A new garden from old wounds
ChertLüdde / Potsdamer Straße 97, Berlin
11 September – 9 November 2024
At the entrance, David Horvitz’s work A Clock whose Seconds are Synchronized with Your Heartbeat invites the viewer to sense another temporality, while next to it, the large-scale painting You need to go back to page number ‘13’ to not understand anything, and, by Ali Eyal resonates with a fragmented, unfinished rhythm.
In the center of the painting, a woman’s hair unfurls, revealing a series of images that depict a journey. Several figures appear, and a character arises within a rupture. Each personality becomes a detail, a part, a segment. They gather together with objects that frequently reoccur in Eyal’s paintings: bright bulbs, desks and aerial views of a farm or forest. All stem from the artist’s childhood memories of running his fingers through his mother’s hair while falling asleep. The stories Eyal reproduces involve the recollection of everyday objects as fulcrums of life and memories, portraying scenes in which characters blend with a background that incorporates their rememberings.
Also in remembrance, Horvitz’s vases were made from glass fragments collected by the artist’s friends near Almstadtstrasse in Berlin. This street was formerly called Grenadierstrasse, and it was there that the artist’s grandmother, Irma, was born on December 22, 1906. Irma lived in what was once a Jewish area of Berlin before immigrating to America aboard a steamship in 1913. Shards of broken glass that littered the streets of Berlin, covering the surface of different histories, trace where Irma might have walked and where her presence has lingered for over a century.
Scattered on the walls are texts from the ongoing series Nostalgia, in which Horvitz permanently erases digital photos from his archive, and replaces them with text descriptions of the scenes originally photographed. We are called upon to use our imagination to recreate these memories and find the image carried by the artist’s storytelling.
Vanishing on the screen located on the mezzanine, are the words California and “كاليفورنيا” (the state’s name in Arabic) which are being written in sand. The etymology of this name is significant, not only because both artists are based there, but because California comes from the Arabic language via Spanish. A collaboration between Horvitz and Eyal, recorded by Samar Al Summary, the film captures the moment when both artists inscribed these words on a beach in Los Angeles. As the waves wash over the sand, the writing gradually fades away, symbolizing how divisions of place and discourse are inexorably erased by the landscape itself.
Amidst artworks concealed within furniture, poetry and photographs tucked away in drawers, sand sealed in glass marbles and carried in pockets, a fragmented self-portrait and countless other subtle details, the exhibition concludes in an exploration of absence, embracing the unexpected and the undefined.
I hope they will see this and.
On Facebook, write your name clearly without flourishes or diacritics.
If it’s in English, write your name clearly.
It’s possible we will search for you. We hope to see you.
Pastel on Bhutanese tsharsho paper
16x23 inches
Accident at Night.
Oil on canvas.132 x 171.5 cm. / 52 x 67.5 in.
In an American state, once again I crossed paths with the uncles. A small vehicle emerged from the darkness of the shipping box. It was a gift to help me navigate America. I drove it with both seriousness and joy on the highways. However, I encountered some difficulties amidst the threads of darkness, crisscrossed by the illumination of the wheel and its engine. It took some time, miraculously, my right eyelid arrived at nothingness. There, a peculiar group awaited me.
From then on, doves scare me.
61x80 inches
Oil on canvas
I was playing bus with my sisters, using my mother’s slipper as a steering wheel, when I stepped on a dove and felt all its organs gush out. I let out a blood curdling scream. My mother ran to me and comforted me.
You need to go back to page number “13” to not understand anything and.
2023
124x65 inches
Oil on canvas
A lovely spot a picnic. It’s a very quiet area, but I will not tell you which part.
17x17 inches
Pastel and pencil on amate paper
I’m carrying you dad now and also i hope they will see this now.
15x23 inches
Pastel on Japanese paper
A father holds his child, a child holds his father.