Soft Ground

25.10, 19.00 | BHROX bauhaus reuse, Ernst-Reuter-Platz, 10587 Berlin

Including DJ set: The exhibition launch event will be accompanied by Exercising Modernity alumna Zofia Janina Borysiewicz who will present her own musical reading of EM.

Organizer: the Pilecki Institute in Berlin

Partners: BHROX bauhaus reuse, Adam Mickiewicz Institute

Curators: Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk, Aleksandra Janus

Artists whose works are featured in the exhibition: Artists: Zofia Janina Borysiewicz, Laure Catugier, Michał Kowalski, Vinicius Libardoni, Daphna Noy, Aurélie Pertusot, Marcin Szczodry, Agata Woźniczka, Yael Vishnizki-Levi

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

You can find all the information here: https://berlin.instytutpileckiego.pl/…/new-exercising…

The exhibition is the result of a critical and interdisciplinary reflection on modernism undertaken within five years of the Exercising Modernity project. The invited artists, the graduates of the Exercising Modernity Academy in the years 2018–2022, employ various research tools and artistic methods to analyze places, objects and biographies.

Exercising Modernity, our unique, initially German-Israeli-Polish programme, has always shed light on the vast array of Polish as well as more broadly Central Eastern European contributions to the emergence of modernity. Furthermore, it proves that any attempt to tell the history of modernity devoid of those components remains inevitably incomplete and biased.

It also highlights the richness and vast array of phenomena related to modernity as well as more ambiguous, indeed at times dark elements of modernity.

The ideas of modernity have manifested themselves in multifold ways. An important area was architecture: In the 1920s and 1930s in cities such as Dessau, Frankfurt am Main, Warsaw, Krakow, Tel Aviv, Kharkiv, Kaunas, or Rotterdam, discussions centered around how to build and furnish housing more efficiently, more economically, more rationally and in line with the homeowner’s needs. These discussions shared an interest in the demands for rational organization, affordability, and more economical methods of production. But their aim was not only to transform the architectural infrastructure. They also manifested a quest for new rhythms of life and became expressions of dreams, hopes, and faith in progress.

Yet, as Marci Shore’s texts suggest, modernity is also ‚a source of suffering‘. Its dual nature encompasses both a drive for reform, practicality, and progress, as well as dark sides that bring danger, uncertainty, fragmentation and existential disjunction. This exhibition thus sheds light on the dark side of modernity just as previous editions of Exercising Modernity have always done.