Arturas Raila
Lithuanian artist Arturas Raila has now been carrying out his project in progress entitled “The Power of the Earth” for two years, in collaboration with the geo-energy experts Vaclovas Mikailionis and Villius Gibavicius. The artist and the scientists come from rural areas of Lithuania, where they are leading representatives of a folklorist understanding of nature. […]
SIGNS & SURFACES
People attempt to subjugate their own bodies in many ways. Bodybuilders and tightrope artists are a testimony to this, and every big city marathon is a mass demonstration of collective self-discipline. But without doubt, the most radical way of making the body into its own object is to design the skin, decorating it with symbols […]
PAINTING AS PRESENCE
he exhibition PAINTING AS PRESENCE / This is not a love song is aimed at visitors who are curious and interested – parallel to the BERLIN BIENNIAL – in getting to know positions of painting with very different references and origins, the majority of which nonetheless emerged in Berlin. On the basis of selected examples, […]
Serkan Özkaya
Since we began advertising exhibitions like consumer goods, art has had to make an effort to look smart. Most recently, for example, the products MOMA and GOYA permeated the market to the same extent as OMO and ARIEL, so that one can almost refer to self-defence when an artist conceals his critical standpoints behind the […]
Jesper Nordahl
There are two kinds of contemporary political art: the bold, know-all approach, which conveys a good feeling to its viewers, and painstakingly researched projects, in which art nears the limits of its traditional field of influence. In his exhibition in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Jesper Nordahl presents the Women’s Center self-help project and the Kotmale hydro […]
What is Modern Art?
The exhibition What is Modern Art? (Group Show) shows wide-ranging research into art history – not on the basis of old masters and originals, but on that of anonymity and the copy. It gathers together a series of works and projects that could be regarded as milestones on the road to an art form for […]
Reiner Maria Matysik
At the Bethanien, expectations raised by art and culture as concerns their social potential have recently been at the core of a fierce ideological battle over how art can make itself useful and who may take advantage of it. Reacting to this public debate, Reiner Maria Matysik’s project presents itself less as an exhibition in […]
Tea Mäkipää
Man himself is a genus in the work of Tea Mäkipää, although the habitat of this species is the globalised cultural society of the West. In her often monumental installations, photographs, films and objects, man’s social behaviour and strategies for survival are critically illuminated alongside his attitude towards Nature and her creatures. Biological constants like […]
Lucas Lenglet
Lucas Lenglet’s spatial scenarios often remind us of operative base camps, protective set-ups for use in case of catastrophe, or temporary military hides – or they display the materials and objects characteristic of such places. With “tools for rescue/tools for hiding”, Lucas Lenglet has now realised an installation filling an entire room of the Künstlerhaus; […]
Jannicke Låker
In legend, the director has always adopted the role of the all-powerful potentate. The greater his genius, the less inhibited his autocratic regime over the actors on the set. Perhaps it is repressed envy that leads the average citizen to conceive film direction as a licence to sadism. Jannicke Låker does not harbour such prejudice, […]