Curio
Tiergarten through the lens of Max LiebermannMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Augmented Pedagogies [‘22]
Artists record, creating compositions that are representative of their perception of a place, their subjectivities determining what is included or left out. The Tiergarten exists in painted, drawn, and etched compositions and although they represent different states of the park, they are each a version of events as recorded through the lens of the artist. The canvases of Max Liebermann (1847-1935), a Berliner, and artist who lived to the north of the Brandenburger Tor, that depict the Tiergarten exemplify this. He painted scenes from different locations, from the Kinderspielplatz
(children’s playground), to the Siegesallee. Before our visit to Berlin, this project, Curio was a space with artefacts accreted over time. Each art object referencing the layered history of the Tiergarten. It was a VR environment in which a viewer could experience art objects that share
a history with the Tiergarten and paintings of the Tiergarten by max Liebermann. On visiting the city and repositioning Liebermann's canvases within space, Curio naturally evolved into a visual essay on the hand of the artist as a quill with which to record and delineate places in time.
Curio begins in a painted reconstruction of Max Liebermann's studio, lined with canvases of the Tiergarten that give a rare glimpse into the everyday life of the Park. Curio then extends the boundaries of each canvas, situating the viewer in the contemporary version of each of the paintings and allowing them to explore the archive through the lens of each of the spaces. Before the exploration begins, the viewer experiences the painting of each of these contemporary spaces, as if by the hand of Liebermann. These scenes, as extensions of the canvases of Liebermann, are then lenses through which the viewer can engage with the archive, thus experiencing the multiple layers of history that characterize each location. Link to VR Environment
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