Exhibition Highlights for February 2017

Still of the fiction film The Kitty AI, Pinar Yoldas, 2016

HKW // Transmediale: Alien Matter

3rd February – 5th March 2017

Berlins annual festival for digital art and culture, Transmediale, is opening on Thursday 2nd February at 7pm with the exhibition Alien Matter. The title refers not to creatures from outer space, but to man-made artefacts that are however strange, radically different and potentially intelligent. Artificial intelligence and synthetic biology represent a trend towards the naturalisation of technology, as we have been witnessing since the inception of the internet and advances in biotechnology.

The 30 exhibiting artists have produced works clustering around four main topics: Artificial Intelligence, plastics, infrastructure, and the Internet of Things, which concerns the introduction of things, instead of sentient humans, as active participants of the WorldWideWeb. Alien Matter forecasts the fusing of these traditionally separated entities, human and machine, and how we can grasp the coming future through art.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin

Piano prepared with containers filled with Pyrocystis fusiformis, Andreas Greiner, 2014 copy

Berlinische Galerie // Andreas Greiner: Agency of the Exponent

Finissage: 6th February 2017, 6-9pm

*free*

The exhibition Agency of the Exponent, which was conceived by the artist Andreas Greiner on occasion of the GASAG art prize 2016, closes with a special highlight: A performance work From Strings to Dinosaurs, involving a self-playing piano which provokes bioluminescent algae to emit blue light. Each sound wave from the strings upon which the canisters stand disturbs the contents, algae and seawater, which glow in response. This eerie blue light combines with the disharmonic, solitary notes sounding from the self-playing piano to a other-worldly composition.

Looming over the scene will be the monumental 3D printed sculpture, Monument for the 308, a giant broiler chicken skeleton resembling a contemporary dinosaur in a natural history museum. Broilers are bred in staggering numbers with a modified anatomy to meet human meat consumption. The artist examines different ways of practicing an archeology of the future: What are the traces man will leave behind? What does our relationship to nature say about this anthropocentric age? His works point out different answers to these essential questions.

Berlinische Galerie, Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin

Charlotte Dualé, 2017 Foto: Otto Felber, Berlin Courtesy the artist und EIGEN + ART Lab

EIGEN + ART Lab // Charlotte Dualé: Die Putze

9th February – 13th April 2017

On occasion of EIGEN + ART Lab’s reopening they present Charlotte Dualé’s new body of work, closing the circle that was opened at her first exhibition for the Lab’s inauguration in February 2015. The space, an offshoot of the renowned gallery EIGEN + ART, is an artistic and curatorial laboratory for experimentation: Reflecting the currents in the inexorable flux of contemporary art. They reopen after a renovation period on the 9th February at 5pm with the vernissage and an afterparty.

Charlotte Dualé, who was born in France but has made Berlin her home, is a sculptor who’s amorphic works from ceramic and porcelain seem not to match their form. Often her works resemble plastic tubes, human limbs or plumbing systems, who’s surfaces however are smooth and glossy like industrially produced consumer products. Her works are strewn across the floor, overlapping, or leaning against the walls, thus making the space itself an important reference point for Dualé’s sculptural position.

EIGEN + ART Lab, Torstraße 220, 10115 Berlin

Still from the video work Black Moves, Carla Chan, 2015

Galerie Sexauer // Carla Chan: When the world is left only black and grey

25th Febraury– 25th March 2017

Struggling with the ambivalence between the beauty and toxicity of human intervention into nature, Carla Chan works this destructive and at the same time creative force into her works. Using chemicals to augment the surface of her photographs and paintings, she creates dynamic impressions of an alien nature, one the Hong Kong born artist has an especially divided relationship to.

Sexauer Gallery, Streustraße 90, 13086 Berlin, Germany

Waldsteig (für Adalbert Stifter), Anselm Kiefer 2015-16

Galerie Bastian // Anselm Kiefer: Paintings

4th February – 22nd April 2017

Anselm Kiefers paintings advance into the realm of sculpture: The thickly applied dark paint encloses objects, parchment or cloth, while spidery writing scuttles across the monumental paintings. This groundbreaking style of approaching painting has made the 71 year-old artist one of Germany’s most famous artists. At Gallerie Bastian he presents his works from the last two years, in which he studied literature from Johann-Wolfgang von Goethe and Adalbert Stifter. Their narrative motifs are translated to the canvas.

Galerie Bastian, Am Kupfergraben 10, 10117 Berlin, Germany

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