Nina Beier, AFRIKA, 29.04.2011- 11.06.2011, Croy Nielsen, Weyding Straße 10, D-10178, by craniv boyd.

Nina Beier, AFRIKA, 29.04.2011- 11.06.2011, Croy Nielsen, Weyding Straße 10, D-10178, by craniv boyd.

 

Distilled and concentrated hipster posturing on recycling and green movements are what could be culled from Nina Beier exhibition titled AFRIKA, for the reason behind the titling of the exhibition thus look to the solitary unattributed footnote triplet of paragraphs at the foot of the press handout Croy Nielsen, of Weyding Straße, has prepared as component to the public understanding of this moment of Beiers oeuvre. "The first symbols of abstract thinking in humans can be traced to fossils dating between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago in Africa. However, language itself, whether spoken or written of, involves abstract thinking," This footnote or text fragment rather brackets the simple information of the dimensions, title and materials of the work, at the top of the necessary information pertaining to this rather portable and there by bourgeoisie friendly framed behind glass or acrylic, found materials work, the top bracket is a short recount of a post modern how random can random be anecdote, describing the  "set life" of the production of Stephen Spielberg's film "Close encounters of the  third kind" (1977), the anecdote ends with an observation about the casual wardrobe attire of the union Hollywood professional an unnamed stunt coordinator, whom allegedly wore a tee shirt one day that read "Zay bee-long ere Mozambique."  Frustrated isolated information that is distributed cryptically over the exhibition title, a Nation's name in the context of popular fashion item, and foot note, add to an atmosphere of unclaimed irony and a short of tentative and shy cynics. 

 

One item in the exhibition is the edition of ten of the exhibition poster, (rotated daily calling to mind a parable about stepping in rivers) that collide found materials with the favored artistic method of A. Warhola, the screen print, so surrealism and pop artistry meet yet again, this time not in 70's vintage tabloid photographs of S. Dali hanging out with A. Warhola and cultivated du mode entourage at the hypothetical Saint Regis Hotel Lobby, but in the melding of found materials, posters in Beier's case, and ink squeegee through chemically augmented silk. 

 

The framed works are careful color studies of secondhand lightly worn vintage clothing that, are pressed behind a clear panel to make a cultivated controlled moment or theater of chaos. The clothing in its jumbled and flattened state is not arraigned or over arraigned per se, it the items that add up to the abstract image, emphasis an order of selection, the abstract thinking required to construct this "function" as art idea and object generator: this blue cotton tee shirt and these blue nylon swim trunks together as opposed to two other givens, or is it takens in this context?  We have ostentatiously low cost clothing items (this fact we are told in the materials description) transformed through the Mind much more than the hand of Nina Beier, and of course by virtue of the gallery condition in which we the public choose to encounter it, (close, in proximity to the Volkbuehne building,) the work, a logical further development of pop and surrealist positions of the 20^th century, is valuated further by more abstract thinking that a financial advisor or curating guru would possibly be capable of speaking to.

 

Framed clothing interchangeable exhibition poster and a video eleven minutes and thirty seconds in length of an interview with a French Unidentified Flying Object expert subtitled with dialogue from Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the outtakes from said movie, all this can go under the title of AFRIKA, extra terrestrial and a source of human life abstract thinking and civilization it produces as byproduct. By craniv boyd.