Autumn Highlights: what to watch out for in Berlin

More autumn highlights in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles

Mariana Castillo Deball will organise an artistic installation using items from various related museum collections in Berlin at the historic Hamburger Bahnhof. By reorganising and representing these objects in new contexts, Deball intends to interrogate the role of the museum, particularly the historic ethnological and sociological practices that were prevalent in Berlin, and imbue these installations with new meaning.

‘Mariana Castillo Deball: Parergon’ is at the Hamburger Bahnhof from 20 September–1 March 2015

Thomas Hirschhorn will present a new site-specific work, Höhere Gewalt, his first institutional solo show in Berlin. He intends to entirely ’deconstruct‘ the exhibition space. Hirschhorn has created many site-specific installations in his long career; he made a splash in New York this past year with Gramsci Monument (2013), which built provisional houses in the Bronx.

‘Thomas Hirschhorn: Höhere Gewalt’ is at the Schinkel Pavillon from 29 August–28 September

Praxes, a not-for-profit exhibition space, presents work in cycles, and their entire fall season is dedicated to two seemingly unrelated artists – London–based Christina Mackie, and Matt Mullican, an LA artist who recently relocated his studio to Berlin. The length of the engagement is unique not only for Berlin; I am not aware of any other institution that provides this much time and space to think and make, deliberately focused on two contemporary artists. From September through December, the two artists will rotate through a series of three exhibitions each, including multiple auxiliary activities: talks, papers, and performances.

‘Cycle 3: Christina Mackie, Matt Mullican’ is at the PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art from 30 August–13 December

Van Hanos, a New York-based painter, presents his first solo exhibition in Berlin. His striking representational paintings in oil mark a significant departure from Leighton’s otherwise more Spartan programme; her last exhibition consisted of six copies of the same photograph of a pair of sneakers distributed sparsely throughout the gallery.

Van Hanos is at Tanya Leighton from 6 September–11 October

Performance artist Christian Falsnaes addresses a difficult question: What is the market around performance art? His upcoming solo exhibition will present multiple ideas for potential performances, including props, notes, drawings, and designs – none of which have happened yet. The performances will only be activated if a collector purchases them. A collector may play a creative role in one of the performances by selecting from an archive of actions and characters that Falsnaes has developed. In another, an audience-created painting might include colours that are selected by a collector. Only the collector herself will see another.

‘Christian Falsnaes: Performance Works’ is at PSM Gallery from 17 September–1 November

Lead image: used under Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 3.0)