Concrete#1: RESPIRATION

frontviews at HAUNT Kluckstraße 23 D- 10785 Berlin frontviews.de IG frontviews_berlin FB FrontviewsBerlin Backyard open-air - Covid 19 safe regular opening hours Wed - Fri 2 - 7 pm and by appointment Concrete # is an exhibition series for contemporary sculpture on the former grounds of the Grünflächenamt Mitte, near the Kulturforum. Since April 2020, it is the new location for HAUNT home of the art collective frontviews. In addition to an exhibition pavilion, there is an overgrown courtyard area, of about 500 meters squared, which will be used for contemporary sculptural exhibitions and changing installations from the European scene over the next two years. Each year two conceptual editions of the series Concrete # will take place on one theme. Due to the setting, invited artists will be encouraged to develop thematically appropriate works, dealing with the conditions of the surrounding area. "...or at least their outermost branches illuminated by the lamp with their leaves like feathers that gently shook against the background of the darkness, their oval folios, involuntarily tinted bright green by the electric light, which swayed from time to time like feather bushes, suddenly flickering as if of their own accord (and behind them you could hear a gradually spreading mysterious and delicate murmur, invisibly spreading out in the dark tangle of branches), as if the whole tree awoke, snorted, snorted, shook, then everything calmed down and they sank back into their motionlessness,..."* Concrete #1: Respiration is the primary constellation of pictorial objects in HAUNT. The title refers to the breathing of the city. It is about the rhythm of time and space which has established itself between the buildings, the residents, the plants and the animals during the seven years of previous vacancy. It is definitely not the usual rhythm of the surrounding urban jungle. Without the activities of people, alternative exchange processes could developed on this site. Peace has returned, plants successively conquered the yard and the buildings, animals settled, and the surrounding breaths became slower and deeper. The first setting of works is intended to take up this slowed-down rhythm, to translate it and to maintain it for seven months through the summer, autumn and winter. Thus the exhibition is primarily sensual, it is linked to the quiet processes of urban nature in the yard; processes which had already spread there long before Corona.                                                                                                        Stephan Klee *translated from: Claude Simon „History“, S. 7 , first German Edition,  DuMont Buchverlag Köln , 1999