Participating artists:Bastian Schwenteck, Colette Callec, Tobias Kurpat, Vincent Wolff, Ida-Marie Simonsen, Oliver Bleckmann, Shin Jeong Hoon, Mahmoud Ismail, Eszter Szöke, Sophie Constanze Pohlheim, Gala Lillian, Juli Winterstein
curated by Juli Winterstein and Colette Callec
opening hours:2-6 pm
Venue:Villa Heikle
Freienwalder Straße 17
13055 Berlin
The exhibition examines the showroom as a specific space of visibility – a junction between economic function and the corporeal. Historically, it was a space designed specifically to present and sell industrial machines - the setting for direct encounters between entrepreneurs, their goods and potential clients. It was a place where the efficiency of products and their market value were visualized. What does it mean today to present artistic works in a space originally built to showcase functionality, industrial design, and economic conviction?
In the space of the art gallery, visual communication enables exchange and transmits knowledge. In the showroom it serves the purpose of trade. Yet any format of engagement between agents and witnesses creates a transactional moment, unfolding in both the art gallery and the showroom through the theatrical format of the show. Visuality performs various roles: It addresses the senses and provokes reactions. First however, it demands positioning - because, once visualized, things are harder to be undone, and faster to be understood.
The ambiguity of visualization lies in its potential to enact resistance on one hand, while stabilizing the ephemeral in the economic form of the visible, and thereby conditioning it for market exchange on the other. Visual communication - from artworks to products - aligns form with the conditions of its own exchange.
Now, in a present where form is exhausted, images are reproducible, and creativity is an industry, the exhibition asks: How can we adapt to the conditions of visuality - or reclaim them effectively? The works of twelve students from the Weißensee Kunsthochschule (Berlin) and the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Leipzig) are (re-) shown within the frame of this question.
