On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, Krome Gallery in collaboration with Darri Lorenzen launches Regular Issue.

Presented in a drop-by lounge situation at Krome Gallery
Friday May 1 – Sunday May 3, 2015
12 noon – 10pm
Refreshments served

Regular Issue is a new online publication that exposes currents in the flows of visual culture. It charts the map of knowledge production differently. 

From showing what cultural thinkers are currently working on to resurfacing ideas that have yet to find forum, Regular Issue publishes the latest ›not so regular‹ content.

Distinctive as an anonymous placeholder for how content amasses as idiosyncratic information, the site draws together underlying currencies in contemporary thinking.

While the content may not be so regular the pulse of publishing will be. Every month new articles will be made public that assemble image and text relayed between contributors.

Regular Issue is collecting content towards an archival version planned for print and published by Sternberg Press, Berlin.

www.regular-issue.com
 

Krome Gallery Luxembourg is pleased to present the third exhibition in the series "in dialogue with” showing new works by Berlin-based artist Andrea Pichl and the photography of Zoe Leonard.

Variations in socialist architecture is the prime focus of Andrea Pichl’s research. For this exhibition she will show three of her latest variable tower sculptures based on the floor plans of apartment compounds found in three very different cities and social spaces: the high-rise blocks of Halle-Neustadt (built in the former eastern part of Germany), the high-rise towers of Co-op City in the Bronx (New York), and the satellite town Ballymun (near Dublin airport).

The sculptures will be accompanied by image projections and prints from Pichl's documentary archive of cityscapes, along with two significant series of raster-like drawings in pencil.

Zoe Leonard will show House alongside Pichl's project. Capturing a prefabricated “American family home”, this photographic work questions our strong associations with the American dream and its pursuit for freedom, sprawling out into our past and imagined views of life outside the city bounds.

Zoe Leonard and Andrea Pichl both present archeological takes on urban living: Leonard with reflexivity of the documentary genre; Pichl through a mode of display that reflects on the conglomeration of image and object in the construction of spatial memory.

Andrea Pichl has recently presented solo exhibitions at the M HKA, Museum for Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle and in the exhibition space of the Metalworkers Union Building in Berlin. She participated in many group shows such as „Architektonika“, National Gallery at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.

Zoe Leonard's recent solo exhibitions were presented at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Secession, Vienna and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. 

This exhibition is part of this year's European Month of Photography in Luxembourg. www.europeanmonthofphotography.org 

Krome Gallery cordially invites you to the second exhibition in the series “in dialogue with,“ where new works by Luxembourg artist Catherine Lorent are presented in the context of a referential work by Paul Thek.

Honoring the upcoming exhibitions, performances and events of Catherine Lorent (at MUDAM, Neimënster and Casino), the show features about 40 recent drawings of her ongoing series “Seismes“, in which she imagines what a guitar would look like in an earthquake or a storm. In these drawings the artist posits the formal vocabulary of Baroque as a central reference point of her work. Also on view are three visual and acoustic interactive installations, in which guitars generate a sustained sound triggered by sensors which respond to the movement of the visitors. In addition, the artist presents lesser-known works such as her Leviathan-sculptures, representing the two countries of Germany and Luxembourg.

Catherine Lorent expands her neo-baroque paintings, drawings and sculptures through performance, music and theatrical staging.  Antithetical elements such as abstraction and figuration, highbrow and lowbrow culture, improvisation and concept are merged into a Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk that spectators are to experience with all its disruptions. 

According to Lorent, her performances are influenced by the legendary American artist Paul Thek (1933 – 1988), mainly by his interdisciplinary environments, called “Processions“ -- referring to the artistic “process”, but also invoking the spiritual dimension of Thek’s expansive installations which contain the surrealist and baroque aspects of faux-pagan-theatrical processions. With his frequent use of highly perishable materials, Thek accepted the ephemeral nature of his art works—and was aware, as writer Gary Indiana has noted, of “a sense of our own transience and that of everything around us.” 

In the exhibition, Lorent creates a subtle dialogue between her dark, interactive acoustic rock guitar-assemblages, her „seismic“ drawings and Paul Thek’s intimate diptych „Timely and Timeless“, 1988, painted shortly before Thek’s death. Thek’s piece has a beauty which conter-balances its subject matter: mortality. It engages itself in a dialgoue of time by overcoming the dimension between punctuality and timelessness as a concept. 

Throughout his career, Thek invented his own archeology, creating an individual mythology informed by spirituality, politics and cultural history. But it is also the antiheroic diversity of his oeuvre, the camp, irreverent, sophisticated and altogether penetrating nature of his work which are so appealing to artists such as Lorent.

Catherine Lorent studied painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, history at the University of Freiburg and art history at Paris-Sorbonne. She graduated with a Joint PhD in history from the University of Luxembourg and in art history from the University of Heidelberg. In her musical projects she experiments both with dark, metal sounds and classic elements. Lorent has exhibited in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg. She has won numerous prizes and awards, and represented Luxembourg in 2013 at the 55th Venice Biennale with her interactive installation, “Relegation“. At the end of February 2015, she will have a performance-based solo exhibiton at Krome Gallery Berlin.                 

Marcus Kettel

The dialogue of this kick-off exhibition is between five artworks of younger artist Mathilde ter Heijne and one reference work of Marina Abramovic, who by the end of the century had become one of the defining artists of radical performance.

In her interactive art piece and ongoing project "Woman To Go", Mathilde ter Heijne overcomes the common contrast between romantic inwardness and conceptual rationality. In her installation, ter Heijne combines by chance, photo portraits of anonymous women who have emerged between 1839 and 1920, with meticulously researched biographies of famous artists and scientists (on the message side).  In this random confrontation of image and text on each card, the artists describes on one hand the fictitious character of identities, but provides on the other, a space for reflexive tension.  An opportunity, to rethink about  rights and power relations between the sexes in the 19th century.  During this period the media of  handed-out portraits with biographies existed mainly of known males. The biographies on the cards are a source of inspiration for the artist and stand for female emancipatory role models.

Thereby postcards are to be taken for free from the gallery, to give the visitors the opportunity to „take away“ a female role model in order to spread the message also outside the art world. With the ironic title "Woman To Go", ter Heinje also evokes further questions, surrounding female availability and self-determination at that time in history. Additionally, she addresses with her experimental archive (somewhere between fiction and documentary) our media-mediated collective memory, for which she goes with her research back to the year 1839, the beginning of photography with Daguerreotypes.

This public, procedural installation was previously shown at "Autocenter" (Berlin), at the "Zabludowicz Collection" (London), in the VIP Lounge of Deutsche Bank at the "Frieze Art Fair" (London) and in the Jack Hanley Gallery (New York).

 Mathilde ter Heijne presents in the photo work "Unknown Women“ from 2010, baryt print reproductions of original cabinet card portraits of unknown women from different geographical regions in Europe, Asia and the USA. All taken around the year 1900.  

The 2013 produced video "Lament, Song For Transition" deals with the ritual processes of overcoming grief and sorrow by singing.  There, the artist explores the tradition of lament rituals worldwide. The work was created after a workshop in Helsinki, to which the lament singer Pirkko Fihlman was invited in order to teach the almost forgotten technique of Karelian Lamentations.

"No Depression In Heaven" is a single screen video from 2006. The main theme is the struggle between the rich and the poor. Here, ter Heijne illustrates a paradoxical phenomenon, such as how women would like to be and how they are supposed to be, inspired by the so called womens`s movie, a genre that became popular in the USA in the depression years of the 1930s.

The artist used a very special effect for this video, the so called „Matte Painting“ (also nowadays known in the digital issue as „glass shot“), a former technique, which was used since the beginning of the 20th century in American movies. Parts of scenes in the filmset were painted on glass, to implement a certain illusion which ter Heinje breaks in content and media with the last scene.

 In "The Invisible Hero", a video realized 2005, the artist appears herself only partially visible as a person in a basement with brickwalls (appearing like a prison). It is not clear, if the space is closed or not. In the video, the artist hits the same brick wall constantly, whereby each hit produces both more wounds and more visibility. In summery, this work is about conditioning opposed to freedom and critical thinking. It referes to experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who researches in the late 19th century, how the behaviour of animals and humans could be manipulated. Acoustically, the pictures are accompanied by a "voice over" of a patient with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Mathilde ter Heijne´s installations, videos, sculptures and performance pieces have been shown in main international institutions such as MOMA PS1 (New York), The Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Zürich) and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).

In a general comparison of the two artists, it is obvious that they examine both power relations and role models in our social, cultural, political and economic society, whilst also trying to overcome inequalities.

In a spirit of "J`accuse", they both complain against injustice and go with their art to where it hurts: "mitten hinein in verknöcherte Verhältnisse von denen sie selbst hervorgebracht wurde" (to quote here Jörg Heiser from his german book "Plötzlich diese Übersicht“ by claassen Verlag, in which the author illustrates brilliantly the main currents of contemporary art).Focusing on the aspect of "pain", one realizes that this aspect is for both artists the relevant driving force behind the conceptual issues in their work. They deal with extreme experiences, in which Marina Abramovic uses mostly her own body in her performances, in order to examine the limits of the body and the possibilities of the mind: „I’m interested in art that disturbs and pushes that moment of danger“ (to quote from an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in the book „Marina Abramovic, Artist Body by Edizioni Charta).

Abramovic tries also to figure out the relationship between performer and audience, whereas Mathilde ter Heijne searches more for the essence of our social structures and the role of women by questioning different forms of gender politics. A pioneering similarity in the development of both artists is the exploration of solutions within spiritual performances and workshops.

Marcus Kettel

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Notes on Movements toward inertia

Direct sun light in the eyes. A sculpture without horizon line.

Burnt Sienna was the name given to an ochre pigment original from a region in Italy where the city of Siena is located.

Solid: a state of matter defined by its structural rigidity and resistance to changes of shape or volume. Its atoms are tightly bound to each other in a fixed spatial order, either geometric or irregular. We try to see the bones of the built structures move, but they are very slow.

Bikes rides at night. Quick reflections and blurry volumes under low illumination.



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Opening: 02.05.2014, 6-9 pm
May 31, 2014, 6 pm: Talk with Annika Eriksson and Jan Verwoert

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The city, the camera, the dog. And what it saw. The city knows. It takes its time. It observes what's happening. It recalls what's been going on. It may even intuit what's next. We can't check because the city won't talk to us humans directly. Still we get a sense that the places we cross every day may have a mind and memory of their own. In some places something is in the air that would suggest that much. And it's not necessarily because these places were marked by monuments or otherwise charged with an aura of historical significance. On the contrary, it may precisely be those blank spaces in the urban fabric where a city's consciousness would seem to linger, those spots where roads cross at strange angles, leaving sidewalks too wide and patches of ground without proper use, so that, helplessly, people may put a bench there, to hide how empty the pavement feels. It may also be fenced off pockets of the unbuilt or bombed and never rebuilt between houses or unkept bits in parks that people still visit not because there were actually nice but simply because, for whatever reason, they are still there. It is in these patches, bits and pockets that the peculiar time and tempo at which a city thinks and remembers might be sensed: Because these places are not crowed by interpretations (guided tours leave them uncommented and history looks elsewhere) the city is free to keep its senses alert and, as the planet turns slowly, accumulate awareness.

In her photo series "Reversed (Now you see us now you don't)" and the video "I am the dog that was always here (loop)" Annika Eriksson taps into this particular state and temporality of urban consciousness. She addresses the non-anthropocentric dimension of the awareness a place may create of itself, at its own pace. She does so by letting different mediums channel this peculiar spatiotemporal experience: the camera, the dog and the poem. Reversed (Now you see us now you don't) are black and white photo series, displayed in groups of three. They are pictures of precisely the somewhat blank, forlorn urban locales described above. More than pictures, they are testify to a camera's automatic way of taking in the world, without composition, maybe not even entirely in focus. Crucially, all images are reversed. So what you see, quite literally is what the reflex camera saw in its internal mirror-eye, not what the person taking the picture perceived. Like the recording of a voice played backwards, the reversal adds a touch of the spooky. This is because reversed realities become eerily concrete, as this word does, when I spell it backwards: e-t-e-r-c-n-o-c, turning each letter back into itself, making an e an e, a t a t, an e an e, an r an r, a c a c, an n an n, an o and o, a c a c. What if this was how the city saw itself? Mirrored in itself, rendering space and time infinitely concrete, the literal consciousness of a place might leave words scrambled and permit itself to be uncrowded by false interpretations. We wouldn't know. But the camera may. It is a thing, and hence partakes in the way the material world exists, by and for itself.

"I am the dog that was always here (loop)" summons a different set of witnesses. Live witnesses, yes, but non- human too. The video shows packs of dogs on a derelict ground in the countryside outside Istanbul. They roam around the space and do what dogs do. They keep busy, fighting, playing, sniffing each other and surveilling their surroundings. It's lots and lots of them, big and small ones, of different mixed breeds, city street dogs, attuned to the needs of their survival and visibly in charge of this pocket of space that no one seems to own or want. On the voice-over, a speaker enunciates a text in Turkish in a smooth melodic tone, accompanied by

English subtitles. It's the dog speaking. Which dog? The dog that was always here. It says so. And you feel it too. Because what carries its speech and renders it sublimely poetic is a sense of time and place that exceeds the limits of any one living consciousness. This dog of dogs knows the city because it is the city. It has lived and died with the place, risen like its buildings, and perished with its disasters, always to return. Even though, the dog says, that it and its kin have been captured and moved out from the center to the periphery, it will persist and come back to those streets, after those who wield power over them will long have passed away. The city dog will fight back and survive the forces any police could put up. Its resilience is infinite. Because the time of the city dog knows no end. It goes in circles. Like its poem does, as it repeats and repeats, while the images change. The place of the dog? Place for the dog is a deep knowledge alive in its body like the energy pulsing through its veins that keep the dog watchful, playful and on the go. Would we know for sure that this is what the dog of dogs thinks. No, because, like the consciousness of places the dog of dogs wouldn't use ordinary human language. But, like the camera partakes in the life of things, poetry may convey a touch of the not- altogether human, as its depth evokes more memories than an individual human could recollect. In its rhythm and melody one senses the echoes of more than one life lived, more than a single mind could contain: a collectivity of life experiences, perhaps even the living experience of a whole city. So the camera sees and the dog speaks as it roams around. As mediums they may very well be the ones to channel that peculiar collective consciousness a place might generate of itself in its very own proper time.

Jan Verwoert

Opening: 22.02.2014, 6-9 pm

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This solo exhibition by Lena Inken Schaefer has evolved from a process of diversion and reunification, whose starting point is a banknote from the german period of inflation in 1923, the same that was already used for the "5.000-50.000" work as a template of the endless series of drawings. However, in "Stabsichelbogen" (Rodsicklearc) the process starts with a minimal gesture, where the same 50.000 Mark banknote turns around and some patterns are cut out, enlarged and finally reproduced by the artist, who paints them onto cotton paper. The outcome of this, is the drawing "50000", which transversely extends through the two chambers of the Krome Gallery, as if it was a dissecting or offering table. The contemplative and symmetrical images, which became extended by pressing in a pane of glass, are composed of forms such as rods, sickles, arcs, circles and drops. The original pattern of the banknote was increased from a few centimeters to a length of six meters, as if, during an archaeological investigation, someone was inspecting traces of a past time under the microscope. The same individual shapes that make up the ornament are the basis of two other works in the exhibition.

The video "Stabsichelbogen" shows a mobile that has arisen precisely from these individual forms, which slowly rotates the shadowless silhouettes around its own axis and around each other.

This results in new connections, even if only for a brief moment.
It is as if the characters have been hit a few times by a gust of wind, but it is not clear where this wind comes from. Probably by an external movement, perhaps some person from outside passes through the frame of this mobile and, as a result, the movements of the individual elements are minimally accelerated. This kind of slowness - in the drawing, as well as in the video - looks like an attempt to mitigate the pictures, which were otherwise being associated with pictures of the period of inflation, for example the rapidly spitting printing machine. After the money was devalued by inflation it is now placed in a new context.

At the back of the exhibition is the work "Erdkarussell", which consists of a slide projection with a series of 66 drawings, where seeds, flowers, thickets, tools, antlers or horns, bones, rain or blood, shells, eggs, houses, bodies or waves are shown.

Lena Inken Schaefer let these 33 individual mobile figures be cut out from steel in two different sizes, in order to use them as a character template. These are the basis for the free association drawings about the culture, history and the origins of money. They are displayed in the exhibition as a photographic slideshow.
The individual slides are volatilely changing and standing in contrast to the static presentation of the large drawing in the center of the room. The illustrations remain open on all sides to complete and to continue – there seems to be an equally close focus on the cultural history, e.g. the starting material (the banknote) itself, as well. It remains unclear if it explicitly matters what it is made for and how these are then related in time; whether it is a period of several hundred years or only a few minutes. While the starting material has a specific historical reference, the trace is lost here between the fern, eggs and rain.

An enlarged plaster model of a conventional chewing gum is lying on the reception desk of the gallery. It is entitled "strong, professional, extra" - it’s the slogan of the chewing gum brand Wrigley's, but in a different order. Lena Inken Schaefer sees the title as a similar kind of exaggeration and potentiation in writing, as it is also used in paper money. Furthermore, chewing gum (like paper tissues) is probably one of the most passed on and given away items.

Opening: 30.11.2013, 6-9 pm

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Of all places, it is Alexanderplatz — the so called Heart of Berlin — that was chosen by Andrea Pichl as a model for the schematic framework for her current installation at Krome Gallery. The strict emblematic layout of its configuration today leads to the artistic grid, in which the exhibition elements have to integrate themselves. As always, the presented artwork started out as photographs. Some of them stayed in that mode, while others out of numerous patterns were filtered through collage and reintroduced to the room as sculptures.

Therefore the artist’s attention was not based on the aesthetically outstanding but on the banal — which can be found somehow everywhere. With precision the artist focuses on details, on abstract modules, strange flower boxes, unconventionally placed bollards and forgotten street furniture in public spaces that have been removed from their original function.

With a certain distance, but without the coldness of scientific diagnostics, urban phenomena are scanned for their sculptural qualities. Pichl analyses spaces and forms in which a society focused on the consumption of things got installed and she explores the possibility of arts to act in a critical way without lapsing to an ideology on itself.

Pichl provokes this by dissolving the order of things in front of us, by sorting and arranging them in a new way, by showing analogies, where you would never look for them. That look upon the city is archeological. There does not seem to be a categorical difference between out of construction markets transformed objects and their doubles reproduced by the artist, or between the authentic urban architecture of socialistic provenance and its miniature version of furniture.

In Pichl’s work the vocabulary of public spaces and the inventory of construction markets turns out to be free floating formations of codes, which can be laid upon the world without historical context or legibility. Our categories, it seems, are denying the source they arise from.

Now the question is: how can we read the sculptures, collages and installations by Pichl, when every ornamental phenomena of the public is composed out of the same form, when every single front yard could be a quotation of an English landscape garden or a severe French garden architecture or when Schrebergärten already have been transferred from their function as a base of subsidiary to huge park ground parodies? Is the kitsch-attitude — in terms of both objective appearances and subjective aspects — simply belong to our contemporary world? Or are these signs from far away which are waving back at us, such as Thomas More’s ‘Insula Utopia’ — a radio centric site plan in the shape of a half moon, or the perfect and complex geometries of Dürer’s chess boards or Filarete’s star-shaped ideal cities?

Is there a rest of utopian potential still remaining to every simple-minded construction market element? Are we dealing with archeological leftovers so to speak from the period of heroic architecture — where Le Corbusier had plans about a metropolis built out of prefabricated standardized components and where Mies van der Rohe published his first lines about industrial constructing in G magazine, released in Berlin?

Facing these inconsistent questions of Pichl ’s work, it appears to the viewer that the artist is not talking about apotheosis or about condemnation.

It is rather to observe what happens to things that have been transferred and what it means for an object to be removed from its anyway absurd context and be placed into the context of a gallery.

Pichl is leading us, in a very gentle way, through the back door so to speak, to an individual path of reconstruction, that arises from her interest in the relation of things, their proportion to each other and mutual reference and connections which sharpens one’s attention to their surroundings.

Susanne Prinz

Opening: September 20, 6 - 9 pm

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For the German Pressrelease click here 

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A kind of present absence of sculpture

Michael Hakimi’s work is situated at the intersection of medium, form, and meaning. As such, it cannot be easily assigned to one of the categories of painting, sculpture or installation, but instead operates on and with these categories. Sculptural, pictorial, and installative elements overlap one other, thus forming a nexus that opens up relative to the phenomenal, contextual, and discursive conditions of aesthetic reflection. The current exhibition consists of two constructs, which might be called sculptures and might be seen as interrelated in terms of installation, but not necessarily. ‘Ohne Titel (Großer Phönix I)’ references a modernist sculpture of the 1960s, Bernhard Heiliger’s ‘Großer Phönix I’, which was installed in the entrance area of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg in 1965. The other, ‘Rauch 2’, depicts a cloud of smoke in the form of a free-standing “shaped canvas,” which is mounted on a kind of tripod. It is a highly ephemeral object that does not easily align with the qualities of classical sculpture. In both cases, the photograph serves as the medium for initiating a remediation, in which genre-specific issues as well as their formal and content-based resonances are negotiated.

Sculpture is traditionally characterized by a special presence, both in terms of its material permanency as well as its presentational form, for instance, relative to a specific location. Hence, a space and an assertion of timelessness are denoted simultaneously or charged with symbolic meaning. Modern sculpture has generally adhered to these genre-specific qualities, even if abstraction made diffuse its content-based and paradigm legitimating function. Only in the minimalist and post-minimalist works since the 1960s are sculpture’s specific location and exquisite material programmatically abandoned in favor of the emphatic promise of an “expanded field,” in which sculpture is to finally be democratic, participatory, and thus truly public. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this gain could never really be realized, and that more of a shift would be seen towards installative constellations, which are in themselves quite open-ended but nevertheless outwardly calculated, and along with it the increasing focus on a fragmented art world and thus, ultimately, even a loss of the public and overall meaning.

Hakimi’s work updates this problem. It provides neither a solution in the sense of an expansion nor in the sense of a return to sculpture; rather it presents sculpture as an under-theorized and self-biased authoritarian category, which is, however, simultaneously full of potential in terms of its formal, public-constitutive, and allegorical possibilities. However, these cannot be simply asserted; they must first be developed in the difference between medium, form, and content, and therefore shown as the kind of space in which sculpture can appear both impossible and possible at the same time.

The photographic image surface, mounted with multiple views of Bernhard Heiliger’s sculpture, is converted into a completely new form through the folding of the image support. Now it has less to do with Heiliger’s expressive and symbolic gesture, which opens upward from a point, than with the movements of the observer before and around the sculpture. The “screen” produced by this wave-like flowing of movement results in a new object, which, in turn, is penetrated by a cardboard tube. This stabilizes and cuts across the form simultaneously; it can be seen as drainage, which corresponds to the clearly visible traces of weathered patina on Heiliger’s sculpture, as well as a view, perhaps of another kind of sculpture. Heiliger himself had, to be sure, understood his work as a dynamic expression of a transformation of death into new life, a national allegory regarding the “resurrection,” as it were, of the German Federal Republic after the war. By circling around it in a dual, photographic and sculptural motion, Hakimi’s construct articulates first and foremost a distance to that pathos, but a certain fascination with it also remains palpable. A kind of reinterpretation takes place through the means of assimilation, which is understood neither as a question of sculpture’s potential specificity nor as a pure reconstruction of heroic modernism. Rather, the object, as an equally receptive and reflexive medium, opens itself up to a series of questions: on the fundamental relationship between form and seeing, on the comparability of the locations of the two “sculptures,” and the therefore implied positions of the respective observers, but also on the possible public-constitutive functions and allegorical meanings of art.

In a similar fashion, the second object also links connotations of meaning and formal interrelationships together. The three-leg metal brace of the image support, for instance, can, in its constructive, static as well as its pictorial function, be read as a kind of hearth, from which smoke, presented on the image panel, rises. For the most part, the pictorial form appears to follow the object depicted, the cloud of smoke; and even where differences seemingly stand out, such as between the ephemeral and “immaterial” shape of the smoke and the hardness of the metal frame, or between the pictorial front-side and the constructive, sculptural backside, the categories are ultimately related to one other. Both sides are open to the interplay of literal and metaphorical interpretation, between indexical and symbolic signs, in which ultimately nothing appears fixable and the categories of object and image, front and back, materiality and phenomenality are continuously exchanged with one another.

In particular, it is the unstable balance that links the two motifs, the sculpture of Bernhard Heiliger and the cloud of smoke, together. It references the specific, sculptural, and meaning-laden location of traditional sculpture, which Hakimi invokes in both of his works, without confirming or defeating it. Rather, he transfers it, on the one hand, from heroic unambiguity to a multiplicity of ambiguous readings, and, on the other, to a multi-layered, installative, inter-relational logic. In the display window’s line of sight, the two constructs overlap one another, thereby articulating a simultaneity of autonomy and relatedness. It is no longer the circular view of sculpture that defined sculpture’s distinguished location, but a dominant field of view that remains yearned after and thus worthy of investigation. The public that has emerged from this is no longer the emphatic, all-encompassing, and representative public of modernism, but a public conditioned by the display window, meaning an expansive yet differentiated and selective art world public, which is only capable of constituting itself in the difference between categories and the therefore given range of experiential possibilities. Its presence indicates the absence of another idea of sculpture and public, and can thus only be addressed as such in a kind of calculation of gains and losses.

Helmut Draxler

SOL CALERO • HERIBERT FRIEDL • LENA INKEN SCHAEFER

Opening: June 28, 2013, 6-9 pm

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Item Perspectiva: Von Flüssigen Stammbäumen im Geröll der Vernetzung is a group exhibition originating from the integration of two different identities and locations.

Upon the invitation of Beaumont Public in Luxembourg, KROME Gallery organized a survey exhibition bringing together ten different, seemingly antithetical artistic positions. The exhibition forms a cross section of artistic approaches united around the examination of codifying systems in slippage and a focus on the gaps in taxonomic thinking. Three of these artistic positions are being presented in Berlin.

The work Column Construction N° 3 by Sol Calero is based on research the artist conducted in recent years on West German pottery. Characterized by kitsch and vibrant colors, the ceramic vases evolve on three different levels. Here, the decorative level intertwines with the historical one, but at the same time, functionality is a fundamental aspect.

A tower of twenty ceramic vases, stacked by Sol Calero, appears to act as a pillar for the arch in the middle of the gallery space. As an interface, it separates the first room of the gallery from the space in the back. Sol Calero’s column vertically spans this imaginary passage. Its potential fragility creates a sense of the uncanny. Without regard for stabilizing features or the force of gravity, one vase is stacked on top of the other and shows no sign of being attached. Similar to the column by Constantin Brancusi, it conveys infinity and seemingly emerges out of the ground. By comparison, however, Calero’s column has been excised from the context of different eras. Each vase is capable of recounting a past history, and, at the same time, also conceals a potential future value.

Pottery is often collected because of the object’s characteristic neutrality, although it increases in museum or historical value over time. In general, signs on the vase are useful in tracing their origins and thus in identifying their historic value. However, Sol Calero hides this codification by allowing the production number, the year, or the factory code on the bottom of the vase to disappear as a result of the stacking.

The ontology of West German pottery becomes the subject of a hypothetical anthropological study of found objects acquired at flea markets and thus the overriding theme of the work Column Reconstruction Study. Multiple vases from different time periods are positioned on a table alongside foam material as if recently unpacked and ready for an archaeological investigation. If the positioning here is also highly unstable and precarious, so too is the ruler that functions as a technical parameter.

Forrest Poston also undertakes a fictitious study in the video This Is Not a Pitcher: Getting a Handle on West German Art Pottery. In a scholarly fashion, he recounts while at home the ontology of West German ceramics, ostensibly embarking on a journey to the bygone era. The stories, historical data, research, or simply just hypotheses intermix to create a new reality that likely never existed as such. Left over at the end of this investigation is a vase, which is absurd even in its functionality, and which is located on the windowsill of the gallery: the ornament of the ornament.

In the work of Lena Inken Schaefer, the difference between signifying sign and ornament also stands out. Ten different handmade drawings are presented in a five-meter long series under Plexiglas. An astute eye will notice the almost imperceptible differences between the patterns of the two series. In one drawing, a pattern is repeated from the preceding drawing, while the color is adapted to subsequent drawings. A shift transpires that is only actualized with an awareness of the meaning of these decorative patterns. In the series presented a transformation takes place, a smooth transition, from pink to green. From 5000 to 50 000.

Lena Inken Schaefer has painted the patterns of banknotes. These patterns are the genetic code of the banknote and they also make it possible to figure out which particular bill they represent. However, Lena Inken Schaefer has not only removed these patterns from their context, but has also enlarged them multiple times. In so doing, they are ultimately stripped of any historical referencing or recognizability. What remains is only an aleatoric element devoid of meaning, which could be perceived as a decorative element. However, these patterns tell the story of the period of inflation in Germany in 1923, when German money lost so much value in such a short time that banknotes had to be produced non-stop.

Money- an element that normally enables exchange and simultaneously determines its rules- breaks down, just like its recognition-enabling signs, produced by the halves and combined together, appear as if they were the image of an ancient find in the manner of archaeological excavations.

For Untitled (Fountains), Heribert Friedl conducted on-site research. As with his other works, the room itself or the surrounding space was scanned for forms and associated olfactory clues. Reflected in the shapes of the work are the two forms of the fountain in the courtyard: a circle and a rectangular form with half-rounded sides. Heribert Friedl completes the work with two different fragrances. The visitor is invited to rub the surface and smell it. The tension between these architectural elements—the pseudo-Baroque reference to the slick presentational style of the gallery—emerges in this way. The rigor and austerity is interrupted by the fragrance and suddenly turns into a sensual, moving narration, but without losing itself in this pseudo-opulence. Of course, whether to embark on this journey is left up to the viewer to decide.

With a special interventation by
ELIN JAKOBSDOTTIR

Opening: April 26, 2013, 6-9 pm

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»Falsch« sind diejenigen, die dem Individuum durch partikuläre gesellschaftliche Mächte, die an seiner Unterdrückung interessiert sind, auferlegt werden: diejenigen Bedürfnisse, die harte Arbeit, Aggressivität, Elend und Ungerechtigkeit verewigen. (Herbert Marcuse)

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When Michael Krome invited us to create an exhibition in Berlin he asked us to read or re-read „Die falschen Bedürfnisse“ by Herbert Marcuse. Our own reading habits in relation to the intellectual offspring of Heidegger had previously focused on Hannah Arendt and above all her book „The Human Condition“. We had followed her argumentation about work versus labour, had recognised ourselves in the archetype of ‘homo faber‘ versus that of ‘animal laborans‘ which may well be an equivalent of Marcuse’s ‘one dimensional man’. Arendt provides us with a theoretical model to help analyse the events and circumstances that we have been witnessing and experiencing since the 1980s. To be an artist in Glasgow then was a way to resist the ineluctable situation of post industrial capitalism by being anomalous to it. 

The title of the exhibition, ‘Bursting at the Seams Boiling Point of Dreams‘ is a lyric from one of Mark Sadler’s songs and refers to an aspiration that isn’t tied up in raw socio-economic terms but is a longing to release meaning from life through the pursuit of desire in the face of death; desire being the vector along which we shuttle between eros and thanatos.

In recent years Sadler has used songs as an alternative to the standard requirements of describing his paintings via lengthy analysis. The solitary silent contemplation of a painting is coupled to the song whose role within the Celtic tradition is as a vector for the transmission of history and memory, political and personal dreaming aspirations and an invitation to solidarity. Our thinking has always been based on a poetic approach, most certainly the kind of “plumpen denken” that Hannah Arendt recalls Adorno berating Walter Benjamin for. We create holding structures of heterogeneity made up of strands of experience. We produce work in reaction to the lived world, to the encounter much in the spirit of Freud’s ‘Chance as a worthy decider of fate’.

The selection of work in the show draws on themes of desire as a personal narrative which operates in parallel with symbolic and political/historical structures. Mark Sadler’s ‘Seneca’ based on a Roman sculpture of Seneca portraying the philosopher giving his final speech before death, re-opens historical events pulling them into the present in a mysterious way; while in ‘Uptan Shadiki Rasam’ and ‘Breakers’, desire effuses via saturated light and heavy substances into contemporary spaces. ‘Luxury Sweeper‘ presents a worler as an energetic scrawl disrupting the serenity of an invitingly luxurious chaise longue. 50 drawings form a collection of pathways through repressed passion, playful subversion of the rules, musings and confessional word play related to encounter through travel and experience of religion. 

Elín Jakobsdóttir presents the Berlin premiere of her 16mm film ‘Horsebox’ (originally shown at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh) as well as a sculptural intervention - Wooden Horsebox. The film presents itself first as a purposeful instruction film on how to construct the box; it steadily degrades into an irrational zone of mental projection and physical play verging on the burlesque as the box transforms from use-object to coffin, kinderwagen and conjuror’s disappearing box.

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Mark Sadler is a painter and musician based in Glasgow and Berlin. He is also a contributor to Frieze magazine. Elín Jakobsdóttir is a painter and film maker based in Berlin and Glasgow. Jakobsdóttir and Sadler are cofounders of Fiction House Project space and in October 2013 will present the exhibition “Symbolic Ecstatic“ at Fiction House Berlin.

Opening: February 16, 2013, 6-9 pm

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"Act Zero" is Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen’s second solo show at KROME  Gallery. Speaking as a translator, the Norwegian artist conveys his  experiences of a two month journey he undertook on foot, from Berlin to Trieste, in the summer of 2011. At the same time, observations he  gleaned from the process of translating "Le Bétrou", a play by the  French dadaist Julien Torma, form a common thread in the exhibition.

The title of the show, "Act Zero", is taken from the last act of this   four act play, which starts at minus three and culminates with act  zero. "Le Bétrou" itself is a strange creature who instils terror in the   other characters of the play, though he is only capable of speaking in   inarticulate stammers and his utterances have to be interpreted by an astronomer. In the last act of the play, he finally manages to produce some animal noises, but this only diminishes his power. The veil of  abstraction upon which a dominant language depends is lifted, revealing the uncertainty of language and representation when these are stripped of their context.

It was only through translating the play that Tarje Eikanger  Gullaksen was able to fully comprehend the surreal diversity of the  text. In this way, the mere act of reading became an investigative,  linguistic journey. The woodcut with the bronze lettering in the front  room of the gallery is a direct expression of the act of translation.  "Holebury" is a literal translation of the homophonic play from which  Torma derived the non-existent word "Bétrou". Holebury, an old spelling of an actual English surname and place name, brings us back to the realm  of the real. But through an uncanny contingency, the meaning of this  name – "hollow fortification" – points to the way a dominant language  only serves to conceal an underlying lack and evaporates when confronted  by doubt. This revelation is compounded by the circular notion of the  name itself: dig a hole, bury, dig a hole, bury, …

"The Holebury (pedestal)" builds on this translation while also  representing the central element of the stage set from the final act: a pedestal with the name "The Holebury" in gleaming gold letters. The  character Holebury is to be inaugurated as a statue, and just as he is  about to climb the pedestal and merge with this image of power, the  other characters chase him away and the play ends in chaos, or a certain   degree of nothingness. The pedestal remains empty until the last  sentence of the last scene in the last act: "A ridiculous, egg-juggling squirt of water then emerges from the empty pedestal."

"The Holebury (pedestal)" and the film "Act Zero" consummate   this image. In the latter, a film shot using a high-speed camera, we are  presented with an egg balanced on a jet of water. While working on the  play Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen happened to come across this same image in  two other books by the surrealist writers Philippe Soupault and Robert  Desnos. And during further research into the image he found that a  number of other surrealist writers and artists had also used it: Rene  Clair and Francis Picabia in their film Entr’acte (Between Acts), Henry Miller in his Tropic of Cancer and Jean Cocteau in his poem ILES.   The origin of the image seems to go back to the sixteenth century, when  the acolytes at Barcelona Cathedral would place eggs on the cloister’s  fountain during the festival of Corpus Christi. In the nineteenth  century it became a popular fairground game, the aim being to shoot the  dancing eggs off the jets of water with air rifles. Having initially  been curious about the symbolism of the ending of Torma’s play, Tarje  Eikanger Gullaksen then became fascinated by the multifarious uses and  metaphors of this egg image, which suggests everything from religion to  capitalism, death, sex and love. The image became a model of the  semantic diversity of language: its endless references bring it back to  the concrete image; an image of pure potentiality.

After writing "Le Bétrou" Torma gave up on literature for a life of  perpetual drifting, which ended when he disappeared while hiking in the Austrian Alps. The ideas behind Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen’s journey were   similar; he wanted to leave art behind for a while to just concentrate   on being. In order to avoid the question of exactly where to go he  decided to set himself one rule: to walk south. Rather than being guided   by any desire to visit places of particular interest, his route was  determined by a certain controlled randomness. He was interested in  seeing the in-between places that one never really gets to see when  travelling from one place to another by other means of transportation.  But even when an artist chooses not to make art, his gaze is still that of an artist, and when he came back there were some fragments that had stayed with him, a succession of moments that seemed to combine both  reality and some sort of relation to more artistic or philosophical  concerns.

The photo "Untitled (Das Dasein)" may be taken as a first instance of   this: it is a detail from a typical proverb embroidery found in a  restaurant in the Austrian Alps. The only visible words are "Das  Dasein", which literally means “being there” in English, but it is also a   fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger,   particularly in his book Being and Time. The photo is the only  picture which directly represents the journey, and in a sense it merely  rehearses the romantic notion of the hiker dwelling in the here and now.  But at the same time it manages to set up a dialectic between existence  (everyday life) and existentialism, and as a representation it portrays  the possibility of representation, suggesting both utopia and possible  failure. In a similar way, "Untitled (Moby Dick)" plays with the real  and the fantastic. Moby Dick was the one book Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen  took with him on his trip, but here it is represented by an animation  created from a piece of toilet paper he found in a restroom when he  first stopped for food somewhere in the outskirts of Berlin. The picture  printed on the piece of paper showed three whales: one emerging from  the water, one just on the surface and one diving. For the rest of the  trip it served as a bookmark, a whale within the whale, a voyage within  the voyage, and a reflection within the reflection.

With the sculpture "Untitled (Schwarzenberg)" Tarje Eikanger  Gullaksen transposes a detail from an early nineteenth-century painting into present-day reality. At Orlik Castle in the Czech Republic –  formerly the hunting lodge of Field Marshal Karl Philipp Fürst zu  Schwarzenberg – he saw a portrait by one of Napoleon’s court painters.  Schwarzenberg is shown wearing a pair of boots, though he has chosen to censor them by having another artist repaint them. What used to be a  pair of rounded French riding boots was transformed into a straight-cut German-style boot. After the Peace of Vienna Schwarzenberg was sent to Paris to negotiate Napoleon’s marriage to Archduchess Marie Louise of  Austria. Napoleon, a great admirer of Schwarzenberg, then requested that   the prince take command of the Austrian auxiliary corps in the Russian   campaign of 1812. But when Austria then took the side of the allies  against Napoleon in 1813, Schwarzenberg was appointed Commander-in-Chief   of the allied Grand Army of Bohemia which went on to defeat Napoleon. History seems to be contained in this minute gesture – the cut of the  boots, as an illusion of fashion, conceals reality like a trick of the  light. But what is there is still there, underlining the conflict  between personal vanity and reality in the construction of a personal  truth in the folds of history.

"Untitled (Beehive)", a series of four paintings, plays with the idea   of reference. The patterns are copies of paintings on a beehive Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen encountered somewhere in the Czech Republic on his  journey from Berlin to Trieste. At first glance the images evoke a  specific style of art, but this reference remains quite empty and the  viewer is tempted to read too much into the paintings, for the originals   were not created in the context of artistic design.

"Untitled (Common Horsefly)" is perhaps the most inconspicuous work  in the exhibition: a gold rendering of a female pluvial haematopota, or common horsefly. This type of insect accompanied Tarje Eikanger  Gullaksen on many days of his journey. There is a certain irony in the  fact that this irritating, bloodsucking insect is represented in gold.  It is at once a portrait of a problem and, ultimately, the thing that  keeps you in touch with reality, saving you from generalizations and  preconceived ideas by keeping you in the flux of doubt.

Symbolic metaphors, iconic referencing and the arbitrariness of  language pervade the entire exhibition in the form of dialectical  coincidences. The works originate in the accomplishment of two journeys –   the one hiking on foot, the other in the act of translation. The theme   of distance is reflected on several levels. The distances that Tarje  Eikanger Gullaksen covered during his journey also evoke a mental  distance, a distancing attitude towards things past. It is precisely  this attitude which is necessary for a successful translation. Without  the requisite impartiality there would be a shift in interpretation and the translation process would remain incomplete. The mediation between reality and its representation would risk irrevocable disruption at the   hands of failure.

Opening: December 8, 2012, 6-9 pm

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In the mid-70s, the young Carmelo Bene spoke in an interview about  Buster Keaton and said: “If one imagines the earth as a sphere whose  surface is utterly covered with Soap, obviously one cannot prevent from   slipping”.

The image Carmelo Bene gives of Buster Keaton can also function as a   prologue for the work of Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio who, on this slippery   surface, is slipping himself. He, too, like an actor of silent movies   or  a mime artist, is tide-up on the tug of war, he is slamming against a  glass door or he is climbing on a ladder even though there is no rope,  no glass door and no ladder. Due to his subtle humor the slapstick is  breaking the authoritarian, disillusioning act of the ritual.

The recurring aspect of his work is the simulation of something that   is so credible that the perception of reality itself is called into  question. His staging of fiction correspond with the parody of a drama,   not only in content but also in the methodology, in which the  hyper-realistic results and the production of these objects are more  reminding of the work from a baker as from a sculptor. Instead of a  conceptual minimalism, a baroque narrative adheres to them, which still   performs an anticipation on several levels. With this deconstructive  attitude towards a standardized semiology Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio  repeatedly eludes from any categorization of contemporary artistic  production.

But why is the earth´s surface for some people so slippery? Why is  there a gap between the representation of reality and reality itself?

Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio’s works confront the meaning of experience in   a society that Guy Debord defined as a Society of the Spectable in  which the experience of the reality has been replaced with its  representation. "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord  writes, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is  mediated by images."

Based on his performances Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio unmasks this  epistemological level, at which the images experience their  ritualization.

The Madonna, the ritualized image of a tautological religious  language par excellence equals a noumenon, which works as a  representation of something that cannot exist or cannot be experienced.   As in the language of mass media and advertising, the images are not  called into question, but merely are accepted in a state without opinion  and in a common truth. In this, however, the gap between the reality  and the representation of reality is not filled.

Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio creates a stage for the Madonna, a  mise-en-scene, in which the object plays the role of a picture, or  better, the appearance of an image. On this stage she moves by the use  of a profane technique from the back office of the gallery towards the   depraved Potsdamer Straße. As carefully as the place, the date of the   opening is selected: On December 8, Mary's conception is celebrated by   the Catholicism.

In the context of the Potsdamer Straße this with bizarre meanings  overlaid icon of the Madonna moves as a foreign body and enacts a level   of questioning confusion. Like a nihilistic cynic Lorenzo Scotto di  Luzio accomplishes it to set traps by creating misunderstandings as an  epistemological means.

Soundfair, Laura Berman_Next and KROME Gallery present:

International Contemporary Ensemble, Bo Christian Larsson and Guests

CONCERT

November 29 - December 1, 2012
Overture: November 29 from 12 pm
Opening: November 29 at 6 pm

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„Bring yourself. Bring food. Bring a piece (may be we will play it).“

CONCERT is a deconstruction of a musical performance, which raises questions about the accepted conventions and rules related to this form of event, featuring the New Yorker Ensemble ICE in their first Berlin appearance. In this case the various steps in the process of creating a concert - from the selection of the work and the rehearsals, to the actual performance and moments in between - will be audible and visible as one event spanning three days. Swedish artist Bo Christian Larsson has created an installation especially for CONCERT that further blurs the usual boundaries between onstage and off, between the audience and the artists. ICE, one of America‘s foremost ensembles, will perform works by major composers such as Steve Reich, John Cage and Alvin Lucier as well new work developed with young composers as part of their ICE Lab. Musicians and composers are encouraged to bring music and/or an instrument or perhaps some refreshments to share in the breaks and thereby be part of creating new work in this one-off event at KROME Gallery.

Opening: September 7, 2012, 6-9 pm

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“Put a curve, an arch right through it” is a preface to the artist’s book “The weather, a building” that figures three intersections through specific points in the history of the State Library of Berlin. Matter is made of three points in time when the institution itself was subject to its own kind of splitting; the doubling from its original home on Unter den Linden to Potsdamer Straße, the temporary evacuation of its contents and the interior design of this new building. Intersections, perhaps, or dissections that are also interactions. Which is to say that this exhibition, or a dissected library (this one), might be read as an occupied allegory, an allegory measured.

Allegory is a thing of figures. A simultaneous preservation and evacuation, where the two depend upon each other. The past is collapsed into the present through figures that stand in for it, or something, and this figuring effects a direct address. That is, a message is conveyed, the figure’s purpose is to be read, it operates like a vessel, a hollow form or even a structure. A photograph or a library are allegorical. But whereas in every allegory there is also something like the aesthetics of disintegration (which is why it is often associated with Robert Smithson’s ideas about entropy, a process or an inevitable spiral of irreversible decline into a world of samenesses) instead, the works here and our relationships to them, are a collection of precise distinctions, the marking of separations that rework allegory into a definite, material, non-entropic model.

A building without the contents that usually define it, occupied, is both, suddenly, an anywhere and somewhere particular. Its measuring is a radial pause, the map and location of a heightened state of observation, a reading of the act of reading. It reverses nothing, but brings together language, structures, signs, objects, images and the forces that act upon them (that is, perception) as equal components to be known as such only in and by their specific constellation, in the moment at which they are seen, in time, of time. Not subjects of disintegration, but as (and by) subjects otherwise constituted by the multiplicity of specifically evacuated objects.

So, then, if the preface for a book happened in a room (this room) and asked: What is material? Could it be this? Could it be the evacuation of a pictured hand. A building. A curtain. Shadow. Arrangement. The breeze. Geometry. Light. A body, obstacle, that seen. The seeing, or heard and hearing. The colour of something. Something spoken. The named and names changed, measuring measures, blinked. This hand thrown by a shadow. Folds. The shadow thrown by a page. The page known. And so on, but provisionally. The direct address of a looking away, already looked away. In time, cut through, changed and measured, because. A change of scenery on the open stage, a determined state, the stage fixed. Renovating us in public. Then it would be known, for a moment.

Ian White

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Using methods and media such as sculpture, photography, text, video, performance, sound and graphics, Ruth Buchanan constructs both literary and built spaces that investigate the parameters of artistic action. Often these speculations depart from ‘meetings with meaning'. These ‘meetings’ imply working intensely with, for example, an architectural location, archival collection or production format associated with a particular figure or scenario. In Buchanan’s work encounters turn into objects: historical narratives are manoeuvred into spatial propositions and situated words.

Born in 1980, New Zealand Ruth Buchanan studied Fine Arts in Auckland and Rotterdam and currently lives in Berlin. Recently she has participated in exhibitions and projects at, amongst others, the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Grazer Kunstverein, Tate Modern, Kunsthaus Bregenz, The Showroom and Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory.

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The exhibits of Andrea Pichl which KROME Gallery shows in the window of her partner DYRM, stand in an inverse relation of denotation, compared to their original conception. Originally, this group of sculptures was part of a public art project in a strictly delimited square (1.50 x 1.50 m), arranged on the Anton-Saefkow-Platz in Berlin. This place is synonymous with urbanist DDR planning, whose structure was influenced by the daily life of Vietnamese weekly markets. These unwanted remnants of done work correspond with relics of trade operated in the GDR.

Opening: June 22, 2012, 6-9 pm

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A forest within grasping distance of electric street lights, a meadow surrounded by a chain-link wire fence, heaps of construction debris next to a dense growth of shrubs are pictured in a vaguely recognisable, semi-abstract manner. Incorporeal because of the hazy appearance, they avoid being a straightforward depiction of social distortion. Rather, these are humble dwelling-places of the local spirits, who are affected by a mutant gene. The latest series of landscape paintings by Andris Eglītis, on show at KROME Gallery, is a reverence for the forlorn genius loci of urban outskirts.

When framing the gaze, Eglītis prefers to leave the eyesores of visual pollution outside the picture. Although there probably is an overhead high-voltage transmission line running across the field, or a maintenance shed besides the portrayed group of trees, they stay beyond the frame. Or they become the frame. As in the case of a half dismantled railway track, the wooden sleepers of which the artist has used to build an immense easel on the spot of the outdoor painting session. The presence of train has a significant role in the modern tradition of pastoral genre. Henry David Thoreau contemplated on the disturbing sound of a train in the distance while sitting on the doorsteps of his Walden hut. “The train has come, thanks God! What time it is?” are the famous opening lines of Anton Chechov’s “Cherry Orchard”, a play about the social collapse of the old Russian nobility’s Arcadia. Railroad, once a symbol for changes brought by industrial progress, nowadays seems like yet another leftover of the century long utilization of nature. 

Instead of working with the traditional types of pigments, the artist restricts himself to the variety available in situ and concocts his paints by using soil samples obtained at the sites of plein air sessions. Sceneries of secluded corners rendered with a limited palette and generous brushwork emphasise the air of hopeless neglect and boredom. It is the painterly texture and the absorbing materiality of the surface that holds the viewer captive. The reciprocity between the tactile materiality of the picture plane and the spatial illusion it creates evokes reflections on the very concept of landscape and its status as a cultural construct of human imagination. It also reminds the viewer of the efforts once made by academia to obtain the secrets of the “ideal landscape”. 

Next to the landscape paintings of secluded corners of nature, Andis Eglītis’ show also includes works depicting room corners of unaccomplished interiors. The concept of "ideal landscape" as the alternative to the fierce realities of everyday life are too outmoded to appease the modern service society, which prefers to stay indoors anyway. It is the comforting perfection of plasterboard interiors that nowadays serves as a plain projection ground for the ideal ego. Smooth surfaces and lightweight constructions cover up the deformities of nature caused by the consume orientated high-tech lifestyle. On the urban-rural fringe, the interface between town and country, these deformations become visible again.

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„Andris Eglītis uses surprisingly few mediating elements in his work. His guest for immediacy and the strong sense of intensity go hand in hand with what he calls the “moment of revelation in everyday circumstances”. Spiritual and even religious undertones are invoked in his self-presentations, which also reveals a need to shape and interpret the non-verbal and the subconscious.”

- Maria Lind

Opening: April 27, 2012, 6-9 pm

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“The Great Good Place” by Swedish artist Annika Eriksson brings together a number of video scenarios filmed in Istanbul in 2010, presented in a specifically conceived structure. The videos portray a ‘community’ of stray cats and their life in an inner city park of Istanbul. “The Great Good Place” is composed of a series of viewpoints, each showing different scenes in the daily life of these formerly well cared for domesticated cats contrasted by a video projection featuring their intimate or secret life in the park after nightfall. The notion of place in the title hints at the gaps in the cityscape, gaps that allow alternative pockets of existence and experience to take place.

Over the last two decades, Annika Eriksson has developed a body of work where a critique towards the apparitions of commodity take multiple forms and expressions; mainly through portraying situations that witness the unavoidable presence of institutional and economical powers and class structures. These ‘great good places’ are also the sites where relations are surrounded by conflict and ideology, and it is these public secrets typical of our Neo-liberal age that is exuded in her work.

A returning feature of Eriksson’s work is the staging and the choreographing of people, somehow both performative and documentary, adding to the image a quality halfway between fiction and reality. Besides this, there is a recent emphasis on time. The trilogy of works, encompassing “Wir sind wieder da” (2010), “Wir bleiben/The Last Tenants” (2011) and “It did happen soon” (2012), features a ghostly capitalism at work in the configuration of our collective memory where the past, the present and a possible future overlap. In “Wir sind wieder da” (We’re back) a group of punks hangs out in an park; they look remnants of another era but they live in our days. At a sudden point in the narrative, the video closes with a black and white fragment extending us into a historical fog: a scene of a train that does not stop at stations (something that reminds us that certain trains in the former division of Berlin, when trains were instructed not to stop at certain stations). The punk logo ‘No future’ is punctuated by a cyberpunk touch and then the loop starts again.

In “It did happen soon”, the artist investigates the legend of Kommune 1 (one of the first political communities in Germany) fictionalizing a young man speaking in first person about a past that seems to be blurred. Looking at the film we are perhaps back to the 60’s, or perhaps the young man is looking at something that has not yet happened. Resistance and passivity, facts and dreams, past and future. They all are ‘ghosts’ locked in time/space frames, or trapped in loops, and they are also the dwellers of our cities.

Eriksson's projects conjure up the question of whether art, within Late Capitalism, can become a cultural form on the rise,

a form that can generate a cognitive estrangement as a critical position within a post-fordist anxiety of overproduction. It is a process of distortion, one that art also can achieve from science fiction as a genre that allegorizes our present. Eriksson’s work revitalizes the pair of art and politics but it does so from a new perspective; using the directness of an aesthetic of realism plus the magical aspects hidden in reality. Even if any theory that attempts to depict our world system is a ‘capitalist realism’ (as defined by Mark Fisher) this cannot only be sustained by old representations of an aesthetic of realism (or old forms of resistance, including political art) but rather need the component of a Brechtian estrangement that is often housed in science fiction. In the artist, this commitment is marked by an estrangement as the result of a dislocation or context switch that most of the occasions reveals the uncanny in the normality of the everyday.

Peio Aguirre

Rocco Berger • Grischa Lichtenberger • Mickaël Marchand • Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio

Opening: March 17, 2012, 6-9 pm

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KROME Gallery has invited a group of artists to participate in the show “PPP“, which aims to reflect on the contemporary sculpture as an eventful engagement with the spatial production, performativity and socially charged materiality.

By shifting the focus from sculpture approached as an object or outcome, to sculpture regarded as an expanded practice in motion, irreducible to a single instance providing a formal unity, the exhibition presents each of the artworks as a mutable spatiality.

Shaped by the interaction between the individual intentions of the artists and the general means of production and reproduction of social space, the contributions provide a contemplative mapping of particular social landscapes or private habitats, expose the design of their access policies, or question their compatibility with the white cube environment and the art market in general.

The process of selectively registering the chaotic complexity of space and transforming the chosen sample into a formally masterful “spatiality of situation” displays loose links with the aesthetic principals of minimalism and land art of the 1960/70s. On the other hand, practices like creative appropriation of public space, or deliberate cultivation of intimate art-dilettantism as a private shelter from market-shaped culture, depict the issues relevant to the present-day social plastic.

We are aware that the show may include overlapping territorial claims. There has always been a tension between seeing locality either as a site specific ready-made or as a plain building site.

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Mickaël Marchand has brought a tiny fragment from a line one can follow in the streets of Neukölln district for more than 3 kilometres. Carved thoroughly in the cobble stone pavement it bespeaks a loud, dusty and labour-intensive effort, but provides no clues about any particular reason behind it.

The incision is hardly to be noticed in the quotidian flow and becomes almost invisible when rain has soaked the chalky-white cut and rendered it grey like the rest of the paving. Children overtaken by the irrational fear to step on the cracks between the pavement tiles definitely detect it. Situationists, too. And presumably Michael Heizer since it would remind him the legendary land art piece in front of Kunsthalle Bern in 1969.    

The sample displayed in the gallery provides a close-up inspection of the engraving. A saw has furrowed the urban surface and dredged up the primeval materiality behind its social patina: Where are these cobblestones coming from, how many cliffs were therefore laid flat, what is the etymology of a citified rock?

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Rocco Berger’s “123 Polizei” centres around a “ready-found” sculptural object: an impedimental structure installed in the gateway of a Berlin police station to protect the corners of the building from clumsy truck drivers. Its übereloquent design and obviously labour-intensive production seems not to fit with the architecturally banausic purposes. 

On the one hand, the artist’s decision to make its replica for an art exhibition may be aimed to highlight the fetishized urge for creative self expression; on the other hand the reason could be a purely aesthetic rapture (sculptural dignity of deformation-resistant geometric forms and husky proportions, blacksmith-cum-welder as the archetypical personification of masculinity).        

Taking into account the background of Rocco Berger as a street-wise interventionist, there is also a good reason to consider the option that the replica has been swapped with the original: what we see is a secretly hackered and expanded spatiality of the fortified gateway, a critique of product-designs to implement access policies.

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Grischa Lichtenberger’s work on the installation for “PPP” has largely been inspired by “sekretnjik” - a popular pastime of Russian children, based around building and maintaining a secret spaces of variable sizes to be used either as a retreat or as a secret depository for one’s own cabinet of curiosities.

A tree-house or just a tea-bowl hidden in the forest under a layer of moss, “sekretnik” was the place where to accumulate quotidian objects with an extraordinary power to provoke euphoric sensibility of other worldliness.

Grischa remembers similar escapades into the realms of fantasy, when around the age of four was a frequent  witness of Joseph Beuys’ performances, students of whom were his both parents.

Partly a homage to those memories, partly a presentation of semi declassified materials of his present day “sekretnik” archive, Grischa Lichtenberger’s installation includes the rests of burned down cars found in the streets of Berlin and Hamburg, a sculpture by his mother and his own bed built by his late father.

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Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio moves without difficulty from drawing to video, from sculpture to performances, but it was his kinetic machines, devices built out of scavenged materials and with the paradoxical functions which have brought him to the attention of the critics.

His kinetic piece for “PPP” exhibition, “An empty bottle”, is nothing more than promised by the title. A finished up bottle of sparkling wine staggering around the room in a repetitive loop. One would definitely prefer to focus on the tragicomic aspect of the piece, but it seems impossible without removing the bottle from the chosen gallery space. Would forced eviction be justifiable in the name of some fun?

Opening: January 28, 2012, 6-9 pm

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KROME Gallery presents new sculptural works and drawings by Berlin-based artist Andrea Pichl in a show entitled “ausschießlich oder”.

Spatially based art-installations by Andrea Pichl are questioning the architectural concepts of home and living space contrived by Modernism and still influential nowadays.

The exhibition leads with a group of large scale sculptures: “zwischen”.  The title refers to the peculiar capsule of void, coming into being as a neither foreseen nor wanted space in-between when a right-angled prefab slab building is erected next to a less regular pre-war apartment house. As a rule, the gaps are usually hidden from sight with a cover-up extension of the facade. The rustic plywood models of Andrea Pichl visualise the ulterior bowels of this spatial phenomenon of urban habitat, revealing the confluence of the standardised and the heterogenous in its aloof coherence and dynamic irregularity.

The sculptural work “weg“ deals with a particular aspect of Berlin’s architectural history - the recently demolished building of DDR Ministry of Housing. Plasterboards cladded with black and white detail shots of the edifice are arranged in an installation, which explore the principles of panelised building systems through the lens of fragility and deconstruction.

“Wieder“ is a sequel to Andrea Pichl’s installation “doublebind”, commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin for the thematic exhibition “Architektonika”. The minimalistic sculpture, more than two meters high, is a reflection on the WBS 70, the meanwhile notorious DDR era prefab housing series for studio and one bedroom flats. Composed as an architectural model at a 1:6 scale, the installation renders the ground-plans of the building as a rhythmically mesmerising, but socially depressing metamorphose of living space.  

The sculptural works are accompanied by a series of drawings. These are pencil studies of building facades - a repetitive litany of patterns cast in concrete panels, and a vague notion of the fragile human lives behind them.

“Standardised construction models have had a grotesquely dysfunctional impact on the living space. Andrea Pichl focuses on isolated details of normative architecture as peculiarities inexplicable from the viewpoint of rationalism, and turns them into sculptural ensembles.  Irregularities, which normally are not expected to be there, but are still present like the preposterous survival of some almost extinct habitat, are in term used as a basis for a new artistic system. The inherent paradoxes of such a methodology, which reduce the standardised and repetitive architectural components to absurdity, are also present in the title of her latest exhibition: ‘ausschließlich oder’.” (Ludwig Seyfarth)           

Opening: September 9,  2011, 5 – 9 pm

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On the occasion of the opening of its new space on Potsdamer Straße, Krome Gallery presents „Shop Front Coherence“, a project by Annika  Eriksson. This context sensitive work reacts to the situation of  Potsdamer Straße and its surrounding neighborhood, dealing with its  changing processes and ideas of expectation.

Annika Eriksson’s work is associated with socially-engaged and  site-specific practice dealing with everyday situations and collective  actions. Much of her work, mainly photographs, videos or film  installations, concern the urban and public space. 

Annika Eriksson’s work has been exhibited worldwide including the  DAAD Berlin (2010), the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin (2010), the Hayward Gallery, London (2010), the Venice Biennale (2005), the Kunstverein  München (2003), and the Biennale de Sao Paulo (2002). She is currently  working on a solo show at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

The project is curated by Katharina Krawczyk.

In conversation with Annika Eriksson

KATHARINA KRAWCZYK In many of your pieces you invite people  from different professions to participate in your work. For „Shop Front  Coherence“ you invited a professional decorator to make a shop front for  an art gallery. What does it mean to you to delegate a part of the work  to someone else?

ANNIKA ERIKSSON It depends on the project. But generally I  invite people because I am interested in their knowledge of a certain  area. In these works the participants are invited with a suggestion from  my side. There is always a strict framework to the projects. These  works are not collaborations, they are suggestions, and that distinction  is very important for me. Once the framework is established I  don’t interfere with how the participants choose to act or what they  create. In this process, it is not possible to make mistakes. There are  sometimes surprises but those are a bonus. So in one way I do control  the situation and in another way I do not, I just have to accept the  outcome. I like this way of letting go once everything is set. My  process is always the same: after I have the concept, I just follow  the process that I have started. I like very much the way Sol LeWitt  describes the way he works: “The idea becomes the machine that makes the  art“.

KK And how does this relate to „Shop Front Coherence“?

AE In this piece I hired a professional that created the shop  window of the gallery as to follow a similar aesthetic of other displays  on Potsdamer Straße. It had to be as realistic as possible.

KK The title of your project for the Krome Gallery is „Shop Front Coherence“. What does coherence refer to?

AE The piece relates to this time of transition that we see  very clearly in Berlin, the gentrification process is extremely   aggressive. At the moment, the area around Potsdamer Straße is in some   kind of 'in between situation' where you find a few up market galleries  but still they look rather displaced among the shops and 'Kneipen' that  have been there for years. The shop window of the gallery physically  reaches out on the pavement, almost divided from the gallery. And the  „Shop Front Coherence“ is in coherence with the street.

KK For your recent performance „Hannah Arendt Band“ you  invited a young punk-rock band to perform their own music under the   title of the philosophers’ name. Your work deals often with our  expectations. What you see is not necessarily what you get. What about  this discrepancy in „Shop Front Coherence“? 

AE The pieces that I make regarding expectations often relate  to expectations within the art world. They are often displacements in  various ways, because they are placed where they don’t belong. They both  refer to and change the context in which they are placed. But in this  case the displacement looks different: the gallery becomes what is  displaced. An art audience does not expect that kind of shop front from a  contemporary gallery so, as art the piece is displaced, but as shop  front it displaces the gallery.

The shop front is decorated by Heike Belgert from Art Window.

Opening: September 9, 2011, 5-9 pm

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Following his first exhibition, "Do the Stars need a Reason to Shine" (2009), Krome Gallery presents the work of Markus Weisbeck in their new venue at Potsdamer Strasse 98, Berlin-Tiergarten.

With "The Beginning of the End of Time" Markus Weisbeck shows new typographically-oriented sculptural work. His arrangement of poetic word inventions and short stanzas both formally and conceptually address the context of time-based parameters.

As word collages like April in a Day, Spring for a Year and Moments out of Date cross diverse definitions of time, they fragment experienced time and represent compositions of the inner sense’s forms of assumption.

Formally, these are created out of plastic material. The wall-mounted works of layered plexiglass that reference the resulting gaps of die cutting use isolated hour, minute, and second hands for referring to the function of measuring time by kinetics. The hardness of the material presents the force, which can be raised by a hand blow.

Even the oversized printed fabric panels—which run like sails through the rooms like a maze, and in which time and space flow together—allow the word compositions to physically play and distinguish themselves within the context of temporal dimensions. The typefaces are deliberately arranged so that the speed of reading in favor of slower comprehension takes place. Consequently, constructivist forms emerge, which result from the intersections of the spaces between words, which are scaled on an individual grid system.

Through the generation of temporal levels, which only reflect the real time when unified, the viewer is set into a new state, where time is within reach and where he can step out directly from the stream of time.

The projection "Hybrid Clock: Clock-App, that integrates two established time-telling visual devices" presents a clock, which was developed and patented by Markus Weisbeck and celebrates its launch with the opening of "The Beginning of the End of Time." The clock will be available for purchase from the iTunes Store, and can be used for multiple applications. Its volatile substance and computer-generated origin form a counterweight to other time-keeping devices, which suggests that the temporal dimension can never be grasped in its totality and that a holistic escape from the stream of immediate time is never guaranteed, is present in every moment even past.

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For more than 15 years Markus Weisbeck (*1965) has been working as a graphic designer. In 1997 he founded Surface, a studio for corporate and cultural design located in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Since 2000 he has published collaborative music projects on the label Whatness and most recently he produced an edition of iPhone applications. Among the works by Surface are campaigns for the Forsythe Company, the German Pavilion at the 2007 and 2009 Venice Biennales, corporate design for Manifesta7, the website of the Academy of Fine Arts, Frankfurt am Main (Städelschule), and a multitude of catalogue and book projects such as the The Hospitality of Presence by Daniel Birnbaum (Sternberg Press, 2008). With Surface, Markus Weisbeck is internationally renowned as one of the most influential designers working today.

Opening: January 28, 2011, 6 – 9 pm

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For his first solo exhibition in the Krome Gallery, Ivan Seal selected ten paintings from his studio and sent them to six people working in the field of psychology, psychotherapy and Gestalt therapy with instructions to respond with a sentence, word or set of words. Ten participant reactions were used by the artist as stimulus for a new set of 11 paintings that echo to the originals, starting a game of free correlations and open interpretation.

Ivan Seal’s painting acts as a language, whose code underlies an instrumentalisation. It is what it is, color and brushstrokes. Work.

Seal’s paintings develop a language of signs that performs by representing iconographical scenarios in an endless process-related act. Reduced to essential motifs, the artist signalizes with his manic repeated themes a position that claims the contextualization of the “single picture” and also flips the notion of a “singular” meaning to an image.

The premise for Ivan Seal’s practice is often a word, sentence or an associative game. Paintings frequently begin with the image of a plinth against a dark background. A sculpted form is then placed on this stage, either standing firmly or precariously balanced on thin string. The clay may be treated in various ways, eg. divided by a knife or studded with matches. They seem to be sculptures, that have been abandoned in the middle of the process of their creation. The material presence of the depicted object is manifest, the clay is malleable, the string is often strained, the knife sharp.

This selection is complemented by the spoken word piece „Constructed stream of consciousness - narrative mode using six people in the field of psychology (edit)“ where the responses given by the participants are spoken by Seal and then fed into a computer program which constantly shuffles their order and randomly construct an endless associative stochastic poem. In this way the soundwork comments on a parallel level an open combinatorics, paintings as narration, syntax in space.

The second spoken word piece presented in the exhibition is „Inventory“. It involves the narration by the artist of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2, one of the most frequently used personality tests in mental health consisting of 500 statements, which participants have to answer, “true as applied to you or false as applied to you”. These statements, which play continuously in the gallery space, act as points of reference, stimulation or association in conjunction with the paintings. Although Seal reads each question with the same hypnotic and emotionless voice as in the previous sound piece, his matter-of-fact tone leads ad absurdum to a latent confession. The unsaid responses set the scene for the most intimate free associations.

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Ivan Seal was born in 1973 in Stockport, England and currently lives and works in Berlin. Between 1992-1995 he attended Sheffield Hallam University.

Full title: In the Autumn the Electricity withdraws into the Earth again and rests

Opening: November 27, 2010, 6 – 9 pm

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Versatile cultural references to literature, music and art alongside mysticism and folklore can be discovered in Maria Loboda’s work. A basic interest for the transformation of language and knowledge in specific objects as well as room ensembles crosses her work. In these themes Loboda refrains from focus on a certain era and instead investigates as a researcher throughout several fields. Loboda engages with the condensation of cultural history in artefacts and how they may materialise in our time.

In the first solo exhibition of Maria Loboda in the Krome Gallery, distinct powers and energies take effect. The examination of the sculptural power of language and writing system, the energy of forms, objects and materials, as well as their states and transformation, crosses the exhibition as fundamental topics. The title “In the autumn the electricity withdraws into the earth again and rests” is extracted from the Chinese I-Ching, the “Book of Changes”. In it, a central philosophy is the fundamental attempt to understand the world as a whole, which can adopt a variability of forms and states. The exhibition assembles new and recently developed work requiring metaphysical comprehension. As in previous works, Maria Loboda has followed the vital spirit of objects, their unconscious symbolism and poetic power.

The most spacious yet most invisible work “The totality of everything that exists” (2010) centres around the term of “universe.” A majority of the exhibition space has been painted in broken white. Derived from the hexadecimal RGB-value #FFF8E7, generated by scientists in 2002 during the spectral analysis of star galaxies in attempt to calculate the “colour of the universe,” Loboda produced and coated the gallery walls in a unique hue in order to bring together the cosmos and white cube.

This intervention is broken by “Walldrawing (arsenic, cyanide, mercury, lead)”, a wall drawing of colourful, non-objective forms and structures, drawn from the patterns of the Wiener Werkstätte. The appearance of beauty in this room's ornamental pattern is deceptive. The paints in use - Schweinfurter green, Naples yellow, Prussian blue or vermillion - contain the toxic elements arsenic, cyanide, mercury and lead.

Similar themes move through the new work “Ah, Wilderness”. This installation consists of three plants, hanging from the ceiling in baroque conjunction, though their wild behaviour outside the space could be described as antagonistic. The exhibited tree species cedar, pine and birch exist independently and without human intervention on the existence in their particular monocultures.

Further on Loboda has placed a monolithic, leather-covered writing desk in the gallery space. Appropriate to the title “Tasks abandoned before completion” (2010), the function of this abandoned workplace has been stripped as it solely remains a symbolic locality lacking the potential for concentration or intellectual work. In absurdity it seems only to be created for tasks that will never be completed and people who will never use it. On its leather cover remains a mark of a removed object, which is subsequently echoed on the opposite wall.

The divan bed titled “…this overelaboration of patterns leads to the unpleasant effect of four diverse elements without relationship or union with one another. From the distance the details fuse into a grey indistinct blur…” brings together swaths of suit fabric in disharmonious combination.

Thomas Thiel 

Translation by Jules Gaffney.

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Maria Loboda was born in 1979 in Krakow and currently lives and works in Berlin and London. She attended the Mark Leckey class for Interdiciplinary Fine Art Studies at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule.

Between 2007 and 2008 she has been visiting Artist and Scholar at the New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development

Opening: October 2, 2010, 6 – 9 pm

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Krome Gallery presents the European premiere of “Black Moon”, the newest multi-part work by American artist Amie Siegel, which recently premiered in the USA in the 2010 Foster Prize Exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston. “Black Moon” consists of three works –  a 20-minute film, a series of photographs and a two-channel video installation.

The centerpiece of the exhibition at Krome Gallery is a large-scale projection of the film “Black Moon” (2010) shot in super16mm. Siegel’s latest montage of fictional and non-fiction elements blurs the boundaries of different genres and narrative structures. Set in the real-life post-apocalyptic landscape of foreclosed and abandoned gated communities in Florida and the California, “Black Moon” stages a revolutionary troop of armed women surviving an unspecified war. The houses were never lived in or abandoned by their owners or developers during the last economic crisis. Shot in slowly moving and still sequences, the houses and empty streets become protagonists of a silent narrative, a documentary of the recent past. However, these real-estate developments also function as the fictional setting for the female soldiers traversing a surreal suburban topography seemingly absent of other humans. Wandering through abandoned environments, pushed on by gunfire and the bloody aftermath of battles, they cradle their guns, sleep outside, and keep vigilant watch. The film’s deliberate pacing, juxtaposing scenes of the armed women with fixed camera tableaux and tracking shots of the empty architecture of financial speculation, ponders the uncannily recent ruins of a future that never was. Wordlessly moving further into the desert, one of the women discovers an object that sparks an eerie sequence of images-within-images. An absurd puncture of filmic time, it appears as an artifact of a drowned era of commerce and prosperity, fashion, and the marketing of war.

Amie Siegel’s “Black Moon” is a partial remaking of Louis Malle’s 1975 film of the same title. The original Vietnam-era film stages an ambiguous civil war in France as background to a woman’s delusions. A present-day science-fiction without dialogue, Siegel’s “Black Moon” traverses multiple film tropes – action, guns, lonely campfires, the end of the world – and, like the band of female revolutionaries themselves, resists taking up residence in a fixed genre or narrative. Black Moon conjures up references to wars ‘here and elsewhere,’ suggesting alternate endings to the mythical domestic return of US troops from campaigns abroad, pondering the places soldiers protect, and the parallel economies of gender, images, and warfare.

The second work in the exhibition is a series of photographic c-prints, “Black Moon / Hole Punches” (2010), derived from the hole punches, or black moons, typically cut by the motion picture laboratory into the first frame of action in film negative when transferred to video. Used to synchronize the image (and always left out of the final edited film), these hole punches appear in Siegel’s prints as imperfect black disks or voids cut out of film frames. They are evocative of lunar phases, yet strangely violent in their intercession into the otherwise smooth picture plane. As metaphors of the filmic endeavor itself, the set of images expose the film’s own production in a fragmentary manner, while re-capitulating its latent violence and re-use of aesthetic ruins.

The third element of the exhibition, “Black Moon / Mirrored Malle” is a 2-channel video installation that places an original 1975 interview with Louis Malle about his film “Black Moon” against a shot-for-shot version in which the artist Amie Siegel herself plays Malle. This gendered shift of roles introduces a transposition of language and meaning, as Siegel re-composes Malle’s interview in tandem with his original, enacting a battle of authorship and doubled future within the present. As Malle speaks of the “crisis” his film depicts and the role of the viewer, Siegel’s re-playing of the male role echoes her “Black Moon” film’s transposition of male roles—soldiers, bandits— performed by women, and shifts words spoken 35 years ago into present-day commentary.

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In the exhibition “Black Moon”, Siegel continues her engagement with fiction and documentary cinematic devices, her examination of architecture as “the persistent sculpture or meaningful objects of cinema”, the performance of the past in the present, and her use of prior works as scores or texts to be performed anew. The constellation and complication of meaning generated by the three works in juxtaposition with one another mirror the carefully composed montage structure of her theatrical cinema films, such as Empathy (2003) and DDR/DDR (2008), where different cinematic idioms and genres accumulate to create new meanings. This newest exhibition also continues concerns with remaking and simultaneity that pervade her film, photo and video-based installations including Berlin Remake (2005), Deathstar / Todesstern (2006) and the video series My Way (2009).

“The films of artist Amie Siegel deftly transform heady philosophical musings – about history, psychoanalysis, voyeurism, modernist design, cinematic narrative – into elegantly playful and provocative mosaics of carefully loaded images and pointed associations. … The restrained

self-reflexivity and deadpan humour that unite Siegel’s films lend them a rich meta-cinematic dimension that actively questions the limits of traditional nonfiction cinema.” (Harvard Film Archive)

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Amie Siegel was born in 1974 in Chicago, Illinois and currently lives and works in Berlin, New York and Cambridge, MA. She has been a guest of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She received her BA from Bard College (1996) and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999).

HANNES BROECKER • BURGHARD • TARJE EIKANGER GULLAKSEN • DARRI LORENZEN • WIEBKE ELZEL & JANA MÜLLER • REGINE MÜLLER-WALDECK • IVAN SEAL • MARKUS WEISBECK 
  

Opening: June 25, 2010, 6-9 pm

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"KMA Group Show" is the first group exhibition at Krome Gallery giving a selective insight into the ongoing development process of the gallery's program after almost one year of regular exhibitions. Three of the altogether seven positions have already had solo exhibitions at Krome Gallery in the past while four of them have been especially invited to participate in the "KMA Group Show". Almost all of the works on view are installation-based and thereby comprise a wide range of media from sculpture to photography, painting, sound and graphic design.

The abbreviation "KMA" within the exhibition title stands for the venue's site, Karl-Marx-Allee, in whose architecture the gallery is strongly embedded. The works selected for the exhibition can be linked on different levels to the historical, political and aesthetical implications of the boulevard which had a highly representational function during the GDR. In this sense the exhibition title's seemingly neutral part "Group Show" points to the issue of collective representation and its boundaries, whether referring to exhibition discourses, gallery programs, political ideas or joint interests in general. The exhibition's logo, in turn derives from a campaign for an art, design and gastronomy flyer initiated in 2009, which was meant to represent about 20 participants located alongside Karl-Marx-Allee. In the end, however, it has not been produced in that form.

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Leipzig and Berlin based artist Regine Müller-Waldeck (*1975) constructs her objects and installations mostly from scanty materials and sees them as 'psycho-social landscapes' whose associative potential she mobilises to create awareness of the contingency of socially protective and supportive constructions and to make them experience-able. In "Separation / Wehr" (Separation / Defence)  the viewer passes through a fragile collective of unstitched pleated skirts which evoke an image of corrugated iron of the kind that afford scant shelter to slum dwellers.

Simultaneously the dark plissé stands in its stringent form and harsh materiality for a militarily uniform disciplining of the body and conditioning of the subject. Until 2008, Regine Müller-Waldeck was studying under Astrid Klein and Timm Rautert at the HGB Leipzig. She received several grants, among them being the Cultural Foundation Saxony, which afforded her a stay at the ISCP in New York. She had her first solo exhibition in 2006 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, where she received an art prize presented by Dresdner Bank in 2008. Her exhibition at Kunsthalle Mannheim won her a nomination for the Hector Award for Emerging Artists. After showing at Temporäre Kunsthalle, she will have her next solo exhibition in Berlin at Klemm's Gallery this fall.

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Internationally renowned with Surface, his agency for corporate cultural design, German graphic designer Markus Weisbeck (*1965) had his first exhibition with freely created works last year at Krome Gallery. The work "IBKDL" (I am not a democratic country) is deliberately shown once again in "KMA Group Show". While visually referring to the aesthetics of the late 1980s the image’s polemic statement points ironically to the generic mechanisms of a group exhibition, a gallery program, an art district or a social structure and its aesthetical represantations.

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The English artist Ivan Seal (*1973) creates site-specific installations combining painting and sound.  For "KMA Group Show" he has compiled an ensemble of small format paintings and a computer generated sound piece reminiscent of dadaist techniques. For the past year Seal has been creating a continuously growing volume of small to middle format oil paintings in a naturalistic manner depicting recurring motifs against undefined spaces. We see amorphous cubes and cuboids seemingly made of clay, held, connected or pinched with strings, placed on plinths, studded with matches, nails or cigarette stubs that Seal examines in trompe-l'œil fashion. Both the automated sounds of fragmented speech and the paintings, where spaces and objects are loosely interlinked beyond their margins, point to an oneiric realm between the fictive and the real space. Ivan Seal has been living in Berlin since 2004 where he has had several exhibitions and performances, at Julius Werner Galerie amongst others. Parallel to a show by Manfred Pernice Ivan Seal’s exhibition "I learn by osmosis" is currently on view at CEAAC Strasbourg.

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Wiebke Elzel and Jana Müller (both *1977) already started an intense collaboration in 2001 while studying photography at HGB Leipzig. This led to large-staged photographs alluding to social catastrophies and collective fears as subject matter. Analogously, they create photographic series that document urban, geographical and geopolitical processes of dissolution. The exhibited series "Land II", also shows this by depicting abandoned and deserted, and partly-drowned islands from the lagoon of Venice. A map is printed on each photograph’s back side indicating the respective island by its name and position with a stamp. Wiebke Elzel and Jana Müller are currently living in Leipzig and Berlin. Their conjoint works was lastly shown at Kunsthalle Rostock and Fotogalerie Wien. Their individual oeuvres have been presented at Schütte Gallery, Essen, where Wiebke Elzel’s solo exhibition "For the Birds" is currently on view.

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Hannes Broecker (*1980), participant of this year’s sponsorship programme "New Positions" at the Art Cologne, devotes himself to the iconography, the systems and structures of public, and predominantly urban space. He transfers fragments and abstractions from street, sub- and pop-culture into his works of art, which include sculptures, assemblages and installations. He has been working on this project since the start of his study of the "interdisciplinary and experimenta painting" at an art academy in Dresden. Hannes Broecker is represented by Baer Gallery, Dresden.

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BURGHARD signifies the Berlin based artist couple ,  Romy and Stef Richter (*1977, *1971) ,  who have been collaborating since 2002. With their objects, installations and collages that often consist of found material,  BURGHARD creates poetic situations through simple inversions. By doing so,  they raise questions of architectural, linguistic and iconographic matter,  which sometimes even leads to the (seemingly) disappearance of the work itself. In this sense,  the installation of seven used mirrors under the gallery’s ceiling is a gesture of invisibility and refusal. The original purpose of the mirrors is refused and instead their differently colored back sides face the viewers.  In ist simplicity the work is visually comprehensible, however  it creates an abstract space above the mirrors. Romy Richter studied product design in Dresden and typography in Berlin. Stef Richter studied art in Dresden and in the class of Heimo Zobernig in Vienna. Apart from contributions at group exhibitions (at Kunstverein Bregenz and Manifesta 7 a.o.), their last solo exhibitions were held at Kunstverein Arnsberg and at the Communal Gallery of Wolfsburg.

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Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen was born 1973 in Norway and moved to Berlin after his studies in fine arts and art theory at The Royal Danish Art Academy, Copenhagen in 2005. Taking an investigative, research-based approach, Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen works with a wide range of media, such as text, installation, sculpture, and drawing.

Since 2009 he has devoted himself to film projects, which led to "Unfinished Symphony," a filmic portrait, about the laboratory of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), that has been presented at Krome Gallery this year. At the moment, Gullaksen is doing a post production of the film, for which he had received working grant in China recently. In "KMA Group Show," one of his few 'paintings' is presented as a paint page of Walter Benjamin’s "Arcades". Benjamin, in turn, quotes a long section from "Eternity through the Stars" a text by the French revolutionary and early socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881).

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Icelandic artist Darri Lorenzen (*1978) makes site-specific space installations that sometimes take over the whole place. He applies media like sound, light, architectural objects, computer simulation or photography.

Basically, he aims to develop performative models and strategies for a sensible experience of space, time, and body. As in Lorenzen’s  exhibition "In Point of Fact" at the Krome Gallery last year, the viewer becomes part of the work itself in "KMA Group Show", too. He realized a number of performing projects while still studying at the art academy in Reykjavik and the Interfaculty Image & Sound of the academy in Den Haag before moving to Berlin in 2005. Darri Lorenzen gained several grants from the Center for Icelandic Art, Reykjavík, as well as the Dungal Art Prize in 2007. He is represented in the collection of Thyssen-Bornemisza, Vienna, and in a couple of publications, such as "Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory" (Phaidon Press, 2009) and "Icelandic Art Today" (Hatje Cantz, 2009).

Fullt title: SCI-FI + FANTASY; MUD, SALT CRYSTALS, ROCKS, WATER; WIND; ROTATION; REVOLUTION

Opening & Book Launch: May 2, 2010, 2-6 pm

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Krome Gallery presents the first gallery exhibition in Germany by Dave Hullfish Bailey  (*1963). To date the Los Angeles based artist has mainly shown his site-specific and research-based projects at international art institutions.

Bailey’s exhibition at Krome Gallery is conceived in close relation to his recently published artist book, "What’s Left" (2009, Sternberg Press, Berlin and Casco, Utrecht), and to the exhibition site on Karl-Marx-Allee. From the diverse research collected in the book, Bailey presents a series of photographic images that document the self-organized, open-air library at so-called Slab City, a squatters’ camp located on an abandoned military base in California’s southern desert. Alongside these images he includes selected pieces of new research, a text-based slide projection, and a collection of sculptural objects, some of which were created in situ of materials being thrown out by local Berlin libraries.

Together, these elements propose a chain of connections which are rooted in concrete details of location, yet are at the same time highly speculative. By linking these official and unofficial collections of books with each other and with the exhibition and publication site – the gallery is located adjacent to the former Karl Marx Bookstore which was founded in the GDR and today is the office of Sternberg Press – Bailey frames questions about the social spaces of learning, and the possibly asocial reasons for reading. 

"...In other words, I am building the exhibition out of concerns developed in the book, that have to do with dis-organizing and reorganizing information, but also with social structures. These relate in the cultural function
of pedagogy, as a means of creating social cohesion. The Slab City Library (with its heavy weighting of escapist literature), the Rodchenko reading room, and the ghost of the Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung, are specific versions of this nexus between the organization of information (as matter and as ideas) and the organization of the in-dividual and the collective at the level of the social."

 (Dave Hullfish Bailey)

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Self-reflexively, Bailey’s inquiry unfolds through diverse methodologies ranging from the accepted to the idiosyn-cratic: the objectivizing lens of the camera, empirical experimentation, word play and logical games, and site investigations that recall those of Situationist ‘psychogeography’. In this regard the project extends Dave Hullfish Bailey’s performative investigation of issues concerning the production of meaning, and the instrumentalization of informa-tion as a dynamic in the construction of public and private social spaces.

"Making use of a wide range of strategies, Bailey’s installations and sculptures make elbow room and escape routes for when the spaces we inhabit are threatened with being shut down. They speak of the protean fluidity of space with its migrations and occupations, exposing frontiers and trouble spots, haunts and refuges, and investigating the social opportunities latent in our individual mapping and world-making activities... Beneath Bailey’s playfulness is a strong sense of urgency. His work makes it clear that the limits of civilization are not only encountered in wars and disasters, but are inherent in the ways we imagine the world politically. How do we find ways to get along, here and now? How do we enter into co-operative communities without stumbling into the same old collectivist pitfalls?"

(Lars Bang Larsen)

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After completing degrees in philosophy and theology Dave Hullfish Bailey studied at the Art Center College of Design Pasadena where he graduated in 1995. Since then he has realized numerous exhibitions, site-based projects and lecture performances worldwide, including solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna (2004) and Casco, Utrecht (2007), and a two-person show with Nils Norman at Raven Row, London (2009).  His first solo exhibition in Germany was at Berlin’s Künstlerhaus Bethanien, as part of its international residency program. In Berlin his works have also been included in several group exhibitions at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK, 1998, 2003, 2008).

He has participated in international group exhibitions including the 2nd Berlin Biennial (1998), "Charley“ at P.S.1 New York (2002), “Turrbal-Jagera’, Brisbane (2007), the Lyon Biennale (2008) and the touring exhibition "For the blind man in the dark..." (2009- 2010), which was recently on view at the ICA London, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the de Appel Arts Center Amsterdam a.o.

Opening: March 05, 2010, 6 – 9 pm

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Krome Gallery presents its first exhibition with the Norwegian artist Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen, “Unfinished Symphony”. The central piece of the same title is a filmic portrait about the laboratory of the Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957).

For the filmset, Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen circumstantially reconstructed William Reich’s laboratory as it might have looked in 1956. In the same year, Reich was accused of being a quack and sentenced to destroy all remaining examples

of his most controversial invention, the so-called orgone accumulator, along with all of his related writings.1 In his son Peter Reich’s autobiography, which provided Gullaksen with his main source of information, the author describes having to participate in the destruction of his father’s work as absolutely formative in his childhood, when he was just 12 years old.

That eradication not only represents a turning point in the life of both Wilhelm and Peter Reich, but also stands for the culmination of Peter Reich’s childhood conflict – of being torn between the norms of social reality and the unconventional cosmos of his father’s inventions.

"Like the sky and the trees, these dreams were pressed together, but I could only see one at a time; enough to know that some other life ran parallel to this one but it was not here. Two stories ran together and mingled their reality… I realized the two realities were not parallel at all, but were aimed to meet at some point in the future." (Peter Reich)

In “Unfinished Symphony” the camera cautiously guides the viewer through an investigation of the deserted laboratory, closely focusing in on the different objects, thus creating a fragmented view of the whole space. The camera’s slow-motion gives the images a distant and meditative quality that undermines any idea of a subjective view.

"The twilight atmosphere in the room underlines an inbetween state and points to a place where time has turned into space. Here thought’s transgressive abilities are frozen within the limits of the real and a melancholy gone astray in time succeeds to appropriate its own object, only to affirm a loss lurking in the shadow of potentiality." (Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen)

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Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen was born 1973 in Norway and moved to Berlin after his studies in fine art and art theory at The Royal Danish Art Academy, Copenhagen in 2005. He has had solo shows and took part in group shows in Copenhagen, Oslo, Paris and Berlin.

Pursuing an investigative research-based approach, Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen works in a varying range of media such as text, installation, sculpture and drawing. “Unfinished Symphony” is his first filmic work, and had its world premiere at Artspeak in Vancouver last year, and will be part of Gullaksen’s upcoming solo show at UKS (The Young Artists Society), Oslo this year.

SOUND PERFORMANCE & BOOK LAUNCH

feat. BJ Nilsen

Friday, February 12, 2009, 6 – 9 pm

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On the occasion of his current exhibition "In Point of Fact" and the launch of the accompanying booklet Icelandic artist Darri Lorenzen (*1978) gives a performance together with sound artist BJ Nilsen at Krome Gallery.

The booklet has been produced in collaboration with curator and writer Kathrin Meyer (THE OFFICE Berlin, Kestnergesellschaft Hannover) and graphic designer John McCusker (Vaguely Contemporary, Berlin). Both its texts and visual design will reflect Darri Lorenzen’s artistic approach and dealings with space. The performance in turn responds to the booklet by auditory means.

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Krome Gallery presents „In Point of Fact“, a site-performative exhibition by Icelandic artist Darri Lorenzen.

He turns the exhibition space into a real and at the same time virtual pro-tagonist by means of subtle interventions into its architecture beside trans-forming it wihin a three dimensional simulation generated by the computer.

In the center of the (real) space stands a wooden, antique vitrine socket deriving from the inventory of the adjacent former Karl-Marx-bookstore. This display object becomes both the projection screen (of an absent art object) and the animated actor within the computer simulation – in addi-tion to further personnel gradually made up by the visitors during the time of the exhibition. The visitor is thus becoming a part of an interplay of shifting and overlapping perceptions of space, time and body.

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It was already when studying at the art academy in Reykjavik, where Darri Lorenzen graduated in 2000, that he was developing performative models and strategies for the experience of space, time and body. Within his prac-tical education this lead Darri Lorenzen to put an emphasize on auditory techniques and means that he deepened at the Interfaculty Image & Sound of the Royal Art Academy Den Haag from 2002-2003.

Before moving to Berlin in 2005 Darri Lorenzen realized a plentitude of performative projects in Iceland, particularly at The Living Art Museum. Since then he has been creating projects worldwide for solo and group exhibitions such as in New York (Gallery Boreas, 2005), Belgium (Kunsthalle Loppem, 2006), Australia (Gallery BUS, Melbourne 2006), Istanbul (4th International Student Triennial, 2006), Italy (Project Gentili, Prato 2007), Basel (Uovo Open Office, 2008), Reykjavik (Experiment Marathon, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2008), Norway (5th Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moss 2009).

Darri Lorenzen gained several grants from the Center for Icelandic Art, Reykjavík as well as the Dungal Art Prize in 2007. He is represented in the collection of Thyssen-Bornemisza, Vienna and in a couple of publications such as CABINET Magazine #27, 2007 (curated by Walead Beshty), Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory (Phaidon Press, 2009), Icelandic Art Today (Hatje Cantz, 2009).

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THANKS TO

Timur Siqin for his assistance and generating the 3D-Simulation, BJ Nilsen for providing some sound material, Aleksandra Domanovic for her hard-ware

Opening: September 25, 2009, 6 – 9 pm

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Krome Gallery will be showing “Newsblast”, Michael Hakimi’s (born 1968) first solo exhibition in Berlin, following up on his site-specific installation “Resonance”, conceptualized especially for the rooftop of the gallery last year.

Michael Hakimi will exhibit a varied ensemble of individual works, whose multiple formats voluminously extend throughout the gallery space. Three-dimensional images composed of lacquered MDF, molded concrete sculptu-res and an installation assembled from bits of newspaper come together to form a landscape of tactile maneuvers and spatial strategies. These works, predominantly black and white and mostly consisting of elementary geome-tric forms, self-reflexively analyze their precondition as objects, forms and representations. However, they simultaneously deploy a bombardment of illusory, sensational and narrative after-effects, insisting on an encounter that digs below the visible surface. Between the lines of visuality and thought traced by each of these works, there develops a subtle web of formal relations and contextual allusions to a scopious spatial narrative.

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The weeks leading up to the 2009 Iranian presidential elections and its im-mediate aftermath were witness to an unprecedented convergence of conflic-ting forces and visions of the future, perhaps last seen (albeit in a different form) in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. With the exhibition “Newsblast”, Ha-kimi utilizes an ambivalent approach to subtly inscribe in his work the pre-sence of the variety of major and minor media present in the ongoing post-electoral events.  Seldom has there been, among all actors involved - whether citizen journalists, broadcasters or the public, such a clear dependence on the representation and distribution of images and the potential for risky categorizations and (mis)interpretations: the self-organization of protesters and their media-conscious self-staging, the instrumentalization of mobile phones and the Internet technology to document and distribute what was witnessed, the shutting down of major reformist newspapers, the heavy filtering of websites (particularly social networking sites), the scrambling of international satellite dish signals, the temporary blockage of mobile tele-phone networks, and, in a final maneuver to clamp down on all opposition, the arrest of demonstrators, journalists and researchers (foreign and Irani-an). Despite the numerous challenges that the Iranian people faced after the elections, their strategies have remained flexible: repressive censorship saw a simultaneous cultivation of conversation as a powerful means to share knowledge; mouth to mouth news chains replaced text-messaging and Face-booking; furthermore, rumors gained an astounding ability to produce intui-tive information. Although government organs, such as conservative newspapers and state-run television and radio, initially ignored the post-electoral situation, they quickly deployed a heavy propaganda campaign, consisting mainly of a series of Stalinist-show trials broadcasted live on TV, forced confessions from the arrested, and in-structional, “documentary” style programs re-narrating the events for adults as well as children, in order to counter-attack the wildfire of informal media.

The violent and dangerous climate produced by the (re)construction of reali-ty through major media found itself reflected in the form of a highly subjec-tive, month-long state of exception for individual users, readers and viewers in front of their computers, television screens or windows. The acutely in-tensive aftermath of the most recent events engendered, in its singling out of fine details, a particular form of inwardness: high levels of stress and con-centration were interrupted by the twists and turns of the events as they developed, a rollercoaster of emotions oscillating between hope and fear, euphoria and resignation, solidarity and loneliness, a constant shifting of perspectives.

In the course of events, the opposition between the individual and the me-dia intensified. On the one hand, the individual inevitably experienced waves of emotion, complete with psychosomatic repercussions; on the other hand, the media employed journalistic tools, utilizing "standardized" formats and cate-gorizations of functionality and objectivity in its coverage. Combined, this tension led to an ever more increasingly difficult to solve contradiction.

German-Iranian artist Michael Hakimi, who has been following the post-electoral situation in Tehran as well as in Berlin, tries to relate to this ambi-valence in the exhibition “Newsblast”. It is important for him to use his per-sonal artistic vocabulary, in which similar contradictions of visual represen-tation are constantly being negotiated, to extend spatially an atmospheric image that attempts to re-categorize the above-mentioned connections and make them productive. Hakimi’s seemingly sparse and catastrophic image-scape of ruinous shapes and structures plays with the basic parameters of representation and visual perception as well as with the mediated image-discourse of the news. In the delicately balanced arrangements and interde-pendences of these seemingly simple works in the space, an idiosyncratic grammar of forms arises that, as the basis for a narrative, immediately be-gins to tell a tale.

The exhibition departs from the coordinates of a spatial compass composed of unfolded newspapers that have been placed in the corners of the room, whose edges have been outlined with black spray paint. The drafted re-enactment of the space appears to refer back to its origin as an architectural layout or blueprint while simultaneously functioning as a link between the “virtual” two-dimensionality of print matter and the “real” three-dimensionality of the gallery. Nearby, a blackboard, similarly scaled and covered in punched-out holes, acts perhaps as a witness to the aftermath of a shooting, or maybe it is just in a state of irreparable decay. Quite noticeably, what remains of a white enamel letter “A” is painted onto the blackboard, transforming this object into, presumably, part of a much larger billboard or message. On the ground there lies a scattering of ovular, convex-shaped, concrete lenses, invoking the moulds needed to produce large, concave satel-lite dishes. The only painting in the exhibition presents the only exception: what ominously portends to be a glowing light behind a mountainous hori-zon is actually the spray-painted, negative imprint of a torn strip of paper, acting here as a stencil.

Opening: July 31, 2009, 6-9 pm

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Krome Gallery presents the first exhibition of Markus Weisbeck (*1965) who is one of the most notable contemporary designers working in corporate cultural design.

"Do the Stars Need a Reason to Shine“ is his first exhibition that brings
his artistic approach to image production. On large wooden panels Markus Weisbeck renders typographic images (Schrift-Bilder) of slogans and
neologisms that are both poetic and nonsensical, while playing with the visual aesthetics of late ’80s and early ’90s pop culture.

The texts used by Markus Weisbeck are derived from his close friend, the writer Christian Arends, whom he lived with from 1985 to 1990. After
Arends’ early death in 1998, a large collection of fragmentary poetic texts was discovered on his Atari computer. Weisbeck presents these found
„construction sites and ruins of word chopping“ (Petra Maisch) in the form of printed and airbrushed typographic images on wood.

Apart from paying tribute to Arends’ undiscovered creative potential,
Markus Weisbeck gives the texts a visual appearance that expresses the cultural mood of the late ’80s and early ‘90s, embodied by the New Romantic movement for instance. Against the purely functional usage of typography, Markus Weisbeck deliberately reduces the legibility of the text in order to emphasize its literal density, and creates an emblematic structure that does not juxtapose, but merges its iconic and written elements.

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For more than 15 years Markus Weisbeck (*1965) has been working as a graphic designer. In 1997 he founded Surface, a studio for corporate and cultural design located in Frankfurt/Main and Berlin. Since 2000 he has published collaborative music projects on the label Whatness and most recently he produced an edition of iPhone applications.

Among the works of Surface are campaigns for the Forsythe Company, the German Pavilion at the 2007 and 2009 Venice Biennials, corporate design for Manifesta7, the website of the Academy of Fine Arts Frankfurt/Main (Städelschule) and a multitude of catalogue and book projects such as the "The Hospitality of Presence“ by Daniel Birnbaum (Sternberg Press, 2008). With Surface, Markus Weisbeck is internationally renowned as one of the most influential designers working today.

Opening: April 30, 2009, 6 - 9 pm

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After a diverse array of projects at KROME GALLERY, Carlos Bunga’s “Marxitecture” tackles the context of display and organization at the onset of the gallery’s regular exhibition program.
The opening of “Marxitecture” will be complemented with a 'situational' music performance by the collective AADK – Aktuelle Architektur der Kultur, outside of the gallery’s exhibition space.

“Marxitecture” is a site-specific installation that, through the use of fragile yet stabile packing material such as cardboard, seeks to produce a confrontation between the architectural exterior and its (typically) cordoned-off, detached interior space. The installation is the result of a process-oriented approach by Bunga that presents in the gallery space a paradoxical tension between, on the one hand, the seemingly ephemeral, almost trivial quality of the material in use and, alternatively, the ice-cold, majestic “eternity” embodied by Karl-Marx-Allee – the grand boulevard of Socialism. Bunga’s struc-ture allows the eye to freely adopt multiple perspectives on the distanced, vacuum-sealed representational architecture of Karl-Marx-Allee, particularly in its emphasis on the ceremonial exterior. “Marxitecture” relates principles of modular architecture and pre-fabrication, both of which display an extensive use of the grid in the tradition of the Bauhaus as well as in Socialist mass housing (the typical Berliner “Plattenbau”), transforming Bunga’s installation into an associative, fragmentary image. The torn up and broken space, behind which patches of colored paint, the gaping cracks and the wide-open interstices visibly turn into an abstract plea for the restitution of personal history. This working method unabashedly perceives its contextual location as dialectical. If not here, then where else? Similar to the film “Themroc”, a model for the staging of a revolt arises:

“One day, the proletarian Themroc had enough of the monotonous, alienating everyday and vowed to fundamentally change his life. He resigned from his job, sent his sister away to his family, plastered his apartment door, tore down the walls facing the street and metamorphosized into a cave man, abstaining from polite colloquialisms as well as any form of recognizable speech. At first, the neighbors were shocked and then curious, finally they became altogether surprised. The State approached the situation with a mixture of complacency and amusement; at night, Themroc left his dwelling to hunt police officers for breakfast. Everywhere in the city, people began to follow his example.”

“Marxitecture” can be seen as a continuation of the diverse processes of transition present in Bunga’s work. Departing from the gradual yet complete destruction of his own paintings, his practice subsequently developed through the profanement and humiliation of paintings in the context of public space; taking on various forms, whether it be hanging a painting on a demolished wall, its burial in a field, or the tearing of the painting’s canvas itself, Bunga has documented this process in his video works. His references are firmly rooted in performance art, specifically that of the Japanese group “Gutai”, as well as displaying an affinity to the work of artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Kurt Schwitters. In “Ruin”, exhibited at Art Unlimited 2008 in Basel, Bunga reacted immediately to the monumental size and precise functionalism of the Basel Convention Center with a minimalist abstraction: a diffident floor plan of the Convention Center’s basement in cardboard offered an inverse statement on the extra-large format of 'Unlimited'.

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Carlos Bunga (born 1976, Portugal) lives and works in Madrid and New York. In July 2009, he will be exhibiting in “Heterotopias” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo (MARCO). Bunga’s work “Ruin” was shown in 2008 at Art Unlimited in Basel. In 2007, Bunga was in the group exhibition “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century”, curated by Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman and Massimiliano Gioni. At Manifesta 5 in 2004 in San Sebastian, curated by Marta Kuzma and Massimiliano Gioni, Bunga constructed a gigantic cardboard house, only to allow it to collapse immediately.

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On the occasion of the opening and International Worker’s Day, a performance by the collective AADK – Aktuelle Architektur der Kultur will take place. This intervention outside of the gallery space is nevertheless a specific contribution to this culturally and politically ambivalent location. Through the utilization of mismatched and recomposed music pieces from the former German Democratic Republic, Jochen Arbeit (Einstuerzende Neubauten) comments on the euphoria of socialism-turned-architecture. Vania Rovisco and Abraham Hurtado stage an abstract performance in which the female individual falls into an ensnarling confrontation with the symbolically-loaded structures on Karl-Marx-Allee. After this performance, which takes into context the historical function of Karl-Marx-Allee, AADK will additionally contribute to the Bauhaus Festival in Jena with the performance “Crash! Boom! Bau!”. 

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In October 2008 KROME Gallery – Art & Architecture opens its  spaces on the Karl-Marx-Allee 82-84. The outside project "Resonance“,  installed on the roof of Karl-Marx-Allee 82, was produced by KROME  Gallery and marks, in addition to the gallery program, a series of  interventionist artistic projects that deals with the cultural and  architectural context of the Karl-Marx-Allee. 

The external installation by Michael Hakimi consists of silhouettes  of Persian, African und Arabic drums. With their archaic form language, that refers to both the exotic repertory and the stalinistic  architecture set in a central Asian scenography, the drums occupy the  communicative space of western advertisement. At the same time they  comment on the symmetrically designed “workers´ palaces” on the  Karl-Marx-Allee.

In contrast to this illusionist representative architecture, the  two-dimensional negative print of the drum cases creates a space for  backward projection that raises the question of what culturally lies  behind. Through the refusal of depth and concretion, the figures create a   pictoral resonance in the beholder. A response in which the two  cultural patterns of identification are dialectically melt together. The   silhouettes of the drum cases expose the pompous superficiality of the   potemkin facade.

The anthropomorphic, alphabet-like pieces simoultaneously caricature a   relationship between subject and architecture and thereby the question   of “housing” in a phenomenological and for everyone comprehensible  sense.

From the outback of modernity the artist offers “a formalism... that claims neither the beauty nor the purity or the simplicity of the  artistic process, but a quality that placed already the 20s Russian  formalists in the fore: the alienation of our point of view  respectively, that allows us to behold the images from behind.” (Ralph  Ubl)

The project was realised in collaboration with Galerie Karin Günther, Hamburg.

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East Coast Europe

Publication, Exhibition and Conference commissioned and produced by the Consulate General of Republic of Slovenia in New York City.

2008

Edited by Markus Miessen, designed by Zak Kyes, original idea by School of Missing Studies.

Book Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin & New York
Co-published by Zalozba ZRC, Ljubljana

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East Coast Europe, which took place during Spring 2008, is a project about the perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation  to spatial practices and international politics. The title “East Coast  Europe” is a word play. “Europe” in the title is the central topic for  investigation, its contemporary culture, expansion, and its status as a  continuing social project. “East Coast” refers to two distinct edges of  Europe, both real and imaginary—the geographical East Coast of the  United States of America and the political “East Coast” of the European  Union. The project invited leading figures in culture and politics from  the two east coasts—of the United States of America, and of the  countries in the European Union and its vicinity to comment on their  perception of Europe today. East Coast Europe dives into the urgent  details of a dense network of contemporary experience of the European  Union’s extensive exchange of knowledge, people, and goods with the East  Coast of the United States and also with its own eastern border. What  are its challenges and possibilities for social, political and spatial  practices?

East Coast Europe was commissioned and produced by the Consulate  General of Republic of Slovenia in New York City, during Slovenia’s  Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2008, with support of the EUNIC  Network New York and Delegation of the European Commission, New York.  The ECE project is conceived by Katherine Carl, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Markus Miessen and Alenka Suhadolnik.

East Coast Europe Preface: Berlin

As a preface to the main project in New York (May 2008), a set of  billboards facing Berlin’s Karl Marx Allee inscribe an imagined  borderline of ‘East Coast Europe’. The first manifestation took place on   December 21, 2007 in Berlin at Krome Gallery with a special installation by Markus Miessen and Zak Kyes, coinciding with their book launch of The Violence of Participation (Sternberg Press).

East Coast Europe: The Book

East Coast Europe deals with perceptions of contemporary European  identity and its relation to spatial practices and international  politics. It is a program of public conversations, interviews, a design project, and a book. The project invites leading figures in culture and   politics from the two east coasts – of the United States of America, and  of countries in the vicinity of the present European Union such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Lebanon, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine to comment on their  perception of Europe today.

ECE dives into the urgent details of a dense network of contemporary experience of the European Union’s extensive exchange of knowledge,  people, and goods with the East Coast of the United States and also with   its own eastern border. These two crisp north-south borderlines belie many geographic spatial complexities including the islands of  Switzerland and the Western Balkans that now reside within the landmass of Europe but outside of the European Union. ECE investigates the  cultural and political confluence between these two north-south  borderlines, one geographic and one political. What is this new  transverse region through multiple time zones? What are its challenges  and possibilities for social, political and spatial practices? What is  the future of international cultural practices in light of the expansion   of the European Union? What are the changing prospects for  intercultural collaboration between the players within the single entity   of the European Union? What are the new emerging roles for cultural  practices beyond European boundaries, like the East Coast of the United States and the “East Coast” of Europe towards Russia, the Middle East  and Asia? What is the future of the cultural representation of European boundaries? What are cultural practices currently learning from this  geopolitical expansion?

Book launch: October 28, 2008, 6:30pm at the Swiss Institute, New York, 495 Broadway #3
Guest: Eda Cufer, curator, dramaturge and NSK collective member

With contributions by Can Altay, Marina Abramovic, Paddy Ashdown,  Zdenka Badovinac, Katherine Carl, Eda Cufer, Reinier de Graaf, Mladen  Dolar, Lisa Farjam, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Carin Kuoni, Zak Kyes,  Jacques Le Goff, Aaron Levy, Genevieve Maitland Hudson with Cyril Blanc,   Markus Miessen, Viktor Misiano, Miran Mohar, Shamim Momin, Hans Ulrich   Obrist, Orchard, Dan Perjovschi, Marjetica Potrc, Nebojsa Seric Shoba,   Michael Shamiyeh, Erzen Shkololli, Taryn Simon, Nedko Solakov, Alenka Suhadolnik, Milica Tomic, Kazys Varnelis, Felix Vogel, Borut Vogelnik, Jordan Wolfson, and Sislej Xhafa.

“I looked for ways to help you see me.
At night in the mountains and by the shore
I described myself to you in my mind since
I knew you had no category with which to describe me.”

Extract from The Vineyards of Shiraz by Shahid Azim.

The “Canticles of Shahiid Azim“ was a collection of songs written by a traveling salesman in the hotel rooms he occupied while shutt- ling between Iran, Iraq, and the Levant in the 1940s and early ’50s. The songs, sung in a mixture of Persian, Arabic, French and German show the breadth of Azim’s curiosity for language, moving between ancient Babylonian texts, the philosophy of Kant, Ibn Arabi and Baudelaire. 

In Metro to Kairo, Mark Sadler’s paintings similarly transpose his own diverse experiences of culture, language, history and the everyday into pictures that are holding structures of heterogenous encounters. Beginning in his native Glasgow, Sadler spent years wandering; hitchhiking, learning languages, looking for a subject for painting in the lived world. His pictorial lexicon is derived from this approach; working from sketches in travel diaries, occasionally using photographs as an aide-mémoire and more recently, painting directly from memory, often drawing automatic shapes or ‘cosmic doodles‘. The saturated colour spaces of his paintings are zones of intoxication where the memory of an encounter is preserved like an ember continually rekindled by the effect of a blue or yellow on the nervous system. The arena of memory allows Sadler to pull everything into a subjective structure where an Afghan refugee on horseback in Pakistan witnessed in the 1990s can stand before the Metro entrance of Tahrir Square in Cairo that Sadler visited in 2009.

The exhibition comes together as a lyrical meditation on alterity as lived through real encounters. Here is an invitation to ride the imaginary metro that calls in on the archetypal, historical and marginal figures found along the way.

Sadler is an artist, writer and musician who also collaborates with Elin Jakobsdóttir on the mobile project Fiction House. In March 2015 they presented the Fiction House Archive in Glasgow. The archive will be on view during opening of Metro to Kairo.

A selection of Sadler’s paintings were first shown last year at Art Cologne in a pavilion designed in collaboration with the Berlin architect Roger Bundschuh, entitled “Fiction Datcha Folly.” Other solo projects include: “Bursting at the Seams Boiling Point of Dreams,” Krome Gallery Berlin, 2013; “Hot and Sexual Cold and Dead,” Fiction House Berlin, 2011; “Snack Cart Exchange Cairo,” Fiction House Berlin, 2010; and “Between Peshawar and Paris,” Christian Ehrentraut Galerie Berlin, 2008.

PRESS RELEASE

For further information and interviews, please contact: 
armandquetsch@krome-gallery.com