Over the past ten years in Berlin, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff have expanded a practice rooted in photography into a broader social project based around communal artistic spaces, negotiating the fine boundaries between living, performing, and representation, while maintaining a critical aware- ness of the position these spaces occupy within the larger social fabric. After running the New Theater until 2015, and Grüner Salon at Volksbühne during the 2017/2018 season, they now run TV Bar in Potsdamer Straße since 2019.
At Hamburger Bahnhof, Henkel and Pitegoff are showing two series of photographs. For Exteriors, the duo have photographed banners at real estate development projects around the city, including the developments directly behind the Hamburger While only the trailer is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof. These digital renderings present an ideal- ized and purified vision of city living, appealing to an elite audience of socially-mobile urbanites and investors. Yet the photographs taken by Henkel and Pitegoff embed these utopian projections in the gritty reality of the city, contrasting the clean im- ages with the dirt and disorder of the construction sites which frame them. Printed on PVC banners, the photographic works appropriate the mode of presentation used as a marketing tool at the sites and offer a critical gaze on current models of urban planning in Berlin, which are proposed primarily by private entities with commercial interests. The banners are attached to the stripped skeletons of awnings collected from recently closed bars and restaurants. Behind Exteriors hangs a new series of photographs depicting the unseen and marginalized reality of the city, in this case the municipal sewage works at Ruhleben. The series, titled Col- lective Image 1-12 , transforms the cities waste into sparkling images of water which suggest close-up shots of the ocean, in others the artificial maelstroms betray the unsanitary truth.
In the second room, visitors can watch a trailer for the first two episodes of the ongoing TV series Paradise, which Henkel and Pitegoff film on 16mm at their bar in Potsdamer Straße. The series casts em- ployees and regular visitors in new roles to create a fictional narrative around the bar. Paradise, set in 2023, follows the bar’s employees as they walk the foggy line between service and performance. While only the trailer is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof, the two episodes can be seen at a variety of bars and off-spaces around the city. The series is silent, thus borrowing its soundtrack from the ambient noise of the spaces where it is shown. In order to transplant a trace of this network of paral- lel realities into the museum environment, Henkel and Pitegoff have borrowed furniture from each location to occupy the exhibition space. In return, furniture from the Hamburger Bahnhof has been sent to the satellite spaces and also to TV Bar.
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