House of World Cultures
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
+ 49 - (0)30 - 397 87 0
Berlin
Rational/Irrational
November 8, 2008-
January 11, 2009
An exhibition of works by Pawel Althamer in collaboration with Artur Zmijewski, François Bucher, Hanne Darboven, Juan Downey, Arthur Bispo do Rosário and Javier Téllez
In Sentences on Conceptual Art, Sol Lewitt wrote: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach. 5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.”
Where is the difference between rationality and irrationality? The six artists that curator Valerie Smith has brought together for her first exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, explore various states of mind that have lead to new perceptions of reality at the boundaries of logic.
The Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1911-1989) the Chilean Juan Downey (1940-1993) and the German Hanne Darboven are the key figures representing divergent thought processes in the exhibition, but who share qualities of persistence and discipline. Their work offers insight into calculated ways of thinking that ultimately have lead to individual mantra.
Bispo never considered himself to be an artist. These works which he called “registers of my passage on earth” are the tireless obsessions of a man endlessly inventorying his past and present to assure his place in the future. His tireless preparations for Judgement Day materialised into exhaustive lists of everything he knew meticulously embroidered on bed linens and occasionally bound around hospital furniture. These works have earned him admiration by contemporary artists, who find inspiration in his passion.
Downey's pioneering work in early video, his use of the media to penetrate the remotest parts of the Latin world and his resistance to the political corruption in his native Chile have made him a model for artists today. Downey anticipated an anthropological approach to independent broadcasting with large doses of social critique. His ironic approach to video coupled with his reverence for indigenous culture and their integrated way of life perfectly reveals the dilemma of his age caught between technology and a need to escape prescribed notions of "progress." Inspired by Robert Wiene’s classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Javier Téllez (Venezuela/USA) and amateur actors from the Vivantes Clinic in Neuköln produced a film installation especially commissioned for Haus der Kulturen der Welt whose setting takes place in and around the Einstein Tower in Potsdam. The celebration of difference, both social and psychological, guides of Telléz's vision and his public message.
Following in Downey’s footsteps, Warszawa based artists, Pawel Althamer with Artur Zmijewski, break with social convention in So genannte Wellen und andere Phänomene des Geites, a series of eight DVDs, which record their experiments with consciousness-changing drugs. Althamer, and an occasional friend, immerse themselves in the pure wonderment of prenatal worlds, delving into primal instincts to chemically attain unadulterated states of awe. In the montages of news sequences and interviews created by François Bucher (Colombia), a concentrated game-within-a-game evolves in the interstice between reality and fiction. His work centres on the violent psyche caught between tension, terror and manipulation. Severa Vigilancia – (Haute Surveillence) a dual DVD projection, is an allusion to Jean Genet's work, in reference to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. In Bucher’s work, the boundary between staged and real violence is disquietingly vague.
The systematic organisation and presentation of time plays a vital role in the works of German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven. The contrast between the severity of the formal language of a calendar and the fluidity of the artist’s handwriting in Kalendergeschichten, (Kalender 1976 b) (Calendar Stories), pushes the work to the point where control and meaning are transcended and another realm of perception appears..
Exhibition curator, Valerie Smith, is head of the Department of Visual Art, Film and Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt since May 2007. Before that she was Chief Curator and Exhibition Director at the Queens Museum of Art in New York. From 1981-89, she worked as curator at Artists Space, one of the leading venues for contemporary art in New York. From 1990-93, she served as artistic director of Sonsbeek 93 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. She received the International Association of Critics Award for her exhibition Joan Jonas, Five Works (2003). For her work Down the Garden Path, The Artists’ Garden After Modernism (2004) Valerie Smith received the Emily Hall Tremaine Curatorial Award.
In a series of eight videos entitled So genannte Wellen und andere Phänomene des Geites, Pawel Althamer (in collaboration with Artur Zmijewski) uses chemical and psychological aids to return to a pre-social and pre-natal state: he wants to transform his "animal body into a tool." The imperfection of the tool is an essential part of his programme. The adult observer who experiences a loss of self-control only within a specially created context finds these states devoid of boundaries shocking at times, funny at others and frequently disquieting and liberatory. Pawel Althamer’s works of performance and video have been shown at the documenta X in 1997, the Centre Pompidou in 2006, and at the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London in 2008.
Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1911-1989) eked out a living in the world as a Naval gunner, a lightweight boxer, and handy man. When he reached adulthood, he repeatedly fell ill. After a number of stays at the psychiatric clinic in Rio de Janeiro, he decided to spend the rest of his life there. For the next 50 years, he prepared himself for the Last Judgement. He is recorded as having said that Christ and seven angels had instructed him to take stock of all the redeemable things in the world: remnants of materials and discarded everyday items, onto which Bispo carefully embroidered images and text that were then fashioned into ceremonial garments, various assemblages, and miniature universes. Unfortunately, only a fraction is shown at HKW . His works were first shown in Europe at the 1995 Venice Biennale.
François Bucher (*1972) is an artist from Cali, Colombia. He lives and works in Berlin. His works have been shown internationally in group and solo exhibitions,, for example, Location One, New York; Empire/State, Artists Engaging Globalization, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program Exhibition, 2002; Creek Art Center, Shanghai; and the Tate Britain, London. His video works have been shown at the Oberhausen Film Festival, the Independent Film Video Festival in Indonesia, the Impakt Festival in the Netherlands, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival and the Cinema Paradise Festival in Honolulu. He is currently working on a new film commissioned by the Porta 33 Galerie in Madrid in co-operation with Pedro Paixão.
After working as a pianist, the German artist Hanne Darboven (*1941) began studying at Hamburg Art Academy in 1962. Four years later she left the art academy and moved from Germany to New York. Her work focuses on the visualisation of periods of time as structures that fundamentally influence our lives. Since 1980, she has been translating her sequences of numbers into music too. Nationally and internationally, Hanne Darboven’s works occupy an outstanding position within contemporary art.
A small installation by Chilean artist and video pioneer Juan Downey (1940-1993) is on show from the series Video Trans America. In the 1970s, Juan Downey, who was then an architect living in New York, set off on an expedition through Latin America. He lived with the Yahomani Indians in Venezuela’s rain forest, recording their society and shamanist rituals on video. His videos show the relationship between tension and relaxation, both of which are important meditation and the Yanomani rituals.
In co-operation with clients at the Vivantes psychiatric clinic, Javier Téllez filmed a new interpretation of the cinema classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in Berlin und Potsdam. In improvisations and role play, they jointly produce a script, creating a film on the borderline between documentary and fiction. Mendelssohn’s expressionist sun tower in Potsdam serves as a set and forms a projection surface for the participants’ dramaturgical ideas. For many years now, the Venezuelan artist, who lives in New York and is the son of two psychiatrists, has been working with people who have their own forms of perception. The work commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt deals with doppelgangers, stigma against the backdrop of expressionist architecture. |
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Javier Téllez, Film Still aus dem Projekt Caligari und der Schlafwandler, veine Auftragsarbeit vom Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Galerie Beer/Arratia, Figge von Rosen Galerie, © Promo.
Javier Téllez, Film Still aus dem Projekt Caligari und der Schlafwandler, veine Auftragsarbeit vom Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Galerie Beer/Arratia, Figge von Rosen Galerie, © Promo.
Javier Téllez, Film Still aus dem Projekt Caligari und der Schlafwandler, veine Auftragsarbeit vom Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Galerie Beer/Arratia, Figge von Rosen Galerie, © Promo.
François Bucher, White Balance (to think is to forget differences).
Juan Downey, Mediations, 1976-77, color pencil on paper, © Promo.
François Bucher, Ondre Corte.
Hanne Darboven, Installation view of Quartett >88<, 1988, 1989, Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2000.
Hanne Darboven, Detail from Quartett >88<, 1988, 1989, Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2000. |
