Elisa Rusca
Heartbroken –– that’s how I’ve been feeling for the last months. Sure, due to the global situation of ecological collapse, political uprisings and social injustices, I had already been overwhelmed by a giant wave of instability, but that in itself hadn’t been enough: the outbreak of the pandemic smashed the remaining crusts of my Millennial heart. The remainder of fragmented, scattered pieces are like the crumbs at the very end of a packet of Doritos chips: restlessly, I have been trying to find one big enough for a last scoop of (hot) hope, but unfortunately anything left over was too small and frail.
The cracks between the crushed pieces of my heart where soon filled by questions about my life and my future. Writing and art appeared to suddenly be the useless toys of a spoiled brat, and reality hit me hard: I was drowning in the numerous projects popping out like mushrooms after late-summer rain, a boom of online productions, Zoom webinars, art fairs’ online viewing rooms, live streaming with critics, curators, artists. . . and then, 3D tours of exhibitions, Covid-19-proof studio visits, as well shows and texts there were officially inspired by the sanitary crisis. Among the virtual and physically distanced cultural offer during the late spring of a post-lockdown Berlin, my confusion was only growing larger — until a whisper came to my ears: listen to a heart’s beat.
‘Listen to a Heart Beat’ was the title of a group exhibition presented at Thomas Schulte Gallery in the German capital from May 23rd to July 11th 2020, with works by Dieter Appelt, Angela De La Cruz, Paula Doepfner, Rebecca Horn, Alfredo Jaar, Maria Loboda, Michael Müller, Yoko Ono, and Francesca Woodman.
Situated at the corner between Charlottenstraße and Leipzigerstraße, just a few blocks away from Checkpoint Charlie, the gallery also boasts two street-level vitrines that at that time hosted another show, a selection of 400 screenshots from Allan McCollum’s archive An Ongoing Collection of Screengrabs with Reassuring Subtitles. The presentation, titled Everything is going to be OK, gathered still frames from American TV series and movies and printed them on canvas, with each showing subtitles such as ‘Don’t worry, Babe’, or ‘It will be OK’. The works’ display materialised, on one hand, the cacophony of media at the beginning of the pandemic outbreak with its repetitive, meaningless statements – the absurd, motivational rhetoric that encouraged everyone to maintain a positive attitude in front of the crisis; on the other hand, it showed a tight connection, both visual and semantic, between a screen’s interfaces and Leon Battista Alberti, the Italian Renaissance humanist who first thought of the painter’s canvas as a window depicting the world.
To pass over this crowded narthex and proceed into the gallery’s space was to advance into a more quiet and intimate setting. In a dim light, Rebecca Horn’s The Lover’s Bed (1990) was the first piece that captured the eye. The German artist, who has always explored the human condition and the consequences of human actions, transforms personal experiences into universal ones. In fact, The Lover’s Bed, composed of a kinetic sculpture together with an image on the wall, refers to both, her own convalescing period, and a character from her movie Buster’s Bedroom, from which the framed photograph is taken. The metallic, cage-like looking hospital bed is covered by small mechanic butterflies, graciously agitating their wings. Death is present, of course, and it also echoes the AIDS crisis, the period in which this piece was created, but there is more: the piece has an aura of loneliness, absence, isolation, and fragility. The butterflies, which for certain cultures are symbols for the spirits of the deceased, evoke delicacy and vitality, but also remind us of the vulnerability of life. How to better to describe the global context in which this exhibition took place?
‘Listen to a heart beat’, installation view, Galerie Thomas Schulte, 2020. Photo: Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin
On the wall next to The Lover’s Bed one could see You and Me (Atemzüge eines Sommertags) (2016-2017), a large drawing by Paula Doepfner. The abstract ink signs are fragments of a tiny alphabet that the Berliner artist links, letter by letter, into lines of movements, at times more densely, at times more freely. We see them connecting, intertwining, and diverging on the surface of the thin Japanese paper, as if notes of a progression in a sheet music. Doepfner’s work, carrying the title ‘breath of a summer day’, is about closeness and intimacy; it also reminds us, however, of the physicality of breathing, its vital necessity, and of the materiality of what it can carry with it: invisible, dangerous agents. From these particles to more particles: in Hearing the Omniabsence, (2019), Polish artist Maria Loboda deposits fake snowflakes on a Hi-Fi audio system. They have the texture of the oxidation debris of technology, but they might as well be dust or ash, bringing us to another aspect of the pandemic, which is the frozen moment of the lockdown. The ‘omniabsence’ in the empty streets, the silence of closed shops and cafes, the void of knowledge about the possible end of the situation: these were the sounds evoked by Loboda’s piece in my head. Overall, the silent and inexorable passage of time progressing, despite everything – and yet, the sudden tension derived by longing in the feeling of suspended time for too long: in Angela de la Cruz’ Bloated (Mud) (2012) it’s a body that cannot be contained anymore, similar to a giant insect that wants to break free from its cocoon. Between the two sculptures, Beat Piece (1963), the Beat poem by Yoko Ono which lends the exhibition its title in the line: ‘Listen to a heart beat’, called to mind the rhythm of our life as cadenced by regular breaks in our pulse.
‘Listen to a heart beat’, installation view, Galerie Thomas Schulte, 2020. Photo: Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin
On the opposite wall, after the consciousness of sickness and the suspense of the lockdown, we could breathe again: a series of 12 photographs by Dieter Appelt Der Fleck auf dem Spiegel, den der Atemhauch schafft (1977), meaning literally ‘The Mark on the Mirror Made by My Breathing’, which focuses on the action of breathing. A work about ephemerality and mark-making, as well as the revelation of the invisible, its title refers to a quote from 1910 novel Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa) by French author Raymond Roussel. Unable to stop myself from mentally repeating: ‘der Atemhauch schafft’ – ‘the breath makes it’, what I intended as a play on words in German, I suddenly was struck by the thought of George Floyd’s life, taken only two days after the opening of this exhibition. I could breathe, where others tragically could not. Not only Corona patients die of asphyxia, and not only in 2020. With this in mind, the sentence ‘Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness’, a large neon piece from Alfredo Jaar towering in the last exhibition’s room, appeared to me as the only possible ending. Two small black and white photographs from 1979 by Francesca Woodman completed the room. They show stolen scenes that one could easily associate with life in the new normal and within the changed paradigms of proximity and distance, inside and outside: the interior of a flat reverberating the ennui of quarantine; a portrait of a woman framed by signs recalling physical separation.
‘Listen to a heart beat’, installation view, Galerie Thomas Schulte, 2020. Photo: Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin
Cleverly crafted, this exhibition majestically captured the fragility of life, the fear of the sickness, the disorientation mixed up with the pandemic outbreak, and the desire to grasp tools for a new normality. As curators and writers, we should bear in mind that living in the present doesn’t automatically makes what we do ‘contemporary’, namely the ability to enact an immediate, relevant dialogue with those who share their time with us; indeed, ‘Listen to a Heart Beat’ at Thomas Schulte Gallery Berlin succeeded where many others failed only by gently showing a new pace to a broken heart.
Chair of the Digital Strategies Committee at AICA International and member of the AICA Swiss section, Elisa Rusca is a curator and writer based in Berlin.