BERLIN

always live twice

Sonja Alhäuser

Inna Artemova

Sven Drühl

Karsten Konrad

Katja Pfeiffer

Miriam Vlaming

Time is a phenomenon that will always stay a mystery to men, no matter how easily it can be measured in seconds, days and years. Its passing at times remains unnoticed, at times we are awfully aware of it. Never the less, it time and again challenges us, forces us to query it and manifests itself in art.

We are very happy to present with „always live twice“ the interplay of six positions that all analyse time from different perspectives.

Let us start with the ending, just as Sven Drühl does. His sculpture is a skeleton, lying life-sized like a figure of a middle-aged tomb slab on a box that resembles a sarcophagus. However, it does not rest dignified on its back, hands crossed in prayer, but is turned to its side, knees bent, the head bedded on the hands, as if it slept.

Miriam Vlamings „Classroom“ shows a group of young pupils, sitting at their desks. Their hands folded well behaved, they watch the beholder. Nevertheless, clothes and surrounding make it clear, that none of the girls is alive anymore. They all belong to a different century, frozen in time in a picture from 2010 that suggest in the way it is executed patina and material transience.

Past time as memory is Inna Artemova’s approach to the subject in her “Flashback” - series. It is the memories of a time which in calendarical terms seems close, but on the other hand has become very distant. In decaying factory buildings from soviet times young gymnasts, pioneers, appear like projections. They do not sense yet, that their reality will soon be history.

New and old and new again: that is the way Karsten Konrad shapes the course of time in his works. Broken things, thrown away and discarded come to a renaissance in Konrad’s sculptures and wall relieves. New forms arise form old ones. Though not existent before, they still retrieve tales and history.

In her recipes, Sonja Alhäuser, too, describes the cycle of things, though in her work it is recycling in an organic sense. What just jumped about or grunted, gets seasoned, sautéd, eaten and enjoyed in the next instant, partly incorporated in a new body (not without effect on it) and partly egested.

Finally Katja Pfeiffer’s object offers an outlook through the past. When the beholder looks through the keyhole of an old door that leans so unimposing against the wall, his view gets drawn into the seemingly physically perceptible depth of the long and decaying floor of a former sanatorium. The rose window at the end of the floor prompts the eternal question of what is to come.

Vernissage:                         Saturday, 09th July .2011, 6 pm – 9 pm

Duration:                               9th July. – 6th August 2011