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Hours and Hours of Inactivity
Mar 4, 2017 – Apr 30, 2017
Bettina Allamoda, Diana Artus, Olga Balema, Fritz Balthaus, Mariechen Danz, Christine Sun Kim, Wolf von Kries, Sandra Schäfer, Roman Schramm, Heidi Sill, Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton
Curator: Rhea Dall
With the exhibition Hours and Hours of Inactivity, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein resumes the exhibition series of the Berlin Senate’s Art Fellowship recipients. Eleven positions from different generations of the city’s international art scene reflect Berlin’s eccentric plethora of artistic genres.
Hours and Hours of Inactivity puts this generous diversity at the fore and spans photography, film, video, and drawing, to sculpture, and installation. The exhibition uncovers diverging queries and temporalities within the distinct artists’ work, including a conglomerate of long-term investigations and serial gestures, surprise encounters and forgotten ephemera.
The title is a musical catch phrase taken from a piece by participating artist Mariechen Danz and her band UNMAP. Striking a chord with the curatorial approach, the song line Hours and Hours of Inactivity mirrors how the duration and complexity of the included oeuvres drive the display.
Various works wrestle with the ‘museal’ freezing of time, tinkering with white-cube behaviors. Among those are a wall piece constantly redone by Fritz Balthaus, a waiting area by Wolf von Kries, an (almost) motionless stone sculpture by Olga Balema, a series of drawn scores reverberating ‘time passing’ by Christine Sun Kim, or Bettina Allamoda’s fashionable fabric dressing-up parts of the exhibition space. Reflecting a current favoring of instant, excessive performance-as-success, n.b.k.’s storefront windows host a depot-like presentation of staggered glossy, digital photography by Roman Schramm that seems caught between a storage space and one of consumer-oriented, accelerated entertainment. Other tableaux by Diana Artus, Sandra Schäfer, Heidi Sill, and Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton forward stagnated building projects, city-scape meanderings, and the rise and disassembling of architectural utopias, alluding to the exhibition’s core tension between sedate quiescence and hyperbolic time pressure, both marking the creative productions on view.
Publication
As part of the n.b.k. book series “Berlin”, a bilingual publication (DE/EN) is published by Walther König, Cologne, including an introduction by Klaus Lederer and Marius Babias as well as texts by Ann Cotton, Rhea Dall, and Michaela Richter.
Public Program
Thursday, March 30, 2017, 7 pm
Panel discussion with Hannah Black (artist and writer, Berlin), Caroline Busta (author and editor-in-chief, Texte zur Kunst), and Kerstin Stakemeier (professor for art theory and art education, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg), moderated by Rhea Dall (curator, director PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art and Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Oslo)
In English
Thursday, April 27, 2017, 7 pm
Experience-oriented game with Roman Schramm (artist, Berlin)
Max. 25 participants, please register in advance until April 20, 2017, via email: kunstvermittlung@nbk.org
Sunday, April 30, 2017, 8 pm
Concert
