Germany

Ben Greber, Bram Kuypers

Berlin

LAGE EGAL CURATORIAL PROJECTS

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PROCESSION III

The exhibition PROCESSIONS brings together the work of artist BEN GREBER and BRAM KUYPERS. The artists met during a residency in Schloss Ringenberg, North Rhine-Westphalia and started working together because of a shared interest: technological utopias in the digital age. This became the starting point of their collaboration and resulted in several artworks presented at five exhibitions around the world as well as a booklet under the same title. Now at LAGE EGAL, all previously developed artworks are brought together and presented alongside new ones. 

PROCESSIONS explores the hope and loss of utopian visions of futuristic innovations in railway mobility. Ben Greber and Bram Kuypers have developed a three-part video performance work, each taking place in and around test facilities for futuristic trains that were - or are - way ahead of their time. These 'processions' are a way of remembering what has been lost through (failed) attempts to implement new concepts of land transport and infrastructure.

In the room built especially for PROCESSIONS, the artists presents the video works Procession I and Procession II. Both videos focus on the past and look at the architectural remains of two monorail test tracks, namely the ruins of the track once used by the jet-powered Aerotrain in Orleans, France, and the decommissioned test facility for the magnetically levitated Transrapid in Lathen, Germany.

Presented on a screen in the front room the Procession III looks to the future and the utopia of the Hyperloop, a system of gondolas that travel through vacuum tubes at speeds of over 600 miles per hour. Passengers will be completely isolated in the tube, oblivious to the landscape they are traversing. That's why in Procession III Ben and Bram zoom in on the surroundings of the Hyperloop test and safety facility to show a Nevada wasteland full of shot-up car parts, remnants of stolen cacti and stranded helium balloons from Las Vegas.

In addition to these video works, several sculptures are presented here at LAGE EGAL that are references to the test sites and technologies in the video works. Such as the computer case with a cactus inside; the shoe on a wooden plank with golden letters that are barely readable; or the cutout flowers an casted found objects in wooden boxes by Ben Greber presented together with a wooden bench by Bram Kuypers. These and the other sculptures on display bring together the artists' collective and individual works of art that poetically reinforce each other. Each of the sculptures reveals the concepts reflected in the video works, such as an urge for progress, for development and procession, but also an urge for preservation and conservation, an urge to maintain progress even when it has failed.

The exhibition is made possible thanks to E.ON Stiftung.

PROCESSIONS — LAGE EGAL #181

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