18 Sep Berlin’s Best Exhibitions, Autumn 2024

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/features/berlins-best-exhibitions-autumn-2024/

From Rirkrit Tiravanija’s career survey at Gropius Bau to Luiz Roque’s cinematic vignettes at KW Contemporary, explore six must-see exhibitions at local galleries and institutions this autumn.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled (demo station no. 8) (2024). Exhibition view: DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG [Happiness is not always fun], Gropius Bau, Berlin (12 September 2024–12 January 2025). © Gropius Bau. Photo: Luis Kürschner.

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Happiness is not always fun
Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstrasse 7
12 September 2024–12 January 2025

Expect: a career-spanning survey of the relational aesthetics pioneer with early installations, experimental films, and seminal participatory pieces.

Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija made a splash in the art world in 1990, when he cooked and served visitors pad thai at Paula Allen Gallery in New York, positing interactions resulting from the dinner as the artwork. Speaking to Hans Ulrich Obrist for Ocula, Tiravanija explained: ‘I think of [art] as a space, a space where there is no limitation of ideas, and it is always free and not consumable. From my perspective, I would like it to be a space where you can experience otherness without fear’.

Other memorable works by Tiravanija include a full-scale replica of his East Village apartment that visitors could enter, creating spaces for reflection and play, and a reactivation of Július Koller’s Ping-Pong Club (1970), which saw a Bratislava gallery transformed into a sports club.

Happiness is not always fun surveys nearly four decades of Tiravanija’s work. Performances from the late 1980s to today are activated daily in the atrium and shown alongside sculptures, photographs, and films.

The exhibition’s title nods to current tensions surrounding immigration within Germany and Europe at large, referencing the opening lines of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 drama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which highlights anti-immigration sentiment in postwar West Germany through a love story between a German widow and Moroccan man.

Isaac Chong Wai, Rehearsed, Mirrored: Dance of Falling #1 (2024). Acrylic glass and mirror. 180 x 240 cm. Courtesy the artist and Zilberman.

Isaac Chong Wai: Falling Carefully
Zilberman, Schlüterstrasse 45
10 September–16 November 2024

Expect: choreography, installation, and live performances that urge greater vulnerability and communal support.

For Berlin and Hong Kong-based artist Isaac Chong Wai, the act of falling (and being caught) serves as a metaphor for how communities facing social and structural pressures can find solidarity within.

Wai investigates power and its distribution through video and performance. His seven-channel installation and live performance Falling Reversely (2021/2024), currently on show at the Venice Biennale, invited performers from the Asian diaspora to enact a choreography that reversed the movements of a fall. The continuous motion referenced the editing of a video tape, where the consequences of an action can be erased, unlike the artist’s experience of aggressions against Asian people during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At Zilberman, Wai builds on this metaphor with a new series of etched glass and mirror works entitled ‘Rehearsed, Mirrored’ (2024), which illustrate the movements of individuals as they dance, bodies abstracted into flowing lines that converge and blur.

‘Many people throughout history have been knocked down by a higher authority or state power,’ the artist has told Ocula Magazine. ‘Falling carefully might not make those who suffer stronger, but care and solidarity can allow all of us to move forward.’

Rebecca Horn, Concerto dei Sospiri (Konzert der Seufzer) (1997–2014). Copper tubes, copper funnels, clay, metal construction, electronics, stones, wood. Dimensions variable. Courtesy Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin. Photo: GRAYSC.

Rebecca Horn: Concert of Sighs
Galerie Thomas Schulte, Charlottenstrasse 24
11 September–2 November 2024

Expect: a remake of the artist’s 1997 Venice Biennale installation alongside recent paintings and sculptures in the last exhibition conceived before her passing.

German artist Rebecca Horn was bedridden from tuberculosis as teenager and sent to a sanitarium in her 20s after sculpting with fibreglass without a mask. These experiences of illness would inform her practice—comprising performance, kinetic sculptures, and site-specific installations—which often poeticises the place of bodies and objects in the world.

Early sculptures designed for performance such as Einhorn (Unicorn, 1970–72)—an elongated horn to be worn by a classmate tasked to walk through a countryside field for 12 hours, her body wrapped in bandages—saw the artist attach objects and instruments to the human physique to explore the contact point between a person and their environment.

Following these body sculptures, Horn conceived kinetic pieces and site-specific installations. Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a recreation of her 1997 Venice installation, Concert of Sighs, comprising rubble, wire, and wood pallets from dilapidated Venetian houses piled up on the floor. In the mix are copper funnels from which whispers and lamentations in different languages are broadcasted, generating a sense of melancholia while reminding viewers of the generative potential of destructive forces.

Luiz Roque, White Year (2013) (still). Performer: Glamour Garcia. © Luiz Roque. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo/Brussels/Paris/New York.

Luiz Roque: Estufa
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststrasse 69
6 July–20 October 2024

Expect: dreamlike shorts that inhabit science fiction to explore the intersection of queer biopolitics and modern technologies.

For over two decades, Brazilian artist and filmmaker Luiz Roque has conceived cinematic vignettes set in atmospheric and anachronistic spaces, inviting audiences to imagine alternative realities for queer and marginalised groups in his country.

His first mid-career survey, Estufa (greenhouse), derives its title from an early experimental film project with Letícia Ramos, ‘Roqueramos Farm’ (2004–2006), for which the artists intervened in natural landscapes to investigate the cinematic composition of artificial realities.

In Estufa (2004), pink smoke fills a greenhouse—an organised natural space—disrupting the perception or ideal of natural environments as spaces of wilderness free from human intervention. This tension between representation and reality, and form and identity, is further explored in a new video commission and body of ceramic work.

Exhibition view: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, THE SOUL STATION, Halle am Berghain, Berlin (12 July–13 October 2024). Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist and LAS Art Foundation. Photo: Alwin Lay.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: THE SOUL STATION
LAS Art Foundation, Halle am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof
12 July–13 October 2024

Expect: a radical, participatory exploration of ethics and morality, as told through video game technology.

Many of LAS Art Foundation’s projects invite contemporary artists to stage ambitious environments, from digital operas to immersive post-human worlds. Their newest collaboration is with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, who creates rich participatory works utilising video game technology to invite the audience to question their own biases by becoming active participants rather than passive viewers.

The first episode of the two-part project, YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING, followed the unfolding of a cataclysmic event in a parallel world, in which slavery was overthrown through revolt, with the audience invited to vote and ultimately impact the narrative.

In the second episode, ARE YOU SOULLESS, TOO?, visitors are able to see the real-life participants who shaped the first part while following a new set of characters who have migrated to another universe. A project five years in development, THE SOUL STATION intertwines speculative fiction with personal realities to invite a nuanced understanding of marginalised lived experiences.

Exhibition view: Rebecca Morris, #33, Trautwein Herleth, Berlin (14 September–26 October 2024). Courtesy the artist and Trautwein Herleth. Photo: Lee Thompson.

Rebecca Morris: #33
Trautwein Herleth, Kohlfurter Strasse 41/43
14 September–26 October 2024

L.A.-based painter Rebecca Morris presents a suite of six new large-scale abstract canvases at Trautwein Herleth (formerly Galerie Barbara Weiss). Dominic Eichler writes: ‘The works revel in Morris’ sumptuous tonality, ranging from dirty pastel to metallic; their jazz compositions veering or riffing off wayward grids, patchwork, visually satisfying impasto, and fuzzy edges.’ Continue reading Eichler’s insight into Morris’ exhibition here. —[O]

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/features/berlins-best-exhibitions-autumn-2024/