GROTESKE: PEDRO MORAES

At regular intervals, humid air is released against a pane of glass; for a brief moment the surface clouds, a faint, fleeting trace of something that resembles breath, and then disappears. The cycle repeats. The system is technical and self-contained. No body is present, but the gesture it produces is unmistakably bodily.

Groteske isolates a small physical event that is usually performed without notice: the fogging of a window by exhaled breath, familiar to anyone who has leaned their head against the glass of a moving train. It is a gesture of absent thought, of waiting for one's stop, of looking out at the city without seeing it. The work returns this moment to visibility by removing the body that would ordinarily produce it and reproducing it mechanically: a minimal, repeating sign of being inside one's own body. In this sense, the work is a quiet nod to the tired, the sad, or the contemplative: the passengers who actually make the gesture, and whose interior life otherwise leaves no trace in the city. 

The water inside the artwork is supplied by an Erikli bottle, continuing a thread in Moraes's recent work in which the bottle is not a generic vessel but an integral component of the piece. Erikli is the cheapest still water in Berlin: a Turkish import distributed without Pfand and sold mostly in the spätis and shops of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and along the lines that pass through Hermannplatz. The bottle locates the work in a specific Berlin: a specific culture, a specific pattern of consumption shaped by migration, and the everyday geography of what one drinks and where one buys it. The breath that appears on the glass arrives, in this sense, from the neighbourhood.

Hermannplatz is not the background of Groteske but its active surrounding: a site of permanent movement, transit logic, and dispersed attention, where small bodily events of this kind ordinarily pass unregistered. The work asks for the smallest possible act of noticing.
Installation Views shot by Joe Clark.