Hours and Hours of Inactivity

Curator: Rhea Dall

 

With the exhibition Hours and Hours of Inactivity, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein resumes the exhibition series of the Berlin Senate’s Fine Arts Scholarship recipients. Eleven positions from different generations of the city’s international art scene reflect Berlin’s eccentric plethora of artistic genres.

 

Hours and Hours of Inactivity puts this generous diversity at the fore and spans photography, film, video, and drawing, to sculpture, and installation. The exhibition uncovers diverging queries and temporalities within the distinct artists’ work, including a conglomerate of long-term investigations and serial gestures, surprise encounters and forgotten ephemera.

 

The title is a musical catch phrase taken from a piece by participating artist Mariechen Danz and her band UNMAP. Striking a chord with the curatorial approach, the song line Hours and Hours of Inactivity mirrors how the duration and complexity of the included oeuvres drive the display.

 

Various works wrestle with the ‘museal’ freezing of time, tinkering with white-cube behaviors. Among those are a wall piece constantly redone by Fritz Balthaus, a waiting area by Wolf von Kries, an (almost) motionless stone sculpture by Olga Balema, a series of drawn scores reverberating ‘time passing’ by Christine Sun Kim, or Bettina Allamoda’s fashionable fabric dressing-up parts of the exhibition space. Reflecting a current favoring of instant, excessive performance-as-success, n.b.k.’s storefront windows host a depot-like presentation of staggered glossy, digital photography by Roman Schramm that seems caught between a storage space and one of consumer-oriented, accelerated entertainment. Other tableaux by Diana Artus, Sandra Schäfer, Heidi Sill, and Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton forward stagnated building projects, city-scape meanderings, and the rise and disassembling of architectural utopias, alluding to the exhibition’s core tension between sedate quiescence and hyperbolic time pressure, both marking the creative productions on view.