Berlin Art Week 2016: Reality is Too Real in Never Never Land. Passionate about art? Click here to get our newsletter and follow your favorite artists

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1 MutualArt.Com Features: Charlotte Jansen / MutualArt September 14, 2016 Berlin Art Week 2016: Reality is Too Real in Never Never Land Passionate about art? Click here to get our newsletter and follow your favorite artists Spekulative Raumwirkung / Speculative Ambience, 2016, Video, still, produced by Iconoclast. KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Courtesy Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. This week, it s Berlin s turn to do a pirouette across the global art world stage. Until 18 September, commercial galleries, institutes, and non profit art spaces will put on their best inshow, giving the outside world a projection of what art is selling, but also, what kind of ideas are mobilizing local artists, curators, and audiences now. So what does the city s art week say about them this year? For some time, Berlin has been a refuge for people who don t want to grow up. The scene has changed vastly since the post Wall years when young musicians and artists from all over the world flocked to the German capital, but the image of a European Never Never Land is hard to shake off. Then again, perhaps Berliners want it to be that way. The cornerstones of the week are the two commercial fairs abc art berlin contemporary and Positions Berlin, both taking place from the 15th to the 18th September but across the calendar there are events and exhibits that converge in an alternate reality past, present or entirely made up inviting a burying of heads in the proverbial sand. 1/8

2 Anne Imhof, Angst II, Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart Berlin. Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. What is going to happen to humans? Perhaps we won t need our bodies anymore, but will become pure data. One of the major exhibitions is happening at the Schinkel Pavillion, where you won t want to miss the second part of Goshka Macuga s Now this, is this the end the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end? Part two inhabits the Octagon space, and in a continuation of the exhibition s overall exploration of artificial intelligence, memory, and materiality, she has built a talking, moving, bearded android, who gives a speech that implores humane action and makes the case for getting past being human. For a neat follow on, head over to Hamburger Bahnhof to see Joseph Beuys's The Capital Space , at the centre of Capital: Debt Territory Utopia," in which he gives us many ideas for living differently. Larissa Sansour, Olivenbaum / Olive Tree, Art Lab Berlin im iphonedoctor. Larissa Sansour. This isn t to say that the imagined spaces beyond here are always an escape from reality: often the visions are dark, and dreams fail. This is explored at The Country of Last Things taking its 2/8

3 title from Paul Auster s dystopian novel. Taking place at Art Lab Berlin im iphonedoctor, the exhibition features works by five artists, and includes works like Larissa Sansour s Nation Estate, a sci fi film and photo project that uses CGI to imagine a vertical solution for the Middle East: a high rise that houses the entire Palestinian population with a city on each floor. Yvonne Roeb, Midnight Rider, Schering Stiftung. Photo: Markus Bachmann. Among the displays at private collections this week, you can travel to another time with Icelandic artist Egill Saebjörnsson at Salon Dahlmann s Concierge room. His site specific installation Timebridge takes you to 500 years into the future or 1000 into the past. Curated by insitu (a space for contemporary art in Berlin), the artist will connect the audience s projections of what we think is happening, or might happen, with physical reality. 3/8

4 Sven Drühl, Simulationen, Landschaft jenseits der Wirklichkeit / Simulations, Landscape beyond reality. Haus am Waldsee. Sven Drühl. From constructions of alternative social, technological, and architectural times and places, to the construction of art in and of itself, many artists at Berlin Art Week are also innovating with the perception of images. A self proclaimed child of the 90s, Berlin based Sven Drühl is a painter, mathematician, art historian and dancer. Hardly a surprise, then, that he creates his works in parallel to each other. Haus am Waldsee is presenting a survey of his work, titled Simulations, Landscape Beyond Reality, focusing on the artist s painterly responses to how technology permeates nature. Drühl creates pictures on pictures, starting with well known artworks. He then extracts details and reworks them using materials associated with the artificial: silicone, lacquer, oil. Drawing together hybrid works on loan from various collections, the exhibition considers how the artist s process intersects with the history of representational painting and the present dialogue on autonomy in the digital age. 4/8

5 Edmund Kuppel, Am Ende des Tunnels / At the end of the tunnel, , Akademie der Künste. Edmund Kuppel, VG Bild Kunst, Bonn Another artist whose working method queries the construction inherent in art production itself is Edmund Kuppel. Berlin Art Week also spotlights several awards, and Kuppel has recently been announced as the recipient of the Käthe Kollwitz Award for 2016, on show as a special exhibition at the Academy of Arts. Kuppel, who has been active since the late 1960s, has been prescient in contemplating the relationship between sculpture and photography, engaging ideas about how photographs are created and how photography is understood. 5/8

6 Elzbieta Jabłońska, Nowe ycie (New Life), 2011, Neon Sign. Deutsche Bank KunstHalle. Elzbieta Jabłońska. The libertarian vibe that Berlin is known for really shows in the amount of performances, video works, and other less commercial, immaterial forms of art that dominate during Art Week. In this terrain, too, there s plenty of diving into the Pandora s box of the unknown and the unreal. Kulturpalast Wedding International will host four in an interdisciplinary show, *Wave If You re Real, heady with millennial questions about contemporary personality crises, such as, which part of my personality has 1000 friends? and is a selfie authentic if it was not made with the intention of posting it on Facebook? Don t expect any answers. Wu Tsang, Duilian (production still), Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst / 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Courtesy Wu Tsang; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. Photo: Ringo Tang. 6/8

7 At Zwitschermaschine, Virtual Cave and Golden Cage will construct an archive of different media on the effect of technology in the production of images inside a large golden cage with ribs made out of cartographical borders. Pitting the limits of human bodies against the possibilities of technologies, the installation explores open source as paranoia, a never ending voyeurism like in a Hitchcock film. Meanwhile, at the last week of the gimmick smitten 9th Berlin Biennale, that has been widely panned by critics for its louche handling of present sociopolitical issues (Jason Farago dubbed it the LOL biennale in the Guardian), expect a crescendo of trendiness to top it off: workouts on rooftops, performances with hand sanitizers, boat rides, and juice pairing. Berlin is back, and it s boycotting reality. Charlotte Jansen MutualArt.com is a revolutionary online art information service which covers the world of art by collecting content about events, venues, artists, articles and auctions from thousands of web sites. YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN Sponsored Bowie/Collector: What David Bowie s Art Collection Tells Us About His Music 10 Upcoming Auction Lots 10 Exhibitions Opening This Week Students revive extinct squash with 800 year old seeds (Mother Nature Network) Recommended by Joseph Beuys Sven Drühl Anne Imhof Käthe Kollwitz Edmund Kuppel Goshka Macuga Yvonne Roeb Egill Saebjörnsson Larissa Sansour Ringo Tang Wu Tsang 7/8