DIE BALKONE
Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg windows
and balconies
Jeremiah Day & Alisa Margolis
All Your Neighbors, 2021
Margolis and Day’s collaboration juxtaposes fragments from a new series of figurative pastel paintings by Margolis, and Day's ongoing commemoration of Carl and Margarethe Schurz, Germans who fled the crushed revolution of 1848 to become abolitionists and civil society activists in the United Sates.
Margolis’ continues her proposal for a “contemporary sublime,” drawing from her inspiration and engagement with the Italian Madonella tradition of painting’s function in public space.
The quote - "If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.” - comes from Carl Schurz 1859 attack on slavery, preceding the US Civil War in which he fought.
Planned originally for their own apartment building’s window, the project took a new turn when it became clear that the building on Choriner Strasse 12 - home to the famous original Späti, a living monument and soul of the neighborhood – will possibly be sold.
Margolis' ambiguous hands suddenly seemed full of latent meanings when imaging the loss of dozens of neighbors and the anchor of community. At the initiative of the Späti, the work has shifted in location (and scale) to Choriner 12, with the support of local cafe Lass Uns Freunde Blieben, with the aim of re-visiting the commemorative meaning of figuration and perhaps even contributing to this unfolding story, as the efforts to preserve the Späti take shape.
-Jeremiah Day & Alisa Margolis
Jeremiah Day
works in both performing and visual arts, as well as a teacher of performance and research in the arts, with a weekly workshop at K77 Studios (when there's no lockdown, after all). He studied art at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Day's work has been shown at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris and Artist's Space New York, amongst others. A new publication about his work If It's For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful, She Said will be launched this spring.
Alisa Margolis
studied at Columbia University, New York and de Ateliers in Amsterdam. Her work has been featured in The Saatchi Gallery's "The Triumph Of Painting," among other group exhibitions. Margolis' artist book "Theory of Everything" documents her research into "the contemporary sublime." In 2015, Margolis was a fellow at the Villa Romana in Florence, Italy and her publication produced from this collaboration "Black Square, Black Square, Black Square" explores the Madanella tradition of painting in public space. Recent exhibitions include CCA Andratx Kunsthalle in Spain and Galerie Judin in Berlin.