“3hd 2019: Fluid Wor(l)ds” opens its “(Un-)Real E-state” group exhibition at Berlin’s Postscheckamt. Situated in the city’s Kreuzberg district—named after the area’s homonymous landform and literally translating to “cross mountain” in English—the now defunct postal bank becomes a site for examining the changing geographies of communication. The building and its obsolescence represents a crossroads of perpetual progress, as the hill where it is located forms part of the Tempelhofer Berge developed from a 17th century rural holiday spot to a 19th century industrial center, before becoming the quickly gentrifying immigrant and art district we all know today.
The artists featured use language, narrative and material investigations to create alternative identities and interpretations of their own lives, and society at large. Using video, installation, sculpture and painting, they each represent multiple subjectivities that navigate an ever-shifting and complex global network. This is a world that continues to feel overwhelming and impenetrable, as we vainly try to label, brand and neatly package its contents.
The art of storytelling and myth-making, beyond familiar visual and textual narratives, takes precedence is these works. New forms are found in the uncanny, the fantastic, the spiritual, the dream-like. They’re not limited to binary divisions of dystopia versus utopia, but instead emphasize the shadows as integral parts of existence. Building on a forthcoming interpretative biography of occult personality Cameron, Margaret Haines presents an installation of four transparent pink raincoats, representing chapters from her book, that in turn emerges in excerpts on 3hd’s “Embedded Narratives” online anthology. Viviana Abelson contributes, along with existing work, a new production in which she repeatedly uses non-conventional casting materials to transform domestic and industrial objects. Both these sculptures are marked by contrasts, as static works depicting progress and movement. Ruth Angel Edwards will show a new installation piece as part of her ‘ENEMA’ series, which uses fan fictional narratives staged within augmented spaces to explore personal cycles of consumption and waste, as well as the ways these things are politicised as they connect with global capitalist economies.
Josefin Arnell and Max Göran’s HellFun collaboration questions normative ideas of family and children through humor. Referencing filmic and literary cliches, their alter egos, Tony and Nilla, run a baby care/replacement business. Julian-Jakob Kneer’s works investigate the contingency of inherited sociocultural symbol and allocation systems. Central to his practice is the examination of the subconscious and ‘abnormal/pathological’ deviances as judged from a bourgeois-normative perspective. Artist and poet Tarek Lakhrissi interweaves science fiction elements in his work to speculate on ideas of social utopias, while considering debate around the power of allocating language and its emancipatory rearticulation by drawing on slang, popular culture and theory. Shaun Motsi is also interested in the politics of words and narrativity, whose installations, paintings and sculptures, question how worlds and identities are constructed both from and through language. Across all the pieces in “(Un)real E-state”, realities are reconstructed and reconsidered through their extension into fiction.
Opening performance
Magdalena Mitterhofer will present the opening performance ““Official Dreaming (Il Vetro Ci Allega)” on Tuesday, which will continue for the duration of the exhibition. The artist deals with dreaming as an everyday form of expanding perception in contrast to the regulated everyday in a capitalist society.
