Crystal Ball Berlin – Gegenwartskunst und Performance

Manfred Kirschner: Berlin à Gogo – Prosaische Schublade, Buchpremiere

Friday, September, 19. at 6 pm, with friendly weather meeting up at Zickenplatz (if it´s raining we will be at the gallery) aftershowparty c/o Crystal Ball with DJ Kollagen

The long-awaited middle part of the graphic novel series about the artist Harald Baumeister and his friends Rita, Kurt, and Ytong takes us to Berlin and Lower Saxony. Kirschner’s third collage story is a queer science fiction art novel, garnished with architectural criticism, 1980s Berlin, and the question of how to travel through time with a snow globe. With great narrative joy, a turbulent story unfolds about loss, transformation, and the healing power of lightness.
Manfred Kirschner, aka Lydia Karstadt, creates collages, paintings, and
performances – and once again immerses us in his multi-layered world of words and images. With footnotes, the author adds another layer, connecting historical city history and popular knowledge with prose. We learn a lot about Berlin, about wild art production, about friendship, and about the healing lightness that shines through in human togetherness or unfolds in the joy of the present moment. In the book, the objects are mirrored by the events: because we all encounter each other at least twice. The first time, we may not know anything about each other, and the second time, we believe we know each other inside and out—without being able to say why.

The publication was promoted with funds from VG Bildkunst/ Neustart Kultur and the author got 2023 the scholarship; Künstlerische Recherche from Berliner Senat.

Boris Jöns – Tanz in die Meinung

Am Sonnabend, 3. Mai. Vor und in der Galerie Crystal Ball, Schönleinstr. 7, Beginn: 19:00 Uhr

Boris Jöns/ Lydia Karstadt: Tanz in die Meinung

Astonishingly fitting for this year’s already legendary Celery Weekend, Crystal Ball is presenting a special: artist Boris Jöns has discovered opinion as a sustainable resource. With his innovative reception converter, he can extract the energy potential contained in the comments and opinions of passers-by and visitors and transform it directly into sounds and music.

With the complex interactive sound performance and art action “Dance into Opinion”, the usable exhibition “Room With A Viewer” closes at the same time. Visitors can write text comments or speak important statements on current topics, with which music is generated, as in a jam session. A specially developed language model recognizes five speech acts that trigger different musical impulses. A team of opinion secretaries (Boris Jöns, Lydia Karstadt and Stefan Ruf) assists and fuels the transformation of opinions into music.

Boris Jöns’ delightfully ironic art action may seem inappropriate in the face of global crises, but it speaks of the critical relationship between individual, differentiated views in a social debate characterized by populism, in which individual opinions seem increasingly critical and worthless. This is precisely where the artist points to the energy contained within, which no longer fizzles out unused but develops into a social sculpture in the interplay of statements, a utilization, a new togetherness of the people involved.

The start of the event also marks the opening of the dance floor in the art hotel room. We are looking forward to many visitors!

Room With A Viewer – the art of a night´s stay

Crystal Ball transforms into an art hotel room

Opening on Friday, February 21, 2025 at 7 pm

February 22 until May 4, 2025

Thomas Behling – Evita Emersleben – Tornike Gognadze – Elke Graalfs – Maike Häusling – Manfred Kirschner – – Boris Jöns – Eva Kim – Abir Kobeissi – Christina Paetsch – Gabriele Regiert – Rebecca Rothenborg – Veronika Schumacher – Silke Thoss – Oliver Voigt – Barbara Wagner – Ole Wulfers

The project “Room With A Viewer – the art of a night’s stay” curated by Julia Psilitelis (Frankfurt am Main) and Lydia Karstadt (Berlin) is an experimental, yet usable exhibition presentation. Seventeen artists furnish a guest or hotel room in the gallery space, which can be booked for overnight stays. Each piece of furniture of the interior has been designed by one of the artists and completes the guest room. Many of the artworks were created especially for this project. Placed in context with each other they form a group exhibition during the gallery’s opening hours but also a room that can host a person overnight.

This twofold concept is continued in the thematic aspects of the project. On the one hand, the exhibition examines what it is like to spend the night in an art installation not unlike a sociological experiment. On the other hand, it denounces Berlin’s precarious housing shortage in a housing market dominated by the from the Senat uncontrolled rent madness of the Senate.

The project further points to the current, drastic cuts in the cultural sector by ironically demonstrating what exhibition spaces can be used for in the future and how artists can make a living according to present politics.The exhibition is open during our events and by appointment.

Enjoy a very special experience and stay overnight in the exhibition in the Crystal Ball gallery space in Berlin! You can already book an overnight stay via the gallery contact.

The proceeds of the overnight stays will benefit the gallery’s and artists’ fund.

We look forward to your request.

Overnight stay, Sun-Fri, per night 120,-€

Overnight stay, per night, Fri-Sun 150,-€

Overnight stay, with vegetarian breakfast (10 a.m. – 12 p.m.) 140,-€/ 170,-€

berlin@galeriecrystalball.de, Tel: 0049 030 600 52 828

Finissage, Concert, Performance: Ausgesprochen Blühender Blödsinn + die Zugvögel

For our first event of the new year, we have multi-instrumentalist and film composer Mareike Hube from Unordentliche Musik as our guest. She will be presenting her music project “Ausgesprochen Blühender Blödsinn”. The band has a special, original sound that creates a kind of post-modern Krautrock, especially through concise minimalism, a cello and exceptional percussion instruments such as thunder with concise lyrics. In addition, the improv performance group Zugvögel will perform and use the materials of the multi-layered installation “Good News” by Elke Graalfs to bring them to life. The Zuvögel performances, which will also take place unexpectedly in public spaces, will be developed live and directly on site. The acts will be accompanied by DJ Lobotomy, who will also be playing and singing with a cellist and Mareike Hube in ABB. As a bonus, there will be a surprise from Mireille& Matthieu. All this at the end of the installation by Elke Graalfs.

Elke Graalfs – Good News

30 Schichten Unlust zur Erbauung

Vernissage, December 7th, at 7 pm

until January, 12th, 2025

open; fridays 2 to 7pm & after appointment

Elke Graalfs, 30 Schichten Unlust zur Erbauung, 2024, Photos by Jutta Lilienfein

In her exhibition at the Crystal Ball, Elke Graalfs is showing an installative project idea that has developed from her work form and which she has long wanted to realize in the exhibition space. The artist’s works move and combine photography and painting in collages and expansive installations.

For “Good News – 30 Schichten Unlust zur Erbauung”, Graalfs has developed an installation that is similar to her studio situation, focusing on the processual nature of her working strategy and the secondary paths that accompany it. The artist lines the walls of her studio with white paper, as she very often paints her motifs on paper in order to cut them out later and use them for installations. This is very similar to her collage work, which she also continues on the pages of printed books and magazines. In the studio, however, painting is always accompanied by commenting on and implementing other ideas in the margins or on the sides of the large pieces of paper as she works. If motifs are later cut out and new papers are stapled over them, layers also open up in the room, like in a book. Formulated thoughts, political commentaries and drawings emerge like an inner dialog that also packs drafts, incidentals and relations of concepts into speech bubbles and images on the sheets of paper. We see the creative process with its accompanying inner actions, mirroring the artist’s thoughts and feelings. In the exhibition, the artist will show this experiment, creating an almost holistic, structuralist concept in which not only the finished work, but also the path to it, with its difficulties, distractions, side paths and pauses, is of interest. Yes, the pause itself, the not doing, not painting or doing something else that nevertheless leads to the work, can become the subject of a playful investigation. But it can also open up a personal, sensitive context. In Graalf’s installation, she shows the work as if in a book, thus opening up her works to further relationships that surround the artwork like speaking layers and locate it in a sphere of creation, as if it had only just been completed the moment we look at it. This can be found as a recurring motif in Elke Graalf’s works, that she transforms creative, mental processes into spatial adaptations and thus into installations that are as suitable as they are impressive.

Fotos: Michael Jungblut

Matchbox – NIZA Collective

Work in Progress from 20. bis 29. November

Opening Saturday, 30th November at 7pm, Sunday, December 1st, open 2- 7pm

Oliver Zabel, Java, 15 x 7 x 2,5 cm, Mixed Media, 2023

In November, the NIZA collective will visit us and create a wall-sized work for “Matchbox” in the gallery within just one week. As in the group’s previous works, in which murals were realized in public spaces in Bremen, Polleur in Belgium, Schildow in Brandenburg, Bornholm and Berlin, a large mural will be painted based on a miniature template. It is therefore also possible to visit the artists at work, similar to what happens “outside” by chance. The small miniature that is the model for “Matchbox” was created by artist Oliver Zabel. Using old matchboxes, Zabel stages object collages whose playful scenes develop surprising changes of meaning in relation to their small, rare lithographs. The artists Daniela and Malte Nickau work together with Oliver on the NIZA concept, on large reproductions of the boxes, which also charmingly focuses on enlargements of small inaccuracies and creates a virtuoso painted blow-up of object art.

“Matchbox” also shows miniatures that have already been realized in public space as part of a series.

NIZA at work at the harbour Rønne/ Bornholm, 2024

Bad Art Secrets! -practice workshop-

Das Gute in der schlechten Kunst

The new workshop for artists and all those who don’t want to become one, the course offers instructions for bad art and overcoming inner blockages

It always seems to be about creating something true and beautiful. To find an expression for the times, to immerse the personal in the general, to balance technical perfection with expressiveness in order to then create something incomparable – to create a work of art. The work itself should be unique, enigmatic and yet ambiguous. Like a visual magnet that you want to look at again and again without ever being able to understand it or fully grasp its inherent mystery. This is true art, according to the recipes for great works of art taught by experienced artists.
But what if you put the cart before the horse from the other side and the actor could even be assigned to an unskilled, non-artistic community and approach the matter in a completely uninformed and direct way with the tools of the unconscious? Or he/she would be an artist with an irrepressible thirst for adventure for something new, untamed, for borderline experiences and play on the chaotic, expansive landscapes of the anarchic pastures of the accidental. “You have to throw off the learned, the academic, the so and so”. In order to gain true artistic freedom, it is immediately a matter of dumping this manicured, superfluous ballast, facing up to the psychological blockades, even escaping the home stretch of one’s own personality,” says Lydia Karstadt. “Great art is created in bad art,” says Lydia Karstadt, ”when it is simply open to what is being created.”

With artists such as Joseph Beuys, art has opened up to people with the expanded concept of art, so why shouldn’t people now also open up to art? So let’s allow all arbitrary, spontaneous, thoughtless, contradictory and reckless strategies in production to happen, as automatically as possible, and watch what happens.
For “Bad Art Secrets”, the first workshop for bad art, we have been able to exclusively win over the enthusiastic lecturer Lydia Karstadt. Once a week, she will give us an introduction to the random and thoughtless production of bad art and then help us with the subsequent direct production. With a humorous, light and performative effect, the course: Bad Art Secrets is particularly suitable for self-taught artists and those interested in breaking down mental inhibitions and gaining self-confidence and creative experience.

An exhibition presentation is planned after the course.

Participation fee per course is: 30,- Euro/ including material of 10€ Euro

Every Monday from 18:45 in the Crystal Ball gallery

Registration by e-mail: crystalballberlin@gmail.com

or 0151- 55 910 099

James Beatham – Radiant Springs

Installation/ Drawing

Vernissage, Saturday, September 7th. , 7pm

fridays from 3 to 7 pm, & after appointment, exhibition runs until Oktober, 18th.

Artist Talk on sunday, oktober, 6th at 4pm

James Beatham, Initial Sketch for an Ceramic Fountain, Berlin 2024

James Beatham’s artistic oeuvre encompasses drawing, ceramics, painting and objects. In multi-part installations, the artist combines all these expressions in one form and brings them into communication in diverse, imaginative arrangements. He creates model-like habitats or sets which, as miniaturized urban landscapes, reveal relations that are both meaningful and mysterious. They are constructed from mysterious objects, images, personal relics, poetic allusions and have a strong narrative quality. They in turn contain art, the impossible, the fictitious, perhaps literarily imagined, the future, which echoes in the interior as if in a reflection. Beatham’s means seem free and develop through their combination. Even the scales of the objects used are not uniform, so that the resulting worlds, surreally detached from everything, like space stations, simultaneously cite mythical and real places far removed from their known location. Some things seem to stand out of context like an incongruous souvenir, absurd but equally integrated, so that associations arise quite casually. Many of these small worlds have a fountain or even a fountain in common as the central object around which everything is arranged. The fountains are of different shapes and designs and can be seen as an image of the basic conditions of human settlements, dwellings and habitats. The artist also provides lighting and light. The rippling of the water, a natural sound, also acts as a logical argument. James Beatham thus creates places that seem alive. The presence of these works appears inviting. The artist dares to create a special simultaneity here. He allows the users of the water, the people and animals, to be absent. Through this void, he draws the viewer into his spaces and allows us to experience the landscape in our contemplation. In a similar way to model landscapes, we consider how we would live in it if it were adapted to our scale. At the same time, he throws us out through profanity and the use of the absurd – he places a manquette in our view and thus shows us the design-like, the unreal, the artificial, as the outside of things. In this challenge between inside and outside, these special compositions by the artist develop a dialectical sound that, animated by this extraordinary effect, can tell stories of creatures and people quite freely.
To accompany the installations, James Beatham is showing a series of new drawings and ceramic objects.

James Beatham drawing — James Beatham, option one, Drawing

Manfred Kirschner – Smoke Three Flames

exhibtion while summerbreak

Vernissage June, 23th, 8 pm, open after appointment: Tel: 0151 55910099

Manfred Kirschner, Smoke Three Flames, 140 x 120 cm, Acryl/ Papier auf Leinwand, 2024

Store & Crystal Ball Boutique for Sellerie Weekend

For the first time, Crystal Ball is presenting the boutique behind the exhibition space especially for Sellerie Weekend and is showing special prints, editions and art by Marion Bösen, Katharina Willand, Mimi-Mo, Lydia Karstadt, Gabriele Regiert and many other artists of the gallery.

The exhibition Store by M. Bösen and S.K. Willand and the boutique are open on Friday and Saturday from 2 to 7 pm.

We look forward to your visit!