In connection to the exhibition Scherben hosted a conversation of Krista Montagna, the cousin of John Boskovich, and guard of the Estate John Boskovich who was involved in the production of his films and artist and curator John Neff, an early adopter and supporter of Boskovich’s work.

Krista Montagna and John Neff were in conversation about the life, work, and legacy of the late LA-based artist John Boskovich. Their discussion focused on the creation of Boskovich’s artwork-residence the Boskostudio and the challenges involved in preserving the project. 

Suspension
Burkhard Beschow

Exhibition Text

Burkhard Beschow’s video installation provides a viewpoint into the hidden interiors of abandoned buildings associated with the German railway network. Empty and decommissioned, these buildings are vacant properties where access is blocked to the public, and their operations have been disconnected from the grid. Still, somehow, they remain part of the transport network infrastructure—at night illuminated by railway lighting, only lightly restricted by fences or security.

In a state of disrepair, the abandoned buildings are often barricaded with heavy-duty steel sheets, perforated and reminiscent of the inner cities of East Germany during the 1990s and early 2000s. Not coincidentally, this was when Deutsche Bahn began commonly using perforated panels to conceal old buildings. For wanderers, urban explorers, and others seeking the dilapidated, the chances of encountering perforated panels today are highest at abandoned train stations and similar buildings along the German rail network. These are the sites that Beschow repeatedly visits to make his videos.

More than a portrait or document of an old structure, his video installation—composed of thousands of photographs of the insides of buildings—is an ongoing process that poses questions. Probing deeper than other explorers, his exploration goes beyond urbex clichés such as What’s inside? What remains? Look how old it all is! More than this, Beschow’s interest lies somewhere along the lines of Are these the remnants of another world we are looking into?

Beschow’s photographic process, in which a camera lens peeps from one world into another, hints at the 21st-century concept of the Backrooms. Quoting Wikipedia, the Backrooms are a fictional, impossibly large, extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting reality—actual or digital. The concept was born out of internet culture. We are reminded of a scene in The Matrix Reloaded. Neo exits the Matrix through a door and enters a dead-silent corridor that stretches endlessly. Revealed to him is the infrastructure of the designed world he has been living in. The infinite corridor is full of doors, and each door is an exit into another possibility within this fake world. No-clipping, it is called. You might remember a similar glitch in the Grand Theft Auto video game series when our unlawful character unexpectedly exits the settings of the game and endlessly falls through digital space. In all cases, the protagonist enters a liminal space usually kept hidden from them.

Beschow’s video installation is constructed from photographs taken with a small digital camera; the size of the lens conveniently fits the perforations in the sheets guarding the buildings. We see the occasional shadow or reflection of the photographer, but apart from that, no human figures are visible. The buildings are empty and ghostly. It resonates with the writings of the late Mark Fisher, for whom the eerie is a sense of absence—where something should be there but isn’t. Absence is something we witness in Beschow’s video installation, along with a feeling of the past and its synchronic fantasy about a different, foreclosed future. But unlike the sadness and desolation referred to in some of Fisher’s writings, Beschow’s video installation lacks the persuasive affect found in music or cinema. The video installation itself is silent; however, across the room, a superannuated transmitter emits sound. An audio effect suggesting progression echoes in the space, derived from recordings of Beschow’s footsteps walking through abandoned railway buildings. Also heard, concealed within a pair of headphones, is a probable voice-over that reads a timeline of the loss and sale of abandoned railway stations and the transition of listed buildings from public to private ownership.

Are we to take away that a lost past or an unrealised future is what Beschow is getting at? The installation is not immediately melancholic or forlorn; however, it does provide a space to reflect, without urgency, on our unsettled present.

John Ryaner

Press
Emergent Magazine

Millennial Hallway
Paul Levack, John Neff, Jasia Rabiej, Michel Wagenschütz, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Zoë Field, Shelim Alvarado, Albin Bergström

The side exhibition “Millennial Hallway” presents current works by young and established artists Paul Levack, John Neff, Jasia Rabiej, Michel Wagenschütz, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Zoë Field, Shelim Alvarado and Albin Bergström, alongside the exhibition “JOHN S. BOSKOVICH I appreciate my uniqueness”.

floorplan

Michel Wagenschütz’s performance He’s Got It was performed in two versions, one happened during the opening of the exhibition and the other before the Screening of Sandra Bernhards film Without you I’m Nothing at Babylon and organized by Scherben as part of the Exhibition John S. Boskovich, I appreciate my uniqueness. He’s Got It is a performance that interrogates creation myths and narratives of genius and talent in the arts, with a focus on musical theatre and its affect economy. Drawing on the works of Stephen Sondheim and Howard Ashman, the performance delves into queer realities, the AIDS crisis, and living with HIV.

Supported by the Stiftung Kunstfonds

Sources
Evelyn Plasch, Shelim Alvarado

What happens every day when you wake up? Sometimes, when I wake from sleep I come to realise that the brain has been temporarily disconnected from the receptors of consciousness and everything outside of my body. Waking up, the real world slowly comes back in. I soon realise what needs to be done. I consider the tasks of the day ahead. Usually I get out of bed and make a coffee to become stimulated immediately. Dormant communications come to my attention as I receive new correspondence. The body is now present. What will I wear? What style do I have? I often sit and think about waking up and what spending time in silence feels like. Contemplation. I come to realise I am inside domestic space. I think about its limits. The walls, like a shell, are a physical boundary. My body is enclosed. These physical proportions suit the shape and movement of my body, it facilitates a living being. Looking at the closed apartment door I try to think about scale: scales of matter that start from the sub-atomic. I am aware that energy, life, moves through molecular cell structures into amoebas, into evolution, into long periods of time of which we have no perception of. Of scale, a long perspective. But, what does scale really mean? Scales of time, the scale of the room, the scale of my body and how other bodies occupy similar spaces. What does your space look like? And when does space become geography? The geography of organs, of the landscape, of light that travels and the electricity that shoots down the cable, power in turn becoming entangled. A hat on top of the brain, layers of the onion, and what about psychology then? Hopes, fears, thoughts, personality traits, the things which make us who we are and why we connect with certain ideas, traditions and behaviours. Then it’s time for work. I move outside and every day the street is a reality: the logistics of life keep on going, the trash gets taken out, the weather, social life, transport, headphones in. What music I listen to is usually a conscious choice. What food should I eat? How much nutrition is taken into consideration, it’s sustenance. This is all based on the pretext that I am in control of my own life, my thoughts, my individuality and my perspective. I recently read that the idea of historical consciousness came about around the turn of the 19th century when Hegel said that the ways people orient themselves in time is bound by the historical and cultural contexts they inhabit. So, humans eventually formed themselves into civilisations and cultures as a larger development, leading to the perception of themselves as humanity – a subjectivity that can realise itself as something more complex and larger than individual human beings. Like how children don’t understand what it’s like to be an adult – the whole species of human beings forms a history with phases of development. They learn from their accumulated experiences about what they are and what is the world around them – coming-of-age, for ages. Hegel’s philosophical developments were likely connected to the onset of the steam engine which spurred the industrial revolution. Later, Marx said that change is the only constant in the modern world. Since then the speed of history accelerated, culture is disseminated back onto itself as inter-generational growth and time passes, rehashing moments as recurring symbols. War drives the need for speed. And there’s a direction to time and technology. Balancing out with physical resistance the bat as a weapon violently retaliates. Something brutal and primordial is at stake, a wolf in sheep’s clothing… there is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end. Good examples of interpretation only lead to more interpretation and an idea in the head can become very real – a strange obsession.
Freedom is an important idea for a lot of people: be the change etc. But actually, a lot of people have serious concerns about freedom, often to the point where it becomes ideological. One might see contemporary life as defined by our ideologies, even if we don’t really know what it means to be ideological. Different hats give access to various personalities: they communicate style and the desire to be fashionable. Even when we look around and see people all wearing the same things. Marc Jacobs said that “Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.” This seems like a statement that assumes individuality is a form of freedom, yet to look fondly on the idea – I imagine he’s asking us to respect and love each other as individuals rather than building hierarchies on style. Be it banal or unglamorous, it always seemed serious to me to think of the uneventful as enough. Not to call out what trivial concerns I might have as hysterical, but to attempt to become more aware of the multi-layered codes, communications and frequencies as sources detached from something much more immediate. After all, the phone is a mediation of reality and the “everyday” is its own frequency. A life less ordinary?
Right now, although I may later regret this, I can say I sustain a specific kind of freedom when becoming aware of the prosaic: a new perspective emerges where what might not have previously seemed important or meaningful suddenly gains value; or even better, it becomes a boring facet of reality. And that is something I often long for. In fact, I actively engage with boredom as if it were a civil right, where I obtain my own specific kind of freedom. This profound change in speed can allow me to temporarily withdraw from all the things that interfere. And in these moments of boredom I am able to really experience a frequency of nothing being worth my while and altogether beautiful. A profound source of relief.

– Richard Sides –

Floorplan
Review (morgenpost)

Without You I’m Nothing
starring Sandra Bernhard 
directed by John Boskovich

20.10.2024  18:15 Uhr 
at Babylon
Location: Kino am Rosa-Luxenburg-Platz
Tickets on: https://babylonberlin.eu

“Without You I’m Nothing” is an American musical comedy from 1990 starring comedian and singer Sandra Bernhard. The film is based on material from her award-winning one-woman show of the same name, which was produced by Terry Danuser. The film recreates moments from the stage show, with Bernhard often dressed in crazy costumes reminiscent of the character she is portraying, without actually “becoming” that character. The show is repeatedly interrupted by fake interviews in which people such as Bernhard’s supposed manager appear.

Sandra Bernhard made headlines not only as Madonna’s ex-lover. With her bizarre off-Broadway show Without you I’m nothing, she drew the ire of many a big, offended artist such as Diana Ross. She parodies the “decals of American pop culture”, delivers ludicrous monologues and sings Israeli folk songs. “An astonishing performance in this bizarrely funny and prickly satire of pop culture”

The Screening was supplemented and introduced with What It Takes, a Performance by Michel Wagenschütz.

JOHN S, BOSKOVICH: I Appreciate My Uniqueness
John Boskovich

The exhibition “JOHN S, BOSKOVICH: I Appreciate My Uniqueness” presents the work of the artist John Boskovich, who passed away in 2006, for the first time in Europe, placing it within a contemporary context. While Boskovich has gained recognition in recent years, particularly within younger circles of the American art world, his name remains relatively unknown in Europe. His work was rediscovered about 15 years after his death and has since been exhibited at key institutions such as O-Townhouse in Los Angeles, David Lewis Gallery in New York City, and Western Exhibitions in Chicago. Additionally, his works has been included in collections of internationally renowned museums such as MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Boskovich’s work lends a queer and personal aspect to the still highly influential art movement of conceptual art. This is particularly effective because his work, ahead of its time, was deeply integrated into the artist’s life. Over his twenty-year career, Boskovich critically engaged with popular and visual culture, religion, psychology, romance, and consumer behavior through the appropriation of images and ritual objects. In the mid-1980s, Boskovich emerged as one of the most prominent and provocative artists engaging with the legacy of conceptual art in Los Angeles. Together with other artists of his generation—such as Mike Kelley, Larry Johnson, 

Richard Hawkins, and Kathe Burkhart—he questioned mainstream culture and societal norms. Boskovich’s work, which was self-reflective and autobiographical, drew on his life as a gay man and radically blurred the boundaries between art and life.

Boskovich’s early work was characterized by an ironic and sharp combination of text and image, viewed from a queer perspective against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis. In the 1990s, his sculptures and installations deeply explored self-help culture and religion. In the late 1990s, Boskovich transformed his 1920s Los Angeles apartment into what he called the “Boskostudio,” which served as both his residence and a comprehensive total work of art until his death. The Boskostudio literally took over the entire apartment, incorporating walls, floors, and ceilings. Each room—from the living and dining rooms to the kitchen, breakfast nook, and hallway to the bedrooms—was theatrically transformed into a distinctive staging full of eerie references to consumerism. Boskovich himself described the Boskostudio as “a [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder set where no film was ever shot,” but where “drama thrives in abundance.” Boskovich’s cinematic work was also remarkable and ahead of its time—his extraordinary film North (2001), featuring artist and writer Gary Indiana reading from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel of the same name, is a captivating portrait of its subject.

What social spaces are available to queer people? Boskovich’s artistic oeuvre also documents an increasing retreat into the private sphere. In his aesthetic negotiation of identity-forming practices and consumer culture, he shows how society, then as now, cannot guarantee safe living conditions for people outside the heteronormative, despite superficial efforts.

We would like to thank the Estate of John Boskovich, David Lewis Gallery, John Morace, Ann Goldstein, Schwules Museum Berlin, and Kunstfonds for their support.

Side program:
“Without you I’m nothing” Screening at Babylon Berlin
Conversation with Krista Montagna and John Neff

exhibition text
notes on North
floorplan
Review (Mousse)
Review (taz)
Review (textezurkunst)

Supported by the Stiftung Kunstfonds

John Boskovich: I Mean Every Word of It

11.10.2024  18:00 Uhr

In connection to Scherbens current exhibition “JOHN S. BOSKOVICH I appreciate my uniqueness” Scherben will host a conversation of Krista Montagna, the cousin of John Boskovich, and guard of the Estate John Boskovich who was involved in the production of his films and artist and curator John Neff, an early adopter and supporter of Boskovich’s work.

Krista Montagna and John Neff will be in conversation about the life, work, and legacy of the late LA-based artist John Boskovich. Their discussion will focus on the creation of Boskovich’s artwork-residence the Boskostudio and the challenges involved in preserving the project. 

Concerning Jealousy
Whitney Claflin, Pati Hill, Stella Sieber, Graham Hamilton, Wanwen Zhang and unknown artist

Curated by Charlotte Berg and Jackson Beyda

Accompanied by a publication with writings by Agnes Callard, Graham Hamilton, and Henrike Elisabeth Kohpeiß as well as an introduction by the curators.

Supported by the Stiftung Stark and the Checkpoint Charlie Stiftung.

Introduction to the publication Concerning Jealousy

In 1895, Edvard Munch produced the first painting in a sequence of works all titled “Jealousy.” The image depicts a romantic triad consisting of Dagny Juel, her husband, writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, and Munch himself. Munch can be seen in the background, in amorous embrace with Juel, while Przybyszewski occupies the foreground, rendered in green, his mask-like face looking towards the viewer in distorted angst. Over the proceeding forty years, Munch would produce twelve variations of that same painting. Although the series could be read as a continuation of Munch’s ongoing interest in allegory, the image reveals a psychic investment in the scene of infidelity which exceeds mere disinterested depiction. “Jealousy” would repeatedly stage the discord between Munch and his contemporary by carefully fixing the characters in their respective roles of seducer, betrayed, and object of desire. The conflict between Munch and Przybyszewski was thus mediated through the painterly presentation of Juel’s affection. When preparing “Jealousy” for an exhibition in Paris, Munch was forced to withdraw the work out of personal concern: 

“I had traveled to Paris to hold an exhibition there. Then they showed up, and I had to leave with my paintings because it was indeed the two of them that I had painted—him green and her naked. The exhibition in Paris came to nothing […] This woman-related affair ruined a lot for me.”(1)

Concerning Jealousy Intro
Concerning Jealousy Publication
Floor Plan
Review (Mousse)

AI Hallucinations

The exhibition aims to explore the nuanced landscape of AI hallucinations, which disrupt conventional understanding of language and perception. By contemplating large language models through the lens of Gershom Scholem’s insights on lamentation as a linguistic form, the endeavor ventures into uncharted territories of AI inquiry. The exhibition scrutinizes the intricate facets of AI hallucinations, arising from factors such as insufficient training data, flawed model as-sumptions, and inherent biases within the data. Scholem’s contemplation of lamentation as a mode of language accentuates the intricacy of the investigation.

Comprising three video works, the exhibition invites viewers to ponder the complexities of AI hallucinations:

In John Miller’s video “Deus ex Machina,” the mannequin embodies a transcendent form — an ideational automaton to which individuals aspire, emulate, envy, and often despise. Its immutable facade remains aloof to the mundane trivialities upon which it imposes itself. It exists and yet does not, haunting imaginative realms. While humanity bears responsibility for its creation, the mannequin, in turn, reshapes humanity. Has its essence truly been glimpsed? Now it is no more. In “The Oracle” by Lou Cantor, a holographic projection presents talking lips symbolizing a future intelligence ruling the world. Visitors confront a reality where human intelligence is eclipsed. The oracle’s text, an amalgamation of cultural references, resonates with humanity’s collective consciousness.

The exhibition culminates with works by the collective ROBOT (John Miller and Takuji Kogo), surrealistic musical compositions accompanied by on-screen text. Drawn from contemporary philosophers, these pieces challenge viewers’ preconcep-tions of language and context.

As observers navigate the enigmatic realms of linguistic exploration, where AI hallucinations blur the boundaries between reality and illusion, they are invi-ted to decipher the echoes of human thought within language predictions.

ACID HAUS
geetha thurairajah

“geetha thurairajah is a troll (compliment), an almost-Platonically-ideal manifestation of humanity’s latest iteration of the eternal trickster figure (this time, born in the aether of cyberspace). By troll, I am not referring here to its conception within the popular imaginary, a pissant shut-in, all Mountain Dew stains and rage. No, hers is a chimaeric figure whose composition is part critic, part comedian, part philosopher, and fully necessary.”

Exhibition Text by Leo Cocar
Room Plan