Book of Burning Matches: Collecting Installation, ME Collectors Room Berlin

“Vom 14. März bis 24. Mai 2015 präsentiert der me Collectors Room Berlin „A Book of Burning Matches: Collecting Installation Art Documents“. Die Ausstellung untersucht die Bedeutung der Dokumentation in der Installationskunst und präsentiert die Sammlung umfassender Dokumente, welche die in London ansässigen KuratorInnen Nicolas de Oliveira (Deutschland/Portugal) und Nicola Oxley (Großbritannien) über drei Jahrzehnte zusammengetragen haben.” (Quelle: https://www.me-berlin.com/collecting-installation-documents-14-03-24-05-2015/)

Probebühne 6, Humboldt Lab Dahlem

Black Mountain. An Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933 – 1957, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin

Imprint
Curators: Eugen Blume, Gabriele Knapstein
Curatorial assistance and project management: Matilda Felix
Architecture + Exhibition Design: raumlabor_berlin
Carrier: Staatliche Museen

Black Mountain. An Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933 – 1957 presents the first comprehensive exhibition on Black Mountain College to take place in Germany. The show appears as a temporary exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, and guides visitors chronologically through the school’s history and creative production.

The exhibition includes authentic art objects produced by Black Mountain students and faculty, as well as original letters, documents, and reading materials from the progressive education movement (John Dewey’s Art as Experience, for example) that lend further insight into the life of the school.

The overall chronological structure of the exhibition breaks down at a finer level into vignettes that highlight particular moments, stories, or individuals: the early episode in which John Andrew Rice writes to Josef Albers in the hopes that he and his wife, Anni, will join the faculty; spaces devoted to work by Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, or John Cage’s experimental music. The arrangement of these vignettes serves a helpful, didactic function by allowing a visitor’s knowledge of Black Mountain College to build up in graspable pieces.

Stylistically, the most prominent aspect of the exhibition is its use of plywood throughout the display structures. This is a visually striking choice of material—particularly in the context of a refined, white-walled museum—and lends the show a low-cost, ‘DIY’ aesthetic that is elegantly plain. This is a thoughtful creative decision for raumlabor_berlin to have made, as it echoes the way in which dwellings at Black Mountain College were constructed informally by students and faculty themselves.

Perhaps the central curatorial challenge of the show consists in balancing between showcasing artwork and providing historical context. While Black Mountain College produced a wealth of artistic achievement, showcasing this alone would be insufficient for providing a historical account of the school as a place of learning and a community with particular values and ideas. On the other hand, recounting the history of the school without emphasizing the artistic production it encouraged would be equally insufficient, for this would neglect and understate the work for which the college is remembered. Curators Eugene Blume and Gabriele Knapstein succeed in striking a balance between these two approaches, creating an exhibition in which visitors are led between spaces that alternate between emphasizing artwork over historical context and vice versa. The artworks are displayed simply, elegantly, and spaciously, while the historical documents and books are displayed more densely in groupings inside glass and plywood display cases. This back-and-forth has the added benefit of allowing visitors to focus primarily on the artwork or the history if they so choose. A number of large, vinyl, paragraph-length texts appear on walls throughout (in both Deutsch and English), weaving together the whole.

The exhibition is very much worth visiting purely for its art. Even more so, the books, letters, and other original documents it contains provide a particularly special chance to appreciate Black Mountain College for the day-to-day character it cultivated as a community and place of learning.

Text Tucker McLachlan

PANDA, Naturkundemuseum Berlin

Ever since the first arrival of a female Panda in Berlin approximately 20 year, ago named “Yan Yan” at the Berlin Zoo, residents of Berlin were enthusiastic and welcoming of this animal in their city. For one of the first times in history, Berlin was soon to have a population of Panda cubs with Yan Yan being female and able to reproduce. However before that could occur, Yan Yan had passed on and wasn’t able to fulfill the legacy that the city has initially hoped for. “But what do we really know about this blackandwhite bear that seems to be constantly munching away on bamboo and becoming ever more popular in the process? “ This is the objective question that has risen from the curators working within the exhibition, ‘Panda’ at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. The Museum für Naturkunde is one of the largest natural history museums in Germany. Having the exhibition of the ‘Panda’, not only piques interest for others who come from all over the world to view the skeletons of creatures who have lived many years ago, but it points the questions and has an informative approach of the Panda itself and the threats that this animal is faced with in present day.

The exhibition is organized by the different roles the Panda plays in the world today.From the cultural icon that is represents and its place in history, to its habitat what it eats, where they live, the anatomy, ways that organization such as WWF, Wildlife Research, Zoo Berlin has researched its protection, their offspring and their way of reproduction, and ultimately the final conundrum: its threat for extinction today. With Yan Yan actually being in the beginning of the exhibition, it allows you to move through the space smoothly with digesting each bit of information and the Panda’s relevance. From having the actual taxidermy panda babies, to the food that they eat, bamboo in the space, it allows the viewer to see the objects in real life, (as close as one can behind a piece of glass), and to see the scale and the color, texture, of the objects themselves. I think this is useful for the audience because it gives them a point of reference to have a visual instead of reading wall texts.

The exhibit, ‘Panda’, is most definitely worth a second visit. Although the exhibition is well laid out and gives you just enough information the first time so you aren’t overloaded, it’s crucial to raise awareness to not only you as an individual but to others as well. By showing colleagues, family members, children this exhibition is can provide a level of knowledge that perhaps allows others to be able to actively take control of the situation and provide solutions in years to come.

Text Monica Terrero

COLAB, Buchstaben Museum Berlin

The Buchenstaben museum (Museum of Letters) opened in 2005 to exhibit its passion for typography. Located on Holzmarktstrasse in central Berlin, this museum surreptitiously forces the viewer to enter with no preconceived notion of what the museum is likely to display.

The contemporary privately owned museum is known for its work in preserving, restoring, and exhibiting signage from around Berlin from the earliest artifacts dating back to early 1940’s. It celebrates the unique typographic qualities of the signs displayed and also focuses on the industrial process of manufacturing the signs. The museum houses a plethora of signs in custom fonts in all forms and sizes that were rescued from public spaces after they were of no use. It comments on the change brought about as a result of globalization when companies run by traditional sign makers for generations were closed as a result of standardization of signs in public spaces. Their dedicated craft has been preserved in the museum and is celebrated for its unique characteristics.

The museum, by displaying typography in 3 dimensional forms, lends a fresh perspective typography before its digitization and its use and impact on advertising, language, communication and contemporary and urban history. Its informal and interactive atmosphere allows its audience to personalize each experience. The museum looks to interest everyone of all ages and has no particular target audience. The signs are all presented out of content and context thus, can be truly appreciated for the craft of lettering. The curation of the artifacts displayed is solely based on the uniqueness of the signs and its unmodified state. Upon reading the description and history of the sign, the viewer gets to appreciate the sign for not just its craft but also it’s historical and geographical context.

Unlike other museums, the Buchenstaben museum does not delve into the history of typography but instead displays its wide variety of signs that used to exist in various part of Berlin. It delves into each artifact’s history, which purely because of its existence in the city is tangled with the history of Berlin. It exposes its audience to phases in Berlin’s history in an urban context and its forward contemporary design thinking in a time when it was not so common.

The experience in the Buchenstaben museum gave me a new perspective on interactions with artifacts in museums. The Buchenstaben museum felt more like a gallery to me, with personal experiences and playful interactions with the artifacts and the space they were allocated. To me, the interaction went further than just with the artifact, I connected to the urban history as the artifact aimed to explain a story and age with context to the signs. Upon returning from the museum, I also brought with me knowledge about some of the typefaces used such as U8 in common places I transit through everyday like Alexanderplatz.

My personal favorite was the warehouse in the back of the museum where signs, old and new, lay in abundance, varying shapes, sizes and origins. Some taller than me, lay isolated as an object by itself from the rest of the alphabets that would lend knowledge to the original word or name. While some others, in their full form, presented their history and use with the sign itself. The space offered the viewer to interact with three-dimensional signs by using the space it occupied as a result of its informal presentation. The lighting here in the warehouse was dimmed and more universal to all the signs it held as opposed to the front of the museum where the signs were formally displayed, some with switches to turn on neo signs or flashing lights. The thematic presentation of the signs felt accessible and the display of the various materials used for signs was highly informative.

The enriching experience allowed me to peek into a time in Berlin, that compared to the rest of the world was viewed as progressive for its innovation through creation. It gave me a fresh understanding of letters as a form of visual art, independent from its key role in communication. Although the gift shop was geared towards sales for tourists, I believe that only through the keen interest of typographers and signmakers can a museum like the Buchenstaben be sustained and used as a platform and resource for people globally with similar interests. I also do reckon that major cities in the world would benefit from museum such as the Buchenstaben to inform and depict contemporary histories of cities from the perspective of typography.

Bildnachweis
Text Roshni Kochhar

Sammelwut und Bilderflut – Werbegeschichte im Kleinformat, Jüdisches Museum Berlin