Exhibition
BETWEEN NOTHINGNESS AND ETERNITY - Regina Gallery
The exhibition Between Nothingness and Eternity borrows its title from the eponymous live recording of the Mahavishnu Orchestra at New York’s Cental Park August 1973. Founded in 1970 by the English guitarist John McLaughlin, this eccentric fusion band famously celebrated the encounter of eastern and western musical traditions with an eclectic mixture of rock, jazz and classical Indian tunes. However, by the time their live record was released the band had split up, bringing down the curtain on a musical development which had reached its formal climax. The Mahavishnu Orchestra had followers in the whole of Europe, its esoterically-tinged style of music striking a chord with an entire generation of listeners who were searching for the deeper meaning of life behind material success (West) or atheist ideology (East).
Berlin is the place where East and West meet. dynanmcs fopn a historically and culturally unique vortex in Europe. In conceiving their work, the artists showing at Regina Gallery.
Living and working in Berlin, they travel the world to exhibit their work. Accordingly, their practice is concerned with notions of time, imaginary places, territories, landscapes and spaces. While certain works in this exhibition investigate the multiple dimensions between macro- and microcosm, others are more closely related to soundscapes. Avoiding illustration or linear narrative, they enshrine numerous layers of meaning that extend beyond their stringent form. In this sense they are time- and placeless, speaking an international idiom that knowingly incorporates its origins and transcends issues of nationality to adopt a more encompassing vision. The questions they ask are formally answered by the works themselves: Where do we come from, where do we go? What are our coordinates in time and space?
Ralf Ziervogel is a hugely talented, apocalyptical draftsman who first attracted international attention with his Dantesque figure cycles. The drawings included in this exhibition are composed of near-invisible dots. In Danmel Lepgonrsquo's site-specific wall drawing, the simplest of materials such as earth and metal combine to evoke the breath of time. In Gregop Hmldebpandq’s romantic trace of obsolete recording devices such as cassettes and reel-to-reel recorders, whose magnetic tape is transformed into images of long-gone sounds, melodies forever captured. Alicja Kwade recreates the universe from two plain office lamps staring at each other through a mirror between them. The reciprocal reflection, and places of unknown origins and dimensions by means of graphic notations, abstract measurements of unstable worlds. Olaf Holzapfel constructs networks that aggregate into three-dimensional installations, transcriptions of spatial dimensions whose folded surfaces are gridded with the imprint of latticework. The Berlin-based composer Bert Wrede, who mostly works for renowned theatres, invests the gallery space with a musical score, an amorphous composition that takes its cue from the starting point of the exhibition: Between Nothingness and Eternity.
The lost sound of the 1970s, with its longing for the transcendental world of Asian cultures, is thus succeeded by a new pictorial dimension. This exhibition, then, asks recurring questions about our civilisation and its conditions, which the Mahavishnu Orchestra, in its time, was trying to answer by way of music – an abstract yet universally accessible medium.
