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Review

Neue
Heimat

Berlin Contemporary

The exhibition shows works by 29 German and foreign artists from contemporary Berlin, which has developed into one of the most important creative arenas since reunification, becoming a new home for many.

The increasing uniformity of a globalised society means that art in particular faces the issues of cultural location and identity. The works presented here, the majority of which were produced especially for the exhibition, reflect the artistic definition of living space and the creative assimilation of an increasingly alienated environment.

Home is associated with notions such as dwelling place or housing. For that reason, numerous exhibits are related to Architecture in its widest sense. The house is identified as a protective shell, as a place of longing, a refuge, but is always at risk as well - a domicile threatened by loss, a place of failure. Home is never seen as something matter-of-course; the relationship to it is always disturbed. The artists have a similar approach to Landscape, which has always been closely bound up with a sense of home, as well. And it is also a frequently threatened territory. The uncanny is poised in wait behind the idyll, the apparently familiar metamorphoses into its opposite, becoming alien. We set out on our wanderings, and it is the Objects that remain faithful to us; we take them with us to far-away places, where they recall our once familiar surroundings. The individual object becomes a reference to the individual life. In an age characterised by Mobility and migration, among the rapid upheavals of which permanent change seems to be the only certainty, home can only be compensated by our own identity. As the source of ideal counter-images to reality, art is usually far from Romanticism – it is not committed to the idyll, but to a critical and yet simultaneously utopian perspective on the present day.

The exhibition integrates also three artists from this year’s GASAG Art Award, which will be given by the GASAG in cooperation with the Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben e.V.   

Simultaneously with the exhibition the Berlinische Galerie is showing three new paintings by Clemens Krauss in the Auditorium.

Participating Artists

Nevin Aladag (Förderpreis GASAG)
Michel de Broin
Christina Dimitriadis
Martin Dörbaum
Markus Draper
Paul Ekaitz
Nina Fischer und Maroan el Sani
Christine de la Garenne
Eva Grubinger
Erla Haralsdóttir und Bo Melin
Mona Hatoum
Anton Henning
Jeroen Jacobs
Takehito Koganezawa
Lucas Lenglet
Via Lewandowsky
Tea Mäkipää
Birgit Ramsauer
Mandla Reuter (GASAG Kunstpreis)
Miguel Rothschild
Michael Sailstorfer
Yehudit Sasportas
Florian Slotawa
Costa Vece
Maria Vedder
Jorinde Voigt (Förderpreis GASAG)
Brigitte Waldach