Saturdays, 14.00–19.00 and by appointment

Public tour through the area and exhibition with curator Guilherme Vilhena Martins: Sunday, 1.12.2024, 14.00
Finissage and open discussion in the exhibition space: Sunday, 8.12.2024, 15.00

Building on a series of collective conversations around the industrial district of Berlin-Tempelhof, on animated architecture is a group show featuring works by the artists Dongchan Kim, Esteban Pérez, Jakob Francisco, Juliane Tübke, Maija Fox, and Nina Nowak.

While Tempelhof was a thriving industrial district in the early 20th century, nowadays, its old industrial neighborhoods seem mostly composed of empty buildings and ruins – an eclectic mix of car workshops, junkyards wholesalers and food delivery services scarcely populate some of its areas that otherwise feel left behind from another time. The aim of the exhibition on animated architectureand the group seminar that took place in the months leading up to it, is to point at the act of abandoning through a critical lens, highlighting the burden that outdated infrastructure represents within urban ecosystems, while stressing the tension between public and private space as well as the power dynamics at play in urban planning. Shaped by a series of discussions moderated by curator Guilherme Vilhena Martins, on animated architecture seeks to point at notions such as ‘waste’, ‘purification’, ‘extraction’, and ‘hegemony’. The exhibition at soft power– an art space itself located in a former and largely empty factory building in the old industrial district of Tempelhof – presents a group of works that range from sculpture to photography and video installation, staging a dissection of still life that sketches the possibility of critique based on different instances of emotional response, thus hinting at a sense of gesture and animation; a careful touch among the waste.

"Apparently, this whole area was a prosperous industrial district sometime at the beginning of the 20th century. It all seemed perfect back then – there was a big road running parallel to a canal connected to the network that stretches all over the continent, boats coming and going, trucks loading up and leaving. The future looked bright. There was a railway, plans for extension, and a port nearby. The building I am in, for instance, used to be a massive chocolate factory. We had to scrub the tiles as we first broke in. The smell never really left.

It all seems so fragile now, almost absurd. And yet it is perfectly reasonable: power is spatial and that can be seen in how space is organised, what’s left in and out, what is useful and what is not. I mean, just look at these long streets, these concrete meadows dotted by falling shutters and empty rooms, the huge crane passively floating in a chain of steel, almost like one of Zettel’s huts, stuck in clouds that might just as well be an extension of the gray tarmac surrounding it. Who gets to decide who waits for what? Who gets to decide that it’s time to leave, that all of a sudden it does not matter anymore?"

(Excerpt from the exhibition text by Guilherme Vilhena Martins)