“Double Bound Economies” is about reading an East German photo archive. This non-institutional archive was created between 1967 and 1990 by the freelance photographer Reinhard Mende, who was commissioned by various GDR combines and the trade fair in Leipzig. “Double Bound Economies” takes the proclamation of internationalism of the socialist production as starting point to thematize its economies, schizophrenia, gestures, contradictions, as well as its staged images, spaces and displays.
The exhibition shows artistic interventions into the archive and contributions by Tekle Belete, KP Brehmer, Seiichi Furuya, Allan Sekula, Noël Burch, Olaf Nicolai and The Otolith Group. “Double Bound Economies” is curated by Estelle Blaschke, Armin Linke and Doreen Mende.

As part of this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin (April 26–28), Galerie Thomas Schulte will present a site-specific installation by Franka Hörnschemeyer in the gallery’s Corner Space. Hörnschemeyer’s installation will stand next to a larger solo exhibition with the American sculptor Alice Aycock. The artist will be present at the opening.
 
Franka Hörnschemeyer, who lives and works in Berlin, focuses her work on a multifaceted approach to redefining spatial conditions. As she explains, “To me a space represents a construction made up of social, historical, and psychological relationships that are constantly in an interplay with people. I examine these relationships and reorganize them.” As a rule, Hörnschemeyer’s special constructions are developed site-specifically, challenging the viewer to explore them through movement.
 
Unlike her previous constructions, Hörnschemeyer’s installation at Galerie Thomas Schulte is not set into movement by the viewer, but through a motor from within the construction itself. The construction’s mobile, horizontally swinging elements embody the principle of a marionette, questioning the relationship between gracefulness and movement. The elements divide the Corner Space into two levels, altering its outward perception. The horizontal elements create space by composing a type of suspended ceiling. At the same time, the construction is a moving figure, behaving within the room, much like a viewer would.
 
The installation’s title Im Innern der Figur references Heinrich von Kleist’s essay Über das Marionettentheater, in which the author describes a dialogue between the narrator and a dancer who admires the natural grace of the marionette. Here, Kleist writes, “Every movement, he said, has a focal point. It would suffice to control this from within the figure – the limbs, which would be mere pendulums, would follow, without needed assistance, in their own mechanical way.”
 
Due to conscious reflection, the dancer cannot match the natural gracefulness of the marionette. This means that the marionette’s absolute gracefulness would only be realizable if “it’s dance were to slip completely into a mechanical realm,” rather than being controlled by the human hand. This principle is of the central aspects being expressed in Hörnschemeyer’s installation. Furthermore, it finds a stage to perform on in the gallery’s Corner Space, whose big arched windows open onto Leipzigerstrasse.
 
Additionally, Hörnschemeyer’s digitally mastered Piezo prints, will be on display in the gallery’s Window Space. Some of these prints represent outlines of already existing works, including LaSound 908 – from the 2008 Berlin exhibition Megastructure Reloaded – as well as Konditional, the interactive moving foundation of the Polish city Zamosc. These prints, in form of layouts, allow us to understand the transparency of special systems, which run through the construction like labyrinths. On the other hand, the title of the series here exhibited Diffusion und Konfusion does not merely reference the finished project, but cryptological concepts. In this sense, it focuses on two basic principles of encryption that are fundamental to Hörnschemeyer’s work. Whereby Konfusion describes the blurring of the relationship between plain-language and secrete code and Diffusion suggests the principle of dissolving statistical structures.
 
Franka Hörnschemeyer was born in Osnabrück in 1958, and lives and works in Berlin. Her latest solo exhibitions include Franks International, Display, at the Wilhelm Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen (2011), The Presence of Noise at the Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2010), Peenemünde at the Jewish Museum, Athens (2008), Franks International at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2007), and the TSE 11022 at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2002). Her most acclaimed works in public include Trichter, Dresden (2011), Koordinaten at Kunstwegen Station, Neugnadenfeld (2011), BFD – bündig fluchtend dicht, at the Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin (2001), and PSE 900 at the Kunsthalle Hamburg (2000). She was part of many group exhibitions counting Wir sind alle Astronauten, Universum Buckminster Fuller im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Kunst at the Museum Marta, Herford (2011), squatting. erinnern, vergessen, besetzen at the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin (2010), MAN SON 1969. Vom Schrecken der Situation at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2009), Megastructure Reloaded at the Ehemalige Staatliche Münze, Berlin (2008), as well as Ideal City – Invisible Cities, at the Brandenburgischer Kunstverein Potsdam and Zamosc, Poland (2006).

In Zusammenarbeit mit der Galerie im Einstein und der Galerie Villa Köppe zeigen am 15.Juni 2013 30 zeitgenössische Künstler ihre Werke im Oskar-Helene-Heim. Das zum Abriss freigegebene ehemalige Krankenhaus ist ein außergewöhnliches architektonisches Ensemble und 48 Stunden Bühne für 30 Künstler. Zum Rahmenprogramm gibt es Musik und eine Modenschau der jungen Modedesignerin Juli Cardoni. (www.julicardoni.com) Lassen Sie sich von der Atmosphäre des Ortes und der dort ausgestellten Kunst inspirieren. (Getränke vor Ort)
 
Vernissage: Samstag 15.Juni 2013, 16.00 Uhr - Finissage: Sonntag 16.Juni, 17.00 Uhr.
Adresse: Oskar-Helene-Heim, Clayallee 229, Einfahrt B, 14195 Berlin.

For his Berlin series Olaf travelled around the capital and chose to photograph seven places of personal, historical and aesthetic value: the Olympic Stadium, the Schöneberg town hall – iconically associated with Kennedy’s famous proclaimation, “Ich bin ein Berliner” - Clärchens Ballhaus, a classic 100-year old Berlin ballroom, the old city hall in the former heart of Berlin, a public bath house in Neukölln, a fencing hall in Westend and the interior of a Freemasons lodge.
 
With his painterly style of photography, Erwin Olaf also references New Objectivity, an era recognised through the paintings of Otto Dix or George Grosz.
 
In this series we encounter children on the edge of adulthood, old women displaying the last of their appeal and stumble into Franz Bieberkopf’s Berlin of the 20’s again. All this is bound to leave the viewer with a mixture of voyeurism, fascination and discomfort.
 
More information will be available shortly.

ZAK | BRANICKA Gallery is pleased to present “the weight of 8”, our first exhibition of Marlena Kudlicka‘s work. Specially prepared for the gallery space, the artist has created an installation consisting of three objects along with a narrative, the key to which is the title of the exhibit. “The weight of 8” is a description of the relationship between space and language. The artist says that “Letters and words serve to describe a space, while numbers do the same for its measurements. Words are not, however, capable of precisely expressing something, as they constitute a subjective evaluation, yet numbers code precision. I join both forms in a new language.”
 
The first component of “the weight of 8” is an installation constructed of metal letters and numbers. It looks like a piece of DIN A4 paper that has been proportionally enlarged to fit the height of the display space, but, due to a coding error, all of the characters have been garbled, creating an abstract visual composition. The second component is a hanging sculpture that was created based on the exact measurements of the dimensions of the gallery. It is a kind of abstract “algorithm” that visualizes mathematical operations, without describing them with characters or numbers. The sculpture is made of metal elements of varying thickness and is based on the principle of counterpoint: the weight of some elements is distributed to the exterior with the help of other elements. The steel object that connects the first two components has two meanings. The first comes from mathematics (statistical calculations), as the object has the shape of an enlarged I-beam, the load bearing construction element that was introduced into architecture by Mies van der Rohe. The second meaning comes from language: the cross section of the object is simply a large letter “I” and it carries specific semantic meanings: in Polish it means “and”; in English “I”; and it is also the Roman numeral 1.
 
All of the pieces of the installation are based on the relationship between letters, numbers, and punctuation, as well as matter and its weight. Everything is important here, including the thickness and type of materials, and the finish. Even the color is derived from mathematical calculations. So, what does the “eight” in the title weigh (estimated visually), and what is its color? In order to calculate them, it is enough to read the title-equation out loud: the letter “w” is present in the first word, but not the second. A proportion of 50% black to 50% white gives us the gray.
 
Kudlicka is particularly interested in the relationship between precision and error: her sculptures are made with a jeweler’s precision, but at the same time an error is factored into the process of their creation. This relationship leads to a balance—the main theme of the exhibition—not only between, for example, numbers and the written word, or dimensions and color, but also the balance of weights. Her sculptures are based on statistical calculations, which is why they seem to float on air, and why we doubt the force of gravity when looking at them, or walk around them on tiptoes.
 
Kudlicka‘s work follows in the tradition of constructivist art. Just as Katarzyna Kobro, the forerunner of Polish avant-garde art, she also derives her sculptures from architecture. Kudlicka says that “In this project I refer to the peripheral areas of architecture, as well as to the construction process. My inspiration was a trip to Beirut and the suburbs of Cairo, but also the 1970s in my native Poland, where, in a situation of constant systemic political change, temporariness and a lack of stability were a permanent part of architecture. Most often this was a result of improvisation and limited access to building materials; so this whole temporary architecture became a ’monument of errors.‘ In illegally erected buildings, construction elements that leaned on each other were balanced in accordance with the principle of counterpoint. Of course this was all inevitably predestined to be fragile, and this interested me the most. In what way does fragility activate a space? Does it play a primary or secondary role? Why are certain places felt to be weak points, or can fragility, perhaps, be seen as a temporary state between instability and scarcity on the one hand, and effectiveness and function on the other?”
 
Language is also a key element in Kudlicka’s work; the title is always an integral part of her art. Friedrich Meschede writes that “Focusing on the title reveals a crucial core of Marlena Kudlicka’s work. She refers to concrete poetry, a term that can be ascribed to both literature and the fine arts, which transforms the flowing transitions between the medium of language, its visualization using letters as a pictorial form, and sounds as concepts of rhythm into a complex system. The rigid guidelines of grammar turn into a new order through a playful disregard of grammatical regularity. The combinatorics of opposites, and elements that would not initially be thought of as going together, is the technique of collage used for concrete poetry. The vocabulary of construction creates the surprise.”

MARTIN KIPPENBERGER: SEHR GUT | VERY GOOD
23 FEBRUARY - 18 AUGUST 2013
In 2013 Martin Kippenberger would have celebrated his 60th birthday - that is, had he not died in 1997 due to an excessive life. At several places in the building, the Hamburger Bahnhof currently exhibits an artist whose work and life cannot be separated from one another - a painter, an actor, a writer, a musician, a drunkard, a dancer, a traveller, a charmer, an enfant terrible and self-producer - in short, an “exhibitionist” as he called himself and an artist who today is considered one of the most significant of his generation. The permeation of personality and oeuvre, as well as the incredible variety of his artistic production, is now presented in its entire spectrum. “Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good” however does not intend to be a retrospective, but rather an approximation of both the private and public persona of the artist Martin Kippenberger. Even if Kippenberger only spent a few years in West-Berlin (1978-1981), it was here that he developed important topics of his artistic cosmos. Hence he announced that “Berlin needed a new coat of paint” and made a name for himself as a short-term co-owner of the legendary punk club SO36 and operator of the “Büro Kippenberger.” Besides performing as a musician in the band “Luxus” or respectively as an actor, he also once created for Claudia Skoda a floor collage as a catwalk for her Kreuzberg studio that he made from 1,300 photos from the fashion designer‘s environment. For the duration of the exhibition, the collage is shown in the historic passage in the East Wing. With the series “Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze” (1976-1977) he had still performed as a painter using oil and canvas, but in Berlin he traded large parts of this series for free food and drinks at the legendary Paris Bar (which he also then painted). With his series “Lieber Maler, Male mir” (1981) he shortly thereafter subverted the cliché of the genius painter by ordering large-format images from a movie poster painter. In spite of public indignations that Kippenberger repeatedly caused, with works such as “Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm dich” (1989) he managed to distil something positive.
 
A multiple installation - often referred to as “white paintings” (1991) and so far rarely shown - can be seen on the main building’s first floor: eleven white canvases that are embedded into the wall, virtually becoming one with it. Upon approaching the work one recognises glossy children‘s handwriting on the images, which quasi certifies Kippenberger’s work by grading it throughout with the mark “very good” - of course on request of the artist. Yet, “Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good” does not only refer to the white paintings but also to a magazine Kippenberger published in 1978 called “sehr gut. very good.”
 
In the midst of all this irony however the exhibition also reveals a human being who needed to combat his sickness through art. Kippenberger painted himself in the pose of the shipwrecked from Théodore Géricaults famous painting from 1819: bloated, aged, exhausted. Self-portrayal is in fact an essential part of his work and life, which is why there is an abundance of photographs and in particular self-portraits. A selection of photographs allows for a differentiated perspective of Kippenberger - thirty years after he left Berlin: “Art is always only looked at in retrospect anyway… I would say that the period is twenty years. […] Whatever the people will or will not continue to talk about me is what matters. Whether I spread good fun or not. And so what I'm working on is that the people will be able to say: Kippenberger was good fun!”
 
Curated by Udo Kittelmann and Britta Schmitz, Co-Curator: Miriam Halwani