Asta Gröting: Berlin Fassaden / Haegue Yang: Silo of Silence – Clicked Core

Asta Gröting: Berlin Fassaden
In September, the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art will be showing the new series “Berlin Fassaden” by the sculptor Asta Gröting. The point of departure for the sculptures in “Berlin Fassaden” is stories that are inscribed in the walls of buildings in Berlin—facades that still contain traces of the war in the form of bullet holes. Asta Gröting replicates the damaged walls in sculpture by making silicone impressions of them. They function like long exposures that depict the story from the moment of the bullets’ impact to the present time. Dust, dirt, and even graffiti are applied to the material and give these negative imprints, some of which are monumental in scale, an almost painted effect.

Human skin serves to protect the body. The bullet holes protrude like scars of history from the heavy silicone skin of the walls and facades. The silicone reconstructs wounds as architectural traces and translates them into abstract pictures. “I want to look from inside these destroyed walls and facades into the world—as if I could see my own face staring back at me,” says Asta Gröting.

To have a stone face means to reveal nothing of one’s inner thoughts and feelings. When facades crumble, hidden stories are exposed. “My eyes stare into the bullet and canon holes and the holes stare right back into my own psychic holes. In a bold conceptual strike, Gröting embodies/embalms both trauma and time in a ghostly silicone skin,” Deborah Levy writes about “Berlin Fassaden” in the accompanying publication.

Asta Gröting (*1961) is a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Kunstraum Dornbirn, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, and the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute, among others. She has also participated in important group exhibitions at venues including the Maas Museum in Sydney, the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, the Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, and the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo. She lives and works in Berlin.

A comprehensive selection of works from the series “Berlin Fassaden” will be shown for the first time at the KINDL.
The exhibition is curated by Andreas Fiedler.
An accompanying catalogue will be published by Sternberg Press.

Haegue Yang: Silo of Silence – Clicked Core
Once a year, the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art invites an artist to present a single work in the imposing, 20-metre-high Boiler House. This year the artist Haegue Yang, who lives in Berlin and Seoul, is realising her first institutional presentation in Berlin with her large-scale work Silo of Silence – Clicked Core.

As a sculptor, Yang is known for her use of a variety of materials and diverse working methods. Her materials range from industrial mass-produced items to organic and immaterial things such as smells or noises. Her working method is labour-intensive both conceptually and in regard to the craftsmanship involved. At the KINDL she will use her most well-known material: window blinds, which have become a signature of her work.

Memories of the aggressive industrial development in South Korea in the 1970s and ’80s continue to shape her oeuvre today, as is also apparent in her work Approaching: Choreography Engineered in Never-Past Tense, which she showed at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012. While for many Western countries the Industrial Revolution was a defining but long since past experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, now in other parts of the world it is occurring alongside rapid technological development. The collectively experienced change in all areas of life which these fundamental shifts entail serves as one of the points of departure for Haegue Yang’s work.

The artist understands the Boiler House at the KINDL as a typically post-industrial place that is now only a relic of its original industrial era and has been repurposed as a cultural venue. Yang has previously exhibited in a variety of such spaces typical of modern-day cities, such as a former freight train station in Kassel and the Tanks at Tate Modern in London.

Haegue Yang (*1971 in Seoul) lives and works in Seoul, and since 2005 also in Berlin. Her works are exhibited around the world, most recently in Germany at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2016), Haus der Kunst in Munich (2012), and Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2008). She was recently appointed professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.

Press contact: Denhart v. Harling, dh@segeband.de / T +49 179 4963497