Winterreise

In the first part of our exhibition Winterreise, Ali Kazma’s (1971, Istanbul, Turkey) recent double projection ‘North’ (2017) will be presented. Ali Kazma is known for his video works that question and explore the different human activities in their emotional, social and political dimensions, as well as the obsessive ways in which humans offer resistance to their surroundings. The diptych ‘North’ takes the viewer to Spitzbergen in Norway. With his camera, Kazma explores a deserted mine, operated by the Soviets from 1930 to 1980. Time has crystallized in the buildings belonging to this former Soviet workers’ colony – as time simply seems to disappear in Kazma’s work. Or maybe historical time dissolves into unmeasurable time: the accumulation of dust on floors or the changing of the seasons.
In Ali Kazma’s diptych ‘Orphanage’ (2018), which will be presented in Winterreise from February 19 onward, memories are preserved within the largest wooden building ever built in Europe: the Greek Orphanage on Büyükada, an island near Istanbul, now an empty ghost building in a state of near collapse and a witness of Turkey’s long and tumultuous ethnic history.
Axel Hütte’s (1951, Essen, Germany) diptych ‘Marignano I’ and ‘Marignano II’ (2017) shows two monumental photographs of trees in a winterly setting in Northern Italy. The viewer can detect some patches of snow. Comparable to Ali Kazma, Axel Hütte is an artist whose travels lead him to all parts of the world. With his camera he depicts carefully selected landscapes, almost like people: mountain sceneries, waterscapes or trees — often in full detail, more than an eye can possibly detect at once. Is it by chance that Hütte’s eye was caught by the misty trees, partly covered with moss and snow in the former battle field of Marignano?
Another contribution to this exhibition is Cevdet Erek’s (1974, Istanbul, Turkey) ‘Fireplace’ (2016), which was the centrepiece in his exhibition ‘Winterausstellung’ at the Kasseler Kunstverein, Germany in January 2016. In order to ‘measure’ the hours and days of the exhibition, Erek had a fire lit every day in the curator’s stove, with as many logs of wood needed for each day. Due to fire regulations in Germany, the fire in the museum could not be a real one, as initially had been Erek’s plan. Therefore, a video of the burning fire ran during opening hours, surrounded by Erek’s seating installation. In Winterreise, ‘Fireplace’ will be a centrepiece as well, however, this time the crackling fire will be accompanied by a sturdy beat composed by Erek.
There is a significant painting in Winterreise, titled ‘Climate Report’ (2016) by Andrei Roiter (1960, Moscow, Russia). Roiter, who has been described as an ‘artist-tourist’ by Russian curator and critic Viktor Misiano, has never chosen for one destination only. Being a restless settler in two continents, Europe and the US, he constantly excavates his memories, and maps his observations. ‘Climate Report’ is, as Roiter states, a painting of a rather ‘emotional’ nature, consisting of a painted stack of colourful files — or even joyful, bright slices of postcard landscapes — beneath a block of darkness pressing it all down like a heavy paperweight or the looming shadow of our environmental crisis.
This journey ends with new work by Edwin Zwakman (1969, The Hague, Netherlands). Zwakman is known for reconstructing the world entirely from memory by building and photographing sets in his studio. The places he depicts do not exist. They are compactions of banal, yet seminal situations that can be found in endless variations anywhere in the world. He has the ability to surprise his viewer with the undisputable self-evidence of the image. Maybe they reconnect with our own memories, transforming the ordinary into the archetypical.