BPA// Exhibition 2021
at KW Berlin

BPA// Exhibition 2021, Installation View, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artists; Photo: Frank Sperling

Is there one of those oddly-specific German words to describe the particular misfortune of a real estate giant descending upon your building, and being unable to escape from its claws? Perhaps there isn’t need for a new one, since, by no accident, Aufstockung, the word for the construction of a roof extension—currently ongoing over the building where my boyfriend lives—is also the word for capital accumulation.
Joanna Pope

 
Shirin Sabahi, Plinth Series, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Shirin Sabahi, Plinth (Andrea), 2021 (with Andrea Canepa), Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Shirin Sabahi’s series of sculptures Plinth (2021) works precisely against this disappearing act; scale models of archetypical buildings that could receive roof extensions have become plinths. Sitting atop each building-plinth, original sculptures by Berlin-based artists Andrea Canepa, Angela Bulloch, Camilla Steinum, Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard, Marina Pinsky, and Saâdane Afif reveal to us what roof extensions really are—elevated objects of desire that exist separately from and yet depend on the structure below. These sculptures undo, if only temporarily, the cunning of streamlined roof extensions that dissolve in paperwork and vanish in plain sight by swallowing whole the building they take as their host.
Joanna Pope

Shirin Sabahi, Plinth Series, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Xiaopeng Zhou, How does a flower bend?, Detail, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

For over a year, Zhou has been teaching drawing to someone whose artistic skills lie in the remote past, and it has been a source of both income and professional inspiration for him. Working in one or two weekly sessions of several hours with E.S., a lady in her early 80s, Zhou has now turned into a teacher as well as an observer, a reporting draughtsman, a conversationalist learning more German from his student than he knew before, and a dedicated and friendly companion. Depending on each day’s weather conditions and motivation, he and E.S. sit together either in her apartment or a public botanical garden. Both started making drawings of the same plants, widening or concentrating their attention for external circumstances and long-term and short-term memories—or for each other. Zhou’s drawings from that exchange form the bigger part of the exhibited works, because it is not his intention at all to expose E.S.’s renderings of plants and other objects to the critical eye of an anonymous art public

Clemens Krümmel

Xiaopeng Zhou, How does a flower bend?, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Xiaopeng Zhou, How does a flower bend?, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Owing to their cultural touch-points, these pieces were doubled simulations. They echoed the effect of quasi-anthropological museum dioramas, kitsch renditions of history, and multiple other realms of folktale and myth culture, right up to actual building facades, themselves always a tricky mixture of the real and the represented. Adam’s stuff has juice, sizzle, power, because it revels, in a complex and very involved way, in this netherworld of the real. He hoards the dusty magic of these human-cultural forms. Then he makes it sparkle and twitch with new alterity.

Mitch Speed

Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw, city assembly, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw, an interval between events, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

BPA// Exhibition 2021, Installation View, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artists; Photo: Frank Sperling

Rose tinted semitransparent masking shielding visor Deep illuminating electrifying eyes

Wiry armpit hair

Dripping maple syrup

Things in slo mo

Sound muted

Colours softly desaturated

Bob Kil

Jana Schulz, Home Series. Ashley Temba, Film Still, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Joshua Schwebel, Receipt, 2021 and The Gift of Glove, 2021, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

What Schwebel takes seriously is not just the political and material truths of cultural enterprise, but the affects they generate. […] He met with the school’s Director of Graduate Studies, the artist Bruce Barber, who decided to pass Schwebel but requested at least some kind of documentation for the thesis. Schwebel refused and left Barber’s office, but not before swiping a black leather glove that belonged to the professor. Via one of Schwebel’s colleagues, the object eventually wound its way back to Barber’s home, but upon encountering a black leather glove at random two years later, Schwebel decided to return to his thievery. With all the dedication of a newspaper-baiting criminal, Schwebel continually sent a black leather glove each month to Barber over the next three years. He wrapped every specimen in brown paper and omitted any return address, until 60 gloves in total had arrived at Barber’s home.

Joseph P. Henry

Joshua Schwebel, The Gift of Glove, 2021, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

BPA// Exhibition 2021, Installation View, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artists; Photo: Frank Sperling

Falling has symbolic meaning in this project. Under patriarchy, women are considered as ‘fallen beings,’ a step down from ‘standard’ humans, but women who are defined as ‘unclean’ (whatever that means) fall one more time. This subject doesn’t belong to any category (not human nor woman), but therefore can approach ‘the Real’ by Lacan’s definition. A being who is ‘willing to fall’ is in this monstrous gap (neither A nor B), and when the subject cannot be grasped by a language (category), people feel uncomfortable. However, in consequence, new ethics (the Truth) can arise (jump).

Mooni Perry and Hanwen Zhang

Mooni Perry, Binlang Xishi, Film Still, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

BPA// Exhibition 2021, Installation View, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artists; Photo: Frank Sperling

Photographs glued on canvases, plastic pigments imitating street signs and slogans, landscapes that situate the thing and the place in conflict. The dream and the real are part of a distant narration that situations are painted as if they are already in the past and forgotten. Remembering a city but still living in it. Forgetting a place that you were for so long inhabiting, rejecting it by trying to recall.

Georgia Sagri

Sofia Defino Leiby, 15.09.2020, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Sofia Defino Leiby, Shopping, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

[…] it isn’t the sculpture alone in the room; rather our senses are also touched by music, which has an impact on the overall scenario. Kévin Blinderman works with sound and music, with the viewer’s movements and impressions in space, with what happens when different sensory impressions—the sculpture as Hardboy, or the sound of a familiar melody—collide and evoke different reactions simultaneously. How do we construct reality? How do we construct situations?

Bettina Steinbrügge

Kévin Blinderman, Hardboy, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling

Kévin Blinderman, Hardboy, Installation View, BPA// Exhibition 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2021; Courtesy the artist; Photo: Frank Sperling