Live Stream

Concurrent with Gallery Weekend Berlin, Fluentum presents the group exhibition Live Stream, featuring videos, sculptures, and installations that engage in a dialogue with the exhibition space and its specific histories and materiality. Live Stream takes the form of an open exchange with five artists who were invited to adapt existing works in response to the site of Fluentum. Individual artistic practices transform the historical architecture into a broad network of associations. Through sculptural interventions in the building, the works in Live Stream initiate a reorientation of perspectives and emotional states, as familiar visual axes give way to an activation of the entire space.

Almost ten years ago, the complex’s transformation into a residential area began—a conversion superimposed on the ideological architecture that will influence and change it in the long term. The exhibition Live Stream therefore confronts the private and the public, the domestic and the political, the present and the past. As the tongue-in-cheek title suggests, the works on display activate the site’s rigidity like a stream of life, reflecting the specific inscriptions of people in the formal abstraction of the political material vocabulary.

Moving image and its technologies seem ubiquitous, yet their silent dependence on physical media is often overlooked. By depicting and scanning (imaginary) spaces, infrastructures, and architecture, the works in Live Stream highlight the material conditions of showing. In sculptures and video works by Michael E. Smith, subtle and mischievous interventions turn the monumental building into malleable material, while Jason Hirata focuses on the social dimensions of exhibition making. A ceiling suspended sculpture by Patricia L. Boyd, made from old floor boards, uses the site’s staircase void. Matt Welch’s installation, consisting of a kinetic sculpture, video, and sound, merges the immaterial space of the video and its affective qualities with the unnervingly homely residential area surrounding Fluentum. Nina Könnemann’s films observe public space and break up the banality of everyday life at its margins.

Live Stream is curated by Dennis Brzek and Junia Thiede.