Transformator +, Espace d’art Cully-Berlin

28th of octobre, Petrov Ahner
Koinzidenzen

All Photographies Inkjet on Hahnemühle 40 cm X 40 cm

„Unobserved photography on public transport has a long tradition, from
Walker Evans to Tom Wood; but Petrov Ahner’s digitally created series is […]
coherent in itself and opens up a new dimension in the broad field of street
photography, which seems to combine even the conceptual and the instinctive.
 
Formally, the focus is initially on indifferent reflections and reflections on the
glass surfaces, and on shadowy, de-individualized figures on the other side. In
the picture of this situation, the fogged up or graffiti- or tag-scratched panes of
the suburban trains cause seemingly superficial injuries to the faces and bodies
behind them, when they can be seen more closely, so much so that everything
within the picture merges. The window pane is usually a transparent
separating layer, a protection between inside and outside, but here it is often
opaque due to extensive soiling, condensation or ice-flower-like freezing over
and is therefore more comparable to a semi-transparent curtain […].
 
Some photographs are abstract, others remain realistic and yet puzzling
because of the multiple layers of reality and images that overlap. Petrov Ahner
visually freezes the everyday moments before the doors of trains open and the
previously so shadowy is personalized for a moment, but can still hardly be
grasped. He is interested in the fleeting and accidental encounters of unknown
people, which in this form only a photographer or writer with a special eye can
capture so excellently […].”

Extract of the text on Koinzidenzen (coincidences)
by Dr. Matthias Harder, curator Helmut Newton Foundation

Petrov Ahner, born in 1965, worked from 1994, after his assistantship in Munich and
Miami,15 years as a fashion and portrait photographer in Paris. With the documentary
„Out of the dark“ about illegal immigrants in Paris, he distanced himself from the fashion
world and in 2009 moved to Berlin, where he devoted himself entirely to the production
of artistic photo series. The series „Coincidences“, shown in excerpts in the exhibition,
has been published as a limited edition book by Edition Carpentier.

Photos by Petrov Ahner


9th of June 2023, Marco Goldenstein

Das ist die Wahrheit (This is the Truth) 140 of 500 pieces

Marco Goldenstein works on serial drawing projects over long periods of time. Wall-filling graphic installations are created. The drawings of the installation „This is the truth“ were created over 2 years while working in a call center. Hence there is a connection to the classic telephone drawings, fleeting scribbles lost in thought that could appear on a notepad during a business call. Drawn with blue ball pen and based on the form of the bubble, they together create an overwhelming variety of patterns and signs.

Also part of the exhibition are selected works from the serial „Lockdown“ which all in all comprises 120 pieces.

The designs here can be thought of as an imaginary spiritual refuge that has to be abandoned and reconstructed again and again. Manifestations of time created in a late-capitalist open-plan office, variations of self-localization removed from temporality, patterns, rituals, models, vanishing points, communication, ……
There ist still space between the lines.

Marco Goldenstein, born 1968 in Oldenburg, is a painter and draughtsman. He was
co-operator and curator of the project space „Hochparterre Berlin StudioSalon“ in Berlin Kreuzberg from 2015-2020.

www.instagram.com/goldenstein_existenz, https//hochparterreberlin.blogspot.com and www.marcogoldenstein.de


The happiness of a soap bubble is short and glorious. Anyone who breathes life into it and sees a part of himself, freed from all heaviness, float away, hardly more than a round glimmer, but breath of his own breath, must feel a little bit like a god.

Marco Goldenstein’s graphic variations under the title „Das ist die Wahrheit“ initially seem like a late reminiscence of this moment of happiness. In their crowdedness and multiplicity, his bubbles and spheres, circles and rings, which are continuously set in motion anew and condensed into fabrics, foams, streams or meshes, could seem like the result of a childlike, naïve creative joy and playfulness. The fact that this impression soon gives way to a growing uneasiness may be due to the fact that the truth, which according to the title is to be represented here, is composed of a large number of parts that differ widely in form and structure. In contrast to the sphere, which formally dominates the drawings, the A4 formats are arranged without distance in a wide band to form a grid.

This truth, whatever is hidden behind it, looks at the viewer as if from a cell with a hundred eyes. Nothing rounds out here; only through the structural violence of the arrangement do the drawings remain connected. One finds oneself surrounded by it and overwhelmed by beauty and apprehension in an almost sublime way, if one experiences sublimity according to Burke like a „delightful horror“.

It is all the more astonishing that this perception owes itself to the nervously meticulous drawing of a plain biros and hardly art-suspicious everyday utensils from a late capitalist open-plan office: it is probably no coincidence that the majority of the pictures were created in the call centre of an polling institute where Goldenstein earned his living.
Excerpt from a text by Emanuel Maess

From the series „Lockdown“ pastel on paper 40 X 40 cm

The artist in conversation

5th of May, Opening of the Art Space

with my works: Organic Shapes, Egg Shaped, Ancestry and Pretty Pressure Dance

Being busy providing Malaysian Satay with peanut sauce and drinks to our visitors, we missed taking pictures during the opening. So an exhibition view is what you get.

For more pictures and information about the works please scroll down to previous posts.

Ancestry 50 pieces, various sizes

From the series Organs and Machines 25 X 18 cm and 20 X 15 cm

Organic Shapes

Pretty Pressure Dance and Egg Shaped

The last 3 years

Lac Leman
Lac Leman

2 years ago I left Berlin and moved to Cully, a small village at Lac Leman, between Lausanne and Montreux. I renovated a small, very old house in the centre of the village.

the house
The House
to the lake
to the lake
to the vineyards
to the vineyards

The work is not yet done, but I established my atelier and a small gallery.

entry
Entry
gallery space
gallery space
gallery in the atelier
gallery in the atelier
working in the atelier
working in the atelier

And of course I started working.

organic shape 7
organic shape 7

ANCESTRY AT AU TOPSI POHL

The last exhibition in Berlin before Covid and moving to Switzerland took place in the wonderful Jazz-club Au Topsi Pohl. Unfortunately the club now is closed: The „Au Topsi” spirit left its body and floats around as potential, now and again visible like snow through a lamppost in a park in Denmark a century ago. 
Many thanks to the team for great concerts and nights and the support for the exhibition.

The work Ancestry comprises 50 collages on early 20th century photographies in contemporary frames. It is actually conceptualized
as a 3 m x 5 m wall installation

ancestry at autopsi
ancestry at au topsi
ancestry at au topsi
ancestry at au topsi
ancestry at au topsi
ancestry at au topsi
detail
detail

ANCESTRY: THE BOOK

During Covid we transformed Ancestry into a book. Besides the images of the 50 collages, the book contains an introduction written by myself and a synergy text by D. Holland-Moritz. Both texts in german and english. It was designed and partially made by hand by Alexine Chanel. Photographies by Petrov Ahner. There is an edition of 50 numbered copies.
Thanks to Frank Benno Junghanns for the help.

the book
the book
the book
the book
the book
the book
the book
the book
the book
the book

Organic Shapes + Ancestry

Organic Shape 6

Zwitschermaschine, Berlin
October 2019
Sound Happening: Narval
(Evgenija Wassilew & Peter Strickmann)

Please scroll down for CVs and the text „About working with flowers“ from my catalog

Organic Shapes

Organic Shapes 5, 6, and 3

 

Egg shaped 3 (pink egg)

Organic Contamination

Ancestry

Sound Happening: Narval

Peter Strickmann
Evgenija Wassilew

Photographies by: Petrov Ahner, Frank Benno Junghanns and the artist

The Duo Narval draws on sounds of possible languages. The minimal and sculptural sound happenings emphasize contrasts, sparseness and timbre and meet in improvisations between chance and control.

Peter Strickmann: Objects, Feedback, Wind, Ceramics, Smartphone

Evgenija Wassilew: glass, vodka, alarm, resonance loudspeaker, smartphone

Peter Strickmann installs, performs and manipulates audible activity in public and private environments, observing, confronting and questioning the habits of hearing in both routine and extraordinary contexts. He realizes installations, essayistic projects/field trips, as well as situational sound actions and concerts in various groups, duos and solo.

Evgenija Wassilew’s work comprises installations and objects, performative sound recordings as well as sound and text based records. In doing so, the respective recording, translating and compositional methods touch limits and possibilities of communication, in which different worlds of perception encounter.

About working with flowers

The flowers used provide a wide range of color, reaching from white to deep purple. These colors change with the process of drying and pressing, whereby the blossoms of one plant, depending on the moment of „harvesting“ and the state of wilting undergo different changes. The results of this process are not exactly predictable. The pressed blossoms are not homogenous; each blossom is intricately different from the next, with varying shapes, color patterns, and veining creating diversity among the material.

Another important feature of the organic material is their transparency. Working with the color and intensity of the pigment in the process of overlaying the flowers, the levels of transparency create a necessity to find balance among the varying blossoms.

The individual pieces in the body of work “Organic Shapes“ are constituted of 200 – 300 blossoms, although 400 – 500 blossoms are pressed to realize each work. A limited, heterogeneous (s.a.) stock is available, embedded in constellations of ongoing change. Through the inspection of the available material and the definition of the shape, diverse combinations can be formed from gradients of color and transparency.

From this point on, the work evolves through the interaction of the artist with the blossoms.

The trajectory of making is substituted by a process of mediated growth that is induced by the singular qualities of each blossom. The work grows with and from the material.

The process of growth, thought to be in contrast to the process of making, is the starting point in the material and realization of the artistic process united in one.

Tim Ingold describes this way of production in an encompassing reflection of worldcreation as follows:

“The maker´s ambitions, in this understanding, are altogether more humble than those implied with the hylomorphic model. Far from standing aloof, imposing his designs on a world that is ready and waiting to receive them, the most he can do is to intervene in the worldly processes that are already going on, and which give rise to the forms of the living world that we see all around us – in plants and animals, in waves of water, snow and sand, in rocks and clouds – adding his own impetus to the forces and energies in play.“

The aesthetic direction of these pieces, which is briefly described here, has developed since 2016. It was realized with “Usambara (Hybrids)“ and “Organic Contamination“. With the most recent works, “Organic Shapes“ it has fully unfolded.

The pieces of the Organic Shape / egg-shaped series integrate aspects of similitude and mimikry into the morphogenetic process.


Jörg Hasheider · Organic Shape I

inter-port, Berlin November 2018
Jelena Bolevich, Vanessa Farfán, Jörg Hasheider

The exhibition shows three artistic positions that place a special emphasis on the processes that are fundamental to and continually inscribe themselves in the creation of the works. This continuous inscription takes place in an interaction between the artist and the material/medium. This interaction presupposes a special attention to the qualities inherent in the material, the medium.

Jelena Bolevich · am/pm (Detail)

Jelena Bolevich’s medium is primarily drawing. She performs laborious and manually repetitive processes of mark-making, whose constant deviations and mutations bring focus to the physical body moving through time.
The pictorial process is both the form and content of the works, as they accumulate into a story of their own formation, while providing a record of the artist’s lived time. Her work thus considers the human as an organism engaged in constant processes of mark making, as it interacts with materials that surround it.

    Vanessa Farfán · 5052 (Detail) 

The creation process of Vanessa Farfan’s works of art is determined by artistic experiments. She finds her source material during extensive expeditions through urban structures. The subjective impressions gained are combined with knowledge of the analogous and virtual processes of our everyday lives. Mistakes, accidents and undetermined factors and their aesthetic potential belong to the artistic process. Using paper and graphite as the main materials, Farfan creates structures that she subjects to processing by folding, embossing, and overpainting, the results of which she then partially superimposes and sets to music in a further step.
In the resulting image objects, subjective and objective aspects, aesthetic and accidental interventions are linked to analogies of our living spaces, the conditions of our existence.

Jörg Hasheider Organic Shape 3

Jörg Hasheider works with pressed flowers. The non-homogenized material, the uniqueness of each flower in color, form and transparency requires a correspondence between artist and material. The process of making is replaced by a process of moderated growth. The work grows out of and with the material. The process of growth, thought as opposed to the process of making, is at the same time the starting point in the material and the realization of the artistic program. 

Vanessa Farfán, Mexico Jelena Bolevic Before Sunset, Am/Pm
Jörg Hasheider Organic Shape 3 Vanessa Farfán Z-Code Berlin
Jörg Hasheider Organic Shape 1+2
Jelena Bolevic Bark Recomposition
Jelena Bolevich Accumulation Catalogue Vol.3

Opening

artworks in galleries

einladung_oc_final_web

Baustelle 1, Hamburg, November 2017

Organic Contamination 40 sheets of tracing paper, 20 floral blotches

Berlin based artist Jörg Hasheider has been working with pressed flowers for many years. After he explored their symbolic values in collages and material paintings, he recently switched his focus towards the immanent qualities of the flowers — shape, colour, transparency —.
For “Baustelle eins”, Hasheider created “Organic Contamination”, a wall piece constituted of 64 A4 sheets of tracing paper and 20 floral blotches. In this work he explores the tension between conceptual shaping and organic growth. To achieve this, he scrutinizes two aspects of the process of contamination. Initially, the concept to contaminate a geometric, standardised raster with floral blotches directs our attention to the differences between industrial and organic shapes and patterns.

On another level one can witness the process of the “making” of the blotches from grown organic matter — always unique flowers. This takes place in a modulating process of ongoing mutual influence between the artist and the flowers: The “maker” is contaminated by his material. This interaction alters the classical understanding of “making” — shape dominates material — towards a “making“ that intertwines shape and material in a common flow of energy.

Baustelle eins (Building Site one), whose name refers to ongoing, uncompleted processes, integrates the organic contamination in its concept. The tracing paper sheets merge with the wall and the floral blotches interact with the surrounding glass, stone and metal.

Gerbera

Installation at Gallery Puccs Contemporary, Budapest
June / July 2017

gerbera_inst21 x 1 x 1 m cube, wood, metal chains, 40 flowers                                                      2017

text
    Gerbera wilted
Photographies by Alexine Chanel and Bullet

Usambara (Hybrids)

usambara1_blog

usambara2_blog

diameter 22,5 cm                                                                                                        2017
Showroom Axel Nestle, Zwischenraum, Bieberach
Galerie Uli Lang, Bieberach

nightsky/matter 1 – 5

fluctuating

fluctuating 2

fluctuating 1 + 2    23 x 18 cm                                                                                     2016

Showroom Axel Nestle, Zwischenraum, Bieberach
Galerie Uli Lang, Bieberach
Hochparterre Berlin / KunstSalon

pretty pressure dance


pretty pressure dance
 5 x 23 x 18 cm                                                                                                           2016

Showroom Axel Nestle, Zwischenraum, Bieberach
Hochparterre Berlin / KunstSalon

Ilan Nachum „Sketches of Israel“

nachum0

Exhibition at Neue Sächsische Galerie, Chemnitz , February / April 2017

Neue Sächsische Galerie

Exhibition at Galerie Nord / Kunstverein Tiergarten Berlin in the frame of the European Month of Photography, October / November 2016

nachum1 nachum5„one hour at the beach“, 8 photographies 75 X 50 cm, 2 photographies 180 x 120 cmnachum4„privatized“, 8 photographies 75 X 50 cm, 2 photographies 180 x 120 cmnachum3„targets“, 8 photographies 75 X 50 cm, 2 photographies 180 x 120 cm 

The exhibition comprises 3 series of 10 photographies that are dealing with social and political phenomena of Israel today. His themes are: the decay of the utopian vision of the first settlers, the way to treat ethnical and religious minorities and the neccessary absurdity of the israelian military. Ilan Nachum is dealing with these intricate, deeply ideologicaly and religiously rooted issues with great intelligence and ease, completely undogmatic and without any pathos. He virtously plays with the possibilties of documentary photography. Always keeping the necessary distance, his deep envolement in – and commitment to the photographed subject, life in israel, its problems, absurdities and beauty, is strongly perceptible.

Privatized

privatized1

„… Kibbutz is an experiment that did not fail.“ Martin Buber In 2009 the Kibbutz movement celebrated its 100th anniversary. The long lasting and influentual utopian, socialist experiment started with the foundation of the first Kibbutz, Degania, in 1909. Over time it evolved and underwent changes, but its primary idea, the equality of all members, remaind, more or less, untouched. „From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.“ In the 1980s, with the privatization of the kibbutzim – different levels of income and private ownership – this primary quality begins to vanish. The loosening of the communal bonds in the Kibbutzim seems to go hand in hand with a change in the collective thinking of the Israeli society. In 2009 Ilan Nachum started a series of photographs, that, at first glance, document the typical housing of Kibbutzim. Underlyning the documentary appeal of the photographs is his use of similar angles and light situations, following the idea of the well-known german photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher: to define a type by the slight differences that become obvious when the objects are isolated and than aggregated in a sequence. Looking at the differences between the work of the Bechers and Ilan Nachum we find the core of his work „privatized.“ The Bechers document landmarks of a declining industry – connected with specific forms of technology and societies – that were often dismantled soon after they were photographed. Due to these circumstances the photographic representations become monuments of the photographed objects. Referent and sign fall in one. Ilan Nachum´s work is transcendent in a different way. His objects will remain. He is documenting a declining idea. He turns the usual iconography of the representation of life in a kibbutz – groups of children playing together, groups of people working together- upside down. The dwellings he photographs seem to be abandoned. The inhabitants that appear in a few of the pictures seem isolated and ghostlike in the bright light. In a strange but factual way the dwellings change their meaning from being representations and symbols of an egalitarian utopia to images of a classical suburban lifestyle.

One hour at the beach

beach4

This sequence shows the most crucial point of israeli social life: the coexistence of diffrent religious groups. The beach is a surrounding, where the social interactions of groups and individuals can be perfectly surveyed. It offers an almost neutral and empty space, in which the choice, where to settle yourself is determined by the relation towards others. The groups represented in the photogaphs are secular israelis and arabic muslims, easily identified by their divergent dress codes. Even when together, it is obvious, that there is no interaction between them. The art of Ilan Nachum shows people in an overwhelming and elementary set-up of beach, ocean and sunset. The chosen time – the sun has set and darkness sets in – is augmenting the existential expression of the work. The sheer beauty and intensity of the scenery integrates the various attitudes and shows people as they are: human beings enjoying and understanding life in respect to the elements of nature. Ideas of social or religious segregation seem vain.

Targets

targets3

This series is the most recent work of Ilan Nachum and it still is a work in progress. He has access to a restricted army district inside the Negev Desert, where he found constellations, that at first sight are reminiscent of landart pieces : strange constructions mounted on top of artifical hills, weird objects and circular arrangements. Placed within the wide and empty desert landscape they create a surrealistic impression, similar to the paintings of Dali or Tanguy. Looking closer at the objects an additional aspect comes into play: the objects are composed of scrap – military residue as well as refrigirators, metal bedframes, car parts, old barrels, etc. The objects are used as targets for the Israeli Air Force. They, in an almost touching way, are mimicking radar stations or rocket launches. The camera, as a documenting tool, is preserving a utilitarian fake, a manipulated reality. Layers of „The Real“ and the imaginary melt under the relentless desert sky.

The exhibition was supported by:       logo3

Botschaft Logo 2-zeilig 2 EMOP_BERLIN logoo4

Links:
Ilan Nachum
Neue Sächsische Galerie
Galerie Nord / Kunstverein Tiergarten

Inken Reinert „POEL“

poel_plakat

Installation on the 1st floor of the medival hospital „Altes Spital“
built from discarded GDR wall units.

More information about Inken Reinert, her installative and graphic work you find here:

Inken Reinert

poel2

poel1

 

All photographies by Inken Reinert
Poster by Frank Benno Junghanns