TRACKS IN A BOX – Wenn Künstler geführte Touren geben
Guided tours as artistic practice to explore Berlin this September Tracks in a Box presents a program of ten newly commissioned artistic guided tours, a discursive space and living archive
From 7 to 27 September 2019 Tracks in a Box will take place at the CLB Pop Up at Aufbau Haus on Moritzplatz, turned into a center for artistic guided tours: a gallery, a space for debate and a living archive. The programme presents talks with Berlin-based institutions including SAVVY Contemporary, Walk&Talks with participating artists, performance and conversation with Amsterdam-based duo Helwes &Van Goudoever combined with a Berlin Art Week special midissage.
The experimental group show is the starting point for ten different audio walks, self-guided explorations, and performative tours created by Berlin-based artists. Using sound, image, performance, text and technology, ten artists present newly commissioned works exploring the city, while the project headquarters encapsulates the experience by the walks presenting an archive of artistic guided tours previously presented by international artists, such as Rimini Protokoll.
“Who lives on Moritzplatz Island? What if a building, a former squat in Kreuzberg, could speak? How is everyday life for an inhabitant of utopia? Where do puddles travel? And is Berlin paradise? Tracks in a Box approaches the imagination not as an individual activity but as a collective playing field that belongs to the realm of the public. Rather than creating one shared idealistic vision, this exhibition brings together multiple overlapping and contradictory imaginary landscapes to celebrate the coexistence of nightmares, wild fantasies and daydreams” , says curator Yael Sherill.
Invoking the concept of exploring the urban or public space and at the same time one’s own range of perception, Tracks in a Box’s artistic tours rooted in the situationist dérive concept by Guy Debord, which influenced radical avant-garde artists movements like the Imaginist Bauhaus from the 1950s. Debord’s called psychogeographic walks were seen as a revolutionary technique to combat the malaise and boredom of the society of the spectacle and consumerism - an idea which seems to increasingly fit into current needs and desires of our times. Technological innovation in Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence is not yet able to influence and trigger human perception as these artistic tours presented in Tracks in a Box.
Furthermore the project is a collaboration between B _ Tour, a nomadic curatorial platform dedicated to guiding as an artistic practice, and CLB Berlin. Born out of a desire to reflect on questions such as how to “archive the unarchivable” and preserve artistic tour projects, Tracks in a Box explores what an archive and a library of transitory, participatory and performative artworks could look like. For full program tours, events and further information, please check:
Mit Arbeiten von Birte Endrejat, Wanda Dubrau, Pia Lanzinger, Georg Klein, Gabi Schaffner, Mirja Busch, Christoph Rothmeier, Camila Rhodi, Ilona Marti und Gianni Maccaroni, u.v.m.
Selected press coverage:
Berlin Art Link by Ernela Vukaj