Scratching the Surface
April 30–May 2, 2021
An exhibition in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg windows and balconies.
With: Sarah Alberti & Grischa Meyer, Salwa Aleryani, Arts of the Working Class, Kader Attia, Yael Bartana & Saskia Wendland, Timur Celik, Matthias Daenschel, Jeremiah Day & Alisa Margolis, Christina Dimitriadis, discoteca flaming star, Christoph Draeger & Heidrun Holzfeind, Sam Durant & Ana Prvački, Övül Ö. Durmusoglu & Jörn Schafaff ft. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Knut Eckstein, Theo Eshetu, Olaf Grawert & Gábor Kocsis, Jan Peter Hammer, Heinz Havemeister, Hannah Hurtzig, Stine Marie Jacobsen & Teobaldo Lagos Preller, Monika Jarecka, Anne Duk Hee Jordan & Pauline Doutreluingne, Christoph Keller, Joanna Kusiak and Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen, Matylda Krzykowski, Sonja Lau, Michelle-Marie Letelier, Antonia Low & Tommy Støckel, Cam-Anh Luong & Hatef Soltani & Dachil Sado & Ulf Aminde & Krishan Rajapakshe & D’Andrade, Kamila Metwaly & Max Schneider, Markus Miessen & Lena Mahr, Tom McCarthy & Eva Stenram, Müller Dreimalklingeln & Joke Lanz, Olaf Nicolai, Pınar Öğrenci, LAGE EGAL & Irène Hug, Andrea Pichl, Prater Galerie/x-embassy, Matheus Rocha Pitta, David Rych, Harry Sachs & Ini Dill / Daniel Drabek, Susanne Sachsse & Marc Siegel, Eva Scharrer ft. Ayşe Erkmen, Isabella Sedeka, Antje Stahl & Felix-Emeric Tota, Nasan Tur, Markus Uhr (Note di Sguardi), Uslar und Rai/Sophia Tabatadze, Raul Walch, Joanna Warsza & Florian Malzacher, Christine Würmell, Dolores Zinny & Juan Maidagan and all unexpected.
Curated by: Övül Ö. Durmusoglu & Joanna Warsza
It has been a year, and what a year it has been. We have improved at slowing down, seeing things in larger detail, falling into everyday traps, and grieving. And have we become more aware of the space in-between us, of how we breathe the common air, and of how being in public has changed? Die Balkone, for the second time, invites members of the artistic community in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg to activate their windows and balconies with signs of life, art, isolation or connection. Last year’s edition grew like a snowball from a spontaneous project; spawning nearby versions in Kreuzberg or further in Paris, Stockholm, Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, or Taipei. Wherever we go, we are all neighbors to someone.
This time, in addition to the more than 40 artistic contributions spilling from the domestic into the public, the second iteration of Die Balkone scratches another surface by addressing the complex experience of pandemic life from a situated perspective of the Berlin Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood. Many prejudices are projected on the area—some with good reason. It is generally a privileged zone, a gentrified terrain shaped around the needs of the nuclear family, such as ice cream parlors, or organic food markets. But other worlds exist here as well: ones that don’t fit this picture between shame and comfort.
Besides the windows and balconies, this year’s exhibition will start at the Ernst Thälmann monument—one of the few that remained from the GDR era, as per the locals’ wishes—with a project by Sam Durant and Ana Prvački. We also dive into domestic and artistic archives with the art historian Sarah Alberti and graphic designer Grischa Meyer, who revisit parts of the 1990 historical public art exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit. The third project highlights the immediate post-Wall era in an apartment where another nomadic resident, Rirkrit Tiravanija, lived at the time. Finally Prater Galerie, an important place for the East German art scene since 1967, presents the Kollektiv x-embassy working on intergenerational wom*ns experience of urban spaces in Pankow around 1989.
Die Balkone becomes a cyclical calendar exhibition, a temperature-check marking time from the beginning of the pandemic, and a situated exercise for art as a form of recovery, social glue, and point of connection. Die Balkone is also an invitation to negotiate what the pandemic has taught us: the interdependence between the priorities and the needs, the very local and the global, the inside and the outside, the digital and the analogue, the public and the personal, again somewhere on the edge of a balcony.
Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
