A live set by Headless Horseman will take place on the opening evening.

As the second to last part of their exhibition series Speaking to Ancestors, Keumhwa Kim and Pauline Doutreluingne introduce two Berlin-based artists*: Viron Erol Vert and Mariechen Danz present expansive, site-specific installations in the Kleiner and Großer Wasserspeicher in Prenzlauer Berg, in which sound, video, projection, and sculpture melt together. Inspired by mythological narratives and contemporary rituals, the focus is on the human body's relationship to cult and knowledge.
The artists combine journeys into the ancient underworld with today‘s club culture and invite us into the world of technocratic and astrological sign systems. What they have in common is understanding human beings as complex, transcending beings.

The German-Turkish-Greek artist Viron Erol Vert (*1975) investigates religious systems and cultural identities in his work. He addresses the reciprocal relationships between inner spiritual spaces, on the one hand, and spaces constructed by societies on the other. In ancient places of worship, he finds references to mankind's early longings for
transcendence and a supersensory connection to gods and ancestors remain relevant today. Erol Vert transforms the Grosser Wasserspeicher with its circling corridors and barrel vault into a performative transcendence space. The exhibition Club Telesterion is his adaptation of the ancient cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries into contemporary
club culture, in which he himself has been working for 25 years. The Telesterion was a hall in the city of Eleusis where the cult of Demeter and Persephone took place for over 2000 years. Created around 1400 BC, the Sacred Way to the Greek city attracted thousands of people from all over the ancient world to performatively indulge in the idea of rebirth. Just as Persephone descends and returns to the land of the dead every year, it enables people to experience other planes of existence and to live again/differently/newly. Erol Vert sees the parallels to club culture in the temporary immersion in another world where one can let go, lose oneself, and open up to multiple identities and meanings of life.

The artist expansively spans an arc of light on which pieces of clothing from the Berghain Club‘s collection are hung close together. The garments he has collected over the course of a year are human shells of the bodies that wore them. On the labyrinthine path there, along the first rotunda of the former water reservoir, the visitors* encounter nine media installations in opened suitcases, showing celebrating groups of people of various religious, ethnic, and cultural affiliations. Together with images of symbols and landscape fragments, they merge into a whole. The videos were created in collaboration with Ali M. Demirel, a Berlin-based Turkish artist whose work is rooted in architecture, science, and nature. The accompanying sound installation in the space was composed in collaboration with Berlin-based producer Headless Horseman. He combines his otherwise experimental and intense techno sets
with sound spheres that invite you to lose yourself in the labyrinthine spaces.

The Irish-German artist MARIECHEN DANZ (*1980) places the human body at the center of her practice. In sculptures, drawings, costumes, and installations - often in collaboration with other artists or musicians - she explores the history(s) of media as data carriers and questions the communicative capacity of language, standard practices of mediating knowledge, hierarchies of signs and the primacy of Western notions of reason. Danz additionally activates her installations with staged vocal performances.
In View From Above (a song from her sound album Clouded in Veins) at the Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Danz directs the gaze from the earth to the sky and vice versa. In her ongoing series of metal glyph structures (in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co.), punched-out, coded and printed aluminum plates are installed in various arrangements to convey knowledge and information across the boundaries of time and space. Patterns of vents meet punctuation marks and icons from digital communication; stylized planispheres meet anatomical representations from different cultures and eras. Like modular carriers of knowledge, they become a new vocabulary and serve in the exhibition as shadow-casting patterns and reflective media for light that creates their own star maps. The installation is surrounded by casts of human organs: brain, heart, liver, lung, kidney and intestine. Her series Fossilizing Organs consists of transparent and colored organ models that are offset with stones and minerals. History, politics, culture and socialization have literally left their mark on these organs. The natural „implants“ set off immanent fossilization processes in the sculptures and connect the origin of each organ to different places in the world.
In View From Above, Danz assembles a kind of three-dimensional fragmented atlas that appears in the exhibition space like an operating theater in which subjective and objective, subaltern and historical knowledge is actively treated. Her works Modular Glyphic System and Ore Oral Orientation: modular mapping system, on view in the exhibition, were each created in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co. who develop decolonising strategies for production processes in Silicon Valley.

Opening hours: 12:00 - 19:00 (daily)
Design: The Holding Page