“Die Natur ruft!”

The relationship between art and nature, the curatorial conceit for “Die Natur ruft!” (Nature Is Calling!), is about as open-ended as it gets. The fact that the artists included are all DAAD alumni gives the project a little more focus. But still, the setup is dangerously broad, so it’s a credit to curators Ariane Beyn and Raimar Stange that they’ve managed to assemble such an intelligent exhibition.

The highlight of the show is the distressing barbecue portrayed in Allora & Calzadilla’s video Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands, 2006. In the work, a blistered and splayed pig roasts on a rotary spit attached to the back wheel of a car. As the swine spins frantically, a Puerto Rican reggae musician raps about the social organization of bats and bugs. Image and sound combine to create a greasy, disturbing hypnosis. The throb of the free-form rant drifts from its location at the back of the gallery into the main room, where it merges with birdsong from Grunewald, 2006, a video in which Jimmie Durham, Maria Thereza Alves, and their assistants enact odd musical performances in Berlin’s most iconic forest. Both works make it clear that the exhibition is driven more by productive collisions between nature and culture than by gentle interactions. Other pieces support this view: For example, a 1974 poster by Mario Merz explores the eerie role that the Fibonacci sequence plays in both natural and man-made structures; and Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler’s delicate drawings appropriate images from the naturalist Ernst Haeckel and the painter Moritz Michael Daffinger to create strange hybrid forms. While environmentalist messages are hinted at throughout the exhibition, the curators have cleverly avoided overburdening the show with a moralistic climate-change agenda, instead leaving each work to create its own dialogue with the natural world.