TRACKS IN A BOX

7 - 27 SEP 2019
Exhibition opening 6 SEP, 7 pm

On the 7th of September, ‘Tracks in a Box’ opens its doors to the public as an imaginary center for artistic guided tours: a pop-up gallery, a discursive space and a living archive. It offers a program of audio walks, self-guided explorations, and performative tours by Berlin-based artists. The exhibition explores what an archive and a library of ephemeral, participatory and performative artworks could look like. As a space for collective research, it hosts a series of conversations with artists and thinkers reflecting on the intersection between the ephemeral and the material.

‘Tracks in a Box’ approaches the imagination not as an individual activity but as a collective playing field that belongs to the realm of the public. Rather than creating one shared idealistic vision, this exhibition brings together multiple overlapping and contradictory imaginary landscapes to celebrate the coexistence of nightmares, wild fantasies and daydreams.

Who lives on Moritzplatz Island? What if a building, a former squat in Kreuzberg, could speak? How is everyday life for an inhabitant of utopia? Where do puddles travel? And is Berlin paradise? Momentarily fracturing the mundane, the participating artists take the audience on a trip between the infra-ordinary and the grand spectacle.

For the duration of three weeks, ‘Tracks in a Box’ resides in the Aufbau Haus on Moritzplatz. Born out of a desire to give a body to the artistic guided tours that have been presented in the context of B_Tour, a nomadic curatorial platform dedicated to guiding as an artistic practice, since 2013, the exhibition takes on the paradoxical challenge of exhibiting, collecting, mediating and possibly even selling inherently transitory, participatory and public artwork.