Allora & Calzadilla
11 Jul - 06 Sep 2009
ALLORA & CALZADILLA
July 11 to September 6, 2009
Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla have developed a complex artistic vocabulary utilizing film, installations, performances, and sculpture. Their artistic practice engages with history and contemporary geo-political realities, exposing their complicated dynamics, destabilizing and re-ordering them in ways that can be alternately poetic, humorous, and revelatory.
Allora & Calzadilla’s new work Compass, 2009, conceived specifically for the Temporдre Kunsthalle Berlin, creates a new spatial and acoustic experience. Dividing the Kunsthalle horizontally, a level is introduced, inaccessible to the viewer and reducing the grand exhibition hall to less than one third. Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads. The otherwise empty exhibition space is turned into a huge resonating chamber: “The performer is like a specter that moves through this flat horizontal stretch and whose sonic traces become a type of metrical language – a rhythmic and poetic means of communication with the public below.” (Allora & Calzadilla)
In the entrance area, Allora & Calzadilla will present their most recent video work How to Appear Invisible, 2009, in which a German shepherd with an oversized collar bearing the logo of a fast food chain roams the demolition site of the Palast der Republik.
Both pieces can be read as a commentary on the situation outside the Kunsthalle and on Schlossplatz with its remaining traces and signs. The empty space of the hall points to the vacuum left behind by the deconstruction of the Palast der Republik and to the debate about the future of the site, while the film puts into play notions of iconolatry and iconoclasm within monumental space. With their exhibition, Allora & Calzadilla elaborate on the relations between orientation and disorientation, memory and visibility, presence and absence – as well as on the realms of imagination, projection, and possibility.
Jennifer Allora (born 1974 in Philadelphia/USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971 in Havana/Cuba) live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They are currently living in Berlin as DAAD fellows.
Curated by Dirk Luckow (Director of Kunsthalle zu Kiel, and since 2007 Member of the Artistic Advisory Board of the Temporдre Kunsthalle Berlin)
July 11 to September 6, 2009
Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla have developed a complex artistic vocabulary utilizing film, installations, performances, and sculpture. Their artistic practice engages with history and contemporary geo-political realities, exposing their complicated dynamics, destabilizing and re-ordering them in ways that can be alternately poetic, humorous, and revelatory.
Allora & Calzadilla’s new work Compass, 2009, conceived specifically for the Temporдre Kunsthalle Berlin, creates a new spatial and acoustic experience. Dividing the Kunsthalle horizontally, a level is introduced, inaccessible to the viewer and reducing the grand exhibition hall to less than one third. Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads. The otherwise empty exhibition space is turned into a huge resonating chamber: “The performer is like a specter that moves through this flat horizontal stretch and whose sonic traces become a type of metrical language – a rhythmic and poetic means of communication with the public below.” (Allora & Calzadilla)
In the entrance area, Allora & Calzadilla will present their most recent video work How to Appear Invisible, 2009, in which a German shepherd with an oversized collar bearing the logo of a fast food chain roams the demolition site of the Palast der Republik.
Both pieces can be read as a commentary on the situation outside the Kunsthalle and on Schlossplatz with its remaining traces and signs. The empty space of the hall points to the vacuum left behind by the deconstruction of the Palast der Republik and to the debate about the future of the site, while the film puts into play notions of iconolatry and iconoclasm within monumental space. With their exhibition, Allora & Calzadilla elaborate on the relations between orientation and disorientation, memory and visibility, presence and absence – as well as on the realms of imagination, projection, and possibility.
Jennifer Allora (born 1974 in Philadelphia/USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971 in Havana/Cuba) live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They are currently living in Berlin as DAAD fellows.
Curated by Dirk Luckow (Director of Kunsthalle zu Kiel, and since 2007 Member of the Artistic Advisory Board of the Temporдre Kunsthalle Berlin)