Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.)

Anja Kirschner and David Panos

01 Dec 2012 - 27 Jan 2013

Exhibition view Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, 2012, Photo: Jens Ziehe
ANJA KIRSCHNER AND DAVID PANOS
Curators: Sophie Goltz, Kerstin Stakemeier
1 December 2012 – 27 January 2013

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein shows new work by Anja Kirschner (b. 1977 in Munich) and David Panos (b. 1971 in Athens). In recent years, Kirschner and Panos have established themselves internationally, taking a significant position in artist video and were awarded the 2011 Jarman Award. Most recently their work has been exhibited in locations including: Artist Space, New York (2012), Liverpool Biennial (2012), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2011) and Kunsthall Oslo (2011).

Their video Ultimate Substance (2012, 34 min), presented for the first time in Germany, will be staged in a setting of sculptural elements. The film departs from the hypothesis that the advent of coinage, which first emerged in ancient Greece, led to the fundamental division between sensual and abstract forms of experience. The metaphysical outlook of Greek philosophy and mathematics can be seen as corresponding to the abstract experience of monetary exchange.

Ultimate Substance was filmed in and around the Numismatic Museum of Athens and in Lavreotiki, a nearby mining district, where industrial scale extraction provided the silver on which the classical Athenian city-state was founded. Abandoned in Roman times, the mines were re-discovered in the 19th century making Lavrio the first factory town of the modern Greek state. In the 1970s the local mining industry was again dismantled. Today the factory ruins house a museum on mining history.

Jumping between images of antiquity and present-day crisis ridden Greece, the film is neither documentary, nor a narrative work. Instead, it consists of fragmented pictorial quotes that are assembled and shuffled through hard cuts, emphasized with concrete sound editing.

The artists collide choreographed movements of labor, geometric proofs, and archaeological and contemporary everyday objects, contrasted and compiled into a reflection on economy and the prehistory of industrial labor. Kirschner and Panos propose the introduction of coinage as crucial to the rise and development of the Western philosophical tradition and science, which even today dominates the way in which we comprehend the world.

The exhibtion will be closed from December 24 to 26, 2012 and on January 1, 2013.
 

Tags: Anja Kirschner, David Panos