX became the friendly ambassadors and calling card to the project. Surely, without their welcoming presence in the garden to greet the inquisitive visitors forward, the preexisting derelict and squatter-like aura would have remained adrift in the front yard.

         Sternberg sourced his materials locally and cheaply, using lots of recycled and on-hand materials. The remains of a destroyed piano from a film set was used to build the bison, the fallen tree branches from the garden used to resurrect the black bear and the mammoth rose from the rubbish of garbage bags. The animals were primarily made black, causing them to appear as outcasts. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico one person commented that it was a piece about “the plight of innocent animals worldwide”. The simplicity of using animals in artwork is that they come preloaded with people’s personal associations to them and encourage anthropomorphic tendencies. One cannot help but relate to a structure, which references a creature of the earth. There remained a continuing debate over the giant in the tree being a mammoth or a King Kong primate of sorts.  Though, this confusion was always eagerly corrected by the children of the neighborhood who happily set strangers straight by saying, “of course it is a mammoth”.  In this fashion, the mammoth found his beloved role in the last front garden left on Linienstrasse.

         I don’t think that Sternberg had a life span in mind when he built the beasts of MMX and when the project ended in early 2011 the animals remained. They withstood a winter and the bear, being the most natural of materials slowly started to lean and finally fall to the ground.  The structure of sticks and branches easily blending back into the now unkempt garden.  The bison held out longer and only sacrificed bits and pieces, a horn there and a sunken back leg. A true warrior and one reminisce of the great, open plains and the hunt for hides. The mammoth, in its synthetic plastic coat, showed no wear or tear.  The two figures kept on, undisturbed for close to three years. Over the duration of Schadensorge tour guides in all languages brought groups to see the creatures. If you waited outside for a few minutes, you would certainly see someone stop and pose for a photo with the creatures - they had become a fixture of the city.

         In the ever-changing Berlin, three years is a long life span for a growing metropolis.  The animals fulfilled the prophecy that Sternberg created them under. Schadensorge is a play of German words that translate to the worriment over injury and damage, implying that we should have better awareness of the things that we harm or make disappear. This point was flushed out even further when the MMX building was sold and developers moved in. They cleared the front yard of all trees but the one in which the mammoth perched. The bison stood naked and exposed in contrast to the fresh arrival of a real estate sales container and a huge billboard advertisement of modern apartments to come. The tale of the creatures’ annihilation was soon to be retold despite that fact that all the clues to what was coming were so blatantly apparent.  

In late winter of 2013, the last tree came down along with the first and last mammoth of Mitte. The forestry crew stripped the mammoth and bison of their recyclable materials in under an hour, visually a brutal scene. It was the direct reenactment of Sternberg’s historical references to extinction. On a larger scale it was a final act that symbolized the end of an alternative art era in the city center of Berlin, a more tamed and gentrified place these days. It echoes a reminder to the viewer that what is here today will not necessarily be here tomorrow and begs the question: what lessons can be gleaned from this moral?  

~ Text for artist catalog of Tobias Sternberg 2013

Despite recent changes spurred by the feminism, the art world is still very much male-dominated.  Still, there are certain female artists who beat the odds and truly have their own place in art history.

Enter Méret Oppenheim, one of the only women from the Surrealist art movement of the 1920s. She shared the stage with Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti and of course Man Ray. Criticised and at times ostracised, Oppenheim was not afraid to make art about gender roles, social stereotypes, and the non-conformist attitude of an emancipated woman — facets that make her a worthy role model for future generations of women artists.

Two of Berlin’s highest calibre performers collide on stage tonight, reacting off each other’s sublime and spontaneous talents. Volker Bertelmann, aka Hauschka, is one of the world’s leading experimental and classical pianists, from modern compositions to cinematic soundtracks, to sound-art experiments and minimal techno.

Hauschka continues to push his instrument to its limits by  attaching percussion and electronic devices that resonant inside the piano when played, creating further tonal and spatial elements of sound. Edivaldo Ernesto is to dance what Hauschka is to music, constantly championing the magic of his exceptional craft. Ernesto, who hails from Mozambique, brings his own distinct style and passion to every performance, including those with Berlin-based dance company Sasha Waltz, who recognised his talents early on, back in 2005. Ernesto has a proven track record of excelling in improvisational pairings with musicians.

Berlin is truly blessed with an inordinately high amount of quality cultural events – but Tanz im August still manages to stand out as particularly impressive.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, the festival runs until the end of this month across several locations, from churches and dance studios to the main hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof. Highlights include the production of Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula  Drums and Digging, a performance about the changes in his home village of North Eastern Congo and how they influence his life. South African, Boyzie Cekwana and Panaibra Canda from Mozambique explore through dance the effects of their two bordering countries, how they are close in proximity to of each other and yet culturally so distant. The brilliant dance-based conceptual artist and recent Golden Lion recipient from the Venice Biennale Tino Sehgal will have three of his signature pieces performed at three different venues (warning: tickets to Sehgal’s performances are in high demand). Mixed in with these newcomers to the stage, the festival’s inaugural performances by the Trisha Brown Dance Company, chance choreography co-founder Steve Paxton, and Slovenia Iztok Kovač’ will also be recreated. Be sure to check the free public video installation by American artist David Michalek; the work is entitled Slow Dancing and Michalek has used high-resolution, slow motion cameras (designed originally for the military ballistic research teams) to film 48 different types of dancers – imagine belly dancer versus prima ballerina versuss breakdancer, all impossibly prolonged. These monumental portraits are displayed at the beautiful Gendarmenmarkt at sundown.

Tonight is the last chance to see the premiere of Moo Kim’s Chasing Silence. Part dance and part installation, the performance aims to fracture silence and take a closer look at the split shards. The show works with the extremes of bodily expression, where minimal but emotionally charged movements are used to convey the poetic chase of an intangible silence.

© ccn images, Zagreb Resort Haludovo, Malinska (Krk), Architekt Boris Magaš 1971 – 72

Holiday After the Fall…, curated by Michael Zinganel, shows the timeline of Croatia’s development as a holiday destination since the mid-1950s, through its rise to escapist wonderland and fall during the 1980s before being all but wiped out by the post-communist conflict.

Today, tourism makes up a quarter of the country’s GDP, but it’s been a long struggle back to the top. Through images of Adriatic leisure, this thoughtful exhibition covers the gamut of large-scale tourism, life after a major war, the division of Yugoslavia, the end of socialist self-management and the onset of privatization.

It is highly appropriate that this show touches down in Berlin,  due to some of the parallels and contrasting elements of how tourism functions in a young destination still claiming its place on the global map. Tonight’s opening starts at 7pm. 

Nature meets high-tech in this Berlin spinoff of Ars Electronica’s famous festival. Started in 1979 in Linz, Austria, Ars Electronica has been one of the most stimulating, radical, cutting edge festivals to hit Europe.

Like a Second Nature deals with the Anthropocene; a term that describes a new paradigm in the Earth’s history, one where humans are actively changing the environment and its future.

Highlights of the show include a contraption by Alistair McClymont that can create tornados by bringing together the right ingredients of wind, moisture and a vacuum. Akira Nakayasu’s clover-like Plant is an interactive robotic flora with sensors that respond to motion and shadow, allowing visitors to play God.

Elsewhere, a white, arboreal sculpture looms over the viewer, waiting to be fed paper leaves. Each leaf has an open eye printed on one side a closed eye on the other; when released back into the air the leaves fall and blink their way to the floor. The all-seeing eye of nature awaits. 

According to P-Berg studio Malsalon, anyone can paint. And what’s more, they’re exactly the right people to show you how, by offering painting classes Thursday through Sunday, using a particular grand master artist as subject and inspirer. Upcoming sessions concentrate on the work of Schiele’s portraits, Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes, Cézanne’s still lifes, van Gogh’s Cypress trees and Klimt’s Kiss.

Today’s focus is on a lesser-known but equally admired artist within art history circles: the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton. Vallotton was part of the Les Nabis group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde, but is probably better known for his edgy woodcuts.

His painting style differs from the standard idea of Post-Impressionism in that it is graphic in style like a print, with contrast, hard edges, and flat colours making the final image visually simplified. His work was ahead of his time and paved the way for the New Objectivity movement, and even influenced Edward Hopper’s severe, minimal style.

Malsalon supplies all you need to learn to paint or return to the medium and Vallotton returns from the annals of art history to provide the muse — his figures on the beach. Rebecca Loyche

Little known but definitely at the forefront of breaking the mold of traditional representational painting, Hilma af Klint will finally get the proper recognition she deserves almost 70 years after her death.

Af Klint hailed from Sweden and was part of a mystical and theosophical movement in the early 1900’s that painted diagrams, symbols, and pattern-based work to visually convey the more ephemeral, complex philosophical ideas of the spirit.

In terms of art-making with nuance and avant-garde vision, af Klint was quite prolific, with over 1000 works. But she doubted people would understand her intricate, nature-inspired systems, geometric shapes and formulaic methods so she never showed her work. Even her last testament stated to not display it publicly until twenty years after her death.

Now the Hamburger Bahnhof has finally brought the artist to centre stage, a wise decision for such an under appreciated leading lady of early abstraction. 

Berlinde de Bruyckere’s Piëta

When you think of figurative sculpture you tend to think of classical examples of perfectly chiselled marble statues, exquisite patina coloured bronze figures and the glorified human form.

The Hamburger Bahnhof would like to offer a rebuttal to this traditional mindset, with their new exhibition Body Pressure: Sculpture since 1960s.

Curators Henriette Huldisch and Lisa Marei Schmidt present a contemporary shift of the figurative form into new materials, from plastics to electronic media.

The subject matter is no longer a slave to the idolisation of the perfect body, but to the darker side of the grotesque, the more abstract and even the campy and consumer culture of the figure. Sculpture has stepped down from its holy pedestal to interact with the viewer and to even be born from the actual bodily materials of the artist themselves.

Japanese painter, architect and writer Kyohei Sakaguchi has created a direct testament for “accessible housing for all”, a mobile house outside the Berliner Festspiele during the performing arts festival Foreign Affairs. Working with Germany’s Über Lebenskunst organization (an interesting project that aims to find sustainable ways of life and how culture can initiate this process), Sakaguchi has built a five-part dwelling on wheels made out of discarded materials from the local consumer waste of Berlin. Based on the survival strategies of the homeless in Japan’s large cities and a loophole in Japanese construction laws that state that a portable structure can not be considered a resident, Sakaguchi believes is doesn’t take much to build a home.

His dwelling will protect and house the Italian pianist Mario Formenti for the next two weeks. Formenti will play for 12 hours each day and visitors are encourage to experience his personal space and get carried away with the fusion of life and music.

Acclaimed sound researcher, sonic journalist, musician and field recording artist, Peter Cusack initiates a gathering of sonic based lectures, performances and presentations in the former airfield and now Tempelhof Public Park. Not only will Cusack talk about his ecoacoustics and the city of Berlin’s ever changing soundscapes but also several sound specialists will be presenting under the umbrella of Berlin Resonance: Symphony of a Metropolis. Berlin Sonic Spaces will also be exploring and discussing the airport as a medium for wind and breathe and how this can influence urban evolution.  This is the third part of a larger series of sound studies and discussions that have taken place at uniquely Berlin locations.

Cusack is a pioneer in the study of sound, his work ranges from his favorite sounds project (a sound-mapping site that asks the simple question of what noises distinctly represent a place, giving ears to locations worldwide) to the sonic capturing of trauma that remains at sites of environmental disasters. Cusack exposes the traces of place through the seldom realized but always present- world of the aural. 

      Across from Maybachufer Strasse and on the Northern banks of the Landwehrkanal, nestled quietly in one of the back houses is the printshop of Keystone Editions.  There is something magical about walking into a light filled shop, with the slight smell of pigmented inks in the air, large beast-like printing presses waiting patiently to be called into action and the feeling of entering the history of printed matter at it’s roots. The digital age of immediacy has spoiled us and removed the simple pleasure of a drawn, transferred, developed, inked, pulled prints made entirely by hand. Technological advancements have a counterpoise and that is the resurrection of analog art. Lithography is a medium 200 plus years old and created by water, oil and a chemical-based resist system worked onto heavy flat stone surfaces and plates. As one of the early workhorses of the graphical and mechanical age, it was once used to mass-produce a majority of printed pictorial material.  In the knowledgeable hands of Keystone Editions, Litho is still thriving though in a modern context marked by rebirth and a break out central role as a respected and diverse art form.

       The founders and master printers of Keystone Editions, Sarah Dudley and Ulrich Kühle opened their shop in Berlin in May of 2010. After traveling the world for close to ten years, Berlin offered them the right mix of an international art scene, affordability and a receptive art community. There are already other well-known and established printshops in Berlin, but Dudley and Kühle offer up something different. They provide their printing expertise and work collaboratively with artists with a distinct emphasis on changing the way Lithography is perceived. The pair are already known in the printmaking community for “pushing the envelope” and seeking out non-traditional ways to shake up a medium deeply steeped in tradition. They have added sound elements to prints, had automated car equipment draw on the litho stones and are even going to start collaborating with some of Berlin’s little, slimy snails from the park.

            Before starting their own business, the duo traveled the world and gained experience working in many different shops. They quickly learned how printmaking can engage and interact with the local community. Their nomadic lifestyle brought them to Northern Ireland, Munich, Germany, the Kalahari Desert in Bostwana, Lowveld near the Kruger National Park in South Africa and to the outback of Australia’s Northern territory. The theme that stems from this is that they learned more about the culture directly from the inside out, through the immersion with the local artists. By means of printmaking, it enabled and empowered people to tell their stories, such as the loss of a way of life due to the privatization of public lands or the inherent earthly awareness that comes with living symbiotically with the land. Dudley and Kühle often brought the printshop to the artists, working with them in their isolated countrysides of desert, bush and outback.  Working with the San artists in the South Africa, Sarah remarked on the similarities of working with indigenous artists on stone:

        “It was an interesting experience for them to draw on the stones because where they are from in the Kalahari Desert, there are plenty of rock drawings, done by their ancestors. We took them on a tour of some of the best rock drawings in the Kruger National Park at the beginning of the project, so they could see how other tribes of their people made images. None of them had ever made a drawing on a stone before, and the work they were doing was largely inspired by how their lives had changed since no longer being able to live nomadically-it made for an interesting juxtaposition of ancestral connections through the stone with portraying life for a "modern" San person.”

            Working abroad helped the pair hone in on what the foundation of their printshop practice would be based on. While waiting for the final details of a new job that would bring them back to Australia, the duo had a lengthy lay over and discovered Berlin. For years, the couple had lovingly been rescuing equipment from closing printshops around Europe.  Kühle, who is German, was beginning to acquire quite a collection of machines and tools at his parent’s home in Soest. So, when news came that they wouldn’t be traveling to Australia, it lead them to the next logical step that perhaps now was the right time to set up their own shop.  They debated over location, what country to choose? They thought about North America and for Dudley, who is originally from Montreal, Canada, this would be returning to her roots. In the end, the pair decided on Berlin, a city rightly known as a Mecca for creative of all types, and found the perfect space in Kreuzberg.

       Not even 2 years old yet and Keystone Editions has broken a lot of ground. They have published the artwork of many local and international artists, hosted artist exchanges and collaborated with local street artists.  Also many well-known artists like Jim Dine, Liliana Porter and William Kentridge to name a few have sought out their service and expertise. Keystone Editions houses a broad collection of works on paper for viewing and for sale.  To keep up to date on future events, sign up for their mailing list.

      And if you are interested in finding out more about fine art printmaking or wish to purchase original art prints, you can find more on Keystone’s multi-language website.

      In terms of the Slow Movement, Lithography is the slowest medium in printmaking; a true labor of love that requires patience and nurturing but offers the fruitful rewards of fine art prints. This is the central goal of Keystone Editions and, like their namesake the keystone, they are the final stone that brings the whole picture together.

     Their 2-year anniversary event will be on June 9th from 5-9pm and will feature an exhibition of the worked printed in their shop. In addition there will be print demonstrations, live music, a vernissage of neighboring Boehmers Produzentgalerie and of course food and drinks for the celebration.

Keystone Editions Paul-Lincke-Ufer 33, 10999 Berlin