It's rather rare to experience a sense of context in Berlin. The city's insurmountable scale evades our habits of perception; its storied past appears often as a maddening, irreconcilable scattering of fragmented narratives. Berlin's physical and social substance is so prone to reconfiguration that its inhabitants rarely have the time to develop a common image of the city's identity. Today's Berlin has become somewhat of a clichéd tag-line of itself: young, creative, raw. Yet if this is the Berlin we collectively have a crush on, it is the more intricate city, the one that exposes itself over time, that commands us with an unforgiving lure. Berlin remains a deeply private city that is knowable only in the most individual and intimate manner.
In Nathan Peter's Eminent Domain, a site-specific installation presented within Wooloo's New Life Berlin contemporary art festival, we find ourselves confronted with our own private Berlin: blatantly unrefined and explicable only to those who invest their time. Taking out the storefront-windows of a ground floor gallery in one of Mitte's few remaining unrestored buildings, Peter eliminates the boundary between interior and exterior to reconsider the discrimination between public and private, urban and domestic. With the gallery laid bare to every passing eye, the installation and its accompanying discourse is subjected to the logic of the city's elements.
Even from across the street, passersby can see Eminent Domain's shimmering reflections. What appears from a distance as a surface of chipped rock or a projection of rippled water, reveals itself upon approach as mirrored foil, freely applied over several weathered stacks of laminated advertisement posters. The city, the gallery and the viewer seem to merge in the wrinkled reflection of the foil. Arranged to cover the back wall of the gallery space, these surfaces were then punctured with different sized drill holes to create a pixelated image – an imaginary landscape that Peter created by combining classic paintings by Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich. In synthesizing the classic imagery with layered sheets of advertisement, Peter demonstrates how our traditional constructions of fictional, utopian environments are quite literally drilled into the index of Berlin's social, commercial and political climate. The picturesque representation, whether it be the banks of the Hudson River (Cole), the Capuchin Mountains (Friedrich) or the ruins of Tacheles (the point-and-shoot vision of Berlin as ‘edgy ruins’), blinds the critical view with the flattening, artificial glow of a stage set. If our collective imagining of Paris has frozen it into a screenshot of a mythical 19th century belle époque, then Peter reminds us that Berlin's run-down, gritty dynamism is as much a self-fulfilling desire as it is a possible version of reality.
Text by Carson Chan
APPLICATION INFORMATION
DISCUSS THIS PROJECT
ADD A COMMENT
You must be logged in to add a comment.
To create a free Wooloo.org account, click the "SIGN UP NOW" button below.
If you already have a Wooloo.org account, click the "LOG IN" button below.
