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BÜLENT SANGAR
ISIMSIZ
March 24 - May 29, 2010

In his early photograph series, Bülent Sangar depicted the terror dominating public life in Turkey in the mid-nineties, and the ways in which this political violence was transported and translated into the quotidian life by individuals and the majority of the population. A parallel concern in this period of Sangar´s production was based on the tendencies of homogenisation of daily life, pushing the manifestations promoted by the corporate capitalism towards the miltitaristic spectre. The following works by Sangar problematised both the public and private, and space in the Turkish specificity. In a series of photographs he deals with the conflict-ridden nature of the public, urban realms in metropolitan cities, which are being appropriated and re-signified by the migrated masses, flowing in from the provincial and conservative regions of Anatolia. Parallel to this, his particularised take on the issue of tradition shifted towards domestic environments and using them as a setting for staging tragic moments such as death, murder or sacrifice. The familial space was marked as suffused by both solidarity and a suffocatingly constrictive quality. Recent works of the artist go a step further and raise his doubts about the safety of the household, which in his previous work seemed to function as a shelter, or at least somewhere to return to. Now, the individual is completely isolated, exposed to the fierce forces blitzing from the outside world and reduced to an embryonic state of survival. Figures mostly taken from the fragile and victimised segments of society, such as housewives or female university students, are seen lying on the ground in a curled, self-protective posture as if they were waiting for a natural disaster, perhaps an earthquake, to happen; or trying to hide their faces in front of a judgemental and even criminating camera, combining the brutal police force and the pornographic stare of a corrupted, event-thirsty, post-political and ethic-free mass media. Erden Kosova In: In the Gorges of the Balkans, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel 2003

Bülent Sangar ISIMSIZ, 2005 (Detail)   Bülent Sangar ISIMSIZ, 2005 (Detail)   Bülent Sangar ISIMSIZ, 2005 (Detail)

JAWBREAKER
A VIDEO-MULTIPLE BY EBRU ÖZSECEN
December 15, 2009 – May 29, 2010

Ebru Özsecen's work stems from research in the fields of architecture and contemporary visual arts. Her work concentrates on different aspects of the psychological and sociological relationship between space and body and on specific environments or locations. Her work covers the range from urban sculpture to strategies of interior and environmental design, from video installation to photography. Her visual and tactile works have taken the form of sound installations, objects, animation, performance, and drawings. Some work is installation in space other is photographic reflex of space or pictorial narration of the history of a given space. The work deals a lot with collective memory. Emerging from this thin steam between inside and outside are dreams, fantasies and longings embodying reflections on society and the individual. The subject matter in her work concerns dualities like public and private, rendering and architecture, figure and abstraction, inside and outside which keep focusing on the individual memory in the contemporary society. Ebru Özsecen investigates the seemingly mundane and exposes it's magical and unseen aspects. She reveals a space where fantasy and memory hide in plain side. Ebru Özsecen tries to capture these "inner wishes via outer spaces." By converting and exploring everyday practices, events and rituals, she addresses the ambivalence of inner and outer space, the opposition between public and private, which has to do not least with social norms and individual fantasy. In a multilayered manner, all of these aspects come together in the work "Jawbreaker", which at the same time reflects strategies of industrial design in multiple productions.

Ebru Özsecen Jawbreaker 2009 (Filmstill)

AUS AUSTRALIEN
8 GRAPHIC POSITIONS
October 20, 2009 – May 29, 2010

In 1988, Edition Block issued Aus Australien, a portfolio of prints consisting of forty sheets by eight Australian artists. The project resulted from curator René Block's interest and involvement in the Australian art scene. As the German coordinator of the Biennale of Sydney in 1984 and 1986, Block was introduced to the local scene, which he later introduced to Berlin in the exhibition Fünf vom Fünften at the daad-Galerie in 1986. A portfolio of prints was already being contemplated at that time and it appeared two years later. In addition to the artists in the exhibition - Richard Dunn, John Lethbridge, Mike Parr, Peter Tyndall and Ken Unsworth - invitations were extended to John Nixon, Vivienne Shark-LeWitt and Jenny Watson. Each created a suite of five sheets in classic techniques of woodcut, etching, stone lithography and silkscreen, which were printed at the Viridian Press in Melbourne. The portfolio represents a leading generation of artists who brought about major developments in Australian art of the 1970s and '80s. These artists created new alternatives for independent work outside the commercial system and generated increasing critical consciousness in their milieu, thereby also paving the way for a younger generation. Conceptual art and Minimalism formed a common background to this radicalized artistic praxis. Performance, installation and serial art played a significant role in newly structuring the relationship between artists and audience. The work of Richard Dunn (born 1944) often reflects the social and historical context of artistic production and deals with the complex problem of perception and interpretation. The artist uses paradox, metaphor, codification and contrast between minimal form and complexity of content so that his artworks elude any kind of simplistic interpretation and challenge viewers to enter into an intellectual exchange. Dunn employs eclecticism and changing stylistic orientations as a conscious strategy, while viewing his work as indebted to Minimalism, Supremacist painting and Conceptual Art. Photography, realistic painting, perspective drawing and film montage techniques clash with and relativize each other in his pieces in order to undermine conventional modes of interpretation and ways of seeing. In the 1970s, John Lethbridge (born 1948) used minimalist strategies to explore the language of art and was interested primarily in self-limiting formal systems. This led him to investigate the polarity of minimal composition and illusionist style, leading to works that bring together formal austerity and intuitive emotionality, the rational and the metaphysical. Lethbridge has developed a formal vocabulary of frontal lines, planes and masses that are used to construct the content of images concerned with the reciprocal attraction and repulsion of bodies, with laws of energy and balance. Minimalism, the monochrome, Constructivism and readymades are reference points for the work of John Nixon (born 1949), whose work revolves around the contemporary relevance and realizability of the utopian aesthetic and the social and political program of early Modernism. In 1968, the artist set up the Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), an ongoing project to investigate non-representational painting. Malewich's Black Square, an icon of the self-referential and absolutist idea in painting, and Duchamp, whose readymades transposed everyday objects into the art context, are key points of reference for Nixon. He analyzes the possibilities of monochrome and readymade in laboratory-like project rooms where, building on prior research, he develops them further. Mike Parr (born 1945) conceives his work chiefly autobiographically and in series, but at the same time considers the problem of audience involvement. While he primarily explored family relations in his early performance pieces, in the 1970s he started to deal with questions of body and space or spatial organization. Since the early 1980s he has developed anamorphic drawings, whose expressive gesture and analytic clarity point to physical and psychological images. Along with performance, the artist uses film, installation, photography, typography, drawings and words to investigate psyche and soma, the interactions between individual and social realms, and the coherence of the self-image. The works of painter Vivienne Shark-LeWitt (born 1956) deal with domestic life, relations between the sexes, everyday power relationships, trivial mishaps and slightly surreal and poetic phenomena. Humor and references to Catholic iconography, modern literature and art theory characterize her works, which are often executed in small formats or as vignettes. In formal terms, her works are finely painted in oils, in a restrained cartoon-like style that supplies the perfect form for her satirical subjects. While the design is reminiscent of 1950s illustrations, the themes concern a more progressive era where men deal with the housework while women pursue successful careers. Shark-LeWitt's paintings likewise address art-historical questions such as the return to figuration, the impact of advertising and pop culture on art, and the relationship between high and low culture. Peter Tyndall (born 1951) not only works intentionally in series, he also continually interrogates and reevaluates his own history. He titles every work Detail, A Person Looks At A Work Of Art, someone looks at something, pointing to his preoccupation with the language of art. Each object is only a detail, an effect in a universal web of causes. Tyndall´s pictures consist of series of signs that elaborate the relationship of artwork to viewer, artwork to artwork, and artwork to the cultural context. The symbol that is the key to it all is a square with two parallel lines - an indicator of a possible field of effects and connections. In this way, the artist highlights his pictures' dependence not only on psychic and physical conditions (light, color, frames, hanging) but also on the viewer's presence and the prevailing cultural and historical perceptual praxis. Ken Unsworth (born 1931) is a sculptor who, starting in the mid-1970s, also began to use his own body in a series of performances in sculptural installations that can be seen in the context of his sculptural oeuvre. These works incorporate recurring basic elements such as steel plates, staves, sticks or river stones arranged in simple, powerful arrays. The artist thematizes the fragility of balance of any kind in a disturbing way: at the precise moment of balance we might become insecure; objects might fall to or lift off the floor. In Unsworth's works, the flawless resolution of formal problems conveyed with clarity and the utmost austerity is always accompanied by doubt and discomfiture as well as dramatic tension. Jenny Watson (born 1951) works in a figurative mode with a combination of painting, text and objects. Rather than corresponding with what is portrayed, her texts consist of elusive sentences idioms and stories that trigger free associations between image, language and memory. Memorably simple subjects, humor and biting irony characterize her work, which quite intentionally evokes a certain kind of naïveté. Watson's pictures tell complex stories with feminist and socio-critical dimensions. Her art explicitly deals with themes such as female identity, chauvinism and family relationships, but also with mortality, nature and memory. The portfolio created quite a sensation when it appeared in Australia, for it was the most significant project of its kind as yet realized in that country. It demonstrated that a great number of Australian artists with their own language were vigorously participating in an international dialogue. Moreover, the portfolio evidenced how center and periphery interpenetrate in the cultural context - a theme that publisher René Block would consistently work with in subsequent years. The portfolio is being presented in Europe for the first time.

John Lethbridge The Ring Cycle (I - V) 1988   Mike Parr The Pool of Blood (I - V) 1988   Vivienne Shark-LeWitt Untitled 1988   Peter Tyndall detail: A Person Looks At A Work of Art/someone looks at something... CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCTION 1988   John Nixon Self Portrait (Non-Objective Composition) (Purple) (Red) (Brown) (Black) (Ultramarine Blue) 1988   Ken Unsworth Villa des Vergessens (I - V) 1987   Jenny Watson The Bottled Memories 1 - 5 1988   Richard Dunn 100 Blossoms (Five Prisons) 1988

MARIA EICHHORN
THE MULTIPLES
May 2 - October 10, 2009

Maria Eichhorn's projects constitute an inquiry into the concept of art, the reception and localization of art, the autonomy and authorship of works of art. The artist is not interested in resolving formal issues. Her interest instead lies in spheres of activity - her projects develop out of manifold influences and considerations. The exhibition venue is treated not simply as an architectonic space where art is displayed, but in its entire context: who runs it, what happens there, what transpires in its orbit, etc. "I am trying to think more globally. When I visit a place, I try to absorb it in a comprehensive way. A detail could turn out to be important in the end, but the first time I encounter a place, I don't want to go there with any preconceived structures in mind." (Eichhorn) Maria Eichhorn's works could be described as investigations at the threshold of the perceptible. Her projects and interventions are often so minimal that they will elude an exhibition visitor's hurried glance. Yet they evoke an ambiguous interplay around perceptual issues - not just sensory perception and concrete experience, but also and most emphatically the perception of politically and socially relevant questions and problems. Eichhorn directs our attention to perception and to the changing contexts of art. By designing situations where the customary, institutionally configured patterns of perceiving art fail us, she frees up space for seeing and thinking differently. Maria Eichhorn's projects are often developed in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines. And they often contain instructions for actions or precise guidelines for implementation, as does the artist's new multiple titled Vier Multiples in Tasche [Four Multiples in Bag] now being issued by Edition Block. The future owner is challenged to get into the act and complete the work by following various instructions given by the artist. Edition Block is taking the presentation of this new object in the edition as the occasion to show all of Maria Eichhorn's multiples.

Maria Eichhorn Vier Multiples in Tasche 2009   View of the Exhibition

KP BREHMER / PHILIP CORNER
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION
January 3 - October 10, 2009

KP BREHMER Pictures at an Exhibition, 1975 In the year 1874 Modest Moussorgsky wrote "Pictures at an Exhibition", inspired by his impressions of an exhibition of watercolors, drawings, architectural sketches and stage designs by the Russian painter and book illustrator Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann. Moussorgsky set ten pictures to music, the cycle of which is held together by an inserted Promenade in variations. The composer did not attempt to make musical illustrations of Hartmann´s work but rather extracted scenic aspects to transform them into musical phantasies. From Moussorgsky´s translations into musical pictures came the impetus for further adaptations and orchestrations. In 1928, for example, Wassily Kandinsky translated the "Pictures" into a stage composition using abstract, kinetic visual forms that came into his mind as he listened to the music. KP Brehmer also translated Moussorgsky´s music back into the visual but used a scientifically generated method. He chose pieces with a length of 4 - 5 seconds from the respective motifs which were then translated into a sonagram at the Institute for Communication Studies at the Technical University in Berlin. The Promenades, the recurring motif that unites the individual pictures, were left out. Brehmer transferred these sonagrams onto etching plates and copied in the titles which are identical with those of the ten pictures set to music. Brehmer´s visualisation of soundwaves has a fundamentally different significance than Moussorgsky´s musical realism or Kandinsky´s idea of a synthetic art. It can be interpreted as pure research into one of the ways the known world can be measured by technical apparatus. To this end, Brehmer presents not simply a single translation of a new form of reality, but sets into operation a process of organization. PHILIP CORNER Pictures of Pictures from Pictures of Pictures, 1977/79 From this ongoing process there came into being a new musical development by the American composer and pianist Philip Corner. To each of his ten piano pieces, which, like Brehmer´s bear the same titles as Moussorgsky´s musical pictures, Corner has given an equal frame of time, 5 minutes, virtually a transference from the format of the graphics. The choice of cluster and tremolo as underlying musical structure achieves an equivalent for the texture of concentrated or wavering blackness of line in the visualised duration of sound. Vertical, spatial formations are translated into the ambit of pitch, horizontal relationships into duration of the continous or interrupted prelongation into regulation of tempo, massivity into dynamic delivery. References to the original musical version arise through a minmal adoption of musical material. The reduction to simple, but fundamental material sets the imagination free, heightens it into an unexpectedly new kind of work which combines very unusual, repetitive procedures with complexly worked out sound structures. The score, in form of a first sketch, makes the composers´ working procedure visible. The notation is not meant to be followed while listening. It brings subjective moments into play that give the reader the role of a deciphering sleuth. Its colorful mixture of writing, notes and drawing turns it into a graphic work that adds a new picture to the mu

KP Brehmer aus der Serie Bilder einer Ausstellung 1975

AYDAN MURTEZAOGLU
IN CHARGE
May 2 - May 30, 2009

The artist Aydan Murtezaoglu deals in her works with the boundaries and structural constraints of Turkish society and how gender roles are formed through family relationships - as well as with possible routes of escape, practices of disobedience and resistance, and gestures of disruption. She articulates these issues via a "perspective from within" that problematizes the artist's claim to an external position as critic of the culture s/he inhabits. The artist searches for ways to express her own embeddedness in the social structure and to articulate her responsibilities toward the social surroundings in which she is also involved as an artist. Aydan Murtezaoglu formulates these same concerns in the eight offset lithographs comprising IN CHARGE, the portfolio now being published by Edition Block. The motifs, based on her photographs, depict reenactments of situations from the domestic and public spheres. While the artist herself is always one of the central protagonists, her intent is not to resurrect autobiographical incidents. Rather, Murtezaoglu assumes a proxy position, slips into a role in order to illuminate as many of its facets as possible. The artist is "in charge" in the sense that she assumes responsibility for examining different aspects of certain role models and the background for their development. Yet she eschews an emotional or accusatory critical stance. Instead she is concerned with differentiations: what similarities exist, what bonds us, what separates. Aydan Murtezaoglu's investigation of social reality brings to light equivocal factors and ambiguities that disclose new, open-ended avenues of reflection. This edition is published on the occasion of the joint exhibition by Aydan Murtezaoglu and Bülent Sangar: UNEMPLOYED EMPLOYEES - i found you a new job! in the Tanas project space.

Aydan Murtezaoglu IN CHARGE 2009 (Detail)

ICH KENNE KEIN WEEKEND
Beuys & Block: the joint editions 1966 - 1986
October 2, 2008 - March 31, 2009

The media of the multiplied object was of central meaning for Joseph Beuys because the sociological and economical aspects of his artistic idea found a suitable form within this context. Beuys was interested not only in the serial character, above all he was convinced by the possibilities of this media as a carrier of ideas and a media of communication. The meaning and form of the multiplied object was radically extended by Beuys. In the course of his artistic career he created more than five hundred multiples, mostly using photographs of his own actions, but also working with original prints and objects. Beuys created his first multiples in the 1960ies on invitation and suggestion of René Block. Significant works such as "Schlitten", "Filzanzug", "Silberbesen" or "Das Schweigen" were then published together with Edition Block. The exhibition now presents some of these joint editions, in parallel to the retrospective of Joseph Beuys at Hamburger Bahnhof.

View of the Exhibition

TO BE CONTINUED
March 8 - July 26, 2008

The first presentation of Edition Block, "to be continued", shows new multiples by John Cage, Henning Christiansen, AySe Erkmen, Sejla Kameric, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Olaf Metzel, Bülent Sangar, Carlos Santos et al. as well as some exclusive editions of the past decades. With this presentation and the continuation of it´s work Edition Block deliberately takes up the tradition of the non-established: The first video multiple ever, which was edited in the 1970ies with Nam June Paik, is now followed by the first video installation in an edition of twelve copies with the Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen. Erkmen´s video installation "PFM-1 and others" (2004) was published by Edition Block as a multiple and shows on several monitors computerized simulations of landmines. In rubber-like, almost organic gestalt they appear from the background, accompagnied by synthetic sounds, and jump into the foreground just to disappear again with a buzzing. By stageing an absurd and bizarre parade the deadly weapons are indeed defused by Erkmen, but still a distressing impression of their deadly force remains. The multiple "Bosnian Girl" (2007) by Sejla Kameric also results from the preoccupation with an usurping past but at the same time implies something more. Kameric does not regard art as a goal but as a means of self-identification and intermediation. The media and the reality which surrounds her are the points of reference for the artist who grew up in Sarajewo, the city that was besieged by war for more than three and a half years. "Bosnian Girl" is an examination of the tragedy of Srebrenica but also of the phenomenon of country-specific prejudices. The debasing graffiti quoted in this work was written on the wall of a barracks in Srebrenica by an unknown Dutch soldier in 1994/95. "Das wohlpräparierte Klavier" (2008) by Carlos Santos presents itself closely related to the body but with a completely different approach. The artist, a cross-border commuter between art and music, treats the keyboards of pianos and in so doing visualizes the erotically-tactile moment typical for his piano playing. Using musical means and performative physical exertion Santos attempts with his compositions to uncover a fundamental energy and to break up traditional means of expression. With surreal wit and post-dadaistic onomatopoeia he takes the human voice to her limits - drastically, erotically and obsessively.

Šejla Kameric Bosnian Girl 2007