Silberkuppe: Old Ideas / Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel

Silberkuppe is an independent space for contemporary art and culture located in Berlin. The gallery was founded by Dominic Eichler und Michel Ziegler. Since their inaugural opening in Spring 2008, Silberkuppe has initiated presentations, exhibitions, talks, screenings, music and performances. At the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland, they present a selection of new, site-oriented productions from a diverse group of artists, titled “Old Ideas”. The show presents performative, sculptural and installative works by Phyllida Barlow, Dirk Bell, Gerry Bibby, Janette Laverrière, Shahryar Nashat und Josephine Pryde. Throughout the course of the exhibition, Silberkuppe will host a variety of social evenings and events.

From the press release: Phyllida Barlow (*1944, lives and works in London) usurps the architectural structure of the museum with her unique language of abstraction in a site specific installation “Hide”. Similarly, the artist Gerry Bibby (*1977, lives and works in Berlin) presents a landscape of spatial “citations” which were cast in concrete in his Berlin studio. With his new signage and sound work, Dirk Bell (*1969, lives and works in Berlin and London) taps the micro reverberations of light and sound emanated as a by-product of the built edifices of commerce. A new work from the Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat (*1975, lives and works in Berlin) directly involves the collection of the Kunstmuseum. Two sculptures by the Swiss artist Karl Geiser (1898 -1957) become the protagonists of Nashat’s specially produced film shot in the museum’s storage facilities. A reproduction of a two-part seating arrangement (1966) from the Swiss designer Janette Laverriére (*1909, lives and works in Paris) together with two eye- shaped coffee tables (1990) bearing the name “Black Eye”, represents the more discursive aspects of Silberkuppe agenda. Josephine Pryde (*1967, lives and works in Berlin and London) is showing new photographic works that transgress into a more sculptural medium.
In May 2009, Silberkuppe organised a two week programme with 17 international artists in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden as part of the ‘7 x 14’ exhibition series. More recently, Silberkuppe was invited by the Hayward Gallery in London to stage a project centered around the history of project-based independent and collective cultural production in a reunified Berlin. While continuing an active programme in their Berlin space, in 2010 Silberkuppe will also be mounting projects with the Kunsthall Bergen in Norway and Open Space at the Art Cologne.

Silberkuppe: Old Ideas, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel. Opening reception, January 15, 2010.

> Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.

Posted in: art, Basel, no comment, VernissageTV