
"There Is No Longer a Place to Be" is the title of the upcoming solo-exhibition by André Uerba presented at Agora.  The artist was invited to conceive of and construct the entirety of his work within the physical and social structures of Agora, transforming our community and its space into a research institute for his work. This process embodies a desire of both artist and enabler to limit the standard disruptions within an artist’s creative flow inherent in traditional modes of creation that separate the production process from a work’s presentation (i.e. white cube galleries). Being that the piece is materializing within the space in a limited span of time, the final piece is not pre-conceived but needs to be finalized without outsourcing, it is inspired by the elements within the space. And so, for a three week period, Agora’s ground floor becomes a gallery that lays bare not only the finished works, but the faint remnants of various unused energies, inevitable backfires, and inherent risks that are as much a part of any final product as the finished piece.

The title connects the viewer to the artist’s innermost feelings about the difficulties of simple existence.  There Is No Longer a Place to Be refers to that space where you cannot connect nor disentangle your notions of the past and future, you cannot express your feelings with words before they are less than what is required to fully describe.  This place exists in the paradox of the present where we are never allowed to remain long enough to make sense of our identities within nor our responses to it.

André began his process by observing Agora’s community and its space through images, conversations, events, words, expressed states of being, yesterday’s memories, tomorrow’s desires, and then filtered these experiences and assembled them together to create his images.  In creating both still and moving images he sought to capture the vacillating energy that exists between the present image and the suspense of the moment after its taken.  How did that moment fall apart?  How has the image held up? Who are we from moment to moment, from image to image?  This relationship with his subjects shapes his work.

This systematic connection between the public and the work can be at times overwhelming, melancholic, and ironic, but always tries to be inquisitive of the body as a surface, a physical materialization that holds the more enigmatic self that we try to understand but never can.  The physical body can project what a message from within, whether intentional or not, without any input from its most immediately definitive element, the face.  Decipher for yourself the ways in which the artist extracts subtle meanings and messages in his images from the physical and emotional vocabulary of revenants from moments past.

Opening: 15th of March 2012, at 19:00

Mittelweg, 50 (in front of the Water Tower)

U8 Leinestrasse Berlin

www.andreuerba.com

*text by Alexandra Sebag and Travis Wood

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Andre Uerba