Rushes

The group exhibition Rushes, curated by Juliette Desorgues and Raoul Klooker, explores the pervasive influence of screen-based technologies on our daily lives, where private and public become increasingly enmeshed. Borrowed from the term “rushes,” used in film and video production to describe unedited footage, the exhibition title reflects the artists’ interest in the immediacy of recording, screening and broadcasting inherent to quotidian consumer electronics.

Drawing a contemporary parallel to video art of the late 1980s and early ‘90s—produced before the rise of the internet, and engaged with television as a mass medium for the transmission of information, ideologies, and pop culture—the works assembled in Rushes centre on portable devices that have become integral to the viewing, recording, and sharing of data and moving images. At a time when the digital sphere is increasingly associated with misinformation, surveillance and reactionary politics, Rushes explores a heightened awareness of these shifts underpinning today’s socio-political landscape.

Rather than attempting to document lived experience, the works on display examine, often with a sardonic edge, how contemporary media fragments and reframes it. Ad-hoc smartphone and spy cam recordings, live streams, and found footage create an illusion of unmediated witnessing, while resisting the distinction between what is staged and what is real.

The artists presented work with materials that are inexpensive, accessible, and embedded in everyday life. They share an aesthetic of the mundane, one that resists monumentality, either by sidestepping or subverting its features. New and existing works—some reconfigured specifically for the exhibition—inhabit the building’s spaces, provoking moments of friction as they brush against its complex, charged architecture steeped in Germany’s fascist history.

The works on view are attuned to the scale of the human body, evidenced through its traces, from hands grasping objects to human-sized interfaces, and devices marked by the imprint of touch. Rushes uncovers ways of reclaiming and reimagining the technologies that structure our daily lives, rather than merely being shaped by them.

Rushes opens at Fluentum ahead of the 21st edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin. The exhibition will be accompanied by a text by American author Stephanie La Cava.