On 8 February 2025, the artist JAŠA invites you to a performance at Kühlhaus Berlin am Gleisdreieck. Fragments of Us transforms the industrial environment of the Kühlhaus Berlin into a stage for fragmented narratives and enigmatic encounters.
Image above: © the artist.
The audience is invited to move through this evocative landscape and observe the performers in repetitive gestures and movements that hint at forgotten stories and unspoken truths.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905
With each new chapter, JAŠA continues its research into the relationships between different media, emphasising the performative element of the body and its presence in dialogue with space as a material and symbolic element. Recognisable elements of everyday life become part of an architectural sculpture embedded in the space. The audience moves within it, creates its own perspectives and thus captures the ephemeral in all its beauty and potential.
The artist explains: ‘Over the past year, I have been working on developing the chapters of The Monuments – both as stand-alone stories and as part of the overall concept of a long-term project, a complex visual narrative that unfolds over seventeen chapters. Twelve have already been completed, five remain.’
JAŠA (born Jaša Mrevlje-Pollak in Ljubljana in 1978) represented Slovenia at the 2015 Venice Biennale in the Arsenale with a sculptural-architectural installation and a long-term group performance entitled Utter_the violent necessity for the embodied presence of hope. Internationally active, JAŠA has lived and worked in Berlin since 2020.
The Monuments is a long-term project that was developed on the grounds of the Kühlhaus Berlin as part of the residency programme. It is divided into 17 chapters, each of which represents an independent and unique event.
The individual chapters of The Monuments are linked by an evolving conceptual narrative. JAŠA’s conceptual stance manifests itself in each individual event as an ‘attitude’ towards the use of space and time. ‘Have you ever wanted to enter a sculpture?’ here becomes not just a rhetorical question, but a fact, a statement. A work of art shapes and creates reality, even if it is ephemeral. It arises from fleeting overlaps and yet remains tangible and sensual.
The Monuments is not an art project that aims to remedy all the world’s ills or design new structures for living. It is a self-confident artistic structure that is organised collectively. It is about finding ways to survive and grow – regardless of the conditions in which the protagonists find themselves.
Each chapter of The Monuments consists of different narrative, parallel and contrasting strands that deal with proximity, urgency and self-realisation through reaction and presence. A live artwork can respond directly to the socio-political present, so the original plan serves as the foundation on which each chapter is built. The attempt to embed the ephemeral in materials can seem the most futile of all forms of expression. At the same time, however, such a process can lead to a work of art that creates its own stance – rather than following, bowing to or reflecting on an existing one.
The experience of an architectural monument or a work of art is inherently limited, as we only fully engage with it for a short period of time. Material possession does not define the exclusivity of the art experience. What remains is a memory of the work – fragments and pieces of this experience that spread out in different layers and structures of memory.
The basic principle of The Monuments is to structure itself through the simultaneous expansion and contraction of site-specific and performative interventions. These define the individual chapters in the course of the project, which began in December 2021 and will conclude with the final chapter, Chapter 17, in February 2026.
Performance: Aws Zubaidy, Gáspár Bálint-Hazai, Irene Ambrogi, Jillian May, John Shades, Mattias Gimigliano, Laura DeAngelis und Vincent Schneider
WHEN?
Saturday, 8 February 2025, 6 – 10 pm
WHERE?
Kühlhaus Berlin
Luckenwalder Str. 3
10963 Berlin
COSTS?
Free admission
