NOWs: Garten der Gegenwart

18 June - 08 November 2020 / Nows

Garten der Gegenwart

Sommerausstellung in Hamburg

Jeder neue Tag hat zwei Griffe.

Wir können ihn am Griff der Ängstlichkeit oder am Griff der Zuversicht halten.

(H. Beecher, 1813-1887)

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Statt ihrem “Salon der Gegenwart” veranstalten Margarita und Christian Holle dieses Jahr Corona-bedingt den “Garten der Gegenwart”: Fast 30 Künstler zeigen in Harvestehude ihre Werke.

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Die Adresse:

Garten der Gegenwart
Rothenbaumchaussee 145
20149 Hamburg

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Künstler und Künstlerinnen:

Nevin Aladag, Christian Awe, Tjorg Douglas Beer, Matthias Bitzer, Jonas Burgert, Claudia Comte, Jose Dávila, Henrik Eiben, Jeppe Hein, Gregor Hildebrandt, Fabian Knecht, Lilia Kovka, Gerold Miller, Paul Morrison, Timo Nasseri, Anselm Reyle, Hoda Tawakol

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Fabian Knecht: Bruch 3 (studio view), Bronze, 123 x 34 x 34 cm, 2019

NOWs: Your country of two dimensions is not spacious enough. Limits of Perception Lab. By Ivana Franke

18 - 28 June 2020 / Nows ⟶

Ivana Franke. Planetary Nebula, World t012345_A6_0, 2019. Photo Martina Mihaljevic Your country of two dimensions is not spacious enough. Limits of Perception Lab by Ivana Franke at SAAVY Contemporary, Berlin Entrance; Plantagenstraße 31 – OPEN LAB, EXHIBITION, EXPERIMENTS 18.06.–28.06.2020 Tuesday–Sunday 14:00–19:00 Open to the public (max of 15 people in the gallery at same time), visitors wanting to participate in the experiments should register HERE ONLINE INVOCATIONS 21.06.2020 18:00–20:00 WITH Jarita Holbrook, Taita Juan Martín Jamioy Juajibio, Juan-Andres Leon, Sangeetha Menon, Ida Momennejad, Monica Narula, Lisa Randall, Tomas Saraceno, Sunčica Ostojić SATELLITE EVENT: DREAMSCAPE #1 18.06.–28.06.2020 WITH Israel Lopez In the Limits Lab in Berlin-Moabit – Open to the public by appointment HERE …your country of Two Dimensions is not spacious enough to represent me, a being of Three, but can only exhibit a slice or section of me, which is what you call a Circle. – Edwin Abbott Abbott.1884. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions For one week, SAVVY Contemporary transforms itself into the LIMITS OF PERCEPTION LAB, a hybrid of an artist studio and a scientific laboratory, using multidisciplinary methodologies to study experience and as a means of knowledge disruption and production. [2] It is grounded in artistic practice within an extended context, drawing from and working with practitioners from the fields of cognitive and vision science, neuroscience, experimental psychology, mathematics, and architecture while being in conversation with critical practitioners from the fields of humanities, including but not limited to art history, history of science, and philosophy. The project serves an experimental phase of a long-term platform for investigation of perceptual limits as potential sites of social transformation. This materialization of the open lab at SAVVY Contemporary focuses on perception and imaginations of extra dimensions. The SAVVY Contemporary iteration of LIMITS OF PERCEPTION LAB concerns itself with limits of perception and epistemological categories, including Western definitions and how they shape the ways in which we are taught to think, feel, and rationalise our sensing of ourselves and the world. Ivana Franke’s work probes possibilities of approaching consciousness in “a multidimensional way,” [3] seeking means of affirming our imaginations beyond already known categories and habituated ways of perceiving – going beyond what Harvard physicist Lisa Randall calls the “pervasive but quite possibly mistaken assumption that we live in a three-dimensional world.” The weeklong exhibition and laboratory installed at SAVVY Contemporary materialises as a zone to provide experience in which to question the habitual ways of seeing and knowing in three-dimensional environments. Visitors are invited to navigate the gallery space transformed into an open studio, and to engage with spaces of darkness, epiphanies of lights, visual quandaries and thought experiments. In addition to the public experiments, a discursive programme and a radio broadcast will address Western scientific assumptions about consciousness and the limits of perception. The project connects to and draws upon SAVVY Contemporary’s programme THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE and its long-term explorations and challenges of the frailties and fallacies of objective scientific knowledge. The laboratory problematises the potential of “epistemological ruptures” that break with “normal science” [4] and evokes experiences to challenge existing common modes of knowledge-production, to question the “hegemonic assertions of Enlightenment ideals of the liberal white male subject,” [5] to crack open preconceived ideas of reality, and to lend it other dimensions that are decidedly fictitious, imaginary, and cosmic. We concern ourselves with a set of questions: What is an experience and what conditions it? How does the meaning from the experience itself? How does cultural embeddedness influence perception and cognition of experience? Every single view from within speaks the truth about its own reality. It is irreplaceable, so invaluable, and equally valid as all others are. Experiencer’s experience holds the power to subjective truth. Disrupting the Cartesian tradition of placing mind over matter, and interrupting the idea of the “liberal subject, represented as having a body, but not being a body,” as Alexander G. Weheliye states, the experiments also grapple with redrafting the hegemonic Western version of personhood, and engage with “inscriptions of humanity” … “that always incorporate their own multiplicities, as opposed to mere uncritical echoes of the white liberal humanist subject.” [6] This project engages with scientists alongside indigenous, non-Western and non-positivist modes of investigating human consciousness. It reflects on lived experiences, which combine first and third-person perspectives, while suggesting new ways of sharing them. This opens possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge in an unterritorialized, non-hierarchical, multidimensional, and more-than-human future planetary imagination. – OPEN LAB Visitors are invited into an archive of scientific papers, literary pieces, filled questionnaires, sketched analysis of data, drawings and dreamscapes shared by subjects experiencing the exhibition. An exercise to probe the limits of our perception and imagination follow. INSTALLATIONS BY Ivana Franke Within the installation We close our eyes and see a flock of birds: we sit in the middle of a cylindrical room and are invited to close our eyes. We are exposed to a flickering light which gives rise to a quasi-hallucinatory visual experience of moving images behind our closed eyes. A shimmering of colours, patterns, shapes, or figures in motion happen in our heads, making us see a stream of images: birds flying, people passing by, circles and spirals swirling and whatever else one can imagine. Each person “constructs” their very own “movie”, a possible reminiscence of something long forgotten or closeby. We are also asked to enter From The Faraway Past and From The Future: we perceive a dark space where the only thing visible are thin curved lines floating in the air, at eye level. Slowly, circular shapes start to emerge, flowing in different directions. Decontextualized specular highlights move according to the viewer’s individual movements; the unknown “object” starts to overlap, merge, shrink, expand, appear and disappear, bustling in unexpected directions, changing its shape, size and position. These curious constitutions seem to extend deep into the space, only to come back towards us in rolling motion. Our brains cannot measure what they perceive, we can only guess, speculate, imagine and try to find the coordinates. EXPERIMENTS After being exposed to flickering light in the first installation, participants are asked to fill a version of 5D-ASC, 5-Dimensional Altered State of Consciousness: a questionnaire to explore measures of subjective qualities of non-ordinary waking states. Following the experience of darkness in the second installation, participants are handed questionnaires inquiring about their perceptual experiences and cognitive processes – with focus on experience of spatial dimensions and interpretation of spatial concepts. ONLINE INVOCATIONS 21.06.2020 14:00–20:00 WITH Jarita Holbrook, Taita Juan Martín Jamioy Juajibio, Juan-Andres Leon, Sangeetha Menon, Ida Momennejad, Monica Narula, Lisa Randall, Tomas Saraceno, Sunčica Ostojić, and others A number of thinkers will examine the concept of multidimensionality within their respective disciplines and reflect on its significance as a transformative force for production and dissemination of knowledge in unterritorialized, non-hierarchical, multidimensional future world. SATELLITE EVENT: DREAMSCAPE #1 18.06.–28.06.2020 WITH Israel Lopez Dreamscape #1 is an installation that aims to stage a dream. The installation works based on sensory manipulation, by which a flat is staged as a place to tune down, isolate, and calibrate the sensory system in preparation for the sleepstate. Dreamscape #1 is a composition for closed eyes, is an offer of self space and an attempt to modulate the ways in which we create spatial relations. The flat will be open for several visitors every day after a previous appointment, each occupying the flat alone. CURATOR Elena Agudio CO-CURATOR Kelly Krugman ARTISTIC DIRECTION Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung PRODUCTION Kimani Joseph MANAGEMENT Lema Sikod COMMUNICATIONS Anna Jäger LIVE-STREAM Boiling Head Media LAB COLLABORATORS Israel Lopez, Dora Sribar THANKS to Elena Agudio, Bilge Sayim, Ida Momennejad, Heike Catherina Mertens, Katja Naie, Hannah Hurzig, Tomas Saraceno, Natalija Miodragović, Philipp Dreyer, Olafur Eliasson, Mathias Sohr, Sunčica Ostojić, Martina Kramer, Pierre Gallais, Etienne Ghys, Oliviere Varenne, Sandra Aračić, Tanja Cvetko, Elena Chronopolou, Frank Spenling, Stephan Spenling, Johann Klaphake, Israel Lopez, Alexandre Mballa Ekobena, Dora Šribar, Vedran Franke. SUPPORT The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, part of the program Croatian presidency of the Council of the European Union – 1 “When we widen our horizon to include transformative approaches to experience, especially those concerned not with escape from the world or the discovery of some hidden, true self but with releasing the everyday world from the clutches of the grasping mind and its desire for an absolute ground, we gain a sense of perspective on the world that might be brought forth by learning to embody groundlessness as compassion in a scientific culture.” Varela, Francisco J., et al. 2016. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. The MIT Press. 2 Artworks or artist-devised tools are employed to create settings for conducting experiments and developing questionnaires in collaboration with cognitive scientists for subjective reports – including verbal and visual descriptions, and quantitative measures. One of the experiments at SAVVY Contemporary employs flickering light and standardised 5D-ASC rating scale. 3 Tim Bayne and Olivia Carter. 2018. “Dimensions of Consciousness and the Psychedelic State.” in: Neuroscience of Consciousness. 4 Thomas S. Kuhn and Ian Hacking. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. University Of Chicago Press. 5 Ibid 7. 6 Alexander G. Weheliye, 2002. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music“ in Social Text, 71 (Volume 20, Number 2), Summer 2002, 21-47, Duke University Press. Ivana Franke. Planetary Nebula, World t012345_A6_0, 2019. Photo Martina Mihaljevic Your country of two dimensions is not spacious enough. Limits of Perception Lab by Ivana Franke at SAAVY Contemporary, Berlin Entrance; Plantagenstraße 31 – OPEN LAB, EXHIBITION, EXPERIMENTS 18.06.–28.06.2020 Tuesday–Sunday 14:00–19:00 Open to the public (max of 15 people in the gallery at same time), visitors wanting to participate in the experiments should register HERE ONLINE INVOCATIONS 21.06.2020 18:00–20:00 WITH Jarita Holbrook, Taita Juan Martín Jamioy Juajibio, Juan-Andres Leon, Sangeetha Menon, Ida Momennejad, Monica Narula, Lisa Randall, Tomas Saraceno, Sunčica Ostojić SATELLITE EVENT: DREAMSCAPE #1 18.06.–28.06.2020 WITH Israel Lopez In the Limits Lab in Berlin-Moabit – Open to the public by appointment HERE …your country of Two Dimensions is not spacious enough to represent me, a being of Three, but can only exhibit a slice or section of me, which is what you call a Circle. – Edwin Abbott Abbott.1884. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions For one week, SAVVY Contemporary transforms itself into the LIMITS OF PERCEPTION LAB, a hybrid of an artist studio and a scientific laboratory, using multidisciplinary methodologies to study experience and as a means of knowledge disruption and production. [2] It is grounded in artistic practice within an extended context, drawing from and working with practitioners from the fields of cognitive and vision science, neuroscience, experimental psychology, mathematics, and architecture while being in conversation with critical practitioners from the fields of humanities, including but not limited to art history, history of science, and philosophy. The project serves an experimental phase of a long-term platform for investigation of perceptual limits as potential sites of social transformation. This materialization of the open lab at SAVVY Contemporary focuses on perception and imaginations of extra dimensions. The SAVVY Contemporary iteration of LIMITS OF PERCEPTION LAB concerns itself with limits of perception and epistemological categories, including Western definitions and how they shape the ways in which we are taught to think, feel, and rationalise our sensing of ourselves and the world. Ivana Franke’s work probes possibilities of approaching consciousness in “a multidimensional way,” [3] seeking means of affirming our imaginations beyond already known categories and habituated ways of perceiving – going beyond what Harvard physicist Lisa Randall calls the “pervasive but quite possibly mistaken assumption that we live in a three-dimensional world.” The weeklong exhibition and laboratory installed at SAVVY Contemporary materialises as a zone to provide experience in which to question the habitual ways of seeing and knowing in three-dimensional environments. Visitors are invited to navigate the gallery space transformed into an open studio, and to engage with spaces of darkness, epiphanies of lights, visual quandaries and thought experiments. In addition to the public experiments, a discursive programme and a radio broadcast will address Western scientific assumptions about consciousness and the limits of perception. The project connects to and draws upon SAVVY Contemporary’s programme THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE and its long-term explorations and challenges of the frailties and fallacies of objective scientific knowledge. The laboratory problematises the potential of “epistemological ruptures” that break with “normal science” [4] and evokes experiences to challenge existing common modes of knowledge-production, to question the “hegemonic assertions of Enlightenment ideals of the liberal white male subject,” [5] to crack open preconceived ideas of reality, and to lend it other dimensions that are decidedly fictitious, imaginary, and cosmic. We concern ourselves with a set of questions: What is an experience and what conditions it? How does the meaning from the experience itself? How does cultural embeddedness influence perception and cognition of experience? Every single view from within speaks the truth about its own reality. It is irreplaceable, so invaluable, and equally valid as all others are. Experiencer’s experience holds the power to subjective truth. Disrupting the Cartesian tradition of placing mind over matter, and interrupting the idea of the “liberal subject, represented as having a body, but not being a body,” as Alexander G. Weheliye states, the experiments also grapple with redrafting the hegemonic Western version of personhood, and engage with “inscriptions of humanity” … “that always incorporate their own multiplicities, as opposed to mere uncritical echoes of the white liberal humanist subject.” [6] This project engages with scientists alongside indigenous, non-Western and non-positivist modes of investigating human consciousness. It reflects on lived experiences, which combine first and third-person perspectives, while suggesting new ways of sharing them. This opens possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge in an unterritorialized, non-hierarchical, multidimensional, and more-than-human future planetary imagination. – OPEN LAB Visitors are invited into an archive of scientific papers, literary pieces, filled questionnaires, sketched analysis of data, drawings and dreamscapes shared by subjects experiencing the exhibition. An exercise to probe the limits of our perception and imagination follow. INSTALLATIONS BY Ivana Franke Within the installation We close our eyes and see a flock of birds: we sit in the middle of a cylindrical room and are invited to close our eyes. We are exposed to a flickering light which gives rise to a quasi-hallucinatory visual experience of moving images behind our closed eyes. A shimmering of colours, patterns, shapes, or figures in motion happen in our heads, making us see a stream of images: birds flying, people passing by, circles and spirals swirling and whatever else one can imagine. Each person “constructs” their very own “movie”, a possible reminiscence of something long forgotten or closeby. We are also asked to enter From The Faraway Past and From The Future: we perceive a dark space where the only thing visible are thin curved lines floating in the air, at eye level. Slowly, circular shapes start to emerge, flowing in different directions. Decontextualized specular highlights move according to the viewer’s individual movements; the unknown “object” starts to overlap, merge, shrink, expand, appear and disappear, bustling in unexpected directions, changing its shape, size and position. These curious constitutions seem to extend deep into the space, only to come back towards us in rolling motion. Our brains cannot measure what they perceive, we can only guess, speculate, imagine and try to find the coordinates. EXPERIMENTS After being exposed to flickering light in the first installation, participants are asked to fill a version of 5D-ASC, 5-Dimensional Altered State of Consciousness: a questionnaire to explore measures of subjective qualities of non-ordinary waking states. Following the experience of darkness in the second installation, participants are handed questionnaires inquiring about their perceptual experiences and cognitive processes – with focus on experience of spatial dimensions and interpretation of spatial concepts. ONLINE INVOCATIONS 21.06.2020 14:00–20:00 WITH Jarita Holbrook, Taita Juan Martín Jamioy Juajibio, Juan-Andres Leon, Sangeetha Menon, Ida Momennejad, Monica Narula, Lisa Randall, Tomas Saraceno, Sunčica Ostojić, and others A number of thinkers will examine the concept of multidimensionality within their respective disciplines and reflect on its significance as a transformative force for production and dissemination of knowledge in unterritorialized, non-hierarchical, multidimensional future world. SATELLITE EVENT: DREAMSCAPE #1 18.06.–28.06.2020 WITH Israel Lopez Dreamscape #1 is an installation that aims to stage a dream. The installation works based on sensory manipulation, by which a flat is staged as a place to tune down, isolate, and calibrate the sensory system in preparation for the sleepstate. Dreamscape #1 is a composition for closed eyes, is an offer of self space and an attempt to modulate the ways in which we create spatial relations. The flat will be open for several visitors every day after a previous appointment, each occupying the flat alone. CURATOR Elena Agudio CO-CURATOR Kelly Krugman ARTISTIC DIRECTION Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung PRODUCTION Kimani Joseph MANAGEMENT Lema Sikod COMMUNICATIONS Anna Jäger LIVE-STREAM Boiling Head Media LAB COLLABORATORS Israel Lopez, Dora Sribar THANKS to Elena Agudio, Bilge Sayim, Ida Momennejad, Heike Catherina Mertens, Katja Naie, Hannah Hurzig, Tomas Saraceno, Natalija Miodragović, Philipp Dreyer, Olafur Eliasson, Mathias Sohr, Sunčica Ostojić, Martina Kramer, Pierre Gallais, Etienne Ghys, Oliviere Varenne, Sandra Aračić, Tanja Cvetko, Elena Chronopolou, Frank Spenling, Stephan Spenling, Johann Klaphake, Israel Lopez, Alexandre Mballa Ekobena, Dora Šribar, Vedran Franke. SUPPORT The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, part of the program Croatian presidency of the Council of the European Union – 1 “When we widen our horizon to include transformative approaches to experience, especially those concerned not with escape from the world or the discovery of some hidden, true self but with releasing the everyday world from the clutches of the grasping mind and its desire for an absolute ground, we gain a sense of perspective on the world that might be brought forth by learning to embody groundlessness as compassion in a scientific culture.” Varela, Francisco J., et al. 2016. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. The MIT Press. 2 Artworks or artist-devised tools are employed to create settings for conducting experiments and developing questionnaires in collaboration with cognitive scientists for subjective reports – including verbal and visual descriptions, and quantitative measures. One of the experiments at SAVVY Contemporary employs flickering light and standardised 5D-ASC rating scale. 3 Tim Bayne and Olivia Carter. 2018. “Dimensions of Consciousness and the Psychedelic State.” in: Neuroscience of Consciousness. 4 Thomas S. Kuhn and Ian Hacking. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. University Of Chicago Press. 5 Ibid 7. 6 Alexander G. Weheliye, 2002. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music“ in Social Text, 71 (Volume 20, Number 2), Summer 2002, 21-47, Duke University Press.

NOWs: ONLY by Jonas Wendelin

15 June - 29 August 2020 / Nows ⟶

ONLYsolo exhibition by Jonas Wendelin Dittrich & Schlechtriem Linienstrasse 23 10178 Berlin DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is pleased to present the first solo exhibition with JONAS WENDELIN (b. Düsseldorf, DE, 1985) in our gallery, titled ONLY, on view from Monday, 15 June, through Saturday, 29 August, 2020. The exhibition was originally scheduled to open as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2020. Due to the lockdown in Los Angeles, the artist could not travel to Europe and the works could not be shipped to Berlin. The show was substantially conceived in 2019. For his first solo show ONLY at the gallery, Wendelin deconstructs the actual and symbolic context of the gallery, exposing its methodologies through a fictive architectural installation and aligning strands of his thinking into a narrative spanning from conceptual found objects to the visceral physicality of his ceramics practice. ONLY engages the public in an alternative reality, pursuing an organic futuristic narrative of idealism and leaving the viewer with hope in dystopia. An ecology held together by stories needs people to hear them and retell them. But how do these tales disintegrate without an audience? And without civilization to know the difference between natural matter and cultural objects, how might these things take on or leave behind lives of their own? Wendelin’s question is: “When we leave or vanish, how will the dust settle? If we return, what new traces will be found?” He stages these questions in the form of a scene. The exhibition is set in a gallery concealed by broadsheets posted over its windows. These are pages of a publication commissioned and edited by the artist called THE ALLUSION, whose contributors have offered “fictions on fiction” that dissect conceits of the show while also propagating them.THE ALLUSION is produced in collaboration with multiple artists, architects, writers, and journalists and describes an entry to this illusion of abandonment. Through the juxtaposed, overlapping, and contradicting contributions, it aims to limn perspectives examining these tools of contemporary fiction. The involvement of different voices raises the question of individual agency and opens gateways toward shaping a shared evaluation of objects and belief systems. The inside of the exhibition suggests the aftermath of some progress-halting event. Wandering among empty workstations through the stripped gallery, one can see that files and business machines have been replaced with jars of preserved foods predating the internet. Some are from the Chernobyl era, artifacts of times shaped by disaster, and in response, by the physical limitations of bodies and of resources like these. Wendelin presents them here as readymades and as bunker decor, items that might be found in a place where survivors subsist waiting for history to restart its engine. Dozens of organic, aqueous forms are littered around the galleries themselves. These are ceramic artworks made by Wendelin titled ONLY ONE, TWO, THREE … counting upwards in numeric evolution. Despite their raw contours and appearance of natural proliferation throughout the space, these are hand-pinched and deliberately placed sculptures. Here as thousands of years ago, they are the product of ritualistic methods, the practice of which could be thought to hold some part of the time concentrated within their making. Their abyssal lusters are the result of a chemical-induced glazing technique called raku. To achieve these, the sculptures are removed from the kiln at their peak temperature of more than 1800 degrees and placed in metal containers full of paper that combusts upon contact. The resulting carbon compounds extract otherworldly colors from the suffocated glazes. Charred remnants of paper appear in traces around the sculptures. In their virgin form they are pages from the publication pasted in the gallery windows, which have also been placed in geometric stacks throughout the exhibition to be taken. Additionally, stored up in shelves, are customized preserves from the last decades dating back to 1945, pre-internet or -Chernobyl. These objects assemble a sentiment or timeline of technology in the early stages of our kind, to the enhancements leading up to our way of life today, with generational differences widening more than ever as it accelerates. The shift in consumption laid the foundations for our technological revolutions, elevated our consciousness to experimentation, and refocused our attention to develop increasingly complex social structures. These objects are reminders of a world prior to our human-centric sphere. The above contains excerpts from the press text of Kevin McGarry, published in THE ALLUSION. Jonas Wendelin currently works between Los Angeles and Berlin. His work includes performance, sculpture, installation, studies in traditional ceramics, as well as the facilitation of cultural spaces, initiating, cultivating, and directing a social vision that queries cultural abetments. Wendelin is a co- founder and director of FRAGILE, a multi-disciplinary nonprofit project for contemporary artistic practices located in Berlin. FRAGILE encompasses an exhibition and a residency space, and fosters a program of conversation, antagonism, renegotiation, and celebration. He is also a co- founder of NAVEL, a community-driven nonprofit residency, learning platform, and self-defined test site for collectivity and creative practices in downtown Los Angeles. Wendelin graduated as Hito Steyerl’s Meisterschüler from the Berlin University of the Arts and was a participant at Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments). Wendelin was an artist in residence at the American Museum Of Ceramics Art, AMOCA in Pomona, California. His work has been shown at Hamburger Bahnhof— Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; MoMA PS1, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; and NAVEL, Los Angeles. For further information on the artist and the works or to request images, please contact Nils Petersen, nils(at)dittrich-schlechtriem.com. ONLYEinzelausstellung von Jonas Wendelin DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM freuen sich, die erste Einzelausstellung von JONAS WENDELIN (geb. Düsseldorf, DE, 1985) in unserer Galerie zu präsentieren. Die Schau mit dem Titel ONLY wird ab Montag, dem 15. Juni bis zum 29. August zu besichtigen sein. Die Ausstellung sollte ursprünglich im Rahmen des Gallery Weekend Berlin 2020 eröffnen. Aufgrund des Lockdowns in Los Angeles konnte sowohl der Künstler als auch seine Werke nicht nach Europa reisen. Die inhaltliche Auseinandersetzung der Ausstellung wurde schon im Jahr 2019 konzipiert. Für seine Ausstellung ONLY dekonstruiert Wendelin den tatsächlichen und symbolischen Kontext der Galerie, legt deren Methodik durch eine fiktive Architekturinstallation offen und verflicht verschiedene Stränge seines Denkens zu einer Erzählung, die von konzeptuellen gefundenen Objekten bis zur handfesten Körperlichkeit seiner Keramikpraxis reicht. Die Ausstellung ONLY bezieht die Besucher in eine alternative architektonische Realität ein, verfolgt eine organische futuristische Erzählung des Idealismus und lässt den Betrachter mit Hoffnung in der Dystopie zurück. Ein von Geschichten zusammengehaltenes Ökosystem braucht Menschen, die sie hören und nacherzählen. Wie aber vollzieht sich die Auflösung dieser Geschichten, wenn es kein Publikum für sie gibt? Und wenn keine Zivilisation mehr den Unterschied zwischen Naturstoff und Kulturgegenstand kennt, wie könnte das Eigenleben aussehen, das diese Dinge dann womöglich annähmen oder hinterließen? Wendelin formuliert es so: „Wenn wir weggehen oder verschwinden, wie wird der Staub sich legen? Wenn wir zurückkehren, welche neuen Spuren werden wir vorfinden?“ Diese Fragen setzt er in der Ausstellung in Szene. Die Fenster der Galerie sind mit großformatigen bedruckten Seiten zugehängt, die aus einer vom Künstler herausgegebenen Publikation mit dem Titel THE ALLUSION stammen. Die Autoren, die er dafür einlud, steuerten „Fiktionen über Fiktion“ bei, die die Ideen hinter der Schau auseinandernehmen, aber auch weitertragen. THE ALLUSION ist in Zusammenarbeit mit mehreren Künstlern, Architekten, Schriftstellern und Journalisten entstanden und beschreibt einen Einstieg in jene Illusion der Verlassenheit. Durch die nebeneinanderstehenden, sich überschneidenden und einander widersprechenden Beiträge sollen Perspektiven einer Auseinandersetzung mit diesen Werkzeugen der zeitgenössischen Fiktion entworfen werden. Die Einbeziehung verschiedener Stimmen wirft die Frage nach der individuellen Handlungsmacht auf und öffnet Wege zur Gestaltung einer gemeinsamen Bewertung von Objekten und Glaubenssystemen. Die Szene im Inneren der Galerie wirkt, als habe ein unerwartetes Ereignis den Betrieb zum Erliegen gebracht. Die Arbeitsplätze sind verwaist, die Räumlichkeiten weitgehend leer; statt Aktenschränken und Bürogeräten finden sich Nahrungsmittel in Einmachgläsern, die älter sind als das Internet – manche stammen aus der Zeit von Tschernobyl, Artefakte, in die sich die Katastrophe und die Grenzen von Körpern und Ressourcen wie diesen in der Reaktion auf sie eingeschrieben haben. Wendelin zeigt sie hier als Readymades und Bunkerausstattung, wie sie an einem Ort zu finden sein mögen, wo Überlebende ausharren, bis das Räderwerk der Geschichte sich wieder in Bewegung setzt. Dutzende wässrig-organischer Gestalten sind über die Räume der Galerie verteilt: Keramiken von Wendelin mit den Titeln ONLY ONE, TWO, THREE … und so weiter in numerischer Reihung. Trotz ihrer rohen Konturen und dem Anschein einer Art natürlichen Ausbreitung im Raum handelt es sich um von Hand in Form gepresste und sorgfältig angeordnete Skulpturen. Hier wie vor tausenden Jahren sind sie Früchte ritueller Verfahren, in deren Ausübung man sich etwas von der Zeit, die in ihrer Herstellung verdichtet wurde, aufgespeichert denken mag. Ihr abgründiges Schimmern verdanken sie einer durch chemische Zugaben herbeigeführten Glasurtechnik namens Raku. Dazu werden die Skulpturen dem auf eine Maximaltemperatur von über 1800 Grad erhitzten Brennofen entnommen und in Metallbehälter gelegt, die mit Papier gefüllt sind, das bei der Berührung in Flammen aufgeht. Die entstehenden Kohlenstoffverbindungen entlocken den erstickten Glasuren überirdische Farben. Spuren von verkohlten Papierschnipseln sind um die Skulpturen herum zu erkennen. In unversehrter Form waren es Seiten aus der Publikation auf den Galeriefenstern; weitere Exemplare liegen in der Ausstellung in geometrischen Stapeln zum Mitnehmen aus. In Regalen aufgestellte scheinbar aufbewahrte individuell gestaltete Artefakte aus den letzten Jahrzehnten zurück bis 1945, aus der Zeit vor dem Internet und Tschernobyl, bieten einen Eindruck oder eine Zeitleiste der Technologie in den frühen Stadien unserer Art bis hin zu den Neuentwicklungen, die zu unserer heutigen Lebensweise führen, wobei die Generationsunterschiede mehr denn je zunehmen, je schneller sie fortschreitet. Der Wandel des Konsums hat die Grundlagen für unsere technologischen Revolutionen gelegt, unser Bewusstsein auf die Stufe des Experimentierens gehoben, die in der frühen Menschheit begann, und unsere Aufmerksamkeit bewusst auf die Entwicklung unserer immer komplexeren sozialen Strukturen ausgerichtet. Diese Objekte erinnern an eine Welt vor der unseren, in der der Mensch im Mittelpunkt steht. Diese Ausführungen stammen von Kevin McGarry, welcher einen Pressetext für THE ALLUSION verfassen hat. Jonas Wendelin arbeitet derzeit in Los Angeles und Berlin. Sein Werk umfasst Performances, Skulpturen, Installationen, Studien zur traditionellen Keramik sowie die Moderation kultureller Räume; er initiiert, fördert und entwickelt eine gesellschaftliche Vision, die kulturelle Routinen hinterfragt. Wendelin ist Mitbegründer und Leiter von FRAGILE, eines multidisziplinären Nonprofit-Projekts für zeitgenössische künstlerische Praxen in Berlin, das einen Ausstellungs- und ein „Artist in Residence“ für eingeladene Künstler umfasst und Gesprächen, Auseinandersetzungen, Neuverhandlungen und Festivitäten Raum gibt. Außerdem ist er Mitbegründer von NAVEL, einer gemeinschaftlich betriebenen Nonprofit-Organisation in Downtown Los Angeles, die Künstleraufenthalte ermöglicht, eine Lernplattform betreibt und sich als Testgelände für Kollektivität und kreative Praxen versteht. Wendelin war Hito Steyerls Meisterschüler an der Berliner Universität der Künste, Teilnehmer an Olafur Eliassons Institut für Raumexperimente und „Artist in Residence“ in American Museum Of Ceramics Art, AMOCA in Pomona, Kalifornien. Seine Arbeiten waren im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, im KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, im MoMA PS1, New York, in der Neuen Nationalgalerie, Berlin, und bei The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, und NAVEL, Los Angeles, zu sehen. Für weitere Informationen zum Künstler und den Arbeiten und für Bildanfragen wenden Sie sich bitte an Nils Petersen, nils(at)dittrich-schlechtriem.com.

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NOWs: Garten der Gegenwart

Garten der Gegenwart

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