GlogauAIR’s open studios invites the public to witness the result of three months of intensive research and production by the resident artists taking part in GlogauAIR residency program on site in Berlin and online throughout the world. These artists join GlogauAIR to dedicate themselves to the creation of new work and to explore new processes together with an international cohort of artists.

While each of the artists you will see represented here prepare and produce an individual project that is the culmination of their creative process over the past few months, it is also possible to observe topics and themes that overlap among the artworks. Topics such as intimacy, togetherness and urbanism represent our desire to come together after such a long period of isolation. Migration and borders appear as subjects to be understood and challenged. Climate anxiety and even climate grief are notable in some of the approaches and concepts, although a more optimistic note often prevails. Being able to observe these coincidences and influences is one of the most exciting aspects of the concept of open studios, which offers the chance to see all-new artworks presented to the public for the very first time.

Out of Season Shelters

by Paula Vidal

Paula Vidal is an academically trained architect who works as an artist with space as a canvas. Her large-format installations are on-site interventions that seek to launch questions that visitors must answer through their bodies, thus questioning their perception of physical and mental territories.

At GlogauAIR, Paula Vidal will present her new project Out of Season Shelters (OSS), a site-specific installation that reinterprets the agrarian architecture of the greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This region has the world's largest concentration of intensive agriculture, whose fruits and vegetables grow encapsulated to satisfy the manifestation of its true ugliness: the careless consumption of out-of-season products from northern European countries, especially Germany.

The art installation investigates and questions the terms 'beauty', applied to pristine nature, and 'ugliness', referring to humanised nature, in order to criticise the aesthetic values implicit in the concept of ecology. Vidal uses the greenhouses' skin, plastic, that reveals the landscape's characteristics, to create an idealised scenography with pneumatic structures that cover tomatoes. By removing the burden of ugliness from plastic architecture, the aim is not to affirm or defend it, but to disarm the critique of aesthetics so that the real questions that allow for social change can emerge.

Since 2021, the catalogue cover of GlogauAIR is decided by an open call to all of the participating artists, giving them the opportunity to present their work on the cover. For June 2022, and after carefully reviewing the proposals for this session, the jury selected the image submitted by Annabel Zoe Paran, an Israeli artist who joined us in the residency starting in April 2022. The image that was selected ultimately captures both something about the present moment and about the experience of the residency itself. Paran works with the unique material of bioplastics and what we see here is both the sculptural material objects in the foreground and their shadows cast on the background. The carefully created level of abstraction lets us read the image from multiple angles. 

Catalogue · June 2022