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Courtesy of the artist.
Program’s most recent show, ÜBERleben, closes today before the winter holidays; Christmas being perhaps one of the most important of the German Feiertagen. Strings of lights dot the city streets and steaming pots of spiced wine can be had at the ubiquitous, festive outdoor markets. But the spirit at Program is a little less heartwarming.
An architectural project space at the northern end of Mitte, the up-and-coming district that claims to be the East’s new center, Program occupies the ground floor of the former Newa Hotel; a one-time Russian concern and routine gathering place of the city’s post-war artists. The walls of Program’s gallery are now bleached to contemporary-art-space-white; but the cool kids are still flocking here tonight. Playing since the date of American Halloween, the crazed survivors of ÜBERleben will finally be put to rest.
The German word überleben is used for the English survival, but curators Sophie Hamacher and Louise Witthöft pun upon the word’s eerier, literal meaning—“over-life”—by bringing together a group of artists intent on exorcising the Gothic in contemporary life. Nikolai Kaindl’s impressive exhibition structure draws the individual works together, its oversized modular corners both consuming and reflecting the gallery’s “white box.” Constructed from pieced-together triangulated plywood boards, the veritable iceberg houses four narrow chambers distributed about a singular central column. Each is shrouded in inky black; only the light beaming from four television screens flickers comfortingly within, tempting the viewer to penetrate the jagged threshhold and watch.
In the first chamber, Erase You projects grainy images of lethargic youths alternately prostrate on wooden floors and unremarkable fields in the outdoors. Elke Marhöfer focuses on fingers and sides of faces set to ambient noise; the actors—drugged or simply drowsy—focus in and out amid smoke and strike bleary silhouettes in the foreground of direct sunlight. The next chamber, and the next screen, depicts the Russian performance artist Elena Kovylina waltzing in a crowded courtyard to a raspy Marlene Dietrich record, growing increasingly drunk with each acquired partner and accompanying shot of vodka—her ensuing desperation only weakened by the necessary, diluting effects of quaffing coca-cola. In the third compartment, Rebekka Kressley’s animated short, A Blonde Sun, fancies the center of the universe decked in the golden locks of the widely publicized duo Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie; though virtually unrecognizable because of fleeting friendships and quickly fading coiffure fashions. Kressley perhaps anticipates the point by concluding with an attack initiated by similarly monstrous, blond human-headed harpies. Finally, in Polish artist Rafal Jakubowicz’s Arbeitsdisziplin, a parka-wrapped security guard paces alongside the barbed-wire fence of a Volkswagen compound beneath the gray clouds of morning; puffing cold breaths of air, his gaze hardened at the viewer in presumable contemplation of the psychological location of his controlled border.
Beyond the reach of Kaindl’s structure, the Bernadette Corporation’s faux Zombie creation myth unfolds in the deep, rational tones of a male narrator recorded against raw footage of the Berlin Love Parade—a celebration of scantily clad bodies pulsing to inaudible music as the voice earnestly and inconclusively questions, “what is the difference between a zombie and an insane animal?” Karl Holmqvist’s fixation on the celebrity pair Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise stems from a more or less grotesque place than Kressley’s ‘The Simple Life’ couple; nevertheless manifesting itself in pixilated film stills from 1994’s Interview with a Vampire. Holmqvist overshadows a disjointed black and white collage with tacked-on glossy color tabloids featuring the two actors off-set, in wide-brimmed caps; his question of true identity frustrated by a perplexing composition. Andre Wekua’s delicately frankenstinian collages incorporate photographs, found material and human-like forms. Jannis Jaschke’s solid black rectangles, covered in confused, barely-discernible graphite script, provide the only contrasting points of negative space to the desolate indoor-scape.
A pale-purple glow leads into a small back room and the final installation by Malte Lochstedt, a discordant concert playing from a spliced-together EP; Iron Maiden’s Killers and Mozart’s Requiem. Spinning together in a disconcerting circularity on the surface of a vintage record player, pummeling beats scratch uneasily against operatic heights. Riffing on the hodge-podge production of popular music, Lochstedt displays torn halves of the classical score and the heavy metal chord progressions behind glass.
In a city rife with its own historical ghosts, it would seem difficult to repeat or even reinvent ÜBERleben’s questions of stagnation, depression, anxiety and emptiness. Competing against the uncanny echoes of accordions underneath the Ubahn archways would be enough. But Hamacher and Witthöft have managed to create an exhibition that truly explores the architecture of survival, if only temporarily. The mood tonight, then, is appropriately funereal. To the sound of Jordi Rubi’s electronic tones, artists, scenesters and partiers revel alongside ÜBERleben’s critical works, downing beers and dancing; perhaps zombies of the culture industry themselves.
