Artist Portrait: Alisa Berger
Thibaut de Ruyter
13th April 2019
German artist Alisa Berger, graduate (2016) of Cologne’s prestigious Kunsthochshule für Medien (KHM), was
born in 1987 in Makhachkala, Dagestan, Russia and grew up first in Lviv, Ukraine and then in Essen, Germany. Her work blends cinema, video, installation and performance, playing with historical references and personal anecdotes to tell absurd, incredible, poetic stories.
Alisa Berger’s graduation film is a 73-minute feature, produced using the school’s technical resources. A work in Cinemascope and DOLBY 5.1, titled Die Körper der Austronauten (The Astronauts’ Bodies), two sisters take invented rocket trips wearing a motorcycle helmet while their brother lends his body to scientific experiments on weightlessness.
Note that from the vocabulary related to the conquest of space, Alisa Berger chose the term astronaut (used by the Americans) and not cosmonaut (used by the Russians) or spacenaut (Europeans). Perhaps her choice demonstrates that though born in the Soviet Union, her life is made up of the Internet, English and travel. But mostly, not of nostalgia. In her film she weaves the link between one of the 20th century’s greatest myths (the conquest of space, its heroes and their tragic destinies) and the common people on the Earth. It is not helpful to recall how, in the middle of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong opposed each other without ever meeting. But these figures, these icons, also add souls and bodies: this is what Alisa Berger reminds us of in her film, closer to the existential wanderings of Andrei Tarkovski’s Solaris (1971) than to the grandiloquence of Philip Kaufman’s Hero Fabric (1983).
HUMOUR AND DISTANCE
Post-colonialism is one of the discourses, the themes, that even the most diverse biennials like to deliver to us. Alisa Berger’s biography could fit neatly into this catalogue, and she uses it in her own works, avoiding any form of morbid exploitation. Indeed, it would be easy for an artist born in the USSR to a Jewish Ukrainian father and a Korean mother to recall the violence with which Russia in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th conquered territories and eradicated languages. But when she approaches this subject, the artist shows her humour and her distance. In 2016, for an exhibition questioning the existence and nature of the border between Asia and Europe, Alisa Berger produced Three Borders, a 55-minute slide show from her family’s archives. The artist’s voice accompanies the images, with an autobiographical text that also adds various historical contexts. How Stalin deported people of Asian origin, how Ukrainians ended up in the Caucasus, how customs officers cannot comprehend the link between a passport and a face. Until her emigration to Germany in the early 1990s, which while an opportunity for the artist, proved problematic for her father who was unable to learn and integrate the German language.A history of languages: Russian, Ukrainian, German and Korean, which finally converge in one person.
THE BODY’S WEIGHT
The aesthetic of Three Borders sits between that of Godard of the Histoire(s) du Cinéma (the video effects at least) and Chris Marker of La Jetée (the slide show as a form of literary essay). A game with fairy stories (the grandmother’s exile, the father’s lie when marrying) and crucial moments in history (genocides, the fall of the Eastern Bloc). While the story’s end is quickly understandable—one day, all these characters will meet to give birth to Alisa Berger—this is not a pretentious or self-analysing exercise. She loves her family, her artist father and her graphic designer mother, and above all, she pays tribute to people caught up in the torments of history.
Alisa Berger’s biography may seem extraordinary, but in the historic framework of the former Soviet Union, it is one of many. Following on from her story, the artist now searches for strange origins. During a residency in Erevan, Armenia, she set up pyrotechnic effects to ‘set fire’ to a ruined building (Domesticated Spectacle, 2017) and soon after, she left for Japan to film, and learn, the famous Butoh dance (Ghosts of Body, 2018). Obviously, we think of Hito Steyerl who before becoming the post-Internet generation’s muse, realized the brilliant Lovely Andrea, a documentary of her visit to Japan searching for the bondage photographs that she had posed for several years earlier. But while Hito Steyerl has a direct family link with Japan, Alisa Berger is only ‘part’ Asian. She humorously evokes this part of herself in Three Borders, as she recalls the moment in her adolescence when one of her two eyes took a more slanted shape than the other. What she looks for in Butoh, though, just as in her first film, are mutilated, masked and transformed bodies. In this dance, born in Japan after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, ghostly slowness and the body’s weight have a vital dimension. That same weight that astronauts, cosmonauts and spacenauts try to forget as they are flying into space, that weight that our history has written on our faces, the weight of family that makes us what we are.
Thibaut de Ruyter is an architect and independent curator. He lives in Berlin.
Translation: Bronwyn Mahoney
The text was commissioned and first published at ArtPress Nr. 460