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At PSM Gallery in Berlin, a progressive publishing company has curated a show dedicated to a very real and contentious zeitgeist.

PETUNIA (written in all caps) is a feminist art and entertainment magazine based in France. According to their website, the collective hopes to correct the clear disproportion of woman’s presence in the art world by dedication each publication to texts focusing on contemporary art featuring female critics, theorists, and artists. Given the specificity of their publication, their curatorial venture at PSM inquires into issues beyond feminism by investigating topics like race, sexuality, income inequality, but most importantly Momentum.

As defined by their press release, Momentum is the convergence of individuals who hope to create a “completely new situation: a revolution”. Although never defined, given PETUNIA’s credo and the works included one can discern that the Momentum encapsulated in the show is towards a society of classlessness, without privilege or prejudice. Some of the works within the space concisely illustrate this, whereas others enrich the conversation.

The Finnish artist Pilvi Takala presents two projectors that alternately beam images and texts of a “week-long intervention” at a Berlin mall where she carried hundreds of Euros in cash inside a transparent plastic bag. The interactions she has with clerks and fellow shoppers mix between polite offerings for a more confidential carryall to abusive warnings for her to “look after [the] money”. While this piece showcases our obsession of currency in its physical presence, the anecdotal references to the artist’s repeated purchases of ice cream humanizes the performance. Takala here makes visible how offensive money can become when it’s literalized in such an astute context.

Across the room are three monitors by Tobias Kaspar that intimately detail a woman in a bathrobe applying beauty cream to her face. Played in slow motion, the artist gives viewers three alternative angles to the personal application. Unlike advertisements for cosmetics, Kaspar’s video is revealing and romantic, as if you are watching the protagonist through the lens of her lover. The artist gives us the opportunity to gaze at an individual just as a devoted partner may enjoy the appearance of their spouse sans-makeup, unveiling an idealized world where in beauty, less is more.

The space’s centerpiece, a giant hand-knitted wool sculpture by Norwegian artist Kjersti G. Andvig and American executed inmate Carlton A. Turner, is chilling. Executed in 2008, the same year the piece was completed, Turner had been on death row for nearly a decade after he was charged for murdering his parents. An exact duplication of the room where he spent his last years, viewers are invited to stand on wooden steps and peek into the chamber via a small window cavity. What’s revealed are gang insignia, a swastika, religious paraphernalia, and a red pentagram on the ground. While the realities of capital punishment are very distant, Andvig reminds us that even governments put people to death in the “civilized world”.

Perhaps the piece that encapsulates the entirety of the show is a video by Sylvia Blocher. Within a dark room in the back of the gallery, a tall projection displays a white man intricately painted with the tones of other races. He plays an electric guitar while sighing out utopian visions of a world without ethnic divide. His words are borrowed from Barack Obama’s A Perfect Union speech given during his 2008 campaign for president where he asked Americans to move beyond their “racial stalemate”. The singer’s desperate and wearisome tone is appropriate, as since nearly 6 years after Obama pleaded with the world for change, we sit in 2014 and ask ourselves if any of that Momentum actually accomplished anything at all.

MOMENTUM? MAYBE THE TIME HAS COME TO LIVE OUR CORPORALITY RATHER THAN SPEAK OUR SEXUALITY
PSM Gallery Berlin
17 January through 28 February

Curated by Petunia, the art and entertainment magazine – Marie Angeletti, Kjersti Andvig, Sylvie Blocher, Caroline Mesquita, Marina Faust, Pilvi Takala, Tania Perez Cordova, Tobias Kaspar, Hannah Weinberger