homecomings

19 September–27 October 2013
HORSE | GRÜNDERZEIT
Boxhagener Str. 93 | 96
10245 Berlin

featuring
benandsebastian GB; DK Anton Burdakov UA/GB Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson ES; IS Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez CR/DE
Eric Ellingsen US Jean-Pascal Flavien FR Hreinn Friðfinnsson IS Elín Hansdóttir IS Florian Neufeldt DE Sophia Pompéry DE/HU

What can it mean to return home? “homecomings“ brings together international artists living in Berlin to investigate the various facets
of coming home. No one definitive denotation for the term exists. In its plurality, “homecomings“ can be understood as a multi-layered experience of locality, coated in time. Every return loosens the stability of the singular—through repetition a home is traced in its absence.

The concept and presented works are inspired both by Georges Perec‘s Espèces d‘espaces (Species of Space, 1974)—exemplary of his poetic explorations of space and language—and the Icelandic artist, Hreinn Friðfinnsson‘s House Project (1974). Based on a myth, Friðfinnsson built an inside-out house in a lava field south of Hafnarfjörður, Iceland. With the wallpaper on the outside and the façade on the inside,
he conceptually encapsulated the universe within his structure. Over the years the artist returned to this original concept in making a series of structures that successively dematerialize the house.

The fragile flux of presence and absence found in outlining the home—in relation to the frame, the house, the structure, the self—is a reflection of surfaces both interior and exterior. Any such designation registers a perspective constantly shifting in a complex succession of things seen or imagined. Each of the artworks, whether existing or newly produced for “homecomings“, translate both architectural and linguistic terms and methodologies into spatial and conceptual loci of agency. Through shifts of scale, serial combination, and systematic modeling of the world around them, the assembled artists address an intimate reflection of self-perception, proposing a rereading of lived space and history-less time. Inhabiting both a present and a simultaneous past and future, the works arrive home in illusory revolution.

“homecomings“ will take place in a recently inaugurated art space—a former horse and carriage stable under historic preservation. Rather than a definitive end, the show will come to a close through the sequential deinstallation of the works alongside events aimed at opening up the discussion surrounding what it can mean to both leave and return to a place as both emotional and conceptual journey.
Press release