A Night to Remember

The artist reception and opening were both amazing. Hob-knobbing with artists from Berlin, Denmark, Italy, France, Belgium, Bavaria, Paris, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, London, and of course the sole other Canadian was quite the surreal experience.
Pablo had the reception at a former squat which is now a gallery /residence and I think a cool space. It was very Berlin. We had mojitos and bad wine served with pretzels and rice crackers. This was our official opportunity to network and meet all the other artists.
Now imagine in the middle of this Toby arrives to do his speech with a Muslim women from Libya who he met on a train. She then arrived three weeks later unannounced at his door and stayed the night. According to her religion Toby could not also stay, so had to leave his own house. In the end he happily transported her along with him for three days. What she thought of the squat and art work, I can’t imagine.
Toby did his speech with her at his side which was quite comical and thenalso did a photo shoot of many of us at the reception which was great fun.
We then all went to Pablo’s favourite bar the Kiwi Café for dinner and stayed up very late talking long into the night, with the big night still to come!
The big event featured two bands, one dancer, caterers walking around with trays of food and wine, and a performance art show. The performance artists are from Atlanta and in their seventies. They do human sculptures which are something like a cross between very good yoga and those Chinese acrobats that twirl plates. They recite quite interesting poetry while building the sculptures and eventually get completely naked to perform. Yes completely naked and do human sculptures at seventy. You couldn’t not be impressed as there were over two hundred people there watching in amazement as they unabashedly contorted their naked bodies in front of us as they talked of death and decay.
At this point the only other Canadian, a math teacher from Victoria came up to me with wide eyes and said – “Wow this is a happening – nothing like this would ever occur in Canada would it” And that was exactly the point.

The Really Big Show

For three days we played curatorial assistants to Pablo as he set up the 3rd Annual International Assemblage show to be ready for the opening on Sept 29th. There are over 300 art works by the sixty artists participating and over twenty five arriving in person to attend. It’s terribly exciting and as they say in the circus “a really big show”!
Dion’s main job is transporting things to the mouldy dungeon and working on the computer, I mostly assist with the unloading and moving of art work. I try hard not to break things. Mostly it goes well. There are some dramas about the placement of art and the sizes of certain pieces, a set of three that Pablo thought were about 2ft long, turn out to be over nine feet long each! (A metric misunderstanding as it turns out)
Huge parcels arrive daily in crates, badly wrapped packages arrive by courier, some artists transport their work themselves and drop it off. It’s wonderful to open all the surprise packages. Pablo says it is like a horrible Christmas, as you never know what you are going to get. His three interns keep very busy cataloguing both the show and packaging it arrived in, which Dion also gets to take down to the dungeon.
Four large parcels arrive from Canada in crates – and lo and behold the packager has used the Robertson screw driver to seal them. The Robertson screw driver is apparently unknown in European and American hardware circuits. Not thinking to bring this tool with us from Canada, we disappoint. In the end it takes all day to open the four crates using alternate technology.
In the midst of all this artists arrive from all over the world and need direct directions to restaurants, to look at their art, to talk, to flirt, to network and in one case shop! I was seconded as the only other north American female of shopping age to take the LA Times art critic shopping through out Berlin. I happily obliged
Slowly over the three days between shopping and computer work the show was hung.
It looked fantastic and filled the entire gallery and the three studios. The only major glitch was about twenty minutes before the opening Deiter somehow managed to erase the entire data base of catalogue materials, which of course contained all the labels! To say there was drama is to underscore the tension and words exchanged. We missed most of it as it was all in German. A last minute plan was devised to label everything with a number and print out a price sheet. After much running to the copier store, hand edited corrections and last minute identification of art work, there was something to give to the “collectors” at the opening. And what an opening it was.