Berlin Art Prize 2022

Curator of:
Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation
by Bassem Saad (Beirut, Lebanon) at Peles Empire

NightVision by artist duo Mazenett Quiroga
(Bogotá, Columbia) at LAGE EGAL [Kimgo]

Category: research, writing, curation, installation
Date: July - August 2022
Location: Berlin
Venue/Gallery: Peles Empire & LAGE EGAL [Kimgo]
Link: https://2022.berlinartprize.com/en

Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation

Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation brings together film and sculpture from the past three years, in addition to new print works by artist and writer Bassem Saad (1994, Beirut, Lebanon). Central to the six works shown at Peles Empire is Saad’s attention to forms of administration, domination, and identity – the many clashing categories of collective life – as well as to how they are refracted through dialogue and performance. The result is a suite of bracing juxtapositions, investigating organization and spontaneity, infrastructure and fantasy, policing and struggle. The exhibition’s title is lifted from a passage in Civilization and its Discontents in which Freud tries and fails to devise a metaphor that could capture the specific shape of the unconscious, imploring the reader to imagine a version of Rome that somehow contains all its history superimposed onto the present. Responding to Peles Empire’s studious fascination with the eponymous historicist castle in Romania, the deepest recesses of the psyche are thus imagined as an unrepresentable picture of an unimaginable city – the flickering, shifting no-place that sometimes goes by the name utopia.

Exhibited Works

_{Congress of Idling Persons, 2021
36 minutes

4K video, stereo audio}

_{Kink Retrograde, 2019

19 minutes
HD video, stereo audio}

_{To my mother and a protester

detained on November 15th, 2019}

_{Still many hours to be spent with

mixed company at the Square, 2020
Repurposed spine braces

Dimensions variable}

_{Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation (1), 2022

Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation (2), 2022

Lenticular prints
84.1 x 59.4 cm}

_{Photo Courtesy: Sandra Gramm}

In Congress of Idling Persons (2021), Saad draws on the nuances and tensions, anguish and jubilation evoked throughout the October 2019 uprising and the 2020 port explosion in Beirut, as well as the 2020 BLM protests across the United States. Through multilayered dialogue and on-screen text, the film’s characters gaze upon their own vexed interiorities, as well as a cartography of counterrevolution and besiegement, migrant labor and Palestinian outsider status, rage, and mourning. The exhibition also presents a new version of Kink Retrograde, shot in 2019 in a seaside landfill on the outskirts of Beirut against a backdrop of environmental collapse and toxicity. The voiceover in the re-edit revises and rehearses its allegorical call for a risk-aware “kink,” in light of more recent historical and autobiographical events.

The two sculptures To my mother and a protester detained on November 15th (2019) and Still many hours to be spent with mixed company at the Square (2020) repurpose spine braces meant to improve posture and productivity or nurse an ailing body back to health. The sculptural forms contort these devices of support and undermine their usability, suggesting a rupture and cessation of labor. Whereas these sculptures take the idle body as their locus of form-making, the lenticular prints (both 2022) hone in on particular geographic sites whose occupants are considered peripheral to city, nation-state, and wage relation through photography and text. Each composite image attempts to move beyond the sensuous dimensions of the physical spaces, often also functioning as sites of leisure, such as the Flughafensee lake and the nearby Tegel prison.

The exhibition’s title is lifted from a passage in Civilization and its Discontents in which Freud tries and fails to devise a metaphor that could capture the specific shape of the unconscious, imploring the reader to imagine a version of Rome that somehow contains all its history superimposed onto the present. Responding to Peles Empire’s studious fascination with the eponymous historicist castle Peleș in Romania, the deepest recesses of the psyche are thus imagined as an unrepresentable picture of an unimaginable city – the flickering, shifting non-place that sometimes goes by the name utopia.

NightVision

In NightVision, we are guided into the rhizomes of Shamanic territory. Room dimensions, windows, light, atmospheric conditions, and smell shape the appearance of each object the artist duo Mazenett Quiroga (Bogotá, Colombia, founded 2014) presents at Lage Egal [Kimgo]. Their paintings, sculptures, and installations explore mythology in an urban setting through material experiments and embedded hidden forms: A mythical landscape emerges. The artists refer to it as “the time of origin, the time when there was still no differentiation, when there were still no (ontological) boundaries between humans and animals, when everyone was gente (people).” Works like Motherboard Motherearth (2020) reimagine industrial waste as ethnographic artifacts, namely pre-Hispanic goldsmithing items, and present them as a technology from another era. In Snake People (2019) and Walking Palm (2021), for instance, everyday objects are taken as inscriptions of the entanglements between the organic and the industrial.

Exhibited Works

_{From the series Devouring Fire, 2022
Oil, gold leaf on camouflage canvas fabric
200 x 140 cm}

_{Body Modification, 2021
Coconut flower, resin, piercings, painting and stainless steel chain
84 x 22 x 17 cm}

_{Body Modification (Lobe), 2022
Seashell and varied piercings

30 x 30 x 30 cm}

_{Gente Serpiente, 2019-2020

Bicycle tires, acrylic, bronze castings
ø 60 cm}

_{Motherboard-Motherearth, 2021

Cut-outs from motherboards and TV hanger
40 x 33 x 30 cm}

_{Skin and clothes, 2022
Cut-outs from synthetic leather
Variable dimensions}

_{Walking Palm, 2021
Clothes rack and various feathers
170 x 70 x 70 cm}

_{Photo Courtesy: Sandra Gramm}

The artists consider how mutations and a drawn-out process of coevolution with other species can change a plant's anatomy. The large oil painting series Devouring fire (2022) examines flames, and the surrounding vegetation. Fire spreads through an enigmatic and lush space, a sort of epiphany and ambiguity between dream and reality. A jaguar dressed in gold appears at the bottom of the image and moves toward the viewer while hiding among the flames. In works like Snake People (2019) and Walking Palm (2021), everyday objects are taken as inscriptions through re-imaginings, and the entanglements between the organic and the industrial.

In Motherboard Motherearth (2020), cut-outs from motherboard waste reconnect ethnographic artifacts as technology from another era, pre-Hispanic goldsmithing items of ancient pre-Columbian tribes, whose ritual function is dependent on knowledge that is codified in each piece, to be deciphered. Body Modification (2021) made of coconut flower, resin, piercings, paint, and stainless steel chain, speculate on the vital world of plant intelligence and non-human beings.

Channeling deeper forms of attention to the life of forest ecosystems, the artists ponder on the temporality, origin, and symbolism of key components of the global economy— in their relationship with more-than-human intelligence and interspecies interaction, to show their hybrid modes of representation.