Home is where the art is.

It’s been a whirlwind of cultural activity lately with Transmediale, Vorspiel and other arts events and I must admit, it was hard work struggling to keep up with it all! So here’s a bit of a critique and blog about some of the events from January and February that I’ve found the most stimulating…

Back in January I went along to HomeBase in Pankow for the final day of their Feur und Flamme Festival. As I live on the Wedding/Pankow border I was keen to discover this arts initiative in my local area, especially one that explores the same themes that I’m interested in – contemporary art, geographical borders and the concept of ‘home’. More recently in February, I also visited The Nordic Embassy in Tiergarten to see the Transmediale Festival exhibition The Embassy Reconstructed and stayed for the accompanying tour and panel discussion. The installation of sound based work explored the closely related concepts of cultural and national identity, and the representation of such things through the form of the embassy institution.

HomeBase’s three day festival featured an array of events from live performances, djs, artist talks and open studios. The Turkish Tee Garten was a delightfully warm and welcoming space for project organisers, artists and members of the community to mingle and get to know one another, and sample simple yet delicious culinary delights. A social initiative to encourage collaboration between young people from different neighbourhoods though learning new skills, my favourite part of the Tree Garten was the “conversation menu” created and offered to guests to encourage discussion (in three different languages – English Turkish or German) between total strangers. This welcoming atmosphere was present throughout the entire festival with artists on hand to answer questions about their finished and unfinished works, and when they weren’t present, their studio doors remained open giving insight into their temporary lives at HomeBase. What I found most interesting was the blurring of boundaries between private and public – we were allowed into the spaces that the artist not only worked in, but lived in: often I found beds turned on their side and stored in a corner, but more often than not they were left as they would be, perhaps unmade (in one studio one of the artists was even in bed under the doona chatting away to someone on the phone). But somehow it didn’t feel awkward, it didn’t feel like an intrusion – instead, it felt rather like a visit to a friend’s or a distant relative’s house. This was after all, their home.

The exhibition of studiowork was a critique on the idea of home, from within a home, handled in a variety of different ways, the most successful being the works that responded to the local environment or the physical fabric of the building itself such as the work of Hanae Utamura or Ilya Noé. While I realise that the theme of “home” is wide ranging and that the open studio exhibitions showed individual responses to these themes, what kept creeping back into my mind was: how were the artists asked to respond to this rather vast and woolly theme? What was the curatorial process behind how artists were selected? Could subthemes be developed from the original and which artists will stay on to do so? With plans for HomeBase to develop a third partner city in Jerusalem well under way, it will be interesting to see how future projects will develop there and how those here will continue on here in Berlin. HomeBase have plan to use technology such as skype to fascilitate dialogue between artists based in the partner cities of New York, Berlin and Jerusalem and hope “to explore questions of belonging and identity with a focus on cross cultural dialogue and tolerance in society. By taking place in an abandoned hospital the project will emphasize the connection of art as a form of healing and as a catalyst for social awareness. Continuing the legacy of coexistence in the Hansen Hospital we will collaborate with leading artists, social entrepreneurs, and organizations promoting co-existence and human rights.” One thing is for sure – I will definitely be keeping my eye on these developments in the future!

********************************************************************************************

It seems appropriate to bring up my experience of The Embassy Reconstructed exhibition and panel discussion at The Nordic Embassies here too as the themes explored were somewhat related. From one home to another, the various sound installations appeared throughout the main building or Fellahaus (Danish for “house for everyone”) of the Embassy. Again, the concept of private and public space was brought into question, although this time perhaps quite a bit more deliberately, with the focus this time on the role of the Embassy and its workers within today’s highly globalised and war stricken society.

I made the unfortunate mistake of turning up without having seen (or heard) the exhibition before hand, nor did I have enough time to see (or hear) it properly afterwards. However, the tour led by Åsa Stjerna one of the exhibiting artists and project ‘initiator’ (not curator as she kept insisting), with additions by artists Juliana Hodkinson and Liv Strand was a fantastic insight into the production of and their ongoing relationship with the work in situ. However, I still wish I’d gone earlier and had a proper listen to works such as Brandon LaBelle’s Skizo-Embassy, a 40 minute piece featuring a dialogue between a Libyan farmer, a US fighter pilot and an imaginary diplomat. Or had a chance to hear Juliana Hodkinson’s Defending Territory in a Networked World where a collage of speeches by various politicians and diplomats regarding foreign policy ping-ponged across the 2^nd floor and emanated down to the foyer below. However, in a way, my lack of foresight perhaps highlights one of the key messages the artists wanted to get across – that an exhibition of sonic work interrupting a space such as an embassy, that I would normally never go into unless absolutely necessary, is only temporary. The exhibition’s success hangs on the very fact that it is ephemeral and cannot be experienced again in exactly the same way.

The panel discussion was an opportunity to ask such questions as “how much of the embassy will we actually get to understand or appreciate though this project?” or “will it actually make any difference as to how people view the embassy and its role within society or to the employees within?” directly to embassy employees as well as delve into the deeper issues of diplomacy, national and cultural representation of such institutions, and what contemporary art projects such as these can do to explore such issues. What was most interesting was the way the artist and embassy employees explained the process of creating and exhibiting the work. On the one hand, the embassy welcomed and encouraged an examination of the institution and also even participated in the creation of work such as Liv Strand’s Spoken Versions 1, 2 +3. However on the other hand, what quickly became apparent in this process was the replication of how the embassy already operates with other partners such as the media or other government officials on a daily basis – loyalty to the embassy must be maintained, including in discussing their work with artists, and any new relationships and new projects must be negotiated with that in mind. Also present on the panel was Marika Lagercrantz The Cultural Atache of Sweden who even went as far as to say that employees of embassies are increasingly expected to take on more and more of a representative role of the institution as a whole and that the voice of the individual has become one of the organisation. This makes me wonder if a project such as this is even able to critically “reconstruct” the embassy if staff cannot truly open up completely. Perhaps the exhibition should really have been called “Embassy Reflected” as I somehow get the feeling that despite the ambitious attempts to examine the embassy within society by creating works that question it’s diplomatic and representative nature and then temporarily occupying this politically charged space, it couldn’t possibly change the way the embassy operates. I am aware that was not the point of the exhibition, however it soon became obvious in the panel discussion that the aim was really not to reconstruct, but to explore what happens when contemporary art occupies such spaces where important national decisions are made and cultural relationships negotiated and what kinds of interruptions of workflow can take place. Judging by the comments of the Cultural Atache of Sweden, while acknowledging that not everything in the embassy’s daily functions can be made transparent, the opportunity for individuals within the institution to reflect personally on their role, position and activities and how they approach them was a very welcome one.