Elinor Sahm has been researching on personal and historical archives to discover the figure of her two grandfathers, two big men, to look into the roots where she flourished. Mimi Youn’s work is also creating images and collages from remnants of the past found in archives and stock photos. She has been focusing on the age and documentation from before German reunification especially in Berlin and border areas. The delineation and separation of location is the focus on the paintings by Maria Kubysh that uses symbols in flags, banners, emblems, pennants which relate to divisions of space. From her experience in a field of logs and the Australian soil, Rosalind Holgate Smith has been experimenting around a kinder relationship with nature, our surroundings, through the contact of the body, taking influence from somatic practices.

Susie Su questions the essence of human communication especially in this era of screens and social distancing when technology and machinery are mediums of all interactions. The digital imaginary in which we are immersed is also the field of action of Minjung Lee who works around the relationship between digital images and painting questioning about the way one affects the other and how. Kwanyoung Jung’s work relates to imaginary places and drawing installations made line by line in a meditative methodology. Clara Gross becomes an observer walking by the city, across buildings and architecture which she translated into a formal interdisciplinary study called “Movable city”. The architect Gloria Jurado also goes trough the city documenting changes, layers of history as the rings on a tree, as an archeology of contemporary urban transformation. She will bring part of the construction materials involved in the transformation of the city with protographs of double exposure as Berlin Guest Resident of this edition of Open Studios.

Laura Olea López

Curatorial Management

Gloria Jurado, born in 1990 in Seville, Spain, is an architect based in Berlin from 2015. During this time, she has been immersed in architectural projects, where she has been able to appreciate up close the transformation of the city of Berlin. This approach made her start with the project “Berlin Umbau”, which interprets the constantly changing reality of the urban layout and the city’s identity through photography and installations.

The artist is using the technique of double exposure in analog photography, understanding the 35 mm film as a “time capsule“ where a final image is not planned, which allows that time to pass and record its path. With this technique, Jurado not only wants the observer to focus on the beauty of the shapes but also to raise awareness about the uncertain future of Berlin. Berlin Umbau gives back this interpretation to the city through an exhibition that usually has been in the same building site or architectural elements (scaffolding, passages, fences, etc.) helping to enforce the bond between citizens and their environment.

As Berlin Guest Resident Artist at GlogauAIR, Jurado has been experimenting with materials from the rubble of the places depicted in his photographs, returning them to public consciousness.

The garden part of GlogauAIR is a little oasis in the middle of the Kreuzberg neighborhood. A calm peaceful piece of nature that changes with the weather, highlighting every quarter like a Kairós timer: it allows us, the team, artists, and collaborators, to measure the pass of time.

The most ancient tree in the garden is the protagonist in the catalogue of GlogauAIR Summer Term 2020, a witness of our history as an art institution and natural referent that gives perspective to the times that all we are living: the amount of time it has been there, being part and present in so many editions and artists that passed by. A figure that has grown strong, deeply anchored by the roots but a long time ago it was just a little seed, like when Chema Alvargonzalez founded this project in this particular location. The trunk has been growing since then; slowly, calm, day by day with a lot of effort and strength against all odds as to how it was made possible to do thanks to Pablo Alvargonzalez, Chema’s brother and director of GlogauAIR until his lasts days.

In the process of keeping growing is where the branches start growing apart, extending their bonds further away that the stable and steady trunk never could imagined. From Berlín, where the seed grew in a full nice tree, GlogauAIR is now reaching more than 25 countries with the Virtual Program of Artists Residencies that allow connect and interact with artists from around the globe, without any physical limitation.

This analogy expressed in the visual design of the catalogue of Open Studios September 2020 is also in relation with the work by the residents during these three months: each branch looking for their own path, their own route but all together growing as a community, as one and only canopy that moves at once with the wind.