With sections to encourage new collectors, kindling an interest in fashion, young contemporary artists and digital art, but also featuring internationally successful artists, the art fair remains faithful to its mission in its eleventh year. At home at Tempelhof Airport, Positions uses the spectacular space with its industrial flair, visible steel girders and fourteen-meter-high walls to avoid glossy presentations and closed white cubes, providing space for change and new formats. This year’s country focus is an example of this: South Korea. Parallel to the worldwide craze for K-Pop and Korean cuisine, the South Korean art market is also growing rapidly. The growing importance of South Korean art and a mutual interest is celebrated this year with this special focus: six galleries provide insights into South Korean art. Here you can read more about this year’s focus, additional events on the programme, and artistic highlights of this year’s Positions.
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A bit of a bad mood, but the colours optimistically counteract this impression. Despite the grumpy frowns, Kim Chan Sae’s works are incredibly fun. Wearing a red bikini top and blue striped pants, a figure stands in the greenery with a cardboard box on her head that reads ›I don’t want to show you‹. With a great deal of humour, Kim Cham Sae takes up the subjects of shame, fears, and the small pleasures of everyday life. Her works tell stories and, like the panels of a comic strip, combine words and images. A crow picks at a mango, a youngster doesn’t want to be looked at and targets a small weapon, hard to take seriously, at the viewer. A mouse is beginning to dice a carrot, but its shirt says that it doesn’t actually like cooking, and two cantankerous boys realise they are wearing the same bathing cap, but think the tight caps are stupid. Kim Cham Sae creates a playful, brutal world for Grumpy Cats and the child inside her. Kim Cham Sae’s works will be shown together with Mina Ham and Kim Yeji at the ERD Gallery stand.
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In the curated special exhibition to mark this year’s country focus ›Spotlight on South Korea‹, we present four young artists from South Korea who studied in Germany, where they currently live and work. In their works, Jaeyun Moon, Jeiryung Lee, Sol Namgung and Suah Im thus create an artistic bridge between the two countries. In Suah Im’s work, the nose, a sensory organ that is strongly linked to memory, is a recurrent motif. In her performances, the artist includes the smell of garlic and thus creates an olfactory connection to Korean cuisine. The tie to the home or chosen home isn’t always so clear. Can art emerge entirely independent of geographic influences, its place of origin? Do both worlds flow into the works of the four artists, and to what extent? Find out for yourself.
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An especially fresh wind blows in this section: over twenty select students and recent graduates from Germany’s art schools will be provided their very first platform on the art market with the special exhibition ›Academy Positions‹. In this way, the expert audience can obtain an overview of trends in Germany, galleries can find new artists for their programme and collectors have the opportunity to purchase an early work by an artist from the upcoming generation. Young artists are offered a chance to show their work and be discovered. The curated presentation will consist of sculptural works, wall and floor pieces, exuding the fruity-fresh air of the art academy, a colourful mix! Two artists from this section will be honoured with the Berlin Hyp Award; the artists can then show their work in a special presentation at next year’s art fair. This year, the works of winner Anna Zachariades will be on view.
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In presenting Berlin’s vibrant creative community, fashion must be included. The format ›Fashion Positions‹ focuses on the intersection between fashion and art. In his section of the fair, twenty select Berlin fashion designers engage directly with art, presenting themselves and their concepts in open stands and thus placing a focus on their inspiration, the artistic thoughts that guide their designs. By walking through the art fair, visitors can experience a seamless transition from art to fashion. And if a label is particularly enticing, purchases can be made at the shop right next door.
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Wearing a white dress and a red balaclava that covers her face entirely, Carolina Bazo stands on a narrow strip of green that separates the four lanes of a major thoroughfare. But ›green‹ is an exaggeration: there’s just a few dry clumps growing at her feet. On the left and right, cars and trucks race by, the artist does not move on her own accord, she only sways back and forth from the pressure waves of the passing vehicles. Another scenario: Carolina Bazo stands in a dry, mountainous landscape. She holds up a jagged red shape around her face, wearing an impressive white hoop skirt and long red gloves. The distorted silhouette appears inorganic in the vast desert. Her red gloves grasp onto a tree, red fluid flows through a hose into her mouth. She spits: Bazo’s performances show how the human being harmonises with his or her surroundings and how they mutually repel one another. As if the Triadic Ballet were performed in a rain forest or in the steppe. Humanity and nature? Not such a good match. A forceful work, both the performances and the rituals. The performances can be seen on videos and photographs at stand of Lima gallery O Art Project.
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They are called wind socks, the red and white striped textile tubes that hang from a mast and fill with wind to reveal where the wind comes from. They can usually be found near a body of water, these relics from a period before digitalisation, a nostalgic remainder, probably more reliable that some electronic sensors. Sadie Laska has created her own windsocks: patchwork windsock fish. In the exhibition context, they hang limply, as if they were waiting for a gust of wind. At this moment? Only a gentle breeze. Selections from Laska’s painterly work grant fishing a powerful character and exude playfulness and optimism. They want to move, point to the social state? They hang in the space as if paralysed, but with so much potential to act decisively. A state of waiting seems caught. Sadie Laska succeeds in drawing attention to problems in playful way. Her tools include collage, windsocks, and painting, and they all crave for a fresh breeze.
On view at Golestani from Düsseldorf. On 12 September the artist will perform with her band I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska) at Gropius Bau as part of Berlin Art Week.
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A broken stretcher frame, with the painted canvas hanging down: what sounds defective is for Franziska Reinbothe the start of her artistic process. The artist is motivated by exploring the effects an intervention can have. She is always asking: what is behind it? She brings the rear of a picture to the front, breaks it, repairs it, so that the deconstruction and reconstruction of a work can result in something new. Franziska Reinbothe explores the materials, the building blocks of contemporary art, and she is not intimidated by them, but looks at them as a field of possibilities. Instead of paint, she uses chiffon, cuts the canvas and sews it back together, wraps the wood, the frame replaces the canvas, its corners and edges multiply. Franziska Reinbothe’s works encourage us to see beauty in unusual places, to look behind the façade. An idea of upcycling seems to inhere in them, acknowledging the circumstances and recognising potential that otherwise goes unnoticed. On view at Galerie Mathias Güntner from Berlin/Hamburg.
For this year’s art fair, the second edition of POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair Magazine will be published, where you can read more about this year’s highlights.