Viktoria Binschtok's photographs are as blurry and mysterious as the situations that her subjects have been hired to navigate. In "Suspicious Minds," we never see the photographs' central subjects.

Rather than displaying the entire news photograph  that she appropriates and blows up to massive proportions, the Russian-born photographer zooms in the people around the periphery hired to protect whomever's appearance is the reason why the image was taken.

Binschtok's source material spans photo archives from state receptions, outdoor speeches and random shots of celebrities being bombarded by fans. It is never explicit whether we are witnessing moments when a president or a pop-star enters the public gaze. The importance of a protective figure is therefore equalized and the history altering possibility that a leader might be assassinated is placed on the same plane as the more personalized tragedy of a popular cultural figure being hurt. Instead we see only the men hired to protect them from the inquiring and intrusive public - ie: us.

What becomes the focal point of each image is a conservatively dressed man with a stony stares whose expressionless regard counterbalances the frenzy apparently surrounding him and undercuts the focused interest of the emotionally roused public. They are constant presences in press images and yet they most often overlooked as they look over the crowds with scepticism. In Binschtok's images these me appear bizarrely detached from their settings. Although they are hired to oversee the manic scenes that assault them and their charges, their frozen expressions seem to focus on nothing.

The exhibition's title references Elvis's late song of the same name, which lustily accuses a woman of destroying a relationship with jealousy. However, the function of a bodyguard is to be the embodiment of a public's toxic feelings for the object of their communal adoration. A bodyguard functions like a biblical scapegoat on whom a public's sins are placed thereby liberating us all to hurl our emotions and energy at the star who attracts our unbridled attention.

-- Ana Finel Honigman

(Images: Viktoria Binschtok, Body 116, 2009, c-print, framed, 73 x 53 cm; Body 12, 2009, c-print, framed, 163 x 128 cm; Body 106, 2009, c-print, framed, 41 x 22 cm; Courtesy of the artist and KLEMM'S)

With its dominant street charm and DIY flair, it seems fitting that Berlin is the birthplace for a project like Backjumps - a magazine for “Urban Communication and Aesthetic” cum art event. The magazine was introduced in 1994 and is now available in museum book-stores (Palais de Tokyo, Tate Modern etc.) without having lost any of its street cred. To promote and celebrate the magazine’s growing popularity, Editor Adrian Nabi inaugurated Backjump’s Live Issue in 2005 - a biennial series of street art exhibitions held in Berlin’s legendary squat, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg. Always a lively affair, the opening nights of Backjumps’ Live Issue soon became known as must-go event for many Berliners. 

However, with a myriad of works by various artists, the Live Issue wasn’t always a comprehensively curated show. This year, Vol. 4 was presented in a much smaller and more concentrated format. It’s not clear if this is a result of curatorial decisions or a lack of funding in light of the financial crisis - either way: the reduced amount of art and artists being shown strongly contributed to the show’s overall unity. Vol. 4 features four aesthetic positions by seven artists living in Berlin (some working as a duo or a group), with a focus on their interactions with the city.

The first room featured a video by American ex-pat and Backjumps veteran Brad Downey. Shot in broad daylight on a busy road that connects the trendy neighborhoods of Prenzlauerberg and Friedrichshain, the video shows the creation of one of the artist’s “Spontaneous Sculptures” - a clever combination of disobedient behavior and action performance. The video features Downey attaching the ends of industrial rolls of adhesive tape in blue, red and white to a rotating, column-shaped billboard bearing an ad for a popular Swedish clothing manufacturer. The rolls of tape are then fixed upon street objects such as lamps and garbage cans. As the billboard rotates, it gradually becomes covered with tape, becoming the source of its own transformation. Downey can be seen running around the column trying to find more fixed objects to connect with tape. In the process, the cylindrical billboard begins to resemble a maypole with the energetic Downey a modern pagan celebrating urbanism instead of nature.

Another piece that transforms the idea of reclaiming urban space for art is the video “Zwischenzeit” (In Between) by the creative duo Wermke and Leinkauf of Stop Making Sense. In 2008, the two artists took a makeshift handcar made of metal and bike parts and embarked on a nocturnal journey on Berlin’s railway tracks. The result is a 17 minute video arrangement on 3 screens, featuring an eerie soundtrack made up of the monotonous, droning sound of the handcar rolling along the tracks at night. Trains can be seen cruising past the stations intermittently. Following their departure (after the station has quieted down and before the next train arrives) an obscure figure can be made out in the dark, slowly making his way along the tracks. Once in focus, we can see a calm but persistent person riding the handcar. 

Similarly, artist Pigenius Cave built a tricycle to explore Berlin’s largely inaccessible underground for “The Immortal Youth of Pigenius Cave,” a collection of photographs and found objects taken out of city’s canalization system. Displayed in an amusing manner resembling a natural history museum, the objects and photographs allegedly reconstruct the childhood and youth of a street artist growing up in Berlin. RZM’s installation „Wandklopfen“ also uses found objects and sounds recorded around Berlin to create a three dimensional collage of the city. 

Without a doubt, the piece that drew most attention on opening night was Brad Downey’s “Don’t worry about that shit, René.” The work documents the controversy surrounding the artist’s spraying the front windows of Berlin’s luxury department store, KaDeWe, with green paint in 2008. Downey used a fire extinguisher to achieve maximum results. While the scandalous piece took place on the streets of Berlin, it has less to do with the city itself than with the global phenomenon of the commercialization of art in general – and of street art in particular.

The story goes like this: To celebrate their 75^th anniversary and spice up its image, Lacoste (with the help of the KaDeWe) commissioned 12 street artists to reinterpret the brand’s green crocodile emblem. The works were to be presented in the departments store’s windows for a few weeks before being auctioned. Downey, a reputedly “hard to buy” artist, finally agreed to participate, submitting the cryptic proposal/prophesy “Something outside will turn green.” Instead of designing a piece for the department store’s windows, Downey sprayed them with Lacoste-green. The piece presented at Backjumps documents everything from the news reports speculating about the identity of the “vandals”, to the damage-control email exchange between the artist’s agents and KaDeWe managers.

Downey’s action could be understood as a much needed critique of the state of street art: alienated from its illegal, nocturnal origins, graffiti today not only features prominently on ridiculously priced sneakers and T-shirts, but is also widely commissioned by major companies for “embedded” advertisements. However, I made the unfortunate mistake of reading what the artist himself had to say about his piece. In his text, Downey describes how he was contacted by NOWADAYS, the event agency that curated the Lacoste show and tried to convince him to participate. Admitting that he didn’t know what the KaDeWe was, Downey decided to “go and have a look.” The American ex-pat, unfamiliar with Berlin’s oldest, most traditional department store, expected to find a shopping mall. While looking for the Lacoste “store”, Downey recounts an unpleasant encounter he had with a KaDeWe employee whose English wasn’t good enough to understand what he wanted.

Claiming to be “disgusted” by his first experience with the KaDeWe, Downey resolved to take part in the show. It seems strange that instead of being disgusted with a “creative” commercial industry that pays people for generating bad art (in celebration of a clothing brand, for example), the artist directs his anger towards a simple KaDeWe employee who does what Berliners do best - be rude. But giving Downey the benefit of the doubt, the work itself is hilarious documentation of commissioned art gone wrong.

--Hili Perlson

(Images courtesy of artists and Backjumps:  Backjumps poster Vol #4; Backjumps creator Adrian Nabi and photographer Denise Palma Ferrante (photo: Hili Perlson); Matthias Wermke & Misca Leinkrauf, Zwischenzeit, 2008, Still aus 3-Kanal-Videoinstallation, Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf ©; Pigenius Cave, Tricycle, photo courtesy of urbanartcore.eu; Brad Downey, Don't worry about that shit René, Matson Jones Remix, 2008, Action Shot, Brad Downey © (Foto: Richard Schwarz)

Photo Captions:

- Backjumps Live Issue

- downey_1.jpg: »Don't worry about that shit René, Matson Jones Remix«, 2008, Action Shot, Brad Downey © (Foto: Richard Schwarz)

- wermkeleinkauf_1.jpg: »Zwischenzeit«, 2008, Still aus 3-Kanal-Videoinstallation, Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf ©

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FEINKOST is pleased to present the group exhibition entitled “Communism Never Happened”. Taking its title from a work by artist Ciprian Mureşan, the show explores different modes of archiving, processing, assimilating and forgetting.

Do math equations in your head. In Mureşan’s work the title phrase was cut from vinyl records of propaganda. This now unconfirmable recording functions here as a revised text, the original source compromised to convey new information. Legibility of text and its translation into raw material is the outcome of Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová’s piece “All Periods in Capital” from 2007. The seminal book by Karl Marx has been filtered through the bean counter, each moment of punctuation converted into a small handmade black ball, more than 22,000 sentences of commodified ideology. How well ideology works on paper versus its real-world application underlies Yang Zhenzhong’s 2003 video “Spring Story”, a tale of a two-headed dragon and a unified workforce.

Keep a diary. Cold storage of celluloid can be the best method for properly preserving an archive. Sean Snyder’s imagery of where this methodology has helped to extend our resources for remembering proves insightful. Re-enactment can stimulate the memory of an experience. Bodily memory obtained through a routine of regimented exercise is the starting point for Lucia Nimcova’s video “Exercise” (2007). The video’s juxtaposition atop a photojournalistic archive of daily practice helps to fill the gaps between workouts. Enactment facilitates recalling an event based on projection and the actor’s ability to evoke the character. A production still from the set of David Levine’s documentary “Bauerntheater” (2007) depicts the actor David Barlow endure the manual labor of method acting as he trains to become a 1950s East German potato farmer.

Draw a map from memory. The sculpture “Neueröffnung” by artist Patrick Tuttofuoco is a map editorialized according to a psychogeograhical experience – neighborhoods are layered and reconfigured complete with ciphers of time and place. “Billboard Heaven” is a continuation of Luchezar Boyadjiev’s research into the collapse of public, private and corporate space within cityscapes. In this body of work Boyadjiev has sequestered every remaining available space of sky and sidewalk with commercial excess and sexualized architecture.

Learn a new language. The mirror-like quality of Julian Bismuth’s floor piece teases the eye with a familiarity of economic structures by transcending pocket change into an alternative value system. The analysis of cultural languages and codes has always been at the heart of the Kiev-based REP Group’s research. Their project “Patriotism” functions as a progressive iconography, i.e. word pictures transmitting messages that instruct us on how to navigate contemporary society.

(Images: Sean Snyder;  David Levine; Patrick Tuttofuoco; Courtesy of the artists and FEINKOST)

BERLIN DESIGN DUO:

Jennifer Gilpin & Kyle Callanan

"Leather is grown not made. It is skin. We feel naturally connected to it," declares Canadian-born and Berlin-based Jennifer Gilpin of the design duo Don't Shoot the Messengers. With her partner, fashion and costume designer Kyle Callanan, Gilpin focuses on supple geometrically-cut leather dresses and skirts. The team began their collaboration after Gilpin's travels in Morocco inspired her interest in the sensual qualities of leather. Originally called Garter & Asp, an appellation merging a harmless snake with one that is lethally poisonous, the line aimed to create elegant yet subversively sexy feminine garments. "There is a sort of darkness that we look at," says Gilpin. "Our aesthetic comes from an undefined place, yet we both seek to define it and rein it in. We look at development of a feeling, a world for each collection, not necessarily restrained by the seasonal movements. Each of these worlds are linked yet separate and unique, a specific line remains that passes though each." The designers aim to incorporate other tactile material including silk and other light fabrics to complement their masterful use of leather and exotic skins such as stingray. But the focus of their line is not the materials but their artful cutting and construction based on triangular cuts and a careful adherence to the body's curves. Gilpin sums up their aesthetic as, "Geometry in relation to the body is key for us. What we want is make clothes that are molten, elegant, sexy, and just a little bit rock 'n roll."

--Ana Finel Honigman

(PHOTO BY MAXIME BALLESTEROS)