For the following 5 months, the artist Alexandra Pirici has turned the huge central corridor of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof right into a cross between a science experiment, a panorama and a choral efficiency. Her newest large-scale stay work, titled Attune, opened final week on the up to date artwork museum forward of Gallery Weekend Berlin, co-funded by the German Federal Cultural Basis and Audemars Piguet Modern, the artwork commissioning programme of the Swiss luxurious watchmakers.
A skilled dancer, Pirici made her identify with “stay sculptures” by which she choreographs teams of performers to behave out a dizzying number of ideas utilizing solely their our bodies. Her breakout 2013 exhibition, An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale, took over the Romanian pavilion of that yr’s Biennale with bodily re-enactments of greater than 100 artworks from the occasion’s historical past, from Picasso to Maurizio Cattelan. Leaking Territories, made for Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017, noticed performers answering random questions from the viewers like a “human search engine”. Encyclopedia of Relations, a earlier collaboration with Audemars Piguet Modern for the 2022 Venice Biennale, dissected the very thought of interplay, not solely between people and know-how however amongst different entities, together with crops and animals, rocks and waves.
Humanity’s coexistence with different lifeforms—and with non-living issues on the planet—is centre stage in Attune. Talking at a press convention, Pirici described the brand new work as a “celebration” of the “continuum” between the dwelling our bodies who will transfer collectively by the Hamburger Bahnhof corridor and the “lifelike” behaviour present in inanimate matter. She stated she was “thinking about increasing the vary of what can carry out and what might be energetic”.
Pirici’s “chemical gardens” hanging in outsized take a look at tubes Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet
For 4 hours each afternoon till October, Pirici’s forged of human performers will dance, crawl, sing, recite and collect collectively on the museum. However Attune additionally includes a collection of inanimate parts which can be anticipated to carry out in their very own manner, together with a sand dune and a cluster of “chemical gardens” hanging in outsized take a look at tubes from a sprawling metallic construction. These vibrant mineral growths, evoking the tendrils of coral or algae, are created by dropping metallic crystals into an answer: an experiment that has fascinated chemists because the seventeenth century.
Pirici desires to make seen the self-organising patterns in inorganic supplies which have been discovered by trendy science. Borne by the wind, grains of sand coalesce into dunes. A mixture of colourless options produces a dramatically oscillating chemical response between darkish blue and amber. Pirici has collaborated with chemists on the Freie Universität Berlin and College of Bucharest to scale up the Briggs-Rauscher Response for a couple of public “performances” as a part of her exhibition.
Inanimate parts, corresponding to a san dune, are anticipated to carry out in their very own manner Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet
The analysis for Attune attracts from biochemistry, molecular biology and physics in addition to extra “poetic” sources, she tells The Artwork Newspaper, just like the writer Ursula Ok. Le Guin’s 1985 sci-fi novel All the time Coming Dwelling. One other start line was the concept of choreographing a “duet” between a human physique and a stone, the dwelling with the non-living. “There needn’t be a distinction between scientific info and delightful tales and metaphors,” she says.
Pirici likens the set up to “a panorama or a small piece of a fictional planet” for guests to roam round freely, and the stay performances additionally take inspiration from the pure world. At moments within the present the performers’ actions evoke the spiralling leaves of an aloe plant, the synchronised flashing of fireflies in the dead of night (the group waves their telephone lights in concord in an expertise acquainted to any concert-goer) and the murmurations made by starlings swooping collectively by the sky.
Their voices, too, mimic the whistling of birds. The title “Attune” has a intentionally musical connotation, as Pirici has composed a lot of polyphonic songs for the efficiency that echo by the cavernous house. She describes the feat of attaining concord by a mess of melodies as a metaphor for a urgent political problem: to “discover a frequent floor” within the midst of division. “It’s fascinating to consider the artwork establishment as an area for a brand new form of gathering and singing collectively,” she says.
Alexandra Pirci’s Attune (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet
Within the age of local weather emergency, there’s an ecological message underlying all of it, “about interconnectedness, and the way we’re mainly a part of the identical world and cloth”. Finally, Pirici hopes to encourage viewers with “an prolonged appreciation of the fabric world” and of humanity’s “non-exceptional” standing on the planet, she says in a latest interview, printed within the exhibition catalogue.
Though Attune invitations Berliners to linger and return to the work repeatedly for the present’s five-month run, it will likely be an ephemeral presence within the museum, like all of Pirici’s durational stay works. However there’s a likelihood that in future she may have a everlasting base for her hybrid experiments between efficiency, philosophy, science and nature. Her “dream”, she says, could be to create her personal public artwork house in Europe, a form of “performative sculpture backyard”. Increasing on the sci-fi storytelling of Attune, she imagines it as a spot the place “folks might carry out alongside crops” or different “more-than-human parts”.
• Alexandra Pirici: Attune, till 6 October 2024, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin. Dwell motion day by day from 1pm-5pm, Thursdays from 3pm-7pm. The Briggs-Rauscher Response might be skilled between 1.30pm-2pm and 4-5pm from 26-30 April.
