Mitya Trotzki, LIBERTY OF THE SEAS 01:02:16.Fragment 1, copyright: the artist
Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz // Fugitive Souls
10th November 2017 – 6th January 2018
Being at home and passing the days looking through the window could be synonym of a tedious life – or a kind of L. B. „Jeff“ Jefferies complex… Not if you are an artist. The Miami-Berlin-based photographer Mitya Trotsky captured more than 7.000 scenes in nearly two years from his condo, where he could observe luxury cruise passengers stepping outside to wave from their balconies as their ships departed. The result is what he calls a „visual anthropology across the full spectrum of the human species“: singles, couples, mature couples, seniors, married with children, newlyweds, gays. The photographs and videos are displayed in 25 meters long in human size scale. „Fugitive Souls“ is the first solo exhibition of Mitya Trotsky in Germany.
Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz: Linienstr. 40, 10119, Berlin
Unbekannter Maler, Ahnenporträt einer Frau, 佚名 祖先像, Qing-Dynastie, 19. Jh., Hängerolle, Tusche und Farben auf Seide, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, George Crofts Collection, 921.1.142, Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum, © ROM, Foto: Brian Boyle, MPA, FPPO
Kulturforum // Gesichter Chinas: Portrait Painting of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368–1912)
12th October 2017 – 7th January.2018
This is a kind of mainstream exhibition that is also cool and you should not avoid. Portrait painting has a 2000-year-old tradition in China. “Gesichter Chinas“ presents more than 100 paintings focusing on portraits of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), which includes members of the imperial court, ancestors, military figures, and informal portraits of artists and famous women. Most works were painted by professional, but anonymous artists and are unsigned. The set is a plus. Large-scale imperial portraits are surrounded by imperial silk garments once worn in the Palace Museum Beijing and the ancestor portraits, who were venerated as part of religious observance within the family, are placed how the people used to honor them – alongside an altar table with a censer, candle, and flowers. The exhibition also highlights transcultural relationships by placing the Chinese paintings next to European works from the same time. The portraits were select from collections of the Palace Museum Beijing and the Royal Ontario Museum Toronto.
Kulturforum: Matthäikirchplatz 6, 10785, Berlin
Konstantin Déry, Lichter Wald über der See, 2017, oil on canvas, 150x210cm
Burn, Still // Konstantin Déry, MagicBeans.Gallery
10th November – 22th December, 2017
The colorful paintings by the Hungarian Berlin-Based artist Konstantin Déry invite to contemplation. In slow motion. Take your time to observe the texture and the movement of his work at his solo exhibition “Burn,Still“. His interpretation of landscapes, which emphasizes the terrain and surface, will make you travel through a world of vivid colours. To reproduce nature, he chose to apply the paint with palette knives and small wooden picks. The result is an abstract structure with rough surface, almost alive. Most of Déry works are presented on big canvas (1,5 x 2,2 meters) which makes the experience for the viewer even more intense, especially against Berlins grey skies.
MagicBeans: Auguststraße 86, 10117, Berlin
shouting in the wind, 2017, Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern
Blain|Southern // Shadows of Curls
11th November – 23rd December
Sislej Xhafa’s first solo exhibition in Berlin presents his well esteemed themes: power, politics, immigration, social and economic mobility. In “Shadow of Curls”, the artist from the Republic of Kosovo works with a variety of materials associated with different types of migration, as well as a range of quotidian objects that have been re-appropriated, altered or rendered useless. You can expect to see a space full of familiar things, such as a plastic bag, a garden hose, a lighter, a refrigerator or a mattress. But all of them were transformed into questionings and ideas of ownership and privacy, human freedom, permanence and belonging, a hope of a new life or a grim reality – feelings that are so trivial such those domestic objects to whom decides to live somewhere else. “Lost and Found”, the artist’s pavilion representing the Republic of Kosovo at the Venice Biennale, is on view until 26 November 2017.
Blain|Southern: Potsdamer Straße 77-87, 10785, Berlin
Licht- und Klanginstallation im Jüdischen Museums Berlin (2017-2019)
© Archiv Mischa Kuball, Düsseldorf / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2017
Jüdisches Museum Berlin // res·o·nant
17th November 2017 – Summer 2019
To explore the architectural elements of Daniel Libeskind’s building, the Düsseldorf-based concept artist Mischa Kuballl created a light and sound installation that will traverse 350 square meters of the Rafael Roth Gallery at the Jewish Museum Berlin. In the 24-meter-tall spaces, rotating projectors will cast light fields shaped like the Voids’ blueprints on the walls and ceilings. Spinning mirror elements and stroboscopic flashes are designed to spark “resonance between architecture and skin”, Kuball explaines.The sound component consists of one minute audio clip that follows the projections. Beginning this month, “res·o·nant” will also be presented in public spaces in the city through summer 2019. Next year, performances and concerts at the museum as well as various interventions in public space are scheduled on top.
Jüdisches Museum Berlin – Rafael Roth Gallery: Lindenstraße 9-14, 10969, Berlin
Header Photo: Unbekannter Maler, Porträt des Dawaci, 佚名 達瓦斉像, Qing-Dynastie, Qianlong-Ära (1736–1795), ca. 1756, Öl auf Koreapapier, Ethnologisches Museum – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, I D 22242, © Ethnologisches Museum – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Waltraut Schneider-Schütz
Author: Maíra Goldschmidt
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