Trip to Berlin 2014
We visited 3 galleries as part of our Uni work
Gallery 1 – Hamburger Bahnhof
The Hamburger Bahnhof is a converted train station in Berlin that has since become a fantastic gallery. It is full of fairly modern works (from the last 40 years) and almost all of the pieces on show needed an entire wall or room to be displayed, allowing you to be completely immersed by each piece as they tower over you. The pieces were all very minimalist and abstract so it makes for an interesting visit as each artists interpretation of their message/meaning is portrayed in the work, spawning hundreds of unique pieces. The artwork is hung in large, very well lit rooms, mounted on completely white walls, that means when you enter the rooms the artwork is the only point of interest. I really enjoyed this gallery as there were so many pieces on show to see. I especially enjoyed the The Wall Works collection which was presented down a long hallway connected by a series of warehouse style rooms. My favourite piece of the gallery was in this collection, “Berlin Says…” by Nasan Tur. The work was made of hundreds of messages that Tur had seen graffitied around Berlin, layered on top of each other until it was a solid wall of red, with no decipherable words. I was drawn to the piece as I was amazed by the sheer size of it and the radiance of the red. It was alone in the room except for all the discarded paint cans, strewn on the floor in front of the work. It really gave you a perspective on how long the piece would have taken and how much paint went into making it. I think the meaning of the artwork is to call into question the effectiveness of message-based graffiti as a form of expression, as I feel graffitied statements are still used and still speak to oppressed marginalized groups who want to get their voice heard.
I think the gallery is very successful in the way they present their artwork and all the works on show are very interesting.
Gallery 2 – Converted WW2 Bunker
The second gallery we visited was a converted World War 2 bunker located in the center of Berlin. Since the war the bunker has been used as everything from an underground rave to a banana storage facility. In the last 15 years a married couple of art collectors have since bought the property (adding a penthouse on the top) and transformed it into their own private art gallery. All the pieces were extremely conceptual and abstract in both their meanings and the way they were presented. Although I wasn’t a massive fan of the content, it was a cool idea and the bunker setting gave all the pieces a unique feeling. It threw them in a dark shady light, as most of the walls and floor was still made of the original, very worn and broken bunker materials. All the works were given their own rooms so that you could go in and only focus on that particular piece. The tour guide also added to the whole experience as you could give you a unique insight and you got to actually find out about each of the pieces and got a bit of perspective and background on them. There was one work in the bunker that did stand out to me and it was that of Wolfgang Tilmans called Kate Moss with Broccoli. It seemed like such a bizarre concept to me, explained by the tour guide that Wolfgang refused to take commercial pictures for a magazine as he’d been continually asked and only agreed if it could be Kate Moss he photographed. Obviously he added in the Broccoli element so as to keep true to his art background and not sell out to commercialism. Again this piece is displayed alone and really dominates the room its in. Overall I think the gallery was a very cool idea and worth visiting if not just for the novelty of it being inside a bunker. I’d definitely go again to see another collection.
Gallery 3 – Transmedial Festival
Transmedial festival was an absolutely crazy exhibition. The show featured very modern abstract digital art, all displayed together in one very large, badly lit room. The room had a system of scaffolding poles and nets placed about so that each piece on the bottom floor was displayed underneath the support poles for the second floor, either just on the floor or tucked in between the scaffolding poles. This made it very hard to view the show as you weren’t sure whether some of the pieces were part of the exhibition or not. There wasn’t even any information about the stuff on display so I wasn’t impressed with how it was laid out at all. There was still a strong theme of digital art, as all the pieces I saw were either about or using technology to show a weird concept. To continue that theme, one of the fairly unique things the festival did was to hack everyones phones and send out a series of strange text messages to make it look like a robot was hacking you or something. As I didn’t understand most of the things that went on in the show, I can only really talk about the one guy I did like, who was painting captcha phrases on peoples arms. He explained it that although a computer may class someone as human if they correctly enter the captcha you can only really be assured by physically seeing this person. Ergo if you can see the captcha on my arm then i’m human and if I can see yours, so are you. I thought it was a really interesting idea, and although it had no actual artistic value as he was just painting over stencils, it did make me think, unlike any of the other pieces. Overall I wasn’t really impressed by the event, as it was the one I was most looking forward too. There should have been a tour guide to explain the pieces as they were so abstract half the time it was impossible to guess and they should have been laid out in a clearer fashion, as it was just a mess.