I. S. Kalter

Bureaucratic Bibism | Foreseeable Future | Still Life for The Living

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December 22, 2024 - January 1, 2025

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MOUNTAINS

Berlin, DE

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This triptych is featured in "Adventskalender 2024" for Christmas — a changing display in the storefront window of the gallery at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. 

 

""Following a period of continuous bloodshed from wars across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and a few days before Christmas and the New Year, while everybody are going out of Berlin, I travelled to install together with Markus & Klaus a triptych, in the storefront window of Galerie Mountains, which represents my work. At the center of the triptych is the curatorial object titled "Ephemeral Emancipation in the Foreseeable Future", to its left, "Bureaucratic Bibism", and to its right "Still Life for The Living".

 

Galerie Mountains is located in Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, in the same building as the iconic Kino Babylon Cinema and situated across from the Volksbühne Theater, which opened to the public at the same time of year — five months after the outbreak of World War I on July 28, 1914.

On the square's pavement and surrounding streets, one can notice sentences engraved on metal — quotes from the anti-war marxist Rosa Luxemburg, who worked to end the war and establish a form of democracy in place of the German Empire — a democracy that would later be usurped by the Third Reich. These quotes are, in fact, part of an institutional critique artwork by the German-American artist Hans Haacke (1936), installed in the public space in 2006.

This is the environment where I was invited to present my work within this specific coordinate of spacetime. From that point of view, this square celebrates the people and their right to live in equality, diversity, and peace even if a creative, non-violent democratic struggle is constantly necessary.

 

My ephemeral emancipation will occur
— no matter what —
in the foreseeable future"".​

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MOUNTAINS website

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