The title takes inspiration from Ukrainian author Mykola Khvylovy, who in a Twenties modernist poem rephrased the Latin saying “Ex oriente lux” — “Light comes from the East” — as “Ex oriente fumis,” or “Smoke comes from the East,” to have fun industrialization after the 1917 Russian Revolution. On the biennale in Chemnitz, the theme shifted again to the core factor of fireplace each as a metaphor for and as a mirrored image of the present state of Jap Europe, Ukraine, and past.
Kim Brian Dudek with the sculpture of Karl Marx
In a metropolis anchored by an enormous, 23-foot-tall (~7-meter-tall) sculpture of Karl Marx’s head, which locals selected to maintain after the autumn of the Communist regime, the biennale served as a counterpoint to the “Eastern State of Mind” theme behind its nomination because the European Capital of Tradition.
“The ‘Eastern State of Mind’ slogan is an attempt to place Chemnitz and the mentality of its citizens in a European context,” Kim Brian Dudek, challenge supervisor of the Pochen Biennale, instructed Hyperallergic throughout a walk-through of the exhibition on October 12. “This is a simplification and reduction that ignores how discursive, intellectually complex, and profound the East is, exemplified by authors like [Milan] Kundera, Czesław Miłosz, or Ismail Kadare.”
The cavernous halls of the Wirkbau, the most important textile manufacturing facility in Germany when it opened in 1883, hosted work by 22 primarily German and Jap European artists. Throughout a variety of media, a lot of the work on view conveyed photographs, shapes, and sounds of the destruction wreaked by Russia on Ukraine, and a pervasive sense of worry, struggle, and dying. The title of the biennale itself has its roots each within the historical past of Chemnitz and the German language: “Pochen” is a polysemic phrase, which means to insist, to faucet rhythmically on a floor, or to pound, as employees did and nonetheless do within the close by uranium mines.
“Tachyoness” (2022), a video by Ukrainian artist Lesia Vasylchenko, seen by way of the one-way turnstiles of Danylo Galkin’s “Tourniquet” (2013)
Guests first encountered “Tachyoness” (2022), a video by Ukrainian artist Lesia Vasylchenko. A synthetic intelligence program condensed a sequence of dawn photographs taken for the reason that collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the current into this eight-minute work. The title refers to a tachyon, a hypothetical faster-than-light particle. The underlying theme addresses the “sunrise problem” within the principle of chance and statistics, a longstanding mathematical puzzle articulated by Laplace and different 18th-century students: “What is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?”
Close by, Danylo Galkin’s “Tourniquet” featured two turnstiles that solely spun in a single route. Developed in 2013 throughout the early days of the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, the poignant set up now symbolizes the pressured conscription of Ukrainian males and the restrictions on their journey.
The turnstiles led right into a white room with fluorescent lighting, the place a fog machine hidden above a false ceiling launched clouds of vapor resembling smoke. This was “European Sleep,” an set up by bergenissen (the pen title of Alisa Berger and Lena Ditte Nissen). The nondescript area evoked a fuel chamber inside what appeared like an nameless, trendy workplace area.
Nonetheless from Mykola Ridnyi, “The District” (2022), 20 minutes
Mykola Ridnyi’s sculpture “Dark City” (2015) standing close by comprised a mannequin of a metropolis with black authorities buildings, residential complexes, and transport infrastructure, all topped by a clean flag — each an ideological marker of territory and allegiance, in addition to a army goal. He complemented this work with “The District” (2022), a video that takes viewers by way of his childhood in Northern Saltivka, a now-destroyed neighborhood in Kharkiv that has been focused by heavy Russian bombing.
A big corridor within the Wirkbau housed many of the video works, which had been maybe the celebs of the biennale. Maria Matiashova’s “Futile Words, Loud Noises” (2022) commented on the hypocrisy of worldwide diplomatic organizations by way of paper planes comprised of the Geneva Conventions and different treaties banning significantly brutal weapons. In the meantime, in “How to Disappear” (2020), the Austrian artwork collective Complete Refusal, which describes itself as a “pseudo-marxist media guerrilla,” illustrated the impossibility of escaping struggle within the Battlefield V online game. Even leaping off a cliff or taking pictures oneself doesn’t lead to dying; the sport won’t enable it, nor the destruction of a flag. The one technique to escape is to be killed or to vanish.
Nonetheless from Dana Kavelina, “Such a landscape” (2024), animation
Whereas Ukrainian artists dominated the biennale, it was in no way restricted to them. Vietnamese-German artist Sung Tieu introduced a claustrophobic tackle the “Havana Syndrome” — an alleged sonic assault towards American diplomats — by way of a video primarily based on a three-dimensional reconstruction of the Lodge Nacional de Cuba. Cyprien Gaillard’s brief movie “Ocean II Ocean,” which premiered on the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, depicts New York Metropolis subway vehicles being dumped into the ocean and their subsequent underwater afterlife. Fish swim by way of the home windows and doorways of the discarded vehicles within the silence of the ocean.
The biennale additionally revived, in its personal means, a mural that held iconic standing within the German Democratic Republic: “The Mechanization of Agriculture” (1960) by Karl Heinz Jakob, which was lined with drywall a decade after the reunification of Germany. Jakob created the large portray, which measures roughly 36 toes lengthy and 12.5 toes excessive (~11 meters lengthy and three.8 meters excessive), for the town council of Chemnitz, then often called Karl-Marx-Stadt or Karl Marx Metropolis. Nonetheless, in 2002, the Chamber of Trade and Commerce lined the mural with drywall to modernize the area and make it extra appropriate for conferences. Jakob’s granddaughter, artist Henrike Naumann, introduced it again to life with a efficiency on the Chemnitz city corridor alongside the Chem Valley Line Dancer eV and the hardstyle jumpers of Nischelhupper on September 26, the primary day of the biennale. Within the Wirkbau, Leipzig artist Susanne Rische erected a drawing of the mural, which Chemnitz residents had been portray with steerage from members of the biennale group.
Chemnitz residents had begun to color a reproduction of “The Mechanization of Agriculture” (1960) by Karl Heinz Jakob.
A youth artwork part on the biennale cleverly performed on the occasion’s theme with the title “Ex Oriente Polylux.” Named after the Polylux model of East German projectors generally utilized in colleges throughout the Communist period, the part featured projectors that allowed youngsters to put objects on them and experiment with projecting shapes onto transluscent, hanging screens.
“The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc’ did not mark the ‘end of history,’” Dudek stated of tolerating misperceptions concerning the previously Communist international locations, referencing the idea proposed within the Nineteen Nineties by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama.
“The resulting new geopolitical orientations were commented on by Chancellor Scholz in his speech at Charles University in Prague, when he said that Europe’s center is moving eastwards,” Dudek added. “The Biennale aims to create a space for discourse, to discuss whose experiences and ideas shape the debate about our future, about the East, and about Ukraine, in order to start thinking of a common future in fragile times.”
The immediate “What is youth for you?” written on one of many projectors in “Ex Oriente Polylux”
Nonetheless from Dana Kavelina, “Such a landscape” (2024), animation
A youth artwork part on the biennale cleverly performed on the occasion’s theme with the title “Ex Oriente Polylux.”
Set up view of Soiled White by Alina Kleytman
Nonetheless from Dana Kavelina, “Such a landscape” (2024), animation
