Showcase // Aileen Bahmanipour

Showing-up for the Show-case (2021)
Performance 

Experimental collaboration with the space and working with the specific and unexpected companionability of the space are some of my goals for my three-month residency at the GlogauAIR.

The Showcase space is a window-display space that is re-purposed as an exhibitionary space. The idea of re-purposing spaces and things, for example, scrap pieces of metals, old furniture, and non-functional tools, is very visible to me in Berlin. If the Showcase is already a re-purposed space, how can I re-use it differently? How can I let the space make the artwork? How can I collaborate with the space? What can this space afford me? Transparency, reflection, a limited framed perspective (almost like a viewfinder or a camera lens), a view to the fluidity and temporality of the street, as a space, and its time.

In a way, I’m understanding the logic of this space, or more precisely, creating a logic for my collaboration with the space. For that, I show up at 5 pm, every day for one week, open the Showcase space and start to trace as many things as I can see. The space becomes a picture plane, allows me to document the street’s space and time, and archive these documentations through my repetitive act of tracing. But from the other side, for the passengers, I become the object, who is subjecting them. Both sides of the glass become object and subject at the same time through the constant back and forth reflections that the space provides to both sides’ visions.

www.aileenbahmanipour.com
@aileenbahmanipour

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