Modern Painters #june | reviews in brief (berlin | De)
Berlin
Emily Wardill - Carlier|Gebauer // January 31–March 14
British filmmaker Emily Wardill’s When You Fall into a Trance, 2013, is all about the quest for genuine human contact. Loosely based on the real-life story of Ian Waterman and his enigmatic proprioceptive disorder, the feature-length film follows the emotional life of neuroscientist, workaholic, and widow Dominique, her patient, Simon, her lover, Hugh, and her daughter. Wardill uses the fragmented format of her film to establish the defective nature of memory’s structure. Creating her own visual language, she reveals both language’s opacity and its underlying desires.
Channa Horwitz - Kunst-Werke // March 15–May 25
Her mathematical and technical artworks are largely ignored during her life, but Horwitz (1932–2013) is having a well-deserved posthumous revival.“Counting in Eight, Moving by Color” is her first comprehensive institutional solo show. The exhibition deliberately retraces the development of her work, thereby showing the creation of a new language of numbers and colors. It offers an opportunity to see all the works’ growth at once, but it doesn’t make the individual pieces stronger, as the beauty of the data visualization lamentably disappears in the excess.
Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen - Schering Stiftung // January 23–May 3
Can we engineer life? This question is central to the work of Cohen and Van Balen. In their new piece Sterile, the couple, teaming up with a Japanese professor, created an albino goldfish designed to be born without reproductive organs. At first sight unspectacular, the fish slowly swim in small aquariums in the gallery. The sterile fish is of absolute irrelevance to nature and evolution, as it exists merely as an object. By producing living objects on technical demand, Cohen and Van Balen mark the absolute end of Romanticism.