Installation view, Ngorongoro. Images courtesy of Lepkowsi Studios, Berlin
The first sight upon entering the 5000 m2 former factory site for Ngorongoro, Gallery Weekend’s largest side-event, is a 20 metre wall piece by Anri Sala, consisting of thousands of tiny, hand-drawn notes is affixed in an open-sided structure. Elsewhere in the courtyard, a grave has been dug for Gregor Schneider’s sculpture Hannelore Reuen, the ‘house slattern’, his most famous work and a bête noire he wants to symbolically lay to rest here.
“The idea was to mix it up, to allow a meeting of works outside the gallery system or museum,” initiator of the exhibition, Jonas Burgert told Sleek. “The idea was to bring the works back to the studio, to enable a different type of encounter.” The show takes over a huge compound studios and nearby derelict buildings – a mammoth project involving 300-plus works by 133 artists. The location itself, a GDR-era semiconductor factory in Weissensee, with buildings from the 1850s on in various stages of repair is a window on to the spaces 90s Berlin.
Installation view, Ngorongoro. Images courtesy of Lepkowsi Studios, Berlin
As you’d expect, a huge variety of work is on show. A swimming pool shimmers in the afternoon sun, above which a large Andreas Golder oil painting hangs, exposed to the elements. A Manfred Pernice sculpture rusts gently in the nearby grass, a clash of media, styles and pieces, while a Berlinde de Bruyckere wax sculpture of a male torso (lent by collector Thomas Olbricht) in a glass case abuts a delicate Polly Morgan stuffed finch, perched delicately on a painting. Indeed, a 15 metre high Björn Melhus video projection of a dancing gorilla fills a former boiler house, a Mat Collishaw video of a homeless man puking lurks in the cellars, while paintings and works by the initiators Jonas Burgert, Christian Achenbach, Zhivago Duncan, Andreas Golder, John Isaacs and David Nicholson are scattered throughout. John Bock’s three day performance took place in a tiny attic, with the performance artist sculpting heads of visitors throughout the exhibition. A dancer was twisting in front of Anri Sala’s monumental musical score. The event had the atmosphere of a Happening, given the wild juxtapositions of moods and styles, albeit underpinned with some very tight organisation at a not insignificant cost.
Installation view, Ngorongoro. Images courtesy of Lepkowsi Studios, Berlin
“We invited friends and friends of friends, and were interested in the confrontations of different positions,” Burgert says. The exhibition teems with works, and the large-scale studios each of the artists, who are mainly painters, are hung scattershot with works. There is no narrative thread, the volcanic crater Ngorongoro with its unique biosphere serving as a metaphor for the exhibition, in which both well-known and local positions co-exist. The common thread tying the positions together is that they have or had an association with Berlin. However, a generational divide does become apparent: the works, with their clearly defined media, where something is either a painting, or a sculpture, or a video, represent a different, older view of artistic practice than the current crop of Berlin-based young artists, with their focus on the slippage of artistic media. Ngorongoro then perhaps best represents a snapshot of a particular generation of Berlin art-making, and of its diversity.
Text by Jeni Fulton
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