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until 19.10. | #4371ARTatBerlin | neugerriemschneider (Linienstraße) presents from 7. September 2024 the exhibition NowJustPassedBy by the artists Cevdet Erek, Mario García Torres, Shilpa Gupta Renata Lucas, Mike Nelson and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
In NowJustPassedBy, a group exhibition featuring works by Cevdet Erek, Mario García Torres, Shilpa Gupta, Renata Lucas, Mike Nelson and Rirkrit Tiravanija, divergent notions of time and its structure reveal a multivalent capacity to mold our experience of the present. Linear, circular or hypothetical temporal models collide with the instantaneous and the spatial, shaping interfaces that prompt reimagination of chronology’s persistent forward momentum, materializing its intangible potential as sculptural manifestations.
Shilpa Gupta’s wall-mounted, neon-lit work NowJustPassedBy (2023) serves as the point of departure for this presentation, both in title and concept. The eponymous phrase, authored by the artist, centers “now” as an ever- shifting, uniquely individuated moment, while the work’s mirrored image emphasizes the close link between movement, perspective and interpretation. The present is likewise at the core of Cevdet Erek’s Ruler 100 Years 2023 (with Calendar and Alphabet Revolution) and Ruler 100 Years 2023 (both 2023): paired rulers whose abilities to measure space are supplanted by the capacity to enumerate time. With their shared year of conception as anchors, regular markings plot a reductionist calendar that encapsulates everything from the minutiae of the lives lived within the former’s bounds to the potential held by the latter’s coming century. Integrating his extensive work as a musician and sound engineer, Erek’s rulers are accompanied by a modified daf drum. Adorned along its frame by metal rings joined as suspended chains, a cryptic system of notation takes shape, paced and measured in a looped advance, codifying and recalling ephemeral action. The three hand-blown glass rings of Mario García Torres’s Fragment of An Infinite Discourse (n.d.) too visualize time as an unending cycle, passing through one another to portray infinitude as an interdependent, delicate system.
Deconstructing the fleeting and exposing the commonplace for its fundamentals, Renata Lucas’ on love and possessions (because exhibitions are like a coffee that we serve cold) (2023) distills the act of pouring coffee to its choreography and symbolism, memorializing them as a sculptural table. A series of rings incised on its surface disjoint and immortalize reality, archaeologically excavating its compositional layers. This approach continues in her farsinha (each 2024) – a suite of wall-hinged curtains that, when activated by a viewer, playfully segment their form in a reconsideration of personal agency, stasis and stability. In Amnesiac Beach Fire (MoD III) (2021), Mike Nelson crafts an alternate reality with The Amnesiacs – a fictional biker gang whose members here act as sculptors assembling debris to a would-be beach fire, its flames inanimate and frozen in time. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled 2018 (stones and ashes) (2018) similarly builds upon an illusory materiality. Positioned around a mirrored corner, a truncated circuit of burnt matter completes itself through its reflection, linking seamlessly to expand the bounds of tangible space. Translation and transformation of media reappear in Tiravanija’s untitled 2008 (鉛の重さ)(そこにあるすべては生命) (2008) as a crushed coffee cup, reproduced in lead and enameled in off-white. “Is this all there is to life” translated to Japanese, is painted across its front, posing an existential question whose philosophical weight both contradicts the object’s seeming disposability and hints at its physical mass. Space and time come to contract and expand, double back on themselves and challenge their own connection to one another, provoking a line of inquiry that suffuses the presentation’s entirety.
Exhibition period: Saturday, 7. September until Saturday, 19. October 2024
To the Gallery
Image caption: Shilpa Gupta, NowJustPassedBy, 2023, © Shilpa Gupta. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, glass tubing, neon, 11.8 x 196.6 cm
Exhibition NowJustPassedBy – Galerie neugerriemschneider | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
