And then there was war.
In the first room of the exhibition “Echoes of Tumult” you are right in the middle of the devastation that barrel bombs and cruise missiles, drones and explosive devices have caused around the globe in recent years. Iranian artist Hoda Afshar has collected found footage that shows bombings of homes, office buildings and mosques in gloomy black and white video. However, the shots in his installation “Undone” are shot backwards: the buildings that were hit emerge from clouds of smoke and swirled dust – like at the end of Elem Klimov’s 1985 Soviet anti-war film Come and See.
It may be that Afshar likes Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History wants to raise the dead with the help of her media arsenal and make what has been broken whole again. But if this was their intention, it is overshadowed by a totality of destruction that flows into the exhibition space from theaters of war around the world.
Noise of air raid sirens
In the room opposite there is the sound installation “Tryvoha. (The Siren and the Mast)” by the Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan straight on with the warlike bombardment of the senses: Anyone who approaches a metal pole in the middle of the room triggers the demonic noise of the air raid sirens that are currently wailing day after day and night after night in Kyiv – or so it seems. But the work is not quite as literally documentary: Kadan had the long, deafening wail sung and replayed by a mezzo-soprano and a violinist.
„Echoes of Tumult“. Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien and DAAD Gallery, Berlin, until March 22nd.
These are completely different sounds than previous CTM exhibitions. While it was often about gender issues, identity politics, post-colonialism or internet culture, this year a brutal global political reality has overtaken the festival. It is the sound of a multipolar world that overlaps and drowns out one another in the exhibition rooms without soundproofing.
Even lipsticks become war goods, as in the installation by the Romanian Ioana Vreme Moser. During her research into cosmetic ingredients, she found so much heavy metal in old make-up sticks that she could use them to build small radio receivers. During World War II, she found out, the rotating casings of cosmetics were actually converted into bullet casings. An armada of lipsticks, some hundreds of years old, now hangs from the ceiling like a swarm of projectiles and croaks out historical radio advertisements for make-up.
But it’s not just wars that fortunately only reach us in the safe space of the art space as the echoes of the exhibition title. Even without political conflict, humanity manages to wreak havoc on the one planet at its disposal with resounding, trembling destruction. Sissel Marie Tonnn and Jonathan Reus have compiled an archive of seismographic recordings of the major earthquakes triggered by gas production in Groningen. Equipped with vests and headphones, visitors can experience first-hand what it feels like when the ground beneath you slips away because the Netherlands’ hunger for energy has to be satisfied.
The recordings of the meadows that have grown over the last two years in the former basin of the Kadyrova dam in the multimedia installation have an impact Ukrainerin Zhanna Kadyrova almost bucolic – if you have forgotten that the Russians blew up the dam in 2023 to flood the city of Kherson and more than 40 other towns.