19/07/2024 - 24/08/2024

Danilo Andrés, Elisa Jule Braun, Yuni (Hoa Yun) Chung, Abie Franklin, Pavlos Ioannides, Lukas Liese, Luka Naujoks, Marlies Pahlenberg, Leniko Sennoma, Ryke Turin, Zhiyuan Yang

Zilberman | Berlin is delighted to announce the 1st edition of YFD | Berlin: You say I have unlimited potential. I disagree.

The exhibition is dedicated to the subject of potentiality. Derived from the Latin potentia (translated: ability, strength), the word describes the quality of an object or a person to have potential. Potentials are possibilities. Often existing yet unutilised possibilities or strengths awaiting realization. Within the realm of art, potentiality initially manifests itself as a driving force, a dynamic energy that drives creative exploration and innovation: In their search for new talent, gallerists and collectors weigh up the potential of emerging artists. New, unusual places and spaces for art are discovered, created and expanded. Artists explore the potentials of different materials and test the boundaries of traditional art genres. But they don’t stop there; they also work with what is perceived as having no potential – the unusable, the forgotten, the overlooked – and constantly renegotiate what that means. Take, for example, Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield – A Confrontation, for which the artist transformed a former landfill into a wheat field in the center of Manhattan, New York City. But all that glitters is not gold. At a time when concepts of potentiality are being exposed as neoliberal mental constructs of the privileged, and the dark side of self-optimization is becoming more apparent through social media, the idea of unlimited potential seems to have lost its shine. Given these ambivalent approaches, we ask: How does potential take shape when we think of the new, the different, or the unfamiliar? What potential lies in overlapping materials, media or alternative approaches that defy clear categorization? What potential do private spaces (such as galleries) have in comparison to public institutions? The title You say I have unlimited potential. I disagree questions, in a gesture of resistance, the presumed premise of an allegedly limitless potential that extends to different areas of life, such as work or health. 

With the Young, Fresh, Different (YFD) format, Zilberman has been promoting emerging artists at its Istanbul location since 2010, giving them the opportunity to present a work in the professional environment of a gallery through a public call for submissions. The exhibition aims to give young artists more visibility in the art scene and to open a dialogue between them and a gallery. This year, YFD will also take place at Zilberman | Berlin and Zilberman | Miami for the first time. For the Berlin edition, the artists were selected by an expert jury consisting of Gabriela Lademacher (Collector & Founder of Lademacher Consultancy), Lotte Laub (Gallery Director at Zilberman | Berlin), Catherine Nichols (Curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart), Simon Wachsmuth (Artist), Christopher Weickenmeier (Curator and Research Assistant at the Kunstraum Leuphana University Lüneburg). This year’s theme and exhibition are conceived by Lusin Reinsch.

Thematic brief and text by Lusin Reinsch

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