December featured the very first Gallery Quest in Moabit! We started at Bäckerei, where the installation Point of no return by German artist Josina von der Linden (1962) was on view. Normally the installation can only be viewed through the window, but the very kind Susann Unger who runs the project space opened the doors and arranged a meeting with the artist as well.
Through the window we could look into some kind of fishnet construction shaped like a funnel and made out of old rolled up news papers and ty raps. It opens in the front and guides you in, but the further you get inside, the more you are stuck. It is like a trap.
Although it may feel negative, it is also a visualisation of life. Once you are born, an array of choices are open to you. The further down the road you get, the more focused you may get, but also the more choices have become out of reach. I will never be an astronaut anymore. This is also where the title points to.
Made out of circles and lines, it cleverly combines two ways to look at life; one circular, one linear. Circular like the days, weeks, months, years, seasons and life cycles. Lineair in the sense that it has a starting point and an end.
Our next stop is the exhibition Text Bild Exzess in Galerie Nord/Kunstverein Tiergarten, showing work by three artists. We focussed on the overwhelming image archive made by German artist Hannes Kater. He designed his own visual language. It’s like a personal hieroglyphical system. Imagine creating a custom made emoji archive, where you get to decide what means what (in my case, a chocolate bar would stand for happiness- sweet, amazing taste and leaving you longing for more).
Although Kater draws, he also has an interest in space. So he transforms his drawings into styropor forms and with them he builds whole installations, as a sort of 3D- drawings. They permit the viewer to walk around and into them and in doing so creating multiple points of view.
Next up is Manière Noire, which at the moment is run by Guðrún Benónýsdóttir from uns. The exhibition Suggested Spaces shows a multitude of Icelandic artists, all dealing with the imaginative space between the idea and the form.
It summarises how artists work. They generate a space to work in, where the idea and the material come together. Like the work Tear by Örn Alessander Ámundarson. You have to know where it is. Located on an otherwise empty white wall, a little piece of canvas is tagged onto the wall. It was torn of a painting by the artist. The empty wall gives you room to imagine the rest. Also here, the artistsproces of creating, destroying and creating again is shown.
Our final stop is Office Impart, run by the curator duo Anne Schwanz and Johanna Neuschäffer. After more than ten years working in a conventional gallery in Berlin, they decided it was time to rethink the gallery structure. They call themselves a post gallery, where the network and collaborations are more interesting if you want to react on what’s happening now. Once every few months they host an Open Office, luckily enough on the same day as the tour!
On view are three artist with whom they work closely together. Pola Sieverding (1981) showed photo’s from the series Bodies that Matter, Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg (1987) was represented with her typical and very interesting relief panels that focus on translating the act of (digital) painting into a form. And last but not least Conny Maier with a painting from her excellent series that was recently on view in Smac, “I didn’t mean to burn the woods”.