Ich sehe

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From 12 May, the gallery will be open again at the usual times. In order to give all those interested the opportunity to still view the exhibition, we have extended it until 4 Jul 2020.

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In the series Grenzgängerinnen, Galerie Nord presents female artists who defy and expand borders and genres. The third exhibition in this series is dedicated to Käthe Kruse, an outstanding artist who since the 1980s, then still as part of the legendary West Berlin avant-garde trio Die Tödliche Doris, has developed new formats with the interweaving of music, texts, performance, video and painting that cannot be categorised conventionally.
Today, as a solo artist, Käthe Kruse continues to conceptually combine a wide variety of media into her own artistic approach. In her latest project, she uses painting, music and performance to investigate the interaction of language, politics and media coverage.

For the two work complexes Ich sehe (I see) and 366 Tage (366 days), Käthe Kruse collected 25 headlines a day for two years, each from a German-language daily newspaper such as Taz, Tagesspiegel or Süddeutsche Zeitung. She used headlines from the fields of society, politics, economy, ecology and culture without distinction. When selecting headlines, she relied solely on her artistic and political sensibility. Stored in a calendar, she collected a contingent of sentences and nouns during this period – a subjective archive of recent contemporary history in the most concise form – that does not seem to follow any fixed system of content, but in its artistic transformation creates a disturbing social picture.
Transferred to individual A4 photo panels, Kruse arranges the 366 days strictly in calendar order and thus presents not only a chronological memory but also an image complex that in its minimalist arrangement reveals irritating connections about the meanings of language, text and image.

In a second step, the artist isolates all the nouns from the headings, which she lines up word by word in alphabetical order and painted in block letters with a thin brush on canvases. The result is 80 black-and-white, encyclopaedic-looking text images with a total of 3927 nouns: from fear of descent to immigration record. The tableau with the initial letter X contains only one word: xenophobia – the rest is white pictorial space. In the isolation and in the monotonous, staccato, brittle stringing together of sentences and nouns, as well as in the reduced spatial staging, Kruse almost casually exposes the dangers of the unreflected use of language.
But “Käthe Kruse grounds the two language works neither with moral imperative nor with indignation; neither do they radiate fatalism, nor optimism. First, the political artist-subject registers something: ‘I see.'”
(from Hanne Loreck: An Alphabet Against the End of the Future, Käthe Kruse’s cycle of works Ich sehe, DISTANZ, 2020)

The two intertwined groups of works are spread across two exhibition venues in Berlin, making this project a special event. Under the title Ich sehe (I see), Kruse presents the 80 tableaux in an installation at Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten, forming a frieze that runs through all the rooms. At the Zwinger Galerie, the archive of collected headings will be opened up under the title 366 Days.

In keeping with their interdisciplinary approach, both exhibitions will be complemented by a series of performative events. Together with Myriam El Haik on piano and Edda Kruse Rosset on percussion, Kruse has set the 80 word tableaux to music in a spoken word concert that will be performed in both galleries. In addition, Käthe Kruse will perform a reading performance over several days in the North Gallery.

An important part of the project is a publication that will be published by DISTANZ to accompany the exhibitions. The edition consists of a double LP recorded at Studio 65 by Alexander Hacke, 80 picture plates, a newspaper with all the headlines and an accompanying booklet with installation views of the exhibitions. The numbered and signed special edition includes a modal cloth printed with all 3927 words.
The presentation of the publication with publisher Matthias Kliefoth (DISTANZ) will be accompanied by an artist talk between Prof. Dr. Hanne Loreck (Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Hamburg) and Käthe Kruse.

Veronika Witte, Curator

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Edition “Ich sehe”: 70 €
Cassette with 80 plates, accompanying booklet, newspaper and double LP
64 pages, 80 colour and 140 black and white illustrations, German/English, 31,5 × 31,5 cm, ISBN 978-3-95476-328-3, published April 2020.

Also available individually:
Double LP: 40 €
Scarf, printed, modal, edition 366: 180 €

Special edition: 480 €
DISTANZ-Verlag publishes the cassette together with the scarf in an edition of 50 copies as a hand-signed special edition.

With the kind support of the district funding of the Senatsverwaltung Kultur und Europa.
In cooperation with Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin, Fachbereich Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte.

The publication “Käthe Kruse: Ich sehe” is produced with the kind support of the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa.

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And here are some articles on the exhibition from the press:

Tagesspiegel: Wörter mit Wumms
taz: Nazipelz und ein Kilo Kokain
Tip Berlin: Erste Corona-Lockerungen in der Kultur
Ecke Turmstraße: Käthe Kruse – Eine Doppelausstellung

Interview with Käthe Kruse at Art in Berlin and the magazin Kaput

Online tour through the exhibition “Ich sehe” at Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten: One Heart Berlin
Online tour through the exhibition “366 Tage” at Zwinger Galerie: YouTube

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