Shaft, Barak Bar Am & Milo Frielinghaus, 2019

Ab in die Ecke, Barak Bar Am & Milo Frielinghaus, 2020

The rooms on the 2nd floor of Goethestraße 2 were my former studio. Neumeister Bar-Am gallery operated in those rooms until 2018 and since last year changing its name to Bar Am – the premises where I work and present art.

At Bar Am I look for new ways to engage with art and architecture and to establish a different format of collaboration with others. I invite artists, architects, writers, curators, gallerists and collectors to collaborate with me in creating new presentations in this space.

In 2019, the wooden panels of the old shelving system were replaced with mirrors. This opened up another dimension in the room. The new visual space, entitled Cabinet, doubled in size; an imaginary shaft was now visible in the mirror, creating a new virtual ambulatory circuit.

Shaft, a video I shot with Milo Frielinghaus last year, is the centrepiece of the new default installation. In this video, I am going in circles around this imaginary shaft.

The new default installation is about the “Jetztzeit” and the “will have been” of the space. It’s about the building in the Goethestraße 2 and me in it. It is yet another default project because the post-Corona world calls for default. It is time to do things differently, to reboot to a new, simple and effective system of making and presenting art.

 

A default option is an a priori choice made by a system, prior to any choice made by a user. default is a concept and a framework for the production of art. default is Merz, an attitude towards everything – a movement!

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default – An exercise in public aesthetics, shift e.V, Berlin 1998

 

RGB – Kurfürstenstraße U-Bahn station, Berlin, 1999

 

Hebeschiebewerk, Dorothea Deimann gallery, Basel, 2000

 

Monfort / Starkenburg, 2007