All buildings carry the echo of overlapping timelines in their walls. Every room, every crack in the façade and every surrounding street bears traces of the lives they have hosted and the moments they have witnessed. Peel away a layer of paint and countless stories emerge. In a similar way, art collections guard time and archive memories of generations and socio-political events. Through the works of art they preserve and those they lack, collections document a present in flux.
Against the backdrop of the PalaisPopulaire's multi-layered history, the exhibition It's Just a Matter of Time examines the confluence of temporalities. Once the palace of the Prussian princesses, the building has undergone many transformations: from a museum to a war ruin and later to an opera café in the GDR, which also offered refuge to the queer community, until it became an exhibition space for contemporary art in 2018 - after a long period of vacancy.
Conceived as a contemplative journey, the exhibition presents artistic positions from 1946 to the present day by placing historical and contemporary works from the Deutsche Bank Collection in dialog with selected loans. It's Just a Matter of Time conveys a sense of absence and encourages reflection on how past narratives persist and intertwine with emerging realities.
Artists: Max Beckmann, Marianne Berenhaut, Ayşe Erkmen, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Shilpa Gupta, Cildo Meireles, Rachel Whiteread, among others.
Curated by Liberty Adrien & Carina Bukuts
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