17.05 kolonie wedding

hyvinkää art museum, finland

contemporary art from berlin 

exhi­bi­ti­on of ten con­tem­po­ra­ry ber­lin based visu­al artists and six video artists in hyvin­kää art muse­um, fin­land. the kolo­nie wed­ding is an asso­cia­ti­on of pro­ject art spaces in the ber­lin borough of wed­ding, foun­ded in 2001 and con­sis­ting of 23 pro­ject spaces to date.
all of the artists shown in the hyvin­kää exhi­bi­ti­on are in one way or ano­ther asso­cia­ted with the kolo­nie wed­ding, six of them are them­sel­ves orga­nisers of one of the pro­ject spaces.
the exhi­bi­ti­on in hyvin­kää art muse­um aims at show­ing a broad varie­ty of ber­lin con­tem­po­ra­ry art. the kolo­nie wed­ding can be seen as a kind of para­digm – as an exam­p­le of berlin’s art sce­ne with its excep­tio­nal­ly fer­ti­le atmo­sphe­re and pro­ba­b­ly uni­que cul­tu­re of net­works and discourses.

working in object, instal­la­ti­on and video, maty­sik deals in mani­fold ways with con­cepts for future land­scapes and orga­nisms, like post-evo­lu­tio­na­ry life forms. he crea­tes an area of con­flict bet­ween pro­mi­se and fail­ure in a poten­ti­al future. both the visu­al imple­men­ta­ti­on and their lin­gu­i­stic form can be reco­g­nis­ed here as the essen­ti­al artis­tic stra­te­gies which he uses as his own inter­face bet­ween the worlds of sci­en­ti­fic rese­arch and pseu­do-sci­en­ti­fic fiction.
maty­sik has crea­ted more than a hundred orga­nisms as models of pla­s­ti­ci­ne, pvc, epo­xy res­in, rub­ber, and sili­co­ne, and cate­go­ri­sed them by weight, size, gen­der, form of extre­mi­ties, ori­en­ta­ti­on, loca­ti­on, mode of life, etc. essen­ti­al parts of matysik’s artis­tic pro­cess include pro­du­cing pro­to­ty­pe models fol­lo­wed by con­cep­tua­li­sa­ti­on and tex­tu­al interpretation.

the clouds ori­gi­nal­ly were deve­lo­ped for a work com­plex cal­led river beco­mes cloud. maty­sik, who grew up in the indurstri­al west of ger­ma­ny, was invi­ted to build an art­work as part of the con­ver­si­on and rena­tu­ra­ti­on pro­ject of one of the rivers, the emscher, in this struc­tu­ral­ly chal­len­ged area. the artist desi­gned a machi­ne to trans­form the water of the emscher at the point whe­re it flows into the rhi­ne – which is a was­te­wa­ter-free sec­tion of the river – into cloud-forming steam. the power nee­ded for the pro­cess was rege­ne­ra­tively deri­ved from the river its­elf. in addi­ti­on to the ‘cloud machi­ne’, rei­ner maria maty­sik instal­led an acces­si­ble, sphe­ri­cal sta­ti­on, whe­re the clouds were displayed.
due to matysik’s art­work, the river doesn’t sim­ply cea­se to exist at this point, but parts of it are trans­for­med into sky. the pro­ject rai­ses ques­ti­ons on the ext­ent to which rena­tu­ra­ti­on or a con­ver­si­on back to natu­re is at all possible.
artists
jovan balov, tom früchtl, pablo her­mann, jörg hom­mer, hen­rik jacob, karen kol­ter­mann, rei­ner maria maty­sik, mat­thi­as may­er, karen sche­per, prof. ira schnei­der, gabrie­le stell­baum, artist-duo stoll&wachall, kata unger, vero­ni­ka wit­te, andre­as wolf

cura­ted by andre­as wolf, dr. anna e. wil­kens and dr. mika karhu