To cover is to work with what’s already there. Cover also means shelter. To protect or hide. To conceal or disguise, to extend over time or space. To run for cover, to cover one’s back.

cover me softly, the main exhibition of the 2024 Beta Biennial, is an exploration of covers across disciplines, mediums, and geographies. Counter to notions of copying, stealing, imitating, and bootlegging that may each come with their own ethical slant, the cover provides an alternate set of relational vocabularies for understanding how transferences of knowledge and structures of authorship are circulated through art and design. By centering our vast interconnectedness, cover me softly opens new realms of possibility for doing, making, and being.

The 2024 Beta Biennial brings together a wide selection of architects, designers, musicians, artists, activists, photographers, writers, directors, and those that refuse categorization in a choreography of public exhibitions and programs from September 13th through October 27th.

For his exhibition Open Doors at Sweetwater, Berlin, in 2023, Friedemann Heckel painted a large-scale watercolor after a photograph depicting his grandparents’ wedding table in 1949. The painting titled Fest, 1949 shows a ceremonial table that appears in a resting or waiting state, giving stage to potential events of which the outcome might be uncertain, thus creating a sense of Vorfreude (anticipation) or Vorahnung (premonition).

For cover me softly Friedemann Heckel built a three-dimensional cover version of the table. Placed in the attic of the Garrison Command building in Timișoara, Romania, the table with its pristine decor traces a memory that got lost between generations but re-emerges as a frozen moment in time, an accessible diorama.

While the date stated in the title of the watercolor, 1949, points towards a specific moment of attempted (and maybe already corrupted) new beginning in post-war Germany, the u-shaped table with its gathered found objects for cover me softly alludes towards a more collective or universal memory of past or future festivities.

The mixed media installation consists of 22 wine glasses, 22 champagne glasses, 22 napkins cast in porcelain, 22 silver knives, 22 silver forks, 22 silver tablespoons, 22 silver teaspoons, 22 wooden chairs, 3 wooden tables, 3 tablecloths, 4 bowl vases, 2 large vases, 6 flowers bouquets, 2 speakers and a droning sound.