PLATTE BERLIN TOOK ITS FIRST BERLIN ART WEEK BOW UNDERGROUND
More than 400 guests came down to the store's basement last night for HYPOGEUM, a group show in which Thomias Radin took an ancient underground burial complex as a model for the human mind. Asthetik Magazine recalls the night.
PLATTE Berlin took part in Berlin Art Week's featured programme for the second time with HYPOGEUM, a group exhibition curated by the artist Thomias Radin, which opened last night within the store's basement and drew upwards of 400 artists, press, buyers and members of the city's wider cultural community. The show anchors ART/PLATTE — a newly added extension to the brand's preexisting narrative — and a programme staged around the retailer's fifth birthday, which has given the space over to exhibitions, performances, DJ sets and daily interventions.
The exhibition honed in on the archaeology of human psychology and marked Radin's second series of curatorial excellence. Diving into the mind as a machine, constantly in motion between consciousness and reality.
The title is borrowed from the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta, the prehistoric complex carved directly into living rock and used as a burial site from roughly 4000 to 2500 BC, and Radin has treated its interconnected chambers and passages as a curatorial blueprint rather than a set to be rebuilt. "Like the Hypogeum, the mind is made of different chambers, passages and depths," he says. "Some are familiar, some hidden, some connected in ways we may not immediately understand." Walking down into the basement puts the visitor in that movement from the visible to the hidden before a single work has been looked at.
Ten artists were shown, among them Thomas Delaroziere, Shuaitong Zong, Sarah Domitille Jehle, Nils Ben Brahim, Jill Winnie, Devon Nguyen, Allistair Walter, Alejandra Valcárcel, Ál Varo T Guilherme and the sound artist Delawhere.
Five years in, PLATTE Berlin is still building outward from fashion and the independent designers it stocks, and ART/PLATTE reads as an extension of that position into art and sound rather than a departure from it.
