This article is part of Berlin Art Link's feature topic of ‘Ritual.’

by Aoife Donnellan, studio photos by Trevor Good

Aoife Donnellan met Peles Empire in their studio to talk about their artistic practice and upcoming solo exhibition "the long sleep of amber" at E-Werk in Luckenwalde which opens on 1 May 2021.
At E-Werk the duo will present new sculptural works in the former turbine hall, as well as a series of printed flags, which will appear as part of E-WERK’s Flag Commission.

E-WERK Luckenwalde was originally a coal power station and has only recently been reanimated into artist studios and an exhibition space. For their exhibition at E-WERK, they are engaging with the history of the space. They created a pit-fire in Luckenwalde, using the wood chips normally used at the power station to create electricity, to capture the elemental quality of the location’s original purpose. “Thinking about where electricity comes from, how people started imagining how fire can happen, it’s a very primal or human desire to make fire or energy…controlling light and fire.” They created collages out of images taken of the material as it burned, which consisted of documents, images of gods, fantastical historical depictions of how electricity works and Frankenstein, among other things. This crossover from science and technology to the ritualistic practice of burning symbols perfectly captures their interest in combining historical moments with contemporary understanding. The images captured will ultimately be created into a flag, which will embody the process of creating fire and ash. “The process of the firing is what we are showing as the flags,” they tell me. “It is as much about the ritual as it is about what happened before or what comes afterwards.”

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