27.10 – 08.12.2007

Opening 
Friday, October 26th
 

Antje Wachs Gallery is pleased to present  Heike Klussmann with her second solo exhibition in the gallery.

Since 1999 Heike Klussmann has been accompanying the alterations of the Alexanderplatz as well as the modification of the central buildings at the Alexanderplatz: the “Haus des Lehrers” (House of the teacher), Kaufhof, built as “Centrum Warenhaus” (Central department store), the Forum Hotel built as Hotel Stadt Berlin and the bunker Alexanderplatz. The outcome of this is an extensive, multipartite complex work that has to be seen as a compound of portraits of the buildings and their surrounding area. Through different details, perspectives and media they impart their own origin, structure and presence and interweave reality and fiction to a document of possible individual and social memory.

“I like the place precisely because of its strict gesture and the urban vacancy, because of the traces of only partly realised planning, failed concepts and incomplete projects – visible in fragments and the parallelism of different time levels and existences. And this location currently and exemplarily reflects the disassembly of the eastern centre of Berlin.” HK

Heike Klussmann‘s new work focuses on the bunker under the Alexanderplatz, one of the biggest bunkers of the city, which was built in 1941 in a fundamental block from the 1920ies. This subterraneous building is not accessible anymore since it serves now as a fundament for a building standing above the Alexanderplatz.
In the centre of the exhibition “Bau” there is Heike Klussmann’s filmic work of the same title. Therein, the artist slides down at first the escalator at Alexanderplatz, the view scrolls down into the bunker as the sliding movement continues. On one hand, the film is a documentation of this underground building; on the other hand it is the fiction of the acquisition: the artist herself slides like an animal or the “Princess of Persia” in the computer game through convoluted rooms and occupies bit by bit this subterraneous parallel world.
Several foldable, bottomless boxes, which normally serve as barriers for holes in streets during construction works, are both frames of representation of the film “Bau”, that is of imagination, and also autonomous architecture in the exhibition situation.
Photographical sequences interconnect the film and the sculptural presentation of the boxes: on the one hand the photos pick out the real filmic movement of the room as a central theme; on the other hand the view is framed by the black edge of the film in the same way as by the boxes.
A further change of perspective is the film “O.T. (Unknown object)”. Here, the viewers do not ook into a dark box or a dark building anymore, but find themselves in one of these rooms, together with an “unknown object”. The decision whether this is a hole or an object, a building you are looking at from outside or the model of the room situation of the bunker Alexanderplatz is left to the observer’s imagination.
Heike Klussmann’s complex installation arrangement shows a multilayer reflexion about architecture, city and memory and is at the same time the artist’s fiction that can be aesthetically experienced.
Heike Klussmann (*1968) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and at the UdK Berlin.
She received various scholarships such as by the Berlin senate and the Villa Aurora Foundation for European American Relations. Her works are located in public art collections such as the Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Landesmuseum Rheinland Pfalz.
Since 1999 she has been teaching at diverse institutions amongst others at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, USA and the BTU Cottbus. Since 2006 she has been professor at the University of Kassel. Her works have been represented in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions since 1992.