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15 September 2021
Becoming Another (2021) by Aleksandra Domanović is on view in Berlin from 16 September to 10 October 2021 at the former Der Tagesspiegel print house on Potsdamer Straße. The exhibition is the first that Audemars Piguet Contemporary presents in Berlin, a city that the artist has called home for over a decade.
Throughout her career, Domanović has been exploring the interrelation of technology, history and identity in sculptures, videos and digital artworks. Becoming Another employs the artist’s in-depth research practice and asks: what does technology enable us to visualise?
The multi-layered exhibition begins with the history of medical imaging—in particular obstetric ultrasound images—and offers an opportunity to rethink the relationship between seeing and perceiving. Ultrasound is at once technical and personal for the artist. Her mother was a radiologist who specialised in ultrasound and the artist grew up living with the machinery. In Becoming Another Domanović reminds visitors of the link between obstetric ultrasound and foetal gender identification. She then delves into the danger posed by pyrotechnic devices used at gender reveal parties, which she discovered when reading about the San Bernardino, California, wildfires in September 2020.
At its core, this project is about things becoming something else. Through the example of obstetric ultrasound images, we realise that perception is a political field. Looking at art changes you or makes you part of art. Similarly, through perception, a foetus becomes the ultrasound, a gender reveal becomes environmental catastrophe and an image becomes an object.
Aleksandra Domanović
Artist
The artwork responds to the height of the vast exhibition space and features six large-scale video sculptures wrapped and hung from an overhead passage that was originally used by Der Tagesspiegel printing technicians to supervise machinery. The video sculptures hang at alternating 45-degree angles and project down a collage of moving images via LED fan-displays.
Installed on either side of the video sculptures are two large-scale prints that use the Bezold effect, an optical illusion that makes small areas of interspersed colour appear to change depending on adjacent colours. These prints—the largest realised by the artist to date—represent the fraught distinction between what one sees and what one perceives.
It’s an honour to be working with Aleksandra in Berlin on her first large-scale exhibition in the city. Certainly we can all learn from the questions she poses in Becoming Another, which not only reflect contemporary art, but also contemporary life today.
Denis Pernet
Art Curator, Audemars Piguet Contemporary
Aleksandra Domanović (born in Novi Sad, 1981) lives in Berlin. She has had major solo exhibitions at Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan (2019); MoCA Cleveland (2018); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2017); Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2017); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2016); Oakville Galleries, Canada (2016); the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2014); and Kunsthalle Basel (2012). Her work has been included in numerous international biennials including the VAC Foundation exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Belgrade Biennale (2018); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2015); and Shanghai Biennale (2014). In 2018, she was awarded the 5th Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize, Milan. Current and upcoming projects include the 58th Belgrade Biennale, 14th Baltic Triennial, 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2022) and “Future Bodies from a Recent Past” at Museum Brandhorst (2022). She is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin and Los Angeles.
– www.tanyaleighton.com