Fata Morgana

Peggy Buth, Leelee Chan, Falk Haberkorn, Renaud Regnery, Jonas Roßmeißl, Monika Uelze, Karl- Heinz Adler, Friedrich Kracht

Klemm's Berlin is excited to present the group exhibition Fata Morgana on the occasion of the presentation of the future gallery space at Leipziger Straße 57-58, which opens in the temporary project space in cooperation with the Mitte Museum Berlin at number 66. Conceived with Falk Haberkorn, this show gathers works by Peggy Buth, Leelee Chan, Falk Haberkorn, Renaud Regnery and Jonas Roßmeißl, which will be presented alongside photographs by Monika Uelze and concrete form stones by Karl-Heinz Adler and Friedrich Kracht.

A flickering mirage, a stylized idea that manifests itself temporarily and, on closer observation, is revealed to be an illusion, dissolving into thin air. Fata Morgana is a positive imago and a temporary state, a promise of the future that is linked to the urgent desire to fulfill it, superimposed on reality and shattered by it as soon as the wishful glaze dissolves. Moments of simultaneity shimmer translucently and through parallel spheres new potentials open up – characterized by plurality.

»When did modernity come to an end? - When conviction lost its form or when form lost its conviction? When both, separately, took possession of other forms, other attitudes, other senses? When the great form began to disintegrate into many small ones, something for everyone?

[...]

If modernity, whatever that may have been, came to an end, it died many deaths. And almost as if to ensure that –under the concrete of all the monuments that tower as its tombs and gravestones in the reunited sky above Berlin and the entire reunited rest of the world – it had eventually surrendered and stopped twitching, one did not rest in declaring it dead for so long and singing one requiem after another until one could finally breathe a sigh of relief and say with confidence: Once upon a time, there was…«

—Falk Haberkorn

Monika Uelze's documentary photographs trace the modernist visions with which Leipziger Strasse was imagined and constructed from the 1970s onwards, not only as a response to the housing shortage in East Berlin, but also in particular as a new place for social and commercial life. In three bodies of work by Berlin artist Peggy Buth from her cycle Vom Nutzen der Angst / Politics of Selection (2014, 2016, 2017), she explores the fulfillment of notions of a better (built) future. High-rise buildings that pursued humanist ideas of a peaceful and social life and thus failed, utopias that were blown up, searches for traces of the existing and visions of a new way of life. The molded concrete blocks presented in the exhibition space were developed and serially produced by the artists Adler and Kracht. They appear on countless facades in the former GDR, as well as free-standing sculptures, and can be read as a style-defining design element.

For the smaller concept series of his work Durst (2023), Renaud Regnery uses the two original motif components as recurring elements – the artist overpaints digital prints of medieval war scenes with the depiction of a dachshund, which has its origins in a found postcard. Regnery's combination of such different aesthetics reveals a sense of the growing semantic complexity of the world we live in. A feeling that not least attests to the legitimacy of ambivalences, which also appears in the superimposition of meaning, of the dreariness of the found and objects or places to which a dreamy theory still clings, in Falk Haberkorn's digital-analog photographic work Brotherhood / Zum ewigen Frieden (2015/16, 2023).

Like an archaeologist of the material world, Hongkong born artist Leelee Chan finds her artistic source material at trading hubs of our highly technologized world and processes these raw materials for her works Double Oculus (Amber) and Circuit (Jasper Green #2) (2022) with sculptural dedication. Jonas Roßmeißl's scenic-installative work O.2 (How to measure the quality of life after a revolution) (2019) juxtaposes naturality and the traditional with artificiality and fiction, visualizing the dynamic, transitory potential of destruction.