Rethinking Location
Anytime Anywhere Everything
1 May – 19 June 2010
Oranienburger Straße 18
D-10178 Berlin
Rosa Barba – Cyprien Gaillard – Andreas Hofer – Koo Jeong- A David Maljkovic – Trevor Paglen – Christodoulos Panayiotou – Sterling Ruby Paul Sietsema – Taryn Simon – Armando Andrade Tudela – Andro Wekua
Curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen
Evolving from the work of twelve conceptual artists, filmmakers and photographers presenting alternate interpretations of fictional geographies, imaginary sites and ‘mash-up’ destinations, the exhibition Rethinking Location reconsiders the notion of location. In an era characterized by a rapidly changing perception of time and space due to ever increasing mobility, migration and globalisation, our understanding of what a location is has significantly tranformed. Taking these changes for granted, the exhibition investigates how artists consider location and geography as source material for their work.
The work of Rosa Barba and Taryn Simon often derives from an interest in unusual places or improbable situations: Barba’s film The Empirical Effect (2010) explores a geographical ‘Red Zone’: weaving a fiction around the Vesuvio Vulcano, her film was shot during an actual evacuation test and, on another level, points towards the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy. Collaborating with the scientific research laboratory Observatorio Vesuviano in Naples, Barba creates a fictional documentary including surveillance cameras, seismographs and early archival material of Naples by the Lumière Brothers. Empathizing with the role of a contemporary ethnographer, the work of New York based photographer Taryn Simon oscillates between an aesthetisized realism and collective memory. The works shown in Rethinking Location symbolically refer to sites of geopolitical weight, such as the Interior of Fidel Castro’s Palace of the Revolution in Havanna and night shots of a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah on the West Bank.
In his work Cyprien Gaillard alters the hierarchy of geographical sites and their representative value by detaching them from their original connotations: it deconstructs and conflates actual landscapes perpetuated by a spirit of anachronism and ruin of both past and present. His Fields of Rest series (2010) evolves around decomposed architecture of Second World War bunkers at the coastlines of the French Normandy. Paul Sietsema’s 16 mm films, drawings and sculptures bridge color, space and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. Over the last years, Sietsema has gathered archival photographs of artifacts of ‘lost cultures’, often from rare anthropological and ethnographic books. The artifacts he examines and transcribes into his own work often derive from western colonialism, industrialisation and geographic explorations including Oceania, South Asia, and Africa. In his film analyse d´une épouse (2008) he traces a ship-wreck, capturing its ruins on celluloid like timeless sculptures of a lost cultural memory.
Recalling thoughts by Bourriaud of the artist as Semionaut, treating geography as source material for new work, the drifting and the displacement between different cities allows artists to enter multi-dimensional, seminal dialogues within different contexts. Within both a local and global artistic practice charted by increasing displacement, expeditions, sites, destinations, distances and routes are elements that become incrementally significant.
Interested in topographies of detachment and displacement, Peru- born Aramando Andrade Tudela explores the notion of ‘tropical abstraction’. Reffering to the potential of 1960s utopian modernist architecture from South America, his 16 mm film Espace Niemayer (2007) takes place in the headquarters of the French communist party in Paris. Shot mostly in close-up mode, Tudela transformed the site built 1967 – 1972 by Brasilian architect Oscar Niemayer into a non-place: a fictional site without geographical foundation.
Koo Jeong- A creates mythologies and imaginary sites within the logic of existing places. Her work often gives prominence to the hidden, the ephemere, and the invisbile. For the exhibition Koo Jeong-A produced a new series of works, consisting of geological and social layers where maps, drawings and signs extend to a notional geography. Furthermore, she created a site specific, secret surprise location yet to be discovered.
Andreas Hofer´s work overlaps science fiction, scientific research and popular culture. Often evolving around early film noir, comics and crime literature, his multi-media installation Robert and Matt Maitland (2010) responds to the notion of the artist as an explorer. His work in the exhibition archly superimposes the protagonist from J.G. Ballard´s 1974 science fiction novel Concrete Island and the setting of a geographic exploration from a 1950s comic classic. By blending two originally detached storylines, Hofer proposes a new imaginary landscape.
Today intersections between actual sites, mass media and communication technology transform places into virtual mash-up locations: archipelagos of alternating signs oscillating between the actual and the virtual. Moreover, the internet has significantly increased the presence of maps and navigation systems in our thinking. For example, it has become easier to generate maps, to share and alter them, and to create them collaboratively (e.g. GPS and geo-tagging systems like Google Maps and Google Earth).
The art of Trevor Paglen blurs the border of art, science, and politics. Holding a Ph.D. in geography and operating at USC Berkeley´s geograph department, Paglen uses data analysis, advanced research skills and state-of-the-art photo observation techniques to map the terrain of American military secrets. He appropriates scientific imagery and dicourses of astronomy to provide the framing for what he calls an ‘experimental geography’. In his series The Other Night Sky Paglen turns our attention to some 189 secret intelligence satellites operated by the U.S. military to keep most of the world under surveillance.
The juxtaposed positions within Rethinking Location express a vast area of interconnected ideas and systems in a world where places are increasingly re-articulated and interrelated. Fostering an interdisciplinary approach, the exhibition aims to serve as inspiration to reconsider what the notion of location implies today. After the recent emphasis on networks and communities, could the focus now shift to location as a new key dimension?
