Nemo
Doug Ischar, Irina Lotarevich, Henrike Naumann, Julian Van Der Moere, and Max Eulitz & Sophia Eisenhut
Scherben (Berlin) at Good Weather (Chicago) is on view until May 18, 2024 with gallery hours on Saturdays from 1–4 p.m.
Exhibition Text
Review (Kennich)
Scherben is pleased to invite you to ACID HAUS an exhibition by geetha thurairajah. The exhibition will run from April 26 until June 2, 2024. Please join us for the opening on April 25 at 7 pm.
Scherben is pleased to invite you to the exhibition AI Hallucinations, with works by Lou Cantor, John Miller and Robot. The exhibition will run from March 15 until April 14, 2024. Please join us for the opening on March 14 at 7 pm.
Hunter
Albrecht Becker, Juliana Halpert, Tobias Hohn & Stanton Taylor, Tarik Kentouche, Anaïs Morales, Doug Ischar, Richard Sides
Publication: Kea Bolenz, Haris Giannouras, Chris Kraus, Mark von Schlegell
Curated by Lorenz Liebig
Publication by Esra von Kornatzki
Referring to the idea of the hunter, the works selected for this exhibition negotiate a specific perception of the body: Generally a hunter is a person who hunts. But it is also a name, a thematic topic and a 1980 American biographical action thriller film by the same name, starring Steve McQueen as a bounty hunter. Stereotypes of the wild west, cowboys taking the law into their own hands come to mind. Images that have undoubtedly influenced mass culture and public consciousness. The world of action thrillers: undercover agents, stalkers, fiends, lovers, estranged. Inherent motifs are impersonation, the stealing and borrowing of identities, using disguise and deception, hinting at underlying topics of the transformation and change of body and image. Emblematic of an obsessive search. There is something fascinating about the chase. Its an instinct, that fuses the experience of pleasure and pain, an obsession, a thrill. The obsession with the hunt continues off screen. A fan’s obsession is ignited. The prey is chased, fulfilling a romantic stereotype: the wooing of the adored.
Supported by the Video Data Bank of the School of the Art Institue of Chicago.
John Neff & Thomas Love
Survival On Land & Sea
October 28 – December 3, 2023
Survival On Land & Sea
The title of the show, Survival On Land & Sea, is also the title of a survival manual the U.S. Navy issued to John Neff’s grandfather during his service on the Pacific Theater during World War II.
In the exhibition, a wood-frame wall runs two thirds of the length of the gallery. Positioned across from the gallery’s entrance is an opening in the stud wall. In that opening hangs a mink coat belonging to Neff’s grandmother – also worn by his mother. His grandfather’s U.S. Navy knife hangs from the ceiling. A set of photographs in clip frames depicting rat holes is installed on the long wall of the exhibition space. They are photographed using a iphone. The photos have an unreal, landscape-like quality. Chicago, where the artist lives, is a city of alleys. It’s also a city with lots of rats. The rats chew through garbage cans left out in the alleys. Neff has been photographing these rat holes since 2022.
Affixed to the the shorter wall is John Neff’s contribution to the ninth issue of the journal Portable Gray, published in October 2022. The special issue was titled “Arts of Psychoanalysis” and edited by Seth Brodsky. In this piece, Neff documents his mother’s open heart surgery and the infestation of her childhood dollhouse by mice. The dollhouse, a replica of the house his mother grew up in, was designed and built by her father.
The exhibition also includes a set of sculptural objects by Thomas Love collectively titled Cock-of-the-Rock, all from 2023. These include “Lek,” a bird carved out of limestone, and a series of stacks of fake rocks cast out of resin, titled “Cairns.” Such resin rocks are typically used to hide a key around the exterior of a house. An additional text is available in the gallery to accompany Cock-of-the-Rock
Lorenz Liebig
Thomas Love – Monument to an intrusive thought
Room Plan
Jasia Rabiej
Nighttime Time
September 14, 2023 – October 6, 2023
In Jasia’s pieces people and objects constantly merge into other things but also into themselves. A girl becomes a girl, a woman turns into a woman, she may change from a blonde to dark-haired, her face can shrink a little. But it’s not an ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’ type of ontology ̶ a chair can also become your leg, or someone else’s, I’m not sure.
It’s a world of eternal morphing which reminds me of what Bruno Schulz wrote of his book Cinnamon Shops: ‘The substance of that reality exists in a state of constant fermentation, germination, hidden life. It contains no dead, hard, limited objects. Everything diffuses beyond its borders, remains in its given shape only momentarily, leaving its shape behind at the first opportunity’.
Scenes in Jasia’s digital collages may appear at first as glitched Al products but the technique she uses is quite different. She gathers pictures from photoblog.pl (a social media website popular among Polish teens in the 00s) and other mostly abandoned blogging platforms, then blends them with her own, using free iPhone photo editing apps. If we were to ask Al to mimic Jasia’s visual style, describing faces would be crucial. The faces of the actresses in Jasia’s works do not seem to belong to them – they don’t look like masks either, they appear like botched face transplants. This uncanny feeling is vital here.
Situations occurring in her pieces did not occur. Not memories nor dreams, they are a secret third thing (called art; maybe a made up dream or memory could work as one of the definitions of an art piece).
The feeling that Jasia’s works give me is also contrary to uncanniness, they fill me with some kind of assurance. This oneiric life is not mine, not theirs also. And even if some of the actresses seem to suffer, I imagine them humming little lullabies to themselves. A blissful and nostalgic feeling of unattachment everyone needs during a nighttime time.
Zuzanna Bartoszek
Captions, Nighttime
Room plan
Review (gallerytalk)
Mika Schwarz
A Knight’s Willing Suspension of Disbelief
August 11, 2023 — September 3, 2023
When I look at the image of Hans Holbein* I think of two different literary characters: the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, who wants nothing more than a heart. The other is the Steadfast Tin Soldier who braves all dangers to reach his coveted love and yet is ultimately thrown into the fire where he melts into a heart-shaped lump.
To defend oneself against the symbolic figure of death that seizes one, is on the threshold of no longer completely giving in to this idea of an image, resisting its destined path. The figure defends itself against the attacker, who only thereby becomes real. In the intertwining of the two armored figures, a twisted form is created that results in a stalemate. As both simultaneously strike each other down, they appear frozen (as if in a pillar of salt), crystallized in the moment of complete physical entanglement. As they kill each other, they also seem to give each other support. Perhaps this is how they find comfort in their togetherness, frozen in the moment, outlasting place and time.
*Drawing after „Bilder des Todes“, Hans Holbein d. J., woodcut, The Knight, 1512
Possession at Scherben is Onur Gökmen‘s first solo exhibition in Berlin. Born in 1985 in Ankara, the artist studied at Bard College in New York and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Today, he lives in between Berlin, and Istanbul. In Onur Gökmen‘s works seeks to question the relationship between westernization and modernization, challenging established narratives and exploring the subjective nature of history itself.
The exhibition is kindly supported by the Bezirksamt Mitte.
The movie “Bob” was made with the kindly support of the Hans and Charlotte Krull Stiftung.
Desire
Claudia Lemke, John Neff and Evelyn Plaschg
July 14th at King’s Leap 105 Henry Street, New York, NY
Curated by Scherben (Berlin, DE), the exhibition presents the work of Claudia Lemke, John Neff and Evelyn Plaschg. It brings together painting, photographs, and sculptures emphasizing the imaginative quality of psychic deformation. Gaston Bachelard, in his analysis of the imaginable, reminds us that our perception, memories, and even the products of our art are never in stable states. The exhibition is accompanied by a text, CRITICAL FANTASY, CONVEX DESIRE, by Mark von Schlegell.
Exhibition handout
Review (Artviewer)
The exhibition is kindly supported by the Checkpoint Charlie Stiftung.
Scherben is pleased to invite you to the exhibition Eavesdropping with Sophia Eisenhut, Adrienne Herr, Lukas Meßner, Sophie Podolski & Anna R. Winder, curated by Inga Charlotte Thiele. The exhibition will run from March 11 until April 30, 2023. Please join us for the opening on March 10 at 5 pm.
Exhibition Text
The book Glancing To The Right of Antares In Medium Blue, I Intuit Cosmic Allurement, was published in the context of the exhibition Eavesdropping, curated by Inga Charlotte Thiele at Scherben in 2023 and takes up the themes negotiated therein and thinks them further, mixes, and restructures them within the space of the book. It’s not conceived as a catalog documenting the exhibition but as a companion, a second half, that is in conversation with it but functions beyond and independently of it. With contributions by Ethan Assouline, Sophia Eisenhut & Monika Rinck, Susan Finlay, Jackie Grassmann, Elijah Jackson, Alice Notley, Lukas Meßner, Sophie Podolski, Nat Raha, Inga Charlotte Thiele and Anna R. Winder. The book was edited by Thiele and Winder and appeared with Fat Vampire Press, Berlin and Prosopopoeia, Vienna. It can be purchased at Scherben or here.
