PLAY Gallery For Still & Motion Pictures

PLAY Gallery For Still & Motion Pictures Berlin (2002-2009)

Since its establishment in 2002, PLAY has been showcase of different activities related to film & video with a strong focus on geographic and socio-political issues in art context. Besides presenting in its spaces located in the Hannoversche Straße projects developed with various filmmakers and video artist, amongst others Moser & Schwinger, Jonah Freeman, Alejandro Vidal, Pierre Coulibeuf, Ellen Pau, Jean Susplugas, Cecilia Lundquist, Anna Konik and Paola Salerno, PLAY hosted several curated thematic exhibitions like “Revolution Reloaded” and “Fluidic” presenting a selection of the top exponents of recent generations of young Romanian artists, “Do it right ” urban actions and interventions in Guatemala City by Anibal Lopez, “Disobedience” about civil disobedience from the social struggles in Italy in 1977 to the recent anti-globalisation protests before and after Seattle.
PLAY has been also collaborating with numerous other institutions, such as Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Kunsthaus Zürich, Centre pour l’image contemporaine Saint-Gervais in Geneva, La Rada in Locarno and festivals, such as Transmediale, Interfilm, Videoex, Rencontres Paris, Berlin and Locarno Film Festival.
Since 2003 PLAY has organized a festival for art, FAIR PLAY, an event which is complementary to its program and conceived to serve as a presentation platform for works exploring the border between film and art. Every year the Festival has been inviting contemporary art, film and video experts such as curators, institution directors, academics, artists, gallery and film industry members to meet in Berlin and join discussions about the latest productions of young emerging artist filmmakers.
The heterogeneous program of PLAY and in particular the conflict arising between conventional gallery issues on one side and independent project platform and festival issues on the other, has led to a question about the definition of ‘gallery’ and the status of PLAY. Therefore, after suspending the exhibitions activity for some months, the management decided, together with the team, to have the project PLAY embedded in a more extensive concept, which, under the new name, PLAY platform for Film & Video Berlin, collects the experience of both PLAY as a gallery space and PLAY as an ongoing project and a film and video award.
Unconventional gallery presentations and a multiplicity of activities is reflected in the choice of an unorthodox space which now hosts the office and the exhibitions: the new location is a loft apartment on the roofs of Torstraße in Berlin Mitte.
PLAY intends to lead intense project-based collaboration processes with an artist, starting from the very beginning, to the production and subsequent exhibition of works.
A space which allows a coexistence between private and public conversations, events and presentations seems explicitly suited to this.
PLAY can thus continue to evolve as an increasingly dynamic testing ground, and a reference point free from space constraints and predetermined programs in a conventional sense.
PLAY will continue the collaboration with Fine Arts Unternehmen AG, a Swiss based film and video production company established in 1999.
This experience gained in this collaboration on two different presentation targets (gallery space and cinema) reflects a fundamental focus of interest of PLAY: The exploration of the relationship between film and visual arts both in production and presentation terms.
The artistic researches of PLAY and Fine Arts Unternehmen meet in the investigation of the boundary between the two media (film, video) and in the examination of contemporary artistic efforts in blurring the technical and aesthetic distinction between art and film.
Fine Arts Unternehmen video+film produced works by Moser & Schwinger, Knut Asdam, Piero Golia, Shahram Entekhabi, Daria Martin, Pierre Coulibeuf among others.