‘Warm, Kalt und Sehnsucht’ (‘Warm, Cold and Longing’), the title alone sets the tone for Jakob Urban’s exhibition. Those who have been around long enough may remember ‘Gefühl und Härte’ (‘feeling and hardness’), a slogan that epitomised the Berlin lifestyle well into the 1980s. Ultimately, it also stood for the nine-month squatting at Winterfeldtstraße 20/22, which became famous thanks to the documentary film of the same title.
At one end of the wide arc that Urban draws is a series of monochrome screens: sublimation print on aluminium, a broad colour spectrum, in classic 16:9 format and barely larger than the mobile world access in your pocket. We later learn that these are profile pictures Urban takes as screenshots from a queer dating website. In just about every colour and still matching the grey Berlin sky, anonymised privacy is plastered across the filtered public sphere of social media dating.
Urban’s screens placed in an irregular sometimes widely spaced sequence form a horizontal band. A rather restrained and minimalist gesture in the gallery space. Which, however, is dominated by a boldly printed tarpaulin, 2.50 x 3 m, stretched diagonally and expansively across a wooden wall blocking the gallery. With the provocative question: ‘Gibt es genug Homosexuelle?’ (‘Are there enough homosexuals?’) Almost a slogan that sounds like old ‘Berlin Frontstadt’ (‘Berlin frontline’) in tranquil Wilmersdorf.
In Urban’s solo show, the materiality of language, theme at the very core of the gallery’s almost year-long ‘Paroles …’ project, is encountered in extremes. On the one hand, it appears in some sort of a megaphone format, as a literally oversized question posed in the middle of the room. On the other hand, with the anonymised monochrome profile pictures of a self-portrayal published in smartphone format, it does not even find any word. And this mobile access to the world, which we carry around with us in our breast, buttock and trouser pockets as increasingly intrusive prosthetics, is still good, if no answer is forthcoming, to cause phantom pain caught up in longing. In the queer world, privacy, reduced to anonymous monochrome, is, due already to the existence in the margins of society particularly infected by the public sphere. However, it is not only played out on social media and on the stage of online dating. The common colour codes also help with mutual recognition in real urban space (see: Hamky Code). Urban has also worked on this variant of coding.
From this anonymised and coded privacy in the public sphere, Warm, Cold and Longing draws a connection to the large-format question boldly displayed in the gallery space. The question has a history. Almost 20 years ago, Isa Genzken put in similarly bold capital letters, ‘Gibt es genug Medikamente’. First presented in the context of the exhibition ‘Ground Zero’ in 2008, it offered a very graphic examination of a state of emergency long before Covid. Which in turn has just made headlines again with the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling of nullity regarding post-Covid legislation on the subject of triage. Urban declares with this strange question a completely different state of emergency and most prominently in the gallery window.
However, the reference to Genzken is not limited to the manipulated quotation. Significant sections of Genzken’s sculpture can be described as complex, (eventually) cultural-historical complex collages, assembling materials, forms and colours from some past everyday life. Ultimately, however, collage is also the construction principle underlying Urban’s ‘Warm, Cold and Longing’. The aesthetics of appearance and veiling of coded privacy in excerpts from everyday public life are interwoven with Genzken’s tarpaulin and these billboard referencing aspects of her art. A no longer coded denunciation of this very different state of emergency is ultimately trumpeted (almost) onto the streets. Urban presents an artistically nuanced argument that lingers in the depths of monochrome colourfulness and yet insists on the political voice.
Text: Helmut Bauer