Job Center. Aufgeladene Orte. Psychic Places

Jobcenter. Aufgeladene Orte – Psychic Places is an exhibition by Berlin-based Australian artist Emily Hunt subsuming the energies of Berlin faces and places experienced while walking in lockdown times. Why are we drawn to certain faces and places? In the windows of Galerie Wedding Hunt frames and depicts local characters, their whimsical faces, psyches and energies in vibrant ceramic figures and expressive power rings. The faces she stumbled upon at the local Jobcenter, the Panke Ufer, the bars Beim Dicken and Zum Magendoktor, as well as other specific places like the Humboldthain Flak Turms and Amtsgericht Wedding, Berlin.  These places have in themselves been elevated to emotionally charged meeting places during the lockdown. Psychic places perhaps. Hunt portrays these places into a hand drawn filigree map: “Places have personalities. Jobcenter sits in the center of the painted map – it is the only place that has gone through a re-invention – it is a fantasy Jobcenter.  I have taken the imposing monolith building and discharged the energy out of it. In a sense flipping the power of the bureaucracy into a folly. Places can affect us in the same way that other humans can affect our moods,” says Hunt. So many people have now gotten to know the Jobcenter from the inside due to the Pandemic. The artist sees “emotional mapping of the city as a rebellious act against the urbanisation and gentrification of the city.”  This ornamental, psycho-geographical map of magical Berlin – above and underground – appears as a printed poster, which is available and handed out for free at Galerie Wedding. It can be used as an instigation for the visitors to do her or his own magic walking as Hunt suggests in her Reschooling lecture which will be released online. “Walking is a magical tool. Walking is political.  The street provides. Walking is thinking.  Walking is about making the mundane ~ extraordinary Walking is about energy.” The aim of the new exhibition series „Existing Otherwise – For a New Politics of the Senses“ that now begins in Galerie Wedding, is to invigorate the role and vision of art and artists in a time of collapse – be it socio-economic, administrative, ecological or healthwise. To learn and think about the adaptation of the human sensorium, our habitus, and body language as we due to the Pandemic e.g. are limited in space and social interaction. However, the limitation for the artist, to stay in her neighbourhood Wedding, turned out psychedelic, maybe even enriching or inviting; “I see walking as this tool to begin looking at what is around us ~ to re-enchant the public space and make this action of magical walking an inspiring action.”