Berlin Curatorial Development Trip

Welcome!

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This blog documents the Curatorial Development Trip from North West England to Berlin attended by 11 curators. It has been initiated and organised in an independent capacity by Clarissa Corfe, Programme Manager at Castlefield Gallery in association with artist and co curator of Apartment, Hilary Jack The original motivation for the trip was the 5th Berlin Biennial When Things Cast No Shadow curated by Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic. As with the previous trip to the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Clarissa Corfe has put together an exciting itinerary with visits to the Berlin Biennial exhibitions as well as meetings with a wide variety of curators and artists based in the city. The trip is aimed at increasing our knowledge and networks with other curators who are also near the beginning of their careers with the potential for future partnership, exchange and sharing of curatorial expertise within an international context. The information gained from our trip to Berlin will be fed back into the region through the use of this collective daily blog. Curators participating in the trip will be James Alderson, Vanessa Bartlett, Rebecca Chesney, Clarissa Corfe, Karen Gaskill, Paul Harfleet, Tomas Harold, Hilary Jack, Harriet Mitchell, Sumit Sarkar and Penny Whitehead.

With thanks to Ceri Hand, Pavel Buchler, Alnoor Mitha and Lesley Young for their curatorial nominations.

Click on the links in the archive to see previous posts and to visit related links.

The 5th Berlin Biennial

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The 5th Berlin Biennial for contemporary art When things cast no shadow, curated by Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic, brings together artists from different generations and nationalities in an exhibition by day and night that aims to trace the diversity of art practices today. Eschewing a singular theme, form, or temporality, and determined instead by a critical engagement with artists’ processes, When things cast no shadow could be said to take the form of an open structure in five movements without a plot.
The day part of the 5th Berlin Biennial will be on view at four distinct venues and include mostly newly commissioned works by 50 artists, while the night part of the show will feature still more artists and cultural producers in 63 nightly events taking place in locations spread across the once-divided city.

Image showing waste land at the site where the The Berlin Wall and death strip stood at Engledamm Strasse Kreuzberg.

History of The Berlin Biennial

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The berlin biennale für zeitgenössische kunst e.v. was founded on March 26, 1996 by Klaus Biesenbach, founding director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and a group of collectors and patrons of the arts such as Eberhard Mayntz. Eberhard Mayntz has since then been chairman of the association’s board.

The idea of establishing a biennale in Germany was inspired by the Venice Biennale in 1995. Following the demise of aperto - the forum for young contemporary art founded in 1981 - there was much discussion about the need to heighten the profile of contemporary art in Berlin, a fact which undoubtedly accelerated the project’s progress.

The aim of the association is to organise a representative, international exhibition of contemporary art in berlin every two years and to attract attention to less established younger artists. The exhibition’s original and most important institutional partner is the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, which regularly provides the berlin biennale with the use its exhibition spaces.

Klaus Biesenbach took the artistic helm of the 1. berlin biennial in cooperation with Nancy Spector and Hans Ulrich Obrist. For the second biennial in 2001, the baton was passed to Saskia Bos, who is in turn followed by Ute Meta Bauer for the 2004 exhibition. The fourth berlin biennial in 2006 was curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. Adam Szymczyk was chosen for the fifth berlin biennial in 2008 who then appointed Elena Filipovic as co-curator.

The berlin biennial has established itself as an open space that experiments, identifies and critically examines the latest trends in the art world. The innovative character of this “art lab,” which tries and tests the greenest shoots in the art world is to be expanded, with the particular aim of giving young artists the opportunity to introduce themselves to broad sections of the public.

Although the exhibition has an essentially public character, it also has an inner forum in which event organisers, artists, curators, selected critics, cooperation partners, sponsors and promotors committed to the advancement of this association work at shaping the exhibition and its seismographic interpretation of current cultural and social developments.

Day One - Tuesday 27 May 2008

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After arriving at Berlin Schonefeld we took the S Bahn to Schesisches Tor in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin to our hostel Die Fabrik, a former butter factory. After a refreshing coffee on Schesischestraße some of the curators who had not been to Berlin before went to the Reichstag to see the view across the Tiergarten from Norman Fosters dome. Afterwards we went to meet the other half of the group in an Italian restaurant back in Kreuzberg.

Day Two - Wednesday 28 May 2008

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The Curatorial Development Trip itinerary started with a visit to the Berlin Biennial exhibition – KW Kunstwerke the main temporary contemporary art gallery in Berlin, where the Biennial offices are also housed. The curators reject the idea of a strong didactic theme, but instead use as its starting point the changing historic context of KW.

KunstWerk
We then went to our first meeting with Lise Nelleman, co-director and co-founder of SparwasserHQ which is based in the Mitte area of Berlin. She spoke to us about how Sparwasser was set up in 2000, their approach to programming which is centred around dialogue and exchange, and their current ‘Out for Lunch’ period of change and restructure. We also met with their intern Pedro Neves Marques from

Portugal

who spoke about his temporary placement at Sparwasser and his independent projects.

After this we went to meet with Axel Lapp at his project space Axel Lapp Projects which is currently 1½ years old, also in the Mitte area. Axel Lapp is a curator, art critic and publisher. He talked to us about the show he is currently curating in Konstanz. We discussed our early thoughts on the Biennial exhibition we had seen and he told us about his future projects, a book with Angela Bulloch about performance art, and exhibition with Nick Crowe.

Meanwhile the 11^th curator Tomas had arrived in Berlin and joined us at the second Biennial venue the Schinkel Pavilion just off the infamous Unter den Linden. The Schinkel Pavilion is housing 5 different shows in succession throughout the Biennial. All are curated by artists curating older generation artists. The show that we saw was the 4^th in the series and had been curated by Banu Cennetoğlu, founder and director of BAS artist book publisher based in Istanbul who a couple of us had met with on the previous Curatorial Development Trip to Istanbul in October 2007. On show was a series of books by Masist Gül, a Turkish bodybuilder, poet, painter and actor of Armenian origin.

At 6:30pm we had our meeting with the Berlin Biennial co-curator Adam Szymczyk who gave us an introduction to the Biennial and its ‘Day’ and ‘Night’ elements and the alternatively approached Secret Service tour guide strand. He spoke at length about their reasons for choosing the four different sites for the Biennial and how they fed into the artists’ work.

At 8:30pm we had dinner with Plan B and British duo Daniel Belasco Rogers and Sophia New who have been based in the city for the last few years and have performed extensively through Europe. Plan B are a performance group who often incorporate new media into their work and respond to the specific location or city. They talked us through some of their previous projects with the aid of their ‘presentation box’ in which an object personifies each of their past projects.

Day Three - Thursday 29 May 2008

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At 10am we had a breakfast meeting with artist Nikola Irmer in her studio in the newly regenerated Prenzlauerberg area. She told us about her interest in people on the periphery of society and showed us her series of paintings which depict intimate images of a drag queen, Horst, and her more recent paintings of young teenagers.

Just a short walk away was Knut Eckstein’s studio, an artist who has recently returned to Berlin after living in New York for a few years. He showed us his sculptures made from ‘urban traces’ such as empty plastic bottles, hazard tape and other street debris. He has a forthcoming show at Klara Wallner Gallery in Berlin.

After lunch we met with the co directors and founders of Wooloo, Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard. Wooloo, being an Aboriginal term for ‘where waters meet. They have shown extensively in South Africa, New York, Germany and Denmark and spoke to us about some of their previous projects, a socially engaged project AsylumHome and their ‘Life Exchange’ project. They also spoke to us about their New Life Berlin Festival which was due to launch the next day and would feature mainly performative based work selected through an online open call for submissions.

After a few hours to meander the galleries around the Augustsraße area we met Maurice Carlin (who was leading the Islington Mill Art Academy residency at Westgermany Gallery) for a quick coffee at KW. Berlin based artist Ingo Gerken who was also there then took us to Gitte Weise Gallery where his solo show currently was. He then took us to a monthly artists dinner hosted by Uwe Jonas of Neues Problem where we ate pasta, spinach and pumpkin with mint infused oil.

Gallerie Neue Problem

The final stop for the day was at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the third Biennial venue which is open late on Thursdays. The Neue Nationalgalerie was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1968 and is constructed of mainly of glass resulting in a free flowing space linking the exterior wasteland area to the deliberately challenging interior gallery.

Day Four - Friday 30 May 2008

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Our first meeting was with Ariane Műller director and founder of Starship Magazine which states on its website that is will accompany the hundred years of mankind to 2098. She spoke to us about Starship’s conception in 1998 and its early operation. The magazine is produced on an ad hoc basis when funding is available. They also produce exhibitions such as The Like of It Now Happens, Excess and sustainability at Silverman Gallery in San Fransisco and have published other books such as Picture a Moon Shining in the Sky, a conversation with the German artist Martin Kippenberger.

We then met with Anette Schafer and Miles Chalcraft co-directors of Trampoline based in Berlin and Nottingham, UK. Trampoline programmes work at the intersection performance and technology. Set up in 1998 they spoke about the changing approaches to curatorial selection of work to the present day. They told us about First Play Berlin a festival that featured work using mobile and gaming technology and performative practice and about the Radiator Festival. Future projects include the organisation of a residency in rural Germany for 10 artists from visual art and performative backgrounds.

After a quick lunch and a stopping off to see the resident bear in the nearby park we visited artist Martin Kaltwasser in the Hansapark area which consists of a series of blocks of flats designed by Walter Gropius. Martin Kaltwasser, who collaborates with Folke Kőbberling told us about their ongoing project Ressource Stadt – City as a Resource: One Man’s Trash is another Man’s Treasure. Using recycled materials they build architectural constructs, often in collaboration with the public to stimulate dialogue around architecture, sustainable living and migration. They will soon be featured in Wysing Arts programme.

After this meeting we took taxis and drove through the Tiergarten, past the Siegesaule (Goddess of Victory statue as featured in Wim Wenders Wings of Desire) to the Skulpturenpark, the forth Berlin Biennial venue. The Skulturenpark, a piece of urban wasteland where the Berlin Wall once cut through, was first used as an art-space by a collective of five artists KUNSTrePUBLIK e.V in 2006. Ironically they named the area the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum which meets neither with one’s expectations of a kempt parkland nor with one’s expectation of public or traditional sculpture.

Our final meeting of the day was with Tanya Leighton for a drink at the Ballhaus (Ballroom) on Augustraße. Tanya Leighton is soon to open her own commercial gallery in the old West Berlin near the shopping area of the Kufurstendam. She spoke to us about the art market in Berlin, the challenges of setting up one’s own gallery and how she selected the artists that she would represent. She also told us about some of her previous projects such as a film programme of Pop Cinema screened at the ICA and Tate and her previous posts at the Whitney Museum, ICA – Pennsylvania and Dundee Contemporary Art.

Later that evening a few of us went to The Production Unit’s reading group (a collective based in Berlin comprised of artists engaged in discussion on the crossover of politics and aesthetics). The discussion was focussed around a text by geographer David Harvey who has been delivering seminars in New York on Marx’s Capital. The discussion was centred around the art market, the economy and its positioning to politically engaged practice, the discussion was interspersed with an interval featuring popular music about money.

Afterwards – we joined the rest of the group for traditional German Schnizel.

Day Five - Saturday 31 May 2008

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Our final meeting for the trip was with Mari Brelloch from Kunstwerk am Flutgraben a complex of artists’ studios situated along the former Berlin Wall in Kreuzberg. He gave us a tour around the studios and onto the roof which was once patrolled by the boarder guards.

view from the roof of the studios

He then told us about his project Produkt und Vision: An experiment set-up between artists and businesses. Artists, consultants and scholars were brought together for a 6 month period with a business in an attempt to tease out some of the ways in which they could learn or adopt each others’ working models. These points for discussion and findings were brought together in an exhibition held at Kunstwerk am Flutgraben.

Afterwards we lunched and three of the curators returned to Liverpool.

On Saturday evening those of us left in Berlin went to the Berlin Biennial Night event hosted by Goshka Macuga. Jazz in the Garden was a re-enactment of a legendary jazz concert series held in the Sculpture Garden at Neue Nationalgalarie from the 1960’s to the 1990’s.

And so ended the Berlin Curatorial Development Trip. We would like to thank all of the artists and curators we met with in Berlin for their time and generosity!