PAPER
Contemplations
on visuals - field Notes
Käthe Kruse “Jetzt ist alles gut” at Berlinische Galerie 7.3.25 – 16.6.25
Mariechen Danz “edge out” at Berlinische Galerie
Mariechen Danz “edge out” at Berlinische Galerie
Mariechen Danz’s show caught me by surprise. I went to the Berlinische Galerie to see the exhibition by German artist Käthe Kruse. I’d listened to the institution’s podcast episode featuring the artist in conversation with director Thomas Köhler and curator Ilka Voermann on Jetzt ist alles gut, and it made me nostalgic for a time I didn’t even experience - the early ’80s in Berlin. Grimy, chaotic, improvised. A divided city.
The East: bound by limitations and a belief in an ideology that was supposed to atone for the country’s recent past, guiding it toward something different.
The West: delusional and opinionated, also turning away from that same past - but through excess and experiments in new ways of living, if one was sober enough to remember or willing to agree with others.
A fascinating time of shedding old skin with the naïveté and energy of a newborn (at least in my head). My mom, who was visiting, told me that, like the artist, she moved to Berlin in 1981, in love.
The Berlinische Galerie has a calm design - easy to enter and navigate. Its massive walls and clean architecture open up in different ways as you wander through the rooms, offering elevated vantage points, closed-off video rooms, and subdivided exhibition spaces. Architecturally, it feels soft, almost fluffy. The only strange space is occupied by an elegant staircase that moves from two opposite corners, briefly meeting halfway, as if leaning onto each other. It takes centre stage and makes the surrounding walls almost always feel like an afterthought or a spillover from bordering exhibition rooms.
In the case of Kruse’s exhibition, it is occupied by massive rows of differently textured and coloured wallpaper, which, according to the artist explanation in the podcast: “Die Idee der komplizierten Treppenhalle und dieser langen Wand (...) genau da könnte die Vergangenheit sein und zwar als riesen Installation auf Tapete” / “The idea of the complicated staircase hall and this long wall (...) right there could be the past as a huge wallpaper installation.”
The exhibition text confirms what kept coming to mind while walking through: I was surprised by the artist’s care for order, sequence, and subtle details. With her group Die Tödliche Doris, she was known for loud, weird, and - according to my mom - cheeky performances responding to the conditions and issues of her time.
Some of the video footage in the first room, I believe, was shot at SO36, the notorious club in Kreuzberg - one I would go to decades later with high expectations of time-travelling into the legendary then. The concerts were great, though the rest, not that glorious. I find that places - especially recreational ones - live primarily through the people who inhabit them, who give them soul and character. Only a few spaces can hold memory beyond their physical presence. Like the Village Vanguard in NYC - a space that still holds its magic, patinated since the ’60s. Definitely not SO36. But maybe that was never the point to begin with?
Those videos clearly belong to a certain time - with technological and financial limitations - and again, maybe the point was never to make a high-definition recording. The point was to be then and there, present. I mean, what is tomorrow, anyhow? But it does make it difficult to engage with the shaky videos and the improvised, at times clumsy, movements flickering on screen 40ish years later.
The second room, however, blew me away. Kruse’s conceptual productions are beautiful, intricate, and witty. The vinyls painted over with thick, colourful paint - where silence lives. Or the meticulously leather-costumed instruments on stage - including the teapot! A brilliant tactile interpretation of the readymade, and a stylish development of artistic expertise in comparison. I very much enjoyed the conceptual ideas behind her works - the playful nudges - like the vinyls that birthed the show’s title from Wie geht es dir jetzt? - Jetzt ist alles gut. And when played simultaneously, they create a third space.
But I’m jumping. Let’s go back to the elongated room one has to enter to access all others.
In edge out, Irish-German artist Mariechen Danz shows works from the past ten years. Arranged in what seems like a meticulous production - heavy on research, collaboration, and labour - they extend across the floor and rise up its six-meter walls. Here again, the architecture affords an openness for the works to spill beyond norm-hanging eye height. It forces the visitor to continuously look up, reinforcing the marginal scale of one’s own body, as well as to look down - to the groundedness of one’s feet standing in front of a low-placed artwork.
The title edge out suggests some sort of winning or losing - slight but still definitive. It also suggests things could have turned out differently - a nod to the philosophy of contingency: a relational understanding of the world, where properties and relations are not absolute or necessary, but contingent. They could have been otherwise. The tight space between two polar opposites reveals the potential for different outcomes - it is not unambiguous, and both outcomes feel almost contestable.
Or, staying in the artist’s realm of art, science, and technology, it could be read as the margin between one or another result - between interpretation, research, and conviction. The power that lies in positionality, access, and knowledge - like the work Possible Paths (2014/24) the exhibition begins with. But to be honest, it’s not entirely clear to me - which makes for a fun round of speculation. Above being case in point.
Beyond the title, the materials and productions are solid and clear. From organic materials formed by hand, anatomical props replicating human body parts, to metal cut-outs of abstracted human forms - precision CNC, a collaboration with the machine - as well as resin, making for lucid specimens hanging in relation to. The exhibition wayfinder reads: “The shape of the metal plates refers to the costume pattern ‘CCC’, which Danz has been using in various media since 2011. Here it appears as a votive offering that creates its own star map in the body.” The traces of research, data collection, and long-term collaborations are visible in small details - atop cut-outs, referencing locality, history, and navigation in both astronomy and geography.
A subtle detail I especially enjoyed was the interplay between light-cast shadows and painted shadows on the wall and floor, creating a multidimensional space for the objects - extending them, framing them, and giving them an eerie, seductive feel.
The main video, Ore Oral Orientation: Clouded in Veins (2018/24), hovers in an aluminium science-fiction frame high above, evoking dystopian urban settings where the powerful broadcast into dark streets. It’s a sharp contrast between the bright white walls and the darkness of association. Even though the exhibition isn’t figurative, the human body takes centre stage - through its parts and systems, connections and neural links. It is a brilliant and gentle rendition of us. Ana Mendieta comes to mind - her body imprinted into the earth’s surface. The often-referenced idea of absence and presence doesn’t feel like the focus here - for both it goes deeper. Danz explores the representation of knowledge - what it is, and especially how it is materially translated. The imprint. The trace. Without a claim but an offering.
Presented in one big room, all works visible at the same time - layered, much like Danz’s research. I feel my movements decelerate, as though navigating a vector-exploded drawing. Not the sum of its parts but the parts of its parts, without a ‘correct’ way of putting it all together - rather loads of possibilities.
images of the exhibition “edge out”, I missed taking photos from “Jetzt ist alles gut”. sorry.