Thursday, June 02, 2016

It’s a small world after all

NZ’s having a moment in Berlin. There’s Simon Denny in the Berlin Biennale opening at the end of the week and a group show just launched at ifa galleries in the toney part of Mitte. Ifa fronts one of those amorphous government organisations that’s all about ‘peaceful and enriching coexistence between people and cultures worldwide.’ The NZ artists Leonie Hutchison, Natalie Robinson, Peter Robinson and Kalisolaite ‘Uhil occupy a couple of spacious brightly painted galleries along with Berlin-based Gabriel Rossell-Santillán, the peripatetic Daniel Maier-Reimer and an Indonesian collective. The exhibition is titled Politics of sharing – on collective wisdom. It's branded as promoting ‘important current questions', ‘new ways to share from the Maori’ and defining ‘the gallery space as a Marae’. That sort of thing. Pretty earnest, although Robinson peps it up by felt bombing the place and, as we saw last night, bits of Berlin.

Images Peter Robinson in the Ifa exhibition and, bottom right outside via an enthusiastic 'participating' visitor