BERLIN.- For FUNKTIONIEREN, his latest show at Blain|Southern, Berlin-based artist Nasan Tur transforms the ground floor of the 40 metre long gallery space into a live printmaking studio installation.

The process involves the conceptual artist working on-site, making visible every stage in the production of an exhibition. The artist, supported by a team of artisan printmakers, is carving questionable statements and slogans into large woodblocks, which he will then use to produce a collection of several different prints. These will be hung within the installation, increasingly filling the space. The woodblocks, prints and the studio that created them, each become individual artworks as part of this self-referential exhibition.

The installation contains tables, shelves, carving tools, computer equipment, printing devices and racks for drying the prints. With endless reproduction of works enabled by the woodblock format, the resulting collection of text-based prints will feature Tur’s highly contentious aphorisms and philosophical statements, which have in the past included ‘KNOWLEDGE IS DANGEROUS’ and ‘CONTROL IS NECESSARY’.

Tur references the history of the gallery building that formerly housed a different type of printing press, producing Berlin’s daily newspaper, Tagesspiegel. Through this link with high-speed, yet already out-dated, media production and the subsequent contrast with woodblock printing - the oldest and slowest printing technique - the artist reflects on the rapidly increasing ease with which information is circulated. He focuses on the social and political implications of this, in a digital age where public opinion can be stirred at the click of a button.

Expanding on these concerns, the upper floor of the gallery includes two powerful bodies of work that are exhibited in relation to one another:

Presented at each end of the room are pairs of photographic seascape panoramas. These seemingly sublime scenes are in fact appropriated press images of the refugee crisis with the human elements, such as the refugees and the sinking boats, cropped from the frame. They offer proof that it is impossible to ignore or forget this crisis.

Tur describes these waters as cemeteries and as such he surrounds the seascapes with small watercolours that, like gravestones, aim to memorialise the dead. In resistance to marginalising the tragic number of deaths reported daily by the media, Tur took to painting the numbers of the reported dead along with the date and location of each event. In these carefully painted numbers, he aims to rescue the memory of these events from fleeting news blasts, and grapples with the futility of measuring such incalculable pain.

Addressing similar concerns and opening a week before, Tur’s solo museum exhibition, Running Blind, runs concurrently at the Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna from 15 November 2016.