I went to the new Galerie Nord/Kunstverein Tiergarten exhibition "Sag mir wer du bist" - translated into: "tell me who you are", which opened yesterday, April 9th. The interesting thing about this exhibition is the fact that it has been concieved in only an extremely short period of time... Why is that?!?!? O.K. let's start from the beginning...

The previous exhibition in Galerie Nord was entitled: "ZOG - surrend - subversive Praxis im oeffentlichem Raum". The exhibition was done by a Danish group called "surrend". They used a very direct way to talk about or maybe even criticize religious and cultural phenomenons as well as social and group behaviour... so one of the photographic media used in the exhibition was a sort of "triptycon" portraying, among other things, a very direct comment or joke or whatever (depending how you want to interpret it) about the Mecca. Needless to say, the Moabit/Tiergarten/Berlin Muslim community flipped out and started menacing the gallery until it was forced to close the exhibition for over a week, until it got protection from the police and could reopen again.

And so, the press went crazy, television crews were on the spot a lot, filming, interviewing... and so on. The gallery made a record of 1700 visitors but had to cancel the following exhibition and trade it in for a Muslim community friendly and productive project which opened to the public yesterday evening.

having cleared that, I have to say that I was very skeptic about a quick "ready to wear" concept to calm down the masses... but I must admit that it was very interesting to be there and see it, even though the opening was poorly attended to. The walls of the main hall of the gallery are filled with information sheets about Muslim integration and history and there are posters that deal with the same topic, made by kids at school and so on... all in all a very didactic exhibit without any pleasure for the aesthetic searching visitor.

The really fabulous thing in the exhibition was... and here is the reason I am really writing this comment, was a group of very young, under eighteen, teenagers from the "kiez" - "neighborhood" rapping and hip-hopping about the situation in the world... you know... freedom, integration, poverty and all that stuff. They were amazing, a bit shy and with the typical posse ghetto attitude, with their strict dress codes and smoking cigarettes in front of everybody... little rebels! So they stood in the center of the gallery and started their performance and I just thought it was amazing. I would keep them in the gallery as a living installation throughout the entire exhibition. Just observing their behaviour and language was interesting and aesthetic enough to fill the whole space. And they even wrote their texts themselves. So what seemed to be an apologetic exhibition opening, turned into a great surprise. It was refreshing and pure and yet not in the least pretentious. Go see it and hope they put at least the documentation video on display for us to watch...

Kiss.

Ivan

I en gade med præg af muslimske indvandrere, tyrkiske cafeer, restauranter, butikke og kiosker er det nødvendigt med konstant politivagt udenfor galleriet, som er godt besøgt.

Temaet er ZOG (Zionist occupied Government) om konspirationsteorier som grundlag for højreradikalismen. Der var faktisk flere plakater der var modbydelige overfor præsident Bush og israelske politikere end 'Dumme Stein'.

Adresse: Turmstrasse 75, Moabit, Berlin. Åbent dagligt fra kl. 14.00 til den 29. marts.

"Vi skal ikke gå baglæns."

Politically Incorrect følger situationen i Tyskland.

Kunstverein Tiergarten