Imagine landing in a new city where you don’t know the language. Signs make no sense, people speaking around you are a puzzle. Looking out the window of the bus or plodding along the sidewalk you see posters, ads, and graffiti. Look for the expressions on faces, body language, and interrelationships. These are the visual clues that may tell you about the culture you have just landed in.
“All of us are like marionettes,” says Ben, “Somebody pulls our strings and we move.”
Various and Gould can’t be sure that their own strings didn’t get pulled last week when they installed on the street a life-sized replica of one half of this German Street Art duo. Hanging from the beams below a train station in Berlin-Kreuzberg, the cardboard puppet named “Heinrich” had gone on display two or three times indoors before but the artists wanted to see how he would be received by passersby in the public sphere.
“Before we were even done installing people showed up and started to play intuitively with it by pulling the strings,” they told us as they described their surprise at what would become a 6-day experience.
People from all walks of life and ages took interest in this naked man hanging out near the bicycles, and many took his movements into their own hands. The artists visited the site regularly to observe the interactions, and often found that a mirroring of movements, a sort of dance, took place. “Not only was the marionette being moved but also the people moved themselves. Some just pulled one of the chords briefly, while others would get totally into it, grabbing the strings with both of their hands, experimenting with various sequences of movements.” Their lifeless creation somehow brought the street to life, and vice versa.
Sometimes there was damage to Heinrich that they needed to repair when visiting him first thing in the morning, and he suffered one violent episode that left his arms dangling by themselves from the hooks in the ceiling above. But he also gained a protective crew of friends who call this area home, including the 40-ish slim musician named Ben with a bandaged hand of his own. Drinking coffee or beer with his buddies all day, Ben took on a protective air toward the puppet, instructing people how to use the strings. To their amazement, the artists often found that their creation had been repaired; a torn-off foot was reattached with a rubber band and a shoulder joint was rejuvenated with an empty cigarette box and some adhesive tape.
What began as a fun experiment with a puppet that they were ready to part with eventually transformed into a bonding experience they had not predicted. Watching individuals interact with the strings became like poetry. “It looked like two marionettes facing each other with both being joined by the same chords,” they say. Finally one day Various and Gould found that Heinrich had been cut down from his strings and taken away, perhaps to someone’s home.
For their experience, they cannot help but think of the people they met, and what Ben said about everyone being a marionette. Public artists know of course that public art will always be subject to the whims of the public. What they didn’t expect was to find that their puppet project might have had some heart strings attached to it.
The artists wish to thank Lucky Cat and Studio Nura for their photography, support and help with this project.
“Heinrich”, a life-sized marionette by Various & Gould
Installed at Goerlitzer Bahnhof in Berlin-Kreuzberg on the 10th of July, 2012.
This article is also published on The Huffington Post
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Our weekly interview with the street, this week including Bronco, Cindy Sherman, Dan Witz, LNY, Miyok, PK, Read, Royce Bannon, Stikman, Swoon, Trojan Horse, Various & Gould, and Who is Charlie?
Kyle Hughes-Odgers
“IF WE CAN’T CONTROL THE BOAT,LET’S CONTROL THE OCEAN”
Kyle Hughes-Odgers – Okazi gallery Berlin.
Vernissage – February 10th – 6PM with attendence of the artist
These new works explore the futility of an uncontrollable existence, shown in moments of clarity and small gestures of resistance.
Kyle Hughes-Odgers is an Australian artist. His working approach encompasses a range of mediums. Primarily muted warm acrylics on wood, canvas and large scale street work.
Focusing on ideas of nostalgia and story telling through figurative, pattern and abstract imagery. His work is inspired by ideas of communication, chaos and memory.
He has exhibited throughout Australia, as well as internationally in New York, Los Angeles and Paris. His street art and installations have been seen across the globe. His work has previously featured in publications such as Street Art New York (Prestel 2010), Kingbrown, and Empty magazine. In 2010 he completed a 45m public art commission for the Murdoch university art collection in Western Australia.
– OKAZI GALLERY –
OPENING RECEPTION – FRIDAY FEBRUARY 10 | 6PM
EXHIBITION RUNS FEBRUARY 11– 28
TÜRSCHMIDTSTRASSE 18 | 10317 BERLIN | S-NÖLDNERPLATZ |S-OSTKREUZ| TRAM 21 –
MARKTSTRASSE OPENING HOURS: TUESDAY | THURSDAY | SATURDAY 2–6PM
www.okazigallery.com
www.kylehughesodgers.com
Evol has a fascination for sites that focus on meat production, having previously chosen a former Dresden slaughterhouse for his installation Caspar-David-Friedrich-Stadt. Perhaps influenced by Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5, a fantasy novel set during the firebombing of the city in World War Two, the title references the most important German artist of the early 19th Century. While Freidrich is best known for his allegorical landscape paintings, Evol creates pieces that comment on the very opposite of the Romantic school – urban decay.
A housing block with a graffiti tag is nothing new, but upon closer inspection these images reveal how cleverly Berlin based Evol plays with scale and social comment. Taking stencilling to new levels of detail, including St. Georges Cross English flags beloved by soccer fans and the satellite dishes, he recently completed this major piece in London’s Smithfield meat market.
By transforming a dozen concrete blocks into miniature apartment blocks Evol reproduces the monstrosity of the estate that included his former Berlin home into a miniature modernist housing estate. The installation has become a tea break destination for contractors working on the nearby Cross-rail high speed transport link.
~ Garry Hunter
Dissidents
DISSIDENTS
Group Show, Opening November 17th 18:00
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. By acknowledging the social and political unrest of this year, West Berlin Gallery cordially invites you from 18:00 until 22:00 on November 17th, 2011 as we debut Dissidents, a Group Show featuring: ALIAS, SP38 , Prost, Emess, Rallito X, BR1, Linda’s Ex, Niark1, Jakob Tolstrup, and Giacomo Spazio.
In 1800s Europe, the rising food prices and high unemployment fueled widespread popular protests. Communist Europe in 1989, created frustration with corrupt and unresponsive political systems and provoked the fall of once powerful regimes. 2011 is spurring a similar chain of events, bringing people together and empowering us to grab our governments by the balls and demand what is rightfully ours, human rights.
Seeking truth and raising awareness, the artists that we have chosen for this show strive for non-conformity and create work representative of both political and social opposition, making them pioneers of dissident activity. Consciously or not, they seek honesty, challenge boundaries, then create art as a way of driving this message in to the minds of on-lookers.
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| About the artistsALIAS– Always keeping in mind the social and political activities and breaking through the boundaries of traditional art making, ALIAS delivers a great deal of gravity through his loaded imagery and mindful aesthetic. The self taught street artist never ceases to astound the public with his stencil work on recycled material.SP38 – Urban poetry is this Berlin based french artists’ speciality. Mixing silkscreen and paint, SP38 plays with words to create provocative sentences which are strongly related to both political and social events of their time. The more sophisticated look of his artwork, using his unique deep gold color, helps him reach a wide range of public, even those who his messages are directed to.
Prost – From his “Prostie” smileys making witty social commentaries that always put a smile upon our faces, to denouncing misleading, abusive, sexist advertising by his adbusting actions, Prost has never ceased on challenging society. Emess – His work is mostly motivated by political issues that he approaches using a wide range of medias, such as murals, prints and sculptures. Emess confronts the viewer with issues that would rather be swept under the rug. Rallito X – The attitude of an alienated society manipulated by the media, has been this spaniards work theme since he started putting his work up on the streets. Rallito X refuses to follow society’s rules and shows his unconformity with unacceptable formed characters carrying politically incorrect messages. BR1 – For the last years, this italian artist has been studying the figure of the Muslim woman: history, tradition, legal sources and development in contemporary society. Charmed by the image of veiled women, BR1 decided to take the risk of introducing religious elements on his posters and make us wonder why is this piece of cloth so controversial. Linda’s Ex – A while ago Roland Brückner aka Lindas Ex asked his lover to come back to him in plastered posters and stickers throughout the city. Nowadays, his pleas have turned into social commentaries sprayed into canvases. Niark1 – His characters rise like monsters or aliens on a dark world filled by details. Their infinite nature scares and hypnotizes as there is always space for new discoveries. Cutting and pasting strips of newspaper where he later paints, Niark1’s artwork brings his dreams and fears to surface. Jakob Tolstrup – Mixed media and color crayons are Jakob’s favorite techniques to work with. His characters have a childish style giving a sweet and humorous feeling to his paintings, which take a bitter look into nowadays society. Giacomo Spazio – The established Italian artist, lead of the Italian Street Art movement, creates pop images, with shocking fluorescent colors that shout out their presence, as loud as possible. Using old fanzines and punk imagery to create lo-fi styled artwork with a cynical and subversive intention. Brunnenstraße 56, 13355 Berlin, Germany
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It would be fair to say that the first decade of the the 21st Century didn’t augur jolly good times ahead of us. The nascent century brought enormous challenges worldwide: There were numerous terrorist attacks; 9/11 in the USA was a transformative event that affected the society at large in ways that have not been previously experienced before. Other countries such as Spain, India and England suffered their own devastating terrorist attacks during the same decade. There was the big economic crisis in 2008 spurred by the banks and the mortgage collapse in the USA and the subsequent massive layoffs from all sorts of industries and gutting of social programs. Not to mention SARS, bird flu, swine flu, earthquakes, forest fires, hurricanes, mudslides and tsunamis.
By the time December 2010 arrived we were feeling exhausted from the past ten years. Only two months into a new decade few people could have expected that we would be witnessing radical changes taking place in The Middle East. Who could have imagined that the ray of hope in humanity would come from Tunisia and Egypt. As the people fill the streets to demonstrate publicly to renounce their leaders, citizens in neighboring countries likewise are openly questioning the power and authority of the leaders in their highest offices. The urge to speak up and demand in the street – it is as if a giant is awakening. Cries for change are coming from the ordinary citizens fed up with authoritarian regimes and amazingly, we are seeing the last gasps for air from shaken dictators who refuse to give up their lucrative and powerful positions.
From Berlin we received this wheat-pasted Street Art with the hand rendered illustration of Golda Meir. Meir was one of the first female politicians to be the elected as the leader of a government in the modern age, as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974. She understood the perils of power and authority during a tumultuous tenure that saw terrorist attacks and the assassination of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Interesting that various sources online have this quote attributed to both Meir and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, two people well acquainted with the topic of authority.
Our weekly interview with the street; this week featuring Aarhus, Clown Soldier, Don John, El Sol 25, Gaia, Michael DeFeo, CB23, Tats Cru, and Voina.
CircleCulture Gallery
NEW ART – FORMERLY KNOWN AS: NEW ART
Urban artists paying homage to innovators from the history of art
Opening: January 20, 7 – 9 PM
In this exhibition, artists from all over the world take reference to some ground breaking artists of the past. An homage to the spirit of innovation, non-conformity and alternative thinking of the older days.
Judith Supine / Christian Awe / Jonathan Yeo / Helle Mardahl / XOOOOX / Kevin Earl Taylor / Anton Unai / Jaybo Monk / Adriana Ciudad / Stefan Strumbel / Marco “Pho” Grassi
VS.
Gustav Klimt, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Pablo Picasso, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Pierre Soulages, Henri Matisse, Théodore Géricault, James Ensor
Art looks back on a history that is as multi-faceted and fascinating as our own time. Among the illustrators, designers, sculptors, painters, calligraphers, fashion designers and architects of the past centuries, new avant-gardes have constantly emerged, establishing themselves to be replaced soon enough by the next generation craving innovation.
A process of creation that naturally builds upon preceding aesthetics, concepts and techniques that deconstructs them in order to create a contemporary art-remix. Many artists eschew this conscious connection to history. Freely and radically, they create new approaches: the new art.
Exhibition: January 21 to March 05 2011
Opening hours: Tue – Sat 12 – 6 PM
For more information please see the press release and online: http://www.circleculture-magazine.com/?p=2547
Circleculture Gallery
Gipsstrasse 11
10119 Berlin Mitte
berlin@circleculture-gallery.com
www.circleculture-gallery.com
Muralismo Morte
We are delighted to commence our fall season with a beautiful new title.
Wir freuen uns sehr mit diesem außergewöhnlich schönen Buch in den Herbst zu starten.
Muralismo Morte – The Rebirth of Muralism in Contemporary Urban Art reveals the vibrancy of a new type of muralism as it rises from the shadows of urban spaces in metropolises worldwide. From much celebrated pieces in prominent places to those hidden in anonymous, decayed ruins, it features the large-scale murals and small interventions of some of the most exciting international artists associated with this movement. Muralist and art activist Jens Besser uncovers these treasures and offers special insights into the emerging scene that is coloring our urban experience.
Artists/Künstler: Roa, Remed, Klub 7, Aec & Waone (Interesni Kazik), Blu, Os Gemeos, Escif, Jens Besser, BerlinBeamBoys, Sonice Development, 3ttman, Kain Logos and many more.
Muralismo Morte – The Rebirth of Muralism in Contemporary Urban Art, zeigt die Dynamik einer neuen Form der Wandmalerei, die seit einigen Jahren weltweit aus den Schatten der urbanen Räume der Metropolen hervor tritt. Von den gefeierten Arbeiten an prominenten Plätzen zu den anonymen Werken, versteckt in verfallenen Ruinen, bietet dieses Buch die großen Murals und kleinen Interventionen einiger der spannendsten internationalen Künstler dieser Bewegung. Muralist und Kunst-Aktivist Jens Besser deckt diese Kostbarkeiten auf und bietet einen tiefen Einblick in eine aufstrebende Szene, die unsere urbane Landschaft in neuen Farben zeichnet.
Take a look inside the book here!
Title: Muralismo Morte – The Rebirth of Muralism in Contemporary Urban Art
Author: Jens Besser
Pages: 200, color, ca. 300 Illustrations & photographs
Format: 28.5 x 21 cm (11.22 x 8.27 inches)
Language: English edition
Price Hardcover: 24.95 | £ 24.99 | US $ 34.95
ISBN Hardcover: 978-3-937946-29-0
Book Release / 1. October 2010!
Exhibition & Book release party / Common Ground Gallery / Berlin:
1.October 2010 / 7 pm-open end
Lecture / Buchvorstellung (Jens Besser): 8:30 pm
Live video performance BerlinBeamBoys
DJ Dejoe
Common Ground Gallery / Hip Hop Stützpunkt
Marienburger Str. 16 A (Hinterhof)
10405 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg
www.commongroundgallery.de
Muralismo Morte Events Schedule:
for detailed information please check www.fromheretofame.com
1. October 2010 Berlin
Common Ground Gallery
Exhibition & Book release party / lecture by Jens Besser
7 10. October 2010 Berlin
Stroke.03 Urban Art Fair
Muralismo Morte lecture by Jens Besser & live painting by Roa, Sepe and Aryz (TBC)
27. October 2010 Dresden
Motorenhalle
Muralismo Morte lecture by Jens Besser
3. November 2010 Leipzig
Mzin Book Store
Muralismo Morte lecture by Jens Besser & exhibition
This weeks top stencils as picked by Samantha Longhi of Stencil History X
Check out an interview with Boxi by Samantha Longhi here
The Stencil Top 5 as picked by Samantha Longhi of StencilHistoryX
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