By Susannah Edelbaum, to Museum Spotlight Europe (October 2021)
While the internet was still collectively making sourdough, the Berlin-based curator duo Kala&Krüger started planning an exhibition in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Five cancelations later, through lockdowns, shifting regulations, and the novel virus’s ebb and flow, the pair, Halea Isabelle Kala and Alexander Krüger, finally opened the doors to “Corona Culture — what the f*** is happening?!” [Note: Editor’s change] on October 13th.
Installed over 4000 square meters of the Alte Münze (a vast exhibition space named for its former life as a Berlin city mint), the 100 or so artists and activists showing at “Corona Culture” are part of a collective pandemic processing mechanism which, unlike the global effects of the novel virus to which their work is a response, is really a lot of fun.
An early aim when she and Krüger first conceived of “Corona Culture,” Kala noted in her remarks during the exhibition opening, was to “analyze exactly what is going on right now. It’s in constant flux, and it’s difficult to grasp.” Thanks to repeat rescheduling, what entailed “right now” kept changing, with the curators ultimately organizing the exhibit’s final form around five different chapters of pandemic processing: overwhelmed, synchronicity and silence, normalization, marathon of uncertainty (this one pertains to the city’s second, much longer lockdown, which began at the end of October 2020 and indeed felt like a marathon, if not an even more unpleasant, bizarre race with no finish line), and future corona, a section dedicated to how we can use this pivotal shift, but which also acknowledges that the pandemic is likely to go on for some time.
The exhibit’s first room is dimly lit, painted black, and among other works, home to a shrine produced by AWE Studio, welcoming viewers to light a stick of incense and offer up a prayer. Akin to a Tibetan Buddhist mandala, the shrine’s design is formed from sand, but in place of colorful, geometric flora, this all-white sand fans out in what looks like the wires of a circuit board — if only our pandemic technology dependency would and could be destroyed so easily.
In the next room, the former mint’s main hall, technology visually overwhelms, surrounding us with reminders of the pandemic on a massive screen wrapping three-quarters of the space. A video cycles through five creators’ works, among them Daniel-Ryan Spaulding (an expat comedian best known for skewering Berlin hipster mores), blubbering in front of a closed fetish club, Kit Kat, currently operating as a Covid testing site, with the video giving way to another shuttered cultural space: Barcelona’s El Liceu Teatre, reimagined by Eugeio Ampudio taken over by a dense jungle. Nestled in their gilt-edged seats, the plants seem to have cozily replaced a human audience. But the lights are on, and there is no performance.
On the way downstairs to the mint’s former vault, Kala’s own work, a hanging sign reading “I. Overwhelmed,” is suspended in a claustrophobic black hallway, a piece of “live, laugh, love” adornment for those of us who live our lives with a modicum of emotional honesty. Into the mint’s former vault we go. The word “renovation” doesn’t appear to ever have been so much as breathed in the direction of Alte Münze’s cellar, and Kala and Krüger have astutely paired off each dusty nook and cranny with a different work.
Nina E. Schönefeld’s “F.E.A.R.L.E.S.S.,” featuring two tiny televisions set in front of a glass-enclosed hunk of tree and a mirror, speaks to our dependence on technology, while next door, the rhythmic bass and flashing lights off a roped-off techno club set deep among the building’s pipes, from Jonas Urbat and Bruno Montañez, are a site-specific reminder of heute leider nicht (“unfortunately, not tonight,” a common refrain from Berlin club doormen). As long as the pandemic continues, when it comes to Berlin’s legendary club scene, nobody’s getting in anywhere.
One cramped, red-lit staircase is the only way up or down to the cellar. Joshua Murphy’s and Uri Moss’s audio piece, “in your face,” blasts the stairwell with a surfeit of uncomfortably loud information — it’s easy to make the connection to the height of the pandemic’s overwhelming glut of news, editorializing, and blatant disinformation. A few of the words cutting through the din include “education,” “flight,” “institute,” and “classified.” At the bottom of the stairs, you find yourself standing on a simple projection of a tree onto the floor — from Lucas Christiansen, the piece is one of the show’s more literal elements, representing the photographer’s view from his windows in April 2020.
The “what the f*** is happening?!” in the show’s title sums up the exhibit as a whole, but the work shown here is a reminder that you might have experienced your own personal moment, or moments, of WTF at any stage of the pandemic, including right now. On the other hand, as Kala pointed out during the show’s opening, “the human nervous system gets used to things so quickly.” Whether we’re saying a prayer to the technology that saw us through or trying, successfully or not, to beat back a sense of overwhelm, “Corona Culture” is an effective reminder that what we’ve become accustomed to would have been unthinkable two years ago.
Corona Culture – what the f*** is happening?! will be on view through November 13th. In addition to the exhibit, performances will be held during the evening. Check the schedule for further information.
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