A Curatorial Residency in Berlin

Resident Curator Profile:
Periodically I am going to post a profile of one of my fellow resident curators at Node. First up we have Gabriela Acha.

Gabi is a Spanish curator/musician who has been based in Berlin for a few years now. She has worked at a few galleries, including Tanya Leighton. It is from here that we have a mutual connection. Tanya Leighton represents Sean Edwards, an artist who I know from the times I lived in Cardiff. Gabi had only praise for him and his work, which was nice.

As with all the resident curators I’m thoroughly enjoying working alongside Gabriela and am looking forward to more of the same over the coming weeks.

Day 8 – Visit to Deutsche Kinemathek’s Museum fur Film und Fernsehen/German Museum of Film

On Tuesday a small group of us set off to review the German Museum of Film at Potsdammer Platz. I was excited as I’m a big fa of film in general, but also because my knowledge of German film beyond Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich and Michael Haneke is not great. This was an opportunity for me to learn more about, what some would argue, where cinema really began.

As we entered the museum, we were confronted by an unusual method of display. Three fairly large back projections just out of the walls of a room that is on all six sides covered with mirrors. Its very difficult to know what these mirrors signify and how they relate to the birth of cinema in Germany (cinema as a distorted reflection of reality?), but it created an unpleasant atmosphere.

The mirrors theme continued throughout the museum, but thankfully not to the same intensity.

The first main focus of the museum was the iconic film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920). The display methods leading up to this section complimented the film’s adventurous set design excellently. Monitors and cabinets jutted out of walls at odd angles and, although looking slightly post-modern, prepared you nicely for marvellous diorama of the studio in which Dr. Caligari was shot.

The museum is obviously blessed with a huge collection of historic documentation relating to various points throughtout German film history. This was particularly evident as we transferred through to the next major focus of the museum: The Fritz Lang era. Cabinet after cabinet of letters and photographs. The letters written in German, naturally, but with no English translation. Very frustrating. That may sound lazy on my part but as everything else is signposted in Germ and English it seemed odd not to translate a letter.

The Fritz Lang section focussed heavily on Metropolis as expected but also featured a very impressive two-storey wall of monitors displaying disaster scenes from various Lang movies, all enhanced by floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

The main crticism of the whole museum would be, while there is an obvious necessity to focus on the history of cinema in Germany, as an outsider I felt it was important to give this history a context. There is next to zero reference to what is happening in cinema in other parts of the world at the key moments of development in the museum’s display. On the occasions that focus is moved away from Germany, it is only related to the mass exodus of actors and directors from Germany to the US in 1930/40s and how these German stars influenced Hollywood’s development. For me this was disappointing and, without prior knowlegde of the history of film, slightly alienates the display and to a certain extent the viewer.

The main attraction to the museum is the extensive collection of Marlen Dietrich memoribilia. From dresses to love letters to lucky charms, there are at least three large rooms dedicated to the famous actress.

The Dietrich rooms lead into a focus on the NS era of German cinema and a feature on Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia ducumentary. Surprisingly only documentation of the making of Olympia was on display and not any footage from the actual film. The sombre atmosphere of this part of the museum was compounded by the morgue-like drawers which were used as interective display cases, something that I really enjoyed.

The museum ends with a relatively small room summing up the past 60 or so years of German cinema, perhaps the most frustrating section of the whole museum. Such a large portion of German film history featuring work by Wim Wenders and Michael Haneke and some fascinating hand drawn story boards were crammed into such a small space.

Overall the museum was spectacular both in the amount of artefacts it possesses and in how dissapointing it was. The display was dense and dry but the content on the whole was extremely interesting.

Day 6

Artist and gallery visits.

Following a coulple of days discussing as a group methods of fundraising and grant proposal writing we ventured out into Berlin to visit a couple of artists and a project space.

Visits to artists, getting to know there practice, meeting gallerists and getting to know what kind of spaces inhabit the Berlin art scene is pretty much the main reason I applied to be on this residency. So for me this was the most exciting day so far.

The first artist we visited was Sam Smith. Sam is an Ausralia artist working in sculpture and video. I actually met him a few days previously at the welcome party at Node. The main reason for our visit was to view Sam’s new video work Film Without a Past, currently being exhibited at Altes Finanzant, Neukolln. Film Without a Past is the culminating product of a research residency period spent by the artist at the Helsinki International Artist Programme, Finland.

Using Aki Kaurismaki’s film The Man Without a Past, 2002, as a source for both inspiration and material, Smith removed scenes and almost all dialogue and re-shot parts of the film in the original locations. The resulting work is evocative and reflective, dealing with the themes of loss and erasure with great effect.

We next ventured to the Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance, or LEAP as it is more commonly known. For 18 months LEAP has been situated in a large commercial unit on the 1st floor of Berlin Carre, just off Alexanderplatz, with a fantastic view of the Fernsehturm TV tower.

We had an interesting and informative talk with co-founder John McKiernan. He talked about programming and funding strategies. Unsurprisingly their programme of exhibtions focuses, as their name suggests, on performative works and works dealing with exlectronic media. John also talked about the logistics of running the space and he emphasised the importance for them to own a lot of equipment. I proceeded to ask him if there were any other project spaces in Berlin that LEAP align themselves with and cooperated with in terms of sharing equipment to save money. I was very surprised to hear that, while there are other spaces that they admire in Berlin, there were none that they had a real connection with. This is a topic I intend to pursue whilst I am staying in Berlin and will revisit LEAP to get some more details on why they do not associate with other spaces.

Following that introduction to the space, we were introduced to artist Shingo Yoshida. Shingo is a Japanese artist who has lived in France for a large portion of his life. He is currently working out of one of the studios that LEAP have housed within their project space.

Shingo’s artistic practice is very interesting in terms of the way it is developed. Working in a crude, observational, documentary style of film making, Shingo thrives on what he referred to as ‘accidents’, occurrances that trigger something that otheriwse might not have happened. Previous works have involved research trips to the Amazon and a remote Chilean island. He is currently working on a tourist guide formed entirely from his own experiences and attempting to ignore any preconceived ideas about the locations he visits.

Although he speaks limited English, we spent the best part of an hour crammed into his little studio watching his videos and listening to him talk of his fascinating experiences. On that basis, Shingo’s guidebook is not to be missed.