Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer’s solo exhibition The Care With Which The Rain Is Wrong begins on the Schinkel Pavillon’s first floor, inside the (darkened) glass rotunda. There, the algorithmically generated digital slideshow “Look in my face…” draws from Farmer’s continuously compiled collection of over 17,000 images and sounds that cover such varied topics as history, ethnography, business, lifestyle and agriculture. As a result, the experience is amazingly hypnotic, and never exactly the same. On our visit, at least, this dizzying array of “cultural” documentation focused on representations of human figures which, over time, seemed to only emphasize their particular – and sometimes painfully historic – Western sources. Downstairs, “Boneyard” is presented in the Schinkelklause. A dramatically lit octagonal room is filled with a large circular plinth covered with cut-outs from the art monograph Maestri Della Scultura, printed in 1966 by the Milanese publishers Fratelli Fabbri. By following this circular path in the round, the organised groupings and texts provide a free-form art history paralleled with the political turmoil in Italy at the time of their printing – during which the Fabbri brothers came under the radar of the Brigate Rosse, a left-wing paramilitary organization, and were forced to flee their home country. Our associative interpretations of these historical juxtapositions add to the story, creating a poetic meta-narrative across time and space.
Geoffrey Farmer: The Care With Which The Rain Is Wrong, through Nov 12 | Schinkel Pavillion, Mitte