Thursday 12.07.2018
Video exhibition – Screening

The exhibition „Connected – East meets West“ presents the selection of video works by 14 international artists currently living and working in Berlin. Each of them has a different cultural and spatial background, artistic interests and portfolio, different ideas and ways of presenting it, but what binds them together is the courage to experiment and to rethink the video as an art form and a tool of global connection.

To connect the two dots on a piece of paper in a shortest and most effective way, or any arbitrary points in any given space, is to draw a straight line between them; even our basic cognitive abilities recognize this as a definitive, apriori fact, without needing to think about the properties of a space in between. We can utilize various ways and means to define the straight line, our connection between two opposing points – measure it, or cut it to halves or smaller pieces, use it as a distance marker and so on. However, in terms such as East and West there is no such certainty, even as they are presented as defined, opposing points in our mental and physical landscape. The space connecting them can’t be defined by basic geometry, even if we manage to pull a straight line – if we try to define where one stops and the other begins, imaginary space attributed to certain point could turn our conclusions in Zeno’s arrows, floating in an infinity. Still, these terms are projected to physical space, often resulting in a barbed wire cutting through the scenic, flowery valley in the Alps, walls splitting city and its families to half, or a boats sinking in someone else’s part of sea – tragic and paradoxical, considering that the opposite and distant point could be just a click away, just a video away.

The uncertainty of space connecting these seemingly opposite points is reflected on the gallery windows, as the works are exhibited on them – set in the undefined territory between the gallery space and the public space, it turns the tables around; the public is not invited to the exhibition, but the exhibition invites itself to public. The selection of works presents a wide variety of ways and means the artists are utilizing to define the connection – from long and detached documentaristic shots to rapid,hallucinative montages; from video-essays and sculptures to collages; from stories to accidents, the artists connect us with the spaces of beauty, satire and mystery that lay in latitudes of everyday, somewhere between us and the point B, be it east or west.

Artists:
Ana Bilankov
János Brückner
Markus Butkereit
Božidar Katić
Vikenti Komitski
Martina Mezak
Francisco Montoya Cázarez
Sybille Neumeyer
Mila Panić
Nika Radić
Helmut Smits
Saša Tatić
Nebojša Vuković
The Wa

Text by Nikola Njavro
Curated by: Božidar Katić & Martina Mezak