Dear Friends,
not only are we launching our first artist book tonight (aw, let’s try that again: TONIGHT!), but I will also participate in a group exhibition opening this Saturday as part of the Berlin Month of Photography. The independent project space Galerie Weisser Elefant invited photography project Uncommon Place to curate a group exhibition with the title of Fremdungen, addressing various states of alienation – see press text below – to which I will contribute a selection from a new series titled Parallel Lines [...that should have never crossed]. The series depicts the Hong Kong headquarters of the 25 most powerful banking corporations in the world, making a statement on the recent financial crisis and its exposure of the dysfunctional power structures undermining our modern society.
The title of the exhibition, the derivative ‘Fremdung’, refers to several different forms of perception of the other, the unknown, the distant. In German language it can be linked with expressions of contemporary socio-cultural discourses – alienation, disassociation, infiltration, estrangement, being disconcerting or outlandish – that can influence our life and culture and implicitely shape the notion of what we call home.
We become aware of our own identity by the incursion of something alien, which it threatens to discompose. The outside, the unknown is being demarcated in order to assert the concept of our existence. But what do we actually know about the construction of what we call home? Don’t we need the other to comprehend our own existence? And don’t we find a lot of our own ideology in the definition of the unfamilar?
The exhibition Fremdungen, prepared and compiled by Daniel Klemm (Uncommon Place, Berlin), in its range of works mirrors the different strategies how to deal with the unknown, the seemingly strange and that what we cannot or do not want to understand. The artists show us their interpretation of what amounts to be the alien and the home: their own originally created Fremdungen.
Please join us for the opening this Saturday, at 19h.
With kind regards,
mono.kultur
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Fremdungen
Nils Clauss / Wolfram Hahn / Andy Rumball / Kai von Rabenau / Rainer Sioda / Hannes Woidich
21 October – 17 November 2012
Opening: 20th October 2012 / 19h
Tue-Sat 13-19h
Galerie Weisser Elefant
Auguststrasse 21
10117 Berlin
