ART-PRESENTATION: Fragments of a Broken Season
A group of German artists on exhibit at Venice Biennale 2015, raised a Greek flag with the word “Germoney” scrawled across it above the German pavilion, a show of solidarity with Greece and a strong stance against Germany’s imposition of austerity on the indebted Country. On 2/9/16 the Turkish police found the body of Aylan Kurdi a 3-year old Syrian refugee who had drowned together with his 5-year-old brother Ghalib and mother in the Aegean Sea while trying to escape Syria. Images of his lifeless body went viral, driving home the danger and desperation of the refugee crisis in Syria and inspiring a powerful emotional response from artists around the world.
By Efi Michalarou
The exhibition “Fragments of a Broken Season” at HilbertRaum (Αn independent, non-commercial, artist-run project space, opened in January 2015) deals with questions of aesthetics and diachronic values of humanism in art. The exhibition brings together photo reporting of the current refugees influx into Europe, riots in Athens and works that reflect upon the more general nature of the human condition. The focus is on the poetics as well as the aesthetics of the image, and how they are manipulated by the artists. As the title suggests, with its play of words from John Cale’s album “Fragments of a Rainy Season” (1992), all works presented in the show evoke the memories of something as timeless and recurrent as the seasons, they create stories that are small fragments of a universal narrative, the struggle of human life. Angelos Christofilopoulos, captured with his lens the reality of Greek–Macedonian borders, with photographs of patrols and barbed wire, be it the ghostly figures of Athenian rioters, as seen through the lens of Manolis Tsafos, portraying the face of a country’s deep crisis, or the broken pieces of mirror that won’t reflect the sky, as in Ali Kaaf’s work. The painters presented in this exhibition each have a very distinct timbre in their way of handling and manipulating images, ranging from the highly figurative, masterful and detailed works of Barbar, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Maria Polyzoidou, to the imaginary scenes of domestic lives and urban living by Nasser Hussein and Daniel Wiesenfeld, and finally to the stillness of time in Michael Kirkham’s enigmatic still life painting, or in the case of artist Eberhart Fröhlich, the seemingly casual paintings transport us to ominous surroundings. The spectrum reaches the complete abstractness in the work of David Benforado, where colors and shapes are suggestive of dark and empty landscapes. In all cases however the result is common: the creation of narratives where the human factor – and its absence – is at the centre. Participating Artists: Barbar, David Benforado, Angelos Christofilopoulos, Eberhard Frohlich, Nasser Hussein, Ali Kaaf, Michael Kirkham, Maria Polyzoidou, Manolis Tsafos, Dimitris Tzamouranis and Daniel Wiesenfeld.
Info: Curator David Benforado, HilbertRaum, Reuterstr. 31, Berlin, Duration: 4-13/3/16, Days & Hours: Fri 18:00-22:00, Sat-Sun 14:00-19:00, www.hilbert-raum.com
