On the occasion of Berlin Art Week, DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is pleased to present Dispair, Ersan Mondtag’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Dispair presents a new ensemble of works that Mondtag has created specifically for the exhibition at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM. It combines large-scale sculptures made of carbonized wood and a series of wood-and-silicone reliefs. The works add to the artist’s ongoing exploration of questions around transience, desire, and collective memory. They grow out of extended meditations on the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion—with a focus both on forms of solidarity and on the fragility of communities and their shifting internal as well as external boundaries.
Concurrently with Dispair, Mondtag presents Alternde Meister, a performance developed in collaboration with Nadim Samman and produced in partnership with the Berliner Ensemble. As the Berlin Art Week’s opening event, the work marks the start of the program and unfolds over the course of several stagings in the rooms of the Gemäldegalerie. Conceived as a Berlin vanitas, Alternde Meister initiates a dialogue between aging bodies and paintings from past centuries. Bridging the divide between museum and theater, a living tableau of beauty, transience, and memory emerges in which past and present briefly share the same moment in time.
