BERLIN — Gallery Weekend Berlin 2023 has come and gone full of joys. There is, of course, a brilliant official achievement: the 19th edition of the initiative was the largest ever, with 55 galleries (large, small, institutional) from across the city presenting more than 80 artists, including celebrities and veterans. All this bathed in the soft glow of corporate sponsorships (Gucci, BMW) promising sumptuous dinners and frenzied techno evenings.
Gallery Weekend is not a Wagnerian endurance test. Since it’s impossible to see everything, especially for its restless attendees, it’s more of an art world’s version of Wacky races: glorious chaos prepared. There is no grand curatorial theme dictated to the galleries above. It is surely an act of generosity, allowing different exhibits to contradict each other, inviting visitors to discuss with enthusiasm. Curators, collectors and critics all jump in and out of the sleekly-interior shuttles, gossiping ravingly at brunches, huddled in smoking areas; ordinary people politely listen to the spiel of gallerists, mostly in smiling silence, the bravest asking insightful questions happily without the names of other artists they’ve heard of, the shows they’ve seen, or the language technical; the throngs of impossibly stylish local performers sweep the cool, damp streets.
A standout theme, however, was exhibitions motivated by political ideas. Kapwani Kiwanga 15 Piece Wall Art Series Sisal (2023) at Tanja Wagner consists of light drapes in sisal, questioning the colonial history of the material. At Rhea Dillon’s We searched for eyes narrowed in concern, but saw only veils at Sweetwater, ten sculptures embody passages by Toni Morrison The bluest eye (1970). The six versions of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec The medical visit (1894) which appear in the self-proclaimed “political dominatrix” Reba Maybury [erp] From Paris with love at Efremidis Gallery are produced by its “submissives”. Each of them must donate to charities of their choice and complete a detailed application form before serving her, and the works, reflecting the emotional toll of the moral terrorism perpetrated against sex workers by medical authorities backed by the State, bear the name their pseudonym, their profession, their age and their place of residence. Meanwhile, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger heart core at Barbara Weiss reflects on the gendered history of the human heart as an example of devotional symbolism, redeploying the forms of triptych altarpieces and fifteenth-century Flemish painting.
There was also a thematic and often material scale to some of the exhibitions which reflects the scale of Gallery Weekend as a whole. These include shows by veteran artists who may well be known outside the art world, like Hito Steyerl and Cao Fei, as well as less obvious names like Hiwa K and Monia Ben Hamouda. The latter’s exhibition About telepathy and other violence in ChertLüdde consists mainly of works by the artist Aniconism as figurative urgency series (2021-ongoing) of twisted steel sculptures influenced by Arabic calligraphy, with brown, black and white dusty scatters made of spices (chilli, cumin, henna, coconut charcoal, dried beetroot, salt) forming winding paths beneath them. I saw Adam Budak, curator at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, go around these works, attentive and pensive. He told me, whispering excitedly in the momentary silence between visits from curators and collectors, that these twisted shapes showed “sensuality and a poor sense of place.”
The gnarled linguistic forms of Ben Hamouda hang from the ceiling, as do the large blown glass lamps resembling melons in Hang don’t cut by the art collective Slavs and Tatars in Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. This is not their only similarity. The show Slaves and Tatars tells a story about the complex status of the fruit in Central Asian societies (especially Uzbekistan and Xinjiang), where it is stored in warehouses to ripen artificially late, contrasting with the arid landscape and inflexible. It also plays a hybrid social role: melons are part of local religious mythology, as they are said to have grown as splendid divine gifts in the Garden of Eden, the cracks in their earthly forms reflecting the sweeping gestures of Arabic script . Where Ben Hamouda contorts words and characters Arabic readers might once have understood, Slavs and Tatars offer a sweet, juicy taste of the redemptive power of words. Both sets of objects, however, remove the possibility of being deciphered at the same time that they give us the painful taste of what knowledge might be.
Partly inaccessible truths are also the basis of Hiwa K’s “View from Above”. (2017) by Like a good, good, good boy at KOW. Originally created for Documenta 14, the work consists of a resplendent carpet-like floor model of the city of Kassel seen from above and destroyed by war; the video allows you to listen to the artist describe his hometown from an imaginary point of view from memory, as if he were looking at the city from above from a bird’s eye view. This is what the German system requires of its asylum seekers, as a court examines maps of “dangerous” places to determine whether the asylum seeker is telling the truth about their place of origin and the legitimacy of their request on this basis. .
It’s easy for those of us who come armed with art theory ammunition to read this as a high-stakes inversion of Marco Polo’s descriptions of imaginary places to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino Invisible cities (1972). For many, however, including some visitors visibly moved by the work, treading carefully on the “carpet” as if they were at home, it is reminiscent of the specific type of bureaucratic humiliation imposed on the most vulnerable.
“Contemporary Rock Art” by Hito Steyerl (2023), which is part of the exhibition at Esther Schipper, is a site-specific version of her “Animal Spirits” (2022) environment. This film, complemented by computer-generated live animation projected onto custom surround screens, produces a prime cave-like space to experience the work’s combination of historical footage, animation, motion graphics and of interviews. Several spectators have declared feeling totally immersed in the darkness of the work, the primordial palace of the screens. Proceeds from the sale of individual glass spheres, which contain measurement indicators for plant health that respond to visitor interaction, will go to victims of recent earthquakes in Turkey and northern Syria.
Simurgh. Ten women artists from Iran at Crone takes Islamic poet Attar of Nishapur’s epic poem “The Conference of the Birds” from the 12th century as a starting point to exhibit the works of women who will help create a new Iran when the Islamic Republic comes to an end. The density of the exhibition means that it is quite crowded in the gallery space on Fasanenstrasse, but that does not make less dignified what it says about art’s contribution to future democracy, Berliners nodding their solemn assent. In particular, “No National Flag Uses a Gradient #1-8” by Anahita Ramzi (2022), which features the main phrase on a series of eight flags running on a black and white gradient, is a timely and solemn reflection on the visual language of democracy and what is at stake when we strive for social change radical.
Fo Finally, Cao Fei Duotopia at Sprüth Magers is a vast post-digital playground with several video works; a cosmic viewing platform that makes viewers feel like they’re doing cybernetic stargazing; a badminton court with the artist’s elegant dystopian post-post-internet images adjoining as a net; a camping scene with tents and a gazebo with folding chairs placed in front of a screen showing real people doing exactly what viewers pretend to do; and more. The book is a meditation on the metaverse and the long history of philosophical reflections on how we look at the world to construct reality from what is only illusory.
Dodging the badminton court, a woman craned her neck to watch the disconcerting visual banquet: “My God,” she gasped, in a German accent, full of unconscious wonder. We could probably do more.
