"The Wonderful World of Wallywoods"
Tulip Enterprises (21 July 2007)
"Impressions from the new Wallywoods location in Berlin Weissensee. The traveling art space/atelier/home of British artist Paul Woods has landed in a run-down GDR "Kulturhaus" located in an unfashionable and slightly scary Eastern part of town.
The local authorities don't seem to be able to fund art & culture at the "Kulturhaus Peter Edel" anymore, the future of the impressive set of buildings is now hotly debated. In the meantime, as so often in Berlin, artists can create their famous Temporary Spaces there.
Good how flexible this is made possible, but bad how few of this kind of initiatives get proper funding. Also good how nobody expects "Wallywoods" to set some kind of gentrification in motion.
A very busy idealistic sub-cultural impresario, Paul Woods works with a pool of some 150 maladjusted emerging talents, his taste in musical performers is superb.
The first exhibition at the new place (opened on 20 July), called "10" seemed decidedly "unfertig", unlighted and chaotic, the artists seemed a bit unconnected. Yet somehow the whole exhibition worked like one big brilliant art installation: Summer of Love meets squatter Outsider Art, Berlin 1980. You never knew if the whole set up was all very self-conscious or very naive. It sure made a great bohemian party setting, at a very unexpected place.
My favorite art pieces were a series of austere logo mash-up paintings by Kai Pohl (Germany), and the truly eerie Lady Macbeth painting by Marie-Cécile Lutta (Switzerland), pictured above. (Check out her poster work as well.)
All artists from the "10" exhibition, 10 artists from 10 countries:
Timur Çelik (Turkey), Zabo Chabiland (France), Holicska (Transylvania), TJ Korst (USA), Young-Sik Lee (Korea), Marie-Cécile Lutta (Switzerland), Maria Marachowska (Russia), Kai Pohl (Germany), Nicholas D.Vargelis (Greece) & Paul Woods (UK).
The musical program was unambiguously fine: the polysexual subversive electronic glamfolk act of Alex Tornado, was amazing, at once re-inventing and parodying the classic singer/songwriter stance and mixing it with spoken word elements that require great memory and composure. The Ugly Americans played some great distorted punk-jazz.
The Ugly Americans at Gallery Wallywoods
Check the homepage for upcoming events, Calls for Art etc.:
Wallywoods, Berliner Allee 125, 13088 Berlin.
3pm - 8pm daily..."
www.tulip-enterprises.de
(click 'diary', then 'Wallywoods' from the right-hand menu)