Chinese-Italian artist duo Berger & Berger (Claudia Sambo & Hanyue Tang) engage in a critical, playful and distinctly feminine manner with the business of art production and art viewing. Through moving image, photography and intervention Jo and Dolly Berger seek to challenge art that takes itself too seriously.
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REVIEWS
"Berger & Berger embodies the new-wave of culturally dissenting artists, artworks, art-handlers, on the fringes of a would-be world that exchanges in ideas and objects sans the predication on stock and capital. Mematic and energetic, the “work” questions the status quo of art and its circularity. What is the profit incentive for a work of art? The answer is in dots - and no, the reference to Baldessari is totally and unequivocally serendipitous. The work is critical-litical-itical in a way that confounds, confuses, and graces us with a presence that requires no introduction or didactic in the nonsensicality of presence and space and time. To view the work, one must think intensely about making work in twenty-twenty, without hindsight or PPE. The work is Berger & Berger existing in the world. A world that also has art and all the other stuff.
Their primary mandate is to staunch the ever-present wound of the art-world-fair-gallery-mega-complex-corporation as it bleeds over the boundary of imagination and into the real world. The excess material, the supposed luxury, the expected branding of Berger & Berger is not in favour of entering such a vicious cycle. The monogrammed masks, mugs, and crayons of anti-material are a trompe l’oeil - spending meager watts of energy to enter existence. The non-objects remain an evanescent reminder that the key is in “doing nothing”. Jo and Dolly Berger, remain committed in their lack of making, and in making money. If they do either, they sell out. Their lack of work and opposition to “producing” calls to mind a familiar euphemism, “all men must toil”. Their toil is the ever-present nothing. Are they real artists? We know of the bodies that move in and out of art fairs and white cubes, perusing the lack with inanity. Who is performing at the plinth? Interviewing the work? Single-handedly occupying the Tate? Vaccinating paintings? Shopping without money? They constitute an energy that moves in and out of the art world, across cultural boundaries, to form the outlines of people that are also artists, but maybe not real artists in order to become something more important than nothing. Something more important than art."
Olivia Mossuto, artist and writer
"Post-pandemic art at its finest, Berger & Berger have really embraced the genre. Through their salt of the earth criticality, Berger & Berger have so much to teach us - but don’t bore them unless you wish to be serenaded ... They will tell you whether a spade is a spade or if it is in fact a work of art. Their profound but ambiguous incomprehension cuts straight to the heart of the matter, forcing us to confront our own joys and expectations and dragging us back to earth. Berger & Berger are all of us. I couldn’t be without them."
Holly English, artist and writer
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2021 Rally. Chelsea Graduate Showcase, London
2020 Late at Tate Britain Online (15 December 2020 – 4 January 2021)
2020 |un| COMFORT ZONE (online)
2019 Un1t, Chelsea College of Arts Unit Show, London
2019 The Berger & Berger Show, Perpo Gallery in Cookhouse Gallery, London
2019 Open Mouth Film Festival, various London locations
2019 Chelsea College of Arts Undergraduate Summer Show, London
