Berlin Art Week 2019
Berlin Art Week is a highlight on the contemporary art calendar in the German capital. The rich variety of the programme is made possible by the joint collaboration of art fairs, institutions of contemporary art, galleries, artists, private collectors, and project spaces.
This key fall event dedicated to contemporary art combines exhibitions, art fairs, art awards, and an auxiliary programme featuring talks, films, and tours. In addition, Berlin Art Week provides new, surprising insights into private collections, project spaces, and the city’s sites of artistic production.
Akademie der Künste will show works from the curator’s and collector’s private archive, who decisively contributed to establish video art in Germany: sketches, photographs, his legendary guest books, and video works by Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Rebecca Horn, Ulrike Rosenbach, and many more.
Museum Berggruen underlines in its juxtaposition of “Pablo Picasso x Thomas Scheibitz” the formal and content-related parallels as well as each artist’s struggle for credibility, each body of work resonating the daily life of Paris of the 20th century as well as contemporary Berlin.
me Collectors Room is drawing parallels from classical Modernism to the art of the present as well in its exhibition “Kirchner · Richter · Burgert”, comparing form, content, and motives of the artists.
At KW Institute for Contemporary Art works of American artist Christina Ramberg—one of the artists who died way too early—enter a dialogue with newer and contemporary positions taking up her approach like the works of Alexandra Bircken or Frieda Toranzo Jaeger. Ramberg’s understanding of the body as an environment that is closely intertwined with its surrounding, shaped by corsets, hairdos as well as behavioural conventions are crucial to her work.Talking of body, the discursive event programme “Reading Bodies! Cruising Corpoliteracy in Art, Education and Everyday Life” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt brings together interesting positions of art on that topic. The term corpoliteracy (meaning: body reading) is the exhibition’s underlying keyword for examining the complex backgrounds of how people perceive themselves and others and the mechanisms that lead to attributions, constraints, and exclusions.
At Schering Stiftung Berlin-based artist Anna Virnich traces scents as subjective sensations. Iman Issa, whose art is subject to associations and individual experiences, looks at the relation of language, history, and object through the media of installations, sculpture, video, photography, and text at daadgalerie. Film and video installation artist Bjørn Melhus always embodies the various and often most bizarre figures in his films, scrutinizing phenomena of media reality and basic strategies of mass media. His new and old movies will be shown at Kindl—Centre for Contemporary Art. Object artist and illustrator Tobias Dostal’s exhibition at Haus am Lützowplatz is also about showing and perceiving images: Upon entering the darkened exhibition space, visitors will enter a world inspired by the early history of the cinema in which diverse apparatuses of illusion do their work, sometimes quite loudly.
Acoustic side scenes will be part of the programme “Art in the Underground” initiated by neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) as well, when artists Miro Kaygalak, Stephanie Hanna, Alexis Dworsky in collaboration with Cajus Heinzmann, and Beatrice Schuett will transform the subway stations Stadtmitte, Platz der Luftbrücke and Paradestraße into an exhibition space dealing about the armament industry. Bettina Pousttchi is one of the artists, who uses public space as a crucial element in her work. Her sculptures are an extension of her interest in the political and social structures of the urban fabric, transforming crowd barriers, street bollards, or bicycle racks into sculptures. At Berlinische Galerie she will also present a site-specific photographic intervention on the facade of the museum referencing the urban and historical context of the place.
