There is an ongoing series happening at Reh Kunst, in which an artist is chosen to present their work for the duration of one week. 7 days and then the space is taken over by another creatives’ mind. The gallery looks like a small trailer, with wood-pressured plank walls, grossly assembled together, a far cry from the habitual white concrete walls. Inside was housed the work of Carly Fischer, disposed in a seemingly arbitrary way, the trash, coke bottles, plastic bags, pieces of city relics were strewn along the walls. A subtile and vibrating sound was echoing through ones ears and legs, and kept our gazes spinning round the space to try and figure where exactly this was coming from. The sound resembled the vibrating noise a truck makes when passing outside your home, ubiquitous, vibrating, but creating a crescendo inside your lobes, which is disconcerting when you cannot see the actual speaker it is coming from. The viewer is then confronted to self-doubt about the actual sound and its provenance. Finally deciding to make my way through the small space I finally noticed that this was coming from a radiator-like piece on the floor, and was informed that it was a sound scape based on Kraftwerks’ work.
Upon my first-walk through which lasted 3 minutes 13 seconds, trying to get images for this text, something glitched, these pieces were a tad different from all of the Lidl bags, coke bottles, cigarette wrappers, and garbage I am constantly seeing on the floor of the city, and inside my own appartment(though generally not on my floor, but in the garbage can). The letters were skewed a bit, the lines were not machine-made prints, they bled, the transparent plastic bag was made of parchment paper, and though crumpled to give the effect of the actual entity, this was not in fact the actual grocery bag, but a paper replica. Going back for my second turn and actually taking the time to notice what I had in front of me, instead of numbingly going through the garbage, I noticed, to great enjoyment, that all of these pieces were in fact made out of paper by the artist herself. Hearing the not-so-distant conversation happening to my left, the artist was explaining how she had started by making these exact realist replicas’ of her subjects but had decided to play with the viewers’ optics, making them slightly imperfect, inciting a second look, directing the public to go back to examine the pieces so common to them.
Her piece I Want to Love You But I’m Getting Blown Away plays on the notion of the transitional individual experiences in Berlin, how people are continually coming and going. The trash embodying the notion of Berlin as this constantly-moving gritty metropolis, the “generic models(…) propose a kind of street culture that has been cleansed and disinfected for general consumption.”(1)A true reaction to the gentrification process happening here threatening (up to a certain point) to make this German city look like a procession of stuccoed boxes and neat streets.
