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20 February 2024

Artist Alexandra Pirici presents Attune – a major new site-specific installation with live performative action as part of a solo exhibition that will run from 25 April until 6 October 2024 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. The exhibition inaugurates a new annual commission for Hamburger Bahnhof’s historical central hall which, in 2024, is co-commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart and Audemars Piguet Contemporary. The exhibition is co-funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

With Attune, Pirici has transformed the central hall at Hamburger Bahnhof into a living landscape in which performers move and sing among chemical and physical reactions, exploring the emergence of complex structures. Pirici invites viewers to recognise the wonder and intelligence of self-structuring matter, both organic and inorganic, and appreciate the reality of our vibrant world.

Drawing on her previous works’ concern with live action and the human body, Pirici now investigates how other material configurations and structures perform and behave in a “life-like” manner. In this way, Attune comes to embody a continuum between the living and the non-living – between so-called “inert” matter and biological matter.

Pirici creates a vibrant imaginary landscape within the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof. She interweaves active sculptural elements with live performance and polyphonic musical pieces of her own choreography and composition. A stainless steel vine-like sculpture, a shape-shifting sand dune, a spiraling platform, plants, mineral formations and chemical gardens among other elements bring audiences face to face with the wonder of self-organizing processes and patterns. These not only define the experiential world but also offer an insight into the emergence of life and evolution.

In this at once archaic and futuristic environment, created by the artist and designed together with long-term collaborator Andrei Dinu, chemical reactions, mineral formations, and physical phenomena perform alongside living bodies in acknowledgement and celebration of the continuum between animate and inanimate matter. Together these actors show how stable structures emerge from the random behavior of atoms, molecules, and cells – in both animate and inanimate matter.

This will be the second collaboration between Pirici and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, following the programme’s support of Pirici’s Encyclopedia of Relations (2022) at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale. The new co-commission enables the artist to develop her practice at a larger scale, incorporating fixed physical structures alongside live performance.

Attune is curated by Catherine Nichols, curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, and is co-commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof and Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Accompanying the exhibition is the fifth edition of the Hamburger Bahnhof’s catalogue series, published by Silvana Editoriale Milano. This exhibition is co-funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

"Attune" comes from an ongoing interest in exploring our relationship to other life forms and the possibility to come closer to other forms of embodiment. It now expands to include non-living material configurations and their performativity. I am hoping to celebrate this continuum through this imaginary landscape that lives for a few months in the exhibition space.

Alexandra Pirici

Artist

Attune will be on view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin from 25 April until 6 October 2024.

Address
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Invalidenstraße 50, 10557 Berlin, Germany

Opening Hours
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays: 10AM to 6PM
Thursdays: 10AM to 8PM
Saturdays, Sundays: 11AM to 6PM
Closed on Mondays
Portrait of Alexandra Pirici

Alexandra Pirici (b. 1982) is an artist with a background in choreography, whose artworks have been shown at the Venice Biennale – most recently in the 59th edition in the Central Pavilion in 2022 and at the 55th edition in 2013 in the Romanian Pavilion – as well as at the New Museum in New York in 2018, at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017, at Tate Modern London and Tate Liverpool in 2016, at Manifesta 10 St. Petersburg in 2014, and at the Centre Pompidou Paris in 2014, among many others.

Pirici works in museum contexts, in public space and sometimes in theatrical frameworks. She choreographs ongoing actions, performative monuments and performative environments that fuse dance, sculpture, spoken word and music. Her works deal with monumentality or the history of specific places and institutions in order to playfully tackle and transform existing hierarchies. They also reflect on the history and function of gestures in art and popular culture or on questions about the body, its presence, absence or image and the politics of capture.

We are proud to continue our collaboration with Alexandra Pirici in the co-commissioning of her new installation at Hamburger Bahnhof. Alexandra’s reflection on how we resemble, influence and attune to one another echoes both Audemars Piguet’s belief that creativity connects people, and the interconnectedness that is at the core of Audemars Piguet’s values.

Denis Pernet

Art Curator, Audemars Piguet Contemporary