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until 21.12. | #4503ARTatBerlin | ChertLüdde (Potsdamer Str.) shows from 16. November 2024 the group exhibition A soft edge to break a sword.
With works by: Monia Ben Hamouda,Stephanie Comilang,Patrizio di Massimo,Kasia Fudakowski,Petrit Halilaj,Heike Kabisch,Wilhelm Klotzek,Zora Mann,Beatriz Morales,SofíaSalazar Rosales,Young-jun Tak,Tyra Tingleff,Álvaro Urbano,Zhibo Wang and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt
Hosted at the gallery’s temporary location on Potsdamer Straße97, the exhibition showcases a broad range of artistic approaches—spanning etching,weaving, painting, and welding—unified by their exploration of the subversive powerof softness and vulnerability.
At the entrance of the space is Sofía Salazar Rosales’s striking fiberglass beam,which bends under the weight of the artist’s personal talismans from her home. Symbolsof protection, the artist’s string of red beads appear deceptively heavy, causing thesturdy reproduction of the IPN beam to curve. This theme of material transformationcontinues in Tyra Tingleff ’s abstract oil paintings, where her expansive fields of colormelt and swirl into marbled surfaces, evoking a seemingly periment fluidity. MoniaBen Hamouda also expands on this notion with her abstract, calligraphic drawing.Smudged with medicinal spices, the artwork is part of her growing practice of blendingEuropean figuration with the Islamic tradition of aniconism to askew their differences.
Sofía Salazar Rosales, Installation view of “Des lignes de désir – Félicités 2023”, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Paris, 2024
Beatriz Morales, Zhibo Wang and Young-jun Tak have also been invited to exhibitwith the gallery. Morales draws upon ancient knowledge systems that steadfastlywithstand the pressures of industrialized agriculture. By carrying out these richtraditions and abstracting them, she weaves luxurious tapestries from the agave plant,a native species of Mexico. Meanwhile, Wang’s latest oil painting subtly shifts everydaymoments into a quietly surreal scene. Tak’s hand-carved limewood sculpture referencesChristian iconography, featuring two young male figures sprouting from woodenasparagus stalks. The figures gaze upwards, offering a subversive reinterpretation oftraditional religious forms.
Through materials research and delicate observations into various cultural andsocial factors, the artists reshape their personal histories by offering transformativevisions of change. The exhibition challenges conventional notions of power andstrength, opening up for narratives capable of breaking even the sharpest sword.
Stephanie Comilang, “Manton de Manila – 1”, 2024; Embroidery on pineapple fabric, maniquin; Approximately: 180 × 60 × 90 cm; Dimensions variable
Monia Ben Hamouda(1991, Milan, Italy) lives and works between al-Qayrawan andMilan. Ben Hamouda’s practice reflects her Tunisian and Italian heritage, sculptingcalligraphic references that blend identity and meaning, with specific emphasison Islamic rituals, history and medicinal spices through the Islamic tradition ofaniconism. Her work has been shown at the MACRO, MAXXI, Istituto Svizzero,La Casa Encendida, Heidelberger Kunstverein, FRAC Corsica and Museion. She iscurrently a finalist for the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE IV and recipient of the MuseionAudience Award (2024) and Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation Grant (2024).
Stephanie Comilang(1980, Toronto, Canada) is a Filipina-Canadian artist living andworking between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary-based works create narrativesthat look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labor on a global scaleare shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown atthe Tate Modern, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, TaiKwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Julia Stoschek Collectionand Haus der Kunst. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s mostprestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Patrizio di Massimo(1983, Jesi, Italy) lives and works in London. Over the pastdecade, di Massimo has cultivated a distinct aesthetic that merges figuration withelements from Italian history, particularly drawing inspiration from Baroque tones anddramatic portraiture. His artistic representations exhibit an uncanny and sometimesgrotesque quality, exploring various aspects of human nature. His work has beenexhibited at Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, ParaSite, Dhaka ArtSummit, Museion, Triennale di Milano, Milan, Castello di Rivoli, Stedelijk Museum,Museo do Arte do Rio, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Villa Medici, EVAInternational – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gasworks and KunsthalleLisbon.
Petrit Halilaj, “They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens”, 2024; Pencil on paper, wood, faux fur
Kasia Fudakowski(1985, London, England) lives and works in Berlin. Her diverseand playful practice, which includes sculpture, film, performance, and writing,explores social riddles through material encounters, surreal logic and comic theory.Fudakowski’s works refer to the allure and danger of binary categorisation and thesubsequent absurdity that it unfolds in our political and social climate, revealing thediscrepancies amongst cultural norms. Her work has been exhibited at Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, 1646, Centre for Contemporary ArtFUTURA, Harburger Bahnhof and Bauhaus Museum Dessau. She was awarded theArts Maebashi Prize (2019) and the Otto d’Ame Film Award (2016).
Petrit Halilaj(1986, Kostërrc, Kosovo) lives and works in Berlin. His work is deeplyconnected to the recent history of his native country Kosovo and the consequencesof cultural and political tensions in the region, which he often takes as a startingpoint for igniting countercurrent poetics for the future. Rooted in his biography, theprojects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, painting, textand performance. He has exhibited recently at the Met, Museo Tamayo, Tate St Ives;Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia and New Museum. He received the KunstpreisBerlin from the Akademie der Künste in 2023 and was honored with the SmithsonianArtist Research Fellowship (SARF) in 2018. In 2017, he earned both the Mario MerzPrize and a special mention from the jury at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Heike Kabisch(1978, Münster, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Informed byarchival materials, family heirlooms, or objects otherwise facing extinction, HeikeKabisch presents fragmentation as a poetic tool for regeneration. Her practice unfolds across figurative sculpture, installation, drawing, and collage. To capture a sense ofvulnerability, her sculptures often have wires, cracks or raw material exposed as away to resist completion and remain open to revision, chance and time. Her workhas been exhibited at Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Nomas Foundation,Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Kunstverein Kirschenpflücker, KünstlerhausDortmund, Kunstverein Gelsenkirchen, Kunstmuseum Baden Solingen, KunstvereinLeverkusen and Cornerhouse.
Álvaro Urbano, Marta, 2024, Metal, paint, 130 x 55 x 36 cm
Wilhelm Klotzek(1980, Berlin, Germany) is best known for his sculptures, videos,and performances, interspersed with sound poetry and word jugglings, in which hetakes up everyday cultural or even political-historical phenomena. In terms of content,the examination of post-socialist reality is a recurring theme, while at the same timepublic space and people’s relationship to architecture play an important role. Since2023 he has been teaching as a professor in the sculpture department at the BerlinWeißensee Art Academy. His works have been on display at DAS MINSK, SchlossDerneburg, Schloss Bellevue, Institut für Kunst und Kontext Berlin, Bibliothek der Gemäldegalerie, Memphis in Linz and ifa-gallery Berlin, among others.
Zora Mann(1979, Amersham, England) lives and works in Berlin. Mann’s identifiableaesthetic ventures into the realms of disparate experiences and scores of interests.Her vibrating, psychedelic expression finds influence in folklore, geometry, dreamlikeshifts, vibrant, affective color palettes and surreal repetition that moves in relationto so many other competing movements. Zora Mann’s work has been exhibitedat Berlinische Galerie, Villa Arson, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Haus amLützowplatz, Palais De Tokyo and BKV-Brandenburgischen Kunstverein.
Beatriz Morales(1981, Mexico City, Mexico) lives and works between Berlin andMexico. Morales combines an investigative, abstract-expressionist approach withtextile art, fiber art and conceptual components, often realized in monumentalinstallations. As part of her practice, the artist incorporates traditional, pre-hispanicdyeing techniques, both in her work with plant fibers as well as when painting oncanvases. Her work has been exhibited at Museo Tamayo, Mexican Painting Biennial,Circle Culture, Chancellery Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art MACAY andFrieder Burda Museum. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Social Arts Award inBerlin and was the 2006 winner of the Jeune Créateur Prize.
Zora Mann, “Fugue”, 2023; Etching on paper; 52 × 39 cm
Sofía Salazar Rosales(1999, Quito, Ecuador) lives and works between Paris,Amsterdam and Quito. In her practice, she often recreates objects tied to her homeand surroundings, blending organic and industrial elements. She conceives her piecesas spaces of reconciliation to negotiate between the object, the material and theirhistory throughout different contexts. Reconciling is also a constructive gesture inher work, which continuously transforms the objects with particular focus on theiremotional effect. This year, her work is on view at the 17th Contemporary Art Biennialof Lyon and she is currently participating in the two-year residency at De Ateliersin Amsterdam. In 2023, she was nominated for Premio illy Sustain Art Prize andEmerige-CPGA Prize and won the SARR Prize in 2022.
Young-jun Tak(1989, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Berlin. In Tak’s artisticpractice, he investigates some of the socio-cultural and psychological mechanismsthat are part of shaping certain belief systems. Appropriating Christian religiousiconographies and anti-LGBTQ+ printed materials, Tak redeploys them together toamplify the dissonances between the devotional imagery and the organizations’ basemessaging and actions. His work has been exhibited at Atelier Hermès (Seoul), Julia Stoschek Foundation (Dusseldorf, Berlin), the 4th Bangkok Art Biennale, the HighLine (New York), the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial, the 16th Lyon Biennale, the11th Berlin Biennale, the 15th Istanbul Biennial, KINDL Centre for ContemporaryArt (Berlin), Seoul Museum of Art SeMA Bunker, amongst others. In 2024, he wasthe winner of the Love at First Sight Prize at the 3rd St. Moritz Art Film Festival.
Tyra Tingleff(1984, Hönefoss, Norway) lives and works between Oslo and Berlin.Typically kept to a portrait format, Tyra Tingleff ’s expansive visual world is fluid, punk,unrestrained – limitless. Combining a manifold of techniques in her oil paintings onraw canvas, Tingleff balances vibrant shades and hues that refract like sedimentarylayers. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstnerfubundet, SALTS, Kunsthall Oslo;Kunstverein Arnsberg and Kunstnernes Hus. In 2020, she was the recipient of theFegerstens Stiftelsen Award, Norwegian Cultural Department Scholarship and theRingerike Sparebankstiftelse Editorial Scholarship.
Álvaro Urbano(1983, Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Berlin. Urbano’s workinvolves an archeology of desires and past intentions. By creating atmospheres thatreplicate specific spaces and architectural gestures, the artist explores the narrativesthat are embedded in these built bodies. These staged realities are inhabited by vegetaland animal elements, only from a close distance these entities reveal themselves asintricate organic simulations. His work has recently been exhibited at TEA TenerifeEspacio de las Artes, SculptureCenter, Bergen Assembly, Storefront for Art andArchitecture, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 24th Biennale ofSydney and Hamburger Bahnhof.
Graphic Design by Jesse Schmeller, 2024
Zhibo Wang(1981, Zhejiang, China) lives and works in Berlin. Zhibo’s practice surveysthe absurd spectrum of what is real – geographically, historically, ethnographically,architecturally. She creates oil on canvas paintings that confound our notions of timeand space. Transcending traditionalism through the subject matter depicted, which isboth curious and challenging, Wang channels her painting to represent the variancesof our visual experiences, similar to the reflection on the surface of water: capable ofcapturing the multiple manifolds of a subject. Her work has been exhibited at the TaipeiContemporary Art Museum, Shanghai Art Museum, Aranya Art Center, Times ArtCenter, Villa Vassilieff, Chongqing Art Museum, and Penrith Regional Art Gallery.In 2008, she won the prestigious national Luo Zhongli Scholarship.
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt(1932, Wurzen – 2024, Berlin, Germany) was born in Wurzen,Saxony, and after the war she settled in Berlin. Despite not having a formal artisticeducation, she produced paintings, pastels, drawings and most notably what shecalls “typewritings”. Works on paper made on a typewriter, the typewritings areintricate studies spanning concrete poetry, linguistics, graphic design and conceptualart – innovative hybrids of language, symbols and visual form. Although in thebeginning of her practice Wolf-Rehfeldt explored semiotics and concrete poetry,she began to shift her focus in later years to abstract compositions, moving fromlinguistic signage to language as form and matter. Her work has been exhibited at DASMINSK Potsdam, Sammlung Schering Stiftung im Kupferstichkabinett, StaatlicheMuseen zu Berlin, MAMCO, Kunstverein Reutlingen, Tirana National Gallery ofArts, Albertinum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Malmö Konsthall, documenta 14, Museumfür konkrete Kunst, Museum Barberini, Kunstnernes Hus, Martin Gropius Bau,Schloss Plüschow Museum and The Weserburg Study Centre / Museum of ModernArt Bremen. Wolf-Rehfeldt was awarded with the Gerhard-Altenbourg Prize of theLindenau-Museums 2021 and the Hannah Höch Prize 2022.
Opening: Saturday, 16 November 2024
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 16 November until Saturday, 21 December 2024
Location: ChertLüdde Potsdamer Strasse
To the gallery
Title image caption: Beatriz Morales, ‘Ts’ul VI’, 2024, Ink and embroidery on cotton canvas, 220 × 180 cm
Exhibition A soft edge to break a sword – ChertLüdde | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
