André Rottmann

• 

  print May 2009

  Katharina Sieverding

  In her latest solo show, which formed part of the “Forum Expanded” program associated with this year’s Berlinale, Katharina Sieverding invited viewers to enter literally into a pictorial space in which—as critic Rainer Bellenbaum noted in a lecture during the film festival— the apparatuses of cinema and art exhibition overlapped. Sieverding projected a randomly controlled digital slide show, Projected Data Images, 2009, directly onto a large wall of the gallery, creating a dynamic surface with fragmentary views of architectural monuments of postwar German history repeated in parallel. These

• 

  print February 2009

  Deimantas Narkevičius

  In his first film, Europa 54°54'–25°19', 1997, Deimantas Narkevičius sets out for the center of Europe—which, after a reestimation of the borders of the continent by geographers at the Parisian Institut Géographique National in 1989, is located at a spot in a village called Purnuškės, north of Vilnius (“One Friday morning I got the urge to go and see the center of Europe”). The artist can be heard off-screen explaining that he had previously disregarded the existence of this supposedly highly significant location in Lithuania, dismissing it as just another instance of the sort of ethnocentric

• 

  print December 2008

  Ayşe Erkmen

  Visitors wishing to enter the first retrospective of the work of Ayşe Erkmen were required to pass through a security gate complete with metal detector. This initially irritating prelude is paradigmatic for the aesthetic method of Erkmen (who divides her time between Berlin and Istanbul): The checkpoint, titled Portiport, 1996/2008, resembled those found at any international airport (and, increasingly, other places as well) and announced via its light signals and alarm bells that the threshold of the institutional spaces of contemporary art had literally just been crossed. At the same time,

• 

  previews September 2008

  “Solo Show”

  Although corporate production models are increasingly synonymous with art-market success, the notion of individual authorship seems strangely intact. But can an artist working today ever honestly claim to produce a solo show?

  Although corporate production models are increasingly synonymous with art-market success, the notion of individual authorship seems strangely intact. But can an artist working today ever honestly claim to produce a solo show? That is the question at the center of this exhibition of work by one fictional Robbie Williams, created (in collaboration, naturally, with an art-production company, mixedmedia berlin) by Berlin-based artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian, whose practice typically aims at destabilizing the rules and formats of institutional representation. “Solo Show”—as

• 

  print September 2008

  Andrea Fraser

  “I’ve always been very ambivalent about my field, and I made a kind of career out of that . . . ambivalence, but recently, it’s gotten extremely difficult. . . .” In the right-hand channel of her most recent DVD installation, Andrea Fraser is projected at life size and repeatedly bursts into tears. She speaks about feelings of failure, her “long history of commitment to certain principles,” desire for recognition despite her own privileged position, feelings of envy and shame, and admittedly all-too-indecisive rejection of the marketplace and its logic of injustice. Alternately, Fraser is also

• 

  print Summer 2008

  the 5th Berlin Biennial

  THE BIENNIAL FORMAT may exert a more decisive influence on the field of contemporary art than any other kind of exhibition today, but such shows are also regularly criticized on account of their instrumentalization in the service of both cultural and local political agendas. Noting that this type of large-scale show tends to prioritize post-Conceptual and lens-based practices that engage the historical, economic, and (geo-)political resonances of specific sites in a particular city or region, Julian Stallabrass, in Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (2004), goes so far as to argue

• 

  print April 2008

  Kirsten Pieroth

  Untitled (Loan) (all works 2007), the first work viewers encountered in Kirsten Pieroth’s third solo show at Klosterfelde, comprised a vitrine and seven unframed photographs. An ironic examination of the international exhibition industry and its protocols, the images documented the Berlin-based artist’s contribution to “Learn to Read,” a group show at Tate Modern last fall. Pieroth had borrowed the wall label for the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in order to show it in London as an unassisted readymade, using this self-reflexive gesture to reenact the paradigmatic shift from work to frame (to borrow

• 

  print February 2008

  Andreas Siekmann

  WITH SOME SIX MONTHS’ critical distance from last summer’s hyberbolic “Grand Tour,” it is now apparent that one of its most notable effects, in terms of the making of individual reputations, has been the increasing international attention enjoyed by the work of Andreas Siekmann. Indeed, the Berlin-based artist was, other than Martha Rosler, the only person represented both at Documenta 12 in Kassel and at Skulptur Projekte Münster 07. No doubt this visibility stems in part from the ways in which Siekmann’s politically engaged work, as it was installed in public spaces in Kassel and Münster,

• 

  print February 2008

  Charlotte Posenenske

  Last year’s Documenta wasn’t the first on which Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) left a mark. She was present at Documenta 4, in the summer of 1968, though not as an exhibiting artist: She distributed leaflets criticizing art for being “affirmative” and “veiling reality.” Earlier that year, Posenenske had decided to end her artistic work and instead study sociology; she later published papers on standardized labor processes.

  Shortly after the end of Documenta 12, in 2007, where Posenenske was among those artists repeatedly appearing throughout the various sites of this idiosyncratic mega-exhibition,

• 

  previews January 2008

  Alice Creischer

  Since the mid-1990s, Alice Creischer has contested official representations of capitalism and liberal democracy by proposing historical counternarratives in complex assemblages of texts and images.

  Since the mid-1990s, Alice Creischer has contested official representations of capitalism and liberal democracy by proposing historical counternarratives in complex assemblages of texts and images. This exhibition of twelve works includes the Courbet-inspired installation L'atelier de la Peintrice: Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Defining Seven Years of My Artistic Life), 2000, and Apparat zum osmotischen Druckausgleich von Reichtum bei der Betrachtung von Armut (Apparatus for Osmotic

• 

  print January 2008

  Mike Kelley

  High production values and immersive media strategies are often viewed as incompatible with a truly critical practice in contemporary art. Mike Kelley’s recent show, “Kandors”—which confronted the viewer with an overwhelming assembly of crystalline architectural sculptures, videos shown both as wall projections and on monitors, and light boxes with lenticular image panels—might understandably have provoked such skepticism: The fabrication was obviously costly, and the exhibition was on a scale befitting a museum—although, under the present conditions of market imperialism, one

• 

  print December 2007

  Annette Kelm

  Annette Kelm’s photographs are characterized by formal rigor and a sense of objectivity; the works always maintain a distance from the objects they portray, which often look isolated, even sculptural. Taking a page from art-historically sanctioned post-Conceptual models from Gabriel Orozco to Christopher Williams (yet distinct from the latter’s commitment to notions of institutional critique), models in which increased attention to questions of technique, surface, and composition replace the “marks of indifference” (to quote Jeff Wall) associated with the first generation of Photoconceptualists,