Compressed Time
29.4. - 10. 7. 2021
Concept by Friederike Nymphius for FS.ART, Berlin
Compressed Time is a group exhibition that has been conceived especially for FS.ART at Potsdamer Straße in Berlin and presents works by Maxime Ballesteros, Martin Boyce, Paul Hutchinson, Caro Jost, Wilhelm Klotzek, Caroline Kryzeck, Alicja Kwade, Bernhard Martin, Olaf Metzel, Gerold Miller, and Anselm Reyle. The show presents a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture and photography.
The Potsdamer Straße exemplifies the „city myth“ as a place of change, renewal, and collapse as no other street in West Berlin does. To this day, traces of different periods and socio-political transformations that left their mark and shaped the street can be found there, as if on a journey through time.
Considering this background, Compressed Time deals with themes such as time and the memory linked to it, socio-political events and spatial redefinitions that – as in a palimpsest – have been deposited and inscribed layer by layer in Potsdamer Straße’s arterial road. In this context, it represents all the great streets and boulevards of the world, but it also builds a case for Berlin as an art metropolis.
The artistic contributions of the exhibiton all share their reference to this theme; the approaches are multifaceted and complex while also being analytic, descriptive and fictive. The artists show works in which these topics are examined directly and indirectly through metaphorical-poetic means or through subtle contextual shifts. The human condition is treated with subtle subversion by the the works of Maxime Ballesteros, Paul Hutchinson and Bernhard Martin. The aspect of time is described by Martin Boyce, Alicja Kwade and Anselm Reyle in a poetic, philosophical or purely visual way. Social upheavals are the subject of the pieces and installations by Wilhelm Klotzek and Olaf Metzel. The works by Caro Jost, Caroline Kryzeck and Gerold Miller can be read as spatial redefinitions and remeasurements.
The extraordinary multiplicity of Potsdamer Straße is still determined by its contrasting scenarios, its cosmopolitanism and tolerance, which offer space for the development of diverse ways of living and last but not least for art. Its rediscovery has triggered a process that suppresses its remarkable complexity, but at the same time allows new things to emerge; the new that perpetuates the eventful history of Potsdamer Straße and thus of Berlin as a whole.
Dr. Friederike Nymphius
www.nymphiusprojekte.de
FS.ART
Potsdamer Str. 102
10785 Berlin
www.fs-art.de
