DARREN ALMOND

At the temporary space of OsramHöfe in Berlin-Wedding Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Darren Almond.

Night + Fog is the title of a documentary film by Alain Resnais from 1955 about Auschwitz. This is also the subject of Almonds exhibition. It is divided into three bodies of work:

Terminus is a large array of bus shelters relocated from the town of Oświęcim, Poland. Almond here concludes his project with the Polish town. Last year has seen the completion of the town’s refurbishment of new shelters, an aspect which is integral to the work that will be on view. These quotidian objects that once stood near the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum are drawn from "the material culture of the „second world” – the nearly-vanished social space that once mediated between center and periphery of the social global political economy." (Charity Scribner) Now, relocated in Berlin, with remarkable economy they activate a force field between Nazi-era Auschwitz and postwar Oświęcim, designating the gallery as a frame for reflection on recent history and its cultural mobilization.

In conjunction will be large scale, bromide photographic prints of the dead forests of Siberia. Almond spent the past five years travelling to the nickel mines of Norilsk, formerly Norilag, the largest and harshest of Stalin’s Gulags. Today Norilsk is a closed city. It is controlled by the Norilsk Nickel Company which also controls the world’s market price for this ore, visas are heavily monitored. As a bi-product of the smelting process, the mines produce some of the largest amounts of sulphur dioxide on the globe, which in turn has generated extraordinary amounts of acid rain and destroyed the surrounding forests of the region.

Almond also draws reference to the mining history of Oświęcim. The work’s title Terminus has been cast in the form of a train plaque. Originally cast in aluminum, Almond here has used salt. The rubber production for the Nazi war effort demanded vast quantities of salt which was mined from the region of Oświęcim.

Installed between these two bodies of work stands an unwritten archive. A modular shelving system of architectural proportions containing 4 million single sheets of paper, a solid-state hard drive of potential possibilities.

A book will be published on the Terminus project with Holzwarth Publications, edited by Kathleen Madden with essays by Charity Scribner, Mark Godfrey, Julian Heynen and Anthony Scher.


Darren Almond was born in 1971 in Wigan, North England. He lives and works in London. This is the fourth solo show of Darren Almond at Galerie Max Hetzler. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2005 and had solo exhibitions at the Folkwang Museum, Essen (2006); K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (2005); Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (2004); Tate Britain, London (2001); De Appel Foundation – Centre for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (2001); Kunsthalle Zurich (2001); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999) and the ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1997).