Just as we wave goodbye to Gallery Weekend & Mayday madness, positively exhausted and perfectly content, new invitations are filling up our virtual inboxes. Pictoplasma festival is coming up, and yet another holiday which will roll into a four-day weekend. There is no shortage of exhibition openings, either; scroll through the highlights of another eventful week. 

 

WEDNESDAY 04.05

14.00 Pictoplasma Berlin @ Various locations

WHY: One of the world's leading festivals for the latest trends in visual culture, Pictoplasma brings together international artists working in contemporary character design, illustration, graphics, animation, and urban arts. Creators, producers and fans meet for the conference with artist presentations, screening programmes, lectures, workshops, and a series of exhibitions with a range of new works: sculptures, paintings, art editions... Visitors get the opportunity to learn about the current trends in image production, and to get in touch with cutting-edge artists.

Various locations; central venue Kino Babylon / Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse 30, 10178 Berlin, U Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz / ongoing until 08.05 / more info

 

THURSDAY 05.05

10.00 Carl Andre - "Sculpture as Place, 1958 – 2010" @ Hamburger Bahnhof

WHY: With more than 300 works, „Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010“ is the largest solo show to date of this major artist who pioneered a fundamentally different concept of sculpture. Carl Andre's oeuvre is presented in works spanning over five decades: approximately 50 sculptures, over 200 poems, a group of rarely exhibited assemblages known as „Dada Forgeries“, and a selection of photographs and ephemera allow the audience to trace the historical and aesthetic shifts and evolutions in Andre's artistic production.

Hamburger Bahnhof / Invalidenstr. 50-51, 10557 Berlin, S Hauptbahnhof / ongoing until 18.09 / more info

 

19.00 "2011 2012" @ Meinblau Projektraum

WHY: The collaborative project “2011 2012” is developed by ten artists of the sculpture department, year 2011/12 at the Berlin Weissensee Art Academy. Their works began in dialogue with each other, stayed flexible, and took shape in the process until the set-up. The artistic approaches range from installation, sculpture, video to drawing, or follow performative influences. As a joint project, the exhibition reflects the variety of interpretations and extensions of the classical notion of sculpture.

Meinblau Projektraum / Christinenstrasse 18-19, 10119 Berlin, U2 Senefelder Platz / open through 21.05 / free entry / more info

 

19.00 Travis Jeppesen  - “New Writing” @ Exile

 

WHY: Exile presents “New Writing”, the first solo exhibition of writer and artist Travis Jeppesen in Berlin. The exhibition oscillates between text as language, as abstraction, as calligraphy, as image, as text. Two-dimensional subtexts reverberate within the gallery space, turning text to image to mirror, offering up a new language for the eye to decode.

Exile / Kurfürstenstr. 19, 10785 Berlin, U Kurfürstenstr. / open through 28.05 / free entry / more info

 

SATURDAY 07.05

18.00 "Cmelka - Choi - Falsnaes. Repetition" @ Friedhof St. Elisabeth II (Blumenladen)

WHY: The central works by the Berlin-based artists Kerstin Cmelka, Sunah Choi and Christian Falsnaes are brought together for the exhibition that takes repetition as the main theme. The exhibition looks at the possibility of documenting performance art. Not with photographs or videos that basically aim to testify, but rather with the repetition of the work itself; sometimes in a more subtle manner, sometimes in very distinct repetitive gestures. After the opening night, the three performance replays will take place on three consecutive weekends – May 14th, 21st and 28th.

Friedhof St. Elisabeth II / Wollankstr. 66, 13359 Berlin, S Wollankstr. / ongoing until 28.05 / more info

 

20.00 Uriel Orlow – "Unmade Film: The Proposal" @ Scriptings

WHY: “Unmade Film: The Proposal” is a lecture performance by Uriel Orlow which presents the journey of a film that is impossible to make. It takes as its starting point the mental hospital Kfar Sha’ul in Jerusalem. The different elements evolved over a two year period of research and production through exchanges and collaborations with psychologists, psychiatric nurses, historians, musicians, pupils, amateur actors, curators, artists and others. The artist returns to the very beginning of the project, looking backward and forward at the same time.

Scriptings / Kamerunerstr. 47, 13351 Berlin, U Seestr. / free entry / more info

 

WEDNESDAY 11.05

20.00 Imagination Language: Paint Sessions @ AETHER

WHY: When was the last time you sunk your hands into paint, played with colour, texture  and shape, and allowed your conscious self to drift along? AETHER is letting the space  this night for finger paint and drawing. It is their first open experiment of 'collective intuitional creativity', which will be run as an open and loose art therapy session. Paints, brushes, pencils, charcoal, papers and a painting overalls supplied (limited), or if you are an artist, feel free to bring your own tools.

AETHER / Pannierstr. 56, 12047 Berlin, U Hermannplatz / free entry / more info

 

THURSDAY 12.05

10.00 William Kentridge – "NO IT IS!" @ Martin-Gropius-Bau

WHY: William Kentridge is a visual artist, filmmaker, director, and a great raconteur. His comprehensive body of works has spanned several artistic disciplines for more than three decades. The “Drawing Lessons”, which the artist will present in a marathon performance, are autobiographical lectures, hybrid pieces of art between theatre, film and drawing, and constitute the quintessence of his transdisciplinary way of working, as well as the nucleus of the work presented in Berlin. They are the starting point for his large-scale solo show at Martin-Gropius-Bau, which assembles art works and topics of his oeuvre along the lines of this autobiographical, artistic and political narration.

Martin-Gropius-Bau / Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, S+U Potsdamer Platz / ongoing until 21.08 / more info

 

FRIDAY 13.05

18.00 The Berta Art Raffle: Vol.5 @ HilbertRaum

WHY: The Berta Art Raffle takes place through a group exhibition, which will allow the artists to not only display, but also to sell their works through a lottery system. It is a win-win situation: each acquired ticket guarantees the owner an original artwork, determined at random, while the artist gets a real chance at being discovered by a new audience. The participating artists are Barbara Cousin, BLO, Dani Dan, Emanuele Crotti, Jutta Scheiner, Katie Armstrong, and Arnejo Corata.

HilbertRaum / Reuterstr. 31, 12047 Berlin, U Hermannplatz / more info