Attune

Alexandra Pirici presents a major new site-specific installation with live action and music in the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof. The exhibition launches a new series of annual commissions in the museum’s Historic Hall to be opened in conjunction with Gallery Weekend Berlin.

With her expansive new work Attune, Alexandra Pirici explores the ways in which human beings – and their more-than-human counterparts – resemble, influence, and attune to one another to bring forth complex structures, whether chemical, physical, mineral or social. Pirici creates within the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof a vibrant imaginary landscape. She interweaves active sculptural elements with live action and musical pieces of her own choreography and composition. In this at once archaic and futuristic environment, chemical reactions, mineral formations, and physical phenomena perform alongside living bodies in acknowledgement and celebration of the continuum of living and non-living matter. Together these actors show how stable structures emerge from the random behaviors of atoms, molecules, and cells. The wonder of self-structuring matter comes to the fore.

Briggs-Rauscher reaction
A highlight of Pirici’s work is the demonstration of the Briggs-Rauscher reaction in which a solution shifts back and forth between two colors before the reaction finally comes to an end. This oscillating chemical reaction is often used to demonstrate self-organizing patterns in chemistry.

The reaction, which lasts for approximately five minutes, can be experienced twice daily during the opening and closing weeks of the exhibition: from 3 to 6 October between 1:30 and 2 pm; and between 4 and 5 pm.