Better Life exhibited along video works from the Wemhöner Collection

The exhibition “Sehnsucht und Fall” (Longing and Fall), curated by Philipp Bollmann, shows video works from the Wemhöner Collection. In rooms that are specially modified for the show, videos by Isaac Julien, Bianca Kennedy, Masbedo, Hans Op de Beeck, Alexandra Ranner and Erik Schmidt are presented in one to three-channel installations.

The selected pieces take up essential motives of love, impermanence, nature, mythology and globalization in different ways and put them in the context of culture and society.

"Better Life (Ten Thousand Waves)" (2010) by Isaac Julien uses stylized images against the background of Chinese culture to address global migration in the context of an accelerated modern age. Hans Op de Beeck's “Parade”(2012) provides a fundamental view of life and death by showing the passing by of many different characters on a stage. In her video “We're All in This Together” (2018), Bianca Kennedy uses the motif of the bathtub and the act of bathing as a complex code of social expressions while Erik Schmidt deals with illness and death in a spa scenery in “Bogged Down” (2010). The human head floating in the calm water in the work "Ich habe genug" (I Have Enough, 2010) by Alexandra Ranner serves as a symbol for the intellectual power of our society and our simultaneous impotence towards war, climate change and other global catastrophes. In the video "2'59" (2014) by Italian artist duo Masbedo, a record with John Lennon's "Imagine" is getting scratched by a dental scaler, illustrating how we are dealing with culture and the utopia of peaceful coexistence.

Exhibition on view at Kunstaele Berlin until the 29th February 2020.