I walked across Berlin, from Gesundbrunnen to Schöneberg. Badstraße, Brunnenstraße, across Bernauer Straße to Rosenthaler Platz. Auguststraße, Tucholskystraße, straight ahead and across the river. Past the Reichstag, across Potsdamer Platz, into the Park am Gleisdreieck, by the triangular railway junction. In Zehlendorf, past apartment houses and petrol stations and on to the canal. A block of flats, a detached house, terraced houses. On the following day, down Blissestraße to the “Bierpinsel”, through allotment areas and streets and streets all the way back home. To the left and to the right, there is one apartment building after another. Either you look out through a window or you look in from outside. Corner buildings steeped in light, bright yellow rolling over into green. Some light is gentle and inviting, full of dark green, soft overlays, above all at night. And there are delicate, pink tones, which are overlaid in turns with lush yellow and red. Colours unfold out of themselves. Shades of red overlap. White on green, yellow on blue, translucently delicate and fleeting. Areas of space turn themselves outside in or inside out, depending on where you are standing and where you are looking from. You move on a variety of levels amidst multi-dimensional space. And depending on where you are moving to, or which direction you are coming from, you see something new, or something old, or something forgotten. And you remember something and wonder where the one thing ends and where the other begins. nightshop. hillwood. minibar.

Tamina Amadyar paints large-format pictures with rabbit-skin glue, into which she mixes her chosen pigments. In lavanderia, the sky-blue surface sinks down deep into the cinnabar green ground in sensuous, languorous warmth. Thanks to the drying processes a rhythm of gleaming surfaces emerges, making the colours all the more radiant. Rabbit-skin glue dries swiftly and individual brush-strokes become visible on the canvas. Tamina Amadyar transforms this into her distinctive signature style, playing with abstract and representational readabilities. At first glance, nightshop seems to be an abstract picture. On taking a second look, however, perhaps prompted by the title, you can recognize the forlorn display window of a kiosk in the depths of night-time in the big city. You believe you can see the counter, as if in homage to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, in almost representational form. minibar, pink matter and wolkenkratzen [skyscraping] show similar aspects of buildings. And whilst in gramercy park a scrap of vibrant green asserts itself defiantly, glowing undauntedly and with aplomb despite being wedged in between rows of buildings, in hillwood the high-rise buildings come up to one like two old acquaintances. drive in, in its turn, shines resplendent in unforeseeable and yet so familiar artificial light.
City light has its peculiarities. It tumbles out of nooks and corners and tumbles into nooks and corners. In the morning it falls into windows and at night-time falls out of them. It can happen that you are walking along a street and from somewhere or other light shines out and falls at your feet. It bathes the walls in a variety of colours. No sooner have you noticed it than the colours have changed again, becoming dark or light, or yellow, red, green or blue.
And in the very same moment, precisely now, somewhere else far away, the colours are so totally different from here, are brighter, more resplendent than they will ever be here.
By now, you have long since come to know the streets off by heart. Very little changes, apart from the light and your longing. Your longing for places where you have once been, from which you have taken fleeting memories of their colours – colours which, by comparison, tend here to be gentle and soft. Over time, a personal space has developed out of the memories, out of everything that was there – there was no need for you to invent or add anything.

Ayumi Rahn
Translation: Richard Humphrey