GUZZLE THAT GAS
February 19, 2023, opens at 5 pm, screened on loop
Location: Parked car in front of Halle 3, Dragonerareal,
Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin.
Enter through Auto Klas
Road trips and hijackings in the trunk. Better call an Uber, no desire to take the smelly subway. The Fast and the Furious is kind of a sexy movie, don’t you think? Need for Speed, vroom vroom, beep beep.
In the collective imagination of Western culture, the car has occupied a strange place. Always and necessarily tied to questions of gender and class, it sits somewhere between the unfulfilled promise of freedom and individualism, the demand for mobility, and the defiant awareness that we still can't -– or won't – break away from untimely gas guzzlers.
With GUZZLE THAT GAS, EVBG presents a selection of short film and video works in which cars, in all their everyday wastefulness, yet symbolically charged and culturally specific nature, are made the main protagonists. Viewed on small screens in the back seat of a parked vehicle, the movements of the cars receive special emphasis, whether they perform a comical accident or a nerve-racking parking process, accelerate and drift or speed across a motorway at nighttime.
On View:
FEIKO BECKERS
ACCIDENT WITH RED CAR, 2010
HD video, 2’24”, color, sound.
A wide angle: Greenery moves in the wind, we seem to be on an empty concrete square with puddles of water on its surface. An archetypical representation of a cartoon car is parked on the right side. An engine howls, the car accelerates and crashes. The impact is audible; elements of reality break through the facade of artificiality created by the cardboard figure of the red car. The driver gets out, looks head-on into the camera and leaves the wreckage behind. The scene is as simple as it is absurd.
LENA MARIE EMRICH
INFINITY DRIFT, 2018
HD video, 3’31”, color, sound.
Based on a self-staged experiment in which Lena Marie Emrich cooperates with the local car tuning scene of the Brandenburg Uckermark, she generates images of high-speed movements that she presents to the viewer in a hypnotic deceleration. Car tuning functions here as a break with the urbanite's over-romanticized view of the idyllic Uckermark. The vehicle is tuned to infinity and drifts in the emptiness of the landscape, seemingly without ever starting or stopping, seemingly autonomous. In the burning rubber and pink clouds, however, the viewer may find a different kind of romance.
MAX GÖRAN
MAN I LOVE FISHING, 2021
Video, 04’40”, color, sound.
A red Volvo 940 and a blue Volvo 945 station wagon drive in loops on a frozen lake. As the sun sets over the Swedish hinterland, the cars' tires leave tracks and swirl clouds of white glitter. Volvos generally have a reputation for being safe and reliable, but in Sweden their significance goes beyond that: they are seen as classless, a car for everyone, the ultimate cultural symbol of Swedish pragmatism and humility. In Man I Love Fishing, the functional family cars put on a macho drift performance for no audience but themselves; the excessive and aggressive quality of the driving also carries a hint of boredom that resonates with the beautiful but also eerily vast backdrop.
ALMUT LINDE
DIRTY MINIMAL #45.8.3
– NIGHT DRIVE STILL/STREETWALKER, 2007
Video, 02’16”, color, sound.
Directed out the window of a moving car, the camera captures flashes of light illuminating the darkness of the night, creating blurs and streaks of color. What feels like a familiar, even nostalgically charged image is part of the series of works DIRTY MINIMAL #45.8.3 - NIGHT DRIVE STILL/STREETWALKER, which records nighttime roadside drives along the Czech-German border, a brutal region for human trafficking and child prostitution in Europe. For this series and other works, Almut Linde applies her concept of Radical Beauty. The term radical – derived from the Latin word radix – refers to the root, the origin of a form. The radical approach is to return the concept of beauty to the roots of form. It makes it possible to place things that we cannot or do not want to see in the space of the observable. Although Linde deals with reality directly and without detours, she often wraps it in a deceptively beautiful form that reveals itself only at second glance.
MARIKE SCHUURMAN
MOVING STILL, 2002
Mini dv, 9’21”, color.
Shot from the window of her own apartment, Schuurman secretly films, in one long take, a couple’s grimly determined efforts to park their car in a narrow residential street. What could have been a quickly completed task becomes a cumbersome and lengthy mission and a trial of patience for the man on the road and his wife giving instructions. The middle-class comfort and convenience of driving suddenly becomes a burden. With her sharp gift of observation, Schuurman shows us how rich everyday reality is in simple stories that can easily expand into metaphorical narratives.
EVBG (founded in 2015 in Berlin), a project by curators Marie Sophie Beckmann and Julie Gaspard, is dedicated to the inquisitive exploration of daily life and exhalations of the mind: feminism, representation, and expectation. As a curatorial collective they have organized exhibitions and screening programs such as: re.act.feminism#3, Berlin (2022); Efremidis Gallery, Berlin (2019); uqbar, Berlin (2019); Project Space Festival Berlin (2019); Salon Gallery, Berlin (2019); PSM Gallery, Berlin (2018). In 2019, EVBG was awarded the Preis für künstlerische Projekträume und -initiativen (prize for artistic project spaces and initiatives).
