Embark
18th June - 25th July
Opened on Friday 18th June 15:00 - 21:00 pm
Opening Times Thursday until Sunday 15:00 - 20:00 pm
Embark grew out of a desperate need for undulation in a time of artistic and social stagnation. At each stage of this pandemic we are reminded of the transient nature of our lives. This infamous respiratory disease has unearthed uncertainty and fear in its wake and yet it has offered many a much-needed pause for thought and opened a door for robust introspection, reflection and conversation.
Empty cabin doors will open and fifteen international Berlin based artists will exhibit works conceived for this unique occasion.
Single occupancy viewings will provide a safe environment for the public to view and experience these works in isolation and therefore offers an opportunity for a rare, personal experience with each one of these works.
In times of pandemic confinement, travelling is not allowed. But you don’t need to renounce all the sensations of sea travel thanks to the invention of the Seasickness Simulator by Roland Fuhrmann.
It transforms the room of your choice into a swaying ship and, with irony, shows the advantages of immobility during the pandemic confinement.
This site-specific installation has been created for the exhibition and will be shown for the first time. The sea swell is simulated by a kinetic installation of steel balls, rolling back and forth, combined with sound. In parallel there will be exhibits linked to seasickness.
With a set-up for a DJ session on the banks of the river Vltava in Prague. Christian Jankowski played his field recordings from Berlin’s river Spree to the Vltava (Moldau in german.) He focused on the significance of the Vltava for Czech history and legends, taking into account the role of Bedřich Smetana’s symphony Má vlast and it’s best-known segment, named after the river. Upon his arrival back home in Berlin, Jankowski presented in turn, the sounds of the Vltava to the Spree. With this gesture, Jankowski connects the two poles of his voyage from Berlin to Prague and back again, serenading two bodies of water which flow into the river Elbe and exit the European mainland into the North Sea.
Jankowski brings home this seminal work Playing the Spree to the Moldau and Vice Versa and installs it on two levels. Four photographs documenting the perferformance are hung in Cabin 27 along with the installation of the record playing and the wires run out of the window heading up the side of the boat. The installation continues up on the Rooftop where you can look out to the Spree, standing alongside the two speakers playing out to the Spree and eavesdrop on the conversation.
This is RESIST CLIMATE CHANGE. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us to never stop fighting. Since the late 1970's Greenpeace has been fighting against dumping of nuclear waste in the seas to prevent worldwide contamination. 2019 Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future were omnipresent. Since Covid everything has changed. 2030 is going to be a crucial year for the world.
C.O.N.T.A.M.I.N.A.T.I.O.N. is a new video work by the artist Nina E. Schönefeld installed in the transformed Cabin number 9. C.O.N.T.A.M.I.N.A.T.I.O.N. is a plea on the relevance to bring back environmental activism.
Quantum theory has an enigmatic reputation because its predictions are dramatically unlike our pre-programmed logic. In Quantums, every known element is made of waves, but also simultaneously, particles-2 states at once. It's nature in a primal paradox. As nature is essentially quantum, to simulate and understand its behaviour, we need a quantum computer...
In observing one of these odd magical metal machines, one could say they emulate a queerly organic aesthetic, much like that of a sea creature. The installation Quantum Jelly by Sadie Weis is a crystallized hybrid of an enigmatic quantum computer and its most nonobvious/obvious guise - the ambiguous jellyfish.
The work Rialto by Max Sudhues is an improvised stage setting: Street cats in front of a former cinema in Gibraltar (back then in 2016 still part of the E.U.), performing a choreography. Led by instinct, reacting to the light of an overhead projector placed on site during a night action, interacting with the movement of thin gold foil which was placed on the ground. This floating feeling, a glimpse of memory, is being revisited and re-staged on a ship, in a narrow cabin on a broad river, in Berlin in 2021 (Gibraltar is not part of the E.U. anymore). Different times, different stages. Andere Zeiten, andere Bühnen.
Cabin No 8 - already half under water - will be filled up with pink light and sound. This is the new installation by Georg Klein entitled Deep Pink.
Susanne Gerber builds entangled, interwoven, heavy-weight balls of cables. They call to mind what constitutes the substance of our age behind the facade of immaterial images. The cables she uses derive from the film studios in Babelsberg and the Deutsche Kinemathek, among others. One sculpture in her installation Emerge is caught in between the window leaving us to question whether it is leaving the room or entering it.
Routines and conveniences of our daily life have become gradually fatal for the environment, thus representing a growing problem for functioning ecosystems of flora and fauna, but also directly for our health. The ubiquity of synthetic polymers and their resilience to organic decay processes will destroy the balance of nature and thus our livelihoods.
We can only fantasise about heroes, who get to the root of the cause in the here and now ... This is seen in the new video work Urban Hero Part 1 by Elke Reinhuber.
Entering the room in which Franziska Harnisch’s work is located is restricted. Only those who have sent the artist a selfie in advance are allowed in. Everyone else can only catch a glimpse through the porthole of the door or through the window from the promenade in the new work entitled Please wait, the meeting host will let you in soon.
You have just come back from months at sea, things aren’t quite as you remember them.
Under the riverbed a new installation work by Abie Franklin looks for the things below the surface and out sight.
Each of the works in the installation takes on a different approach to the surface layer: as connecting tissue, a clue to what is happening underneath, a mirage or camouflage.
Myitkyina' is a story of 20 comfort women in Myitkyina, Burma.
They appear at multiple photos and documents, but no witness was revealed. Chan Sook Choi’s 1 channel video work Myitkyina is a representation of single women, but at the same time it is a representation of prior discussions and results of research related to the Japanese Military "Comfort Women".
Testimonies of three Myitkyinas in the video sometimes permeate or penetrate existing controversial arguments and subtly contradict each other at times.
Therefore no word from one of three Myitkyinas can become an ideal representation of the Japanese Military "Comfort Women".
Myitkyina' is not an "object" which can be captured or reproduced from a single point of view.
It´s a "living Being" who have existed in various forms at a variety of moments.
“Friendly Fire” describes the military shelling of one's own or allied armed forces in a belligerent conflict.
However, in Heinz Schmöller's sculpture, named Friendly Fire as well, there are two toy figures (rabbit and bear) that shoot the observer with machine guns.
The viewer's presence triggers a motion detector to induce the gunfire whilst they are seducingly looking upon the hanging work Icon.
In Arthur Patching’s new site-specific work entitled Unveil housed in Cabin 12, he discloses to us that a previous artwork he shot in 2018 failed, in which he had written a manifesto which he couldn’t follow through.
Watching the video work under the bed in which he sets off on a ritual of burying a television screen cast into the Spree from a boat. In trying to bury his present, he ends up just burying his past, showing his flaws and encouraging the visitor to look under the wet sheet on the bed before leaving the cabin.
“Commuters' faces revealing unconcealed scorn press next stop button with gloved hand owing to a symphony of coughs sickness everywhere must wear mask over mask and dredge something from this day.”
These words are part of the prophetic poem found typed up in the typewriter in Cabin 24, we are confronted with Das Nasenbluten an expressively painted face tucked up in bed sick with a nosebleed.
When one enters C. Serritiello’s cabin it is similar to being transported back in time to a place, with sounds of voices from the past, amid the bad air.
Walking into Franziskus Nakajima’s new site-specific installation The river told me , the viewer is confronted with the reality that the guests could come back in on you at any time, amongst the guests clothes and consumed food and drinks there is a alienated viewer to look through with a projection of a live camera feed from the Spree.
