Aaron Amar Bhamra
You read me a poem once And I called it beauty And then you read me another one and I called it harmony air, 2024
77,7 m2
space, breath

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You read me a poem once And I called it beauty And then you read me another one and I called it harmony air, 2024, is a passive yet active performative encounter with the space and the other framed in/as a work description. The work requires only the description of the work on a printed floor plan. The title of the work refers to a poem by Dorothea Lasky, suggested by Monika Georgieva as the first text for the exhibition ON AIR. In the title of the work, the "I" is replaced by the "You" and the "You" is replaced by the "I".

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Mail to Adrienne & Sanna on the 17.11.24

I think a lot about the chronology in which I show work. With this one, the chronology is part of it. 

The work can be read in many ways, but a starting point might be a work from 2021 (model of a place, 2021) where I unfolded a roll of paper in the space - stapled it to the wall and then rolled it up again leaving traces. The paper, which is a material used to build architectural models, was used here to introduce the space itself as a 1:1 model that should reflect on abstractions of a reality but remain a perceptible object. At that time I was thinking about the given frame, the specific place & the exhibition space which might seem separate from its surroundings - and the exhibition space as a model for a society. After that, I often used the door as a material to emphasise this border of entry. Another time I used a fire escape plan as a visual score to empty a gallery space.

For the work air, 2024 which I did earlier this year, the air in the exhibition space was the material. I was interested in this arbitrary moment of defining the air in the space (m2), which is nonsense - because air has no boundaries. I was mostly interested in giving space rather than taking it. I did not want a one-sided approach to the materiality of air, which is also impossible. That is why I invited eight dear friends and colleagues to suggest texts that would become the exhibition text for this show and then become the reader. The work (You read me a poem once And I called it beauty And then you read me another one and I called it harmony air, 2024), takes two adapted lines of a poem from one of the suggestions, which I really love as an act - as a perception or reflection of the given conditions, herby literally named the work. 

What is different here is that the work only unfolds when it is read, noticed or perceived by the audience, the other performers or the hosts. The work is therefore only performed by the people who are present. In this way everyone acts as a carrier or even as a the display and at the same time as a viewer of and to the work.

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amatter, Berlin, DEU
23.November, 2024, 4-9pm
Erich-Weinert-Strasse 135, Berlin
With participating artists: Luise Arnold, Sanna Helena Berger, Aaron Amar Bhamra, Cis De Gendt, Adrienne Herr, Irina Jasnowski Pascual, ft. Ma Clement, Hye Young Sin, Lotta Thießen

organised by Adrienne Herr & Sanna Helena Berger