The Soon Enough group exhibition is on at Berlin’s insituopening August 3.
Guestcurated by Matilde Cerruti Quara and Sorana Serban for the 2016 Project Space Festival Berlin, the event is a one-night series of performances and a group show with works by James Hoff, Franziska Lantz, Deborah Ligorio, Mara Ploscaru, Nicolò Russian and Priscilla Tea. Both will open the same night.
It is self-described as “an exploration of time” and posits that time is an assumption, “an apparatus humankind produced in order not to lose track of itself”. It further states, “once overcome, the evolution of species may spread beyond its borders, crossing the limits of this dimension”.
The performances represent a “metaphorical Big Bang within the context of the exhibition” and include a guided meditation by Ligorio. The meditation aims to develop “inner evolution through both critical thinking and relaxation” and will feature a sound performance intervention by Lantz, who will produce “ancestral sounds from an era of the future past”.
Berlin, it is widely known, is a global centre of the “emerging” artist, even if said artist doesn’t emerge from his nightlife long enough to see the sun. And the city, now nearly profligate with pop-up project spaces, has decided to dedicate an entire summer month to nothing but. In what (in retrospect) seems a curiously belated move, Berlin celebrates its inaugural Project Space Festival Berlin, inviting 30 of these sites throughout the city to open their doors with a different surprise event scheduled for each day of August.
To open the festival, the Import Projects curatorial initiative screened Austrian artist Ursula Mayer’s contemporary art film, ‘Gonda’ (2012), written by Belfast-born writer Maria Fusco and partially shot in a real-life smoking volcano. The event, titled Vibration / Frequency / Substance, was followed by a conversation between Mayer and curator Nadim Samman, discussing the artist’s approach to narrative structure and notions of the “queer audience”. Despite the seeming abundance of art events on any given night in Berlin, the screening ran past capacity, dozens of nodding heads spilling out of the small room and straining to see amid mid-20s Berlin.
Video still from Ursula Mayer’s ‘Gonda’ (2013). Image courtesy Project Space Festival Berlin.
As with anything amalgamating 30 distinct artistic ideologies and practices, Project Space has the potential to be diverse at best, disjointed at worst. Following Import Projects’ Friday film screening, the festival’s opening weekend introduced Agora‘s ‘Stravaganza’, a group performance installation involving, among other things, a man in a billowy white dress that stretched across the Neukölln space’s garden, as well as tête‘s culinary art event, Hors d’œuvre: The Secondary Concern.
“Magic Tricks” by Tobias Dostal and Ariel Schlesinger. Image courtesy Project Space Festival Berlin.
The festival’s second week brings a whole other slew of miscellaneous events with LEAP‘s LMSTFU/Let Me Search That For You, an “internet search battle” accompanied by a BBQ and music by Nadav, Kleine Humboldt Galerie‘s exhibition on the historic architecture of the Berlin Agriculture College, titled raumbestandserhebung, as well a reinterpretation of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s last and unfinished work for the viola by artist Daniela Gugg for Lage Egal. The week rounds out with Ozean‘s Ocean Plays, inspired by the 1998 Italian drama, The Legend of 1900 and Archive Kabinett‘s discussion on art and feminism, geopolitics, and speculative futures between Caitlin Berrigan and Beirutopia photographer, Randa Mirza. At insitu, the first artist collaboration between Tobias Dostal and Ariel Schlesinger, Magic Tricks, promises “moments of deception and illusion”, while Center‘s Stoneroses group exhibition –include Sandra Vaka Olsen and Mirak Jamal –comes close to ending the month.
By mostly only revealing events for the first two weeks of the festival, Project Space forges ahead with an air of last-minute mystery. Some of the venues –such as the Selda Asal-founded Apartment Project (one of the first artist initiatives in Turkey) –have yet to announce their events, and all that’s left to go on is the promise of eclecticism laid along the conceptual platform of the project space.
