| Berlin’s Brunnenstrasse opened its season this past fall with the inauguration of more than five new galleries, making it one of the most heavily gallery-populated streets in the city. However, one of the most interesting exhibitions was not associated with any gallery, but was rather the independent effort of an artist who has been living illegally in Berlin for more than a decade and who gained free access to a tiny storefront where he constructed the installation, Kleine Ausstellung Heimatslose Volkskunst. The translation of this title is more complicated than one would assume. |  |
Kleine Ausstellung Heimatslose Volkskunst – Emilie Trice
Berlin’s Brunnenstrasse opened its season this past fall with the inauguration of more than five new galleries, making it one of the most heavily gallery-populated streets in the city. However, one of the most interesting exhibitions was not associated with any gallery, but was rather the independent effort of an artist who has been living illegally in Berlin for more than a decade and who gained free access to a tiny storefront where he constructed the installation, Kleine Ausstellung Heimatslose Volkskunst. The translation of this title is more complicated than one would assume. “Heimatlose,” in this context, refers to the absence of one’s fixed cultural origin, roots, land and home. “Volkskunst” translates as folk art. However, because “folk” are inherently tied to their land and home, the concept of the words “heimatslose volkskunst” is paradoxical. Due to the artist’s illegality, for the purposes of this article he will only be referred to as K. His installation, Heimatslose Volkskunst consists of a daunting number of prints, paintings, murals, collages, painted sculptures, masks, dolls, ornaments and figurines. The installation spills out from the wall, hangs from the ceiling and rises from the floor like a totem-pole altar, surrounded by candles, fake money and plastic roses, forming a complex shrine to history, political conflict, social strife, world religions and the dead.
Originally from South America, K.’s Visa was revoked 15 years ago and, consequently, his return flight expired, leaving him very much stranded in Germany. Fortunately, the early-90s was actually the perfect time to be homeless in Berlin. Abandoned houses full of discarded memorabilia and reminders of communism were quickly claimed post-unification by squatters such as K., who adopted these homes and their contents as their own. As an illegal resident with limited opportunities for employment, K. has been forced to work mostly with found objects, which he recycles and reinvents as sculpture, collage and installation. The overwhelming mass of “waste” that was left in the East when the Berlin wall fell provided a substantial amount of source material for K. to work with, things which he terms “historical or cultural detritus” and describes as, “restructured pieces and meanings of history and culture that are not on the surface of collective cultural consciousness.”
By incorporating found objects, among them soviet propaganda books, old film advertisements, figurines, watches, etc., with hand-painted masks, murals and prints, K. creates a dialog, allowing these pieces of history to interact freely with each other. He believes that there is an embodied causality and interrelation between these cultural artifacts, a metaphysical relation that comes together organically. When deliberately arranged in the unnatural context of the artist’s installation, the pieces’ historical and cultural significance becomes illuminated. They act as a bridge, connecting the former divided culture of Berlin with the present culture of the unified and yet still culturally fragmented city. Additionally, by arranging these found objects with spiritual symbols and motifs, K. creates another link between Eastern and Western cultures, the past and the present, the dead and the living. This idea of a past narrative of a city or some spirituality no longer existing in the same form is a central theme of the installation. Developed Western societies have a tendency to alter their perceptions of value, both materially and spiritually. In fact, the notion of value becomes inherently relative to the society and the generation in question.
K. uses the example of shamanism as a religion that has been devalued by materialistic, Western societies. He defines art as “a melting point between spiritual and material, articulating something spiritual in a material way” and says that he is not “developing a form through the essentials, but rather developing the form through focusing in the essentials.” Throughout K.’s prior travels through Cuba, Mexico and South America, he went through primal shamanistic experiences, among them “imago mundi,” which translates as “replica,” and the Cuban ritual “prenda.” Some rituals involved the assignment of intangible human conditions in earthly objects, similar to K.’s use of “historical and cultural detritus” as symbolic objects.
In an imago mundi, the symbolic objects are designated and arranged as representatives of higher consciousnesses and the super-natural, creating a tangible model of the world and the cosmos. Shamans that preformed this ritual sought to reveal the cognitive experiences, which connect the various dimensions of supernatural reality with that of the ordinary in order to understand where cultures originate and how they evolve (or regress). All of these representational objects are arranged by the Shaman on a table, created as a material reflection of the human psyche and a space of symbolic significance, which will hopefully create a physical reaction in the world. K. views his reconstructed, found objects as representations of ideas of communism, Western mentality, contemporary society, existentialism, as elements of European and Berlin history and, most importantly for this particular installation, death. By recycling and reconfiguring these found objects in his installations, which he refers to as “landscapes of the mind,” he seeks to illuminate some inherent truth in the human condition.
In the Cuban ritual, the prenda, a ceremonial cauldron that houses the dead is filled with earth, sticks, bones, roots, herbs and other sacred objects, which unify this world with the supernatural world. These objects become the souls of transcendental beings whose souls are trapped in the realm of the living. Through the prenda, shamans are capable of communicating with these lost souls, creating a bridge from one reality to another. K. began the installation in the apartment of his neighbor in the squat where he was living. The neighbor died in his apartment, but because he had no relatives or friends, his death went unnoticed for almost three months. After the authorities came to collect the body, they left the apartment as it was, completely unsanitary, which allowed K. to claim it, clean it and begin to work there. Ultimately, the events that had occurred in the squat contributed to his installation, making death a central theme and one that relates to not only the former tenant, but in K.’s opinion, to the plight of the illegal immigrant and the history of Berlin as a divided city. The “Holy Dead,” a Mexican religious icon of a woman holding the world in her hands is a recurring motif in his installation and gesamtkunstwerk.
K. describes his initial reaction as an illegal resident in Berlin as an introduction to the criteria of death; “To be here without the right is like being in the realm of the living dead…the experience of immigration is a rite of passion, initiation. You cannot be a world citizen if you do not have the experience of immigration, of being not loved and not wanted. This experience prepares you for the deeper sense of the human state. If you are alive, you have the responsibility to survive, which is why people migrate. There is a polarity in the world between cultures. In the situation of living here, although separated legally, I am, in a way, existentially connected to everyone and I want to create a bridge sensibly so that I do not forget where I came from and so that I can balance it with what I found here.”
K. feels that “Doing art and being in the situation of extreme poverty and classlessness may be related to an older sense of creation.” He’s not only talking about himself—more than that he is referring to people living in extreme poverty in developing nations that have no materials available to them and to the tendency of contemporary art lately to be shiny and pretty, overly-academic interior adornments. He says, “The culture of the so-called developed countries needs to meet the sensibility that is arising in the third world. If people in this culture do not confront it, they have a limited idea of reality. This extreme polarity is impoverishing the state of the global human mind, and the challenge of every human being is to create a bridge of consciousness, data and experience to confront your own partial sensibility and complete reality.” K.’s Heimatslose Volkskunst echoes the ghosts of culture and society, among them Friedrich Nietzsche who famously wrote that man is not a purpose unto himself, but a bridge. The installation aptly remained in Brunnenstrasse until “The Day of the Dead.”
