PLANT LIFE, PLANT PATTERNS (WT)

Online Exhibition 

The online exhibition is organized by the research group 4A_Lab (KHI, Max Planck Institute, in cooperation with SPK) and investigates the relationship between plants, humans and aesthetic practices across nature-cultures. In collaboration with the 4A_Lab’s program partner Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (SPK), it highlights objects related to or based on plants from the museum’s collections. The display both unravels patterns of how botanical life shapes and is shaped by cultural practices, and gives a glimpse into larger socio-political, economic and transregional constellations that have defined artistic production, aesthetics, and visual (nature-)cultures across space and times. Looking at the largest life-form on earth, the exhibition contributes to botanical discourses in art history, turning ‘plant blindness’ into an active imperative of engagement.

Throughout the online display the patterns of plant’s legacies unfold in the hidden stories from the collections and archives: Plants are the protagonists in herbaria—used to systemize botanical knowledge; in still life paintings and photographs—materializing themselves as physical evidence of intertwined cultural practices; or, among other things, in tradable goods—shaping communities and their aesthetics as well as geopolitical relations across and beyond borders. Against the backdrop of transregional visual studies, the projects trace the complex interrelations between human and non-human agents, weaving the social, political and economic fabric of ‘plantscapes’ together with the physical and metaphorical materiality of vegetal life in artistic and cultural artifacts.

The exhibition examines the formations of social values, cultural expressions, aesthetics, and national formations—a formation that is greatly shaped by the analysis and categorization of plant material, and the extraction of their structures and systems, not only but for the benefit of human desires. The structural patterns that shape museum collections today are in part a consequence of the evolution of natural history collections, colonial practices, and recent neurobiological notions that intend to determine vegetal life as sensitive and mobile agents in the formation of the Anthropocene.

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Keep Your Eyes Peeled

Pop-Up Exhibition 

›Keep Your Eyes Peeled‹ is an exhibition project of the AFF Gallery. It takes place in the gallery space at irregular intervals during special art highlights throughout the year.
During this year's Art Week a group exhibition will be on display that shows works by the AFF photographers and artists selected from the extended network of the gallery and its members.

Photography today influences our daily lives more than any other medium – to facilitate communication, for recording memories, as documentation and evidence, as a research tool, to make notes, and, of course, as artwork. Images are captured, fill our hard drives, pop up on various screens and implant themselves in our thoughts. The apparatus - the smart phone, the camera, or the wireless transmission - occurs mostly in the background, and we cannot identify their operations within the image production. We are surrounded by a diversity of photos that shape our vision and experience so that the complex everyday life appears partially relieved but also inscrutable.

In this tradition, the AFF Gallery continues its exhibition format ›Keep Your Eyes Peeled‹, to respond to developments and tendencies in contemporary photography. In a short exhibition, the communication with and through our images, will be temporarily brought back to a common real place (the gallery).

SUDOR

Exhibition 

Erstmalig wird die fotografische Langezeitdokumentation des Künstlers Leonardo Flores Parés, über die Ausbeutung von Arbeitnehmer*innen mit Migrationshintergrund in Mindestlohn und Servicejobs gezeigt.

Die Arbeit von Flores Parés thematisiert die Herausforderungen und die oft unsichtbare Arbeit von Migrant*innen auf dem deutschen Arbeitsmarkt. Anhand von Hinterlassenschaften – symbolisiert z.B. durch Schweißflecken auf der Arbeitskleidung – dokumentiert er seine eigene ganz persönliche Geschichte und stellt sie in Kontext heutiger Debatten. Die minimalisierte und anonymisierte Bildästhetik seiner Fotografien ermöglicht es die körperliche Arbeit sichtbar zu machen, ohne die Personen dahinter zu demaskieren.