Peggy Buth, Leelee Chan, Falk Haberkorn, Renaud Regnery, Jonas Roßmeißl, Monika Uelze, Karl-Heinz Adler + Friedrich Kracht

Fata Morgana

A flickering mirage, a stylized idea that manifests itself temporarily and, on closer observation, is revealed to be an illusion, dissolving into thin air. Fata Morgana is a positive imago and a temporary state, a promise of the future that is linked to the urgent desire to fulfill it, superimposed on reality and shattered by it as soon as the wishful glaze dissolves. Moments of simultaneity shimmer translucently and through parallel spheres new potentials open up – characterized by plurality. Conceived with Falk Haberkorn, this show gathers works by Peggy Buth, Leelee Chan, Falk Haberkorn, Renaud Regnery and Jonas Roßmeißl, which will be presented alongside photographs by Monika Uelze and concrete form stones by Karl-Heinz Adler and Friedrich Kracht, to put the artist’s works from the gallery’s program in relation to the historical-architectural context of Leipziger Straße.

On the mezzanine, we present documentary images by photographer Monika Uelze from the Mitte Museum Berlin collection. As the curator of the exhibition Wohnkomplex Leipziger Straße – Planen, Bauen und Leben in der Hauptstadt der DDR (29.09.2023 – 26.02.2024), Edouard Compere, explains, “when Uelze (1941-2000) was first employed by the VEB Wohnungsbaukombinat Berlin (housing construction state-owned enterprise for Berlin) in 1975, one of her first assignments was to document the construction site on Leipziger Straße. A massive residential complex had been under construction there since 1970, which was intended not only as a response to the great housing shortage in East-Berlin, but also to revive Leipziger Strasse as a lively shopping street. However, this was not done as a historical reconstruction but with the use of advanced construction methods and in the spirit of a modernist architectural vision. The photographs document the construction phases up to the completion of the complex in 1979, but do not just show concrete, steel and rubble: an impression of the life on Leipziger Straße in the 1980s is also visible.”

In three bodies of work by Berlin artist Peggy Buth from her cycle Vom Nutzen der Angst / Politics of Selection (2014, 2016, 2017), she explores the fulfillment of notions of a better (built) future, here particularly in the French banlieues. The projection Demolition Flats (2014) features a choreographed montage of found-footage of various former social buildings being blown up – all of them high-rise projects that pursued humanist ideas of a peaceful and social life and thus failed, burst utopias. Flächen / Surfaces (2017), as well as the work Your Place (2016), negotiate the actual traces and idealized-rendered ideas of spaces where visions of a new, better way of life are still emerging or have long since failed in the face of reality and where social and economic interests meet.

The molded concrete blocks presented in the exhibition space were developed and serially produced by the artists Adler and Kracht. They appear on countless facades in the former GDR, as well as free-standing sculptures, and can be read as a style-defining design element. “When Adler and Kracht developed the twelve basic forms of the system in Dresden in 1968, their aim was to create new possibilities for modernist decoration in harmony with the architecture.”, says Edouard Compere. Originally conceived as free-standing structural walls, the building blocks convey an abstract, industrial and modernist artistic intention that carries the creative handwriting of the originators and, without the artists anticipating it, also accompanied a new era of architecture when installed on countless façades.

For this exhibition, Renaud Regnery has developed a smaller concept version in series from the large-format work Durst (2023). The two original motif components also become a recurring element in the new works. The artist overpaints digital prints of medieval war scenes taken from the Internet with the depiction of a dachshund, which, according to his artistic practice, has its origins in a found postcard. On it, boozing as a crisis management strategy, which has been firmly rooted in German popular culture since the 1940s, is praised as an identitarian model. Given the fact that war has been raging in Europe for over two years now, Regnery’s combination of such different aesthetics unfolds a sense of the growing semantic complexity of the world we live in. A feeling that not least attests to the legitimacy of ambivalence. Falk Haberkorn‘s photographic work Brotherhood / Zum ewigen Frieden (2015/16, 2023), in which he combines digital and analog image material, is also a testament to the superimposition of meaning, the dreariness of the found and objects or places to which a dreamy theory still clings. Unedited impressions of an actual state, taken in Kaliningrad in 2015, generate an open, historical-contemporary space charged with countless cultural and political connotations in confrontation with the immaculate product photographs of an online store for camouflage clothing.

Like an archaeologist of the material world, Leelee Chan finds her artistic source material at the port of Hong Kong, one of the main trading hubs in South-East Asia. She processes industrial plastic pallets and remnants of Hong Kong’s colonial history, the raw materials for her works Double Oculus (Amber) and Circuit (Jasper Green #2) (2022), with sculptural dedication and combines them with materials such as urethane resin, silver, copper and epoxy, which in turn are extracted to find their role in upgrading our living standards and thus stand equally as memorials to a highly technologized society. Overlaying, overwriting, reworking in simultaneity, non-opaque states, the multiple layers of meaning also shimmer through in Jonas Roßmeißl‘s work. With his scenic-installative piece O.2 (How to measure the quality of life after a revolution) (2019), he juxtaposes naturality and the traditional with artificiality and fiction, visualizing the dynamic, transitory potential of destruction. As if it had been naturally deformed and torched, the tree trunk, whose transformation into the energy carrier charcoal takes place visually, yet was forced into the division of its possible states by the artist’s hand. The distinct levels of the artistic body in terms of their cultural-technical charge and their (aesthetic) materiality confront each other as both relic and prognosis.