NOTE ON
Is there anything we can do for now?
News about the Apocalypse 2012
Friederike Hamann, Christina Kral, Malte Urbschat
19.5. – 10.6.2012
Opening Friday, 18. May, 7 pm
The third exhibition of the series News about the Apocalypse 2012 revolves around the question: what can be done in the face of inevitable events causing grave consequences for humankind? Three invited artists Friederike Hamann, Christina Kral and Malte Urbschat take the approaching end of the world as a fictitious starting point and take position on the question at hand.
Malte Urbschat explores the boundaries of art and science through his sculptures, mobiles, drawings and installations. For Is there anything we can do for now? Urbschat will install two handmade flags on the facade of Kollowitzstr.12. These flags are part of his series 8 Fahnen and deal with the use of resources and technologies in our everyday life- specifically the growing privatization of water and the unknown longterm consequences of extensive global mobil communication networks. His work Tropfenfahne (drop flag) is accompanied by a sign with the question Who sells us our water? and the second flag displays a mobile phone with an antenna similar to a human tumor or a mutation, reminding us of speculations about the effects of mobile phone radiation. Urbschat’s public installation reacts to the posed question with two specific examples and renders the apocalypse as a sum of many pre-apocalyptic incidents that we are collectively holding responsibility for.
Friederike Hamann is interested in abstract representations of heterogenous mental models and ideas in the form of specific constellations. Her installation for Is there anything we can do for now? reconnects with her Archiv Scenes, a series of previous installations at NOTE ON experimenting with the perception of archives. In her new work she reduces the archive to its basic structures and forms of information and architecture and combines it with the idea of a collective potential in a definite yet open group of people. For her installation at NOTE ON she works with colored sheets of paper that she rearranges and documents in long and meticulous stop motion film sequences. The resulting 16mm and digital animations consist of infinite variations, each representing a singular spatial structure of light, color and transparency. Selected stills of these studies are projected like single images of landscapes, opening the room’s architectural reality while layering different levels of possibilities combined with yet another intervention: much like a movie’s credit roll the names of all people who are connected to the participating artists and NOTE ON are projected onto a wall. Despite anonymity and multitude the possibilities for action and relationship seem to multiply and Hamann points to our -often vast and extensive- circle of friends and allies as the likeliest potential for a solution to the question What do you think we can do for now?
Christina Kral delves into the subjective attitude towards an unknown, impending event and searches for potential of abstraction in everyday life. She perceives the act of waiting for something as a productive moment of transition and stages a waiting room that visitors can enter alone or in pairs for 7 minutes each. What will they do with their time? For Kral waiting- much like other everyday situations and routines- implies a potential transitory value of experience. A formalized, but abstracted waiting room set is placed into a constructed room. The feeling of time and space is distorted, instead of art that is ready to consume, there will be different suggestions how to use the remaining time actively. Furniture, plants, objects and photos offer suggestions and inspirations to pass the remaining time actively in passivity. The waiting room is at the center of her multimedia installation Suggestions for the Meantime-An Archive of Possibilities.
The archive for the exhibition is presented by Christina Kral and is the continuation of Suggestions for the Meantime-An Archive of Possibilities. She displays objects and recorded activities of her family-mostly the ones by her grandfather Karl Kral from Delitzsch. Due to its repetition, observation and documentation, his paper scrolls of notes on the weather and diaries of counted steps suggest activities that become objects of peculiar confrontation of yesterday, today and tomorrow. The detached view on everyday life and its routines turns into an agent highlighting and celebrating idiosyncracies, changes and differences.
News about the Apocalypse
With News about the Apocalypse we anticipate and celebrate the predicted end of the world on December 21st as both an actual collapse and a new beginning. From January to December, various models and systems will be tested together with complices and visitors. Currently disputed, they might be of use in the future. We investigate the borderlands of art and science, search for extraordinary methods of archiving and implement historical and marginalized knowledge. The expansion into the public sphere, an interdisciplinary dissolution of boundaries and the question of how we want to act and archive in a new world define NOTE ON in 2012.
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19. Mai – 10. Juni 2012
May 3 – June 10, 2012
Öffnungszeiten: Fr.-Sa. 15-19 Uhr
Opening hours: Fr.-Sa. 3-7 p.m.
NOTE ON
Kollwitzstraße 10, 10405 Berlin
(@ Senefelderplatz)
Picture: Malte Urbschat, Tropfenfahne, from the series 8 Fahnen, 2003, flag and textile, 100x140cm, detail.
