Thu 23 Jun 2022 to Sat 6 Aug 2022
Karl-Marx-Allee 45, D-10178 the state I am in
Tue-Sat 11am-6pm
With works by James Gregory Atkinson, Noah Barker, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Peter Fend, Lea Grundig, Jacqueline de Jong, Laura Langer, Louise Lawler, Oswald Oberhuber, Li Ran, Lotty Rosenfeld, Bruno Serralongue, Bri Williams and Leyla Yenirce
Capitain Petzel presents the group exhibition the state I am in, curated by Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff.
Untitled (Upstairs-Downstairs), 1986
Charcoal, crayon and acrylic on watercolour paper
Image dimensions: 68 x 51 cm / 26.8 x 20.1 inches Framed dimensions: 74 x 58 cm / 29.1 x 22.8 inches
© Jacqueline de Jong Courtesy the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London Ph: Todd-White Art Photography, London
Untitled (Upstairs-Downstairs), 1984
Charcoal, crayon and acrylic on cartridge paper
Image dimensions: 45 x 60 cm / 17.7 x 23.6 inches Framed dimensions: 51 x 66 cm / 20.1 x 26 inches
© Jacqueline de Jong Courtesy the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London Ph: Todd-White Art Photography, London
Devantures, centre ville de Pristina, Kosovo, 8 novembre 2010, 2010
Ilfochrome print, mounted on aluminium
Image dimensions: 125 x 156 cm / 49.2 x 61.4 inches Framed dimensions: 127.5 x 158.5 cm / 50.2 x 62.2 inches
© Bruno Serralongue Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris, Romainville. Edition of 3 + 1 AP
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In the gallery’s modernist pavilion located on the former monumental marching corridor of the GDR, the exhibition brings together fourteen artists and addresses the contradictory relationship between nation, state, and art. The artworks in the exhibition span not only from the post-war era to the present but also the variety of state systems: capitalist, socialist, democratic, authoritarian, and fascist.
A state is both an order and a condition. It is the social mediation of various conditions and the struggle for representation – recognition and rights – within that order that is conceived as politics. Art is implicated in this struggle for recognition and rights as it waged over the image of society. Here the nation-state provides the dominant frame which itself can be understood as constructed around a fiction: the congruence of the nation, people, and state borders.
Historically, art’s role in the construction of an image of the people was central to the birth of modernism and the emergence of different forms of nationalism, for instance, civic or ethnic. When appearing to be made by the people themselves, the images would situate an aesthetic judgment, producing an experience where the people recognized itself as autonomous and sovereign. This recognition emboldened a promise of universal and liberal values – freedom, individual rights, and rule of law – that the modern nation-state never delivered, as the over-represented oppressed those barred from sovereignty along racial borders.
Amidst what is widely perceived as a decisive rupture in the post–Cold War order, the exhibition brings together artistic practices that demarcate shifts in representation at the critical juncture of the nation-state today.
Installation view, the state I am in, Capitain Petzel, Berlin, 2022. Courtesy the artists and Capitain Petzel, Berlin. Ph: Gunter Lepkowski