WHAT'S GOING ON?

The title of the opening exhibition is intended both as an open question and as an invitation to take a close look at the present moment.


The exhibition brings together works by Dora Budor, Clara Hausmann, Samuel Jeffery, Tam Ochiai, Oliver Tirré, Melvin Way and Constantina Zavitsanos. Their works range from sculpture and installation to drawing and conceptual approaches, opening up different perspectives on the social, political and personal conditions of our time.

In the unique architecture of the Mies van der Rohe House, the works enter into a dialogue with the space, structure and history of the location. This gives rise to new constellations between artistic voices, materials and narratives that raise questions about perception, belonging and the present.

‘What's Going On?’ thus marks not only the start of a new programmatic orientation, but also a moment of opening: for artistic experiments, for international positions and for a critical view of the here and now.


What’s going on? marks the start of the programme by Dennis Brzek, the new director of the Mies van der Rohe House in Berlin. The group exhibition brings together seven artistic positions and combines existing works with new pieces created in dialogue with the location. With this exhibition, the Mies van der Rohe House approaches the tension between the past and present of the historic Lemke House, where the institution is located, through the lens of artistic practice. The works on display raise questions about time, absence and personal stories, drawing on both private and shared memories as their material.

Under the direction of Dennis Brzek, the Mies van der Rohe House is breaking new ground institutionally. Located in Alt-Hohenschönhausen, with direct access to a park and lake, the institution has made it its mission to facilitate artistic practice, to communicate its themes broadly and to make them tangible through various approaches. The Mies van der Rohe House is an exhibition space for contemporary art that mediates between the past and the present. The common thread is reflection on architecture and its social contexts, with the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe serving as material for artistic exploration. A holistic programme of site-specific exhibitions, commissioned artistic works and cross-disciplinary collaborations gives the Mies van der Rohe House a flexible institutional vocabulary that deliberately opens it up to different audiences with different perspectives on permanence, attention and knowledge transfer.


WHAT’S GOING ON?

Deformed and worn down over decades, it was only with its renovation in accordance with monument preservation guidelines between 2000 and 2002 that Haus Lemke became the well-known testament to Mies van der Rohe's architecture that it is today. In the course of the work, all traces of previous uses and residents were removed. In its current form, Haus Lemke is also a fiction, elaborately reconstructed on the basis of archives and restored as faithfully as possible using contemporary means. The soon-to-be 100-year-old building now leads a seemingly timeless existence, constantly seeking the ideal state. The exhibition What's going on? aims to initiate a reflective approach to the logic of the monument. By handling found objects, dissolving the boundaries between intention and chance as carriers of time, and opening themselves up to branching narratives through personal stories, the works on display question how memory can function.

Based on an expanded understanding of artistic practice, Oliver Tirré's sculptures, which are created in direct engagement with context and location, take up everyday activities and show how very little can give rise to form when attention and care are devoted to it. In this sense, Constantina Zavitsanos also draws attention to how the friction between life and the rules that govern it can undermine conventional notions of artistic practice in order to reveal different definitions of body and time. Samuel Jeffery explores the theatricality of encounter and presentation and understands the exhibition as a performative medium for posing questions about temporality and boundaries. Melvin Way's haunting drawings, which he worked on for months despite their compact format, are evidence of his constant search for the connections in the world – an examination of languages and systems from the sciences that Clara Hausmann also addresses in a new work. Tam Ochiai's sketches show iconic buildings by Mies van der Rohe daydreaming and play with the seriousness of the medium in order to open up this canon of modernism to anthropomorphic fantasies. Dora Budor's site-specific wall work Nicotine Museum is itself an archival interpretation. Using a colour tone from the stage design, which serves to simulate rooms discoloured by cigarette smoke, the traces of the Lemkes' furniture are visibly drawn on the walls.