Displays: On the Surface
Displays: On the Surface
Friedrich Andreoni, Isu Donggeon Kim, Yun Kima, Lukas Liese, Qing Lu, Aiko Shimotsuma
Opening: October 13. 2023 18:00 – 21:00
Exhibition: October 13 – November 11. 2023
Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin
Curator: Congle Fu
Different kinds of displays increasingly characterize contemporary forms of viewing and ways of exposing objects. From user interfaces on mobile terminals, screens, or designed surfaces in exhibitions, displays fulfill various functions shaped by their cultural and historical usage, which are rooted in heterogeneous contexts. Furthermore, these displays can impact not only technological apparatuses and exhibition design but also discursive modes of framing as well as critical practice.
Exhibition Displays: On the Surface brings together six artists to delve into diverse dimensions of the notion of display, with a particular focus on surface aesthetics. In his On Route (2023), Lukas Liese revisits a road to the quarry originally constructed by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century by employing contemporary mapping technology. An interactive display screen is materialized as solid marble, imbuing the surface with depositional and historical qualities akin to canonical sculptures.
Yun Kima’s Under Your Skin (2021) assembles the industrialized products and human skin and cells into a slippery and visceral surface. These skin-like modular synthetic shells, along with an array of industrial readymades, create a hybrid yet nearly sterile landscape that explores the intricate entanglements of organisms and technology in the context of late liberal capitalism. Here, the display serves both as a surface for mediating and interacting and as an ethereal presence, detaching from its solid form while filling the architectural space like vapor.
Sharing the same focus on surface and interaction, Aiko Shimotsuma’s site-specific sculpture Feeling is All (2019/2023) emphasizes the haptic experience. An ostensibly ordinary painting gains material depth on its surface through interaction with human touch. Above the surface, a hazy climate emerges, creating another spatial dimension within the architectural space, where viewers can haptically sense the materiality of the surface, much like feeling the atmosphere itself.
Friedrich Andreoni’s Erinnerung + Zeit (Memory + Time) (2018) resonates this haptic spatiality by exploring the texture of sound. This ambient space is established through the texture formed through sonic vibrations on the water’s surface. Moreover, steeped in exoticism and ornamentation, the Moroccan tiles–often used as delicate surface displays in furniture, gardens, and architecture–add another layer of texture to the surface, evoking a distinct understanding of time and memories.
A critical approach to the notion of display can be observed in ½ μαζός (½ Mazo) (2022) by Isu Donggeon Kim, which sheds its habitual appearance and investigates the tension around the surface of the body. It performs and envisions the Amazons of ancient Greek mythology through its transitioning body, revealing that this body perpetually resembles a site under construction, filled with friction.
In Qing Lu’s The Moving Berlin Wall (2023), the fixed exhibition space is transformed into a mobile entity that traverses various locations across the city of Berlin. His education in China and Germany translates into a sort of hybridized past, which he intentionally displays on the mobile, partial white cube. The performance serves as his exploration of the selective framework of display, embodying the intersections of his experiences.
Text by Congle Fu. Congle Fu is a PhD researcher based in Zurich.
Installation view © Galerie Met and the artists.
Friedrich Andreoni is an Italian-German artist born on the verge of the last century, who grew up between the Middle East and Europe. Andreoni works across multiple media including sculpture, sound, installation, performative acts, and video. His artistic approach gained shape under the influence of Hannes Brunner, Susan Philipsz, Ulrike Mohr and artists from the Raster Media group (aka Raster Noton). From 2020 to 2022 he was granted a fellowship from the DAAD – German Academic Exchange Service and the Art Institute of Chicago, which brought him to research two years in the Sound department of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. During this time he also worked with ESS (Experimental Sound Studio Chicago). Andreoni is a member of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes since 2018. His project SHIFT (2021-22) was presented within the official program of the 4th Chicago Architecture Biennial: The Available City and received a special mention for the Pontifical Vatican Academies Prize – Virtuosi del Pantheon, as the only visual artist among several architecture studios. In 2023 Andreoni received the DucatoPrize Academy Award. Friedrich Andreoni’s works can be found in public and private collections. Currently, Friedrich is official Meisterschüler of Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz in Dresden, Germany. There, he is investigating ways of thinking about space beyond the physical object.
Isu Donggeon Kim (it/its) is a multi-disciplinary performance artist based in Berlin and Isu Mignon Mignonne(異水 謎龍 未姩) is its drag persona. Mignonne in its name doesn’t stand for “cute” in French, but for 미친년 “Mi-Chin-Nyeon” in Korean, which means “crazy b*tch”. In its work, Isu questions how itself appears in this world and twists it through various performative situations, such as drag, lip-sync, lecture, installation, spoken words and more..
Yun Kima is a visual artist and designer based in Berlin, born in Seoul, South Korea. Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses multi-sensory installations, site-specific works, digital drawings, and sculpture. Kima employs contemporary technologies, including AI techniques, CNC, 3D scanning and printing, alongside familiar materials, such as Bronze, plastic or ready-made objects. By blending the industrial production process and conceptual art approaches with a slight notion of science fiction, the artist delves into the complex relationships between altered nature, technology, and our current digitally embedded culture within the framework of late capitalism. She studied fine art at the Berlin Weißensee School of Art, Art University Kassel and product design at the Seoul National University of Technology. Her work has been showcased in various art spaces, museums and art festivals, including Humboldt Forum Museum, Institut für Alles Mögliches in Berlin, Documenta Halle in Kassel, Delphi space in Freiburg and the Company Studios in Milan.
Lukas Liese was born in Munich in 1991. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2010. He studied sculpture at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee and at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In 2019 he graduated as a “Meisterschüler” of Prof. Else Gabriel and has been working as an artist since then. He has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. Among others, in the Uferhallen Berlin, Bärenzwinger Berlin, Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, Warte für Kunst in Kassel or Galerie Mazzoli Berlin. He has also curated several group exhibitions, including in the Berlin exhibition spaces Spoiler and Zentrale. For his work, he has been awarded, among others, the Deutschlandstipendium (2017), the Mart Stam Prize (2018), the Elsa Neumann Fellowship of the State of Berlin (2020), the Inside Art Fellowship of Artists Inside (2020) and the Neustart Plus Fellowship of the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2023).
Qing Lu was born in 1989 in Hunan, China. aka.Yong Zeng. lives and works in Berlin since 2014. He studied traditional Chinese painting at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and sculpture at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee. In 2023 he graduated as a masterclass student of Prof Hanns Brunen.The central theme of the artist’s work revolves around the mobilization of collective emotions in everyday life. This theme is deeply influenced by the artist’s personal experience of continual migration, which is an ever-flowing journey. To express their artistic experiences, the artist employs performance, engages with the public, creates installations, produces videos, and utilizes various media forms.
Aiko Shimotsuma was born in Japan. Currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She obtained Sociology BA in Kyoto (Japan) then moved to Berlin and graduated as a Meisterschülerin from the sculpture department (Fine art) at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee in 2021. She works on site-specific installation which converse with the environments that surround the space. In 2020, she was selected for an award of Bernhard-Heiliger-Förderstipendiums (Germany). She was granted a fellowship from Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation(Japan) in 2021 and received a scholarship from Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium (Germany) in 2022-2023.
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