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Until October 2006, CAPRI was a non-commercial artspace in Brunnenstrasse, Berlin-Mitte. Founded in 2001 by the artitsts Ina Bierstedt, Bettina Carl and Alena Meier, CAPRI realised over 70 exhibitions and events, presenting work by young international artists who often created site-specific installations for CAPRI's rather peculiar space in Brunnenstrasse.
The three artists-curators always saw their project as a participant in local and international networks, and thus organsised several cooperations with non-commercial partners, among them artspaces in Paris, Amsterdam and Auckland (NZ).
CAPRI Berlin continue their work as a collective of artists-curators.

organised by:

Ina Bierstedt
Bettina Carl
Alena Meier
 

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I KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T SEE

Introduction:

An exhibition held in December in an ample and unheated factory hall, inevitably stipulates a special curatorial approach. Accounting for Karlin Studios' particular circumstances, CAPRI Berlin has elaborated an all-over site-specific installation. I KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T SEE comprises mostly 3-dimensional artworks and video pieces, presented on and inbetween garden furniture and caravans, and forming a scenario that recalls a camping site.
If you go camping, you endeavour to install a kind of living-room out in the greens, and this act contains and mirrors many of the ambiguous notions that define our very idea of nature. 'Nature' stands for something we have lost, we look for, and we don't belong to - also something we control and exploit, however we may adore it: a picture.

Stages of transition, intervalls, and the potentials of imperfection are central issues of the exhibition. The indoor-camping site in I KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T SEE supplies the ground for artworks that often deal with prototypes and clichées, questioning the vantage points of the beholders and of the artists themselves. Any artistic statement is both a proposition and a refusal: something is offered, and a lot remains concealed. The title I KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T SEE refers to the dialogic and contradictory nature of any act of identification, including that of identifying a work of art. Sometimes taking rather funny turns, this process of exclusions and cooptations is playing with the obvious, with our knowledge and with the invisible.

In many works presented in I KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T SEE the gestures of mapping and identifying appear as performed in a test assembly - assuming that failure is likely to happen. The term crisis originally means intensification and landmark, hence it points towards the future, however turbid this may be. Accounting for the probability of stranding, the works in the exhibition nevertheless stand for the resolve to defy a precarious reality with a kind of passionate irony - being aware that only fragile things may move.

CAPRI Berlin is a collective of artists-curators founded in 2001. With their exhibition in Karlin Studios, CAPRI continue their collaboration with many artists who have also participated in ICH WEISS WAS DU NICHT SIEHST, an exhibition project realised in March 2010 at Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien Berlin.

Bettina Carl/CAPRI Berlin