Berlin is the city of History. The flows of memories and temporal sludge converge into palpable wounds from the past, into monuments, the rubble of the Wall, buildings and streets. The commodification or commercialisation of the past is striking, but so is the enormous institutional deference to the horror, the silence, the sores, stitches and scars of two World Wars, which turned over and over every cobblestone, every speck of mortar. Berlin is truly memorable, and its History, built on many – surely complex – uneven, individual and collective histories, is endless, unfinished – a never-ending archaeological process.

From Kreuzberg to Mitte, from Tempelhof to Charlottenburg, the chronological and syncretic layers succeed each other. Underground currents run from the great stream that is Time: they penetrate Berlin’s fresh and marshy terrain, the walls of houses and buildings, and the roots of lush trees. All has been touched by the Angel of History, by death, by destruction, whilst the relentless, unstoppable winds of Time thrust their wings and bodies into the future.

Kirsty Bell surveys the history of her house in Berlin in The Undercurrents, while her marriage and family fall apart. Like her marriage, the house had rotted away. This body of debris, rooms, doors and walls is the reason why the author revisits the many lives that have passed through her dwelling, after running into flooding, leaks and obvious traces of damp. Located on the banks of the Landwehr Canal, where Kreuzberg borders Tempelhof and Schöneberg, the artist’s house has been a witness to the city’s major changes.

From her kitchen window, overlooking the watery landscape of the canal, Bell observes the tapestry of the last two centuries unfolding before her eyes, against the backdrop of chronological reading. Numerous temporal journeys are made, stripping away layers, conjuring up spirits, reading documents – a true exercise in archaeology. Through the kitchen window, and looking at the spectres that once inhabited the building where she lives, Bell sees Rosa Luxemburg’s body being dragged to the surface, watches the cyclopean vortex of industrial and technological advancement shape an ever-changing Berlin, listens to the polyphony of the Weimar Republic, testifies to the rise of terror, the machinations of the Freikorps, Hitler, Goebbels, et al.

The Undercurrents combines topographies – one cultural, calling to mind the iconic names of Walter Benjamin, Menzel, the aforementioned Rosa Luxemburg, Gabriele Tergit, Theodor Fontane and Reiner Fassbinder; and another of terror, of course, in what was once History’s most violent and violated city, where every shadow haunts Humanity’s darkness.

Such are the undercurrents of history, the hiding places of fear and terror.

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There is something ominous about Nasan Tur’s Hunted exhibition, which is itself made up of the human being’s shadows – that being brimming with mass destruction, capable of manipulating, subjugating, killing, wounding and hunting.

The world of all other sentient beings, laid out on the floor of the Berlinische Galerie, resembles a beautiful, peaceful dream, where violence only occurs when it is necessary, sporadic, causal and existing purely for biological or physiological reasons. An eagle has no hubris, no arrogance, no desires and no vanity. A fox has no Machiavellian urges. A deer has no thirst for revenge. A wild pig, a wild boar, has neither gods nor demons. They die without signs. They die without meanings. They just die. They decompose, subsumed into the plants to come, into the insects, fungi, lichens and bacteria that are yet to be. They pass into the Earth’s generator, that sucks them in, breaks them down and transforms them.

Preventing this decomposition is to give these bodies, these corpses, an aura that they do not possess in their own world, something that only helps to confront human labour in its incessant, ineluctable contradiction, trapped in a perpetual, fatuous cycle of violence. These object-bodies are seen from above, like gods at the apex of the power chain. The hierarchy  is contemplated first, compassion second.

The animal bodies embalmed by Nasan Tur herald the cessation of death, of disappearance, replaced by a profound sleep. The candid expressions suggest relief, peace. The whiteness of the walls and the emptiness of the room give the entire place an immaculate serenity. But this sleep is undone by enormous shadows, drawn in charcoal: hands whose gestures hint at imminent terror, hands that pull, squeeze and reach out sinuously, insidiously, with clawed fingers; predatory, rapacious hands. We are suddenly the prey. The sheer size of the drawings overwhelms us. The blackness becomes oppressive. These corpses turn into ghosts that haunt us in an ectoplasmic reality.

Towards the back of the gallery, as if peering behind the scenes of the torpid human conscience, there is a recorded interview with a hunter. The conversation is frank, plain talking, without preconceived ideas. This phenomenological exercise allows the hunter to explain his passion, how he feels when he hunts, when he pulls the trigger, when he sees the wounded animal giving up its life. Is it pity, guilt?

Hunted may be perceived as an Aesopian fable on morality, where humanity is manifested through the dead spirits of animals. This ghostly reality leads human beings to profoundly reflect on how they understand human, non-human and superhuman realities, touching on individual and collective psychology and the shadows of History and Humanity. In other words, this is a treatise on power and necro-politics, where man (the choice of word is not innocent), the apex predator by excellence, is the one deciding on the life and death of other beings, orienting life according to the death of others.

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Kirsty Bell reviews the work of T.C. Lethbridge and Rupert Sheldrake in The Undercurrents, two scholars who went on to pursue and publish works dealing with the paranormal and occult sciences. Lethbridge’s “energy fields” and Sheldrake’s “morphic fields” theorise the existence of experiences, memories and traumas contained in ordinary objects. To investigate them meant listening to them, like a cassette, waiting for the past to reverberate in the present. It was only then that we would have access to the era that brought them into being, to the hands that made them happen, to the zeitgeist through which they passed. Thus, objects would be turned into transgenerational vehicles, able to tell, read or see a bygone reality.

Can one look at art objects like this? Can we perceive artistic endeavour as the stenography of a time, on which artists stamp or inscribe a reality and an experience, regardless of how fictitious or how fine-tuned and perfected it may be – because truth and its pretence are essential facets of life? We do not expect science from art, we do not expect minimisation. From art we hope for realities whose access needs methods that go beyond normality, that imply coping with the euphoria, turmoil and melancholy of sensitive souls. With these methods, we can still understand the imprisoned cries in the former premises of the School of Arts and Crafts at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 – subsequently the headquarters of the Reich Security Main Office, where suspects and prisoners were interrogated, tortured and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Through this palimpsest of voices, accounts, stories and histories, next door in the Gropius Bau, we feel rumblings of the Second World War, of destruction, of reconstruction, of the many artists and objects on display there over the decades.

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The language developed by the General Idea collective, on show at the Gropius Bau, may well be seen as an effort to write and register a time in objects, so that later they can be deciphered and heard by generations who did not experience it. While some of this language is still around today – the ubiquity of advertising, citation, referencing, repetition, commercialisation, etc. -, the truth is that the issues they fought over are fading away between the ghosts of the forgotten matrix to which this language frequently refers.

The General Idea collective, formed by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, has put on some of the most hilarious and challenging exhibitions in the history of contemporary art. The one now taking place in Berlin is proving to be no exception, combining a 25-year career, from the group’s beginnings in 1969 to the period in which Partz and Zontal died of AIDS in 1994, dictating the group’s end. The contagious, viral, circular and hyper-productive character of the mass media, advertising, urban and popular art which many of their works celebrate, consecrates them within a time and formal field that goes from conceptual art to mail art, from architecture to activism, from romanticism to industrial and media production, from antiquity to modernism.

The series Infe©ted (1994) uses the virus as an exploratory means of expression, infesting, polluting and instilling fear in everyone and everything. Mondrian’s geometric abstractionism, with its squareness and orthogonality of black lines and rectangles painted in primary colours, is subverted. Yellow is replaced by purulent green – a colour Mondrian never used. Rietveld’s legendary chair is also exposed to the same virus. The word AIDS appears on the walls in such vibrant colours that not even several coats of white paint can erode it.

The exhibition fluctuates between celebration and illness, life and death. Sex gives way to AZT pills. What feels like a tribute is actually satire. Everything that seems light-hearted and good-humoured is, in fact, serious – a complete work of art that spans all of life’s moments, the glorious, the exhilarating, the decadent and the risible. We laugh at the allusions to capitalism and consumerism, but in reality we are laughing at ourselves. We sneer at the seal pups lost in a sea of crumbling white Styrofoam, but we are ridiculing our own contradictions and hypocrisies, when saving these little creatures stirred up the public more than people infected with HIV.

General Idea, through this surfeit of texts, subtexts and hypertexts, offers an inexhaustible journey through the artistic output of the final decades of the 20^th century, bringing to the table not only these topics, but also a kind of art-historical rollcall that, as well as those already mentioned, calls on the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Frank Stella and Dan Flavin. General Idea brings to the fore what would later become the strikingly hybrid, expansive, timeless character of contemporary art and post-modernity, where satire blurs with sincerity and vice versa, taunting us with unnerving meta-irony.

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“How do you remember a city, a city with such a past?”, Kirsty Bell asks herself. We certainly can put the question the other way round – the meaning would be the same: How do we forget a city, a city with such a past? We both remember and forget, between history books, documents from the past, gaping wounds in the city, monuments and museums; between the unreliability of memory, the limitations of biology, the hurly-burly of life.

The Undercurrents tries to map and analyse Berlin’s continuum: a compact time-space trip that reads like a cultural, political and social chart of an undefinable city. Reading The Undercurrents is translating one language into another, a process of relocating the author’s narrative and building strategies, interpreting the explicit and the implicit, bringing to the experiences described those also of the reader. Reading is an exercise in empathy with the making of History and the idea of Humanity, of attaching ourselves to a life (real or imagined) and growing with it, learning, recalling affections, emotions, the cruelty of so many human acts; letting go of fear, the politics of fear, the insidiousness of fear.

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Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s exhibition in the coherence, we weep calls for a similar approach. It is actually a book transplanted into the exhibition area of the KW – Institute for Contemporary Art, where the text’s metrics, structure and barebones of logic, grammar and semantics are displayed not only in their constructive and destructive potential, but also in all their graphic and pictorial potential. Janan Rasheed not only deconstructs reading, but also writing using a formal and pseudo-forensic language, attempting to find connections and meanings on the edges, between the lines, erasing and extending sentences, words and gestures. Pictorialising the text takes over the space.

In the coherence, we weep is an enquiry into the collapse of language and coherence, the impossibility of a crystal-clear reading, equal for all, as words falter and the mediatory exercise of translation requires the embodiment of experiences which are sometimes alien and unintelligible. Incoherence opens up a critical and poetic moratorium on knowledge production and self-analysis. Taking this perspective, we can also grasp in Janan Rasheed’s exhibition a textual engagement that allows room for performance, improvisation and the collective construction of meaning between spectators, readers and citizens with agency and political authority.

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Everything converges at the Wall. The Wall is the reference point, the Wall is the destination, North and South, East and West. The Wall is the meeting point of History.

Nasan Tur, Hunted, at the Berlinische Galerie, until March 1, 2024.

General Idea, at the Gropius Bau, until January 14, 2024.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, in the coherence, we weep, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, until January 7, 2024.

The Undercurrents, by Kirsty Bell, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.