Kate Cooper‘s RIGGED, spread over two floors of Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art from September 14 to February 12, was not designed for comfort. I wrote about it earlier, comparing the effect of Cooper’s CGI-based exhibition with Marguerite Humeau‘s show Horizons at Import Projects, also running during Berlin Art Week. Cooper won the Schering Stiftung Art Award for her work, which takes the techniques of CGI, commercial photography, and post-production to look at the status the female body has occupied in the history of digital image technology. “In our post-representational world,” Cooper writes, “where images are dislocated and free-floating across networks – how can we renegotiate an agency to images, imbue them with power, make them work for us?”

Months later on May 2, Rachel de Joode‘s solo exhibition, Surfaces, opened at Neumeister Bar-Am in Berlin, along with Cooper’s new photographic piece, Care Work, produced specifically for the gallery’s Der Würfel 80 centimetre cubed project space. The two artists’ approaches couldn’t be more different. Whereas Cooper takes painful steps away from the natural, de Joode’s exhibition is a kind of return to the natural—or, at the very least, an examination of it. Interrogating a “contemporary agency of ‘things’ and how we engage with them”, de Joode focuses in on the German concept of ‘Zwischendinge’—”a between of things”. Examining the connections between her skin and the clay she moulds, between various objects and their photographic representations, between the organic and the artificial, she argues that “all these ‘Things’ and their ‘Betweens’ have equal agency”. **

Rachel de Joode’s Surfaces and Kate Cooper’s Care Work were showing at Neumeister Bar-Am from May 2 to June 26, 2015.

Header image: (left) Kate Cooper, ‘Care Work’ (2015). Install view; (right) Rachel de Joode, Surfaces (2015). Install view. Courtesy Neumeister Bar-Am.