Two birds in the bush are more worthy than one in the hand, or rather hundred! What it means to keep hundreds, we understand in the exhibition by looking at the pictures of the historical archive of the behavioral scientists family Heinroth. 18,000 species of nature’s birds are known to us – and imaginatively supplemented by artist Edward Summerton with some eerie, mysterious creatures. Birds are often barely visible, hidden or far away, and yet they are acoustically present. Cemre Yeşil & Maria Sturm’s photo project For Bird’s Sake explores the phenomenon of bird ownership in Turkey: men keeping birds in dark boxes in order to possess their songs. The photo series makes us think about ownership, love, passion and longing. Can humans adopt the language of birds to communicate with each other? The video work The Calling by Angelica Mesitis depicts remote valleys in Europe where a bird-like whistling language has been cultivated, allowing people to communicate across great spatial distances.

Art’s preoccupation with birds may be surprising, but at the same time it is obvious, for birds have been constant, ubiquitous companions of human life for millennia. All linguistic and visual cultures, mythologies and religions are permeated by bird stories, and much seems so self-evident that one regularly overlooks this proximity. The exhibition shows artists as observers and, in the spirit of many ornithologists, encourages us to take time to marvel. Freedom, light-heartedness, beauty, majesty, and vastness are often associated with birds, while judgments about many bird species are as disrespectful as they are arrogant. With hardly any other species is our interaction so ambivalent. The exhibition Birds offers a multi-layered and subtle analysis of art with, for, about, and by birds.

Inspired by the balcony view of C834, curators Lene Harbo Pedersen and Jörg Koopmann focus on more than 14 projects by international artists and researchers explicitly concerned with birds for the first exhibition Birds in the trilogy.

Framework program

Thursday, Jan 20, 2022, 7 pm
Curator’s Tour with Lene Harbo Pedersen & Jörg Koopmann. Held in English. The 2G rule applies.

C834

The exhibition space C834 was created in 2012 in the Corbusierhaus Berlin out of a private initiative of the architect Peter Ottmann. For this purpose, he converted the three-room apartment C834 on 8th Street into an exhibition space to create a place of encounter and a platform for exchange about contemporary art and culture. The space invites its immediate neighbours – the residents of the building – on the one hand, and an international audience of architecture and art enthusiasts on the other, to view the regularly changing thematic exhibitions. C834 serves here as a curatorial laboratory, in a sense.

Sep 26, 2021 — Mar 13, 2022
Winter break: Until Jan 8, 2022
+ Framework program: please see above

C834 Corbusierhaus

Flatowallee 16 · 14055 Berlin
[District: Westend | Borough: Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf]

Sundays 2 – 6 pm, and by appointment: mail@1733250636c834.1733250636de1733250636

Admission free