Fall 2020 exhibition program

The world is not like us, it was imposed, we try to transform it
Miguel Calderón, Karla Kaplun, Sarah Minter, Berenice Olmedo, Lucia Elena Průša
Curated by Anna Goetz
September 11–October 15, 2020

“The world is not like us, it was imposed, we try to transform it” says a protagonist of Nadie es inocente [No One is Innocent] (1987) by Sarah Minter (1953–2016). The pioneer of Mexican video art and experimental film is known for her portraits of marginalized individuals and groups in Mexico. Her unsparing but empathic depictions are a critique of social inequality in Mexico, a persisting consequence of the country’s colonial history, the effects of which are still felt in Mexican society and the societies of other former colonies.

The group exhibition The world is not like us, it was imposed, we try to transform it deals with the violent imposition—and resistance against—Western constructs of identity, values, and development, which are defined as normative means by which hierarchies are constructed and reproduced, thus resulting in various forms of marginalization.

The exhibition presents drawings, sculptures, videos, photographs, and installations by five international artists of various generations, in which the body is used as a medium of resistance. The validity of patriarchal and modern concepts is called into question. The compulsion to adapt and subject oneself to these ideas is revealed as a process of physical and psychological violence. The bodies and their subjects struggle against these imposed patterns and ideals, bearing signs of the force used against them.

Text by Anna Goetz

Static
Lena von Goedeke
October 23–November 19, 2020

Static marks the first solo exhibition by Berlin artist Lena von Goedeke (*1983) at Galerie Britta Rettberg in Munich. Originally planned under different circumstances for spring 2020, the concept of the exhibition transformed during the pandemic to become an atmospherically trenchant view of individually and collectively experienced shifts and distortions caused by the lockdown’s temporal caesura.

Lena von Goedeke’s artistic oeuvre is not limited to any one medium or technique but revolves around the specific qualities of the material she chooses for realizing her works and the questions that arise from these. Her virtuoso treatment of extremely different materials and the concentrated and precise implementation of the underlying concepts and ideas are based on physical phenomena, her own expedition experiences in the Arctic extremes, and her regular transgressions of borders in digital transit. In her sculptural work, priority is given to the transformation of a single material into a complex and subversive statement about our perception of the world, whereas in the case of her precise paper cuts and photographs, the artist explores both the potential and the risks of a digitally pre-sorted perception of the world.

Text by Lena von Goedeke

On Survival
Boban Andjelkovic, Helene Appel, Jakob Brugge, Chiara Camoni, Hanna Maria Hammari, Piotr Lakomy, Anastasia Sosunova, Alan Stefanato, Andrew Norman Wilson
Curated by Caterina Avataneo
November 27, 2020–January 15, 2021

Operating through allusive references and lyrical registers, On Survival addresses the ambiguities and tensions behind contrasting modalities of human subsistence and in particular their tendency towards mutual care and solidarity, or self preservation and societal withdrawal. The evocative qualities of materials, forms and imagery relating to the basics for survival, are brought to the fore in order to stage—and undo—ideas of both collectivity and hermitic isolation.
The show presents simultaneously convivial and hostile situations, which overlap, threatening any sense of safety on the one hand, and allowing a post-prosperity vitality to emerge on the other. In such a ruinous landscape, the modalities of human participation rest rather unresolved, and looking at survival becomes an excuse to ponder upon perceptions of community and immunity at a moment when the understanding of such ideas is increasingly shaping political strategies and collective conscience around future ecologies of endurance.

Text by Caterina Avataneo