Ansichten einer Ordnung


with
Elif Saydam,
François Pisapia,
José Segebre,
Kollaps Plaza,
Laura Langer,
Pauli Scharlach,
Zana Aksu

Exhibition dates: 12.10 – 06.12.2024 16.01.2025

Location: Peace Gallery – Anti-Kriegs-Museum


https://anti-kriegs-museum.de/sonderausstellungen/


Brüsseler Str. 21, 13353 Berlin, DE


Organized by: Pitt Wenninger and François Pisapia


Photography: Sebastian Eggler

Gefördert durch die Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa des Landes Berlin

The Exhibition

The city of Berlin is a bunker. Built on top of wartime destruction and the ideological urban planning of the successive orders, it encompasses overlapping expressions of the supposed end of history. And nowadays, it postures as the safe and wealthy capital of one of the leading national economies of the world. The measures taken to maintain this position are kept invisible, either outsourced or tightly woven into the very fabric of society. Inside the walls is a contentious safety as bombs are dealt and dropped out of sight.

For the current exhibition, artists and writers working in Berlin were invited to look at the city and its political landscape from within. It contemplates everyday life in a place that is indeed constantly negotiating the wars and genocides happening elsewhere.

A geometric series of paintings by Laura Langer depict concentric circles. Through abstraction, they convey a sense of dizziness, of vertigo: both plunging deep and expanding wide. In the context of the Anti-Kriegs-Museum, they suggest a certain focus, a target, like an illustration of what could be the rippling effects and convergence of an explosion’s hypocenter.

Elif Saydam paints banners and other signs such as “Kein Mensch ist Illegal” or “Free Palestine” on top of photographs of residential buildings. This wishful-thinking intervention projects political ideologies onto the very facade of buildings, reminding us of the precarity, displacement and wars which Western European safety rests upon. They prolong the chants and banners that take over the streets during protests; heavily policed moments where issues are physically legible in the city. In this sense, Saydam’s intervention could be said to circumvent the police repression and silencing through which the calm of the bunker is maintained, while also commenting on how gentrification wipes away dissenting voices from the Kiez.

Pauli Scharlach’s video takes glitchy 3D scans of the city to create new environments. Renovated, reconstructed or new buildings become part of a dreamlike cityscape in ruins where environments vacillate between digital empty shells and crumbling materiality. A character traverses spaces that loop into one another, losing herself in a decomposed city that merges future, past and fantasmagoria. The video illustrates inner turmoil as well as a vision of what Berlin would be if it were destroyed like other contemporary metropoles now in ruins.

The video by François Pisapia takes personal textual accounts of images coming out of the livestreamed genocide in Gaza and the violent repression of peaceful protests, and overlays them with banal imagery of the city in an effort to illustrate the cognitive gap of witnessing this existential threat from a “safe” place. Such images (which circulate mostly on our phones, or on the news) are often where the violence of war is visible from a city not under siege. By remediating and superimposing them onto snapshots of the city, the artist is interested in drawing out the violence which is perhaps embedded in the urban fabric of the bunker capital. A photo series further investigates this.

Kollaps Plaza (Pitt Wenninger and Moritz Englebert) shows the documentation of Index (Basis for Negotiation), an outdoor and sound installation made in collaboration with Shirin Sabahi which was presented this September in Cologne. The photographs in the vitrine remediate the work which itself restaged traces of a protest camp in the US seen in a photo taken by David Goldman in April 2024 for the Associated Press. The installative approach to the documentation includes the original sound piece and the new work Until all are Free.

The accompanying publication traces experiences that hint to other ways in which war inhabits the city and affects life within it.

Seeing horrors happening elsewhere through news and social media is increasingly part of our everyday reality. José Segebre’s contribution explores the diasporic experience of witnessing images of death while living in a capital of the Global North. Taking the form of fragments, Unpublished & Posthumous moves through grief, anger and the woes of a migrant’s life inside the bunker.

People who flee war carry it with them through their experiences of loss, displacement, death and resilience. Refugee centres and their attached bureaucratic apparatuses negotiate and control refugees’ presence in the safe city. As such, border infrastructure mitigates the reality of war within fortress Europe. In his text Zana Aksu speaks about the entanglement of capitalism, imperialism and war, focusing on the people whose lives are displaced by it.

Finally, as in all exhibitions at the Peace Gallery, a vitrine displays research material and artifacts from the museum’s collection to complement and interact with the artists’
contributions.

  • Pitt Wenninger and François Pisapia

List of works

Kollaps Plaza
Documentation of Kollaps Plaza & Shirin Sabahi ‘Index (Basis of Negotiation), four photos and sound, 18 min, 2024
(IMAGE: 03)
Until All Are Free, mixed media installation, 2024
(IMAGE: 04)

Elif Saydam
Casino, Wedding, painting, 2022, 23k gold, inkjet and oil on canvas, 30 x 21 cm
(IMAGE: 07)
Zu spät (VII), painting, 2022, 23k gold, inkjet and oil on canvas, 30 x 21 cm
(IMAGE: 08 )
Losing my license, painting, 2023, 23k gold, inkjet and oil on canvas, 30 x 21 cm
(IMAGE: 09)

Laura Langer
Concentric Circle 9, 2024, Marker and acrylic on canvas,
50 x 50 cm
(IMAGE: 11)

Wenninger and Pisapia
ANTI-KRIEG, prints in vitrine, 2024
(IMAGE: 12, 13)

François Pisapia
Everyday In Bunker Gardens, prints pinned on framed stretched poplin, 2024
(IMAGE: 19)

Laura Langer
Concentric Circle 10, 2024, Marker and acrylic on canvas,
200 x 200 cm
(IMAGE: 20)