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.

Days 2 and 3 continued…

To ensure that what we were proposing remained part of the Prinzessinnen community we also proposed that at the end of each residency we would host a weekend of events.

Each artist would present the work cultivated by their respective residencies. We would also invite guest speakers to discuss topics relating to art and the notion of community. For the first weekend of events we proposed to invite Dr Helen Pheby, curator of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. She would give a seminar discussing the topic of her doctoral thesis, Making Sculpture Public. We would also invite artist Yorgos Sapountzis to give a talk entitled Collective Memory Through Public Sculptures.

On the final day of the weekend we would introduce the incoming three resident artists, one of which would be Sapountzis, the others would be Katharina Grosse and Cyprien Gaillard.

The weekend would be rounded off by a screening of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice, alluding to the utopian, magical nature of Prinzessinnengarten.

The future of Prinzessinnengarten was not something we wanted to consider head-on. Our main focus was always to find the best way to integrate art into the garden. By doing that, if we aided awareness of the garden’s troubles then that was a bonus. We did however want the residency programme to continue through the leadership of the community. It was our intention that we would be able to build a foundation, to pass on our knowledge to the community so that they could take on the role of curator and lead the residency programme after our departure.

In essence, we just wanted to plant a seed in the garden.

Not bad for two days work, I think.

Days 2 and 3

At the beginning of day two we were divided into three groups. Each group was given the assignment of devising a hypothetical proposal for a site specific event, exhibition or project at a designated location in Berlin. We would have to present our proposal at the end of day three.

Adriana Bildaru, Anna Frost and myself were assigned Prinzessinnengarten as our location. Situated on the south-east side of Moritzplatz, Prinzessinnengarten was the site of a Jewish owned department store which was demolished during the second world war. Since 2009 the land has been utilised as a community garden and also containing a kitchen, cafe and library.

Upon visiting the site the first thing we noticed was that the land was at risk of being sold for development by the council. Exploring the gardens and seeing how content people were just by being in there and having somewhere to grow crops told us how important this garden was for the city and its inhabitants. We instantly decided that anything we did here would have to be complementary and respectful to the garden. Key words that came up at that point were sustainable, subservient and integrative.

Each of us were fervent in our desire to bring art into the garden, but in a way that did not detract from Prinzessinnengarten’s overall ethos. We were also conscious that we did not want to get tangled up with the politics of saving the land but that any event were able to propose would aid awareness and bring people to the garden on a regualr basis.

After some deliberation we came to a group decision of bringing in one work of art that would sit permanently in the garden and act as the flagship to attract people there. As this was a hypothetical proposal with an unlimited budget, it was decided that work of art would be Jef Koon’s Puppy. Puppy was actually proposed by Koons to be included in dOCUMENTA 9 but was rejected, so we felt it was nice that the sculpture would now be ‘coming home’ to Germany from its current location at Gugenheim Bilbao.

The second half of our proposal consisted of a quadannual artist residency. Every three months we would invite 3 artists to spend 12 weeks working in the garden producing site-specific works that compliment the atmosphere and the spirit of Prinzessinnengarten.

Along the east wall of the garden are several shipping containers. Two of these containers house the kitchen and cafe, is used as a toilet cabin while others are used simply as storage units. We proposed that we would bring in six more of these containers to act as artist studios. These spaces could also be utilised as projection rooms or as seminar or workshop rooms for the community.

The initial three artists that we proposed to invite to the residency were Haroon Mirza, Laura Buckley and Pablo Bronstein. These artists were chosen based on their style of work and the great potential of seeing their work integrated within the garden was particularly excited.

Laura Buckley is an artist I know from working at Cell Proect Space in London. Her video works and projection installations would provide an interesting new dimension to the garden. The work she produced in collaboration with Haroon Mirza and David MacLean, Stage Fright, was one of the main points of departure for us in choosing what type of artist we wanted to invite to the residency. Pablo Bronstein’s Teatro Alessandro Scarlatti, the worlds smallest opera house was again a work that we felt would alter the dynamics of the garden without being disruptive or disrespectful.

An important part of our project was, whilst integrating art within the garden, to not impose anything or disrupt the balance of Prinzessinnengarten. Therefor, whilst the new cabins provided a kind of community centre alongside the artist studios we also had to replace a garden that was being removed due to the imminent arrival of Puppy. This garden would be relocated to the roof of the six new shipping containers and would remain fully functional.