The BERG
Munich and Istanbul based artist.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/berktheberg/
Since coming to Munich his works have become more egotistical, as he describes it.
His works now center around himself and his image and experiences.
This work is titled “M. A. M. C. A.” or “Monotone Artist Mimicking Conceptual Art”.
Being annoyed by art which “poses as conceptual art, but only mimics a minimalistic aesthetic and doesn’t have an actual concept behind it”, as BERG describes it, he made a conceptual work criticising this phenomenon by producing an object that only mimicked the aesthetics of conceptual art as well and destroying it in a performance.
“I like to have room for the audience, to challenge them, to have this moment in which they are not sure what they are supposed to do”, The BERG says.
For this “Doorless Installation” he installed an object made of plaster, a poem and a hammer.
The viewers interpreted the poem and the hammer as an instruction to destroy the plaster-object. Soon nothing of it was left.
“Before I came to Munich I worked a lot on social, political and cultural changes throughout history”, The BERG says.
One of these works is the two channel video “Now, show them”. In this work he shows footage from a movie about a street created as a prostitution street in Istanbul on the left, and footage of a circumcision ceremony and celebration in Turkey in the 60s on the right. “I show these videos together because they both show different aspects of Turkish culture and relate to each other in the sense of the entertainment of men”, The BERG says. .
In his first year in Munich The BERG moved three times. From this experience of the process of constantly packing and unpacking all of his belongings he developed the work “-Ant”.
In one letter each The BERG asks famous museums for a refund of the entry fee because of a “underwhelming” and “lackluster” exhibition. The title of this work is “Concerned art lover”, which is the anonymous signature on all of the letters.
“I was working in between the connection of art being an “service insdustry” and luxury spending so I wanted to play with the idea if it’s a luxury service industry what are the rights of a “viewer” that they can demand in a bad service. The bad service in this sence being a bad exhibition,” The BERG says.