AWAKENING DESTRUCTION - VOL. 2

AWAKENING | DESTRUCTION
bergernissen (Alisa Berger & Lena Ditte Nissen)
Galerie Biesenbach

For the first time, the duo bergernissen presents contaminated sculptures from the performance of the same name from 2019 in a space-encompassing installation. Spatially broken down into two states, the artists address a past event: the explosion of a contaminating fluorescent tube in their studio.

At the center of the room stands a sculpture made of everyday but contaminated objects that have been sealed with plaster bandages, condensed, and become an object. This object, formed in a happening, testifies to the attempt to contain the contamination and to heal it through artistic work. A neon tube protrudes from the object instead of hanging from the ceiling. It marks the thin transition between functioning civilization and destruction; the beginning of a dissolution.

Site-specifically, the architecture of Galerie Biesenbach itself also becomes a theme: a niche mutates into an entrance to a walled-up, closed room. A suggested laboratory in which a plant grows, from which fog rises. A vacuum bag with contaminated objects protrudes from it. A second object-state, frozen in an uncompleted process.

Through installative relics and spatial interventions, a field of tension emerges between destruction and new beginning, between the sealed and the open. The viewer moves between these poles and is invited to witness a healing that perhaps never takes place, or a catastrophe that never ends.

The arrangement is accompanied by a video that documents the performative event from 2019: the formation of the contaminated objects into a sculpture as a happening accompanied by ritual actions. But the video is detached from the linear narrative of the performance. A feeling of constant repetition emerges – destruction, reconstruction, ritual, contamination. A loop that holds us captive in the metaphor of transition.