Chris Swithinbank

Ear­lier this month I headed to Berlin to check out S.​LOW Pro­jekt, an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary art pro­ject span­ning the sum­mer months or­gan­ised by my mas­ters su­per­vi­sor Ri­cardo Cli­ment. While I was there I got to see the lat­est in­car­na­tion of Sam Salem and Patrick Sanan’s Pond Life se­ries, ex­hib­ited at Pro­jek­traum Schwarz in the gallery-stud­ded area Neukölln. This is an au­dio­vi­sual work fea­tur­ing a tank of water as a pro­jec­tion sur­face and two hy­drophones that pro­vide the gen­er­a­tive soft­ware be­hind the work with a rough es­ti­mate of where any ag­i­ta­tion in the water is. This means peo­ple can splash about and af­fect the small neon crea­tures that ap­pear to be in­hab­it­ing the tank. Here is an in­ad­e­quate pho­to­graph from the in­stal­la­tion, but check out Sam & Patrick’s web­sites for videos and more in­for­ma­tion:

The great thing for artists in Berlin ap­pears to be the wealth of cheap space to work in, much of it in old in­dus­trial build­ings. One strand of the S.​LOW pro­gramme took place at N.K., a sound-art com­mu­nity on two floors of a dis­used fac­tory that has half a dozen stu­dios and an empty floor for larger events that looks won­der­fully broody when de­serted:

Prob­a­bly the most in­cred­i­ble thing I saw in Berlin was Innen Stadt Außen, an ex­hi­bi­tion of works by Dan­ish-Ice­landic artist Ola­fur Elias­son at the Mar­tin-Gropius-Bau. If you have heard of Elias­son, it is prob­a­bly be­cause it was he who put the enor­mous sun in the Tur­bine Hall at Tate Mod­ern. I re­mem­ber think­ing at the time that I couldn’t un­der­stand what the fuss was about (not being able to visit it my­self) — it was just a big sun, wasn’t it? That’s the kind of re­ac­tion I’ve had when try­ing to ex­plain the works at Innen Stadt Außen to peo­ple, breath­lessly, ur­gently, be­cause it was awe­some. And I use that word in full un­der­stand­ing of its ori­gins. No cam­eras were al­lowed in and the ex­hi­bi­tion web­site is woe­fully in­ad­e­quate, but pic­tures prob­a­bly wouldn’t con­vey the ex­pe­ri­ence any­way. Try this de­scrip­tion: there was an in­cred­i­ble 10-minute piece of video-art which fea­tured a white van with an enor­mous mir­ror strapped to its side dri­ving round Berlin. Doesn’t re­ally spark the imag­i­na­tion, does it? In short the prob­lem with words here is that all the ideas were of ex­treme sim­plic­ity, de­scrip­tion be­lies their im­pact, but their ex­e­cu­tion was con­sis­tently breath­tak­ing. Trust me, if ever this man does any­thing near you. Go.

Per­haps it’s worth not­ing that — de­spite the clearly touristy, vis­it­ing ‘events’ as­pect of this post — Berlin is a truly great place to hang out. Hav­ing rushed head­long into sight­see­ing, felt my legs grow tired and lose all sense of time and lo­ca­tion in the Jew­ish Mu­seum (which is, by the way, an ex­cel­lent build­ing), I dis­cov­ered that the bars and cafés of Kreuzberg and Neukölln were quite spec­tac­u­larly laid back and that my sand­wich came with a salad with kumquats and cran­ber­ries!!!

A good ex­hi­bi­tion I could take pho­tos of was Fis­chGräten­Melk­Stand cu­rated by Ger­man artist John Bock at the Tem­poräre Kun­sthalle Berlin, which con­tained a col­lage-like amal­ga­ma­tion of art­works built into a large scaf­fold­ing maze. Here are some half-built houses, which were tan­gled in the web of art­works:

There are a few more pho­tos from this ex­hi­bi­tion and N.K. on my (brand-new) Flickr page, but one last thing to share here is some­thing that is infinitely geeky, but ex­cit­ing for me. As some may know, I’m a bit of a Hel­mut Lachen­mann ob­ses­sive and here, in this maze of con­tem­po­rary art and ex­tremely stale piz­zas, in a small glass case, were two pages, on loan from the Paul Sacher Stiftung, of man­u­script sketches from the great man him­self. Per­haps it was just their in­con­gru­ence in the tan­gle of art, but it seemed slightly thrilling. Though vi­su­ally un­spec­tac­u­lar here they are: