Zilberman Gallery exhibits works by Heba Y. Amin, Simon Wachsmuth, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Guido Casaretto and Alpin Arda Bağcık. Using various media such as painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video and performance, these artists challenge our social, cultural and political awareness by being evenly poetic and progressive in their approach.
The megalomaniac idea of a supercontinent blurring the line between history, present and future as well as truth and fiction is presented in Heba Y. Amin's work Portrait of Woman as Dictator I (2018) and her video Relocating the Mediterranean, Inaugural Speech (2018) as part of her project Operation Sunken Sea, previously shown at the 10th Berlin Bienniale (2018). Egyptian Berlin-based visual artist Heba Y. Amin—15th Istanbul Biennial (2017), Karachi Biennale (2017) and Marrakesh Biennial (2016)—follows an artistic practice embedded in extensive research and a studio practice investigating the convergence of politics, technology, and urbanism. Berlin based artist Simon Wachsmuth—part of significant international exhibitions, such as the 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009), documenta12 (2007), currently the Gropius Bau (2019) and awarded with the Marta Prize of the Wemhöner Foundation (2016), the Otto Mauer Prize (2003) and the Prix Ars Electronica (1989)—researches the blind spots and unexpected epilogues in the grand narratives of history and art history while his works often use archival materials, which stand in dialogue with a vocabulary of minimalistic forms. Wachsmuth's series 'Genius Malignus (Evil Demon)' (2018) uses iconic pictures of the early stagings of Berthold Brecht's Mother Courage. Pedro Gómez-Egaña—presented at the 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017), Kochi-Muziris Biennial (2016) and Marrakech Biennial (2009)—poses questions to how technologies affect societies, both historically and today and explores collective experiences of time. Gómez-Egaña places great attention to how images and sounds appear in a particular space of time and duration. In his immersive video installation Pleasure (2017), the protagonist is on an ongoing search for reasoning in life while seeking for answers on current social concerns such as social isolation and the connotation on basic human needs such as physical interaction. Guido Casaretto's work—part of renowned public collections such as the MOCAK (Museum of Contemporary Art, Kraków, Poland) and the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia)—focuses on making formation processes of materials visible. Casaretto is concerned with imitating such processes to facilitate—both for himself and for viewers—the understanding of systems by conceiving them as something that has become over time. To this end, he observes how the materials react (i.e. layer, penetrate, or connect) with each other, and what kind of surfaces emerge from this partly controlled, partly random process. Alpin Arda Bağcık's photorealist paintings take inspiration from defining moments in the history of the 20th century. He titles his works after drugs that are prescribed to people suffering from various mental illnesses. In his work, Bağcık explores the relationship between painting, photography and the archive through the remediation and exploration of history, memory and trauma. His paintings are represented in the collections of the Salsali Museum (Dubai, UAE) and the MOCAK (Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, Poland).