Review
& Press

14 Jan 2012

Black holes at REH Kunst
This thing just has to make you smile. Among all the innovative ideas GDR architects have come up with, the Raumerweiterungshalle is certainly one of those that display their practicality best. It is a room that you can stretch or diminish manually as needed:  Up to eight segments fit into each other telescopically and form a curvy room, the size of a caravan expandable to a maximum of 82 sqm. This flexible hall was invented in 1959 by Helmut Both and pretty popular in the GDR wherever sheltered space was needed temporarily. Just last year, a private investor has enabled art historian Valeska Hageney to revive one of them for hosting art shows. Tagesspiegel has called the REH Kunst building the real “Temporäre Kunsthalle”: “Fast, small, flexible”. While it seems inadequate for hanging paintings on its curved pull-out walls, videos and installations work well, as the latest show demonstrates. “Out of the Black” is curated by Lauren Reid and combines works of three up-and-coming artists: A beautifully media reflective moving image by Sam Smith, a light installation by Kim Westerström and an impressive video piece (both visually and acoustically) by Regina de Miguel. The text states: “This exhibition draws together three artists from different corners of the globe who seek to contemplate the universe while simultaneously turning the lens around to gain a deeper understanding of self and our position in the world.” The lens theme fits perfectly into this telescopic hall. Arranged one behind the other, the artworks draw in the visitor deeper and deeper: both physically and mentally. Be careful not to get sucked in completely. Open until January 27th. Installation view showing Sam Smith’s work.
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5 Jan 2012

Philip Topolovac at Invaliden1
Generations of archaeologists and monument conservators have thought about the ideal way to preserve artefacts and buildings. In the last century, it was fashionable to reconstruct what seemed to be missing. Nowadays, it is all about doing as little as possible to the remains from the past and keeping them as found. In his current exhibition »Diverse Zimmer« at Invaliden1, Philip Topolovac does both. For his work he collected war-torn artefacts that he discovered on construction sites in the city centre of Berlin, a link to layers of the past that would have been lost otherwise. By placing them on a hybrid of a piece of furniture and a spacecraft, he embeds these untouched story tellers in a new context that builds a bridge between the past and the future. We think it is a really nice comment on all the ongoing discourses about reconstruction here in Berlin. Philip Topolovac shows that there is no necessity to reconstruct the original settings to give the things he has found a meaning. To check this out, join the artist at the closing of his show on January 7th.
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4 Jan 2012

Happy new year!
Niche Berlin started 2012 by lighting all the sparklers at once - and wishes you an explosive new year with lots of fantastic art and architecture!
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25 Nov 2011

"Das Numen"'s Transformation
Whenever there’s a sign at the entrance of an art show, warning you to “enter at your own risk,” you can be quite positive that it’s gonna be a hell of a lot of fun. “Das Numen”’s installation Transformation at Haus am Lützowplatz is indeed fun to experience – but also very smart. Andreas Greiner, Julian Charrière, Felix Kiessling and Markus Hoffmann are the four founding artists of this collective. For this show, they filled the art space with hundreds of euro-pallets with which they formed a fictive landscape. To climb around in the balancing pallets demanded a little bit of aptitude and definitely heel-less shoes. Euro-pallets are strange things, Hoffmann said at the opening. They are shipped around, constantly on the move, never really belonging anywhere. Thus, they formed a perfect background for an installation about metamorphosis and cycles. In the backyard, the artists dug a hole six meters deep, pumped out ground water, filtered it (Kiessling said that a lot of small-scale enterprises are said to have dumped their waste water in the ground in this area), and let it run through a system of tubes attached to the ceiling of the gallery space. With the water dripping out in designated areas like mounds and little water pools, the artists want to grow mushrooms. Theoretically, after their consumption, the water cycle could be closed… With this kind of experimental volition, it is not surprising that “Das Numen” are all members of Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente. The show will be on until February 2012, Lützowplatz 9, Berlin.
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