The Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla. Known for their complex artistic vocabulary utilizing film, installations, performances, and sculpture, their artistic practice engages with history and contemporary geo-political realities, exposing their complicated dynamics, destabilizing and re-ordering them in ways that can be alternately poetic, humorous, and revelatory.
Allora & Calzadilla's new work Compass, 2009, conceived specifically for the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, creates a new spatial and acoustic experience. Dividing the Kunsthalle horizontally, a new level is introduced into the space, inaccessible to the viewer and reducing the grand exhibition hall to less than one third of its normal height. Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads. The otherwise empty exhibition space is turned into a huge resonating chamber:
"The performer is like a specter that moves through this flat horizontal stretch and whose sonic traces become a type of metrical language – a rhythmic and poetic means of communication with the public below." (Allora & Calzadilla)
Allora & Calzadilla will also present their most recent video work How to Appear Invisible, 2009. Filmed in Berlin on the site of the Schlossplatz at the close of 2008, it documents the last remains of the Palast der Republik being torn down. Bearing witness to this event is a German Shepherd dog wearing a makeshift cone collar fashioned from the trademark container of one of the largest American fast food franchises: Kentucky Fried Chicken. The camera follows the dog roaming through the barren no man's land of the palace ruins as if it was searching for the last remains of an utopia that has vanished.
Both pieces address the historically significant grounds where the Kunsthalle has been temporarily erected: the Schlossplatz with its remaining traces and signs. The empty space of the hall points to the vacuum left behind by the deconstruction of the Palast der Republik and to the debate about the future of the site, while the film puts into play notions of iconolatry and iconoclasm within monumental public space. With their exhibition, Allora & Calzadilla elaborate on the relations between orientation and disorientation, memory and visibility, presence and absence – as well as on the realms of imagination, projection, and possibility.
Allora & Calzadilla's new work Compass, 2009, conceived specifically for the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, creates a new spatial and acoustic experience. Dividing the Kunsthalle horizontally, a new level is introduced into the space, inaccessible to the viewer and reducing the grand exhibition hall to less than one third of its normal height. Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads. The otherwise empty exhibition space is turned into a huge resonating chamber:
"The performer is like a specter that moves through this flat horizontal stretch and whose sonic traces become a type of metrical language – a rhythmic and poetic means of communication with the public below." (Allora & Calzadilla)
Allora & Calzadilla will also present their most recent video work How to Appear Invisible, 2009. Filmed in Berlin on the site of the Schlossplatz at the close of 2008, it documents the last remains of the Palast der Republik being torn down. Bearing witness to this event is a German Shepherd dog wearing a makeshift cone collar fashioned from the trademark container of one of the largest American fast food franchises: Kentucky Fried Chicken. The camera follows the dog roaming through the barren no man's land of the palace ruins as if it was searching for the last remains of an utopia that has vanished.
Both pieces address the historically significant grounds where the Kunsthalle has been temporarily erected: the Schlossplatz with its remaining traces and signs. The empty space of the hall points to the vacuum left behind by the deconstruction of the Palast der Republik and to the debate about the future of the site, while the film puts into play notions of iconolatry and iconoclasm within monumental public space. With their exhibition, Allora & Calzadilla elaborate on the relations between orientation and disorientation, memory and visibility, presence and absence – as well as on the realms of imagination, projection, and possibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment