The art of the week: The body between huts and prefabricated buildings

W How comfortable is it to live in the huts, in these little shacks made of weathered wood and – cutely – decorated with buttons gathered together? In the spacious rooms in House on the forest lake The makeshift outhouses, the churches with crooked Christian crosses on the roof or the seemingly imminently collapsing dwellings shrink a little more. They are just a miniature world, a kind of slum in doll format, set up in an actual Berlin villa that an investor had built at the beginning of the 20th century as part of a villa colony. The social contrasts are spatially noticeable, which the American artist faces Beverly Buchanan with her sculptures, drawings, texts and films shown here.

Beverly Buchanan, who died in 2015 at the age of 74, was interested in what buildings can tell us about society and life. As early as the 1970s, during her time in New York, she tried to artistically address the city’s decay with her Black Walls, making the erosion of facades visible on panels with black surfaces.

Her architectural fragments made of concrete can be seen in the Haus am Waldsee. Small abstract shapes lined up on the fine parquet floor, almost like minimalist sculptures. They’re just not as slick as market standards, but rather rough and weathered.

Also at Klemm’s it’s about the damage to architecture and spaces – and about the body, the body after the war. Met for that Sven Johne his 1990s self on an old video recording. The man born in 1976 was stripped naked during a performance as an art student. As more and more red streaks form on young Johne’s skin from the hard jet of water, his current offscreen voice talks about the men in his family.

They were all accurate soldiers in the Wehrmacht or in the National People’s Army of the GDR, and the East German post-reunification youth went into the Bundeswehr.

Meanwhile, photographs of soldiers from the First World War hang on the opposite wall. In the black-and-white pictures you can see the faces disfigured by war equipment, roughly patched up with prostheses. But their mouths are covered by hands, today’s hands, as the color photographs show. So the dutiful soldier is not allowed to speak. But the architecture does it when Johne shows black and white photographs of historic city centers in the Oder area on another wall. The Second World War left nothing of their history.

At Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler The absolute contrast program can then be seen. The New York artist Trey Abdella, Born in 1994, he staged Winter and Christmas as a commercial horror film. Nothing new actually. But you can see how he throws the kitschy, ice crystal-covered decorative painting in the style of Christmas Coca-Cola advertising with rosy-cheeked children’s faces, ice-skating idylls and schmoozy love romance into the abyss with smoldering aggression on his sculpturally erupting canvases. Tom and Jerry complain and angels sink into the icing.