I see myself standing at the deck of a ship …

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Penelope Wehrli works at the intersections of space, performance, theatre, film and media art. For her first solo exhibition in Berlin, the scenographer and media artist creates an arc of spatial works across all the rooms and window fronts of Galerie Nord, bringing together poetic research with linguistic, visual, physical and sonic movements.

Penelope Wehrli is known to theatre and dance lovers for her spectacular stage spaces. For decades, she has also been experimenting in her “spatial scores” with diverse performative modules, the respective real spaces and the presence of the visitors. With precision and sensitivity, Wehrli repeatedly balances spatial perception as an aesthetic experience and, by means of overlapping the various levels, designs spaces of imagination that transcend art forms, irritatingly questioning one’s own patterns of perception and thus becoming an exploration of reading, seeing and hearing – the basis of communication, understanding and imagination.

“I see myself standing at the deck of a ship …”, the titular central work of this compilation, was developed by Wehrli exclusively for the gallery and its urban position as an auto-choreographic composition of images set in motion by machines, reflections and urban sound, and choreographed into a spatial score in which the visitor moves as if in a time sculpture.

Her installations and productions are usually created in close cooperation with other artists, the composers Hannes Strobl/Sam Auinger, Michael Vorfeld and katrinem, the performer Rickie Edens, as well as the musician and computer scientist Joa Glasstetter.

The new installation is flanked by earlier works that Wehrli has further developed and spatially adapted for Galerie Nord. Buckminster Fuller’s “Synergetics” and the stable imbalances in complex systems are the initial interest for the computer-controlled video “House of Snow”, in which the movements of bees on a honeycomb serve as the impulse generator for a continuously regenerating polyphonic sound and thought structure.

In the semi-fictional video portrait “of departure” about the Irish-Australian anthropologist Daisy Bates (1860-1951), Wehrli leads us via the fine thread of language into the projection of departure and asks:

How much fiction is there in each departure to become an Other, or Further? How much imagined, dreamed reality does it take to leap over social resistance and personal abysses?

curated by Veronika Witte

With the kind support of the district funding of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the District Cultural Fund Mitte.

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