Parallel Exporting - Courtesy The Dominion Post 2006-10-06

By Mark Amery

Traveling in Europe is full of occasional so-close so-far moments. In London, the Black Seeds are about to play. By the time I get to Munich Goldenhorse have just passed through. In Wiesbaden, south of Frankfurt, I tour a grand theatre and spot the cast list for Ladies Night. Parallel Exporting - Courtesy The Dominion Post 2006-10-06

By Mark Amery

Traveling in Europe is full of occasional so-close so-far moments. In London, the Black Seeds are about to play. By the time I get to Munich Goldenhorse have just passed through. In Wiesbaden, south of Frankfurt, I tour a grand theatre and spot the cast list for Ladies Night.Image: Lisa Densem NZ dancer in Berlin

It's just closed, a sell-out. Few in Germany I ask know the work is from New Zealand; but then no-one in New Zealand knows it's one of Germany's most popular plays.

Travel and communication may be easier and the globe covered by digital webbing, but our artists still often end up having to try and maintain parallel careers on both sides of the world. In Berlin, leading choreographer Sasha Waltz has just opened Radial Systems, a new performance space. Watching an opening performance I come face to face with New Zealand dancer Lisa Densem. Both of us do a 'so close so far' double take. Densem has been performing with Waltz for some years now - not that you'd guess it from the small reception a work she premiered in Wellington last year received.

In the visual arts Berlin remains the international centre of the moment - a heaving compost of artists and dealers from across the world, munching through the layers as soon they form - but that doesn't necessarily mean an interest in the peripheral or culturally distinct. People want an immediate connection here as much as anywhere. There's little time for getting to grips with foreign political or cultural issues, they're still looking for an art middle earth.

Interestingly, parallel existences and exploration of being both here and there has manifested itself in the work of contemporary New Zealand artists living in Berlin of late.

Now back in Auckland, Peter Robinson's art when in Berlin shifted into a kind of binary system - on one level still relating to New Zealand culture and its peripheral perspective, yet on another playing the outsider on internationalism with an interest in science and surface.

New CNZ Artist in Residence in Berlin is Croatian born New Zealander Mladen Bizumic. Known for his interlaying of one location over another like transparencies, the work he plans to create in Berlin will explore the physical impossibility of being in seven different places around the globe at the same time.

Still resident in Berlin, Michael Stevenson's work often deals with issues to do with art, trade and the interaction between national and global economies. A project in San Francisco in November concerns Stephenson's investigation of a hydraulic analog computer built in 1949 by New Zealander Bill Philips, which was shipped to 15 different locations around the world. For the exhibition Stevenson will recreate Philips' machine from the Central Bank of Guatemala.

New Zealand artists talk of having to spend considerable time and energy on both sides of the world to maintain presence. One giving it a good crack is painter Judy Millar, currently spending six months a year each in Berlin and Auckland.

Millar's gallerists in Berlin, New Zealander Hamish Morrison and German Georg Spielhaus of Spielhaus Morrison say her presence in Berlin is vital, but her work also translates. Millar speaks the international language of the abstract, and is often mistaken as American or European.

Predictions of success are hard to make here. New Zealanders might identify with the fact that contemporary Berlin seems forever in a state of becoming rather than being. It is one big building site. In its center past scars are cheek by jowl with face-lifts. Here the art dealers circulate. Thousands of apartments are under renovation, soon to be filled with pictures while their crumbling bottom storeys remain covered in street art.

Berlin is still not yet a place for high heels, the pavements a crazy-paving collage of historical fragments. At art museum Hamburger Bahnoff I see an Anselm Kiefer exhibition. History here has become a compost of gunmetal grey decay. "Rubble is the future, " Kiefer writes in his artist statement, "because everything that is, passes." In one work, scrap metal is twisted into a grand library of books, as grave as stone.

Round the corner from Hamburger Bahnoff, Spielhaus Morrison have just opened a new gallery space in time for Art Forum Berlin. Established in 2002 with a stable of largely young Berlin artists, Spielhaus Morrison is increasing its international reach and growing up in spectacular fashion.

Their gallery is one of three just opened in a small industrial area five minutes walk from Berlin's grand new central railway station. Also opening is a German space for reputable London dealers Haunch of Venison (their artists include Bill Viola and Richard Long).

Berlin gallery areas are changing faster than the Courtenay Place bar scene, as the city starts to gobble up the leftovers of a once great industrial city. Morrison confidently predicts there will soon be other galleries around them in what is still a small shabby innocuous area complete with car mechanics.

In fact, I'm reminded of the industrial estate Millar has her studio in West Auckland. The advantages for Morrison are the same as for the artist - space. At 650 square metres the new Spielhaus Morrison is the third largest private gallery in Berlin (at least, for the next five minutes). In height and floor area it's akin to the West gallery in City Gallery Wellington. This allows Spielhaus Morrison to give Millar's large work justice and accommodate her move into installation.

Millar is one of three painters currently featured in the gallery's first show in its new home, showing large work and installation that no private gallery space here could accommodate.

Garage doors allow work to literally be driven in - an upcoming show features a young Swiss artist, Raffael Waldner known for his exhibition of car wrecks.

ENDS.