Across the centuries, what has brought people in Europe together?

What traces can we find of these past interactions in our lives today?

“INTERACTIONS” reveals stories about people moving and meeting, about travelling ideas and goods, about encounters and exchange, into a kaleidoscopic view of Europe’s cultural history.

“INTERACTIONS” is a meeting place: It invites you to interact in different ways, just as previous Europeans did, when they were trading, fighting, or negotiating. Come and interact with the exhibition, play games with other visitors!

“INTERACTIONS” invites you to discover using all senses: You will see beautiful objects, play musical records, listen to stories of people meeting, smell perfumes, touch cloths and discover the history of pizza and croissant!

https://historia-europa.ep.eu/en/interactions

Candice Nembhard writes:

Intense political climates such as Trump’s Administration and Brexit negotiations often mobilise visual, performative and conceptual responses among artists an. In an age of the closely documented and widely circulated, consumers are often inundated with updates and headlines, discussing a breadth of facts and fiction. Centrum’s group exhibition ‘Shades of Today: Picking Up the Pieces Post Truth’ not only addresses this either/or dynamic but looks to physical and online spaces that seek to keep specific narratives hidden from public consumption. The small interactive project space, through smell, image and sound, calls into question our own understanding of agency and accountability.

 

Curated by Kate J Davis, the exhibition consists of six standout artists directly and excitingly dealing with the unreported and the unspoken. Martin John Callanan​’s ‘Wars During My Lifetime’ (1982-2013) is a prime example regarding tone and intent of the exhibition space. His small newspaper publication lists a number of wars across 30 years, without footnote or commentary. Although this piece could easily be disregarded in terms of it size and aesthetic appeal, arguably, its purpose is to point out media bias and media accountability when reporting incidents are often supported if not enforced by state and media groups. Its simple and accessible form allows readers to impart their own experience, or lack thereof with the content and as a result come to term with their own moral agency and consciousness.

 

Quite often we desire the headline and not the story.

 

Callanan’s use of the printed format as opposed to online sources such as the internet or smartphones subtly addresses the shift in news consumption. Production of the broadsheet has depleted in favour of being first to report the headline, even if this means neglecting the truth. The simple nature of the work is a direct response to the simple ways in which wish to digest news; quite often we desire the headline and not the story. The publication in itself does prompt the questions, what do we desire from the media? Furthermore, are we willing to look beyond? In effect, Callanan’s piece is a nod towards the uncertainty or responsibility in so-called ‘honest journalism’, moreover, whether or not we as consumers actually desire the truth.

 

In a similar style of presentation, Benedikt Partenheimer​’s ‘Business As Usual’ (2016) looks into issues of clarity among bureaucratic powers regarding issues of pollution and climate change. Spanning across the space of a wall are printouts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change overseeing picture frame of smog. Stacked next to the backdrop are a pile of papers representing the extensive report and research gone into investigating climate change. In a sense, this work is a representation of fact versus fiction. Evidence of climate change surrounds us; unpredictable weather patterns, migrations and deaths of species, even unexpected natural disasters; both visually and physically we are victim to these changes.

 

Partenheimer’s work, much like Callanan’s piece focuses on addressing why we give precedence to bureaucratic officials when evidence of their findings are lived experiences for many communities.

 

It seems only darkly funny, that a picture of smog covers the factual information gone into investigating climate change. Partenheimer’s work, much like Callanan’s piece focuses on addressing why we give precedence to bureaucratic officials when evidence of their findings are lived experiences for many communities. Much like the pieced backdrop, we as global citizens should not be clouded by jargon smog or ‘official findings’. Again, without providing, additional criticism, I would argue that both artists are asking us to reclaim our own investigative interests. In doing so, we put the destiny of our futures back into our own hands and into the hands of the generations to follow.

 

Continuing on with the theme of agency, Jae Jyung Kim’s piece extending from her ‘2+2=5’ (2016) project focuses on transparency versus privacy. Upon entry, viewers are greeted with three stereoscopes showing carefully collaged images of houses blurred on Google Street View. Each stereoscope is attached to a pulley system, next to which are three words pertaining to different states of time, being and remembering.

 

For most, Google is a one-stop-shop for answering all our inquisitive needs, often at the expense of our right to privacy. What’s most intriguing about Kim’s piece is the link between image, representation and memory. How much is constructed about our identity beyond our control? Furthermore, when we deny digital access to personal images, do we in some ways cease to exist? Living outside of Facebook, Youtube and Instagram almost seems like an alien concept in a society where’s it possible to stay connected and even make a living by simply being on the internet.

 

With that as a backdrop, refusing to contribute to the monetisation of images that aren’t self-curated is very much a radical idea. Of course, we rely on images to tell a story, but so often these images are manipulated or purposefully constructed to support biased narratives. Much like the smog of climate change, or the monstrosities of war, the truth is always evident somehow. Kim’s work so expertly challenges the idea that self-curation is beyond our control and moreover, asks that we take pride in who we are and what we choose to display or even hide.

 

As a whole, ‘Shades of Today’ is a poignant example of future possibilities that allows us to call out law enforcements, media spaces and biased narratives to uncover the simple, often messy truth of societies and communities today. It means coming to terms with both sides of the coin and using that balance to move onwards and upwards.

SHADES OF TODAY: PICKING UP THE PIECES POST-TRUTH

William Kherbek writes:

It has become almost something of a cliche to reference the 1992 Francis Fukuyama book, The End of History and the Last Man, which argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the communist dictatorships that ruled Eastern Europe during the Cold War signaled the triumph of liberal democracy and vindication of market-orientated capitalism, as a supreme moment of hubristic punditry. In some ways this is unfair to Fukuyama, the book is essentially an exercise in the art of the political subjunctive, but the basic critique holds. History did anything but end in the winter of 1989; indeed, as some of Fukuyama’s critics have subsequently suggested, it is perhaps the period of the Cold War itself that represented a pause in history and pre-Bretton Woods business-as-usual returned to the geopolitical discourse as a result of the fall of the Soviet Empire. These kinds of heady thoughts came to mind reading Martin John Callanan’s work “Wars During My Lifetime” at the group exhibition, Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces of Post Truth, at Centrum in Berlin. Callanan is a youthful 35 and his adult life more or less tracks the post-Cold War period of global political conflict. The wars of Callanan’s lifetime are recorded on a largish booklet of newsprint listing the dates of the conflicts and the names by which they are known. If one turns to the year of the publication of Fukuyama’s book, one can find armed conflicts in South Ossetia, Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, Transdniestria, Abkhazia, Afghanistan, Chad, Algeria, Sierra Leone, and a region of Russia known as Prigorodnij just to name a few. If this is what the end of history looks like, one is tempted to grab Paul Klee’s wonky angel — postulated as “The Angel of History” by Walter Benjamin — by the wings and drag him toward the ground to intervene. There are a number of striking aspects to Callanan’s work, not least the choice to use his own lifetime as the baseline metric from which the work originates. Could the vaunted solipsism of the millennial outlook be more neatly satirised? Probably, but I want to see it when it happens. More somberly, Panglossean books and articles are constantly appearing telling us how much safer, less violent and more pleasant life is becoming, even in these ostensibly troubled times, Callanan’s work serves as a riposte to such macro-reasoning about concepts as intimate as violence: the world may be getting statistically more peaceful, but many sins can be hidden behind the smooth bell curve of a normal distribution.

Talking of “business-as-usual”, I also found myself caught by the grimly precise language of the International Panel on Climate Change’s report, sections of which were posted on Centrum’s back wall as part of Benedikt Partenheim’s work bearing that exact title. The work is obviously too big to take in, a babel tower of reams of packages of printer paper stand at the right of the work representing the number of pages in the complete report. The fragmentary presentation of the report’s content, scattered over printed A4 pages overlain with a photograph of a smogged up landscape, drives home the implications of the scale of the crisis faced by humanity. Reading the words of the panel, I was struck by its odd moments of poetry, not least in the description of the correction process contemporary researchers use for accounting for antiquated methods of measuring temperature in earlier ages which used less precise tools. It is, in part, a biography of our epistemology. Jae Kyung Kim’s “2+2=5” was another engaging aspect of a wide ranging and crowded show—in addition to the in situ works, the show also included performances, a discussion on the gallery’s tumblr page, and screenings of two films by Louis Henderson at the forthcoming finissage. “2+2=5” consists of a set of stereoscopes dangling on cables in the gallery’s front window. The viewer holds the object and flips through a series of landscapes and urban images obscured behind hazy geometric shapes. The claustrophobia of our heavily surveilled world is palpable, and the visual disruption feels like a meagre, but potent expression of resistance. The work is a reminder that while more of what will become “history” is being recorded than ever before, this is no guarantee that future histories will be any more true or complete than those of the past.

Shades of Today / Centrum, Berlin

Exhibition opening: Friday, 30 June, 7pm
with a performance by Kirstin Burckhardt, 8pm

The concept of distorted representations and perceptions of reality may date as far back as Plato’s allegory of the cave. However, in light of Brexit and Trump’s election, the manipulation of information seems to have reached new heights (Oxford Dictionaries dubbed ‘post-truth’ as 2016’s word of the year). Amidst the confusion between true facts and fake news, heightened by 24-hour news cycles, social media and a populist rhetoric, artists play a pivotal role in warning and reminding of reality’s different shades and how they can be exploited by those in power. For Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth, Centrum have invited ten artists to shed light on this issue through a series of sound, scent, text-based, and video installations, and a suite of events.

The group exhibition Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth will open on the 30th of June with a performance by Kirstin Burckhardt: Grow a Body (2017) centres around a rhythmic, pulsating reading of a text which poses the question: When is your body complete? This question is echoed in the feeling of some people who disidentify so strongly with a ligament that they self-amputate (‘Body Integrity Identity Disorder’). In the performance, this feeling is carefully embedded within the sensation of completely dissociating from your body when in a traumatic situation, raising questions about subjective and alternative truths, the relationship between alienation and violence, and the prevalence of emotion over reason – questions considered to be at the core of our post-truth era. Included in the exhibition will be Archaeology of a Smell (2008), a scent installation by Erkan Öznur which uses ‘Wofasept’, a cleaning liquid produced by a former GDR company which until today was primarily used in the former East. The persistent smell makes the city’s former division apparent today. As an alternative to the iconic Berlin wall Archaeology of a Smell offers a symbol for the reality of the slow, on-going process of reunification. Martin John Callanan’s Wars During My Lifetime (1982-2013) is a newspaper that lists all of the wars fought during the artist’s lifetime (up until 2013). Listed without comment, the newspaper acts as a potent reminder of media bias and sensationalisation. With her sound sculpture Ram-tam-tam! Rat-a-tat-tat! (2014), Emma Waltraud Howes utilises a resonating cast iron pot as a symbol of resistance, both acknowledging historical protests by recalling the ‘Cacerolazo’, a cacophony of banging pots and pans, while humorously evoking the feeling of help- and speechlessness in the face of recent political developments and the impossibility and lack of rational debate. In a similarly ironic gesture Benedikt Partenheimer’s Business As Usual (2016) draws attention to one of the most debated yet controversial topics in politics: pollution and climate change. Printouts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change line the wall and act as backdrop to a dramatic photograph of an urban landscape concealed by smog. Covering the factual information on climate change, the picture itself fails to serve as photographic evidence with the pollution having rendered the photograph illegible. As part of the exhibition Jae Kyung Kim will show a set of three stereoscopes showing pictures of houses blurred on Google Street View related to her project 2+2=5 (2016) in which the artist explores questions of privacy, transparency, visibility and social control, and also speculates about the effect the blurred images have on our collective imagination, emphasising that it relies on what we think we know and what we imagine we see.

To support and expand on the exhibition in Centrum’s physical space, our Tumblr is a virtual space to further develop and explore notions of post-truth and for six weeks we will post starting points for further research here. The material will be grouped into themes and will show how people, including artists and thinkers, are experiencing the world right now and communicating their most pressing concerns. The themes will include the subjectivity inherent Information Systems, Alternative Realities, Protest, Sensory Experience, and acute insights into How we Live Now.

Chris Hong writes:

There are more thoughtful pieces such as Wars During My Lifetime, which is a newspaper by Martin John Callanan listing all wars between 1982-2014 and read aloud by a town crier at various times throughout the day. It is a sobering and thoughtfully simple piece that highlights the number of conflicts and the lack of progress we have made in reducing them.

full review here.

BCB Radio, the Sound Art Show on BCB which aims to make sound art more accessible to mainstream audiences in the Bradford district.

Tracklist:
Late, Jim Scott
Pulse, Michelle Lewis-King
Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne, Joseph Beuys
Wars During My Lifetime (1982 – 2013), Martin John Callanan