BERLIN - current Exhibitions

German Guggenheim, Jewish museum, museum for photography, national galleries

Still by 14 October the German Guggenheim shows up as an exotic Ecofabric. The New York artist Phoebe Washburn has prepared an installation for the Berlin Guggenheim, in which waste materials and accidentially found objects join to a factory-like construct for the house Unter den Linden. On an assembly-line genuine pieces of grass are brought to lighting and irrigation stations, before they are finally installed on the roof of the artificial factory. There, without further care or natural environment they are purged and integrated into the other „building materials“ of the installation.

The Recycling of secondary materials can be understood as political statement, as comment on the abundance company or as symbol (or symptom) of today's consumer habits. The objects, which carry traces of their past, spread their developing history openly before the viewer.

The rather monstrous and pedantic impression of the space-filling installation questions aesthetic value patterns such as novelty, openness, ease and attractivity of art. Even the recycling cycle leads in Washburns work not to a genuine renewal, but celebrates and produces rather the effort around the repetition of decay. Despite the natural freshness of grass breed, lighting and irrigation, the repetition has very negative resemblances, nearly somewhat defaetistic, which is waived by the symbolic revaluation, the expenditure of the mechanism evokes.

Since the American artist lets itself be forced badly into the European tradition, as producing the pieces of grass as purge symptom of the tradition of modern natural architectures, „Regulated Fool's Milk Meadow" offers itself rather as comment on the American settlement and cultivation-history. Thus the installation presents itself as such, comparably with the monocultural agriculture fighting laboriously against the own destructive tendencies, which is based on the destruction of the natural landscapes and cultures. The allusions in „Fool's Milk“ on Fool's gold, "Narrengold", strengthen this association to misdirected economic dynamics in the American history.

14 July - 14 October

Phoebe Washburn. Regulated Fool's Milk Meadow, 2007

German Guggenheim

Unter den Linden 13/15

10117 Berlin

Fon +49 - (0) 30 - 20 20 93-0

Fax +49 - (0) 30 - 20 20 93-20

Email: berlin.guggenheim@db.com

http://www.deutsche-guggenheim-berlin.de/d/ausstellungen-phoebewashburn01.php

© photos: Phoebe Washburn

_______________________________________________________________

Cutout from Charlotte Salomons Gouache, around 1940 Charlotte Salomon with their grandparents © Charlotte Salomon Foundation, Amsterdam

277 sheets from a picture sequence of Charlotte Salomon, which covers altogether 1300 gouachs, are shown in the Jewish museum. They represent the auctorial and truth-preserving potency of art, that can help to overcome catastrophic life situations at least symbolically. The gouaches were made by the 23 years old artist in 1940 in Southern France, while the Berlin native was on escape from the Nazis, and therefore living with her grandparents in France. Because of her fear of a nationalsocialistic pursuit of France the grandmother committed suicide in these years. Charlotte Salomon got at the same time notice that her mother had killed herself for the same reason. The Gouaches were a direct reaction to this situation. Salomon remained in Southern France, until she was arrested 1943 and deported over Drancy to Auschwitz, where she probably died already in the subsequent days.

Charlotte Salomons screen sequence energized numerous artists to an argument. In the exhibition an installation of Chantal Akerman is shown, in the exhibition's additional program the actress Joanne Gläsel puts the picture cycle under the title ”Keep it carefully! It is my whole life!“ in a theatrical solo piece.

Special exhibition Charlotte Salomon

7. August until 25 November 2007

daily from 10 to 20 o'clock, on Mondays to 22 o'clock (except: 13. /14.9., 22.9. , 25.9. , 7.11.2007)

Jewish Museum Berlin, Lindenstr. 9-14, 10969 Berlin

http://www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de/site/DE/homepage.php

_______________________________________________________________

The retaining and symbolically reminding function of art is also subject in the photographies from Simone Mangos, which are to be seen in the museum for photography from 24 August to 4 November:

Since 1998 the photographer undertook observations in the area of the former Minister Gardens in Berlin. These are now parallelized with the development of the debate to the monument for the murdered Jews of Europe, planned there. The pictures examines the different stages of the genesis of the monument, as well as the many controversies about it.

During the period the change of the perspective becomes clear. While the effort of a symbolic memory shows up only as subjective mixture of elegy and frights, e.g. in the shelter Triptychon of 2000, 2001, the actual discretion of the historical relicts are reminiscent in "Minister Gardens", 1998, and "Brezel", 2001. Finally the photographically implicit comment becomes a more cynical happiness about the way, how the monument for the murdered Jews of Europe adds itself into the number of the touristic attractions and demonstrates more the weakness than the strength of art, in particular in the series „Such Shoah is real fun“, 2007; Photo © Simone Mangos).

The enormous emperor hall on the area of the Minister Gardens has inspired Simone Mangos to an installation, which transfers a geophysical admission and the sketches of an earlier land development, which were found on the memorial area, into the war-destroyed hall. Reconstructed out of archives shelves found in the museum, the construction creates a kind of passage by the emperor hall ruin into history.

One could see “the ideology of the memory” in such a way as „suggestion for our handling the memory “, like the museum for photography: „What do we select for the memory, which form do we give our memories, and how do we select for understanding the past, with which consequences?“ More sharpened in its approach as this noncommittal request, nevertheless to think, is the critical appeal on "the ideology “. The photographic work shows that in the requirement with a public production - not regarding the meaning it has as perservation of historical truth - comes along the misjudging idea collective memory and reminder could fedge the individual experience. Calculations of the monument like “size = meaning” and “experience without embarrassment”, like the photographical series „Such the Shoah is real fun" critically analyze, are actually rather the contrary to the memorial's requirement.

Museum for Photography

24 August - 4 November 2007

Simone Mangos: The ideology of the memory

The exhibition is promoted by the capital culture fund.

Museum for Photography

Jebenstrasse 2

10623 Berlin

Tel. +49 (0) 30 - 3186-4825

Wheelchair-been suitable

Opening times

Mo closed, Di-Then 10,00 o'clock - 18,00 o'clock

Admission fees:

Range map Charlottenburg 6, -, reduces 3 Euro.# euro

© Simone Mangos, from the series: „The Shoah in such a way makes “, 2007 correct for fun.

Still until the 07the October is the at least in the public representation unequal Pas de Deux of the impressionistic collections from the Metropolitan Museum New York at the Neue Nationalgalerie and the French-German Art of the 19th century, to be visited at the Alte Nationalgalerie on the Museumsinsel in Berlin. With the 147 works of the most important artists of the next to last century - paintings of Ingres, Corot, Courbet, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Bonnard and Matisse as well as sculptures of Rodin, Degas and Maillol - associates for the visitors, who did not shrink from the relatively short way between the Neue Nationalgalerie at the Potsdamer Platz and the Alte Nationalgalerie on the Museuminsel. In 1900 Hugo of Tschudi acquired pictures of Manet, Monet, Renoir and Cézanne for the german Alte Nationalgalerie. The museum still praises itself that it belonged with these purchases to the first houses, which integrated impressionistic paintings into their collections. Also the etching cabinet shows 30 works from the time in an own presentation.

France in the Alte Nationalgalerie. French art and German Impressionism in the collection of the national gallery

Alte Nationalgalerie

National museums to Berlin

Genthiner STR. 38

10785 Berlin

Telephone: 030/266 2987, fax: 266 2161

E-Mail: besucherdienste@smb.spk-berlin.de

23 May - 7 October 2007

French masterpieces of the 19.th century from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum OF Art New York to guest in Berlin

Neue Nationalgalerie

Potsdamer road 50

10785 Berlin zoo

Information cultural forum Potsdamer Platz: +49 (0) 30 - 266-2951

_______________________________________________________________

Further exhibitions:

Old museum, antique collection

27 July - 28 October 2007

Myth and power - raised pictures in jewel

At the desire garden

10178 Berlin center

Tel. +49 (0) 30 - 2090-5577

Museum of arts and crafts

(Cultural forum Potsdamer place)

starting from 13 September!

13 September 2007 - 6 January 2008

Uli judge. Mode from Berlin 1949 - 1998

Museum of arts and crafts

Zoo route 6

10785 Berlin

E-Mail: kgm@smb.spk-berlin.de

Etching cabinet - collection of the designs and pressure graphics

(Cultural forum Potsdamer place)

3 August - 11 November 2007

Piranesi. Vedute di Roma - opinions from Rome

Matthäikirchplatz 8

10785 Berlin

Tel.: +49 (0) 30 - 266-2002

Fax: +49 (0) 30 - 266-2959

E-Mail: kk@smb.spk-berlin.de

Martin Gropius Bau

6 July - 1 October 2007

The golden seizing. King graves of the Skythen

Martin Gropius Bau Berlin

Niederkirchnerstrasse 7 | Ecke Stresemannstr. 110

10963 Berlin

Tel +49 (0) 30,254 86-0

Fax +49 (0) 30,254 86-107

E-Mail post@gropiusbau.de

www.gropiusbau.de

Museums Dahlem, Ethnological Museum

10 August - 11 November 2007

World of the shade - art of the South Seas.

Dead cult and ancestor pictures from new Ireland

Ethnological museum

Arnimallee 27

14195 Berlin - Dahlem

Telephone: 030/83010

Fax: 030/8301500

E-Mail: md@smb.spk-berlin.de

Museum entrance: Lansstrasse 8

Report: Dr. Ulrike Ritter