Handwritten notes are magical. Whether a love letter or a scribble made during a Zoom call, in a world where even paintings are digitally created, handwriting seems enchantingly nostalgic. A similar kind of nostalgia besieged the 18th edition of Berlin Gallery Weekend. After two years of soft openings and a more or less no (official) party policy, the art fuelled weekend with more than 50 participating galleries and numerous additional events was back, aiming to tie on the years before Covid.
In the cab on the way to Gallery Weekend’s official reception, artist Pieter Schoolwerth, whose solo exhibition Rigged is on view at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, talks about how estranging it felt that for the past three months, he was only able to visit his exhibition via Zoom while stuck in New York. Schoolwerth’s gallery is one of the few venues that did not have an exhibition opening specifically for Gallery Weekend, and yet Rigged is not just testimony of our cybernated zeitgeist but the eerie sensation Covid has spawned. The artist’s paintings revolve around society’s increasingly abstract social relations as well as alienations of the contemporary body. Reminiscent of computer game characters, the depicted humans partially leave their physical corporealities, leaving behind half-empty, translucent shells. In the work Akvadiskoteka (Rigged #4) (2021) a woman in a coral cocktail dress is starring at an almost naked man who is sitting on a deckchair in front of a lavish villa. While his body is uncannily curled up, her mouth is half-wide open, seeming like she is trying to say something that ultimately results in a blank scream composed of a silent void.
While Schoolwerth’s paintings function as deconstructors of the human body and soul, Taslima Ahmed’s exhibition “Reconstructor Paintings“ at Galerie Noah Klink might, as the title suggests, be a form of rejuvenation. Some shapes on the glisteningly white canvases are akin to a scribble you could have made during a Zoom meeting; however, Ahmed’s paintings are the antipode of handwritten nostalgia. They consist of printed layers of UV-pigments and, although digitally created, propose that computer intelligence is overrated and human vision is biased. If we cannot trust any of the two, what is left seems to be yet again silent void, uncertain about what (technological) development is going to emerge next.
Participating in Gallery Weekend, you always be sure about your next destination. Alongside the 52 galleries, Reference Studios also hosted their biannual festival. If you did not have an aching hangover from one of last night’s parties, the first event on Saturday morning took place at 7am. Hans Ulrich Obrist was in dialogue with Berlin-based artist Luki von der Gracht as part of Obrist’s event series Brutally Early Morning Club. Conversing about von der Gracht’s practice, she pulls out a handwritten note from her teenage times and reads it to the audience. Being continuously exposed to a digital influx of content, about which you most likely forget minutes after reading it, these kinds of nostalgic notes seem to persist.
During the car ride to KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where the design duo BLESS placed a 90s Mercedes-Benz that was transformed into a sauna in the museum’s yard, a gallery director and I analyse people’s outfits from last night’s dinner at Neue Nationalgalerie. While speaking on a broader and more theoretical level, it is certainly true that fashion needs art more than art needs fashion; however, when considering the many people who have been wearing the same look throughout their 30-year long careers, the opposite might sometimes be as true. It at least shows that operating at the intersection of both realms more profoundly would benefit the two. Sterling Ruby could be seen as one representative of this idea. Having his own fashion collection, the artist opened a solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, displaying colossal textile and ceramic works. As fashion is often criticised for its hyper-commerciality, Ruby appears to have incorporated this critique in a non-critical way.
Mercedes-Bez sauna by BLESS in collaboration with Sam Chermayeff Office at KW. Image Courtesy of KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
He Xiangyu’s sculpture Asian Boy (2019 – 2020), part of the new group presentation at Boros Collection with works by, among others, Anne Imhof, Bunny Rogers, and Anna Uddenberg, is, as opposed to Ruby’s work, a critique of consumerist desires. It references his Cola Project (2009 – 2011) in which the artist boiled Coca Cola until it transformed into a solid matter. The slender boy seems to be holding one of these cans that is, however, physically absent, suggesting that although the boy intends to ingest the modern time elixir, he is denied access to what functions as a proxy of the neoliberal world.
During the Uber ride home on Sunday evening, the driver tells me about a notebook he uses to record any kinds of ideas. Instead of typing them in a phone, he perceives these handwritten notes as a way of decelerating. With the myriad amount of exhibitions Gallery Weekend is certainly not a weekend for slowing down, but perhaps noting your thoughts on an exhibition of the next Gallery Weekend in 2023 in a notebook will at least let them linger nostalgically.
