DOMINIONS: Julian Charrière & Andreas Greiner
02 September - 14 October 2011
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| Collecting microbes. |
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"Urbanism doesn’t exist. It is only an ideology in Marx’s sense of the word.”
Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL. 1995
With the influx of people and capital in cities come decrees for laying
new roads and rail. Infrastructure, institutions, homes and public
spaces proliferate as the population demands their use. As the city
limits expand—pushed from within by the combined energies of
development, and pulled from without by the gathering momentum of
adjacent conurbations—its components separate, giving structure to the
city’s zones; Life naturally generates efficient forms.
PROGRAM presents Dominions, a commissioned exhibition by Julian
Charrière and Andreas Greiner that breaches the gulf between national
and microbial scales. Systematically collecting microbes throughout
Germany, the artists have bred them in sealed glass vitrines in the
gallery. The various molds trapped will grow into colonies of different
shapes, sizes and color; the interconnected network of filaments bursts
into competing globes, hills, meadows and slime. This exhibition
projects a new German topography, one that came into being organically
and free of social, political or economical parameters.
More than just a question of territory, the word dominion implies a
degree of legislated control. Traveling throughout Germany the artists
utilized the country’s infrastructure as a guiding logic for the
collection process. Country roads, the autobahn, the rail
network—systems of movement that impose a level of control on the
landscape—were hijacked to bring the world of microbes permeating the
same territory into the controlled realm of art exhibition. At its core,
Dominions is a display of the will to control and the variegated manner
in which this force displays itself in our lived experience.
Julian Charrière & Andreas Greiner are both currently students in
the Universität der Künste in Berlin, at Olafur Eliasson's Institut für
Raumexperimente. They have worked both together and separately, and are
members of Das Numen, a Berlin-based art collective that probes
questions both biological and mystical.
www.programonline.de
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