Where to live? This is maybe one of the most relevant questions I asked myself in the last years. At the beginning it seemed easy to answer but the more I look around the more complicated it gets. Nevertheless the relation between how much a city offers and how much people are able to take from it is without doubts one important matter to take into account.

For decades the city of Cologne was a world leader reference for contemporary art. People from all over the world visited the city and got connected with a hot art scene and also with a scenario that offered exceptional galleries and art institutions. The city over the years built an exciting international image. If we research well about this topic we’ll find out that just few cities in the world have contributed to contemporary art in such a vast and sustained way like Cologne did. Today Cologne is just the shadow of what it was, a shadow that could also disappear. What happened? The answers are many and they all have the same common denominator: local politics / state politics / global politics / art institution politics / galleries politics / artist politics /collectors politics / visitors politics.

Visiting Cologne very often during the last 4-5 years I have realized that all the city history that I find extremely useful and interesting is actually developing into a huge barricade (it usually happens with heavy pieces of history, in the same way that big monuments are hard to move). But who or what could possibly change the discouraged situation Cologne is experiencing? These days we can find one promising answer to this question at Clages gallery.

‘Catch Sight Screening’, is a video group show that has been well engineered by gallery’s artist Bernhard Walter. Clages gallery space is austere and sharp per se and is one of those spaces that invites you to do something wrong with it. Walter has thoughtfully created a smart structure that allows us to see multiple videos. The space is elegantly packed with flickering information as well as with a lot of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm that we permanently need to develop if we would like to be here rather than elsewhere.

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‘Catch Sight Screening’ at Clages Gallery, Cologne. Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa / Rita McBride / Marina Naprushkina / Anne Pöhlmann / Claus Richter / Bernhard Walter