Alexandra Pirici presents a major new site-specific installation with live action and music in the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof. The exhibition launches a new series of annual commissions in the museum’s Historic Hall to be opened in conjunction with Gallery Weekend Berlin.

With her expansive new work Attune, Alexandra Pirici explores the ways in which human beings – and their more-than-human counterparts – resemble, influence, and attune to one another to bring forth complex structures, whether chemical, physical, mineral or social. Pirici creates within the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof a vibrant imaginary landscape. She interweaves active sculptural elements with live action and musical pieces of her own choreography and composition. In this at once archaic and futuristic environment, chemical reactions, mineral formations, and physical phenomena perform alongside living bodies in acknowledgement and celebration of the continuum of living and non-living matter. Together these actors show how stable structures emerge from the random behaviors of atoms, molecules, and cells. The wonder of self-structuring matter comes to the fore.

The Artist

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.

This is the second collaboration between Pirici and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, following the program’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 both fixed physical structures alongside live action.

 Live Action

• During the exhibition opening on 25 April 2024 the live action will take place from 7:30 pm to 10 pm
• Daily from 1 pm to 5 pm

Briggs-Rauscher Reaction

A highlight of Pirici’s work is the demonstration of the Briggs-Rauscher reaction in which a solution shifts back and forth between two colors before the reaction finally comes to an end. This oscillating chemical reaction is often used to demonstrate self-organizing patterns in chemistry.

The reaction, which lasts for approximately five minutes, can be experienced twice daily during the opening and closing weeks of the exhibition: from 3 to 6 October between 1:30 and 2 pm; and between 4 and 5 pm.

Concept, Realization, Choreography, and Composition

Alexandra Pirici

Design

Andrei Dinu

Performers

Caroline Beach, Juan Corres Benito, Noemi Calzavara, Michelle Cheung, Gabrielle Duval, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Nitsan Margaliot, Jared Marks, Tatiana Mejía, Emily Ranford, Asuka Julia Riedl, Robert Schulz, Yurika S. Yamamoto

Curator

Catherine Nichols

Publication

Accompanying the exhibition is the fifth edition of the Hamburger Bahnhof catalogue series, published by Silvana Editoriale Milano, comprising 116 pages, available at Buchhandlung Walther König for €12. ISBN: 9788836656578

The project is co-commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof and Audemars Piguet Contemporary.

Co-funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Supported by the Federal Government

Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin