Museé sentimental de l’ours de Berlin

Nschotschi Haslinger (*1982 in Eitorf) is an artist working at the interface of sculpture and drawing. Recent solo exhibitions include »Der geheime Dienst«, Zero Fold, Cologne, »Die untere Welt«, Overbeckgesellschaft in der St. Petrikirche, Lübeck, »Introesque«, Exile, Vienna (all 2019), »Das gestohlene Lied«, Galerie Genscher, Hamburg, »Apropofola«, Kunstverein Kjubh, Cologne (both 2018). In addition, her works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions including »When the Sick Rule the World«, GR_und, Berlin (2019), »May the Bridges I burn light the Way«, Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018), Simonow Collection, Kunsthalle Bozen, Bolanzo (2016) and »Ruhe-Störung, Streifzüge durch die Welt der Collage«, Marta Herford, Herford (2013). She lives and works in Berlin.

During the preparatory phase of her work, Nschotschi Haslinger delved deeply into the Bärenzwinger’s history and the heraldry of the city coat of arms. This is particularly evident in the poses of the various animals within the group. The artist’s choice of color was comparatively freer and adapted to the spatial situation in the Bärenzwinger’s exhibition rooms. Haslinger takes the bears very seriously as entities and uses the individual figures and the way they’re positioned in space to tell a story of trepidation and to allow viewers to empathize with the bears’ suffering in captivity.

Sathit Sattarasart (*1979) is an artist whose works are mostly about how things come to be, while he is focusing on art related subjects, material, process and structure of things, he also works with various subject matters from politic to everyday life scenario. Sattarasart’s works have been included in several international exhibition, among them, Asian Film & Video Art Forum at MMCA, Seoul (2015), Home Stories at KfW Stiftung, Frankfurt am Main (2013), Move on Asia at ZKM, Karlsruhe (2013), Busan Biennale 2006. In 2017, Sathit Sattarasart graduated (Meisterschüler) from Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste from the class of Professor Tobias Rehberger and currently he lives and works between Berlin and Bangkok. In his artistic practice, Sathit Sattarasart pursues various threads ranging from sculpture and installation to his own curatorial projects, all of which share an intensive exploration of the respective location or context in which they are to be later shown.

One of these threads is the »pedestals« series, which consists of pedestals he designs for works by other artists for the purposes of exhibiting them. This can be meant in a very physical sense, but also takes place on a non-material level. For the Bärenzwinger, Sattarasart developed two new »pedestals«. Unlike their predecessors, these are dedicated to two objects that are not works of art. Resting on one is a small sculpture atop a colored sheet of acrylic glass. The sculpture is a model that was made for the purpose of fabricating a taxidermic specimen from Schnute, the last surviving female bear in the kennel. The proportions of the pedestal correspond to the bear’s body size and the relationship to the interior of the cage in which the pedestal is placed. Its position, the distance the viewer needs to stand at to view the work, and its color are references to a sense of privacy that the artist tries to create for the sculpture. The second pedestal is immaterial and incorporates bear fur from the Bärenzwinger’s last two bears, Maxi and Schnute, into a narrative.

03/18/2020 7 – 10 pm

with Philipp Kleinmichel

04/24/2020 7 – 10 pm
»Der Bärenzwinger zwischen den Staatssystemen (1937-1995)«

by Marie-Christin Krüger