Wieland Speck and Shelly Silver
EXILE
Alexandrinenstr 4, HH,
November 4–December 5
Wieland Speck, Berlin Off/On Wall, 1978, still from a black-and-white video, 22 minutes.
One August afternoon in 1978, painter Per Lüke straddled the western end of the Berlin Wall and played a small harp. Filmmaker Wieland Speck (who would go on to make the 1985 queer classic Westler, about a romance between two men living on either side of the wall) documented this potentially life-endangering performance, which captured the curiosity of passersby—as well as the hostile attention of authorities on both sides of the divide. The footage forms the half-hour-long video centerpiece of Speck’s installation Berlin Off/On Wall, 1978, which also includes photos taken by the secret police as well as photocopies of the Stasi files on Speck’s documentation of the action, the documentation itself regarded as a provocation by the East German authorities. Speck’s piece cleverly asserts the blunt material stupidity of the wall—that massive symbolic failure of a few bureaucrats and politicians, blinded by chauvinistic allegiance to their respective ideologies, whose inability to sit down and have a conversation resulted in the needless suffering of millions.
The immediate aftermath of the Mauerfall (the toppling of the wall) forms the subject of Shelly Silver’s 1994 documentary Former East/Former West, which consists wholly of interviews with inhabitants of Berlin in the years 1992 and ’93. That denizens hailing from both sides of the divide were already strongly divided about the wall’s collapse reflects a state of ambivalence, a perspective that the ongoing jubilee celebrations in the German capital have carefully avoided.
— Travis Jeppesen
Nan Goldin
C/O BERLIN
Postfuhramt, Oranienburger Straße 35/36
October 10–December 6
Nan Goldin, Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC, 1983, color photograph, 30 x 40".
As a photographer, Nan Goldin has inspired a legion of imitators who tend to confuse certain lifestyle traits with artistic substance, a privileging of content over form with an excuse for taking sloppy photographs. I tend to think of them as the Vice generation, after the magazine that first published many a Goldin copyist under a hipster anti-ethos saturated with attention begging and unwarranted self-destruction. Where one finds a similar mode of annihilative glamour in a Goldin original, it appears more authentic, perhaps accidental. Her subjects, whether laughing or crying, often seem as though their minds are somewhere else, and their eyes are lost in pensive reverie (unlike the random soulless fashion victims hamming it up in, say, a Ryan McGinley). Revisiting The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1981, in this exhibition, one is struck by this generational lapse in the twenty or thirty years since most of the photographs comprising the famous slide show were taken. Whatever happened to empathy?
For it is her empathetic identification with her subjects that has always been at the core of Goldin’s work, from the Ballad to the more recent Heartbeat, 2003, a series of couples captured in moments of intimacy. It is this most “uncool” facet of her output that endows it with its lasting appeal, as the four slide shows that constitute this exhibition––each set to a sound track compiled by the artist––attest.
— Travis Jeppesen
Mat Collishaw
HAUNCH OF VENISON
Heidestrasse 46,
September 12–December 19
Mat Collishaw, Insecticide 15, 2009, color photograph on Dibond, 72 x 72". From the series “Insecticide,” 2009.
“Submission” is the name of Mat Collishaw’s first solo exhibition in Berlin, and the work on display assigns Collishaw’s subservience to the altar of art history. Collishaw was never the flashiest of the YBAs, but his most recent work positions him among the more studious—perhaps even the most gifted.
On entering the massive darkened gallery, viewers are confronted by The End of Innocence (all works 2009), a monumental digital work projected onto an enormous screen. The work hijacks the “digital rain” effect popularized by the “Matrix” film trilogy to present fragmented re-creations of Pope Innocent X as interpreted by both Bacon and Velázquez. In the rear gallery, a new series of “Insecticide” photographs, capturing an array of insects at the moment of their deaths, calls to mind both early Netherlandish still lifes and the butterfly paintings of Collishaw’s friend and contemporary Damien Hirst. Upstairs, a mechanized zoetrope, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, sustains Collishaw’s interest in Victorian curiosities while providing, with its child hunters ritualistically attacking their prey, a sort of pagan alternative to Bosch’s famous triptych.
Now that postmodernism is beginning to appear an almost retro stance, it is artists like Collishaw, who interrogates histories through the disparate prisms of technologies recent and refurbished, that demonstrate how to make it new in even newer ways.
— Travis Jeppesen
Ricarda Roggan
THE MARIE-ELISABETH LÜDERS BUILDING
German Bundestag, Schiffbauerdamm,
September 4–January 10
Ricarda Roggan, Garage 8, 2008, color photograph. From the series “Garage,” 2008.
Photographers are often praised for their ability to work with light; with Ricarda Roggan, one might say that it is her talent for isolating darkness that distinguishes so many of her images. The light in her large photographs typically emanates from mysterious, unseen sources—and like the series of interiors she depicts, it is often unremarkable. But the omnipresent force of darkness—whether it hovers threateningly, annihilates the background, or appears in shadowy splotches to sculpt her blunt arrangements of mundane household objects, furniture pieces, and cars—endows her work with its dramatic edge.
Roggan’s artful manipulation of shadow is on full display in her current mini-retrospective. In the “Interieurs” series, 2000, boxed belongings and pieces of furniture wrapped in swaths of transparent plastic are shrouded in the darkness of some ill-defined space—neither clearly indoors nor outdoors, as the gray floor could be concrete or sand, and the typically domestic items are obviously in a state of transit. Perhaps they were removed from the empty “Attika,” a series from 2005, whose arboreal beams of stained wooden columns and supports appear to have sprouted out of dusk itself.