BOOKS: ON BORDERS

from the top: Anne Schönharting: Gerry Reynolds, katholischer Priester, Bombay Street, West Belfast, 2011 © Anne Schönharting; Annette Hauschild: Alex und Enikó, Gyönyöspata, Ungarn, 2012 © Annette Hauschild; Espen Eichhöfer: Nationalgarde, Südsudan 2012 © Espen Eichhöfer; Heinrich Völkel: UN Pufferzone, Flughafen Lefkosia, Nikosia, Zypern © Heinrich Völkel; Harald Hauswald: Bluesmesse Rummelsburg, DDR © Harald Hauswald; HATJE CANTZ Cover Image by Dawin Meckel: Vern auf Taubenjagd, Kanada 2012 © Dawin Meckel; ALL IMAGES ALSO © OSTKREUZ

"Not even death wants me", the young Palestinian Saleh says, recalling one of his many failed tries to kill himself. Saleh is a hustler, living in the middle of Tel Aviv, Isreal. His life takes place within the walls of an abandoned bus station, where he resides together with other drug-addicted homosexuals, transvestites, Christians, Muslims, Jews. The walls mark a border - not a territorial one, but one that makes the other inhabitants of Tel Aviv feel more comfortable and similarly offers shelter to the outcasts. Tobias Kruse's photographic documentation and Fritz Schaap's accompanying essay on the old "Terminal" in Tel Aviv, is one out of incredible 17 stories, printed in the exhibition catalogue "On Borders".

BERLIN: BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK

 

all images: Jannis Kounellis exhibition at Blain|Southern, Berlin; photo copyright artfridge

The material of tar pitch is extremely viscous - it is so viscous, that it was used to torture people and therefore reached a negative connotation in the German language: "Pech" suggests bad luck. In Jannis Kounellis current show at Blain|Southern in Berlin, the black substance emblematically hovers above the artworks, regardless of its brutality and its comfortless severity.

For the 1936-born Kounellis, steel and coal - multiply employed in the greek artist's solo show - assume the roles of a basis of modern society. Their heaviness is outweighted by simple black worker-jackets, which are nailed to steel frames or laid in a serpentine pattern around four circles of coal sacks. This connection instantly evokes a notion of labour, but the jackets similarly represent an anonymous figure - a shell that lost its inside.

Opposed to the jackets on steel frames, Jannis Kounellis re-introduces Kazimierz Malewicz's manifesto and positioned several black painted canvases in different sizes, measured after paintings of famous masterpieces by Goya or Caravaggio. Above each painting, the artist placed long steal beams hanging on steel bars, each carrying a long knife on a butcher's hook. The same hooks are used in the wall installation at the end of the gallery, carrying black jackets folded into a ball of textiles.

The non-colour black is not only visually apparent, but it becomes, as curator Rudi Fuchs translates for Jannis Kounellis, "the topic, the leitmotif". Art, as Fuchs explains, needs to be "terrible", it is not beautiful. But however aggressive, brutal and even viscous Kounellis black-in-black exhibition might seem, it certainly doesn't lack beauty.

BERLIN: INFINITY HAS NO ACCENT

  

all works, including photos, sculptures and film-stills, by Halil Altındere in the show 'Infinity has no accent' at Tanas, Berlin; images by artifridge

In most parts of Europe and the USA, socially and politically critical art works have had a hard time being accepted within the last years. That might be because the western world feels more or less comfortable with its current situation or maybe just because it generally seems uncool to talk about politics. At the same time, however, it is collectives like Pussy Riot, who have been celebrated as important and liberating heroes of our generation. In the end, it always comes down to the question: Can art actually change anything?

From that perspective, it was interesting to see the current exhibition by Halil Altındere, a 1971-born contemporary Turkish artist and curator with an extremely wide spectrum of work material, at Tanas Berlin. Showing art that he produced within the last five years, Altındere breaks all the rules, crosses all the borders that we perhaps imagine to be stopping him in Turkey. Gay soccer players and body builders, seductive beauty queens, ridiculous chauvinism and nationalism - criticism is his weapon. 

Originating from a painterly education, Altındere's short films reveal his liability to classic aestheticism. Colours, composition, dynamics merge into a superficially beautiful picture, that is broken with a harsh cynicism and irony. And hasn't irony always been an effective weapon against politics?

COLOGNE: A STOLEN LIMESTONE

from the top: image 1-2, cemented shirts 'Selenium' by Rowena Harris; image 3-6 three-piece installation 'Whenever Standing In Between Whiles' by Alice Guareschi, all images by artfridge, courtesy DREI, Cologne and the artists  

On the gallery's ground floor Rowena Harris positioned two cemented and squared shirts, standing - shy and invisible - in a corner next to the stairway. Her colourful and abstracted prints Attachment, which are the second part of her mini-show 'Cold Compress', are similarly camouflage by the space, almost becoming absent, as they are hanging behind the windows as if they were light protectors.

In the first floor's main room, Alice Guareschi's presentation 'Whenever Standing In Between Whiles' suggests an interplay of the two- and the three-dimensional - the vertical and horizontal: a standing paravant-like mirror, a lying round-shaped labyrinth, a hanging and framed photograph. Beautiful and yet, conceptually challenging, this composition asks the visitor to interfere and disturb its invisible bond. 

The most traditional and equally narrative space is to be found in the last and smallest room of the gallery, where Samantha Bohatsch presents a textile sculpture and three manipulated museum-postcards in her mini-show 'Virginia'. Referring to Virginia Woolf, baroque and alienated clothes  suggest identificatory notions of the (artist's) body. Also Bohatsch plays with the motif of absence, as she integrates a missing white limestone as her central piece, now merely adorning the invitation cards.