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Sep
13

Berlin Art Week SILT

Series

(Berlin Art Week)

Summary

Where

Reethaus

When

Friday, September 13, 2024
18:00-22:00

What

Audiovisual Installation

In 2012, a lake appeared suddenly outside of Likančiai, Lithuania. The body of water is fallout from a Soviet-era drainage project that sought to make land more suitable for agriculture. With the disrepair of the artificial system, water has started to accumulate and begun to emerge unexpectedly, creating accidental landscapes.

Reethaus presents a portrait of the surge. In SILT, a site-specific audiovisual installation by Ona Julija Lukas Steponaitytė, Iida Jonsson, and Ssi Saarinen, the landscape is explored by perspectives proper to the study and depiction of emergencies: first-person wandering documentation, forensic diving, and helicopter flyover.

Meandering around, across and beneath the surface of this alien upwelling, the artists insistently document the formal qualities of the new lake with an eerie, banausic faithfulness. The polyphonic soundtrack by Alexander Iezzi — like the landscape, never settling into any particular rhythm or harmony — lends reality to this latter-day natural feature. Audiences are pressed into a meditation on the restlessness of landscapes under contemporary conditions, asked to contemplate failed attempts to reform territory in accordance with human will.

This Berlin Art Week show of SILT will be the first time that Reethaus presents a video channel in its shrine to the sonic arts. The composition by Iezzi has been spatialized by MONOM for the Reethaus.

Series

(Berlin Art Week)

Berlin Art Week is a five-day festival week, the largest collaboration between institutions of note in the contemporary art scene in Berlin. Once a year in September, Berlin Art Week presents a diverse program with more than 50 museums, exhibition houses, private collections, project spaces and galleries. Inviting the public to discover exhibitions, performances, screenings, and extensive outreach programs, Berlin Art Week provides an opportunity for immersion in ongoing developments in contemporary art. The 13th edition of Berlin Art Week will take place from September 11 to 15.

Featured

Iida Jonsson, Ona Julija Lukas Steponaitytė and Ssi Saarinen

Iida Jonsson, Ona Julija Lukas Steponaitytė and Ssi Saarinen make up an artist collective based in Berlin and Vilnius. The group are alumni of the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, and are interested in how landscapes and their depictions unveil national identity, historical memory, and power dynamics. Their works have been presented at the Venice Biennale, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, KIN Museum, De Thomas and Whitechapel Gallery. The collective shares professional backgrounds in cinema, applying cinematic tools to their practice in the art space.