What's On: Navigating Berlin – Perspectives on Cartography

Copyright: CLB Berlin. Photo by Vietze & Fels.

By Sara Bellini

Tonight at 7pm at CLB Berlin sees the start of the second chapter of Navigating Berlin: Perspectives on Cartography. This is an exhibition in three parts about historical maps in dialogue with contemporary art to narrate how the representations of the city over time mirror the society that made them. Part I closed last week and focused on the maps from the private collection of Michael Müller and featured works by Olaf Kühnemann and DISSS. Lisa Gordon curated the exhibition in collaboration with CLB, an interdisciplinary space for the intersection of urbanism, art and cultural studies. 

Navigating Berlin II: Design and Cognition considers the maps as artefacts and symbol systems. The works by Berlin based artists Elizabeth McTernan and Simon Faithfull explore Berlin orbital journeys and water representation in maps respectively. It will be open until the 2nd of February and will be followed by Representation and Absence, with the participation of artists Birgit Szepanski and Hadas Tapouchi. 

The third part of the exhibition confronts the socio-political background of the maps and how it influenced, and even distorted, the reproduction of the city on paper. Because a map, exactly like a book, a movie or any other art form, is only a partial portrait, filtered by the cultural lens of the author and aimed at manipulating the perception of the viewer.

Navigating Berlin I: 30.11.19 - 05.01.20
Navigating Berlin II: 10.01 - 02.02.20
Navigating Berlin III: 07.02 - 01.03.20

CLB Berlin
Aufbau Haus am Moritzplatz
Website

Now, for the Future at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool

Preview by Paul Scraton:

The photography organisation Shutter Hub have teamed up with Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery this November for a new international exhibition that brings photographers from around the world together to explore contemporary ideas of myths, folklore and memory. The motivation for the exhibition was to not only explore the many unique ideas for creating a visual language drawing from the past and the present, but also one that, in this time of growing environmental crisis, plots potential road-maps for the future.

‘We’re looking for the myths and fables of today. Will the stories we tell today survive to be the folklore of the future? We hope that Now, for the Future could be a visual handbook for emotional survival.’
– Shutter Hub Creative Director, Karen Harvey

David Come Home © Simon Isaac

One of the highlights of the exhibition promises to be the work of Simon Isaac, whose work ‘David Come Home’ explores ideas of migration, home and homecoming through the story of David, who crash-lands back on earth having lived on a distant planet. Once here, he walks the landscape in search of his brother, reflecting the contemporary reality of many migrants who travel on foot for countless miles, leaving behind their loved ones because of war, the need to survive or simply the human desire to explore.

Elsewhere, the exhibition showcases the work of more that 20 photographers from across the planet, including Bolivia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, US, Portugal and, of course, the United Kingdom. It promises to be a thought-provoking exploration of how photography can be used to tell stories that help us understand what’s going on around us, and allow us to find common ground in this increasingly fragmented world.

About Shutter Hub

Shutter Hub is a photography organisation providing opportunities, support and networking for creative photographers worldwide. They provide the chance for photographers to professionally promote their work, access high quality opportunities and make new connections within the photographic community through their website, in-person meet ups and exhibitions. Shutter Hub has dramatically changed the way photography exhibitions are run. An online entry form and low entry fee with no further costs for printing, framing or postage levels the playing field, allowing photographers from around the world to enter. Bursaries are also available for photographers on low incomes.

Now, for the Future
1 November 2019 - 30 November 2019
Open Eye Gallery (Google Maps)

Open Eye Gallery Website
Shutter Hub Website

The Welcome Chorus at Turner Contemporary, Margate

Image © Yuri Suzuki / Pentagram

Preview by Sara Bellini:

Yuri Suzuki is a Margate-based sound artist, designer and musician that uses sound to examine the relationship between people and their environment. As part of the festival Margate NOW, he was commissioned by Turner Contemporary, in collaboration with Kent Libraries, to create an interactive installation that will be activated for the duration of the Turner Prize opening on 27 September. 

The Welcome Chorus features twelve horns, representing the twelve districts of Kent and paying homage to the etymology of the county’s name: the Brythonic word ‘kantos’, meaning horn or hook. Twelve libraries all over Kent offered workshops open to everyone that gave the participants the possibility to record lyrics based on the different sides of their Kentish experience, encompassing history to landscape to migration. The recordings were processed by an AI software and will be reproduced by the horns installed at Turner Contemporary. The AI technology will be active throughout the exhibition to record the visitors’ voices, expand its own database and interactively change the installation itself. 

Turner Contemporary is also hosting another exhibition focused on Kent, belonging and identity. Barbara Walker has been artist in residence since April 2019 and from September until the following April she will present her artwork Place, Space and Who, featuring portraits and sound recordings centred on five women from the African Diaspora living in the Margate area. Barbara Walker’s works are the product of her experience growing up in the Black community in Birmingham and try to address the questions of race, gender, class, identity, belonging and (mis)representation.

The Welcome Chorus
28 September 2019 - 12 January 2020
Turner Contemporary, Margate (Google Maps)
Turner Contemporary Website

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Rashid Johnson, „Antoine's Organ“, 2016 / Schwarzer Stahl, Wachstumslampen, Pflanzen, Holz, Sheabutter, Bücher, Monitore, Teppiche, Piano
Installationsansicht, Rashid Johnson. Fly Away Hauser & Wirth, New York NY, 2016. Courtesy: der Künstler und Hauser & Wirth

Sara Bellini explores a new exhibition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau:

Every Saturday at 2pm a different musician plays a piano hidden inside with Rashid Johnson’s installation Antoine’s Organ, a black steel-shelved open cube housing potted plants, video monitors and books on African-American history. Welcome to the Garden of Earthly Delights.

Named after Hieronymus Bosch’s ambiguous triptych, this multimedia exhibition in the Gropius Bau plays with the concept of garden as both an enclosed paradise and a corner of dystopia. From the 26th of July until the 1st of December over twenty international artists explore themes of migration, colonialism, climate change and nature’s beauty, highlighting the world’s contradictions and its fragile status quo. 

Some of the artworks on display include Yayoi Kusama’s giant polka dot tulips, Hicham Berrada’s jasmine terrarium and (moon)light installation, Taro Shinoda’s replica of a traditional Japanese garden and Pipilotti Rist’s intensely colourful sensual videos. Featuring blooming seeds, colonial seeds and a seed bank, The Garden of Earthly Delights brings history into nature and nature into politics.

Gropius Bau Website

Home Where Home Is Not, at Glasgow Women's Library and Platform

Interregnum n.1, laser cut puzzle bricks, cork and wood, by Sogol Mabadi, 2018 / Photo Credit: Iman Tajik

By Sara Bellini:

Home Where Home Is Not is the brilliant title of an exhibition that combines the works of two Glasgow-based artists, jointly organised by the Glasgow Women’s Library and Platform. Sogol Mabadi and Birthe Jorgensen, both born outside the UK, explore the concept of ‘home’ in a context where people move freely and their identities are shaped by their multiple homes. 

Both Platform and Glasgow Women’s Library are arts centres involved with the local community and aiming at fostering creativity and making art accessible to everyone. The exhibition includes wood sculptures, sound art and installations and will be open until 3rd August in both locations. Admittance is free. 

As part of the exhibition, on Thursday 18th the artists will talk about Languages of Belonging with Amanda Thomson, visual artist and author of A Scots Dictionary of Nature. On Sunday 21st writer and director Julia Lee Barclay-Morton will give a performative tour of the exhibition in both locations. Check the websites about opening times and event tickets:

Glasgow Women's Library
Platform

First There is a Mountain, by Katie Paterson

First There is a Mountain 2019 Image © Katie Paterson / First There is a Mountain is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and Arts Council England

By Sara Bellini:

Every Sunday for the duration of British Summer Time Katie Paterson is touring the British Isles with her new participatory artwork until the end of October. The title is First There is a Mountain and it engages the spectators in building sand mountains on their local beach, using buckets that are shaped after five real mountains: Mount Kilimanjaro (Africa), Mount Shasta (North America), Mount Fuji (Asia), Stromboli (Europe) and Uluru (Oceania). The forms themselves are made out of corn-starch-based bio-plastic, which will be composted at the end of the season. The mountains will be taken over by the rising tide, bringing the participants’ attention to geological processes and the UK disappearing coastlines. 

First There is a Mountain 2019 Image © Phil Rees, Swansea Bay with Glynn Vivian Art Gallery / First There is a Mountain is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and Arts Council England

First There is a Mountain explores time and our relation to the environment and connects the local with the distant landscape of other continents through the minimal constituent of the sand grains. Katie Paterson’s artworks, from black holes to fossils,bring together scientific research and poetic sensitivity and make the viewers consider their space in the universe and the ancient and eternal beauty of the natural world we inhabit.

Check out the website to find out about the project locations and the pieces of writing commissioned for every single one of them:

Project website and next events
Katie Paterson's website

The People's Forest

We’ve been following The People’s Forest project with interest, rooted as it is in place and what it inspires. Co-curated by Kirsteen McNish and Luke Turner, The People’s Forest includes a programme of events, talks, gigs and artistic collaborations, and continues the history of great writers drawing inspiration from nature and the outdoors to present a literary programme designed to seek out new writing related to Epping Forest – London’s strange and wonderful woodland, and its unique history that has been shaped and maintained by man.

As part of the project,  Faber New Poet and Caught by the River poet-in-residence Will Burns will create a series of new works inspired by Epping Forest. Over the year Burns will pen a collection of poems, one per season, in part reflecting on the unique nature of Epping intertwined with his own experience of the forest real and imagined, and we are extremely pleased and proud to announce that we will be publishing one of the forthcoming poems here on the Elsewhere: A Journal of Place blog.

Burns has proposed a long walk from Wendover Woods to Epping Forest, revisiting the physical act that his mother made in her lifetime, and as a family unit twenty years ago. This journey will in part shape the latter part of the series and will revisit family history, memory and these two forests many miles apart. This journey will cross the rivers and chalk streams and hillsides of this odd and lost middle land between the capital and the bulk of the country. He will also be exploring what this strip of lush, wooded country means - this dividing line, in this divided time.

Will’s first poem “The Word For Wood” appeared in Caught By The River’s online journal in March that conjures up themes of isolation, crisis and crossroads:

The fertility symbols of other, older cultures
harass me through the cold wood.
The sounds of jackdaws going berserk
(though the sound is not their name…).
I might as well come clean—
all this is to impress somebody else
though they have long given up interest.
First I read they had left the conversation,
then I watched them leave the house,
finally I heard they left town

Speaking about the project and his connection to the location, Burns said:

“Epping Forest has loomed strange in my imagination since childhood. I grew up just outside its shadow, in Enfield, and my mother was born in Epping itself without ever knowing the place. Since moving out of London at 10, I have always loved woods – either 'my own’ out here in Wendover, or others that I’ve visited. They are places unlike any other in our imaginations and I feel as if there is a whole chapter of my memory linked to that part of London but somehow missing. I hope to recover it through a year of walking and thinking and writing in the forest.”

We are really excited to read more from Will as the project continues and we hope to bring more from The People’s Forest to our readers in the coming months. For the full programme of events taking place, click here.

Imagined Cities: Stories from Berlin and Beyond

Some familiar faces and new friends are getting together in Berlin on Sunday 5 May for a a literary event at the Sir Savigny Hotel, hosted by Influx Press. Our editor in chief Paul Scraton and contributor to Elsewhere No.01 Gary Budden will be reading, along with Berlin-based writers Donna Stonecipher, Linda Mannheim and Charlotte Wührer.

IMAGINED CITIES: Stories from Berlin and Beyond, is a night of literature exploring urban spaces and how we write them – from the German capital to London and New York – and the event will feature flash fiction, prose poetry, short stories and excerpts from city-based novels. It promises to be a lot of fun and we hope to see our Berlin-based friends there!

Sir Savigny Hotel
Kantstraße 144, Berlin (Google Maps)
7pm – Entry Free
Facebook Event Page