Gregor Hildebrandt / For the White City
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Berlin-based artist Gregor Hildebrandt primarily works with near-obsolete relics of recording technology – VHS tapes, cassettes, and vinyl records – to create sculptures, paintings and installations. This choice of medium reflects his passion for music, which accompanies him at every stage of creation. However, his artworks are soundless. Sound and lyrics are embedded in the materials, and hints of the songs or films recorded on the tapes emerge through the titles of the works. We see what we no longer hear and imagine what we could hear.

The interplay between silence and sound is one of many opposing forces that permeate Hildebrandt’s body of work, embracing the visible and the invisible, the positive and negative. While many artworks within the exhibition have a negative black version, Für die weiße Stadt (English: For the White City) marks a departure from Hildebrandt’s usual duality.

In the book “White City, Black City,” Sharon Rotbard writes: “A city is always the realization of the stories it tells about itself,” addressing the complexity of the White City narrative. This story revolves around the Bauhaus houses that emerged on the Mediterranean coast, gaining international recognition and culminating in Tel Aviv’s inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. As a tribute to Tel Aviv’s White City, Hildebrandt chose to display predominantly white artworks, leaving their black negative versions behind in Berlin.

After years of association with black, due to his use of black magnetic tape, Hildebrandt had developed a rip-off technique to peel off the top layer of the tapes. This erasure enables him to reveal the white primed canvas through the transparent tape, shifting the focus from embedded sound to the memory of the story. But is it possible to tell a story that’s entirely white without any black?