Berlin.Status (1) investigates the big-city phenomenon of art, starting out from the observation that Berlin today is “an art city with no consensus” (Drühl/Tannert). Whereas it had been possible to observe an organic weave in the sense of reciprocal interplay between tradition and renewal until into the 1980s, young art in Berlin today lives primally from international influences, multiperspective orientations, and globally determined lines of production. This development was triggered long before the fall of the Wall by the grant programmes of the DAAD and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, the Transmediale after 1990, a growing avantgarde electro- and club-culture, and by successful intermedia and thematic projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Volksbühne and the HAU. Additional bonds between Berlin and its artists are created by working grants awarded by the State of Berlin, and the provision and mediation of affordable studio spaces by the Bundesverband Bildender Künstler (Federal Association of Fine Artists).
If Berlin is a landing area for young international artists today, it is not only because of continuing favourable opportunities to live and work here – the culture of “interim uses” that passed its high point long ago. Even though the developments of globalisation have had a noticeable impact on Berlin, in many cases artists want to work in the city precisely because they as individuals are consciously struggling against the pull of uniformity. And although Berlin is caught in a lasting state of radical change, young artists do not regard the city itself as worthy of capturing in images; a reduction in site-specific and situational research projects can also be registered. After a twenty-year phase of transformation, Berlin is becoming – neighbourhood after neighbourhood – a ‘normal’ place to work. However, this does not mean that reasons for worry and doubt have turned into delight, and the new interest in ornament, design and non-representational formal languages does not indicate that criticism of society and consumerism is drying up, either. Today, aesthetic debate is shifting towards cultural debate, and some artists react to this development in a decidedly formalist manner.
Berlin. Status (1) presents artists who doubt in the necessity for large-scale mobilisation and are therefore working intellectually and aesthetically to supplement or sharpen their own very personal profile. Although they have definitely moved the focus of their lives to Berlin permanently, it is not “the Berlinesque” here that provides fertile ground for the extraordinary, but the individual ability shown by every outstanding artist. For Berlin.Status (1), therefore, we have selected both well- and lesser-known artists: the common characteristic being that they are laboratory practicians – pure and idiosynchratic. The main conceptual interest of the exhibition curators, Sven Drühl and Christoph Tannert, is in the doubt inherent in almost all current tendencies.
Sven Drühl (*1968 in Nassau), artist and art theorist, has lived in Berlin since 2002. Christoph Tannert (*1955, Leipzig) has lived in Berlin since 1976; since 2000, CEO and project director of fine art at Künstlerhaus Bethanien , Berlin.
Stine Marie Jacobsen
Stine Marie Jacobsen works with video, performance and text. Key themes in Jacobsen’s work are cinema and film, gender archetypes, anonymity, death and violence, as well as their portrayal and presentation in film.
In "Direct Approach", as in many of her projects, Jacobsen interacts with a wide spectrum of people from various fields of life and work. In Berlin she aimed to discuss the topic of violence, initiating a dialogue with interested participants about their individual perceptions of violence. First, she had the participants recount personal memories of a specific film scene which they had found especially violent or traumatising. Jacobsen then restaged the film scenes in question on the basis of these subjective descriptions. Here, she cast the people she had questioned in place of the actors: victim, witness, violent perpetrator – each participant could choose which of the characters he or she wished to incorporate.
The exhibition "Direct Approach" at Künstlerhaus Bethanien presents three of the video portraits made in this way. They are shown in the form of a weekly changing projection. The artist has also arranged a selection of other film-scene descriptions as text posters in the adjacent room. Complete reports by all the people Jacobsen spoke to during the project will be published in a book to appear in early 2013, which also marks the end of her long-term project "Direct Approach".Stine Marie Jacobsen is a grantee from the Danish Arts Council, Copenhagen; she is a guest at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in the context of our International Studio Programme. http://www.stinemariejacobsen.com
