Projects
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Gagosian Gallery

Friends and Ennemies

Autocenter, Starship, Tilmann Wendland

The managers of Autocenter (Joep van Liefland, Maik Schierloh), the editors of Starship Magazine (Hans-Christian Dany, Martin Ebner, Ariane Müller) and the artist and curator Tilman Wendland represent three distinct approaches for engaging and presenting contemporary art in Berlin and beyond.

Many of the activities of the participants included in Friends and Enemies were deliberately set apart from the art market, and yet they operated as some of the most interesting and active formats driving contemporary artistic production in Berlin. These private partnerships reflected a spontaneous and informal system of aggregation that was capable of reinventing spaces and generating unusual connections in which exhibitions had been staged in apartments, magazines spontaneously grew out of the simplest resources, and original projects staged in alternative venues alter the site’s original context and gave it a new meaning or perspective for the art audience. The title of the exhibition, Friends and Enemies, refered to the numerous communities and partnerships in Berlin that rarely commingled or collaborated with each other. The exhibition brought together three of these distinct scenes in the modest space of Gagosian Gallery.

But, in the end, Friends and Enemies was also about people making things happen on their own, and creating shows and publications that we wished we had done ourselves.