KOW

04/05/2021

Candice Breitz’s video installation 'Double Karen (Close To You)' (1970 - 2000) featured in the group exhibition ‘Elvis and Wein & Mozart’ at Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples.

Double Karen (Close To You) is part of Breitz’s “Four Duets” series, which spans nearly half a century of the most sentimental pop tunes. The music video performances that serve as the source material for the work - but which ultimately live on only as digitally mutilated and autistic chains of stammering pronouns - are: Karen Carpenter’s Close To You (1970), Olivia Newton John’s Hopelessly Devoted To You (1977), Annie Lennox’s Thorn In My Side (1985) and Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You (1999). Revisiting and rewriting the four ballads, Breitz dramatizes the absurdly inescapable longing which allows songs like these to endure from generation to generation.
Each of the Duets is a condensation of a lovesong into its two crucial structural components, an “I Loop” and a “You Loop,” now set in a somewhat short-circuited and schizophrenic dialogue with one another. The duets call up their decades with a painful and sometimes cringe-worthy specificity (Karen Carpenter’s bangs unmistakably announce the end of the ‘sixties, while Annie Lennox’s chic platinum spikes are pure ‘eighties).
As a series, the Four Duets make disturbingly visible the speed with which each new cultural moment is now reified, only to be consumed almost immediately as the lucrative kitsch of the next generation. In conflating the digital loop with the historical loop of pop culture, they address our need to constantly reinvent and market the past. That retro is now indeed Retro is testimony to the planned obsolescence and eventual return of even the quaintest jukebox ballad or music video.

Images Courtesy Collezione Morra Greco, Napoli, © Maurizio Esposito

#candicebreitz #doublekaren #karencarpenter #collezionemorragreco #fondazionemorragreco #kow #kowberlin

01/05/2021

We‘re open!

To visit the exhibitions, please present a negative Covid-19 test result issued within the last 24 hours.

Due to limited capacity we suggest booking an appointment via [email protected] beforehand.

We‘re open!

To visit the exhibitions, please present a negative Covid-19 test result issued within the last 24 hours.

Due to limited capacity we suggest booking an appointment via [email protected] beforehand.

30/04/2021

Sonia Leimer’s exhibition „Junks of Joy“, presented by Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, is the second show in our Joint Ventures Program. On view until June 12.
Joint Ventures is a year-long project inviting international galleries to present exhibitions in the KOW Showroom.

Sonia Leimer’s exhibition „Junks of Joy“ intertwines several strands in the artist’s output of the past few years. Leimer’s art grapples with forms of globalization, the exploration of new places, and the relevance of these movements, sketching their impact on the world.
In the key scene in the classic 1980s movie “Wall Street,” Gordon Gekko, the personification of rampant neoliberalism, tries to explain the world to a delegation of union representatives. Gekko’s credo that “greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit” sums up a growth-positive way of thinking that has shaped our lives for generations. At its core, it contains a second important component—hope. The hope of advancement, the hope of setting off for distant shores, but by extension also the expectation that technology will compensate for our destructive way of life: the perennial hope that we will somehow fix the whole mess.
The video “Eden Antarctica” homes in on this observation. We are transported to a research station in the icy wastes of Antarctica, where scientists are investigating novel forms of food production—a tacit admission of defeat: instead of trying to resolve a global challenge, humanity invests its hopes in scientifically and geographically remote panaceas. The need for less exploitative uses of the planet and its resources is obscured by the futuristic belief that a broken planet can be made livable again by an enormous feat of engineering.

#sonialeimer #galerienaechstststephan #rosemarieschwarzwälder #jointventures #galleryweekendberlin #galleryweekend2021 #kow #kowberlin

30/04/2021

Mario Pfeifer’s exhibition “What Must Not Be, Cannot Be” is now open to the public - on view until July 24.

“After Mario Pfeifer’s widely acclaimed video installation Again / Noch einmal (Xth Berlin Biennale, 2018), KOW presents his most recent project, which puts the focus on another scandalous instance of racism: the unexplained death of Oury Jalloh, a prime example of the problem of institutional racism in Germany and beyond.
The case has been all over the German media. Because the idea that Oury Jalloh set himself on fire sixteen years ago in a detention cell at the police headquarters in Dessau-Roßlau and died within minutes is not only believed by virtually no one—it has also been conclusively rejected by a number of scientific experts and refuted by attempts to reconstruct the events. Jalloh’s death is simply impossible to explain without the involvement of a third party. Yet the investigation did not even consider the possibility that the very policemen who had arrested the man from Sierra Leone might have started the fire that killed him. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office and other authorities did not see sufficient reason to suspect a murder motivated by xenophobic hatred. That is why a cloud of doubts has continued to hang over the case. The German and international press have widely remarked that the proceedings have been hampered by almost farcical legal and administrative bumbling and foot-dragging. A constitutional appeal related to the case is pending in the Federal Constitutional Court.
Established in 2005, Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh e.V. has been pushing for a thorough investigation in order to uncover the full truth. For his project, Mario Pfeifer has worked with the initiative to produce a new expert study of the fire that will revisit the findings of earlier trials and experiments and elaborate on their conclusions.”

#mariopfeifer #whatmustnotbecannotbe #galleryweekendberlin #galleryweekend2021 #kow #kowberlin

29/04/2021

Sophie Gogl’s exhibition "Jars“ is now open to the public - on view until June 12.

"I don’t want to. I can’t. I mustn’t! Not now. Maybe I’ll come back to it tomorrow. We’re perpetually compelled to postpone what we would want, should do, might wish for. Acting hasn’t felt like this in a long time: like an uncertain proposition that’s presumably inappropriate just now and may well be just as inappropriate the day after tomorrow.
Perhaps you’re at home. Perhaps the kids are getting on your nerves. Perhaps you’re sitting all alone in a gallery and have no idea what you should actually make plans for. Perhaps you’re not even getting replies to your emails anymore because people have wandered off somewhere beyond reach. An island life. And inside your head, ideas are starting to hunker down in the same places where they were perched yesterday and you shoo away the cobwebs between them.
KOW presents Sophie Gogl. It’s her first exhibition with KOW, scheduled to open for the 2021 Gallery Weekend. We talk on the phone. There will be fourteen tondos to be hung. She’s obviously going to come to Berlin from Vienna to hang them, she says. Tondos are circular canvases, and these are painted on both sides and will be suspended from the ceiling instead of being bolted to the wall the way paintings more typically are.
She has epistulaphobia, she says on the phone, and I ask whether that’s a virus. No, she says. It means that you’re scared of letters. I simply can’t open them, Sophie says, and I think: Yes. Bad news. Most of them are about money. There are so many things I keep kicking down the road, she says, and I nod quietly. And then you open the fridge and take out a jar of jam, you unscrew the lid and stick your knife into a cushion of green mold, Sophie says, because the jam has been sitting there, unnoticed, for months and now it just can’t keep going on, its willpower is spent, and so it’s embarked on a life of its own.“

#sophiegogl #jars #galleryweekendberlin #galleryweekend2021 #kow #kowberlin

29/04/2021

Introducing Sonia Leimer, the third artist we will be showing during our upcoming Gallery Weekend exhibition - opening this Friday.

In her work, Sonia Leimer explores our perceptual foundations, which are formed on the basis of individual, historical, and media-related patterns of experience. As products of concrete historical contexts, rooms and objects undergo a transformation in which history and societal changes become palpable.
Urban spaces and hypothetical territories are key themes in Sonia Leimer’s work. Her sculptures, videos and installations find expression somewhere between real locations (transformed into the imaginary contexts of the cinema industry) and undefined dimensions – like the dimensions of cosmic galaxies that are so far away, they seem almost virtual. Sonia Leimer’s works leave scattered clues and traces without ever forming a complete identity, to the point of becoming visual enigmas requiring constant re-interpretation.

Leimer’s exhibition “Junks of Joy“ at KOW is presented by Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, as part of our Joint Ventures program.

Image 1: Installation view Museion Bozen, 2020. Photo: Luca Guadagnini.

Image 2: Installation view Museion Bozen, 2020. Photo: Luca Guadagnini.

Image 3: Installation view Museion Bozen, 2020. Photo: Luca Guadagnini.

Image 4: Installation view ISCP New York, 2019.

Image 5: Installation view ISCP New York, 2019.

Image 6: Installation view Museion Bozen, 2020. Photo: Laura Egger.

#sonialeimer #galleryweekend2021 #galerienaechstststephan #rosemarieschwarzwaelder #jointventures #kow #kowberlin

28/04/2021

In preparation for our upcoming Gallery Weekend show, we introduce the second of the three artists exhibited.

Mario Pfeifer was born in 1981 in Dresden, Germany. His work explores representational structures and conventions in the medium of film, in locations ranging from Mumbai to California to the Western Sahara. Conceiving each project out of a specific cultural situation, he researches social-political backgrounds and weaves further cross-cultural art historical, filmic and political references into a richly layered practice, ranging from film and video installations to photographs and text installations. Often, Pfeifer collaborates on publications that reconsider these projects, offering research materials and critical investigations by writers and thinkers of related fields, concerning issues suggested in his projects for a wider social-political discussion.

His most recent project, “Zelle 5 – 800° Celsius: Act I”, will be on view in the exhibition “What Must Not Be, Cannot Be” at KOW - opening this Friday.

Image 1: Approximation In The Digital Age To A Humanity Condemned To Disappear, 2014, installation view at KOW Berlin, 2015.

Image 2: Approximation In The Digital Age To A Humanity Condemned To Disappear, 2014, installation view at KOW Berlin, 2015.

Image 3: Again / Noch Einmal, 2018, installation view at The Power Plant Toronto, 2019. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Image 4: Again / Noch Einmal, 2018, installation view, 10. Berlin Biennale, Akademie der Künste Berlin, 2018. Photo: Timo Ohler.

Image 5: #blacktivist, 2015, installation view at Pylon Hub Dresden, 2019.

Image 6: Corpo Fechado, 2016, installation view at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, 2016.

Image 7: Black/White/Grey, 2020, video still.

#mariopfeifer #galleryweekendberlin #galleryweekend2021 #kow #kowberlin

27/04/2021

In preparation for our upcoming Gallery Weekend show, we introduce the first of the three artists exhibited.

Sophie Gogl was born in 1992 in Kitzbühel, Austria, and studied painting at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with Professor Judith Eisler, where she graduated in 2017. Most of her imagery she finds on the internet. Motifs from media, films or advertising are transformed to investigate ways in which painting can shape narratives in an infinite world of images. More than in the images themselves, Sophie Gogl is looking into the mechanisms of their appearance and disappearance in the data stream, while her practice includes installation and combinations of various media.
Her first solo exhibition at KOW, “Jars”, will be opening this Friday.

Image 1: Installation view Preview Cities Milan, Palazzo Cramer, 2020.

Image 2: Installation view Preview Cities Milan, Palazzo Cramer, 2020.

Image 3: Installation view Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, 2020. Photo: Aslan Kudrnofsky.

Image 4: Installation view Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, 2020. Photo: Aslan Kudrnofsky.

Image 5: Installation view Strabag Kunstforum Vienna, 2021. Photo: Rudi Froese.

Image 6: Installation view Strabag Kunstforum Vienna, 2021. Photo: Rudi Froese.

Image 7: Installation view Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, 2020. Photo: Verena Nagl.

Image 8: Installation view Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, 2020. Photo: Verena Nagl.

#sophiegogl #galleryweekendberlin #galleryweekend2021 #kow #kowberlin

26/04/2021

Throwback to Barbara Hammer’s exhibition “Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor”, shown during Gallery Weekend 2020 at KOW.

Barbara Hammer framed deviant perspectives on social relations, on the female body, and on the people who mattered to her, devising an alternative to the male gaze that long ruled, and still remains hegemonic in the worlds of art and cinema. She turned her attention to images and stories from lives—her own and those of other women and men—that were suppressed by the modern apparatuses of the camera and the editing suite, sound and technical abstraction, but also by politics and the medical and media industries; images and stories that were time and again edited out of the common psyche and not even taken into consideration. Hammer put her hand to the task, earnestly and joyfully. She grappled with herself, with her media, with situations that were challenging, with a canon that included some and excluded others, with the aesthetics of her time. And her time spanned half a century.
Focusing on the 1980s—when Hammer left California for New York—our exhibition turns the spotlight on an artist confidently pursuing an experimental practice and expanding on the themes of her early work, while insistently enlarging the radius of her activities and her engagement with politics and media.

#barbarahammer #wouldyouliketomeetyourneighbor #galleryweekend2020 #kow #kowberlin

26/04/2021

Throwback to Clegg & Guttmann and Franz Erhard Walther’s joint exhibition, shown during Gallery Weekend 2019 at KOW.

People need rules. Following rules is a social, political, and economic imperative. We like some and resent others; we make them, bend them, break them. The three artists we present have long investigated how rules operate, how they exert power over us, as well as how to understand them better, game them, or come up with new ones. They have different perspectives on rules and ideas on how to mold, twist, or dismantle them. But they share a critical and playful approach to what we might call the snares of participatory cultures, lured by the democratic promise of autonomy within the norms established by a society that has institutionalized mutual support. If you’re a fan of the concept of social participation, the exhibition is an entertaining study in how this political idea is celebrated and distorted, undermined and lampooned.
[...]
Striking a balance between self-determination and the pitfalls of interaction is a tricky business. The regimes of identity and representation, of self-expression and heteronomy can entangle the subject and her thoughts, but they can also be the sharp edge that lets her cut through such tangles. Franz Erhard Walther spotlights how certain forms of agreement are key to the cohesion of a democratic community in which everyone can recognize and accept their positions. Clegg & Guttmann, meanwhile, regard the social as shaped by an ongoing tug of war between countervailing forces: “Whenever something seems democratic, one must try to identify the violence that makes people move in the same direction.”

#cleggandguttmann #franzerhardwalther #galleryweekend2019 #kow #kowberlin

25/04/2021

Throwback to Henrike Naumann’s exhibition “Ostalgie”, shown during Gallery Weekend 2019 at KOW.

Ostalgie may be read as an individual and collective longing: as the projection, loaded with positive emotions, of a fictional East German society, an imagination cobbled together from media discourses and selective snippets of memory. This sentiment is at odds with the communist philosophy of history known as historical materialism. In the logic of history’s necessary progression, the past could not possibly have been better than the future. With the collapse of communism, the authoritarian rollback around the world, and the onset of global warming, however, the future has lost its allure as a social vision. On the other hand, Ostalgie is also a form of resistance, a “counter-memory” (Daphne Berdahl) that defies a hegemonic culture of memory and commemoration as much as the colonialization of East German lived realities.
The linear sequence of stages envisioned by the Marxist model of social development and the capitalist growth paradigms share a positive point of reference: the primordial hunter-gatherer society as a projection of the human foundations of sociality. In the gallery’s ground-floor showroom, Naumann’s new installation Ostalgie (Urgesellschaft) turns the spotlight on the materiality of anthropological narratives and reactionary social models. East German everyday objects mingle with cartoonish furniture for a Flintstonesque “neo-Paleolithic” (Markues). Naumann’s work inquires into the abiding appeal of utopias that promise to reduce the complexity of contemporary life and beckon with the construction of an ostensibly simple past. Sexual, racial, and social structures that are unmistakably steeped in violence and raw power are the intellectual constants of this imaginary “retrotopia” (Zygmunt Bauman). The ground that no longer holds firm becomes the wall.

Text: Clemens Villinger

#henrikenaumann #ostalgie #galleryweekend2019 #kow #kowberlin