Max volume: Curator Ellen Blumenstein puts rock'n'roll centre stage at KW Institute Berlin

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Exhibition: Welcome to the Jungle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, until November 15 2015

While it can seem at home that every week is art week in Berlin, the official event by that name took place in September. The theme was Stadt/Bild which curators helpfully translated as Image of a City. This spawned a raft of high calibre events and exhibitions, the most inviting of which is still in full flow at Kunst-Werke Berlin.

Welcome to the Jungle might sound like a frightening walk on the wild side, to mix up the pop cultural reflerences. But fortunately we have a friendly introduction from KW Institute’s head curator Ellen Blumenstein. The following exchange took place via email.

C24: Why cities? Why now?
 
EB: All over the world, more and more people live in cities, and in the light of the dramatically changing cityscape of Berlin, the question of where and how we want to live is more pressing than ever.

C24: Can you perhaps tell us about some of the highlights in your show?

EB: The exhibition "Welcome to the Jungle" uses the image of the 'jungle' as an alternative space to our regular habitat and casts a glance at our fascination for, as well as our fears of the Other.

We start from the assumption that in order to understand oneself, it is most productive to detour and look at effective phantasms of foreign places – which are not necessarily real existing places. There are many great works which approach this topic from unexpected and unusual perspectives, like the Viennese artist Marianne Vlaschits, who (re-)enacts the politically incorrect, but nevertheless extremely powerful exoticism many of us are secretly dreaming of when heading out for far away countries.

The Berlin based photographer Roman Schramm took Mexico City as a starting point to carve out the uncanny in our immediate surrounding: the weird feeling of being observed in the middle of the city where everyone goes one's own way, the pink, plant-like materiality of a cow's rumina, or the colourful towers of multi-angled sculptures on a traffic island.

And the London-based curator Filipa Ramos selected not only four works for the show, but also developed two film evenings and thus adds another perspective onto the topic.

C24: What inspired you to namecheck a famous disco, (the Jungle)?

EB: Just like the rock band Guns'N Roses used the motif of the jungle for the eponymous song "Welcome to the Jungle", the Berlin discotheque "Jungle"  functioned as an ideal place, or maybe a counter-image to the daily life of the city's habitants. We like the immediacy of this image: In the Jungle, everything is possible, and sex, drugs and rock'n’roll take centre stage, but also violence and aggression find their place in joint excess. Each society needs those places, which give concrete images to vague desires and allows individuals to break loose from the controlled environment without destroying the functioning of its overall structure. But these places cannot only be found outside, far away, in tropical surroundings or in subculture, but also they can break through the surface of any 'normal' life, as well.

C24: What have you found is the connection between urban living and hedonism and is there a sense in which cities become most true to themselves at night?

EB: I don't think that the city and hedonism are causally connected per se, just as the village doesn't naturally equal austerity. I would even claim that the normative powers of live in the city are extremely strong, so that an urban environment consists of an elaborate system of rules and regulations and the unregulated fulfillment of one's desires are preserved for clearly defined spaces and times, functioning as a counter-space and counter-time to the everyday. In that sense, the excessive nightlife needs the daily routine to exist, they are mutually dependent on each other.

C24: The show promises to reveal the city's subconscious. What is the subconscious of Berlin?

EB: We never did that, on the contrary: We want to show that there is no 'real' self, nor a 'real' place (city) behind or under the surface of the profane.

But of course, it is always helpful to look at our phantasms to draw attention to the unconscious shares in our visions and plans - if the aim is to allow stabilizing structure and pleasurable raptures to both exist at the same time.

C24: Does video hold a privileged place in art about urban condition? There is a lot in your show.

EB: Video is definitely an important artistic medium today, if it is specifically fit for examining city life - I don't know. In our show, the label 'video' is very misleading if you just look at the list of works. Some of the central works are sculptural, for example, and the video and film works function in very different ways: some are almost like an image, like a tableau vivant, others are narrative and need to be watched with attention, again others have circular structures and operate mostly visually... come and see for yourself!

C24: How does placement, in either a public or a private urban space, affect a work of art?

EB: Since concept art was developed in the 1960s, the context and placement has continuously been an integral part of a) the logic of the art work itself, and b) of its presentation in concrete spatial situations. There is not one work of art today, which wouldn't be aware, where and under which circumstances it is presented, so it makes all the difference if you show the same object, let’s say, at KW or at the museum for National History, or open air on Potsdamer Platz. And we shouldn't be naive about the viewer either - s/he knows exactly what to expect in a museum, from public art or in a private gallery - and s/he chooses whether to go and see it there very consciously.

C24: Is there an echo of the Calais 'Jungle' in this exhibtion title?

EB: The preparation time of a show like this is about a year and a half - the latest developments both on site and on a national or even global scale can only be approached on a fundamental level. Nevertheless, discussing the topic "city" within the curatorial team and with the artists, it was always clear that it is part of our question to reflect on power structures and hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion within social systems, as well as thematize not only our own projections on other places, but also other people's projections on us and our country, in reverse. There are several works in the show reflecting on migration and the idea of "home".

C24: What sets Berlin apart from other cultural centres (London and New York in particular)?

EB: It is a much discussed reality that Berlin has enormously changed in the last years - but it is still far away from the pressure that London or New York put on the individual who is trying to not only survive but have a good life there. Berlin understands itself at least partially as a cultural city also on a political level, and this is something that other metropolises are way too big for.

• Admission 6 Euros (4 Euros). OPen 12-7pm Wednesday to Monday (until 9pm Thursday).

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art539068