For the first exhibition in its Berlin space, Galeria Plan B presents a cross-section of its portfolio, intended as an introduction and statement of purpose. 'Berlin Show #1' assembles projects made by artists working with the gallery since its inception, in Cluj, Romania, in 2005.
Serban Savu, 'Parking', 2008.
Gabriela Vanga, 'Pavel', 2006.
These are accompanied by more recent - and geographically more dispersed - collaborators, in a tight interplay of shared concerns and interconnected attitudes. Reassessing the debris of the recent cultural and political past is a question running through a number of contributions to the exhibition. In Ciprian Muresan's 'Un chien andalou', characters from 'Shrek' re-enact the famous eye-slashing scene from the film by Bunuel / Dali, presenting the post-modern intellectual with a daunting Rorschach test of conflicted histories and interpretations.
Muresan's Communism never happened, cut from propaganda records and implacably revisionist, mirrors the ways in which post-communism and globalization endlessly complicate each other. It is a slogan that bypasses political disputes about the Left, memories and statistics: if more people agree that 'Communism never happened', the possibility of a community discreetly arises. Projects and specially commissioned installations by Mircea Cantor and Victor Man address complementary issues, pitting artistic subjectivity against views of the past that resemble Zeno paradoxes.
Istvan Laszlo and Cristi Pogacean engage history the way monuments do, proceeding by extreme, effective simplification. Pogacean's Modernist Bird House or the crushing weight of his Lead helmet, Laszlo's manipulation of a propaganda image, showing the political leader drowsing off into irrelevance - these works isolate and genetically modify bits of history in what feels like a simulator for alternative flows of time.
Paintings by Adrian Ghenie and Serban Savu deconstruct our habits in situating images historically: they exhale history, but a generic and delocalized one, operating on an imprecise timeline that unites contradictory purposes and events.
Another cluster of works constitutes a collective, post-Conceptual 'portrait of the artist', a resonant study of existential contingency, cultural conditioning and their potentially infinite artistic reversals. The exhibition includes Gabriela Vanga's sandglass-cum-feeding bottle, Miklos Onucsan's patient study of creative entropy, Navid Nuur's relentless construction and destruction of a sculpture that finally equals its own postponed achievability, as well as Cristian Rusu's seeming obsession with a Venetian street sign that reads Calle della Morte, filmed until hands start trembling from the effort of prolonged stillness and the frame loses its sharpness.
Plan B is an artist-run space opened in September 2005 in Cluj, the main city in the Romanian province of Transylvania. Initiated by Mihai Pop and Adrian Ghenie, Plan B is a production space for contemporary art. It also has a particular focus on Romanian art of the last 50 years, functioning also as a research centre that reveals works by remarkable artists with no previous international exposure.
The name of the gallery -- Plan B -- is a reference to the general state of art spaces in Romania: as these are mostly reliant on insufficient public resources, the 'plan B' fallback is animated by individual involvement, a different understanding of the institutional and a coherent managerial policy. Plan B organised the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale 2007 with Mihnea Mircan as the curator and Victor Man and Cristi Pogacean among the artists exhibited.
Plan B Berlin has 260 sqm of exhibition space and is located in a 20th century former industrial building on Heidestrasse 50, near to the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart Berlin.
'BERLIN SHOW 1'
To 18 Oct 2008.
PLAN B Berlin
Heidestrasse 50
Berlin
T: +49 172 3210711
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