Hamburger Bahnhof

Alexandra Pirici is set to present Attune – a major new site-specific installation with live performative action and music – at Hamburger Bahnhof. Pirici’s expansive work launches a new series of annual commissions in the museum’s Historic Hall to be opened in conjunction with Gallery Weekend Berlin. The 2024 edition is cocommissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof and Audemars Piguet Contemporary and co-financed by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Pirici transforms the Historic Hall into a dynamic landscape: A stainless steel vine-like sculpture, a shape-shifting sand dune, a spiraling platform, plants, mineral formations, dance and song bring audiences face to face with the fascination of self-organizing processes and patterns.

With Attune Pirici explores how humans – and their more-than-human counterparts – resemble, influence, and attune to one another to bring forth complex structures, whether chemical, physical, mineral or social. Having extensively studied self-organizing patterns and processes across all forms of matter, Pirici imbues her work with the knowledge she has acquired from careful observation of the world around her as well as from her reading, experimentation, discourse and collaboration with scientists across various disciplines.

Pirici creates a vibrant imaginary landscape within the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof. She interweaves active sculptural elements with live performance and polyphonic musical pieces of her own choreography and composition. In this at once archaic and futuristic environment, created by the artist and designed together with long-term collaborator Andrei Dinu, chemical reactions, mineral formations, and physical phenomena perform alongside living bodies in acknowledgement and celebration of the continuum between living and non-living matter. Together these actors show how stable structures emerge from the random behavior of atoms, molecules, and cells – in both animate and inanimate matter. A stainless steel vine-like sculpture, a shape-shifting sand dune, a spiraling platform, plants, mineral formations, chemical reaction, dance and song bring audiences face to face with the wonder of self-organizing processes and patterns. These are not only part of the world as it is experienced but also offer an insight into the emergence of life and evolution.

A highlight of Pirici’s work is the demonstration of the Briggs-Rauscher reaction in which a solution shifts back and forth between two colors before the reaction finally comes to an end. This oscillating chemical reaction is often used to demonstrate self-organizing patterns in chemistry. For Attune, Alexandra Pirici has collaborated with chemists and engineers to significantly scale up and, for the first time, to fully automate the reaction. It will take place several times in the course of the exhibition.

Performers: Caroline Beach, Juan Corres Benito, Noemi Calzavara, Michelle Cheung, Gabrielle Duval, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Nitsan Margaliot, Jared Marks, Tatiana Mejía, Emily Ranford, Asuka Julia Riedl, Robert Schulz, Yurika S. Yamamoto

The exhibition is curated by Catherine Nichols, curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.