Home > Current events > ECHOES OF VOICES IN THE HIGH TOWERS | BERLIN | SUMMER 2012

ECHOES OF VOICES IN THE HIGH TOWERS | BERLIN | SUMMER 2012

JULY 7 TO OCTOBER 31 2012


New works by British artist Robert Montgomery Opening | 7 July 2012

The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside Of You And Like This You Keep Them Alive, painted wood, LED lights and recycled sunlight, Installation view at De La Warr Pavilion, UK, 2010.



Neue Berliner Räume is pleased to announce Echoes of Voices in the High Towers, an exhibition project with British artist Robert Montgomery that will take place over the course of summer 2012 at the disused Tempelhof Airport and various other locations across town. The presentation of his open air installations will be accompanied by artistic interventions in several magazines and an exhibition of his drawings in September 2012. Coinciding with the exhibition is the autumn release of an artist book on Robert Montgomery. Prior to the exhibition’s official opening in July 2012, the first work of Echoes of Voices in the High Towers is featured in the current issue of Um[laut] Magazine.


Montgomery works in a poetic and melancholic post-Situationist tradition. Since 2005 he has carried out his Words in the City at Night project where, echoing the Situationist concept of detournement, he hijacks advertising space in the city, often illegally. He covers advertising billboards with austere black posters with white letters. His texts are part poetry, part enquiry into our collective unconscious. They are intended to be encountered by commuters who don`t know they are art, and an attempt to describe in public space what it feels like to live now. Since 2008 he has made sculptures that use the medium of recycled sunlight such as The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside Of You And Like This You Keep Them Alive. These sculptures hold the sunlight of the day in solar cells and recycle it at night.


At the very heart of Robert Montgomery’s Berlin exhibition is the city itself: Though committed to its future, Berlin has never lost touch with the painful reality of its troubled past. And it is this state of being in-between that has inspired Montgomery in his latest works. Tempelhof Airport, the main site for the exhibition project, stands as a tangible testimony to the ambitious task of both remembering and moving forward: Once the biggest building in the world, the monumental complex was facing a chequered history when it was completed in the early 1940s. First a deterrent symbol of the Nazi Regime’s ideology; later an icon of the city’s endurance when the airport became the central site of the Berlin Airlift during the Soviet blockade of West Berlin. After the last take-off in 2008, the airport was claimed by the public in a spectacular series of demonstrations and subsequently handed over. Today, it is one of the most iconic sites of the city. Both a reminder of bygone ideas and an impressive platform for new ones, Tempelhof Airport is emblematic of the city’s spirit. And it is this spirit which Montgomery’s works lend a voice to.


In more than one way, Berlin’s struggle to map out a future for itself is a symbolic one. And so where the exhibition is inspired by this city, it is only ever inspired by the question of how we want to move on from here to – where?



Media Partner
http://ignant.de/

Project Partners
http://tempelhoferfreiheit.de/
http://umlaut-magazin.de/
http://berlinplakat.net/

NEUE BERLINER RÄUME Berlin
INFORMATION: • Phone: 0049 162 31 44 791
• Website: http://www.neueberlinerraeume.de/
• Mail : info@neueberlinerraeume.de

OPENING TIMES: Public installations - open 24/7
ADMISSION PRICE: FREE
CONTACTS: • Neue Berliner Räume Phone: 0049 162 31 44 791
press@neueberlinerraeume.de