Ashley Berlin is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Alexander Iezzi. Little Shocker presents a multimedia installation that acts as a sculptural extension to the eponymous film produced in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Shade Théret. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with new poems and a translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater by Elijah Jackson.

For Little Shocker, analogical structures between art, religion, contemporary culture, and psychological disorder are condensed and displaced into separate rooms—each of which spatially reconstruct emotional experience. A room takes form on several co-extensive planes as a state of the psyche, film scene, or dollhouse. One might be tempted to treat these containers as classifying frameworks: x-material, arranged in y-fashion will produce z-meaning. This form of reading is disappointed by methods that allow meaning to emerge in a radically unpredictable way.

Different signatures of improvisation, conversation, and arrangement inscribe themselves in the work. What normally eludes language finds expression in processes of transposition, between memory, literature, sound, images, lived experience, and choreography: A conversation is improvised on through dance, which is transcribed into a voice message veering between personal confession and fiction; fabric is soaked in wax and carefully arranged to spatialise a mental state at the scale of a dollhouse; fragments of recordings are cut-up, edited and layered into music compositions; a distorted edit of Singing in the Rain resounds.

This motion of continued transformation allows contents to seep from an industrial stacking container into a film scene and vice versa. When an element in one container becomes exigent (gravity), the entire constellation across containers takes on new meaning (grace). Marionettes illustrate this phenomenon most clearly: there is no requirement for the puppeteer to control every joint individually to make a marionette move, instead, every movement has a centre of gravity located at the very core of the marionette, and therefore it is sufficient to control the movement of its heart to make it dance.

— Steph Holl-Trieu