CloudCities: Tomas Seraceno

by HRM on January 12, 2012

review by Lacey Haynes

Cloud Cities is the paradigm when it comes to creating boundless, massive, and dreamy interactive art. Exhibition at Hamburger Banhof until January 15th.

Saraceno CloudCities

Buoyed into new landscapes by Tomás Seraceno’s Cloud Cities.

Hamburger Banhof, a renovated train station turned contemporary art gallery in upper middle Berlin, is housing a utopian instillation of floating spheres and tangled black ropes. The exhibition is inspiring. It gives you a feeling that bubbles faintly in the pit of your stomach and mounts, increasing to a rolling boil when you focus, really ingesting what it is that’s spurring it on.

Saraceno CloudCities

Cloud Cities is a magical and awe inspiring exhibition that finds inspiration in the effortless nature of bubbles and the inherent strength of spider webs. I read the description of Tomás Seraceno’s (1973,Tucuman/Argentina) Cloud Cities three times before I stepped into his sci-fi shangri-la; as if the description of the instillation might help me to feel grounded in a world of magical transparent domes, hovering effortlessly throughout the main space of the gallery. The instillation is other worldly, with plants encased inside some of the spheres, while others are heavy on the ground filled with water. Spectators are able to enter into two of the larger spheres, either looking up at other people, laying on the sheer material above, or entering high into the bubble, enjoying a weightless feeling of floating. Water mists throughout some of the space as the living spheres are watered, while others shimmer with purples and pale greens, like soap bubbles refracting sun light.

Saraceno CloudCities

The exhibition for the first time shows more than twenty of the spheres on display simultaneously. It is a perfect art excursion for long-term art lovers and those lusting after an untethered afternoon rendezvous. Seraceno’s utopia encourages people to become physically part of the art, experiencing textures and feelings spurred on by his world that defies both time and space. You have only a few days left to experience the whimsy before Cloud Cities ceases to exist in its current landscape.

Saraceno CloudCities

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