CLUB TELESTERION
Viron Erol Vert
Opening: 11 November 2023, 7:00 pm with live set by Headless Horseman
12.11 to 20.11 2023
Großer Wasserspeicher

In his work, the German-Turkish-Greek artist Viron Erol Vert (*1975) investigates religious systems and cultural identities. He addresses the reciprocal relationships between inner spiritual spaces on the one hand and spaces constructed by societies on the other. In ancient places of worship, he finds references to mankinds early longings for transcendence and a supersensory connection to gods and ancestors, which retains its relevance today.

Vert transforms the Grosser Wasserspeicher with its circling corridors and barrel vault into a performative transcendence space. The exhibition Club Telesterion is his adaptation of the ancient cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries into contemporary club culture, in which he himself has been working for 25 years. The Telesterion was a hall in the city of Eleusis where the cult of Demeter and Persephone took place for over 2000 years. Created around 1400 BC, the Sacred Way to the Greek city attracted thousands of people from all over the ancient world to performatively indulge in the idea of rebirth. Just as Persephone descends and returns to the land of the dead every year, it enabled people to experience other planes of existence and to live again/differently/newly.

Vert sees the parallels to club culture in the temporary immersion in another world where one can let go, lose oneself and open up to multiple identities and meanings of life. The artist expansively spans an arc of light on which pieces of clothing from the Berghain Club‘s collection are hung close together. The garments he has collected over the course of a year are human shells of the bodies that wore them. On the labyrinthine path there, along the first rotunda of the former water reservoir, the visitors encounter nine media installations in opened suitcases, showing celebrating groups of people of various religious, ethnic and cultural affiliations. Together with images of symbols and landscape fragments, they merge into a whole.

The videos were created in collaboration with Ali M. Demirel, a Berlin-based Turkish artist whose work is rooted in architecture, science and nature.

The accompanying sound installation in the space was composed in collaboration with Berlin-based producer Headless Horseman. A live set will take place on the opening evening.

The exhibitions CLUB TELESTERION by Viron Erol Vert takes place as part of the exhibition series Speaking to Ancestors curated by Pauline Doutreluingne and Keumhwa Kim. The two-year exhibition series brings together seven artistic positions that deal with the search for genealogies, origins and ritual (image) practices. The invited artists have in common that they develop their own narrati-on about their ancestors, starting from cere-monial, ritual traditions or based on intimate, familial stories. They create a new symbolic and social field of action situated between faded myths and handed-down imagination. They strive to heal societal wounds, resurrect forgotten histories of marginalized groups, and counter patriarchal, colonial power structures through ancestral and magical ri-tual powers. Speaking to Ancestors explores how our global society responds to ancestor worship, shamanism, animism and myth.

Co-curated with Pauline Doutreluingne
More Information about Speaking to Ancestors