Destination Berlin: 9 November

Before 9 November at 19.00 h.

09.11.2012

Fate and the city of Berlin came together for the creation of Destination Berlin, a group exhibition that opened last 21 September at 1a Space Gallery (Hong Kong). The exhibition remains open untill next 23 December.

The celebration of the 20th anniversary of Berlin Wall fall gathered together for first time these six international artists: Jacqueline Kooter, Shirley Wiebe, Susana Lopez F, Thea Jentjes, Wai Kit Lam and Wai Yi Lai, in Takt Kunstprojektraum, an artist residence in Berlin. It was there where this work started and today presents 1aSpace in this exhibition which has brought us together for a second time.

Destination Berlin, the name of the exhibition, is a tribute to the city where it was born. We see this through each artist´s work as it focused on a common platform: the search for identity: individual or collective in the city of Berlin.

We start a journey through their different views and we explore different art techniques from graphite to paint to multimedia art while  we travel to investigate the different faces and interpretations of identity

Jacqueline, Shirley, Susana, Thea, Kit y Yi search the communication and the integration in a city whose language do not speak and that makes them vulnerable. But at the same time that helps them swimming in extrange waters trying to analyze the complexity of the human mind.

Jacqueline Kooter analyzes in her work the strenght and the vulnerability of the human body and the complexity of human relations. Her videos combine drawing and painted backgrounds with contemporary dance.

  In the Autumn of 2009, when Germany was celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jacqueline moved to Berlin. During her stay she researched the rise and the fall of the Berlin wall and the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MFS), the Stasi, the Secret Service of the DDR and their archives and prison in Berlin. The three videos she presents in Destination Berlin: Walled in, Blocked off and Trapped in the city, are the results of this research. In these movies a man struggles to move forward because he always finds a barrier, the wall which is surrounding the city from 1961 to 1989. She reflects on the lack of freedom to move around, the lack of privacy and group behavior.

We can notice Thea Jentjens´ background as biologist and scientist in her paintings, in terms of depth and as a suggestion of an infinite number of layers.

In 2009, Thea travelled to Berlin, where she stayed for two non-consecutive months. During those days she walked through the city from east to west while thinking and trying to recapture the feeling of living in a city that was divided by a wall for 28 years. Once, came back to her studio, Thea worked with color, form and structure to create the pictures and drawings she had in her mind. Her long walking tours of Berlin resulted in a series of drawings mostly with architectural elements, given from the the formerly divided city. 

The work that Susana Lopez F. presents in Destination Berlin combines two projects: “20 years later” and “LastCall”, given as result: Letzter Aufruf: Berlin.

Letzter Aufruf is a graphic study of the history and the reunion of the city through Berlin airports. During the cold war, the city has three airports that brought it life, sometimes, ridiculous situations. Tempelhoff airport closed its gates in October 2008. Tegel airport will close next in 2013 and Schönefeld airport is going to be renamed Berlin-Brandenburg airport. This closing process is part of the reunion of the city that began on 9 November, 23 years ago.

    In Wai Kit Lam´s work, the research of identy is constant. In Destination Berlin, she presents Undelivered Letters. This work began during her stay in Berlin when she bought a second-hand German book, that she could not understand. That book had formely belonged to an Alexander Simon and he had underlined some of the senteces. This was the starting point to Wai Kit. She could not understand the language neither the content, and she started to think about where the lack of freedom is exactly: in walls or in an unknown language that do not allow us to comunicate with those who are around us.

In Home Lesson, the work by Wai Yi Lai, she thinks about the feeling of be “foreign in my home country”. In 2010 she travelled to Beijing, where she spent more than half a year. During this time she visited Bei Gao a village nearby to be demolished in the eastern part of Beijing near Fifth Ring Road. With only a map, she walked the streets, thinking about the velocity of time and society when, once more, a twist of fate visited her culminating in the work she presents in Destination Berlin. 

Wai Yi met Mrs Gu, a middle-age lady, who needed some help with her camera in order to photograph the house her family owned before it would be demolished the next day. Wai Yi helped her taking images of every corner of the house. After the shooting, Wai Yi took down all the posters and decorationss from the empty rooms, and brought them back to Hong Kong. This work shows us of the empty rooms, and what she has obtained from Mr and Mrs Gu´s house. Today she presents us this work which is a reflection about time and velocity as well as a tribute to all who have lost their home in China. 

      In 2009 Shirley Wiebe made two significant trips with the intent of reconnecting with her ethnic origins. First she visited Russia and Ukraine, where some of her ancestors had migrated from the Netherlands in the late 1800's. She was retracing the sites of former villages with the help of translators and guides. Her mother tongue is German but she had never been to Germany. As an artist, she decided Berlin would be the best place to explore German culture and develop a body of work based on the research from her earlier trip. The residency allowed her to become part of a local creative community, rather than being merely a traveller, adding to the sense of feeling a true sense of day-to-day life. 

In Destination Berlin, she exhibits two large-scale drawings: 30 days, created in Berlin, and 90 days, upon returning to Vancouver. Both works vividly reflect the experience of being immersed in a new environment and culture through fragmentary elements of upheaval and chaos that appear to float and drift across a surface.

Visit: DestinationBerlin2012 for more information.