Friday 2 May 2008

Day Two - Wednesday 28 May 2008

The Curatorial Development Trip itinerary started with a visit to the Berlin Biennial exhibition – KW Kunstwerke the main temporary contemporary art gallery in Berlin, where the Biennial offices are also housed. The curators reject the idea of a strong didactic theme, but instead use as its starting point the changing historic context of KW.


KunstWerk
We then went to our first meeting with Lise Nelleman, co-director and co-founder of SparwasserHQ which is based in the Mitte area of Berlin. She spoke to us about how Sparwasser was set up in 2000, their approach to programming which is centred around dialogue and exchange, and their current ‘Out for Lunch’ period of change and restructure. We also met with their intern Pedro Neves Marques from Portugal who spoke about his temporary placement at Sparwasser and his independent projects.

After this we went to meet with Axel Lapp at his project space Axel Lapp Projects which is currently 1½ years old, also in the Mitte area. Axel Lapp is a curator, art critic and publisher. He talked to us about the show he is currently curating in Konstanz. We discussed our early thoughts on the Biennial exhibition we had seen and he told us about his future projects, a book with Angela Bulloch about performance art, and exhibition with Nick Crowe.

Meanwhile the 11th curator Tomas had arrived in
Berlin and joined us at the second Biennial venue the Schinkel Pavilion just off the infamous Unter den Linden. The Schinkel Pavilion is housing 5 different shows in succession throughout the Biennial. All are curated by artists curating older generation artists. The show that we saw was the 4th in the series and had been curated by Banu Cennetoğlu, founder and director of BAS artist book publisher based in Istanbul who a couple of us had met with on the previous Curatorial Development Trip to Istanbul in October 2007. On show was a series of books by Masist Gül, a Turkish bodybuilder, poet, painter and actor of Armenian origin.

At 6:30pm we had our meeting with the Berlin Biennial co-curator Adam Szymczyk who gave us an introduction to the Biennial and its ‘Day’ and ‘Night’ elements and the alternatively approached Secret Service tour guide strand. He spoke at length about their reasons for choosing the four different sites for the Biennial and how they fed into the artists’ work.

At 8:30pm we had dinner with Plan B and British duo Daniel Belasco Rogers and Sophia New who have been based in the city for the last few years and have performed extensively through Europe. Plan B are a performance group who often incorporate new media into their work and respond to the specific location or city. They talked us through some of their previous projects with the aid of their ‘presentation box’ in which an object personifies each of their past projects.



6 comments:

Harfleet & Jack said...

Day two, was when we went to see the BB, which was fascinating, I loved the tarmac floor, perhaps the work that has lingered in my mind the most!....often it comes to me as I wander the streets in Manchester...gazing blankly at the floor I see a crack or blemish and it reminds me of the almost perfect tarmaced gallery floor...

Then it was to Sparwasser, An interesting insight into the occasionally intuitive running of an art space it reminded me a bit of Apartment. It was comforting to see a space that has such a good reputation appeared to have evolved quite naturally, much like Apartment has.

Paul

Rebecca said...

It seems like agers since we were all in Berlin in the sunshine...
The timetable was hectic and we managed to see so much in such a short time. Looking round KW Kunstwerke I saw a couple of things that held my attention - and i'd be able to name them if my suitcase ever arrives with the biennial catalogues and my notes in - but I really wish I'd had more time to look round and I think it would have been interesting if we'd seen the show after hearing Adam Szymczyk speak.
I enjoyed seeing the Axel Lapp Projects space and hear Axel's views on the biennial as well as how he operates and the shows he's working on. The issue of funding came up, as with Sparwasser too, and it was intesting to hear how projects are supported (or not) by the state.

Rebecca said...

It seems like agers since we were all in Berlin in the sunshine...
The timetable was hectic and we managed to see so much in such a short time. Looking round KW Kunstwerke I saw a couple of things that held my attention - and i'd be able to name them if my suitcase ever arrives with the biennial catalogues and my notes in - but I really wish I'd had more time to look round and I think it would have been interesting if we'd seen the show after hearing Adam Szymczyk speak.
I enjoyed seeing the Axel Lapp Projects space and hear Axel's views on the biennial as well as how he operates and the shows he's working on. The issue of funding came up, as with Sparwasser too, and it was interesting to hear how projects are supported (or not) by the state.

James Alderson said...

Meeting with SpaswasserHQ
It was interesting that our first meeting was with someone (Lise Nelleman) who had been in Berlin for a while and had a view of how the city had changed since the year 2000. It gave me the impression that things were moving apace… and that there was kinda’ changing of the guard with the city drawing in so many people from across Europe.
I was glad to be able to talk with Adam Szymczyk after his talk, as the large gallery space laid with tarmac wasn’t especially conducive to chat. I tried to bear in mind what he had said about the way the show had been put together as we went round the various venues on subsequent days and actually found it beneficial that we had meet him before doing so. Initially I had thought it would have been better to see all the work first but as it happened it was good, especially when visiting the sculpture park to have met one of the curators.
I loved the kookiness of PlanB’s show and talk box. I’m always intrigued by artists who embrace art practice so fully into their everyday lives, as with PlanB who record their every move with sat. navigation do-da’s.

Anonymous said...

I think out of the 4 main biennial venues, KunstWerk held some of the most interesting work. Because of the potential of the space itself, the works had been carefully curated into small and what would usually be insignificant spaces. For example a piece by Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys - De Fregatte was installed in a small cellar space of the main gallery, it could only be seen if you ventured down the steps onto Ahmet Ogut's amazing tarmac piece - Ground Control. Other works climbed wall spaces, making the most of the available height of the building. Works such as Soft City by Pushwagner, and City Scene by Zhao Liang stood out, contrasted by Kohei Yoshiyuki's grainy and uncomfortably intimate photographs capturing the relationship between lover's frolicking in Tokyo's parks and the voyeurs that followed them.

Anonymous said...

Today was most useful in gleaning an insight into the effect of the biennial on the alternative creative practitioners and their institutions in Berlin. I got the sense Lise Nelleman (Sparwasser HQ) was feeling tired of being squashed by the bigger and more corporate institutions and in need of a reflective period. I thought the title of their non-exhibition "Out to lunch" very witty and poked fun at the countless ‘Grand Tours’ taken by earnest curators such as ourselves. Later we visited Axel and all felt a bit pepped up by his pragmatic positivism- perhaps it was due to the tender age of his gallery but Axel seemed, although resigned to the dire state of funding, cheerful. I remember feeling interested at having met a curator who did not cultivate an art practice of his own in his spare time, unlike the majority of our group. We wondered whether one or the other way was better or more useful and whether this would define a curator/artists practice in any way. I felt inspired by the multiplicity of Axel’s careers moonlighting as freelance curator, publisher and critic as well as nurturing his gallery and pleasant adjoining garden in Mitte. Sandwiched between the two, of course, was our meeting with the mighty Adam Szymczyk on the uncomfortable (but brilliant!) asphalt floor at KW Kunstwerk. Aesthetically I thoroughly enjoyed this show. Perhaps it was the weather but I liked the colour scheme of muted colour, punctured with flashes of bright colour. I had a meditative stroll round the place and enjoyed spending time to watch the films. Despite having been warned I didn’t see nearly everything and culminated my visit with a rather ungainly dash between the remaining two floors. I bought the night/day guides and felt pleased by the price, disappointed that they contained neither a map nor pictures and again pleased to discover that the texts were both interesting and easy to read for my by-now rather frazzled brain.