By recognizing the movers and shakers of the creative landscape, Swiss Art Awards exhibition provides a representative overview and unique insight into contemporary art and architecture in Switzerland. A definitive index for art professionals and art lovers alike, Swiss Art Awards will honour 11 winners, while the laureates of this year’s Swiss Grand Award for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim are the artists Sylvie Fleury and Thomas Hirschhorn, and influential architect Luigi Snozzi. During the course of the exhibition, regular performances and workshops will be held.
The Swiss art book fair I Never Read focus on the publication programs of around one hundred national and international, institutional and independent publishers, artists, and designers. The fair is committed to being a platform that facilitates connections between text, contemporary art production, artistic presentation, and the form of the book. This year’s thematic focus lies on book collections as well as the development of and various types of libraries. A process of reflection first turns an accumulation of things into a proper collection. The tasks of collecting, sorting, and transferring are among the working methods of the artist. In contrast, the tasks of collecting, editing, and distributing are among the working methods of the publisher. In the realization of an art publication or artist book, these functions are often interconnected. The importance of public and private libraries—whether physical or digital—is again playing a larger role in the debate surrounding a post-digital age. The amount of information and content that is being processed has neither diminished nor dissolved. On the contrary, consciously collecting is an expression of individualism, and it remains an important aspect of determining one’s own position.
Laszlo Glozer Analoges Paradies, photos by Malte Wandel, 2018
Outdoor pool season at Sommerbad Humboldthain kicks off with a varied artistic program, inviting you to combats the laziness of summer heat by tucking into a refreshing cultural calendar. Initiated by Nele Heinevetter in 2017, TROPEZ is a kiosk and platform for young international art that invites outstanding Berlin-based and international fine and performing artists, musicians, authors and curators to realize artworks for this unique setting. This year’s summer exhibition VOYAGE unfolds as a series of journeys to far-away and virtual places through sculptures, installations, computer games, video and sound pieces created at the intersection of poetry, technology, politics as well as fine and performing arts. Discover publishing house Broken Dimanche Press, curatorial collective for electronic music and queer content Creamcake, art magazine Starship, and art space Bob’s Pogo Bar among the boundary-pushing live events, bringing electronic music, contemporary literature, and film to Sommerbad Humboldthain. Find the comprehensive programme from June to September here.
Manfred Pernice’s new catalogue Haldesleben ? Bibette headland ? Hotel Hangelar (2018) / Wolfgang Tillmans, What is Different? (2018), Sternberg Press / New Japan Photo (2018), Einstein Studio, Tokyo / Edition by Mariana Castillo Deball
Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Festival marks its 10th year anniversary, assembling more then 260 international publishers, art periodicals, artists and authors. The fair is accompanied by a series of lectures, discussions, book launches and workshops dedicated to discourse around artists’ books, conceptual publications and publishing as practice. This year’s special focus is on Japanese publishers, with the Stage hosting a series of highlight events; a talk with legendary photographer Takashi Homma, launch of a new edition by e-flux Superhumanity: Design of the Self, and a lecture on Anthropocene with philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour.
Gallery Weekend Berlin is back with some 47 participating galleries, putting their best foot forward, and presenting emerging and established artists throughout the city. Berlin becomes a magnet for international collectors, curators and museum professionals, affording its visitors room to explore and discover new art across its districts. Not dictated by the fast pace of art fairs but having time to view large-scale gallery exhibitions, is very much in line with Berlin as a city of artists. Over decades many have flocked here to explore their creative outlook and this year’s special focus is on artists living in Berlin, who have helped shape the city as an art metropolis.
Late at night, emerging from the cavernous studio on 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, a lonesome figure would inhabit the streets of postwar Paris. In this famously chaotic space, consumed by inner doubts and obsessions, Alberto Giacometti worked relentlessly, with feverish urge to forge a new human; walking away from the rubble of destruction. In London, on the other side of Channel, the younger artist Francis Bacon admired Giacometti from afar, fascinated by the famous sculptor’s aura of intensity and compulsion. In the following years the two went to develop a personal relationship punctuated by both friendship and rivalry. The artist Isabel Rawsthorne was one such connection, a close friend, muse and model to both artists, whose stark portraits feature on several works on display. Special focus, at this exhibition at Fondation Beyeler, is given to investigating their distinct isolation of space; subjects enclosed by means of cage-like entities, foregrounded in key works such as Giacometti’s La Cage (1949-1950) and Bacon’s Study ofa Nude (1952). Like Giacometti, Bacon’s arrival to the ‘truth of his subject’ was rooted in failure and frequent moments of crisis; the artistic act an outcome of frenzied and conflicting struggle between artist and his creation. Beyond their obvious differences in terms of style and iconography, both absorbed so much of l’air du temps through which they lived, rendered in the immediacy and emotional charge of their work. Encompassing circa 100 works and numerous original plaster figures from Giacometti that have never been seen before, the exhibition seeks to untangle the complex layers of their relationship. Formulated across four main thematic sections, it reveals new strands of thought connecting the two masters of modern art.
My stool is an Athlete. Me too? In conjunction with Milan Design Week 2018, Vitra presents the exhibition Typecasting, a panorama of some 200 objects curated by designer Robert Stadler. The Austrian designer looks at the furniture in this installation outside the context of conventional categories, such as their functional uses or historical origins. Instead, he regards them as characters and assigns them to groups that reflect stereotypical behaviour patterns and personality profiles in contemporary society. Drawing on the extensive Vitra archives, the show places current products alongside icons, prototypes, special editions, rejects and future visions. Another central question is how changes in society could affect established furniture typologies. Various designers – including Konstantin Grcic, Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Commonplace Studio – were invited to develop ideas for a collective living space under the title The Communal Sofa.
Certain works of art are important historically but no longer offer us experiential quality. Louise Bourgeois, whose life spanned nearly the entire 20th century, used art as a way of understanding herself, inventing a distinctive visual world containing raw self-expression and emotion. Much like the maze-like structures of her famous Cells, which she invoked as visual expressions of memory, her mind was a complex puzzle. Schinkel Pavillon invites us to enter the last two decades of her life, through focussed selection of works in diverse media featuring the sack form. They first appeared in her writings and later sculptures, as empty and hollow structures, which she often confined with other personal objects inside the intensely psychological space of Cells. Spanning the entire octagonal room of Schinkel Pavillon the visitors encounter Peaux des lapins, chiffons ferrailles à vendre (2006), one of her largest Cells. Where surrealists focused on the more fantastic elements of the subconscious, Bourgeois played with more subtle ideas of the uncanny. Like other remarkable sculptures she created using fabrics, the sacks are made of delicate chiffon in various tones of pink, pushing the borders between seduction and repulsion. Inside her highly symbolic microcosm their incomplete anthropomorphic form suggests a dysfunctional architectural unit, an empty house, or an infertile woman’s body.
from Work/Travail/Arbeid by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Rosas
Drawing on formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography investigates different perspectives on the body’s articulation in space and time. Her collaborative practice is driven by fascination with intertwining of sound and movement, creating a wide-ranging body of work that engages the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. What would it mean for choreography to perform as an exhibition? This question was a point of departure for Work/Travail/Arbeid (2015), which will stage its German debut at Volksbühne. In response, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker reformulated her earlier piece Vortex Temporum (2013), transforming the original choreography for a condensed spatio-temporal environment of a stage to an expanded format of an exhibition space. Work/Travail/Arbeid (2015) will unfold over the course of four days, allowing audience to enter at any time. Transgressing the conditions that have long been essential for dance, the project gives new form to her rigorous choreographic language.
The Catastrophe Colours 2018. An Exhibition by Gonzalez Haase AAS and June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff, Photography: Dominik Gigler
A rejection of colour has come to characterise the aesthetic of modern architecture. White and monochromatic tones were often seen as the antithesis of purity, honesty and authenticity. Stemming from a time that defies any categorization, can contemporary architecture embody a more complex and shifting relationship to colour? Reaffirming the status of colour as primarily a sensory perception, architecture office Gonzalez Haase AAS has developed the book Catastrophe Colours, underlining a critical approach to colour theory in the present. By confronting media images of catastrophes with their inherent chromatic essence, the book establishes a new inventory of colour. One that is based on research, linkage and storytelling, echoing the basic components of our information society. For this exhibition at BNKR, Gonzalez Haase collaborated with June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff, to arrange various catastrophe colours into new sets of colour like Middle East Conflict, Vietnam War, Cold War, Nuclear Disaster, Oil Spills and Terrorism. Such new samples are specifically adopted from a political context, transforming colour patterns into narratives. An event as part of the program „Stop making sense, it’s as good as it gets.“ curated by Ludwig Engel and Joanna Kamm.
