Artists

Amol K Patil
Luzie Meyer
Daniel Gustav Kramer

Amol K Patil

Amol K Patil approaches Sophiensæle’s early years as a space of intensive political and cultural activity during its time as the headquarters of the Berlin Craftsmen’s Association. He explores this through the “BDD Chawls” (Bombay Development Department): special architecture used as social housing for trade union workers in Mumbai. These buildings—known for their cramped living conditions and communal bathrooms—were originally constructed by the British in the early twentieth century to house poor male migrant workers who toiled in factories or mines. Chawls were important spaces of political activism, both during the colonial period and after India’s independence in 1947. B. R. Ambedkar, the principal architect of the Constitution of India, lived here. The buildings were demolished and replaced by new ones several years ago as part of large-scale remodeling and upgrading projects.

Patil grew up near the chawls. His artistic affinity for sound and movement can be traced back to his fondness for the interlocking, noisy life there. His father belonged to the factory workers’ union and wrote experimental plays, which were performed for the union members in the 1980s. His grandfather wrote powada, a form of spoken word or rap, to document Ambedkar’s political uprisings against India’s abhorrent caste system. Although officially banned, discrimination against people based on their hierarchical position in the caste system is still a reality in India today. Patil seeks to use art to make the voices of the chawls’ former inhabitants audible again and reflect their collective character.

A radio plays fiery speeches, but then combusts into a cloud of smoke. B. R. Ambedkar, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and the workers’ movement itself are linked in the drawings on the walls. The theater of the social and its political dimension unfolds.

Luzie Meyer

What role do art and culture play in a city shaken by local and global crises? In her six-channel sound installation, Luzie Meyer turns to poetry and rhythm as tools for reflection in a dystopian present. The words in this sound piece are drawn from notes she took in her daily life over the past few months, reflecting memories of political gatherings, exhibition openings, Senate debates, and moments spent engaging with German and international media. The artist distils these “annotations” of a present charged with emotional tension and conflict, transforming the material by means of repetition, rhyme, homophony, or alliteration into sound poetry. Meyer’s work also subtly references the history of its site as a meeting place of Berlin’s workers’ movement—the former clubhouse of the Craftsmen’s Association, where figures such as Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Erich Mühsam, and Clara Zetkin once spoke. At the same time, this was also a place of celebration—where people ate, drank, and danced.

No voice without a body: Vocal space can be understood as a direct expression of physicality and a potential place of subversive agency. This is how it connects to dance. Tap dance, as both a form of dance and of music, requires intense concentration and bodily discipline to create possibilities for improvisation. The history and ambiguity of this dance form—its heterogenous associations ranging from workers’ resistance to popular entertainment—can also be read as a reference to the equally multi-layered history of this venue in Berlin-Mitte. Meyer’s sound installation is complemented by a maple board, on which tap dancer Cristina Delius created the percussive sounds that served Meyer as the rhythmic foundation for the piece.

Daniel Gustav Cramer

Death Valley in California is a place of extreme heat and dryness. A few years ago, when Daniel Gustav Cramer spent several days in the northern part of the US national park, he noticed a coyote passing his bungalow every morning at roughly the same time. The artist photographed the animal in the early light of dawn, noticing how it seemed completely unfazed by the human observation of its daily routine. Some years after this encounter with the coyote, Cramer spotted a fox moving through the wintery twilight from the balcony of his Berlin apartment. The fox slipped through a hole in a fence across the street, crossed the road, and eventually disappeared between parked cars. Cramer realized that the fox and the coyote shared a striking resemblance. As in a seemingly random circular motion, two distant places became connected through these two animals.

With Fox & Coyote, Cramer brings the wild Californian animal to Berlin as part of a sprawling, citywide installation in which images of the coyote are distributed across the city. From these scattered images, a cohesive yet shifting “sculptural object” is created within the urban thicket. In addition to the circular parcours of the venues of the 13th Berlin Biennale, this emotional cartography of the coyote forms a spatially expansive conceptual whole that only materializes as a sculpture in the minds of the viewers.