The exhibition at Billirubin Gallery, a short walk from Substitut, is in direct counterpoint to Krieg's installation.  Entitled Raw Material, it is anything but--it's instead a series of overtly mediated works, exploring the quandary of representation and re-representation by degrees.  The show features video works by Lohner/Carlson and Pia Greschner, a couple photographs by Gerhard Richter, and a Polaroid collage by Tom Schurr.

Lohner/Carlson's video works, all entitled Raw Material, the unedited scenes from which to make a film, here presented in their own right, line two walls, each one steadied on one frame, as if it's a still camera: a verdant pond, a train platform, a desert.  The stillness of the video leads our focus to the ever slight changes, those brief moments of action: a drop of water falls in the pond, a train rolls in and deposits its passengers, waves of heat rise from the desert sand.  The one video that stands out as quite different from the rest is framed on a woman standing on a street.  She flirtatiously interacts with unseen passersby; her actions seem staged and are weighed down by the connotation that she could be a prostitute of some sort.  This video is particularly voyeuristic in direct contrast to the still and impassive gaze, the various "scenery" as presented in the other videos.  However, this is by far the most interesting and complex of the works, provoking unanswerable questions and hypotheses.

Downstairs Pia Greschner engages with moving images as representations of narrative and conduits of emotion in her work Define Violence, which frames a group of people moving in real time slow motion, a tense scene of what could be seconds lasting instead three minutes.

Using the instant gratification of TV culture and the immediate satisfaction of Polaroid film, Tom Schurr's Polaroid collage is by far the most fun work to look at in this show.  The Polaroid's are entirely shots of TV screens of the 80's, and besides the delicious distortion of colors resulting from tube televisions to instantly processed film, the piece is a veritable time capsule of popular culture (see if you can spot the He-Man).

Two of Richter's works are displayed, and the pieces require a second glance.  At first they appear to be oil paints pressed between panes of glass but are in fact close-up photographs of paint, then hung sideways on the wall.  The re-representation of painting is then highlighted and skewed, as the pieces seamlessly move from one medium to the other.

--Natalie Hegert

(*Images, from top to bottom: Gerhard Richter, Guildenstern, 1998, Cibachrome/Diasec, 102 x 115 cm, courtesy of the Artist and billirubin gallery, Berlin.  Lohner/Carlson, Raw Material, 1994-2008, video, 30.5 x 40, courtesy of the Artist and billirubin gallery, Berlin.  Tom Schurr, TV-Polaroid, 1984-1986, Polaroid, 140 x 302 cm, courtesy of the Artist and billirubin gallery, Berlin.  Tom Schurr, TV-Polaroid (detail), 1984-1986, Polaroid, 140 x 302 cm (detail 10.5 x 9cm), courtesy of the Artist and billirubin gallery, Berlin.)