Gallery Hopping

Gallery Hopping



6pm: The exhibition of CTM - Festival for Adventurous Art and Music opens at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien. Upon entering Bethanien I always get sidetracked by the smell of waffles. This time I resist the temptation. For once, the CTM exhibition is not cluttered, which is a change for the better. There is red carpet and black walls. I don't understand the art and have no access to it.  I don't get the aesthetics. But my friend i. does, and she says she will come back to see the show without me speeding through it. I consider going up to Momentum but i. tells me it's the worst art place in town. I believe her. 

7pm: Left Performance Histories at nGbK is a good exhibition. It's showing performances from Eastern Europe from the 1970s onwards. It's elegantly curated and managed to dig up great material. The emphasis is a lot on the 70s and 80s, less on the contemporary. It features also many women performers. The only minor point is that after a while everything starts to turn into the same: naked women, vagina, dressing up. My favourite is the work by Mladen Stilinovic, Dictionary of Pain, (Letter A), 2011, with pages from the Oxford Dictionary. I like its minimalism. Of course, I might be biased because I just changed the title of this blog to AAAAA. 

8pm: Esther Schipper shows Brazilian minimalist artists. Although I'm a minimalist this work is too minimalist for me. I've never thought so much about Esther Schipper as a blue chip gallery but the new white cube spaces are just screaming it.

8:30pm: At Kunstsaele there's a show curated by Philipp Bollmann from the collection of Wemhöner. It's titled Satisfy Me, and although the art in itself is not as such sexist, it's a sexist show, clearly based on the collection of some rich guy. All the women I meet are turning their eyes in disbelief. Were the curator and collector living in some separate universe for the last months?  

9pm: At Exile there's a hint of the interesting in Martin Kohaut's show but then the video breaks down. The textile shrines in the other space are strange - if it's a good kind of strange I don't know. Pinky gin tonic is served and empty boxes of pizza are on the table. I'm wondering if Exile is trending up. 

We finish the night with a rum at Lena Braun's Bar Babiche on Potsdamer Straße. I'm debating to go to the Transmediale exhibition during the weekend. My friend P. tells me he thinks I won't like it because "it's mostly cubicles filled with the same sort of video/installation/social practice accoutrement that we see all the time." He recommends me to go to one of the panel discussions like the "the weaponization of language" at 2:30pm on Saturday. 

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