The 12th installment of Berliner Luft at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, featuring a collaborative work by Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charrière, opens on Monday, August 3 and will be on view daily from 11 AM to 6 PM through Saturday, August 8. The established artist duo works at the threshold of science and art, examining our relationships to nature, society, and history. It will be the first presentation of the series of photographs from Objects in Mirror Might Be Closer Than They Appear in Berlin.

Objects in Mirror Might Be Closer was shot in the Exclusion Zone, an area stretching 30 kilometers in all directions around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, whose explosion in 1986 rendered the land uninhabitable. The series is an excursion into the “involuntary park” the region has become––a glimpse into a non-human space overrun by wildlife and forest as seen through the perspective of a living deer, made possible by mounting a camera on the animal’s antlers and training it on its eye.

The photographs capture the reflection of the landscape in the animal’s retina: a mixture of an invisibly decaying but thriving natural ecosystem and the ruins left by the humans who once dominated this space, the rejected infrastructures of a forgotten nuclear past. The deformed image, a direct product of the curvature of the animal’s ocular perception system, serves as a metaphor for an altered present, an altered environment in which these animals now live. The resulting image dialogue is reminiscent of found footage from the first space mission. The subjectivity of the astronaut looking at earth from above responds directly to the subjective perspective of the deer.

The project has been shown at the Swiss Institute in New York (2018), Kunstpalais Erlangen, Germany (2018), Parcours, Art Basel (2017), and Villa Bernasconi Centre d’Art, Lancy, Switzerland (2016). An artist catalog of the series, published on occasion of the Villa Bernasconi exhibition, is available at the gallery and through our webshop.

On view in the gallery’s main space is ONLY, a solo show by the artists’ peer and fellow participant in Olafur Eliasson’s Institute for Spatial Experiments, Jonas Wendelin. On view through August 29, the exhibition features an architectural installation, original Raku fired ceramics, and a collaborative newspaper publication that is free for visitors. ONLY engages the public in an alternative reality, setting up a futuristic narrative of idealism and leaving the viewer with hope in dystopia.”