Artists – Büro Friedrich

James Beckett

Living Registration

Tuesday November 21 th – Tuesday, December 19 th 2006

Opening reception: Saturday, November 18 th , 18 – 21h

BüroFriedrich, Berlin, is pleased to present the show Living Registration with installations, reliefs, paper and sound works of South-African artist James Beckett. Beckett scrutinizes the historical origins of technical standards and focuses on the ‘naivety of the historical moment’ – a moment in history, where the private story of the individual and the historicity of our systems of representation collide. The parasitic use of information and its transposition into alien – visual or acoustic – systems are an attempt to test the potential of various languages to hold information. In this sense Beckett’s work can be seen as a modern interpretation of Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics, a 19th century parody of the theory and methods of modern science that often developed a scientifically precise but nonsensical language. To measure the surface of God – for example – was one of the pataphysical projects. In a museum-like display Beckett presents a grotesque history of standardization.In a site-specific installation, designed especially for BüroFriedrich, Beckett presents his own technical language of purposeful but function-less registration: a hybrid of Braille and Morse codes for the interpretation of the train traffic, which passes above the gallery’s arches.The opening will also be the official launch of Beckett’s personal tartan, produced and registered in Scotland. The Scottish fabric has developed through centuries, representing districts, families and clans, in this way functioning as a key or index of sorts. For this exercise, the artist uses a table of digestive results lifted from the work of William Beaumont (1785-1853) “Father of Gastric Physiology”, who was offered access to the workings of the stomach when a patient of his was accidentally shot in the stomach. The artist takes the findings of the physician and transposes them into image, hence translating stomach behavior into tapestry or pattern.In an additional series of drawings, Beckett uses the graphic language of Monkhouse and Wilkinson to present a perspective on traffic flows, information gathered over several years of automatic car counts on various national roads. The development of the profile demands the reduction of source material to absolutes by means of constant comparison in relation to averages: “In any communication one is challenged to find the most efficient means of representation, a means of description, which inevitably becomes a filter in itself. Information is scaled and blown out of proportion, lost through lack of resolution.”The exhibition will close with a concert to be held in the MünzClub on December 19th, a feature of the N-Ensemble of Holland , a production of the N-Collective. This piece is a transformation of early scientific rabbit experiments into sound.Beckett has exhibited in various African, Asian and European countries. This will be his third European solo-show. Further details available at www.jamesbeckett.tk This exhibition is made possible by:
The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture

James Beckett exhibition view Tartan corner

Cao Fei

Cao Fei

Opening: 30th September 2006, 6 – 9 p.m.
Duration: 3rd October – 11th November, Tue. – Sat. 12 – 6 p.m.

Büro-Friedrich-Berlin is very glad to announce the opening of an exhibition of the Chinese artist
Cao Fei on September 30th 2006. During the opening Cao Fei will stage a performance with East Berlin Massaker, three to six hip hop artists from East Berlin, whose stage will be part of the installation.

Influenced by global trends such as Japanese Manga, American Rap and movies from Hong Kong, Hip Hop and other categories of Pop music, advertisement, television and computer games coexist with old Chinese traditions such as opera, theatre or dance. Cao Fei belongs to a new generation of Chinese artists who, due to a growing tolerance, by the government do not rebel against the government directly but look into the social consequences of new developments caused by global capitalism. Fascinated by this cultural and social combination, Cao Fei began her artistic career very early. Before she was 20 years old, she directed an extravagant play. Performance art stayed a central point within her work, which she displays as concerts, plays or live graffiti performances in complete productions combined with sculpture, video and film work.

Cao Fei’s curiosity about Hip Hop evolves from her interest in juvenile culture, especially in its function of mirroring the society in which it exist. The Hip Hop project, which after having realized it in New York will now be implemented in Berlin, familiarizes low-wage workers with the subculture of Hip Hop. Cao Fei plays well-known Hip Hop tracks to the fruit-seller or construction worker on the street and gets them started in the fundamental forms of dance and movement. The juvenile culture has evolved on the streets and is, according to its origin, interpreted in the movements of neutral persons. Like this, it is brought back and thus undergoes a new analysis and questioning of reality.

Her work Cosplayers, 2004 refers to a subculture of costumed play, where the participants assume the roles of their favourite Animé character and dress and act like them. For a moment the participants – usually teenagers who obsessively give themselves up to their hobby – can be superheroes. Moreover, Cao Fei gives an insight to the everyday life of her main characters. While in some works, they are fighting a fantastic opponent in front of an abandoned scenery of industrial structures or on top of the shell of an arising high-rise building, in others, they can be seen in their private environment. In the presence of their indifferent parents they daydream in their own subcultural world, still dressed up as their fantastic alter-ego.

Whose Utopia is a video project that was completed as part of the Siemens Shanghai cultural program. Siemens is inviting young Chinese artists to realize works related to the company. Cao Fei translated this task more than accurately by directing a theater production with workers of Osram, which is located in South China . The main characters of the 30 minute film are the workers themselves, who either interpret the work processes within their original profession by dancing or capturing their daily work in pictures, which removes it from reality. Cao Fei and the workers at Osram have realized the work situation in China with a look at society that not only addresses the actual situation of workers in China but also their fantasies and dreams.

In line with the opening of the second Guangzhou Triennale, Cao Fei staged a play called Antiheroes of the PRD, about the history of the region of the Pearl River Delta. Guangzhou is located on its east coast. The characters of the play ironically resembled famous persons of the region‚s most recent history. Well known heroes of the revolution, as well as pop stars, bandits, or prostitutes, migrant workers, politicians and other figures drew an incredibly humoristic, exact and critically provocative picture of the intense process of rise and downfall of modernization of the PRD. The play is neither an objective description of the reality nor in any way an artistic elevation. It is just an alternative story of real history. The anti-heroes in Cao Fei‚s work are contrary to the heroes of the history of wars and politics known to us. They are part of a history which usually remains clandestine. Mao Tze Tong said: „Human beings, only human beings, are the true driving force of history.“ Cao Fei casts doubts on the realization of this statement and asks when the history of these people really can become history and who are the real heroes, who have created and are creating history.

Cao Fei is born 1978 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China. She lives and works in Beijing.
Cao Fei is currently showing her work in totalstadt.beijing case at ZKM in Karlsruhe . Also, her work
is on display at the Battersea Power Station in the group show China Power Station: Part I organized
by Serpentine Gallery.

Housebreaker — House breaker by Cao Fei Photography, 2006, 120 x 90 cm, edition of 10

Chen Xiaoyun, Andreas Koch, Heidi Specker

In distinctive black and white tones, Heidi Specker, Andreas Koch und Chen Xiaoyun present their works in early summer at BüroFriedrich-berlin. A preoccupation with the embodiment of the complex correlation between nature and its effect on human perception and behavior accumulate in a central subject for the works of the three artists from Berlin and Hangzhou. One analyzes the beauty of shadows in nature through the examination of traditional Japanese aesthetics, another attempts to expose the human figure and its effect on nature. The third displays the human being in its modification through the progress of industrialization and urbanization.

Chen Xiaoyun (*1971 in Hubei, CN, lives and works in Hangzhou) shows with the two videos DRAG, 2006 and LASH, 2005 the preoccupation of the human individual with its environment, which – as merely a cog in the machinery of increasing industrialization – is dominated by physical exertion. As an expression of the pointlessness of redundant work, DRAG shows a man, who pulls with all his might a rope, whose end is fixed to a wall. ‘You have no reason to know nothing, about all darkness.’ (Chen Xiaoyun) And the darkness appears in the shadow world behind the wall.
LASH displays the image of black night. Hints of the plot are only visible through short flashes of light, whose recurring quick bursts are accompanied by the crack of a whip; highlighting scenes of a man and a horse, who both work until burnt-out. ‘A flash is a crack of the whip, and time is an individual religion.’ (Chen Xiaoyun) From a new Asian perspective, this work asks new questions of the phenomenon of work in our times.

Andreas Koch (*1970 in Stuttgart, GER, Lives and works in Berlin) transforms the entrance of BF-b with a romantic, monumental reproduction of a seascape. With a black and white wallpaper installed across a corner, the landscape surrounds the viewer like a diorama from the 19th century. Single details and small scenes, hung in hyper-resolution colour quality on top of the wallpaper, imply a narrative element and refer to little anecdotes of daily life.
Andreas Koch’s second work contradicts the romantic traits of the first. Visually reminiscent of a minimal artwork, a glass tunnel, installed with an opening to the Spree River, in which a lightbox has been enclosed, attracts the large population of mosquitos and spiders inhabiting the river. will be enticed into the sculpture during the night and slowly transform it.

Heidi Specker (*1962 in Damme, GER, lives and works in Berlin) presents her new series Day for Night, the result of her trip to Japan in March 2006. The intense examination of the effect of light and shadow mark the three dark exposures of the Imperial Villa and gardens of Shugakuin as well as the two bright architectural photographs of the terrace of her hotel in Tokyo.
As an origin of Heidi Speckers studies, In Praise of Shadows written in 1933 by the Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki provides a basis. In his reflections on the origin of Japanese aesthetics, Tanizaki contrasts the Japanese beau ideal of muted colors and surfaces with the bright illumination of the Western World. By contrasting the whitewashed walls of her Tokyo hotel with the intensely darkened exposure from the Japanese garden – analog to the Day-for-Night method known from film – , Heidi Specker pays homage to this sensuous essay about the beauty of shadows.

Kleine Fliegenfalle by Andreas Koch Detail

Komarov, Aleksander

Aleksander Komarov

See you in Disneyland

20 May 2006 – 27 May 2006. Solo Show

Morrison, Alex

Alex Morrison

Staging Rebellion

7 May 2006 to 18 June 2006

The work of Alex Morrison centers on an investigation of urban structures and their sub-cultures. In his documentations of youth lifestyles, particularly the culture of skaters, he questions to what extent sub-cultural expressions can be considered authentic, especially in the face of strategies of staging and their commercialization by the media. The artist demonstrates how images of “radical” subjectivities become commodified through the media, thereby subverting the individuals’ claims to authenticity; at the same time, he points to the complicity of the various actors. His work “Poached” (2002), for example, shows a skatepark which an American film production company constructed as a filmset for a television series in Vancouver . The activity of shooting and staging the young skaters becomes the focus of attention and displaces the act of skating itself, which becomes merely theatrical in function. In a similar manner, “Open Air Cinema” (2004) displays a graffiti contest which was organized by municipal institutions in Berlin to encourage adolescents to participate in artistic activities. In the foreground of Morrison’s photographs are several cameras filming the contest, which in turn comes to appear somewhat fabricated. Another work by Morrison entitled “Housewrecker” (2002) documents a group of adolescents destroying a house in what might be considered a ritualized destruction in the guise of a party. Morrison’s representation of these events reveals the individuals’ self-conscious, performative relationship with the camera and thus exposes the staged character of these allegedly “rebellious” acts. However, his work also suggests a desire to retrieve the political potential of such actions and to affirm the legitimacy of this form of protest. The artist’s dual position as an observer and as a member of the skater community, most explicitly reflected in “The Patterer’s Diary” (2002), lends his works an edgy ambivalence, as he oscillates between empathy with the political sensibilities underlying the represented experiences, and a critical distance from the protagonists’ theatrical behaviour. Ultimately, his critique targets not this kind of behaviour itself, but the constrictions placed on urban adolescents and the spaces they inhabit.

Alex Morrison was born in 1971 in Redruth , UK , and currently lives and works in Vancouver . His work has been widely exhibited in Canada as well as in the United States , the UK and Germany . Solo exhibitions include the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2003, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver , the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2004. He has participated in numerous group shows, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery (“Drawing the World: Masters to Hipsters”) in 2003 and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (“I Feel Mysterious Today”) in 2004. Alex Morrison is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver .

Book launch:
Christina Ritchie, Contemporary Art Gallery , Vancouver , and Nicolaus Schafhausen, Frankfurter Kunstverein, are co-publishing the first book on Alex Morrison: “Giving the Story a Treatment” ( Lukas & Sternberg , Berlin / New York , 2005).
This book will be presented at the MünzSalon on May 13 at 8 pm, Münzstrasse 23, Berlin Mitte.

This exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs Canada and the Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur, Berlin. Many thanks also go to Waling Boers, Rosemary Heather, Catriona Jeffries, Vanessa Joan Müller, Christina Ritchie, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Sigrid Stoffels, and most particularly to Alex Morrison.

Kan Xuan

28 April – 27 May 2006

Opening: 28th April 2006, 6 – 10 p.m.

Humor, lightness and grace as well as deep irony and dramatic sceneries characterize the works of the Chinese artist Kan Xuan. While using simple and clear images, she expresses her desire for a more direct, simple and original understanding of life.

Kan Xuan, born 1972 in XuanCheng, lives and works in Beijing and Amsterdam. As a visual artist she chooses different media like photography and video installation. Her first solo exhibition in Europe with BüroFriedrich concentrates on her video works. In a representative choice of her characteristic filmlets, projections of eight different works from the years 1999-2006, cumulate in a sound and image intensive installation.

Besides the tradition of Chinese picture language, Kan Xuan works in the language of international art and in particular of the international media. Using clearly and simply structured filmlets she describes in direct and understandable images what affects her personally. The single sequences are technically perfect, and to some extent composed to be visually irritating.

The peculiar spirit of Kan Xuan’s cheeky-feminine personality affects the short episodes of her works. With her maidenly light narration paired with deep irony she takes a stand against personal and social conditions. Her stories amuse, raising a smirk in the viewers face, and at the same time broach the issue of personally unpleasant or theoretically difficult problems. They do not try to provide an answer, but tell a story, whose continuation is optional.

Like this, the work Objects emerged from the preoccupation with the object and its material and color. Filmed in black and white, objects fall into a liquid. A new color from the palette of grey tones are assigned to them – eggs are white, blood is black, coins are white.

100times shows a 100 cups of the same series of manufacture, one after another smashed on the ground. With accent on the working process, each cup has been filled before with a different amount of ceramic glaze and baked in the oven. Manipulated in this way, each one has a different tone.

The work Countdown, however, is an attempt by the artist to grasp a moment in time. Standing on the historical Tiannamen Square, she counts the 60 seconds of a minute backwards. Counting the countdown with her fingers, she tries to reunite the past and the future for a moment, before she dissappers into the crowd.

Kan Xuan is currently showing her video work at the 9th Havanna Biennial, Cuba and the Museo Colecciones ICO, Madrid. Also, her work is on display at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Biography

Kan Xuan lives and works in Beijing, China and Amsterdam Netherlands

1972        Born in Xuan Cheng, An’hui, China
1993-1997   China Art Academy, Hang Zhou, China
2001-2003   The Royal Rijksacedamy Amsterdam, Netherlands

Selected Exhibitions
2006
9th Havana Biennial 2006, Wifredo Lam Center, Havanna, Cuba
‘Exploding Television – Satellite of Love’, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands,
A happy girl, IKON Gallery, Birmingham, UK
Never go out without my DV Cam-Video art from China, Museo Colecciones ICO, Madrid, Spain
Close Reading, Galerie Julitte Jongma, Amsterdam, Netherlands
20 Desarreglos – Arte Contemporáneo de Brasil, Museo del Artes Visuales, Santiago de Chile

2005
Mahong. Chinesische Gegenwartskunst aus der Sammlung Sigg, Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Schweiz
Focus, China Museum of art, Beijing, China
The Second Guangzhou Triennial, GuangDong Museum of art, Guangzhou, China
Prix de Rome 2005, De Apple Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands
I Still Believe in Miracles, Museum de Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, France
Double Happiness, BizArt Centre, Shanghai, China
A Molecular History of Everything, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Australia
Guangzhou Photo Biennial 2005, Paris, France

2004
Kan Xuan and Cuixiuwen, Museum for Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, France
A l’ Est du Sud de l’ Ouest/ A l’ Ouest du Sud de l’ Est, Villa Arson, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France
Epiphytes, Classic botanical garden, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Object System : Ding Nothing, ARCO2004, Madrid, Spain
I miss you, BizArt Centre, Shanghai, China

2003
Doing nothing anywhere is, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China
Chine: génération vidéo, MEP – Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris, France
Panorama da Art Brasileira 2003, Sao Paulo Modern Art Museum, Brazil
Alors, La Chine?, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
New Zone, Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw, Polan
Everyday , Kunstforeningen Copenhagen, Denmark
Video Festival, Brussels, Belgium
Echigo-Tsumari Short video Festival, Tokyo, Japan
Under Construction, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan

2002
C’ est pas du cinema, Le Fresony studio national, France
Video art, Chinese European Art center, Xiamen, China
The First Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou Museum of art, Guangzhou, China
Fantasia-2, Beijing, China

2001
Fantasia-1, Seoul, Korea
Or Emptiness!, BizArt Centre, Shanghai China

1999
Wu Shi Ren Fei , Photography Exhibition, Shanghai, China
Art for Sale, Shanghai, China

Residencies, Fellowships, Prices
2005        Prix de Rome 2005, Basic Prize, Netherlands
2002-2003 Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science, NL
2002        Dutch Ministry of Foreign, DCO, IC, NL

Zhou Zixi

Zhou Zixi

Interiors

18 March – 29 April

Opening: 18th March 2006, 6-9 p.m.

BüroFriedrich-berlin is happy to announce the first solo show Interiors of the Chinese artist Zhou Zixi in Germany. Zhou Zixis solo project is part in a series of exhibitions BF-b has had since 1998, introducing Chinese artists in Berlin like Cao Fei, Xu Tan, Yang Fudong and Zhang Enli. The Shanghainese painter Zhou Zixi is another representative of this new generation of Chinese artists. Starting from global- and domestical politic topics, he focuses more on the aspects of the daily life.

In his work Zhou Zixi deals with the transformation of the Chinese society, stuck between communism and capitalism. In the style of realism, he documents political life and the growing demands of a consumer society: the developing class of niveu-rich. The basis of his work is formed by images, he obtains from public media: semi-private Internet Blogs, television, print media and also the area of the fine arts. Themes such as the revolt at the Tiananmen Square at 1989 can be found in his paintings alongside appropriated images from well-known works of colleagues and friends like Yang Fudong or Lu Zhengshen. In recent years of the 21st century, the luxury of the new urban life, with its focus on the private interior, came to the forefront of his interest.

Parallel to reproductions of images with historical contents, Zhou Zixi presents life-styles of young social climbers in a new amusement culture. In his current series Happy Life he comments in a humorous way on these social changes. Thus he portrays a scuba-diving woman in the domestic bathtub, or a climber draped across the display room of a museum. In regard to his paintings Zhou Zixi comments: “In my view, this sort of thing and others like jogging in a gym are equally absurd. I just exaggerate them infinitely.”

Zhou Zixi, born 1970 in Nanchang, Jiangxi, lives and works in Shanghai. He studied at the Art Department of the Jiangxi Normal University and the East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai.

In 2005 Zhou Zixi had a solo exhibition at the Bizart Art Center in Shanghai. As from April 15th his works will be on display in the xhibition ‚Under the Skin’ at the UniversalStudios-beijing.

Zhou Zixi, Eroticism Balcony 2 2005 oil on canvas 75 x 75cm

Zhou Zixi, Sun Shine 2005 oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm

Zhou Zixi, Happy Life Series - Marksman — Zhou Zixi, Happy Life Series – Marksman 2005 oil on canvas 110 x 140cm

Zhou Zixi, Happy Life Series - Jockey in the Living Room — Happy Life Series – Jockey in the Living Room 2005 oil on canvas 120 x 160cm

Zhou Zixi, Happy Life Series - Dive in the Bathtube — Zhou Zixi, Happy Life Series – Dive in the Bathtube 2005 oil on canvas 120 x 160cm

Zhou Zixi, Happy Life Series - Cross the huge gap 2005 — Zhou Zixi, Happy Life Series – Cross the huge gap 2005

Monk, Jonathan

Jonathan Monk

Dutch Details and other details

30 November 2004 to 8 January 2004

BüroFriedrich is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Berlin based artist Jonathan Monk Dutch details and other details. Monk also inaugurated the activities in BüroFriedrich’s current location with a film screening of his Gilbert and George work Lost Days (2002).

The current exhibition title refers to Ed Ruscha’s limited edition photo book Dutch Details (1971) which also served as inspiration for Monk’s elegiac series of 41 slides Today is just a copy of yesterday (Amsterdam) (2002). The work involves the daily re-photographing of a projection demonstrating that time does tell, but more often than not through a process of either gradual erasure or complete transformation. One of the impetuses for choice of works on show was to cross reference some lesser known examples of Dutch or Netherlands related conceptual art cognizant of the Dutch connection of BüroFriedrich. The poster accompanying the exhibition for instance, shows an enlarged detail taken from an invitation card designed by the artist Jan Dibbets. The same invitation card appears in Monk’s hand in his new work Hand Held Gesture (2004), a work which is both mockingly affirmative and a kind of doomed-to-fail handheld attempt at occupying centre field.

Jonathan Monk has an enthusiast’s approach to art history and a keen sense of how the radical thought and methods he finds there might be reapplied and reinterpreted today. Monk’s engagement with conceptual art modes, in particular the documentary, is far from purist, his works are nearly always inflected with dry humour or melancholy or sometimes both. He also revels in the absurd for example, in his on going text series proposing meetings in diverse places at future dates that he may not attend, the latest of which will take place in the Hague. Monk’s 16mm films, text pieces and photographic works often involve a kind of conceptual super-impositions in which the originals he refers to, evokes, appropriates, or reproduces under new conditions and in new forms, seem to cohabit his own work. This doubling method creates slippages that emphasize differences and which involves at least in part a reflection on the benefits and deficits of hindsight.

Some original invitations to Robert Barry’s action closing galleries in Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Turin are also included in the exhibition. In the past Monk too has engaged in acts of symbolic, if slightly tongue in cheek negation – his photographic documentation of Cancelled Project (1990) – an action where the artist stuck cancelled signs on a whole series of advertising posters on a street, in a knowingly futile attempt to try and make nothing happen.

Cancelled (Glasgow) Poster, 1990 Cancelled Project, Jonathan Monk

Funky Lessons

14 September – 13 November 2004

John Baldessari, Monica Bonvicini, Andrea Fraser, Martin Gostner, Eva Grubinger, Erik van Lieshout, Marko Lulic, Aleksandra Mir, Adrian Piper, Tino Sehgal, Annika Ström, Barbara Visser, Franz West.

Curated by Jörg Heiser.

The exhibition is funded by the Berlin Capital Culture Fund, the Mondriaan Foundation, and the art section of Austria’s Bundeskanzleramt.

A common resentment against conceptual art is that it was too didactic. The exhibition brings together work by artists that tackle the problem head-on: they undermine the authority of educational forms yet do not simply renounce knowledge and critique. Humour and role play are the disarming weapons used in performance, video, installation, painting and sculpture. New ways open up beyond the cul-de-sac of a false choice between harmless hermeticism and patronizing gestures.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by Adrian Piper’s pivotal piece “Funk Lessons” (1982-1984), a video based on a performance by the artist teaching – a mostly white – audience of students basic and advanced dance routines of funk and soul music. Another classic example is John Baldessari’s “Baldessari Sings LeWitt” of 1972: the artist sings, like a lay preacher, the famous, stern Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol LeWitt, to the melody of famous songs, among them the US anthem. Or Franz West’s cross between a pedestal and a lectern “Laocoon’s sprimgy head (Lessingmstudy)” of 2002, with a paperback copy of Lessing’s ‘Laokoon, or on the divisions between painting and poetry’ casually placed inside of it. In the book, Lessing plays off sculpture, which according to him was static, against poetry, which was in motion. West counters the assumption with an amorphous, reddish lump mounted with a rusty steel spring onto the top of the lectern.

Works by 13 artists from 6 countries will be on display throughout the whole space of BüroFriedrich from September through November 2004. BüroFriedrich is a non-profit international venue for contemporary art that has already put on several exhibitions dealing with the history and present of conceptualism. Complementing a group of classical pieces (Piper, Baldessari), there are some recent works (Fraser, Grubinger, van Lieshout, West) and some commissioned exclusively for the exhibition (Bonvicini, Gostner, Lulic, Mir, Sehgal, Ström, Visser).

A series of lectures at Münzclub (Münzstr. 23, Berlin Mitte), taking place on Mondays from 13 September, will address the question of didactics in direct exchange with the audience: some of them will take the form of ‘interview’ (Adrian Piper on 8 November, Aleksandra Mir on 13 September), while others will cross over into performance (Barbara Visser, on the opening night, 11 September). A catalogue which will encompass some of the material from these lectures will be published after the exhibition.

Funky Lessons at Münzsalon
Münzstraße 23, 10178 Berlin
admission €4, Members free

Every Monday 8p.m. Jörg Heiser talks to:

13 September Aleksandra Mir (English)
20 September Martin Gostner and Marko Lulic (German)
27 September Kerstin Grether and Klaus Walter “The Funky Lessons of Pop Music” (German)
04 October Thomas Bayrle “The Funky Lessons of Teaching” (German)
11 October Tino Sehgal (German)
18 October ‘No Talk’ – Funky Lessons Surprise Film
25 October Monica Bonvicini (German)
01 November Eva Grubinger and Annika Ström (English)
08 November Adrian Piper (English)

John Baldessari 'Baldessari sings LeWitt', 1971 — John Baldessari ‘Baldessari sings LeWitt’, 1971, 15 min b&w

John Baldessari 'Baldessari sings LeWitt', — John Baldessari ‘Baldessari sings LeWitt’, 1971, 15 min b&w

Jun Yang

CAMOUFLAGE – LOOK like them – TALK like them

20 April 2004 – 29 May 2004

Curated by Manray Hsu

Jun Yang analyses in his works the construction of cultural identity and control. He juxtaposes power structure, social order and pop cultural forms.
By using his autobiography as an axis around which meanings of rituals and codes are spelled out, he constructs sarcastic and pungent narratives that verge on fact and fiction.

His video, produced in 2002, Soldier Woods, or Soldat Holzer, is an elaborate play on his name “Jun Yang,” and thus exists in two separate versions, English and German. He tries to trace back all different possible meanings of Jun Yang in the Chinese language as well as various misunderstandings incurred during the last twenty years of living in Europe.
What’s lost in translation is not only things to deal with, but the person himself whose persona cannot but engage in the most simple fact of his life: his name.

Yang’s work touches on the gray area between legal power and illegal fall-outs, personal memories and collective representations. In his latest video CAMOUFLAGE – LOOK like them – TALK like them (2002/2003), he interrogates the situation of illegal immigrants and legal foreigners from the perspective of a fictive person, called X. The video is based on a fictional interview the artist conducted with X, whose generic identity as an illegal immigrant smuggled into the land of wealth, hope, consumption, and, above all, behavioural control, has to be disappeared in order for him to exist again. Using news clips, found footages, ads, and images of public display of power, Yang creates a video of everyday social control laid bare in a documentary form.

In addition to the two videos, the exhibition also includes wall drawings based on CAMOUFLAGE, which intervene into the architectural space to create multifaceted conceptual folds.

Jun Yang was born in China 1975, he lives and works since 1979 in Vienna.
Among his recent exhibitions: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig; Museum für angewandte Kunst Galerie, Vienna; 2001: Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Frankfurter Kunstverein; 2002: Manifesta 4, Frankfurt; PS1, New York.

Manray Hsu is an independent critic and curator based in Taipei and Berlin. His major exhibitions include: 2000 Taipei Biennial: “The Sky Is the Limit” and “How Big Is the World?” (OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, 2002).
Manray Hsu served as a jury member for the 49th Venice Biennale and for UNESCO Prize at the 7th Istanbul Biennial in 2001.

For further information, please contact Waling Boers or Alexandra Saheb