Darkness, as in Dark Store, does not necessarily mean the absence of light. It is about the palpable presence of social matters left in darkness when it comes to the production, exhibition, and discussion of contemporary art.
The project addresses current class discussions in visual arts and considers their questions in relation to class consciousness, long-term collaborations and healing practices of self-organized artist spaces and initiatives.
For more than ten years, Gülsüm Güler has been practicing kitchen psychology in her nomadically run dinner club TDD (Tischlein Deck dich) by creating action spaces together with guest chefs from the respective neighborhood. As an artist, she considers her collaborative practice a safe space that allows her to engage in her work as a portrait photographer to approach actors from different communities who participate in the collective process of their cooking actions
Joshua Schwebel’s work “The Employee” was a yearlong collaboration between the artist and Forest City Gallery artist-run center in London, Ontario. His conceptual work consisted of obtaining arts funding and contracting a supplementary worker to perform as a grant-writer on behalf of the artist-run center. In 2019, Schwebel was nominated for the Berlin Art Prize and used his production budget to provide Kreuzberg Pavillon in his work The Ground durably with a new floor, made of recycled wood from nearby construction sites.
Erin Mitchell’s new work follows up to her site-specific window installation A Prime Dystopia from 2021 which reimagined Kreuzberg Pavillon as displaced by speculative foreign investment. Styled as a teaser for a newly launching startup, the space´s appearance was remade to mimic the influx of grocery delivery “dark stores” in storefronts in the surrounding area. The link to her work was redirected to a collaborative archive chronicling international reporting on the exploitation of low-wage, precarious, and gig economy workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and their self-organization efforts in Berlin and beyond.
Markus Zimmermann has been active as an initiator of projects in overlapping art genres since 2013. He regards the creation of space as a sculptural process and was most recently active in this context with the sculpture group Art Ashram at documenta fifteen. His expansive works often employ recycled and site specific material, and deal with the dichotomy between ego and self, body and space, organism and architecture. Inside the Dark Store, his work expands on the use of delivery transportation materials and questions the extent to which an art exhibition is an exhibition of means of production.
Inside a Dark Store is an exhibition in two parts. The second part with Vika Kirchenbauer and a public program will take place in February 2023.
Curated by Heiko Pfreundt und Lisa Schorm
Design: Erin Mitchell
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