The opening of Christian Jankowski’s “retrospective” at Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin on Thursday was bursting with celebrities and absurdities alike: a karaoke room, photos of weightlifters trying to lift Warsaw’s historical monuments and even the choice of an actress, Nina Hoss, as the curator. (Hoss plays Astrid, the blond German spy, in the television thriller Homeland.) But, Hoss, whose photogenic face appears on all the publicity materials, “didn’t want to limit herself to being a poster girl, she worked harder than most curators,” says Nicole Hackert, one of the gallery’s owners. Before the opening, the über-busy Jankowski and Hoss joked about the texts they sent each other between Christmas and New Years Eve. “Can we curate for half an hour today?” Jankowski, himself the curator of the upcoming Manifesta biennial in Zurich, recalled. He said it reveals how curating is “an activity that can be overrated”, but “the freedom to let someone else make the decisions, brought joy into my life.” A screenplay—with stage directions and all—based on a conversation between the two is forthcoming.
