curator: Mareike Spendel

a Climate of Trust is Sylvain Baumann’s first exhibition project in Berlin. Working in a variety of different media including sculpture, found objects as well as design items, photography, drawing, audio recordings, and text, Baumann arranges spatial installations that provoke questions about the design and shape of contemporary architecture. Baumann understands architectural design to be a political and ideological means of contemporary society and is interested in the motivations, ideas and mechanisms that produce this society: How does our physical environment – private and public – inform and transform us as individuals, our habits, our perception and experience, our ways of thinking and our desires, and how we form relationships with others. Rather than focussing on an analysis of human behaviour, Baumann sees his installations as an analysis of and a comment on the work of contemporary architects, urban and interior designers which aims at the development and elaboration of the ‘world of tomorrow’.

In his exhibition project at centrum Sylvain Baumann is specifically interested in the idea that we currently live in what the artist calls a Climate of Trust. Baumann claims that in the more and more complex, multi-layered and mediated world of today, it is no longer possible to rely on our comprehension and reason as the basis for decision making. Our accelerated environments which are regulated through an increasingly complex and opaque network of rules and regulations, terms and conditions, require that we trust in our intuition. Baumann explores how contemporary design strategies and media imagery are used to speak directly to our instincts and asks, in a Climate of Trust, is there any space left for doubt and are individual thought and agency still possible at all?

installation views (c) ute klein photography