Burkhard Beschow

Body Holes @ New Scenario, launches Jun 3

1 June 2016

The Body Holes group exhibition is launching online at New Scenario, opening June 3.

The show is the third and most elaborate project run by the digital platform, founded by Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig, and will take the concept treating the natural orifices of the human body as practical exhibition spaces for art. It is a part of this year’s Berlin Bienniale, which runs June 4 to September 18, and you can find it, once launched, in the BB9 online ‘#Fear of Content’ section.

Included will be work by Dorota Gaweda & Eglé Kulbokaité, Jesse DarlingJaakko PallasvuoEd Fornieles, and Burkhard Beschow & Anne Fellner, among others, in Body Holes, which is loosely connected to the collaborative exhibition Episode 4: Bathroom by Barsch and Hornig which closed in January this year.

Other artists involved include Yves SchererAnna SagströmAdam Cruces, Jake Kent, Bruno Zhu and Carson Fisk-Vittori.

See the FB event page for more details and a run down of all the artists involved.**

Jake Kent, Everything's a Ruin Waiting to Happen (2016). Install detail. Courtesy the artist and Cactus Gallery, Liverpool.
Jake Kent, Everything’s a Ruin Waiting to Happen (2016). Install detail. Courtesy the artist and Cactus Gallery, Liverpool.
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AFFECT 1: WHILE WE WORK @ Agora, May 27

25 May 2016

The AFFECT 1: WHILE WE WORK: A Temporary State of Affairs group exhibition is on at Berlin’s Agora project space on May 27.

Hosted by the artist run collective and curated by Judith Lavagna, the show is conceived as a time-based structure for one night. WHILE WE WORK operates as a storyteller and as a score that oscillates between the liveness and the memory of Agora’s work in relation to their building —a space in constant mutation, where working phases and changes of plans are part of its daily construction, as well as the multiple informations, stories and rumours that have been circulating.

Included in the Agora Rollberg space —the collective’s second, which the coming exhibition will ‘unveil’ and ‘witness’ —is the work of Berlin-based artists Nicolas Puyjalon, Chile-born Michelle Marie Letelier, duo Anne Fellner & Burkhard Beschow, who were a part of Comedy Club that aqnb reviewed earlier this month and Paul Barsch.

Affect is Agora’s central programme running for the majority of 2016, acting as co-host to the events that take place at Rollberg, kicking off with this show, collecting and archiving the work within Agora’s work as a whole.

See the Agora Affect page for more.**

Paul Barsch @ Comedy Club (2016). Installation view. Courtesy Jens Einhorn, Anne Fellner + Burkhard Beschow.
Paul Barsch @ Comedy Club (2016). Installation view. Courtesy Jens Einhorn, Anne Fellner + Burkhard Beschow.
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Looking back at Comedy Club

17 May 2016

Everything about about Comedy Club is kept low key. The location and the general information is minimal; it’s an exhibition in an attic room of a semi-disused warehouse in the Neukölln. It’s organised by Jens Einhorn, Anne Fellner and Burkhard Beschow, features work by 13 artists including Sofia Restorp, Alex Rathbone, Tamina Amadyar, Robert Brambora, and Santiago Taccetti among others and runs in parallel to Berlin Gallery Weekend, April 29 to May 1.

At the top of a stairwell, beside the doorway, a toy butterfly skewered on a curved wire rod circles around the opening of a large crisp packet from a hidden motor inside. Crumbs beside the packet release oil into the concrete dust. It is a work by Paul Barsch. I am lightheaded and seeing stars because the exhibition is at the top of a long spiral staircase that scales the corner of the mostly abandoned building. The sculpture has a smoother mechanism but remains positively lo-fi in its technics, like a hand drawn animation superimposed over 35mm film. In its cyclical dance, a comic gesture, perfected in this automaton, indicates the threshold of the show; the bouncer.

Paul Barsch @ Comedy Club (2016). Installation view. Courtesy Jens Einhorn, Anne Fellner + Burkhard Beschow.
Paul Barsch @ Comedy Club (2016). Installation view. Courtesy Jens Einhorn, Anne Fellner + Burkhard Beschow.

Past the doorway, a skinny tubular structure, one of several of Erik Larsson’s ‘Beach Bums’ works emerges from a mound of sand. Jammed into each other with shims of banknotes; currencies I can’t make out amongst other domestic debris. These notes serve a function to wedge and physically support. Behind this work, a punk and his dog sits in a little scene with their backs against a large modernist object by Lin May Saeed. A haggard host welcoming us to the venue, its crude white plaster legs bleed rust from their internal armature. Alongside it are the words “WR 6603 ART BRUT” written in paint on the ground. The paint is older, inflicting my reading of the sculpture in such proximity; the punk in a moment of disdain contemplating ‘Art Brut’ in huge letters at its feet.

These words and numbers, along with other wall drawings and graffiti in the attic were made in the early 2000s. I piece together a narrative through my conversation with the organisers of an artist who went by the name of Dada Reiner. Two manifesto-like texts by Reiner were found in a stairwell dated from 2001, they included his views on the art-industrial-complex and his methods of practice. The texts have been brought into the space of the show and left on a beam to be read. It is confusing perhaps for the art viewer in search of an exhibition text, but this derailment and the possible co-option of Reiner’s politics is part of the routine at the club.

In the second room Tilman Hornig’s rear painted window frames feel nostalgic and inward in this scenario, their materiality put under scrutiny by that of the attic space. In the adjacent eaves the room is part sectioned-off by a wire mesh, a white rectangle of fabric creates a quick-fix wall divide, and inside this is a salon of small paintings by Real Positive. Unknown schematics, wires gridding the surface of a canvas. In another work I make out wind turbines, or stars collaged from pills and silver foil, a gritty future.

Comedy Club (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy Jens Einhorn, Anne Fellner + Burkhard Beschow.
Comedy Club (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy Jens Einhorn, Anne Fellner + Burkhard Beschow.

Against a landscape painting by exhibition organiser Fellner, two crude cars made from tin food cans travel in static motion alongside an improvised wall. They’re part children’s toys, part anachronistic prototype, forgotten and resigned to the loft. The metal, cut and torn into vehicles, feels like a dark critique of our modern aspirations and tragedies. A video with clips from Disney-Pixar’s computer-animated comedy adventure film Cars and a text describing the tin can’s journey make up parts of this installation by Fellner & Beschow. Like with Saeed’s art brut punk, there is a contemplation of the future through the tendencies of how we interpret and fetishize the past and its production values, at times with fairytale simplicity.

Comedy Club is short and sweet but its jokes are long-winded and bitter. It feels timeless, in that it occupies a crusty building and shows emerging art. Timed with Berlin Gallery Weekend, the character of many of the works and the precarious rooms they inhabit turn in on the official market-driven programme with a critical gaze. Sub-cultural systems of practice as affect, historical assimilation, spun out. As one of the organisers jokes, it’s an ‘underground’ show but it’s above us in an attic.**

The Comedy Club group exhibition was on during Berlin Gallery Weekend, running April 29 to May 1, 2016.

Header image: Lin May Saeed @ Comedy Club (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy Jens Einhorn, Anne Fellner + Burkhard Beschow.

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C R A S H (2015) @ New Scenario exhibition photos

6 February 2015

Installed in a Hummer limo but exhibited on the internet, the C R A S H group exhibition is the image of rupture. Or make that several images, as the show – curated by artists and New Scenario founders Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig, along with Burkhard Beschow – presents a body horror of cybernetic objects and synthetic organisms sharing a place in fragments at a point of temporal rift.

Launched on January 17 and featuring the work of 11 artists, each image comes from the one luxury car interior but its object is viewed only in isolation at any given time. The empty space becomes animated as you select an artist’s name, like a point-and-click adventure game of grotesque hidden artefacts, from Hornig’s nylon-limbs stretched out across a leather couch to Barsch’s disembodied hairpiece, dreadlocked and dangling from the sunroof.

Tilman Hornig @ C R A S H (2015). Install view. Photo by Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy New Scenario.
Tilman Hornig @ C R A S H (2015). Install view. Photo by Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy New Scenario.

Inspired by David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and Chris Cunningham’s ‘Windowlicker‘ video for Aphex Twin there’s something chilling about Adam Cruces‘ baguette arm that wears three watches in the speaker compartment and Thomas Payne’s plastic pack of oversized synthetic slaters. It’s place in the driver’s cupholder implying it’s there to be eaten.

This is a backdrop of obscene wealth and mediated overstimulation, where the Hummer limousine comes already loaded with a contextual meaning that a white cube – whether online or off – consciously, but possibly even more artificially attempts to avoid. Thus these actors and their stage in the total cinematic experience of C R A S H, where the drama of  Zack Davis‘ motionless glass barnacle stuck to the screen of a simulated fireplace plays out in a different dimension of the same space as Anne Fellner‘s painting of a white swan lying limply on its side.

Adam Cruces @ C R A S H (2015). Photo by Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy New Scenario.
Adam Cruces @ C R A S H (2015). Install view. Photo by Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy New Scenario.

An accompanying text by Joseph Hernandez called ‘Observations From the Bucket‘ presents a first-person account of a “coming change” ignored by the family but offering ideas and concepts that are “constant and shattered and reveled within”. The anatomical imagery that mostly travels through the protagonist’s digestive tract is slightly less confronting than d3signbur3au‘s troublingly feminised personification of a capitalism that’s eating itself in ‘for a future IV: but what if we are not alive?‘:

“Blue shit burning in her ass like melting solder… the smell of blue fever fills the air, a rotten metal meat smell that steams off her as she shits a soldering blue phosphorescent excrement”.

A bulbous pink blob, ice cubes expanding into polygonal shapes, a napkin spattered with what looks like blood and a toilet brush encrusted with grime and cigarette butts. All of these individual pieces add up to a production that evokes that same sensuous feeling of ‘venereal horror’ that made Cronenberg famous, J. G. Ballard an icon and our collective view to the future one that’s equal parts frightening and fascinating. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

New Scenario is a dynamic platform for conceptual, time based and performative exhibition formats. The C R A S H group exhibition launched online on January 17, 2015.

Header image: C R A S H (2015). Exhibition view. Photo by Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy newscenario.net.

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