Allora & Calzadilla – Temporary Kunsthalle

Allora & Calzadilla - How To Appear Invisible - 2009

The Temporary Kunsthalle in Berlin is currently in the midst of inter-office strife with the entire Artistic Advisory Board resigning, including the director Thomas Eller, just weeks before the opening of Allora & Calzadilla‘s exhibition. Prefacing the show’s press conference with a curt message, Dirk Luckow (also formerly on the board) made clear that no questions would be taken regarding the intended programming of the Kunsthalle. Despite this disorder, however, the fourth exhibition seems to be the most successful yet.

Diminishing the space of the Kunsthalle, by dropping the ordinarily cavernous ceiling to an almost claustrophobic 2.9 meters, Allora & Calzadilla’s installation Compass is disorienting for those familiar with the room. Within moments, a tapping sound begins to resonate from overhead as one of the tap dancers, brought in by the artists, begins their syncopated shift. A creeping feeling of entrapment takes over, as though we are under the floorboards listening to the sometimes rhythmic, sometimes arrhythmic choreography that maps a sonic path across the ceiling.

Remapping space also takes place in their new film How to Appear Invisible where a German Shepherd dog navigates through the ruins of the Palast der Republik, as if searching for signs of the iconic monument that once stood. A common sight for Berliners over the past year has been the gradual disintegration of the former GDR political headquarters and Allora & Calzadilla are not the first artists to document it’s deconstruction. However, the inclusion of a dog wearing a Kentucky Fried Chicken cone collar disrupts any sense of nostalgia and monumentalism, instead creating new, more erratic associations with American fast-food culture and placing importance on the building site itself.

The only contentious aspect is the effectiveness of Allora & Calzadilla’s questioning of site-specificity: The location and history of Berlin hangs heavy in the film, and the installation perfectly fits the Kunsthalle’s dimensions – the artists would be hard-pushed to find an identical space in which to fit this work. Yet their attempt to realign space in these meditative pieces is ultimately successful through the removal of sentimental or transcendental elements, so that both sites essentially become architectonic cadavers.