Special Edition: Berlin Art Week #1

 

BERLIN'S NEW KUNSTHERBST Your fair itinerary by Nicole Rodriguez Art fair season is a delicate negotiation between time and interest: a balancing act between crowd surfing, booth gazing, chitchat and artwork hovering. Disparate events claim your schedule and force you to taxi around a city, time crunching it all in, arriving slightly damp everywhere you land. This year consolidation is king.  While Berlin’s Kunstherbst is not exactly a novelty, with last year’s demise of famed fair Art Forum (R.I.P. 1996-2011) Berlin’s major institutions of contemporary art and privately organized art fairs abc—art berlin contemporary and Preview Berlinhave launched a consolidated art program under the new moniker Berlin Art Week. The merger has allowed different private and public institutions to cross-pollinate planning tours, educational lectures, performances and events in and on the fringes of the major local fairs. After sitting down with countless press releases, online invites and a few snail-mail requests to devise an art-week-plan-of-attack, attention might shift away from the elbow-rubbing of the fair buzz and onto smaller events farther afield, tours and lectures—the goings-on one often manages to miss in the midst of herding through all the bright lights of gleaming booths. For an amuse bouche of Berlin Art Week’s savory events to come, read on with your calendar book on the ready... ...Read more...

Berlin-based artist Timur Si-Qin will be featured during Berlin Art Week by Société at abc art berlin contemporary. Probing our psyche with subjects as disparate, but nonetheless economically, socially and ontologically relevant as Nike, Unilever and the Transformers movie series, American consumerism functions as the axis on which  Si-Qin investigates our globalized society. Read more about his work in this week's Rackroom interview...  ...Read more...