Alexandra Pirici is set to present Attune from Thursday, 25 April 2024 – a major new site-specific installation with live performative action and music – at Hamburger Bahnhof. Pirici’s expansive work launches a new series of annual commissions in the museum’s Historic Hall to be opened in conjunction with Gallery Weekend Berlin. The 2024 edition is co-commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof and Audemars Piguet Contemporary and co-financed by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Pirici transforms the Historic Hall into a dynamic landscape: A stainless steel vine-like sculpture, a shape-shifting sand dune, a spiraling platform, plants, mineral formations, dance and song bring audiences face to face with the fascination of self-organizing processes and patterns.
Image above: Installationsansicht. Alexandra Pirici. Attune, 2024. Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2024, Courtesy die Künstlerin, Hamburger Bahnhof und Audemars Piguet / Foto: Edi Constantin
With Attune Pirici explores how humans – and their more-than-human counterparts – resemble, influence, and attune to one another to bring forth complex structures, whether chemical, physical, mineral or social. Having extensively studied self-organizing patterns and processes across all forms of matter, Pirici imbues her work with the knowledge she has acquired from careful observation of the world around her as well as from her reading, experimentation, discourse and collaboration with scientists across various disciplines.
Pirici creates a vibrant imaginary landscape within the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof. She interweaves active sculptural elements with live performance and polyphonic musical pieces of her own choreography and composition. In this at once archaic and futuristic environment, created by the artist and designed together with long-term collaborator Andrei Dinu, chemical reactions, mineral formations, and physical phenomena perform alongside living bodies in acknowledgement and celebration of the continuum between living and non-living matter. Together these actors show how stable structures emerge from the random behavior of atoms, molecules, and cells – in both animate and inanimate matter. A stainless steel vine-like sculpture, a shape-shifting sand dune, a spiraling platform, plants, mineral formations, chemical reaction, dance and song bring audiences face to face with the wonder of self-organizing processes and patterns. These are not only part of the world as it is experienced but also offer an insight into the emergence of life and evolution.
A highlight of Pirici’s work is the demonstration of the Briggs-Rauscher reaction in which a solution shifts back and forth between two colors before the reaction finally comes to an end. This oscillating chemical reaction is often used to demonstrate self-organizing patterns in chemistry. For Attune, Alexandra Pirici has collaborated with chemists and engineers to significantly scale up and, for the first time, to fully automate the reaction. It will take place several times in the course of the exhibition.
The live action will take place for four hours each day for the duration of the exhibition period from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. with the exception of Thursdays when it is scheduled to take place from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. The Briggs-Rauscher reaction can be experienced twice daily during the opening and closing weeks of the exhibition: on 25 April between 8:00 and 8:30 p.m. and between 9:15 and 10 p.m.; and from 26 April to 1 May between 1:30 to 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. The times during the closing week will be announced on the museum website and via its social media channels. An interdisciplinary mediation program with special offers for schools will also be available.
Performers: Caroline Beach, Juan Corres Benito, Noemi Calzavara, Michelle Cheung, Gabrielle Duval, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Nitsan Margaliot, Jared Marks, Tatiana Mejía, Emily Ranford, Asuka Julia Riedl, Robert Schulz, Yurika S. Yamamoto.
The exhibition is curated by Catherine Nichols, curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.
Accompanying the exhibition is the fifth edition of Hamburger Bahnhof’s catalogue series, published by Silvana Editoriale Milano.
In 2024 the work for the Historic Hall has been co-commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof and Audemars Piguet Contemporary.
This is Pirici’s second collaboration with Audemars Piguet Contemporary, following the program’s support of Pirici’s Encyclopedia of Relations (2022) at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale. The new co-commission enables the artist to develop her practice at a larger scale, incorporating fixed physical structures alongside live action.
The exhibition is co-funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Funded by Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).
The Artist:
Alexandra Pirici (born in 1982 in Bucharest, Romania) is an artist with a background in dance and choreography, working in the field of visual arts and contemporary performance art. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, two times included in the Venice Biennale – the 59th edition of the International Art Exhibition The Milk of Dreams in 2022 and the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th edition in 2013, and in the decennial art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Munster in 2017. She had collective and solo exhibitions in contexts such as New Museum New York, Art Basel Messeplatz, The 9th Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 10, Tate Modern London, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum Ludwig Cologne, The Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, NTU CCA Singapore, among many others. Alexandra Pirici works in museum contexts, in public space and sometimes in theatrical frameworks. She choreographs ongoing actions, performative monuments and performative environments that fuse dance, sculpture, spoken word and music. Her works deal with monumentality or the history of specific places and institutions in order to playfully tackle and transform existing hierarchies. They also reflect on the history and function of gestures in art and popular culture or on questions about the body, its presence, absence or image and the politics of capture. Her performative artworks are part of private and public collections as live actions. Since February 2023, she has been the first professor of performance in contemporary art at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich (AdBK Munich).
“Attune comes from an ongoing interest in exploring our relationship to other life forms and the possibility to come closer to other forms of embodiment. It now expands to include non-living material configurations and their performativity. Bodies and material configurations do not have to be human or even alive to display intelligent behavior, which grounds the idea that no matter how different, we are somehow fundamentally connected to one another. I am hoping to celebrate this continuum through this imaginary landscape that lives for a few months in the exhibition space.”- Alexandra Pirici, Artist
WHEN?
Opening: Thursday, 25. April 2024, 7 pm
Exhibition period: Thursday, 25. April until Sunday, 6. October 2024
Live-action: daily from 1 to 5 pm, on Thursdays from 3 to 7 pm.
Opening hours:
Tue, Wed, Fri 10 am – 6 pm
Thu 10 am – 8 pm
Sat + Sun 11 am – 6 pm
WHERE?
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart
Invalidenstraße 50/51
10557 Berlin-Mitte
COSTS?
Regular: € 14
Reduced: € 7
