JULIUS VON BISMARCK

032c Workshop / Joerg Koch is pleased to present new work by Berlin-based artist JULIUS VON BISMARCK (b. 1983).

Exploring the ambiguous relationship between nature and culture, Von Bismarck manipulates existing technologies to invent new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

At 032c Workshop Bismarck debuts Forest Apparatus Video and Documentation, a continuation of the artist’s recent exhibition, Unfall am Mittelpunkt Deutschlands (Accident at the center of Germany), organized at Alexander Levy gallery, Berlin. Using a range of synthetic materials, Bismarck has fabricated an artificial birch tree that appears indistinguishable from its real counterparts. The tree was carried into the forest of Grunewald, where it was raised and planted into a concrete foundation, becoming a permanent fixture in the Berlin park. With the guidance of a map made by the artist, visitors to Grunewald are welcome to look for and discover Forest Apparatus, which remains both a monument to nature and an object that questions our very understanding of naturalness.

In February 1991 a basswood tree was planted in the Thuringian province of Germany, a site where Bismarck enacted part of his recent body of work. In April this year, the artist had a Volkswagen Golf smash into the tree, which grows at the geographical center of Germany, thereby using an apparent accident to create an aesthetic act in which nature, technology, and power collided.

Click here to see opening scenes.

032c Workshop / Joerg Koch is an exhibition space in Berlin. Featuring an eight-meter-long vitrine designed by Konstantin Grcic, its programming is dedicated to the idea and different formats of the archive.