Photos: Tiphanie Kim Mall, 2024.
It’s common practice to return to an exhibition’s photographic documentation online; to re-read the accompanying text; to bring it up with friends; or, if you’re lucky, to speak about it with the artists themselves. Reviews tend to appear in due course, timed to the show in question. But sometimes thoughts take longer to gather, and a text arrives slightly later than expected. In this case, it is a year after Tiphanie Kim Mall’s solo exhibition at Fächer in Berlin, and so what follows may be considered a kind of durational (re)view. The artist’s show ran from September 7 to October 20, 2024, at the long-standing artist-run space tucked into the balcony passage above Kottbusser Tor. Since then, Tiphanie and I have had several conversations, and those exchanges now form the basis for this text. What struck me most was how much of her work(s) had to do with time: time passing, time withheld, time repeated. In that sense, writing about the exhibition a year on feels oddly appropriate.
If you’ve ever climbed those rattling metal stairs to Fächer, you’ll know its peculiar setup: a cubicle within a room, with two glass fronts—one facing the balcony, the other turned inward. Usually, the entire exhibition space can be surveyed with a single glance through the front window. This time, however, Tiphanie walled off the outward-facing side and spoiled the shortcut. While practical in solving the problem of fitting six new photographs made for the occasion onto not enough surface, the wall was just as much conceptual. It thickened a sense of enclosure, pushing the mild claustrophobia of the works on view into the architecture itself. The space was effectively boxed in and the frontage turned into something like a display case. Before you even stepped inside, the attention was pulled toward the largest of the artist’s new works: Eingang/Ausgang (Entrance/Exit), a nearly life-size image of a front door, sat behind the glass like a phantom portal, echoing Fächer’s actual entrance (and exit) just beside it. A sly mise-en-scène that set the tone for what followed.
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Full text online: www.newsletter.provence.st/newsletter/letter-from-the-editor/a-durational-view-on-tiphanie-kim-mall-at-faecher-berlin