How Long Is Now? / Eberhard Havekost: Inhalt

On October 22, 2016, the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art will open the entire former brewery building with exhibitions spanning three floors in the Power House as well as the cafe in the Brew House. Now, after extensive renovations, regular exhibitions can begin throughout the building.

The former Power House at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art offers 1,200 square metres of space across three floors for monographic and thematic exhibitions of international contemporary art. The building will also include spaces for a wide variety of cultural events. As the first exhibitions in the Power House, the group exhibition How Long Is Now?, which deals with the theme of the contemporary, and an extensive exhibition by the Berlin-based artist Eberhard Havekost will be shown.

The Brew House with its six giant copper vats—once the largest of their kind in Europe—will now be open to everyone. In the former Palace of Berlin Beer Culture, the cafe König Otto will offer a place to linger, and the square in front of the brewery will include a beer garden under plane trees. Since September 11, David Claerbout has been showing his work Olympia (The Real-Time Disintegration into Ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium over the Course of a Thousand Years) in the impressive, twenty-metre-high Boiler House. He thus continues the exhibition series that began with Roman Signer’s Kitfox Experimental: once a year, the KINDL invites an artist to realise a single work for the unique space of the Boiler House.

How Long Is Now?
Philip Akkerman, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, Ceal Floyer, Andrea Geyer, Jeppe Hein, Uriel Orlow, Manfred Pernice, Michael Rakowitz
Power House, M0

What does it mean to be “contemporary”? Sharing a common time requires many things: above all, an active awareness of one’s own time. But also the idea of a synchronous world and the will to act within it and to change, to take part in one’s own time. The title of the exhibition How Long Is Now? points to the fundamental difficulty of reflecting on a time while it is occurring. Time is fleeting, and every moment has already passed as soon as one becomes aware of it.

The works shown in the exhibition make the contemporary visible in various ways and question its importance for current artistic production. They deal with the reflective, active participation in a time and aspects of the synchronous experience of time, and ask questions about the extent to which the past and the future meet in the contemporary. What otherwise can only be witnessed in the sequential flow of time will be made visible in a parallel presentation in the exhibition. Lectures, discussions, and a movie night will flesh out and supplement the exhibition.

Curated by Andreas Fiedler and Valeska Schneider

Eberhard Havekost: Inhalt
Power House, M1 and M2

The painter Eberhard Havekost, who was born in 1967 in Dresden, is among the most important German artists of his generation. The starting point for his painting is his own or found photographs, which he digitally edits and then uses as templates for his paintings. Havekost thus makes use of the latest advances in digital photo editing, while also dealing with the effects of the endless production of images through digital media. With an impressive radicalness, the artist questions the authenticity of images: What is it that we see? How much reality is in the surface of things and their likenesses?

The exhibition Inhalt concentrates on Eberhard Havekost’s work from the past ten years with a focus on new series of works that will be shown at the KINDL for the first time. After important solo exhibitions at venues including the Museum Küppersmühle Duisburg (2013), the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2010), and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2006), Inhalt is the first institutional exhibition by Eberhard Havekost in Berlin.

A publication will come out in November 2016.