Exterior Installation
Die Balkone 2 – Scratching the Surface
An exhibition in the windows and on the balconies of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Curated by Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza
30 April – 2 May 2021
Your desktop and your interior can be understood, in a very general sense, as the locations of experiences and negotiations, of the 21st Century. In its desired form they are the places where personal identities are formed. I do not have a balcony but my window to the outside world is the desktop, while the interior of my home is committed to the idea, that it not only mirrors my contemporary life, more importantly, it plays a role constructing it. This exterior installation is an information to my physical and digital interior condition in pandemic times.
Me: I do not have a balcony.
María Inés Plaza Lazo: Your desktop is your balcony!
Quote:
The increasing levels of complexity that characterise realised, represented and idealised interiors in early 20st Century private and public spaces suddenly seem unproblematic, however, until they are considered alongside the implications for the interior of the concept ‘virtual space’. Perhaps in that context, in which new inside and outside spaces can be accesses through computer screen – which can be viewed at home, at work, in the gym, in the garden, in an aeroplane or on the top of a mountain – the idea of modernity, of the seperate spheres, and above all of the modern interior, cease to have any meaning.
Penny Sparke, Professor of Design History at Kingston University, London, from the book The Modern Interior (2008)
From the curators:
Die Balkone becomes a cyclical calendar exhibition, a temperature-check marking time from the beginning of the pandemic, and a situated exercise for art as a form of recovery, social glue, and point of connection. Die Balkone is also an invitation to negotiate what the pandemic has taught us: the interdependence between the priorities and the needs, the very local and the global, the inside and the outside, the digital and the analogue, the public and the personal, again somewhere on the edge of a balcony.
Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza (2021)