German Angst
Until 2 November
Neue Berliner Kunstverien, n.b.k.
Chauseestrasse 128/129
www.nbk.org
Marius Babias, a Romanian critic and curator who came to Berlin as a student in the mid-1990s, assumed the directorship of NBK this fall. His inaugural show announces an audit of the national psyche. Input from native and foreign-born artists has been welcomed; contributions lean heavily toward contemporary film and video - much of it by young, local artists (Fattal, Engelmann), as well as works by Thomas Hirschhorn and Andreas Slominski.
Cult of the Artist.
Beuys: We Are the Revolution;
Celebrities, Andy Warhol and the Stars; and
"I can't just slice off an ear every day" Deconstructing the Myth of the Artist
Until 22 February
Hamburger Bahnhof
Invalidenstrasse 50-51
+ 49 (0) 30 3978 3413
www.hamburgerbahnhof.de
An exhibition trilogy at the Hamburger Bahnhof this autumn promises nothing less than to "take on the cult of the artist". Exhibitions devoted to Warhol and Beuys meet their dialectical match with a group show of varied antagonists from FLUXUS to Martin Kippenberger through Christian Jankowski and Bernadette Corporation. (Curated by Gabriele Knapstein)
Amie Dicke
Amie Dicke: Passive Drifter
Until 25 October
Peres Projects
Schlesische str 26
www.peresprojects.com
Amie Dicke is best known for her calculated x-acto knife mutilations to the unbending ladies of fashion glossies. For her latest show at Peres, she has turned her efforts to more responsive surfaces. The artist, for instance, burned holes in some bedsheets, whose synthetic quality is such that they've puckered violently. The Eva Hesse references are inescapable, but so is the fact that by comparison Dicke's poor sheets are pretty abject.
Thomas Scheibitz
Thomas Scheibitz: "The Goldilocks Zone"
From 18 October
Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers Berlin
Oranienburger Str. 18
+49(0)30 - 2888 40 30
www.spruethmagers.com
Cologne-based Sprueth and Magers open operations in Berlin this month with a show of abstract sculptures conceived as existential building blocks by Thomas Scheibitz. The gallery is also bring Berlin an artist-oriented public service: its front space, designed by Rosemarie Trockel and Thea Djordjadze, is to provide a library of unlimited edition video art, film, and documentary for reference and purchase. IMAGE MOVEMENT is, according to the gallerists, "a work in progress, its stock will grow gradually as the number of available art film DVDs increases."
Tomas Saraceno
MEGASTRUCTURE RELOADED
Until 2 November (Symposium 18 and 19 October)
Former State Mint
Molkenmarkt 2
www.megastructure-reloaded.org
Contemporary artists like Tobias Putrih and Tomas Saraceno have dealt loosely with utopia - and more specifically with the aesthetics of total systems. The 60s "megastructuralists" - Yona Friedman and Archigram among them - were urbanists whose designs aimed to re-imagine the city as a more highly evolved organism. This exhibition does more to bring the second group into the ambit of the first than vice versa.
Family Jewels, curated by Damien Deroubaix and Conny Becker
27 October - 6 December
Bongout
Torstrasse 110
+49(0)30 280 93 758
www.bongout.org
French painter Damien Debrouaix deals with guilt and association - this time as a curator. His family tree began as a project for the publication Particules, and will continue to grow in three dimensions at Bongout showroom. 19 artists will be implicated, each literally putting his or her own name to the project in painting, sculpture, drawing, or collage.
Via Lewandowsky
Peace and Agriculture
Until 25 October
Haunch of Venison
Heidestrasse 50
+44 (0) 20 7495 5050
www.haunchofvenison.com
Eight artists present synthetic visions of the world under the rubric of contemporary landscape. Interpretation of that mode, according to the exhibition's curators, range from the "political and industrial" (Via Lewandowsky, Ori Gerscht) through the "digital" (Jules Spinatsch's CCTV jigsaw panorama, and Takeshi Murata's reworked film stills). They also mention the "spiritual" - a category which might be intended for the work of young interventionist James Ireland.
Nina Canell
Nina Canell: Walking on no-top hill
Until 24 December
Linienstrasse 158
+49 (0)30 28 38 53 52
www.barbarawien.de
Nina Canell is a self-identified sculptor who works equally with sound and assemblage. Among the works on display at Wien is 'Nightwalker', a sort of perceptual metal detector. Describing it, the artist quotes Claus Oldenburg: "I am searching for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man's metal stick."
Torstrasse 166: Haus der Vorstellung (House of imagination)
Until 12 November
Torstrasse 166
www.torstrasse166.de
An apartment building in which each dwelling represents the vision of a different artist or collective: in Berlin such things are sponsored by hardware store chains. (Though not, in this case, BAUHAUS.) The collaboration of a butcher, a baker and candlestick maker - rather an artist, gallerist and music video producer - Torstrasse 166 houses Laura Kikauka's manic homage to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and a dense human scale web by Chiharu Shiota. Next door, chez raumlabor berlin, you can visit the replicated the interior of a DDR plattenbau. Und so weiter.
Bernd Krauss
Bernd Krauss
Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch
Until 22 November
Kurfürstenstr. 12
49 30- 44 04 67 81
www.nourbakhsch.de
Bernd Krauss rearranges the mundane to form more artful scenarios. This summer he set up a television station on the roof of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, broadcasting the results at street level. Here his collections of lightly remastered plebian items cut their own dainty paths through Giti Nourbaksch's gallery. In the words of critic Jan Verwoert, "content seeps inexorably" into Krauss's work "in the same way you involuntarily pick up bits of gossip."
Alix Rule writes on art and politics. She has worked for In These Times and Dissent magazine, and her writing has appeared in a variety of other publications. Alix grew up in New York and studied at the University of Chicago at then at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating she worked briefly as an organizer of low-wage workers in London, UK. Alix is interested in interior and outer space, organizing communities, "social entrepreneurship" and above all, clothing. She has recently moved to Berlin. You can contact her at alix.rule@gmail.com.
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