Notes on Rescue - Exhibtion in the former firestation of tempelhof airport
The old fire station, once a place of urgency and salvation, now stands like a silent sentinel, a reliquary of another time. It is a remnant of a bygone world: an industrial-aviation era that once pointed toward the future, but now serves as a testament to small-scale, local ambition—obsolete, out of time.
In this context, the fire brigade becomes a large-scale toy—powerful and performative at once. large gates, fast solutions always at the ready, the ever-punctual arrival of heroes. Today, the fire brigade is no longer in operation. Its dimensions—the height, the footprint, the large gates, the bright hoses—still bear the imprint of its mission: to protect, to intervene, to respond.
notes on rescue is an invitation to people and communities to come together and consider how to approach what is past, obsolete, discarded, or decommissioned. The exhibition calls for a collective reactivation of a place that has fallen out of time. It urges us to think about repurposing, re-seeing, and reconnecting. At the same time, it recalls the illusion of control, and the way gender stereotypes have shaped spaces and narratives. It echoes the false promise that strong men will save us.
The exhibition notes on rescue brings together artistic positions that, in one way or another, revolve around the notions of rescue and loss. The six positions employ metaphorical, visual, and auratic strategies to open spaces, for themselves or for others.
Who protects whom—and how? And where is the place where we gather in thought to ask these questions?
Einer von Euch unter Euch mit Euch
The large-format analogue photographs by Kurdish-Berlin-based artist Bahar Kaygusuz depict bodies in safe spaces, placing them in an absolute present and beyond reach.
Bahar Kaygusuz was born in Berlin-Kreuzberg to Zazaki-Kurdish immigrant parents. Growing up around Kreuzberg’s Böcklerpark, she developed a poetic perspective to capture the countless and significant possibilities of being in her surroundings. She studied at the Ostkreuz School of Photography. Focusing on documentary photography, her work revolves around themes such as cultural, gender, and social belonging, as well as questions of identity.
Carnaval Sauvage
rtist Bela Brillowska presents her ongoing artistic research Carnaval Sauvage, which explores strategies against displacement and seeks to develop mechanisms through which resistance cannot be instantly absorbed by capitalism.
Bela Brillowska works as a filmmaker, performer, sound artist, and musician. She began making her own short films at an early age and was active as a voice artist and radio producer. Her work often engages with humor and fiction. Originally from Hamburg, she is currently based between Cologne and Brussels.
SUMO
A similarly artistic-activist approach is pursued by designer Emma Mende, whose large sensory sculpture SUMO invites visitors to resist the pressures of productivity and simply rest.
Emma Mende is a young designer from Berlin with a degree in Product Design from the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work is characterized by a clear stance, conceptual strength, and a playful engagement with social issues. She combines craftsmanship with a sensitive awareness of materiality, emotions, form, and interaction.
HP_O_ST_006
Hauck Plümpe contributes a sculpture, which makes a literal reference to the site while simultaneously acting as a provocation. Something small becomes monumental: a call, an outcry, a mischievous promise.
Alice Hauck and Amelie Plümpe live and work in Berlin. In 2018, they founded the artist duo HAUCK PLÜMPE. In their work, they explore—conceptually, sculpturally, and performatively—the intersections between model and architecture, as well as systems of industry, everyday life, and its social meeting places.
Light Speed Text Tool
The Swiss collective Hotel Regina presents an interactive light installation, exemplary of its working method. The group’s projects always emerge from thematic and local contexts, whose structures, processes, and narratives they seek to capture. They respond to what they encounter with playful interventions that function as proposals for negotiation. This has led them to develop a highly process-open approach in which the environment where a project takes place becomes the most important actor.
The collective Hotel Regina has been working since 2016 in the fields of art, design, and performance. They use a wide variety of media—from photography, film, text, and music to performative and installation-based formats—while deliberately and repeatedly breaking the rules of these disciplines.
Ground Truth
In his work Ground Truth, Ulrich Formann combines real-time data from research satellites with social media content to track fires across the globe. This project was developed in collaboration with the Biogeochemical Department of the Max Planck Society, the ELLIS Unit Jena, and the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Friedrich Schiller University Jena as part of the *künstlerische Tatsachen* Art & Science residency.
Ulrich Formann (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary conceptual and media artist from Vienna. In his digital media installations, he translates ecological and political topics into physical spaces for discourse. Ulrich Formann’s works make the distant realities of a digital realm — remote realities — visible through methods such as coding, hardware hacking, and reverse engineering.