S He didn’t use sound – no problem, says Karl Holmqvist succinctly about the filmmaker Maya Deren, who came to the USA from Ukraine in 1922 and died in 1961, aged just 44. “No Sound, No Problem” is what Holmqvist writes about her experimental films. Or: “Noir Before There Was Noir”. And you can imagine the tough, deep voice with which Holmqvist often presents his multimedia verbal art.
Simple words that come together to form a kind of stream of consciousness. As in the film “Berlin Trilogy Part 1” now in Holmqvist’s solo show in the Neu gallery: the camera runs along a cracked concrete wall, while sentences like “and all just stays the same sky over Berlin” appear.
The exhibition is primarily about the sky over Los Angeles in Maya Deren’s 1943 film “Meshes of the Afternoon”. In it, Deren herself appears as an enigmatic figure dressed in black; she combines symbols such as flowers, knives and keys into a surrealistic narrative using simple cutting and blinding techniques.
Karl Holmqvist: „Paint With Make-Up“. Gallery NewLinienstraße 119 abc, until March 7th
Johannes Büttner / Catherina Cramer: “Dissolutions”. Sequence I of an exhibition series, Art space centerAuguststrasse 21, until May 10th
Holmqvist now shows a cover version, lets a performer take Deren’s place, sometimes collages himself into the story, sometimes sticks to the template, sometimes moves away from it humorously. Filmed in Rudolf Schindler’s modernist Mackey Apartments with their white cubic architecture, Holmqvist’s melancholic, almost silent remake is a homage to the 1940s Los Angeles underground.
Architecture for Liberland
Exhibition view “Dissolutions” in the Kunst Raum Mitte with the installation by Johannes Büttner for “L’etat c’est moi”
Photo:
Jannis Uffrecht
Architecture also appears in Johannes Büttner’s film “L’état c’est moi” in the Kunst Raum Mitte, where Büttner shows the duo exhibition “Dissolutions” together with Catherina Cramer. Architecture in its megalomaniacal, libertarian excesses. Patrick Schumacher, who now heads the office of Zaha Hadid, who died in 2016, wants to build the world’s tallest skyscraper and creamy-white smart homes meandering in the landscape for the pseudo-state “Liberland”.
The self-proclaimed “Free Republic of Liberland” on an uninhabited stretch of land on the border between Croatia and Serbia attracts numerous strange characters. Büttner gives them names like in a computer game: There is “The Architect” Patrick Schumacher or “The Pilgrim” Klaus, who otherwise lives in Brandenburg and feels harassed by the German authorities. And there are the European aristocrats, the super-rich crypto entrepreneurs, all those who want a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, meritocratic “Liberland” where no taxes are paid and the police are booked by Uber.
But the virtual Liberland, with its congressional elections held online, is different from the actual, pitiful piece of land on the Danube, where a few lost guys in caravans and dilapidated shacks wait for Schumacher’s plans to be implemented. And so Büttner’s film fluctuates between documentary and found footage elements and some fantastic scenery. Projected on cobbled together panels for a reality check.