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C.O.N.T.A.M.I.N.A.T.I.O.N. (2023), video installation, 11:11 min.
This is RESIST CLIMATE CHANGE.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us to never stop fighting.
Since the late 1970ies Greenpeace has been fighting against dumping of nuclear waste in the seas to prevent worldwide contamination. 2019 Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future were omnipresent. Since Covid everything has changed. 2030 is going to be a crucial year for the world.
C.O.N.T.A.M.I.N.A.T.I.O.N. is a plea on the relevance to bring back environmental activism. [Nina E. Schönefeld]
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Nina E. Schönefeld (b. 1972 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin and Ibiza, Spain.) < < https://www.ninaeschoenefeld.com > >
Nina E. Schönefeld was born in Berlin. She is half Polish and half German. She studied at the University of Arts in Berlin (UDK) and at the Royal College of Art in London. Since several years she has given lectures in Fine Art at private Art Colleges. Together with Marina Wilde she founded “Last Night In Berlin” a cultural platform about art openings in Berlin. She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art Theory (Dr. Phil.). Schönefeld lives and works in Berlin (& sometimes in Ibiza). Nina E. Schönefeld works as an interdisciplinary video artist. The future scenarios in her art works are closely linked to current political, ecological and social issues in the world. She operates with a system of different light sources, sound systems, electronic machines, newly built sculptures, costumes, interiors and video screenings.
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Benjamin Heim Shepard
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Benjamin Heim Shepard (Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and New York, USA.)
Dr Benjamin Shepard, PhD, LMSW is a social worker and professor working to keep New York from turning into a giant shopping mall.
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The Clash – Tale of Two Cities (2023), video installation, 15 min.
Capitalism is frequently referred to as the means of production for climate change. Currently, it’s taking us in an unsustainable direction. To alter this, cities need to become more sustainable, including open green spaces and sustainable non-polluting transportation. The majority of the people in the world live in cities. If cities can be sustainable, we have a better chance at a future. Yet, to get there involves a clash, between those who see public spaces as commodities to monetize by the inch, and supporters of sustainable urbanism, who favor greening and democratizing the commons. We can work toward this as we navigate this clash, between bodies in spaces. After all, public spaces are mirror reflections of our democracy. When they are full of color they thrive; when they are full of cops or restrictions curtailing speech, it suffers.
Composed of five connected public space battles, from Critical Mass Bike Rides to Community Gardens, struggles for a sustainable city, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matters, Tale of Two Cities traces a story about both New York and the world. With parks and green spaces at risk from Istanbul to Manhattan, the Tale of Two Cities is a New York and a global story. Past is prologue, what happens with New York’s neighborhoods, high rents and patterns of displacement, seems to be what will happen in Berlin. ‘Save the Garden, Save the City’, say garden activists. The majority of the people in the world live in cities. Save the city, save the world. Order is coming to Berlin, some worry. The same thing happened to New York three decades ago. And the city lost a bit of its soul in the cleanup. ‘Keep New York Sexxxy’, activists chanted. In Berlin, we are poor but we are sexy, said an old mayor. Keep Berlin Sexxy! Save the Gardens, Save the City. [Benjamin Shepard]
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Benjamin Shepard is a Professor of Human Service at New York School of Technology/City University of New York. He received his Masters at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and training in psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in their Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program. As a social worker he worked in AIDS housing settings from San Francisco to Chicago to New York, where he directed the start ups for two congregate housing programs for people with HIV/AIDS, as well as served as Deputy Director at CitiWide Harm Reduction.
He has done organizing work with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), SexPanic!, Reclaim the Streets New York, Times UP, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army, the Absurd Response Team, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, the More Gardens Coalition, and the Times UP Bike Lane Liberation Front and Garden Working Groups. Combing ethnography with social change activism, his work considers the interplay between theory and practice.
Much of Shepard’s scholarship is based on the ethnographic study of social services and social movements. He is the author/editor of numerous books and publications, including: Play, Creativity, and the New Community Organizing (Routledge, 2011); Queer Political Performance and Protest (Routledge, 2009); The Beach Beneath the Streets: Exclusion, Control, and Play in Public Space (co-written with Greg Smithsimon) (SUNY Press, 2011); Community Projects as Social Activism (Sage); White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell, 1997); and From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (co-edited with Ron Hayduck) (Verso, 2002), which was a non-fiction finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2002.
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Caroline Shepard
In Memoriam (2023), photo installation
Caroline Shepard’s current work in berlin looks to document the invisible legacy of violence that was perpetrated against the German women at the end of WW2 through sculpture and photography.
These works emerge from a series entitled Don’t Tread On Me (2022-2023), begun at the outset of Caroline Shepard’s year-long Artist Residency at MOMENTUM.
“In 1989 Barbara Kruger proclaimed “our bodies are a battleground” in response to the chipping away of abortion protections in the United States. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the historic decision that protected abortion access across the nation. 50 years. The course of my lifetime. What does forced motherhood mean? It means women are not autonomous. It means women in the United States are not equal citizens. But we are not alone in our move towards political extremism. From Afghanistan, to Poland and beyond, practically half the countries in the world have some form of restrictions on abortion. Why? We need only look back to the Third Reich to know that our bodies are controlled when fascism is on the rise, when power is threatened. By 1945, approximately 2 million German women were raped. Female bodily autonomy is continually violated during times of war, and yet where are the monuments? Where is the healthcare, or the compensation? Where is the recognition that we are targets in war? This isn’t ancient history, this is Bosnia, the Ukraine. Think of the Yazidis, the Rohingya. The girls stolen by Burko Haram. “Culturally sanctioned“ child marriage and forced marriage. Consider the murdered Transgender women across the globe. And the Tribal women in North America. When will it end? When we insist that all rape is not a justifiable byproduct of patriarchy, or war, or something that doesn’t exist. Sadly, on January 6, 2022, the US witnessed more than just a right-wing rebellion as throngs of angry men waving “DON’T TREAD ON ME” flags stormed the capitol building of the United States, we witnessed Patriarchy armed and ready to fight for domination at the cost of democracy. Women’s bodies have been walked over, abused and misused throughout History. Our bodies remain a battleground. We can feel the footsteps all over us, but where is the evidence? Positioned on the gallery floor, ‘Don’t Tread On Me‘ dares the viewer to trespass the intimate lines of bodily autonomy. In the picture series, much like a memorial, it stands as a marker of the myriad untold stories, and silenced voices.” [Caroline Shepard]
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Anonyma (2023), sculptural installation
Caroline Shepard (b. in New York, USA. Live and work in Berlin, Germany and New York, USA.) < < https://www.carolineshepard.com > >
Caroline Shepard is old enough to have seen some things, and young enough to still be curious. Born and raised in New York City, they received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College under Joel Sternfeld and Gregory Crewdson, and an MFA at the School of Visual Arts, under Collier Schorr, Sophie Calle and Sarah Charlesworth – all of whom continue to influence. Their work has been published and exhibited worldwide. They are currently living in Berlin.
Caroline Shepard has been Artist-in-Residence at MOMENTUM from August 2022 to July 2023. During that time, she has participated in four MOMENTUM exhibitions: You Know That You Are Human @ Points of Resistance V at Zionskirche, Berlin, 3 December 2022 – 8 January 2023; ART from ELSEWHERE: Mexico City at LAGOS, Mexico City, Mexico, 2 February – 2 March 2023; You Know That You Are Human & MOMENTUM Collection at Kultursymposium Weimar, Galerie EIGENHEIM Weimar, 11 May – 10 June 2023; and this exhibition, TRUTHTRUSTTREES.
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Andreas Templin
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The Blind Leading the Blind (2000), photo installation
The 2020s seem to me like a time of crossroads, a time of transition on many different levels. It also seems difficult to me at the present time just to interpret the near future. This peculiar feeling is not new to me though. It found already once expression in an artwork from the year 2000. The philosophical question posed by The Parable of the Blind (after Pieter Bruegel the Elder) prompts us to examine the relationship between knowledge, leadership, and the collective fate of humanity – properties that today more than ever will have far-reaching influence on the near and distant future. [Andreas Templin]
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Goodbye World (2021), video performance, 14 min.
Andreas Templin (b. 1975 in Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Andreas Templin is a Berlin based conceptual artist working seamlessly between the cultural & corporate sector. Templin received a Master of Fine Art in fine and studio arts from the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam.
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Großmutter-Paradoxon / Grandmother Paradox (2017)
Readymades, two flat irons produced by Siemens in the 20ies; one restored, the other one a warfind from Berlin Mitte (Torstrasse), H 14 x B 10 x T 18 cm
“Truth is always granted only a brief celebration of victory
between the two long periods of time
where it is condemned as paradoxical and held in low esteem as trivial.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Authenticity and transfiguration, imagination and truth are themes that are often addressed in Philip Topolovac’s work. He often plays with the gray area between reality and fiction. In the case of the extensive collection of war-destroyed objects that Topolovac has rescued from building pits in Berlin in recent years, these are entirely real, historical objects. Since reunification, the many post-war wastelands along the Wall and in the divided rest of the city have been rebuilt at full speed. In the process, the real estate boom opens a window into the dramatic past and brings forth evidence of Berlin’s extensive destruction during the war. The contaminated sites, which were actually intended for disposal, are oozing out of the ground as if from the city’s subconscious. Behind the construction fences, history emerges, only to be immediately erased.
In numerous works, Topolovac questions the meaning and value of these artifacts and places them in new contexts. In the pair of works “Grandmother Paradox” and “Grandfather Paradox” he juxtaposes the same objects with different fates. In the case of the grandmother, the objects are two identical Siemens irons (model EPD 30dh). The other work is based on two unbranded hand drills. In both works, restored, newly chromed examples are juxtaposed with one destroyed during the war and rescued from Berlin construction pits. The concept of the “grandfather paradox” is borrowed from a theory of time travel, the core of which is the question of whether someone who travels into the past and kills his grandparents could exist afterwards to make this journey at all, because then the person would not have been born at all. This work thus not only reinforces the question of the origin and identity of the objects, but also underscores the enigmatic nature of their meaning in the here and now.
In contrast, the iridescent richness of colors and forms in “Bodenproben” seems almost seductive. Layered, deformed, exploded like crystals or melted like slag, only fragmentary clues to the origin of these glass objects can be discerned. Staged like a collection of minerals, their genesis in the fires of the bombing war only gradually reveals itself, only to become all the more potent. Instead of precious gems, it is the force of destruction that beguiles us here with its variety of form and color. The particularly large and rare specimen in the exhibition was excavated in Berlin Kreuzberg. [Philip Topolovac]
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Bodenproben / Ground Sample (2016)
sculpture, glasobject from 2nd worldwar found in Berlin Kreuzberg (Heinrich-Heine Strasse), H 19 x B 18 x T 15 cm
Philip Topolovac (b. 1979 in Würzburg, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.) < < https://philip-topolovac.com > >
Philip Topolovac studied at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) (2001-2008), and the Master Classes under Christiane Möbus (2009). He established the arts initiative TÄT with six other artists in 2007. The exhibition room of TÄT in the Schönhauser Allee operates as a gallery run by graduates of the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2014 he received a working grant from the Kunstfonds Bonn.
Recent solo exhibitions include: “mockup (fountain)”, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2023); “In Process”, Galleria Mario Iannelli, Rome (2022); “Orpheus”, Lake Halensee, Berlin (2021); “Tel Berlin”, Korn Ausstellungsraum, Berlin (2021); “Shaping mont Ventoux”, Wilhelmhallen, Berlin (2021); “…doch listig erzwäng ich mir Lust”, Kunstverein Bayreuth (2020); “Glass“, Stroux, Berlin (2020); “Eden beneath”, M3 Festival, Prague (2020); “Mockup”, CNTRM, Berlin (2018); “yesterday was dramatic”, Berlin-weekly, Berlin (2017); “Wunderkammer”, Art-Open festival, Brno (2017); “für immer”, Galleria Mario Iannelli, Rome (2016); “remote sensing”, Invaliden1, Berlin (2015); “Niemandsland”, Museo Nivola, Orani, Sardinia (2015); “Out of this world”, with Martin Schepers, Studiogalerie Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2014); “Containment Units”, NUN, Berlin (2013); and Galerie Laboratorio, Prague (2012); “Various Rooms” Invaliden1, Berlin (2011); “Earth Observations” in the Czarnowska Gallery, Berlin (2010) and “Light Machine” in the Kwadrat Gallery, Berlin (2009).
Selected recent group exhibitions include: “polished/ raw” & “Lichtsekunde”, Hilbertraum, Berlin (2023); “Wall of sound”, Lage Egal, Berlin (2023); “Festsache”, Schaufenster, Berlin (2022); “Vergoldet”, Schloss Biesdorf, Berlin (2022); “Doré”, Chateau de Nyon, Nyon (2022); “Oliver Mark-Collaborations”, Guardini Stiftung, Berlin (2022); “Electro”, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2021); “Blocks”, Albergo delle povere, Palermo (2021); „Black Album, White Cube“, Kunsthal Rotterdam, NL (2020); “Electronic”, The Design Museum, London (2020); “Night Fever”, Design Museum Denmark (2020); “Back to Life”, Tape Modern, Berlin (2020); “Electro”, cité de la musique, Paris (2019); “Hyper-a journey into sound and music” Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2019); „Unselect“, Kleine Humboldtgalerie, Berlin (2019); “All out” Kwadrat, Berlin (2019); “Night Fever”, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein (2018); “when peace erupts”, Vittorio Veneto, Italy (2018); “Neue Schwarze Romantik”, National museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest; Kunsthaus Kiel, Kiel; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2017); “Small”, Sexauer gallery, Berlin (2017); “Welt am Rand”, Kunsthaus Erfurt (2016); “Los der Kybernetik“, Kunstverein Aschaffenburg (2016); “Anatomy of restlessness” , Mario Ianelli gallery, Rome (2016); “Boys and their Toys” at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien (2015); “Net – about spinning in art” at the Kunsthalle Kiel (2014); “The Mechanical Corps”, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin (2014); “Forever Young“, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2013) and many others./p>
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Magaly Vega
You Breathe… The Light Enters (2023), performative installation
You breathe… the light enters – The air as an instrument – The air as a bond – The violence of the invisible – It disrupts all of us. How are certain spaces transformed physically and symbolically with the use we give to the air? How do our bodies resist certain instruments of violence? How do we redefine our relationship with air? This is an performative installation work that investigates the relationship between air and the violence of the invisible. The kind of violence that is linked to what we normally do not associate with instruments of cruelty. In this case, the management of air supply as a weapon for femi(ni)cide worldwide, especially in domestic spaces. [Magaly Vega]
The work shown in this exhibition builds upon Magaly Vega’s work Love In A Mist, created for her Artist Residency at MOMENTUM-LAGOS Berlin earlier this year. In this body of work, Magaly transposes her ongoing research on domestic violence in her native Mexico into the German context. Taking the form of research, installation, and performance, this series of works addresses the increase in domestic violence in Germany, and the inherent biases entrenched within the legal system. MORE INFO >>
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Magaly Vega Lopez (b. in 1986 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Mexico and New York, USA.) < < https://magalyvega.com > >
Magaly Vega is a Storyteller, Visual Artist, Educator, and Writer who lives and works between New York and Mexico City. She holds a Master of Art + Education from NYU Steinhardt, class of 2019, and a Master of Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art, class of 2016.
Magaly Vega Lopez uses counter-narratives to start a dialogue on the violent acts of reality and pursues possible social healing through art. She believes in art that interacts with the eye of the beholder, starts a conversation or action, and lets us have our own voice. She believes that only through listening to your community you can achieve a profound knowledge of humanity. She reflects on her teaching experience, conversations, and personal memory in her own artwork. She uses art to explore the world, share, and honor stories. Art as a social-act rather than an individual practice.
Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Spain, and Germany. She has been awarded artist residencies in Russia (2015: New York Art Academy Art Residency, Moscow & St. Petersburg, Russia); Argentina (2018: AIR Program, Tribu de Trueno, Bariloche, Argentina); Switzerland (2019: Flair Talents, Bulle, Switzerland); Mexico (2021: J.A. Monroy Bienal x LAGOS Art Residencies, Mexico City); Uruguay (2022: Mango Air Program x Puertas Abiertas, Punta del Este, Uruguay); Germany (2023: LAGOS Berlin x MOMENTUM AiR, Berlin, Germany); Iceland (2023: Gamli Skóli Old School Arthouse, Iceland).
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LAGOS Berlin @ MOMENTUM AiR
ARTIST RESIDENCY
#5
Aurora Pellizzi
Website – CV
1 – 31 July 2023
OPEN STUDIO
28 July 2023 @ 5 – 9pm
RHABARBER SPRITZ
Works on Paper, Weaving & Felt
Artist Residency Presentation by Aurora Pellizzi
@ MOMENTUM-LAGOS
Kunstquartier Bethanien, rm 134
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
ARTIST BIO:
Aurora Pellizzi currently lives and works in Mexico City. Daughter of anthropologists, she was born in 1983 in Mexico City and grew up between New York and Cuernavaca. She studied art at Cooper Union School (BFA, 2010) and art history at New York University (BFA, 2005).
Pellizzi’s work combines formal precepts of painting and sculpture with craft techniques. Her practice is informed by pre-industrial textile processes and materials, from natural dyeing to back-strap loom weaving. Technical constraints give way to textural, dimensional shapes and forms. Fiber is used both as a pictorial field and as the embodiment of the subject it represents.
She has exhibited in Austria, Belgium, Colombia, France, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including exhibitions at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, the Museo de Arte Maya in Cancun, the Museo de Artes Populares of Mexico in Mexico City, and forthcoming at the Museum of the City of Queretaro and the Mexican Institute in Madrid (2023).
Pellizzi’s recent one and two person shows include Gorgona, forthcoming at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey (MARCO, 2023), Culebras with Jeff Marfa Gallery at Salon Acme in Mexico City (2023), Corpi a Galla / Cuerpos Flotantes at the Italian Cultural Institute in Mexico City (2022), El Deseo Aparece de Repente at Instituto de Vision Gallery in Bogota (2022), Focus: Aurora Pellizzi at Lisa Kandlhofer Gallery in Vienna (2022), Transfiguration at Canada Gallery in New York (2021) and Serpientes at l´Appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco (2016). She has published two artist books Serpientes (2016) and Transfiguration (2021).
Pellizzi´s work has been featured and reviewed in Agenzia Ansa, Art Net News, Art & Object, The Art Newspaper, Art Observed, Art Review, Blouin Art Info, Coolhunting, Coolhunter Mx, Dazed Digital, Espoarte, Exibart, Glocal Design Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Hyperallergic, la Jornada de Morelos, Local MX, Purple Magazine, La Razón, Reforma Newspaper, el Sol de Cuernavaca, Terremoto Magazine, El Universal Newspaper, and on the cover of U: magazine published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
ARTIST STATEMENT – Aurora Pellizzi:
My work playfully combines formal concepts of painting and sculpture – such as abstraction, perspective, figure, and ground – with traditional textile techniques and practices – most notably weaving and natural dyeing. Humor acts as a catalyst dissipating the traditionally ascribed divide between craft and art.
In my work I often use natural infusions of indigo, brazilwood, cochineal, avocado pits, and Aztec marigold to produce my color palette. Variations of tone and hue derive from the source’s natural composition and from the particular PH of each dye recipe. Treated as a material in and of itself and not as an external attribute or coating, the resulting colors are deeply saturated and unusual, especially in our post-industrial, digital age.
Simplified abstract shapes are fleshed out into volumetric relief through layers of sculpted fiber. Geometry, figuration, and abstraction are turned on their head so that circles become breasts which spin into spheres. A triangle exists as a triangle, becomes a pubis, and then recedes into a vanishing point. The body is experienced both as detail and landscape – figure and ground coexist symbiotically.
The female figure isn’t represented but embodied as field, subject, and symbol. Bodies are simultaneously uninhibited, charged, at ease, and distended within their canvas. Physically dominant like the boulders, depressions and horizons that make up a landscape, the female body is permeated by the creative force within it –– the pro-creative and creative, intertwined.
– Aurora Pellizzi
Berlin Artist Residency Project
RHABARBER SPRITZ
During my residency at MOMENTUM-LAGOS, I transposed my studio practice from San Miguel Chapultepec in Mexico City to Kreuzberg in Berlin. Employing many of the same processes I use at home: weaving, felting and natural dyeing – I adapted these practices to local sources, materials and workshops in the area surrounding the Residency Studio within the historical Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center. Throughout the Residency, I have been furthering my engagement with locally sourced materials and craft communities.
Working within the BBK Print Workshop at Kunstquartier Bethanien, I extended my use of natural dyes by applying them to the silk-screen process. The result is a series of works on paper and fabric in different hues of color (from yellow, to pink, brown, and teal) – obtained by altering the PH of a dye liqueur I extracted from Rhubarb root. Rhubarb, native to Siberia and Alaska, was introduced to Europe in the 1600s as a medicinal plant for its healing properties. It is particularly suited to northern countries for its ability to withstand winter frosts. It is now a ubiquitous ingredient in dishes, beverages, and deserts in Germany.
The print edition references the optical illusion known as Rubin´s Vase. The image used in psychology tests typically depicts either a cup or two faces kissing; depending on the viewers own interpretation and ´projection.´ In art it is referred to as a figure/ground relation. In these rhubarb tinted prints, profiled and frontal female torsos combine, separate and merge back together. The edges of one define the shape of the other. The process entailed printing a series of transparent acid and base layers onto paper. The final flush of dye reveals the image – as the dye reacts to the invisible inks ¬ the figures emerge.
Other experiments during the residency include a small-scale weaving project made with fabric refuse sourced at a local knitting shop in the neighborhood. Woven on an improvised rigid-loom made from painting stretcher-bars; the weaving combines tapestry and double-weave techniques, which together permit more elaborate color combinations and representational freedom. Using only straight and diagonal lines, I return to a prevalent tension or ambiguity in my work between geometry and figuration.
A female figure composed of parallelograms is entwined throughout both warps. ´Positive´ and ´negative´ versions are visible on both ´faces´ of the weaving. The figure isn´t in repose, but is meant to evoke movement. Since the material itself is left-over from fashionwear and retains the printed patterns of the original fabric – the image is meant to allude to the origin of the material – to an urban rhythm and pace that incorporates a sense of street wear and style.
Lastly, by way of a collaboration with local felter Elizabeth Schwartz – in her workshop and store, Lieberfilz, directly across from the Kunstquartier Bethnien from Mariannenplatz – I am working with wet and needle felting techniques within the parameters of her own studio´s materials and equipment; producing a series of samples and experiments in color and texture.
In Cooperation With:
Lieberfilz Felt Studio & Shop > >
BBK Print Workshop > >
Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center > >
The MOMENTUM AiR / LAGOS Berlin
ARTIST RESIDENCY
is part of the
LAGOS Mexico City / MOMENTUM Berlin
RESIDENCY EXCHANGE
MORE INFO > >
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In weiter Ferne, so Nah! / Far Away, So Close:
Mexico in Berlin
Featuring:
Julieta Aranda, Luis Carrera-Maul, Mariana Castillo Deball, Emilio Chapela, Sandra Contreras & Anselmo Fox, Beatriz Morales, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Gabriel Rossell Santillán
Curated by Luis Carrera-Maul
Within the framework of the 30th anniversary of sisterhood between Berlin and Mexico City,
MOMENTUM & LAGOS jointly present:
In weiter Ferne, so Nah! / Far Away, So Close
An exhibition of contemporary art by Mexican artists working in Berlin.
OPENING: 5 July @ 6-9pm
With DJ Set by Pato Watson & Mezcal by San Cosme
FINISSAGE: 23 July @ 5-8pm
With Catalogue Launch & Mezcal by San Cosme
Catalogue Design by Emilio Rapanà
EXHIBITION: 6 July – 23 August 2023
Opening Hours: Monday – Friday @ 9-5pm
@ The Cultural Institute of Mexico in Germany
Embassy of Mexico
Klingelhöferstraße 3, 10785 Berlin
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the sisterhood between the cities of Mexico and Berlin, which is being celebrated throughout 2023, LAGOS-Mexico and MOMENTUM-Berlin in collaboration with the Mexican Cultural Institute in Germany, are honored to present the exhibition “In weiter Ferne, so nah! – Mexiko in Berlin”, featuring the work of artists from Mexico who live and work in the city of Berlin.
The exhibition includes the work of eight artists who share a common generation and who, as residents of Germany, draw on their Mexican roots in their practice. They integrate the ancestral cultures of Mexico into their artistic discourses, creating through their work a conceptual bridge that unites tradition with contemporary language. The proposals stimulate a series of conversations about the relationship between Mexico and Germany, as well as a dialogue between the native cultures of Mexico and contemporary artistic production in Berlin.
All of the selected artists work in a transdisciplinary way, focusing on installations. The works that make up this exhibition establish a series of timeless and complex relationships. They dialogue with each other through conceptual themes such as the critique of modernity and progress, decolonialism, the Anthropocene and ancestral cosmogonies. The complexity of the artist’s approaches is complemented by a view on Berlin and its own cultural hybridization. The exhibition shows ancestral images re-signified in contemporaneity, historical, mythical and mystical characters in a timeless and continuous dialogue, sacred places in the process of extinction, visions of an altered past and an uncertain future. Objects and sounds deconstructed and returned to their place of origin. Resistance and negotiation.
The exhibition takes its title from Wim Wenders’ 1993 film of the same name, bearing in mind that it was also made 30 years ago, and refers to the apparent spatial distance between the two cities, but at the same time to the mutual recognition of the similarities that exist between them. The argument of Wenders’ film is time and territory, as well as his reflection on individual and cultural identity. The dialectic between time/territory of the human vs. time/territory of the divine, which may suggest a line of interpretation of the selected works.
Finally, this exhibition is an invitation to intercultural dialogue, shows the complexity, diversity and potential of eight artists from Mexico in Berlin, highlights their uniqueness and recognizes the strength of their artistic discourse.
– Luis Carrera-Maul, Curator
Credits:
Curator: Luis Carrera-Maul
Curatorial Assistant: Fernanda Pizá Aragón
Producer: Rachel Rits-Volloch
Graphic Design: Emilio Rapanà
Documentation and Social Media: Alex Rich, Dodi Shepard
Co-Production: LAGOS-México & MOMENTUM-Berlin
Featuring:
[Click on the name of each artist to see the bio and the work description below.]
Julieta Aranda
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[Photo left by Andrew Hasson Getty Images]
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Regresando un Regalo / Returning a Gift (2023)
Music Box, mixed media, 10 x 10 x 7 cm
120 years ago, a gift of 200 musical instruments called harmonipans was gifted to Mexico City by the City of Berlin. The harmonipan is an automatic instrument, similar to player pianos and music boxes, that re-plays popular songs pre-recorded on its punch card-like mechanism, which is enclosed within a lavishly decorated wooden box, bearing inlays of wooden flower motifs. The harmonipans were made by Frati & Co. a company located at Schoenhauser Allee #73, in Berlin, and were a popular instrument for street public performances in Germany at the time. lt must be noted that German players were not musically trained, and operated harmonipans with the same technique used to manoeuvre old-fashioned meat grinders. lt was customary for them to wear a vaguely military-looking uniform.
The 200 boxes that arrived in Mexico had a pre-recorded selection of both popular Mexican and German songs of the time – including polkas, waltzes and corridos. Quickly becoming popular, they are now a staple of daily life in the centre of Mexico City, and over the past century became so familiar as to appear as a local custom – today almost no one knows that they are from Germany (despite the fact that they bear the manufacturer’s name and the Berlin address). Mexican harmonipan players also wear a uniform that is something of a mixture between that of a traffic cop and a hotel bell boy. Only one person in the past 60 years knew how to tune these mechanical instruments: señor Alfonso Lazaro García, who sadly passed away in 1965. During the ensuing decades, the instruments went completely out of tune, so much so that the sounds they produce today appear to be totally abstract, and the melodies are barely recognizable, if at all. However the tradition of having these instruments played on the streets is so strong, that most people do not mind the strange noise they hear coming out of these objects and happily give money to the players in reward.
Regresando un Regalo (Returning a Gift) consists of bringing one of the harmonipans and its player from Mexico City to Berlin for a period of one week, during which he will play at various public locations, amongst them the address of the former harmonipan factory, and solicit donations just as the harmonipan players do in Mexico. At the exhibition, a music box plays an out-of-tune song from the harmonipan that is visiting Berlin.
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Julieta Aranda (b. 1975 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and NYC, New York, USA.)
In her artistic practice, Julieta Aranda composes sensorial encounters with the nature of time and speculative literature. She observes the altering human-earth relationship through a multidisciplinary lens, looking at science and technology, environmental humanities, multispecies encounters, artificial intelligence, and collective subjectivities. Working with installation, sculpture, video, and print media, she is invested in exploring the potential of temporalities otherwise, and the ‘poetics of circulation’. Her projects challenge the boundaries between subject and object while embracing chance encounters, auto-destruction, and social processes.
Julieta Aranda has been awarded numerous grants and merit scholarships, from institutions such as FONCA, the National Foundation for the Culture and the Arts in Mexico (1995–1996), and both the School of Visual Arts (1995–1999), the National Board of Review (1996–1999) and Columbia University (2004) in New York. She has also been an artist in residence at UNIDEE, the International Program by Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy (2006), as well as at IAPSIS, the International Artists Studio Program in Stockholm (2006) and at the International Residence of Recollets in Paris (2008). Her work has been shown in internationally renowned institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2009); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (2010); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2010), as well as at international art festivals such as the Liverpool Biennial (2010); the Kassel Documenta, Germany (2012); and the Shanghai Biennale (2012).
Aranda has been actively collaborating on e-flux since 2003, which is a publishing platform, archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and cultural enterprise founded by Anton Vidokle in 1998.
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Luis Carrera-Maul
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STRATUM / Wasteland (2023)
Installation, soil, ceramic paste, recycled material, geomembrane, drip irrigation system, 300 x 400 cm
Bosque de Chapultepec I & II (2014)
Digital print, 50 x 70 cm
Luis Carrera-Maul’s Berlin work continues the geo-aesthetic intervention STRATUM realised in 2022 at the Mexican Museum of Sciences and Arts (MUCA, UNAM); it interprets the configuration and alteration of the Earth’s strata as a fundamental political issue: according to Bruno Latour, all soil interventions are archaic political processes. In the present, marked by climate crisis and species extinction, the critical state of the forests and the aridification of its soils is a central theme that the artist now addresses in his Berlin installation STRATUM / Wasteland.
He places 8 objects of compressed and dried soil on an abstracted geological relief map of Germany spread out on the floor of the exhibition hall, always at the location from which he had taken soil samples from various German forests on a tour in 2017. During the exhibition’s runtime, these dried clumps of soil are watered so that they can become the substrate of new plant growth – an experimental arrangement that profiles the artwork as an instrument of ecological research. The autopoiesis of plants, should it actually happen at the exhibition site, becomes a metaphor for the power and vitality of vegetation, even in a possible posthuman future. Thus, in the artistic imagination, the withered wasteland of dying forests is transformed into vital woodscapes.
Carrera-Maul’s critical topography of a country plagued by forest dieback and increasing drought produces orientational knowledge for the debates about the Anthropocene. It is an aesthetic soil science that inscribes itself in the “geological turn,” which defines the geological as a subject of the arts and humanities. In this context, the conceptual development and elaboration of an artwork becomes a complementary form of knowledge. STRATUM/Wasteland offers a sensual realisation of the constitution of our living worlds, stimulates reflection on a more responsible approach to planet earth.
– Peter Krieger, Dr. phil., curator and research professor
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Luis Carrera-Maul (b. 1972 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Mexico City, Mexico.)
Luis Carrera-Maul is a visual artist who has followed several lines of research throughout his career, mainly around the Anthropocene and geo-aesthetics. His work establishes a strong dialogue between science and art. In this sense, his projects seek an interdisciplinary connection, taking up concepts from ecology, archeology and geology, among others, as well as themes related to the environment and therefore, to the political. Many of his works are process-oriented and site-specific installations on a large scale, in which he normally uses both traditional techniques and new media.
Luis Carrera-Maul is a visual artist, curator, and art professor. He earned his Master’s degree in arts teaching at the Faculty of Arts and Design (FAD) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Postgraduate studies in Visual Arts at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK). He is founder and director of the Lagos Project – Studios and Residencies for artists, created as a platform for experimentation and exchange for national and international artists. He has received several awards and recognitions including being Member of the National System of Art Creators (FONCA), the Acquisition Award in 2010 at the II Biennial of Painting Pedro Coronel. Nominated for Best Latin American Visual Artist in the United Kingdom (LUKAS Awards, 2015) and nominated for Prix Thun for Art and Ethics in Switzerland in 2017. In 2018 he was commissioned artist to produce a work for the XIII FEMSA Biennial.
He has exhibited both individually and collectively in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, England, Italy and Germany, at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MAM), the National Museum of San Carlos, in Mexico City, Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) in Buenos Aires Argentina, Barcelona Contemporary Culture Center (CCCB) at Barcelona, Spain, Pedro Coronel Museum and Francisco Goitia Museum both in Zacatecas, the Museum of Oaxacan Painters, Museum of the City in Mérida and the Art Museum of Querétaro, Mexico.
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Mariana Castillo Deball
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UMRISS (2014)
Two laser chrome prints mounted on dibond, 270 x 180 cm
Courtesy Kurimanzutto Gallery
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Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
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UMRISS is a series of large-format photographic prints based on a Mexican advertisement of the 1980’s promoting Stelazine, an antipsychotic medicine. The flyer used the following slogan:
“Schizophrenic patients sometimes hide behind a mask of psychotic withdrawal, which can make them inaccessible to therapy. Stelazine: Remove the mask of the psychotic patient.”
This pamphlet was illustrated with images of Mexican masks with extravagant and texturised colour backgrounds, which was in turn a translation of the American advertisement for the same brand. The original version used the African and Canadian equivalents of these masks.
Mimicking the style of the promotional campaign, UMRISS uses examples from the Mesoamerican collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin; acquired at the beginning of the twentieth century and originating primarily from the south of Mexico and Guatemala. The photographs only show the backside of the masks, putting an accent on the inventory number from the museum, and the backside and usually invisible part of the object, exhibiting its manufacture, and the side where the face meets the mask when being worn.
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Mariana Castillo Deball is a visual artist whose work has explored the history of cultural objects, their prevalence and the different ways in which these have been interpreted and understood throughout time. Her work’s multidisciplinary focus has driven her to collaborate with professionals of different branches of knowledge on science and culture. Castillo Deball’s installations, performances, sculptures and editorial projects emerge from the recombination of different languages and explore the role of objects in the understanding of our history and identity. Her work is the result of long research processes that allow her to analyse how certain historical objects can be read over time and how they constitute a dialogic version of reality that creates a polyphonic panorama. She takes on the role of the explorer or the archaeologist, compiling found materials in a way that reveals new connections and meanings. Castillo Deball works with ethnographic collections, libraries and historical archives, seeking to go beyond contemporary art institutions and museums. Her artistic production includes several editions: books or objects whose different uses and formats aim to open up new territories. Her raw material arises from the exchange between anthropology, philosophy and literature in a process of mutual learning.
Mariana Castillo Deball has been awarded internationally renowned prizes, including the Prize of the National Gallery, Berlin (2013). She has participated in numerous major exhibitions and biennials, including the Sao Paulo Biennial (2016), Berlin Biennale (2014), dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012) or the Venice Biennale (2011). The artist’s most recent solo exhibitions include MGK Siegen (2021), MUAC Mexico city (2022), Modern Art Oxford, England (2020), Museum Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne and New Museum, New York (both 2019). She has been teaching as a professor of sculpture at Münster Academy of Art since 2015.
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Emilio Chapela
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Río Revuelto (2023)
Six paintings polyptych, Acrylic on canvas, each 140 x 140 cm
Rio Revuelto is part of a series of works that consists of paintings and drawings that aim to better understand the varied and complex motions experienced by moving water – as manifested in the form of turbulence, calm water, vortexes, whirlpools, splashes, waterfalls, eddies, waves and tidal movements. Each painting is made by making numerous strokes of paint that fill the canvas with the objective of assimilating the complex movements of water and sediments in a river. This polyptych of six paintings is only a segment of an ongoing image that unfolds from painting to painting describing the flow of a river as it advances forward.
There have been consistent efforts to control and domesticate the flow of rivers with the help of infrastructure works like dams, canals and diversions that aim to redirect, reduce floods, or even change the direction of a river flow. While some of these engineering works might be useful, water often finds its way to break through them. It does so by remembering the places where it used to flow or by finding its way out, flooding and changing in shape. By understanding how water moves, it might be possible to learn new forms of resistance to control structures and impositions, like the ones forced on water throughout human history.
However chaotic in appearance, when water becomes agitated and turbulent, it is subject to a high degree of spontaneous order: water particles become sensitive to other molecules and their environment, which results in a coordinated response. This is similar to the kind of order seen when a large group of people accommodate without explicitly agreeing to it and walk through a narrow path or tunnel: bodies become tightly packed and move in coordination. Similar forms of spontaneous order are also seen in climatic events, ecological systems and technology systems.
The Río Revuelto is a series of works that unfolds as a long (potentially infinite) line of paintings that resembles a river flow and that are always connected to each other. One painting “flows” into the following keeping the same direction, similarly as a river advances by moving forward, as an arrow. Physicists also use the image of the arrow to describe how time moves, from the past to the future in an irreversible motion. ´No one has ever seen a river flow up a mountain´, explains the philosopher Michel Serres, referring to the direction of time as manifested in rivers: The Seine in Paris flows from “memory to hope”, he explains in the Incandescent. Río Revuelto also flows from past to future advancing in time.
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Emilio Chapela (b.1978 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Mexico City, Mexico.)
Emilio Chapela is a visual artist and researcher. His work is informed by science, technology and ecology and aims to visualise bonds and connections between humans and nonhumans to reconcile with the world’s various temporalities and movements. Chapela inquiries on notions of time and space that are manifested through matter and forces such as astronomical phenomena, light, weather, gravity, rocks, plants, volcanoes, and rivers. He utilises writing, walking, hiking, and stargazing, as tools for his art practice.
Emilio Chapela is a fellow at Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (2022-2024) in Mexico. He has exhibited extensively in Mexico, Latinoamerica, the USA and Europe in institutions and museums such as Museum Fine Arts Houston, Fundación Jumex, Phoenix Art Museum, FEMSA, Museo Rufino Tamayo and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, amongst others. His most recent solo show En el tiempo de la Rosa no envejece el jardinero was exhibited at Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City in 2019, where he collaborated with architects, astronomers and scientists. He holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of Plymouth, UK.
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Sandra Contreras & Anselmo Fox
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intervene / negotiate (2023)
Wood, cotton rope, plaster, furniture, dimensions variable
For the exhibition Far Away So Close at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Berlin, the artist duo Sandra Contreras and Anselmo Fox have focused on the activity of cleaning as an occasion for the structural investigation of private space. For this intercultural exchange, Sandra Contreras and Anselmo Fox have twinned two mechudos, whose German counterparts are the mops, by means of a surgical procedure and, not entirely free of humour, sculpturally exposed them to decision-making processes.
42 cleaning cords, approx. 3 meters long, twisted from natural white cotton threads are pierced at their ends into one brush body each and thus connect the two handles twisted into them. Usually, a stem connects us to the event of our action, which is performed with it and thus triggers a function. In this respect, its linkage can also be understood as prompts, especially when it is part of the room leaning against the wall. The two handles make them a flexible and mobile venue for an interaction that expresses the shared and physically spatializing activity of brushing as an ornament of mutual perception. Their entanglements are the occasion for blackish lumps to embody themselves as one-grips. The situation is different in the immediate vicinity, where two pieces of seating furniture spread out in front of them, an action that has just taken place as a communicative order of what is literally strained.
Inward and outward invaginations stretch their surfaces curvaceously and transitionlessly in opposite directions. On closer inspection, their supple bulges illustrate the petrified shaping of the action performed and the mass displaced under the pressure of in-formation to the extent of material cohesion. As a result, the elasticity of the moulding mass arches its increasing loss of form and forms bulges, with the degree of its surface curvature, symbolises the approaching moment of the return to the state of uneventfulness, which weakens the memory of form. Pulling, pushing, grasping, turning, pressing and holding out are stored as information of the
social body.
Sandra Contreras and Anselmo Fox are a Mexican – Berlin-based artist duo. Together they address topics such as the working conditions of the lower and precarious social classes under social and environmental aspects, migration, cultural differences and private space.
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Sandra Contreras (b. 1974 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Mexico City, Mexico.)
Sandra Contreras is a Mexican artist who since 2001 has lived and worked between Berlin and Mexico City. Her artistic practice is situated in the emerging field of contemporary textile work, a territory that intersects with the practice of painting, drawing and installation. Since about 10 years, Contreras has been exploring embroideries that are transformed into hand-made objects – for example: altars, curtains, carpets, tapestries, flags, books, through to full architectonic spaces.
Textiles have a long tradition in art history. Hand-made textile objects have existed for thousands of years. The objects provide a sense of well-being in daily life, as well as a symbolic and aesthetic lifestyle. However, textiles have a shorter history in contemporary art. Contreras’ artworks fall within this conceptual field, which follows painting and drawing practices. This handcraft combines a narrative with contemporary topics.
Sandra Contreras completed a B.A. in Art History and an M.A. in Art Studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and an M.A. in Art in Context in Berlin. She has presented more than thirteen individual exhibitions and artistic actions in Germany, Mexico, and Greece, for example in the Textile Museum, Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as multiple group exhibitions, for example in Spazju Kreatttiv, Museum St. James Cavalier, Valetta, Malta. Likewise, for twenty years she has been conducting artistic mediation activities and giving workshops on this subject in museums, schools and communities in Mexico and Germany.
Anselmo Fox (b. 1964 in Mendisio, Switzerland. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Anselmo Fox’s interest is in settings in whose processes traces of self-behaviour are expressed, which refer to the actual medium, the body. His work explores plastic, installations, digital media, drawing, and aesthetic theory. Anselmo Fox studied art and education at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and education at the Basel University of Art and Design, interdisciplinary cultural studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin and product design at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences.
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Beatriz Morales
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Ts’ul (2020)
Agave fibre, acrylic, natural pigments, ink on cotton and jute fabric, 550 × 210 × 10 cm
Beatriz Morales’ fibre art installations float in the room like giant hides of mystic creatures. Frayed and wild, they are created from an unusual material: agave fibre. Drawing from her biography and experience as a Berlin-based, Mexican artist with a Lebanese background, her work is an exploration of the many facets of multinational, multilayered identity. In her oeuvre, she contrasts urban and natural influences, whereby nature is not only the source of pigments and fibres, but is also understood as a natural habitat for her large, often monumental textile installations. Art and nature reflect and complement each other, to the point that the boundary between organic presence and abstract composition dissolves.
Beatriz Morales’ work Ts’ul is a large conceptual installation consisting almost entirely of variously processed agave cactus fibre. Historically, agave fibre was a widely used raw material in pre-Columbian Mexico, until its economic importance shrank with the onset of the industrial revolution and the appearance of synthetic materials. Like bursts of raw nature, Morales’ fibre art works are draped in the exhibition space like gigantic, floating hides of untamable, mythical creatures. The immediate aesthetic impact of this work paves the way to Morales’ deeply rich, conceptually charged visual and haptic language, which confidently integrates the archaic and the refined. The artist thus creates a symbiosis between fibre art, with its echoes of local artisanal traditions, and a compositional gesture in the tradition of abstract expressionism and its focus on pure correlations of colour and texture.
Morales draws on historical aspects of her chosen material as well as biographic reflections. Both perspectives are present in the title of her work series: Ts’ul, a word from the indigenous South-Mexican Maya language, means “the other”, “stranger” and “foreigner”. It is yet another clue to the conceptual subtext in Beatriz Morales’ art.
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Beatriz Morales (b. 1981 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Hidalgo, Mexico.)
Born and raised in Mexico City, Beatriz Morales left her native country in 2001 to pursue largely autodidactic studies in painting, pottery and fashion design. Morales combines an investigative, abstract-expressionist approach, at times combined with figurative and illustrative components, creating a concretely conceptualised body of work. One major strand of her work is fibre and textile art, often drawing on agave fibre as a raw material. Morales creates her work in contrasting scenes between the pulsating urbanism of the German capital and Mexico City, as well as the rough nature of rural Hidalgo, where her Mexican studio is located. She explores questions of identity – personal and societal – on small to medium sized canvases, as well as large to monumentally sized installation pieces, often presented in natural contexts.
Beatriz Morales’ recent installation work “Zarcillo”, extending to a height of 14 metres, is currently on view at Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden. Her painting Wonderland II was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City and Oaxaca) as part of the Mexican Painting Biennial 2017. Morales made her major art fair debut at Zona Maco in 2018. Her work has since been shown at numerous art fairs and several galleries across Europe and in North America. Beatriz Morales’ recent exhibitions include major solo exhibitions at Circle Culture Berlin and Hamburg, as well as several institutional exhibitions including the high-profile show “The king is dead, long live the queen” at Frieder Burda Museum Baden-Baden, solo exhibitions at the Chancellery Museum in Mexico City and the Museo MACAY in Mérida. She published her first solo major monograph “Color Archaeology” on Kerber Publishing in December 2021, available now in bookstores internationally.
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Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Alex(ander) and Axol(otl) (2017)
HD Video, 31’37” (extended version)
Performers: Marie Strauss and Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Lyrics: Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Music: Federico Schmucler
Vocals: David Katz
Cinematography: Gabriel Rossell
Photo documentation: Kathrin Sonntag
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“Alex(ander) and Axol(otl) is a chapter from The Formaldehyde Trip – a series of videos and performative screenings in which murdered Mixtec activist Alberta “Bety” Cariño goes on an imagined, psychedelic journey, where indigenous rights and speculative fictions wind together through the underworld.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo (b. 1979 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Oaxaca, Mexico.)
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Alexander von Humboldt “discovered” the axolotl in his expedition through the Spanish Colonies, and took with him a couple of specimens to Europe in order to deliver them to French naturalist George Cuvier for further research. The axolotl became raw material for scientific inquiry, an object to be classified, described and categorised with necrophilic accuracy. Towards the end of his expedition in the Americas, Alexander von Humboldt visited the United States, and was hosted by President Thomas Jefferson. Humboldt shared his detailed description, maps of natural resources and his political analysis of the Colonies. The enlightened transatlantic friendship between Humboldt and Jefferson provided the later with strategic information to fuel his expansionist will, while contributing to the expansion of racialized political systems of Western modernity over the colonies through the appropriation/violence paradigm that marks abyssal global lines between metropolitan societies and colonial territories.
In Alex(ander) and Axol(otl), Alex(ander von Humboldt) poses like he would do for a painter like Friedrich Georg Weitsch or Eduard Ender in the early nineteenth century, whose paintings would depict the nobleness of an Enlightened European explorer with unruly hair, spotless outfit, sweat-less white skin free of mosquito bites or sunburns, in an imagined landscape of the Southern territories of the American Continent, maybe surrounded by lush flora, wild animals and naked innocent natives. Once on his* still pose, Alex opens his mouth, as if he would be ready to sing an operatic song or to offer a fellatio. From behind the curtain Axol(otl) caresses and holds Alex’s body against his/hers. Alex(ander von Humboldt) appears as the subject of action, discovery, exploration and knowledge production; he* exists in time, while Axol(otl) only occupies space having no world-making-effects. They encounter each other within the logic and structure of racist practices, which arrange the world under a particular racial ordering within which Axol is supposed to respond to Alex’s needs and commands. Yet, their fleeting encounter is intimate, poignantly charging the surface of contact between the two of them with desires situated on the edge of the dominant orders of belonging and subjugation.
“Alex(ander) and Axol(otl) is a chapter from The Formaldehyde Trip. In this psychedelic speculative fiction, Naomi Rincón Gallardo has written and directed a cycle of songs and videos dedicated to murdered activist Alberta “Bety” Cariño, who defended indigenous territorial rights. The work has also been performed live with idiosyncratic and ornate props and costumes that echo Mexican B-side Sci-Fi films of the 60s and 70s, weaving together Mesoamerican cosmologies, decolonial feminist and queer perspectives, and lyrics addressing indigenous women’s struggles against the background of the dispossession of their bodies, cultures, and territories. On an imagined journey through the underworld, Cariño encounters women warriors, witches, and widows, the dual-gendered goddess of death, and animals preparing her rebirth party. An axolotl, or Mexican salamander, in formaldehyde is the storyteller, agitating between fact, fiction, and friction as sounds and voices from the past lurk into the future.
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From a decolonial-cuir perspective, Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s research-driven critical-mythical dreamlike world-makings address the creation of counter-worlds in neo-colonial settings. In her work she integrates her interests in theatre games, popular music, Mesoamerican cosmologies, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms and queer of colour critique.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo completed the PhD in Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Recent shows and performative screenings include: 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022), 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021), Una Trilogía de Cuevas (A Trilogy of Caves), 2020 (Solo Show) Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, May your thunder break the sky, 2020 (Solo Show) Kunstraum Innsbruck, 11 Berlin Biennale, 2020 Berlin, Heavy Blood, 2019, (Solo Show) Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, Opossum Resilience, 2019, (Solo Show) Parallel Oaxaca, 2019, Stone Telling, 2019, (Collective Show) Kunstraum Niederösterreich Vienna, En Cuatro Patas, 2018, (Performative Screening) Pacific Standard Time. L.A.L.A. The Broad Museum, L.A., Prometheus. Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco. (Collective Show), 2018, Pomona College Museum of Art, L.A., FEMSA Biennial. We have Never been Contemporary, 2018, Zacatecas, Odarodle, An imaginary their_story of naturepeoples, 1535-2017, 2017, (Collective Show) Schwules Museum, Berlin, and Nicaragua Biennial, 2016, Managua.
The Formaldehyde Trip has been shown at: SF MOMA, San Francisco CA (2017), The Broad Museum, LA, California, USA (2018); Academy of Fine Art, Vienna, Austria (2018); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA (2020); The New Museum NYC, New Yotk, USA (2022); amongst others.
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Gabriel Rossell Santillán
Los Lobos: Second meeting and questioning of the Wixárika offering in Berlin (2017-2022)
HD Video, 16’18”
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El Cajón (2014 – 2019)
Installation: printed plastic curtains. Video 17’38” (2014), mini DV. Audio reconstruction (2019) of the Berghain Kantine concert with Nik Nowak in 2014, with texts as homage to Aimé Césaire’s “discourse about colonialism. In collaboration with Nik Nowak.
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Gabriel Rossell Santillán’s work shows an engagement with images which give centrality to the process of memorial reconstruction. In this way, the topic of “return of memory (memories)” is at the centre of his work. Since the artist first engaged with the Wixárika Indigenous community in Mexico in the Proyecto Wixárika, a thorough thinking about the return of the “order of the things” was set in motion. [This is connected to ancestral fathers and mothers, as well as to their relations to offerings and elements of ceremonies such as non-human subjects, rivers and mountains.] Regarding this project, it is important to stress the return of the “order of things” (which can be represented in an image) and not the return of the objects themselves. [For the Wixárika, what we call “ethnological objects” are, in fact, offerings and ceremonial utensils.] In this way, the Wixárika project has the aim to develop a method –a way– to return knowledge and memories of sacred ceremonies to Wixáritari communities in Mexico.
Beyond this project, the topic of the “relation of things” – the reconnection of offerings and ceremonial utensils with the community – has always been present and has continued in his most recent work.(…)
(…) The video „Los Lobos. Zweites Zusammentreffen und Befragung der Wixárika Opfergabe in Berlin“ (2017-2022), shows conversations between Mara’akate, the artist and staff of the Museum in Dahlem – after having engaged in two ceremonies. At the museum, where every participant was re-named, the Mara’akate looked for images of extinct animals and plants as well as ceremonial utensils with drawings, patterns and/or techniques carrying information about textile methods which do not exist in the Wixárika communities anymore. This resulted in the project of a booklet about these extinct animals and plants as well as the offerings (which are in Berlin) and the extinct methods, for the younger generations. Further, the video shows how the Mara’akate reordered ceremonial utensils at the museum and explained the importance of maintaining a correct order of (material) things. According to their knowledge, this order is important for the wellbeing of humanity.
– Andrea Meza Torres, originally for “Die Vibration der Dinge” at the 15. Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach 2022.
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Gabriel Rossell Santillán (b. 1976 in Mexico City, Mexico lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Taupurie/Santa Catarina, Mexico.)
In his work, Gabriel Rossell Santillán uses drawing, performance, photography and video in order to stage narratives that provide an epistemology towards shared authorships, feminists of colour, critical indigenous theory, and queer thinking. These explore the transfer of subaltern and alternative forms of knowledge and focus on the body – for example, in the interaction with smell, heat or humidity.
Gabriel Rossell Santillán attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM, in Mexico City, as well as the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain and the Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin. He graduated as Master Student of Prof. Lothar Baumgarten. In 2008 he was awarded the DAAD-Preis for foreign students’ outstanding achievements. 2009-2010 he was promoted with the NaFöG grant for visual arts. 2010-2012 he had the Atelier fellowship from the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft. 2017 the book fellowship from the Stiftung Kunstfond “de todos colores menos plomo”. 2020/21 and 2022 NEUSTART KULTUR from Stiftung Kunstfonds. Rossell Santillán has presented his work in numerous exhibitions in Germany, Europe, Mexico, Latin America and Asia.
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LAGOS Berlin @ MOMENTUM AiR
ARTIST RESIDENCY
#4
Laura Valencia Lozada
Website – CV
1 June – 5 July 2023
OPEN STUDIO
1 July 2023 @ 5:00 – 9:00pm
Artist Residency Presentation by Laura Valencia Lozada
For the Art-In-Context Masters Program at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UDK)
@ MOMENTUM-LAGOS
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
A Participatory Art Project
work-in-progress by Laura Valencia Lozada
SILO / Semillera de Memorias presents:
A graphic exploration of an encounter of narratives between women who work or have lived in the Tlatelolco neighborhood, in Mexico City and the Kreuzberg neighborhood, in Berlin. Both are districts where social movements have taken place, spaces of social and civil resistance against patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism.
Participants:
BERLIN-Kreuzberg
Anna, Marisa Maza, Nayeli Vega and Shokoufeh Eftekhar
MEXICO-Tlatelolco
Dolores Espinoza, Ivonne Ojeda, Juana Canales y Reyna Barrera
For the Artist Residency at MOMENTUM-LAGOS Berlin, Laura Valencia Lozada collects stories from women living or working in Kreuzberg, a neighbourhood located in the central part of Berlin, and home of the MOMENTUM-LAGOS Residency in the historic Kuntsquartier Bethanien Art Center.
The idea is to add stories to Lozada’s ongoing project, the SILO / Semillera de Memorias Tlatelolcas archive, which is currently exploring the construction of memories of women living or working in neighbourhoods where social movements and spaces of resistance against patriarchy, colonisation or capitalism have taken place. The aim is to create an intergenerational dialogue between the participants and a reading of their memories from a non-linear time.
How are individual and collective memories created?
Who writes the history of our places, of our objects, of our encounters?
In the course of this Residency, Lozada proposes to initiate a dialogue between Tlatelolco and Kreuzberg, a district in the city of Berlin that was founded more than 100 years ago, and despite being much younger than Tlatelolco, they coincide and reflect each other, as Kreuzberg has a long history of social, labour, occupy, feminist and anti-racist movements. It also has a strong multicultural life with very large communities of Turkish origin and countercultural and artistic movements that have brought together artists creating collectives and self-managed their own spaces. Despite all this history, Kreuzberg is currently suffering from serious problems of gentrification, especially affecting housing due to property speculation, rising rents and the displacement of the district’s original inhabitants and neighbours. By constructing this paradigm of parallels between Kreuzberg and Tlatelolco, Lozada aims to draw on the context and knowledge of the city of Berlin, which has been the nerve center of a profound reflection on the study of memories and its relationship between memory and the city, art and creation.
In SILO, the elaboration of memories is proposed as a constant process of creation in the present, arising from the lived experiences of its protagonists as a human right to know what happened, and compiling subjective, affective accounts, with different versions of the event and unstable forms of memory.
SILO began in Tlatelolco, located in the centre-north of Mexico City, its origin and name come from the ancient Mexica City founded before the conquest, twin sister of Tenochtitlan and which archaeologist Eduardo Matus Moctezuma names as: “the first indigenous resistance against the Spaniards and the last city to be founded in the centre of Mexico in pre-Hispanic times” (Matos Moctezuma, 2021, p. 13). It was a key place in the formation of the 1968 student movement and the site of the 2 October 1968 massacre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas by the government of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. In addition, in 1985, a strong earthquake damaged the structures of 12 of the 90 buildings that make up the housing unit that make up modern Tlatelolco and the fall of the Nuevo León building.
[SILO, 2021, Tlatelolco, Mexica City]
Berlin Artist Residency 2023: Background
CODEX – A Story of Conquest
“My Artist Residency at MOMENTUM-LAGOS continues the research I began in Mexico and Paris as a preparatory study for the elaboration of a codex that seeks the representation of a group of Tlatelolca women who participated in the last confrontation of the Mexica against the Spanish on August 13, 1521.
As part of my research in the Tlatelolca Biennial and the SILO/Semillera de memoria oral project, I found a first account told by the Tlatelolcas themselves about living in this place, it is a manuscript called “el Relato de la Conquista”, written by an anonymous Tlatelolca, which describes how women participate in the emblematic fall of the Mexica/Tlatelolcas on August 13, 1521.
From the analysis of the manuscript in a facsimile copy in the National Library of Mexico, it is evident that it was written by several authors, since you can see the calligraphic variations in the document, which led me to ask: Is it possible that a woman wrote this fragment? Can history or archaeological objects be read with a gender perspective as a manuscript written by pre-Hispanic authors? In addition, in the iconographic research, there are no images that describe them, which led me to propose in an exercise of imagination and creation of contemporary memories, and to propose the creation of a codex in which these women, their costumes, weapons, and insignia are represented.
SILO / Semillera de Memorias Tlatelolca, 2021, Mexico City
Numerous events have taken place in Tlatelolco throughout its history, and consequently, numerous are the stories and experiences linked to the space. The Semillera de Memorias Tlatelololcas was created to recover and contain the stories told by the inhabitants of Tlatelolco. The use of the silo in different latitudes evokes a container of grains to preserve them for as long as possible, which seeks to establish a relationship with the oral story as a subjective, affective, unstable and changing form of memory, but which arises from the lived experience of the protagonists themselves. The relationship of the seedbed as a container of microhistory leads us to think about the elements from which memory is constituted, its uses and functions in our society, questioning those stories that have been recovered and recorded, while many others are unknown. Of course, the violence exercised by the state on October 2nd in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and the 1985 earthquake come to the fore, although the recovered accounts show that not everything has been, nor has everything been said.
Part of the project takes up the idea of the Tlacuila as a space for writing and the creation of memories, focusing on the stories of women who, from their lived experiences, explore the territory they inhabit.
– Laura Valencia Lozada
ARTIST BIO:
Laura Valencia Lozada is a Visual Artist educated at the Faculty of Arts and Design, UNAM, Mexico City. In Berlin is is affiliated with the Art In Context Masters Program at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UDK). Lozada specialized in art practices in context and participation by the Seminario de Medios Múltiples, FAD – UNAM. Lozada was part of the 2013-2014 class of the School of Peace and activisms J’Tatic Samuel Ruiz, Serapaz, Mexico City, and in 2017- 2018 she studied at the Independent Studies Program at MACBA in Barcelona. Her artistic practice focuses on the study of memory, artistic activism, participatory art and expanded graphics. In parallel, since 2003, Lozada has worked as a printer, and in collective projects of independent graphics.
Lozada’s work has been presented in venues such as: Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Museo Nacional de la Estampa in Mexico City, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá, Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Visual Arts Gallery at the University of Texas at El Paso Texas, Espai D’Art Contemporani de Castelló – EACC in Valencia and Schweizerisches Architektur-Museum – SAM, Basel. Her exhibitions include: Carta Codex-escritura colectiva de mujeres buscadoras, Performatividades de la búsqueda, Galería Metropolitana UAM, Mexico City, 2022-2023. SILO/Semillera de Memorias Tlatelolcas, Centro de Interpretación Xaltilolli, CCUT, Mexico City, 2021. Video CUENDA. Crónicas-Resonancias, SBC-Gallery, Montreal, 2021-2022. SILO/Semillera de Memorias Tlatelolcas, Bienal Tlatelolca, Central de Maquetas, Mexico City, 2021. Habitat, exposición colectiva en Greengallery, 2019. Cuinar un Guateque, Paella de pedres, KGG, Stripart Festival, Guinardó, Barcelona, 2019. Encuentros en librerías feministas, libertarias y cooperativas, 21 Personae, Raqs Media Collective MACBA, Barcelona, 2018.
Pasos para hacer llover, PEI, MACBA, Barcelona, 2018. Neuma, Gráfica abierta – Rutas expansivas en la gráfica mexicana, Gallery B-132, Belgo Building, Montreal, 2018. Unión de Co-editores Gráficos, CODEX The 6th. Biennial International Book Fair, San Francisco, 2017. Cuenda-Acción escultórica colectiva, Universidad Autónoma de Morelos, Morelos, 2016. Neuma, HR negativo-Huella, Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico City, 2016. Inicio de un diálogo epistolar, Un mundo en Común, Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City, 2016. CUENDA, Medios entre múltiples narrativas, Seminario de Medios Múltiples, Galería Metropolitana, UAM, Mexico City, 2015. Poéticas en Resistencia, Bitácoras de un equívoco, Estación Cero Lab, UNOSJO y Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca, El Parqueadero, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, 2013-2014. Unión de Coeditores Gráficos, CACAO, Museo del Chopo, Mexico City, 2013. Cuenda Acción escultórica colectiva, Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, Secretaría de Gobernación, Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City and City Hall, Los Ángeles, 2011-2012. Segunda Vuelta dentro del proyecto Lemexraum, Bristol Biennial, Bristol, 2012. Saber vivido, Jardín de Academus. Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC, Mexico City, 2010. Mapping, Citámbulos, Un viaje a través del espejo. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, 2010. Hipergrabado, Galería 100 m3 de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2008. Hiperbólica, Estacionarte 3a. Muestra Itinerante de Arte Contemporáneo, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, Mexico City, 2008. Mapping, Citámbulos, Instant Urbanisim. Danish Centre for Architecture DAC, Copenhagen, Espai D ́Art Contemporani de Castelló EACC, Valencia, SAM Museo Nacional de Arquitectura, Basel, Suiza, 2008-2007.
ARTIST STATEMENT – Laura Valencia Lozada:
My artistic practice has been taking the form of a membrane, a flexible fabric that in constant movement, contracts and expands towards different directions, a sensitive interface made of living matter.
Inwardly, it begins in the personal, in actions close to a simple craft, made with common forms and materials such as a gelatin, a rope, an oral story or my own body. Movement that uses tools such as drawing, cutting, engraving or microhistories.
Outward, with actions aimed at knowing and activating the relationship between art and memory, to generate moorings / encounters with forms of artistic activism, where feminism, eco-dependence and self-management have been taking greater prominence. This movement uses tools such as expanded graphics, participatory art, interventions in public spaces and the formation of self-management collectives.
The MOMENTUM AiR / LAGOS Berlin
ARTIST RESIDENCY
is part of the
LAGOS Mexico City / MOMENTUM Berlin
RESIDENCY EXCHANGE
MORE INFO > >
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LAGOS Berlin @ MOMENTUM AiR
ARTIST RESIDENCY
#3
Luia Corsini
Website – CV
3 – 31 May 2023
OPEN STUDIO
27 May 2023 @ 5:00 – 9:00pm
BEYOND BAUHAUS
Works-in-Progress
Artist Residency Presentation by Luia Corsini
@ MOMENTUM-LAGOS
Kunstquartier Bethanien, rm 134
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
The Open Studio presentation of works-in-progress by artist Luia Corsini from Mexico City, showcases the ongoing works that Corsini has created during her artist residency in Berlin with LAGOS @ MOMENTUM AiR.
Prior to her Berlin artist residency, Luia Corsini developed a series of works in Mexico City entitled “The Grid”. In this series, Corsini created large-scale abstract paintings based on the colour palettes and architecture of iconic buildings in Mexico City by groundbreaking modernist architects such as Luis Barragan, Ricardo Legorreta, and Mathias Goeritz. In her Open Studio, Corsini will be presenting her book of the Mexico City series as well as new paintings inspired by the modernist architecture of Berlin, focusing especially on iconic buildings by Mies van der Rohe, specifically: the Neue National Galerie, the Kiosk and Haus Lemke.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was a renowned German architect and the last director of the Bauhaus before he fled Germany under the Nazi regime and resettled in the United States. Van der Rohe’s work is characterised by his minimalist approach to architecture and the principle of “less is more”, emphasising clean lines, open spaces, and the innovative use of materials like steel and glass.
The works on show in the Open Studio are works-in-progress that Luia Corsini began during her short 1-month artist residency in Berlin. Corsini plans to complete these works and continue to develop this series when she returns to her studio in Mexico City.
ARTIST BIO:
Luia Corsini is an Italian-American artist, born in New York City in 1994. Her passion for art originated growing up in Rome, Italy. Her time there allowed her to develop a keen eye and an appreciation for beauty and culture. Luia then moved to the Swiss Alps for two years, where she lived her daily life exposed to the rough yet refined beauty of nature. Luia studied Fine Arts at the New York University in New York City, where she learnt how to paint and create her own style, through studying and being exposed to contemporary art around the city. After her studies, she moved to Barcelona, to learn and get inspiration from the Catalan culture. Currently, Luia is living in-between Malibu California and Mexico City where she is painting in her two studios, creating large scale paintings inspired by urban architecture and the natural components of pigments and dyes endemic to her surroundings.
Recent exhibition include: “Mexico City Architecture”, Zona Maco, February 2023: Solo Show, Casa Pedregal, Mexico City, Mexico; “Arte Vivo”, Sept 2022 Group Show, Museo Tamayo, México Vivo Fundación, México City, Mexico; “Tintas Naturales”, October 2022, Group Show, Lugar Usual gallery, Mexico City, Mexico; Book Launch “Mexico City Architecture”, October 2022, group show, gallery in Oaxaca City, Mexico; “Light and Landscapes”, Group show, Amangiri Resort Hotel, Canyon Point, UT, USA; Castello Forte Stella 13th-30 August 2022, Group Show, Monte Argentario, Italy; Zona Maco Feb 9-13 February 2022, Group show, Lagos, Mexico City, MX; Gallery Weekend 3- 7 November 2021, Group Show, Lagos, Mexico City, MX; Arte Vivo, 18-25 October 2021, Group Show, Maia Centemporary, México Vivo Fundación, Mexico City, Mexic; Comex, 1-31 October 2021, Group Show, Headquarters of Comex, Mexico City MX; Orto Botanico Corsini; Group Show, 2021, Art Foundation, Argentario, Italy; Singulart, Group Show, 2021, art platform, NYC, NY, USA; Zona Maco 2021, Open Studio, Lagos Residency, Mexico City Mexico; Que Rica es la Calle, Group Show, 2021, Galeria Furiosa, Mexico City, Mexico; “The Grid”, Solo Show, 2021, Lagos, Mexico City, Mexico; “Colors of Lebanon”, Group Show, 2021, Miami FL, USA; “Memories Manifest”, Group Show, 2020, Palo Gallery, New York, NY, USA; Group Show, 2018, Gerald Bland Gallery New York, NY, USA; NYU Thesis Show, 2017, Group Show, Rosenberg Gallery, New York, NY, USA.
ARTIST STATEMENT – Luia Corsini:
I am an Italian-American artist, born in NYC, then moved to Rome, Italy, when I was eight. Growing up in Europe gave me an appreciation for beauty and culture. It wasn’t until I left for boarding school at the age of sixteen, where I started my art practice and fell in love with creating.
My work is called “the grid”, a geometric sequence that explores narratives and techniques through shape and color. A journey of six plus years, evolving with my curiosity of my surroundings, environments and cultures. “The grid” is an extension of myself, my story and visions. First discovered in New York City, while attending university at NYU. I was exploring tape techniques on a canvas, pursuing perfection of geometric shapes, and accidentally created a sequence. This sequence became an exploration of a narrative through color and shape.
The curiosity of my surroundings, environments and culture are what feed my practice. Since I started painting my grid, the correlation I saw after living in New York City, Barcelona and Los Angeles, told me that I naturally am influenced by culture and my environment. This is because when I first started my grid, I was painting intuitively without a theme in mind, as the years past is when I noticed a pattern in my work. I moved to Mexico City because I was intrigued by their unique style in architecture, the colors and use of natural light that I saw in many of the iconic houses designed by respected architects such as Luis Barragan, Ricardo Legorreta, Juan O’Gorman and Mathias Goeritz, were similar and influenced by one another. Hence I consciously decided to research all the houses designed by these architects and create a series inspired by them. After living in Mexico City for three years, I am now changing mediums and focusing on a more natural approach to painting, where I use local plants and insects as a form of paint on canvas. My goal is to only use the local plants and insects as a form of paint and natural dye to create an architectural inspired series, from the cities I visit.
Berlin Artist Residency 2023 – The Grid: Berlin
When I moved to Mexico City, I was in awe by the colorful architecture of the city, and the juxtaposition of highly saturated colors throughout the buildings that populate the streets. The culture in Mexico City is uplifting and creative, a clear reflection of its modernist, colorful architecture. I had by then understood the paramount role that architecture plays not only in defining the aesthetics of a city, but also the collective psyche of its citizens. While undertaking an Artist Residency in Mexico City for over two years, I researched the iconic houses designed by Mexico’s great modernist architects. “Mexico” is a series I started in the fall of 2020 when I moved to Mexico City. These works are inspired by the Mexican modern architecture. Each painting is an abstraction of a particular house designed by architects such as Luis Barragán, Ricardo Legorreta & Mathias Goeritz.
I am coming to Berlin for the month of May to explore the style of architecture there. I will visit several sites to get inspired such as Bauhaus Archive, Neue National, Gallery, Marie-Elizabeth Luders Haus, Velodrom, Chapel of Reconciliation, GSW, Headquarters James Simon Gallery, Memorial to the Jews of Europe, Cube Berlin, Axel Springer, Jewish Museum, DZ. Bank Building, and more iconic locations throughout the city. In response to the architecture in the city, I will make a series of paintings using the local natural dyes from Germany, as my work focuses on creating paintiings from plants and insects.
SEE LUIA CORSINI’S PORTFOLIO & ARTIST TEXT HERE > >
The MOMENTUM AiR / LAGOS Berlin
ARTIST RESIDENCY
is part of the
LAGOS Mexico City / MOMENTUM Berlin
RESIDENCY EXCHANGE
MORE INFO > >
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You Know That You Are Human
together with
Selected Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection
travels to
Galerie EIGENHEIM Weimar
the exhibition takes place within the frame of
The Kultursymposium Weimar 2023: A MATTER OF TRUST
OPENING: 9 May @ 6-9pm
GUIDED TOUR & ARTIST TALK: 11 May @ 4pm
Roman Pyatkovka & Alena Grom in conversation with Kateryna Filyuk
EXHIBITION: 11 May – 3 June 2023
EXTENDED UNTIL 10 June 2023
OPENING HOURS: Thursday – Saturday @ 4 – 7pm
@ Galerie EIGENHEIM Weimar
Asbachstrasse 1, 99423 Weimar, Germany
Featuring:
[Click on the name of each artist to see the bio and the work description below]
You Know That You Are Human
Selected Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection
Watch here the exhibition tour with the curators and the artist talk
Initiated by:
IZOLYATSIA & MOMENTUM
Curated by:
Kateryna Filyuk, Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà
Supported by:
Mediapartners:
In cooperation with:
The third iteration of the exhibition “You Know That You Are Human” is part of the Kultursymposium Weimar 2023 and is hosted by Galerie EIGENHEIM Weimar. The exhibition brings together works of 23 Ukrainian photographers and video works of 10 Berlin-based international artists. It’s a joint undertaking of IZOLYATSIA, Ukraine and MOMENTUM, Berlin curated by Kateryna Filyuk and Rachel Rits-Volloch. “You Know That You Are Human” premiered in Berlin’s Zionskirche at the end of 2022, where it was matched with the group exhibition “POINTS of RESISTANCE V”, an initiative of KLEINERVONWIESE. The second iteration of the show took place at THE gallery in Mürsbach, where it was enriched by the sculptures of the Ukrainian dissident artist Vadim Sidur. Now in its third edition, this traveling exhibition is itself an exercise in trust, taking on new forms in each location in cooperation with diverse partners.
Addressing the topic of “Trust” formulated by Kultursymposium against the background of growing uncertainty and multiple economical, ecological and political crisis hitting societies around the world, “You Know That You Are Human” seeks to zoom into a micro level and focus on the individual, the human being. It depicts human likeness in a diversity of forms, addressing the role which gender, occupation, geography and heritage play in defining the human position in the world.
The title of the show is borrowed from a famous poem by one of the brightest Ukrainian poets of the sixties, Vasyl Symonenko, “Ти знаєш, що ти– людина/ You Know that You are a Human”. Part of the official school curriculum in Ukraine, the poem praises life and the uniqueness of each person, urging everyone to cherish each single moment. Today – during Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine – these simple but powerful verses call for humanity, solidarity, trust and cohesion with particular urgency. They remind us once again that despite the elusive monstrosity of war, every life counts. The works of the Ukrainian photographers also provide a crucial insight into the changes that have taken place in Ukrainian society since the 1960s, from the years when the dream of socialism gradually proved to be a failure, until the last few months of the self-sacrificing struggle of the Ukrainians for their country.
The video works which accompany the exhibition of 60 years of photography from Ukraine, address historical and current struggles prevalent throughout humanity – violence, ideology, politics, religion, and the need to find a common language of trust to communicate that we are human.
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READ HERE THE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
|
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You know that you are a human.
You know that, or do you not?
That smile of yours is unique to you,
That torment of yours is unique to you,
Your eyes no other person has got.
Tomorrow you won’t be here present.
Tomorrow on this blessed land
Others’ll be running and laughing,
Others’ll be feeling and loving;
Good people and bad ones, my friend.
Today all the world is for you:
Forests and hills, valleys deep.
So hurry to live, please, hurry!
So hurry to love, please, hurry!
Don’t miss out on it, don’t oversleep!
‘Cause you on this Earth are a human.
And whether you want it or not,
That smile of yours is unique to you,
That torment of yours is unique to you,
Your eyes no other person has got.
– Vasyl Symonenko
About Kultursymposium Weimar 2023:
A MATTER OF TRUST
10 – 12 May 2023
The Kultursymposium is returning to Weimar under the title »A Matter of Trust«. From 10th to 12th of May, the Goethe-Institut will be bringing together exciting personalities from across the globe to exchange ideas about the multifaceted topic of trust in debates, presentations, workshops and artistic works over the course of three days.
Trust plays a central role in many areas of life, both as an individual emotional category and as a fundamental social resource: as trust in our fellow humans, in private and business relationships, trust in political systems, media and science, in legal systems and international agreements, as trust in cultural codes, new technology and currencies – and last but not least, as trust in ourselves. In a world in which past conflicts are re-emerging with unanticipated vehemence and contradictory information shapes our everyday media, trust is of elementary importance. Trust enables decision-making and taking action in complex situations, in which not all details can be researched and not every risk precisely assessed. At the Kultursymposium Weimar the role and effects of trust on our social interactions will be discussed from a global perspective in order to negotiate joint paths to make trust possible in a fragile world.
The Kultursymposium Weimar is a three day, discursive-artistic festival for new networks and ideas, active since 2016. Every two years, the Goethe-Institut brings together over 500 people from all over the world. It reflects the richness and complexity of urgent social issues with varying focal points from a global perspective, such as the coming edition from 10th to 12th May with the topic Trust and as such provides new inspirations for an international cultural exchange. As part of an interdisciplinary programme of lectures, discussions, participative formats and artistic interventions, the varying topics are illuminated with participants from across the world, including representatives from culture, science, economy, media and politics. The programme is inspired by varied contacts and cultural cooperation projects of the global network of Goethe-Institutes.
The Kultursymposium will be held in Weimar once again from 10th to 12th May, 2023. Numerous international guests from culture, science, economy, media and politics will gather at the E-Werk premises and further locations in the cultural city of Weimar to exchange ideas on the multifaceted topic of trust, under the title »A MATTER OF TRUST«. Selected programme items will be realised in cooperation with the following local partners: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar, Galerie Eigenheim, Klassik Stiftung Weimar and Lichthaus Kino.
MORE INFO > >
About EIGENHEIM Weimar:
EIGENHEIM Weimar (which literally translates to “your own home”) was founded as a space for contemporary art and communication at Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 10 in Weimar in 2006. In 2016 the Gallery had to leave this mansion and moved to the Gardenhouse of Weimarhallenpark (Asbachstr. 1), kindly supported by the city of Weimar. In addition to traditional solo and group exhibitions, frequent concerts and readings the gallery stages project-related and curated exhibitions focusing on particular topics, realized in cooperation with partners like the City of Weimar, the cultural foundation and ministries of Thuringia or the Art Festival Weimar. Functioning as an interface between high and subculture, the gallery comprises also a multifunctional space and therefore stimulates political, ethical and social discourses. Furthermore, Eigenheim Weimar provides an annual program of residency for artists and another one for the curatorial field. Responsible for the gallery are, in addition to the multitude of artists, Konstantin Bayer as founder and artistic director and Bianka Voigt as executive director.
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You Know That You Are Human
Travels To
Mühlstrasse 8, 96179 Mürsbach, Germany
in parallel with
Vadim Sidur (1924 – 1986): War and Peace
OPENING: 2 April 2023
EXHIBITION: 2 – 30 April 2023
Opening Hours:
Monday – Friday / 3 – 6 pm
or by appointment
Featuring:
You Know that You are Human
Valentyn Bo, Aleksander Chekmenev, Maryna Frolova, Oleksander Glyadyelov,
Paraska Plytka Horytsvit, Borys Gradov, Alena Grom, Viktor and Sergey Kochetov,
Yulia Krivich, Sasha Kurmaz, Viktor Marushchenko, Sergey Melnitchenko,
Boris Mikhailov with Mykola Ridnyi, Valeriy Miloserdov, Iryna Pap, Evgeniy Pavlov,
Roman Pyatkovka, Natasha Shulte, Synchrodogs, Viktoriia Temnova, Mykola Trokh
&
Sculptures by Vadim Sidur
Organized by:
THEgallery & MOMENTUM
Curated by:
Kateryna Filyuk & Thomas Eller
Supported by:
Goethe-Institut and Goethe-Institut in Exile, IZOLYATSIA, Ukrainian Institute
|
READ HERE THE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
|
|
You know that you are a human.
You know that, or do you not?
That smile of yours is unique to you,
That torment of yours is unique to you,
Your eyes no other person has got.
Tomorrow you won’t be here present.
Tomorrow on this blessed land
Others’ll be running and laughing,
Others’ll be feeling and loving;
Good people and bad ones, my friend.
Today all the world is for you:
Forests and hills, valleys deep.
So hurry to live, please, hurry!
So hurry to love, please, hurry!
Don’t miss out on it, don’t oversleep!
‘Cause you on this Earth are a human.
And whether you want it or not,
That smile of yours is unique to you,
That torment of yours is unique to you,
Your eyes no other person has got.
– Vasyl Symonenko
You Know That You Are Human began as an exhibition of 21 Ukrainian photographers, curated by Kateryna Filyuk, depicting human likeness in a diversity of forms and addressing the role which gender, occupation, geography and heritage play in defining the human position in the world. The conceptual framework of this project was set forward before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sought to present a panorama of Ukrainian photography from mid-twentieth century until nowadays, with the focus on the human form and being. The title of the show is borrowed from a famous poem by one of the brightest Ukrainian poets of the sixties, Vasyl Symonenko, “Ти знаєш, щоти– людина/ You Know that You are a Human”. Part of the official school curriculum in Ukraine, the poem praises life and the uniqueness of each person, urging everyone to cherish each single moment. Today – during Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine – these simple but powerful verses call for humanity, solidarity and cohesion with particular urgency. They remind us once again that despite the elusive monstrosity of war, every life counts. The works of the Ukrainian photographers also provide a crucial insight into the changes that have taken place in Ukrainian society since the 1960s, from the years when the dream of socialism gradually proved to be a failure until this past year of the struggle of the Ukrainians for their country.
You Know That You Are Human was previously presented by MOMENTUM and IZOLYATSIA at the Zionskirche Berlin on 3 December 2022 – 8 January 2023, jointly with Kleiner von Wiese in POINTS of RESISTANCE V. The origin of this exhibition is the show of Ukrainian photography “You Know That You Are Human” curated by Kateryna Filyuk – the winner of the international exhibition support program “Visualise” of the Ukrainian Institute, supported by the Goethe-Institut and the Goethe-Institut in Exile, and produced by MOMENTUM.
MORE INFO > >
In this edition of the exhibition at THE gallery, You Know That You Are Human is presented in parallel to Vadim Sidur | Вадим Сідур (1924 – 1986): War and Peace | Війна і мир. The two parallel exhibitions at THEgallery draw surprising historical links between the small rural community of Mürsbach and the Ukraine. Mürsbach has had a strong connection with the Ukraine, established by one scholar who was born and raised in Mürsbach and lived to become the founder of the philosophy faculty at what was then a new university in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1804. Johann Baptist Schad introduced ideas of enlightenment and humanism in the Ukraine, inspiring many intellectuals there. Both exhibitions, “You Know that You are Human” and Vadim SIdur “War and Peace”, address the harsh history and human life in the Ukraine in the last century.
In this edition of the exhibition at THE gallery,
You Know That You Are Human is presented in parallel to
Vadim Sidur | Вадим Сідур (1924 – 1986): War and Peace | Війна і мир.
Vadim Abramovich Sidur was a Ukrainian Soviet avant-garde sculptor and artist sometimes referred as the Soviet Henry Moore. Sidur is the creator of a style named Grob-Art (Coffin-Art). Sidur was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine to a Jewish father and Russian mother. One of the most memorable childhood memories was the Holodomor of 1932-1933. Particularly the mass mortality from famine in the villages, cases of cannibalism, and nutrition by surrogates in his autobiographical work “Monument to the Current state”.
He also talks about the work of the Torgsin system. In particular, his mother exchanged a silver spoon for a kilogram of flour. In 1942 he was drafted into the Red Army and fought in World War II. After being wounded in the jaw by a German bullet, he was discharged as a disabled veteran. Since the 1960s Sidur’s works became known in the West. Soon he became famous. In the Soviet Union his works were not exhibited from 1950 until his death, with the exception of the one-day exhibition in the House of Writers in Moscow in 1968.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nettling (1793-1824), Portrait of Johann Baptist Schad, 75 x 119 mm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Johann Baptist Schad was born in 1758 in Mürsbach, a small village in Upper Franconia. His poor peasant parents sent him to a monastery. Yet instead of blindly following the edicts of the church, Schad became a whistleblower, calling the bluff of monastic life as one of gluttony and deceit. This put him on the inquisition´s list of heretics, and he had to flee the monastery. Arriving in Jena he found a mentor in the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and subsequently became his successor as professor of philosophy in Jena. Schad was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution and the ideas of humanism, freedom and enlightenment, as well as a harsh critic of the Jacobine movement in France. He denounced violence, resentment, deceit and bigotry, and instead became a strong proponent of freedom of speech. In early 1804 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recommended him to be professor of philosophy in, what was at that time, a newly established university in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where Schad spent the next 12 years teaching and fostering an intellectual climate. There he became the teacher of many scholars, poets, scientists and journalists in the Ukraine.
THE gallery is an institution in Mürsbach in the rural Bamberg region. Two and a half hours by train from Berlin is a water mill in the Itztal, which today generates green electricity for about 100 households. Thomas Eller, the owner of the mill, is a curator and artist. Most recently, he lived in Beijing for six years, where he founded Gallery Weekend Beijing, which brought an international art audience to Beijing with great success. He then spent three years as the founding director of the China Arts & Sciences project in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province.
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MAHSA FOROUGHI
(b. in Iran. Lives and works in Sydney Australia and Berlin, Germany)
Mahsa Foroughi is a poet, filmmaker, critic and architect. She was awarded her PhD for interdisciplinary research on architecture, film and philosophy that questioned the status quo of human perception. As an academic, since 2018, she has been teaching architecture history and theory at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia.
Mahsa is one of the authors of The Theatre Times, a non-partisan, global theatre portal. She is currently an artist-in-residence at MOMENTUM in Berlin, developing and producing her docudrama, A Poetic Suicide. She has also finished her first non-fiction book, Haptic Visuality in Arts.
Poetic Revolution
2022, Video, 9 min 13 sec
Editor: Saeed Foroghi, Composer: Lynden Bassett
Born into the aftermath of the Revolution in Iran, Mahsa Foroughi has experienced first-hand the horrors of authoritarian repression. The many abuses of human rights by a brutal regime are once again in the world news since the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in Iran earlier this year. The resulting protests, which continue to rock Iran at the time of this exhibition, are waged by a people, at great risk to their own lives, standing up against tyranny and fear. Mahsa Foroughi lends her voice to this resistance in a new work made especially for You Know That You Are Human @ POINTS of RESISTANCE V. Intercutting footage from the iconic film, The Color of Pomegranates (made in 1969 by Soviet Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov), with research materials for her own film in production, A Poetic Suicide, and found footage from the internet documenting the current protests in Iran, Mahsa Foroughi weaves a poetic protest against inhumanity in all its forms.
Mahsa Foroughi is a poet, filmmaker, critic and architect. She was awarded her PhD for interdisciplinary research on architecture, film and philosophy that questioned the status quo of human perception. As an academic, since 2018, she has been teaching architecture history and theory at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Mahsa is one of the authors of The Theatre Times, a non-partisan, global theatre portal. She is currently an artist-in-residence at MOMENTUM in Berlin, developing and producing her docudrama, A Poetic Suicide. She has also finished her first non-fiction book, Haptic Visuality in Arts.
The recurrence of history is dreadful! It’s haunting to witness the trauma we went through going live again. Seven years into the revolution that the Islamic party highjacked, I was born to a geography drowned in pain, bloodshed, mass slaughter, and a history of enduring violent oppression. The history that I’ve been carrying on my shoulders all these years. For all I know, my poems were filled with darkness I was experiencing in the chamber of my mind and out there in society. The dusk against which I fought and tried to survive. I was there when our votes were stolen in the year 2009. I was there and witnessed my friends and my fellow citizens being bashed brutally. Heart-wrenched as one can be, I relocated to what I hoped would be the freedom of the West, only to discover a brick wall of incomprehension that made me feel even more alone than I was. I verbalised my pain through poetry; I visualised the bloodshed through film. Apart from a handful of friends, that terror remained unknown to the rest of the world. To them, I was a Middle Eastern woman. As Kumar Daroftateh, a handsome 16-year-old Kurdish boy who was beaten to death by the Islamic thugs, beautifully posted,
We are the people of the Middle East
Some of us die in war,
Some in prison.
Some of us die on the road,
Some in the sea
Even the highest mountains
They take revenge for their loneliness from us,
Because our job is “to die”.
Kumar jan (dear Kumar), we are not a number, and our job is not to die. You know that you are human! We won’t stay quiet; we will shout your name and other children of sun as long as we are alive. Yes, history is recurring, but this time we are being heard. This time is A WOMAN REVOLUTION, and our men are at our side! Mahsa, Nika, Sarina, Hadis, Hannaneh, Ghazaleh, Minoo (and the list goes on), your blood is on the hand of the Islamic Regime, it’s running down the alleys of Iran’s cities, and it will drown these thugs so severely. Your blood also runs down our veins, creating a miraculous art…THE ART OF FREEDOM! The one I hope to capture in my short video.
– Mahsa Foroughi
Hear me as a woman.
Have me as your sister.
On purpled battlefield breaking day,
So I might say our victory is just beginning,
See me as change,
Say I am movement,
That I am the year,
and I am the era/of the women.
– Amanda Gorman
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LAGOS Berlin @ MOMENTUM AiR
ARTIST RESIDENCY
#2
Mercedes Gertz
Website – CV
19 April – 1 May 2023
OPEN STUDIO
During Gallery Weekend Berlin
27, 28, 30 April 2023 @ 3:00 – 6:00pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
DREAM FOR A DREAM
Participatory Performance by Mercedes Gertz
with Tarot Performance by Paulina Jade Doniz
& Hypnosis Performance by Marcos Lutyens
EVENT PROGRAM:
27 April @ 3:00 – 6:00pm
Dream Exchange with Mercedes Gertz
Come and explore the realm of the subconscious through the language of dreams. This participatory performance engages in the exchange of the symbolic language of dreams through oral tradition and drawings. Recount your dreams, and in exchange you will receive a digital print from the artist.
28 April @ 3:00 – 6:00pm
Tarot Reading by Paulina Jade Doniz
Accessing the unconscious through the visual language of Tarot, this performance explores what the symbology of a card can tell you about your unconscious. Each Tarot Reading forms a symbolic energy exchange. Please bring an item to give Paulina Jade Doniz in exchange for her reading.
30 April @ 3:00 – 6:00pm
Closing Ritual
Hollow Earth Hypnosis Induction by Marcos Lutyens @ 5:00pm
With a special long-distance guest appearance by Marcos Lutyens, we invite you to come and close the circle of energy exchange begun through Mercedes Gertz’s Dream Catching research in various historically laden and haunted locations throughout Berlin, and continued through the Dream Exchange and Tarot Reading performances.
MERCEDES GERTZ – ARTIST BIO:
Mercedes Gertz was born in Mexico City and works from studio residences in Mexico City, Los Angeles, CA and Lausanne, Switzerland. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York, as well as an MA in Fine Arts from the Otis School of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and a PhD in Depth Psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Bárbara, California. Mercedes was awarded a grant for young artists by the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) in 1988. From 2001 to present she has worked in community practice and offered workshops on art as a language to Latino families in Los Angeles, California. She has also given workshops in Mexico, Los Angeles, and Paris, focused on the study of dreams and fairy tales as a symbolic language that articulates aspects that words cannot express. Her paintings, conceptual installations, and graphics have been exhibited in Mexico, the US, and Europe. As of 2018, she has been the co-founder of Women’s Salon LA, an international collective of female artists that have been working and exhibiting in Los Angeles, that collaborate with up to 76 women from 7 cities in three different continents. Her social practice projects are inspired by her ongoing interest in building creative and collaborative communities that foster and highlight the skilled work of women.
ARTIST RESIDENCY PROJECT:
DREAM FOR A DREAM
For her Artist Residency project at LAGOS Berlin @ MOMENTUM, Mercedes Gertz reprises her ongoing research on the subconscious language of dreams. Her work in Berlin transposes her practice into a new cultural context, using the study of dreams and the translations between symbolic language and oral storytelling as a method through which to address her own German genealogy. Mercedes Gertz’s Artist Residency begins with a research period of Dream Catching in historically laden, haunted locations throughout Berlin. Her Residency Presentation takes the form of a multi-day workshop inviting participants to recount their dreams in exchange for drawings by the artist and tarot readings by Paulina Jade Doniz – a practitioner of Psychogenealogy, Tarot, and Psychoshamanism, whom Mercedes invited to Berlin especially for this project.
Born in Mexico, Paulina Jade Doniz has been in contact with Mexican shamanic traditions. She was trained in metagenealogy, psychogenealogy and psycho-tarot by Alejandro Jodorowsky – renowned Chilean-French surrealist filmmaker. The Tarot, as a way of self-knowledge, engaged her in a psychological, spiritual, bodily and identity search that pushed her to follow different disciplines and personal therapies before starting to teach.
Accompanying Mercedes Gertz throughout her Artist Residency, Claudia Polanco is a visual storyteller who will document and communicate every stage of Mercedes Gertz Residency Project as it unfolds.
ARTIST STATEMENT – MERCEDES GERTZ:
Dream images are of themselves another language, the language of our inner landscape. When we recall our dream images and attempt to capture them in spoken language, these images suffer a transformation. They cross the threshold of the unconscious into the conscious mind, where they seem to lack logic and are difficult to understand. This is perhaps because we are meant to understand them instead through intuition, similar to a poem.
Since 2014, I have been leading a group experiment with a variety of international participants in the pursuit of the language of the unconscious. These events have taken place with migrant women and minority youth in Los Angeles, as well as with participants in Mexico City and Paris. These experiments have led to connections that grow beyond every day conversation, and access inner mythologies of being and ancestry.
While traveling to Japan in 2019, I wanted to continue with this psychological art experiment. Given that I wanted to treat this material with respect and sensitivity, I had the idea of proposing an exchange between myself, and the participant, where they would receive something in return for giving me their dream. I did not speak the local language, so instead I decided to speak through images and gestures, allowing the participant to have one of my own dream images in exchange for theirs.
Berlin Artist Residency 2023 – Dream for a Dream:
An experimental space tending to the unknown.
My intention is to create a space of investigation and exchange where the material from the unconscious is being treasured and acknowledged. In the space we will activate some exercises. One will be A Dream for a Dream: it is the exchange of this symbolic language through oral tradition and drawings. The other will be symbology and tarot, what a card can tell you about your unconscious today. This exercise will be lead by Paulina Doniz. In Berlin 2023, Paulina is one of the guests I intend to invite to activate these dialogues. In the same manner specialists and curious participants can participate in order to enrich and exchange unconscious material. The opportunity to create a container for experimental exchange in Berlin, an artistic meeting space through the collective psyche, which is shared in dreams and with the tarot, is as well a private ritual for me to reconnect with my ancestry since my great grandfather came from German origins.
Disclaimer:
Working with dreams is both exciting and frightening at times. It is important to treat the material with respect and sensitivity. This workshop is an invitation for you to begin a relationship with your dream images through the sharing of a dream, drawing and reflecting on the dream images. This work may be psychologically activating and is no way to be considered a substitute for therapy. If you feel activated or triggered in any way, please consult your physician or find a therapist near you.
About Paulina Jade Doniz:
I was born in Mexico City into a family of artists who from an early age introduced me to the deep culture of Mexico and the indigenous peoples. As fate would have it, I arrived very young to study in Paris. While studying dance and plastic arts I met Alejandro Jodorowsky of whom I first became a disciple for many years and later his personal assistant. At the same time I continued to travel to Mexico regularly where I had fundamental encounters with healers such as Pachita, Carlos Said, Luciano Peres (Lakota leader) María Concepción del Castillo of the Nahua tradition and long stays in indigenous communities.
In a personal search I also followed different types of psychological and body therapies until I came across Barbara Schasseur and her innovative technique of emotional and spiritual healing through the body, after training with her my work took the form it has today combining the different techniques I practice: The importance of Rituals.
I currently give private consultations, courses and workshops in different parts of the world.
TAROT:
Our method of study considers tarot as a visual language that allows us to get in touch with our unconscious through encrypted images. Tarot cards are used not as a means of divination, but as a therapeutic support to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and of life in general. In fact, the cards are a tool to put us in contact with our inner world and through their understanding, repair, heal and empower our personal conflicts. As with all sacred works, understanding the tarot requires a gradual approach, through a harmonious learning process that includes theory: history, numerology, symbolism of colors, arcana, spreads, etc., and practice (readings) and experimentation through consultations, games and exercises directed at oneself. In this way the language of the tarot is becoming clearer and we can feed ourselves with its deep meanings, applying this knowledge in a practical and positive way in our lives.
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About Marcos Lutyens:
Lutyens´ artistic practice targets the psychic and emotional well-being of his audiences by skillfully leading participants in hypnotic exercises that affect the deepest levels of their psyche. His works take form in installations, sculptures, drawings, short films, writings and performances. In his explorations of consciousness, Lutyens has collaborated with celebrated neuro-scientists V. Ramachandran and Richard Cytowic, as much as studying under shamans from different cultures. From these investigations and research he has worked with visitors´ unconscious states in museums, galleries and biennales around the world.
Lutyens was invited by the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, NY to be keynote artist with the opening performance at Culture Summit 2019. Lutyens has exhibited in many museums and leading art exhibitions around the world, including the Royal Academy of Arts, Centre Pompidou, National Art Museum of China, Documenta, and the Biennials of Venice, Istanbul, Liverpool, São Paulo. In the time of COVID-19, Lutyens created a series of 12 zoom performances to help the healing process of people in various countries around the world, and is currently working on the national scale COVID-19 artwork Rose River Memorial which has been exhibited at various sites around the US including most recently, the Orange County Museum of Art.
Lutyens has exhibited internationally in numerous museums, galleries and biennials, including the Havana Biennial (2019) and as keynote artist invited by the Guggenheim at CultureSummit Abu Dhabi 2019, the Frye Museum, Seattle (2018), Miró Foundation, Barcelona (2018), Main Museum, Los Angeles (2018), Latvian National Museum of Art (2018), the 33rd Bienial de São Paulo (2018), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); The Armory, New York (2017); Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2017), Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (2017), La Monnaie de Paris (2017), Palazzo Grassi, Venice, (2017), 57th and 55th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2013 & 2017), Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2016); 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2015); MoMA PS1, Queens (2014); National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2014); dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel (2012); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2010); the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2010 & 2014); the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2010); 7th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2000)
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About Claudia Polanco:
Storytelling and audio-visual exploration are the main tools that Claudia Polanco weaves to bring the narrative of her pieces to actualization. She comes from a complementary journalism & communications background and so understands the common & cultural dynamic which she integrates into her work. Claudia is the founder of Hija del Cuervo Productions, a company born out of love for art and community, that brings stories to life and supports the local art community, Claudia’s stories have crossed paths in collaboration with multiple artists around the world sharing audiovisual offerings.
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The MOMENTUM AiR / LAGOS Berlin
ARTIST RESIDENCY
is part of the
LAGOS Mexico City / MOMENTUM Berlin
RESIDENCY EXCHANGE
MORE INFO > >
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LAGOS Berlin @ MOMENTUM AiR
ARTIST RESIDENCY
#1
Magaly Vega Lopez
Website – CV
1 – 31 March 2023
OPEN STUDIO
29 March 2023 @ 6-9pm
LOVE IN A MIST
Performance by Magaly Vega Lopez @ 7pm
ARTIST TALK @ 7:30pm
Magaly Vega Lopez in dialogue with Luis Carrera-Maul, Director of LAGOS Mexico City & Berlin
& Caroline Shepard, Artist and Prof. of Photography
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
ARTIST BIO:
Magaly Vega Lopez (born in 1986 in Mexico City) is a Storyteller, Visual Artist, Educator, and Writer who lives and works between New York and Mexico City. She holds a Master of Art + Education from NYU Steinhardt, class of 2019, and a Master of Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art, class of 2016.
Magaly Vega Lopez uses counter-narratives to start a dialogue on the violent acts of reality and pursues possible social healing through art. She believes in art that interacts with the eye of the beholder, starts a conversation or action, and lets us have our own voice. She believes that only through listening to your community you can achieve a profound knowledge of humanity. She reflects on her teaching experience, conversations, and personal memory in her own artwork. She uses art to explore the world, share, and honor stories. Art as a social-act rather than an individual practice.
Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Spain, and Germany. She has been awarded artist residencies in Russia (2015: New York Art Academy Art Residency, Moscow & St. Petersburg, Russia); Argentina (2018: AIR Program, Tribu de Trueno, Bariloche, Argentina); Switzerland (2019: Flair Talents, Bulle, Switzerland); Mexico (2021: J.A. Monroy Bienal x LAGOS Art Residencies, Mexico City); Uruguay (2022: Mango Air Program x Puertas Abiertas, Punta del Este, Uruguay); Germany (2023: LAGOS Berlin x MOMENTUM AiR, Berlin, Germany); Iceland (2023: Gamli Skóli Old School Arthouse, Iceland).
ARTIST RESIDENCY PROJECT:
LOVE IN A MIST
For her Artist Residency project at LAGOS Berlin @ MOMENTUM, Magaly Vega Lopez transposes her ongoing research on domestic violence in her native Mexico into the German context. Taking the form of research, installation, and performance, “Love In A Mist” addresses the increase in domestic violence in Germany, and the inherent biases entrenched within the legal system. This project is accompanied by the presentation of three previous works by Magaly Vega Lopez related to the shockingly prevalent problem of violence against women in Mexico, where the murder of women is such recognised by the legal system as feminicide.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
How are certain spaces transformed both physically and symbolically with the use we give to the air? How do our bodies resist certain instruments of violence? How do we redefine our relationship with air?
“Love in a Mist” is a project that investigates the relationship between air and the violence of the invisible. The kind of violence that is linked to what we normally do not associate with instruments of cruelty. The management of air supply as a weapon for femi(ni)cide worldwide, especially in domestic spaces. As Monika Schröttle explains regarding domestic violence, “The violence is less visible to outsiders. The shame is even greater.” The shame that Schröttle is talking about is regarding how many of these women killed were well educated and successful professionals and how their status made them feel that they were not allowed to speak. The image of the strong successful women makes society diminish any sign of violence or even asking if there is any issue. Many of them don’t even speak out with their therapist regarding their daily violence.
In Germany domestic violence is becoming a hidden plague. In the last couple of years, the government report reveals that domestic violence increased 3.4% in 5 years, the overwhelming majority of victims are women. The official figures show that in 2021, assault resulting in death due to intimate partner violence for females was 113 females. That is 89% of the victims were women that year. Most of the perpetrators are partners or ex partners and almost half of victims lived with the perpetrator in a shared household. That means a German woman is killed by her partner once every three days.
Even when Germany has one of the highest rates of femi(ni)cide in Europe. Officially the government does not catalog any of these deaths as femi(ni)cide. For researchers it is a difficult task to provide numbers and stats since there is no official data. One of the main institutions working on German violence against women is The Femicide Observation Center Germany. In 2020 they published “EvidenceBased Data on German Femicides” by UN Special Rapporteur Dr. Kristina Felicitas Wolff. They have continually published more data since then.
One of the main concerns of the legal term “ intimate partner violence” is that it disregards homicides committed by brothers, sons, fathers, stalkers etc., thus minimizing the scope.
“The fact that German society is exposed to an unspecific vocabulary that exclusively benefits perpetrators by, for example, dehumanizing those killed via the objectifying expression »extended suicide« posthumously to the extension of the killer, is another glaring, structural grievance that must be eliminated.” [-Kristina Felicitas Wolff]
Death by suffocation is legally called in Germany, attacks on air supply (choke, suffocate, strangulate) and it is the second modus operandi for killing women due to intimate partner violence. “Although attacks on the air supply are the second leading cause of death, the criminal law assessment »bodily injury« does not map the attack directly on life (Wolff).” Meaning that this term led to sentence reductions or being guilty of manslaughter instead of murder. Air as an indirect weapon becomes the perfect instrument of cruelty.
A sensory art installation that uses the senses of smell, sight, touch and hearing to immerse us in a space where the invisible becomes visible. A space that on the one hand looks beautiful at first glance, linked to the feminine west social construction and gradually transforms into a suffocating place where it invites us to question the murders of women caused by attacks on air supply.
Beauty creates a barrier, it dazzles us from the outside and doesn’t let us in. If we add to the formula strength, education, and success, then we got this perfect place for violence to live and go unnoticed. The aftermath, are you able to smell the violence?
How can society demand that the government investigate, name and prevent femi(ni)cides?
How can we keep the beauty and get rid of violence?
How to talk about violence to generate thoughts that nourish us and destroy us?
How to search, find the tools and transform the objects that we have in our households in order to build a shelter and eventually recover the spirit?
– Magaly Vega Lopez
Bibliography:
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/domestic-violence-in-germany-on-the-rise-government-report-reveals/2747401#
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/german-women-killed-in-domestic-violence-once-every-three-days-li.118018
Femicide Observation Center Germany – Evidence-Based Data on German Femicides > >
https://focg.org/about/
https://femicide-watch.org/node/920874
Wolff, K (2022). Germany: Deadly Consequences Based on Ignorance of Rule of Law. Außeruniversitäre Aktion -AuA.
RELATED PROJECTS ALSO ON SHOW:
The emancipation of the surrender of being (2021)
Using the invisible and neglected domestic activities as materials. I used found objects as a way to ask myself how can we heal our relationship with domestic oppressive spaces, how can we honor all of those that suffer from domestic violence, and how can we resignify the domestic labors and their objects/tools.
In a country like Mexico where domestic violence increases every year and even more with the pandemic of COVID-19, I decided to explore and inquire where this violence begins in a familiar yet neglected space. Investigating my memory, my family history and national events, a series of actions led me to ask myself even more questions and take another look at everything that is required to have functional living but is omitted.
MORE INFO > >
The eviction of Santa Julia: Resisting against the calamity (2021)
Where to find domestic activities invisible and unattended when you can’t enter domestic spaces? Can domestic violence spread into public spaces? Walking for a month in Anahuac neighborhood in Mexico City, wanting to find where the violence of the invisible dwells, using my memory, my experiences, and photographic records and the events of violence in Anahuac neighborhood from 2020 to 2021, I found that in all that we do not see, that in all that we do not associate with violence one learns to walk on our dead spirits, resisting the inevitable. Living altars to shake off violence and plants to protect us from inevitable falls.
The Anahuac neighborhood once belonged to the Santa de Julia neighborhood and for many of its inhabitants is still part of Santa Julia. Anahuac is the Miguel Hidalgo neighborhood with the highest rate of violence. As women’s bodies are thrown off balconies and assaults on passersby end in death, one wonders if one can really get there and enter without being transgressed.
The symbol of the virgin as protector in Mexico is something one learns on a daily basis as a Mexican. In grandmother’s rosary, in the processions of the towns, in the colorful pendants and medals and in many occasions we entrust ourselves to her in situations of violence. I walked through Anáhuac neighborhood and all those altars are more than altars. They are the question of why drugs, human trafficking and domestic violence do not end and inhabit the daily life of this neighborhood. How many altars are needed to return safety to this community? And who benefits from the absence of such altars?
Through actions and a site specific installation I inquired about how we can move through places by connecting with the past/roots and rethink the future both personal and communal. How to talk about violence to generate thoughts of nurturing and not destruction? How to search, find the tools and transform the objects I count on to build a shelter and eventually regain the spirit?
MORE INFO > >
Air Supply (2023)
You breathe… the light enters – The Air as an instrument – The air as a bond – The violence of the invisible – It disrupts all of us.
Air Supply is a project that investigates the relationship between air and the violence of the invisible. That violence that is linked to what we normally do not associate with violence and which goes back to what we do not associate as an instrument of cruelty. In this case, the air works as a weapon for femicide worldwide, especially in domestic spaces.
Plants have served as protection elements for women. In an invisible way, women using certain plants can make their attacker sick or even kill them. In this project:
Smell of space: Holly. Use: purgative and irritant. Obstruction of the digestive system. Eating the fruit can be deadly in large doses.
Amarylis: Contains toxins that can cause vomiting, depression, diarrhea, abdominal pain, hypersalivation, anorexia, and seizures.
Lilis/Azucenas: Vomiting, lethargy, tachycardia and polyuria.
Tulip: Eating the bulb causes indigestion, central nervous system depression, seizures, and cardiac abnormalities.
Chrysanthemum: Contains pyrethrins that can cause gastrointestinal imbalance, depression and loss of coordination.
Mexico adds 3,462 women murdered in 2021, an average of more than 10 per day, according to updated figures from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP).-El Heraldo, 11/19/2022
According to data from the National Information Center of the Secretariat for Citizen Security and Protection (11/30/22), at least 112,300 women have been victims of violence in Mexico.
In Mexico, a homicide caused by suffocation is classified as “with another element”.
In this space are the portraits of:
Debanhi Escobar, whose body was found in April 2022, died of suffocation in its variety of respiratory orifice obstruction.
Cecilia, Araceli and Dora, the sisters appeared dead and with signs of suffocation in a house in the city of Torreón in 2020.
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The MOMENTUM AiR / LAGOS Berlin
ARTIST RESIDENCY
is part of the
LAGOS Mexico City / MOMENTUM Berlin
RESIDENCY EXCHANGE
MORE INFO > >
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IVÁN BUENADER
Iván Buenader is an Argentinian writer and visual artist based between Alicante and Mexico City. He graduated in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires. He has exhibited his work (painting, photography, video, installation) in contemporary art venues in Latin America, the United States, Canada, India and Europe, while participating in numerous artist residencies – including MOMENTUM AiR in August – November 2021. He has conceptualized and produced collective interdisciplinary projects including poetry, music, dance and performance (‘CFW Poet Agency’). He is author of 11 novels and 6 books of experimental poetry.
Selected solo exhibitions include: FUTURA Galerie des Artistes (Puerto Vallarta) 2019; Brain Clouds (SometimeStudio, Paris) 2017, Monochromatic Fantasy (Lizieres, Epaux-Bezu), A house full of boxes is a place full of secrets (CentralTrak residence, Dallas TX) 2015, Face down on the sun (Museum of Contemporary Art of Aguascalientes, Mexico) 2014.
Group exhibitions include: FUTURA Alc Video Art Festival (Alicante) 2019; Untitled (Omar Alonso Galería, Puerto Vallarta) 2019; we the people (Montalvo Arts Center), Mikaela (San Miguel de Allende) , Studio Lisboa 018, La Verdi Mexico , CDMX, 2018, Rosadea (Play Video Art, Corrientes Capital), Processes in art (Chancellery Museum, CDMX), Luck of the Draw (DiversWorks, Houston TX), Hotel x Hotel (Carmen Thyssen Museum of Malaga, Malaga and Factory of Art and Development, Madrid) 2017,
Machemoodus (La 77, CDMX), In the lobby (Liliana Bloch, Dallas TX), Les sentiers de la création (Galerie du Lycée Jean de La Fontaine, Château-Thierry, and Gallerie du College Jacques Cartier, Chauny, France) 2016, AAMI Foundation (Mexico City ) , Tell me what you think of me (Texas State University Galleries) 2015, Then / Now / Next, (Gladstone Hotel, Toronto) , Floating Memories (WhiteSpider Project) 2014, Imaginary Archetypes (57th Alley) , Be or Not South (José Luis Cuevas Museum, Museum of the City of Querétaro, Museum of Art of Ciudad Juárez, Museum of Art Co Time of Tamaulipas), Argenmex (Centro Bella Época), Inheritance (MACA Alicante, Hospicio Cabaña, GACX Xalapa, La Esmeralda, Art Careyes, Lakeeren Mumbai, Cloister Sor Juana, among others), Transitios (Changarrito group show, Artpace, San Antonio TX) 2013; Migrant Suitcases (Memory and Tolerance Museum, DF; David J. Guzman Museum, El Salvador; European Foundation Center Philanthropy House, Brussels; CECUT, Tijuana; New Americans Museum, San Diego CA), Side by Side (Universidad Iberoamericana), En mi being eternal (La 77), Mexico; Timeline Project, Chicago; 2012; International Biennial of Banners , Tijuana 2010, International Biennial of Visual Poetry , Mexico 2009; Close UP , Mexico 2007; Domestic Mail , Galerie Nod, Prague 2007; Half Mast, Haydee Rovirosa, NYC 2007, Interregno , Art & Idea, Mexico 2006; Harto Espacio , Montevideo, 2004.
VOLKSPARK
2021, Video Performance, 3 min
Iván Buenader’s video performance, Volkspark, is the latest in a series of impromptu dance performances enacted within the context of every Artist Residency in which he participates. In this case, the work results from his 3-month Residency at MOMENTUM AiR during the summer and autumn of 2021 – a period of cautiously hopeful ‘normality’ in a city still learning to cope with the ongoing aftermath of the pandemic. Buenader is not a dancer. His dance series is not intended as a performance of technical competence, but rather, as his way of experientially engaging with every Residency location by means of mapping the movements of his body onto that space – be it a studio, cityscape, or countryside. The very act of movement through space connotes a freedom of which many were deprived during the long months of pandemic lockdown. While the title of the chosen soundtrack to this performance – “(I just don’t wanna) Miss A Thing” by Kylie Minogue – evokes the thirst for actual experience after months of isolation, coupled with the artist’s journey of discovery through Berlin’s multifaceted cityscape.
In Volkspark (meaning People’s Park in German), Buenader dances through Berlin’s oldest public park: Volkspark Friedrichshain. Dressed in clothes found on the streets – the literal social fabric of Berlin – he moves amidst various monuments inscribed with references to battles, conquests, nations, historical milestones, popular mythologies, and literary characters of children’s fables (the Fountain of Fairy Tales; the Berlin Bear; statues of Frederick the Great, the Javelin Thrower, and Mother and Child; Memorials for German fighters in the Spanish Civil War, and for Polish soldiers and anti-fascist Germans in WWII; and stairs on the hill covering the remains of one of several WWII bunkers and flak towers still inscribed within the fabric of the cityscape).
“The remains that are hidden and lie buried under the appearance of a hill, as well as the static, immovable, inert sculptures that function as tributes to powerful entities or to people who gave their lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, to defend historical or temporal community values, they play a symbolic game with the living, mobile, restless body, which teaches freedom as it orbits around these monoliths, calling for a re-interpretation of memory.”
– Iván Buenader
THE SOWER IN THE COURTYARD OF THE COLUMNS
2021, Wall paint on silk shawl, 85 x 85 cm
This work forms part of Buenader’s ongoing series of paint on textile works. Literally addressing the social fabric, the artist paints abstract alphabets of signs and symbols onto found materials collected in the various cities to which his peripatetic practice leads him. Scarves, blankets, tablecloths, shower curtains, and more found on the street, given by friends, or discovered in flea markets – these relics of the social fabric form the canvases for Buenader’s interventions.
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CAROLINE SHEPARD
(b. in New York, USA. Live and work in Berlin, Germany and New York, USA.)
Caroline Shepard is old enough to have seen some things, and young enough to still be curious. Born and raised in New York City, they received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College under Joel Sternfeld and Gregory Crewdson, and an MFA at the School of Visual Arts, under Collier Schorr, Sophie Calle and Sarah Charlesworth – all of whom continue to influence. Artist, writer, professor, activist, crativ catalyst, with a practice ranging from visual art to written word, photography, installation, and interventions in public space. Their work has been published and exhibited worldwide. They are currently living in Berlin.
DON’T TREAD ON ME
2022, Photographic print on vinyl, 225 x 200 cm
American artist, Caroline Shepard created this provocative work as an act of resistance against the US Supreme Court decision in 2022 to revoke their landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973) that the United States Constitution upholds the right to abortion. The Supreme Court decision of 2022 marks a regressive repeal of rights and civil liberties long held to be entrenched in the very identity of progressive America. Don’t Tread On Me is a floor installation, and the title a provocative misnomer for a work which is intended by the artist to be trodden upon. Through the difficulty of taking that first step, and with its depiction of humanity in its concurrent frailty and strength, Don’t Tread On Me dares us all to engage in an act of resistance against the subjugation of the female body.
This work was created during Caroline Shepard’s Artist Residency at MOMENTUM AiR. The photograph Don’t Tread On Me subsequently becomes the subject of other artworks in Shepard’s series photographing Don’t Tread On Me in locations throughout Berlin where women have been abused, subjugated, and killed. The original work was first shown in MOMENTUM’s exhibition You Know That You Are Human @ POINTS of RESISTANCE V (2022-23) in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche.
CLICK HERE to go to the Exhibition Page > >
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In 1989 Barbara Kruger proclaimed “our bodies are a battleground” in response to the chipping away of abortion protections in the United States. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the historic decision that protected abortion access across the nation. 50 years. The course of my lifetime. What does forced motherhood mean? It means women are not autonomous. It means women in the United States are not equal citizens. But we are not alone in our move towards political extremism. From Afghanistan, to Poland and beyond, practically half the countries in the world have some form of restrictions on abortion. Why? We need only look back to the Third Reich to know that our bodies are controlled when fascism is on the rise, when power is threatened. By 1945, approximately 2 million German women were raped. Female bodily autonomy is continually violated during times of war, and yet where are the monuments? Where is the healthcare, or the compensation? Where is the recognition that we are targets in war? This isn’t ancient history, this is Bosnia, the Ukraine. Think of the Yazidis, the Rohingya. The girls stolen by Burko Haram. “Culturally sanctioned“ child marriage and forced marriage. Consider the murdered Transgender women across the globe. And the Tribal women in North America. When will it end? When we insist that all rape is not a justifiable byproduct of patriarchy, or war, or something that doesn’t exist. Sadly, on January 6, 2022, the US witnessed more than just a right-wing rebellion as throngs of angry men waving “DON’T TREAD ON ME” flags stormed the capitol building of the United States, we witnessed Patriarchy armed and ready to fight for domination at the cost of democracy. Women’s bodies have been walked over, abused and misused throughout History. Our bodies remain a battleground. We can feel the footsteps all over us, but where is the evidence? Positioned on the gallery floor, ‘Don’t Tread On Me‘ dares the viewer to trespass the intimate lines of bodily autonomy. In the picture series, much like a memorial, it stands as a marker of the myriad untold stories, and silenced voices.
– Caroline Shepard
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CHRISTIAN JANKOWSKI
(b. 1968 in Göttingen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Christian Jankowski studied at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg, in Germany. In his conceptual and media artworks he makes use of film, video, photography and performance, but also of painting, sculpture, and installation. Jankowski’s work consists of performative interactions between himself with non-art professionals, between contemporary art and the so-called ‘world outside of art’. These interactions give insight into the popular understanding of art, while incorporating many of contemporary art’s leading interests in contemporary society: regarding lifestyle, psychology, rituals and celebrations, self-perception, competition, and mass-produced and luxury commodities. Over time, Jankowski has collaborated with magicians, politicians, news anchors, and members of the Vatican, to name just a few. In each case, the context for the interaction and the participants are given a degree of control over how Jankowski’s work develops and the final form that it takes. Jankowski documents these performative collaborations using the mass media formats that are native to the contexts in which he stages his work––film, photography, television, print media––which lends his work its populist appeal. Jankowski’s work can be seen both as a reflection, deconstruction, and critique of a society of spectacle and at the same time as reflection, deconstruction, and critique of art, which has given itself over to spectacle and thereby endangered its critical potential.
In 2016, Jankowski curated the 11th edition of Manifesta, becoming the first artist to assume the role. He has participated in numerous international Biennales, including: Bangkok Art Biennal, Bangkok, Thailand (2020); Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas, Lithunia (2019); Venice Biennale (2013 & 1995); 1st Montevideo Biennial, Montevideo, Uruguay (2013); Taipei Biennial, Taiwan (2010); 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2010); 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China (2008); 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art, Vilnius, Lithuania (2002); Whitney Biennial, New York, NY, USA (2002); 2nd Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2001); Lyon Biennale, France (1997).
Selected recent solo exhibitions include, amongst numerous others: joségarcía, Mérida, Mexico (2020); Fluentum, Berlin, Germany (2020); Galleria Enrico Astuni, Bologna, Italy (2019); @KCUA, Gallery of the Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan (2018); Galeria Hit, Bratislava, Slovakia (2017); Haus am Lütowplatz, Berlin, Germany (2016), Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany (2015), Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2013); Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); MACRO, Rome, Italy (2012); Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Germany (2009); Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany (2008); Miami Art Museum, FL, USA (2007); MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA, USA (2005); Swiss Institute, New York, NY, USA (2001) and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, USA (2000).
Selected recent group exhibitions include: 2020: „Sender and Receiver“, Bangkok Art Biennal, Bangkok, Thailand. 2019: “Seeing Artists Voices”, Saco Azul & Maus Habitos, Porto, Portugal; “RAM Highlights”, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China; “Ikonen”, Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; “The Last Supper”, Faena Festival, Miami, USA; “El Desig de Creure”, Arts Santa Monica Centre, Barcelona, Spanien; “After Leaving | Before Arriving”, Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas, Litauen; “Fuzzy Dark Spot”, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; “Comeback”, Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen; “Visitors @ c/o”, Café c/o Berlin – Amerikahaus, Berlin. 2018: “The most successful couple of the epoch”, Spazio Cabinet, Mailand, Italy; “Entfesselte Natur”, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; “Wahlverwandtschaften”, Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; “Vice Versa”, m3 / Art in Space, Prague, Czech Republic; “ Fleisch”, Altes Museum, Berlin; “The Playground Project”, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Germany; “KNOCK KNOCK”, South London Gallery, London, UK. 2017: “Yokohama Triennale 2017- Islands, Constellations and Galapagos”, Yokahoma Museum of Art, Yokahoma, Japan; “Generation Loss. 10 Years oF The Julia Stoschek Collection”, Julia Stoschek Collection, Duesseldorf, Germany; “Transactions – About the value of artistic labour”, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, Germany; “Luther und die Avantgarde”, Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur e.V. , Bonn, Germany; “Duett mit Künstler_in. Partizipation als künstlerisches Prinzip”, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; “Behind the Screen / An Art Tribute to Isabelle Huppert”, Michael Fuchs Galerie, Berlin, Germany; ”Tower of Blue Horses”, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany; ”Autogestion”, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona, Spain. 2016: ”Exhibitions Are The Best Excuses:“, Michael Fuchs Galerie, Berlin, Germany; “Shame – 100 Reasons to be Red“, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, Germany; “Unexpectedly: The Art of Chance“, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany; “Wall to Wall Carpets: Carpets by Artists“, MOCA, Cleveland, OH, USA; “Performer/Audience/Mirror“, Lisson Gallery, London, UK; “Think Outside the Box“, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland; “Social Contract“, Izolyatsiz Platform for Cultural Initatives, Kyiv, Ukraine; “TeleGen. Art and Television“, Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz, Lichtenstein; “Mirror, mirror…self-portraits in Northern Germany 1892 to today“, Kunsthaus Stade, Germany; “Autogestion“, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona, Spain; “Way Man“, Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen, Germany; “Momentary Monuments“, Migrosmuseum, Zurich, Switzerland; “Obsession Dada“, The Carbaret Voltaire, Zurich, Switzerland. 2015: “The Wish to Believe“, Mataró Art Contemporani, Spain; “Spirit your Mind“, Free Spirits Sports Café, Miami, USA; “Freedom Myths“, Cinémateque Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany; “Trends“, Gogol House, Moscow, Russia; “Moment!“, Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany; “Tele-Gen: The Language of Television in the Mirror of Art, 1964-2015“, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; “Checkpoint California: 20 Years of Villa Aurora“, Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin Germany; “When I Give, I Give Myself“, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; “Hunters and Collectors in Contemporary Art“, Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany; “A Man Walks into a Bar…“, me Collectors Room, Berlin, Germany. 2014: “Things we discover alone (Independent Learning)”, Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany; “Dance Me“, Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden; “Room Service“, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; “Real Emotions: Thinking in Film“, Kunst-Werke Institute, Berlin, Germany; “GOLA: Art and Science of Taste“, Foundation La Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy; “Lucky: From the Piggy Bank to Life on Credit”, Vögele Kulturzentrum, Pfaffikon, Switzerland.
TRAVELING ARTIST
2018, Video Performance, Japanese with English subtitles, 15 min 47 sec
2018, Video Performance (excerpt), Loop
Jankowski’s conceptual practice is that of artist-as-sociologist, playfully intervening to subvert the many norms and conventions we all take for granted. As one of the best known contemporary artists from Germany, Jankowski is always on the move to far-flung exhibitions, biennales, art fairs, and artist residencies. Travel is at once liberating and – especially in our post-pandemic age – increasingly difficult. Constrained by the many obligations of his career as a traveling artist, Christian Jankowski made these constraints literal when he was invited to the Kyoto City University of the Arts. Engaging with the traditional Japanese artform of Kinbaku – Japanese bondage – Jankowski, with his customary subtle humor, translates an exotic subculture into something we can all relate to. We have all felt tied down by life’s innumerable obligations, or suspended in limbo – waiting with our luggage for delayed flights, or interminably waiting through the pandemic for our lives to get back on course. Though this work was made before the pandemic, it is a prescient metaphor for our increasingly complex world.
The metaphor of the traveling artist addresses the heart of Christian Jankowski’s socially-engaged artistic practice. Jankowski’s far-reaching body of work invites viewers to see our ourselves and others, history, the media and art from a whole new perspective. By using the language of human relationships, comedic humor, or indeed any of the other innumerable tools of modern communication available, Christian Jankowski trades blows with diverse cultures, history, politics and the language of art. His playful and far-reaching projects tug at the very fabric of society itself – of the (re)reading and (re)making of history and identity – querying many notions of authorship, ownership, originality, propriety and authenticity that might otherwise be taken for granted.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
An artist goes where he finds an audience. That‘s why traveling is a constant companion in Jankowski‘s life. In Kyoto, Jankowski seized the opportunity and visited Aska, a Kinbaku mistress running her own erotic nightclub – “Barbara Club Bizarre“ – frequented mainly by Japanese businessmen.
Sensing a connection between the Japanese bondage tradition and the constraints of his life as a contemporary artist, he asked Aska to use her binding technique on him and his travel utensils. She accepted under the condition that Jankowski put on a western business suit like her customers, but not wear trousers, reflecting the naked or seductively dressed women, who are usually bound in Kinbaku. Jankowski rose to the challenge and showed up to their “date” sporting a suit and slightly old-fashioned white underpants provided by the mistress. Shortly after, he and his luggage hang upside down from the ceiling of Aska‘s establishment, rotating to soft, but festive piano music. The four photographs accompanying the project show Jankowski from four points of the compass.
Jankowski left the luggage that had accompanied him through the years of being a traveling artist with Aska and she rearranged the bags with their content spilled out into a new Kinbaku composition. The resulting sculpture was exhibited along with the photographs at @KCUA in Kyoto.
– Christian Jankowski
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VADIM ZAKHAROV
(b. 1959 in Dushanbe, UdSSR (now Tajikistan). Lives and works in Berlin and Cologne, Germany.)
Vadim Zakharov is an artist, editor, archivist of the Moscow Conceptual art movement, and collector. Since 1979 he has participated in exhibitions of unofficial art and collaborated with such artists as: V. Skersis, S. Anufriev, I. Chuikov, A. Monastyrski, Y. Leiderman. In 1982–1983 he participated in the AptArt Gallery, Moscow. Since 1992 till 2001 he has published the “Pastor” magazine and founded the Pastor Zond Edition. In 2006 he edited book “Moscow Conceptualism”. His retrospective was held at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2006. He represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with the project “DANAE”. In 2016-2020 Zakharov organized the exhibition space “FREEHOME-Artist to Artist” in Berlin.
Selected honors and awards include: Griffelkunst-Preis, Hamburg (1995); Renta-Preis, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1995); Soratnik Prize, Moscow (2006); Innovation Prize, Moscow (2006); Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, American Academy in Rome (2007); Kandinsky Prize – Best Work of Year, Moscow (2009); Kaissering Art Prize – Germany’s most prestigious art award (2023).
In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions, Vadim Zakharov has participated in many biennales of contemporary art, including: the 49th Venice Biennale, “Plateau of Humankind”, (Director Harald Szeemann, Arsenale, 2001); 1st Thessaloniki Biennale, “Black Birds” installation (Museum of Byzantine Culture, 2007 ); 55th Venice Biennale, Vadim Zakharov, “Danaë”, Russian Pavilion (2013); 5th Moscow Biennale, Vadim Zakharov, “Dead Languages Dance. Fall collection”, (TSUM, 2013); “2014. Space Odyssey”, CAFAM BIENNALE, Beijing (2014); 3rd Biennale of Bahia, Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (2014); 14 Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale, Russia (2021).
Vadim Zakharov’s works are held in many prestigious public collections, including: Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; TATE Modern, London, UK; Modern Art Museum, Frankfurt, DE; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main, DE; Kupferstienkabinet, Berlin, DE; Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Budapest; Saint Petersburg, RU; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers USA; Museum of Art at Duke University, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, HU; Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, DE; Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, RU; Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, RU; Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, RU; Moscow Collections of the NCCA, Moscow, RU.
BAFF BAFF! WHAT ARE THE POLITICIANS TALKING ABOUT
2021, Video Performance, HD, sound, 4 min 20 sec (original 65’)
Vadim Zakharov’s recent video work presents an all too fitting commentary on our current state of affairs where politicians spout nonsense at one another while remaining unable to stop the atrocities of war. BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About invokes the talking heads we see on news programs every day, recounting an equally incomprehensible reality, which would be surreal were it not so tragic.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In the video performance, non-verbal words are read aloud, most of which have been found in the magazines “Mickey Mouse” (German editions) and also taken from the books “Tintin The Mysterious Star” and “Asterix & Obelix The Laurels of Caesar”. The words collected in the non-verbal vocabulary have no meaning, but only phonetically reflect certain events:
someone has fainted (BLIEP!), a glass has broken (CRACK! CLIRR!), a helicopter has crashed into a cupola (KAROMMS!), a museum has collapsed (CRACK! THUNDER! CRIME!).
The Reader (Vadim Zakharov), wearing a white shirt and a tie, recites these words seriously and forcefully. The image of a politician is created, a public figure who professionally and convincingly is ready to say something on any occasion. At the same time, we see that these are just empty words – bubbles that float away as soon as they reach our ears. The film highlights the absurdity of what we see and hear every day on television and the internet.
At the same time, reading non-verbal words can be perceived as reading poetry…
– Vadim Zakharov
AN EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION WITH THE SUN
1978, Photograph on Aludibond, 30 x 54 cm
An Exchange of Information with the Sun is Vadim Zakharov’s first artwork, made in 1978 at the age of nineteen. Growing up in the vastness of the Soviet Union, a nation proudly encompassing one-sixth of the earth, Zakharov nevertheless chaffed against his isolation from the rest of the world. Borders were closed, travel was largely impossible, and the exchange of information with the ‘free’ world tightly controlled. In a gesture designed to send his consciousness out into the universe, to communicate somehow with the world outside, the young artist made a print with his thumb on a pocket mirror and angled the reflection towards the sun.
Now, over forty years later, living in Berlin, in a free world ostensibly devoid of punitive ideologies, where every child is brought up to believe that they can become whatever they want to be, the specter of oppression nevertheless looms large once more. Is it an overabundance of ‘freedom’ which has caused the resurgence of the far right throughout Europe and many parts of the world? In a Germany perpetually aware that the horrors of history must not repeat themselves, like anywhere else in the world, we can never guess when the next dictator might be born.
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MÁXIMO GONZÀLEZ
(b. 1971 in Argentina. Lives and works in Alicante, Spain and Mexico City, Mexico.)
Argentinian artist Máximo González is widely known for his massive immersive mixed-media installations, as well as large-scale collages made out of money. The currency collages, reminiscence of the political wall paintings of the Mexican muralists, express the complications of a consumer culture that exploits natural resources, produces waste, and lately drives nations to bankruptcy. González’s work – often poetic, always political – focuses on the environment, education, and the evolution of cultural value systems.
Máximo González is also the founder of “Changarrito Project”, a non-profit cultural initiative he launched in 2004 in Mexico City. What began as an underground subversive project has evolved into a platform to promote, support and show the work of visual artists, novelists, poets, curators, designers, performers, filmmakers, which has so far has exhibited more than 5,000 works by more than 350 emerging artists. Changarrito was invited twice to participate at Mexico Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2013), and has, since 2012 been operating in cooperation with Mexic-Arte Museum (Texas, USA).
González has held 46 solo shows and participated in 168 group shows. Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘POGO’ at Hospicio Cabañas Museum, Guadalajara (MX); Magnificent Warning at Stanlee & Rubin Center, El Paso (USA); Playful, CAFAM, Los Angeles (USA); ‘Walk among Worlds’ at Casa de América, Madrid (ES) y Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (USA), ‘Something like an answer to something’, Artane gallery, Istanbul (TUR); ‘Project for the reutilization of obsolete vehicles’ at Travesía Cuatro Gallery, Madrid (ES) and Project B, Milano (IT); ‘PISAR’ at Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires (ARG); ‘Greenhouse effect’ at Art&Idea, Mexico City.
Selected group shows include: ‘The Supermarket of Images’ at Jeu de Paume in Paris and at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, China; ‘Memoria del porvenir’, MUSAC collection (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León), Spain; Viva México! at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and at BWA Awangarda Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland; ‘The possibility of everything’ at Nuit Blanche Toronto (CA); ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’, Poetics of the handmade exhibition at MOCA LA (USA); ‘The tree: from the sublime to the social’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery (CA); ‘Fine Line’ at Museo de Las Americas in Denver (USA); The lines of the hand at MUAC, Mexico City; ‘2nd Polygraphic Triennial of San Juan’, Latin America and the Caribbean, Puerto Rico; ‘Mexico: Poetry/Politics’, San Francisco State University (USA) and at Nordic Watercolor Museum, Gothenburg (SE); ‘Tiempo de Sospecha’, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.
Untitled (‘Tissue Culture’ Animation #1) and N8 – Carbonic Incineration 1 form part of a large body of work resulting from Máximo González’s 3-month Artist Residency at MOMENTUM AiR in 2021.
UNTITLED (‘TISSUE CULTURE’ ANIMATION #1)
2021, Video Animation, 2 min 25 sec
Marching through the shelf of a library, some decorative objects and other toys, peek into a drawing that absorbs them in a universe of colorless lines, where an indecipherable shape squeezes them to make room for those who continue to arrive. The drawing gradually becomes denser, until at a certain moment it begins to be imperceptibly released: the elements that had entered leave the drawing and, little by little, it becomes a simpler composition, without saturation.
– Artist Statement by Iván Buenader
N8 – CARBONIC INCINERATION 1
2021, Tissue culture oil, ink, acrylic and gesso on pasted street signs, 85 x 60 x 5 cm
On the streets of the city of Berlin, street posters are piled up on the walls, one on top of the other, glued together with paste. Some promote a new hamburger, others a musical concert, a home delivery app or an express covid test service. The stacking of posters creates a volume that, with the passing of days, is destined to disappear: a downpour falls on the city and they become so heavy that they bend like a withered flower, or someone tears them off as a souvenir or innocuous form of vandalism, or the city council removes them when it performs its regular cleaning.
In her laboratory, a Polish scientist, under a microscope, places a number of cells on a substance that is used for their proliferation. Cells will begin to reproduce slowly, then quickly, until they meet their limit and begin to shrink. It is difficult to distinguish when or what the maximum point was before beginning their decrease, in search of their own balance.
Hanging on the wall, on the whitened surface of a pile of posters, there is an unclassifiable, carbonic-looking shape that expands on the paper as if it were burning, or perhaps it contracts, as if it were submerging.
– Artist Statement by Iván Buenader
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MARINA BELIKOVA
(b. in Moscow, Russia. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Marina Belikova is an award-winning Berlin based media artist, working with artist collaborations, 2D animation, UI & graphic design, motion design, video postproduction, photography and other visuals.
In 2012-2013 she completed an M.A. in Communication Design at Kingston University, London and in 2016 she graduated from the Bauhaus University, Weimar with an M.A. in Media Art and Design, specializing in oil-on-glass animation techniques and creating “The Astronaut’s journal” as her graduation project. Marina animates her narratives through the traditional technique, where each frame is painted individually and subsequently captured with a camera as stop motion animation.
Belikova has 10+ years of experience in the field of art and design, having worked for Crazy Panda Games, MOMENTUM Berlin, LemonOne (now BOOM!), various art and freelance projects, and is one of the organisers and producers of the Factual Animation Film Festival.
She also works with photography and mixed media, exploring the topics of human memories and interaction between people and urban spaces. Her award-winning animations have been screened at numerous film festivals in more than 10 countries, and her photo series have been nominated for Sunny Art Prize (2021), received the Bauhaus Essentials Prize (2016) and have been shown in various international exhibitions.
BALAGAN!!!
2015, Video Animation, 1 min 47 sec
In Russia balagan is a popular exclamation that describes, with celebratory gusto, a farce, a fine mess, the most unholy of cock-ups. BALAGAN!!! is also a major international exhibition produced by MOMENTUM in 2015 of contemporary art from the former USSR and Eastern Bloc that reveals a world where chaos and misrule, along with the social comedy that results from it, are celebrated and scathingly exposed. Balagan originally meant ‘fairground’. By the 18th century it had become associated with the activities of the people who worked in them: puppeteers, clowns and jesters, who made fun of and satirised established order. And, from the beginning, artists have realised the potential of balagan as an effective framework for revealing the truth. Today, the revolutionary politics of laughter, as well as the cathartic release it promises, are engendered by a sense of outrage at cruelty, inhumanity and the abuse of human rights. But balagan is not only modern: ever since time began, chaos has been ever-present.
CLICK HERE to go to the BALAGAN!!! Exhibition Page > >
The exhibition BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places is about how some artists choose to depict the chaos of our times critically, challenging its power through humour, parody and the power of art itself. For this exhibition, the curator David Elliott wrote his own unique description of BALAGAN, which Jonathan Barnbrook designed, and Marina Belikova visualized as an animated film.
We reprised Belikova’s BALAGAN!!! animation for MOMENTUM’s exhibition Birds & Bicycles (2021), as it comes increasingly more relevant to our world today – world still afflicted by chaos and misrule, and now also war between Russia and Ukraine, and a global pandemic to contend with. Perhaps the power of humour, parody, and art itself lies in its ability to lift us out of the darkness and, soaring above it, develop new perspectives and better hopes.
CLICK HERE to go to the Birds & Bicycles Exhibition Page > >
RELATED MATERIALS:
David Elliott (text) & Jonathan Barnbrook (graphics), BALAGAN!!! (2015), print on paper
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Marina Belikova
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CHRISTIAN NICCOLI
(b. 1976 in Südtirol, Italy. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Christian Niccoli was awarded the prestigious Italian Council Award in 2020-21 for his video project Zwei, which he produced together with MOMENTUM, and which was subsequently shown at: National Museum in Szczecin, Poland, Video Premiere: 11 November 2022 / Exhibition: 12 November 2022 – 16 January 2022; MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany, in the group exhibition States of Emergency: 11 December 2021 – 27 March 2022; Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria, Presentation: 13 May 2022 / Screening: 14 May – 12 June 2022; MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, Presentation & Artist Talk: 8 April 2022; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, Presentation: 10 June 2022 / Screening: 11 June – 28 August 2022; Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany, Presentation & Artist Talk: 11 June 2022; Kunst Meran / Merano Arte, Merano, Italy, Presentation & Artist Talk: 25 June 2022; MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, Italy
October 2022.
Niccoli’s works have been presented at numerous festivals, including: Transmediale, Berlin, Germany (2009); Hamburg Short Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany (2008); Oblíqua – International Exhibition of Video Art & Experimental Cinema, Lisbon, Portugal (2016); 16th WRO Media Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland (2015); Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart, Germany (2015); Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece (2015); Facade Video Festival Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2014); and Video Art Festival Miden, Kalamata, Greece (2014).
Christian Niccoli’s videos and video installations have been presented internationally in museums and institutions, among others at: Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria (2006); Phönix Art – Harald Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, Germany (2002); Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal, Canada (2015); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2012); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2009,2004); 8th Baltic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland (2009); 4th Biennial del Fin del Mundo Valparaiso, Chile (2015); Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia (2010); Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France (2015), Museion – Museum für Moderne und Zeitgenössiche Kunst, Blzano, Italy (2020); Museum Kunst der Westküste, Alkersum, Germany (2020); Alfred Ehrhard Stiftung, Berlin (2021).
Christian Niccoli’s works are in several public collections, including; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland; Kunstsammlung der Autonomen Provinz Südtirol, Italy; Collezione Farnesina – Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome, Italy; and Museion – Museum of Modern and Conemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy.
In 2006 Christian Niccoli was an artist in residence at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy, and in 2008-09 he participated in the International Studio Program at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany.
OHNE TITEL
2011, HD Video, 45 sec loop, 10 min 57 sec
A recurring theme throughout Christian Niccoli’s practice, this work tells the story of a group of people bound together in a relationship of inter-dependence. It can also be read as a social metaphor as individuals, communities and societies have always been linked to each other by a relationship of mutual dependence, where, in a conscious or unconscious way, one person’s choices and actions have an impact on the other, even if this is not always evident.
This video investigates the complexity of building on each other. This is shown metaphorically through a group of five people balancing on an rola-bola, a balance tool commonly known from the circus. In order to stand on it without collapsing, the group has to perfectly coordinate. Everyone is responsible in his movements for the entire group.
– Christian Niccoli
Concept and direction: Christian Niccoli
Camera: Andreas Steffan
Sound: Roman Strack
Make-up and styling: Daniela-Carolin Bähr
Set photographer: Loredana Mondora
Set design: Christian Allkämper
Assistance: Stefan Andres
Catering: Konstantin Vogas
Circus artists: Katharina Huber, Jakob Nickels, Marie Oldenbourg, Malte Strunk, Ihor Yakymenko
Realized with the support of Staatliche Artistenschule Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Christian Niccoli
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ART from ELSEWHERE: Mexico City
The MOMENTUM Collection @ LAGOS
Part of Mexico City Art Week 2023
& the First Event Launching the Cultural Program of the
30th Anniversary of Berlin & Mexico City as Sister-Cities
OPENING:
2 February 2023 @ 20:00
EXHIBITION:
3 February – 2 March 2023
Opening Hours:
Art Week, 6-12 February: 11:00 – 18:00
All Other Times,
OPEN BY APPOINTMENT
info@artelagos.mx
Featuring:
aaajiao – AES+F – Inna Artemova – Claudia Chaseling & Emilio Rapanà – Margret Eicher – Nezaket Ekici – Thomas Eller – Theo Eshetu – Amir Fattal – Christian Jankowski – Ola Kolehmainen – David Krippendorff – Milovan Destil Marković – Almagul Menlibayeva – Gulnur Mukazhanova – Kirsten Palz – Nina E. Schönefeld – Caroline Shepard – David Szauder – Vadim Zakharov
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà
Laguna de Tamiahua 3,
Anáhuac I Sección,
Mexico City, 11320, Mexico
Special Program for Mexico City Art Week:
EXHIBITION & LAGOS OPEN STUDIOS:
6 -12 February 2023 @ 11:00 – 18:00
ZONAMACO VIP Event: [please RSVP]
9 February 2023 @ 11:00
CURATORS from ELSEWHERE: Exhibition Tour with MOMENTUM Curators
ART WEEK PARTY & EXHIBITION TOUR
Saturday 11 February – Public Program
@ 20:00 – CURATORS from ELSEWHERE:Exhibition Tour with MOMENTUM Curators
@ 22:00 – The Berlin-Mexico Connection Party
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of partnership between Berlin and Mexico City as sister cities, and of Mexico City Art Week 2023 – and to mark the opening of LAGOS Berlin in partnership with MOMENTUM – we present ART from ELSEWHERE: Mexico City with a selection of work from the MOMENTUM Collection, Berlin. With 55 international artists currently comprising the MOMENTUM Collection, the artworks selected for this exhibition are by 20 artists based in Berlin, who are as diverse as Berlin itself. Presenting artists from China, Denmark, Ethiopia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the US – they are all also Berliners. At the geographical center of Europe, Berlin is a city of mobile people and moving images, where art and artists alike are often from elsewhere.
Today most of us live lives of perpetual motion from one piece of information to the next, from one opportunity to the next, and – until the pandemic briefly stopped us in our tracks – from one place to the next. Mobility – both geographical and social – not so long ago the privilege of the few, is now taken for granted as the entitlement of the majority. Artists are at the forefront of this peripatetic existence, travelling the world for inspiration, exhibitions, and artist residencies, experiencing new places and cultures through the critical lens of the outsider, and then reflecting back upon their own locales through the prism of their expanded world views.
ART from ELSEWHERE is an exhibition about otherness; about communication and its opposite; about the many different ways in which we see the world and interact with it. Moving images move us, and artworks serve as windows onto the world. As we emerge after periods of isolation, and learn how to negotiate the new realities of a post-pandemic world, it becomes more important than ever to have such windows through which to gaze. In these uncertain times, they remind us that, for all our differences, we are all in this together.
The works shown in this exhibition focus on global issues, equally relevant to us all, no matter where we live or where we have come from. They reflect on the social and environmental repercussions of globalization and its impact on the transformation of cultural identities; they interrogate issues of identity, inequality, and poverty; they scrutinize the environmental traumas we inflict on our planet and its creatures; and they ponder the (un)quiet poetry, conflicts, and beauty of how we must live from day to day.
CLICK HERE for MORE INFO on
the MOMENTUM COLLECTION > >
Featuring:
[Click on the name of each artist to see the bio and the work description below.]
ART from ELSEWHERE – The MOMENTUM Collection, Berlin
ART FROM ELSEWHERE Collection Trailer from Momentum Worldwide on Vimeo
MOMENTUM enters its second decade in a post-pandemic world radically altered in numerous ways, and yet remarkably unchanged when it comes to aspects of human needs and desires, and our impact upon the planet and one another. In this post-pandemic era of travel restrictions, ART from ELSEWHERE reframes the MOMENTUM Collection as an array of windows onto the world, a selection of works celebrating otherness. ART from ELSEWHERE is a series of travelling exhibitions, which began in 2021 to mark MOMENTUM’s 10th Anniversary. Taking a new site-specific form in each edition, developed in concert with curators at the host locations, ART from ELSEWHERE showcases works and artists from the MOMENTUM Collection, Berlin.
Click on the icons below to see previous editions of ART from ELSEWHERE:
ABOUT LAGOS
Mexico City & Berlin
LAGOS is an art studio and residency space in Mexico City dedicated to the production and development of contemporary art projects and their exhibition. LAGOS is an organization that supports artists and promotes the intersection of art professionals. Lagos seeks to support artists at crucial moments in their careers in three ways: by offering workspace, facilitating collaborations with specialists in various disciplines, and promoting new audiences through a diverse program that includes open studios and exhibitions. One of th first of its kind in Mexico City, the LAGOS Studios & Artist Residencies, is open to artists, curators, writers, editors and cultural agents, offering them the opportunity to insert themselves in the creative panorama of Mexico City; as well as proposals, collaborations and projects that broaden the discussion of current problems addressed via contemporary art.
In the autumn of 2022, LAGOS opened a branch in Berlin, at the MOMENTUM space in the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center. Beginning in January 2023, LAGOS and MOMENTUM are initiating their Art Exchange Program – FAR AWAY SO CLOSE – with artists residencies, exhibitions, curatorial research trips, and other cultural initiatives exchanged between Mexico and Berlin.
MORE INFO @ www.artelagos.mx > >
With Thanks To:
aaajiao
404404404
2017, Installation, ink & sponge roller, dimensions variable
Free Will, Open Mic, GFW, Confessions
2021, Video installation, LCD screen, acrylic fittings,
16 x 24 x 3,8 cm, 10” on loop, on loan from the artist
AES+F
Inverso Mundus
2015, Full HD Video with sound, 38’, on loan from the artists
Inna Artemova
Utopia # 3337
2020, 130 x 170 cm graphite, oil on canvas, on loan from the artist
Utopia # 4145
2020, 75 x 110 cm , ink, marker, pencil on paper, on loan from the artist
Utopia #4374
2020, 75 x 105 cm, ink, marker, pencil on paper, on loan from the artist
Claudia Chaseling & Emilio Rapanà
deluge of delusion 1
2021, Digital print on canvas and 10 watercolors on paper, 190 x 390 cm, on loan from the artist
Margret Eicher
Zeus Appears To Eva In The Shape Of A Rocket
2013, Wallpaper Tapestry, color print on paper, 171 x 240 cm
Nezaket Ekici
Kaffeeklatsch
2019, Video Performance, HD with sound, 6’17”, on loan from the artist
Thomas Eller
THE white male complex, #5 [lost]
2014, HD Video with sound, 11’25”
Theo Eshetu
Festival of Sacrifice
2012, HD Video with sound, 18’
Amir Fattal
ATARA
2019, HD Video with sound (single-channel version of 2-channel installation), 15’20”
Christian Jankowski
Traveling Artist
2018, Video Performance, Japanese with English subtitles, 15’47”
Traveling Artist
2018, HD Video, 7’9″ on loop
Ola Kolehmainen
Sultan Ahmet 1616 IV
2014/18, Photographic print on paper, 23 x 33 cm
David Krippendorff
Nothing Escapes My Eyes
2015, HD Video, 14’9”
Milovan Destil Marković
Messenger Irma / Messenger Dora / Messenger Megi /
Messenger Maria / Messenger Mangkhut [Barcode: Commodity Dream]
2021, 5 framed prints, ink print on paper, each 29 cm x 42 cm (31 x 44 cm with frame)
Almagul Menlibayeva
Transoxiana Dreams
2011, HD Video, Kazakh with English subtitles, 23′
Gulnur Mukazhanova
Iron Woman
2010, Installation: nails, screws, metal wire, chain, 40 x 30 x 5 cm
Kirsten Palz
Songbook/ Nunca más la guerra, un lamento. Edition.
2023, Ink on paper, A4, edition of 20
Nina E. Schönefeld
B. T. R. [BORN TO RUN]
2020, HD Video with sound, 20’3”
W H Y D O W E K I L L
2022, HD Video with sound (single-channel version of 3-channel video installation), 6’39”, on loan from the artist
Caroline Shepard
Don’t Tread On Me
2022, Photographic print on vinyl, 230 x 230 cm
David Szauder
Light Space Materia
2020, HD Video, Digital Animation, 8’27”
Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM
2020, HD Video, 2’20”
Vadim Zakharov
BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About
2021, Video Performance, HD with sound, 4’20”
(edited for exhibition from original 65 min. performance)
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You Know That You Are Human
@ POINTS of RESISTANCE V
OPENING: 3 December 2022 at 1 pm – 6 pm
3 pm / Welcome Speeches:
Representatives from the Embassy of Ukraine and Goethe-Institut
Curators: Kateryna Filyuk, Constanze Kleiner, Rachel Rits-Volloch, Stephan von Wiese
Representatives from the Association of Friends of the Zionskirche & Zionskirche Congregation
FINISSAGE: 8 January 2023 at 12 – 6 pm
EXHIBITION:
4 December 2022 – 7 January 2023
At Zionskirche,
Zionskirchplatz, 10119 Berlin Mitte
Opening Hours:
Monday – Friday / 2 – 6 pm
Saturday & Sunday / 12 – 6 pm
Guided Tours by appointment / contact:
ck@kleinervonwiese.com
Watch the 3D exhibition tour here:
Featuring:
[Click on the name of each artist to see the bio and the work description below]
You Know that You are Human
Points of Resistance V
Organized by:
IZOLYATSIA, KLEINERVONWIESE, MOMENTUM
Curated by:
Kateryna Filyuk, Constanze Kleiner, Rachel Rits-Volloch, Stephan von Wiese
Supported by:
Ukrainian Institute, Goethe-Institut as well as Goethe-Institut in Exile
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READ HERE THE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
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Watch the exhibition trailer here:
The exhibition “You Know That You Are Human @ POINTS of RESISTANCE V” in Berlin’s Zionskirche is a joint statement by 55 artists and 4 curators from Ukraine and Berlin for peace and an alliance of all people who condemn Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine as an attack on culture.
The origin of the joint exhibition is the show of Ukrainian photography “You Know That You Are Human” curated by Kateryna Filyuk – the winner of the international exhibition support program “Visualise” of the Ukrainian Institute, supported by the Goethe-Institut and the Goethe-Institut in Exile. This joint exhibition at Christmas-time is a co-production of IZOLYATSIA / Ukraine as well as MOMENTUM and POINTS of RESISTANCE / Berlin.
Taking place during the Christmas season, this exhibition is a wake-up call aiming to remind us all of our civic duty for resistance in the face of ongoing injustice; to remind us that each individual, by means of their daily choices and actions, can have an impact in the hope that this war in Europe ends rather than escalates, that the freedom and independence of Ukraine is secured, that the destruction is repaired, and that Putin and his fellow aggressors would be convicted in an international court.
Amidst the tragic return of war to Europe, the joint exhibition in Berlin’s Zionskirche assembles the collective voices of international artists to address our common humanity. “You Know That You Are Human” is both the title of this exhibition and a guiding principle that we must never forget that inhumanity can only end in tragedy.
Taking place in the protective space of a church, “You Know That You Are Human @ POINTS of RESISTANCE V” invokes the remarkable history of the Zionskirche as a crucial point of resistance both against the Nazis and during the GDR – from the courageous anti-fascist work of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to serving as a refuge for resistance movements against the GDR, such as the “Environmental Library”. Acting as a safe haven – irrespective of one’s creed, denomination, or belief system – the Zionskirche exemplifies how religion and art have a common root in human spirituality.
For this reason, and because especially in times like these, art and culture are crucial in mobilizing the forces that are needed to put a stop to ignorance and indifference, the Zionskirche is the home of the “POINTS of RESISTANCE” exhibition series. Initiated by KLEINERVONWIESE and MOMENTUM in cooperation with the association of friends of the Zionskirche, during the strictest Corona lockdown in 2021, “POINTS of RESISTANCE” serves as a platform giving voice to humanist viewpoints necessary at a time when authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, and war are steadily resurgent around the world. The previous editions of this exhibition series, all taking place at the Zionskirche, were entitled “POINTS of RESISTANCE”, “S-O-S”, “Paradoxes of Freedom”, “Großer Lastenbär / Why I Bear”, and “Skills for Peace”.
“You Know That You Are Human” began as an exhibition of 23 Ukrainian photographers, curated by Kateryna Filyuk, depicting human likeness in a diversity of forms and addressing the role which gender, occupation, geography and heritage play in defining the human position in the world. The conceptual framework of this project was set forward before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sought to present a panorama of Ukrainian photography from mid-twentieth century until nowadays, with the focus on the human form and being. The title of the show is borrowed from a famous poem by one of the brightest Ukrainian poets of the sixties, Vasyl Symonenko, “Ти знаєш, щоти– людина/ You Know that You are a Human”. Part of the official school curriculum in Ukraine, the poem praises life and the uniqueness of each person, urging everyone to cherish each single moment. Today – during Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine – these simple but powerful verses call for humanity, solidarity and cohesion with particular urgency. They remind us once again that despite the elusive monstrosity of war, every life counts. The works of the Ukrainian photographers also provide a crucial insight into the changes that have taken place in Ukrainian society since the 1960s, from the years when the dream of socialism gradually proved to be a failure until the last few months of the self-sacrificing struggle of the Ukrainians for their country.
The joint exhibition “You Know That You Are Human @ POINTS of RESISTANCE V” expands upon this initial concept by assembling a diversity of artistic voices to establish a direct dialogue between these Ukrainian photographers and works in a variety of media by international artists who live and work in Berlin, as well as works by young Ukrainian artists from the “UCC / Ukrainian Cultural Community” in Berlin. These artists were able to flee the war in Ukraine and have found refuge in the “UCC” – an Artist Residency program created through the exemplary social commitment from Berlin based entrepreneurs and art managers, to give young Ukrainian artists and creatives a safe base and new perspectives during this time of war.
In line with the mission of every exhibition in the “POINTS of RESISTANCE” series, “You Know That You Are Human @ POINTS of RESISTANCE V” brings together a multitude of human perspectives and artistic universes to reflect on the mistakes of the past and present in order to preserve the values which enable us to forge unity from diversity, and to live together in peace in the future. These are the values which make us human – values that people today regard as basic human rights, for which past generations have repeatedly made great sacrifices.
The exhibition will take place from 3 December 2022 to 7 January 2023 in the Zionskirche, Berlin. “You Know That You Are Human @ POINTS of RESISTANCE V” is a refusal of powerlessness; a call to resistance. We can all do something, even if only by not looking the other way, by helping those who have lost everything, by standing up every day against forgetting and against indifference.
Watch the video tour here:
Sponsored by:
AusserGewöhnlich Berlin Foundation, Bernd Heuer Karriere GmbH & Co.KG, Luther Rechtsanwaltsgesellschaft mbH, NAWROCKI ALPIN GmbH
Additional Thanks to:
Berlin Art Link, Förderverein Zionskirche e.V. & Ev. Kirchgemeinde am Weinberg Berlin-Mitte, Gilla Lörcher Gallery, Grynyov Art Collection, Happy Immo Club, Iryna Pap Estate, Kryvorivnia Village Community, Mann Bau GmbH, Markus Deschler Gallery, MOKSOP, Tetyana Pavlova, Kateryna Radchenko, SCOPE BLN gUG, Yaroslav Solop, Stedley Art Foundation, Transiträume e.V., UCC Ukrainian Cultural Community, WeiberWirtschaft e.V., Werner Tammen Gallery
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ARTIST SPOTLIGHTS
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ART from ELSEWHERE:
Danube Dialogues
Selected Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection
19 August – 15 September 2022
Presented at the
Danube Dialogues Contemporary Art Festival
In the historic Karlovci Gymnasium, Sremski Karlovci, Serbia
for the European Capital of Culture 2022 Novi Sad
Featuring:
Marina Belikova // Claudia Chaseling // Nezaket Ekici // David Krippendorff // David Szauder // Mariana Vassileva // Vadim Zakharov
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
Presented in Parallel to:
Danube Dialogues – Off-Centre
Inna Artemova // Claudia Chaseling // Milovan Destil Marković
ART from ELSEWHERE: Danube Dialogues presents a selection of video artworks by seven artists from the MOMENTUM Collection, Berlin, who come from the Danube regions of Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria. MOMENTUM’s program is presented for the European Capital of Culture 2022 Novi Sad, in the Danube Dialogues Festival in Sremski Karlovci, Serbia, and is shown in parallel to the exhibition “Danube Dialogues – Off-Centre”, featuring Milovan Destil Marković, Claudia Chaseling, and Inna Artemova – three of the artists from the MOMENTUM Collection.
ART from ELSEWHERE is a series of travelling exhibitions, taking a new site-specific form in each edition and location, showcasing works and artists from the MOMENTUM Collection, Berlin.
Today most of us live lives of perpetual motion from one piece of information to the next, from one opportunity to the next, and – until COVID-19 stopped us in our tracks – from one place to the next. Mobility – both geographical and social – not so long ago the privilege of the few, is now taken for granted as the entitlement of the majority. Artists are at the forefront of this peripatetic existence, travelling the world for inspiration, exhibitions, and artist residencies, experiencing new places and cultures through the critical lens of the outsider, and then reflecting back upon their own locales through the prism of their expanded world views.
ART from ELSEWHERE: Danube Dialogues is a program of video artworks by artists based in Berlin, and as diverse as Berlin itself. Presenting artists from Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Russia, and Turkey – they are all also Berliners. At the geographical center of Europe, Berlin is a city of mobile people and moving images, where art and artists alike are predominantly from elsewhere. “ART from ELSEWHERE: Danube Dialogues” is a video program about otherness; about communication and its opposite; about the ways in which we see the world and interact with it. Moving images move us, and artworks serve as windows onto the world. As we emerge after periods of isolation, and learn how to negotiate the new realities of a post-pandemic world, it becomes more important than ever to have such windows through which to gaze. In these uncertain times, they remind us that, for all our differences, we are all in this together. The works shown in this program focus on global issues, equally relevant to us all, no matter where we live or where we have come from. They reflect on the social and environmental repercussions of globalization and its impact on the transformation of cultural identities; they interrogate issues of identity, inequality, and poverty; they scrutinize the environmental traumas we inflict on our planet and its creatures; and they ponder the (un)quiet poetry, conflicts, and beauty of how we must live from day to day.
Learn more about the MOMENTUM Collection > >
FEATURING
(Click on the artist name to see the bio and the work description below)
Inna Artemova
Utopia V (2017), Oil on Canvas, 155 x 160 cm (on loan from the artist)
Artemova’s paintings, as well as her wall installations escaping the boundaries of the 2-dimensional, embody Artemova’s focus on architectures of utopia. Yet while the idea of utopia is the dream of a perfect society, these works evoke a sense of impending cataclysm, as yet quite far removed from an idealized state of perfection. Seeming to capture the aftermath of some volatile force, this exploded and explosive installation sends a suitably ambiguous message about the future and the present. The sense of velocity in Artemova’s works gives her floating structures a futuristic speed, propelling them – as the titles of her Utopia series suggests – into a more perfect future. Contriving to comingle a notion of existential threat with the sense of the sublime, these works can be seen as a portrait of our precarious times. Having witnessed first-hand the collapse of the Communist utopia in her native Soviet Union, Artemova’s utopias are fragile constructivist visions in a state of constant flux; exploding, imploding, teetering on the edge of a perilous balance, or perhaps already being rebuilt. Every collapse presents the hope of a new beginning; a renewed dream of an ideal future. Utopias are too often built on the ashes of their opposites.
Utopia H 2836 (2021), ink, marker, paper on cardboard, approx. 30 x 84 cm (on loan from the artist)
Inna Artemova (b. Moscow, USSR. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Born in Moscow, Inna Artemova studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI). For her diploma project, she received the 2nd prize of the Russian Federation. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and started to focus on her work as an artist in the field of painting and drawing. Artemova’s practice remains heavily influenced by her professors at the MArchI in Moscow, the “Paper Architects“, a movement originating in the 1980s that developed futuristic architectural creations never intended to be realized. The visionary projects of the Paper Architects and her experience of the failure of the Communist utopia with the fall of the Soviet Union, has led Artemova to explore, through her constructivist painting style, the ideas of architectural utopias from the 1960s up to her own futuristic visions. In creating utopian landscapes and spaces, Artemova interrogates the future of living spaces and their impact upon human relationships. The concept of utopia stands for a space of possibility in human consciousness in which the crucial questions have to be answered again and again: Is there no alternative to the reality in which we live? What will we do in the future? Do we have to fail because of our ideal ideas? Artemova’s work is included in the major survey exhibition and publication “DISSONANCE. Platform Germany” (2022) edited by Mark Gisbourne & Christoph Tannert. Her work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, biennales, and collections.
Marina Belikova
BALAGAN!!! (2015), video animation with sound, 1 min. 47 sec. (courtesy of MOMENTUM Collection)
In Russia balagan is a popular exclamation that describes, with celebratory gusto, a farce, a fine mess, the most unholy of cock-ups. BALAGAN!!! is also a major international exhibition produced by MOMENTUM in 2015 of contemporary art from the former USSR and Eastern Bloc that reveals a world where chaos and misrule, along with the social comedy that results from it, are celebrated and scathingly exposed. Balagan originally meant ‘fairground’. By the 18th century it had become associated with the activities of the people who worked in them: puppeteers, clowns and jesters, who made fun of and satirised established order. And, from the beginning, artists have realised the potential of balagan as an effective framework for revealing the truth. Today, the revolutionary politics of laughter, as well as the cathartic release it promises, are engendered by a sense of outrage at cruelty, inhumanity and the abuse of human rights. But balagan is not only modern: ever since time began, chaos has been ever-present. The exhibition BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places is about how some artists choose to depict the chaos of our times critically, challenging its power through humour, parody and the power of art itself. For this exhibition, the curator David Elliott wrote his own unique description of BALAGAN, which Jonathan Barnbrook designed, and Marina Belikova visualized as an animated film. We reprise BALAGAN!!! for Birds & Bicycles, as it remains equally relevant to our world today, still afflicted by chaos and misrule, and now also a global pandemic to contend with. Perhaps the power of humour, parody, and art itself lies in its ability to lift us out of the darkness and, soaring above it, develop new perspectives and better hopes.
David Elliott (text) & Jonathan Barnbrook (graphics), BALAGAN!!! (2015)
Marina Belikova (b. 1989 in Moscow, Russia. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Marina Belikova is a Berlin based media artist, working with photography, graphic design and 2D animation. She has a background in web and media design. In 2012-2013 she completed an M.A. in Communication Design at Kingston University, London and in 2016 she graduated from the Bauhaus University, Weimar with an M.A. in Media Art and Design, specializing in oil-on-glass animation techniques. Belikova animates her narratives through the traditional technique, where each frame is painted individually and subsequently captured with a camera as stop motion animation. She also works with photography and mixed media, exploring the topics of human memories and interaction between people and urban spaces. Her award-winning animations have been screened at numerous film festivals in more than 10 countries, and her photo series have received the Bauhaus Essentials Prize and have been shown in various international exhibitions.
Claudia Chaseling
On The Edge (2005), Egg Tempera & Oil on Canvas, 180 x 540 cm, (on loan from the artist)
Murphy the Mutant (2013), HD Video with Sound, 14 min. (courtesy of MOMENTUM Collection)
Splashes of bright colors in biomorphic forms. Shapes and hues redolent of crackling, explosive energy. Claudia Chaseling’s work confronts viewers with a psychotropic saturation of visual information interlaced with text and the URLs of source materials for her research. What seems initially to be pure abstraction, is in fact a complex visual analysis of the radioactive contamination caused by depleted uranium munitions.
Murphy the Mutant is Chaseling’s fist graphic novel of watercolors animated through video and read out loud by the artist. This seminal work marks the starting point of Chaseling’s enduring focus upon the nuclear chain leading to depleted uranium and its toxic aftermath, which forms the subject of her body of work over the past decade. By means of it’s deceptively naïve drawings, akin to a children’s book, the story of Murphy the Mutant transposes into a paradoxically sweet atomic allegory, the horrific aftermath of the way we wage war in the modern world – namely, the enduring environmental devastation of nuclear waste and munitions. Set in a fictional future, the story refers to what is happening in our world right now. Murphy the Mutant is an imaginary creature deformed by the all too harsh reality of the atomic waste used by armies throughout the world to fight their wars.
The irreversible radioactive pollution caused by depleted uranium weapons has been proven through international scientific research, much if which Chaseling cites within her work. This ammunition was first used by the USA in the Gulf war in 1991 and later in Afghanistan, Iraq, former Yugoslavia, Gaza and other countries. The use of these armaments leads to severe deformations, cancer, and death and continues to do so a long time after the wars are over; the radioactive particles have a half-life of 4.5 billion years. When ingested or inhaled these particles change DNA, and in this way remain to affect populations for generations. The USA, France, Israel and the UK are still using these weapons, and repeatedly voted against resolutions on behalf of the UN General Assembly that called for a moratorium and, ultimately, a ban of depleted uranium ammunition. Affected communities call its use a silent genocide.
Hadzici (2016), Aluminum, Egg Tempera & Oil on Canvas, 150 x 150 cm. (on loan from the artist)
Claudia Chaseling (b. 1973 in Munich, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Kangaroo Island, Australia)
Dr. Claudia Chaseling received a Masters degree in Visual Art, from the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK), and in 2019 Chaseling completed her studio-based PhD in visual arts, with a focus on spatial painting, at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Her work has been exhibited in over sixty solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, Australia and Europe. She has been featured in the X-Border Biennial, Finland; the Lueleå Biennial, Sweden; and the Lorne Biennial, Australia. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Art Gallery Nadezda Petrovic, Cacak, Serbia; Wollongong Art Gallery, Australia; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Krohne Art Collection, Eifel, Germany; Yuill Crowley Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Kunstverein Duisburg, Germany; Art-in-Buildings, New York City and Milwaukee, US; among others. Chaseling has taken part in international artist residency programs, including: Art Omi and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, USA; Texas A&M University, USA; and the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. The Verlag für zeitgenoessische Kunst und Theorie Berlin published her first extensive monograph in 2016. Her work is included in the major survey exhibition and publication “DISSONANCE. Platform Germany” (2022) edited by Mark Gisbourne & Christoph Tannert.
Nezaket Ekici
Kaffeeklatsch (2019), HD Video Performance with Sound, 6 min. 17 sec. (on loan from the artist)
In her video performance Kaffeeklatsch, Nezaket Ekici refers to the German afternoon ritual of ‘coffee and cake’, a time of meeting and togetherness for many German families. The history of coffee gossip is a long one. In Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, women began meeting for coffee gossip – “Kränzchen” – to exchange ideas among themselves, allowing them a taste of freedoms that up until then had been reserved for men in social circles. Nezaket Ekici addresses the tradition of the coffee klatsch from her perspective as a migrant and a fully integrated German, questioning her sense of belonging in German society. She asks herself what her own German tradition is – which leads to the general question of what actually is German tradition? In order to answer these questions, Ekici stages herself as three characters dressed in traditional German costumes from the Black Forest, the Spreewald, and Thuringia, representing the south, the north and the center of Germany. With the focus on the articulation, gestures, and facial expressions of the performer, Ekici drinks coffee with her doppelgangers in this playful video addressing the fine line between foreignness and belonging. Watching this work now – on the cusp of the third year of social distancing and intermittent lockdowns, when we have all spent far too much time in our own company – we come to see how very precious this simple freedom is, to gather together with one another.
Nezaket Ekici (b. 1970 in Kirsehir, Turkey. Lives and works in Berlin & Stuttgart, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey.)
Nezaket Ekici holds a degree in Fine Arts, an MA in Art Pedagogy, and an MFA degree, having studied Art History and Sculpture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Fine Arts Academy Munich (1994-2000). From 2001 to 2004 she studied Performance Art under Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. Ekici’s video, installations and performances are often process-based and ask viewers to derive their own emotional and intellectual interpretations. In her work, complex, often controversial topics are tackled with humor in highly aesthetic compostions. Ekici frequently uses her own Turkish origins and education as a subject of tension, pitting her background against her living environment in Germany. Cultural, geographic and individual boundaries, transgressions, gender, authorial bodies, art history, religion, culture and politics are central to Ekici’s works. By highlighting these themes in everyday life and placing them in a new context, she aims to interconnect every element to form a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk. Nezaket Ekici has presented more than 250 different performances in more than 170 cities in over 60 countries on 4 continents.
Selected international exhibitions since 2000 include: Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich; The Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; 25. May Museum Belgrade; PAC Milano; Venice Biennale; P.S.1 New York; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei/ Taiwan; Poznan Biennale; Curiciba Biennale; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Istanbul Modern; Marta Herford; Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; KunstWerke Berlin; Oslo Museum; The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Total Museum Seoul, and many more. Ekici was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cultural Academy Tarabya, Istanbul (2013-14), was the recipient of the Rome Prize for an Artist Residency at the German Academy, Villa Massimo, Rome (in 2016-17); and participated in the Schlingensief Opera Village Residency in Burkina Faso, Africa (2021). She received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Award (2018), and received the Berlin Culur Senate prize for her Artist Residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York (2020).
David Krippendorff
David Krippendorff, Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015), HD Video with Sound, 14 min. 9 sec. (courtesy of MOMENTUM Collection)
Nothing Escapes My Eyes takes us on an intimate journey through identity and history. David Krippendorff’s time-warping tribute to a changing world presents a would-be Aida, to a moving soundtrack from the eponymous opera, shedding tears for a place and time which no longer exist.
“Nothing Escapes My Eyes is about a silent transformation of a place and a human being, both subjected to the melancholy of conforming. The film was inspired by the famous opera Aida, to depict in a metaphoric form current issues of cultural identity, loss and the pressures to conform. The film refers to the following historical event related to this opera: Aida premiered in Cairo in 1871 at the Khedivial Opera House. One hundred years later the building was completely destroyed by fire and replaced by a multi-story parking garage. Nevertheless, to this day, the place is still named Opera Square: Meidan El Opera. The film combines this urban alteration with the painful transformation of a woman (actress Hiam Abbass) in the process of shedding one identity for another. With no dialogue, the film is backed by a musical excerpt from Verdi’s opera Aida, whose lyrics express the difficulties of being loyal to one’s country and cultural identity. The personal and urban transformation tackles issues of identity, loss and disorientation as a result of historical colonialism and contemporary globalization.”
[David Krippendorff]
David Krippendoff (b. 1967 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin)
David Krippendorff is a US/German interdisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker. He grew up in Rome, Italy, and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, where he graduated with a Masters degree in 1997, and was subsequently based in New York for some time. The son of a Holocaust survivor and the grandchild of practicing Nazis, cultural contradiction and dislocation shaped Krippendorff’s experience early on. His artistic practice inquires into this state of being a “permanent foreigner” and explores resulting questions of home, national and cultural identity, and belonging. Krippendorff’s works, films and videos have been shown internationally, including at: the New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, and Belgrade), as well as in many international art and film festivals worldwide.
Milovan Destil Markovic
It Really Did Fill My Mouth (Morning) (2013), Pigments on Canvas, 186 x 250 cm (on loan from the artist)
Missionary Position (2009), Pigments on Canvas, 186 x 250 cm (on loan from the artist)
It Really Did Fill My Mouth (Evening) (2013), Pigments on Canvas, 186 x 250 cm (on loan from the artist)
Milovan Destil Marković’s series of Transfigurative Paintings are the result of intensive research and the attempt to develop and expand the idea of the portrait. In his ongoing series of Barcode Paintings, Marković uses barcodes to signify written words through colourful, bright stripes on his canvases. Every text can be translated into a barcode that is the product of a systematic process of codification, at the end of which only a rhythmic series of vertical lines remains. This abstraction allows for an international rationalized system of merchandise management, the organisation and distribution of commodities. In Marković’s work, there is a tension between the image as an abstract painting and the barcode as algorithmic script. The content of each image is revealed through the title of the painting.
The titles of the three bar code paintings shown here are quotations from the infamous memoir “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.”, the autobiography of Catherine Millet (renowned French writer, art critic, curator, and founder and editor of the magazine Art Press).
Marković’s works contain short text quotations from pornographic literature, politics and banking; representations of the world of power and oppression. His barcode paintings veil their content behind a normalised form; at once the language of commerce, and a kind of digital calligraphy. They can be understood either as an impish joke on the part of the artist, or as a critique of the opaque structures of markets that mask their global deficiencies and injustices. As a sly comment on the possibility of art as commodity, printed on the side of each painting is a barcode: the normal-sized, black and white version of the content of each barcode painting.
Milovan Destil Marković (b. in 1957 in Čačak, Serbia. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Milovan Destil Marković is a visual artist who studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Arts, Belgrade, where he graduated in 1983. Defining himself as a conceptual painter, Marković has exhibited extensively in Europe, Asia, Australia and in the Americas. His work was featured at 42nd Venice Biennial (Aperto ’86), 4th Istanbul Biennial, 46th Venice Biennial, 6th Triennial India New Delhi, 56th 49th 24th October Salon Belgrade Biennale, 2018 Lorne Sculpture Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Kumamoto, MoMA PS1 New York, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Saarland Museum Saarbrücken, The Artist’s Museum Lodz, National Museum Prague, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, MSURS Museum of Contemporary Art Banja Luka, Landesmuseum Graz, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, National Gallery Athens, Art Museum Foundation Military Museum Istanbul, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Kunstverein Hamburg, Kunstvoreningen Bergen, Kunstverein Jena, Galleri F15 Oslo, Nishido Contemporary Art Tokyo, Fei Contemporary Art Center Shanghai, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana and many others. Marković’s works are held by numerous public and private collections throughout the world, including: Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany; Museum of the City of Belgrade, Serbia; Istanbul Art Museum Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany; Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria; The Artists’ Museum, Lodz, Poland; amongst others.
David Szauder
David Szauder, Parallel Universes (2021), 4 Digital Animation Loops, with Original Sound
I. The Dream of the Statue (Budapest) 1971-2021, 1’20”
II. Changing of the Guard (Berlin, DDR) 1972-2021, 1’14”
III. Busó (Mohács, Hungary) 1967-2021, 1’09”
IV. Parallel Dimension (Budapest, Prague, Balaton) 1967-2021, 1’10”
In this series of work, Hungarian media artist David Szauder re-animates original Super 8 footage shot by his grandfather in the 1960-80’s. Superimposing his own somewhat surrealistic universe onto the historic footage, Szauder conveys the sense of a world perpetually going slightly mad. And perhaps it is. In the state of our world today, where nationalism, political tensions, and the closing of borders are on the rise, it would indeed be mad not to look back upon the lessons of history. The artist’s grandfather developed his passion as an amateur filmmaker with the purchase of his first 8mm camera in the 1960s. Through its lens, he recorded glimpses of the world he was allowed to see, travelling as much as he was permitted within the political constraints and physical borders of the Eastern Bloc. Upon his grandfather’s death, David Szauder inherited a time-machine – a collection of over 1000 rolls of film archiving the world as his grandfather saw it. This footage forms the basis for much of Szauder’s recent work, exploring memory in the light of personal and collective history.
The Dream of the Statue (Budapest) 1971-2021
For the past seven decades, the most distinctive feature of the Budapest skyline standing tall above Gellért Hill is the Liberation Monument, a Soviet-built metal statue looking eastward as a tribute to the Red Army’s triumph over Hungary’s Nazi occupiers during World War II. Because of this politically fraught past, several movements attempted to remove this feminine figure over the years, but it has persevered to become an iconic symbol of Hungary’s capital.
Changing of the Guard (Berlin, DDR) 1972-2021
These guards protected the eternal flame in Berlin’s Neue Wache, the Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny on Unter den Linden, between 1969 and 1989. Yet in Szauder’s universe, they’ve changed their position and are now protecting the Tesla Model S. The world has found its new eternal flame, updated for our aspirational economy of luxury in a form impossible to imagine at the time the original footage was shot.
Busó (Mohács, Hungary) 1967-2021
The Hungarian folk tradition of the Busó festival, shot in the 1960’s by the artist’s grandfather, remains largely unchanged to this day. Marking the end of the annual Carnival season, this procession of terrifying costumed monsters was immensely popular during the Communist regime, supported by the government as a safe non-political form of entertainment. Yet the enduring popularity of Busó today is derived from its appropriation by an opposing force. With a government leaning further and further to the right, the folklore and cultural traditions of Hungary are being today deployed to celebrate nationalist ideals and values.
Parallel Dimension (Budapest, Prague, Balaton) 1967-2021
The 1st of May was celebrated as a holiday for workers in every socialist country, with parades of labourers from factories and communes, pioneers and party members. Szauder comingles footage from various May Day celebrations in Hungary and what was then Czechoslovakia with his whimsical animations in a game between visible and invisible – much like the political subtexts of these enforced displays of ideology.
Light Space Materia (2020), HD Video & Digital Animation with Original Sound, 8 min. 27 sec. (courtesy of MOMENTUM Collection)
David Szauder’s film Light Space Materia (2020) translates Bauhaus ideas on technology, new materials, and light into a digital context, upgrading an iconic work of the 1930’s into a 3D digital animation and algorithmically derived soundscape. Taking as his inspiration the kinetic light and sound sculpture Light Space Modulator (1930) by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder re-created his own large-scale rendition of this iconic work – Light Space Modulator (2020). Szauder subsequently used this installation as the basis upon which to make a series of over 100 videos, digital animations, and soundscapes. David Szauder recontextualizes into digital media the driving principal of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s aim to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world. Szauder’s analysis of the Bauhaus-related kinetics of the original piece focuses on the fundamental question of how contemporary technology could change the formal expression of movement and capture the physicality of materials in a digital context. The Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology. For this reason, this characteristic always formed an essential basic notion of Szauder’s work, and led him to use computer code when creating his animations. The code contributed to a better understanding of the compositional methods and movements and opened a new door for the perception of the 3-dimensional kinetic world. As the last step, a soundscape was derived from the ambient sound and kinetic movement of Szauder’s Light Space Modulator sculpture using algorithms based on motion analysis. This soundscape accompanies Szauder’s film Light Space Materia, which commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of the materiality of the image.
David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Media artist and curator David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Buildingscape, an initiative to turn construction sites into venues for public art. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.
David Szauder has participated in numerous international projects as artist and curator. Projects in cooperation with MOMENTUM include: “MOMENTUM InsideOut: Lockdown Schmockdown” at CHB Collegium Hungaricum (Berlin, 2021); “Light Space Modulator” at MOMENTUM (Berlin, 2020); “Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014); “INTERSECTION”: Film and Video Art Panel Discussion for Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival, 2014); “THRESHOLDS”: Performance, Exhibition, Discussion (.CHB, Berlin Art Week, 2013); “THRESHOLDS” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013-2014); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “Mass & Mess” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013).
Mariana Vassileva
Lighthouse (2009), HD Video with Sound, 4 min. 30 sec. (on loan from the artist)
Toro (2008), HD Video with Sound, 5 min. (on loan from the artist)
Marianna Vassileva’s video, Lighthouse, opens with a man driving out to the sea. Confronted by the immensity of the ocean and its implacable rhythms, he conducts nature’s symphony – the winds and the waves. While in Vassileva’s film, Toro, the same man once more confronts the sea. This time, he fights against the waves, challenging them much as a toreador waves his cape at a charging bull. This simple gesture is both as futile and as eloquent as Don Quixote tilting against windmills. Both films together paint a poetic allegory of mankind’s relation nature. Confronted by our helplessness in the face of the elements, we try to control them, to bend them to our will.
Mariana Vassileva (b. 1964 in Bulgaria. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Mariana Vassileva graduated from the Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2000, and has remained in Berlin since that time. Working across varied mediums such as video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Vassileva’s practice is concerned with the poetry that lies beneath the quotidian and the routine. Based upon observation of daily life, her works respond to an element of playfulness inherent in artist and viewer alike. With the curious gaze of a voyeur or of an urban anthropologist, the artist observes people and their surroundings in order to capture a moment of poetic imagery. Watching, and the distance it implies, are both method and subject of a body of work reflecting on human concerns familiar to us all: communication, cultural displacement, relations with self and other, loneliness and the humor hidden within the rhythms of the day-to-day.
Mariana Vassileva is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, having shown in major institutions including: Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Tate Britain (UK); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany); Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst (Germany); Kunsthalle zu Kiel (Germany); Edition Block (Berlin, Germany); The Stenersen Museum (Oslo,Norway); Total Museum (Seoul, Korea); Hong Kong Arts Centre (Hong Kong).
Mariana Vassileva has participated in several international Biennials, including: the 1st Biennal del Fin del Mundo, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, (Argentina, 2007); the 17th Biennale of Sydney, The Beauty and the Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, (Australia, 2010); the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Rewriting Worlds, (Russia, 2011); Biennale Vento Sul in Curitiba, (Brasil, 2012); the 56th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale, The Pleasure of Love, (Serbia, 2016).
Vassileva’s works are held in international public collections, including: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany); Rene Block Collection (Berlin, Germany); Koc Museum (Istanbul, Turkey); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel); La Caixa, Caja de Ahorros de El Monte y Fundacion el Monte (Spain); Lemaitre Collection (London-Paris); Kunsthalle Emden (Germany); Lidice Memorial.
Vadim Zakharov
Vadim Zakharov, BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About (2021), HD Video Performance with Sound, 4 min. 20 sec. (courtesy of MOMENTUM Collection)
Vadim Zakharov’s most recent video work presents an all too fitting commentary on our current state of affairs where politicians spout nonsense at one another while remaining unable to stop the atrocities of war. BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About invokes the talking heads we see on news programs every day, recounting an equally incomprehensible reality which would be surreal were it not so tragic.
“In the video performance, non-verbal words are read aloud, most of which have been found in the magazines “Mickey Mouse” (German editions) and also taken from the books “Tintin The Mysterious Star” and “Asterix & Obelix The Laurels of Caesar”. The words collected in the non-verbal vocabulary have no meaning, but only phonetically reflect certain events:
someone has fainted (BLIEP!), a glass has broken (CRACK! CLIRR!), a helicopter has crashed into a cupola (KAROMMS!), a museum has collapsed (CRACK! THUNDER! CRIME!).
The Reader (Vadim Zakharov), wearing a white shirt and a tie, recites these words seriously and forcefully. The image of a politician is created, a public figure who professionally and convincingly is ready to say something on any occasion. At the same time, we see that these are just empty words – bubbles that float away as soon as they reach our ears. The film highlights the absurdity of what we see and hear every day on television and the internet.
At the same time, reading non-verbal words can be perceived as reading poetry…”
[Vadim Zakharov]
Vadim Zakharov (b. 1959 in Dushanbe, UdSSR (now Tajikistan). Lives and works in Berlin.)
Vadim Zakharov is an artist, editor, archivist of the Moscow Conceptual art scene, and collector. Since 1979 he has participated in exhibitions of unofficial art and collaborated with such artists as: V. Skersis, S. Anufriev, I. Chuikov, A. Monastyrski, Y. Leiderman. In 1982–1983 he participated in the AptArt Gallery, Moscow. Since 1992 till 2001 he has published the “Pastor” magazine and founded the Pastor Zond Edition. In 2006 he edited book “Moscow Conceptualism”. His retrospective was held at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2006. He represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with the project “DANAE”. In 2016-2020 Zakharov organized the exhibition space “FREEHOME-Artist to Artist” in Berlin.
Selected honors and awards include: Griffelkunst-Preis, Hamburg (1995); Renta-Preis, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1995); Soratnik Prize, Moscow (2006); Innovation Prize, Moscow (2006); Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, American Academy in Rome (2007); Kandinsky Prize – Best Work of Year, Moscow (2009).
In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions, Vadim Zakharov has participated in many biennales of contemporary art, including: the 49th Venice Biennale, “Plateau of Humankind”, (Director Harald Szeemann, Arsenale, 2001); 1st Thessaloniki Biennale, “Black Birds” installation (Museum of Byzantine Culture, 2007 ); 55th Venice Biennale, Vadim Zakharov, “Danaë”, Russian Pavilion (2013); 5th Moscow Biennale, Vadim Zakharov, “Dead Languages Dance. Fall collection”, (TSUM, 2013); “2014. Space Odyssey”, CAFAM BIENNALE, Beijing (2014); 3rd Biennale of Bahia, Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (2014); 14 Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale, Russia (2021).
Vadim Zakharov’s works are held in many prestigious public collections, including: Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; TATE Modern, London, UK; Modern Art Museum, Frankfurt, DE; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main, DE; Kupferstienkabinet, Berlin, DE; Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Budapest; Saint Petersburg, RU; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers USA; Museum of Art at Duke University, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, HU; Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, DE; Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, RU; Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, RU; Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, RU; Moscow Collections of the NCCA, Moscow, RU
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STUDIO RESIDENCY
Mahsa Foroughi
Website – CV
15 June – 15 November 2022
ARTIST BIO:
Mahsa Foroughi is a published Persian poet, filmmaker, critic and architect. She was awarded her PhD for interdisciplinary research on architecture, film and philosophy that questioned the status quo of humans’ perception. As an academic, she has been teaching architecture history and theory at UNSW since 2018. Mahsa is one of the authors of The Theatre Times, a non-partisan, global theatre portal. Mahsa has recently been offered an artist residency in Berlin to develop and produce her docudrama A Poetic Suicide. She has also finished her first non-fiction book, Haptic Visuality in Arts. She previously engaged with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), National Art School (NAS) and Carriageworks as a literary curator’s assistant.
ARTIST RESIDENCY PROJECT:
A POETIC SUICIDE
For her Artist Residency project at MOMENTUM, Iranian filmmaker and poet Mahsa Foroughi undertakes research for the production of her new film, A Poetic Suicide. Set in three seminal cities spanning three continents – Tehran, Sydney, and Berlin – this work commingles the bitter truths of history and the poetic license of fiction to address individual and collective memory, trauma and healing, dream and reality. Based on a young poet’s life in post-revolutionary Iran, and then in Europe and Australia, A Poetic Suicide explores a young girl’s attempt to escape the trauma of persecution through an inner journey taking her to her most terrible memories and fears. The film traces the poet’s growth from a rebellious teenager in Iran to a desperate young woman in Australia, and onwards through her family connection to Berlin. Shot on location and also using found documentary footage, this film is designed as visual poetry comingling historical fact with fictional dreamscapes.
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/716457757 [/fve]
“What if I told you that instead of ordinary round neurons, the poet has a head filled with concrete cubes, each holds an embodied memory? What will become of people like her? The disillusioned poet and her cynical cameraman take us on a spiralling inner journey. A mysterious, baffled, and woeful voyage to the poet’s brain who tries to escape the trauma of persecution. She is no Don Quixote! Nor has she lost her mind! She simply desires to reveal the truth, the one that exists in the liminal space. The space we all experience inhabiting at least once in our life. Yet to reveal and revive such truth, we must hold on to poetry and swing between dream and reality, fact and fiction, verity and myth.”
– Mahsa Foroughi
WATCH HERE “A POETIC SUICIDE” READING PERFORMANCE >>
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Poetry, pain, and the memory of grandma’s cushion-cut agate ring
My dream of living a poet’s life has been significantly influenced by developing a cinematic perspective. As an immigrant from a non-English speaking background residing in Australia in my mid-twenties, I have found it challenging to communicate poetry through literary form in English. The task of translating poems from Persian to English does not do any justice to the inherent essence and highly stylised poetry forms I have been pursuing in Farsi. Yet cinema has provided a way for me to overcome this obstacle.
Cinema has always been my second – if not first – favourite art form besides poetry. The slow, meditative, minimalist cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, Be ́la Tarr, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Alexander Sokurov and Abbas Kiarostami has always been of inspiration; to observe how these filmmakers steer away from the plot to focus on poetic consciousness and life itself. In sharp contrast with mainstream commodified entertaining cinema, these filmmakers use poetic drives and slowness as instruments to explore everyday life, using high culture and literary exercise to convey the beauty of language while challenging our moral, ideological and existential conventions. Within this context, I set a goal to use cinema as a means to write a form of poetry that could illustrate a tranquil sense of slowness that in itself offers a much stronger message.
My interest in philosophy was another drive for creating a script that explores the question of personal memories versus history. If memories are experienced subjectively, and history is written objectively, what is time? Is it an objective, linear measure of our lifetime? If so, why have our memories always returned to us in a non-linear fashion? What is this unconventional juxtaposition of the past and the present? The French philosopher Henry Bergson postulates a theory that time is a duration that involves a subjective account of temporality. According to Christine Ross (2012, p. 23), time goes ‘beyond the measured task-oriented temporalities of daily life.’ Having criticised Immanuel Kant’s view of time as a priori form of sensibility, which exists external to our body, Bergson (1950, p. 232) argues that time is not a homogeneous medium but a pure duration, which ‘is made up of moments inside one another and is dependent on the individual experience.’
John E. Smith (1969, p. 1) explains that the questions relevant to time as a quantitative measure are ‘How fast?’, ‘How frequent?’ and ‘How old?’, whereas time as a qualitative sensation point to an experience that happens at a specific moment, that would not be possible at another time and under other conditions. My memories, their traumatic nature, and their recurrence in my present life led me to consider time as a durée that is inseparable to discrete moments, while constantly referring to the past that ‘incessantly prolongs itself into the present’ (Ross 2012, p. 23) so that the present is co- perceived with the past. When I started writing the script, I was in this headspace; to show the subjective ground of time or time that is experienced as a significant moment. I was not sure how to deliver such subjectivity. Still, somehow, unconsciously, I picked a form of docudrama, the documentary exploring objective chronological traces of historical events and the drama delving into the non-linear chaotic personal memories. In this comparative context, I realised that the subjective approach to time involves a qualitative character that could better be addressed through our haptic perception rather than our visual faculties. This meant a multi-sensory approach was crucial to my exploration of personal memories.
In its ancient Greek etymology, the term haptic (haptikós) means ‘able to come in contact with’, which derives from the verb haptō, which means ‘to touch’. Haptic perception is then a perception that, by drawing on all sensory experiences, equips us to grasp and touch an event, a story, and untouchable memory. These thoughts brought me to A Poetic Suicide, a film that I drafted and redrafted many times to further explore the nature of traumas. During my writing, I drew on the thematic, aesthetic and textural qualities in Tarkovsky’s movies, which offer representations that evoke senses other than vision by depicting alternative modes of knowing that prompt memory. However, my script differs from Tarkovsky’s cinematic style by employing a type of docudrama instead. I rely on documentary conventions to represent people’s struggles in Iran and other parts of the world—those historical moments that are otherwise repressed and erased from the official or popular memories.
On the other hand, I use drama to evoke a form of literary exercise and illuminate life’s sophistication and the complexity of pain. Through a voice-over recitation of various poems (each corresponding to the event explored in a particular scene), I bridge documentary and drama to put the audience on the edge of dream and reality, fact and fiction, truth and myth. The film I aim to make is an invitation to feel rather than follow, experience the imperfect world, perceive human pain and recognise that a wound is a wound: it hurts no matter our skin tone, place of birth, language, race or gender.
Writing Process
An inspiring in-class experience sparked this project’s beginning. We were asked to draw on a method of free-associative writing, which in essence means writing without thinking. This task is not the easiest since the unconscious goes to its darkest memories and digs out dirt and traumas that sometimes are not safe to explore without supervision. However, in this process, I touched on and brought to focus my deepest concerns in the most poetic form. The script begins by exploring my past
experiences in Iran and Germany, tracing the life of an immigrant poet who tries to escape the trauma of persecution for her political beliefs and sexual identity by travelling to what she hopes will be the freedom of the West, only to discover a brick wall of incomprehension that makes her feel even more alone than she was.
Having read Laura Marks’ book The Skin of Film over the past year, I believe that the condition of being in-between cultures lets intercultural filmmakers use sensations over visual glamours in the search for ways to represent embodied speculations and experiences of people living in the diaspora: ‘Intercultural cinema moves backward and forward in time, inventing histories and memories to posit an alternative to the overwhelming erasures, silences, and lies of official histories’ (Marks 2000, p. 151–152). The condition of living between two or more cultures, with the host culture as a dominant narrative, prevents intercultural filmmakers from representing their memories and experience in the dominant idiom1. Therefore, the use of silence and the omission of the visual image is a way for intercultural filmmakers to explore new forms of expression. And so it does for me; I wrote A Poetic Suicide during my life in Australia, feeling uneased here and there (in Iran), to find alternative modes of expressing my memories of pain and trauma. I am trying to avoid these official records of history (what the West wants to see from the East) to focus on the characters’ feelings or personal relationships to the past. Just as Tarkovsky directs us to imagine the faith of the character who is removed from his home, A Poetic Suicide draws on universal genocides to reveal the private and ordinary memories that are located in the gaps between the dominant narratives of history: the untruthful account that stays away from poetry, pain and the memory of grandma’s cushion-cut agate ring.
Work Cited
Bergson, H 1950 (1910), Time and free will: an essay on the immediate data of consciousness, trans. FL Pogson, George Allen & Unwin, New York.
Marks, LU 2000, The skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses, Duke University Press, Durham.
Ross, C 2012, The past is the present it’s the future too : the temporal turn in contemporary art, Continuum, New York.
Smith, JE 1969, ‘Time, times, and the ‘right time’; Chronos and Kairos’, The Monist, vol. 53, no. 1, p. 1–13.
Featuring:
(Click on thewilliam name to s ee the bio and the work description below)
Andreas Blank
Box with military boots
2010, Limestone, Serpentinite, 56 x 55 x 38,5 cm
Monument
2021, Marble, Basalt, Alabaster, Serpentinite, Bronze, 124 x 107 x 70 cm
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POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace presents three of Andreas Blank’s iconic works – a businessman’s white shirt carefully folded atop his briefcase, and military boots standing upright in their box, ready to wear. The juxtaposition of these two works is sadly emblematic of our times. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, war has tragically returned to Europe. In many Ukrainian cities, people are working from home or from bomb shelters, while offices are allocated to the streams of refugees fleeing from homes turned into battlegrounds. Those conscripted into the war on both sides, forced to fight for expansion or required to stay and defend their homeland, have replaced their business attire with combat boots, and their briefcases with guns. And with so many lost lives being mourned in Ukraine, Blank’s basalt shroud hanging on the wall is reminiscent of the mirrors draped over in black in the houses of the dead.
“To a certain extent, the work has an archaeological character: the contemporary world, here: German history, becomes petrified, it acquires timelessness. In this case, a real pair of leather military boots, with which Andreas Blank’s grandfather returned from the war and from captivity, was the template – the boots were stored in a box under the roof for decades. The box was then set in stone to form the inverted base. The pedestal is also a time depot at the same time. It is a real anti-war piece.”
– Stephan von Wiese
In his sculptural practice, Andreas Blank combines the abstract and the realistic, the conceptual as well as the technical. He sources stones from quarries from all over the world, carves them with elaborate deliberation, and assembles them as deceptively realistic objects of the everyday. In his precise installations, the apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. Whether marble, alabaster, or porphyry, material historically used to serve religious or political functions, has in Blank’s hands acquired a seemingly casual and fragmentary character. The geographical and cultural identity of the stone and the memorial function of stone-sculpture in general refer to the value of each object. Blank questions the obvious and transforms traditional ideals, subverting the value of the ordinary and mundane. In a discourse of image and likeness, things lose their functional purpose, transcending into pure, formalistic objects. Stone sculptures, which historically were intended primarily for political representation or religious devotion, in Andreas Blank’s works come to question a (post)modernist nihilism. His works succeed to condense time and narrative structures, stretching the limits of traditional sculpture.
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Andreas Blank (born in Ansbach in 1976) is a Berlin-based sculptor. He attended the Karlsruhe State Academy of Art (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and was a student of Prof. Harald Klingelhöller. He held a scholarship with the German National Academic Foundation and received his Master of Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2009 he was a finalist for the New Sensations Award by Channel 4 and the Saatchi Gallery. Among other venues, he has exhibited at Choi&Lager Galerie Köln (2021), Galerie Knecht und Burster, Karlsruhe (2019), Bernheimer Contemporary, Berlin (2016), Royal College of Art, London (2009).
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Jonas Burgert
Licht lügt / Light lies
2014, Oil on Canvas, 240 x 220 cm
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In the mystical, theatrical paintings of Jonas Burgert, the figures move in front of a membrane of cultural symbols and archaic patterns that seem to come down to us from another dimension.
Jonas Burgert personifies human psychology through figurative painting bordering on the grotesque. Astutely observing the minutiae of daily life, he bears witness to the entire range of human emotion. Loneliness, hatred, revenge, vanity and excess – a parade of human expressions feeds his imagination – giving form to the characters within his tableaux. There is a timeless sense of other dimensions and emotional undercurrents reflected in the ruptured layers of Burgert’s environments. Often breached by characters and architectural features, these tears in the pictorial plane reveal various levels existing simultaneously.
Burgert’s canvasses abound with rubble, detritus, remnants of history, cinders of the art of painting – the very cinders that serve to feed greed. However, they are of a fleeting nature. Their purpose is to devour the images and to unleash from the chaos the impulse and those emotions that linger in the memory.
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Jonas Burgert (born in Berlin in 1959) is a Berlin based contemporary artist. He has shown work in many exhibitions including Rohkunstbau at Stipendiaten in Berlin, Geschichtenerzähler at Hamburg Kunsthalle and Dis-Positiv at Staatsbank in Berlin. Burgert has exhibited internationally at museums and galleries such as Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Beirut and Villa Manin, Passariano, Italy and was part of the Malerei Biennale in Stockholm in 2003. He is represented by Produzentengalerie in Hamburg BlainSouthern in London and Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong. He has also exhibited in Seattle, Mumbai, London and Denver. From January to April 2017 he exhibited his first solo show “Lotsucht. Scandagliodipendenza in Italy, at MAMbo in Bologna.
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Tony Cragg
Karst
2020, Bronze Sculpture: 125 (h) x 136 x 96 cm, Pedestal: 40 (h) x 60 x 90 cm, Weight 500 kg
Courtesy of André Buchman, Buchmann Galerie
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Collecting, sorting, stacking, and layering material is a working process that Tony Cragg has repeatedly tested as a sculptural principle since the 1970s. The bronze Karst impressively demonstrates the progress of this principle. The sculpture is reminiscent of geological formations and seems to push against gravity with powerful force.
Tony Cragg stands out as one of the foremost sculptors of our time. His oeuvre testifies to a method of working in which he constantly negotiates with questions of the figural by revisiting and further developing sculptural solutions to representation. Duplication, nesting, and scaling are methods that Tony Cragg masterfully combines in ever-new ways. His work’s continuity and validity relate to the fundamental questions about the relationship between body, matter, object, and space, which the artist has been dealing with continuously for decades.
“In order to decide about the form and structure of many things we will need sculpture and sculptural thinking. I would like to apply sculptural thinking to biomechanics, to government institutions, to social structure etc.”
– Tony Cragg, 2006
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Tony Cragg (born in Liverpool in 1949) has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. He has a BA from Wimbledon School of Art, London, UK (1973) and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, UK (1977). Among many major solo shows he has exhibited at Houghton Hall, UK (2021); Museum Belvédere, Netherlands (2021); Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil (2020); Split Kula Cultural Institution, Croatia (2019); City of Arts and Sciences, Spain (2018); Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran (2018); Istanbul Modern, Turkey (2017); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017); the National Museum of Havana, Cuba (2017); MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2017); Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany (2017); Wroclaw Contemporary Art Museum, Wroclaw, Poland (2017); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (2016; Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2015); Gothenburg International Sculpture Exhibition, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015); Heydar Aliyev Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan (2014); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2013); CAFA Museum in Beijing, China (2012); Musée du Louvre, Paris, France (2011); the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2011); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, USA (2011); Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2010); Tate Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2000); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (1995), Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1991) and Tate Gallery, London, UK (1988). He represented Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988 and in the same year was awarded the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, London, UK. He has been a Professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris, France (1999-2009) and Professor at Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Germany (2009–present). He was elected a Royal Academician in 1994; received the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture, Tokyo, Japan (2007); was Awarded the 1st Class Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2012) and was made a Knight’s Bachelor in 2016.
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Wojtek Doroszuk
Festin
2013, HD Video, 20′ 15″, Ed. 5/8+1
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Festin takes as its inspiration the paintings of the 17th century Flemish still life artists, such as Frans Snyder, Jan and Ferdinand Van Kessel who depicted sumptuous spreads of food, often garnished with dead animals which have been recently shot. Further alluding to Peter Greenaway’s scenes of sumptuous decay, Festin envisages a feast interrupted by an unknown calamity, a world from which human beings have disappeared. The film portrays a timeless vanitas tableau of decay and disorder where non-existent guests have been usurped by the uninvited intrusion of insects and stray dogs. This imagery creates a post-apocalyptic epilogue for humankind, a portent of what may result if human greed continues to grow unabated. Seeing this work in the context of the war in Ukraine, one cannot help but imagine a last supper left to rot, the guests fleeing to join the streams of refugees displaced by battles on city streets, closer to home than any of us could have imagined mere months ago. The ubiquity of war, even today in our seemingly enlightened age, renders this contemporary vanitas that much more timeless.
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Wojtek Doroszuk (born 1980, Poland) is a visual artist. He works with video and photography. He is interested in society as a spectacle and a series of conventions which he tries to deconstruct. He asks why we so easily reconcile ourselves to the existing, what is repressed, and invokes the stranger. In his Istanbul project, consisting of a series of aestheticized postcards with non-standard views, hidden from tourists, and information like this on the back, and the film triptych Picnic, Lunch I and Lunch II (2005), he shows the impossibility of communication, translation of behavior and cultural habits. It draws attention to colonial conditioning and orientalist perceptions, which are visible even despite the political correctness of conscious Europeans. Similar themes recur in Free Cracow Tour (2005), a mystified walk around Krakow for foreigners, a work she created with Anna Szwajgier, or Video Party (2006), a party at which foreign students staying in Poland play alleged games typical of Poles. He has exhibited at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia (2019), Maksla XO Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania (2018), Arsenal Gallery, Białystok, Poland (2016), Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris (2013), EKKM, Tallin (2011), lokal_30, Warsaw, Poland (2010), Platan Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2010), Main Train Station of Ankara, Turkey (2007), Sala Verónicas, Centro Párraga, Murcia, Spain (2007), Container Gallery, Roma, Italy (2006). He lives and works in Kraków.
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Nezaket Ekici
Flesh (No Pig but Pork)
2011, Performance Video, HD, sound, 9’34”
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The artist kneels in a pile of pork from a freshly slaughtered pig. She wears safety goggles and rubber gloves which refer to the Islamic law forbidding the touching and eating of pork. She holds up pieces of meat and sniffs at them as if to ascertain why the law exists. The sound of her breathing is amplified by a microphone and is clearly audible throughout the room. The work is a direct reference to her piece No Pork but Pig (2004) in which she spent several hours in a small pen with a living pig.
Throughout Ekici’s performance practice, she again and again confronts the image of a woman and an artist caught between cultures. Born not far from Ankara, socialised within the narrow circle of her Turkish family in Germany, she explores the limits of what is physically possible in her projects, radically committing her own body to her artworks. In Flesh, (No Pig but Pork), she targets the taboos and traditional rituals of the Islamic world, donning Lady Justice‘s blindfold, a black leotard and yellow rubber gloves to wallow in pork meat, sniffing the forbidden raw flesh. Presented here in POINTS of RESISTANCE: Skills for Peace, at a time when war has inconceivably broken out in Europe once more, this work transforms from grotesque to tragic. In the face of bombs falling on residential streets, we could all be piles of flesh, meat torn asunder by violence. Lady Justice could well be asking, what could possibly justify that?
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Nezaket Ekici (born in Kirsehir, Turkey in 1970) is an international performance artist. She holds an M.A. in Art Pedagogy, and studied Art History and Sculpture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Fine Arts Academy Munich (1994-2000). From 2001 to 2004 she studied Performance Art under Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. She received a degree in Fine Arts as well as an MFA degree. Ekici has been presenting her work in national and international exhibitions since 2000: Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich; The Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; 25. May Museum Belgrade; PAC Milano; Venice Biennale; P.S.1 New York; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei/ Taiwan; Poznan Biennale; Curitiba Biennale; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Istanbul Modern; Marta Herford; Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; KunstWerke Berlin; Oslo Museum; The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Total Museum Seoul. In 2013/2014, she was an artist in Residency at the Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul and in 2016/2017, she got the Rome Prize and was an artist in Residency at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome. In 2018 she received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Award, and In 2020 she was an artist in residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York, sponsored by the International Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin. Ekici’s work includes mainly performance, video and installation. She presented more than 250 different performances in over 60 countries, more than 170 cities on 4 continents. She lives and works in Berlin, Stuttgart and Istanbul.
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FRANEK
Besuch im Atelier (Ostersonntag) / Visit to the Studio (Easter Sunday)
2021, Mixed media on canvas, 100 x 190 cm
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My paintings are narrative associative fields – while I work, phantasms surprise me, which then melds with current affairs and pertaining to literature, film and theatre. Through various artistic techniques, available image material and fictional images, I transform these fields into a vast network, which is always in accordance with world events.
What’s fascinating is exactly that one doesn’t understand. I play with incomprehension and not with a given history.
– FRANEK
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FRANEK (Sabine Franek-Koch, born in Potsdam in 1939) studied painting and printmaking at the Berlin Art School (now Berlin University of the Arts) with Fred Thieler and Mac Zimmermann. Her first solo exhibition was in 1968 at the Pels-Leusden Gallery in West Berlin. Others followed in galleries, art clubs and museums at home and abroad. She taught at the Berlin Art School, the University of Art and Design in Helsinki and Lahti, and University of the Arts Bremen. FRANEK’s work includes paintings, drawings, prints, book illustration, sculpture, photography and film. In the 1970s and 1980s, the artist became deeply immersed in researching visual symbols used by the indigenous cultures of North and South America. She worked in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras and helped mathematician Maria Reiche to map spirals (Nazca Lines) on the Nazca Plains in Peru. Furthermore FRANEK recorded rituals for the Übersee-Museum in Bremen among the Lakota (Sioux) at the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the United States. The artist lives and works in Berlin and in Radegast, Lower Saxony.
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Asta Gröting
Fassade
2019, Installation in wax, 85 x 70 x 5 cm
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I am working on the assumption that our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subject from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over.
– Sigmund Freud Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, December 6 1896
Moving on from her long association with ventriloquism in which the hollow doll became an instrument to explore the awkward, perhaps shameful feelings we cannot easily voice to each other, Gröting now gives her attention to the inner voice of the holes, scars and histories transcribed on the architectural surfaces of buildings in her city.
How do these memory traces speak to us and how do we speak to them? It is certain that my conversation will be very different from your conversation.
The uncanny installations that make up BERLIN FACADES resemble a sculptural, slow- exposure photograph, pushing through the 20th century into the 21st in one simultaneous moment.
Where were we then; where are we now?
In a bold conceptual strike, Gröting embodies /embalms both trauma and time in a ghostly silicone skin. It is a forensic procedure. Peeling off these memory traces resembles the taking of fingerprints after a crime has been committed. My eyes stare in to the bullet and canon holes and the holes stare right back in to my own psychic holes. In Gröting’s words: “I want to look from inside these destroyed walls and facades into the world – as if I could see my own face staring back at me.”
Gröting’s ongoing sculptural conversation between interiors and exteriors across a number of media, her absolute preoccupation with the ways in which the invisible can technically be rendered visible – (a task usually pursued by poets) – makes her uniquely placed to land inside these cracked, pierced, damaged walls.
As I stand before these facades, re-transcribed by Gröting in silicone, how am I being invited to read their expression and repression? I am reminded that the function of skin is to protect my body from damage. Furthermore, if skin can access my mood and physical state, it can also bring to the surface any number of turbulent emotions –the historical and personal represented in visible marks and traces. This is why most of us give a great deal of attention to concealing our own facades. Let me tell you that every time I type the word- facade – (also meaning a deceptive outward appearance), my spell- check changes this word to face – a blunt, literal robo -correction, but it is not incorrect. A facade is the face of a building.
There is in English the phrase to be stony faced (literally, to have the face of a stone) – meaning to reveal nothing of our inner thoughts, to show no emotion. Yet, as we know, our facades do eventually crumble, and when that happens, we are unmasked to reveal our concealed histories.
To return to Freud’s archeological metaphor, in which with great care and patience, the buried “objects” of the past are gradually uncovered and brought to the surface, it would seem that Gröting, in re-transcribing these historical and architectural memory traces (blurring, smudging, smearing still intact) has excavated both past and present, conserving and reconstructing our relations to them.
– Deborah Levy, 2016
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Asta Gröting (born in Herford, Germany, in 1961) is a contemporary artist. She works in a variety of media like sculpture, performance, and video. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art Berlin, the Kunstraum Dornbirn, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the LENTOS Art Museum in Linz, and the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute, among others. She has also participated in international group exhibitions at venues including the Maas Museum in Sydney, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, the Hartware Medienkunstverein Dortmund, and the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo. Gröting’s works often present ordinary, familiar elements, where the viewer’s attention is drawn towards their material transformation, caused by the exaggeration of the familiar. In Gröting’s work there is a focus on what is not visible, like the inner voice, the space between lovers having sex, the digestive system, or the inside of holes made by bullets, and the ways in which the invisible can be brought to the surface. She is currently a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art.
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Sven Helbig
Skills (Vanitas)
2022, Photograph, C-Print with Frame, 90 x 165 cm, Ed. 1/3
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Skills for Peace, the fourth edition of the POINTS of RESISTANCE exhibition series, derives its name from the still life Skills, by the renowned German composer Sven Helbig. Created in the style of baroque vanitas painting, it depicts, among other things, a vaccine vial, a skateboard, his iPhone, and the cables of his first computer under the neutered protective gesture of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, in addition to the common attributes of the still life genre. The central score features Strauss’s setting of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The deformed Hermes thereby reveals the dual questions: that of the divine idea, and that of the self-conquest of man without God as proclaimed by Nietzsche. The question remains: what in today’s secular present can all people of this earth connect with after thousands of years of cultural history? It is peace, one should think. We should have the skills for it – after all that was. Skills for Peace lives in this field – between hymn and melancholy.
Sven Helbig’s photographic work Skills, was made in parallel to his new Symphony, also entitled Skills, to be performed on Easter Sunday within the POINTS of RESISTANCE: Skills for Peace exhibition in the Zionskirche.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In my parents’ living room stands an elaborately hand-forged copper kettle – my grandfather’s masterpiece, hammered out of a single piece of copper. Growing up in a family of craftsmen, I have been familiar since early childhood with the attitude of perfecting a thing for its own sake.
The deepening concentration and slow maturing of execution, the craft shares with spiritual rituals, with arts, sports and the sciences. I am touched by the sight of almost ideal expressions of human activity, be it a forged piece, a perfectly build sentence or an athletic performance. I dedicate my album SKILLS to this fascination.
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Sven Helbig (born in Eisenhüttenstadt in 1968) is a German composer, director and music producer. Helbig’s symphonic images are closely connected to his life, experiences, aspirations and also the voids between epochs, systems and continents. In 2003 he produced the project “Mein Herz Brennt” (My Heart Burns) based on song ideas by Rammstein. A year later he performed “Battleship Potemkin” with the Pet Shop Boys, and in 2009, he recorded with the Fauré Quartett as producer of their “Popsongs” album. The friction between the feeling of security of yesteryear and the challenges of the present is one of his central motifs. In this respect, Helbig’s little symphonies are in fact substantial works, for they continue to expand within their framework. Helbig’s versatility has made him a much sought-after producer for crossover projects; he has worked as a producer, composer and arranger with Snoop Dogg, Polarkreis 18, opera singer René Pape, pianist Olga Scheps and more. Helbig’s work builds on the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk (all-embracing art form) and he often takes responsibility for content, music and production at the same time. Helbig currently lives and works in Dresden.
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Stefan Höller
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Olaf Holzapfel
Lichtbild Leinen Blau / Linen Blue Photo
2014, Hay, Wire, Ash, Pigment, 130 x 120 x 25 cm
Courtesy of Daniel Marzona
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Olaf Holzapfel, born in Dresden in 1967, is an artist from a country that no longer exists. His coming-of-age involved crossing a border between the East-West divide of the Cold War era that – until the current outbreak of war in Ukraine – was becoming a distant memory. Holzapfel has long been interested in boundaries, demarcations, and frontiers – or, more precisely, in interstitial spaces, what is possible in between. With Europe’s anxiety surrounding its porous borders now central, sadly enough, to its paranoid sense of self, Holzapfel’s work could not be more timely and more apt, choosing to shift his gaze to a frontier far from the eastern Mediterranean, namely in south-central Chile, the past site of a number of Holzapfel’s projects; all of which have involved close cooperation with the local population and an elemental reliance on Indigenous traditions of building, constructing, and manufacturing.
Holzapfel’s new pictures made of straw and cactus fibers describe the relationship between human and landscape; they translate space into surfaces. These are material pictures of the periphery – straw pictures from Lusatia and Brandenburg, chaguar plant fiber pictures from the dry forests of the Chaco in northern Argentina, pictures and folds of interconnected straw, line spaces in which light is refracted, reticulated woven textile pictures of cactus fibers colored with materials extracted from the plants in the environs. In them, traditional motifs are combined with contemporary compositions of paths, spirals, and fields to yield landscape-like pictorial spaces. Holzapfel’s works, created with ancient craft techniques, blur, within contemporary art, the strict separation of nature and culture. Are line spaces and networks exclusively contemporary terms of a digitalized, media world? Holzapfel’s dealings with living forms of crafts suggest that the contradiction between tradition and modernity can be viewed as a bygone construct, as mere appearance that glorifies landscape as an Arcadian subconscious. Instead, the artist is interested in landscape as a reservoir of its own media technology, with a presence of the approximate, of the recurring dimensions of plants, of the systematics of even inhospitable rural regions. He thereby counters a view of truth and reality shaped by theoretical conceptions with an action and the material that lead to a picture.
The spaces that are meanwhile virtually retrievable everywhere and at all times via GPS coordinates or actually as urban space are juxtaposed and compared with what we call nature, wilderness, or landscape to produce the disturbing fascination of his new works. Until now, nature was usually perceived as a depiction or a resource – whereby it produces its pictures in direct exchange with itself. Thus, Holzapfel’s pictures tell us something about our relationship to nature and landscape, about our relational being, about the similarity and comparability of modern and archaic, urban and rural models of spatial organization. They draw their beauty from their simultaneity – they originate from the interior of the landscape in which they are made, and the question arises whether these pictures of the periphery are not in reality the beginning of a new center and perhaps already inscribed in it, and whether the contradiction between wilderness and order, between nature and culture actually exists or is only a theoretical construct that keeps us within the interior of a human egocentrism and blocks our view of their natural kinship.
The first chaguar pictures were created in collaboration with the northern Argentinian Indios, the Wichis, and were first exhibited in 2009 in Buenos Aires and then at the Venice Biennale 2011. Later, Holzapfel created additional individual pictures that can now be viewed as autonomous pictorial works. They provide examples of the ambiguity of seemingly fixed categories of a modernity enclosed within itself and prepared for random access. For it remains simply unclear whether their theme is determined by a recollection of the Bauhaus, by digital designs, or by the technique and craft of the Indios. Holzapfel’s artistic practice thus proves once more to be shaped by a nomadic, alternative thinking that includes the fissure and that brings contraries together to advance to new shores.
– Daniel Marzona
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Olaf Holzapfel (born in Dresden, 1967) is a German contemporary artist. First featured in Ausgesucht von Thomas Scheibitz at Koch und Kesslau in Berlin in 2003, his work is particularly well-known in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, having been exhibited with Eberhard Havekost and Frank Nitsche. He was notably featured in the 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011) and in documenta14 (2017).
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Huang Jia
Ohne Titel / Untitled
2022, Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
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A fortuitous cojoiing of Malevich’s Black Square and White Square – Huang Jia’s spatial painting is a minefield of optical illuson. Made of opposing planes of straight lnes, it nevertheless defies the eye to percieve it as straight. Leaving the viewer with an uneasy sensation that something is somewhat out of joint, it could be an allegory for our twisted times – a world skewed by war and disease off of the straight line which was once our perception of normal.
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Huang Jia (born in China in 1964), is a painter and well-respected representative of minimalist conceptual painting. Her work goes from figurative to minimalist, combining basic concave and convex forms in differing permutations attempting to demonstrate, that varying psychologies and the collective unconsciousness can be transmitted through the simplest visual symbols. Huang Jia’s “Waiting for New Hairstyle” series was selected into Guangzhou Biennale 1992 and her early works were inspired by Francis Bacon, Paul Delvaux and Lucian Freud, focusing on self expression and construction. To give our readers a broader perspective of her works and practice we arranged an interview with Huang Jia. She currently lives and works in Shenzhen.
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Nikita Kadan
4 Aquarelle
Watercolor on paper, 25,2 x 20 cm
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Predating the current attrocities of war in Ukraine, but poignanty relavent now, is this series of watercolors of excecuted Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.
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Nikita Kadan (born in Kiev in 1982) is one of the leading personas of Ukrainian art. Kadan works with painting, graphics, and installation, often in interdisciplinary collaboration with architects, sociologists and human rights activists. He is a member of the artist group R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and founding member of Hudrada (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective. Nikita Kadan represented Ukraine at the Venice Biennale in 2015. He has been awarded the Kazimir Malevich Prize, 2016; the Future Generation Prize (special prize), 2014; the Maiмn Prize, PinchukArtCentre Prize, 2011; and he was shortlisted for the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2009 and for Future Generation Prize in 2012. His works are featured in the public collections of Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, M HKA; Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp; mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien); National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv; Arsenal Gallery, Białystok; Military History Museum, Dresden; The Art Collection Telekom, Krasnoyarsk; museum centre, Krasnoyarsk; The Kingdom of Belgium, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; FRAC Bretagne; Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; Сentre Pompidou in Paris.
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William Kentridge
Processional Nose
2015, Mohair Tapestry, woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Johannesburg, South Africa, 258 x 257 cm, Ed. 1/6
Courtesy of Galerie Kewenig, Berlin, and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
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Kentridge’s studio states:
For the stage design of the opera, on top of projections of human figures, paper cut-outs were added and interposed, trying to find a link between the constructivist language of El Lissitzky and the earthy language of Gorky and the Russian filmmakers. Languages which were very different at the time and even antithetical, but which in hindsight are joined by a sense of openness, of possibility, of agency. As if the upheavals of the 1917 revolution could provide an energy for new images, new words, a new language.
We know the post-history.”
This painful post-history comes back to haunt us today, with Russia’s aggressive imperialist ambitions and tragic regression to the punitive measures of Stalinist times. It is becoming a country divided against its own people, as well as a nation seeking to restore long-lost borders.
The motif in Kentridge’s tapestry ‘Processional Nose’ from 2016 refers also to the many states of migration and displacement during the apartheid era in South Africa and more generally around the increasingly globalized world. It is tragic how little has changed since those darker times. With so many once more fleeing war and repression in Ukraine and Russia we are again faced with mass forced migration and displacement. This major theme in Kentridge’s work appears in animated films, drawings, collages, theater productions, tapestries and installations – such as his permanent large scale staircase work at MoMA PS1, New York (2000) or the 2016 inaugurated ‘Triumphs and Laments’, a 500 meter-long frieze alongside the Tiber River in Rome.
https://www.kentridge.studio/projects/the-nose/
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William Kentridge (born in Johannesburg in 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. The latter are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds’ screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
His works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at many museums, including Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Barcelona (2020), Liebegshaus, Frankfurt (2018), MAXXI, Rome (2013), MACO, Oaxaca (2011), Louvre, Paris, (2010), Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2009), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2007), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007), Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2006).
Since the 1980s, Kentridge has been awarded various prizes, such as the Kaiserring Prize, the Carnegie Prize, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, and the Red Ribbon Award for Short Fiction. He currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Kentridge’s works are included in the following permanent collections: Honolulu Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Tate Modern (London). An edition of the five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012), which debuted at documenta 13, was jointly acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2015, Kentridge gave the definitive collection of his archive and art – films, videos and digital works – to the George Eastman Museum, one of the world’s largest and oldest photography and film collections.
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Ola Kolehmainen
Das Ist Der Dom in Coeln I
2019, 5 panels, 226 x 777cm, mirrors, matt archive inkjet prints in artist frame, Ed. 2
Synagogue Glockenkasse 1861 (Destroyed 9.11.38)
2019, 75 x 68 cm
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Places of worship have, throughout human history, played a significant role in times of conflict and war. They are places of hope and redemption where we come to pray for peace. But also – alas – they have historically represented the causes of many conflicts, from the religious wars and inquisitions of the Crusades, to more recent conflicts around the world. With the outbreak of war once more in Europe threatening to engulf the world, Ola Kolehmainen’s work in POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace is presented with this duality in mind. It is both a reflection on the greatness of human endeavor in building architectural marvels in the glorification of God, and the human potential for evil in destroying those same marvels in the name of dogmas and ideologies.
– Dr. Johanna Gummlich,
Director of the Rheinisches Bildarchiv
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Ola Kolehmainen (born in Helsinki in 1964), has lived and worked in Berlin since 2005. He studied at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki (TaiK) and became one of the most visible and successful artists of the first Helsinki School generation in the first decade of the 21st century. He is known for his minimalistic and abstract pictures of modern architecture, with a special interest in the work of modern masters such as Alvar Aalto and Mies van der Rohe.
His current more narrative works focus on exteriors and interiors of sacred buildings that he started after spending an intense work phase in Istanbul in 2014 researching buildings of the Ottoman and Byzantine Period.
The Berlin-based artist is one of the leading figures in Finnish photography. His work is included in multiple international art institutions, foundations, and collections, from Germany and Spain to renowned Nordic museums such as the Malmö Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Galerie Forsblom has been representing Ola Kolehmainen since 2011.
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Via Lewandowsky
Und dann das / And then this
2021, Neon, Wooden Box, 35 x 30 x 130 cm
как жаль (ach, schade) / what a shame
2009/2022, Text with Neon, 25 x 120 cm
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Via Lewandowsky’s works speak for themselves. The two text pieces spell out a scathing portrait of our times. Inside its own packing crate is nestled a red neon word meaning ‘senseless’. Originally intended by the artist as a caustic comment on the art market, this work and the sentiment behind it are even more applicable to our situation today with the senseless outbreak of war in Ukraine. While the translated title of как жаль (What A Shame), executed in glowing Cyrillic letters, doesn’t begin to cover the profound pathos of this short phrase in the original Russian. What a shame, indeed, that violence and repression have returned again to a people who have already endured so much. Having been born and raised in the DDR, Via Lewandowsky in his work often voices his resentment at the legacies of this repressive political system with bittersweet humor. Yet there is no room for humor in the atrocities of war unfolding in Ukraine right now, and как жаль (What A Shame), as a statement of our times, remains simply bittersweet.
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Via Lewandowsky (born in Dresden in 1963), is a contemporary artist based in Berlin. He studied at the Dresden University of Fine Arts from 1982 to 1987. Between 1985 and 1989 he organized subversive performances with the avant-garde group “Auto-Perforations-Artisten”, which subverted the official art scene of the GDR. His multimedia practice focuses on sculptural-installational works and exhibition scenographies with architectural influences. His leitmotifs are always the misunderstanding as a result of failure of communication, as well as the processual. An ironic refraction of the everyday, the intrusion of the foreign into the familiar, mostly domestic, realm, often happens by using insignia of the German bourgeoisie (e.g. a cuckoo clock, or a budgie). His predilection for the tragic-comical, the absurd and paradoxical, as well as the Sisyphean motif of the constant repetition and futility of action connect his art with Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus. Via Lewandowsky’s works have been shown worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Jewish Museum, Berlin (2020), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019), Bongsan Cultural Center in South Korea (2019), Shedhalle, Zurich (2018), David Nolan Gallery, New York (2017), Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig (2016) or Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2015).
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Bernd Lohaus
Untitled
2001, Wood engraved with text, 28,5 x 264 x 253 cm
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Bernd Lohaus’s oeuvre gives a voice to the material. Since the late 1960s, wood, rope, and later also stone and bronze have been the working materials of elemental sculptures in which the raw and the fragile interlink and in which flotsam found in the water gains a new artistic life of its own with a few simple interventions.
Along with the usually block-like and expansive sculptures stand reduced works on paper and raw canvas pieces – “coudrages” – with similar, powerfully expressive simplicity; some are inscribed with a few words as if with pictorial poetic exclamations, while in other cases, they are marked with bar-like brown strips of tape that cut out space, sometimes accented with energetic strokes of color.
Because the material points beyond itself to the realm of feeling, thinking, language, and back to history and nature, Lohaus’s sculptural oeuvre is an expansion of traditional sculptural forms of expression. It connects the material with spirituality.
Bernd Lohaus created his first works directly in Beuys’s class, and they were exhibited in the gallery circuit of the Academy at that time. Since then, in its various forms of expression, the oeuvre has continued to develop in the sense of a progressing dialog with itself and the world. Lohaus has also repeatedly placed large ensembles in natural surroundings.
Bernd Lohaus was born in Dusseldorf in 1940 and died in Antwerp in 2010. In 1965, he and his wife Anny De Decker founded Antwerp’s Wide White Space Gallery (until 1976). After beginning with Fluxus-like Happenings, in 1969 he had his international artistic debut at Harald Szeemann’s exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” in the Kunsthalle Bern. In September 2014, Daniel Marzona opened his Berlin gallery programmatically with a solo exhibition by this pioneering artist.
– Stephan von Wiese
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Bernd Lohaus (born in Germany in 1940) is a contemporary artist. Lohaus is represented by multiple galleries around the world, such as Georg Kargl Fine Arts in Vienna, Galerie Bernard Bouche in Paris, and Daniel Marzona in Berlin. His works have been shown at Geukens & De Vil in Antwerp with the exhibition PRESQUE RIEN; at Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp; at Galerie Bernard Bouche in Paris.
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Sarah Loibl
Fahrt ins Blaue (Himmelfahrt 2) / Journey to the Blue (Ascension 2)
2019, Egg Tempera on Transparent Paper, 220 x 114 cm
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Journey to the Blue (Ascension 2) is one of many possible combinations of the group of works Konvolut Möglichkeiten / Convoluted Possibilites, which Sarah Loibl continues since 2016. Countless studies on transparent paper webs, which on the one hand serve Loibl as preparation for her up to 3.60m large wall-related paintings and on the other hand – folded, cut and recombined again and again – investigate and thematize mobility and action space of pictorial thinking as changing image assemblies. In a frame, pinned to the wall, or layered as a loose pile on rolling carts, they form a contradictory joint, emphasizing process, movement, and the assertion of always possible shifts.
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Sarah Loibl (born in Munich, Germany in 1987) is a contemporary artist. She graduated at University of Fine Arts, Berlin, 2017. Her work is strongly connected to movement and distances. Her Solo Exhibitions include “Win Heart”, Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo (2015), “Four possibilities to run against a wall” (2018). Her group exhibitions include “Canvas”, Tschechisches Zentrum, Berlin (2018), “Ten Years Regina Pistor”, Berlin (2018), “Meisterschülerausstellung”, UdK Berlin (2017), “What stayed from Fichten”, Max Planck Institute for arts and research, Berlin (2017), “Berlin stoneprints from the last decade”, Galeria ASP, Gdansk, Poland (2016), “Five caps”, Galeria Kaufhof am Alexanderplatz, Berlin (2016), “young positions”, Galerie Pankow, Berlin (2015), “Druckgrafik Plastik”, Kunstraum Heiddorf (2015), “Das Atelier für Lithographie”, Printing Museum, Lublin, Poland (2015), “Physis”, market place and court of Veria, Greece (2013), “Projekt Physis”, griechische Kulturstiftung, Berlin (2013).
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Boris Mikhailov
Untitled
Color photography, triptich, 40 x 50 cm, Unique work
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Boris Mikhailov’s images bring to life one of the most tumultuous chapters of the 20th century: the height, decline, and fall of the Soviet Union and its disturbing aftermath. Yet as they chart this extraordinary history, they also express the complex emotions and intellectual subtlety of a powerful artist. Mikhailov’s work ranges from the covert transgressions of a critical mind under a totalitarian regime to the tender depictions of daily life. The world in his pictures is always unadorned and raw – everyday scenes, poverty, sexuality, despair, resignation, the decline of a forgotten Eastern Europe. Mikhailov, always dedicated to the outcasts of society, explores the position of the individual within the historical mechanisms of public ideology, touching on such subjects as Ukraine under Soviet rule, the living conditions in post-communist Eastern Europe, and the fallen ideals of the Soviet Union. Although deeply rooted in a historical context, Mikhailov’s work also incorporates profoundly engaging and personal narratives of humor, lust, vulnerability, aging, and death.
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Boris Mikhailov (born in the USSR in 1938), is a Ukrainian photographer living and working between Kharkiv and Berlin. He has been described as one of the most important artists to have emerged from the former USSR. Mikhailov studied electrical engineering at Kharkov Technical University and initially worked as an engineer before he began taking photographs as a self-taught photographer in the late 1960s. The early series of the 1960s and 70s often show personal images of friends, acquaintances or partners of the artist.
Boris Mikhailov’s works have been presented in countless solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Mikhailov represented Ukraine in the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), and also participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). Other recent solo exhibitions include: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2019); Before Sleep/After Drinking, C/O Berlin Foundation, Berlin (2019); Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2016); Kunstverein Wolfenbüttel (2016); MADRE, Naples (2015); Camera Italian Centre for Photography, Turin (2015); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); Tate Modern, London (2010); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2010).
Selected group exhibitions include: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen (2021); Bruce Museum, Greenwich, USA (2018); Stedelijk Museum Amesterdam (2018); ‘Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins’, Barbican Centre, London (2018); 5th Odessa biennale (2017); ‘The Human Condition Session II’, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2016).
Mikhailov was the recipient of the 2016 Goslar Kaiserring Prize; the 2012 Spectrum International Prize for Photography; the Citibank 2001 Photography Prize; and the 2000 Hasselblad Foundation International Award, among others. His work is included in important public collections, including: Hamburger Bahnof, Berlin; ICA, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York.
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Fiona Pardington
Young Hawk, Hag Stone and Paper Nautilus, Ripiro Beach
2014, Photograph printed on canvas, 108 x 144 cm
Courtesy of the MOMENTUM Collection
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Young Hawk, Hag Stone and Paper Nautilus, Ripiro Beach is one of a series of photograps from Fiona Pardington’s Ex Vivo series. Like so much of her work from this period, it is a still life made in the vantias tradition – a way to exalt life through reminders of mortality.
“Twice a day the tides that lave and redraft the coastline wash up a diversity of bounty: driftwood, kelp, shells, dead crabs, bones, fishing floats, perhaps a rare paper nautilus,and occasional hints of life in the deep interior depths and cool green hells, or over the blue horizon. After a big storm, more than likely there will be dead seagulls and albatrosses too, studies in greyscale. New Zealand’s long and supine coastline acts like a driftnet, gathering it all up. You never know what gifts Tangaroa will surprise you with, which is part of the magic of it all. If it floats, and falls into the Tasman, the Pacific, the freezing Southern Ocean, or perhaps further afield, hidden currents will probably wash it up on our sand or shingle for a beachcomber to find.
It is beachcombing which provided most of the objets trouvés for this suite of works by Fiona Pardington. Appropriately enough, it starts out as a Pacific phenomenon. The first appearance of the word in print is to be found in Herman Melville’s 1847 novel Omoo which described a community of feckless and outcast Europeans in the Islands who had abandoned Western culture for a life “combing” the beach for anything they could use or trade. Not for the faint of heart, Sappho warns the squeamish against poking the coastal rubble; Μὴ κίνη χέραδασ. While living in Waiheke Island, Fiona regularly explored Rock Bay and Ontetangi beaches, and later Ripiro and Bayley’s Beach, walking her canine menagerie. She, also, was looking for things to use and trade, though these transactions are of an entirely aesthetic sort. She is, as Shakespeare writes of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”.
The albatross feathers allude to the artist’s great love of nature and her Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Ngāti Kahungunu ancestry – Māori associations with the deep water, long voyages and return. To Māori, albatrosses, Torora, represented beauty, grace and power, and their feathers and bone were worn by people of rank or adorned the prow of waka taua (war canoes). The (with a nod to Monty Python) ex-gulls. Karoro, the blackbacked gull, were kept as pets by some Māori to control vermin, and were considered an ill omen seen inland. The objects that look like white wax flowers and the plastic casings of fired rifle cartridges. These can be considered symbols of explosive and potentially dangerous energy and transformation.
The philosophy of collecting and salvage moves like an eel up the river from the coast. Like the carnage from the Māori legend of the battle between the sea birds and the land birds, among the fallen, mingling with the gulls and albatrosses are a humdrum sparrow and a young kāhu (hawk). Te kāhu i runga whakaaorangi ana e rā, / Te pērā koia tōku rite, inawa ē! (“The hawk up above moves like clouds in the sky. Let me do the same!”). Here, too, are items that have washed up from the human sea; a crystal ball, a pounamu heart (the heart of Fiona’s whakapapa lies among the iwi of Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island), a hag stone (a stone naturally pierced by water through which those gifted with second sight were, according to legend, supposed to see the future and the other world through, a pewter mug, roses, and a cut glass decanter of water from Lake Wakatipu. Transparent and fragile vessels are important in Fiona’s work, alluding to the tradition of Vanitas painting (remember, you too shall one day die) and often containing water from places significant to the artist. These lustrous objects also reveal Fiona’s virtuosity with light, and photography, after all, is Classical Greek for drawing or writing with light. The eye scavenges.
– Andrew Paul Wood (2014)
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Dr Fiona Pardington was born in Auckland, and is of Maori (Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Ngāti Kahungunu) and Scottish (Clan Cameron of Erracht) descent. She holds a Doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of Auckland, and lives and works in New Zealand.
An abiding concern with emotion and affect is at the heart of Fiona Pardington’s photographic practice. With over three decades experience as an exhibiting artist, she has continued to explore the capacities of photography by attending to what is hidden or unseen in the photograph as much as what it may represent. In the late 1980s she was among a group of women artists who challenged photography’s social documentary aesthetic, prevalent in the previous decade. She went on to focus on the still-life format, recording Museum taonga (Māori ancestral treasures) and other historic objects such as hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now extinct huia bird. Thus she brings an awareness of traditional and forgotten objects to contemporary audiences. Pardington is renowned for her ability to breathe the life force into these objects and to raise global awareness of the importance of conservation. In her interrogation of death, she celebrates collecting and preservation.
In 2016 Pardington was named a Knight (Chevalier) in the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Prime Minister, and she is the first New Zealand visual artist to receive this honour. Last year she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Fiona Pardington has received many fellowships, residencies, awards and grants, including the Moët et Chandon Fellowship (France) in 1991-92; the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in both 1996 and 1997; a Ngai Tahu residency at Otago Polytechnic in 2006; and both the Quai Branly Laureate award, La Résidence de Photoquai, and the Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2011. Pardington has created staggering works as a result of these opportunities.
Her work has been included in several important group exhibitions and biennales, including: Middle of Now|Here, Honolulu Biennial 2017; lux et tenebris Momentum Worldwide, Berlin 2014; The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art, Ukraine Biennale Arsenale 2012; Ahua: A beautiful hesitation, 17th Biennale of Sydney, 2010; Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography, 1989, Constructed Intimacies, 1989 and Now See Hear 1990. Prospect 2001: New Art New Zealand, all at the City Art Gallery, Wellington; Slow Release: Recent Photography from New Zealand, Heide Museum of Modern Art Melbourne, Australia and the Adam Gallery, Wellington, 2002; Te Puawai O Ngai Tahu, Christchurch Art Gallery and Pressing Flesh, Skin, Touch Intimacy, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki in 2003; and Contemporary New Zealand Photographers, Pataka’s International Arts Festival, Porirua, 2006.
In 2008 the New Zealand Government donated a suite of her heitiki prints to the then newly-opened musée du quai Branly, Paris. A similar work auctioned in Auckland realised the highest price in New Zealand for a photographic work at auction.
Fiona returned from Paris where she completed a Laureate Artistic Creations Project with musée du quai Branly in 2011. In the same year the Govett-Brewster Gallery and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery presented The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, a series of photographs of life casts made by medical scientist and phrenologist Pierre Dumoutier during one of French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville’s South Pacific voyages from 1837 to 1840. An accompanying catalogue was published by Otago University Press.
This series has continued to be exhibited and discussed by academics and curators from all over the world and will feature in Oceania which opens at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in September 2018 and then travels to the co-organising institution musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. Australian art historian Susan Best, in her book Reparative aesthetics which closely examines the work of four female photographers, including Fiona, argues that art has the capacity to heal shameful histories.
A survey exhibition, A Beautiful Hesitation, profiling thirty years of Fiona Pardington’s practice, opened at City Gallery Wellington in 2015, after it was shown also at Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery. An accompanying publication with the same title was published by Victoria University Press, bringing together new and classic writings on the artist’s work.
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Angelika Platen
Dennis Oppenheim. „Erdarbeit/Earthwork“, Düsseldorf
1969, 4 Archival Pigment Fine Art Prints, 25,7 x 32,5 cm
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Angelika Platen (born in Heidelberg in 1942) is a German photographer known for her artist portraits. She studied Art History and Romance & Oriental Studies at the Free University of Berlin. She then specialized in Photography at the School of Fine Arts in Hamburg. In 1968, she established herself as an independent photographer and photojournalist. She displayed her photographs for the first time in 1969 in an exhibition entitled “Artists are also humans”.
From 1972 to 1975, she managed the Günter Sachs Gallery in Hamburg. During this period, she photographed more than sixty artists. Her passion for artist’s portraits was born. Angelika Platen studied art history, Romance studies and Oriental studies at the Free University of Berlin and then photography at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. From 1972 to 1975 she ran the “Galerie an der Milchstraße” in Hamburg, which belonged to Gunter Sachs.
During this time, she created about 100 photographic portraits of young artists who began their careers at that time, some of whom are now world-famous. Her works show the painters, sculptors, conceptual and object artists in their respective artistic contexts: they were photographed in characteristic settings or in unusual locations. Among the most important works are the series of pictures of Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and Gerhard Richter, as well as the portraits of Joseph Beuys, Christo, Walter de Maria, Dan Graham, James Rosenquist, Günther Uecker and Andy Warhol. Since 1998, numerous portraits of artists, especially younger artists, have been produced. Among them are Julian Rosefeldt, Thomas Struth, Neo Rauch, John Armleder, Christian Boltanski and Jeff Koons. In her Phase II, Platen has now produced new portraits of some of the newcomers she portrayed in the 1960s/70s, which provide an interesting look at the established artists who are now coming of age. On the occasion of the 1998 exhibition “Angelika Platen – Photo Works,” the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main acquired a collection of the photographs taken between 1968 and 1974. The illustrated book “Platen Artists” (Edition Stemmle), published to coincide with the exhibition opening, documents her photographic work from this period. In 2018, 180 portraits from her collection were exhibited at the Berlin Fotografiemuseum.
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Gerhard Richter
Edition Grauer Spiegel / Edition Grey Mirror
2021, Paint on glass, 40 x 34 x 1 cm, Ed. 179
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Gerhard Richter applied monochrome gray paint to the reverse sides of a mirror. Instead of producing an image, Richter transforms the gray paint on glass into a ground for reflections. Viewers can see themselves and their surroundings mirrored on the dark surfaces, and one can interpret these monochromes as large-scale photographic plates of endless exposure. Blurring the boundary between painting and photography, the artist explores the complex relationship between abstraction and representation.
Although Richter is, in many respects, a very traditional painter, and revels in all the things paint can do – render images of reality, create luscious concoctions of colour – he also has a strong cerebral, radical element to his make-up. Although still concerned with looking through a rectangular, window-like frame – much as his figurative or abstract paintings – Richter’s panes of glass and mirrors, that he has continued to make from 1967 to today, have affinities with Conceptual Art, and even with Marcel Duchamp’s Dada works. This mirror, colored grey by the pigment attached to the back of the glass, resembles Richter’s earlier ‘black and white’, photographic paintings, since the reality one sees reflected in its surface is grey, but also his monochrome grey canvases of the early 1970s.
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Gerhard Richter (born in Dresden in 1932) is a German painter known for his diverse painting styles and subjects. His deliberate lack of commitment to a single stylistic direction has often been read as an attack on the implicit ideologies embedded in the specific histories of painting. Such distaste for aesthetic dogma has been interpreted as a response to his early art training in communist East Germany. Relying on scenes from newspapers, personal photographs, and magazines, Richter painted the victims of serial killers, portraits of famous European intellectuals, and German terrorists (the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang), among other media images. He also created a series of colour-chart paintings, which were the inspiration for his 2007 large stained glass window for Cologne Cathedral. Richter later returned to stained glass design when in 2020 he produced three sets of windows, which recall his scraped oil paintings, for Tholey Abbey, Germany’s oldest monastery. Richter was the recipient of many awards, among them the Golden Lion for painting at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997) and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting (1997).
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Stefan Rinck
Schutzmantelmadonna / Madonna with Protective Mantle
2022, Sandstone, 110 x 40 x 30 cm
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Stefan Rinck’s Madonna, created especially for POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace, is a touching beacon of hope in troubled times. The two figures kneeling in a gesture of prayer beneath the protective embrace of her cloak resonate with us all, hoping and rayer for peace.
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Stefan Rinck (born in 1973 in Homburg/Saar) is a German visual artist. He lives and works in Berlin. Rinck studied Art History and Philosophy at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken and Sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe. He has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including Museum de Hallen, Harlem (NL), Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (BE), Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (US), Vilma Gold, London (GB), Semiose, Paris (FR), Gallery Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (DE), The Breeder, Athens (GR), Galeria Alegria, Madrid/Barcelona (ES) and Cruise&Callas, Berlin (DE). He participated at the Busan Biennale in South Korea and at the Vent des Fôret and La Forêt d’Art Contemporain in France where he realized permanent public sculptures. In 2018, the work The Mangooses of Beauvais was permanently installed in the city of Paris at 53-57 rue de Grennelle (Beaupassage). He is in the following public collections: CBK Rotterdam (NL), Musée de la Loterie (BE), Sammlung Krohne (DE), FRAC Corse (FR). In 2019, Stefan Rinck was featured in the Thames & Hudson publication 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow. The documentary Heart of Stone by Sonja Baeger, premiered in 2021 in Berlin, features Rinck’s production process of three monumental sculptures.
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Arsen Savadov
Donbass Chocolate
1997, C-print on Aluminum, 115 x 150 cm
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Arsen Savadov first came to public attention in the mid-1990s when he published a series of fashion shoots of scantily clad models taken in cemeteries during funerals, with burials as the backdrop. The shocking and provocative juxtaposition of life and death, happiness and sorrow, power and weakness, transformed into an allegory of pretense and reality, has continued in his works until the present.
During the 1990s, when the newly formed Republic of Ukraine was restructuring its economy, Savadov moved to work in obsolete industrial plants, initially in the coal fields of Donbass. His Donbass-Chocolate (1997) series of large photographs were made around Donetsk, a Soviet-era paragon of heavy industrial labor. Here, in close and camp detail, he depicted the semi-naked, still coal-dust-caked bodies of former miners. Once the Stakhanovite hero-workers of the Soviet Union, they are now garbed, ludicrously and pathetically by wispy fronds of ballerinas’ tutus. Initially referring to the false heroism of Soviet Labor, as well as to the lost souls of the newly unemployed masses, these works have, since the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2014, moved away from sarcastic nostalgia to establish a more contemporary resonance with the pseudo-macho Russian-backed mercenaries who have occupied this territory and have provoked the current war.
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Arsen Savadov (born in Kiev in 1962) is a noted Ukrainian conceptual photographer and painter, based between Kiev and New York City. He studied painting at the Shevchenko State Art School. Savadov graduated from the Kiev Art Institute in 1986 and was one of the first artists in Ukraine to work with video in the 1990s. A versatile artist during the course of his career, Savadov has utilized techniques of installation, performance, and photography. His solo exhibitions include Gulliver’s dream, Art Ukraine Gallery, Kiev (2017); First-person, Pecherskiy Gallery (V-art gallery), Moscow (2012); Paintings,Daniyal Mahmood Gallery New York (2007), Donbass-Chocolate, Galerie Orel Art Presenta, Paris (2003); Arsen Savadov, Chasie Post Gallery, Atlanta, USA (1995).
Group shows include Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism, Saatchi Gallery, London (2017); Recycling Religion, WhiteBox, New York (2016); BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, curated by David Elliott, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2015); Escape to Egypt, Collection Gallery, Kyiv (2012) and First-person, Pecherskiy Gallery, V-art gallery, Moscow (2012) as well as in group shows: Days of Ukraine in the United Kingdom, Saatchi Gallery, London (2013), the 1st Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012) and After the Wall. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Stockholm, Budapest, Berlin, (1999/2000).
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Katharina Sieverding
MATON SOLARISATION F-XI
1969/2022, Color photography, digital print, 300 x 150 cm, Unique work
MATON SOLARISATION F-XII
1969/2022, Color photography, digital print, 300 x 150 cm
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Katharina Sieverding (born in 1944) is a German photographer. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf. Sieverding’s works mostly consist of self-portraiture and most have an abstract quality. She uses the techniques of silhouette, contrast, and extreme close-up. Her work often makes statements about society and the individual, such as showing the familiarity of the self and the distance of others. Often she puts multiple portraits together in one piece. Each portrait fills the frame in a way to show the presence of self. Sieverding took part in documenta 5 in 1972, documenta 6 in 1977 and documenta 7 in 1982, Kassel, and in 1997 she exhibited in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her solo exhibitions include: Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (1998); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998); Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (1997–98); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (1993); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1992). Collective exhibition: “Objectivités – La photographie à Düsseldorf” – Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2008) C Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2010). In the United States, her works have been shown at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and ICA, Boston. In 2004 and 2005, New York’s MoMA PS1 and Kunst-Werke Berlin presented an extensive survey of her work. She is a professor emeritus at the University of the Arts, Berlin.
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Vadim Zakharov
1000 Stalinistische Opfer auf einer Seite / 1000 Stalinist Victims on One Page
2021, Installation 36 x A4 sheets + 1 framed gold leaf print on paper, 150 x 180 cm, Ed. 1/4
BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About / BAFF BAFF! Worüber sprechen die Politiker
2021, Video Performance, HD, sound, 4’20” exhibition variant (Original 65’), Ed. 1/4 – Original version 65’
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Artist Statement for 1000 Stalinistische Opfer auf einer Seite:
On one page are printed 1,000 portraits (one on top of the other) of Stalin’s victims. Around it are 1,000 names of these people.
The work is based on materials collected by “Immortal Barracks”. Thank you to everyone who is trying to restore the memory of people who innocently
suffered during Stalinist repressions. This memory is more important than ever today, at a time when Russia bombs Ukrainian homes and kills Ukrainian women and children… Consciously amnesia is a crime!
(The proceeds from this work, in case of sale, will be transferred to the “Immortal Barracks” and will help the people of Ukraine.)
Artist Statement for BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About:
“In the film, more than 1000 non-verbal words are read aloud, most of which have been found in the magazines “Mickey Mouse” (German editions) and also taken from the books “Tintin The Mysterious Star” and “Asterix & Obelix The Laurels of Caesar”. The words collected in the non-verbal vocabulary have no meaning, but only phonetically reflect certain events:
someone has fainted (BLIEP!), a glass has broken (CRACK! CLIRR!), a helicopter has crashed into a cupola (KAROMMS!), a museum has collapsed (CRACK! THUNDER! CRIME!).
The Reader (Vadim Zakharov), wearing a white shirt and a tie, recites these words seriously and forcefully. The image of a politician is created, a public figure who professionally and convincingly is ready to say something on any occasion. At the same time, we see that these are just empty words – bubbles that float away as soon as they reach our ears. The film highlights the absurdity of what we see and hear every day on television and the internet.
At the same time, reading non-verbal words can be perceived as reading poetry… “
Vadim Zakharov’s works shown in POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace present an all too fitting commentary on our current state of affairs where politicians spout nonsense at one another while remaining unable to stop the atrocities of war. BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About invokes the talking heads we see on news programs every day, recounting an equally incomprehensible reality which would be surreal were it not so tragic. While the 1000 Stalinist Victims are no longer a relic of a repressive history, but harbingers of what is to come – with the Russian regime resorting once again to the repression of all those opposed to its regressive policies, turning back to a time when the power of the state was wielded through ubiquitous terror and control. Stalinism may have changed names for a new millennium, but its tactics remain the same and its victims grow by the day.
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Vadim Zakharov (born in UdSSR in 1959) is an artist, editor, archivist of the Moscow Conceptual art scene, and collector, living and working in Berlin. Since 1979 he has participated in exhibitions of unofficial art and collaborated with such artists as: V. Skersis, S. Anufriev, I. Chuikov, A. Monastyrski, Y. Leiderman. In 1982–1983 he participated in the AptArt Gallery, Moscow. Since 1992-2001 he has published the “Pastor” magazine and founded the Pastor Zond Edition. In 2006 he edited book “Moscow Conceptualism”. His retrospective was held at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2006, and he has exhibited at Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2005), State Historical Museum Moscow (2003), amongst many others. Zalharov represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with the project “DANAE”. In 2016-2020 Zakharov organized the exhibition space “FREEHOME-Artist to Artist” in Berlin.
Selected honors and awards include: Griffelkunst-Preis, Hamburg (1995); Renta-Preis, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1995); Soratnik Prize, Moscow (2006); Innovation Prize, Moscow (2006); Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, American Academy in Rome (2007); Kandinsky Prize – Best Work of Year, Moscow (2009).
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POINTS of RESISTANCE IV:
Skills for Peace
OPENING: 7 April 2022 @ 6pm
EXHIBITION: 8 April – 1 May 2022
CONCERT by Sven Helbig: 17 April 2022 @ 7pm
PANEL DISCUSSION – Postponed
@ Zionskirche
Zionskirchplatz, Berlin
Opening Hours: During Church Opening Times
Monday – Saturday: 14:00 – 18:00
Sunday & Holidays before Easter: 12:00 –16:00
Sunday & Holidays after Easter: 12:00 –18:00
Initiated by:
MOMENTUM & KLEINERVONWIESE
Featuring:
Andreas Blank – Jonas Burgert – Tony Cragg – Wojtek Doroszuk
Nezaket Ekici – FRANEK – Asta Gröting – Sven Helbig
Stefan Höller – Olaf Holzapfel – Huang Jia – Nikita Kadan
William Kentridge – Ola Kolehmainen – Via Lewandowsky – Bernd Lohaus
Sarah Loibl – Boris Mikhailov – Fiona Pardington – Angelika Platen
Gerhard Richter – Stefan Rinck – Arsen Savadov – Katharina Sieverding – Vadim Zakharov
MORE INFO HERE ABOUT THE ARTISTS >>
Curated by:
Constanze Kleiner, Rachel Rits-Volloch, Stephan von Wiese, in cooperation with David Elliott and Daniel Marzona
HOW ARE YOU?
Ukrainian Video Program curated by Kateryna Filyuk:
Piotr Armianovski – Fantastic Little Splash – Oksana Karpovych – Dana Kavelina
Yarema Malashuk & Roman Himey – Oleksiy Radynski – Mykola Ridnyi
MORE INFO HERE ABOUT THE UKRAINIAN VIDEO PROGRAM >>
Skills for Peace EDITIONS:
To support Ukrainian artists and cultural workers who have become refugees or forced migrants fleeing the devastation of war in Ukraine, we offer visitors to our exhibition editions of video stills for sale, with all proceeds going to the artists.
Panel Discussion:
SKILLS FOR PEACE: “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”
Postponed – TBC
In cooperation with: Deutsches Institut für Gutes Leben & Female Vision
The subtitle of this discussion derives from the Motown anti-Vietnam War hit song, “WAR”, originally performed by The Temptations in 1969. If we have been singing about the futility of war since the 60’s, why must we learn this simple truth all over again today? As the song tells us, “War is the enemy of all mankind.” Sing it again!
Concert: SKILLS by Sven Helbig
On Easter Sunday, 17 April 2022 @ 19:00
Points of Resistance IV: SKILLS FOR PEACE takes its name from the new symphony – SKILLS – by the acclaimed German composer Sven Helbig.
His new symphony will premier on Easter Sunday, 17 April 2022, in the Zionskirche in Berlin, accompanying the exhibition.
About Skills for Peace:
Since the beginnings of human civilization, survival skills have evolved into craft and art. Here, the changes in aesthetics, ethics and morals are reflected. People describe this transformation in various ways: in culturally pessimistic dystopias or in posthumanist utopias. Out of this tension wars have been fought since the beginnings of culture about values of many kinds. What is new is the realization that war makes everyone a loser: those involved and even those not involved alike.
Points of Resistance IV: SKILLS FOR PEACE takes its name from the and still life SKILLS, by the renowned German composer Sven Helbig. Created in the style of baroque vanitas painting, it depicts, among other things, a vaccine vial, a skateboard, his iPhone, and the cables of his first computer under the neutered protective gesture of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, in addition to the common attributes of the still life genre. The central score features Strauss’s setting of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The deformed Hermes thereby reveals the dual questions: that of the divine idea, and that of the self-conquest of man without God as proclaimed by Nietzsche.
The question remains: what in today’s secular present can all people of this earth connect with after thousands of years of cultural history? It is peace, one should think. We should have the skills for it – after all that was.
SKILLS FOR PEACE lives in this field – between hymn and melancholy.
Points of Resistance IV: SKILLS FOR PEACE is the final exhibition in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche before the church closes for several years of renovations.
Ukrainian Video Program: In the context of the 4th edition of Points of Resistance – Skills for Peace, video works by Ukrainian artists will be shown in collaboration with curator Kateryna Filyuk. To support these artists, we present editions of video stills, with proceeds going exclusively to the artists.
– Constanze Kleiner
About POINTS of RESISTANCE:
POINTS of RESISTANCE is an exhibition series taking place in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche. Initiated during the pandemic lockdown in 2021 as a cooperation between MOMENTUM, Gallery Kleiner von Wiese, and David Elliott, the inaugural exhibition in April 2021 featured 54 exceptional international artists.
Click to View POINTS of RESISTANCE 1 > >
This series of exhibitions takes as its starting point the remarkable history of the Zionskirche as a crucial point of resistance. It was the place of activity of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who tried not only to stop the Nazi preparations for war, but also publicly denounced the persecution of the Jews. During the GDR era, the Zionskirche was a shelter for dissenters with democratic views.
Since Easter 2021, the initiators of POINTS of RESISTANCE have been inviting artists and thinkers from a variety of locations and perspectives to engage with the many possibilities and meanings of resistance in today’s complex world.
POINTS of RESISTANCE gives voice to humanist viewpoints necessary at a time when authoritarianism, nationalism and racism are steadily resurgent around the world. This is as much a disease of our times as the ongoing pandemic emergency. Each exhibition in this series brings together a multitude of human perspectives and artistic universes reflecting on the mistakes of the past and present in order to preserve the values which enable us to forge unity from diversity, and to live together in peace in the future. These skills are especially necessary in the context of Berlin’s painful history – and particularly in the face of the tragic return of war to Europe.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
In a world in which wars and armed conflicts have become insidiously embedded as “normal,” and which again faces the threat of nuclear disaster, paranoid, self-seeking power vaunts its deficit of imagination, empathy, and compassion as “strength.” In this state of emergency action must be taken and skills for peace relearnt and mobilised. Reflecting this, the works in this fourth iteration of Points of Resistance link, in radically different ways, the nightmarish actions of past and present with harsh dreams about the future. Such forms of resistance set a clear sight on their targets: virulent, divisive nationalism; the manipulative self-interest of governments and corrupt (social) media barons; all those who attempt to subvert human freedoms and rights and who, in their desperate search for “enemies”, obliterate the possibilities of others for self-realization, truthful reflection and considered critique. This battle, and the encompassing war of which it is part, is comprised of multiple acts of resistance, all made in the cause of truth.
Confined in enclosed, irreconcilable worlds, impervious to the nuances or openness of truth, Russia’s current war on Ukraine reveals how distinctions between “soldiers,” or “freedom fighters” – or between “drug-fuelled neo-Nazis” and “terrorists” – may quickly become reduced to little more than “points of view.” The only possibilities of resolution remain either the complete obliteration of the “enemy,” or the unstable knife-edge of war-like co-existence. Under such conditions, skills for peace are desperately needed, not only in Ukraine and Russia but also in Ethiopia, Israel, Korea, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tibet, Xinjiang and Yemen. Yet, where life is governed by the realpolitik of brute force, effective, prolonged resistance cannot depend on the vicious cycle of counter-atrocity and counter-inequity, paid in the same currency as that of the aggressor. Instead, it should assume the reverse approach by adopting an autonomous, humane, moral position, akin, perhaps, to that of art.
In whatever form or medium it appears, the art in this exhibition confirms one essential truth: although it may be useless in the brute face of power, art possesses a discrete and subtle power of its own. It should never instruct, yet it holds knowledge; it should never moralize, yet it is unavoidably moral. Its function is to be nothing other than itself – which means that it must “do” nothing. Even though its palette may be the whole universe and the emotions that resound within it, this power is derived from its integral disinterest.
Because of its acuity, disinterest, commitment and humanity, all art, if it is any good, is inevitably a point of resistance; a small speck to be amplified – as an expression of vulnerability, as an embodiment of truths, and as a further step towards self-knowledge and peace.
– David Elliott
HAVE A 3D TOUR HERE
POINTS of RESISTANCE WEBSITE > >
KLEINERVONWIESE WEBSITE > >
Featuring:
(Click on the name to see the bio and the work description below)
Andreas Blank
Box with military boots
2010, Limestone, Serpentinite, 56 x 55 x 38,5 cm
Monument
2021, Marble, Basalt, Alabaster, Serpentinite, Bronze, 124 x 107 x 70 cm
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POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace presents three of Andreas Blank’s iconic works – a businessman’s white shirt carefully folded atop his briefcase, and military boots standing upright in their box, ready to wear. The juxtaposition of these two works is sadly emblematic of our times. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, war has tragically returned to Europe. In many Ukrainian cities, people are working from home or from bomb shelters, while offices are allocated to the streams of refugees fleeing from homes turned into battlegrounds. Those conscripted into the war on both sides, forced to fight for expansion or required to stay and defend their homeland, have replaced their business attire with combat boots, and their briefcases with guns. And with so many lost lives being mourned in Ukraine, Blank’s basalt shroud hanging on the wall is reminiscent of the mirrors draped over in black in the houses of the dead.
“To a certain extent, the work has an archaeological character: the contemporary world, here: German history, becomes petrified, it acquires timelessness. In this case, a real pair of leather military boots, with which Andreas Blank’s grandfather returned from the war and from captivity, was the template – the boots were stored in a box under the roof for decades. The box was then set in stone to form the inverted base. The pedestal is also a time depot at the same time. It is a real anti-war piece.”
– Stephan von Wiese
In his sculptural practice, Andreas Blank combines the abstract and the realistic, the conceptual as well as the technical. He sources stones from quarries from all over the world, carves them with elaborate deliberation, and assembles them as deceptively realistic objects of the everyday. In his precise installations, the apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. Whether marble, alabaster, or porphyry, material historically used to serve religious or political functions, has in Blank’s hands acquired a seemingly casual and fragmentary character. The geographical and cultural identity of the stone and the memorial function of stone-sculpture in general refer to the value of each object. Blank questions the obvious and transforms traditional ideals, subverting the value of the ordinary and mundane. In a discourse of image and likeness, things lose their functional purpose, transcending into pure, formalistic objects. Stone sculptures, which historically were intended primarily for political representation or religious devotion, in Andreas Blank’s works come to question a (post)modernist nihilism. His works succeed to condense time and narrative structures, stretching the limits of traditional sculpture.
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Andreas Blank (born in Ansbach in 1976) is a Berlin-based sculptor. He attended the Karlsruhe State Academy of Art (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and was a student of Prof. Harald Klingelhöller. He held a scholarship with the German National Academic Foundation and received his Master of Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2009 he was a finalist for the New Sensations Award by Channel 4 and the Saatchi Gallery. Among other venues, he has exhibited at Choi&Lager Galerie Köln (2021), Galerie Knecht und Burster, Karlsruhe (2019), Bernheimer Contemporary, Berlin (2016), Royal College of Art, London (2009).
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Jonas Burgert
Licht lügt / Light lies
2014, Oil on Canvas, 240 x 220 cm
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In the mystical, theatrical paintings of Jonas Burgert, the figures move in front of a membrane of cultural symbols and archaic patterns that seem to come down to us from another dimension.
Jonas Burgert personifies human psychology through figurative painting bordering on the grotesque. Astutely observing the minutiae of daily life, he bears witness to the entire range of human emotion. Loneliness, hatred, revenge, vanity and excess – a parade of human expressions feeds his imagination – giving form to the characters within his tableaux. There is a timeless sense of other dimensions and emotional undercurrents reflected in the ruptured layers of Burgert’s environments. Often breached by characters and architectural features, these tears in the pictorial plane reveal various levels existing simultaneously.
Burgert’s canvasses abound with rubble, detritus, remnants of history, cinders of the art of painting – the very cinders that serve to feed greed. However, they are of a fleeting nature. Their purpose is to devour the images and to unleash from the chaos the impulse and those emotions that linger in the memory.
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Jonas Burgert (born in Berlin in 1959) is a Berlin based contemporary artist. He has shown work in many exhibitions including Rohkunstbau at Stipendiaten in Berlin, Geschichtenerzähler at Hamburg Kunsthalle and Dis-Positiv at Staatsbank in Berlin. Burgert has exhibited internationally at museums and galleries such as Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Beirut and Villa Manin, Passariano, Italy and was part of the Malerei Biennale in Stockholm in 2003. He is represented by Produzentengalerie in Hamburg BlainSouthern in London and Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong. He has also exhibited in Seattle, Mumbai, London and Denver. From January to April 2017 he exhibited his first solo show “Lotsucht. Scandagliodipendenza in Italy, at MAMbo in Bologna.
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Tony Cragg
Karst
2020, Bronze Sculpture: 125 (h) x 136 x 96 cm, Pedestal: 40 (h) x 60 x 90 cm, Weight 500 kg
Courtesy of André Buchman, Buchmann Galerie
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Collecting, sorting, stacking, and layering material is a working process that Tony Cragg has repeatedly tested as a sculptural principle since the 1970s. The bronze Karst impressively demonstrates the progress of this principle. The sculpture is reminiscent of geological formations and seems to push against gravity with powerful force.
Tony Cragg stands out as one of the foremost sculptors of our time. His oeuvre testifies to a method of working in which he constantly negotiates with questions of the figural by revisiting and further developing sculptural solutions to representation. Duplication, nesting, and scaling are methods that Tony Cragg masterfully combines in ever-new ways. His work’s continuity and validity relate to the fundamental questions about the relationship between body, matter, object, and space, which the artist has been dealing with continuously for decades.
“In order to decide about the form and structure of many things we will need sculpture and sculptural thinking. I would like to apply sculptural thinking to biomechanics, to government institutions, to social structure etc.”
– Tony Cragg, 2006
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Tony Cragg (born in Liverpool in 1949) has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. He has a BA from Wimbledon School of Art, London, UK (1973) and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, UK (1977). Among many major solo shows he has exhibited at Houghton Hall, UK (2021); Museum Belvédere, Netherlands (2021); Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil (2020); Split Kula Cultural Institution, Croatia (2019); City of Arts and Sciences, Spain (2018); Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran (2018); Istanbul Modern, Turkey (2017); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017); the National Museum of Havana, Cuba (2017); MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2017); Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany (2017); Wroclaw Contemporary Art Museum, Wroclaw, Poland (2017); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (2016; Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2015); Gothenburg International Sculpture Exhibition, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015); Heydar Aliyev Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan (2014); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2013); CAFA Museum in Beijing, China (2012); Musée du Louvre, Paris, France (2011); the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2011); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, USA (2011); Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2010); Tate Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2000); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (1995), Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1991) and Tate Gallery, London, UK (1988). He represented Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988 and in the same year was awarded the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, London, UK. He has been a Professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris, France (1999-2009) and Professor at Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Germany (2009–present). He was elected a Royal Academician in 1994; received the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture, Tokyo, Japan (2007); was Awarded the 1st Class Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2012) and was made a Knight’s Bachelor in 2016.
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Wojtek Doroszuk
Festin
2013, HD Video, 20′ 15″, Ed. 5/8+1
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Festin takes as its inspiration the paintings of the 17th century Flemish still life artists, such as Frans Snyder, Jan and Ferdinand Van Kessel who depicted sumptuous spreads of food, often garnished with dead animals which have been recently shot. Further alluding to Peter Greenaway’s scenes of sumptuous decay, Festin envisages a feast interrupted by an unknown calamity, a world from which human beings have disappeared. The film portrays a timeless vanitas tableau of decay and disorder where non-existent guests have been usurped by the uninvited intrusion of insects and stray dogs. This imagery creates a post-apocalyptic epilogue for humankind, a portent of what may result if human greed continues to grow unabated. Seeing this work in the context of the war in Ukraine, one cannot help but imagine a last supper left to rot, the guests fleeing to join the streams of refugees displaced by battles on city streets, closer to home than any of us could have imagined mere months ago. The ubiquity of war, even today in our seemingly enlightened age, renders this contemporary vanitas that much more timeless.
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Wojtek Doroszuk (born 1980, Poland) is a visual artist. He works with video and photography. He is interested in society as a spectacle and a series of conventions which he tries to deconstruct. He asks why we so easily reconcile ourselves to the existing, what is repressed, and invokes the stranger. In his Istanbul project, consisting of a series of aestheticized postcards with non-standard views, hidden from tourists, and information like this on the back, and the film triptych Picnic, Lunch I and Lunch II (2005), he shows the impossibility of communication, translation of behavior and cultural habits. It draws attention to colonial conditioning and orientalist perceptions, which are visible even despite the political correctness of conscious Europeans. Similar themes recur in Free Cracow Tour (2005), a mystified walk around Krakow for foreigners, a work she created with Anna Szwajgier, or Video Party (2006), a party at which foreign students staying in Poland play alleged games typical of Poles. He has exhibited at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia (2019), Maksla XO Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania (2018), Arsenal Gallery, Białystok, Poland (2016), Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris (2013), EKKM, Tallin (2011), lokal_30, Warsaw, Poland (2010), Platan Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2010), Main Train Station of Ankara, Turkey (2007), Sala Verónicas, Centro Párraga, Murcia, Spain (2007), Container Gallery, Roma, Italy (2006). He lives and works in Kraków.
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Nezaket Ekici
Flesh (No Pig but Pork)
2011, Performance Video, HD, sound, 9’34”
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The artist kneels in a pile of pork from a freshly slaughtered pig. She wears safety goggles and rubber gloves which refer to the Islamic law forbidding the touching and eating of pork. She holds up pieces of meat and sniffs at them as if to ascertain why the law exists. The sound of her breathing is amplified by a microphone and is clearly audible throughout the room. The work is a direct reference to her piece No Pork but Pig (2004) in which she spent several hours in a small pen with a living pig.
Throughout Ekici’s performance practice, she again and again confronts the image of a woman and an artist caught between cultures. Born not far from Ankara, socialised within the narrow circle of her Turkish family in Germany, she explores the limits of what is physically possible in her projects, radically committing her own body to her artworks. In Flesh, (No Pig but Pork), she targets the taboos and traditional rituals of the Islamic world, donning Lady Justice‘s blindfold, a black leotard and yellow rubber gloves to wallow in pork meat, sniffing the forbidden raw flesh. Presented here in POINTS of RESISTANCE: Skills for Peace, at a time when war has inconceivably broken out in Europe once more, this work transforms from grotesque to tragic. In the face of bombs falling on residential streets, we could all be piles of flesh, meat torn asunder by violence. Lady Justice could well be asking, what could possibly justify that?
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Nezaket Ekici (born in Kirsehir, Turkey in 1970) is an international performance artist. She holds an M.A. in Art Pedagogy, and studied Art History and Sculpture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Fine Arts Academy Munich (1994-2000). From 2001 to 2004 she studied Performance Art under Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. She received a degree in Fine Arts as well as an MFA degree. Ekici has been presenting her work in national and international exhibitions since 2000: Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich; The Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; 25. May Museum Belgrade; PAC Milano; Venice Biennale; P.S.1 New York; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei/ Taiwan; Poznan Biennale; Curitiba Biennale; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Istanbul Modern; Marta Herford; Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; KunstWerke Berlin; Oslo Museum; The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Total Museum Seoul. In 2013/2014, she was an artist in Residency at the Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul and in 2016/2017, she got the Rome Prize and was an artist in Residency at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome. In 2018 she received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Award, and In 2020 she was an artist in residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York, sponsored by the International Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin. Ekici’s work includes mainly performance, video and installation. She presented more than 250 different performances in over 60 countries, more than 170 cities on 4 continents. She lives and works in Berlin, Stuttgart and Istanbul.
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FRANEK
Besuch im Atelier (Ostersonntag) / Visit to the Studio (Easter Sunday)
2021, Mixed media on canvas, 100 x 190 cm
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My paintings are narrative associative fields – while I work, phantasms surprise me, which then melds with current affairs and pertaining to literature, film and theatre. Through various artistic techniques, available image material and fictional images, I transform these fields into a vast network, which is always in accordance with world events.
What’s fascinating is exactly that one doesn’t understand. I play with incomprehension and not with a given history.
– FRANEK
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FRANEK (Sabine Franek-Koch, born in Potsdam in 1939) studied painting and printmaking at the Berlin Art School (now Berlin University of the Arts) with Fred Thieler and Mac Zimmermann. Her first solo exhibition was in 1968 at the Pels-Leusden Gallery in West Berlin. Others followed in galleries, art clubs and museums at home and abroad. She taught at the Berlin Art School, the University of Art and Design in Helsinki and Lahti, and University of the Arts Bremen. FRANEK’s work includes paintings, drawings, prints, book illustration, sculpture, photography and film. In the 1970s and 1980s, the artist became deeply immersed in researching visual symbols used by the indigenous cultures of North and South America. She worked in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras and helped mathematician Maria Reiche to map spirals (Nazca Lines) on the Nazca Plains in Peru. Furthermore FRANEK recorded rituals for the Übersee-Museum in Bremen among the Lakota (Sioux) at the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the United States. The artist lives and works in Berlin and in Radegast, Lower Saxony.
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Asta Gröting
Fassade
2019, Installation in wax, 85 x 70 x 5 cm
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I am working on the assumption that our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subject from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over.
– Sigmund Freud Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, December 6 1896
Moving on from her long association with ventriloquism in which the hollow doll became an instrument to explore the awkward, perhaps shameful feelings we cannot easily voice to each other, Gröting now gives her attention to the inner voice of the holes, scars and histories transcribed on the architectural surfaces of buildings in her city.
How do these memory traces speak to us and how do we speak to them? It is certain that my conversation will be very different from your conversation.
The uncanny installations that make up BERLIN FACADES resemble a sculptural, slow- exposure photograph, pushing through the 20th century into the 21st in one simultaneous moment.
Where were we then; where are we now?
In a bold conceptual strike, Gröting embodies /embalms both trauma and time in a ghostly silicone skin. It is a forensic procedure. Peeling off these memory traces resembles the taking of fingerprints after a crime has been committed. My eyes stare in to the bullet and canon holes and the holes stare right back in to my own psychic holes. In Gröting’s words: “I want to look from inside these destroyed walls and facades into the world – as if I could see my own face staring back at me.”
Gröting’s ongoing sculptural conversation between interiors and exteriors across a number of media, her absolute preoccupation with the ways in which the invisible can technically be rendered visible – (a task usually pursued by poets) – makes her uniquely placed to land inside these cracked, pierced, damaged walls.
As I stand before these facades, re-transcribed by Gröting in silicone, how am I being invited to read their expression and repression? I am reminded that the function of skin is to protect my body from damage. Furthermore, if skin can access my mood and physical state, it can also bring to the surface any number of turbulent emotions –the historical and personal represented in visible marks and traces. This is why most of us give a great deal of attention to concealing our own facades. Let me tell you that every time I type the word- facade – (also meaning a deceptive outward appearance), my spell- check changes this word to face – a blunt, literal robo -correction, but it is not incorrect. A facade is the face of a building.
There is in English the phrase to be stony faced (literally, to have the face of a stone) – meaning to reveal nothing of our inner thoughts, to show no emotion. Yet, as we know, our facades do eventually crumble, and when that happens, we are unmasked to reveal our concealed histories.
To return to Freud’s archeological metaphor, in which with great care and patience, the buried “objects” of the past are gradually uncovered and brought to the surface, it would seem that Gröting, in re-transcribing these historical and architectural memory traces (blurring, smudging, smearing still intact) has excavated both past and present, conserving and reconstructing our relations to them.
– Deborah Levy, 2016
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Asta Gröting (born in Herford, Germany, in 1961) is a contemporary artist. She works in a variety of media like sculpture, performance, and video. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art Berlin, the Kunstraum Dornbirn, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the LENTOS Art Museum in Linz, and the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute, among others. She has also participated in international group exhibitions at venues including the Maas Museum in Sydney, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, the Hartware Medienkunstverein Dortmund, and the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo. Gröting’s works often present ordinary, familiar elements, where the viewer’s attention is drawn towards their material transformation, caused by the exaggeration of the familiar. In Gröting’s work there is a focus on what is not visible, like the inner voice, the space between lovers having sex, the digestive system, or the inside of holes made by bullets, and the ways in which the invisible can be brought to the surface. She is currently a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art.
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Sven Helbig
Skills (Vanitas)
2022, Photograph, C-Print with Frame, 90 x 165 cm, Ed. 1/3
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Skills for Peace, the fourth edition of the POINTS of RESISTANCE exhibition series, derives its name from the still life Skills, by the renowned German composer Sven Helbig. Created in the style of baroque vanitas painting, it depicts, among other things, a vaccine vial, a skateboard, his iPhone, and the cables of his first computer under the neutered protective gesture of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, in addition to the common attributes of the still life genre. The central score features Strauss’s setting of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The deformed Hermes thereby reveals the dual questions: that of the divine idea, and that of the self-conquest of man without God as proclaimed by Nietzsche. The question remains: what in today’s secular present can all people of this earth connect with after thousands of years of cultural history? It is peace, one should think. We should have the skills for it – after all that was. Skills for Peace lives in this field – between hymn and melancholy.
Sven Helbig’s photographic work Skills, was made in parallel to his new Symphony, also entitled Skills, to be performed on Easter Sunday within the POINTS of RESISTANCE: Skills for Peace exhibition in the Zionskirche.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In my parents’ living room stands an elaborately hand-forged copper kettle – my grandfather’s masterpiece, hammered out of a single piece of copper. Growing up in a family of craftsmen, I have been familiar since early childhood with the attitude of perfecting a thing for its own sake.
The deepening concentration and slow maturing of execution, the craft shares with spiritual rituals, with arts, sports and the sciences. I am touched by the sight of almost ideal expressions of human activity, be it a forged piece, a perfectly build sentence or an athletic performance. I dedicate my album SKILLS to this fascination.
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Sven Helbig (born in Eisenhüttenstadt in 1968) is a German composer, director and music producer. Helbig’s symphonic images are closely connected to his life, experiences, aspirations and also the voids between epochs, systems and continents. In 2003 he produced the project “Mein Herz Brennt” (My Heart Burns) based on song ideas by Rammstein. A year later he performed “Battleship Potemkin” with the Pet Shop Boys, and in 2009, he recorded with the Fauré Quartett as producer of their “Popsongs” album. The friction between the feeling of security of yesteryear and the challenges of the present is one of his central motifs. In this respect, Helbig’s little symphonies are in fact substantial works, for they continue to expand within their framework. Helbig’s versatility has made him a much sought-after producer for crossover projects; he has worked as a producer, composer and arranger with Snoop Dogg, Polarkreis 18, opera singer René Pape, pianist Olga Scheps and more. Helbig’s work builds on the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk (all-embracing art form) and he often takes responsibility for content, music and production at the same time. Helbig currently lives and works in Dresden.
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Stefan Höller
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Olaf Holzapfel
Lichtbild Leinen Blau / Linen Blue Photo
2014, Hay, Wire, Ash, Pigment, 130 x 120 x 25 cm
Courtesy of Daniel Marzona
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Olaf Holzapfel, born in Dresden in 1967, is an artist from a country that no longer exists. His coming-of-age involved crossing a border between the East-West divide of the Cold War era that – until the current outbreak of war in Ukraine – was becoming a distant memory. Holzapfel has long been interested in boundaries, demarcations, and frontiers – or, more precisely, in interstitial spaces, what is possible in between. With Europe’s anxiety surrounding its porous borders now central, sadly enough, to its paranoid sense of self, Holzapfel’s work could not be more timely and more apt, choosing to shift his gaze to a frontier far from the eastern Mediterranean, namely in south-central Chile, the past site of a number of Holzapfel’s projects; all of which have involved close cooperation with the local population and an elemental reliance on Indigenous traditions of building, constructing, and manufacturing.
“Holzapfel’s new pictures made of straw and cactus fibers describe the relationship between human and landscape; they translate space into surfaces. These are material pictures of the periphery – straw pictures from Lusatia and Brandenburg, chaguar plant fiber pictures from the dry forests of the Chaco in northern Argentina, pictures and folds of interconnected straw, line spaces in which light is refracted, reticulated woven textile pictures of cactus fibers colored with materials extracted from the plants in the environs. In them, traditional motifs are combined with contemporary compositions of paths, spirals, and fields to yield landscape-like pictorial spaces. Holzapfel’s works, created with ancient craft techniques, blur, within contemporary art, the strict separation of nature and culture. Are line spaces and networks exclusively contemporary terms of a digitalized, media world? Holzapfel’s dealings with living forms of crafts suggest that the contradiction between tradition and modernity can be viewed as a bygone construct, as mere appearance that glorifies landscape as an Arcadian subconscious. Instead, the artist is interested in landscape as a reservoir of its own media technology, with a presence of the approximate, of the recurring dimensions of plants, of the systematics of even inhospitable rural regions. He thereby counters a view of truth and reality shaped by theoretical conceptions with an action and the material that lead to a picture.
The spaces that are meanwhile virtually retrievable everywhere and at all times via GPS coordinates or actually as urban space are juxtaposed and compared with what we call nature, wilderness, or landscape to produce the disturbing fascination of his new works. Until now, nature was usually perceived as a depiction or a resource – whereby it produces its pictures in direct exchange with itself. Thus, Holzapfel’s pictures tell us something about our relationship to nature and landscape, about our relational being, about the similarity and comparability of modern and archaic, urban and rural models of spatial organization. They draw their beauty from their simultaneity – they originate from the interior of the landscape in which they are made, and the question arises whether these pictures of the periphery are not in reality the beginning of a new center and perhaps already inscribed in it, and whether the contradiction between wilderness and order, between nature and culture actually exists or is only a theoretical construct that keeps us within the interior of a human egocentrism and blocks our view of their natural kinship.
The first chaguar pictures were created in collaboration with the northern Argentinian Indios, the Wichis, and were first exhibited in 2009 in Buenos Aires and then at the Venice Biennale 2011. Later, Holzapfel created additional individual pictures that can now be viewed as autonomous pictorial works. They provide examples of the ambiguity of seemingly fixed categories of a modernity enclosed within itself and prepared for random access. For it remains simply unclear whether their theme is determined by a recollection of the Bauhaus, by digital designs, or by the technique and craft of the Indios. Holzapfel’s artistic practice thus proves once more to be shaped by a nomadic, alternative thinking that includes the fissure and that brings contraries together to advance to new shores.”
– Daniel Marzona
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Olaf Holzapfel (born in Dresden, 1967) is a German contemporary artist. First featured in Ausgesucht von Thomas Scheibitz at Koch und Kesslau in Berlin in 2003, his work is particularly well-known in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, having been exhibited with Eberhard Havekost and Frank Nitsche. He was notably featured in the 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011) and in documenta14 (2017).
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Huang Jia
Ohne Titel / Untitled
2022, Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
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A fortuitous cojoiing of Malevich’s Black Square and White Square – Huang Jia’s spatial painting is a minefield of optical illuson. Made of opposing planes of straight lnes, it nevertheless defies the eye to percieve it as straight. Leaving the viewer with an uneasy sensation that something is somewhat out of joint, it could be an allegory for our twisted times – a world skewed by war and disease off of the straight line which was once our perception of normal.
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Huang Jia (born in China in 1964), is a painter and well-respected representative of minimalist conceptual painting. Her work goes from figurative to minimalist, combining basic concave and convex forms in differing permutations attempting to demonstrate, that varying psychologies and the collective unconsciousness can be transmitted through the simplest visual symbols. Huang Jia’s “Waiting for New Hairstyle” series was selected into Guangzhou Biennale 1992 and her early works were inspired by Francis Bacon, Paul Delvaux and Lucian Freud, focusing on self expression and construction. To give our readers a broader perspective of her works and practice we arranged an interview with Huang Jia. She currently lives and works in Shenzhen.
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Nikita Kadan
4 Aquarelle
Watercolor on paper, 25,2 x 20 cm
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Predating the current attrocities of war in Ukraine, but poignanty relavent now, is this series of watercolors of excecuted Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.
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Nikita Kadan (born in Kiev in 1982) is one of the leading personas of Ukrainian art. Kadan works with painting, graphics, and installation, often in interdisciplinary collaboration with architects, sociologists and human rights activists. He is a member of the artist group R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and founding member of Hudrada (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective. Nikita Kadan represented Ukraine at the Venice Biennale in 2015. He has been awarded the Kazimir Malevich Prize, 2016; the Future Generation Prize (special prize), 2014; the Maiмn Prize, PinchukArtCentre Prize, 2011; and he was shortlisted for the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2009 and for Future Generation Prize in 2012. His works are featured in the public collections of Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, M HKA; Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp; mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien); National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv; Arsenal Gallery, Białystok; Military History Museum, Dresden; The Art Collection Telekom, Krasnoyarsk; museum centre, Krasnoyarsk; The Kingdom of Belgium, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; FRAC Bretagne; Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; Сentre Pompidou in Paris.
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William Kentridge
Processional Nose
2015, Mohair Tapestry, woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Johannesburg, South Africa, 258 x 257 cm, Ed. 1/6
Courtesy of Galerie Kewenig, Berlin, and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
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William Kentridge’s tapestry, Processional Nose, engages a recurring motif from his three-year-long period of preparations for his staging of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera ‘The Nose’, commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera and performed in 2009. This daring opera, based on Gogol’s well known tale “The Nose” – about the misuse of power and a person divided against himself – is rendered strikingly relevant in light of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“A man wakes up to find that he has lost his nose. In 1837, Gogol writes a short story about the man’s attempts to find the missing proboscis and to reattach it to his face. Gogol considers the story that he has just recounted, concluding that it is a strange and improbable tale. Not only is it very odd for a nose to disappear from a man’s face, only to reappear baked inside a loaf of bread, but it’s even more absurd to imagine that he could persuade the newspaper to let him take out an advertisement looking for his nose. This is not about money. It is about the impropriety of the newspaper and advertisements for lost noses. “Why do authors write stories like this?” Gogol asks. “It’s no good for the country, although in truth it does no harm either…. But why write about it? Such things may happen, but they do not happen often.”
For the stage design of the opera, on top of projections of human figures, paper cut-outs were added and interposed, trying to find a link between the constructivist language of El Lissitzky and the earthy language of Gorky and the Russian filmmakers. Languages which were very different at the time and even antithetical, but which in hindsight are joined by a sense of openness, of possibility, of agency. As if the upheavals of the 1917 revolution could provide an energy for new images, new words, a new language.
The conception of the opera, its range, inventiveness and daring of the music, is fuelled by the possibilities that seemed unleashed by the transformations in the society around the composer, Shostakovich. The opera and, I hope, the production celebrate that moment of possibility.
We know the post-history.”
This painful post-history comes back to haunt us today, with Russia’s aggressive imperialist ambitions and tragic regression to the punitive measures of Stalinist times. It is becoming a country divided against its own people, as well as a nation seeking to restore long-lost borders.
The motif in Kentridge’s tapestry ‘Processional Nose’ from 2016 refers also to the many states of migration and displacement during the apartheid era in South Africa and more generally around the increasingly globalized world. It is tragic how little has changed since those darker times. With so many once more fleeing war and repression in Ukraine and Russia we are again faced with mass forced migration and displacement. This major theme in Kentridge’s work appears in animated films, drawings, collages, theater productions, tapestries and installations – such as his permanent large scale staircase work at MoMA PS1, New York (2000) or the 2016 inaugurated ‘Triumphs and Laments’, a 500 meter-long frieze alongside the Tiber River in Rome.
https://www.kentridge.studio/projects/the-nose
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William Kentridge (born in Johannesburg in 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. The latter are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds’ screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
His works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at many museums, including Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Barcelona (2020), Liebegshaus, Frankfurt (2018), MAXXI, Rome (2013), MACO, Oaxaca (2011), Louvre, Paris, (2010), Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2009), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2007), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007), Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2006).
Since the 1980s, Kentridge has been awarded various prizes, such as the Kaiserring Prize, the Carnegie Prize, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, and the Red Ribbon Award for Short Fiction. He currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Kentridge’s works are included in the following permanent collections: Honolulu Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Tate Modern (London). An edition of the five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012), which debuted at documenta 13, was jointly acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2015, Kentridge gave the definitive collection of his archive and art – films, videos and digital works – to the George Eastman Museum, one of the world’s largest and oldest photography and film collections.
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Ola Kolehmainen
Das Ist Der Dom in Coeln I
2019, 5 panels, 226 x 777cm, mirrors, matt archive inkjet prints in artist frame, Ed. 2
Synagogue Glockenkasse 1861 (Destroyed 9.11.38)
2019, 75 x 68 cm
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Places of worship have, throughout human history, played a significant role in times of conflict and war. They are places of hope and redemption where we come to pray for peace. But also – alas – they have historically represented the causes of many conflicts, from the religious wars and inquisitions of the Crusades, to more recent conflicts around the world. With the outbreak of war once more in Europe threatening to engulf the world, Ola Kolehmainen’s work in POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace is presented with this duality in mind. It is both a reflection on the greatness of human endeavor in building architectural marvels in the glorification of God, and the human potential for evil in destroying those same marvels in the name of dogmas and ideologies.
Ola Kolehmainen (born in Helsinki in 1964), has lived and worked in Berlin since 2005. He studied at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki (TaiK) and became one of the most visible and successful artists of the first Helsinki School generation in the first decade of the 21st century. He is known for his minimalistic and abstract pictures of modern architecture, with a special interest in the work of modern masters such as Alvar Aalto and Mies van der Rohe.
His current more narrative works focus on exteriors and interiors of sacred buildings that he started after spending an intense work phase in Istanbul in 2014 researching buildings of the Ottoman and Byzantine Period.
The Berlin-based artist is one of the leading figures in Finnish photography. His work is included in multiple international art institutions, foundations, and collections, from Germany and Spain to renowned Nordic museums such as the Malmö Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Galerie Forsblom has been representing Ola Kolehmainen since 2011.
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Via Lewandowsky
Und dann das / And then this
2021, Neon, Wooden Box, 35 x 30 x 130 cm
как жаль (ach, schade) / what a shame
2009/2022, Text with Neon, 25 x 120 cm
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Via Lewandowsky’s works speak for themselves. The two text pieces spell out a scathing portrait of our times. Inside its own packing crate is nestled a red neon word meaning ‘senseless’. Originally intended by the artist as a caustic comment on the art market, this work and the sentiment behind it are even more applicable to our situation today with the senseless outbreak of war in Ukraine. While the translated title of как жаль (What A Shame), executed in glowing Cyrillic letters, doesn’t begin to cover the profound pathos of this short phrase in the original Russian. What a shame, indeed, that violence and repression have returned again to a people who have already endured so much. Having been born and raised in the DDR, Via Lewandowsky in his work often voices his resentment at the legacies of this repressive political system with bittersweet humor. Yet there is no room for humor in the atrocities of war unfolding in Ukraine right now, and как жаль (What A Shame), as a statement of our times, remains simply bittersweet.
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Via Lewandowsky (born in Dresden in 1963), is a contemporary artist based in Berlin. He studied at the Dresden University of Fine Arts from 1982 to 1987. Between 1985 and 1989 he organized subversive performances with the avant-garde group “Auto-Perforations-Artisten”, which subverted the official art scene of the GDR. His multimedia practice focuses on sculptural-installational works and exhibition scenographies with architectural influences. His leitmotifs are always the misunderstanding as a result of failure of communication, as well as the processual. An ironic refraction of the everyday, the intrusion of the foreign into the familiar, mostly domestic, realm, often happens by using insignia of the German bourgeoisie (e.g. a cuckoo clock, or a budgie). His predilection for the tragic-comical, the absurd and paradoxical, as well as the Sisyphean motif of the constant repetition and futility of action connect his art with Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus. Via Lewandowsky’s works have been shown worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Jewish Museum, Berlin (2020), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019), Bongsan Cultural Center in South Korea (2019), Shedhalle, Zurich (2018), David Nolan Gallery, New York (2017), Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig (2016) or Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2015).
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Bernd Lohaus
Untitled
2001, Wood engraved with text, 28,5 x 264 x 253 cm
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Bernd Lohaus’s oeuvre gives a voice to the material. Since the late 1960s, wood, rope, and later also stone and bronze have been the working materials of elemental sculptures in which the raw and the fragile interlink and in which flotsam found in the water gains a new artistic life of its own with a few simple interventions.
Along with the usually block-like and expansive sculptures stand reduced works on paper and raw canvas pieces – “coudrages” – with similar, powerfully expressive simplicity; some are inscribed with a few words as if with pictorial poetic exclamations, while in other cases, they are marked with bar-like brown strips of tape that cut out space, sometimes accented with energetic strokes of color.
Because the material points beyond itself to the realm of feeling, thinking, language, and back to history and nature, Lohaus’s sculptural oeuvre is an expansion of traditional sculptural forms of expression. It connects the material with spirituality.
Bernd Lohaus created his first works directly in Beuys’s class, and they were exhibited in the gallery circuit of the Academy at that time. Since then, in its various forms of expression, the oeuvre has continued to develop in the sense of a progressing dialog with itself and the world. Lohaus has also repeatedly placed large ensembles in natural surroundings.
Bernd Lohaus was born in Dusseldorf in 1940 and died in Antwerp in 2010. In 1965, he and his wife Anny De Decker founded Antwerp’s Wide White Space Gallery (until 1976). After beginning with Fluxus-like Happenings, in 1969 he had his international artistic debut at Harald Szeemann’s exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” in the Kunsthalle Bern. In September 2014, Daniel Marzona opened his Berlin gallery programmatically with a solo exhibition by this pioneering artist.
– Stephan von Wiese
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Bernd Lohaus (born in Germany in 1940) is a contemporary artist. Lohaus is represented by multiple galleries around the world, such as Georg Kargl Fine Arts in Vienna, Galerie Bernard Bouche in Paris, and Daniel Marzona in Berlin. His works have been shown at Geukens & De Vil in Antwerp with the exhibition PRESQUE RIEN; at Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp; at Galerie Bernard Bouche in Paris.
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Sarah Loibl
Fahrt ins Blaue (Himmelfahrt 2) / Journey to the Blue (Ascension 2)
2019, Egg Tempera on Transparent Paper, 220 x 114 cm
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Journey to the Blue (Ascension 2) is one of many possible combinations of the group of works Konvolut Möglichkeiten / Convoluted Possibilites, which Sarah Loibl continues since 2016. Countless studies on transparent paper webs, which on the one hand serve Loibl as preparation for her up to 3.60m large wall-related paintings and on the other hand – folded, cut and recombined again and again – investigate and thematize mobility and action space of pictorial thinking as changing image assemblies. In a frame, pinned to the wall, or layered as a loose pile on rolling carts, they form a contradictory joint, emphasizing process, movement, and the assertion of always possible shifts.
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Sarah Loibl (born in Munich, Germany in 1987) is a contemporary artist. She graduated at University of Fine Arts, Berlin, 2017. Her work is strongly connected to movement and distances. Her Solo Exhibitions include “Win Heart”, Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo (2015), “Four possibilities to run against a wall” (2018). Her group exhibitions include “Canvas”, Tschechisches Zentrum, Berlin (2018), “Ten Years Regina Pistor”, Berlin (2018), “Meisterschülerausstellung”, UdK Berlin (2017), “What stayed from Fichten”, Max Planck Institute for arts and research, Berlin (2017), “Berlin stoneprints from the last decade”, Galeria ASP, Gdansk, Poland (2016), “Five caps”, Galeria Kaufhof am Alexanderplatz, Berlin (2016), “young positions”, Galerie Pankow, Berlin (2015), “Druckgrafik Plastik”, Kunstraum Heiddorf (2015), “Das Atelier für Lithographie”, Printing Museum, Lublin, Poland (2015), “Physis”, market place and court of Veria, Greece (2013), “Projekt Physis”, griechische Kulturstiftung, Berlin (2013).
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Boris Mikhailov
Untitled
Color photography, triptich, 40 x 50 cm, Unique work
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Boris Mikhailov’s images bring to life one of the most tumultuous chapters of the 20th century: the height, decline, and fall of the Soviet Union and its disturbing aftermath. Yet as they chart this extraordinary history, they also express the complex emotions and intellectual subtlety of a powerful artist. Mikhailov’s work ranges from the covert transgressions of a critical mind under a totalitarian regime to the tender depictions of daily life. The world in his pictures is always unadorned and raw – everyday scenes, poverty, sexuality, despair, resignation, the decline of a forgotten Eastern Europe. Mikhailov, always dedicated to the outcasts of society, explores the position of the individual within the historical mechanisms of public ideology, touching on such subjects as Ukraine under Soviet rule, the living conditions in post-communist Eastern Europe, and the fallen ideals of the Soviet Union. Although deeply rooted in a historical context, Mikhailov’s work also incorporates profoundly engaging and personal narratives of humor, lust, vulnerability, aging, and death.
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Boris Mikhailov (born in the USSR in 1938), is a Ukrainian photographer living and working between Kharkiv and Berlin. He has been described as one of the most important artists to have emerged from the former USSR. Mikhailov studied electrical engineering at Kharkov Technical University and initially worked as an engineer before he began taking photographs as a self-taught photographer in the late 1960s. The early series of the 1960s and 70s often show personal images of friends, acquaintances or partners of the artist.
Boris Mikhailov’s works have been presented in countless solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Mikhailov represented Ukraine in the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), and also participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). Other recent solo exhibitions include: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2019); Before Sleep/After Drinking, C/O Berlin Foundation, Berlin (2019); Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2016); Kunstverein Wolfenbüttel (2016); MADRE, Naples (2015); Camera Italian Centre for Photography, Turin (2015); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); Tate Modern, London (2010); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2010).
Selected group exhibitions include: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen (2021); Bruce Museum, Greenwich, USA (2018); Stedelijk Museum Amesterdam (2018); ‘Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins’, Barbican Centre, London (2018); 5th Odessa biennale (2017); ‘The Human Condition Session II’, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2016).
Mikhailov was the recipient of the 2016 Goslar Kaiserring Prize; the 2012 Spectrum International Prize for Photography; the Citibank 2001 Photography Prize; and the 2000 Hasselblad Foundation International Award, among others. His work is included in important public collections, including: Hamburger Bahnof, Berlin; ICA, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York.
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Fiona Pardington
Young Hawk, Hag Stone and Paper Nautilus, Ripiro Beach
2014, Photograph printed on canvas, 108 x 144 cm
Courtesy of the MOMENTUM Collection
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Young Hawk, Hag Stone and Paper Nautilus, Ripiro Beach is one of a series of photograps from Fiona Pardington’s Ex Vivo series. Like so much of her work from this period, it is a still life made in the vantias tradition – a way to exalt life through reminders of mortality.
“Twice a day the tides that lave and redraft the coastline wash up a diversity of bounty: driftwood, kelp, shells, dead crabs, bones, fishing floats, perhaps a rare paper nautilus,and occasional hints of life in the deep interior depths and cool green hells, or over the blue horizon. After a big storm, more than likely there will be dead seagulls and albatrosses too, studies in greyscale. New Zealand’s long and supine coastline acts like a driftnet, gathering it all up. You never know what gifts Tangaroa will surprise you with, which is part of the magic of it all. If it floats, and falls into the Tasman, the Pacific, the freezing Southern Ocean, or perhaps further afield, hidden currents will probably wash it up on our sand or shingle for a beachcomber to find.
It is beachcombing which provided most of the objets trouvés for this suite of works by Fiona Pardington. Appropriately enough, it starts out as a Pacific phenomenon. The first appearance of the word in print is to be found in Herman Melville’s 1847 novel Omoo which described a community of feckless and outcast Europeans in the Islands who had abandoned Western culture for a life “combing” the beach for anything they could use or trade. Not for the faint of heart, Sappho warns the squeamish against poking the coastal rubble; Μὴ κίνη χέραδασ. While living in Waiheke Island, Fiona regularly explored Rock Bay and Ontetangi beaches, and later Ripiro and Bayley’s Beach, walking her canine menagerie. She, also, was looking for things to use and trade, though these transactions are of an entirely aesthetic sort. She is, as Shakespeare writes of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”.
The albatross feathers allude to the artist’s great love of nature and her Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Ngāti Kahungunu ancestry – Māori associations with the deep water, long voyages and return. To Māori, albatrosses, Torora, represented beauty, grace and power, and their feathers and bone were worn by people of rank or adorned the prow of waka taua (war canoes). The (with a nod to Monty Python) ex-gulls. Karoro, the blackbacked gull, were kept as pets by some Māori to control vermin, and were considered an ill omen seen inland. The objects that look like white wax flowers and the plastic casings of fired rifle cartridges. These can be considered symbols of explosive and potentially dangerous energy and transformation.
The philosophy of collecting and salvage moves like an eel up the river from the coast. Like the carnage from the Māori legend of the battle between the sea birds and the land birds, among the fallen, mingling with the gulls and albatrosses are a humdrum sparrow and a young kāhu (hawk). Te kāhu i runga whakaaorangi ana e rā, / Te pērā koia tōku rite, inawa ē! (“The hawk up above moves like clouds in the sky. Let me do the same!”). Here, too, are items that have washed up from the human sea; a crystal ball, a pounamu heart (the heart of Fiona’s whakapapa lies among the iwi of Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island), a hag stone (a stone naturally pierced by water through which those gifted with second sight were, according to legend, supposed to see the future and the other world through, a pewter mug, roses, and a cut glass decanter of water from Lake Wakatipu. Transparent and fragile vessels are important in Fiona’s work, alluding to the tradition of Vanitas painting (remember, you too shall one day die) and often containing water from places significant to the artist. These lustrous objects also reveal Fiona’s virtuosity with light, and photography, after all, is Classical Greek for drawing or writing with light. The eye scavenges.
– Andrew Paul Wood (2014)
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Dr Fiona Pardington was born in Auckland, and is of Maori (Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Ngāti Kahungunu) and Scottish (Clan Cameron of Erracht) descent. She holds a Doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of Auckland, and lives and works in New Zealand.
An abiding concern with emotion and affect is at the heart of Fiona Pardington’s photographic practice. With over three decades experience as an exhibiting artist, she has continued to explore the capacities of photography by attending to what is hidden or unseen in the photograph as much as what it may represent. In the late 1980s she was among a group of women artists who challenged photography’s social documentary aesthetic, prevalent in the previous decade. She went on to focus on the still-life format, recording Museum taonga (Māori ancestral treasures) and other historic objects such as hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now extinct huia bird. Thus she brings an awareness of traditional and forgotten objects to contemporary audiences. Pardington is renowned for her ability to breathe the life force into these objects and to raise global awareness of the importance of conservation. In her interrogation of death, she celebrates collecting and preservation.
In 2016 Pardington was named a Knight (Chevalier) in the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Prime Minister, and she is the first New Zealand visual artist to receive this honour. Last year she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Fiona Pardington has received many fellowships, residencies, awards and grants, including the Moët et Chandon Fellowship (France) in 1991-92; the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in both 1996 and 1997; a Ngai Tahu residency at Otago Polytechnic in 2006; and both the Quai Branly Laureate award, La Résidence de Photoquai, and the Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2011. Pardington has created staggering works as a result of these opportunities.
Her work has been included in several important group exhibitions and biennales, including: Middle of Now|Here, Honolulu Biennial 2017; lux et tenebris Momentum Worldwide, Berlin 2014; The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art, Ukraine Biennale Arsenale 2012; Ahua: A beautiful hesitation, 17th Biennale of Sydney, 2010; Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography, 1989, Constructed Intimacies, 1989 and Now See Hear 1990. Prospect 2001: New Art New Zealand, all at the City Art Gallery, Wellington; Slow Release: Recent Photography from New Zealand, Heide Museum of Modern Art Melbourne, Australia and the Adam Gallery, Wellington, 2002; Te Puawai O Ngai Tahu, Christchurch Art Gallery and Pressing Flesh, Skin, Touch Intimacy, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki in 2003; and Contemporary New Zealand Photographers, Pataka’s International Arts Festival, Porirua, 2006.
In 2008 the New Zealand Government donated a suite of her heitiki prints to the then newly-opened musée du quai Branly, Paris. A similar work auctioned in Auckland realised the highest price in New Zealand for a photographic work at auction.
Fiona returned from Paris where she completed a Laureate Artistic Creations Project with musée du quai Branly in 2011. In the same year the Govett-Brewster Gallery and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery presented The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, a series of photographs of life casts made by medical scientist and phrenologist Pierre Dumoutier during one of French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville’s South Pacific voyages from 1837 to 1840. An accompanying catalogue was published by Otago University Press.
This series has continued to be exhibited and discussed by academics and curators from all over the world and will feature in Oceania which opens at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in September 2018 and then travels to the co-organising institution musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. Australian art historian Susan Best, in her book Reparative aesthetics which closely examines the work of four female photographers, including Fiona, argues that art has the capacity to heal shameful histories.
A survey exhibition, A Beautiful Hesitation, profiling thirty years of Fiona Pardington’s practice, opened at City Gallery Wellington in 2015, after it was shown also at Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery. An accompanying publication with the same title was published by Victoria University Press, bringing together new and classic writings on the artist’s work.
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Angelika Platen
Dennis Oppenheim. „Erdarbeit/Earthwork“, Düsseldorf
1969, 4 Archival Pigment Fine Art Prints, 25,7 x 32,5 cm
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Angelika Platen (born in Heidelberg in 1942) is a German photographer known for her artist portraits. She studied Art History and Romance & Oriental Studies at the Free University of Berlin. She then specialized in Photography at the School of Fine Arts in Hamburg. In 1968, she established herself as an independent photographer and photojournalist. She displayed her photographs for the first time in 1969 in an exhibition entitled “Artists are also humans”.
From 1972 to 1975, she managed the Günter Sachs Gallery in Hamburg. During this period, she photographed more than sixty artists. Her passion for artist’s portraits was born. Angelika Platen studied art history, Romance studies and Oriental studies at the Free University of Berlin and then photography at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. From 1972 to 1975 she ran the “Galerie an der Milchstraße” in Hamburg, which belonged to Gunter Sachs.
During this time, she created about 100 photographic portraits of young artists who began their careers at that time, some of whom are now world-famous. Her works show the painters, sculptors, conceptual and object artists in their respective artistic contexts: they were photographed in characteristic settings or in unusual locations. Among the most important works are the series of pictures of Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and Gerhard Richter, as well as the portraits of Joseph Beuys, Christo, Walter de Maria, Dan Graham, James Rosenquist, Günther Uecker and Andy Warhol. Since 1998, numerous portraits of artists, especially younger artists, have been produced. Among them are Julian Rosefeldt, Thomas Struth, Neo Rauch, John Armleder, Christian Boltanski and Jeff Koons. In her Phase II, Platen has now produced new portraits of some of the newcomers she portrayed in the 1960s/70s, which provide an interesting look at the established artists who are now coming of age. On the occasion of the 1998 exhibition “Angelika Platen – Photo Works,” the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main acquired a collection of the photographs taken between 1968 and 1974. The illustrated book “Platen Artists” (Edition Stemmle), published to coincide with the exhibition opening, documents her photographic work from this period. In 2018, 180 portraits from her collection were exhibited at the Berlin Fotografiemuseum.
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Gerhard Richter
Edition Grauer Spiegel / Edition Grey Mirror
2021, Paint on glass, 40 x 34 x 1 cm, Ed. 179
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Gerhard Richter applied monochrome gray paint to the reverse sides of a mirror. Instead of producing an image, Richter transforms the gray paint on glass into a ground for reflections. Viewers can see themselves and their surroundings mirrored on the dark surfaces, and one can interpret these monochromes as large-scale photographic plates of endless exposure. Blurring the boundary between painting and photography, the artist explores the complex relationship between abstraction and representation.
Although Richter is, in many respects, a very traditional painter, and revels in all the things paint can do – render images of reality, create luscious concoctions of colour – he also has a strong cerebral, radical element to his make-up. Although still concerned with looking through a rectangular, window-like frame – much as his figurative or abstract paintings – Richter’s panes of glass and mirrors, that he has continued to make from 1967 to today, have affinities with Conceptual Art, and even with Marcel Duchamp’s Dada works. This mirror, colored grey by the pigment attached to the back of the glass, resembles Richter’s earlier ‘black and white’, photographic paintings, since the reality one sees reflected in its surface is grey, but also his monochrome grey canvases of the early 1970s.
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Gerhard Richter (born in Dresden in 1932) is a German painter known for his diverse painting styles and subjects. His deliberate lack of commitment to a single stylistic direction has often been read as an attack on the implicit ideologies embedded in the specific histories of painting. Such distaste for aesthetic dogma has been interpreted as a response to his early art training in communist East Germany. Relying on scenes from newspapers, personal photographs, and magazines, Richter painted the victims of serial killers, portraits of famous European intellectuals, and German terrorists (the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang), among other media images. He also created a series of colour-chart paintings, which were the inspiration for his 2007 large stained glass window for Cologne Cathedral. Richter later returned to stained glass design when in 2020 he produced three sets of windows, which recall his scraped oil paintings, for Tholey Abbey, Germany’s oldest monastery. Richter was the recipient of many awards, among them the Golden Lion for painting at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997) and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting (1997).
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Stefan Rinck
Schutzmantelmadonna / Madonna with Protective Mantle
2022, Sandstone, 110 x 40 x 30 cm
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Stefan Rinck’s Madonna, created especially for POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace, is a touching beacon of hope in troubled times. The two figures kneeling in a gesture of prayer beneath the protective embrace of her cloak resonate with us all, hoping and rayer for peace.
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Stefan Rinck (born in 1973 in Homburg/Saar) is a German visual artist. He lives and works in Berlin. Rinck studied Art History and Philosophy at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken and Sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe. He has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including Museum de Hallen, Harlem (NL), Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (BE), Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (US), Vilma Gold, London (GB), Semiose, Paris (FR), Gallery Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (DE), The Breeder, Athens (GR), Galeria Alegria, Madrid/Barcelona (ES) and Cruise&Callas, Berlin (DE). He participated at the Busan Biennale in South Korea and at the Vent des Fôret and La Forêt d’Art Contemporain in France where he realized permanent public sculptures. In 2018, the work The Mangooses of Beauvais was permanently installed in the city of Paris at 53-57 rue de Grennelle (Beaupassage). He is in the following public collections: CBK Rotterdam (NL), Musée de la Loterie (BE), Sammlung Krohne (DE), FRAC Corse (FR). In 2019, Stefan Rinck was featured in the Thames & Hudson publication 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow. The documentary Heart of Stone by Sonja Baeger, premiered in 2021 in Berlin, features Rinck’s production process of three monumental sculptures.
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Arsen Savadov
Donbass Chocolate
1997, C-print on Aluminum, 115 x 150 cm
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Arsen Savadov first came to public attention in the mid-1990s when he published a series of fashion shoots of scantily clad models taken in cemeteries during funerals, with burials as the backdrop. The shocking and provocative juxtaposition of life and death, happiness and sorrow, power and weakness, transformed into an allegory of pretense and reality, has continued in his works until the present.
During the 1990s, when the newly formed Republic of Ukraine was restructuring its economy, Savadov moved to work in obsolete industrial plants, initially in the coal fields of Donbass. His Donbass-Chocolate (1997) series of large photographs were made around Donetsk, a Soviet-era paragon of heavy industrial labor. Here, in close and camp detail, he depicted the semi-naked, still coal-dust-caked bodies of former miners. Once the Stakhanovite hero-workers of the Soviet Union, they are now garbed, ludicrously and pathetically by wispy fronds of ballerinas’ tutus. Initially referring to the false heroism of Soviet Labor, as well as to the lost souls of the newly unemployed masses, these works have, since the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2014, moved away from sarcastic nostalgia to establish a more contemporary resonance with the pseudo-macho Russian-backed mercenaries who have occupied this territory and have provoked the current war.
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Arsen Savadov (born in Kiev in 1962) is a noted Ukrainian conceptual photographer and painter, based between Kiev and New York City. He studied painting at the Shevchenko State Art School. Savadov graduated from the Kiev Art Institute in 1986 and was one of the first artists in Ukraine to work with video in the 1990s. A versatile artist during the course of his career, Savadov has utilized techniques of installation, performance, and photography. His solo exhibitions include Gulliver’s dream, Art Ukraine Gallery, Kiev (2017); First-person, Pecherskiy Gallery (V-art gallery), Moscow (2012); Paintings,Daniyal Mahmood Gallery New York (2007), Donbass-Chocolate, Galerie Orel Art Presenta, Paris (2003); Arsen Savadov, Chasie Post Gallery, Atlanta, USA (1995).
Group shows include Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism, Saatchi Gallery, London (2017); Recycling Religion, WhiteBox, New York (2016); BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, curated by David Elliott, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2015); Escape to Egypt, Collection Gallery, Kyiv (2012) and First-person, Pecherskiy Gallery, V-art gallery, Moscow (2012) as well as in group shows: Days of Ukraine in the United Kingdom, Saatchi Gallery, London (2013), the 1st Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012) and After the Wall. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Stockholm, Budapest, Berlin, (1999/2000).
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Katharina Sieverding
MATON SOLARISATION F-XI
1969/2022, Color photography, digital print, 300 x 150 cm, Unique work
MATON SOLARISATION F-XII
1969/2022, Color photography, digital print, 300 x 150 cm
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In the exhibition POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills of Peace at the Zionskirche in Berlin (7 April to 1 May 2022), Katharina Sieverding is showing two new diptychs, each with two photographic self-portraits mirrored by alternating views from mullioned windows. The genesis of these two works is briefly recapitulated here.
The diptychs stand out because of the mirrored views of the rear courtyard of the 1930 building of the former Jewish Girls’ School in Auguststraße in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel. This particular “Kiez”, often hostile, was once a centre of Eastern Jewish emigration.
Here, in the school building burdened by its traumatic history and the dramatic events around it, the Salon Berlin of the Museum Frieder Burda was most recently housed on the third floor. Last September, this salon branch concluded its activities with an exhibition of large-format photographic works by Katharina Sieverding: Headlines.
Here, in one of the exhibition rooms, not planned in advance, several glazed self-portraits from the MATON SOLARISATION series reflected the window view to the back, to the former schoolyard (further away, visible from the roof of the former school, stands the Jewish Synagogue); this mirror effect became the trigger for the new diptychs. For it was precisely through the reflections that a central theme of the exhibition and the photographic oeuvre manifested itself: the National Socialist era and thus the darkest chapter of German history.
In the resulting double diptych, the artist also has in mind the dramatic history of the girls’ school in the form of the meaningful schoolyard and in the form of the projected school windows filtering this view. And thus, in view of the work here, the question of identity also arises immediately, for the reflection of the building on the eye and face points to a deeper identification of the artist with the victims who were once taught daily in these rooms until their deportation to the extermination camp in 1942. Besides the usual school subjects, Hebrew and traditional forms of art were also on the curriculum here.
The diptychs with their manifold reflections thus also refer to the ever virulent debates about anti-Semitism, exclusion, racism and violence, all burning issues, especially now when a nationalist war is raging over Ukraine in a way that was no longer thought possible.
The artist’s focussed gaze emerges from the large photographs, as if petrified. With the mirror images of the girls’ school in her face, she shows solidarity with the Jewish schoolgirls from Auguststraße, with the victims of Nazi terror, as she does in other works with reference to the concentration camps of Dachau and Sachsenhausen and to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial.
In the POINTS of RESISTANCE IV exhibition in the Zionskirche, the two new diptychs are placed on the front sides of the side aisles, visible from afar, and visitors to the church walk up to them on their way to the altar, keeping them in view. Here, too, there are closer historical connections. For from the beginning, already in Wilhelmine times, this church repeatedly proved to be a place for the socially disadvantaged, it became more and more a place of resistance against violence and persecution and against anti-Semitism. In 1931, the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer took over confirmation classes here for the Protestant congregation for one and a half years. He immediately denounced the social grievances and practised his counter-concept of the “church for others”, in his bitter fight against the “Aryan paragraph” and wrote at that time, among other things: “The Church is unconditionally committed to the victims of every social order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” And concluding from this: “The church must not only bind the victims under the wheel, but must fall into the spokes of the wheel itself.” From about 1938 Bonhoeffer joined the resistance. He was executed in 1945.
Back to Katharina Sieverding’s photographic diptych: from 1969 onwards, the artist consistently concentrated on this “new medium” in art, which seemed more objective than the handwriting of painting. The passport photo booth, just below the bar where she worked in Düsseldorf, became Sieverding’s first “small studio”, outside the walls of the academy, in the midst of life. The Photomaton captures every movement incorruptibly. Whole series of Maton self-portraits were now created, became the basic building blocks for the following changes, enlargements. The negative was intervened in experimentally, for example by solarisation, i.e. by blackening selected parts, by montage, by cross-fading, by cross-linking. From 1969 onwards, Sieverding also created large wall photo tableaus. In terms of content, too, the theme of self-portraiture was expanded in the search for one’s own identity. Added to this were technical innovations such as the self-timer, the Polaroid camera and the motor camera. From 1975 onwards, wall-sized colour photographs were produced, which became very specific for Sieverding’s further work. The colouring was alienated again and again, light-colour projections were thrown onto the negative.
So the artist always proved to be at the height of the times and current debates, both technically and in terms of content, as she was already accustomed to from her training. Her work was based on her years as an assistant to the stage designer Teo Otto at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, where he taught the audience to see things in a new way and to concentrate more on the content of the plays than on the décor, and on the lessons of Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy with its constant demand that art be expanded into social sculpture.
Photography thus became for Katharina Sieverding a medium for depicting the human condition, including its catastrophes.
– Stephan von Wiese
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Katharina Sieverding (born in 1944) is a German photographer. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf. Sieverding’s works mostly consist of self-portraiture and most have an abstract quality. She uses the techniques of silhouette, contrast, and extreme close-up. Her work often makes statements about society and the individual, such as showing the familiarity of the self and the distance of others. Often she puts multiple portraits together in one piece. Each portrait fills the frame in a way to show the presence of self. Sieverding took part in documenta 5 in 1972, documenta 6 in 1977 and documenta 7 in 1982, Kassel, and in 1997 she exhibited in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her solo exhibitions include: Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (1998); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998); Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (1997–98); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (1993); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1992). Collective exhibition: “Objectivités – La photographie à Düsseldorf” – Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2008) C Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2010). In the United States, her works have been shown at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and ICA, Boston. In 2004 and 2005, New York’s MoMA PS1 and Kunst-Werke Berlin presented an extensive survey of her work. She is a professor emeritus at the University of the Arts, Berlin.
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Vadim Zakharov
1000 Stalinistische Opfer auf einer Seite / 1000 Stalinist Victims on One Page
2021, Installation 36 x A4 sheets + 1 framed gold leaf print on paper, 150 x 180 cm, Ed. 1/4
BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About / BAFF BAFF! Worüber sprechen die Politiker
2021, Video Performance, HD, sound, 4’20” exhibition variant (Original 65’), Ed. 1/4 – Original version 65’
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Artist Statement for 1000 Stalinistische Opfer auf einer Seite:
On one page are printed 1,000 portraits (one on top of the other) of Stalin’s victims. Around it are 1,000 names of these people.
The work is based on materials collected by “Immortal Barracks”. Thank you to everyone who is trying to restore the memory of people who innocently
suffered during Stalinist repressions. This memory is more important than ever today, at a time when Russia bombs Ukrainian homes and kills Ukrainian women and children… Consciously amnesia is a crime!
(The proceeds from this work, in case of sale, will be transferred to the “Immortal Barracks” and will help the people of Ukraine.)
Artist Statement for BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About:
“In the film, more than 1000 non-verbal words are read aloud, most of which have been found in the magazines “Mickey Mouse” (German editions) and also taken from the books “Tintin The Mysterious Star” and “Asterix & Obelix The Laurels of Caesar”. The words collected in the non-verbal vocabulary have no meaning, but only phonetically reflect certain events:
someone has fainted (BLIEP!), a glass has broken (CRACK! CLIRR!), a helicopter has crashed into a cupola (KAROMMS!), a museum has collapsed (CRACK! THUNDER! CRIME!).
The Reader (Vadim Zakharov), wearing a white shirt and a tie, recites these words seriously and forcefully. The image of a politician is created, a public figure who professionally and convincingly is ready to say something on any occasion. At the same time, we see that these are just empty words – bubbles that float away as soon as they reach our ears. The film highlights the absurdity of what we see and hear every day on television and the internet.
At the same time, reading non-verbal words can be perceived as reading poetry… “
Vadim Zakharov’s works shown in POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace present an all too fitting commentary on our current state of affairs where politicians spout nonsense at one another while remaining unable to stop the atrocities of war. BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About invokes the talking heads we see on news programs every day, recounting an equally incomprehensible reality which would be surreal were it not so tragic. While the 1000 Stalinist Victims are no longer a relic of a repressive history, but harbingers of what is to come – with the Russian regime resorting once again to the repression of all those opposed to its regressive policies, turning back to a time when the power of the state was wielded through ubiquitous terror and control. Stalinism may have changed names for a new millennium, but its tactics remain the same and its victims grow by the day.
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Vadim Zakharov (born in UdSSR in 1959) is an artist, editor, archivist of the Moscow Conceptual art scene, and collector, living and working in Berlin. Since 1979 he has participated in exhibitions of unofficial art and collaborated with such artists as: V. Skersis, S. Anufriev, I. Chuikov, A. Monastyrski, Y. Leiderman. In 1982–1983 he participated in the AptArt Gallery, Moscow. Since 1992-2001 he has published the “Pastor” magazine and founded the Pastor Zond Edition. In 2006 he edited book “Moscow Conceptualism”. His retrospective was held at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2006, and he has exhibited at Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2005), State Historical Museum Moscow (2003), amongst many others. Zalharov represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with the project “DANAE”. In 2016-2020 Zakharov organized the exhibition space “FREEHOME-Artist to Artist” in Berlin.
Selected honors and awards include: Griffelkunst-Preis, Hamburg (1995); Renta-Preis, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1995); Soratnik Prize, Moscow (2006); Innovation Prize, Moscow (2006); Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, American Academy in Rome (2007); Kandinsky Prize – Best Work of Year, Moscow (2009).
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HOW ARE YOU?
Ukrainian Video Program curated by Kateryna Filyuk:
Piotr Armianovski – Fantastic Little Splash – Oksana Karpovych – Dana Kavelina
Yarema Malashuk & Roman Himey – Oleksiy Radynski – Mykola Ridnyi
(Click on the artwork to see the work description below)
1. Oleksiy Radynski, Circulation, 2020, 11’
2. Fantastic Little Splash, Armed and Happy, 2019, 5’56”
3. Oleksiy Radynski, Incident in a Museum, 2013, 8’
4. Mykola Ridnyi, No Regrets, 2011/2016, 5’28”
5. Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Himey, Dedicated to the Youth of the World, 2019, 9’
6. Dana Kavelina, Letter to a Turtledove, 2020, 20’
7. Mykola Ridnyi, Shelter, 2012, 6’13”
8. Piotr Armianovski, Mustard in the Gardens, 2017, 37’
Oksana Karpovych, Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open, 2019, 78’
How Are You? [Як ти?] probably is the most frequently asked question in Ukraine in the last weeks. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine and thus a start of a full-scale war this otherwise trivial question, whether it’s asked by relatives or acquaintances, suddenly gained myriads of whole new meanings. Are you alive? Are you safe? How are you feeling? Do you need help? Do you still have a safe place to stay? – here are just a very few of them. It became the ultimate expression of love and support, an expression of much needed hope that helps one to survive yet another day full of uncertainty and danger to life.
Ukrainian artists, whose feature films and video works were put together for the How Are You? screening program, providentially posed this question in both private and public domain, interrogating Ukrainian reality in the years prior to the invasion – i.e. during the war in Donbas that lasts since 2014. Their inquiries engage with a wide spectrum of subjects and vary in execution, though the faint silhouette of war and the violence it brings looms in each work.
Evidently the scariest answer to the posed question is silence. So, the artists chose to speak out loud, even if their answer so far is a grievous I’m not OK.
– Kateryna Filyuk
Piotr Armianovski
Olena is going home to the village on the frontline in the ‘grey zone’ of the Donetsk region where she spent her childhood. In the garden, her brother has planted mustard to prevent weeds from getting into their neighbours’ garden. The girl lies down in the prickly grass and recalls how big and tasty the apricots, cherries, and pears used to be…
BIO
Piotr Armianovski (Donetsk, 1985) is a performer and director. Since the war conflict started in his home city, Piotr focuses on documentaries. His films received awards at Docudays UA, Open Night, Biennale of Young Art. In 2020 Armianovski received the Gaude Polonia scholarship from the Ministry of Arts and National Heritage of Poland. Also Piotr shares his knowledge with younger artists at various workshops. Currently he is based in Kyiv.
Piotr Armianovski, Mustard in the Gardens, 2017, 37’
Fantastic Little Splash
Armed and Happy, as one of the episodes of Mykola Ridnyi’s Armed and Dangerous video platform, focuses on the emotionality of social media and its role in the militarization of Ukrainian society. Armed and Happy explores common emotional accents in virtual practices – from sports broadcasts to weapon exercises – in an effort to see how previously unacceptable behaviors are normalized through their collective spread in social media, and how they become part of everyday life, contributing to further emotional contamination.
BIO
fantastic little splash is a collective comprising of journalist/artist Lera Malchenko and artist/director Oleksandr Hants, which combines art practice and media studies. fantastic little splash is interested in utopias and dystopias, the collective imagination and its incarnations, projections, delusions and uncertainties. Established in 2016, their projects have been exhibited at The Wrong biennale, Plokta TV, post.MoMA, POCHEN Biennale, Construction festival VI x CYNETART, KISFF, Docudays, among others. The fantastic little splash collective is based in Ukraine.
Fantastic Little Splash, Armed and Happy, 2019, 5’56”
Oksana Karpovych
Shot over the summer of 2018 on elektrychkas, typical Soviet commuter trains that travel between the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and small provincial towns, Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open invites us to share a ride with working class, mostly marginalized, passengers and vendors. Following a number of people from one grimy wagon to another, from station to station, from day to night, we are immersed in the daily struggles of their lives. Filmed during war-time, the film is a look at the human condition and an intimate point of view on the history of independent Ukraine as it is experienced by the common people. We do not see images of war in the film but feel its presence in the air penetrating our character’s minds and hearts. Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open is an atmospheric and intensely human portrait of Ukrainian society on the move.
BIO
Oksana Karpovych is a film writer, director, and photographer born in Kyiv, living and working in between Kyiv and Montreal. Her debut feature documentary film Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open won the New Visions Award at RIDM in 2019, received an honorable mention at Hot Docs and played at numerous film festivals. In her personal projects, Karpovych explores the everyday lives and oral histories of the common people and how state politics invades the personal sphere and influences the communities she intimately documents. Karpovych is a Cultural Studies graduate of the “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” National University in Ukraine and a Film Production graduate of Concordia University in Montreal. She is currently living and working in Kyiv.
Oksana Karpovych, Don’t Worry, The Doors Will Open, 2019, 78’
Dana Kavelina
One of the crucial sources for this work is the anonymous five-hour documentary To Watch the War (2018) – a piece of found-footage filmmaking in its own right. Letter to a Turtledove is thus a second-degree artistic appropriation of amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine, recombined into a surreal anti-war film-poem. The war videos are interspersed with Kavelina’s own animated segments, staged mise-en-scènes, and archival footage of the Donbass from the 1930s (when the region became a hotspot for Stalinist industrialization of the Soviet Union, and of heated class warfare) onwards. There’s an actual poem at the film’s center: a monologue spoken off-screen, authored by Kavelina herself. This piece of writing encapsulates the multitude of traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon the Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Still, numerous elements of this multitude originate from long before the war had actually broken out.
BIO
Dana Kavelina (Melitopol, 1995) was based in Kyiv\Lviv, Ukraine, but has currently fled to Germany. She is a graduate of the Department of Graphics at the National Technical University of Ukraine. She works primarily with animation and video, but also installation, painting and graphics. Her works often thematicize military violence and war, seen from the perspective of gender, and are especially concerned with the position of the victim as a political subject, as well as the distance between historical and individual trauma, memory and misrepresentation. Her works have been exhibited at the Kristianstad Kunsthalle (Sweden), Kmytiv Museum (Kmytiv), Closer Art Center (Kyiv), Voloshyn Gallery (Kyiv). In 2018, the animated film “Mark Tulip, who spoke with flowers” received the Special Jury Prize at the OIFF and the Grand Prix of the KROK festival. In 2020, the film “Letter to the Turtledove” was included in the “War and Cinema” program of the American magazine e-flux.
Dana Kavelina, Letter to a Turtledove, 2020, 20’
Yarema Malashuk & Roman Himey
The focus of this film is the techno-rave Cxema, and the youth on which the camera is carefully focused the next morning after the event. The space of Dovzhenko’s film studio is transformed into a dancefloor, a synchronized crowd, spotlights, arrhythmic synthetic sound by Stanislav Tolkachev — the camera moves away and approaches, creating a sense of romantic “exaltation” and at the same time a modern “alienation”. This is the place and meeting that the youth of Kyiv are waiting for and preparing for — this particular escape from everyday life, and rejection of it — evokes strange feelings of modern ritual. But what does it mean? The film ends with “portraits”, almost static shots, faces “after” utopia. Characters of the film are not ready to accept the new day and its old reality.
BIO
Collaborating at the edge of visual art and cinema since 2013, Kyiv-based artists and filmmakers, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk graduated as cinematographers from the Institute of Screen Arts in Kyiv, Ukraine. They were awarded the main award of the Pinchuk Art Centre Prize (2020), VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2021), Best Short Documentary at Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México (2019), as well as the Grand Prix at the Young Ukrainian Artists Award (MUHi 2019). Their debut documentary feature “New Jerusalem” premiered at Docudays UA International Film Festival 2020. The film received the Special Mention Award at Kharkiv MeetDocs, and the duo also recently participated in the Future Generation Art Prize (2021), a prestigious international award for artists under 35 years of age.
Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Himey, Dedicated to the Youth of the World, 2019, 9’
Oleksiy Radynski
The short film Circulation is a a three-year-long observation of Kyiv’s moving landscape, condensed into 10 minutes of screen time.
Incident in a Museum is a film that was shot as a by-product of research into the interactions of art, politics and religion in the post-Soviet context, undertaken by Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv, Ukraine) in 2013. The film reconstructs a specific incident that occurred to the research group in the provincial art museum. The incident portrayed in the film represents the ongoing antagonism in the cultural field: ‘the revenge of God’, visible in the attacks of religious obscurantism on the realm of contemporary art, against the artistic attempts to replace religion with politics as an ultimate horizon of art as a social practice.
BIO
Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Docudays IFF, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), among others, and have received a number of festival awards. After graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he studied at the Home Workspace Program (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut). In 2008, he cofounded Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics in Kyiv. His texts have been published in Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (Archive Books, 2017), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018), Being Together Precedes Being (Archive Books, 2019), and e-flux journal.
Oleksiy Radynski, Circulation, 2020, 11’
Oleksiy Radynski, Incident in a Museum, 2013, 8’
Mykola Ridnyi
The main object in this film is an underground shelter repurposed for a kind of school that delivers pre-service training. The main character, an elderly teacher, also an archetype of Soviet ideology, does not seem to care about the contemporary political situation, instead opting to stay true to his own principles that have been inculcated into him through military service. His students couldn’t care less about the patriotism promoted in the schoolbooks from their teenage years; instead, they reserve their passions for the shooting ranges, inspired by computer games and Hollywood action movies. During the Cold war the political propaganda of the USSR and US produced a social phobia connected to the threat of nuclear war and the cult of defense. In modern Ukraine, many fallout shelters from the past have since been sealed. A few have been converted to serve new functions, adapted to different needs through individual creativity, spurred on by an overall lack of facilities.
BIO
Mykola Ridnyi (Kharkiv, 1985) is an artist and filmmaker, curator and author of essays on art and politics. Since 2005, he has been a founding member of the SOSka group, an art collective based in Kharkiv. The same year he co founded the SOSka gallery-lab, an artist-run-space in an abandoned house in the center of Kharkiv. Under Ridnyi’s lead, the gallery-lab was instrumental in developing the artistic scene in the region before it was closed in 2012. He curated a number of international exhibitions in Ukraine, among them “After the Victory” (CCA Yermilov centre, Kharkiv, 2014), “New History” (Kharkiv museum of art, 2009) and others. Since 2017, Ridnyi is co-editor of Prostory – the online magazine about visual art, literature and society. In 2019 he curated Armed and Dangerous – multimedia platform bringing together video artists and experimental film directors in Ukraine.
Mykola Ridnyi, Shelter, 2012, 6’13”
Mykola Ridnyi, No Regrets, 2011/2016, 5’28”
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The Conclusion of MOMENTUM’s 10th Anniversary Program
Featuring:
aaajiao (CN) – Iván Buenader (AR) – Claudia Chaseling (DE) + Emilio Rapanà (IT)
Margret Eicher (DE) – Nezaket Ekici (TR/DE) – Thomas Eller (DE)
Amir Fattal (IL/DE) – Doug Fishbone (US/UK) – Máximo González (AR)
Hannu Karjalainen (FI) – David Krippendorff (US/DE) – Shahar Marcus (IL)
Milovan Destil Marković (RS/DE) – Christian Niccoli (IT) – Kirsten Palz (DK)
Nina E. Schönefeld (DE) – Sumugan Sivanesan (AU)
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà
in cooperation with Constanze Kleiner
OPENING (2G+):
11 December @ 7-9pm
EXHIBITION:
11 December 2021 – 27 March 2022
FINISSAGE (2G+):
27 March @ 6-9pm
Live Performance @ 7pm
Hannu Karjalainen Performs His Visual Album LUXE
Finnish artist and composer Hannu Karjalainen presents a live rendition of his most recent audiovisual album, LUXE, released by Berlin record label Karaoke Kalk in December 2021. While STATES of EMERGENCY poses the question ‘What is the role of the artist in a state of emergency?’, LUXE is inspired by a parallel question: ‘Whether being able to make art in times when the world is quite literally burning must be understood as a luxury or rather a necessity that helps humans to reflect upon the slowly unfolding catastrophes around them?’.
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Opening Hours:
11 DEC – 28 FEB: WED – SUN @ 1-7pm
1 – 25 MARCH: WED – FRI @ 1-7pm
26 MARCH: 1-7pm & 27 MARCH: 1-9pm
& ONLINE EXHIBITION:
Watch STATES of EMERGENCY Video Program on IKONO TV > >
Iván Buenader – Nezaket Ekici – Doug Fishbone – Hannu Karjalainen – Shahar Marcus – Christian Niccoli – Nina E. Schönefeld
Supported by
EXHIBITION EXTENDED TO 27 MARCH 2022
When we made the title for this exhibition, we had no idea just how sadly prophetic it would prove. The final month of STATES of EMERGENCY takes place amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of war closer to home than any of us could previously imagine. Our hearts go out to our friends, families, and colleagues in Ukraine and all those in Russia hoping for peace, who never wanted this tragic war. During these turbulent times, MOMENTUM extended STATES of EMERGENCY for an additional month as an artistic reflection on a world unmaking itself, relentlessly turning backwards to a Dark Ages of warfare and plague.
The COVID pandemic appears to be here to stay. As we learn how to navigate this new pandemic reality amidst the ongoing chaos of (mis)information and mixed messages, we turn to one another for guidance. Artists – as cultural first-responders – are at the forefront of translating the felt experience of this time of emergency into visual languages, making sense of our precarious times.
STATES of EMERGENCY is a multimedia and gallery exhibition program asking 18 artists from 12 countries: What will emerge out of this global emergency?; While doctors and scientists race to heal our bodies, what will it take to heal the cultural aftermath of COVID?; What is the role of the artist in a state of emergency?
Featuring new works by artists from the MOMENTUM Collection, States of Emergency compiles their responses to a decade of global environmental and political crisis: particularly to the current pandemic emergency which has transformed the lives of many billions of people. States of Emergency, the exhibition marking the end of MOMENTUM’s 10th Anniversary program, is a sequel to COVIDecameron, our ongoing online exhibition of video art curated during the first pandemic lockdown, re-contextualizing existing works in the MOMENTUM Collection. STATES of EMERGENCY, however, brings together entirely new works, made since the start of the pandemic, reflecting directly on the catastrophes of our times and the far-ranging impacts of COVID-19 and its aftermath from socio-economic, environmental, political, global, and personal points of view.
Click HERE to see the prequel to STATES of EMERGENCY > >
In an era of seemingly endless calamities – pandemics, global warming, political upheavals – life is becoming increasingly cinematic, as the fictions of the screen blur into the realities of the daily news. Disaster scenarios of disease, natural catastrophe, rising sea levels, terrorist attacks, threats of war; is it Hollywood or CNN? Is art mirroring life or vise versa?
While many struggle to survive in these pandemic times, we, the fortunate, surf. We surf the web, the slipstream, the information age. We zoom through meetings, weddings, and funerals. We are constantly connected via smartphones iPads and apps; inundated with images, texts, and tweets; relentlessly bombarded with events, offers and updates; confronted with a barrage of news – real, fake, and somewhere in between. (Mis)information flows more virally than disease. And, confined during the recurrent lockdowns and travel restrictions, we are required to blur the line between real space and cyberspace, living increasingly virtual lives.
Since its inception, MOMENTUM has focused on the growing diversity and relevance of time-based practices by exploring how time-based art reflects the digitization of our societies and the resulting cultural change. As the global race to develop effective vaccines has been paralleled by the race to develop new technologies of digital communication, this question becomes increasingly relevant for our pandemic age. In this era of ongoing travel restrictions, it is good to remember that moving images move us – art is a way of experiencing the world without physically moving through it. Visual languages continue to evolve in concert with the technologies that drive them, and it has been the role of visual artists to push and test the limits of these languages.
Taking the form of video art, performance, installation, painting, drawing, social engagement, sound art, new media and NFT’s, artist talks and interviews, STATES of EMERGENCY is a hybrid exhibition taking place both in the MOMENTUM Gallery, and virtually on the MOMENTUM Channel on the streaming art film program ikonoTV. Click HERE for MORE INFO on STATES of EMERGENCY on ikonoTV > >
Featuring:
[Click on the name of each artist to see the bio and the work description below.]
aaajiao
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Free Will, Open Mic, GFW, Confessions (2021), Video installation, LCD screen, acrylic fittings, 16 x 24 x 3.8cm, 00’10” on loop
Free Will, Open Mic, GFW, Confessions is part of a series of four video installations made by aaajiao for his solo exhibition in Shanghai, I was dead on the Internet, in September of 2021. Reflecting on aaajiao’s existential experience of the pandemic lockdowns in his studio in Berlin, these minimalistic video works are also a subtle, yet striking, commentary on China’s increasingly stringent censorship of artistic expression and communication platforms. As a media artist, blogger, activist and programmer, aaajiao has for many years throughout his practice addressed the issue of China’s Great Firewall – the policy of restrictions on internet content begun in 2000, blocking websites which would enable unfettered access to media and information. His 2017 work 404404404, held by the MOMENTUM Collection, is an analog installation of the universal online code signifying a blocked website. In the work shown in this exhibition, aaajiao inscribes the Great Firewall (GFW) into the very title of the work. As a Chinese artist, aaajiao’s work is necessarily subtle, if he is to have any hope of showing it in his home country. In the series of video installations made for I was dead on the Internet, aaajiao recreates the interfaces of various mobile communications apps (twitter, facebook, ins, and clubhouse), as empty outlines, largely devoid of content, simply tracking the passage of time. Our increasing reliance on the internet was proven time and again during the pandemic, when, for most people trapped at home, it proved to be our only way to communicate – personally and professionally – with the outside world. Yet what if this communication ceases to exist? Free Will, Open Mic, GFW, Confessions depicts the online discussion platform Clubhouse, which was launched during the first pandemic lockdown as a new type of audio social network to enable people to come together to talk, listen, and learn. Yet the app is empty. Only a perpetually looping refresh symbol shows that we are looking at a moving image. Clubhouse was a revelation for younger generations in China, who used this platform to speak with one another and exchange ideas across this vast country. Yet after only two months, Clubhouse was shut down in China. In this series of work, aaajiao also responds to his own experience of having his Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Facebook) account blocked earlier this year, and to the ongoing erasure from the internet (and hence from popular historical record) of important cultural figures in China: filmmakers, artists, writers. Such ‘death on the internet’ has a far less metaphoric equivalent in a time of crisis, when the content of the Internet was largely devoted to pandemic death tolls, while we all know people who died from the virus. Free Will, Open Mic, GFW, Confessions from I was dead on the Internet, comingles aaajiao’s felt experience of the COVID pandemic – the frustration and isolation of lockdown, the depression over the death of loved ones, the stasis of perpetual uncertainties – with the threat if digital death; the possibility of being silenced and erased from cyberspace.
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aaajiao (b. 1984, Xi’an, China. Lives and works in Shanghai, China and Berlin, Germany)
Active online as a media artist, blogger, activist and programmer, aaajiao is the virtual persona of Shanghai- and Berlin-based artist Xu Wenkai. Born in 1984 — the title of George Orwell’s classic allegorical novel — in one of China’s oldest cities, Xi’an, aaajiao’s art and works are marked by a strong dystopian awareness, literati spirit and sophistication. Many of aaajiao’s works speak to new thinking, controversies and phenomenon around the Internet, with specific projects focusing on the processing of data, the blogosphere and China’s Great Fire Wall. aaajiao’s work is interdisciplinary, extending from post-internet art to architecture, topography, design, and beyond to capture the pulse of the young generations consuming cyber technology and living in social media.
aaajiao’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world. Recent shows include: “Deep Simulator” Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2019-2021); “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today”, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, USA (2018); “unREAL”, Haus der elektronischen Künste, Basel, Switzerland (2017); “Shanghai Project Part II”, Shanghai, China (2017); “Remnants of an Electronic Past”, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, UK (2016); OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal Xi’an, China (2016), “Temporal Turn: Art and Speculation in Contemporary Asia”, Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas, USA (2016); “Take Me (I’m Yours)” (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann and Kelly Taxter), Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2016); “Overpop”, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); “Hack Space” (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Amira Gad), K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Shanghai, and K11 Art Museum, Hong Kong, China (2016); “Globale: Global Control and Censorship”, ZKM | Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (2015); “Thingworld International Triennial of New Media Art”, The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China (2014); Transmediale Festival of Digital Art, Berlin, Germany (2010). aaajiao was awarded the Illy Present Future Prize in 2019, the Art Sanya Awards Jury Prize in 2014, and was nominated for the first edition of OCAT-Pierre Huber Art Prize in 2014.
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Iván Buenader
Volkspark (2021), video performance, 3’
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The Sower in the Courtyard of the Columns (2021), wall paint on silk shawl, 85 x 85cm
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Iván Buenader’s video performance, Volkspark, is the latest in a series of impromptu dance performances enacted within the context of every Artist Residency in which he participates. In this case, the work results from his 3-month Residency at MOMENTUM AiR during the summer and autumn of 2021 – a period of cautiously hopeful ‘normality’ in a city still learning to cope with the ongoing aftermath of the pandemic. Buenader is not a dancer. His dance series is not intended as a performance of technical competence, but rather, as his way of experientially engaging with every Residency location by means of mapping the movements of his body onto that space – be it a studio, cityscape, or countryside. The very act of movement through space connotes a freedom of which many were deprived during the long months of pandemic lockdown. While the title of the chosen soundtrack to this performance – “(I just don’t wanna) Miss A Thing” by Kylie Minogue – evokes the thirst for actual experience after months of isolation, coupled with the artist’s journey of discovery through Berlin’s multifaceted cityscape. In Volkspark (meaning People’s Park in German), Buenader dances through Berlin’s oldest public park: Volkspark Friedrichshain. Dressed in clothes found on the streets – the literal social fabric of Berlin – he moves amidst various monuments inscribed with references to battles, conquests, nations, historical milestones, popular mythologies, and literary characters of children’s fables (the Fountain of Fairy Tales; the Berlin Bear; statues of Frederick the Great, the Javelin Thrower, and Mother and Child; Memorials for German fighters in the Spanish Civil War, and for Polish soldiers and anti-fascist Germans in WWII; and stairs on the hill covering the remains of one of several WWII bunkers and flak towers still inscribed within the fabric of the cityscape).
“The remains that are hidden and lie buried under the appearance of a hill, as well as the static, immovable, inert sculptures that function as tributes to powerful entities or to people who gave their lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, to defend historical or temporal community values, they play a symbolic game with the living, mobile, restless body, which teaches freedom as it orbits around these monoliths, calling for a re-interpretation of memory.” – Iván Buenader
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This work forms part of Buenader’s ongoing series of paint on textile works. Literally addressing the social fabric, the artist paints abstract alphabets of signs and symbols onto found materials collected in the various cities to which his peripatetic practice leads him. Scarves, blankets, tablecloths, shower curtains, and more found on the street, given by friends, or discovered in flea markets – these relics of the social fabric form the canvases for Buenader’s interventions.
Iván Buenader (b. 1972 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives and works in Alicante, Spain and Mexico City, Mexico).
Iván Buenader is an Argentinian writer and visual artist based between Alicante and Mexico City. He graduated in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires. He has exhibited his work (painting, photography, video, installation) in contemporary art venues in Latin America, the United States, Canada, India and Europe, while participating in numerous artist residencies – including MOMENTUM AiR in August – November 2021. He has conceptualized and produced collective interdisciplinary projects including poetry, music, dance and performance (‘CFW Poet Agency’). He is author of 11 novels and 6 books of experimental poetry.
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Claudia Chaseling & Emilio Rapanà
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deluge of delusion 1 (2021), digital print on canvas and 10 watercolors on paper, 190cm x 390cm
deluge of delusion 1 was made during the first pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020, intended to be shown in Claudia Chaseling’s solo exhibition, mutopia 5, at the Australian Embassy in Berlin. This 4-month exhibition took place, despite pandemic restrictions. However, this particular work was not shown. We were required to remove deluge of delusion 1 from the exhibition due to its political content. For an artwork to fall victim to censorship in this day and age in Germany – though technically on Australian soil – should be as much a compliment as an outrage. In States of Emergency, we are proud to present deluge of delusion 1 for the first time.
Chaseling’s works are, indeed, inherently political. It took a global pandemic to stop the world in its tracks under the threat of an invisible killer which pays no heed to national borders or political will. Yet Claudia Chaseling has been painting another such invisible killer for over a decade. While the eyes and hearts of the world were focused on the viral threat and aftermath of COVID-19, Chaseling, working in her studio throughout the first lockdown, was addressing another kind of insidious invisible killer: radiation and its repercussions – namely, the radioactive contamination of depleted uranium munitions. The visual language Chaseling has created and the imagery in her work consists of distorted landscapes in toxic colors, poisoned places, mutated creatures and plants whose deformation is caused by radioactive contamination. Her images are not predictions of some post-apocalyptic future, but rather the result of her research into historic and ongoing ways in which we continue to poison our planet with the byproducts of wars and nuclear accidents. To ground the psychedelic fantasy of her imagery in the harsh realities of the nuclear chain her work exposes, Chaseling embeds within her paintings quotations and URLs referencing her source materials, mapping the places polluted by depleted uranium – an environmental contaminant that is a derivative waste product of nuclear power and nuclear weapons technology. Inscribing fact into figuration, normally the text is embedded seamlessly within the spacial structure of each painting, becoming itself an abstract form. Yet in deluge of delusion 1, Chaseling, working for the first time in cooperation with designer Emilio Rapanà, foregrounds quotations from her research, using the text and design to frame 10 small watercolor studies for her large spatial paintings. The resulting “deluge of delusions” both informs and protests about the fatal status quo of global energy and arms industries, and the nuclear chain that leads to radioactive contamination and its poisoning of our planet. Claudia Chaseling has for over a decade dedicated her practice to the pernicious weapon of mass destruction which is depleted uranium. Yet it remains, to this day, no less of a global emergency than when she began.
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Claudia Chaseling (b.1973 in Munich, Germany. Lives between Berlin, Germany and Canberra, Australia.)
Claudia Chaseling studied at Academy for Visual Arts in Munich, Germany, and Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna, Austria. She received her Master’s degree in Visual Arts from both the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin, and the School of Art at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, where she also completed her PhD in Visual Arts. Chaseling is known for the practice of Spatial Painting, site-mutative biomorphic abstract works and murals, which cover walls, floors and ceilings. The Spatial Paintings are drafted from one particular viewpoint, to distort and dissolve the familiar geometry of the space, whilst carrying socio-political meaning. In 2013 she published the graphic novel Murphy the mutant that became an anchor for her work to follow. The diverse body of works, from Spatial Painting to the Graphic Novels, deal with facts and the consequences of today’s socio-political systems and their effects on the environment.
Chaseling has exhibited her work in over sixty solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, Australia and Europe. Among other major international exhibitions, her work has been featured in the X-Border Biennial, Finland; the Luela Art Biennial, Sweden; and the Lorne Sculpture Biennial, Australia. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Art Gallery Nadezda Petrovic, Cacak, Serbia; Wollongong Art Gallery and Yuill Crowely Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Kunstverein Duisburg; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; with MOMENTUM at the Australian Embassy, Berlin; at Rohkunstbau 26 in Schloss Lieberose, Germany; and with Art in Buildings in Milwaukee and New York City, USA. Major grants and scholarships received in Australia and Germany include the DAAD; the Samstag Scholarship; the Studio Award of the Karl Hofer Society; the Australia Council for the Arts Grant in 2014; and the 2015/16 artsACT Project Grant. She has taken part in various international visiting artists programs and artists residencies, including Yaddo in New York; Art Omi and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City; Texas A&M University; the Australian National University (ANU); amongst others. The Verlag für zeitgenoessische Kunst und Theorie Berlin published her first extensive monograph in 2016. In 2022 the book “Dissonance – Painting in Germany Today“ will be published by DCV featuring 80 artists of her generation: the “millennial painters”.
MORE INFO >> https://www.momentumworldwide.org/exhibitions/mutopia5/
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Margret Eicher
The Unbelievables: Uncorrect, Unforgotten, and Unlimited (2020/21), 3 digital montages on aludibond, each diameter 40cm
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The Unbelievables series of digital montages, like so much of Margret Eicher’s practice, addresses the strongly increasing reliance on images in our society. It is no longer text and language that primarily shape political, social and individual attitudes, but ubiquitous images whose truth content is usually no longer verified, and whose meaning can too easily be taken out of context. Invoking academic research in image theory and visual culture alongside quotations from art history, Margret Eicher’s work is about how we think in images. Comingling elements of the Baroque with found images from the internet depicting violent protestors and contemporary tattoo, The Unbelievables series of work brings stark parallels between decorative culture and the daily realities of our current moment of crisis. Baroque vases and ornamental amphorae are part of a courtly pictorial tradition of decorative objects for the bourgeoisie intended as a sign of status, wealth, and power. Such sets of vases made of porcelain and fine china appear in this period, traditionally placed in threes or fives as crowning pieces on mantels or in cabinets. The vessels were not only ornamentally decorated, but often featured pictorial cartouches that paid homage to rulers in effigies, celebrated events, or honored famous personalities of the times. Eicher’s digital montages in The Unbelievables series take this veneration and homage to the extreme by superimposing press photos of violent protesters onto authentic cartouche images of historical vases. By means of this inversion, Eicher addresses the dissolution of a common value system and the culturally divisive tendencies in our society. Made amidst the pandemic, the contrasting duality inherent in these works is a perfect reflection of our times, where the news images of death and protests – from Black Lives Matter to the lunacy of antivaxers – which filled the long days of lockdown, were accompanied by the seemingly endless parade of Amazon deliveries to all our neighbors ceaselessly shopping.
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Margret Eicher (b. 1955 in Viersen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Margret Eicher works primarily with intricate digital collages produced as large format tapestries woven on a digital loom. Invoking the traditional use of the tapestry as a tool of wealth and power, and commenting on our increasing reliance on digital culture, Eicher fills her tapestries with contemporary icons from our overly mediated age alongside quotations from art history.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Stade, Schloß Agathenburg, Germany (2010); Erarta-Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian (2011); Goethe-Institut Nancy (F) Strasbourg (F) ARTE /ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); Hamburg Galerie Carolyn Heinz, Hamburg, Germany (2012); Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, Germany (2012); Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Berlin Orangerie Schloss Charlottenburg, Germany (2013); Anger Museum Erfurt, Kunstmuseum Ahlen, Germany (2014); CACTicino, Bellinzona, Switzerland (2014); Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, Berlin, Germany (2015); Gallery Baku, Azerbaijan (2015); Port 25 Mannheim, Germany (2016); Kunstverein Ulm, Germany (2017); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2018); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2020); Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, Germany (2021); Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany (2021). Recent group exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany (2008); Galerie Eugen Lendl, Graz, Austria (2010); Musee des Beaux-Arts de Tournai, Tournai, Belgium (2011); MOCAK, Krakow, Poland (2012); Museum Liner, Appenzell, Switzerland (2012); Rohkunstbau, Berlin/Roskow, Germany (2013); Tichy Foundation, Prague, Czech Republic (2013); MPK, Kaiserslautern, Germany (2014); Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2014); Gallery of Art Critics Palace Adria, Prague, Czech Republic (2015); KHM, Vienna, Austria (2015); Stresa, Italy (2015); Kaiserslautern, Germany (2016); Museum Liner, Appenzell, Switzerland (2017); Leipzig, Germany (2017); Galerie Deschler, Berlin, Germany (2017); Singen, Kunstmuseum, Germany (2017); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2017); Kunstverein Pforzheim , Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin, Kunstverein KunstHaus Potsdam, Germany (2018); Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany (2019); Room Berlin, Germany (2019); Stiftung Staatlicher Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany (2019); Berlin, Germany (2020); MOMENTUM & Kleiner von Wiese, Zionkirche, Berlin, Germany (2021); Schloss Pillnitz, Dresden, Germany (2021).
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Nezaket Ekici
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Kaffeeklatsch (2019/2020), Video Performance, HD, 6’17”, on loan from the artist
In her video performance and accompanying discussion series Kaffeeklatsch, Nezaket Ekici refers to the German afternoon ritual of ‘coffee and cake’, a time of meeting and togetherness for many German families. The history of coffee gossip is a long one. In Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, women began meeting for coffee gossip – “Kränzchen” – to exchange ideas among themselves, allowing them a taste of freedoms that up until then had been reserved for men in social circles. Nezaket Ekici addresses the tradition of the coffee klatsch from her perspective as a migrant and a fully integrated German, questioning her sense of belonging in German society. She asks herself what her own German tradition is – which leads to the general question of what actually is German tradition? In order to answer these questions, Ekici stages herself as three characters dressed in traditional German costumes from the Black Forest, the Spreewald, and Thuringia, representing the south, the north and the center of Germany. With the focus on the articulation, gestures, and facial expressions of the performer, Ekici drinks coffee with her doppelgangers in this playful video addressing the fine line between foreignness and belonging. Watching this work now – on the cusp of the third year of social distancing and intermittent lockdowns, when we have all spent far too much time in our own company – we come to see how very precious this simple freedom is, to gather together with one another.
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Nezaket Ekici (b. 1970 in Kirsehir, Turkey. Lives and works in Berlin & Stuttgart, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey.)
Nezaket Ekici holds a degree in Fine Arts, an MA in Art Pedagogy, and an MFA degree, having studied Art History and Sculpture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Fine Arts Academy Munich (1994-2000). From 2001 to 2004 she studied Performance Art under Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. Ekici’s video, installations and performances are often process-based and ask viewers to derive their own emotional and intellectual interpretations. In her work, complex, often controversial topics are tackled with humor in highly aesthetic compostions. Ekici frequently uses her own Turkish origins and education as a subject of tension, pitting her background against her living environment in Germany. Cultural, geographic and individual boundaries, transgressions, gender, authorial bodies, art history, religion, culture and politics are central to Ekici’s works. By highlighting these themes in everyday life and placing them in a new context, she aims to interconnect every element to form a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk. Nezaket Ekici has presented more than 250 different performances in more than 170 cities in over 60 countries on 4 continents.
Selected international exhibitions since 2000 include: Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich; The Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; 25. May Museum Belgrade; PAC Milano; Venice Biennale; P.S.1 New York; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei/ Taiwan; Poznan Biennale; Curiciba Biennale; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Istanbul Modern; Marta Herford; Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; KunstWerke Berlin; Oslo Museum; The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Total Museum Seoul, and many more. Ekici was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cultural Academy Tarabya, Istanbul (2013-14), was the recipient of the Rome Prize for an Artist Residency at the German Academy, Villa Massimo, Rome (in 2016-17); and participated in the Schlingensief Opera Village Residency in Burkina Faso, Africa (2021). She received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Award (2018), and received the Berlin Culur Senate prize for her Artist Residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York (2020).
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Thomas Eller
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THE dna by Siri (2021), presented as sound waves and audio on a flatscreen, approx 15.6 years, and as an NFT
“My entire DNA/Genome has been minted as an NFT. What you are hearing is Siri reading the genetic code one-dimensional linear order.
Fact sheet:
– 320 gigabytes of raw data
– equivalent to 584903 A4-pages (11pt)
– 73,5 m tall stack of paper
– or a wall of 3.6m in height and 19.542 m long
– time duration for Siri to read me: 5686 days =15.6 years
The entire genome (my biologically non fungible data) is minted as an NFT and auctioned.”
– Thomas Eller
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Thomas Eller (b. 1964 in Coburg, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Beijing, China.)
Thomas Eller started his studies in Fine Arts at the Hochschule der Künste of Berlin. After his forced dismissal, he went on to graduate in Sciences of Religion, Philosophy and Art History from the Freie Universität, Berlin (1989). After returning to Berlin from 9 years in New York, Eller founded the German edition of artnet magazine, where he served as editior-in-chief (2004-2008) and was appointed executive director of the German branch of artnet AG (2005-2008). In 2008-2009, Eller served as Artistic Director of the Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin. He has been a member of various institutions, including the Association of International Art Critics (AICA), a Member of the Board for Creative Industries at the Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, and on the Steering Committee for Creative Industries in the Berlin Senate. Since moving to Beijing in 2014, Eller has taught at the Chinese National Art Academy, Beijing (2019), Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (TAFA) (2017), Tsinghua University and Sotheby’s Institute (2016 – 2017), and was associate researcher at Tsinghua University (2019-2020). He was a correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Beijing (2016-2017). In 2018 he founded Gallery Weekend Beijing. And since 2018, Thomas Eller is the Founding Artistic Director of China Arts & Sciences in Jingdezhen – a major new art district to feature international artist residencies, a contemporary art museum and a biennial. Since 2013 to the present, Eller is president of RanDian art magazine. Thomas Eller has received various prizes, including the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Prize (1996), the Villa-Romana Prize (Florence, 2000), the Art Omi International Art Center (New York, 2002) and the Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize from the Akademie der Künste (Berlin, 2006). In his artistic practice, Eller has had innumerable international exhibitions dating back to 1991.
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Amir Fattal
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Untitled (Data Mix) (2021), 3D printed sculpture with post processing, 44 x 24 x 41cm
Untitled (Data Mix) is the latest in Amir Fattal’s series of 3D printed sculptures based on the recombination of digital and biological data. In this case, the bust depicts the astronaut from Fattal’s film ATARA (2019), a sci-fi film shot in Berlin about the resurrection of historical memory. ATARA tells the story of two buildings that used to stand at the same place: the Berliner Stadtschloss, destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII, and the Palast der Republik, built in its place as the GDR seat of government in 1973, and destroyed amidst much controversy in 2008 to make way for the rebuilding of a contemporary copy of the Stadtschloss. The resurrection of this historical copy did not begin until 2013 due to the controversy surrounding this project, and opened to the public in its new incarnation as the Humbold Forum, Berlin’s newest museum, in the midst of the pandemic in 2021. Filmed while this building was still a construction site, ATARA follows a ceremony that takes place in the Palace during a moment when one building is being resurrected and the other building is dematerializing into a ghostly memory. Following an astronaut wandering through the construction site of the new Stadtschloss, carrying an iconic lamp from the destroyed Palast der Republik, ATARA deals with the collective memory of architecture and its symbolic representation in public space. In a city perpetually treading the fine line between moving on from its painful history while never forgetting it, the decision to resurrect the Stadtschloss in order to move and consolidate all Berlin’s ethnographic and history of science museums, is interpreted by many as a willful erasure of its GDR past and a dangerous rewriting of history. This controversy is keenly felt in a city still building over its bomb craters, even more than 75 years after the end of WWII.
“Untitled (Data Mix) is part of a series of 3D printed sculptures which combine the digital data of organic and natural elements in a form of 3D scans, together with generated 3D elements that create a new hybrid. In the process of turning these models into a physical object via 3D printing, the organic form goes into a new orientation process that takes into consideration the building up of physical material and its gravity in the ‘real world’, as opposed to the digital realm where anything is possible. The axis of the 3D printer becomes a point of reference in the creation and placement of the objects in space.” – Amir Fattal
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Amir Fattal (b. 1978 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Fattal is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Working in the media of video, photography, sculpture, and installation, his work forms a focused response to the diverse questions raised by his adoptive city of Berlin, where the memory, culture, architecture, indeed every thread in the fabric of this city is problematized by its history. Alongside his art practice, Fattal is the curator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists.
Amir Fattal was distinguished with the GASAG Art Prize in 2008 and graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009. Fattal has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Acclaimed solo exhibitions include: Mesopotopography, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin (2015); From the End to the Beginning, Kunstquerier Bethanien, Berlin (2014); Parallel Lines, Teapot Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2013); Goral Ehad, St-art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); Shadow of Smoke Rings on the Wall, Artitude Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); Tomorrow Gets Me Higher, Wilde Gallery, Berlin (2010). Selected group exhibitions include: Future Life Handbook, Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China (2017-18); Collection Enea Righi, Museo Fortuny, Venice (2016); Interior / Exterior / Sculpture, Belenius/Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); A Naked Singularity, Studio Garaicoa, Madrid, Spain (2015); Fragments of Empires, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2014-15); A Letter From Dr. Faustus, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014); Fundación Botín, Villa Iris, Santander, Spain (2014); Dahlstrøm & Fattal, Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2013); III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2012); Body Without Body, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011).
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Doug Fishbone
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Please Gamble Responsibly (2021), HD Video, 16’
Doug Fishbone’s latest video work, Please Gamble Responsibly, was made for his eponymous solo exhibition at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, in the summer of 2021. Originally shown inside a vast architectural model of a derelict estate in the middle of the museum, the project was conceived as a free-wheeling meditation on money and property, inspired by the phenomenon of “ghost estates” – housing developments built during the speculative Celtic Tiger boom of the Irish property market, and left unfinished when the credit bubble fueling it ground to a halt in 2008. Such ghost estates exist the world over, while the perpetually increasing unaffordability of housing is becoming equally ubiquitous. As the gap between rich and poor perpetually widens, and money, in its many new digital incarnations, becomes more and more conceptual, Fishbone puts his finger on the pulse of what is, apart from the COVID pandemic, becoming one of the greatest emergencies in the western world. And particularly in Berlin, where anti-gentrification protests are practically a daily occurrence, and where the city government’s attempts to stop speculation development are repeatedly overturned at the federal level, Please Gamble Responsibly takes on a keen resonance.
“Please Gamble Responsibly examines how instability and collapse are coded into the very way modern money works – from the Nixon Shock in 1971 to the ongoing corporate bailouts of today – and unmasks a global economic system which is far dodgier than it seems. The film treats a populist and relevant subject – the unaffordability of housing in much of the Western world – from an unexpected and humorous vantage point.” – Doug Fishbone
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Doug Fishbone (b. 1969 in New York, USA. Lives and works in London, England.)
Described as a “stand-up conceptual artist”, Doug Fishbone’s work is heavily influenced by the rhythms of stand-up comedy. Fishbone examines some of the more problematic aspects of contemporary life in an amusing and disarming way, using satire and humor in his films, performances and installations to critically examine consumer culture, mass media, and the relativity of perception and context. In his video and performance practice, he uses images found online to illustrate and undermine his own confrontational monologues on contemporary media and its corollary, the underground and avant-garde. Fishbone’s conceptual practice is wide-ranging, using many different forms of popular culture in unexpected ways. He earned a BA from Amherst College in the US in 1991, and MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 2003, and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Tate Britain, London (2010-11), Rokeby, London (2010-11, and 2009), Gimpel Fils, London (2006) and 30,000 Bananas in Trafalgar Square (2004). Selected group exhibitions include Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, Tate Britain (2010), Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2008); Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery (2008), London; British Art Show 6, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester (2006). Fishbone’s film project Elmina (2010) was premiered at Tate Britain in 2010, and was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria in 2011. Other notable projects include: the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival, London, UK (2013, 2014), and the Look Again Festival, Aberdeen, Scotland (2016). He curated Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and realised his solo project Made in China at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2015). Artificial Intelligence was commissioned by Werkleitz Festival, Halle, Germany (2018); and he showed a specially commissioned video The Jewish Question in the exhibition Jews, Money, Myth at the Jewish Museum, London (2019). Fishbone teaches and performs at major international and UK venues, including: the Hayward Gallery, ICA London, the Southbank Centre, Hauser and Wirth Somerset, and the Royal Academy. Fishbone is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Yinka Shonibare Foundation, an organization which fosters international cultural exchange.
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Máximo González
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N8 – Carbonic Incineration 1 (2021), tissue culture oil, ink, acrylic and gesso on pasted street signs, 85 x 60 x 5cm
On the streets of the city of Berlin, street posters are piled up on the walls, one on top of the other, glued together with paste. Some promote a new hamburger, others a musical concert, a home delivery app or an express covid test service. The stacking of posters creates a volume that, with the passing of days, is destined to disappear: a downpour falls on the city and they become so heavy that they bend like a withered flower, or someone tears them off as a souvenir or innocuous form of vandalism, or the city council removes them when it performs its regular cleaning.
In her laboratory, a Polish scientist, under a microscope, places a number of cells on a substance that is used for their proliferation. Cells will begin to reproduce slowly, then quickly, until they meet their limit and begin to shrink. It is difficult to distinguish when or what the maximum point was before beginning their decrease, in search of their own balance.
Hanging on the wall, on the whitened surface of a pile of posters, there is an unclassifiable, carbonic-looking shape that expands on the paper as if it were burning, or perhaps it contracts, as if it were submerging.
– Artist Statement by Iván Buenader
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Máximo González (b. 1971 in Argentina. Lives and works in Alicante, Spain and Mexico City, Mexico.)
Argentinian artist Máximo González is widely known for his massive immersive mixed-media installations, as well as large-scale collages made out of money. The currency collages, reminiscence of the political wall paintings of the Mexican muralists, express the complications of a consumer culture that exploits natural resources, produces waste, and lately drives nations to bankruptcy. González’s work – often poetic, always political – focuses on the environment, education, and the evolution of cultural value systems.
González has held 46 solo shows and participated in 168 group shows. Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘POGO’ at Hospicio Cabañas Museum, Guadalajara (MX); Magnificent Warning at Stanlee & Rubin Center, El Paso (USA); Playful, CAFAM, Los Angeles (USA); ‘Walk among Worlds’ at Casa de América, Madrid (ES) y Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (USA), ‘Something like an answer to something’, Artane gallery, Istanbul (TUR); ‘Project for the reutilization of obsolete vehicles’ at Travesía Cuatro Gallery, Madrid (ES) and Project B, Milano (IT); ‘PISAR’ at Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires (ARG); ‘Greenhouse effect’ at Art&Idea, Mexico City. Selected group shows include: ‘The Supermarket of Images’ at Jeu de Paume in Paris and at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, China; ‘Memoria del porvenir’, MUSAC collection (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León), Spain; Viva México! at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and at BWA Awangarda Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland; ‘The possibility of everything’ at Nuit Blanche Toronto (CA); ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’, Poetics of the handmade exhibition at MOCA LA (USA); ‘The tree: from the sublime to the social’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery (CA); ‘Fine Line’ at Museo de Las Americas in Denver (USA); The lines of the hand at MUAC, Mexico City; ‘2nd Polygraphic Triennial of San Juan’, Latin America and the Caribbean, Puerto Rico; ‘Mexico: Poetry/Politics’, San Francisco State University (USA) and at Nordic Watercolor Museum, Gothenburg (SE); ‘Tiempo de Sospecha’, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.
Máximo González is also the founder of “Changarrito Project”, a non-profit cultural initiative he launched in 2004 in Mexico City. What began as an underground subversive project has evolved into a platform to promote, support and show the work of visual artists, novelists, poets, curators, designers, performers, filmmakers, which has so far has exhibited more than 5,000 works by more than 350 emerging artists. Changarrito was invited twice to participate at Mexico Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2013), and has, since 2012 been operating in cooperation with Mexic-Arte Museum (Texas, USA).
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“Daemon (Greek: daimon, guardian spirit) stems from reflections on the future of humankind and its relationship with nature. Karjalainen’s film navigates the ground between real and unreal, abstract and absurd as it unravels online comments of trolls criticising climate action. Running on the logic of a dream or a nightmare, the film stirs thoughts about the future of humankind. Will we be able to act as a united front in the face of a disaster or will we become paralysed, waiting for some supernatural force to step in?”
– Hannu Karjalainen
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“The underlying question behind the visual album Luxe was to ask what is the role or the responsibility of the artist in these times and whether art is just luxury when the world is literally burning. The videos elaborate on this concept and bring different perspectives to the underlying theme: climate change and the uncertain future of our planet. I view this work as a collection of audiovisual essays that each take a slightly different approach and point of view on the subject and related themes, like the idea of infinite economic growth, estrangement from nature, inequality, consumerism and the future of humankind on this planet in the first place. Some videos may be more matter-of-fact, like the opening video A Hidden Star with the shapeshifting suitcase. Some others are more surreal or dreamlike (perhaps nightmarelike). The Silkworms video features names of recently extinct species but abstracted in the way that they can’t be read.”
– Hannu Karjalainen
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Hannu Karjalainen (b. 1978 in Finland. Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.)
Hannu Karjalainen is an award winning visual artist, filmmaker photographer, and composer based in Helsinki, Finland. Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School at Alver Alto University, Finland. Karjalainen’s experimental films, video installation work, photography and sound art have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Finland and internationally, including: UMMA University of Michigan Museum of Art, International Biennale of Photography Bogota, Scandinavia House New York, Fotogalleriet Oslo and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki. Karjalainen won the main prize at the Turku Biennial in 2007, and was chosen as Finnish Young Artist of the Year in 2009. Karjalainen’s latest album LUXE was released by Berlin based Karaoke Kalk in late 2020. Karjalainen has collaborated with Simon Scott (of Slowdive), Dakota Suite and Monolyth & Cobalt among others.
David Krippendorff
Burning (2021), pastel on paper, 62 x 92cm (85 x 115cm with frame)
Untitled (2020), 3 drawings, pastel on paper, 18 x 28cm (30 x 40cm with frame)
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“Gone With the Wind (1939) is a movie that has now been condemned for its racist depiction of the American South. For the drawing Burning (2021) I have chosen a still from Gone With the Wind of the burning of Atlanta, one of the pivotal moments in the film that most strongly condemns the civil war. Without the characters and taken out of their context, these images of burning buildings also take on new associations and resonate with images from the Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality in the summer of 2020, but also the fires that happened in California and Australia, due to the unnatural rise in temperatures through climate change.
The three Untitled works are part of an ongoing series based on stills from the movie The Wizard of Oz. All stills are from the initial 18 minutes of the film, the part in sepia taking place in a studio-recreated rural Kansas before the action is transported to a technicolored Oz. By eliminating all the characters, these landscape drawings create new associations for the viewer, taking on a haunted atmosphere of deserted and abandoned places. These lonely and abandoned spaces become a visual metaphor for the collapse of our civilization, our environment and economic system.”
– David Krippendorff
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David Krippendorff (b. 1967 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.)
David Krippendorff is a US/German interdisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker. He grew up in Rome, Italy, and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, where he graduated with a Masters degree in 1997, and was subsequently based in New York for some time. The son of a Holocaust survivor and the grandchild of practicing Nazis, cultural contradiction and dislocation shaped Krippendorff’s experience early on. His artistic practice inquires into this state of being a “permanent foreigner” and explores resulting questions of home, national and cultural identity, and belonging. Krippendorff’s works, films and videos have been shown internationally, including at: the New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, and Belgrade), as well as in many international art and film festivals worldwide.
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Shahar Marcus
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Dig (2020), HD Video, 5’32”
“In the video Dig you can see a group of young men working hard trying to dig out heavy stones. It is not clear where this action takes place. It might be a ruin house after an earthquake or maybe this house was bombed. The men look very stressed and they keep on working and digging out the stones. The action repeats itself in a never ending loop and the beholder never knows what is the reason they are digging, or will they ever find something. This action becomes more and more familiar to the beholder as he might seen it on the news it becomes part of our life but usually it happens in a faraway place.”
– Shahar Marcus
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Shahar Marcus (b. 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel. Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel.)
Shahar Marcus primarily works in the medium of performance and video art. His initial works dealt with the exploration of his own body and its limitations – incorporating various perishable materials, such as dough, juice and ice. His body served as an instrument, a platform on which various ‘experiments’ took place: lying on the operating table, set on fire, dressed in a ‘bread suit’, and more. His recurrent use of bread as a symbol of essentiality and survival is juxtaposed with military symbols. By frequently working with food, a perishable, momentary substance, and by turning it into a piece of clothing or a set, Marcus also flirts with art history; transforming arbitrary objects and materials into something immortal and everlasting. His most recent works deal with local political issues, by approaching iconic Israeli landmarks with a critical and humorous point of view. Marcus reflects on his own heritage, environment and the creation of local historical narratives. His works are influenced by the visual language of cinematography along with familiar themes and tributes to the history of art.
Shahar Marcus studied Linguistics and History of Art at the University of Tel Aviv. He has exhibited at numerous art institutions, both in Israel and internationally, including: Tate Modern, London; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Copenhagen Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biennale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and at other art venues in Poland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, USA, and Turkey. His works are in many important museum collections, such as: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; and others.
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Messenger Irma / Messenger Dora / Messenger Megi / Messenger Maria / Messenger Mangkhut, [Barcode: Commodity Dream], (2021),
5 framed prints, ink print on paper, each 29 cm x 42 cm (53cm x 63 cm with frame)
The five prints shown in this exhibition are digital studies for a series of five large paintings (each 300 x 200 cm) from Marković’s conceptual practice of Barcode Paintings, with which he has been working since 2008. This body of work consists of stripes that signify written words, often intertwined with visual imagery. Barcodes are the product of a systematic process of codification, at the end of which only a rhythmic series of vertical lines remains. Every text can be translated into a barcode and thereby enter the system of global trade. It is possible to scan the bar code with a laser reader or a smartphone app to decode its meaning. Marković’s seemingly abstract images can thus be translated into concrete content.
Marković’s Messengers series is composed of spatial images that, by means of abstract coding, thematize the relationship between environmental destruction through climate change, toxic pollution, current and historical economic interests and their impact on the planet Earth. The five prints consist of barcodes intertwined with satellite images of hurricanes and typhoons which have hit various geographical regions since 2010. Each of these works is composed of an interwoven matrix of barcode and meteorological satellite image of a natural disaster. The barcodes embedded in these works translate to the term “Commodity Dream”. While the titles of the works, taken from the sweetly innocent female names given to these hurricanes and typhoons by the World Meteorological Organization, form a stark counterpoint to the harsh truths and tragic aftermath of such natural disasters.
This body of work conceptually and visually addresses the effects of climate change leading to super-storms and massive fires (which the artist has experienced in recent years in Australia), resulting in damage, death and displacement on a massive scale. This environmental devastation is a consequence of the climate catastrophe resulting from humankind’s mistreatment of the planet which sustains us; a vicious cycle pulling us ever closer to the brink of disaster. Driven by human greed and anomalous management of resources, large geographical areas of healthy nature are disappearing from the face of the Earth due to economic colonization and ecocide by aggressive corporations. The Messengers series addresses how the profit-oriented focus of humanity is a disastrous commodification of the world. If things continue as they are, human greed will turn our planet into a consumed good, like any other commodity.
– Milovan Destil Marković
Milovan Destil Marković (b. in 1957 in Čačak, Serbia. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Milovan Destil Marković is a conceptual artist whose practice spans installation, painting, performance, and video. Marković studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Arts, Belgrade, where he graduated in 1983. Defining himself as a conceptual painter, Marković has exhibited extensively in Europe, Asia, Australia, and in the Americas. His work was featured in the 42nd Venice Biennial (Aperto ’86); 4th Istanbul Biennial; 46th Venice Biennial; 6th Triennial New Delhi, India; the 56th, 49th, 24th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale; 2018 Lorne Sculpture Biennale; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Kumamoto; MoMA PS1, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken; The Artist’s Museum, Lodz; National Museum, Prague; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; MSURS Museum of Contemporary Art, Banja Luka; Landesmuseum Graz; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; National Gallery, Athens; Art Museum Foundation Military Museum, Istanbul; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunstverein Hamburg; Kunstvoreningen Bergen; Kunstverein Jena; Galleri F15 Oslo; Nishido Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Fei Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai; the art program of the European Capitol of Culture Novi Sad; and many other notable institutions. Marković’s works are held by numerous public and private collections throughout the world, including: Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany; Museum of the City of Belgrade, Serbia; Istanbul Art Museum Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Germany; Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria; The Artists’ Museum, Lodz, Poland; MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany; amongst others.
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Christian Niccoli
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ZWEI (2021), video performance, 5’09”
“This installation tells the story of two men bound together in a relationship of dependence but it can also be read as a social metaphor as individuals, communities and societies have always been linked to each other by a relationship of mutual dependence, where, in a conscious or unconscious way, one person’s action has an impact on the other, even if this does not result always evident. The work consists of a vertically mounted wall monitor and shows a very high wall. From the upper edge of the wall hangs a rope that falls along both sides of the wall. A man hangs from each end of the rope. The two men do not seem to know each other’s presence, because each in his own way is busy fighting not to fall. Several meters separate them both from the ground and the top. From time to time the two men look frightened downwards and upwards, then try to climb up, without success. If one pulls the rope towards himself, the other is pulled slightly upwards.”
– Christian Niccoli
The realization of the video ZWEI was supported by the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
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Christian Niccoli (b. 1976 in Südtirol, Italy. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Christian Niccoli’s videos and video installations have been presented internationally in museums and institutions, among others at: Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria (2006); Phönix Art – Harald Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, Germany (2002); Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal, Canada (2015); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2012); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2009,2004); 8th Baltic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland (2009); 4th Biennial del Fin del Mundo Valparaiso, Chile (2015); Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia (2010); Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France (2015), Museion – Museum für Moderne und Zeitgenössiche Kunst, Blzano, Italy (2020); Museum Kunst der Westküste, Alkersum, Germany (2020); Alfred Ehrhard Stiftung, Berlin (2021). Christian Niccoli’s works are in several public collections, including; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland; Kunstsammlung der Autonomen Provinz Südtirol, Italy; Collezione Farnesina – Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome, Italy; and Museion – Museum of Modern and Conemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy. Niccoli’s works have been presented at several festivals, including: Transmediale, Berlin, Germany (2009); Hamburg Short Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany (2008); Oblíqua – International Exhibition of Video Art & Experimental Cinema, Lisbon, Portugal (2016); 16th WRO Media Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland (2015); Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart, Germany (2015); Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece (2015); Facade Video Festival Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2014); and Video Art Festival Miden, Kalamata, Greece (2014). In 2006 Christian Niccoli was an artist in residence at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy, and in 2008-09 he participated in the International Studio Program at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany.
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Kirsten Palz
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Chronicles of Extinction (2021), print on paper, 12 books from an ongoing series, 30.5 × 68 cm
Chronicles of Extinction marks the start of a new series of work for Kirsten Palz, while remaining true to her conceptual practice of “Sculpture as Writing”, encompassing her manuals, songbooks, and other text-based works. The 12 books, shown here, from the ongoing series Chronicles of Extinction, are a cry against the ecological devastation mankind is wreaking upon our planet; they are a song of mourning for the disappeared and still disappearing species that once inhabited this earth with us; a needed reminder; a sad farewell.
Chronicles of Extinction consists of twelve individual editions that form the beginning of an ongoing archive. Each of the twelve editions lists twelve extinct species. The applied scientific classification system compiles information on kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species for each extinct member:
VOID 01 ACTINOPTERYGII ray-finned fishes
VOID 02 AMPHIBIA shrub frogs
VOID 03 AVES birds
VOID 04 AVES birds
VOID 05 BIVALVIA molluscs
VOID 06 GASTROPODA snails and land slugs
VOID 07 INSECTA owlet moths
VOID 08 LILIOPSIDA lilies
VOID 09 MAGNOLIOPSIDA flowering plants
VOID 10 MAGNOLIOPSIDA flowering plants
VOID 11 MAMMALIA rodents
VOID 12 REPTILIA reptiles
Each extinction creates a void.
Each extinction is irreversible.
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Kirsten Palz (b. 1971 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Kirsten Palz, born 1971 in Copenhagen, Denmark, is a visual artist working in Berlin. She holds a degree in Computer Science from the IT-University in Copenhagen and a degree of Fine Arts/ Painting from School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2007, Kirsten Palz initiated her ongoing archive of manuals. The archive is a work in progress consisting today of 410 manuals, including objects, prints on paper and drawings. The manuals engage with various topics, such as dreams, memories, myth, sculpture and social space. These works are elementary entities; the manual, the score, the playwright, the architectural plan, the choreography ect. They exist before the performance, before the realisation, before the show. It is a speculative open process for new actors; be it a visitor, a curator, a collective, an actor, a director or a performer. Each time they are acted out or realised they add a new layer to their existence. Everyone is invited to engage.
Kirsten Palz has shown her works in wide range of spaces in Germany and abroad. Recent works were presented in Points of Resistance with MOMENTUM at the Zionskirche, Berlin; F******* -Towards New Perspectives on Feminism, Neue Berliner Kunstverein (nbk) Berlin; and ff /Temporary Autonomous Zone /2/ in Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin; amongst many others. Palz’s performances frequently take place non-officially in the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg – outside the institution’s listed program – and include readings and experimental guided tours for audiences.
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Nina E. Schönefeld
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H A Z E C I T Y (2021), HD video, 32’57”
The video work H A Z E C I T Y refers to the current discussion of climate change and what might happen in the coming years. The film raises the question: To what extent is it legitimate to use violence to force a necessary shift to prevent irreversible climate change? The philosopher Slovoj Zizek predicts that due to the shortness of time left, a radicalization of environmental activism is going to happen. Other references in the video include theories of Swedish environmental scientist Andreas Malm and environmental activist Greta Thunberg, both of whom point to the urgency of changing society by 2030. H A Z E C I T Y deals with the act of resistance in general and with the unbroken fighting spirit of political activists all over the world. The film points to historical sources for example to the German 68 movement and the American Weather Underground movement.
The story of the video H A Z E C I T Y is set in the year 2027. A toxic fog often appears due to extreme pollution in cities. Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion are still fighting climate change. Progress has been made by corporations and politics, electric cars are mandatory, but they are basically small diversions to avoid having to make fundamental changes. Activists are increasingly frustrated that everything will stay the same.
The film heroine Leocadia Haze is a lawyer who represents environmental activists in court. She stands behind the activists’ demands for a basic right to an unspoiled environment in the future. The activists are concerned with the year 2030. Something has to change fundamentally, otherwise there won’t be a “point of return” any longer. Through Leocadia’s work as a lawyer, she is committed to the law without the use of violence, but she sees the dilemma that the 68 movement already went through with the radicalization of the RAF in Germany and the Weather Underground in the US.
During the night, Leocadia is out in the city looking for her little sister Nikita, who has allegedly gone into hiding. Nikita has joined a radical environmental organization that threatens violence to achieve its goals. It remains unclear whether Nikita is responsible for the fire at a corporate headquarter causing human casualties. Has Nikita become a murderer?
While driving through the city at night, Leocadia has flashbacks and visions. She suffers from insomnia and a mysterious nosebleed illness caused by the city’s smog. Leocadia has a dark secret. To calm herself down, she goes swimming at night.
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Nina E. Schönefeld (b. 1972 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Nina E. Schönefeld is a multidisciplinary artist who studied Fine Art in Berlin at the Universität der Künste, and in London at the Royal College of Art. She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art Theory. For several years she has been lecturing at private art colleges in the field of visual arts. She is the co-founder of “Last Night In Berlin”, a blog and cultural project documenting art openings in Berlin. In her art practice, Schönefeld’s strong interest in new artistic developments has resulted in interdisciplinary video installations – an overall system of light sources (lamps, movement detectors etc.), sound systems (mixers etc.), electronic machines, computer screens, newly built sculptures, interiors and video projections. The focus of Schönefeld’s diverse practice lies on political, social and digital changes in society, phenomena of abrupt shift, escape from political persecution, hacking attacks, nuclear accidents, dictatorships, freedom of speech and a free press, people who are radically different, the lives of hackers and preppers, political activists, investigative journalists, environmental activists, Wikileaks members, NSA employees, data martyrs, political underdogs, hermits, computer gamefanatics, cult members, extremists, the Darknet, Julien Assange, Edward Snowden, the blackout in NY, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the control center of the CIA, the Chaos Computer Club, North Korea, the right wing movement, Children of God, Suprematism, the Bauhaus, Zero, insular colonies, digital inventions and radical social networks.
Schönefeld’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world. Recent exhibitions include: “Roppongi Art Night”, Tokyo, Japan (2021); “Am Limit”, Cole mine Důl Michal, Ostrava, Czech Republic (2021); “Facing New Challenges: Water”, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, Germany (2020); “#Payetonconfinement”, Galerie la Pierre Large, Strasbourg, France (2020); “Topographies of The Stack”, Alternative Culture Making Art Space, Shenzhen, China (2019); “Water(Proof)”, Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia (2019) & MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany (2019); “Anima Mundi Festival 2019 – Consciousness”, Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi, Venice, Italy (2019); “30 Jahre. 30 Fragen. 30 Stunden.”, Goethe Institut – Beijing, China (2018); “Join the Dots / Unire le distanze Salone Degli Incanti”, Ex Pescheria Centrale, Trieste, Italy (2018); “Light Year 25”, Manhattan Bridge / Kuelbs Collection, NY, USA (2017); and many others.
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Sumugan Sivanesan
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fugitive radio (2020 – present), podcast series presented as sound installation
fugitive radio is an artistic-research project initiated by Dr Sumugan Sivanesan to raise migrant, queer and anticolonial issues and music in Helsinki and beyond. Beginning in mid-2020, the project has developed over a series of collaborative live events, supported by {openradio}. These have sought to develop decentralised and distributed modes of radio-making such as: radiophonic picnic, audio fanzine, swarm sound system and online club.
In States of Emergency, we feature Epiode 11 of the ongoing radio research project fugitive radio: Finance for Future features an interview with the Berlin-based degrowth and climate justice activist and campaigner Tonny Nowshin, calling in from Bangladesh in the build up to the Global Day of Finance Action, 29 October 2021. It also presents conversations with some folks I met at on that day on the steps of Helsinki Parliament: Steven Vanholme and Iciar Montes from EKOenergy, an independent non-profit energy label who help finance renewable energy projects around the world and Olavi Fellman a spokesperson for Fridays for Future Helsinki. It also features voices from those involved in actions around the world on that day and in the opening days of the UN climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow in November 2021 — notably Samoan activist Brianna Fruean and the Koala Kollektiv.
Sivanesan initiated the radio research project fugitive radio in 2020 while on a year-long artist residency in Helsinki. The fugitive frequency podcast broadcasts on the first Tuesday of every month on CoLaboRadio, via Freie Radios – Berlin Brandenburg. The online club RUB opens a room on SonoBus on the night of the new moon during the European winter, 2021–2022. fugitive radio was showcased at Pixelache Festival #Burn____ (2021), and has been generously supported by the Kone Foundation (2020–2021). In 2022, fugitive radio will continue as a para-institutional format, adapting to different organisational structures such as the artist association, artist residency, activist camp and artspace.
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Sumugan Sivanesan (Lives and works in Sydney, Australia and Berlin, Germany.)
Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and writer, and a transcultural radical. His eclectic practice is concerned with the legacies of colonialism, the experience of cultural differences, and the diaspora. Often working collaboratively his interests span migrant histories and minority politics, activist media, artist infrastructures, more-than-human rights and multispecies politics, queer theory, Tamil diaspora studies and anticolonialism. In Berlin, he organizes with Black Earth, a collective who address interacting issues of race, gender, colonialism, and climate justice. Sivanesan earned a PhD from the Transforming Cultures research center at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia (2014). He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies (Cultural Studies), University of Potsdam (2016) supported by the DAAD.
Sivanesan has produced events and exhibitions at: Pixelache Festival #BURN____2021 (Helsinki); nadine laboratory for contemporary arts (Brussels 2020); Akademie Schloss Solitude (2020); Tehai (Dhaka 2020); Frame Contemporary Art (Helsinki 2019); The Floating University Berlin (2019); EX-EMBASSY (Berlin 2018); BE.BoP 2018: Black Europe Body Politics, Maxim Gorki Theatre (Berlin, 2018); Nida Art Colony Inter-format Symposium (Lithuania, 2018); Art Laboratory Berlin (2015); ZK/U Centre for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin (2015, 2014); Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2014); The Reading Room (Bangkok 2013); Performance Space (Sydney 2013); MOMENTUM Berlin (2012); Yautepec Gallery (Mexico City 2011); 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney 2011, 2010); MOMENTUM Sydney (2010), amongst many others. Sivanesan was a member of the experimental documentary collective theweathergroup_U who formed for the Biennale of Sydney 2008. He was active with media/art gang boat-people.org who engaged Australian publics in issues of borders, race and nationalism between 2002 and 2014.
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POINTS of RESISTANCE III
Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom
SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM
9 November 2021
The 32nd Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
11:00 – 13:30 & 18:30 – 23:00
At Zionskirche, Zionskirchplatz, Berlin Mitte
Curated by Constanze Kleiner & David Elliott
Morning Program – 3G rules apply: proof of vaccination, recovery, or negative test required.
11:00 – 11:30
Unveiling of the new monumental sculpture Why I Bear by Stefan Rinck
Stefan Rinck in discussion with David Elliott [in English and German]
11:30 – 12:00
Film Screening – Heart of Stone, by Sonja Baeger on the work of Stefan Rinck
[in German with English subtitles]
12:00 – 13:00
Panel Discussion – Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom [in English]
Moderated by David Elliott, with Tatiana Arzamasova, Thomas Eller, Dominik Lejman, Zsuzsanna Petró, Rachel Rits-Volloch
13:00 – 13:40
Film Screening – Allegoria Sacra by AES+F
Evening Program – 2G rules apply: proof of vaccination, or recovery required.
18:30 – 19:00
Unveiling of the new monumental sculpture Why I Bear by Stefan Rinck
[in English and German]
19:00 – 19:30
Film Screening Heart of Stone, by Sonja Baeger on the work of Stefan Rinck
[in German with English Subtitles]
19:30 – 20:30
Lecture – The Church, the Resistance and the Bear – Philosopher, historian, and publisher
Christian Posthofen addresses the Zionskirche as a heterotopia.
[in German]
21:00 – 22:00
Concert – TRES MOMENTOS by Sven Helbig, conducted by Wilhelm Keitel
To Buy Tickets for TRES MOMENTOS – CLICK HERE >>
22:00 – 22:40
Film Screening – Allegoria Sacra by AES+F
Symposium Concludes with a Drinks Reception
MORE INFO > >
This program is prompted by two recent exhibitions: Points of Resistance, shown earlier this year at the Zionskirche (4-26 April 2021), and Taking Flight: Birds & Bicycles Berlin, currently at MOMENTUM in the Kunstquartier Bethanien (4 September – 14 November 2021). Both are concerned with paradoxes of freedom. While the works in these exhibitions reflect on the limits of memory, history, politics, progress, and desire, the cultural infrastructure seems to be becoming increasingly incompatible with the requirements for interaction. Too often, freedoms for some are dependent upon the servitude of others.
The Zionskirche was a centre of resistance itself in many different ways. When the pandemic suspended normality, the references of the works shown there in Points of Resistance ranged from the specific to the global through different times and places. What brought them together was their moral imperative and political and social need to preserve and promote difference as a fountainhead of creativity.
Birds & Bicycles adopts a more metaphorical approach by examining ideas of freedom that focus on borders – mental and actual, physical and figurative – as characterized by the mechanical technology of the bicycle and the poetic symbol of birds in flight. This exhibition assembles the work of 12 artists from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, most of whom live in Berlin. In various ways, their work reflects on the analogy of flight in different paradoxes of rooted mobility.
The starting points for the Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom discussion panel, which takes place on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, are both historical and current issues concerning the crisis in democracy. The panelists, both artists, and curators will talk concretely about how they think art and culture express and reflect the truths of our time. Why I Bear, the sculpture of the bear carrying a heavy burden by Stefan Rinck, being unveiled on this day, is a monumental version made for public space of the work shown in Points of Resistance. The program is accompanied by lectures, film screenings, and a concert by renowned composer Sven Helbig. Tres Momentos describes a section of the infinite spiral, in which disorder and structure, the sacred and the profane, life and death are mutually dependent.
Unveiling of the monumental sculpture Why I Bear by Stefan Rinck
Stefan Rinck in discussion with David Elliott
On November 9, 2021, the monumental sandstone sculpture Why I bear /Grosser Lastenbär by sculptor Stefan Rinck is installed adjacent to the Zionskirche in Berlin-Mitte. The large sculpture hewn from sandstone, measuring 185 x 170 x 120cm, is a new version of the small Lastenbär by Stefan Rinck from 2007. This work was on display in April 2021 in the exhibition Points of Resistance at the Zionskirche in Berlin and touched a particularly large number of people, becoming a surface for projections of private, social and political issues. “A bear that is actually too small, but nevertheless carries its load that is actually too big. It evoked spontaneous empathy among the viewers, and its indomitability amazed and inspired them,” says Constanze Kleiner, the initiator of the project. This is where the idea originated: to create a large, symbolic version of Stefan Rinck’s Lastenbär for public space. Within six months, the idea became reality. Inspired by the great attention of visitors, subsequently conceived for public space and erected in this context, Stefan Rinck’s large “Lastenbär” at the Zionskirche in Berlin-Mitte, becomes an example of relevant, effective everyday culture. Works of art are gateways to memory, but above all to new spaces of thought and the future. The sculpture Why I bear / Großer Lastenbär can accomplish this. The title for the large version of the bear was extended by the artist – just as playfully as light-footedly. Why I bear / Grosser Lastenbär plays with the dual definition of the word “bear”; both the animal, which is also the symbol of Berlin, and the endurance of hardships. What is special about handwriting of Stefan Rinck is an unmistakable gracefulness of a sculptural language that is at the same time monumental. The simplicity with which he turns his creations into creatures and the humor with which he releases them into the world – perfect and incomplete at the same time – are unique. From his works speaks a quiet tenderness for all living things and at the same time an unwavering “I can do it.” This artistic oeuvre is also the origin of the work Why I bear / Grosser Lastenbär as an archetype for excessive pressure and resistant, individual power; a stony universe that carries empathy in a fascinating way. Starting on November 9, Why I bear / Grosser Lastenbär is the artist’s first public sculpture in Germany and will be on view for two years in public space at the Zionskirche in Berlin.
Stefan Rinck (1973). Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Stefan Rinck studied art history and philosophy at Saarland University in Saarbrücken and sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe. His work will be shown internationally: including in Madrid at the Arco art fair in 2020, at Art Basel Miami in 2019, and at the Jardin de Tuileries for FIAC in the same year. He will show his latest works, over 5m high, at FIAC in Paris this year. He is represented in the following public collections: CBK Rotter- dam (NL), Musée de la Loterie (BE), Krohne Collection (DE), FRAC Corse (FR). In 2019 Stefan Rinck was featured in the Thames & Hudson publication “2100 Sculptors of Tomorrow”. Stefan Rinck has been realizing public sculptures since 2008. Already during his participation in the Busan Biennale 2008 in South Korea, the granite sculpture “The Division of Woman and Man” was commissioned. In 2018, the work “The Mongooses of Beauvais” was permanently installed in the Beaupassage in Paris. Other monu- mental limestone sculptures were realized in France in 2010 and 2020. Recently, at the FIAC in Paris, he showed two new sculptures, more than 5 meters high, to learn more about the artist and the history of its creation.
Panel Discussion – Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom
Moderated by David Elliott
Curator, Writer, Art Historian, Museum Director (Oxford, UK / Berlin)
Tatiana Arzamasova
Artist from AES+F (Moscow, Russia / Berlin)
Thomas Eller
Artist and Curator, Artistic Director at Taoxichuan China Arts & Sciences, President of Randian Magazine, Director of THEgallery (Mürsbach, Germany / Berlin)
Dominik Lejman
Artist and Professor at the University of the Arts Poznan (Poznan, Poland / Berlin)
Zsuzsanna Petró
Curator at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, formerly at the Ludwig Museum Budapest (Budapest, Hungary / Berlin)
Rachel Rits-Volloch
Curator of Birds & Bicycles Berlin and Founding Director of MOMENTUM
The Birds & Bicycles exhibition adopts a metaphorical approach by examining ideas of freedom that focus on borders – mental and actual, physical and figurative – as characterized by the mechanical technology of the bicycle and the poetic symbol of birds in flight. This exhibition assembles the work of 12 artists from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, most of whom live in Berlin. In various ways, their work reflects on the analogy of flight in different paradoxes of rooted mobility.
The starting points for the Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom discussion panel, which takes place on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, are both historical and current issues concerning the crisis in democracy. The panelists, both artists, and curators will talk concretely about how they think art and culture express and reflect the truths of our time.
READ REFLECTIONS ON PARADOXES OF FREEDOM by DAVID ELLIOTT > >
Film Screening: Allegoria Sacra by AES+F
AES+F, Allegoria Sacra (2011-13), HD video
Giovanni Bellini’s ‘Allegoria Sacra’ (Sacred Allegory) hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. The subject of this painting is a mystery to art historians. The earliest figures of Christian and ancient mythology are gathered together on a balustrade by a sea or a wide river, surrounded by hills on which can be seen, in the distance, village huts and a palazzo. St. Sebastian, the Madonna, a centaur, small children playing by a tree in the center, a Saracen-Muslim, a man somewhat like the Apostle Paul with a sword in his hand, in the background a peasant with a mule, two beautiful ladies one of whom is St. Catherine, a naked old man reminiscent of Job – this is a far from complete list of the heroes who Bellini brought together in this picture. One interpretation of this painting is that it showed Purgatory, where the souls of the righteous, of virtuous pagans and of un-christened children await their fate – heaven or hell.
This painting has always intrigued AES+F. The mysterious image of the Allegoria Sacra is in keeping with their view of the modern world. They see Bellini’s heroes in those passengers who meet accidentally while awaiting their flights at international airports. The feelings of being cut off from one’s life and of the, as yet, unachieved aim of traveling from one world to another are familiar to the majority of those who fly, whether with large or small airlines. We become part of a special club of people who are united by the condition of a body and soul located between the abandoned and the not yet found. Together, i.e. simultaneously, we listen to the flight announcements, watch the flight board with its changing tableau of figures and cities, try to focus on the newspaper, on an SMS or the internet, or simply on the advertisements on the airport monitors. But everyone is wrapped up in themselves, and it is this which unites us. There is, perhaps, one more thing which somehow links us during this interval in time – we look at each other, having never seen one other before and being unlikely to do so again.
The airport is Purgatory. Only there does one understand that the knowledge of one’s ‘tomorrow’ is a total illusion. We imagine the airport as a space where reality transforms itself – it gets covered with snow, which alters the interior and then melts, the runway turns in to the river Styx as in Bellini’s painting, airplanes become ancient, mystic craft. The light-boxes in Duty Free live a life of their own, showing pictures of heaven. In Allegoria Sacra, we wish to retain Bellini’s metaphorical heroes using the image of modern-day people from various countries and cultures. At the same time we believe that the airport space can include such mythological personalities as the centaur, who we imagine in his literal embodiment. Or the Indian elephant god Ganesha, with the features of a coffee machine. Even the various aircraft may take on the image of ancient gods like the eastern dragon.
The allegorical heroes of the painting can be seen in those awaiting their flights. The Saracen turns into a group of transit passengers from Darfur or Peshawar. Sebastian is a young traveler from the exotic countries of the south, naked to the waist and barefoot, having not yet changed his shorts for jeans. Job is represented as an elderly patient being transported on a hi-tech stretcher and covered with tubes, indicators and monitors, who becomes younger before our very eyes and turns into a magical mutant-baby. A policeman of Biblical appearance carries a sword alongside the more traditional equipment, like Paul. The stewardesses, angels from a new heaven, appear on fantastic flying machines like the cabin crew in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and start to serve passengers.
The film follows in part the reality of airport life. As well as experiencing the usual crowds of passengers we witness the location and destruction of an unidentified piece of luggage, a fight between migrants, the emergency services helping a patient. Alongside everyday reality we see a whole range of mystical transformations of this world, from a jungle with exotic tribes to an underwater kingdom, then to a snow field which melts to form the river Styx, flowing to the horizon in to an endless sea in the direction which the passengers will eventually fly, their planes becoming mystical craft.
[Artist Statement]
Seen in light of the recent pandemic lockdowns and restrictions on travel we have all faced, the metaphor of the airport recast as Purgatory takes on a depth of meaning relevant to all of us for whom freedom of travel and mobility has until now been a given.
AES+F (Artist Group founded in 1987. Live and work in Berlin, Germany; Moscow, Russia; New York, USA.)
First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, and Evgeny Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Vladimir Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies. They define their practice as a kind of “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, and later showed it at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals around the world. AES+F achieved worldwide acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007, and since then have participated in many signature biennials around the world, including: Adelaide, Gwangju, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Kochi-Muziris, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, Moscow, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Vancouver, and others. Festivals devoted to new media include: ARS Electronica (Linz), Mediacity Seoul and Video Zone (Tel Aviv). AES+F had over 100 solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, including: ZKM (Karlsruhe), HAM (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tate Britain (London), MAXXI and MACRO Future (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires), and many others.
Lecture – The Church, the Resistance and the Bear
by Christian Posthofen
Philosopher, historian, and publisher Christian Posthofen discusses the historic Zionskirche in terms of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia – as a realized, actually built utopia on which social relations can be read in a special way. For their part, the three relational elements: church, resistance, and bear each possess a disturbing and empowering imaginative potential. Material and immaterial, mental-emotional structural elements meet here and create situations for special spaces of possibility in this place. Christian Posthofen lives and works in Berlin, and teaches philosophy at the ETH, Technical University, Zurich.
Concert – TRES MOMENTOS
by Sven Helbig, conducted by Wilhelm Keitel
Tres Momentos describes a section of the infinite spiral in which disorder and structure, the sacred and the profane, life and death are interdependent. The lightness of an inexplicable, fleeting idea or affection is followed by unconditional will. Mechanical habit turns first into compulsion and later into uncontrollable violence, which finally collapses and dissolves into a melancholic, whimsical waltz. German composer Sven Helbig created the work on commission from the Moritzburg Chamber Music Festival. With it, he leaves the previously preferred strict harmonics and also allows electronic parts to come more to the fore. For the concert on the occasion of the Birds & Bicycles Symposium on the 32nd Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sven Helbig collaborates once more with the conductor Wilhelm Keitel, who previously conducted the choral work “I Eat the Sun and Drink the Rain” by the composer and performed it among others at the Bolshoi Theater in Minsk.
Supported by a grant from the
German Federal Foreign Office
for the Expansion of Cooperation with Civil Society
in the Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia
 
In partnership with
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AES+F
(Artist Group founded in Moscow in 1987. Live and work in Berlin, Germany and New York, USA.)
TATIANA ARZAMASOVA
Was born in 1955, graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute (MARCHI) – State Academy in 1978. Lives and works in Moscow.
Was occupied in conceptual architecture. Award winner «Grand-Prix» of a jointly OISTT and UNESCO competition «Theater of Future».
Participated in conceptual architecture exhibitions in London, Paris, Venice.
LEV EVZOVICH
Was born in 1958, graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute (MARCHI) – State Academy in 1982. Lives and works in Moscow.
Was occupied in conceptual architecture. The prizewinner of the OISTT competition «The Tour Theatre» in Stockholm. Participated in conceptual architecture exhibitions in Milan, Frankfurt-on-Main, Paris.
Worked as art director in animation film (6 films), as director in puppet animation film. Also worked as art director in film «Sunset» (live action, «Mosfilm» studio).
EVGENY SVYATSKY
Was born in 1957, graduated from Moscow University of Printing Arts (department of the book graphic arts) in 1980. Lives and works in Moscow.
Was occupied with book and advertising design, poster and graphic art. Participated in international poster competitions, exhibitions of book illustration and design, graphic art.
Worked as creative director in few publishing houses in Moscow («Otkryty Mir» and «Intersignal»).
VLADIMIR FRIDKES
Born in Moscow in 1956, lives and works in Moscow.
Worked as a photographer of fashion. Published in magazines: VOGUE, Harper»s Bazaar, ELLE, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Sunday Times Style and others.
Artists united as AES group in 1987. Vladimir FRIDKES joined AES group in 1995. Group changed name to AES+F.
AES+F BIO:
First formed in Moscow as AES Group in 1987 by Arzamasova, Evzovich, and Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies. They define their practice as a kind of “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture.
AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations of striking originality that have come to define both the AES+F aesthetic and the cutting edge of the medium’s capacities. The second of the series, The Feast of Trimalchio (2009), appeared in Venice in 2009, and the third, Allegoria Sacra (2011), debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. United as The Liminal Space Trilogy, this tour-de-force series was premiered in September 2012 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Moscow Manege, the central exhibition hall of the artists’ home city, and has since been shown on many occasions at various museums and festivals. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Inverso Mundus was later shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals all over the world.
Between 2016 and 2019, AES+F have also worked in set design for theater and opera. The artists created their first video set design for Psychosis, a reinterpretation of Sarah Kane’s famous play, 4:48 Psychosis, directed together with Alexander Zeldovich. Psychosis premiered at Electrotheater Stanislavsky in Moscow in June 2016. In 2019, the group premiered their first opera together with the Italian opera director Fabio Cherstich, a reimagined Turandot acclaimed by critics as audacious and visionary. Turandot was created as an international co-production at the initiative of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, together with Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and Lakhta Center in St. Petersburg.
For more than a decade, works by AES+F have been showcased in signature festivals and biennial exhibitions of contemporary art around the world, including — in addition to Moscow and Venice — those of Adelaide, Gwangju, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Kochi-Muziris, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Vancouver, and many others. Their work has also been featured in influential events devoted to new media — such as ARS Electronica (Linz), Mediacity Seoul and Video Zone (Tel Aviv) — and photography — such as FotoFest (Houston), Les Rencontres d’Arles and Moscow’s Photo Biennial.
The group had more than 100 solo exhibitions at museums, exhibition spaces, and commercial galleries worldwide. AES+F works have been shown in such prestigious venues as the ZKM (Karlsruhe), HAM (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tate Britain (London), MAXXI and MACRO Future (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires), and many others.
Their works appear in some of the world’s principal collections of contemporary art, such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), MOCAK (Kraków), Sammlung Goetz (Munich), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), and the Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania), Centre de Arte dos de Mayo (Madrid), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris), the Vanhaerents Art Collection (Brussels), Taguchi Art Collection (Tokyo), and many others. Their work is also well represented in some of Russia’s principal national museums, such as The State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), the National Center for Contemporary Art, and the Multimedia Art Museum (Moscow).
AES+F received Sergey Kuryokhin Award 2011, the main award of the Kandinsky Prize 2012, the main award of the NordArt Festival 2014, and Pino Pascali Prize 2015 (18th Edition) – all for the project Allegoria Sacra. AES+F were also awarded a Bronze Medal (2005) and a Gold Medal (2013) by the Russian National Academy of Fine Arts.
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MOMENTUM AiR
Máximo González // Iván Buenader
2 August – 2 September 2021
Máximo González (b. Argentina, 1971) lives in Mexico City and Alicante.
He is mainly known for his collages made with money paper out of circulation. They have been included in several academic studies, not only from the artistic point of view but also for its economic, transforming and philosophical implications.
The large-scale collages, reminiscence of the political wall paintings of the Mexican muralists, express the complications of a consumer culture that exploits natural resources, produces waste, and lately drives nations to bankruptcy.
Parallel to this work, using varied techniques and media, he realizes huge installations of an immersive character, which could be appreciated at Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City, Rubin Center at UT El Paso, Casa America in Madrid, Fowler Museum in LA, and Nuit Blanche Toronto, to name some.
His constant interests are the environment, the education, the schemes of value installed in our society, as well as their historical and forecasted evolution.
His work frequently implies a meticulous construction. It becomes particularly seductive thanks to a balance that exists between poetic content, the intensive manual labor, and the political connotations.
He has also exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris, Red Brick Art in Beijing, L.A. MOCA, MOCCA Toronto, Vancouver Art Gallery, San Francisco State University, Nordic Watercolor Museum in Gothenburg, MUAC Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, and the Museum of Modern Art in México City.
On his arrival to Mexico, he was captivated by the social and architectural structure of the informal wandering commerce, which served as inspiration to his cultural non-profit project called “Changarrito”, which started labors in 2004 and, as of today, has exhibited more than 5,000 works of more than 350 emerging artists.
Iván Buenader is a writer and visual artist. He lives and works in Mexico City and Alicante. He graduated in Computer Science at the University of Buenos Aires. He has exhibited his work (painting, photography, video, installation) in contemporary art venues in Latin America, the United States, Canada, India and Europe, while participating of several artist residencies. He has conceptualized and produced collective interdisciplinary projects including poetry, music, dance and performance (‘CFW Poet Agency’). He is author of 11 novels (‘The repents’, ‘Relapse’) and 6 books of experimental poetry (‘Elusive’).
ARTIST STATEMENT
My plastic work seeks to abolish language and, at the same time, is supported by it. It addresses original thought, not ideas. It overrates symbols and then undervalues them. It sends messages to intuition as well as reason. It tries to observe symbols in space and their interrelation, as well as it investigates the nature of materials and their antecedents or provenance, without forgetting the importance of the title in the work and the historical-cultural context in which it is inserted.
Through my creative writing, as well as my drawings, paintings, performances, photographs, videos and installations, I seek to help people understand why they do what they do, through the analysis and interpretation of our conceptions and their origin, in order to promote critical thinking and the poetic experimentation of the world.
– Ivan Buenader, 2021
My work frequently involves a construction that can be composed of video, photography, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, collage, graphic arts, and social actions. When I develop a project, I explore its components in their symbolic state, their traditional and historical context, as well as the impact they generate socially, politically, economically and spiritually.
Recovery, as a way of reclaiming discarded objects, is a common theme for me. I analyze the passage of time on the speeches; how they can expire or become effective according to opportunity or convenient to a current situation.
I seek to create values and rescue those that contribute to critical and responsible thinking.
– Máximo González, 2017
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From Berlin Art Week through the 32nd Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, MOMENTUM Presents:
TAKING FLIGHT
Birds & Bicycles Berlin
OPENING:
3 September @ 5 – 10pm
EXHIBITION:
4 September – 14 November 2021
WED – SUN @ 1 – 7pm
3G rules apply: proof of vaccination, recovery, or negative test required
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin, Germany
Featuring:
AES+F // Shaarbek Amankul // Inna Artemova // Marina Belikova //
Zuzanna Janin // Alexei Kostroma // Dominik Lejman // Almagul Menlibayeva //
Hajnal Nemeth // David Szauder // Mariana Vassileva // Vadim Zakharov
Curated by
Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà
SYMPOSIUM:
9 November 2021 – the 32nd Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
11:00 – 13:30 & 18:30 – 23:00
At Zionskirche, Zionskirchplatz, Berlin Mitte
Curated by
David Elliott & Constanze Kleiner
_______________________
ONLINE EXHIBITION ON
Video Art from TAKING FLIGHT: Birds & Bicycles Berlin
5 November – EXTENDED
Featuring:
AES+F // Shaarbek Amankul // Marina Belikova //
Zuzanna Janin // Dominik Lejman // Almagul Menlibayeva // Hajnal Nemeth // David Szauder
CLICK HERE to view TAKING FLIGHT: Birds & Bicycles on IkonoTV >>
Together Birds & Bicycles
Initiated by Georgy Nikich & Anastasia Kamienska
An International Partnership Between 12 Institutions in Russia, Poland, and Germany
Together Birds & Bicycles is a platform initiated in 2021 as a cooperation between a dozen partners in Russia, Poland, and Germany, designed to address ideas of freedom and open boarders. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 makes a travesty of these notions. Because there are so many in Russia who never supported this war, such a platform for freedom is needed now more than ever, if there is to be hope of a peaceful resolution.
Supported by a grant from the
German Federal Foreign Office
for the Expansion of Cooperation with Civil Society
in the Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia
In Partnership With:
ANO Center for Educational & Cultural Projects [Moscow, Russia] // Impact Hub [Moscow, Russia] // Exhibition & Discussion Center Khokhlovka Association, Ukraintsev Chamber [Moscow, Russia] // The Rails Cultural Center [Tver, Russia] // Vyhod Media Center [Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia, Russia] // Miras Gallery [Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia] // The Renaissance Center for Polish Culture and Education [Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia] // The Russian-Polish Center for Dialogue and Accord Foundation [Moscow, Russia] // BWA Krosno [Krosno, Poland] // City Culture Institute [Gdansk, Poland] // Arsenal Municipal Gallery [Poznań, Poland] // MOMENTUM [Berlin, Germany]
Birds & Bicycles is conceived as a ‘factory of metaphors’, taking as its premise the ideas of freedom and the notion of borders, forever shifting and perpetually being crossed, where bicycles symbolise physical freedom, and birds metaphysical freedom; birds become the philosophy of freedom, and bicycles the technology of freedom. The overall manifestation of Birds & Bicycles is an international cooperation between 12 partners in Russia, Poland, and Germany, each hosting their own exhibitions and discussions focused around common values symbolized by the topics of freedom and crossing of borders. Based on social activism, historical reflections, and contemporary art, the project develops an expanding framework of participatory culture, with the contributions of each international partner brought together in a single online platform sharing the social, educational, and communicative results of the Birds & Bicycles initiative.
In Berlin, MOMENTUM presents Birds & Bicycles with the exhibition and symposium TAKING FLIGHT. Extrapolating from the metaphor of birds and bicycles, we build our program around the analogy of flight. Referring to the duality of the term flight as both an airborne means of travel and an escape from crisis, the metaphor of flight is especially important in the historical and contemporary context of Berlin. From the aerial bombardment and destruction of Berlin in WWII resulting in reconstruction on-going to this day; to the Berlin Airlift during the Cold War, when for 15 months in 1948-49 American and British forces flew over Berlin more than 250,000 times to drop essential supplies to keep the population of West Berlin alive during the Soviet blockade; to the transformation of the Nazi-built Tempelhof Airport into Europe’s largest refugee camp in 2015 to house many thousands of migrants fleeing humanitarian crisis in their homelands to this day; to the Berlin Brandenburg Airport fiasco when, after a 10 year delay, seven missed opening dates, and over a billion euros over-budget, the German capital’s new airport finally opened in 2020 amidst pandemic travel restrictions. In a city itself long divided, located in the geographical center of a divided Europe, the history of air travel in Berlin is a history of crisis, indivisible from the basic humanitarian need for freedom. It is an account of flight in both its senses – as a form of travel and a means of escape across borders.
For the factory of metaphors which is Birds & Bicycles Berlin, TAKING FLIGHT assembles the work of 12 artists from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, who are now Berliners. Representative of the significant cultural diaspora in Berlin from the former Eastern Bloc, the artists in this exhibition address the metaphor of flight as a symbol for freedom in various forms. While AES+F re-imagine the airport as a modern-day Purgatory, Almagul Menlibayeva gazes out at space as the next border we are racing to cross. Vadim Zakharov, too, looks out to the heavens to send a signal to the sun as the only way to travel beyond the borders closed to him. While David Szauder surrealistically re-animates his grandfather’s Super 8 footage from the Eastern Bloc of the 60’s-80’s, Shaarbek Amankul captures the historic moment of Lenin in flight, suspended between a past of failed ideologies, and an uncertain future. In a world of global humanitarian, ecological, and medical disaster, we may often feel as if we are in free-fall. Dominik Lejman’s skydivers undulating in the vastness of space come to resemble at one moment the geometric shapes of gothic church architecture, and in the next the biological forms of chromosomes; continually switching between the spiritual and the scientific origins of life. The birth – or persistent possibility – of a dictator is presented as Vadim Zakharov’s reminder that history is always on the verge of repeating itself. Hajnal Németh’s operatic rendition of quotations from failed leaders presents a sadly timeless portrait of an age when the irresponsibility and ignorance of leaders grows undiminished. Mariana Vassileva’s iconic microphone envisions the explosive power of the word through a subtly subverted symbol of power. While Inna Artemova’s exploded utopia is perhaps a reminder that any dream of a perfect society is by necessity build upon the ashes of its opposite. In his ongoing examinations of the unity of meanings in society and nature alike, Alexei Kostroma seems to be searching for a formula within nature to solve the many woes we inflict upon it. Zuzanna Janin’s boxing ballet is a work perpetually relevant in a time when we are all dancing around the issues. And the Russian exclamation balagan – describing, with celebratory gusto, a farce, a fine mess, the most unholy of cock-ups – is deployed by Marina Belikova to present a critical challenge to the chaos and misrule of our times.
Featuring:
(Click on the artist name to see the bio and the work description below)
AES+F
AES+F, Allegoria Sacra (2011-13), HD video
Giovanni Bellini’s ‘Allegoria Sacra’ (Sacred Allegory) hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. The subject of this painting is a mystery to art historians. The earliest figures of Christian and ancient mythology are gathered together on a balustrade by a sea or a wide river, surrounded by hills on which can be seen, in the distance, village huts and a palazzo. St. Sebastian, the Madonna, a centaur, small children playing by a tree in the center, a Saracen-Muslim, a man somewhat like the Apostle Paul with a sword in his hand, in the background a peasant with a mule, two beautiful ladies one of whom is St. Catherine, a naked old man reminiscent of Job – this is a far from complete list of the heroes who Bellini brought together in this picture. One interpretation of this painting is that it showed Purgatory, where the souls of the righteous, of virtuous pagans and of un-christened children await their fate – heaven or hell.
This painting has always intrigued AES+F. The mysterious image of the Allegoria Sacra is in keeping with their view of the modern world. They see Bellini’s heroes in those passengers who meet accidentally while awaiting their flights at international airports. The feelings of being cut off from one’s life and of the, as yet, unachieved aim of traveling from one world to another are familiar to the majority of those who fly, whether with large or small airlines. We become part of a special club of people who are united by the condition of a body and soul located between the abandoned and the not yet found. Together, i.e. simultaneously, we listen to the flight announcements, watch the flight board with its changing tableau of figures and cities, try to focus on the newspaper, on an SMS or the internet, or simply on the advertisements on the airport monitors. But everyone is wrapped up in themselves, and it is this which unites us. There is, perhaps, one more thing which somehow links us during this interval in time – we look at each other, having never seen one other before and being unlikely to do so again.
The airport is Purgatory. Only there does one understand that the knowledge of one’s ‘tomorrow’ is a total illusion. We imagine the airport as a space where reality transforms itself – it gets covered with snow, which alters the interior and then melts, the runway turns in to the river Styx as in Bellini’s painting, airplanes become ancient, mystic craft. The light-boxes in Duty Free live a life of their own, showing pictures of heaven. In Allegoria Sacra, we wish to retain Bellini’s metaphorical heroes using the image of modern-day people from various countries and cultures. At the same time we believe that the airport space can include such mythological personalities as the centaur, who we imagine in his literal embodiment. Or the Indian elephant god Ganesha, with the features of a coffee machine. Even the various aircraft may take on the image of ancient gods like the eastern dragon.
The allegorical heroes of the painting can be seen in those awaiting their flights. The Saracen turns into a group of transit passengers from Darfur or Peshawar. Sebastian is a young traveler from the exotic countries of the south, naked to the waist and barefoot, having not yet changed his shorts for jeans. Job is represented as an elderly patient being transported on a hi-tech stretcher and covered with tubes, indicators and monitors, who becomes younger before our very eyes and turns into a magical mutant-baby. A policeman of Biblical appearance carries a sword alongside the more traditional equipment, like Paul. The stewardesses, angels from a new heaven, appear on fantastic flying machines like the cabin crew in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and start to serve passengers.
The film follows in part the reality of airport life. As well as experiencing the usual crowds of passengers we witness the location and destruction of an unidentified piece of luggage, a fight between migrants, the emergency services helping a patient. Alongside everyday reality we see a whole range of mystical transformations of this world, from a jungle with exotic tribes to an underwater kingdom, then to a snow field which melts to form the river Styx, flowing to the horizon in to an endless sea in the direction which the passengers will eventually fly, their planes becoming mystical craft.
[Artist Statement]
Seen in light of the recent pandemic lockdowns and restrictions on travel we have all faced, the metaphor of the airport recast as Purgatory takes on a depth of meaning relevant to all of us for whom freedom of travel and mobility has until now been a given.
AES+F (Artist Group founded in 1987. Live and work in Berlin, Germany; Moscow, Russia; New York, USA.)
First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, and Evgeny Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Vladimir Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies. They define their practice as a kind of “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, and later showed it at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals around the world. AES+F achieved worldwide acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007, and since then have participated in many signature biennials around the world, including: Adelaide, Gwangju, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Kochi-Muziris, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, Moscow, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Vancouver, and others. Festivals devoted to new media include: ARS Electronica (Linz), Mediacity Seoul and Video Zone (Tel Aviv). AES+F had over 100 solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, including: ZKM (Karlsruhe), HAM (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tate Britain (London), MAXXI and MACRO Future (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires), and many others.
Shaarbek Amankul
Shaarbek Amankul, Lenin Stands – Lenin Fell Down (2003), video, 1’30″
With the advent of Communism in Kyrgyzstan, pre-Soviet ways of life were transformed as nomads became fighters for an international revolution, farmers became citizens, and Muslims became atheists. In the central square of Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, Lenin’s sculpture proudly stood from 1982 to 2003. In an almost comic case of cultural confusion, even after gaining their independence, masses of former communists came to pray beneath this statue; the worship of Communist ideology giving way to the mass prayers of Ramadan. Lenin towered above this square until 2003, when he was brought down from the facade of the Historical Museum (the Museum of Revolution until 1992), and moved to its backyard. This procedure, though oddly ceremonial, was not advertised by local authorities. This work captures a rare historic moment – Lenin in flight, suspended between a past of failed ideologies, and an uncertain future. The ceremony of the changing of the guard – so appropriate to this notable event – is ironically incidental to it, taking place every day at this location, and clearly oblivious to Lenin’s historic flight.
Shaarbek Amankul (b. 1959 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Lives and works in Bishkek.)
Shaarbek Amankul is a curator and interdisciplinary artist working with a variety of media: ceramics, sculpture, installation, performance, video and photography, in addition to conceptual research projects. Amankul holds art and history degrees from Frunze Art College, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (1980) and Kyrgyz National University (1989), respectively. Amankul founded the international artist group Art Connection (2001-2006), the first art initiative in Kyrgyzstan focused on environmental issues. Amankul’s conceptual and curatorial work also includes the extensive art platform B’Art Contemporary, which he founded in 2007 to instigate a critical arts dialogue between the communities of Central Asia and the global art world.
B’Art Contemporary, amongst the very first contemporary art initiatives in Kyrgyzstan, is an artistic research platform which considers art as an essential facilitator of critical dialogue on environmental, social, economic and cultural issues faced by the societies of Central Asia. To continue his mobile art practice and artistic research, in 2011 Shaarbek Amankul founded the Nomadic Art Camp, an series of nomadic art projects in Kyrgyzstan, using the practice of the traditional way of life of nomads as a source of inspiration for contemporary art practices. The project, continuing to this day, focuses on the relationship between art and the political, economic and social processes at the intersection of issues of globalization, migration and bio-cultural diversity.
Inna Artemova
Inna Artemova, Utopia 8-151 (2021), ink, marker, paper on cardboard, 50 x 125 cm
Escaping the borders of the 2-dimensional work on paper or canvas, this installation embodies Artemova’s focus on architectures of utopia. Yet while the idea of utopia is the dream of a perfect society, this work evokes a sense of impending cataclysm, as yet quite far removed from an idealized state of perfection. Seeming to capture the aftermath of some volatile force, this exploded and explosive installation sends a suitably ambiguous message about the future and the present. The sense of velocity in Artemova’s works gives her floating structures a futuristic speed, propelling them – as the title suggests – into a more perfect future. Contriving to comingle a notion of existential threat with the sense of the sublime, Utopia 8-151 can be seen as portrait of our precarious times. Having witnessed first-hand the collapse of the Communist utopia in her native Soviet Union, Artemova’s utopias are fragile constructivist visions in a state of constant flux; exploding, imploding, teetering on the edge of a perilous balance, or perhaps already being rebuilt. Every collapse presents the hope of a new beginning; a renewed dream of an ideal future. Utopias are too often built on the ashes of their opposites.
Inna Artemova (b. Moscow, USSR. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Born in Moscow, Inna Artemova studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI). For her diploma project, she received the 2nd prize of the Russian Federation. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and started to focus on her work as an artist in the field of painting and drawing. Artemova’s practice remains heavily influenced by her professors at the MArchI in Moscow, the “Paper Architects“, a movement originating in the 1980s that developed futuristic architectural creations never intended to be realized. The visionary projects of the Paper Architects and her experience of the failure of the Communist utopia with the fall of the Soviet Union, has led Artemova to explore, through her constructivist painting style, the ideas of architectural utopias from the 1960s up to her own futuristic visions. In creating utopian landscapes and spaces, Artemova interrogates the future of living spaces and their impact upon human relationships. The concept of utopia stands for a space of possibility in human consciousness in which the crucial questions have to be answered again and again: Is there no alternative to the reality in which we live? What will we do in the future? Do we have to fail because of our ideal ideas?
Marina Belikova
Marina Belikova, BALAGAN!!! (2015), video animation, 1’47”
In Russia balagan is a popular exclamation that describes, with celebratory gusto, a farce, a fine mess, the most unholy of cock-ups. BALAGAN!!! is also a major international exhibition produced by MOMENTUM in 2015 of contemporary art from the former USSR and Eastern Bloc that reveals a world where chaos and misrule, along with the social comedy that results from it, are celebrated and scathingly exposed. Balagan originally meant ‘fairground’. By the 18th century it had become associated with the activities of the people who worked in them: puppeteers, clowns and jesters, who made fun of and satirised established order. And, from the beginning, artists have realised the potential of balagan as an effective framework for revealing the truth. Today, the revolutionary politics of laughter, as well as the cathartic release it promises, are engendered by a sense of outrage at cruelty, inhumanity and the abuse of human rights. But balagan is not only modern: ever since time began, chaos has been ever-present. The exhibition BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places is about how some artists choose to depict the chaos of our times critically, challenging its power through humour, parody and the power of art itself. For this exhibition, the curator David Elliott wrote his own unique description of BALAGAN, which Jonathan Barnbrook designed, and Marina Belikova visualized as an animated film. We reprise BALAGAN!!! for Birds & Bicycles, as it remains equally relevant to our world today, still afflicted by chaos and misrule, and now also a global pandemic to contend with. Perhaps the power of humour, parody, and art itself lies in its ability to lift us out of the darkness and, soaring above it, develop new perspectives and better hopes.
Marina Belikova (b. in Moscow, Russia. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Marina Belikova is a Berlin based media artist, working with photography, graphic design and 2D animation. She has a background in web and media design. In 2012-2013 she did an M.A. in Communication Design in Kingston University London and in 2016 she graduated from Bauhaus University Weimar with an M.A. in Media Art and Design, making “The astronaut’s journal” as her master thesis. Belikova tells narratives through the old school oil on glass animation technique, where each frame is painted individually and then captured with a camera as stop motion animation. She also works with photography and mixed media, exploring the topics of human memories and interaction between people and urban spaces. Her animation have been screened at multiple film festivals in more than 10 countries and her photo series have received the Bauhaus Essentials Prize and have been shown various exhibitions.
David Elliott (text) & Jonathan Barnbrook (graphics), BALAGAN!!! (2015), print on paper
Zuzanna Janin
Zuzanna Janin, Pas de Deux (2001), video, 5’
With a title appropriated from ballet, Zuzanna Janin’s Pas De Deux (2001) is a work perpetually relevant in a time when we are all dancing around the issues. Shot in a jerking close-up of two pairs of legs in constant motion on a blank white background, we are drawn into what could be a dance as readily as a fight. It is a dialogue between two bodies, a give and take of power and physical space. It is also a different perspective on one of Janin’s best-known works, the video installation The Fight (IloveYouToo) (2001), where the slight, fragile-looking artist takes on a professional heavyweight boxer. To create this work, Janin spent 6 months training with him in the ring. The boxing match in The Fight is real and harrowing to watch in its intensity. In this work, the camera weaves in and out, dodging and feinting with the fighter’s blows, as close-up and personal as the physical act of combat.
Yet for Janin, this combat between two mismatched opponents is also a dance, a language allowing two bodies to communicate. The direct perspective of the camera in The Fight draws us into the brutality of this uneven combat. But changing the perspective and dropping the camera to ground level suddenly reveals the ambiguity lurking beneath the violence. For Pas De Deux, Janin’s fight performance is shot with the intimacy of a camera moving with the two bodies as they follow the same motions as The Fight, but without seeing the blows. The violent mismatch is transfigured into a match, a term which in sports signifies a contest between opposing competitors, whilst in normal usage it means a harmonious pair.
Zuzanna Janin (b. 1961 in Poland. Lives and works in Warsaw and London.)
Zuzanna Janin is a visual artist and former teen actor, having in her youth starred in the Polish TV serial Szalenstwo Majki Skowron (Madness of Majka Skowron). Having turned her talents to visual art, Janin studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Warsaw (1980-87), and in 2016 completed her PhD at the University of the Arts in Poznan, Poland. Throughout her diverse practice of sculpture, video, photography installation, and performative actions, Zuzanna Janin deals with the subject of space, time and memory, as well as the problem of exclusion and absence. The main theme of her work is a conceptual approach to the visualization of processes, changes, comparisons, continuity, what’s “in between.” Janin transforms fragments of private memory, comingling her own experience with collective memory and images of universal history, contemporary social and political problems. Zuzanna Janin is also he co-founder of the independent art space lokal_30 in Warsaw (2005-2012).
Zuzanna Janin has taken part in a number of international Biennals, including the Sydney Biennial (1992), Istanbul Biennial (1992), Soonsbeek (1993), Liverpool Biennial (1996), Łódź Biennale (2010), 54th Venice Biennale (2011) (in the official program of Romania). She had a solo shows, screenings and performances at: Foksal Gallery Warsaw, Kunsthalle Wien, MAM Rio de Janeiro, Salzburger Kunstverein, National Museum Cracow and Warsaw. Group exhibition include: Whitechapel Gallery, London; Royal School of Art, Edinburg; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Jeu de Pomme Paris; Japanese Palace, Dresden; Kunstmuseum Bern; Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin; TOP Museum Tokyo; Foundation Miro, Barcelona; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery Zacheta, Warsaw; Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Ludwig Museum, Aachen; Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunsthalle, Bern; Hoffmann Collection, Berlin; TT The THING, NY.
Since 2019, Zuzanna Janin is a lecturer in Postgraduate Study of Contemporary Art at the Polish Academy of Science (PAN) in Warsaw, Poland. Janin was Guest Professor in a number of universities, incuding: Academy of Fine Art Cracow (Poland) , ASAB Academia del Arte, Bogota (Colombia), Sapir College of Art in Sderot , (Israel), Haifa University (Israel), Academy of Fine Art Bratislava (Slovakia) , Bezalel Jerusalem (Israel), Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw (Poland) , Academy of Fine Art Warsaw and King’s College London (UK) and took part in conferences, meetings and talks in many other art institutions.
Alexei Kostroma
BLACK BILL 10,16 (2021)
Oil, acrylic gel on canvas, 40×25 cm
Courtesy of STUDIO KOSTROMA, Berlin
The works selected for this exhibition embody Alexei Kostroma’s concept of the Organic Way – the artist’s dedication to the study of interrelations between natural and social laws. Working throughout his practice with eggshells, white feathers, figures (numbers), and lemon yellow pigment, Kostroma identifies these four strands in his work as his ‘signs’ or ‘brands’. In his ongoing examinations of the unity of meanings in society and nature alike, and his use of four distinct media as metaphors for these meanings, Kostroma’s work exemplifies the very idea of the Birds & Bicycles initiative to create a factory of metaphors with which to reflect back on our societies.
Shown here are two works from two new series the artist began during the COVID-19 lockdown. Ongoing to this day, these series of works are a portrait of the artists’ experience of the world in pandemic. ELEVEN [Stability] (2020) and BLACK BILL 10,16 (2021) were both created while Alexei Kostroma was in isolation in his studio. BLACK BILL 10,16 forms one entry in Kostroma’s lengthy diary of consumption. Embedding into his works quotations from supermarket receipts for the food he consumes, the original bill is attached to the back of each painting; as much a proof of life as it is a reflection upon the monotony of long months of lockdown. ELEVEN [Stability] uses Kostroma’s idea of the eggshell as an image of the genome, of coding and storage of information, to present us with a single eggshell enumerated with the number 11, signifying stability. In these unstable times when we seem little closer to solving the ongoing global problems of poverty, disease, war, and climate catastrophe, we need all the talismans of stability we can get. An older work, NANO 163, also uses the egg as symbolic of the basis of life, arranging eggshells in a geometric structure, numbered with ink visible only under UV light, to reveal the invisible mathematical harmony of numbers. Yet in the disharmonious realities of our times, by embedding a secret code into his vision of the universe, Kostroma seems to be searching for a formula within nature to solve the many woes we inflict upon it.
Alexei Kostroma (b. 1962 in Russia. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Alexei Kostroma is an artist, theorist, and researcher living and working in Berlin since 2003. Alexei Kostroma was born in 1962, and in 1989 graduated in painting from the Repin Institute, Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Two years later he founded the “TUT-I-TAM” (ТУТ-И-ТАМ, meaning Here and There) group and began working with an inventory concept, associating natural objects with a theory of numbers. Soon after, he developed the Introspective Actions series of projects engaging social environment wherein he created actions and installations in which he enveloped objects, people, animals, or entire spaces in feathers. Since the early 1990’s, Alexei Kostroma has been working with his Organic Way concept as a study of interrelations between natural and social laws. His practice focuses around series of works using primarily feathers, eggshells, numbers and color theory.
FEATHERS: For Kostroma the structure of the feather represents the unity of chaos (fluff at the base of the feather), order (the precise structure of the main part) and spirit (ethereal weightlessness). The white feather was the iconic material that first made a name for Kostroma in the 1990s. He became famous for the high-profile project ‘Feathering Names and Symbols’, and for installations where he covered various urban objects in white goose feathers: for example, a cannon on the bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg (‘Feathered Aggression’, 1994), the ‘Feathered Purse’ in Germany that gained admission to the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, 1996 (role of money in art), etc. In the mass media, feather installations and actions became a pacifist symbol for the smothering of aggression.
EGGSHELL: an image of the genome, of coding and storage of information. Eggshell objects reveal the theme of micro-macro worlds ruled by the invisible mathematical harmony of numbers. The artist uses natural white eggshells to create geometric structures. Applied in invisible ink to the inner surface of the shell are numbers from 1 to 9, the sum of which presents an information code. Rows of eggshells form an image of the atomic microcosm; circles form an image of the macrocosm. Study of the world of atoms has been actively developed in the age of nanotechnology, hence the series is entitled ‘NANO’. These invisible numbers are only visible under UV light.
NUMBERS: universal coding characters. The artist uses digits from 1 to 9. Zero is an abstract mathematical number and therefore excluded from the concept. There is no stopping in nature. Everything is incessantly evolving and in constant motion. Since 1991 Kostroma has been producing large-scale projects for his ‘Inventory’, covering stone waterfronts and urban buildings with figures. While working on the theory of colour he created a spectral-digital scale and published the FNP concept: Figurative Numerical Painting. Since 1999 he has been painting in numbers. In Berlin these numerals take an acutely social character in the series ‘CODES’ and ‘BILLS & DEBTS’, under the slogan WE ALL REVOLVE AROUND TIME, MONEY AND FIGURES.
ELEVEN (Stability) (2020)
Oil, tempera on eggshell on canvas, 30x25x6 cm
Courtesy of STUDIO KOSTROMA, Berlin
NANO 163 (2017)
Invisible nano color on eggshells on canvas, 60x60x10 cm
Framed in acrylic glass box
Courtesy of STUDIO KOSTROMA, Berlin
Berlin Girl (Feathered Bicycle) (2008)
Image Courtesy of STUDIO KOSTROMA – Object not on view.
Dominik Lejman
Dominik Lejman, 60 Sec. Cathedral (2011), Projected Video Mural, 24’30” [Courtesy of Persons Projects]
60 Sec. Cathedral is a video-fresco showing a specially trained group of skydivers recreating the vaulted ceiling of Durham Cathedral as they fall to earth. The title of the work is derived from the 60 seconds of free-fall in which they must complete their task. Projected in the artist’s signature style of negative image, these small white figures undulating in the vastness of black space come to resemble at one moment the geometric shapes of gothic church architecture, and in the next the biological forms of chromosomes; continually switching in this way between the spiritual and the scientific origins of life. 60 Sec. Cathedral reveals shapes representing Christian values, philosophy and ethics and also bioethical science, bringing into question notions of good and evil and the biological and molecular formations they might take. In a world of global humanitarian, ecological, and medical disaster, we may often feel as if we are in free-fall. Whether it’s a higher spiritual force, or the natural laws of science which will save us, we all need some source of hope to look up to.
60 Sec. Cathedral is accompanied by a making-of video chronicling the immense preparation and training which resulted in the production of this work.
‘Jump’ Production: Dariusz “Dafi”, Jarosław “Widget” Szot, Artur “Bravos” Ceran (cameramen).
Sky Divers: Marcin Szot, Jacek Łącki, Krzysztof Kiebała, Markiz Białecki, Grzegorz Szusta, Kinga Komorowska, Jarosław Szot, Dominika Godlewska, Robert Wolski, Amelia Bobowska, Maciej Machowicz, Dariusz Banaszkiewicz, Robert Przytuła, Sebastian Matejek, Maciej Węgrzecki, Witold Kielerz, Maciej Król, Artur Karwowski, Grzegorz Leonow, Anna Dzido, Agnieszka Szczerbakow, Marcin Laszuk, Agata Chmielak, Izabela Pilarczyk, Laura Stachowska, Dariusz Filipowski, Artur Ceran, Marek Nowakowski.
Dominik Lejman (b. 1969 in Gdnask, Poland. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Poznan, Poland.)
Dominik Lejman graduated from the Faculty of Painting and Graphic Arts at The School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 1993, and in 1993-95 studied at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1996, Lejman completed a further research degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. He has lead the painting workshop at the University of the Arts in Poznań since 2005. Dominik Lejman is the winner of the 2018 Berlin Art Prize awarded by the Akademie der Künste, and is the recipient of many other awards, including: Polityka’s Passport Award in 2001, The Kosciuszko Foundation, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Location 1 in New York, and The Polish Ministry of Culture. Dominik Lejman’s works have been exhibited broadly in many international biennales, museums, and galleries.
Dominik Lejman’s practice is one of painting with time. Since the 1990’s he has been exploring the boundaries of painting by combining videos with paintings. His video projections onto architecture become murals, while in his paintings he projects videos onto prepared canvases such that the video lives in the painting, seamlessly intermingling the still and moving image. In his work, Lejman pays particular attention to architecture and spaces as well as to the question of how they influence or even determine people’s patterns of movement. The structures that the artist uncovers in the process and presents in his installations are extremely fragile, often last only for several moments, cause the limits of space to blur, and in part directly involve the viewer.
Almagul Menlibayeva
Almagul Menlibayeva, Ulugh Beg: Futuristic Machine of Central Asia (2020), Single-channel version of 10-channel Video Installation, with Sound, 38’22”
Almagul Menlibayeva, Astana. Departure (2016/20), 4K Video, with Sound, 21’30”
Originally made for the 2nd Lahore Biennial “Between Sun and Moon”, the remarkable 10-channel video installation Ulugh Beg: Futuristic Machine of Central Asia was shown at the PIA Planetarium of Lahore as an immersive experience with an original soundtrack by German Popov in quadrophonic sound. Shown here in a single-channel format, this work is a reflection upon the life of the historically revered ruler of Samarkand in the Timurid Empire, Sultan Mirzo Ulugh Beg (1394-1449). A famed astronomer, mathematician, musician, poet, and educator, Ulugh Beg’s legacy includes a 15th-century observatory, where much of the work was filmed. Shot on location in Samarkand, in what is today Uzbekistan, this multilayered film tells the story of a man far ahead of his time. In a palimpsest comingling expert interviews with documentary materials, recreations of historical episodes, found footage, digital animation, and an electronic soundtrack referencing the complex musical theory developed by Ulugh Beg, this film paints the portrait of a visionary leader who came to a tragic end. In so doing, this complex work interweaves past and present, myth and reality, in an elegy for the cultural and environmental despoliation currently taking place throughout Central Asia. Showing the dangers of violence bred by fear and ignorance, of knowledge snuffed out by political and religious dogmas, this film also addresses the origins of the space race, of the satellite technologies which enable our contemporary ways of life. What was for Ulugh Beg the exploration of a distant border, physically and ideologically unreachable in his time, is now anew the next frontier for exploration. Much like an astronomer herself, Almagul Menlibayeva gazes out at space as the next border we have already begun to cross. In the same year as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic race to bring the first commercial passengers to outer space, Menlibayeva’s works present a timely warning against mankind’s despoliation of space and the consequent pollution of our planet.
Both of Menlibayeva’s works shown in this exhibition critically explore the current social, economic and political transformation in post-Soviet central Asia and Soviet modernity. The artist confronts the viewer with architectural sites and ruins of oppression, with haunted, surrealistic figures. Menlibayeva’s video Astana. Departure deals with the Russian-run Cosmodrome Baikanur in Kazakhstan, which is the largest producer of space debris. The artist addresses the uncontrolled pollution of the world’s hemisphere and the contamination of the ground by 11,000 tonnes of space metal with particularly toxic UDMH that is still used. She calls that scrap recovery as the “Used Futures”, which became a part of the local economy causing mass deaths of birds and wildlife. It is a repetitive scenery of the concept of the future being abused as a product and commodity for ideological, political systems and for economical and religious purposes. Furthermore, the work combines footage from Kazakhstan’s Tokamak thermonuclear testing device with critical animations of the construction of the city Astana, recently renamed to Nur-Sultan. Becoming Kazakhstan’s capital in 2007, the city was built in a short period on a desert steppe and developed quickly into one of the most modernized cities in Central Asia. Menlibayeva comments, this turbo capitalist growth created a disbalance between the futuristic city and its inhabitants. Discussing former secret military nuclear testing territories such as “Kurchatov” and its traumatic impact on the landscape and the uninformed citizens in her previous works, this video is dedicated to high tech latest- generation of nuclear reactors echoing the region’s collective trauma from the past. The work reflects on the interconnectivity of architecture, science and politics revealing the complex intersection of a totalitarian system in the past and its on-going legacy in the present.
Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Almaty, Kazakhstan.)
Almagul Menlibayeva is a video artist, photographer, and curator, holding an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. Working primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation, Menlibayeva’s practice addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as: the social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia; de-colonial re-imaginings of gender; environmental degradation; and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. In conjunction with her solo exhibition ‘Transformation’ at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-17), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Among other notable awards, she was the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany, and shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Hong Kong (2020). Menlibayeva participated in numerous international biennales, including: the Asia Pacific Triennale, Brisbane, Australia (2020, 2012); Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Channels Festival, Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Cairo Biennial, Egypt (2019); Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018); Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); and many others. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: De. Groen Fine Art Collection, Arnhem, Netherlands (2019); Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); among others, along with numerous international group exhibitions.
Ulugh Beg: Futuristic Machine of Central Asia (2020)
Single-channel version of 10-channel Video Installation with Sound, 38’22”
Astana Departure (2016/20), 4K Video, with Sound, 21’30”
Hajnal Nemeth
Hajnal Németh, The Loser [version 1] (2012), Operatic Video Performance, 35”58
Video Stills: Camera, István Imreh
Two confessions are sung, performed by four soloists and completed with self-introductions by the choir. The lyrics of the songs are comprised of confessional monologues of fallen leaders, shortened and rhythmical rewrites of their self-analytical confessions. A politician and a banker give their testimonies: the direction of their fascinations differs, but the initial enthusiasm, the feeling of devotion, the experience of struggle and power, the ignorance of responsibility, the faith in ideologies and its gradual loss, the degeneration and downfall are all similar factors. It is not the confrontation of different ideologies, but their self-contradictions and the contrast of individual and collective responsibility that are put to the test on the stage.
This work from 2012 has in the intervening years proven itself all too prescient. The ignorance and irresponsibility of politicians and industry leaders has grown undiminished. In the western world alone, between Brexit, the recent US elections, the muscle-flexing of Russia, the rise of the far-right throughout Europe, and on the cusp of the upcoming German elections, we are witnessing a perpetually unfolding drama far surpassing any opera. As a form of art wherein the human voice takes flight to elevate our consciousness, opera has, nevertheless, traditionally addressed even the most base moral and political issues of its day. The first performance of The Loser took place on an open stage, shot in the vacated conference room of Collegium Hungaricum Berlin – the Hungarian Cultural Institute, itself an institution subject to the political winds of its home country. Via the large windows of the hall, the panorama of Berlin was the real set of the live and lifelike piece – a panorama which, at that time, was occupied by the construction site of the highly contested architectural reanimation of Germany’s colonial past; the building of the Humboldt Forum despite the countless voices raised against it.
Hajnal Németh (b. 1972 in Hungary. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
In her artistic practice Hajnal Németh creates musical performances, spatial installations, films and photographs. Her artistic activity is based on performative works of different durations, which are mainly musical interpretations of written texts, drawing on the broad spectrum of musical tendencies (pop, rock, jazz or opera) and the tools and devices of other performative fields. Focused on the process as much as the end product, Németh often includes rehearsals, the artifacts of performances and audience participation in her work. Her projects are mostly based on textbooks containing her own writings or modified quotations such as lyrics, poems or prose fragments, reflect on the gesture of quotation. By rewriting the quoted text and developing a quasi-corrected version, she endows the text with an entirely new meaning.
Németh runs a course at Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Intermedia Department in Budapest since 2010, having graduated from there in 2000. Hajnal Németh represented Hungary at the Venice Biennale 2011. Her work was nominated for the Nam June Paik Award in 2010. Other notable awards incude: Munkácsy Award (Hungary, 2011); AICA Award (Hungary, 2011); Deutsche Akademie Rom, Villa Serpentara Award (2013); Leopold Bloom Art Award (Hungary, 2017). Németh has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at prestigious art institutions in Europe, America and Asia, including MUMOK, Vienna; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; The Kitchen, New York; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Art Museum, Singapore; Ludwig-Museum, Budapest; TENT, Rotterdam; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Kunsthalle, Budapest; Kunsthalle Emden; Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Comunidad de Madrid; 2nd Berlin Biennale, KW Berlin; Casino Luxembourg; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’Art moderne de Saint-Etienne; Picasso Museum, Barcelona; Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
David Szauder
David Szauder, Parallel Universes (2021), 4 Digital Animation Loops, with Original Sound
I. The Dream of the Statue (Budapest) 1971-2021, 1’20”
II. Changing of the Guard (Berlin, DDR) 1972-2021, 1’14”
III. Busó (Mohács, Hungary) 1967-2021, 1’09”
IV. Parallel Dimension (Budapest, Prague, Balaton) 1967-2021, 1’10”
In this series of work, Hungarian media artist David Szauder re-animates original Super 8 footage shot by his grandfather in the 1960-80’s. Superimposing his own somewhat surrealistic universe onto the historic footage, Szauder conveys the sense of a world perpetually going slightly mad. And perhaps it is. In the state of our world today, where nationalism, political tensions, and the closing of borders are on the rise, it would indeed be mad not to look back upon the lessons of history. The artist’s grandfather developed his passion as an amateur filmmaker with the purchase of his first 8mm camera in the 1960s. Through its lens, he recorded glimpses of the world he was allowed to see, travelling as much as he was permitted within the political constraints and physical borders of the Eastern Bloc. Upon his grandfather’s death, David Szauder inherited a time-machine – a collection of over 1000 rolls of film archiving the world as his grandfather saw it. This footage forms the basis for much of Szauder’s recent work, exploring memory in the light of personal and collective history.
The Dream of the Statue (Budapest) 1971-2021
For the past seven decades, the most distinctive feature of the Budapest skyline standing tall above Gellért Hill is the Liberation Monument, a Soviet-built metal statue looking eastward as a tribute to the Red Army’s triumph over Hungary’s Nazi occupiers during World War II. Because of this politically fraught past, several movements attempted to remove this feminine figure over the years, but it has persevered to become an iconic symbol of Hungary’s capital.
Changing of the Guard (Berlin, DDR) 1972-2021
These guards protected the eternal flame in Berlin’s Neue Wache, the Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny on Unter den Linden, between 1969 and 1989. Yet in Szauder’s universe, they’ve changed their position and are now protecting the Tesla Model S. The world has found its new eternal flame, updated for our aspirational economy of luxury in a form impossible to imagine at the time the original footage was shot.
Busó (Mohács, Hungary) 1967-2021
The Hungarian folk tradition of the Busó festival, shot in the 1960’s by the artist’s grandfather, remains largely unchanged to this day. Marking the end of the annual Carnival season, this procession of terrifying costumed monsters was immensely popular during the Communist regime, supported by the government as a safe non-political form of entertainment. Yet the enduring popularity of Busó today is derived from its appropriation by an opposing force. With a government leaning further and further to the right, the folklore and cultural traditions of Hungary are being today deployed to celebrate nationalist ideals and values.
Parallel Dimension (Budapest, Prague, Balaton) 1967-2021
The 1st of May was celebrated as a holiday for workers in every socialist country, with parades of labourers from factories and communes, pioneers and party members. Szauder comingles footage from various May Day celebrations in Hungary and what was then Czechoslovakia with his whimsical animations in a game between visible and invisible – much like the political subtexts of these enforced displays of ideology.
David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Media artist and curator David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Buildingscape, an initiative to turn construction sites into venues for public art. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.
David Szauder has participated in numerous international projects as artist and curator. Projects in cooperation with MOMENTUM include: “MOMENTUM InsideOut: Lockdown Schmockdown” at CHB Collegium Hungaricum (Berlin, 2021); “Light Space Modulator” at MOMENTUM (Berlin, 2020); “Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014); “INTERSECTION”: Film and Video Art Panel Discussion for Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival, 2014); “THRESHOLDS”: Performance, Exhibition, Discussion (.CHB, Berlin Art Week, 2013); “THRESHOLDS” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013-2014); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “Mass & Mess” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013).
IThe Dream of the Statue (Budapest) 1971-2021, 1’20”
Changing of the Guard (Berlin, DDR) 1972-2021, 1’14”
Busó (Mohács, Hungary) 1967-2021, 1’09”
Parallel Dimension (Budapest, Prague, Balaton) 1967-2021, 1’10”
Mariana Vassileva
Mariana Vassileva, Microphone (2017) mixed media / (2021) bronze, 150 x 60 x 60 cm
In an era witnessing the steady resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism and racism the world over, Mariana Vassileva’s iconic work envisions the explosive power of the word through a subtly subverted symbol of power. While many governments still seek to curb freedoms of speech, others perhaps exploit free speech in overabundance. As the line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news continues to blur in our over-mediated culture, and information spreading digitally is even more viral than disease, we live in an era where the power of the wrong word has more capacity for destruction than ever before. Vassileva’s Microphone is emblematic of the very necessity for an initiative such as Birds & Bicycles to consider the meanings and repercussions of freedom in our current age.
Microphone was made during the artist’s tenure at the Tarabya Cultural Academy – an Artist Residency for German-Turkish dialogue in Istanbul – and it is shown in this exhibition concurrently with Studio Bosporus in Kunstraum Kreuzberg, the exhibition celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Tarabya Residency, also taking pace in the Kunstquartier Bethanien.
Mariana Vassileva (b. 1964 in Bulgaria. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Mariana Vassileva graduated from the Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2000, and has remained in Berlin since that time. Working across varied mediums such as video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Vassileva’s practice is concerned with the poetry that lies beneath the quotidian and the routine. Based upon observation of daily life, her works respond to an element of playfulness inherent in artist and viewer alike. With the curious gaze of a voyeur or of an urban anthropologist, the artist observes people and their surroundings in order to capture a moment of poetic imagery. Watching, and the distance it implies, are both method and subject of a body of work reflecting on human concerns familiar to us all: communication, cultural displacement, relations with self and other, loneliness and the humor hidden within the rhythms of the day-to-day.
Mariana Vassileva is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, having shown in major institutions including: Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Tate Britain (UK); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany); Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst (Germany); Kunsthalle zu Kiel (Germany); Edition Block (Berlin, Germany); The Stenersen Museum (Oslo,Norway); Total Museum (Seoul, Korea); Hong Kong Arts Centre (Hong Kong).
Mariana Vassileva has participated in several international Biennials, including: the 1st Biennal del Fin del Mundo, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, (Argentina, 2007); the 17th Biennale of Sydney, The Beauty and the Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, (Australia, 2010); the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Rewriting Worlds, (Russia, 2011); Biennale Vento Sul in Curitiba, (Brasil, 2012); the 56th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale, The Pleasure of Love, (Serbia, 2016).
Vassileva’s works are held in international public collections, including: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany); Rene Block Collection (Berlin, Germany); Koc Museum (Istanbul, Turkey); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel); La Caixa, Caja de Ahorros de El Monte y Fundacion el Monte (Spain); Lemaitre Collection (London-Paris); Kunsthalle Emden (Germany); Lidice Memorial.
Vadim Zakharov
Vadim Zakharov, I Am Ready To Be Dictator! (2021), Mixed Media, 45 x 50 cm
The works selected for this exhibition embody the trajectory of Vadim Zakharov’s conceptual practice – from his first work, made in 1978 at the age of nineteen, to his most recent work, plucked off his studio wall in August 2021. Growing up in the vastness of the Soviet Union, a nation proudly encompassing one-sixth of the earth, Zakharov nevertheless chaffed against his isolation from the rest of the world. Borders were closed, travel was largely impossible, and the exchange of information with the ‘free’ world tightly controlled. In a gesture designed to send his consciousness out into the universe, to communicate somehow with the world outside, the young artist made a print with his thumb on a pocket mirror and angled the reflection towards the sun. Now, over forty years later, living in Berlin, in a free world ostensibly devoid of punitive ideologies, where every child is brought up to believe that they can become whatever they want to be, the specter of oppression nevertheless looms large once more. Is it an overabundance of ‘freedom’ which has caused the resurgence of the far right throughout Europe and many parts of the world? In a Germany perpetually aware that the horrors of history must not repeat themselves, like anywhere else in the world, we can never guess when the next dictator might be born. The installation I Am Ready To Be Dictator! transforms a kitsch painting found by Zakharov in a flea market into a stark warning; a reminder that despite our best efforts, history is always on the verge of repeating itself.
Vadim Zakharov, An Exchange of Information with the Sun (1978), Photograph on Aludibond, 30 x 54 cm
Vadim Zakharov (b. 1959 in Dushanbe, UdSSR (now Tajikistan). Lives and works in Berlin.)
Vadim Zakharov is an artist, editor, archivist of the Moscow Conceptual art scene, and collector. Since 1979 he has participated in exhibitions of unofficial art and collaborated with such artists as: V. Skersis, S. Anufriev, I. Chuikov, A. Monastyrski, Y. Leiderman. In 1982–1983 he participated in the AptArt Gallery, Moscow. Since 1992 till 2001 he has published the “Pastor” magazine and founded the Pastor Zond Edition. In 2006 he edited book “Moscow Conceptualism”. His retrospective was held at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2006. He represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with the project “DANAE”. In 2016-2020 Zakharov organized the exhibition space “FREEHOME-Artist to Artist” in Berlin.
Selected honors and awards include: Griffelkunst-Preis, Hamburg (1995); Renta-Preis, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1995); Soratnik Prize, Moscow (2006); Innovation Prize, Moscow (2006); Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, American Academy in Rome (2007); Kandinsky Prize – Best Work of Year, Moscow (2009).
In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions, Vadim Zakharov has participated in many biennales of contemporary art, including: the 49th Venice Biennale, “Plateau of Humankind”, (Director Harald Szeemann, Arsenale, 2001); 1st Thessaloniki Biennale, “Black Birds” installation (Museum of Byzantine Culture, 2007 ); 55th Venice Biennale, Vadim Zakharov, “Danaë”, Russian Pavilion (2013); 5th Moscow Biennale, Vadim Zakharov, “Dead Languages Dance. Fall collection”, (TSUM, 2013); “2014. Space Odyssey”, CAFAM BIENNALE, Beijing (2014); 3rd Biennale of Bahia, Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (2014); 14 Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale, Russia (2021).
Vadim Zakharov’s works are held in many prestigious public collections, including: Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; TATE Modern, London, UK; Modern Art Museum, Frankfurt, DE; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main, DE; Kupferstienkabinet, Berlin, DE; Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Budapest; Saint Petersburg, RU; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers USA; Museum of Art at Duke University, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, HU; Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, DE; Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, RU; Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, RU; Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, RU; Moscow Collections of the NCCA, Moscow, RU
THE PARTNERS:
ACM (Association of Cultural Managers), Moscow – a large non-profit organization that supports research (including European) programs in the field of museum practices, social initiatives, and the development of public areas based on social, communication, and cultural technologies. (In 2020 – 2021, their curator Georgy Nikich was the research advisor of the analytical review “Volunteer — Museum — Society: Practice and Prospects” (http://museum-volunteer-society.ru/summary)
The Big Museum, Moscow – project organization that develops multimedia platforms.
The Polytechnic Museum, Moscow – provides expertise on the history and technology of bicycling.
The BWA Krosno Gallery, Poland – collaborates with a large number of environmental centers of expertise.
Miras Gallery, Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia – works with expert organizations in the field of migration and inter-ethnic relations.
Moscow Museum – there are many expert groups and activists united around Moscow Museum – raise and solve urban and environmental issues, as well as bicycle activists – the Red Pump community will participate in our project’s events (http://www.redpump.ru/).
MSSES, Moscow School of Economic and Social Studies – one of the bases of scientific support for the project, especially in the fields of sociology, urban studies, social and cultural projects (https://www.msses.ru/).
Vykhod Center, Petrozavodsk, Russia – has substantial experience in cooperating with social and cultural organizations in developing of creative tourism and supporting the idea of a common identity between the Finnish and Russian parts of Karelia.
MOMENTUM, Berlin – the platform for Time-Based Art, acting as a bridge between international art communities, hosts a 2-month exhibition in their gallery space in the Kunstquartier Bethanien in Kreuzberg, and online on their channel on IkonoTV, accompanied by a symposium.
WITH THANKS TO:
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
OPENING PHOTOS
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MOMENTUM AiR
Máximo González // Iván Buenader
2 August – 7 November 2021
Máximo González (b. 1971 in Argentina. Lives and works in Alicante, Spain and Mexico City, Mexico.)
Argentinian artist Máximo González is widely known for his massive immersive mixed-media installations, as well as large-scale collages made out of money. The currency collages, reminiscence of the political wall paintings of the Mexican muralists, express the complications of a consumer culture that exploits natural resources, produces waste, and lately drives nations to bankruptcy. González’s work – often poetic, always political – focuses on the environment, education, and the evolution of cultural value systems.
González has held 46 solo shows and participated in 168 group shows. Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘POGO’ at Hospicio Cabañas Museum, Guadalajara (MX); Magnificent Warning at Stanlee & Rubin Center, El Paso (USA); Playful, CAFAM, Los Angeles (USA); ‘Walk among Worlds’ at Casa de América, Madrid (ES) y Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (USA), ‘Something like an answer to something’, Artane gallery, Istanbul (TUR); ‘Project for the reutilization of obsolete vehicles’ at Travesía Cuatro Gallery, Madrid (ES) and Project B, Milano (IT); ‘PISAR’ at Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires (ARG); ‘Greenhouse effect’ at Art&Idea, Mexico City. Selected group shows include: ‘The Supermarket of Images’ at Jeu de Paume in Paris and at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, China; ‘Memoria del porvenir’, MUSAC collection (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León), Spain; Viva México! at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and at BWA Awangarda Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland; ‘The possibility of everything’ at Nuit Blanche Toronto (CA); ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’, Poetics of the handmade exhibition at MOCA LA (USA); ‘The tree: from the sublime to the social’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery (CA); ‘Fine Line’ at Museo de Las Americas in Denver (USA); The lines of the hand at MUAC, Mexico City; ‘2nd Polygraphic Triennial of San Juan’, Latin America and the Caribbean, Puerto Rico; ‘Mexico: Poetry/Politics’, San Francisco State University (USA) and at Nordic Watercolor Museum, Gothenburg (SE); ‘Tiempo de Sospecha’, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.
Máximo González is also the founder of “Changarrito Project”, a non-profit cultural initiative he launched in 2004 in Mexico City. What began as an underground subversive project has evolved into a platform to promote, support and show the work of visual artists, novelists, poets, curators, designers, performers, filmmakers, which has so far has exhibited more than 5,000 works by more than 350 emerging artists. Changarrito was invited twice to participate at Mexico Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2013), and has, since 2012 been operating in cooperation with Mexic-Arte Museum (Texas, USA).
Iván Buenader (b. 1972 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives and works in Alicante, Spain and Mexico City, Mexico).
Iván Buenader is an Argentinian writer and visual artist based between Alicante and Mexico City. He graduated in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires. He has exhibited his work (painting, photography, video, installation) in contemporary art venues in Latin America, the United States, Canada, India and Europe, while participating in numerous artist residencies – including MOMENTUM AiR in August – November 2021. He has conceptualized and produced collective interdisciplinary projects including poetry, music, dance and performance (‘CFW Poet Agency’). He is author of 11 novels and 6 books of experimental poetry.
Selected solo exhibitions include: FUTURA Galerie des Artistes (Puerto Vallarta) 2019; Brain Clouds (SometimeStudio, Paris) 2017, Monochromatic Fantasy (Lizieres, Epaux-Bezu), A house full of boxes is a place full of secrets (CentralTrak residence, Dallas TX) 2015, Face down on the sun (Museum of Contemporary Art of Aguascalientes, Mexico) 2014.
Group exhibitions include: FUTURA Alc Video Art Festival (Alicante) 2019; Untitled (Omar Alonso Galería, Puerto Vallarta) 2019; we the people (Montalvo Arts Center), Mikaela (San Miguel de Allende) , Studio Lisboa 018, La Verdi Mexico , CDMX, 2018, Rosadea (Play Video Art, Corrientes Capital), Processes in art (Chancellery Museum, CDMX), Luck of the Draw (DiversWorks, Houston TX), Hotel x Hotel (Carmen Thyssen Museum of Malaga, Malaga and Factory of Art and Development, Madrid) 2017, Machemoodus (La 77, CDMX), In the lobby (Liliana Bloch, Dallas TX), Les sentiers de la création (Galerie du Lycée Jean de La Fontaine, Château-Thierry, and Gallerie du College Jacques Cartier, Chauny, France) 2016, AAMI Foundation (Mexico City ) , Tell me what you think of me (Texas State University Galleries) 2015, Then / Now / Next, (Gladstone Hotel, Toronto) , Floating Memories (WhiteSpider Project) 2014, Imaginary Archetypes (57th Alley) , Be or Not South (José Luis Cuevas Museum, Museum of the City of Querétaro, Museum of Art of Ciudad Juárez, Museum of Art Co Time of Tamaulipas), Argenmex (Centro Bella Época), Inheritance (MACA Alicante, Hospicio Cabaña, GACX Xalapa, La Esmeralda, Art Careyes, Lakeeren Mumbai, Cloister Sor Juana, among others), Transitios (Changarrito group show, Artpace, San Antonio TX) 2013; Migrant Suitcases (Memory and Tolerance Museum, DF; David J. Guzman Museum, El Salvador; European Foundation Center Philanthropy House, Brussels; CECUT, Tijuana; New Americans Museum, San Diego CA), Side by Side (Universidad Iberoamericana), En mi being eternal (La 77), Mexico; Timeline Project, Chicago; 2012; International Biennial of Banners , Tijuana 2010, International Biennial of Visual Poetry , Mexico 2009; Close UP , Mexico 2007; Domestic Mail , Galerie Nod, Prague 2007; Half Mast, Haydee Rovirosa, NYC 2007, Interregno , Art & Idea, Mexico 2006; Harto Espacio , Montevideo, 2004.
ARTIST STATEMENTS:
My work frequently involves a construction that can be composed of video, photography, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, collage, graphic arts, and social actions. When I develop a project, I explore its components in their symbolic state, their traditional and historical context, as well as the impact they generate socially, politically, economically and spiritually.
Recovery, as a way of reclaiming discarded objects, is a common theme for me. I analyze the passage of time on the speeches; how they can expire or become effective according to opportunity or convenient to a current situation.
I seek to create values and rescue those that contribute to critical and responsible thinking.
– Máximo González, 2017
My plastic work seeks to abolish language and, at the same time, is supported by it. It addresses original thought, not ideas. It overrates symbols and then undervalues them. It sends messages to intuition as well as reason. It tries to observe symbols in space and their interrelation, as well as it investigates the nature of materials and their antecedents or provenance, without forgetting the importance of the title in the work and the historical-cultural context in which it is inserted.
Through my creative writing, as well as my drawings, paintings, performances, photographs, videos and installations, I seek to help people understand why they do what they do, through the analysis and interpretation of our conceptions and their origin, in order to promote critical thinking and the poetic experimentation of the world.
– Ivan Buenader, 2021
RESIDENCY PROJECTS:
UNTITLED (‘TISSUE CULTURE’ ANIMATION #1)
2021, Video Animation, 2 min 25 sec
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/793934785 [/fve]
Marching through the shelf of a library, some decorative objects and other toys, peek into a drawing that absorbs them in a universe of colorless lines, where an indecipherable shape squeezes them to make room for those who continue to arrive. The drawing gradually becomes denser, until at a certain moment it begins to be imperceptibly released: the elements that had entered leave the drawing and, little by little, it becomes a simpler composition, without saturation.
– Artist Statement by Iván Buenader
N8 – CARBONIC INCINERATION 1
2021, Tissue culture oil, ink, acrylic and gesso on pasted street signs, 85 x 60 x 5 cm
[One from series of may works created during thee Residency.]
On the streets of the city of Berlin, street posters are piled up on the walls, one on top of the other, glued together with paste. Some promote a new hamburger, others a musical concert, a home delivery app or an express covid test service. The stacking of posters creates a volume that, with the passing of days, is destined to disappear: a downpour falls on the city and they become so heavy that they bend like a withered flower, or someone tears them off as a souvenir or innocuous form of vandalism, or the city council removes them when it performs its regular cleaning.
In her laboratory, a Polish scientist, under a microscope, places a number of cells on a substance that is used for their proliferation. Cells will begin to reproduce slowly, then quickly, until they meet their limit and begin to shrink. It is difficult to distinguish when or what the maximum point was before beginning their decrease, in search of their own balance.
Hanging on the wall, on the whitened surface of a pile of posters, there is an unclassifiable, carbonic-looking shape that expands on the paper as if it were burning, or perhaps it contracts, as if it were submerging.
– Artist Statement by Iván Buenader
VOLKSPARK
2021, Video Performance, 3 min
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/753647358 [/fve]
“The remains that are hidden and lie buried under the appearance of a hill, as well as the static, immovable, inert sculptures that function as tributes to powerful entities or to people who gave their lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, to defend historical or temporal community values, they play a symbolic game with the living, mobile, restless body, which teaches freedom as it orbits around these monoliths, calling for a re-interpretation of memory.”
– Iván Buenader
Iván Buenader’s video performance, Volkspark, is the latest in a series of impromptu dance performances enacted within the context of every Artist Residency in which he participates. In this case, the work results from his 3-month Residency at MOMENTUM AiR during the summer and autumn of 2021 – a period of cautiously hopeful ‘normality’ in a city still learning to cope with the ongoing aftermath of the pandemic. Buenader is not a dancer. His dance series is not intended as a performance of technical competence, but rather, as his way of experientially engaging with every Residency location by means of mapping the movements of his body onto that space – be it a studio, cityscape, or countryside. The very act of movement through space connotes a freedom of which many were deprived during the long months of pandemic lockdown. While the title of the chosen soundtrack to this performance – “(I just don’t wanna) Miss A Thing” by Kylie Minogue – evokes the thirst for actual experience after months of isolation, coupled with the artist’s journey of discovery through Berlin’s multifaceted cityscape.
In Volkspark (meaning People’s Park in German), Buenader dances through Berlin’s oldest public park: Volkspark Friedrichshain. Dressed in clothes found on the streets – the literal social fabric of Berlin – he moves amidst various monuments inscribed with references to battles, conquests, nations, historical milestones, popular mythologies, and literary characters of children’s fables (the Fountain of Fairy Tales; the Berlin Bear; statues of Frederick the Great, the Javelin Thrower, and Mother and Child; Memorials for German fighters in the Spanish Civil War, and for Polish soldiers and anti-fascist Germans in WWII; and stairs on the hill covering the remains of one of several WWII bunkers and flak towers still inscribed within the fabric of the cityscape).
THE SOWER IN THE COURTYARD OF THE COLUMNS
2021, Wall paint on silk shawl, 85 x 85 cm
This work forms part of Buenader’s ongoing series of paint on textile works. Literally addressing the social fabric, the artist paints abstract alphabets of signs and symbols onto found materials collected in the various cities to which his peripatetic practice leads him. Scarves, blankets, tablecloths, shower curtains, and more found on the street, given by friends, or discovered in flea markets – these relics of the social fabric form the canvases for Buenader’s interventions.
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ART from ELSEWHERE – Seoul Selection
Video Art from the MOMENTUM Collection, Berlin
Screening At The
21st Seoul International ALT
Cinema & Media Festival (NeMaf)
19 – 27 August 2021
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà
Co-Presented by:
MOMENTUM & 
Featuring:
AES+F // Theo Eshetu // Amir Fattal // David Krippendorff // Almagul Menlibayeva // Nina E. Schönefeld // David Szauder
PROGRAM :
AES+F, Inverso Mundus (2015), 4K Video Art, 38 min.
Nina E. Schönefeld, B. T. R. (Born to Run) (2020), HD Video Art, 20 min. 3 sec.
Amir Fattal, ATARA (2019), HD Video Art, 15 min. 20 sec.
David Szauder, Light Space Materia (2020), HD Video Art & Digital Animation, 8 min. 27 sec.
Theo Eshetu, Festival of Sacrifice (2012), HD Video Art, 18 min.
Almagul Menlibayeva, Transoxania Dreams (2011), HD Video Art, 23 min., Kazakh with English Subtitles
David Krippendorff, Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015), HD Video Art, 14 min. 9 sec.
Curatorial Statement
For the 21st Seoul International Alt Cinema and Media Festival, the streaming art film platform IkonoTV was invited to present a selection of German video art. In turn, IkonoTV invited MOMENTUM, the Global Platform for Time-Based Art, to curate a selection of works from its Collection by Berlin-based artists. The result is a program of seven exceptional artworks by artists as diverse as Berlin itself. Presenting artists from Ethiopia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Russia, and the US – they are all Berliners. At the geographical center of Europe, Berlin is a city of mobile people and moving images, where art and artists alike are often from elsewhere. In this post-pandemic era of travel restrictions Art from Elsewhere – Seoul Selection is a video program about otherness – a way of seeing the world without travelling. Moving images move us, and artworks serve as windows onto the world. As we now emerge carefully after months of isolation, and learn how to negotiate the new realities of a post-pandemic world, it becomes more important than ever to have such windows through which to gaze. In these uncertain times, they remind us that, for all our differences, we are all in this together. The works shown in this program focus on global issues, equally relevant to us all. They reflect on the social and environmental repercussions of globalization and its impact on the transformation of cultural identities; they interrogate issues of gender, inequality, and poverty; they scrutinize the environmental traumas we inflict on our planet and its creatures; and they ponder the (un)quiet poetry, conflicts, and beauty of how we must live from day to day.
– Rachel Rits-volloch
AES+F
Inverso Mundus(2015), 4K Video Art, 38 min.
The title of this video, Inverso Mundus, means the world upside down. Engravings in the genre of “World Upside Down”, known since the 16th century, depict such scenes as a pig gutting the butcher, a child punishing his teacher, a man carrying a donkey on his back, man and woman exchanging roles and dress, and a beggar in rags magnanimously bestowing alms on a rich man. These engravings contain demons, chimeras, fish flying through the sky and death itself, variously with a scythe or in the mask of a plague doctor. The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian “reverse, the opposite” and the Old Italian “poetry,” and Mundus – the Latin “world,” hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In our interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a multichannel video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.
AES+F (Artist Group founded in 1987. Live and work in Berlin, Germany; Moscow, Russia; New York, USA.)
First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, and Evgeny Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Vladimir Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies. They define their practice as a kind of “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, and later showed it at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals around the world. AES+F achieved worldwide acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007, and since then have participated in many signature biennials around the world, including: Adelaide, Gwangju, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Kochi-Muziris, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, Moscow, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Vancouver, and others. Festivals devoted to new media include: ARS Electronica (Linz), Mediacity Seoul and Video Zone (Tel Aviv). AES+F had over 100 solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, including: ZKM (Karlsruhe), HAM (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tate Britain (London), MAXXI and MACRO Future (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires), and many others.
Theo Eshetu
Festival of Sacrifice (2012), HD Video Art, 18 min.
Festival of Sacrifice was originally made as a 6-channel video installation, depicting the ritual slaughter of a goat during the celebration of Eid-ul-Adha, the Islamic Festival of Sacrifice. Through multiple mirroring the extreme footage is sublimated into a series of images that resemble traditional Islamic ornamentation. The skilled dissection of the animal body is reflected in the kaleidoscopic dissolution of the video image. The emotional and aesthetic aspects of ritual religious practices are here heightened by the musical soundtrack of the work. The celebration of Sacrifice harks back to the very origins of religious thought. All religions begin with a sacrifice. Festival of Sacrifice is part of a series of videos that looks at aspects of Islamic culture as a source to explore formal qualities of representation and the underlying links between cultures. Filmed on the Kenyan island of Lamu during the celebrations of Eid-ul-Adha, the video recreates, through the multiplication of images, the kaleidoscopic patterns that highlight the spiritual aspect of the event. Intercultural relations, whether seen as an exchange or a battle, are strongly influenced by the impact of images and their use. While religion and technological development are often used to reinforce differences, electronic inter-connectivity has created a platform for mutual interaction and transformed the very concept of landscape.
Theo Eshetu (b. 1958 in London, England. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu was born in London and grew up in Addis Ababa, Dakar, Belgrade and Rome. A pioneer of video art, Eshetu explores the relationship between media, identity, and global information networks. After studying Communication Design, Eshetu began making videos in early 1982, seeking to deconstruct the hegemonic status of television, which he viewed as a state apparatus. Forging a hybrid language to merge practices of video art and documentary filmmaking, Eshetu explores perception, identity, and notions of the sacred through electronic time-based media and optical devices and effects. He draws from anthropology, art history, scientific research, and religion—Catholic, African, Muslim, Buddhist—to explore clashes and harmonies of human subjectivity between world cultures in the global context. Though essentially conceptual, and often exploring video’s formal components of time and light, Eshetu’s work is often focused on cultural displacement, and is always grounded in compelling aesthetic components, often achieved through fractal repetition, such as kaleidoscopic mirroring, multi-screen projections, or mosaic-like patterning of images. Among various international awards, Eshetu was Artist in Residence at Tarabya Cultural Academy, Turkey where he completed aspects of production for Altas Fractured (2017) which was featured in Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel in 2017. In 2012 he was Artist in Residence at the DAAD program in Berlin, where he exhibited The Return of the Axum Obelisk at DAADgalerie in 2014. In 2011 he participated the Venice Biennale and the Sharjah Biennale. Eshetu’s work has been shown in many museums, biennials, and film festivals worldwide.
David Krippendorff
Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015), HD Video Art, 14 min. 9 sec.
Nothing Escapes My Eyes takes us on an intimate journey through identity and history. David Krippendorff’s time-warping tribute to a changing world presents a would-be Aida, to a moving soundtrack from the eponymous opera, shedding tears for a place and time which no longer exist. Nothing Escapes My Eyes is about a silent transformation of a place and a human being, both subjected to the melancholy of conforming. The film was inspired by the famous opera Aida, to depict in a metaphoric form current issues of cultural identity, loss and the pressures to conform. The film refers to the following historical event related to this opera: Aida premiered in Cairo in 1871 at the Khedivial Opera House. One hundred years later the building was completely destroyed by fire and replaced by a multi-story parking garage. Nevertheless, to this day, the place is still named Opera Square: Meidan El Opera. The film combines this urban alteration with the painful transformation of a woman (actress Hiam Abbass) in the process of shedding one identity for another. With no dialogue, the film is backed by a musical excerpt from Verdi’s opera Aida, whose lyrics express the difficulties of being loyal to one’s country and cultural identity. The personal and urban transformation tackles issues of identity, loss and disorientation as a result of historical colonialism and contemporary globalization.
David Krippendoff (b. 1967 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin)
David Krippendorff is a US/German interdisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker. He grew up in Rome, Italy, and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, where he graduated with a Masters degree in 1997, and was subsequently based in New York for some time. The son of a Holocaust survivor and the grandchild of practicing Nazis, cultural contradiction and dislocation shaped Krippendorff’s experience early on. His artistic practice inquires into this state of being a “permanent foreigner” and explores resulting questions of home, national and cultural identity, and belonging. Krippendorff’s works, films and videos have been shown internationally, including at: the New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, and Belgrade), as well as in many international art and film festivals worldwide.
Amir Fattal
ATARA (2019), HD Video Art, 15 min. 20 sec.
Shot on location in Berlin, ATARA tells the story of two iconic buildings that used to stand at the same place: the Berliner Stadtschloss, destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII, and the Palast der Republik, built in its place as the GDR seat of government in 1973, and destroyed in 2008 to make way for the rebuilding of a contemporary copy of the Stadtschloss. The resurrection of this historical copy did not begin until 2013 due to the controversy surrounding this project. In a city perpetually treading the fine line between moving on from its painful history while never forgetting it, the decision to resurrect the Stadtschloss is interpreted by many as a willful erasure of its GDR past and a dangerous rewriting of history. This controversy is keenly felt in a city still building over its bomb craters, even more than 75 years after the end of WWII. ATARA follows a symbolic ceremony that takes place in the Palace during a moment when one building is being resurrected and the other building is dematerializing into a ghostly memory. Following an astronaut wandering through the construction site of the new Stadtschloss, carrying an iconic lamp from the destroyed Palast der Republik, ATARA deals with the collective memory of architecture and its symbolic representation in public space. The music is based on the Liebestod aria from Wagner’s opera ‘Tristan and Isolde’, rewriting the musical score as mirror of the original then digitally reversing it, like travelling backwards and forwards in time.
Amir Fattal (b. 1978 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
Fattal is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Working in the media of video, photography, sculpture, and installation, his work forms a focused response to the diverse questions raised by his adoptive city of Berlin, where the memory, culture, architecture, indeed every thread in the fabric of this city is problematized by its history. Alongside his art practice, Fattal is the curator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists. Amir Fattal was distinguished with the GASAG Art Prize in 2008 and graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009. Acclaimed group exhibitions include: Collection Enea Righi, Museo Fortuny, Venice (2016); Interior / Exterior / Sculpture, Belenius/Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); A Naked Singularity, Studio Garaicoa, Madrid, Spain (2015); Fragments of Empires, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2014-15); A Letter From Dr. Faustus, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014); Fundación Botín, Villa Iris, Santander, Spain (2014); Dahlstrøm & Fattal, Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2013); III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2012); Body Without Body, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011).
Almagul Menlibayeva
Transoxania Dreams (2011), HD Video Art, 23 min., Kazakh with English Subtitles
Almagul Menlibayeva’s film tells a tale of ecological devastation in the guise of a mythological narrative staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. Transoxania Dreams is filmed in the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea, where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once-thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation policies. The region of Transoxania in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxania lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain ravaged by metal scavengers, while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter observing the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. In her symbolic dream, the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the mythological figures of the Centaur and of Kazakh folklore, Menlibayeva creates a magical landscape with alluring hybrid beings, sexually charged and bizarre.
Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Almaty, Kazakhstan.)
Almagul Menlibayeva is a video artist, photographer, and curator, holding an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. Working primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation, Menlibayeva’s practice addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as: the social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia; de-colonial re-imaginings of gender; environmental degradation; and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. In conjunction with her solo exhibition ‘Transformation’ at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-17), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Among other notable awards, she was the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany, and shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Hong Kong (2020). Menlibayeva participated in numerous international biennales, including: the Asia Pacific Triennale, Brisbane, Australia (2020, 2012); Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Channels Festival, Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Cairo Biennial, Egypt (2019); Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018); Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); and many others.
Nina E. Schönefeld
B.T.R. (Born to Run) (2020), HD Video Art, 20 min. 3 sec.
Video and installation artist Nina E. Schönefeld examines the contemporary social and political climate, exploring the relationship between art, blockbuster movies and the present digital age. Her stories imagine a world where, due to drastic political shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival. B.T.R. is set in the year 2043 in a dystopian future of authoritarian autocracies and restrictions on journalism, where data is the most valuable asset on earth, and authoritarian right-wing governments have implemented youth education camps to gain power and influence. The film’s hero, SKY, grew up in one such education camp, WHITE ROCK. Knowing nothing about her parents she begins to research her heritage, getting in touch with a group of independent journalists and publishers, the most persecuted people on earth, threatened by prison and death every day. In this allegory of a not far-distant future, it seems that freedom of speech is lost forever. The video B.T.R. is intended as a preventative measure against such dystopias. It was created as a film of the future but has its roots in the present. It is based on detailed research on Julian Assange and Edward Snowden; on Cambridge Analytica and the pervasive power of data mining; on the crucial role of investigative journalism and the need for freedoms of the press; on the stories of deserters from the far-right.; and on the growing strength of far-right movements around the world, which leads Schönefeld to draw frightening parallels with conditions which led to the rise of Fascism in Germany in the 1920s.
Nina E. Schönefeld (b. 1972 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin)
Nina E. Schönefeld is a multidisciplinary artist who studied Fine Art in Berlin at the Universität der Künste, and in London at the Royal College of Art. She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art Theory. For several years she has been lecturing at private art colleges in the field of visual arts. She is the co-founder of “Last Night In Berlin”, a blog and cultural project documenting art openings in Berlin. Schönefeld’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world. Recent exhibitions include: “Roppongi Art Night”, Tokyo, Japan (2021); “Am Limit”, Cole mine Důl Michal, Ostrava, Czech Republic (2021); “Facing New Challenges: Water”, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, Germany (2020); “#Payetonconfinement”, Galerie la Pierre Large, Strasbourg, France (2020); “Topographies of The Stack”, Alternative Culture Making Art Space, Shenzhen, China (2019); “Water(Proof)”, Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia (2019) & MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany (2019); “Anima Mundi Festival 2019 – Consciousness”, Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi, Venice, Italy (2019); “30 Jahre. 30 Fragen. 30 Stunden.”, Goethe Institut – Beijing, China (2018); “Join the Dots / Unire le distanze Salone Degli Incanti”, Ex Pescheria Centrale, Trieste, Italy (2018); “Light Year 25”, Manhattan Bridge / Kuelbs Collection, NY, USA (2017); and many others.
David Szauder
Light Space Materia (2020), HD Video Art & Digital Animation, 8 min. 27 sec.
David Szauder’s film Light Space Materia translates Bauhaus ideas on technology, new materials, and light into a digital context, upgrading an iconic work of the 1930s into a 3D digital animation and algorithmically derived soundscape. Taking as his inspiration the kinetic light and sound sculpture Light Space Modulator (1930) by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder re-created his own large-scale rendition of this iconic work in 2020. Szauder subsequently used this installation as the basis upon which to make a series of over 100 videos, digital animations, and soundscapes. Szauder recontextualizes into digital media the driving principal of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s aim to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world. Szauder’s analysis of the Bauhaus-related kinetics of the original piece focuses on the fundamental question of how contemporary technology could change the formal expression of movement and capture the physicality of materials in a digital context. The Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology. This characteristic forms the essential basis of Szauder’s work, which applies computer code to create his animations and soundscapes derived from the ambient sound and kinetic movement of his Light Space Modulator sculpture using algorithms based on motion analysis. This soundscape accompanies Szauder’s film Light Space Materia, which commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of materiality of the image.
David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
Media artist and curator David Szauder studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute (CHB) in Berlin. David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Buildingscape, an initiative to turn construction sites into venues for public art. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture. David Szauder has participated in numerous international projects as artist and curator.
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SHAHAR MARCUS
(b. 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel. Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel.)
Shahar Marcus primarily works in the medium of performance and video art. His initial works dealt with the exploration of his own body and its limitations – incorporating various perishable materials, such as dough, juice and ice. His body served as an instrument, a platform on which various ‘experiments’ took place: lying on the operating table, set on fire, dressed in a ‘bread suit’, and more. His recurrent use of bread as a symbol of essentiality and survival is juxtaposed with military symbols. By frequently working with food, a perishable, momentary substance, and by turning it into a piece of clothing or a set, Marcus also flirts with art history; transforming arbitrary objects and materials into something immortal and everlasting. His most recent works deal with local political issues, by approaching iconic Israeli landmarks with a critical and humorous point of view. Marcus reflects on his own heritage, environment and the creation of local historical narratives. His works are influenced by the visual language of cinematography along with familiar themes and tributes to the history of art.
Shahar Marcus studied Linguistics and History of Art at the University of Tel Aviv. He has exhibited at numerous art institutions, both in Israel and internationally, including: Tate Modern, London; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Copenhagen Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biennale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and at other art venues in Poland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, USA, and Turkey. His works are in many important museum collections, such as: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; and others.
SEEDS
2012, HD Video, 5 min 3 sec
The visually stunning work Seeds (2012) follows a mine clearance team through the desert as they locate and remove land mines. The violence implicit in this action – both the danger of detonation, and the allusion to the conflict which laid these weapons there in the first place – is offset in sharp contrast with the beauty of the natural landscape and the slow meditative actions of the mine disposal crew. As they move over the arid rocky soil, they leave behind themselves trails of red tape, demarcating the landscape into clear rows. A solitary figure enters the frame, following behind the soldiers. In a reference to Millet’s famous painting, The Sower, Shahar Marcus, dressed as a pioneer, walks along the rows of earth, sowing seeds in the newly cleared soil. This act of sowing becomes a healing gesture, planting new life and hope in the scarred earth. Seeds is a poetic work about war and the hope for peace, and about the need to heal the wounds left upon our planet by mankind’s devastating impacts upon nature.
“The work Seeds explores the phenomenon of the buried mines that exist in Israel and the world over, exposing how these areas still carry the consequence of the war within their soil while supporting the new populations who must inhabit the conflict area. It examines the power of the present moment in these places where efforts are beginning to shift these death zones into places that consciously affirm life, embracing continuity in the very place where it once was blocked.”
[Shahar Marcus]
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ART from ELSEWHERE
Ausgewählte Werke aus der Sammlung MOMENTUM
11 JUNI – 25 JULI 2021
@ Kulturforum Ansbach
Kunsthaus Reitbhahn 3, 91522 Ansbach, Germany
Öffnungszeiten:
Mi 10 – 16 Uhr
Do 15 – 18 Uhr
Fr 15 – 19 Uhr
Sa 10 -16 Uhr
So 13 – 16 Uhr
Featuring:
Aaajiao (CN) – Shaarbek Amankul (KG) – Inna Artemova (RU) – Eric Bridgeman (PG/AU) – Stefano Cagol (IT) – Margret Eicher (DE) – Nezaket Ekici (TR/DE) – Thomas Eller (DE) – Theo Eshetu (ET/DE) – Amir Fattal (IL) – Doug Fishbone (US/UK) – James P. Graham (UK) – Mariana Hahn (DE) – Gülsün Karamustafa (TR) – Hannu Karjalainen (FI) – David Krippendorff (US/DE) – Janet Laurence (AU) – Sarah Lüdemann (DE) – Shahar Marcus (IL) – Kate McMillan (AU/UK) – Almagul Menlibayeva (KZ/BE) – Tracey Moffatt (AU) – Gulnur Mukazhanova (KZ) – Anxiong Qiu (CN) – Varvara Shavrova (RU) – Sumugan Sivanesan (AU) – David Szauder (HU) – Shingo Yoshida (JP)
Kuratiert von Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà
Unterstützt von:
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Heute führen die meisten von uns Leben in ständiger Bewegung von einer Information zur nächsten, von einer Gelegenheit zur nächsten und – bis COVID-19 uns aufhielt – von einem Ort zum nächsten. Mobilität – sowohl geografisch als auch sozial – war vor nicht allzu langer Zeit das Privileg einiger weniger und wird heute als selbstverständlicher Anspruch der Mehrheit angesehen. Künstler:innen stehen an der Spitze dieser peripatetischen Existenz, reisen für Inspiration, Ausstellungen und Künstler:innenresidenzen um die Welt, erfahren neue Orte und Kulturen durch die kritische Linse des Außenseiters, reflektieren ihre eigenen Lebensräume durch das Prisma ihrer erweiterten Weltansichten. Auf diese Art entstehende Kunstwerke dienen als Fenster zur Welt. Während wir nun nach Monaten der Isolation vorsichtig wieder auftauchen und lernen wie wir unsere neuen Realitäten in einer post-pandemischen Welt verhandeln, wird es wichtiger denn je, solche kritischen Fenster zu haben, durch die wir blicken können. In diesen unsicheren Zeiten erinnern sie uns daran, dass wir trotz all unserer Unterschiede alle gemeinsam in dieser Situation sind.
Art from Elsewhere bringt erstmalig Arbeiten aus der Sammlung MOMENTUM von 28 internationalen Künstler:innen aus 16 Ländern nach Ansbach. Die in dieser Ausstellung gezeigten Arbeiten beschäftigen sich mit globalen Themen, die für uns alle gleichermaßen relevant sind, egal wo wir leben oder woher wir kommen. Vor allem im Medium Video, aber auch in Malerei und Installationen setzt sich Art from Elsewhere mit den zentralen Themen unserer wandelbaren Zeit auseinander: Verlust und Vertreibung, Migration, Entfremdung und Identitätskrisen, Nostalgie und Verzerrung der Erinnerung, Kontrolle und Überwachung (in den sozialen Medien), Populismus, Propaganda und Wahrheit, Klimawandel und die Auswirkungen der Menschen auf die Natur. Zusammengenommen thematisieren die Arbeiten in dieser Ausstellung die übergeordnete Frage danach, wie Bilder im digitalen Zeitalter benutzt werden, um sowohl Vergangenheit zu reproduzieren und zu rekonstruieren als auch um Gegenwart und Zukunft neu zu imaginieren. Zu diesem Zweck reflektieren sie die sozialen und ökologischen Auswirkungen der Globalisierung und deren Einfluss auf die Transformation kultureller Identitäten, sie hinterfragen die ökologischen Traumata, die wir unserem Planeten und seinen Lebewesen zufügen, und sie sinnen über die (un)stille Poesie, über Konflikte und Schönheit in unserem täglichen Leben nach.
Featuring:
(Klicke auf den Künstler, um die bio und die Werkbeschreibung darunter zu sehen).
aaajiao
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404404404 (2017), Installation, Tinte & Schwammrolle, Maße variabel
404 ist die Fehlermeldung, die auf gesperrten Websites in China und auf der ganzen Welt erscheint – eine digitale Sprache, die Alphabete und Kulturen transzendiert, um überall verstanden zu werden. Durch die Rückübersetzung der digitalen Nachricht in eine analoge Form ist 404404404 (2017) ein subtiler Kommentar von aaajiao zu Zensur und Informationsflüssen in unserer digitalen Kultur. Die Fehlermeldung ist immer dieselbe, egal wie vielfältig die Inhalte sind, die sie vor dem Blick verbergen. In der Interpretation des Künstlers wird die Arbeit jedoch vollkommen ortsspezifisch und nimmt mit jeder Installation eine neue Form an; sie vervielfältigt die 404 Meldung in diversen Formen und Kontexten.
aaajiao (* 1984, Xi’an, China. Lebt und arbeitet in Shanghai, China und Berlin, Deutschland)
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Shaarbek Amankul
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Duba (2006), video, Video, 6’56” & Sham (2007), Video, 4’21”
Shaarbek Amankuls zeitlose Arbeiten, die uralte Traditionen darstellen, werden besonders relevant, wenn man sie durch die Linse der Corona–Zeit betrachtet. Während die westliche Medizin immer noch mit der Pandemie zu kämpfen hat, ist es vielleicht an der Zeit, sich den uralten schamanistischen Traditionen anderer Kulturen zuzuwenden. In Duba (2006) und Sham (2007) bietet uns der kirgisische Künstler Shaarbek Amankul ein intimes Portrait von Reinigungsritualen, die von Schamanen durchgeführt werden, mit Trancezuständen, Beschwörungen, Schreien und Grunzlauten, die den meisten von uns sehr fremd erscheinen. Was uns vielleicht näher an Hexerei erscheint, ist eine Form der Heilung, die in Kirgisistan, in ganz Zentralasien und in vielen anderen kulturellen Traditionen immer noch praktiziert wird. In Kulturen, in denen viele der Wissenschaft noch kein Vertrauen schenken, wird auf alternative Formen der Medizin gesetzt.
„Schaman:innen sind Heiler:innen, die traditionelle Praktiken anwenden, um Menschen mit Krankheiten zu behandeln. Sie lösen natürliche Kräfte auf einer unterbewussten Ebene aus, die helfen Krankheiten zu überwinden. In Duba ist nur die Großaufnahme eines Gesichts auf dem Bildschirm zu sehen – die faszinierende Physiologie einer Trance – eine Schamanin bei der Durchführung eines Rituals. Der Titel des Werkes, „Duba“ bedeutet „Reinigung der Seele“. In der kirgisischen Kultur können wissenschaftliche Erklärungen oft wirkungslos sein, da viele Menschen der Logik nicht trauen. Die Sphäre der informellen Medizin und unerklärlicher Phänomene ist oft überzeugender als die Wissenschaft. Die komplexen Bedingungen des gesellschaftlichen Umbruchs und die rasanten Veränderungen in den Bereichen Technologie und Kommunikation führen zu Gefühlen der Unzulänglichkeit und des Identitätsverlustes. Die Menschen wenden sich daher an Schaman:innen, um eine Behandlung für ihre Krankheiten zu erhalten. Das Irrationale ist eine Form der Wiederherstellung der verlorenen Identität. Sham, wie Duba, dokumentiert ein Reinigungsritual. Das Unkonventionelle scheint in der postsowjetischen Ära ohne feste Paradigmen am ehesten Fuß zu fassen. Hier wird an Wunder geglaubt und auf Wunder gehofft. Und nur der Schamane kann sich in Trance versetzen. In diesem Zustand lesen sie gemeinsam Gebete, sie gähnen und weinen vor Aufregung; sie schreien und rülpsen wegen Krankheiten des Körpers und des Geistes. Seltsam, wie sie meditieren, sich kratzend und schlagend. Und hinterher, so berichten glaubwürdige Quellen, erinnern sie sich oft nicht mehr daran, was mit ihnen geschehen ist. Sie schlussfolgern dann, dass alles durch den Willen höherer Mächte geschah. Wenn sie auf diese Weise gereinigt und gesegnet sind, können sie friedlicher weiterleben.“
– Shaarbek Amankul
Shaarbek Amankul (* 1959 in Bischkek, Kirgisistan. Lebt und arbeitet in Bischkek.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/395745062 [/fve]
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/395746016 [/fve]
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Inna Artemova
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Utopia IV (2017), Öl auf Leinwand, 180 x 240 cm & Utopia XI (2018), Öl auf Leinwand, 190 x 140 cm, Leihgabe des Künstlers
Die Gemälde Utopia IV (2017) und Utopia XI (2018) sind zwei aus einer Serie von über 40 verschiedenen Werken, die den Titel Utopie teilen. Doch während die Definition von einer Utopie der Traum von einer perfekten Gesellschaft ist, evozieren diese speziellen Gemälde eher ein Gefühl des bevorstehenden kosmischen Kataklysmus als einen idealisierten Zustand der Perfektion. Ob Meteoriten, die durch den Kosmos stürzen, oder die viralen Strukturen, mit denen wir im vergangenen Jahr nur allzu vertraut geworden sind, oder die Nachwirkungen einer unberechenbaren Kraft, diese Arbeiten vermitteln eine passend zweideutige Botschaft über die Zukunft und die Gegenwart. Indem sie eine Vorstellung von existenzieller Bedrohung mit dem Sinn für das Erhabene verbinden, können diese Arbeiten als Porträts unserer prekären Zeit betrachtet werden. Da sie den Zusammenbruch der kommunistischen Utopie in ihrer Heimat, der Sowjetunion, aus erster Hand miterlebt hat, sind Artemovas Utopien fragile konstruktivistische Visionen, die sich in einem Zustand ständiger Veränderung befinden; sie explodieren, implodieren, schwanken am Rande eines gefährlichen Gleichgewichts oder sind vielleicht schon wieder im Aufbau begriffen. Jeder Zusammenbruch birgt die Hoffnung auf einen Neuanfang, einen erneuerten Traum von einer besseren Zukunft. Utopien werden allzu oft auf der Asche ihres Gegenteils errichtet.
Inna Artemova (* Moskau, UdSSR. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin, Deutschland.)
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Eric Bridgeman
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The Fight (2010), Video, 8’8″ & Triple X Bitter (2008), Video, 13’
2009 reiste Eric Bridgeman durch abgelegene Teile der Chimbu–Provinz im Hochland von Papua-Neuguinea, seiner Heimat mütterlichseits. Als gebürtiger Australier wurde er sich zunehmend seiner eigenen „weißen“ australischen Präsenz in seinem Heimatland bewusst. The Fight basiert auf ethnografischen Konventionen, vom National Geographic bis zu Irving Penn, die einst dazu dienten, Papua–Neuguinea als Australiens nächste Eroberungsgrenze zu bewerben und zu beanspruchen. Im Nachspielen westlicher Stereotypen von Stammeskämpfen, parodiert The Fight die Geschichte der ethnografischen Darstellung und die daraus resultierenden Auswirkungen auf die nationale und kulturelle Identität Papua–Neuguineas. The Fight dokumentiert zwei Gruppen von Männern aus Bridgemans eigenem Clan, den Yuri Alaiku, die sich spielerisch gegenseitig mit Speeren und Schilden angreifen, die mit Motiven bemalt sind, die von den in dieser Region traditionellen, kühnen, farbenfrohen Kunstwerken inspiriert sind. Schilde wurden in Kriegszeiten als wirkungsvolle Symbole der Macht gegen Angreifer verwendet. Bridgeman sieht diese Ikone der Kriegsführung jedoch auch als Beschützer unerzählter Geschichten, undokumentierter Historien und verblassender kultureller Praktiken, die zu einem integralen Bestandteil seiner späteren Praxis geworden sind.
Das Performance-Video Triple X Bitter inszeniert ein groteskes Kneipenszenario in psychedelischen Farben, an dem „Boi Boi the Labourer“, eine Gruppe ausgelassener Kneipenbesucher:innen, zwei pseudo-Schwarze Schönheiten und ein aufblasbarer Pool beteiligt sind. Mit Bridgeman als Boi Boi im Mittelpunkt dirigiert der Künstler die sich entfaltenden Ereignisse und ermöglicht den Teilnehmer:innen, ihre eigenen Wahrnehmungen, Ängste und ihr Verständnis von Verhaltensregeln in der australischen Kneipenkultur und ihrer allgegenwärtigen Rolle in der australischen kulturellen Identität zu erkunden. Triple X Bitter ist eine von sieben Performance-Videos, die im Rahmen von Bridgemans interdisziplinärem Projekt The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules (2008–2010) entstanden sind. Indem sie subversive Parallelen zwischen der Theatralik des Sports und der Ethnografie zieht, erforscht diese Arbeit interkulturelle Identitäten durch die spielerische Dekonstruktion von Sex-, Gender- und „Rassen-“ Politik – und untergräbt Stereotypen, die die Grundlagen der nationalen Identität im heutigen Australien und Papua-Neuguinea untermauern. Diese karnevalesken Darbietungen, die sowohl in privaten als auch in öffentlichen Räumen wie Stadien, Kneipen und an Arbeitsplätzen aufgeführt werden, beziehen sich auf ethnografische Studien über Stammesidentitäten in Zeiten der Kolonisierung, während sie auf den paradoxen und improvisierten Darbietungen ihrer Teilnehmer:innen basieren. Mit Blackface, Whiteface, Slapstick und Parodie konstruiert Bridgeman unehrfürchtig ein bizarres Amalgam zwischen Symbologien, Stereotypen und soziokulturellen Rollen in Australien und Papua-Neuguinea.
Eric Bridgeman (* 1986 in Redcliffe, Queensland, Australien; lebt und arbeitet in Brisbane, Australien und Wahgi Valley, Jiwaka Province, Papua-Neuguinea)
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<[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/20601726 [/fve]
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/20603350 [/fve]
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Stefano Cagol
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The Time of the Flood, Fragments (2020-21), HD Video, 8’38″, Leihgabe des Künstlers
The Time of the Flood: Beyond the Myth through Climate Change (2020-21), besteht aus 7 Video-Performances, die Stefano Cagol während einer Reihe von internationalen Künstlerresidenzen in Berlin, Venedig, Rom, Wien und Tel-Aviv realisierte. In der Zeit, die für die Fertigstellung dieses Werks benötigt wurde, das im November 2019 im MOMENTUM Berlin begann und 2021 in Tel Aviv endete, hatte sich die Welt unwiderruflich verändert. Cagols Konzept, die biblische Geschichte der Sintflut innerhalb unserer aktuellen Klimakrise neu zu kontextualisieren, bleibt eine wichtige und aktuelle Reflexion über die verheerenden Auswirkungen, die wir Menschen auf unseren Planeten haben. Inspiriert vom biblischen Bild der großen Flut und in Fortsetzung einer Linie, die Kunst, Wissenschaft und Mythos in einem kontinuierlichen Dialog sieht, untersucht The Time of the Flood globale Themen wie extreme Wetterereignisse, steigende Meeresspiegel, das Verschwinden von Gletschern, die Mutation von Winden, Energiequellen und Aussterben. Der allgegenwärtige Einfluss des Menschen auf die Natur – sei es in Form von Umweltkatastrophen oder der Entfesselung neuer tödlicher Viren – ist ein ständiger Fokus in Cagols Werk. Was als Reflexion über die Überschneidungen von Kunst, Ökologie und Technologie begann, erhielt eine noch größere Dringlichkeit, als es inmitten einer globalen Pandemie realisiert wurde. Cagols Time of the Flood ist auch eine Momentaufnahme einer Zeit des globalen Notstands – sowohl medizinisch als auch ökologisch. Cagol vollendete seine Serie von performativen Interventionen in mehreren Städten trotz anhaltender Reisebeschränkungen und institutioneller Schließungen, nicht nur während des größten globalen Gesundheitsnotstandes der jüngeren Geschichte, sondern auch in einer Zeit anhaltender Eskalationen klimatischer Katastrophen mit tödlichen Überschwemmungen, Bränden und Stürmen, die auf der ganzen Welt wüten. Es gibt leider eine dringende Relevanz für Cagols Arbeit in unseren scheinbar apokalyptischen Zeiten.
MEHR INFORMATIONEN ZU THE TIME OF THE FLOOD VIDEO-SERIEN <<
Stefano Cagol (* 1969 in Trento, Italien. Lebt und arbeitet in Trento)
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Margret Eicher
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Posthuman Dance of Death (2016), Wandteppich, 280 x 330 cm
Der Wandteppich Posthuman Dance of Death (2016) verweist auf die stark zunehmende Abhängigkeit von Bildern in der Gesellschaft. Nicht mehr Text und Sprache prägen primär politische, soziale und individuelle Einstellungen, sondern allgegenwärtige Bilder, deren Wahrheitsgehalt meist nicht mehr überprüft wird. Unter Rückgriff auf wissenschaftliche Forschungen zur Bildtheorie und visuellen Kultur sowie mit Zitaten aus der Kunstgeschichte geht es in Margret Eichers Wandteppichen darum, wie wir in Bildern denken. Posthuman Dance of Death ist eine digitale Collage, die aus Bildern von Pokemon-Go-Figuren, Manga-Masken, japanischen Fans und mexikanischen Totenköpfen, Menüsymbolen von Videospielen, Mobiltelefonen und zwei tätowierten Frauen in klischeehaft verführerischen Posen zusammengesetzt ist, die vor einem Magnetresonanztomographen schweben. Bilder, die dem Körper eingeschrieben sind, werden mit der Technologie zur Herstellung von Bildern aus dem Inneren des Körpers in Beziehung gesetzt. Dies ist eine Arbeit über unsere Sucht nach Bildern und die Übersetzbarkeit der visuellen Sprache über alle Kulturen hinweg. Margret Eicher stellt das historische Medium und die Funktion der Tapisserie für das digitale Zeitalter neu vor, bis hin zur Herstellung der Arbeiten auf einem digitalen Webstuhl. Durch die Transformation in einen monumentalen Wandteppich gewinnt der Bildinhalt damals wie heute den Anschein von Legitimität und Macht. Traditionell politischen Zwecken dienend, das Königtum und bedeutende Anlässe der Zeit darstellend, erreichte der höfische Wandteppich vor allem im Barock den Höhepunkt seiner Funktion in der Repräsentation von Macht und der Kommunikation von Ideologien. Eicher zieht frappierende Parallelen zwischen den Funktionen und der Bildsprache des barocken Kommunikationsmediums und denen der heutigen Massenmedien. Indem sie die Filmstars und Medienikonen, die in der heutigen content-gesteuerten digitalen Kultur das Äquivalent von Königshäusern sind, mit verschiedenen Symbolen aus der Kunst- und Architekturgeschichte verwebt, untersucht Eichers Arbeit, wie die Medienkultur die Kunstgeschichte umfunktioniert, und hinterfragt die Macht der visuellen Kommunikation im digitalen Zeitalter.
Margret Eicher (* 1955 in Viersen, Deutschland. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin, Deutschland.)
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Nezaket Ekici
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Kaffeeklatsch (2019), Video-Performance, HD, 6’17”, Leihgabe des Künstlers
In ihrer Video-Performance Kaffeeklatsch (2019) bezieht sich Nezaket Ekici auf das deutsche Nachmittagsritual „Kaffee und Kuchen“, eine Instanz der Begegnung und des Zusammenseins für viele deutsche Familien. Die Geschichte des Kaffeeklatsches ist eine lange. Im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, mit dem Aufkommen des Bürgertums, trafen sich in Deutschland Frauen zum Kaffee und Tratschen – Kränzchen – um sich untereinander auszutauschen und sich Freiheiten zu gönnen, die bis dahin den Männern in gesellschaftlichen Kreisen vorbehalten gewesen waren. Nezaket Ekici thematisiert die Tradition des Kaffeeklatsches aus ihrer Perspektive als türkische Migrantin und voll integrierte Deutsche und hinterfragt ihr Zugehörigkeitsgefühl zur deutschen Gesellschaft. Sie fragt sich, was ihre eigene deutsche Tradition ist – was zu der allgemeinen Frage führt, was eigentlich deutsche Tradition an sich ist? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, inszeniert sich Ekici als drei Charaktere in traditioneller deutscher Tracht aus dem Schwarzwald, dem Spreewald und Thüringen, die den Süden, den Norden und die Mitte Deutschlands repräsentieren. Mit dem Fokus auf Artikulation, Gestik und Mimik der Darstellerin trinkt Ekici mit ihren Doppelgängern Kaffee in diesem spielerischen Video, das den schmalen Grat zwischen Fremdheit und Zugehörigkeit thematisiert. Und obwohl diese Arbeit kurz vor dem Ausbruch der Pandemie entstanden ist, wird uns beim Betrachten jetzt – im zweiten Jahr der Abstandhaltens und der zeitweiligen Lockdowns, in dem wir alle viel zu viel Zeit in unserer eigenen Gesellschaft verbracht haben – klar, wie kostbar diese einfache Freiheit ist, mit anderen zusammen zu kommen.
Nezaket Ekici (* 1970 in Kirsehir, Türkei. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin & Stuttgart, Deutschland und Istanbul, Türkei.)
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Thomas Eller
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THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered) (2020), Video, 5’24” & THE white male complex #5 (lost) (2014), HD Video, 11’25”
Thomas Ellers THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered) entstand inmitten der Corona–Pandemie, während der Künstler sich in China im Lockdown befand. Wie so viele von Ellers Arbeiten ist es ein Selbstporträt, aber gleichzeitig auch ein intimes Porträt von COVID–19, das in Form und Inhalt die biologische Basis des Virus nachbildet. Eller projiziert sich selbst in das Bild in einem visuell und akustisch geschichteten Palimpsest. Der Künstler dupliziert sich selbst, wieder und wieder, wobei jede seiner Kopien den kompletten genetischen Code eines der ersten Stämme des SARS-CoV2-Virus rezitiert, der in Wuhan entdeckt wurde, wo der COVID-19-Ausbruch begann. Aber die Kopien sind nicht perfekt. Die Duplikate variieren. Eller macht Fehler, während er die dichten Zeilen des genetischen Codes rezitiert, bringt hier die RNA-Sequenz durcheinander, lässt dort ein Nukleotid fallen… Mehr Kopien des genetischen Codes, mehr kleine Fehler da und dort. Thomas Eller hat in eine visuelle Sprache übersetzt, wie sich das Virus selbst repliziert, seine genetische Information durch Vervielfältigung verbreitet und durch Fehler von Kopie zu Kopie mutiert, um neue Virenstämme zu schaffen. Zwischen den Duplikaten auf der Leinwand tritt eine digital veränderte Kopie des Künstlers ins Bild; ein Eller in Pixeln, mit der Roboterstimme eines Computers, die die Sequenz der Nukleotide rezitiert. Die Technologie eilt, um den Virus zu überholen, aber wann wird sie ihn einholen? Eineinhalb Jahre nach Beginn der Pandemie warten wir immer noch auf Impfstoffe, auf Behandlungen, auf Heilmittel. Bis dahin verstecken wir uns vor dem Virus – und voreinander. Wir folgen den Abstandsregeln und warten darauf, dass die Wissenschaft den Wettlauf mit der Natur gewinnt. Wir sollten froh sein, wenn das Virus einfach aufhört, so wie Eller es tut, und verschwindet.
Gedreht am Strand von Catania auf der italienischen Insel Sizilien im Jahr 2014, nimmt THE white male complex #5 (lost) auf unheimliche Weise das tragische Schiffsunglück von 2015 vorweg, bei dem 700 afrikanische Migranten an derselben Küste ums Leben kamen, und spielt auf die nahe gelegene Insel Lampedusa an, die als Ankunftsort für Migrant:innen und für das tragische Schiffsunglück berüchtigt ist, bei dem 2013 366 afrikanische Migrant:innen auf einem überfüllten Fischerboot ums Leben kamen. Mit der nur allzu bekannten Umtriebigkeit der Nachrichtenzyklen in unserem Turbo-Informationszeitalter beschäftigten diese Tragödien die Medien nur für einige Tage oder Wochen, bevor diese zu dringenderen Anliegen übergingen. Aber auch wenn die Medien das Interesse verloren haben, werden die zugrunde liegenden Probleme hinter diesen Tragödien und vielen anderen wie diesen so lange bestehen bleiben, wie Menschen irgendwo auf diesem Globus die Hoffnung auf ein besseres Leben hegen und ihrem Instinkt folgen, vor Notlagen jeder Art zu fliehen. In diese Lücke zwischen dem Desinteresse der globalen Medien und dem anhaltenden Bedürfnis, die Geschichten von Menschen in solch verzweifelten Situationen zu erzählen, tritt der Raum für Kunst.
Ein Mann, der die allgegenwärtige Bekleidung unzähliger Berufe trägt – schwarzer Anzug und Krawatte, weißes Hemd, schwarze Schuhe – schwimmt unpassender Weise im Meer. Schwimmt er oder ertrinkt er? Diese Frage stellt sich unweigerlich, wenn die Aufnahme zwischen über und unterhalb der Wasseroberfläche schlingert. Dieser Mann, der fortwährend im Meer ringt, ist der Künstler selbst, der die Notlage so vieler Menschen nachstellt, die an diesen Ufern angespült werden. In einer Endlosschleife an der Schwelle zwischen Leben und Tod lässt dieses Werk die Betrachter:innen mit dem Gefühl zurück, am surrealen Überlebenskampf eines Mannes mitschuldig zu sein. Doch während ein weißer Mann, der in einem Anzug untergetaucht, surreal wirkt, sind die unzähligen Migranten, die einer ähnlichen Notlage die Stirn bieten, die Realität, in der wir leben. Thomas Eller thematisiert in seiner eigenen Bildsprache den Wassertod von Wanderarbeiter:innen als ein leider universelles Leiden, ohne zeitliche oder örtliche Charakteristika. Dies könnte jedes Meer, jeder Strand, jede Tragödie sein. Und in der zeitlosen Metapher des Wassertretens steht dieses Werk auch für unsere anhaltende Unfähigkeit, bei der Suche nach einer Lösung für die unzähligen Probleme, die Menschen auf der ganzen Welt dazu bringen, ihr Leben auf der Suche nach einem besseren zu riskieren, voranzukommen. Aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen und nur als die Metapher, den Kopf über Wasser zu halten, gelesen, wird THE white male complex, #5 (lost) zu einem zeitlosen Werk, das gleichermaßen für die Kämpfe der conditio humana steht. Ob auf beruflicher oder persönlicher Ebene, wer von uns hat sich nicht schon einmal in seinem Leben so gefühlt, als ob sie oder er ertrinkt. Dem Druck, den Erwartungen und den Ängsten, die ihn nach unten ziehen, fast, aber nie ganz erliegend, übersetzt Thomas Eller eine universelle menschliche Erfahrung in eine visuelle Sprache, die gleichzeitig hoffnungsvoll, hoffnungslos und unabänderlich ist.
Thomas Eller (* 1964 in Coburg, Deutschland. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin, Deutschland und Peking, China.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/413957159 [/fve]
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/98466373 [/fve]
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Theo Eshetu
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Festival of Sacrifice (2012), HD Video, 18’
Festival of Sacrifice entstand ursprünglich als 6-Kanal-Videoinstallation, die das rituelle Schlachten einer Ziege während der Feierlichkeiten zu Eid-ul-Adha, dem islamischen Opferfest, zeigt. Durch eine mehrfache Spiegelung wird das extreme Filmmaterial in eine Reihe von Bildern sublimiert, die an traditionelle islamische Ornamente erinnern. Die geschickte Sezierung des Tierkörpers spiegelt sich in der kaleidoskopischen Auflösung des Videobildes wider. Die emotionalen und ästhetischen Aspekte ritueller religiöser Praktiken werden hier durch den musikalischen Soundtrack der Arbeit verstärkt.
„Opferpraktiken zu feiern reicht zu den Ursprüngen des religiösen Denkens zurück. Alle Religionen beginnen mit einer Opfergabe. Festival of Sacrifice ist Teil einer Serie von Videos, die Aspekte der islamischen Kultur als Ausgangspunkt für die Erforschung formaler Qualitäten der Repräsentation und der zugrunde liegenden Verbindungen zwischen Kulturen betrachtet. Gefilmt auf der kenianischen Insel Lamu während der Feierlichkeiten zu Eid-ul-Adha, stellt das Video durch die Vervielfältigung der Bilder kaleidoskopische Muster nach, die den spirituellen Aspekt der Handlung hervorheben. Interkulturelle Beziehungen, ob sie nun als Austausch oder als Kampf gesehen werden, werden stark von der Wirkung von Bildern und deren Verwendung beeinflusst. Während Religion und technologische Entwicklung oft dazu benutzt werden, Unterschiede zu verstärken, hat die elektronische Vernetzung eine Plattform für gegenseitigen Austausch geschaffen und sogar das Konzept der Landschaft verändert.“
– Theo Eshetu
Theo Eshetu (* 1958 in London, England; lebt und arbeitet in Berlin, Deutschland)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/161355780 [/fve]
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Amir Fattal
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ATARA (2019), HD Video, 15’20”
ATARA(2019) ist ein Sci-Fi Film im Stil der 1970er Jahre, der als 2-Kanal-Videoinstallation mit Begleitung von zeitgenössischer Opernmusik konzipiert ist. Die Partitur basiert auf der Oper Tristan und Isolde von Richard Wagner, Originalmusik von Boris Bojadzhiev. Vor Ort in Berlin gedreht, erzählt der Film die Geschichte zweier Gebäude, die einst am selben Ort standen: das Berliner Stadtschloss, das im Zweiten Weltkrieg durch Bombardierung der Alliierten zerstört wurde, und der Palast der Republik, der 1973 an seiner Stelle als Regierungssitz der DDR errichtet und 2008 umstrittenerweise zerstört wurde, um dem Wiederaufbau einer zeitgenössischen Kopie des Stadtschlosses Platz zu machen. Die Wiederauferstehung dieser historischen Kopie begann aufgrund der Kontroversen um das Projekt erst 2013. In einer Stadt, die sich ständig auf dem schmalen Grat zwischen der Bewältigung ihrer schmerzhaften Geschichte und dem Nicht–Vergessen derselben bewegt, wird die Entscheidung, das Stadtschloss wiederauferstehen zu lassen, um alle Berliner ethnografischen und wissenschaftshistorischen Museen umzusiedeln und zusammenzuführen, von vielen als vorsätzliche Ausradierung der DDR–Vergangenheit und gefährliche Revision der Geschichte interpretiert. Diese Kontroverse ist in einer Stadt, die auch mehr als 75 Jahre nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs immer noch auf ihren Bombenkratern baut, deutlich zu spüren.
ATARA folgt einer Zeremonie, die im Palast stattfindet, im Moment, in dem ein Gebäude wiederaufersteht und das andere Gebäude sich zu einer geisterhaften Erinnerung dematerialisiert. ATARA folgt einem Astronauten, der durch die Baustelle des neuen Stadtschlosses wandert und dabei eine ikonische Lampe aus dem zerstörten Palast der Republik trägt; die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem kollektiven Gedächtnis der Architektur und ihrer symbolischen Repräsentation im öffentlichen Raum. Die Musik basiert auf der Liebestod-Arie aus der Oper Tristan und Isolde, die von Isolde nach Tristans Tod gesungen wird. Die Partitur wurde erstellt, indem die letzte Note jeder Zeile der Partitur als erste Note übernommen wurde und so fortgefahren wurde, bis ein neues „gespiegeltes“ Stück entstanden war. Als würde man in der Zeit rückwärts und vorwärts reisen, wird die Aufnahme dieses Stücks dann digital rückwärts abgespielt, um zum Soundtrack von ATARA zu werden, was eine weitere Anspielung auf die Idee der Wiederauferstehung darstellt.
Amir Fattal (* 1978 in Tel Aviv, Israel; lebt und arbeitet in Berlin, Deutschland)
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Doug Fishbone
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Artificial Intelligence (2018), Video, 2’48”, Leihgabe des Künstlers
Artificial Intelligence (2018) ist eine kurze Meditation über Zeit, Vergänglichkeit und Verlust, die ursprünglich für das Werkleitz Festival in Halle, Deutschland, entstand. Es spannt einen Bogen vom Diebstahl der Mona Lisa im Jahr 1911 über die Wurstknappheit in der DDR bis hin zum Mahabharata und bietet eine ungewöhnliche Perspektive auf den Aufstieg und Fall der menschlichen Zivilisation durch das Prisma des Chaos im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Jahrhunderts. Das Stück gewährt einen Moment des Innehaltens, um über die Zerbrechlichkeit und Eitelkeit unseres täglichen Lebens nachzudenken, wenn auch mit einer leichtherzigen Note. Mit einer Slideshow online gefundener historischer Bilder entfaltet Fishbone eine humorvolle und philosophische Erzählung und nimmt uns mit auf eine Reise durch die Turbulenzen der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit in Deutschland und durch sein Vermächtnis der Instabilität. Wenn man sich dieses Werk jetzt im Kontext der Corona-Zeit ansieht, zeichnet Artificial Intelligence ein seltsam vorausschauendes Porträt unserer Zeit, das an die Ängste und Unsicherheiten der ersten Pandemiewelle vor über einem Jahr erinnert – von der Lebensmittelknappheit in den Geschäften über die Übernahme der urbanen Straßen durch wilde Tiere bis hin zur vorsätzlichen Leugnung unserer eigenen Sterblichkeit trotz aller gegenteiligen Beweise. Wir alle hoffen, dass sich die Geschichte nicht wiederholt.
Doug Fishbone (* 1969 in New York, USA. Lebt und arbeitet in London, England.)
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James P. Graham
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Chronos (1999), Video, 6’20”
Chronos (1999) ist der zweite Teil von Grahams Cycle of Life Serie, die zwischen 1999 und 2001 entstand. Sie nutzt den Humor des alltäglichen Lebens, um den „Gebrauch“ und „Verlust“ von Zeit gegenüber zu stellen. Ursprünglich von Channel 4 Television UK in Auftrag gegeben, wurde diese Arbeit zwischen Februar und März 1999 vor Ort in Rajastan, Indien gedreht. Der fröhliche Soundtrack begleitet rasante Bilder von Friseurläden am Straßenrand, die eine kurze Atempause von der unaufhörlichen Bewegung einer lebhaften Stadt bieten. Jetzt, auf dem Höhepunkt der humanitären Tragödie, die sich aufgrund der Verwüstungen durch die Pandemie in Indien abspielt, erlangt Chronos eine schmerzhaft wehmütige Ergriffenheit, die an unbeschwertere Zeiten erinnert.
James P. Graham (* 1961 in Windsor, England. Lebt und arbeitet in London und Italien.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/20608426 [/fve]
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Mariana Hahn
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Burn My Love, Burn (2013), Performance Video, 5’24”
Burn My Love, Burn (2013) erforscht den Körper als Träger einer historischen Signatur. Indem sie ein Gedicht auf ein Leichentuch schreibt, das einst ihrer kürzlich verstorbenen Großmutter gehörte, und dessen Überreste anschließend verbrennt und verzehrt, untersucht Mariana Hahn die Beziehung zwischen Text, Erinnerungsbildung und der menschlichen – insbesondere weiblichen – Form.
„Der Körper tut dies willentlich, er schreibt sich ein, verschlingt die Geschichte, wird zu einem Behälter, der innerhalb einer Erzählung vibriert und lebt. Das Leichentuch wird zum elementaren Signifikanten einer solchen historischen Erzählung, es ist von der Geschichte imprägniert worden, fungiert als Denkmal. Durch die Verbrennung kann es Teil einer organischen Form in Bewegung werden. Der Text bedingt und erschafft den Körper innerhalb des ganz spezifisch hermetisch abgeschlossenen Raumes. Die Worte aktivieren das Erinnerungsfeld des Körpers ebenso wie sie neue Erinnerungen schaffen. Das Ritual wird zur Form, durch die diese Transformation vollzogen werden kann. Der Körper frisst den Körper, zerstört und malt wieder, ein anderes Bild. Wieder geschieht dies durch das Wort, es erschafft das Fleisch, gibt ihm differenzierende Färbung, seine plausible Perspektive. Der Körper fungiert als Papier, er wird von jenen Geflüster der Geschichte eingeschrieben, er wird zu einem lebendigen Artefakt seiner eigenen Geschichte.“
– Mariana Hahn
Mariana Hahn (* in Schwäbisch Hall, Deutschland. Lebt und arbeitet in Paris, Frankreich.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/70407307 [/fve]
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Gülsün Karamustafa
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Personal Time Quartet (2000), 4-Kanal-Videoinstallation, 2’39” im Loop
Die Video- und Klanginstallation Personal Time Quartet (2000) ist als eine sich ständig verändernde Klanglandschaft konzipiert, die die wiederkehrenden Bilder einer endlosen Kindheit begleitet. Der Sound wurde speziell für diese Arbeit von dem slowakischen Rockmusiker Peter Mahadic komponiert. Jeder Track besteht aus verschiedenen Samples (einige davon stammen von Rockkonzerten) und, aktiviert eins der vier Kanäle des bewegten Bildes. Die Arbeit ist so installiert, dass bei jedem erneuten Einschalten die vier Kanäle nie synchron laufen, sondern stets ein neues Quartett zu den geloopten Bildern produzieren. Personal Time Quartet beschäftigt sich mit dem Schnittpunkt zwischen der persönlichen Biografie der Künstlerin und der Geschichte ihres Heimatlandes. Der zeitliche Rahmen, oder die „persönliche Zeit“, die diese vier Videos abdecken, beginnt im Geburtsjahr ihres Vaters und endet in den frühen Tagen ihrer eigenen Kindheit. Gefilmt in Karamustafas Wohnung in Istanbul, zeigt jedes Video das gleiche junge Mädchen – das Alter Ego der Künstlerin – bei verschiedenen Aktivitäten. Das hüpfende Mädchen suggeriert eine unbeschwerte Kindheit; das Mädchen, das sich die Nägel lackiert, deutet auf eine Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Weiblichkeit hin; das Mädchen, das die Wäsche zusammenlegt, könnte als Kommentar zur erwarteten Rolle der Frau in der Gesellschaft gelesen werden; während für das Mädchen das Öffnen von Schränken und Schubladen eine Möglichkeit ist, die verborgenen Geheimnisse und Geschichten zu entdecken, die so sehr Teil unserer Erinnerungen an Kindheit und Jugend sind. In dieser Installation zeigt Karamustafa, wie ähnlich die Entwicklung der (weiblichen) Identität sein kann, selbst in sehr unterschiedlichen Kulturen. Dieses zeitlose Werk, das als Porträt der Kindheit der Künstlerin gedacht war, zeichnet, wenn man es in unserem heutigen Kontext betrachtet, ein Bild davon, wie sich viele von uns während langer Zeiträume des Eingesperrtseins gefühlt haben, in denen wir daheim festsaßen und ständig die gleichen häuslichen Aufgaben wiederholten.
Gülsün Karamustafa (* 1946 in Ankara, Türkei. Lebt und arbeitet in Istanbul, Türkei und Berlin, Deutschland.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/115125359 [/fve]
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Hannu Karjalainen
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Woman on the Beach (2009), Video, 13’6”
Woman on the Beach (2009) ist eine Fotografie, die mittels einer subtilen poetischen Bewegung aktiviert wird und Betrachter:innen dafür belohnt, dass sie sich die Zeit nehmen, sie zu betrachten. Wir sehen eine Frau, gefilmt mit dem Fokus auf ihr unbewegliches Gesicht, wie sie regungslos auf dem nassen Sand liegt. Die Illusion eines unbewegten Bildes wird nur durch das stoßweise Rauschen der Wellen unterbrochen, die sie umspülen. Dann kehrt das bewegte Bild in die Stille zurück. In diesem Tableau vivant unterläuft Hannu Karjalainen die Konventionen der klassischen Porträtfotografie und erzeugt eine beeindruckende Spannung zwischen dem unbewegten und dem bewegten Bild.
Hannu Karjalainen (*1978 in Finnland; lebt und arbeitet in Helsinki, Finnland)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/39542109 [/fve]
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David Krippendorff
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Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015), HD Video, 14’9”
Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015) nimmt uns mit auf eine intime Reise durch Identität und Geschichte. David Krippendorffs zeitverzerrende Hommage an eine sich verändernde Welt präsentiert eine Möchtegern-Aida, die zu einem bewegenden Soundtrack aus der gleichnamigen Oper Tränen über einen Ort und eine Zeit vergießt, die nicht mehr existieren.
„Nothing Escapes My Eyes handelt von der stillen Verwandlung eines Ortes und eines Menschen, die beide der Melancholie der Konformität unterworfen sind. Der Film wurde von der berühmten Oper Aida inspiriert, um in metaphorischer Form aktuelle Themen wie kulturelle Identität, Verlust und Anpassungsdruck darzustellen. Der Film bezieht sich auf folgendes historisches Ereignis im Zusammenhang mit dieser Oper: Aida wurde 1871 in Kairo im Khedivial-Opernhaus uraufgeführt. Hundert Jahre später wurde das Gebäude durch einen Brand völlig zerstört und durch ein mehrstöckiges Parkhaus ersetzt. Trotzdem trägt der Platz bis heute den Namen Opernplatz: „Meidan El Opera“. Der Film verbindet diese städtebauliche Veränderung mit der schmerzhaften Verwandlung einer Frau (Schauspielerin Hiam Abbass), die dabei ist, eine Identität für eine andere abzulegen, um eine andere anzunehmen. Ohne Dialoge wird der Film mit einem musikalischen Ausschnitt aus Verdis Oper Aida unterlegt, deren Text die Schwierigkeiten ausdrückt, seinem Land und seiner kulturellen Identität treu zu bleiben. Die persönliche und urbane Transformation thematisiert Fragen der Identität, des Verlustes und der Orientierungslosigkeit als Folge des historischen Kolonialismus und der heutigen Globalisierung.“
– David Krippendorff
David Krippendorff (*1967 in Berlin, Deutschland. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/261725727 [/fve]
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Janet Laurence
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Grace HD Video, 5’22” & Dingo (2013), HD Video, 4’8” & The Other Side of Nature / Panda (2014), HD Video, 9’18” & Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), HD Video, 2’56”, Leihgabe des Künstlers
Die renommierte australische Künstlerin Janet Laurence ist bekannt für ihre Arbeit zu Umweltthemen, die sie oft zusammen mit Wissenschaftler:innen im Rahmen internationaler Naturschutzinitiativen durchführt. Laurence’ Praxis ist eine direkte Reaktion auf zeitgenössische ökologische Katastrophen und positioniert die Kunst innerhalb des essentiellen Dialogs der Umweltpolitik, um ein Verständnis für den Einfluss des Menschen auf die bedrohte natürliche Welt zu schaffen und zu kommunizieren, um unsere lebenswichtigen Beziehungen zu dieser wiederherzustellen. Hier werden Werke aus zwei Serien gezeigt: die Vanishing Serie, die bedrohte Tiere am Rande des Aussterbens zeigt, und Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef, aufgenommen während einer Zusammenarbeit mit Wissenschaftler:innen, die den Zusammenbruch von Korallenriffen im australischen Great Barrier Reef erforschen – einer Welterbestätte, die das größte lebende und gleichzeitig schnell sterbende Korallenriff des Planeten ist – und die für „Artists 4 Paris Climate“, das Ausstellungsprogramm der COP21, die UN–Klimakonferenz 2015, in Auftrag gegeben wurde.
„Diese ökologische Krise erfordert, dass wir unseren Fokus von einer menschenzentrierten Perspektive auf einen breiteren, artenübergreifenden Umweltansatz verlagern, denn wie sonst sollen wir ethisch leben und unseren Platz in dieser Welt finden. Diese Arbeiten stammen aus einer Serie von Videos, die ich während meiner Recherchen in geschützten Lebensräumen für Tieren mit versteckten Kameras, die speziell für zoologische Forschung entwickelt wurden, aufgenommen habe. In der Projektion werden die Videos verändert und verlangsamt… Ich möchte eine Intimität mit diesen Tieren ermöglichen und unsere Verbindungen zueinander aufzeigen… Ich möchte uns in Kontakt mit der Lebenswelt bringen. Mit einem Fokus auf den Tieren und ihren Verlust, denke ich über die Einsamkeit des letzten einer Art nach. Was war ihr Tod? Ich frage mich nach ihrer Umwelt, der einzigartigen Welt, in der jede Spezies lebt: die Welt, wie ihr Körper sie darstellt, die Welt, die durch die Form des Organismus selbst gebildet wird. Es ist eine sensorische Welt aus Raum, Zeit, Objekten und Qualitäten, die Wahrnehmungszeichen für Lebewesen bilden. Ich denke, es ist wichtig, diese Verbindung zu finden, um Mitgefühl und Fürsorge für die Entwicklung einer echten Beziehung zu anderen Spezies, mit denen wir den Planeten teilen müssen, zu entwickeln.“
– Janet Laurence
Janet Laurence (* 1947 in Sydney, Australien. Lebt und arbeitet in Sydney.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/70449386 [/fve]
Grace (2012), HD Video, 5’22” & Dingo (2013), HD Video, 4’8”
The Other Side of Nature / Panda (2014), HD Video, 9’18”
Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), HD Video, 2’56”
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Sarah Lüdemann
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Schnitzelporno (2012), HD Video Peformance, 174’
Schnitzelporno (2012) ist ein „durational“ Performance-Video, in dem eine nicht identifizierbare Lüdemann zwei Stunden lang unaufhörlich auf ein Stück Fleisch einprügelt. Diese körperlich anstrengende Aktion, die damit beginnt, dass die makellose, weiß gekleidete Figur sinnlich über die Oberfläche des Fleisches streicht, endet schließlich mit der totalen Zerstörung des Steaks. Auf drei Stunden Video verlangsamt und künstlich aufgehellt, betont das finale, verwaschene Video auf beunruhigende Weise die Trennung zwischen sanften, liebkosenden Gesten und der Brutalität der Aktion selbst. Jeder erste Liebkosung verringert die Unmittelbarkeit der Gewalt – eine Handlung, die, gepaart mit der Konzeption des Fleisches als Körpermetapher, die tragfähigen Grenzen der (weiblichen) Identitätsbildung in Frage stellt. Was passiert, fragt Lüdemann, wenn diese vertraute, formende Handlung ohne Ende wiederholt wird?
„Die Idee, den Körper und damit das „Selbst“ zu kreieren, zu formen und sogar zu verzerren, um eine liebenswerte, bewundernswerte, respektable etc. (Re-)Präsentation des „Selbst“ zu schaffen, suggeriert einen Wunsch nach Kontrolle und ein gewisses Maß an Gewalt und Brutalität gegenüber sich selbst. In Schnitzelporno abstrahiere ich den Körper in Fleisch, in Fleisch, das ich mittels eines Fleischklopfers modifiziere. Das Werkzeug selbst trägt bereits eine abwegige Idee in sich, nämlich etwas zu schlagen, um es weich und zart zu machen. Das Werkzeug und sein ursprünglicher Zweck werden weiter ad absurdum geführt, denn ich höre nicht auf, das Stück Fleisch zu schlagen, bis es völlig ausgelöscht ist, bis ich „NObody“ bin. Die Bildsprache der Videoinstallation ist anfangs poetisch und schön, langsam wird sie repetitiv und schließlich abstoßend, eklig und absolut brutal.“
– Sarah Lüdemann (Beauham)
Sarah Lüdemann (Beauham) (* in Köln, Deutschland. Lebt und arbeitet in Bremen, Deutschland.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/63734941 [/fve]
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Shahar Marcus
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Seeds (2012), HD Video, 5’3”
Die visuell beeindruckende Arbeit Seeds (2012) folgt einem Minenräumteam durch die Wüste, wie es Landminen lokalisiert und entfernt. Die Gewalt, die diese Aktion impliziert – sowohl die Gefahr der Detonation als auch die Anspielung auf den Konflikt, der diese Waffen überhaupt erst dort platziert hat – steht in scharfem Kontrast zur Schönheit der natürlichen Landschaft und den langsamen, meditativen Handlungen des Minenräumteams. Während sie sich über den trockenen, felsigen Boden bewegen, hinterlassen sie Spuren von rotem Klebeband, das die Landschaft in klare Reihen abgrenzt. Eine einsame Figur betritt den Rahmen und folgt den Soldaten. In Anlehnung an Millets berühmtes Gemälde Der Sämann geht Shahar Marcus, gekleidet wie ein Pionier, die Erdreihen entlang und sät Samen in den frisch gerodeten Boden. Dieser Akt des Säens wird zu einer heilenden Geste, die neues Leben und Hoffnung in die vernarbte Erde pflanzt. Seeds ist ein poetisches Werk über Krieg und die Hoffnung auf Frieden und über die Notwendigkeit, die Wunden zu heilen, die die verheerenden Eingriffe der Menschheit in die Natur auf unserem Planeten hinterlassen haben.
„Das Werk Seeds erforscht das Phänomen der vergrabenen Minen, die es in Israel und auf der ganzen Welt gibt, und zeigt auf, wie diese Gebiete immer noch die Folgen des Krieges in ihrem Boden tragen, während sie gleichzeitig die neuen Bevölkerungen unterstützen, die das Konfliktgebiet bewohnen müssen. Er untersucht die Kraft des gegenwärtigen Moments an diesen Orten, wo die Bemühungen beginnen, diese Todeszonen in Orte zu verwandeln, die das Leben bewusst bejahen und die Kontinuität genau dort innewohnen, wo sie einst blockiert war.“
– Shahar Marcus
Shahar Marcus (* 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel. Lebt und arbeitet in Tel Aviv, Israel.)
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Kate McMillan
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Paradise Falls I (2011), HD Video, 2’49” & Paradise Falls II (2012), HD Video, 3’28”
Mit dem Fokus auf Orte längst vergessener Traumata versuchen Paradise Falls I & II, Parallelen zwischen physischen Landschaften und den psychologischen Landschaften der eigenen Erinnerungen, breiteren kulturellen Geschichten und Erzählungen der Künstlerin zu ziehen. Der Sound für beide Filme, kreiiert von Cat Hope, bildet einen entfremdenden Kontrast zu den poetischen Bildern der Filme und unterstreicht die anhaltende Unruhe der Geschichte. Die Filme sind wie bewegte Gemälde und beziehen sich stark auf die deutsche Landschaftsmalerei der Romantik. McMillan zitiert mit einem kritischen Blick und betrachtet die Landschaftsmalerei der Romantik als Teil einer Aufklärungsideologie, die uns geholfen hat, zu vergessen. Indem wir uns auf den Betrachtungsprozess einlassen, nehmen wir an einem Wiedererinnern teil, erkennen die Schattenseiten der Dinge an, werden aber auch Zeuge der schönen Traurigkeit, die im Gegensatz zu den Schrecken des Vergessens der Geschichte steht.
Paradise Falls I (2011) wurde im Schwarzwald an einem See namens Mummelsee gedreht, der auf einem erloschenen Vulkan liegt. In der deutschen Folklore gibt es viele Mythen, die mit diesem See verbunden sind, vor allem über eine Sirene, die Männer in den Wald lockt und sie tötet. In McMillans Video flackert eine geisterhafte weibliche Gestalt an den Rändern der ansonsten reglosen Landschaft aus dem Blick heraus und wieder in ihn hinein. Paradise Falls I setzt ein Zusammenspiel von Landschaft, Erinnerung, Vergessen und Geschichte in Gang und untersucht, wie die Geschichte Ablagerungen in der Landschaft hinterlassen kann und die Vergangenheit oft zurückkehrt, um uns heimzusuchen.
Paradise Falls II (2012) folgt einem Ureinwohner, der auf die schroffe Silhouette von Wadjemup/Rottnest Island in Australien zu rudert. Auch er taucht auf und verschwindet wieder aus dem Blickfeld, um sich schließlich im tiefschwarzen Meer zu verlieren. Auf der Insel befand sich ein Gefängnis für Aborigines, das in historischen Aufzeichnungen kaum erwähnt wird. Der Film zeigt einen Mann, der zu seinen Gefängniswärter*innen zurückrudert und damit andeutet, dass Geschichte nicht immer vergessen werden kann. Die gespenstischen Figuren in Paradise Falls I & II stehen für gespaltene und einseitige Geschichten, die aus dem Fokus verschwinden, aber in unserer kollektiven Psyche als dunkle und eindringliche Traumata weiterleben.
Kate McMillan (* 1974 in Hampshire, England. Lebte von 1982–2012 in Perth, Australien. Lebt und arbeitet in London, England.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/78224274 [/fve]
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/78224275 [/fve]
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Almagul Menlibayeva
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Transoxania Dreams (2011), HD Video, 23’, Leihgabe des Künstlers
Almagul Menlibayevas Film erzählt eine Geschichte von ökologischer Verwüstung im Gewand eines mythologischen Narrativs, inszeniert in der weiten Landschaft ihrer Heimat Kasachstan, die von 60 Jahren sowjetischer Besatzung verwüstet worden ist. Transoxania Dreams (2011) wurde in der brutal verwandelten Region des Aralsees gedreht, wo die Ureinwohner*innen im Aralkum leben, der Wüste einer einst blühenden Region, die aufgrund der radikalen sowjetischen Bewässerungspolitik nun ganz ohne Wasser ist. Die Region Transoxiana (griechisch für „jenseits des Oxus“) im Südwesten Kasachstans, Usbekistans und Tadschikistans, einst der östliche Teil des hellenistischen Regimes unter Alexander dem Großen und die ehemalige Heimat der Nomadenstämme Persiens und Turans an den Ufern des Oxus, blieb für viele Jahrhunderte eine wichtige Handelsregion entlang der Nördlichen Seidenstraße mit blühenden Zivilisationen und fruchtbaren Ebenen. Von der ehemaligen sowjetischen Politik in Mitleidenschaft gezogen und für kommerzielle und kulturelle Belänge irrelevant, liegt Transoxiana heute kahl und entblößt in einem surrealen Daseinszustand mit ausrangierten Fischereiflotten auf staubigem Terrain, verwüstet von Schrottmetallsammler:innen, während seine Bewohner:innen zusehen, wie das Meer immer weiter in die unerreichbare Ferne einer scheinbar besseren Welt rückt. Menlibayeva erzählt in einer traumhaften Mischung aus Dokumentation und Fantasie die Geschichte einer jungen Fischertochter, die die dramatischen Veränderungen der Landschaft in der Aral-Region und ihrer Bevölkerung mit den Augen eines Kindes beobachtet. Menlibayeva führt den Zuschauer visuell durch eine leere Landschaft und einen symbolischen Traum, in dem der Vater des Mädchens auf der Suche nach dem verbliebenen Meer und neuen Fangplätzen seltsamen und verführerischen vierbeinigen weiblichen Wesen (Kentauren) auf seinem Weg durch die lebensfeindliche Wüste begegnet. In Anlehnung an die Erscheinung der griechischen Sagengestalt des Kentauren erschafft Menlibayeva verführerische Mischwesen, die sowohl sexuell aufreizend als auch bizarr sind. Der Legende nach hielten die alten Griech:innen, als sie den Nomad:innen der transoxianischen Steppe zum ersten Mal auf ihren Pferden begegneten, diese zunächst für mythologische Vierbeiner, teils Mensch, teils Tier, und fürchteten ihre wilden und magischen Kräfte. In Transoxiana Dreams spinnt Menlibayeva, selbst eine Bildzauberin, eine exzentrische Storyline und fantastische Bilderwelt aus ihrem eigenen atavistischen Repertoire; sie führt uns visuell durch eine existierende, aber unvorstellbare Landschaft in eine ferne und hypnagogische Welt.
Almagul Menlibayeva (* 1969 in Almaty, Kasachische SSR. Lebt und arbeitet in Almaty, Kasachstan und Berlin, Deutschland.)
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Tracey Moffatt
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Doomed (2007), Video, 9’21” & Other (2009), Video, 6’30”
Tracey Moffatts Doomed (2007) und Other (2010) aus der gemeinsam mit Gary Hillberg geschaffenen Serie Hollywood Montage sind aus Ausschnitten populärer Filme und Fernsehsendungen collagierte Videos, die den Wiedererkennungswert dieser Zitate der Kinogeschichte und der Populärkultur nutzen, um unsere Faszination für globale Katastrophen und die gefährliche Anziehungskraft des „Otherness“ humoristisch mitreißend zu zelebrieren. Diese Werke, die hier in einer Ausstellung mit Kunst von „anderswo“ gezeigt werden, die das Anderssein zelebriert und inmitten der anhaltenden Katastrophe einer globalen Pandemie stattfindet, sind eine unbeschwerte Antwort auf die ernsten Situationen, mit denen wir heute konfrontiert sind.
Mit der rasanten Montage von Filmausschnitten treibt Doomed Hollywoods Fixierung auf Tod und Katastrophe auf die cineastische Spitze. Anhand von fiktiven und rekonstruierten Katastrophen schafft Moffatt einen höchst unterhaltsamen, von schwarzem Humor geprägtem Blick auf die düstere Seite unserer psychologischen Landschaft. Jede Sequenz trägt eine besondere Ladung an Referenzen in sich. Sie haben ihre eigene Symbolik und ihr eigenes filmisches Territorium – das Ergreifende, das Erhabene, das Epische, das Tragische, das Zweitklassige und das geradezu Trashige. Indem sie mit dem Katastrophengenre spielt und die Formen der filmischen Unterhaltung sowie „Kunst als Unterhaltung“ betrachtet, geht Moffatt der Frage nach, was wir an Tod und Zerstörung immer so unterhaltsam finden. Die mitreißende Musik manipuliert unsere Emotionen, während sich der Soundtrack aufbaut und zum Höhepunkt steigert. Doch bei aller Zerstörung, die wir auf der Leinwand sehen und genießen, hat der Titel Doomed die Qualität des noch nicht Zerstörten. Es ist eine Beschreibung, die auf Individuen, Familien, Liebende, Politik und Nationen angewendet wird – eine Beobachtung, die von außen geschieht und dennoch die Möglichkeit und Hoffnung enthält, dass die Situation gerettet werden kann.
Other (2009), Video, 6’30”
In Other (2009) nutzt Moffatt die Klischees der filmischen Darstellung des „Anderen“, um eine Popkultur-Geschichte darüber nachzuzeichnen, wie der Westen seine Begegnungen mit Ländern und Völkern, die nicht er selbst sind, dargestellt hat. Diese Mainstream-Darstellungen verraten auf humorvolle Weise mehr über die Kulturen, die diese Filme gemacht und konsumiert haben, als über die Länder, Völker und Geschichten, die sie vorgeben, darzustellen. Das „Andere“ ist hier ein Volk und ein Ort, an dem die Überschreitung von „Rassen“-, Geschlechter- und Kulturnormen imaginiert werden kann, der aber wenig mit einer anthropologischen Realität zu tun hat. Other ist enorm unterhaltsam, rasant und sexy, während es mit sich auftürmenden Klischees durch 60 Jahre Geschichte des bewegten Bildes rollt. Es verdeutlicht auch, wie eng Begehren, Blicken, Macht und das Kinoerlebnis miteinander verwoben sind. Mit einem hypnotisierenden Fokus auf Begegnungen zwischen Menschen verschiedener Hautfarben, wie sie sich Hollywood- und Fernsehregisseure vorstellten, beginnt Other mit Sequenzen des ersten Kontakts zwischen Europäer:innen und Nichteuropäer:innen, die sich gegenseitig visuell begutachten, wobei Angst zu Neugier und Begehren eskaliert, Blicke verweilen und erotisch aufgeladen werden. Der Blick wird zur Berührung, und die erotische Spannung steigt, während westliche soziale Strukturen erodieren und wir eine kitschige, rasende Darstellung des „Anderen“ als bedrohlich, fiebrig, haltlos und erotisch in vorgetäuschten Stammesversammlungen und rasend choreografierten Tanzsequenzen sehen, die sich immer mehr einer orgiastischen sexuellen Hingabe annähern. In den Schlusssequenzen vollzieht sich das Begehren in wilden Begegnungen, die Hautfarbe und Geschlecht überschreiten und in buchstäblich explosiven Momenten gipfeln, die in den Klischees des filmischen Sexualorgasmus schwelgen: Feuer brennen, Vulkane brechen aus und schließlich explodieren Planeten.
„Other ist eine rasante Montage von Filmausschnitten, die die Anziehungskraft zwischen verschiedenen Ethnien zeigen. Marlon Brando schaut sich tahitianische Mädchen an und Samantha aus Sex and the City beäugt einen afroamerikanischen Footballspieler in der Männerumkleide. Sieben Minuten voller Blicke, Berührungen und explodierender Vulkane. Sehr lustig, sehr heiß.“
– Tracey Moffatt
Tracey Moffatt (* 1960 in Brisbane, Australien. Lebt und arbeitet in Sydney, Australien und New York, USA.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/416454021 [/fve]
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/39552060 [/fve]
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Gulnur Mukazhanova
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Iron Woman (2010), Installation: nails, screws, metal wire, chain, 40 x 30 x 5 cm
Die skulpturale Installation Iron Woman (2010) ist eine der ersten Arbeiten, die Gulnur Mukazhanova nach ihrem Umzug aus ihrer Heimat Kasachstan nach Berlin geschaffen hat. In dieser Arbeit unternimmt die Künstlerin eine persönliche Recherche zur weiblichen Identität in ihrer zentralasiatischen Kultur. Das skulpturale Objekt aus Metallnägeln und Ketten nimmt die Form eines intimen Untergewandes an, das von der Künstlerin in einer dazugehörigen Fotoserie getragen wurde. Mukazhanova erforscht den Körper einer Frau in den Konfliktzonen von Sinnlichkeit und Ideologie – an den Schnittstellen von persönlichem und sozialem Umfeld, von ethnischer vs. globaler Kultur, von Moderne vs. Tradition. Bedeutungen von Sexualität bewegen sich zwischen dem Verbotenen und dem Zugänglichen, dem Exotischen und dem Vertrauten, dem Fetischisierten und dem Alltäglichen, dem Fleischeslustigen und dem Sakralen. In diesem beschwörenden Objekt Iron Woman existiert die Dualität eines sehr persönlichen Ansatzes des weiblichen Widerstands neben einem lauten feministischen Ruf gegen die Unterdrückung von Frauen in ihren vielfältigen Formen.
Gulnur Mukazhanova (* 1984 in Semipalatinsk, Kasachstan. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin, Deutschland.)
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Anxiong Qiu
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Cake (2014), Videoanimation, 6’2”
Qiu Anxiongs Cake (2014) kombiniert Malerei, Zeichnung und Knetanimation mit einem unharmonischen Soundtrack mechanischer Geräusche, um eine exquisit gestaltete Kontemplation über die Vergangenheit, die Gegenwart und die Beziehung zwischen beiden zu offrieren. Diese zeitlose und zugleich vorausschauende Arbeit, die sechs Jahre vor der viralen Pandemie von Corona entstand, evoziert bereits ein wachsendes Gefühl des Notstands. Mit Herzfrequenzmonitoren, Sirenen und Polizeifunk-Scannern als Bestandteile des Soundtracks und Bildern von Wrestlern, die in einer Vielzahl von Medien gerendert wurden, kann diese Arbeit als besonders sinnbildlich für unsere Kämpfe in einem pandemischen Zeitalter gelesen werden. Cake ist Qui Anxiongs erster Ausflug in die Animation mit Tonmasse. Wie bei der Entstehung seiner früheren Videoarbeiten generiert der Künstler Tausende von Gemälden aus Acryl auf Leinwand, die im Laufe der Entwicklung des Films oft ausgelöscht und überarbeitet werden. Diese werden digitalisiert und in einer mühsamen Arbeit zusammengestellt, aus der schließlich das animierte Video entsteht. Obwohl er mit Acrylfarbe arbeitet, lässt er sie wie Tinte auf Reispapier aussehen und hat sich damit an der Spitze der experimentellen Tuschemalerei-Bewegung etabliert, die klassische Ästhetik mit zeitgenössischer digitaler Technologie verbindet.
Anxiong Qiu (* 1972 in Chengdu, China. Lebt und arbeitet in Shanghai, China.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/118084226 [/fve]
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Varvara Shavrova
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The Opera: Three Transformations (2010/16), 3-Kanal-Zeitraffer-Videoprojektionen mit Ton, 3’41”
The Opera (2010/16) porträtiert die Gender-Fluidität in der traditionellen Peking-Oper. Das Projekt, das während des sechsjährigen Aufenthalts von Shavrova in Peking entstand, umfasst Fotografien, Ton- und Videoprojektionen, die aus über 60 Stunden Videomaterial zusammengestellt wurden, das bei verschiedenen Aufführungen der Pekingoper, in Theatern, Umkleideräumen und bei privaten Treffen aufgenommen wurde. The Opera: Three Transformations, die hier gezeigt wird, ist ein Aspekt des umfassenderen Projekts und animiert Fotografien der Künstler:innen der Peking-Oper, die während der Produktion des Films The Opera aufgenommen wurden. The Opera ist ein Einblick in die zerbrechliche Welt sowie in die sozialen und menschlichen Aspekte der Peking-Oper, einem der am meisten verehrten nationalen Traditionen des chinesischen Kulturerbes. Das Werk konzentriert sich auf die Verwandlung der Künstler:innen der Pekingoper von Männern zu Frauen und von Frauen zu Männern. Obwohl sie von der Gesellschaft als Künstler:innen bewundert werden, können sie ihre wahren Identitäten und persönlichen Nöte nicht offen ausleben. Mit einem Blick in die archaische und oft utopische Welt der chinesischen Oper untersucht Shavrova Fragen der persönlichen Identität, der Sexualität und der Überschreitung von Geschlechterrollen, wie sie sich sowohl in der traditionellen als auch in der zeitgenössischen Kultur im heutigen China manifestieren. Das Video balanciert Momente reiner Visualität mit den strengen formalen Bewegungscodes der traditionellen Choreographie und unterstreicht so die beeindruckenden avantgardistischen Qualitäten dieser traditionellsten aller Kunstformen. Die Oper wird von einer eigens in Auftrag gegebenen Musik begleitet, die der in Peking lebende Komponist Benoit Granier geschrieben hat und die Elemente traditioneller chinesischer und zeitgenössischer elektronischer Musik enthält.
Varvara Shavrova (* in Moskau, USSR. Lebt und arbeitet zwischen Dublin, Irland, Berlin, Deutschland, und London, England.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/174793198 [/fve]
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Sumugan Sivanesan
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A Children’s Book of War (2010), Videoanimation, 1’45”
Die kurze Animation A Children’s Book of War (2010), vollgepackt mit scheinbar heiteren Bildern und einer low-tech Videospiel-Ästhetik, ist ganz und gar nicht das, was sie auf den ersten Blick zu sein scheint. In dieser prägnanten Videocollage vereinen sich Bilder verschiedener Ikonen der Populärkultur mit Verweisen auf jahrhundertelange koloniale Konflikte, die den Gründungsmythen der australischen Nation zugrunde liegen. Die Stärke von A Children’s Book of War liegt in der verblüffenden Verbindung von Krieg, Souveränität und Gewalt mit einem Format, das normalerweise für viel unbeschwertere Themen reserviert ist. Mit seiner leuchtenden Farbpalette und der amüsanten Geräuschkulisse bezieht das Video eine so vielseitige Ikonografie wie Julian Assange, das Opernhaus von Sydney und das Titelbild von Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan ein. Die Recherchen Sivanesans, die dieser Arbeit zugrunde liegen, stützen sich auf Giorgio Agambens Begriff des „Ausnahmezustands“, um den 11. September 2001, den Eintritt Australiens in den Irak-Krieg 2003, das Erdbeben in Haiti 2010 und den ersten schicksalhaften Kontakt, den Captain Cook in Australien machte, zu diskutieren. Der „Ausnahmezustand“ ist, kurz gesagt, die vorübergehende Aussetzung der Rechtsstaatlichkeit im Namen einer größeren Macht – sei es die Verteidigung gegen aufständische Kräfte oder die Bewahrung der Verfassung einer Staatshoheit. Sivanesan will uns daran erinnern, dass die Souveränität Australiens auf der Aussetzung indigener Rechte beruht – ja, dass überall in der westlichen Welt unser Leben durch die Aussetzung von Rechten ermöglicht wird, was vor allem anderswo gespürt und erlitten wird.
Sumugan Sivanesan (Lebt und arbeitet in Sydney, Australien und Berlin, Deutschland.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/45305238 [/fve]
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David Szauder
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Light Space Materia (2020), HD Video, Digitale Animation, 8’27”
David Szauders Film Light Space Materia (2020) überträgt vom Bauhaus stammende Ideen zu Technologie, neuen Materialien und Licht in einen digitalen Kontext, indem er ein ikonisches Werk aus den 1930er Jahren in eine digitale 3D-Animation und eine algorithmisch abgeleitete Klanglandschaft überführt. David Szauder ließ sich von der kinetischen Licht- und Klangskulptur Light Space Modulator (1930) von Moholy-Nagy, einem der Gründerväter des Bauhauses, inspirieren und schuf seine eigene großformatige Wiedergabe dieser ikonischen Arbeit – Light Space Modulator (2020). Szauder nutzte diese Installation anschließend als Grundlage für eine Serie von über 100 Videos, digitalen Animationen und Soundscapes. David Szauder rekontextualisiert das treibende Prinzip des Bauhauses in den digitalen Medien, Moholy-Nagys Ziel, die menschliche Wahrnehmung zu revolutionieren und dadurch der Gesellschaft zu ermöglichen, die moderne technologische Welt besser zu begreifen. Szauders Analyse der Kinetik des Originalstücks mit Bezug zum Bauhaus konzentriert sich auf die grundlegende Frage, wie zeitgenössische Technologie den formalen Ausdruck von Bewegung verändern und die Körperlichkeit von Materialien in einem digitalen Kontext erfassen könnte. Das Bauhaus hatte stets eine wichtige Vorreiterposition im Verhältnis von Kunst und Technik inne. Diese Eigenschaft bildet die wesentliche Grundlage von Szauders Arbeit, der mit Hilfe von Computercode seine Animationen und Soundscapes erstellt, die aus dem Umgebungsklang und der kinetischen Bewegung seiner Light Space Modulator-Skulptur mit Hilfe von Algorithmen, die auf der Bewegungsanalyse basieren, abgeleitet werden. Diese Klanglandschaft begleitet Szauders Film Light Space Materia, der gefundenes Filmmaterial, das sich auf die bahnbrechenden Ideen des Bauhauses bezieht, mit digitalen 3D-Animationen des Künstlers vermischt, um die haptischen Qualitäten der Bildmaterialität in den Vordergrund zu stellen.
David Szauder (* 1976 in Ungarn. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin, Deutschland.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/450055147 [/fve]
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Shingo Yoshida
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The Summit (2020), 4K Video, 23’54” (2020)
Den Spuren seines Vaters und Großvaters folgend, begibt sich Shingo Yoshida auf eine Reise zum Gipfel des Mt. Fuji – Japans Nationaldenkmal. Der Film wurde auf dem Höhepunkt des globalen pandemiebedingten Lockdowns im Winter 2020 gedreht, als die meisten von uns dem Reisen am nächsten kamen, indem sie sich alte Fotos oder Filme über weit entfernte Orte ansahen. Yoshida wählte diese Zeit der Reiseverbote und geschlossenen Grenzen, um diese persönlichste aller Reisen zu unternehmen. Er reiste von Berlin zurück nach Japan, um den Traum seiner Vorfahren wieder aufleben zu lassen, die Gedichte seines Großvaters auf dem Berg Fuji zu platzieren. The Summit ist ein Film aus statischen Aufnahmen und abgefilmten Fotografien. In einem Wechselspiel zwischen Fotografie und Bewegtbild verbindet das Video Bilder, die der Künstler bei seinem Aufstieg auf den Berg gefilmt hat, mit historischen Aufnahmen vom Bau des Observatoriums auf dem Gipfel und Familienfotos aus dem Jahr 1974 – dem Geburtsjahr des Künstlers – von seinem Vater und Großvater, die den gravierten Felsblock neben dem Observatorium platzieren. Diese generationenübergreifende Reise durch eine zeitlose Landschaft ist das Werk eines Künstlers, der sich seiner Praxis wie ein Entdecker nähert und uns einlädt, ihn auf seinen Reisen zu begleiten.
„Am 20. August, Shōwa 49 (1974), wurde auf dem Gipfel des Mt. Fuji eine Steintafel mit einem Haiku eingemeißelt. Damit erfüllte mein Vater den Traum meines Großvaters, der ein Haiku-Dichter war, eine Steintafel neben dem Observatorium auf dem Kengamine-Gipfel des Mt. Fuji, dem höchsten Berg Japans, der von alters her als Symbol verehrt wird, zu bringen.“ (Shingo Yoshida)
Shingo Yoshida
下界まで断崖富士の壁に立つ 山口誓子
[Standing atop a sheer cliff of Mt. Fuji continuing down to the world below]
Seishi YAMAGUCHI
大沢崩れ覗きてすくむ登山靴 北舟子 (祖父)
[Looking down Osawa Kuzure my feet tremble]
Hokushushi
初富士に一礼頂に父の句碑 南舟子 (父 : 菊次郎)
[Making a bow to Mt. Fuji on New Year, where stands a stone tablet inscribed with my father’s haiku]
Nanshushi
[Translation of the HAIKU in the video.]
Shingo Yoshida (* 1974 in Tokio, Japan. Lebt und arbeitet in Marseille, Frankreich.)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/417440010 [/fve]
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ART from ELSEWHERE
Selected Works from the MOMENTUM Collection
11 JUNE – 25 July 2021
@ Kulturforum Ansbach
Kunsthaus Reitbahn 3, Ansbach, Germany
Featuring:
Aaajiao (CN) – Shaarbek Amankul (KG) – Inna Artemova (RU) – Eric Bridgeman (PG/AU)
Stefano Cagol (IT) – Margret Eicher (DE) – Nezaket Ekici (TR/DE) – Thomas Eller (DE)
Theo Eshetu (ET/DE) – Amir Fattal (IL) – Doug Fishbone (US/UK) – James P. Graham (UK)
Mariana Hahn (DE) – Gülsün Karamustafa (TR) – Hannu Karjalainen (FI) – David Krippendorff (US/DE)
Janet Laurence (AU) – Sarah Lüdemann (DE) – Shahar Marcus (IL) – Kate McMillan (AU/UK)
Almagul Menlibayeva (KZ/BE) – Tracey Moffatt (AU) – Gulnur Mukazhanova (KZ) – Anxiong Qiu (CN)
Varvara Shavrova (RU) – Sumugan Sivanesan (AU) – David Szauder (HU) – Shingo Yoshida (JP)
Today, most of us live lives of perpetual motion from one piece of information to the next, from one opportunity to the next, and – until COVID-19 stopped us in our tracks – from one place to the next. Mobility – both geographical and social – not so long ago the privilege of the few, is now taken for granted as the entitlement of the majority. Artists are at the forefront of this peripatetic existence, travelling the world for inspiration, exhibitions, and artist residencies, experiencing new places and cultures through the critical lens of the outsider, and then reflecting back upon their own locales through the prism of their expanded world views. In this way, artworks serve as windows onto the world. As we now emerge carefully after months of isolation, and learn how to negotiate the new realities of a post-pandemic world, it becomes more important than ever to have such windows through which to gaze. In these uncertain times, they remind us that, for all our differences, we are all in this together.
Art from Elsewhere brings to Ansbach, for the first time, the work of 28 international artists from 16 countries from the MOMENTUM Collection, Berlin. The works shown in this exhibition focus on global issues, equally relevant to us all, no matter where we live or where we have come from. Primarily through video works, as well as painting and installation, Art from Elsewhere addresses the central issues of our transformed times: the loss and displacement of migration; alienation and the crisis of identity; nostalgia and the distortions of memory; control and surveillance in the (social media); populism, propaganda, and truth; climate change and the impacts of mankind upon nature. Together, these works address the broader question of how images are used in a digital age to both produce and reconstruct the past, as well as to reimagine the present and the future. To this end, they reflect on the social and environmental repercussions of globalization and its impact on the transformation of cultural identities; they interrogate issues of gender, inequality, and poverty; they scrutinize the environmental traumas we inflict on our planet and its creatures; and they ponder the (un)quiet poetry, conflicts, and beauty of how we must live from day to day.
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Featuring:
(Click on the artist to see the bio and the work description below)
aaajiao
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404404404 (2017), Installation, Ink & Sponge Roller, Dimensions Variable
404 is the error message which appears on blocked websites in China and around the world – a digital language transcending alphabets and cultures to be understood everywhere. Translating the digital message back into analog form, 404404404 (2017) is aaajiao’s subtle commentary on censorship and the flow of information in our digital culture. The error message is always the same, no matter the diversity of content it is covering from view. But in the artist’s rendition, the work becomes entirely site-specific, taking a new form with each installation; multiplying the message 404 in a diversity of forms and contexts.
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aaajiao (b. 1984, Xi’an, China. Lives and works in Shanghai, China and Berlin, Germany)
Active online as a media artist, blogger, activist and programmer, aaajiao is the virtual persona of Shanghai- and Berlin-based artist Xu Wenkai. Born in 1984 — the title of George Orwell’s classic allegorical novel — in one of China’s oldest cities, Xi’an, aaajiao’s art and works are marked by a strong dystopian awareness, literati spirit and sophistication. Many of aaajiao’s works speak to new thinking, controversies and phenomenon around the Internet, with specific projects focusing on the processing of data, the blogosphere and China’s Great Fire Wall. aaajiao’s work is interdisciplinary, extending from post-internet art to architecture, topography, design, and beyond to capture the pulse of the young generations consuming cyber technology and living in social media.
aaajiao’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world. Recent shows include: “Deep Simulator” Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2019-2021); “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today”, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, USA (2018); “unREAL”, Haus der elektronischen Künste, Basel, Switzerland (2017); “Shanghai Project Part II”, Shanghai, China (2017); “Remnants of an Electronic Past”, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, UK (2016); OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal Xi’an, China (2016), “Temporal Turn: Art and Speculation in Contemporary Asia”, Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas, USA (2016); “Take Me (I’m Yours)” (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann and Kelly Taxter), Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2016); “Overpop”, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); “Hack Space” (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Amira Gad), K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Shanghai, and K11 Art Museum, Hong Kong, China (2016); “Globale: Global Control and Censorship”, ZKM | Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (2015); “Thingworld International Triennial of New Media Art”, The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China (2014); Transmediale Festival of Digital Art, Berlin, Germany (2010). aaajiao was awarded the Illy Present Future Prize in 2019, the Art Sanya Awards Jury Prize in 2014, and was nominated for the first edition of OCAT-Pierre Huber Art Prize in 2014.
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Shaarbek Amankul
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/395745062 [/fve]
Duba (2006), video, 6’56”
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/395746016 [/fve]
Sham (2007), video, 4’21”
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Shaarbek Amankul’s timeless works depicting ancient traditions become particularly relevant when viewed through the prism of Corona-times. While Western medicine is still struggling to cope with the pandemic, it is perhaps time to turn to the age-old shamanistic traditions of other cultures. In Duba(2006) and Sham (2007), Kyrgyz artist Shaarbek Amankul gives us an intimate portrait of cleansing rituals performed by shamans, with the trances, incantations, cries, and grunts, that seem so alien to most of us. What we may perceive as closer to witchcraft is a form of healing still practiced in Kyrgyzstan, across Central Asia, and in manu other cultural traditions. In cultures where many still do not trust in science, they put their faith in alternative forms of medicine.
“Shamans are healers who use traditional practices to cure people of ailments, triggering natural forces on a subconscious level to help overcome illness. In Duba, there is only a close-up of a face on screen – the fascinating physiology of a trance – a shaman performing a ritual. The title of the work ‘Duba’ means ‘cleaning the soul’. In Kyrgyz culture scientific explanations can be ineffective since many people do not trust logic. The realm of informal medicine and inexplicable phenomena is often more convincing than science. This era of complex conditions of social upheaval and rapid changes within the fields of technology and communication lead to feelings of inadequacy and a loss of identity. People therefore turn to shamans to obtain treatment for their illnesses. The irrational is a form of restoration of lost identity. Sham, like Duba, documents a cleansing ritual. The unconventional appears most likely to gain a foothold in the Post-Soviet Era of no fixed paradigms. In this place, they believe in and hope for miracles. And only the shaman can enter a trance. In this state of mind, together they read prayers, they yawn and cry from excitement; they scream and belch from sicknesses of both body and mind. Strange how they meditate, scratching and beating one another. And afterwards, according to credible sources, they often don’t remember what happened to them. They will conclude that everything happened by the will of higher powers. Once they’re purified and blessed like this, they can live on more peacefully.”
– Shaarbek Amankul
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Shaarbek Amankul (b. 1959 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Lives and works in Bishkek.)
Shaarbek Amankul is a curator and interdisciplinary artist working with a variety of media: ceramics, sculpture, installation, performance, video and photography, in addition to conceptual research projects. Amankul holds art and history degrees from Frunze Art College, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (1980) and Kyrgyz National University (1989), respectively. Amankul founded the international artist group Art Connection (2001-2006), the first art initiative in Kyrgyzstan focused on environmental issues. Amankul’s conceptual and curatorial work also includes the extensive art platform B’Art Contemporary, which he founded in 2007 to instigate a critical arts dialogue between the communities of Central Asia and the global art world.
B’Art Contemporary, amongst the very first contemporary art initiatives in Kyrgyzstan, is an artistic research platform which considers art as an essential facilitator of critical dialogue on environmental, social, economic and cultural issues faced by the societies of Central Asia. To continue his mobile art practice and artistic research, in 2011 Shaarbek Amankul founded the Nomadic Art Camp, an series of nomadic art projects in Kyrgyzstan, using the practice of the traditional way of life of nomads as a source of inspiration for contemporary art practices. The project, continuing to this day, focuses on the relationship between art and the political, economic and social processes at the intersection of issues of globalization, migration and bio-cultural diversity.
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Inna Artemova
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Utopia IV (2017), oil on canvas, 180 x 240 cm, on loan from the artist
The paintings Utopia IV (2017) and Utopia XI (2018) are two out of a series of over 40 diverse works sharing the title of Utopia. Yet while the definition of utopia is the dream of a perfect society, these particular paintings evoke a sense of impending cosmic cataclysm more so than an idealized state of perfection. Whether meteors crashing through the cosmos, or the viral structures with which we have become all too familiar in the past year of pandemic, or the aftermath of some volatile force, these works send a suitably ambiguous message about the future and the present. Contriving to comingle a notion of existential threat with the sense of the sublime, these works can be seen as portraits of our precarious times. Having witnessed first-hand the collapse of the Communist utopia in her native Soviet Union, Artemova’s utopias are fragile constructivist visions in a state of constant flux; exploding, imploding, teetering on the edge of a perilous balance, or perhaps already being rebuilt. Every collapse presents the hope of a new beginning; a renewed dream of a more perfect future. Utopias are too often built on the ashes of their opposites.
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Utopia XI (2018), oil on canvas, 190 x 140 cm
Inna Artemova (b. Moscow, USSR. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Born in Moscow, Inna Artemova studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI). For her diploma project, she received the 2nd prize of the Russian Federation. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and started to focus on her work as an artist in the field of painting and drawing. Artemova’s practice remains heavily influenced by her professors at the MArchI in Moscow, the “Paper Architects“, a movement originating in the 1980s that developed futuristic architectural creations never intended to be realized. The visionary projects of the Paper Architects and her experience of the failure of the Communist utopia with the fall of the Soviet Union, has led Artemova to explore, through her constructivist painting style, the ideas of architectural utopias from the 1960s up to her own futuristic visions. In creating utopian landscapes and spaces, Artemova interrogates the future of living spaces and their impact upon human relationships. The concept of utopia stands for a space of possibility in human consciousness in which the crucial questions have to be answered again and again: Is there no alternative to the reality in which we live? What will we do in the future? Do we have to fail because of our ideal ideas?
Recent major exhibitions include: “Points of Resistance” with MOMENTUM, Berlin (2021); the Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); and the Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts presented her works in the solo show “Landscapes of Tomorrow” (2019). She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Austria and Italy. Additionally, her works were shown at international art fairs in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, the US, and Japan.
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Eric Bridgeman
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/20601726 [/fve]
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/20603350 [/fve]
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The Fight (2010), Video, 8’8”
In 2009, Eric Bridgeman traveled through remote parts of the Chimbu Province in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, his maternal homeland. Having been born in Australia, he became increasingly conscious of his own “white” Australian presence in his native land. The Fight is based on ethnographic conventions, from National Geographic to Irving Penn, which once aided in the promotion and consumption of Papua New Guinea as Australia’s next frontier. By means of acting out Western stereotypes of tribal war, The Fight parodies the history of ethnographic representation and the subsequent impact on the national and cultural identity of Papua New Guinea. The Fight documents two groups of men from Bridgeman’s own clan, the Yuri Alaiku, playfully attacking one another with spears and shields painted with artworks inspired by the bold, colorful motifs traditional to this region. Shields have been used in times of battle as potent symbols of power against attackers. Bridgeman, however, sees this icon of warfare as a protector of untold stories, undocumented histories and fading cultural practices, which have come to be integral to his subsequent practice.
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Triple X Bitter (2008), Video, 13’
The performance video Triple X Bitter enacts a deranged pub scenario in psychedelic colors, involving Boi Boi the Labourer, a group of boisterous pub-goers, two pseudo-black babes and an inflatable pool. With Bridgeman taking center stage as Boi Boi, the artist conducts the unfolding events, allowing the participants to explore their own perceptions, fears and understandings of rules of behavior in Australian pub culture, and its pervasive role in Australian cultural identity. Triple X Bitter is one of seven performance video works produced as part of Bridgeman’s interdisciplinary project The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules (2008-2010). Drawing subversive parallels between the theatres of sport and ethnography, this body of work explores cross-cultural identity through the playful deconstruction of sex, gender and race politics – subverting stereotypes that underpin the foundations of national identity within contemporary Australia and Papua New Guinea. Performed in both public and private spaces, such as sporting arenas, pubs and work sites, and referencing ethnographic studies of tribal identities during periods of colonization, these carnivalesque acts are based on the paradoxical and improvised performances of their participants. Using blackface, whiteface, slapstick, and parody, Bridgeman irreverently constructs a bizarre amalgam between the symbologies, stereotypes, and socio-cultural roles in Australia and Papua New Guinea.
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Eric Bridgeman (b. 1986 in Redcliffe, Queensland, Australia.Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia and Wahgi Valley, Jiwaka Province, Papua New Guinea.)
Eric Bridgeman is a multidisciplinary artist, based in Australia and Papua New Guinea, working with photography, painting, installation, video and performance in a variety of applications often to do with masculinity, portraiture, culture and politics. His relational art works are framed by personal connections to his maternal Yuri Alaiku clan, from Omdara, Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea, and his paternal upbringing in the suburban landscape of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The dominant focus of his work involves the discussion of social and cultural issues, often using the theatre of sport as a springboard for his ideas, addressing notions of masculinity as expressed in sporting culture and in the realm of ‘tribal warfare’ in the PNG Highlands, which mimics the drama, color and trickery seen in its national sport, Rugby League. Challenging the hardwired stereotypes of centuries of colonialist ethnographies, Bridgeman uses reconstruction, slapstick, and parody, to interrogate his own cultural and sexual identity in a broader context of belonging. In doing so, his work also seeks to address and subvert the harsh social realities of both his homeland cultures.
Bridgeman holds a Bachelor of Photography from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane (2010), where he developed his seminal work “The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules” (2008-2010). Significant solo exhibitions and commissions include: “Kala Büng”, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, AU (2018); “My Brother and the Beast”, Gallerysmith, Melbourne, AU (2018); SNO 145, Sydney Non-Objective, Sydney, AU (2018); “The Fight”, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, AU (2017); “All Stars”, Carriageworks, Sydney, AU (2012); “Haus Man”, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney, AU (2012). Recent group exhibitions include: “Nirin”, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, AU (2020); “Just Not Australian”, Artspace, Sydney, AU (2019); “Australians in PNG”, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, AU (2017); “Number 1 Neighbour”, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, AU (2016); The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane, AU (2015–2016).
Stefano Cagol
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/180760247 [/fve]
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The Time of the Flood, Fragments (2020-21), HD Video, 8’38, on loan from the artist
The Time of the Flood: Beyond the Myth through Climate Change (2020-21), is composed of 7 video performances realized by Stefano Cagol throughout a series of international artist residencies in Berlin, Venice, Rome, Vienna, and Tel-Aviv. In the time it took to complete this body of work, which began at MOMENTUM Berlin in November 2019 and ended in Tel Aviv in 2021, the world had irrevocably changed. Cagol’s concept, to re-contextualize the biblical story of the Flood within our current climate emergency, remains a crucial and timely reflection on the devastating impacts we humans have on our planet. Inspired by the biblical image of the great flood, and continuing a line that sees art, science and myth in continuous dialogue, The Time of the Flood investigates global issues such as extreme weather events, rising sea levels, the disappearance of glaciers, the mutation of winds, energy sources, and extinction. Man’s pervasive impacts upon nature – whether in the form of ecological disasters, or the unleashing of new deadly viruses – has been a persistent focus throughout Cagol’s work. What began as a reflection upon the intersections of art, ecology, and technology, acquired an even greater urgency in being realized amidst a global pandemic. Cagol’s Time of the Flood is also a snapshot of a time of global emergency – both medical and ecological. Cagol completed his multi-city series of performative interventions despite persistent travel restrictions and institutional closures, not only during the greatest global public health emergency of recent history, but also in a time of continued escalation in climactic catastrophes, with deadly floods, fires, and storms raging throughout the world. There is, unfortunately, an urgent relevance to Cagol’s work in our seemingly apocalyptic times.
MORE INFO ON THE TIME OF THE FLOOD VIDEO SERIES <<
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Stefano Cagol (b. 1969 in Trento, Italy. Lives and works in Trento.)
Stefano Cagol studied at the Brera Academy of fine arts and Ryerson University in Toronto with a post-doctoral fellowship. His works, often multi-form and multi-sited, reflect on the issues of nowadays, from borders to viruses, to ecological issues and human interference upon nature. He is the recipient of prestigious awards including: the Italian Council (2019); the Visit of Innogy Stiftung (2014); and Terna Prize for Contemporary Art (2009). He participated in numerous international Biennales, including: 14th Curitiba Biennial, Brazil (2019-20); OFF Biennale Cairo, Egypt (2018); Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland, (2016); and the 2nd Xinjiang Biennale, China (2014); 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2013) invited by the Maldives Pavilion; 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2011) with a solo collateral event; 4th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2006); 1st Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2006). Cagol has held solo exhibitions at: CCA Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv, Israel; MA*GA Museum, Italy; at MARTa, Herford, Germany; CLB Berlin, Germany; ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany; MAXXI Museum in Rome, Italy; Madre, Naples, Italy; Museion in Bolzano, Italy; Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Switzerland; Museum Folkwang in Essen, amongst many others. Much of his work is created in the context of international residencies and fellowships, including: Italian Council, MOMENTUM AiR, Berlin, Germany (2019-20); Cambridge Sustainability Residency, Cambridge, UK (2016); RWE Foundation, MOMENTUM AiR, Berlin, Germany (2015); Air Bergen, Bergen, Norway (2014); Vir-Viafarini-in-Residence, Milan, Italy (2013); BAR International, Kirkenes, Norway (2010); International Studio and Curatorial Program ISCP, New York, USA (2010); International Center of Photography, New York, USA (2001).
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Margret Eicher
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Posthuman Dance of Death (2016), Tapestry, 280 x 330 cm
The tapestry Posthuman Dance of Death (2016) refers to the strongly increasing reliance on images in society. It is no longer text and language that primarily shape political, social and individual attitudes, but ubiquitous images whose truth content is usually no longer verified. Invoking academic research in image theory and visual culture alongside quotations from art history, Margret Eicher’s tapestries are about how we think in images. Posthuman Dance of Death is a digital collage assembled from images of Pokemon-Go characters, Manga masks, Japanese fans and Mexican skulls, video game menu symbols, mobile phones, and two tattooed women in clichéd seductive poses foregrounding a magnetic resonance tomography machine. Images inscribed onto the body are set alongside the technology for making imagery of inside the body. This is a work about our addiction to images and the translatability of visual language across all cultures. Margret Eicher reimagines the historical medium and function of the tapestry for the digital age, down to the production of the works on a digital loom. By being transformed into a monumental tapestry, the content of the image gains the appearance of legitimacy and power, then as now. Traditionally serving political purposes, depicting royalty and significant occasions of the times, in the Baroque era especially, the courtly tapestry reached the height of its function in the representation of power and communication of ideologies. Eicher makes striking parallels between the functions and visual language of this Baroque communication medium and those of contemporary mass media today. Depicting the movie stars and media icons which are the equivalent of royalty in today’s content-driven digital culture interwoven with diverse symbols from the history of art and architecture, Eicher’s work looks at how media culture repurposes art history, and questions the power of visual communication in the digital age.
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Margret Eicher (b. 1955 in Viersen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Margret Eicher works primarily with intricate digital collages produced as large format tapestries woven on a digital loom. Invoking the traditional use of the tapestry as a tool of wealth and power, and commenting on our increasing reliance on digital culture, Eicher fills her tapestries with contemporary icons from our overly mediated age alongside quotations from art history.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Stade, Schloß Agathenburg, Germany (2010); Erarta-Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian (2011); Goethe-Institut Nancy (F) Strasbourg (F) ARTE /ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); Hamburg Galerie Carolyn Heinz, Hamburg, Germany (2012); Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, Germany (2012); Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Berlin Orangerie Schloss Charlottenburg, Germany (2013); Anger Museum Erfurt, Kunstmuseum Ahlen, Germany (2014); CACTicino, Bellinzona, Switzerland (2014); Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, Berlin, Germany (2015); Gallery Baku, Azerbaijan (2015); Port 25 Mannheim, Germany (2016); Kunstverein Ulm, Germany (2017); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2018); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2020); Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, Germany (2021); Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany (2021). Recent group exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany (2008); Galerie Eugen Lendl, Graz, Austria (2010); Musee des Beaux-Arts de Tournai, Tournai, Belgium (2011); MOCAK, Krakow, Poland (2012); Museum Liner, Appenzell, Switzerland (2012); Rohkunstbau, Berlin/Roskow, Germany (2013); Tichy Foundation, Prague, Czech Republic (2013); MPK, Kaiserslautern, Germany (2014); Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2014); Gallery of Art Critics Palace Adria, Prague, Czech Republic (2015); KHM, Vienna, Austria (2015); Stresa, Italy (2015); Kaiserslautern, Germany (2016); Museum Liner, Appenzell, Switzerland (2017); Leipzig, Germany (2017); Galerie Deschler, Berlin, Germany (2017); Singen, Kunstmuseum, Germany (2017); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2017); Kunstverein Pforzheim , Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin, Kunstverein KunstHaus Potsdam, Germany (2018); Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany (2019); Room Berlin, Germany (2019); Stiftung Staatlicher Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany (2019); Berlin, Germany (2020); MOMENTUM & Kleinr von Wiese, Zionkirche, Berlin, Germany (2021).
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Nezaket Ekici
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Kaffeeklatsch (2019), Video Performance, HD, 6’17”, on loan from the artist
In her video performance Kaffeeklatsch (2019), Nezaket Ekici refers to the German afternoon ritual of ‘coffee and cake’, a time of meeting and togetherness for many German families. The history of coffee gossip is a long one. In Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, women began meeting for coffee gossip – “Kränzchen” – to exchange ideas among themselves, allowing them a taste of freedoms that up until then had been reserved for men in social circles. Nezaket Ekici addresses the tradition of the coffee klatsch from her perspective as a migrant and a fully integrated German, questioning her sense of belonging in German society. She asks herself what her own German tradition is – which leads to the general question of what actually is German tradition? In order to answer these questions, Ekici stages herself as three characters dressed in traditional German costumes from the Black Forest, the Spreewald, and Thuringia, representing the south, the north and the center of Germany. With the focus on the articulation, gestures, and facial expressions of the performer, Ekici drinks coffee with her doppelgangers in this playful video addressing the fine line between foreignness and belonging. And though this work was made shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic, watching it now – well into the second year of social distancing and intermittent lockdowns when we have all spent far too much time in our own company – we come to see how very precious this simple freedom is, to gather together with one another.
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Nezaket Ekici (b. 1970 in Kirsehir, Turkey. Lives and works in Berlin & Stuttgart, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey.)
Nezaket Ekici holds a degree in Fine Arts, an MA in Art Pedagogy, and an MFA degree, having studied Art History and Sculpture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Fine Arts Academy Munich (1994-2000). From 2001 to 2004 she studied Performance Art under Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. Ekici’s video, installations and performances are often process-based and ask viewers to derive their own emotional and intellectual interpretations. In her work, complex, often controversial topics are tackled with humor in highly aesthetic compostions. Ekici frequently uses her own Turkish origins and education as a subject of tension, pitting her background against her living environment in Germany. Cultural, geographic and individual boundaries, transgressions, gender, authorial bodies, art history, religion, culture and politics are central to Ekici’s works. By highlighting these themes in everyday life and placing them in a new context, she aims to interconnect every element to form a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk. Nezaket Ekici has presented more than 250 different performances in more than 170 cities in over 60 countries on 4 continents.
Selected international exhibitions since 2000 include: Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich; The Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; 25. May Museum Belgrade; PAC Milano; Venice Biennale; P.S.1 New York; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei/ Taiwan; Poznan Biennale; Curiciba Biennale; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Istanbul Modern; Marta Herford; Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; KunstWerke Berlin; Oslo Museum; The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Total Museum Seoul, and many more. Ekici was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cultural Academy Tarabya, Istanbul (2013-14), and was the recipient of the Rome Prize for an Artist Residency at the German Academy, Villa Massimo, Rome (in 2016-17). She received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Award (2018), and received the Berlin Culur Senate prize for her Artist Residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York (2020).
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Thomas Eller
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/413957159 [/fve]
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/98466373 [/fve]
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THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered) (2020), Video, 5’24”
Thomas Eller’s THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered) was made in the midst of the Corona pandemic, while the artist was in lockdown in China. As so much of Eller’s work, it is a self-portrait, yet at the same time, also an intimate portrait of COVID-19; replicating in its form and content the biological basis of the virus. Eller projects himself into the frame in a visually and aurally layered palimpsest. The artist re-duplicates himself, again and again, with each of his copies reciting the complete genetic code of one of the first strains of the SARS-CoV2 virus identified in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 outbreak began. But the copies are not perfect. The duplicates vary. Eller makes mistakes while reciting dense lines of genetic code, scrambling the RNA sequence here, dropping a nucleotide there…. More copies of genetic code, more small mistakes here and there. Thomas Eller has translated into visual language an approximation of how the virus replicates itself, spreading its genetic information through multiplication, and through mistakes from copy to copy, mutating to create new strains. Amongst the duplicates on the screen, a digitally altered copy of the artist enters the frame; an Eller in pixels, with a computer’s robotic voice reciting the sequence of nucleotides. Technology is racing to overtake the virus, but when will it catch up? A year and a half after the start of the pandemic, we are still waiting for vaccines, for treatments, for cures. Until then, we hide from the virus, and from each other. We distance, socially, and wait for science to win the race against nature. We should be so lucky if the virus simply stops, as Eller does, and goes away.
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THE white male complex #5 (lost) (2014), HD Video, 11’25”
Shot on the beach of Catania on the Italian island of Sicily in 2014, THE white male complex, #5 (lost) uncannily prefigures the tragic shipwreck of 2015 which killed 700 African migrants on the same coastline, and alludes to the nearby island of Lampedusa, infamous for its migrant traffic and for the tragic shipwreck which killed 366 African migrants packed onto an overcrowded fishing boat in 2013. With the all too familiar promiscuity of news cycles in our turbo-charged information age, these tragedies occupied the media for some days or weeks, only to move on to more pressing concerns. But while the media may have lost interest, the underlying issues behind these tragedies and many others like them will persist as long as people anywhere on this globe nurture hopes of a better life and follow their instincts to flee hardships of all kinds. Into this gap between the global media’s disinterest and the persistent need to tell the story of people in such desperate situations, enters the space for art.
A man wearing the ubiquitous attire of innumerable professions – black suit and tie, white shirt, black shoes – is incongruously floating in the ocean. Floating or drowning? This is what we inevitably come to ask ourselves as the shot lurches between the surface of the water to to submerged beneath it. This man perpetually struggling in the sea is the artist himself, living the plight of so many who wash up on such shores. Eternally looping at the cusp of life and death, this work leaves the viewer feeling oddly complicit in one man’s surreal struggle. Yet while one white man submerged in a suit comes across as surreal, the countless migrants braving a similar plight are the reality we live in. Thomas Eller, in his own visual language tackles the watery deaths of migrant workers as a sadly universal suffering, devoid of markers of place or time. This could be any sea, any beach, any tragedy. And in the timeless metaphor of treading water, this work equally signifies our persistent inability to move forward in finding a solution to the myriad issues driving people around the globe to risk their life in the pursuit of a better one. Taken out of context and read solely through the metaphor of keeping one’s head above water, THE white male complex, #5 (lost) becomes a timeless work, equally applicable to the struggles of the human condition. Professionally, personally, who amongst us has not at some point in their lives felt as if they were drowning. Almost, but never quite, succumbing to the pressures, expectations, and fears pulling him under, Thomas Eller translates an experience universal to the human condition into a visual language which can be read as at once hopeful, hopeless, and immutable.
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Thomas Eller (b. 1964 in Coburg, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Beijing, China.)
Thomas Eller started his studies in Fine Arts at the Hochschule der Künste of Berlin. After his forced dismissal, he went on to graduate in Sciences of Religion, Philosophy and Art History from the Freie Universität, Berlin (1989). After returning to Berlin from 9 years in New York, Eller founded the German edition of artnet magazine, where he served as editior-in-chief (2004-2008) and was appointed executive director of the German branch of artnet AG (2005-2008). In 2008-2009, Eller served as Artistic Director of the Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin. He has been a member of various institutions, including the Association of International Art Critics (AICA), a Member of the Board for Creative Industries at the Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, and on the Steering Committee for Creative Industries in the Berlin Senate. Since moving to Beijing in 2014, Eller has taught at the Chinese National Art Academy, Beijing (2019), Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (TAFA) (2017), Tsinghua University and Sotheby’s Institute (2016 – 2017), and was associate researcher at Tsinghua University (2019-2020). He was a correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Beijing (2016-2017). In 2018 he founded Gallery Weekend Beijing. And since 2018, Thomas Eller is the Founding Artistic Director of China Arts & Sciences in Jingdezhen – a major new art district to feature international artist residencies, a contemporary art museum and a biennial. Since 2013 to the present, Eller is president of RanDian art magazine. Thomas Eller has received various prizes, including the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Prize (1996), the Villa-Romana Prize (Florence, 2000), the Art Omi International Art Center (New York, 2002) and the Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize from the Akademie der Künste (Berlin, 2006). In his artistic practice, Eller has had innumerable international exhibitions dating back to 1991.
Theo Eshetu
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/161355780 [/fve]
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Festival of Sacrifice (2012), HD Video, 18’
The Festival of Sacrifice was originally made as a 6-channel video installation, depicting the ritual slaughter of a goat during the celebration of Eid-ul-Adha, the Islamic Festival of Sacrifice. Through multiple mirroring the extreme footage is sublimated into a series of images that resemble traditional Islamic ornamentation. The skilled dissection of the animal body is reflected in the kaleidoscopic dissolution of the video image. The emotional and aesthetic aspects of ritual religious practices are here heightened by the musical soundtrack of the work.
“The celebration of Sacrifice harks back to the very origins of religious thought. All religions begin with a sacrifice. Festival of Sacrifice is part of a series of videos that looks at aspects of Islamic culture as a source to explore formal qualities of representation and the underlying links between cultures. Filmed on the Kenyan island of Lamu during the celebrations of Eid-ul-Adha, the video recreates, through the multiplication of images, the kaleidoscopic patterns that highlight the spiritual aspect of the event. Intercultural relations, whether seen as an exchange or a battle, are strongly influenced by the impact of images and their use. While religion and technological development are often used to reinforce differences, electronic inter-connectivity has created a platform for mutual interaction and transformed the very concept of landscape.“
– Theo Eshetu
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Theo Eshetu (b. 1958 in London, England. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu was born in London, and grew up in Addis Ababa, Dakar, Belgrade and Rome. A pioneer of video art, Eshetu explores the relationship between media, identity, and global information networks. After studying Communication Design, Eshetu began making videos in early 1982, seeking to deconstruct the hegemonic status of television, which he viewed as a state apparatus. Forging a hybrid language to merge practices of video art and documentary filmmaking, Eshetu explores perception, identity, and notions of the sacred through electronic time-based media and optical devices and effects. He draws from anthropology, art history, scientific research, and religion—Catholic, African, Muslim, Buddhist—to explore clashes and harmonies of human subjectivity between world cultures in the global context. Though essentially conceptual, and often exploring video’s formal components of time and light, Eshetu’s work is often focused on cultural displacement, and is always grounded in compelling aesthetic components, often achieved through fractal repetition, such as kaleidoscopic mirroring, multi-screen projections, or mosaic-like patterning of images.
Among various international awards, Eshetu was Artist in Residence at Tarabya Cultural Academy, Turkey where he completed aspects of production for Altas Fractured (2017) which was featured in Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel in 2017. In 2012 he was Artist in Residence at the DAAD program in Berlin, where he exhibited The Return of the Axum Obelisk at DAADgalerie in 2014. In 2011 he participated the Venice Biennale and the Sharjah Biennale. His work has appeared at: The New Museum, NY; the New York African Film Festival; DIA Foundation’s Electronic Arts Intermix, NY; Snap Judgments at ICP (International Centre for Photography), NY; BAM Cinemateque, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland USA; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Africa Remix at The Hayward Gallery, London; the Venice Film Festival; Roma Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art in Rome; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France; the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; among many other museums, biennales, and film festivals.
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Amir Fattal
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ATARA (2019), HD Video, 15’20”
ATARA is a 1970‘s styled sci-fi film designed as a 2-channel video installation set to contemporary opera music. The score is based on the opera Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner together with original music by Boris Bojadzhiev. Shot on location in Berlin, it tells the story of two buildings that used to stand at the same place: the Berliner Stadtschloss, destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII, and the Palast der Republik, built in its place as the GDR seat of government in 1973, and destroyed amidst much controversy in 2008 to make way for the rebuilding of a contemporary copy of the Stadtschloss. The resurrection of this historical copy did not begin until 2013 due to the controversy surrounding this project. In a city perpetually treading the fine line between moving on from its painful history while never forgetting it, the decision to resurrect the Stadtschloss in order to move and consolidate all Berlin’s ethnographic and history of science museums, is interpreted by many as a willful erasure of its GDR past and a dangerous rewriting of history. This controversy is keenly felt in a city still building over its bomb craters, even more than 75 years after the end of WWII.
ATARA follows a ceremony that takes place in the Palace during a moment when one building is being resurrected and the other building is dematerializing into a ghostly memory. Following an astronaut wandering through the construction site of the new Stadtschloss, carrying an iconic lamp from the destroyed Palast der Republik, ATARA deals with the collective memory of architecture and its symbolic representation in public space. The music is based on the Liebestod aria from the opera Tristan and Isolde, sung by Isolde after Tristan’s death. The score was made by copying the last note of each line of the musical score as the first note, and proceeding in this way until a new ‘mirrored’ piece was formed. Like travelling backwards and forwards in time, the recording of this piece is then digitally reversed backwards to become the soundtrack to ATARA, forming another play on the idea of resurrection.
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Amir Fattal (b. 1978 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Fattal is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Working in the media of video, photography, sculpture, and installation, his work forms a focused response to the diverse questions raised by his adoptive city of Berlin, where the memory, culture, architecture, indeed every thread in the fabric of this city is problematized by its history. Alongside his art practice, Fattal is the curator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists.
Amir Fattal was distinguished with the GASAG Art Prize in 2008 and graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009. Fattal has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Acclaimed solo exhibitions include: Mesopotopography, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin (2015); From the End to the Beginning, Kunstquerier Bethanien, Berlin (2014); Parallel Lines, Teapot Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2013); Goral Ehad, St-art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); Shadow of Smoke Rings on the Wall, Artitude Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); Tomorrow Gets Me Higher, Wilde Gallery, Berlin (2010). Selected group exhibitions include: Collection Enea Righi, Museo Fortuny, Venice (2016); Interior / Exterior / Sculpture, Belenius/Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); A Naked Singularity, Studio Garaicoa, Madrid, Spain (2015); Fragments of Empires, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2014-15); A Letter From Dr. Faustus, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014); Fundación Botín, Villa Iris, Santander, Spain (2014); Dahlstrøm & Fattal, Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2013); III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2012); Body Without Body, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011).
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Doug Fishbone
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Artificial Intelligence (2018), Video, 2’48”, on loan from the artist
Artificial Intelligence (2018) is a short meditation on time, impermanence and loss, originally made for the Werkleitz Festival in Halle, Germany. Spanning from the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 to the shortages of sausages in the German Democratic Republic to the Mahabharata, it offers an unusual perspective on the rise and fall of human civilization through the prism of the chaos of 20th- century Europe. The piece grants a moment of pause to consider the fragility and vanity of our daily lives, though with a light-hearted touch. Unfolding a comical and philosophical narrative using a slideshow of historic images found online, Fishbone takes us on a journey through the turbulence of war-time and post-war Germany and its legacy of instability. Watching this work now in the context of Corona-times,Artificial Intelligence paints an oddly prescient portrait of our times, reminiscent of the fears and uncertainties of the first pandemic lockdown over a year ago – from food shortages in shops, to wildlife taking over our city streets, to a willful denial of our own mortality in the face of all evidence to the contrary. We all hope that history will not repeat itself.
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Doug Fishbone (b. 1969 in New York, USA. Lives and works in London, England.)
Described as a “stand-up conceptual artist”, Doug Fishbone’s work is heavily influenced by the rhythms of stand-up comedy. Fishbone examines some of the more problematic aspects of contemporary life in an amusing and disarming way, using satire and humor in his films, performances and installations to critically examine consumer culture, mass media, and the relativity of perception and context. In his video and performance practice, he uses images found online to illustrate and undermine his own confrontational monologues on contemporary media and its corollary, the underground and avant-garde. Fishbone’s conceptual practice is wide-ranging, using many different forms of popular culture in unexpected ways. He earned a BA from Amherst College in the US in 1991, and MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 2003, and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Tate Britain, London (2010-11), Rokeby, London (2010-11, and 2009), Gimpel Fils, London (2006) and 30,000 Bananas in Trafalgar Square (2004). Selected group exhibitions include Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, Tate Britain (2010), Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2008); Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery (2008), London; British Art Show 6, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester (2006). Fishbone’s film project Elmina (2010) was premiered at Tate Britain in 2010, and was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria in 2011. Other notable projects include: the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival, London, UK (2013, 2014), and the Look Again Festival, Aberdeen, Scotland (2016). He curated Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and realised his solo project Made in China at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2015). Artificial Intelligence was commissioned by Werkleitz Festival, Halle, Germany (2018); and he showed a specially commissioned video The Jewish Question in the exhibition Jews, Money, Myth at the Jewish Museum, London (2019). Fishbone teaches and performs at major international and UK venues, including: the Hayward Gallery, ICA London, the Southbank Centre, Hauser and Wirth Somerset, and the Royal Academy. Fishbone is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Yinka Shonibare Foundation, an organization which fosters international cultural exchange.
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James P. Graham
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/20608426 [/fve]
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Chronos (1999), Video, 6’20”
Chronos (1999) is the second part of Graham’s Cycle of Life series, made between 1999 and 2001. It uses humor within everyday life to contrast the “use of” and “loss of” time. Originally commissioned by Channel 4 Television UK, this work was shot on location in Rajastan India between February and March 1999. The joyful soundtrack accompanies fast-paced images of street-side barber shops providing momentary respite from the ceaseless movement of a bustling city. Seen now at the height of the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in India due to the ravages of the pandemic, Chronos acquires a painfully wistful poignancy, harking back to more carefree times.
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James P. Graham (b. 1961 in Windsor, England. Lives and works in London and Italy.)
James P. Graham is a multi-media artist working in film, photography, drawing and sculpture. He is autodidactic, having left Eton College at 18. He began his career in photography while working in Paris, and transitioned to TV and cinema when he left for London in 1994. Within this period he completed international commissions in editorial and advertising photography as well as television commercials. He abandoned commercial work, turning to art in 2002, creating screen-based, experimental film works using Super 8 film framed within a landscape of metaphysical and ontological significance. Having trained traditionally in photography and filmmaking, Graham particularly enjoys the interface between analogue processes and high-end technology. Mainly using landscape and nature, his work interprets and re-creates notions of sacred space. Infused with ideas that derive from intuitive and ritualistic sources, Graham cites two fundamental factors in his work: first, intuition, or the catalyst behind the creation of every artwork; and second, resonance, or the result of the work as expressed through the viewer.
James P. Graham’s work has been shown in major museums and biennales around the world, including: Eleventh Plateau, Historical Archives Museum, Hydra, Greece (2011); Busan Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, South Korea (2010); Locus Solus, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2010); Volcano: from Turner to Warhol, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK (2010); Searching for Empedocles, Islington Metalworks, London, UK (2009); Space Now!, Space Gallery, London UK (2007); Musee d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg (2007), amongst many others.
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Mariana Hahn
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/70407307 [/fve]
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Burn My Love, Burn (2013), Performance Video, 5’24”
Burn My Love, Burn (2013) explores the body as the carrier of historical signature. By inscribing a poem on a shroud that once belonged to her recently deceased grandmother – and then burning and consuming its remains – Mariana Hahn examines the relationship between text, memory-making, and the human – particularly female – form.
“The body does so by will, it inscribes, devours the story, becoming a container that vibrates and lives within a narrative. The shroud becomes the elementary signifier of such a historical narrative, it has been impregnated by the story, acts as the monument. Through the burning, it can become part of an organic form in motion. The text conditions and creates the body within the very specifically hermetically sealed space. The words activate the body’s field of memory as much as they create new memories. The ritual becomes the form through which this transformation can be made. The body eats the body, destroys and paints again, another image. Again this is done by the word, it creates the flesh, gives it differentiating coloration, its plausible point of view. The body acts as a paper, it is inscribed by those murmurs of history, becoming a living artifact of its own history.”
– Mariana Hahn
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Mariana Hahn (b. in Schwaebisch Hall, Germany. Lives and works in Paris, France.)
After initially pursuing Theater Studies at ETI, Berlin in 2005, Mariana Hahn graduated with a Fine Art degree at Central St. Martins, London in 2012. Hahn’s practice is driven by the exploration of the relationship between the body and the transmission of memory and knowledge. Silk, hair, salt, copper, and textile are part of her research on memory and its means of transmission. Hahn poetically questions human fate as a universal condition through photography, performance and video. Her artistic practice is based on thinking of the body as carrier of continually weaving narrative. She believes that ‘weaving’ is a metaphor for creating human autonomy and often uses textiles to take the place of the human body, the textile itself becoming the carrier of the living narrative.
Mariana Hahn has participated in international biennales including: Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France (2021); the Venice Biennal, collateral event My Ocean Guide (2017); the 56th October Salon – Belgrade Biennial, Serbia (2016); the Biennial for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2014). She has exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries and festivals, such as: MOMENTUM, die Raeume, PS120, and Diskurs, in Berlin, Germany; The Moutain View, Shenzen, China; Ding Shung Museum, Fujian, China; Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China; Mill6 Foundation, Hong Kong; Gelleria Mario Iannelli, Rome, Italy; Trafo Museum of Contemporary Art in Stettin, Poland; Corpo Festival of Performing Arts, Venice, Italy; amongst others. She has participated in Artist Residency programs, including: the Mill6 Foundation, Hong Kong (2016); Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China (2017); Treeline Residency, Capalbio, Italy (2017); and others.
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Gülsün Karamustafa
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/115125359 [/fve]
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Personal Time Quartet (2000), 4-channel Video Installation, 2’39” on loop
The video and soundscape Personal Time Quartet (2000) is designed as an ever-changing soundscape to accompany continually repeating images of a never-ending childhood. The sound was composed especially for this work by Slovak rock musician, Peter Mahadic. Comprised of various sound-samples (some of which are from rock concerts), each track was made to activate one of the four channels of moving image. The work is installed in such a way that each time it is turned on anew, the four channels never synchronize, instead producing a new quartet to accompany the looping images. Personal Time Quartet is concerned with the point of intersection between the artist’s own personal biography and the history of her home country. The timeframe, or ‘personal time’, covered by these four videos begins in the year of her father’s birth and ends in the early days of her own childhood. Filmed in Karamustafa’s apartment in Istanbul, each video screen shows the same young girl – the artist’s alter ego – engaged in various activities. The girl skipping suggests a carefree childhood; the girl painting her nails indicates a concern with the artist’s own femininity; the girl folding laundry could be read as a comment on the expected role of women in society; while for the girl opening cupboards and drawers is a way of discovering the hidden secrets and stories that are so much a part of our recollections of childhood and adolescence. In this installation Karamustafa exposes just how similar the evolution of (female) identity can be, even in very disparate cultures. This timeless work, intended as a portrait of the artist’s childhood, when seen in our current context now paints a picture of how many of us have felt during long periods of lockdown, stuck indoors and perpetually repeating the same domestic tasks.
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Gülsün Karamustafa (b. 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. Lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey and Berlin, Germany.)
Gülsün Karamustafa is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. She received her MFA from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art in 1969. Using personal and historical narratives, Karamustafa explores socio-political issues in modern Turkey, addressing themes including: sexuality and gender; exile and ethnicity; displacement and migration. Her work reflects on the traumatic effects of nation building, as it responds to the processes of modernization, political turbulence, and civil rights in a period that includes the military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980. During the 1970s Karamustafa was imprisoned by the Turkish military dictatorship. She was refused a passport for sixteen years until the mid-80s and, unlike other Turkish artists, could not emigrate or travel. This enforced isolation led her to an analysis of her own situation and context: the city of Istanbul, interior migration and nomadism within Turkey, and the ideological and psychological ramifications of identity. Like a sociologist or anthropologist, Gülsün Karamustafa explores the historical and social connections of oriental cultures in her works, often using materials that express the hybrid character of different cultures and religions. Karamustafa’s approach — poetic, but also marked by a documentary impulse — serves to address the marginalization of women and the violence witnessed by itinerant populations in the wake of Western economic and territorial expansion.
Gülsün Karamustafa is one of the laureates of the prestigious 2014 Prince Claus Awards that are presented to individuals whose cultural actions have a positive impact on the development of their societies. Her recent major exhibitions include: “Chronographia” at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016-2017); “Citizens and States”, Tate Modern, London (2015); “Artists in Their Time”, Istanbul Modern (2015); the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014); the 3rd and 10th Gwangju Biennials (2000, 2014); “Art Histories”, Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2014); “Artevida Politica”, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2014); the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale (2013); the 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); Singapore Biennial (2011), the 3rd Guangzou Triennial (2008); the 11th Cairo Biennial (2008); and very many others.
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Hannu Karjalainen
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/39542109 [/fve]
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Woman on the Beach (2009), Video, 13’6”
Woman on the Beach (2009) is a photograph activated into a subtle poetic motion, rewarding the viewer for taking the time to watch it unfold. We see a woman, filmed with a focus on her immobile face, as she lies motionless on wet sand. The illusion of a still image is broken only by the intermittent rush of waves washing over her. The moving image then reverts into stillness. In this tableau vivant, Hannu Karjalainen subverts conventions of classical portrait photography to create a striking tension between the still and moving image.
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Hannu Karjalainen (b. 1978 in Finland. Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.)
Hannu Karjalainen is an award winning visual artist, filmmaker photographer, and composer based in Helsinki, Finland. Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School at Alver Alto University, Finland. Karjalainen’s experimental films, video installation work, photography and sound art have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Finland and internationally, including: UMMA University of Michigan Museum of Art, International Biennale of Photography Bogota, Scandinavia House New York, Fotogalleriet Oslo and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki. Karjalainen won the main prize at the Turku Biennial in 2007, and was chosen as Finnish Young Artist of the Year in 2009. Karjalainen’s latest album LUXE was released by Berlin based Karaoke Kalk in late 2020. Karjalainen has collaborated with Simon Scott (of Slowdive), Dakota Suite and Monolyth & Cobalt among others.
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David Krippendorff
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/261725727 [/fve]
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Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015), HD Video, 14’9”
Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015) takes us on an intimate journey through identity and history. David Krippendorff’s time-warping tribute to a changing world presents a would-be Aida, to a moving soundtrack from the eponymous opera, shedding tears for a place and time which no longer exist.
“Nothing Escapes My Eyes is about a silent transformation of a place and a human being, both subjected to the melancholy of conforming. The film was inspired by the famous opera Aida, to depict in a metaphoric form current issues of cultural identity, loss and the pressures to conform. The film refers to the following historical event related to this opera: Aida premiered in Cairo in 1871 at the Khedivial Opera House. One hundred years later the building was completely destroyed by fire and replaced by a multi-story parking garage. Nevertheless, to this day, the place is still named Opera Square: Meidan El Opera. The film combines this urban alteration with the painful transformation of a woman (actress Hiam Abbass) in the process of shedding one identity for another. With no dialogue, the film is backed by a musical excerpt from Verdi’s opera Aida, whose lyrics express the difficulties of being loyal to one’s country and cultural identity. The personal and urban transformation tackles issues of identity, loss and disorientation as a result of historical colonialism and contemporary globalization.”
– David Krippendorff
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David Krippendorff (b. 1967 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.)
David Krippendorff is a US/German interdisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker. He grew up in Rome, Italy, and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, where he graduated with a Masters degree in 1997, and was subsequently based in New York for some time. The son of a Holocaust survivor and the grandchild of practicing Nazis, cultural contradiction and dislocation shaped Krippendorff’s experience early on. His artistic practice inquires into this state of being a “permanent foreigner” and explores resulting questions of home, national and cultural identity, and belonging. Krippendorff’s works, films and videos have been shown internationally, including at: the New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, and Belgrade), as well as in many international art and film festivals worldwide.
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Janet Laurence
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/70449386 [/fve]
Grace (2012), HD Video, 5’22” & Dingo (2013), HD Video, 4’8”
The Other Side of Nature / Panda (2014), HD Video, 9’18”, on loan from the artist
Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef – Part 2(2015), HD Video, 11’51”, on loan from the artist
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Renowned Australian artist Janet Laurence is known for her work with the environment, often undertaken together with scientists engaged in international conservation initiatives. Laurence’s practice is a direct response to contemporary ecological catastrophes, positioning art within the essential dialogue of environmental politics to create and communicate an understanding of the impact that humans have upon the threatened natural world, in order to restore our vital relationships with it. Works from two series are shown here: the Vanishing series, depicting endangered animals on the verge of extinction; and Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef, shot while working with scientists researching corral collapse in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – a World Heritage site which is the planet’s largest living, and rapidly dying, structure – and commissioned for Artists 4 Paris Climate, the exhibition program for COP21, the UN Climate Change Conference in 2015.
“This ecological crisis demands we shift our focus from a human-centred perspective to a broader multispecies, environmental approach, for how else are we to live ethically and find our place in this world. These works are from a series of videos made during my research in wildlife sanctuaries, using hidden cameras specialized for zoology research. In projection, the videos are altered and slowed… I want to bring us into intimacy with these animals and to reveal our interconnection… I want to bring us into contact with the life-world. With a focus on the animals and their loss, I think about the loneliness of the last one of a species. What was their death? I wonder about their umwelt, the unique world in which each species lives: the world as its body represents it, the world formed by the very form of the organism. It is a sensory world of space, time, objects and qualities that form perceptual signs for living creatures. I think it’s important to find this link in order to find compassion and care for developing a real relationship with other species we have to share the planet with.”
– Janet Laurence
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Janet Laurence (b. 1947 in Sydney, Australia. Lives and works in Sydney.)
Janet Laurence is recognized as one of the most accomplished Australian artists. Bridging ethical and environmental concerns, Laurence’s art considers the inseparability of all living things and represents, in her words, “an ecological quest”. For over 35 years, Laurence has explored the interconnection of all living things – animal, plant, mineral – through her multi-disciplinary practice. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, photography and video, she explores the natural world in all its beauty and complexity, as well as the environmental challenges it faces today. Researching historical collections and drawing on the rich holdings of natural history museums, her practice has, over time, brought together various conceptual threads, from an exploration of threatened creatures and environments to notions of healing and physical, as well as cultural, restoration. Exploring notions of art, science, imagination, memory, and loss, Janet Laurence’s practice examines our physical, cultural and conflicting relationship to the natural world through site-specific, gallery, and museum works. Laurence creates immersive environments that navigate the interconnections within the living world. Her work explores what it might mean to heal, albeit metaphorically, the natural environment, fusing this sense of communal loss with a search for connection with powerful life-forces. Laurence’s work alerts us to the subtle dependencies between water, life, culture and nature in our eco-system. Her work reminds us that art can provoke its audience into a renewed awareness about our environment.
Laurence has participated in numerous international museum exhibitions and Biennales, including: The Entangled Garden of Plant Memory, Yu Hsiu Museum, Taiwan (2020); the major survey exhibition Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2019); Matter of the Masters, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017); Inside the Flower, IGA Berlin (2017); Force of Nature II, curated by James Putnam, The Art Pavilion, London (2017); the 13th Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador (2016); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Australian Museum, Sydney (2016); Anthropocene, Fine Arts Society Contemporary, London (2015); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Muséum National D’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (2015), as the Australian representative for the COP21 / FIAC, Artists 4 Paris Climate Exhibition; After Eden, Tarrawarra Museum of Art (2013) and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2012); Memory of Nature, Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie, New South Wales (2011); 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); In The Balance: Art for a Changing World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2010); Clemenger Award, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2009); Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan (2003, 2006); amongst many others. Laurence is a recipient of Rockefeller, Churchill and Australia Council Fellowships, and the Alumni Award for Arts, UNSW. She was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW, a former Board Member of the VAB Board of the Australia Council, was Visiting Fellow at the NSW University Art and Design, and held the 2016/17 Hanse-WissenschaftKolleg (HWK) Foundation Fellowship.
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Sarah Lüdemann
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/63734941 [/fve]
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Schnitzelporno (2012), HD Video Peformance, 174’
Schnitzelporno (2012) is a durational performance video in which an unidentifiable Lüdemann beats a piece of meat ceaselessly for two hours. This physically taxing action, which begins with the pristine, white-clad figure sensually stroking the meat’s surface, eventually ends in the steak’s total demolition. Slowed down to three hours of video and artificially lightened, the final, washed-out video disconcertingly emphasizes the separation between soft, caressing gestures and the brutality of the action itself. Each initial stroke strips away the immediacy of the violence – an act that, when paired with an understanding of the meat as bodily metaphor, calls into question the viable limits of (female) identity shaping. What happens, Lüdemann asks, when this familiar, formative action is repeated without end?
“The idea of making, shaping and even distorting your body and hence your ‘self’ in order to create a loveable, admirable, respectable etc. (re)presentation of ‘self’ suggests a desire to control and a degree of violence and brutality towards oneself. In Schnitzelporno I abstract the body into flesh, into meat, which I modify by means of a tenderizer. The tool itself already bears an outlandish idea, i.e., to beat something in order to make it soft and tender. The tool and its original purpose is further taken ad absurdum, for I do not stop beating the piece of meat until it is entirely erased, until I am NObody. Initially the imagery of the video installation is poetic and beautiful; slowly it becomes repetitive and eventually revolting, disgusting and absolutely brutal.”
– Sarah Lüdemann (Beauham)
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Sarah Lüdemann (Beauham)(b. in Cologne, Germany. Lives and works in Bremen, Germany.)
Sarah Lüdemann (Beauham) studied Linguistics, Psychology and Fine Art at Cologne University (2001-2005), afterwards living in Norway, Italy, England and Holland to teach Academic Writing, Critical Thinking and Art History. In 2010 she was selected for an influential residency at Fundación Marcelino Botín, Villa Iris, with Mona Hatoum. Later that year she received the South Square Trust Award to study Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in London, where she completed her MFA with distinction in 2011. Since 2017 she has been a lecturer in Contemporary Art and Mediation at the University of Bremen. Lüdemann’s work has been exhibited internationally, including: Printed Matter, New York (US) / Goethe Institute Cairo (EGY) / Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin (DE) / Hayaka Arti, Istanbul (TR) / Trafo, Szczecin (PL) / LYON Biennale de la Danse, La lavoir public, Lyon (FR) / Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden (DE) / HDLU, Zagreb (HR) / October Salon, Belgrade Bienniale (RS) / Museum Frieder Burda, Berlin (DE) | Salon Berlin, Berlin (DE) / Ventolin Art Space, Melbourne (AUS).
“Sarah Lüdemann’s artistic work explodes norms. In her performances, drawings, sculptures, she proceeds like a surgeon. In her work one sees scraps of skin, tufts of fur, pubic hair, shredded flesh – in a magical way the nervous system and the emotional reflexes, fears and desires of humans and animals are exposed. These revealed drives form a new reality, a new narrative that breaks with the old hierarchies. Through the skin, the artist penetrates to the core of the human being, develops a new systematic. With her works, Sarah Lüdemann gives subtle markings to the world in strange rituals in which sensuality is explored as the vital center of all life.”
– Stephan von Wiese
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Shahar Marcus
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Seeds (2012), HD Video, 5’3”
The visually stunning work Seeds (2012) follows a mine clearance team through the desert as they locate and remove land mines. The violence implicit in this action – both the danger of detonation, and the allusion to the conflict which laid these weapons there in the first place – is offset in sharp contrast with the beauty of the natural landscape and the slow meditative actions of the mine disposal crew. As they move over the arid rocky soil, they leave behind themselves trails of red tape, demarcating the landscape into clear rows. A solitary figure enters the frame, following behind the soldiers. In a reference to Millet’s famous painting, The Sower, Shahar Marcus, dressed as a pioneer, walks along the rows of earth, sowing seeds in the newly cleared soil. This act of sowing becomes a healing gesture, planting new life and hope in the scarred earth. Seeds is a poetic work about war and the hope for peace, and about the need to heal the wounds left upon our planet by mankind’s devastating impacts upon nature.
“The work Seeds explores the phenomenon of the buried mines that exist in Israel and the world over, exposing how these areas still carry the consequence of the war within their soil while supporting the new populations who must inhabit the conflict area. It examines the power of the present moment in these places where efforts are beginning to shift these death zones into places that consciously affirm life, embracing continuity in the very place where it once was blocked.”
– Shahar Marcus
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Shahar Marcus (b. 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel. Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel.)
Shahar Marcus primarily works in the medium of performance and video art. His initial works dealt with the exploration of his own body and its limitations – incorporating various perishable materials, such as dough, juice and ice. His body served as an instrument, a platform on which various ‘experiments’ took place: lying on the operating table, set on fire, dressed in a ‘bread suit’, and more. His recurrent use of bread as a symbol of essentiality and survival is juxtaposed with military symbols. By frequently working with food, a perishable, momentary substance, and by turning it into a piece of clothing or a set, Marcus also flirts with art history; transforming arbitrary objects and materials into something immortal and everlasting. His most recent works deal with local political issues, by approaching iconic Israeli landmarks with a critical and humorous point of view. Marcus reflects on his own heritage, environment and the creation of local historical narratives. His works are influenced by the visual language of cinematography along with familiar themes and tributes to the history of art.
Shahar Marcus studied Linguistics and History of Art at the University of Tel Aviv. He has exhibited at numerous art institutions, both in Israel and internationally, including: Tate Modern, London; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Copenhagen Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biennale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and at other art venues in Poland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, USA, and Turkey. His works are in many important museum collections, such as: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; and others.
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Kate McMillan
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/78224274 [/fve]
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/78224275 [/fve]
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Paradise Falls I HD Video, 2’49”
With a focus on sites of long-forgotten traumas, Paradise Falls I & II attempt to draw parallels between physical landscapes and the psychological landscapes of the artist’s own memories, broader cultural histories and stories. The sound for both films, developed by Cat Hope, provides an unnerving contrast to the poetic images of the films, highlighting the persistent disquiet of history. The films are like moving paintings, heavily referencing the romantic tradition of Germanic landscape painting. McMillan applies these quotations through a critical lens, regarding them as part of an enlightenment ideology that has helped us to forget. By means of engaging with the viewing process we participate in a re-remembering, acknowledging the shady edges of things, but also bearing witness to the beauty of sadness that is contrary to the horrors of forgetting history.
Paradise Falls I (2011) was shot in the Black Forest at a lake called Mummelsee (Mother Lake) situated on top of an extinct volcano. There are many myths associated with this lake in German folklore, most notably about a siren who lures men into the forest and kills them. In McMillan’s video, a ghostly female form flickers in and out of view at the edges of the otherwise still landscape. Setting up an interplay between landscape, memory, forgetting and history, Paradise Falls I considers how history can leave a residue in the landscape and the past often comes back to haunt us.
Paradise Falls II (2012) follows an Aboriginal man as he rows towards the craggy silhouette of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island. He too appears and disappears from sight, finally lost to the inky black of the ocean. The island was the site of an Aboriginal prison that is barely acknowledged in the historical record. The film portrays a man rowing back to his captors, indicating that history cannot always be forgotten. The spectral characters in Paradise Falls I & II are stand-ins for fractured and partial histories that disappear from focus, yet continue in our collective psyche as dark and haunting traumas.
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Paradise Falls II (2012), HD Video, 3’28”
Kate McMillan (b.1974 in Hampshire, England. Lived in Perth, Australia from 1982-2012. Lives and works in London, England.)
Dr. Kate McMillan is an artist based in London. She works across media including film, sound, installation, sculpture, textile, and performance. Her work addresses a number of key ideas including the role of art in attending to impacts of the Anthropocene, lost and systemically forgotten histories of women, and the residue of colonial violence in the present. Often focusing on residues of the past. McMillan’s artworks act as haunting memory-triggers for histories and ideas that are overlooked. In addition to her practice, McMillan also addresses these issues in her activist and written work. She is the author of the annual report ‘Representation of Female Artists in Britain’ commissioned by the Freelands Foundation. Her recent academic monograph ‘Contemporary Art & Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes: Empire of Islands’ (2019) explores the work of a number of first nation female artists from the global south, whose work attends to the aftermath of colonial violence in contemporary life. McMillan is currently a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at King’s College, London.
McMillan’s work has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions and Biennales, including: the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Trafo Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Perth Institute for Contemporary Art; John Curtin Gallery, Perth; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand; and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Recent solo exhibitions include: Edinburgh Arts Festival, Scotland (2018, 2019); Civic Room, Glasgow, Scotland (2018); Moore Contemporary, Australia, (2018); MOMENTUM, Berlin (2017); Castor Projects, London, UK (2016); ACME Project Space, London, UK (2014); Moana Project Space, Australia (2014); Performance Space, Sydney, Australia (2014), amongst many others.
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Almagul Menlibayeva
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Transoxania Dreams (2011), HD Video, 23’, on loan from the artist
Almagul Menlibayeva’s film tells a tale of ecological devastation in the guise of a mythological narrative staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. Transoxania Dreams (2011) is filmed in the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation policies. The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxiana lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. Menlibayeva visually walks the viewer through a vacant landscape and a symbolic dream whereby the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures (Centaurs) on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the image of the Greek mythological figure of the Centaur, Menlibayeva creates alluring hybrid beings, both sexually charged and bizarre. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadrupeds, part person part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers. In Transoxania Dreams, Menlibayeva, a pictorial sorceress herself, breeds an eccentric storyline and fantastical imagery extracted from her own atavistic repertoire; leading us visually through an existing, yet unimaginable, landscape in a distant and hypnagogic world.
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Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan and Berlin, Germany.)
Almagul Menlibayeva is a video artist, photographer, and curator. Menlibayeva, holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. Working primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation, Menlibayeva’s practice addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as: the social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia; de-colonial re-imaginings of gender; environmental degradation; and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. In 2018, she was co-curator of the groundbreaking exhibition Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, which took place at MOMENTUM in Berlin’s Kunstquartier Bethanien. In conjunction with her solo exhibition ‘Transformation’ at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-17), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Among other notable awards, she was the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany, and shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Hong Kong (2020).
Menlibayeva participated in numerous international biennales, including: the Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2020, 2012); the Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Channels Festival, International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Cairo Biennial, Egypt (2019); the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); amongst many others. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: De. Groen Fine Art Collection, Arnhem, Netherlands (2019); Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); among others. Selected recent group exhibitions include: Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2020); Yarat Art Foundation, Baku, Azerbaijan (2020); Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF), Tunis, Tunisia (2019); M HKA, Antwerpen, Belgium (2019); Museum of Fine Art, Shymkent, Kazakhstan (2019); RMIT, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2018); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017); Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2016); National Centre for Contemporary Art ( NCCA), Moscow, Russia (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Strasbourg, France (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art Arnhem, Netherlands (2014); Singapore Art Stage, Singapore (2014); MoMA PS1, NY, USA (2013); ZKM- Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien Technologie, Karlsruhe, Germany (2012); amongst many others.
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Tracey Moffatt
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/416454021 [/fve]
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/39552060 [/fve]
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Doomed (2007), Video, 9’21”
Tracey Moffatt’s Doomed (2007) and Other (2010), from the Hollywood Montage series made together with Gary Hillberg, are videos collaged from clips of popular films and television programs, using the recognizable appeal of these quotations from the history of cinema and popular culture to create comically rousing celebrations of our fascination with global disaster and the perilous attractions of otherness. Shown here in an exhibition of art from elsewhere, celebrating otherness and taking place amidst the ongoing disaster of a global pandemic, these works are a lighthearted response to the severe situations we face today.
By means of its fast-paced montage of film clips, Doomed takes Hollywood’s fixation with death and disaster to its ultimate cinematic end. Using fictional and reconstructed disastrous events, Moffatt creates a highly entertaining and blackly-humorous take on the bleak side of our psychological landscape. Each clip carries a particular cargo of references. They occupy their own unique symbolism and filmic territory – the poignant, sublime, epic, tragic, the B-grade and the downright trashy. Playing with the disaster genre, and looking at the forms of filmic entertainment, as well as ‘art as entertainment’, Moffatt addresses what it is about death and destruction that we invariably find so entertaining. The rousing music manipulates our emotions, as the soundtrack builds and peaks to climactic effect. Yet for all the destruction that we see and enjoy on screen, the title ‘Doomed’ has the quality of the not yet destroyed. It is a description that is applied to individuals, families, lovers, politics, and nations – an observation made from the outside and yet containing the possibility and hope that the situation can be salvaged.
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Other (2009), Video, 6’30”
In Other (2009) Moffatt uses the clichés of cinematic representation of the ‘Other’ to trace a pop culture history of how the West has represented its encounters with countries and peoples that are not itself. These mainstream representations humorously reveal more about the cultures that made and consumed these films than about the countries, peoples and histories they purport to depict. The ‘Other’ here is a people and a place where the transgression of race, gender, and cultural norms can be imagined but which has little to do with any anthropological reality. As the clichés pile up, Other is hugely entertaining, fast paced and sexy as it rolls through 60 years of moving image history. It also reiterates how desire, looking, power and the cinematic experience are so closely intertwined. In its mesmerizing focus on interracial encounters as imagined by Hollywood and TV directors, Other opens with sequences of first contact between Europeans and non-Europeans, appraising each other visually, escalating from fear to curiosity and desire, where glances become lingering and erotically charged. The glance becomes a touch, and the erotic tension mounts as Western social structures erode and we see a kitsch frenzied depiction of the Other as threatening, feverish, abandoned and erotic in faux-tribal gatherings and frenzied choreographed dance sequences, moving closer and closer to orgiastic sexual abandonment. In the final sequences desire is consummated in wild encounters which transgress race and gender, culminating in literally explosive moments which revel in the clichés of cinematic sexual orgasm: fires burn, volcanoes erupt and finally planets explode.
“Other is a fast-paced montage of film clips depicting attraction between races. Marlon Brando looks at Tahitian girls and Samantha from Sex and the City ogles an African American football player in the men’s locker room. Seven minutes of gazing and touching and exploding volcanoes. Very funny, very hot.”
– Tracey Moffatt
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Tracey Moffatt (b. 1960 in Brisbane, Australia. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia and New York, USA.)
Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s most renowned contemporary artists. Working predominantly in photography and film for over three decades, Moffatt is known as a powerful visual storyteller. The narrative is often implied and self-referential, exploring her own childhood memories, and the broader issues of race, gender, sexuality and identity. Moffatt has held over 100 solo exhibitions of her work in major institutions in Europe, the United States, Australia, and Asia. Moffatt became the first Aboriginal artist to represented Australia at the Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition My Horizon at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). Her films have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York and the National Centre for Photography in Paris, amongst others. Moffatt was the recipient of the 2007 Infinity Award for Art by the International Center of Photography, New York, honoring her outstanding achievement in the field of photography. Her work is held in major international collections including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and many others. In 2016 Moffatt was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to the visual and performing arts as a photographer and filmmaker, and as a mentor and supporter of, and role model for Indigenous artists.
Gary Hillberg worked with Tracey Moffatt on all 8 films in the Hollywood Montage series, spanning 16 years of their collaborative practice, from the first montage work created in 1999 to the latest in 2015. The films, two of which are shown in this exhibition, all play with and upon our fascination with cinema: Lip (1999), Artist (2000),Love (2003), Doomed (2007), Revoution (2008), Mother (2009), Other (2010), The Art (2015).
Gulnur Mukazhanova
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Iron Woman (2010), Installation: nails, screws, metal wire, chain, 40 x 30 x 5 cm
The sculptural installation Iron Woman (2010) is one of the first works Gulnur Mukazhanova created after moving to Berlin from her native Kazakhstan. In this work, the artist undertakes a personal research of female identity in her Central Asian culture. The sculptural object made of metal nails and chains takes the form of an intimate undergarment, which was worn by the artist in a related series of photographs. Mukazhanova explores a woman’s body in the conflict zones of sensuality and ideology – at the intersections of personal and social environment, of ethnic vs. global culture, of modernity vs. tradition. Significations of sexuality move between the prohibited and the accessible, the exotic and the familiar, the fetishized and the mundane, the carnal and the sacred. Within this evocative object Iron Woman exists the duality of a very personal point of female resistance, alongside a loudly feminist cry against female oppression in its multitude of forms.
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Gulnur Mukazhanova (b. 1984 in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Gulnur Mukazhanova graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty (2006), and the Weissensee Art Academy in Berlin, Germany (2013). Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses textile art, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Mukazhanova’s art is a confrontation of two different cultures but also a dialogue between them. From her Central Asian roots she keeps a strong physical relation to traditional materials that are not only used for their aesthetics but have a symbolic and historic meaning. While living in Germany she has come to confront questions of feminism, globalization, and ethnology.
Mukazhanova has participated in international biennales such as: A Time for Dreams, IV Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, Moscow, (2014); and the Krasnoyarsk Biennale, Russia (2015). In 2018 she participated in the groundbreaking exhibition Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, at MOMENTUM, Berlin. Selected recent exhibitions include: MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany (2021,2018); Asia Now Art Fair, Paris, France (2019); Aspan Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2018); Wapping Power Station, London, UK (2018); National Museum, Astana, Kazakhstan; (2017); Daegu Art Factory, Daegu, South Korea (2017); Artwin Gallery, Moscow, Russia (2016); HWK Leipzig, Germany (2013); Freies Museum, Berlin, Germany (2013); Tengri-Umai Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2010), amongst others. Her work is held in international collections, including: Fondazione 107, Turin, Italy; Krasnoyarsk Museum, Russia; La Metive, Moutier-d’Àhun, France.
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Anxiong Qiu
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/118084226 [/fve]
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Cake (2014), Video Animation, 6’2”
Qiu Anxiong’s Cake (2014) combines painting, drawing and claymation with a discordant soundtrack of mechanical noises to offer an exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two. At once timeless and prescient, this work made six years before the viral pandemic of Corona, already evokes a mounting sense of emergency. With heart-rate monitors, sirens, and police radio scanners running throughout the soundtrack, and images of wrestlers rendered in a variety of media, this work can be read as particularly emblematic of our struggles in a pandemic age. Cake marks Qui Anxiong’s first venture into animation with clay. As in the creation of his previous video works, the artist generates thousands of acrylic-on-canvas paintings that are often erased and reworked as the film evolves. These are digitized and organized in a laborious effort that results in the final animated video. Though working in acrylic paint, Qiu makes it look like ink on rice paper and by doing so, has established himself at the forefront of the experimental ink painting movement, combining classical aesthetics with contemporary digital technology.
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Anxiong Qiu (b. 1972 in Chengdu, China. Lives and works in Shanghai, China.)
Qiu Anxiong is one of China’s most prominent contemporary artists. He studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, China, and graduated from the University of Kassel College of Art, Germany (2003). In 2004 he began teaching at Shanghai Normal University. After having worked predominantly in oil painting during his studies in Kassel and having later turned to landscape painting in the tradition of the old Chinese masters, Qiu’s return to Shanghai marked a shift in interest towards animations and video art. In his animated films, Qiu co-mingles the classical and the contemporary, using the traditional Chinese ink-and-wash style to transpose contemporary social and environmental issues onto traditional Chinese landscapes, taking the undifferentiated mass of history as his raw material. Qiu’s works are known for their profound and bleak contemplation on the relationship between man and nature, and criticism of mass urbanization and environmental degradation.
Qiu Anxiong’s work is held in numerous museum collections, including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, UK; Kunst Haus Zurich, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan; Art Museum of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas, USA. Qiu Anxiong rose to international prominence in the 2006 Shanghai Biennial, and, the same year, received the CCAA Contemporary Art Award from the Shanghai Zhengdai Museum of Modern Art. Selected recent exhibitions at major museums include: MOCA Yinchuan, China (2017); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2017); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (2016/2013); MOCA Shanghai, China (2016/2014/2012); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2015); Hong Kong Museum of Art, China (2013); Times Art Museum , Guangzhou (2013); Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2013/2009); UCCA Art Museum, Beijing, China (2012); OCAT, Shenzhen, China (2011); Istanbul Modern Art Museum, Turkey (2011); Crow Collection of Asian Art Museum, Dallas, TX, USA (2011); Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS, USA (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2007).
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Varvara Shavrova
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/174793198 [/fve]
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The Opera: Three Transformations (2010/16), 3-channel Time-lapse Video Projections with Sound, 3’41”
The Opera (2010/16) portrays the gender fluidity in traditional Peking opera. Made during the 6-year period in which Shavrova was living in Beijing, the project includes photography, sound and video projections compiled from over 60 hours of video footage shot in various Peking Opera performances, theatres, dressing rooms, and private meetings. The Opera: Three Transformations, shown here, is one aspect of the broader project, animating photographs of the Peking Opera artists taken during the production of The Opera film. The Opera is an insight into the fragile world as well as social and human aspects of the Peking Opera, one of the most revered cultural heritages of the Chinese national scene. The work focuses on the transformation of the Peking Opera artists from male to female, and from female to male. Although they are admired by society as artists, their true identities and personal hardships cannot be lived out openly. Looking into the archaic and often utopian world of Chinese opera, Shavrova investigates issues of personal identity, sexuality and gender bending as they are manifested by both traditional and contemporary culture in modern day China. Balancing moments of pure visuality with the austere formal movement codes of traditional choreography, the video underscores the striking avant-garde qualities of this most traditional of art forms. The Opera is accompanied by a specially commissioned music score written by the Beijing-based composer Benoit Granier, that incorporates elements of traditional Chinese and contemporary electronic music.
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Varvara Shavrova (b. in Moscow, USSR. Lives and works between Dublin, Ireland, Berlin, Germany, and London, England.)
Varvara Shavrova studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, and received her Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, London, with ‘Dreamworlds of Flight in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism’. Shavrova’s practice is focused on excavating the layers of her family’s history through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories. In engaging memory, nostalgia and reflection, Shavrova creates installations that make connections between historic and current narratives, between the archival and the present. Notable projects include: Inna’s Dream reinterprets the first Soviet amphibious aeroplane designed by Shavrova’s great uncle in the 1930s as a site-specific installation at the Science Museum, London (2021), and Imperial War Museum, Duxford (2021); Mapping Fates reflects on Shavrova’s family migration, and includes tapestries and sound, shown in V.I. Lenin’s apartment-museum in St. Petersburg (2017); The Operaportrays the gender fluidity in traditional Peking opera, shown at Temple Beijing (2016), MOMENTUM Berlin (2016), Gallery of Photography Ireland (2014), Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014), Espacio Cultural El Tanque, Tenerife (2011); amongst many others. Shavrova curated multiple international exhibitions and projects, including: The Sea is the Limit at York Art Gallery (2018) and at Virginia Commonwealth University, Doha, Qatar (2019), and Map Games: Dynamics of Change at Today Art Museum, Beijing, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, UK and at CAOS Centre for Contemporary Arts, Terni, Italy (2008-2010).
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Sumugan Sivanesan
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/45305238 [/fve]
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A Children’s Book of War (2010), Video Animation, 1’45”
The short animation A Children’s Book of War (2010), packed with seemingly cheerful imagery and low-tech video game aesthetics, is not at all what it initially appears. Packed into this concise video collage are images comingling diverse icons of popular culture with references to centuries of colonial conflicts underlying the foundation myths of Australian nationhood. The power of A Children’s Book of War lies in its jarring conjunction of war, sovereignty, and violence with a format usually reserved for much more lighthearted topics. With its bright color palette and amusing soundscape, this video incorporates iconography as diverse as Julian Assange, the Sydney Opera House, and the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Sivanesan’s research underlying this work draws upon Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “state of exception” to discuss 9/11, Australia entering the Iraq War in 2003, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the first fateful contact that Captain Cook made in Australia. The “state of exception,” in short, is the temporary suspension of the rule of law in the name of a greater force – whether that be a defense against insurrectionary forces or the preservation of the very constitution of a sovereignty. Sivanesan seeks to remind us that the sovereignty of Australia rests on the suspension of indigenous rights – indeed, that everywhere in the Western world our lives are made possible by suspensions of rights that are felt and suffered primarily elsewhere.
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Sumugan Sivanesan (Lives and works in Sydney, Australia and Berlin, Germany.)
Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and writer, and a transcultural radical. His eclectic practice is concerned with the legacies of colonialism, the experience of cultural differences, and the diaspora. Often working collaboratively his interests span migrant histories and minority politics, activist media, artist infrastructures, more-than-human rights and multispecies politics, queer theory, Tamil diaspora studies and anticolonialism. In Berlin, he organizes with Black Earth, a collective who address interacting issues of race, gender, colonialism, and climate justice. Sivanesan earned a PhD from the Transforming Cultures research center at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia (2014). He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies (Cultural Studies), University of Potsdam (2016) supported by the DAAD.
Sivanesan has produced events and exhibitions at: Nadine Laboratory for Conetmporary Arts (Brussels 2020); Akademie Schloss Solitude (2020); Tehai (Dhaka 2020); Frame Contemporary Art (Helsinki, 2019); The Floating University Berlin (2019); EX-EMBASSY (Berlin 2018); BE.BoP 2018: Black Europe Body Politics, Maxim Gorki Theatre (Berlin, 2018); Nida Art Colony Inter-format Symposium (Lithuania, 2018); Art Laboratory Berlin (2015); ZK/U Centre for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin (2015, 2014); Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2014); The Reading Room (Bangkok 2013); Performance Space (Sydney 2013); MOMENTUM Berlin (2012); Yautepec Gallery (Mexico City 2011) and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney 2011, 2010); MOMENTUM Sydney (2010). Sivanesan was a member of the experimental documentary collective theweathergroup U, who formed for the Biennale of Sydney in 2008. He was active with media/art gang boat-people.org who engaged the Australian publics in issues of borders, race, and nationalism in 2002-2014.
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David Szauder
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/450055147 [/fve]
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Light Space Materia (2020), HD Video, Digital Animation, 8’27”
David Szauder’s film Light Space Materia (2020) translates Bauhaus ideas on technology, new materials, and light into a digital context, upgrading an iconic work of the 1930’s into a 3D digital animation and algorithmically derived soundscape. Taking as his inspiration the kinetic light and sound sculpture Light Space Modulator (1930) by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder re-created his own large-scale rendition of this iconic work – Light Space Modulator (2020). Szauder subsequently used this installation as the basis upon which to make a series of over 100 videos, digital animations, and soundscapes. David Szauder recontextualizes into digital media the driving principal of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s aim to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world. Szauder’s analysis of the Bauhaus-related kinetics of the original piece focuses on the fundamental question of how contemporary technology could change the formal expression of movement and capture the physicality of materials in a digital context. The Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology. This characteristic forms the essential basis of Szauder’s work, which applies computer code to create his animations and soundscapes derived from the ambient sound and kinetic movement of his Light Space Modulator sculpture using algorithms based on motion analysis. This soundscape accompanies Szauder’s film Light Space Materia, which commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of the materiality of the image.
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David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Media artist and curator David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Buildingscape, an initiative to turn construction sites into venues for public art. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.
David Szauder has participated in numerous international projects as artist and curator. Projects in cooperation with MOMENTUM include: “MOMENTUM InsideOut: Lockdown Schmockdown” at CHB Collegium Hungaricum (Berlin, 2021); “Light Space Modulator” at MOMENTUM (Berlin, 2020); “Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014); “INTERSECTION”: Film and Video Art Panel Discussion for Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival, 2014); “THRESHOLDS”: Performance, Exhibition, Discussion (.CHB, Berlin Art Week, 2013); “THRESHOLDS” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013-2014); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “Mass & Mess” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013).
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Shingo Yoshida
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/417440010 [/fve]
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The Summit (2020), 4K Video, 23’54” (2020)
Following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, Shingo Yoshida embarks upon a journey to the peak of Mt. Fuji – Japan’s national monument. The Summit was made at the height of the global pandemic lockdown in the winter of 2020, when the closest most of us got to travelling was looking through old photographs or watching films about far-away places. Yoshida chose this time of travel bans and closed borders in which to undertake this most personal of journeys, travelling back to Japan from Berlin in order to re-live his forefathers’ dream to place his grandfather’s poetry atop Mount Fuji. The Summit is a film of static shots and mobilized photographs. In an interplay between photography and moving image, the video comingles images filmed by the artist in his ascent up the mountain, with historic footage of the construction of the observatory at its peak, and family photographs from 1974 – the year of the artist’s birth – of his father and grandfather placing the engraved boulder beside the observatory. This intergenerational journey through a timeless landscape is the work of an artist who approaches his practice like an explorer, inviting us to accompany him on his travels.
“On August 20th, Shōwa 49 (1974), a stone tablet inscribed with a haiku was set atop Mt. Fuji. This was my father’s near-reckless project – to fulfill the dream of my grandfather who was a haiku poet — to bring a stone tablet to Kengamine next to the observatory on Mt. Fuji, the highest peak of Japan worshipped as its symbol from ancient times.”
Shingo Yoshida
下界まで断崖富士の壁に立つ 山口誓子
[Standing atop a sheer cliff of Mt. Fuji continuing down to the world below]
Seishi YAMAGUCHI
大沢崩れ覗きてすくむ登山靴 北舟子 (祖父)
[Looking down Osawa Kuzure my feet tremble]
Hokushushi
初富士に一礼頂に父の句碑 南舟子 (父 : 菊次郎)
[Making a bow to Mt. Fuji on New Year, where stands a stone tablet inscribed with my father’s haiku]
Nanshushi
[Translation of the HAIKU in the video.]
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Shingo Yoshida (b. 1974 in Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works in Marseille, France.)
Photographer and video artist Shingo Yoshida finds inspiration in travelling, myths, traditions and the overwhelming beauty of nature. With a practice based on seeking out what is normally hidden from view, Yoshida considers the world as his studio and therefore a place of constant creation. In his video and photographic works Yoshida expresses his deep reverence for nature and its power. Undertaking long journeys to distant places, Yoshida searches for legends and myths that are in danger of being forgotten, striving to capture encounters with the magnificent. Shingo Yoshida received his MA with highest honors from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson in Nice France in 2004. In 2005 he earned a post-graduate diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France, and subsequently in 2007 he received another post-graduate diploma in the Program La Seine of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Yoshida completed the prestigious international artist residencies at Villa Arson, Nice, France (2013), and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France (2007-8), among many others. In 2017, MOMENTUM invited him to show his film and photographs made in Siberia in an exhibition for the UN Conference on Climate Change, COP23. Subsequently, his work came to be acquired by the Art Collection of the Ministry of Environment, Germany. In 2016, his film works entered the collections of three major institutions in Berlin: the Berlinische Galerie, the Akademie der Künste, and Fluentum.
Yoshida’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, including: Berlinische Galerie, Museum for Modern Art & Videoart at Midnight, Berlin, Germany (2020); Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, Loko Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2020); S.Y.P. Art, Tokyo, Japan (2019); Mikiko Sato Gallery, Hamburg, Germany (2018); Pavillon am Milchhof, Berlin, Germany (2018); UN Conference on Climate Change, COP23, Ministry of Environment, Berlin & Bonn, Germany (2017); ikonoTV (2017); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, Gunma, Japan (2016); Tokyo Wonder Site / Kunstraum Kreuzberg-Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2016); ‘POLARIZED! Vision’ Competition Winner, Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland (2015); Mulliqi Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Prishtina, Kosovo (2016); Instituto Zappa, Accademia Di Brera, Viale Marche, Milan, Italy (2016); Onufri International Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (2016); Videoart at Midnight #67, Babylon Cinema, Berlin, Germany (2015); Istanbul Modern Museum, Turkey (2015); 60th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (2014); Villa Arson Nice Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2013); Arte TV Creative, France-Germany (2013); 66th Cannes Film Festival, France (2012); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, Chile (2012); Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris, France (2012); 22nd, 23rd, 27th FID International Film Festival, Marseille, France (2011, 2012, 2016); ‘Based in Berlin’ by Klaus Biesenbach, Christine Macel and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Berlin, Germany (2011); Rencontres Internationales Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2007, 2012); Sonom 07, Festival of UNESCO Universal Forum of Cultures, Monterrey, Mexico (2007); Lyon Biennale, France (2005); NCCA Natuional Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2005), among many others.
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SUPPORTED BY:
PRESENTED BY:
OPENING PHOTOS
by Beate Grötsch
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MOMENTUM AiR
Studio Residency
Christian Niccoli
Website
MOMENTUM is proud to host Christian Niccoli’s Italian Council Award solo project
in production in 2020 – 2021.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The video installation ZWEI (Two) tells the story of two men bound together in a relationship of dependence but it can also be read as a social metaphor as individuals, communities and societies have always been linked to each other by a relationship of mutual dependence, where, in a conscious or unconscious way, one person’s choices and actions have an impact on the other, even if this is not always evident. The work consists of a vertically mounted wall monitor and shows a very high wall. From the upper edge of the wall hangs a rope that falls along both sides of the wall. A man hangs from each end of the rope. The two men do not seem to know each other’s presence, because each in his own way is busy fighting not to fall. Several meters separate them both from the ground and from the top. From time to time the two frightened men look downwards and upwards, then try to climb up, without success. If one pulls the rope towards himself, the other is pulled slightly upwards.
The video installation is accompanied by a concept-book that transposes the same theme onto paper, showing a series of unpublished drawings collected in a pop-up book composed of a sequence of six representations capable of taking on a three-dimensional form as the pages are leafed through.
– Christian Niccoli
ARTIST BIO
Christian Niccoli, (Born 1976 in Südtirol, Italy. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany).
In 2006 Christian Niccoli was an artist in residence at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy, and in 2008-09 he participated in the International Studio Program at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany.
Niccoli’s videos and video installations have been presented internationally in museums and institutions, among others at: Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria (2006); Phönix Art – Harald Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, Germany (2002); Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal, Canada (2015); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2012); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2009,2004); 8th Baltic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland (2009); 4th Biennial del Fin del Mundo Valparaiso, Chile (2015); Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia (2010); Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France (2015), Museion – Museum für Moderne und Zeitgenössiche Kunst, Blzano, Italy (2020); Museum Kunst der Westküste, Alkersum, Germany (2020); Alfred Ehrhard Stiftung, Berlin (2021).
Niccoli’s works have been presented at several festivals, including: Transmediale, Berlin, Germany (2009); Hamburg Short Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany (2008); Oblíqua – International Exhibition of Video Art & Experimental Cinema, Lisbon, Portugal (2016); 16th WRO Media Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland (2015); Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart, Germany (2015); Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece (2015); Facade Video Festival Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2014); and Video Art Festival Miden, Kalamata, Greece (2014).
Christian Niccoli’s works are in several public collections, including; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland; Kunstsammlung der Autonomen Provinz Südtirol, Italy; Collezione Farnesina – Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome, Italy; and Museion – Museum of Modern and Conemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy.
CALENDAR OF EXHIBITIONS & PRESENTATIONS
National Museum in Szczecin, Poland
Video Premiere: 11 November 2022 / Exhibition: 12 November 2022 – 16 January 2022
MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany
Included in the group exhibition States of Emergency: 11 December 2021 – 27 March 2022
Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria
Presentation: 13 May 2022 / Screening: 14 May – 12 June 2022
MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Presentation & Artist Talk: 8 April 2022
Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy
Presentation: 10 June 2022 / Screening: 11 June – 28 August 2022
Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany
Presentation & Artist Talk: 11 June 2022
Kunst Meran / Merano Arte, Merano, Italy
Presentation & Artist Talk: 25 June 2022
MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, Italy
October 2022
Project supported by the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020),
program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General
for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture
With thanks for the generous support from
In cooperation with
Cultural Partners
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Points of Resistance
www.points-of-resistance.org
EXHIBITION:
4 – 26 April 2021
Featuring:
AES+F, Chrissy Angliker, Inna Artemova, Lutz Becker, Tom Biber, Andreas Blank, Anina Brisolla, Claus Brunsmann, Claudia Chaseling, Chto Delat, Brad Downey, Thomas Draschan, Kerstin Dzewior, Margret Eicher, Nezaket Ekici, Amir Fattal, Doug Fishbone, Daniel Grüttner, Chris Hammerlein, John Isaacs, Anne Jungjohann, Gülsün Karamustafa, Franziska Klotz, David Krippendorff , Via Lewandowsky, Jani Leinonen, MAP Office, Shahar Marcus, Milovan Destil Markovic, Sara Masüger, Kate McMillan, Almagul Menlibayeva, Robert C. Morgan, Matthias Moseke, Jan Muche, Gulnur Mukazhanova, Kirsten Palz, Manfred Peckl, Otto Piene, Stefan Rinck, Jörg Schaller, Maik Schierloh, Nina E. Schönefeld, Kerstin Serz, Varvara Shavrova, Pola Sieverding, Barthélémy Toguo, Mariana Vassileva, Günther Uecker, Bill Viola, Marta Vovk, Michael Wutz, Jindrich Zeithamml, Ireen Zielonka
Curated by Constanze Kleiner & Rachel Rits-Volloch
In cooperation with David Elliott, Jan Kage, Stephan von Wiese
@ Zionskirche, Berlin
Zionskirchplatz, 10119 Berlin
Easter Sunday, 4 April – 26 April 2021
Open Daily at 1 – 6pm
COVID-compatible – No Booking or Testing Necessary
Initiated by:
Supported by
With thanks to the
Zionskirche and
Brandenburgische Festspiele
CONCERT – Postponed Due To Lockdown Rules
TRES MOMENTOS
Composer: Sven Helbig
Conductor: Wilhelm Keitel
And at KLEINERVONWIESE Gallery, Friedrichstrasse 204, 10117 Berlin
Live-Stream Discussion Series
Friday 23 April @ 11:00
Church and Resistance
Lecture by Christian Posthofen, architectural theorist, philosopher and author on the topic: “Church and Resistance – Heterotopias”
with Christoph Tannert, exhibition organiser and author, and Director of Künstlerhaus Bethanien
and Jana Noritsch – founder of Collectors Club Berlin.
Friday 23 April @ 12:30
Artist / Curator Talk
Moderated by Jan Kage, curator, gallery owner, presenter @ Radio Arty, FluxFM
in conversation with artists Claus Brunsmann, Nina E. Schönefeld, Marta Vovk, Pola Sieverding
and curators Constanze Kleiner and Stephan von Wiese
3D Exhibition Tour
Introduction
Points of Resistance invites contemporary artists and thinkers from a diversity of places and perspectives to address the many meanings of resistance in today’s complex world. Without taking any singular political position, Points of Resistance gives voice to humanistic viewpoints necessary in an era witnessing the steady resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism and racism the world over. This is as much a sickness of our times as the ongoing pandemic emergency. We hope that Points of Resistance will provide an antidote, if not necessarily a solution, to the ills endangering the hard-won, and relatively short-lived, freedoms of our society – especially in the context of Berlin’s painful history.
Situated in Berlin’s Zionskirche, Points of Resistance invokes the remarkable history of this church as a crucial point of resistance both against the Nazis and during the GDR – from renowned theologian and anti-Nazi activist Deitrich Bonhoeffer who worked in the parish for over a decade until his arrest by the Gestapo, to the numerous opposition groups and human rights activists who’s use of the Zionskirche as a meeting point made it a target of the Stasi until the collapse of the GDR. Upon this historic stage, we assemble a diversity of artistic voices – through painting, photography, sculpture, video, sound, performance, and discussion – reflecting on the mistakes of the past and present in order to celebrate the values which enable us to forge unity from diversity.
Points of Resistance takes the form of an exhibition of over 50 exceptional international artists, jointly produced by Gallery Kleiner von Wiese and MOMENTUM, curated by Constanze Kleiner and Rachel Rits-Volloch, in cooperation with David Elliott, Jan Kage, and Stephan von Wiese. Despite our uncertain times of lockdowns and gallery closures, the Zionskirche will remain open to the public. As such, Points of Resistance is amongst the few places that Berliners starved for culture during this time of Corona can come to experience diverse artistic perspectives addressing the ongoing need for resistance, in its many forms. The exhibition is accompanied by a live-streamed discussion series and video interviews with artists.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
Mission Statement
“Points of Resistance” is an exhibition project by artists and non-artists who all take great pleasure in thinking and delight in taking their own position. They also know that we should be concerned with what is important not only for the individual but also for our culture.
The Zionkirche church in Berlin has a distinguished history as a refuge and work space for people who think differently. In all its manifestations, including in its everyday work and loving approach, it has always represented a lived, resolute but also tolerant resistance, right through to the present day. We deliberately chose this special place for our exhibition, for it asks all participants in “Points of Resistance”, whether creators or visitors, to take on a particular responsibility: in the face of the fissures emerging, worldwide, in political, humane and private decision-making practice as a result of fear and inhumanity, our aim is to demonstrate, through artistic positions, attitudes that have the potential to create a spirit of commonality.
The aim of the exhibition “Points of Resistance” is to be an intellectual and emotional home for people – whatever their background, status, age or views – who are working together to find a possible way of gathering enough strength and enough arguments in the fight against the globalization of indifference; against every form of appropriation and manipulation and for the preservation of the hard-won basic values of democracy. “Points of Resistance” also strives to keep alive the memory of all those people who, time and again, remained true to their beliefs and were prepared to give their lives for these.
Berlin, as the capital of Germany today, is strongly marked by its history: whether as the former capital of the German Reich or as the formerly divided city, subsidized by both systems on either side of the Wall for decades. But it is also marked by the now almost proverbial scandals that have rocked Berlin since the reunification of Germany – the Berlin banking crisis, the debate around the rebuilding of the Berlin Palace, the airport debacle, Berlin’s “poor but sexy” status – and last but not least, of course, coronavirus.
Nonetheless, all the world still wants to move here – and this is no longer only “because Berlin is so cheap”. Despite it all, Berlin is still seen as a cosmopolitan, diverse and, in addition, extremely creative city. And neither have all these scandals dampened the humour of the Berliners themselves yet. “Points of Resistance” picks up on this. And this is what we are building on: the “Berlin Bear” carries his burden with difficulty, but he carries it stoically – and that makes him strong. And we are keeping up with him – giving up is not an option!
– Constanze Kleiner
Featuring:
(Click on the name to see the bio and the work description below)
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AES+F
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About Inverso Mundus
Engravings in the genre of “World Upside Down”, known since the 16th century, depict such scenes as a pig gutting the butcher, a child punishing his teacher, a man carrying a donkey on his back, man and woman exchanging roles and dress, and a beggar in rags magnanimously bestowing alms on a rich man. These engravings contain demons, chimeras, fish flying through the sky and death itself, variously with a scythe or in the mask of a plague doctor.
The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian “reverse, the opposite” and the Old Italian “poetry,” and Mundus – the Latin “world,” hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In our interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a multichannel video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.
About Last Riot 2, Tondo #13
The virtual world generated by the real world of the twentieth century is growing exponentially, like an organism in a Petri dish. Crossing its own borders in to new zones, it absorbs its founders and mutates in to something absolutely new. In this new world real wars look like a game on www.americasarmy.com. Prison torture appears more like the sadistic exercises of modern-day valkyries. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment in to a fantasy landscape of a new epoch
This paradise is a mutated world where time is frozen and the past is neighbor to the future. Its inhabitants are devoid of gender, becoming more like angels. This is a world where the severe, the vague or the erotic imagination appears natural in the artificial unsteadiness of 3D perspective. The heroes of the new epoch have only one identity, that of participants in the last riot. Each fights both self and the other, there’s no longer any difference between victim and aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethics.
Bio
First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Arzamasova, Evzovich, and Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies. They define their practice as a kind of “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture.
AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations of striking originality that have come to define both the AES+F aesthetic and the cutting edge of the medium’s capacities. The second of the series, The Feast of Trimalchio (2009), appeared in Venice in 2009, and the third, Allegoria Sacra (2011), debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. United as The Liminal Space Trilogy, this tour-de-force series was premiered in September 2012 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Moscow Manege, the central exhibition hall of the artists’ home city, and has since been shown on many occasions at various museums and festivals. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Inverso Mundus was later shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals all over the world.
Between 2016 and 2019, AES+F have also worked in set design for theater and opera. The artists created their first video set design for Psychosis, a reinterpretation of Sarah Kane’s famous play, 4:48 Psychosis, directed together with Alexander Zeldovich. Psychosis premiered at Electrotheater Stanislavsky in Moscow in June 2016. In 2019, the group premiered their first opera together with the Italian opera director Fabio Cherstich, a reimagined Turandot acclaimed by critics as audacious and visionary. Turandot was created as an international co-production at the initiative of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, together with Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and Lakhta Center in St. Petersburg.
For more than a decade, works by AES+F have been showcased in signature festivals and biennial exhibitions of contemporary art around the world, including — in addition to Moscow and Venice — those of Adelaide, Gwangju, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Kochi-Muziris, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Vancouver, and many others. Their work has also been featured in influential events devoted to new media — such as ARS Electronica (Linz), Mediacity Seoul and Video Zone (Tel Aviv) — and photography — such as FotoFest (Houston), Les Rencontres d’Arles and Moscow’s Photo Biennial.
The group had more than 100 solo exhibitions at museums, exhibition spaces, and commercial galleries worldwide. AES+F works have been shown in such prestigious venues as the ZKM (Karlsruhe), HAM (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tate Britain (London), MAXXI and MACRO Future (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires), and many others.
Their works appear in some of the world’s principal collections of contemporary art, such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), MOCAK (Kraków), Sammlung Goetz (Munich), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), and the Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania), Centre de Arte dos de Mayo (Madrid), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris), the Vanhaerents Art Collection (Brussels), Taguchi Art Collection (Tokyo), and many others. Their work is also well represented in some of Russia’s principal national museums, such as The State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), the National Center for Contemporary Art, and the Multimedia Art Museum (Moscow).
AES+F received Sergey Kuryokhin Award 2011, the main award of the Kandinsky Prize 2012, the main award of the NordArt Festival 2014, and Pino Pascali Prize 2015 (18th Edition) – all for the project Allegoria Sacra. AES+F were also awarded a Bronze Medal (2005) and a Gold Medal (2013) by the Russian National Academy of Fine Arts.
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Inverso Mundus/em>
2015, HD video (1-channel version), 38 min
Last Riot 2, Tondo #13/em>
2006, Digital collage, c-print (⌀150 cm on canvas, 80 x 80 cm on paper)
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Chrissy Angliker
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Artist Statement
The focus of Chrissy Angliker’s work lies in creating a balanced relationship between the controllable and uncontrollable. Chrissy depicts that concept through the relationship she is cultivating with her medium of paint. For every intentional mark, the nature of the medium is challenging it. The artist is searching for a sense of grace in the transition between these two opposing elements. The theme of her work arose from her feeling of life itself being a balance between control and chaos. “As people, we have intentions, but must anticipate the intervention of outside forces beyond our power.” The finished paintings capture the relationship created by aiming to balance these extremes to capture a whole, and frank representation of the subject.
Bio
Chrissy Angliker is a Brooklyn-based Swiss/American artist who regularly shows in both her native and adopted countries. She was born in Zurich and raised in Greifensee and Winterthur. Chrissy’s artistic inclinations emerged at an early age. Beginning in 1996 she was fortunate to study with the Russian artist Juri Borodatchev, who became her artistic mentor for several years. In 1999 at age 16, Chrissy moved to the US to study Fine Art at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Mass. In 2002, Chrissy had her first solo show at Gallery Juri in Winterthur, Switzerland. Seeking to broaden her means of expression, she then pursued a degree in Industrial Design at the Pratt Institute in New York. After spending her post- graduate years working in the design field, Chrissy shifted her creative expression back to painting in 2008. Her art is focused on visually translating her perception of herself in relationship to the world. Chrissy’s work has been shown in Europe and the US, and has been featured in several international publications. She has been commissioned to collaborate with several companies, among AOL, Burton and Wired Magazine. Her most recent solo show, Bodies of Water, was held at the Swiss Consulate in New York.
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Ocean Swim II
2020, Acrylic on canvas, 76 × 76 × 2 cm
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Inna Artemova
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About the work
Utopia XI is one out of a series of over 40 diverse works sharing the title of Utopia. On show in Points of Resistance, this particular painting evokes a sense of impending cosmic cataclysm more so than an idealized state of utopia. Whether meteors crashing through the cosmos, or the viral structures with which we have become all too familiar in the past year of pandemic, Utopia XI sends a suitably ambiguous message about the future, contriving to comingle a notion of existential threat with the sense of the sublime.
Artemova’s practice remains heavily influenced by her professors at the MArchI in Moscow, the Paper Architects, a movement originating in the 1980s that developed futuristic architectural creations never intended to be realized. The visionary projects of the Paper Architects and her experience of the failure of the communist utopia with the fall of the Soviet Union, has led Artemova to explore, through her constructivist painting style, the ideas of architectural utopias from the 1960s up to her own futuristic visions. In creating utopian landscapes and spaces, Artemova interrogates the future of living spaces and their impact upon human relationships. The concept of utopia stands for a space of possibility in human consciousness in which the crucial questions have to be answered again and again: Is there no alternative to the reality in which we live? What will we do in the future? Do we have to fail because of our ideal ideas?
Bio
Born in Moscow, Inna Artemova studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI). For her diploma project, she received the 2nd prize of the Russian Federation. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and started to focus on her work as an artist in the field of painting and drawing. Recently, Inna Artemova has participated in: the Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020), and in 2019, the Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts presented her works in the solo show Landscapes of Tomorrow. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Austria and Italy. Additionally, her works were shown at international art fairs in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, the US, and Japan.
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Utopia XI
2018, Oil on canvas, 190 × 140 cm
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Lutz Becker
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About the work
The Berlin Wall was first breached on 9th November 1989, as the result of popular mass meetings and demonstrations within the GDR. It was not demolished at a single stroke, but over days and weeks was slowly chipped away as people from East and West joined together to obliterate a hated symbol of oppression. This was the first in a chain of events that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain. Europe was freer than it had ever been before! And the ramifications spread the world-over! In 1989 the whole of Berlin rang and rocked to the liberating sound of hammers and pickaxes as the Wall was demolished. It was intended to build a better world without any walls.
Artist and film-maker Lutz Becker made a montage of these percussive sounds as the opening work in After the Wall
Artist Statement
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, symbolised the end of the separation of the City of Berlin, as well as that of Germany into an Eastern and a Western state. It marked, for everybody to see, the final collapse of Communism. It was a moment in history that promised to the people of Germany and other Europeans a new beginning. The significance of the Berlin Wall extended far beyond the city, beyond the borders of Germany. It epitomised the Cold War confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and the NATO alliance. The Wall separated the spheres of interest between Communism and Capitalism. On 13. August 1961 the government of East Germany, the GDR, began to seal off East Berlin from West Berlin by means of barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles. The underground and railway services of Greater Berlin were severed and West Berlin was turned into an island within GDR territory. A solid wall gradually replaced the provisional fence. It was made up of concrete segments of a height of 12 feet and was 165 miles long. A trench ran parallel to it to prevent vehicles from breaking through. There was a patrol corridor behind it, watch towers, bunkers and electric fences.
It appeared to the population of Germany that the split of their country and of Berlin would last forever. In 1989, as a reaction to Gorbachov’s reforms in the Soviet Union and massive unrest in their country, the government of the GDR decreed the opening of the Wall on 9. November 1989. In the following days and months demolition workers began with tearing it down. On 1. July 1990 the GDR gave up her statehood and merged with West Germany. For the Germans the demolition of the wall was an act of liberation. It gave hope for a future in which unhindered communication and freedom of movement would be everybody’s natural right. Within days of the ‘opening’ of the wall its terrifying symbolism lost its power. Millions of people came to Berlin to look at the now defunct wall and to take a piece of it with them to remember this moment of history. Hundreds of people attacked the graffiti covered surfaces of the Wall, eroding it bit by bit. The so called ‘Mauerspechte’, wall-peckers as opposed to woodpeckers, worked on the Wall day and night; their hammering, knocking and breaking sounds travelled along the many miles of Wall. The high-density concrete of the structure worked like a gigantic resonating body; its acoustic properties created eerie echoes driven by the random percussion of the hammering.
– Lutz Becker
Bio
Lutz Becker is a filmmaker, artist and curator from Berlin who lives and works in London. He is of a generation still affected by the aftermath of the WW2, the rebuilding of Germany and the student’s revolt of the late 60s. His films, videos and curatorial projects have been shown internationally. His paintings are in institutional and private collections. As a student in London he embraced the forward looking spirit of abstraction and artistic internationalism. This led him towards the painterly procedures of informel. He got interested in the synthetic sound structures of electronic music which lead him towards the making of experimental abstract films at the BBC. His preoccupation with movement and time influenced much of his film and video work. Becker is a director/producer of political and art documentaries such as Double Headed Eagle, Lion of Judah and Vita Futurista to name a few as well as TV productions, such as Nuremberg in History.
He participated as a guest artist at the First Kiev Biennale in 2012 with the video installation, The Scream and is currently preparing the reconstruction of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Que viva Mexico!. Besides the work as artist and film maker he is an expert on Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism. He curated for Tate Modern the Moscow section of Century City 2001 and for the State Museum of Modern Art, Thessaloniki, Construction: Tatlin and After 2002, for the Estorick Collection, London, a survey of European photomontage Cut & Paste 2008, for Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, a show of 20th Century drawings Modern Times: Responding to Chaos 2010. Most recently he co-curated Solomon Nikritin – George Grosz, Political Terror and Social Decadence in Europe between the Wars at the State Museum of Modern Art, Thessaloniki.
Lutz Becker’s sound sculpture, After the Wall, re-visits a sound installation commissioned for the exhibition After the Wall held at the Moderna Museet Stockholm in 1999, curated by David Elliott. Its five constituent sound montages are based on original recordings made at the fall of the Berlin Wall. After its installation in Stockholm it travelled subsequently to the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. MOMENTUM originally presented the sound sculpture After the Wall in the exhibition Fragments of Empires in the context of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2014. The soundscapes captured in After the Wall – a discordant cacophony of hammering and banging – are derived from the recorded sounds of thousands of people across Berlin wielding hammers and chisels to break down the Wall.
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AFTER THE WALL – Potsdamer Platz
Strong athmosphere. It is the basis of the installation. Hammering and distant voices.
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AFTER THE WALL – Invalidenstrasse
Dramatic close-up percussion of hammers.
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AFTER THE WALL – Checkpoint Charlie
Heavy percussion. Massive rhythmical sound bundles.
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AFTER THE WALL – Brandanburger Tor
Relaxed, regular beats quite close.
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AFTER THE WALL – Night
End piece with dominant echos.
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Tom Biber
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Harz IV Vorbereitungsbild
2016, Oil on wood, 41.5 × 13.29 cm
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Andreas Blank
Website >
About the works
In his sculptural practice, Andreas Blank combines the abstract and the realistic, the conceptual as well as the technical. He sources stones from quarries from all over the world, carves them with elaborate deliberation and assembles them as sometimes consciously stylized, and other times deceptively realistic objects of the everyday. In his precise installations, the apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. Whether marble, alabaster, or porphyry, material historically used to serve religious or political functions, has in Blank’s hands acquired a seemingly casual and fragmentary character. The geographical and cultural identity of the stone and the memorial function of stone-sculpture in general refer to the value of each object. Blank questions the obvious and transforms traditional ideals, subverting the value of the ordinary and mundane. In a discourse of image and likeness, things lose their functional purpose, transcending into pure, formalistic objects. Stone sculptures, which historically were intended primarily for political representation or religious devotion, in Andreas Blank’s works come to question a (post)modernist nihilism. His works succeed to condense time and narrative structures, stretching the limits of traditional sculpture.
Bio
Andreas Blank was born in Ansbach (Germany) in 1976. He attended the Karlsruhe State Academy of Art (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and was student of Prof. Harald Klingelhöller. He held a scholarship with the German National Academic Foundation and received his Master of Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2009 he was a finalist for the New Sensations Award by Channel 4 and the Saatchi Gallery. Blank lives and works in Berlin.
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Untitled
2019, Marble, 25 × 25 × 110 cm
Planes
2021, Marble, Quartz, 47 × 27 × 85 cm
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Anina Brisolla
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Bio
Anina Brisolla‘s works combine researched digital imagery, computer-generated images and digital printing techniques with analog drawing or painterly components. She condenses these into graphic works, collages and objects, moving images and video loops. In her work, Brisolla reflects on privatization and the resulting power relations within the multifaceted relationships of humans, nature, and space.
Anina Brisolla studied fine arts in the Netherlands and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has recently shown her work in solo shows at KanyaKage, SMAC and Blake & Vargas in Berlin and in group exhibitions at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Radialsystem in Berlin and Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna. Anina Brisolla lives and works in Berlin.
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true_false.001
2020, Ink and ink eraser on paper, 29.95 × 21 cm, 30 × 24 cm framed
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Claus Brunsmann
Website >
About the works
Summer of Love is part of his Police Series (2009–2015), originally planned to be a group of paintings centered around the motif of social justice, order, death wish, and impressionism.
Claus Brunsmann’s work oscillates between figurative and abstract art and covers a broad range of form and content. The paintings are characterized by a multi-layered penetration of the medium and its tradition and are deeply rooted in the history of art. At the same time, they open up traditional imagery to unfamiliar interpretations and ways of seeing modern media. Claus Brunsmann’s works testify to the power of a painting, which aesthetically manufactures, or even invents, the reality in the image.
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Summer of Love
2009, From Police Series, Liquitex on paper (framed), 70 × 100 cm
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Claudia Chaseling
Website >
About the work
The work shown in this exhibition is part of Claudia Chaseling’s extensive series she entitles Small Paintings. Sky Can Be More Blue, created during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, is a dream of better days and more open times; a way of traveling without travelling during periods of closed borders. This work is no less powerful for its diminutive scale. The ‘Small Paintings’ were begun in 1998 when the artist was living in NY, and resumed throughout her diverse periods of living abroad. Painting over postcards she collects throughout her life’s journey, Chaseling approaches this aspect of her practice as a kind of diary, inscribing each work with text relating to her experiences.
Claudia Chaseling’s predominant practice is that of wall-size paintings and large-scale site specific installations. The visual language Chaseling has created and called Spatial Painting and the imagery in her work consists of distorted landscapes, poisoned places, mutated creatures and plants whose deformation is caused by radioactive contamination and environmental toxins. A decade ago she created the graphic novel animated on video, Murphy the Mutant, which became an anchor for her work to follow. This narrative work effectively describes her ongoing fixation upon the enduring environmental devastation of nuclear waste and munitions, transposing into a paradoxically sweet atomic allegory, akin to a children’s book, the horrific aftermath of the way we wage war in the modern world. The diverse body of works encompassing Claudia Chaseling’s practice, from Spatial Painting to graphic novels, watercolor, sculpture, print, and video, all deal with the facts and the consequences of today’s socio-political systems and their effects on the environment.
Chaseling’s work, in its entirety, forms an ongoing point of resistance against the global arms industry and the nuclear chain which leads to the radioactive contamination of depleted uranium munitions and their toxic aftermath. Her work results from meticulous research into historic and ongoing ways in which we continue to poison our planet with the byproducts of wars and nuclear accidents. Using her visual language of Spatial Painting to both inform and protest about the fatal status quo of global energy and arms industries, Claudia Chaseling has for over a decade persevered in focusing our attention on the pernicious weapon of mass destruction which is depleted uranium.
Bio
Claudia Chaseling is an international artist, born in Munich, Germany. She received a Masters degree in Visual Art, from the University of the Arts in Berlin and a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Art) from the Australian National University in Canberra. Chaseling is known for the practice of Spatial Painting, site-mutative biomorphic abstract murals, which cover walls, floors and ceilings. These works are drafted from one particular viewpoint, to distort and dissolve the familiar geometry of the space, whilst carrying socio-political meaning. Claudia has exhibited her work in over sixty solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, Australia and Europe. Her work has been featured in the X-Border Biennial, Finland; the Luela Art Biennial, Sweden; and the Lorne Biennial, Australia; amongst others. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Art Gallery Nadezda Petrovic, Cacak, Serbia; Wollongong Art Gallery and Yuill Crowely Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Kunstverein Duisburg and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and most recently with MOMENTUM in collaboration with the Australian Embassy, Berlin, Germany; further with Art in Buildings in Milwaukee and New York City, USA, of which the NYC exhibition radiationscape has been featured in the New York Times. Major grants and scholarships received continuously – include those of the German DAAD and Karl Hofer Society Award; the Australian Samstag Scholarship, Australia Council for the Arts Grant, artsACT Grants, IGNITE Career Fund and the Postgraduate Award. Claudia Chaseling has taken part in various international visiting artists programs and residencies, among others at Art Omi and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, at the Texas A&M University and at the Australian National University. The Verlag für zeitgenoessische Kunst und Theorie Berlin published her first extensive monograph in November 2016.
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Sky Can Be More Blue
2020, Mixed technique on postcard, approximately 10 × 15 cm
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Chto Delat?
Website >
About the work
Project authors: Chto Delat? Olga Egorova (Tsaplya); Dmitry Vilensky; Natalia Pershina (Gliuklya); Nikolai Oleinikov Director: Olga Egorova (Tsaplya) Composer: Mikhail Krutikov Screenplay: Tsaplya, Dmitry Vilensky, Gliuklya Camera and lighting: Artem Ignatov Sound: Sergei Knyazev Set design: Nikolai Oleinikov, Dmitry Vilensky.
Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup is a video structured in the form of a song that conveys and analyses a key episode in the final period of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. In August of 1991 an unprecedented popular uprising against the established order took place. This uprising represented the end of the Soviet period and was deemed by the West to be the final triumph of democracy in Russia. This film is part of the trilogy Songspiels that the collective Chto Delat? made between 2008 and 2010, in which it uses the term created by Bertolt Brecht (“songspiel”) as a perversion of singspiel (German popular opera). The video speaks ironically about the epic genre that tinges certain historical processes, such as the one that meant the end of the Cold War and plays with a distanced re-writing of history.
Shown in Points of Resistance in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche, the format of the songspiel invokes the tradition of choral church music, while furthermore addressing the remarkable history of this church as a crucial point of resistance during the GDR. With the proximity of the Zionskirche within meters to the former path of the Berlin Wall (on the East side!), and to the struggles of the many once trapped within it, Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup takes on a particular significance in light of Berlin’s divided past – a legacy that exists to this day in the ongoing tensions between East and West.
Bio
The collective Chto Delat? (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in Peters- burg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.
The group was constituted in May 2003 in St. Petersburg in an action called The Refoundation of Petersburg. Shortly afterwards, the original, as yet nameless core group began publishing an international newspaper called Chto Delat?. The name of the group derives from a novel by the Russian 19th century writer Nikolai Chernyshevs- ky, and immediately brings to mind the first socialist worker’s self-organizations in Russia, which Lenin actualized in his own publication, What is to be done? (1902). Chto Delat sees itself as an artistic cell and also as a community organizer for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicizing “knowledge production”.
In 2013, Chto Delat initiated an educational platform—School of Engaged Art in Pe- tersburg and also runs a space called Rosa’s House of Culture. From its inception, the collective has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper focused on the ur- gent issues of Russian cultural politics, in dialogue with the international context. In 2014 the collective withdrew from the participation in Manifesta 14 in Petersburg as a local protest against the developing the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and with this act has triggered a current debate on the participation and boycott of art events.
The artistic activity is realizing across a range of media—from video and theater plays, to radio programs and murals—it include art projects, seminars and public campaigns. The works of the collective are characterized by the use of alienation effect, sur- real scenery, typicality and always case based analyses of a concrete social and political struggles. The aesthetics of the group is based also on heretic unpacking the artistic devices offered by Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Luck Godard and Reiner Fassbin- der. The collective make a strong focus on the issue of cultural workers labour rights.
These activities are coordinated by a core group including Tsaplya Olga Egoro- va (artist), Artiom Magun (philosopher), Nikolay Oleynikov (artist), Natalia Pershina / Glucklya (artist), Alexey Penzin (philosopher), Alexander Skidan (poet and critic), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher), Dmitry Vilensky (artist) and Nina Gasteva (choreo- grapher).
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Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup
2008, Video, 26 min 23 sec
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Brad Downey
Website >
About Pretending to Be in Control
Police doing AcroYoga or acrobats wearing full combat gear of the French CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité). Four of them pile on top of each other on a park bench, their heads lying relaxed on each other’s chest, looking up at the sky. In another constellation, one of them is lying on his back like a beetle, balancing a partner on his armorclad hands and feet. Their identity is concealed under the visors of the helmets. The absurdity and the playfulness of the scenes are amusing, since the executive of the state power is ridiculed or portrayed in a peaceful, lovable light.
However, it can only be a parallel universe in which the expensive military uniforms are not used for defense or force, but for acrobatics and flirting. Make Love Not War.
(The CRS are comparable to the German riot police, i.e. used in large scale demonstrations. The predecessor organization was the paramilitary groupes mobiles de réserve of Vichy France)
– Nadia Pilchowski
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Pretending to Be in Control
2018, Digital photographs, 95 × 147 cm, 93 × 140 cm
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About Melania
The cause for the erection of the monument to Melania is Brad’s first visit to Slovenia in the summer of 2018, when he discovered that it is the birthplace of the First Lady of his homeland. Another motivation could certainly be the aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of her husband. So Brad decided to commemorate this contradiction named Melania together with a team of Slovenian colleagues and the local community. After choosing and buying the poplar tree and after meeting and bringing Maxi – an amateur chainsaw sculptor, born in the same month of the same year and in the same maternity ward as Melania – into the project, the monument was unveiled last year in Rožno, near Sevnica, on the day when the American people celebrate the declaration of their independence.
One part of the art project is also the documentary film, a portrait of Maxi, which shows the crucial steps in the making of the sculpture. Brad and his colleagues then began to make replicas of the statue, based on the cast of the original. Exactly one year after the unveiling, on the 4th of July 2020, unknown perpetrators burned down the monument in Rožno. Brad then removed it and, joining forces with the local community that took care of the monument and its surroundings, erected a bronze replica. Melania is a multi-layered project that is simply not allowed to conclude by everything that is happening around it.
– Karlo Hmeljak
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Melania
2019, Sevenica Slovenia, digital video, 12 min 11 sec
Melania (media analysis)
2020, Sevenica Slovenia, digital video, 8 min 11 sec
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About MELANIA
The MELANIA Bronze edition by Brad Downey is a detailed miniature of the original bronze sculpture installed by the US artist on a tree stump near Melania Trump’s Slovenian hometown. Originally created by a Slovenian artist with a chainsaw from a tree trunk, the world’s first sculpture of the American First Lady reflects both the anti-immigrant policies of the 45th U.S. President and the paradox of his own wife’s immigrant background.
The sculpture received worldwide media coverage. The first wooden version was set on fire by an unknown person on July 4, 2020, the American national holiday, and was subsequently replaced by Downey with a full-size bronze. The edition of eighty was produced in Slovenia.
Bio
Brad Downey is a Berlin-based, Kentucky-born conceptual artist. His hyper-diverse approach allows him recognition across multiple art fields. Working across media, he employs spontaneous sculptures, abjected assemblages, unsolicited interventions, silent alterations, and slapstick formalism. By challenging, adapting and manipulating rather than by accepting given forms, norms, and regulations of artistic production, Downey’s rather anti-authoritarian work ventures into uncharted territories and somehow evades an unambiguous definition. In spite of this, his work always evinces a taste for comic anarchy and a love of physical engagement and improvisation.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Reverse Culture Shock, MU, Eindhoven (2018); Vernissage, Overcoat Gallery, Moscow (2017); Souvenirs, Ruttkowski; 68, Cologne (2015); Damaged Goods, Cuadro Gallery, Dubai (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Skin-Fade, Disconnected, Slick-Back, Simulaker Gallery, Novo Mesto (2018); Cultural Hijack, Archip, Prague (2017); Art and the City: Graffiti in the Internet Age, Electromuseum, Moscow (2017); Essentials, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017); Planet B, NRW Forum, Duesseldorf (2016); Wertical I, Michael Horbach Foundation, Cologne (2016). Downey was awarded Stiftung Kunstfonds for his catalogue publication Slapstick Formalism: Process, Project, Object.
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MELANIA
2020, Bronze edition, 52 × 17 × 12 cm
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Thomas Draschan
Website >
About the work
Thomas Draschan’s work speaks to us in a lexicon of found footage, cut-up DADA-style, and re-imagined into an absurdist analysis of our cultural fixations, reconfigured into the imagination of a better world. Drawing on a treasure trove of imagery from popular culture, with references to history and philosophy, Draschan imbues his deceptively quirky imagery with a complex depth of narrative, for those who wish to dive deep to see it.
Artist Statement
A New Hope is from a series of Collages that incorporate people who have become icons of popular culture. Andy Warhol has used Sigmund Freud’s image, as have many artists, from the surrealists till now. I am less playing with Freud’s ideas here, but with the public persona and kitchen psychology that Freud is standing for.
Nonetheless I highly recommend reading his writings first hand.
Continental Divide is an exploration of ritual as such. Unlike my other film work, it is extremely slow paced. a syncretistic meta-religious series of images in dreamlike transformation.
Freude is a film trying to mimic a visual orgasm. It’s trying to have sex with your retina.
Bio
After studying theater and journalism in Vienna, Thomas Draschan studied film at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at the Cooper Union in New York. He worked on numerous film projects, was managing director of the Hessian film office and director of the 1st International Film Festival in Frankfurt. His film, To The Happy Few (2003), was awarded the Hessian Film Prize.
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A New Hope
2016, Archival print on rag-paper
Continental Divide
2010, Video animation, 9 min 44 sec
Freude
2009, Video animation, 2 min 5 sec
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Kerstin Dzewior
Website >
Artist statement
In my paintings I react to what I see, think and feel. I am a painter and have been managing a specialist optician shop in Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg for 15 years. My studio is integrated in the optician shop. “Painting means learning to see”. I decided to start showing my pictures in public in 2014 and had the great honor to exhibit together with well-known artists. In 2015 I co-founded the artist community FO YOU. Since then, I organize and curate large exhibitions on a regular basis.
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Her Mind
2020, Oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm
Red Boxing Gloves
2021, Oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm
Untitled
2019, Oil on canvas, 50 × 30 cm
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Margret Eicher
Website >
Artist statement
With her media tapestries, Margret Eicher refers directly to the function and effect of the historical tapestry of the 17th century. Since the Middle Ages, tapestries have served representative and political purposes like hardly any other visual medium. In the Baroque era, however, the courtly tapestry unfolded and optimized its functions in the representation of power, in ideological communication and propaganda. If one compares functions of the baroque communication medium with those of contemporary mass media, astonishing parallels emerge. Manipulation of the viewer and philosophical reflection on life stand side by side in a value-neutral manner. Although in the courtly context the propagandistic dispersion and thus the circle of addressees is limited, the intention, method, and effect are structurally similar. In choosing her subjects, Margret Eicher draws from the public image fund of advertising and journalism; of lifestyle magazines or TV series.
Combined with set pieces from historical paintings by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Antoine Watteau, or Thomas Gainsborough that correlate in terms of content, they are elaborately digitally processed and finally woven with the aid of computers. By being transformed into a monumental tapestry, the content of the image gains the appearance of legitimacy and power, then as now. The hegemony of advertising media and contemporary information media with their tendencies towards scandalization find a counterpart in this. “Whatever images and visual worlds Eicher appropriates, she relies on one of the basic properties of tapestry to give her pictorial themes a mouthpiece and lend them weight. The tapestry, even if the medium itself is instrumentalized, finds its way back to its original function as a means of communication in the artist’s works and, as a subtle quotation, questions the power of images in today’s world.”
– Katja Schmitz-von Ledebur
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It’s a Digital World 3
2021, Digital collage, jacquard woven tapestry, 310 × 185 cm
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Nezaket Ekici & Shahar Marcus
Nezaket Ekici Website >
Shahar Marcus Website >
About the work
Video trilogy, designed to be shown as a 3 Channel Video Installation. For Points of Resistance, the videos are exceptionally being presented in a single-channel screening format.
1. Geniza (2017) 8:42 min. Filmed in Tel Aviv Forest
2. La Scala (2017) 5:09 min. Filmed in Rome
3. Sea of Life (2018) 10:56 min. Filmed in Istanbul
The trilogy TBQ (Tora, Bible, Quran) is a research project, trying to find out, how the different cultures and religions deal with holy books. The Abrahamic religions have many things in common, but are different as well. According to Jewish and Islamic belief, God and Archangel Gabriel directly disclosed the Word of God to Abraham, Moses and Mohammad. Therefore the Holy Scripture is indistinguishable from God, and cannot be harmed or disposed of in any way. Whereas in Christian belief, Jesus, as son of God on earth, disclosed the Word. In consequence the Holy Bible is only the vehicle for the Word of God, but not by itself holy.
The overall question is: Can a holy book lose its holiness? All great religions relating to Abraham (Jewish, Christian and Islamic) adhere to the belief that a holy book will remain holy for all eternity. Thus, a holy book cannot and should not be discarded but rather requires special handling.
The artists focus mainly on the emotional involvement of all believers and the way, people dedicate themselves to their belief and to holy books. Therefore the artists want to give back to each outdated holy book a part of the deserved respect, applicable not only for one religion but for all three Abrahamic religions. Hence, the artists strive to restore the divinity to the unrightfully cast-off holy books and return them to their rightful place. In this light, the artists want to respect the specific ways religions developed in handling outdated holy books.
In the trilogy TBQ the artists show performance-rituals, using outdated holy books to revive their holy meaning and to free them from their unearned silence. The inner core of performance art is the ritual act itself, which shows similarities with the religious practice by means of repetition.
Geniza (2017), video, 8:42 min
Performers: Shahar Marcus, Nezaket Ekici
Video Photographer: Eyal Sibi
Stills Photographer: Maya Sharabani
Editor: Eyal Sibi
Sound Editor: Janja Loncar
Art: Caroline Atone
Assistants: Noga Rozman, Maya van Soest, Shiran Friedland
Copyright 2017, Shahar Marcus & Nezaket Ekici
According to Jewish law, outdated and unreadable holy books have to be stored in a place, called Geniza (persian „ginzakh“ = “treasury”), which was usually a room attached to a synagogue or a hole in the ground to hide away unreadable holy books. Can a holy book loose it ́s holiness? All great religions relating to Abraham (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) give the same answer to this question: A holy book will be holy for eternity. Therefore holy books cannot easily be thrown away but need special treatment.
Geniza, was produced in December 2016, in a forest near Tel Aviv and addresses the Jewish religion through the ancient custom of Geniza. The work deals with the ritual wherin books that were thrown in pirate caves under the pretext of Geniza undergo a process of restoration, so that at the end they are returned to their original purpose and their glory is restored, forming a shrine under the stars.
La Scala (2017), video, 5:30 min
Performers: Nezaket Ekici, Shahar Marcus
Video Photographer: Andrea Benedetti
Still Photographer: Fabio Bernardo
Editor: Andrea Benedetti
Sound Editor: Janja Loncar
Assistants: Gao Chang, Li Zirui
Thanks to: British School at Rome, Christopher John Smith, Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo, Dr. Joachim Blüher, Deutsche Botschaft beim Heiligen Stuhl, Msgr. Oliver Lahl
Copyright 2017, Shahar Marcus & Nezaket Ekici
La Scala was produced in May 2017 in Rome. The artists use elements of the Catholic religion in the video work: they walk on their knees on steps as pilgrims do at the Santa Scala in Rome in order to get closer to Jesus; they mount mirrors on their backs as done in ancient times to reflect the image of Maria into the sky; they use bibles on a red carpet and incense to bless outdated bibles.
“During the Middle Ages, the pilgrim, once arrived to the site of the holy relic, would take out of his robes a covered mirror. He would then uncover it to reflect the relic, then take it back to his home. When arriving to his land, he would reveal again the mirror, and reflect back the holy vision of the relic he believed was kept within it. The artists return to this ancient tradition and collect the holy books while reflecting their divinity to the sky as they progress on their knees towards the church of Santa La Scala.”
Sea of Life (2018), video, 10:54 min.
Video Photographer: Baran Sasoglu
Still Photographer: Canberk Hasan Karacay
Editor: Eyal Sibi
Sound Editor: Janja Loncar
Assistants: Guler Asik, Gunes Huseyinkulu, Shay Govhary Saldis
Technician: Malte Yamamoto
Boat drivers: Burhanettin Peksoysal, Oruc Sena
Copyright 2018, Shahar Marcus & Nezaket Ekici
Istanbul was specifically chosen for three main reasons: the primary one lies in Turkey’s geographical location – the Bosphorus as a connection between East and West. From a historical and social standpoint Turkey was ruled by the Byzantine kingdom, one of Christianity’s strongholds, only to be later conquered and ruled by Islamic occupation, and to be reborn as modern-day Turkey under Ataturk, who separated state from religion. However, in recent years, Turkey is moving back towards Islamic influence.
Marcus and Ekici preform one final act – they fill buckets with seawater, pouring them onto holy books they have ritually carried through the city. They then fill chalices with this ritual water and sail far out to sea, where they pour the water back into the sea, by which symbolically they pour the spirituality of the books into the sea.
Nezaket Ekici
Bio
International performance artist Nezaket Ekici (b. 1970 in Kirsehir, Turkey) has been living in Germany since 1973. She holds an M.A. in Art Pedagogy, and studied Art History and Sculpture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Fine Arts Academy Munich (1994-2000). From 2001 to 2004 she studied Performance Art under Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. She received a degree in Fine Arts as well as an MFA degree.
Ekici has been presenting her work in national and international exhibitions since 2000: Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich; The Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; 25. May Museum Belgrade; PAC Milano; Venice Biennale; P.S.1 New York; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei/ Taiwan; Poznan Biennale; Curiciba Biennale; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Istanbul Modern; Marta Herford; Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; KunstWerke Berlin; Oslo Museum; The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Total Museum Seoul.
In 2013/2014, she was an artist in Residency at the Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul and in 2016/2017, she got Rome Prize and was an artist in Residency at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome. In 2018 she received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Award, and In 2020 she was an artist in residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York, sponsored by the International Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin. Ekici’s work includes mainly performance, video and installation. She presented more than 250 different performances in over 60 countries, more than 170 cities on 4 continents. She lives and works in Berlin, Stuttgart and Istanbul.
Shahar Marcus
Bio
Shahar Marcus (b. 1971 in Israel) is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in video, performance and installations. Marcus has exhibited at various art- institutions, both in Israel and around the world, including: The Tate Modern; MoCA Hiroshima, Japan; The Hermitage, Russia; The Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Charlottenburg, Copenhagen- Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biannale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Paris-Beijing Gallery, France; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Benaki Museum, Greece; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland; MAXXI, Italy and at other art- venues in Polland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, the USA and Turkey.
Collaboration:
The two artists Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus work together since 2012 in collaboration, calling their overall project In Relation. Within that time, several works have been realized and shown in exhibitions worldwide. Amongst other areas of interest, both artists are working as well on religious topics. Shahar grew up with Jewish religion, Nezaket with Muslim religion and is as well connected with the Christian religion by being married to a German catholic.
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Geniza
2017, 8:42 min. Filmed in Tel Aviv Forest
La Scala
2017, 5:09 min. Filmed in Rome
Sea of Life
2018, 10:56 min. Filmed in Istanbul
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Amir Fattal
Website >
About the Artwork
In an untitled series of large silkscreens made with dust, pigment and lacquer printed on sheet aluminium, Fattal has focuses on images of recent acts of cultural desecration and destruction as they have been depicted throughout the Arab media, often using film supplied by the perpetrators themselves. As a counterpoint to this destructive orgy, not without irony, the series also includes a magnificent example of western conservation: the double headed lion from the Ishtar Gate in Berlin. For Fattal, this example of nineteenth-century cultural booty safely preserved from those who would now destroy it, presents a lively paradox: this regal, heroic heraldic image could also suggest a less admirable two-facedness that the West has often shown in its transactions in this region and continues to manifest in its cultural relations.
Throughout the diverse aspects of his multi-media practice, Amir Fattal’s work highlights present events and attitudes in reference to historical images or narratives. Both as silent witnesses and repositories of memory, Fattal appropriates and adapts chosen examples of previous art, architecture, photography or music as disruptive ‘objects’ in order to create an aesthetic unease out of which patterns of behavior or archetypical responses may be extrapolated. Fattal’s images and objects may, on first sight, seem innocent yet, when reproduced within the framework of his abiding concern with the fragility of life and culture, their associations become redolent of either barbarism or mortality; sometimes of both at the same time. In this respect he has become a protagonist of the cultivation and exposition of what could be described as memory subsumed within the continuing life of objects: fragments of the past living on and transformed by the present. His Jewish-Iraqi descent (both his parents were born in Baghdad, and he is first generation Israeli), as well as his current life as an artist in Berlin, have heightened a sense of tension that runs throughout his work, balancing delicately between the necessities for atonement and reconciliation.
The work shown in Points of Resistance is part of a body of work in which Fattal focuses on the systematic cycles of destruction of historical and religious monuments that have characterised warfare in the Middle East, Afghanistan and North Africa over the past twenty years. The propensity for iconophobia and iconoclasm (as well as for their opposite, iconolatry) has been present in the three monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) since their inception and has recurred periodically throughout their histories as part of a broader ideological struggle for power. Recent manifestations of this struggle, however, particularly those perpetrated by Islamic groups, have demonstrated a strong, almost theatrical, media awareness in which destruction represents not so much a tool of ideology but, under the pretext of obliterating blasphemy, embodies the desire to eclipse both history and memory by shaming and denying them at the same time, rather in the same way that marauding soldiers violently rape the people they vanquish. In these works, the rape of memory is Fattal’s main subject. His meditations on loss and memory expose how victory is currently expressed by destruction and how these historical monuments have become ideological battlegrounds.
Bio
Amir Fattal was distinguished with the GASAG Art Prize in 2008 and graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009. Based in Berlin to this day, Fattal participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Acclaimed solo exhibitions include: Mesopotopography, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin (2015); From the End to the Beginning, Kunstquerier Bethanien, Berlin (2014); Parallel Lines, Teapot Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2013); Goral Ehad, St-art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); Shadow of Smoke Rings on the Wall, Artitude Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); Tomorrow Gets Me Higher, Wilde Gallery, Berlin (2010). Selected group exhibitions include: Collection Enea Righi, Museo Fortuny, Venice (2016); Interior / Exterior / Sculpture, Belenius/Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); A Naked Singularity, Studio Garaicoa, Madrid, Spain (2015); Fragments of Empires, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2014-15); A Letter From Dr. Faustus, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014); Fundación Botín, Villa Iris, Santander, Spain (2014); Dahlstrøm & Fattal, Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2013); III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2012); Body Without Body, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011). Fattal is also curator and initiator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists.
Fattal is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Working in the media of video, photography, sculpture, and installation, his work forms a focused response to the diverse questions raised by his adoptive city of Berlin, where the memory, culture, architecture, indeed every thread in the fabric of this city is problematized by its history.
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Untitled
2015, Industrial dust, raw pigment and lacquer on aluminum , 106 × 71 cm
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Doug Fishbone
Website >
About the work
The Jewish Question looks at the various stereotypes and misconceptions about Jews and money over the years. It examines these questions through the prism of Doug Fishbone’s father’s experience growing up in the Jewish community of the East End of London, as well as his family’s broader immigration history rooted in fleeing antisemitism in Europe. The film uses humor to debunk many of the more outlandish conspiracies that surround ideas of Jews and money, and the position of Jews in the world in general. The film was commissioned as part of Jews, Money, Myth, a major exhibition exploring the role of money in Jewish life, at the Jewish Museum in London in 2019. It has subsequently screened at the Kassel Festival in Germany and the UK Jewish Film Festival in London.
Shown in Points of Resistance in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche, The Jewish Question is seen in the context of Berlin’s painful history, and particularly, the remarkable history of this church as a crucial point of resistance against the Nazis, led by renowned theologian and anti-Nazi activist Deitrich Bonhoeffer who worked in the parish for over a decade until his arrest by the Gestapo.
Bio
Doug Fishbone is an American artist living and working in London. His film and performance work is heavily influenced by the rhythms of stand-up comedy – he was described by one critic as a “stand-up conceptual artist” – and examines some of the more problematic aspects of contemporary life in an amusing and disarming way. He is particularly interested in examining questions of relativity and perception, and how audience and context influence interpretation. He earned a BA from Amherst College in the US in 1991, and MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 2003. Selected solo exhibitions include Tate Britain, London (2010-11), Rokeby, London (2010-11, and 2009), Gimpel Fils, London (2006) and 30,000 Bananas in Trafalgar Square (2004). Selected group exhibitions include Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, Tate Britain (2010), Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2008); Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery (2008), London; British Art Show 6, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester (2006). He performs regularly at both international and UK venues, including appearances at London’s ICA and Southbank Centre.
Fishbone’s 2010 film project Elmina, made in collaboration with Revele Films in Ghana, had its world premiere at Tate Britain in 2010 and was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria in 2011. Elmina was voted no. 35 on Artinfo’s survey of the 100 most iconic artworks of the past 5 years in 2012. Fishbone’s practice is wide-ranging, using many different popular forms in unexpected ways. He curated Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, a bespoke art/crazy golf course featuring some of the UK’s leading artists, at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and in the same year, he collaborated with the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, one of the nation’s most prestigious Old Masters collections, on a solo project involving switching one of the Gallery’s masterpieces with a replica made in China. Other recent projects include a series of guided bus tours in Aberdeen as part of the Look Again Festival in 2016, and a series of riverboat performances on the River Thames called Doug Fishbone’s “Booze Cruise”, originally commissioned as part of the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival in 2013 and 2014. His project Artificial Intelligence (2018) was commissioned by werkleitz within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and Co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union, and he exhibited a specially commissioned video The Jewish Question in the exhibition Jews, Money, Myth at the Jewish Museum, London in 2019.
He has performed at many major venues, including the Hayward Gallery, ICA London, the Southbank Centre, Hauser and Wirth Somerset, and the Royal Academy. Fishbone is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Yinka Shonibare Foundation, an organization which fosters international cultural exchange established by the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare.
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The Jewish Question
2019, HD Video, 10 min
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Daniel Grüttner
Website >
Bio
Daniel Grüttner, born on December 13th, 1979 in Rotenburg an der Wümme, initially studied human medicine at the University of Leipzig from 2000 to 2002. He then switched to studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he finally became a master student of Prof. Siegfried Anzinger. In 2005 he started exhibiting. In 2008 he moved to Berlin, where Grüttner now lives and works. Since 2009 he has been an artist in residence at the Starke Foundation in Berlin.
Daniel Grüttner’s first exhibition was Daniel Grüttner – Bilder at Galerie Sammler in Leipzig in 2006, and the most recent exhibition was Beyond Elysium at Kleiner Von Wiese in Berlin in 2020. Daniel Grüttner is mostly exhibited in Germany, but also had exhibitions in Austria, Spain. Grüttner has 4 solo shows and 26 group shows over the last 14 years. Grüttner has also been in one art fair but in no biennials. The most important show was on 17/13 at Kunstgruppe in Cologne in 2013. Other important shows were at CCA Andratx in Andratx and Werkstadt Graz in Graz. Daniel Grüttner has been exhibited with Herbert Willems and Leiko Ikemura.
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Einszweidreivier
2021, Oil on canvas, 140 × 120 cm
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Chris Hammerlein
Bio
Chris Hammerlein makes ceramic sculptures as painterly stories using a blend of material: glazed burnt clay, ink, and watercolour. Hammerlein’s sculptures are inspired by nature and diverse folklores and mythologies. Acting as metaphors for the human condition, his works are composed of beasts and mythical figures staged, with humour and irony, in dramatic moments.
Chris Hammerlein’s work is included in various collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
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What Has Happened
2012, Glazed ceramic
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John Isaacs
Website >
Bio
John Isaacs first studied biology in the south of England in Exeter. He would later use the knowledge of evolution and nature he obtained there in his art. He considers it his task to connect the rational, scientific view of flora, fauna and, in particular, humans with human qualities such as emotions, humour, and intuition. In 1988, he decided to study art and went to Cheltenham Art College in Gloucestershire for three years. He received the title of Master of Sculpture in London at the renowned Slade School of Fine Art.
In 1996, he earned a scholarship in Los Angeles and from 1999 to 2000 he was a resident artist at Imperial College in London. In 2005, he was a guest lecturer at the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, and in 2015 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. The art of Isaacs, who lives and creates in Berlin, has been presented in many solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad and has been regularly represented in group exhibitions in many galleries and museums, including at the beginning of his career in the 1990s in the context of the Young British Artists.
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Past Errors of Judgement Made Real in the Future Lives Affected
2010, Wood, steel, plastic, leather, rubber, 210 × 115 × 95 cm
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Anne Jungjohann
Website >
About the work
Anne Jungjohann’s practice is an act of resistance against the tyranny of the canvas. Her subtly inflected works are 3-dimensional paintings, sculptures made from canvas. ‘We do not see the world in straight rectangular lines, so why must artists’ representations of the world be delimited by these dimensions?’, the artist asks us in every work she creates. Literally thinking outside the box, Jungjohann folds her painted canvases into forms she installs in dialogue with the spacial architecture.
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Ohne Titel
2015, Acrylic, ink on canvas, 20 × 22 × 1 cm
gesimst nr. 5
2014), Acrylic, ink on canvas, 23 × 13 × 4 cm
Untitled
2015, Acrylic, ink on canvas, 32 × 19 × 7 cm
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Gülsün Karamustafa
Extended Bio >>
About the work
Gülsün Karamustafa’s Memory of a Square (2005), juxtaposes scenes of family life not linked to any place or time with a collage of 50 years of documentary footage of Istanbul’s famous Taksim Square. The documentary sequences trace the history of Taksim Square from 1930 to 1980. They allude to harrowing incidents such as the September 1955 pogrom, when organised mobs attacked the minority Greek community; the military coup of May 1960; ‘Bloody Sunday’ in February 1969, when protestors were attacked by right-wing thugs; and 1 May 1977, when hundreds were killed or injured after gunmen opened fire on the crowds celebrating May Day. This highly charged site has played a crucial role in political and cultural change throughout the history of the Turkish Republic and continues to does so long after this work was made. From the annual May Day protests to the infamous Gesi Park protests of 2013, Taksim Square is a physical space pivotal to the history of resistance in contemporary Turkey. In the context of this exhibition, the duality juxtaposing scenes of enclosed domesticity with the most iconic point of resistance in modern day Turkey, can’t help but bring to mind our current situation of recurring lockdowns in parallel to growing global unrest.
Artist Stetement
Memory of a Square was done for the exhibition Center of Gravity curated at Istanbul Modern in 2005 by Rosa Martinez. Public squares write the history of collective memory. This film displays personal vs. collective history, crisscrossing between the two. While on one screen you see a family, on the other the images flowing are of an entirely documentary nature. The family is one single family for all times. They sit somewhere near the square. They hear the sounds, maybe they see something but we don’t see what they are seeing. What we see are the documentary images flowing on the second screen. Maybe this is what we need to say anyway. Therefore, we have a dual feeling about the square. The film begins with the good times on the square; it begins with the erection of the statue in the 1930s, and even before that, the first balloon that was launched from the Taksim Square during the Ottoman era. Then we move on to the dramatic events of September 6-7, followed by May 27 when we now have a bayonet planted in the middle of the square. The images that follow are of the Bloody Sunday of 1970, which is followed by images we really would prefer not see from May 1, 1977. The film ends in the 1980s with the houses around Taksim square being expropriated and demolished so that the Tarlabaşı road could be built. This film was screened in many places around the world and it was actually received with empathy because there is the fact that this square – at which such a family is looking– can change any day and can also be found anywhere in the world. In other words, if we replace this square by one from, say, Argentina, or China, or Greece, and we can keep the family but change the images of the square; it’s a film that can be watched with the same feeling everywhere. The music is an original composition done for the film by Selim Atakan.
Bio
Gülsün Karamustafa was born in 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. She lives and works in Istanbul and Berlin, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. She received her MFA from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art in 1969. Using personal and historical narratives, Karamustafa explores socio-political issues in modern Turkey, addressing themes including sexuality-gender, exile-ethnicity, and displacement-migration. Her work reflects on the traumatic effects of nation building, as it responds to the processes of modernization, political turbulence, and civil rights in a period that includes the military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980. Dduring the 1970s Karamustafa was imprisoned by the Turkish military dictatorship. She was refused a passport for sixteen years until the mid-80s and, unlike other Turkish artists, could not emigrate or travel. This enforced isolation led her to an analysis of her own situation and context: the city of Istanbul, interior migration and nomadism within Turkey, and the ideological and psychological ramifications of identity.
Gülsün Karamustafa is one of the laureates of the 2014 Prince Claus Awards that are presented to individuals or organisations whose cultural actions have a positive impact on the development of their societies. Karamustafa’s solo exhibitions include: “Chronographia” at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016-2017); Swaddling the Baby, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2016) / Villa Romana, Florence (2015); Mystic Transport (a duo exhibition with Koen Thys), Centrale for Contemporary Art, and Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2015-2016); An Ordinary Love, Rampa, Istanbul (2014); A Promised Exhibition, SALT Ulus, Ankara (2014), SALT Beyoglu, SALT Galata, Istanbul (2013); Mobile Stages; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2008); Bosphorus 1954, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2008); Memory of a Square / 2000-2005 Video Works by Gülsün Karamustafa, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2006); Black and White Visions, Prometeo Gallery, Milan (2006); PUBLIC/ PRIVATE, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (2006); Memory of a Square, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2006); Men Crying presented by Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris”, Galerie Immanence, Paris (2005); Galata:Genoa (Scavere Finestrini), Alberto Peola Gallery, Torino (2004); Mystic Transport, Trellis of My Mind, Musée d’Art et Histoire Geneva, (1999), among others. Gülsün Karamustafa took part in numerous international biennales, including: the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014); the 3rd and 10th Gwangju Biennials (2000, 2014); the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale (2013); the 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); Singapore Biennial (2011), the 3rd Guangzou Triennial (2008); the 11th Cairo Biennial (2008); Contour the 2nd Video Art Biennale, Mechelen (2005); the 1st Seville Biennial (2004); the 8th Havana Biennial (2003); the 3rd Cetinje Biennial (2003); and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th International Istanbul Biennials (1987, 1992, 1995).
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Memory of a Square
2005, Video (1-channel version), 17 min
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Franziska Klotz
Website >
About the work
Franziska Klotz’s large abstract painting in oozing tones of fiery red, pink, and gold places the viewer right up against a cordon of riot police. We are caught within the haze of tear gas, the smoke making our eyes water and our vision blur. In our unquiet era of pandemic, protests, and political upheavals the world over, we are almost too familiar with such images from the daily news. Yet no images safely separated from us by a screen can have quite the same impact of proximity, implicating us in the threat of imminent violence. Or is it, perhaps, protection from violence?
Klotz entitled this work Leviathan in a tribute to the philosophy of Hobbes, for whom Leviathan is the symbol of unlimited and indivisible state power. The Human, in Hobbes’s word view, is by nature a selfish being intent on self-preservation, finding the security of living together only in the institution of the state. The state protects people from themselves – but does this security come at the price of freedom? According to Hobbes, the Leviathan is necessary to overcome the chaotic original state of societies, namely the war of “all against all” and to create lasting peace and order. The basis for this is a social contract in which all members of a society renounce their ancestral freedoms and rights and transfer them to the state/sovereign, who thereby becomes the all-powerful state or the Leviathan, a mortal god who can protect people from themselves and defend them against other people.
Bio
Franziska Klotz (born 1979 in Dresden) is a painter. For her, painting is not a medium “among many”, not at all; it is the medium in which she puts all her energy, time, heart, and soul into, and she expertly explores its potential. Colours, the interaction with them, their effect and materiality are her world (her subject). Her painting is in the most real sense of the word a handicraft; she is hands-on, paints with her fingers, palm, she presses, rubs, smears, literally transfers her energy onto her paintings, and they acquire their intensity and allure from her state of mind and gestures. Meanwhile, she loves oil paint, its sensuality and materiality.
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Leviathan
2020, Oil on canvas, 190 × 230 cm
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David Krippendorff
Website >
About the work
Kali is a short film inspired by Nina Simone’s rendition of Pirate Jenny, the song from the Brecht/Weil Three Penny Opera. The lyrics of the song have been rewritten to become a monologue, performed by actress Hiam Abbass in Arabic (with English subtitles). The film has been shot with two cameras, a main one and a surveillance camera placed further away from the actress. It is conceived as a two-channel installation, with the footage from the main camera as a large projection and the surveillance camera film presented on a monitor within the same venue, and synchronized with the large projection.
The film tackles issues of oppression, exploitation and injustice. The title refers to the Hindu goddess associated with Empowerment, Time and Change. Although presented as dark and violent, Kali is also a figure of annihilation of evil forces. It perfectly reflects the spirit of the text, an angry plea to vengeance over injustice and oppression.
Gone With the Wind (1939) is a movie that has now been condemned for its racist depiction of the South. For the drawing Burning (2021) I have chosen a still from Gone With the Wind of the burning of Atlanta, one of the pivotal moments in the film that most strongly condemns the civil war.
By eliminating the characters in the film still, and removing the image from its original context, this image of burning buildings also takes on new associations which resonate with images from the Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality in the summer of 2020.
Bio
David Krippendorff is a German artist, video- and experimental filmmaker. Born in Berlin, he grew up in Rome (Italy) and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin (Germany), where he graduated with a masters degree in 1997. His works, films and videos have been shown internationally, a.o. at New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, Asunción). He lives and works in Berlin.
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Kali
2017, HD video, 8 min 57 sec
Burning
2021, Pencil on paper, 70 × 100 cm
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Via Lewandowsky
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Bio
Via Lewandowsky (*1963 in Dresden) is a contemporary artist based in Berlin. He studied at the Dresden University of Fine Arts from 1982 to 1987. Between 1985 and 1989 he organized subversive performances with the avant-garde group “Auto-Perforations-Artisten”, which subverted the official art scene of the GDR.
His multimedia practice focuses on sculptural-installational works and exhibition scenographies with architectural influences. His leitmotifs are always the misunderstanding as a result of failure of communication, as well as the processual. An ironic refraction of the everyday, the intrusion of the foreign into the familiar, mostly domestic, realm, often happens by using insignia of the German bourgeoisie (e.g. a cuckoo clock, or a budgie). His predilection for the tragic-comical, the absurd and paradoxical, as well as the Sisyphean motif of the constant repetition and futility of action connect his art with Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus.
Via Lewandowsky’s works have been shown worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Jewish Museum, Berlin (2020), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019), Bongsan Cultural Center in South Korea (2019), Shedhalle, Zurich (2018), David Nolan Gallery, New York (2017), Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig (2016) or Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2015).
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Höhere Wesen? Hm? [Higher Beings? Huh?
2012, Canvas, wood, framed behind glass, 35 × 35 cm
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Jani Leinonen
Website >
About the work
Jani Leinonen is known for his provocative, yet playful works criticizing capitalism and our self-centered consumerist society of today by subverting the symbols and systems of commodity exchange, politics and the marketing strategies through which they operate. In his practice, the artist often pinpoints timely issues and dares the viewer to think outside of one’s comfort zone by taking the most saturated aspects of our modern world and re-presenting them in constantly thought-provoking ways. Inspired by popular culture, corporate brands, and marketing strategies, Leinonen shamelessly adapts the same tactics, turning his objects into articles of ridicule, clichéing our agreed marketing society and every-day economies. What is displayed, though, are not goods but an artistic allegorization that appropriates these marketing strategies only to unhinge their underlying assumptions about value and appropriateness. Leinonen’s entire practice can be viewed as a form of resistance against the norms of the capitalist status quo.
Bio
Jani Leinonen (b. 1978 lives and works in Helsinki) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2002 and his works have been exhibited in widely in Finland and internationally, i.e. at the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial, Galerie Gmurzynska, Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen, Frankfurter Kunstverein and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. In 2015 Leinonen had a successful retrospective exhibition at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki called The school of Disobedience, which continued to ARoS Aarhus in 2016. In December 2016 Leinonen was also awarded the Finland Prize by the Ministry of Education and Culture, which is given in recognition of a significant career in arts, an exceptional artistic achievement, or a promising breakthrough. The artist’s projects include releasing a series of commercial-like videos of Kellogg’s character Tony the Tiger navigating a grown-up world of prostitution, police violence and suicide bombers (2015); opening a hoax fast food restaurant called Hunger King in Budapest, Hungary (2014) to fight against the anti-homeless acts of the Hungarian government; founding a fake terrorist organization called the Food Liberation Army who kidnapped and executed Ronald McDonald, the mascot of McDonald’s fast food chain in 2011. In 2019 the artist made worldwide headlines when his artwork McJesus, 2015 (depicting a crucified Ronald McDonald) caused violent protests outside the Haifa Museum in Israel, where the sculpture was included in an exhibition called Sacred Goods. And in early 2019 he turned the Engadin gallery Stalla Madulain into a chapel with stained glass artworks.
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We Find Love in Hopeless Place
2019, Hand painted ceramic melting colour on glass, 99 × 155 cm
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MAP Office
Website >
About the work
Created in 2010, a decade before the civil unrest in Hong Kong of 2019-20, Runscape takes on an added significance when viewed in light of the long-term anti-government protests which rocked Hong Kong in recent years. Runscape is a film that depicts two young men sprinting through the public spaces of Hong Kong, almost invariably via the visual mode of the long shot, while a narrator describes this action through the rhetoric of post-structuralist urban theory. This narration makes repeated reference to a range of texts from the psychogeographical dérive of urbanism in Guy Debord and the Situationists to the biopolitical machines of Gilles Deleuze to the literary styles of Jean-Luc Nancy. The runners both follow existing paths and establish new ones, moving in straight lines through crowds and across rooftops while also using exterior walls as springboards for less-likely forms of motion. This is, however, far from parkour; it is a much more purposeful action that claims a certain territory or at least trajectory described within the narration through the image of the body as a “bullet that needs no gun”. A soundtrack contributed by Hong Kong rock band A Roller Control complements this aesthetic violence, guiding the eye and ear of the viewer across this novel interpretation of the definition and uses of public space; positing the body in motion as an act of civil defiance.
Runscape is used to knit together the geography of Hong Kong, a cartography that trades on the parallel ideas of mapping and civil disobedience by running through the streets. The runner dodges past pedestrians, runs diagonally through meticulously urban planned plazas, up flights of stairs and through the shopping malls of Hong Kong in order to appropriate the city on his own terms. The runner becomes also a performer, as he leaps and jumps, sprinting through the city, catching the eye of the strolling pedestrians as he breaks out of conventional modes of behavior, putting his body in action, moving faster than the city, as if internally pushed forward, as if fleeing or listening to a voice that was slowly speaking outside of everyone else’s sound register. The culture of the walking figure derived from the French Flaneur, the American Beat Poets, all contextualized and used in exploring and connecting the city streets. Runscape explores the liminal notions between film as public art with the city as landscape and cartography. The film knits the city together in a geography intersecting private and public space. The runner acts as artistic intervention creating an impact on the space itself. This is a creation of an artwork on the street, as it blurs the line between performance, happening, physical exercise, and rebellion.
Bio
MAP Office is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (1966, Casablanca, Morocco) and Valérie Portefaix (1969, Saint-Étienne, France). This duo of artists/architects has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression including drawing, photography, video, installations, performance, and literary and theoretical texts. Their entire project forms a critique of spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space. Humour, games, and fiction are also part of their approach, in the form of small publications providing a further format for disseminating their work. Their cross-disciplinary practice has been the subject of a monograph, MAP OFFICE – Where the Map is the Territory (2011), edited by Robin Peckham and published by ODE (Beijing). Early 2013, Map Office was the recipient of the 2013 edition of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize.
Laurent Gutierrez is co-founder of MAP Office. He earned a Ph.D. of Architecture from RMIT. He is a Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he leads the Master of Design Programs and the Master of Design in Design Strategies as well as the Master of Design in Urban Environments Design programs. He is also the co-director of Urban Environments Design Research Lab.
Valérie Portefaix is an artist and architect. She is the principal and co-founder of MAP Office. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art, and a Master of Architecture, she earned a Ph.D. of Urbanism from University Pierre Mendes France. She is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
MAP Office projects have been exhibited in major international art, design and architecture events including: Guangzhou Image Triennial (forthcoming 2017); 6th Yokohama Triennale (2017); 4th Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2016); Ullens. Contemporary Art Centre, Beijing (2013); 7th Asia Pacific Triennial (2012); 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); 6th Curitiba Art Biennale (2011); 7th, 11th and 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2000, 2008, 2010); Evento 1st Bordeaux Biennale (2009); 4th Tirana International Contemporary Art Biannual (2009); 2nd Canary Island Biennale (2009); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); 52nd Venice Art Biennale (2007); 15th Sydney Biennale (2006); 1st Paris Triennial (2006); 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005); 1st, 6th Singapore Biennale (2006, 2016); 2nd, 3rd and 5th Hong Kong- Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale (2007, 2009, 2013); 1st Architectural Biennial Beijing (2004); 1st Rotterdam Architecture Biennale (2003).
Their publications include: Our Ocean Guide (2017); Unreal Estates of China (2007); The Parrot’s Tale (2007); My PRD Stories (2005), HK LAB 2 (2005); HK LAB (2002); Mapping HK (2000); among many others publications on the « Made in China » phenomenon and other, related issues. Their first film City of Production has been selected for the official competition at: 38th International Film Festival Rotterdam 2009, 33rd Cinéma du Réel Paris 2009, 1st Migrating Forms New York 2009, and presented at: 10th Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2008).
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Runscape
2010, Video, 24 min 18 sec
The City is growing Inside of us…
A political act of defiance of the Urban Authority
With its surveillance and restrictions on movement.
– [Excerpt from Film]
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Shahar Marcus
Website >
About the work
The work Seeds explores the phenomenon of the buried mines that exist in Israel and the world over, exposing how these areas still carry the consequence of the war within their soil while supporting the new populations who must inhabit the conflict area. It examines the power of the present moment in these places where efforts are beginning to shift these death zones into places that consciously affirm life, embracing continuity in the very place where it once was blocked.
Bio
Shahar Marcus (b. 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel) studied Linguistics and History of Art at the University of Tel Aviv. Marcus primarily works in the medium of performance and video art. His initial works dealt with the exploration of his own body and its limitations – incorporating various perishable materials, such as dough, juice and ice. His body served as an instrument, a platform on which various ‘experiments’ took place: lying on the operating table, set on fire, dressed in a ‘bread suit’ and more. Food is also a major theme in Marcus’s works. For instance, his recurrent use of bread as a symbol of essentiality and survival is juxtaposed with military symbols. By working with food, a perishable, momentary substance and by turning it into a piece of clothing or a set, Marcus also flirts with art history; transforming arbitrary objects and materials into something immortal and everlasting. His most recent works deal with local political issues, by approaching iconic Israeli landmarks with a critical and humorous point of view. Thus, Marcus reflects on his own heritage, environment and the creation of local historical narratives. His works are influenced by the visual language of cinematography along with familiar themes and tributes to art Shahar Marcus is an active artist for over a decade and has exhibited at various art institutions, both in Israel and around the world, including: The Tate Modern; The Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Copenhagen Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biennale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and at other art venues in Poland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, USA, and Turkey. His works are in many important museum collections, such as: The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, as well as intuitions in Poland and Italy. Shahar Marcus lives and works in Tel Aviv.
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Seeds
2012, HD Video, 5 min 3 sec
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Milovan Destil Marković
Website >
About the work
Saint Lothar is one of works comprising Marković’s Homeless Project, a series of Text Portraits based on 75 interviews with homeless men in Berlin, Belgrade, Tokyo, and Shanghai.
Translation of the Saint Lothar Text Portrait – fragment from 60 min. video-interview with homeless man Lothar Georke, made in Berlin in 2004:
God only gave us one nose, ‘cos we couldn’t’ve stuck two in the glass, we’d’ve had to lap up our wine… course, it’s a shame in’t it. Yeh, but I’ve no other motto left in my life, no sir, not since I saw that protest would be no good. Oh, I’m past the age of protest, what can I say? I don’t mean I agree with all that, but I’ve got so far now, I say what good can I do, it’ll soon be all over, yeh, like they say, yeh, I can’t change anything – don’t want to these days, sometimes takes a long time before you get it, see that all you’re doing is running around, for some folk or other to manipulate, an object of manipulation, that you’re being exploited some’ow, for their interests. Yeh, one way or another, it makes you sad, some’ow, yeh, so you say: fuck off, all of you, what the hell, yeh, That’s about it, In’t it, don’t know anything else. All be let out now, will it, eh.
View the full interview with Lothar Georke >
Artist Statement
The basis behind portraits of the homeless is using language and text, and not pictures as much in the traditional sense. I wanted to create a portrait out of an interview, bringing together the interview and the picture. An interview is already a kind of portrait. My creative work consists in choosing a central passage, a still, that is transfigured as an image. The subject would be recast as a global phenomenon, but this time anchored locally, and it should be an antithesis to glamour, fame and femme fatale images. Homelessness is a phenomenon of the city that occurs worldwide but is strongly centered in the local. The homeless in Homeless Project are men without house or home. In traditional societies, the man built the house in which the woman then settled…
I had not expected to get so much information about the state, social politics and society. That really surprised me, about how people lived in the GDR, that people also sent their mothers flowers, that in everyday life, people lived as people did in, say, Regensburg. Between East and West there is not such a great difference. But there are crucial differences that make one man homeless and not another: places where there was war or economic upheavals or floods, acts of God. The differences naturally include the cultural background and the moral climate. In India, for example, everyone gives the beggar money. In Germany, however, they expect him to find a respectable job. I learned a lot about the different cultures from what the subjects had to say….
Art is inherently political, and everything that goes on in the public sphere relates to its role. But as an artist, it is one thing to give a big speech and another to go beyond and find a way to draw attention to the work situation and the homeless. That requires give and take. That is a suggestion but not yet a solution. A solution? Such a project makes a momentary ripple and makes sure that different people deal with the subject of homelessness. Because everyone is potentially homeless.
– Milovan Destil Markovic
Bio
Milovan Destil Marković (b. in 1957 in Čačak, Serbia) is a visual artist who has exhibited extensively in Europe, Asia, Australia and in the Americas. His work was featured at 42nd Venice Biennial (Aperto ’86), 4th Istanbul Biennial, 46th Venice Biennial, 6th Triennial India New Delhi, 56th 49th 24th October Salon Belgrade Biennale, 2018 Lorne Sculpture Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Kumamoto, MoMA PS1 New York, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Saarland Museum Saarbrücken, The Artist’s Museum Lodz, National Museum Prague, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, MSURS Museum of Contemporary Art Banja Luka, Landesmuseum Graz, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, National Gallery Athens, Art Museum Foundation Military Museum Istanbul, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Kunstverein Hamburg, Kunstvoreningen Bergen, Kunstverein Jena, Galleri F15 Oslo, Nishido Contemporary Art Tokyo, Fei Contemporary Art Center Shanghai, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana and many others.
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Saint Lothar
2013, Gold leaf on steel (text cut out of steel), 100 × 40 cm
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Sara Masüger
Website >
About the work
In an era witnessing the steady resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism and racism the world over, Sarah Masüger’s delicate sculptures of human ears take on a stark significance. While many governments still seek to curb freedoms of speech, others perhaps exploit free speech in overabundance. As the line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news continues to blur in our over-mediated culture, and information spreading digitally is even more viral than disease, we live in an era where the power of the wrong word has more capacity for destruction than ever before. Fake news is but a new term for a tactic used since the dawn of language: propaganda. We hear it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly—but what defines us as individuals is how we choose to interpret, to understand, and to act. Shown in the context of points of Points of Resistance, Masüger’s ears bear silent witness to the history of resistance in the Zionskirche, and to the ongoing need for resistance in in present times.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
Bio
Born 1978 in Zug (CH), lives in Zurich. Studied at the University of the Arts in Bern and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Her sculptural works focus on the dialogue between fleeting material and the permanent as well as remembering as a process of distortion. Exhibitions include Migros Museum, Zurich (2014), Kunsthaus Zug (2015), Art Museum St. Gallen (2016). Awards include Zuger Werkjahr (2014), Cahiers d’Artistes (2014).
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I Talk To You Later
2017, Series of tin sculpture, each piece approx. 10 × 8 × 3 cm
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Kate McMillan
Website >
About the work
The Lost Girl is an immersive film-based installation by Dr Kate McMillan centered around the fictional character of a cave-dwelling girl on the east coast of England. Using DH Lawrence’s book of the same name as a starting point, the film narrates the experiences of a young woman seemingly alone in a dystopian future, with only the debris washed up from the ocean to form meaning and language.
It is set within a future-time which suggests the decimation of civilisation as we now know it, bereft of other people. The character attempts to create a past and a future from the debris that is washed up from the ocean. She is without language and prior knowledge and must make sense of her existence only through detritus. The film combines various research interests including the Anthropocene; the role of creativity in forming memory and the consequences of neglecting female histories. “This work exists in the blurred space between autobiography and imagination. Its setting, Botany Bay, is the namesake of the first site of contact between the British and the indigenous Gadigal people of the Eora Nation in what is now called Sydney. McMillan was brought up on the northern coastal plain of Perth, Australia, a landscape with an uncanny resemblance to Botany Bay and which is also Mooro, home to the Whadjuk Noonghar people. A regular visitor to Botany Bay as a child visiting English relatives, her choice of this landscape as backdrop to Le Pera’s experiences infuses the film with her own individual memories alongside collective memories of colonial displacement and violence in Australia. The deserted spaces speak of the absence of their original populations. The survivors of such violence across the globe are now disproportionately affected by the impact of anthropogenic climate change, as the legacy of colonialism continues to determine survival or destruction.”
– Excerpt from catalogue text by Dr Jessica Rapson
Bio
Dr Kate McMillan (b.1974, Hampshire, UK; 1982-2012, Perth, Australia) is an artist based in London. She works across media including film, sound, installation, sculpture, and performance. Her work addresses a number of key ideas including the role of art in attending to impacts of the Anthropocene, lost and systemically forgotten histories of women, and the residue of colonial violence in the present. In addition to her practice, McMillan also addresses these issues in her activist and written work. She is the author of the annual report Representation of Female Artists in Britain commissioned by the Freelands Foundation. Her recent academic monograph Contemporary Art & Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes: Empire of Islands (2019, Palgrave Macmillan) explored the work of a number of first nation female artists from the global south, whose work attends to the aftermath of colonial violence in contemporary life. McMillan is currently a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at King’s College, London.
McMillan’s work has been featured in various museums and biennales, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Trafo Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Perth Institute for Contemporary Art; John Curtin Gallery, Perth; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. McMillan’s work is held in private collections around the world, as well as in the Christoph Merian Collection, Basel; Soho House Collection, London; The Ned 100, London; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Wesfarmers Arts Collection; KPMG; Murdoch University, Australia; University of Western Australia and Curtin University, Australia; and the MOMENTUM Collection.
Previous solo exhibitions include The Past is Singing in our Teeth presented at MOMENTUM in 2017, which, in 2018, toured to the Civic Room in Glasgow and Arusha Gallery for the Edinburgh Arts Festival. Other solo exhibitions include Instructions for Another Future 2018 Moore Contemporary, Australia; Songs for Dancing, Songs for Dyin, 2016, Castor Projects, London; The Potter’s Field, 2014, ACME Project Space, London; Anxious Objects, Moana Project Space, Australia; The Moment of Disappearance, 2014, Performance Space, Sydney; In the shadow of the past, this world knots tight, 2013 Venn Gallery; Paradise Falls, 2012, Venn Gallery; Lost at the John Curtin Gallery in 2008, ‘Broken Ground’ in 2006 at Margaret Moore Contemporary Art and ‘Disaster Narratives’ at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts for the 2004 Perth International Arts Festival.
Her work was part of ‘All that the Rain Promises and More’ curated by Aimme Parrott for the 2019 Edinburgh Arts Festival. In March 2018 McMillan presented new work for Adventious Encounters curated by Huma Kubakci at the former Whiteley’s Department store in West London. In June 2018 she produced a new film based installation for RohKunstbau XXIV festival at the Schloss Lieberose in Brandenburg curated by Mark Gisbourne. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Celeste Prize curated by Fatos Üstek. In 2016 she was invited to undertake a residency in St Petersburg as part of the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) where she developed new film works which were shown at the State Museum of Peter & Paul Fortress in Russia in 2017. In early 2017 she was selected to be in the permanent collection at The Ned, for Vault 100, a new Soho House project which reversed the gender ratio of the FTSE 100 by showing the work of 93 women and 7 men. In 2016 McMillan took part in ‘Acentered: Reterritorised Network of European and Chinese Moving Image’ during Art Basel Hong Kong, curated by Videotage.
>>View more work by Kate McMillan<<
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The Lost Girl
2020, HD Video, 7 min 15 sec
Sound developed in collaboration with James Green.
Video Installation, designed to be projected onto cardboard, beach sand, found debris.
For Points of Resistance, this work is exceptionally being presented in a screening format.
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Almagul Menlibayeva
Website >
About the work
Almagul Menlibayeva films mythological narratives staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. In Transoxania Dreams she leads her audience to the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation politics. The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxiana lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. Menlibayeva visually walks the viewer through a vacant landscape and a symbolic dream whereby the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures (Centaurs) on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the image of the Greek mythological figure of the Centaur, Menlibayeva creates alluring hybrid beings, both sexually charged and bizarre. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadruped, part person part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers. In Transoxiana Dreams Menlibayeva, a pictorial sorceress herself, breeds an eccentric storyline and fantastical imagery extracted deeply from her own atavistic repertoire; leading us visually through an existing, yet unimaginable, landscape in a distant and hypnagogic world.
Bio
Almagul Menlibayeva (born in 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR; lives and works in Almaty and Berlin) is a video artist, photographer, and curator. Menlibayeva, holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. She works primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation and her work addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia, de-colonial re-imaginings of gender, environmental degradation, and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. In 2018, she was co-curator of the groundbreaking exhibition Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, which took place in Berlin’s Kunstquartier Bethanien.
In conjunction with her solo exhibition Transformation at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-2017), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Other awards include the Daryn State Prize of Kazakhstan (1996), and the Tarlan National Award of the Club of Maecenas of Kazakhstan (2003). She was also the Winner of the Grand Prix Asia Art at the II Biennial of Central Asia, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1995) and the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany.
Menlibayeva has gained international recognition by participating in: the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); and the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018).
Selected solo exhibitions include: Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); Kissing Totems, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, USA (2008). Recent selected group exhibitions include: Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017).
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Transoxania Dreams
2011, HD Video, 23 min
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Robert C. Morgan
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“I am particularly proud of the fact that this Church is associated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I discovered the letters of Bonhoeffer many years ago in the 1960s when I was actively reading the work of German theologians. Bonhoeffer offered a moving account of his activist position combined with his deeply moving spiritual concerns.”
– Robert C. Morgan
Bio
Robert C. Morgan is a writer, artist, critic, art historian, curator, and educator. Knowledgeable in the history and aesthetics of both Western and Asian art, Morgan has lectured widely, written hundreds of critical essays (translated into twenty languages), published monographs and books, and curated numerous exhibitions. He has written reviews for Art in America, Arts, Art News, Art Press (Paris), Sculpture Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic. His catalog essays have been published by Gagosian, Pace, Sperone Westwater, Van Doren Waxter, White Cube (London), Kukje (Seoul), Malingue (Hong Kong), and Ink Studio (Beijing).
Since 2010, he has been New York Editor for Asian Art News and World Sculpture News, both published in Hong Kong. Many consider his book, The End of the Art World (Allworth, 1998), a classic in predicting the loss of critical judgment in art and its future direction as a marketing and investment phenomenon. In addition, he has written books and edited anthologies, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Cambridge University Press, University of Minnesota Press. George Braziller, Inc. and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. In 1999, he was awarded the first ARCALE prize in International Art Criticism in Salamanca (Spain), and the same year served on the UNESCO jury at the 48th Biennale di Venezia.
In 2002, he was invited to give the keynote speech in the House of Commons, U.K. on the occasion of Shane Cullen’s exhibition celebrating the acceptance of The Agreement with Northern Ireland. In 2003, Dr. Morgan was appointed Professor Emeritus in Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and, in 2005, became a Senior Fulbright Scholar in the Republic of Korea. In 2011, he was inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg; and, in 2016, the Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, acquired The Robert C, Morgan Collection on Conceptual Art.
Much of his work since the late 1990s has focused on art outside the West with books translated and published in Farsi, Korean, and Chinese. He continues to work with contemporary ink artists in the People’s Republic of China on whom he has frequently lectured and written. He has twice been invited to the Islamic Republic of Iran where he has lectured and juried major exhibitions. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, he has continued a parallel involvement as an artist (since 1970). Having had numerous exhibitions in past years, a major survey of his paintings and conceptual works was shown at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City (2017), which published a detailed catalog focusing on his artistic career.
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YIN / YANG(2012/13)
metal pigment and acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 cm
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Matthias Moseke
Website >
Artist Statement
Painting for me means lived freedom, in the process and in the result. In informal there are the least restrictions – for me and the viewer alike. It is amazing how differently my offerings are perceived on the associative level. On the emotional level, the composition, which is always the heart of my images, has an effect.
The permanent look ahead, my own demand and the expectation from the outside to constantly create and show something new, often stands in the way of a more intense reflection. To dive into the deeper memory of my images is analysis and positioning at the same time—again and again I learn and create from the structures, materiality and color depth.
– Matthias Moseke
Bio
Non-representational painting continuously represents the foundation of Moseke’s artistic work. Composition as a core theme, opposing or plane structures, impasto color surfaces, clear ductus and a reduced palette are characteristic of Moseke’s work. Intuition and concept do not act as opposing approaches—they are mutually dependent, forming emotional pictorial spaces with determined settings. Moseke has lived, with interruptions, in Berlin since 1982. In the mid-nineties he studied fine arts with Professor Westendorp in Ottersberg. Numerous exhibitions and projects have taken him throughout the Republic, to Belgium, Italy and Taiwan.
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Lu
2011, Oil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm
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Jan Muche
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Artist Statement
My picture Capa interprets a portrait photo of the famous, and by me much admired, photographer Robert Capa, whose likeness was snapped by his partner Gerda Taro in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Capa’s melancholic look tells a lot about the situation in Spain at that time, and foreshadows the failure of the struggle for a better society by authoritarians from the right but also from the left. His girlfriend dies soon after in an attack by the German Condor Legion. To show courage often requires a high price. We hope for better times.
– Jan Muche
Bio
Jan Muche is a 46 year old artist. Jan Muche is a German male artist born in Herford, Ostwestfalen, NW (DE) in 1975. Jan Muche’s first exhibition was Klasse Hödicke at Universität der Künste Berlin – UdK in Berlin in 2003, and the most recent exhibition was Jan Muche – Farbtrakt at Galerie Schlichtenmaier in Grafenau in 2020. Jan Muche is mostly exhibited in Germany, but also had exhibitions in Italy, United States and elsewhere. Muche has 26 solo shows and 158 group shows over the last 17 years (for more information, see biography). Muche has also been in 10 art fairs but in no biennials. The most important show was Glass and Concrete: Manifestations of the Impossible at Marta Herford in Herford in 2020. Other important shows were at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Jan Muche has been exhibited with Sven Drühl and Axel Anklam.
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Capa
2019, Acrylic, ink and boat varnish on canvas, 170 × 130 cm
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Gulnur Mukhazhanova
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About the work
The sculptural installation Iron Woman, was one of the first works Gulnur Mukazhanova created after moving to Berlin from her native Kazakhstan. In this work, the artist undertakes a personal research of female identity in her Central Asian culture. Through a sculptural object made of metal nails and chains, taking the form of an intimate undergarment which the artist also models in a series of photographs, Mukazhanova explores a woman’s body in the conflict zones of sensuality and ideology – at the intersections of personal and social environment, of ethnic vs. global culture, of modernity vs. tradition. Significations of sexuality move between the prohibited and the accessible, the fetishised and the mundane, the carnal and the sacred. Within this evocative object exists the duality of a very personal point of female resistance, alongside a loudly feminist cry against female oppresion in its multitude of forms.
Bio
Gulnur Mukazhanova graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty (2006), and the Weissensee Art Academy in Berlin, Germany (2013). Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses textile art, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Mukazhanova’s art is a confrontation of two different cultures but also a dialogue between them. From her Central Asian roots she keeps a strong physical relation to traditional materials that are not only used for their aesthetics but have a symbolic and historic meaning. While living in Germany she has come to confront questions of feminism, globalization, and ethnology.
Mukazhanova has participated in international Biennales such as: A Time for Dreams, IV Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, Moscow, (2014); and the Krasnoyarsk Biennale, Russia (2015). Her solo exhibitions include: Artwin Gallery, Moscow, Russia (2016); Iron Women, Almaty, Tengri-Umai Gallery (2010); Wertlösigkeit der Tradition, Kazakhstan-German Society, Berlin (2010). Her work is held in international private collections: Fondazione 107, Turin, Italy; Krasnoyarsk Museum, Russia; La Metive, Moutier-d’Àhun, France.
Selected recent group exhibitions include: Focus Kazakhstan: Bread & Roses, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2018); All the World´s Collage, Aspan Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2018); Astana Art Show, TSE Art Destination Gallery, Astana, Kazakhstan (2018); Focus Kazakhstan: Post-nomadic Mind, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London (2018); Cosmoscow, international contemporary art fair, Moscow, Russia (2018); Interlocal, in association with Blue Container on the New Silk Road, Duisburg, Germany (2018); Time & Astana: After Future, National Museum, Astana, Kazakhstan (2017); The Story Retells, Daegu Art Factory Daegu, South Korea (2017); Expo 2017: Future Energy, Astana, Kazakhstan (2017); Metamorphoses, Pörnbach Contemporary, Pörnbach, Germany (2016); Did you know… ?, Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2016); Cosmoscow, Moscow, Russia (2015); Dissemination, Stadtgalerie Brixen, Brixen (Bressanone), South Tyrol (2014); Nomads, Artwin Gallery, Moscow (2014); Synekdoche, Freies Museum, Berlin, Germany (2013).
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Iron Woman
2010, Installation: nails, screws, metal wire, chain, 40 × 30 × 5 cm
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Kirsten Palz
Website >
About the works
Chronicle of Extinction, made for this exhibition, marks the start of a new series of work for Kirsten Palz, while remaining true to her conceptual practice of “Sculpture as Writing”, encompassing her manuals, songbooks, and other text-based works. It is shown here in Points of Resistance together with her songbook Below the Sun (2020), both addressing the devastating impacts of mankind upon our planet. With the format of the songbook invoking the choral traditions of church music, both works together are a cry against the ecological devastation mankind is wreaking upon our planet; it is a song of mourning for the disappeared and still disappearing species that once inhabited this earth with us; it is a needed reminder; a sad farewell.
Artist statement
Below the Sun (2020) was written against the backdrop of rising global temperatures. The score’s theme centers on the sun as the most powerful energy resource in our solar-system and its relationship to ancient mythology and modern science. On Christmas Day 1968, the Apollo 17 mission delivered a complete photographic image of the Earth, which went down in history as the “Blue Marble”. The visual depiction showed a fragile, glassy-looking object and its implication was responsible for a growing ecological awareness in the decades that followed. However, more than 50 years later, human impact on the planet through consumerism and environmental destruction has brought the world’s ecology onto the verge of destruction. Below the Sun was written against the backdrop of rising global temperature. It’s a song about the sun as the most powerful energy resource in our solar-system. Further more, the sun with its voluminous burning mass, was central for ancient mythology and modern science alike.
Chronicle of Extinction (2021) consists of twelve individual editions that form the beginning of an ongoing archive. Each of the twelve editions lists twelve extinct species. The applied scientific classification system compiles information on kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species for each extinct member.
The first selection, presented as part of Points of Resistance, comprises:
VOID 01 ACTINOPTERYGII ray-finned fishes
VOID 02 AMPHIBIA shrub frogs
VOID 03 AVES birds
VOID 04 AVES birds
VOID 05 BIVALVIA molluscs
VOID 06 GASTROPODA snails and land slugs
VOID 07 INSECTA owlet moths
VOID 08 LILIOPSIDA lilies
VOID 09 MAGNOLIOPSIDA flowering plants
VOID 10 MAGNOLIOPSIDA flowering plants
VOID 11 MAMMALIA rodents
VOID 12 REPTILIA reptiles
Each extinction creates a void.
Each extinction is irreversible.
Bio
Born 1971 in Copenhagen, Denmark Lives and works in Berlin. Kirsten Palz is a visual artist working in Berlin. She holds a degree in Computer Science from the IT-University in Copenhagen and a degree of Fine Arts/ Painting from School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2007, Kirsten Palz initiated her ongoing archive of manuals. The archive is a work in progress consisting today of 410 manuals, including objects, prints on paper and drawings. The manuals engage with various topics, such as dreams, memories, myth, sculpture and social space. Kirsten Palz has shown her works in spaces in Germany and abroad.
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Chronicle of Extinction
2021, Print on paper, open edition, 30.5 × 68 cm
Below the Sun
2020, Print on paper, edition of 100, 29.7 × 42 cm
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Manfred Peckl
Website >
About Soil
This delicate image, painted using the very soil the plant grows out of, depicts a weed common to all cities, and remarkable for its capacity to grow anywhere, no matter how adverse the conditions. So subtle it is often overlooked, this is, nevertheless, the resistance of nature against concrete.
Artist statement
“I found it so beautiful, especially in a church setting, to place world destruction as coming from heaven.
The Skyamonds, as the sculpture group is called (there are more) are, after all, artifacts of total destruction. Covered with the whole universe known to us, and several times, following the theory of parallel universes, a super-meltdown must have taken place, which let the antimatter together with the matter ever become a form, a lump. This, as a testimony of ex-existence has landed in our reality as an artifact of the end of the world. Atom, as the biggest force known to us, hematoma as linguistic modification in the result an injury.
Landed as asteroids, they harbor a new beginning in the catastrophe… this is how planets are created?”
– Manfred Peckl
Bio
The Austrian artist Manfred Peckl (*1968) lives and works in Berlin. From 1988-1990 he studied at the University of Art and Design in Linz, followed by the Städelschule in Frankfurt under Professor Raimer Jochims. The starting point for Peckl’s works are maps and advertising posters from public space, which he cuts into even strips with a shredder and then sorts them according to color. In the summer term 2004 and winter term 2005 he had a teaching assignment for “New Forms of Painting” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz. In 2017 Peckl was deputy professor for painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.
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Soil
2019, Aquarelle, soil on paper, 32 × 26 cm
Flash
2008, Resin, fiberglass, wood, paper, UV-varnish, approx. 60 × 50 × 40 cm
Hämatom
2008, Resin, fiberglass, wood, paper, UV-varnish, approx. 130 × 100 × 100 cm
Saphir
2008, Resin, fiberglass, wood, paper, UV-varnish, approx. 90 × 70 × 80 cm
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Otto Piene
Bio
The German artist Otto Piene (* 1928 in Laasphe/Westphalia) is one of the great pioneers and innovators in 20th century art. Still trained as a painter, he turned away from classical art forms as early as the mid-1950s and instead opened up new space for art. Otto Piene´s pioneering amalgamation of art, science and technology have made him one of the most influential personalities of post-war art. Through founding the artists’ group ZERO in 1958 with Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker – also an artist in this exhibition – Piene proclaimed a new era in Western art, developing numerous projects and events that took place in public spaces outside galleries and museums. His grid, smoke and fire paintings, his light rooms and kinetic light ballets created during this period stand for a visionary combination of nature and science and art that was novel at the time. His eclectic ouevre includes painting, drawings, reliefs, kinetic installations, participative performances and environments that focus on the concepts of light, dynamics, and movement. With his fire, smoke and light works, he has been a permanent representative at Documenta and the Venice Bienniale since 1959. These open artistic approaches culminated in numerous interdisciplinary projects in public space in the late 1960s through his move to the United States and through his work as an MIT professor and as director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS, Cambridge, Massachusetts). Nearby, in Groton, Massachusetts, he developed his “Art Farm” with his wife Elizabeth Goldring. Together with scientists and other artists, Piene realized so-called Sky Art Events and Sky Art Conferences starting in 1968: Otto Piene let air- or helium-filled sculptures rise into the sky above buildings, stadiums, rivers, landscapes worldwide – including his monumental rainbow for the closing ceremony of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The open works, each developed collectively and often colorful, became signs of hope and peace worldwide.
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Der bemooste Stein
2014, 78 × 58 cm
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Stefan Rinck
Website >
About the work
The Zion Church in its neo-Gothic masonry continuously experienced again and again acts of courage and despair – but above all a repeated carrying on and not giving up of the values we have gained over generations. As an analogy to this, we show in our exhibition, among other things, the “Lastenbär”, a sandstone sculpture by Stefan Rinck. The work shows a bear that has to constantly carry an oversized, far too heavy masonry stone on its back and yet continues to walk unflinchingly, looking – almost droll – as if it doesn’t mind so much in the end.
This sculpture – completely disconnected from the intention of the artist who created it back in 2010 – has become a sign for this exhibition and, if possible, will later remain in larger form in the outdoor area of the Zion Church as a temporary memorial and anchor point for a series of subsequent exhibitions until it can move to a permanent location. Based on the spontaneous reactions of many viewers, it seems as if many narratives converge in this work by Stefan Rinck.
On the one hand, the Lastenbär is a work of art, but on the other hand, it also seems to be able to function as a “mascot”. Very often, in fact, he has been identified as a “Berlin bear” – albeit one that has to carry a heavy load of his heritage. It is a curatorial decision to take up the disarmingly positive feedback on Stefan Rinck’s work, not only from the art public, to make him a landmark. And for what all artists, and all those who will have made possible the exhibition POINTS OF RESISTANCE from Easter Sunday and also the concert TRES MOMENTOS (composer Sven Helbig) on April 26, want to achieve: Namely, a sincere discussion – no matter how heated – about all that is important to us. A discussion that can also result in opposing points of view, which must be respectful and tolerant – so that peace remains.
It is an experiment whether such a small sandstone bear, as it will be shown in the context of the exhibition, can achieve so much. It will depend on the commitment of all visitors to the exhibition, on whether people will also like this Berlin bear, and also on who else will turn out to support this project. The sculpture will be realized by the artist and the gallery only in exchange for covering the costs. If more money is raised from the fundraising planned after Easter, it will be used for charitable purposes.
Among other things, there will be a round table discussion on this experiment, hosted by Christian Posthofen, philosopher, author and lecturer, on the topic: “Heteretopias – The Church, the Resistance and the Bear”.
– Constanze Kleiner
Bio
Stefan Rinck is a German visual artist who was born in 1973 in Homburg/Saar. He studied Art History and Philosophy at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken and Sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe. Stefan Rinck has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including de Hallen (Haarlem), Sorry We`re Closed (Brussels), Nino Mier Gallery (Los Angeles), Vilma Gold (London), Semiose (Paris), Gallery Rüdiger Schöttle (Munich), The Breeder (Athens), Galeria Alegria (Madrid), Klara Wallner Gallery (Berlin) and Cruise&Callas (Berlin).
He participated at the Busan Biennale in South Corea and at the Vent des Fôret and La Forêt d’Art Contemporain in France where he realized permanent public sculptures. In 2018, the work The Mongooses of Beauvais was permanently installed in the city of Paris at 53-57 rue de Grennelle (Beaupassage). He is in following public collections: CBK Rotterdam (NL), Musée de la Loterie (BE), Sammlung Krohne (DE), FRAC Corse (FR).
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Lastenbär
2007, Sandstone sculpture, 26 × 16 × 25.5 cm
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Jörg Schaller
Website >
About the work
The picture comes from a B/W series made in the Müggelsee waterworks in 1991. At that time, you could climb over walls, step through a certain window and then you were inside. It was still at the time of the most incredible discoveries in the wild east of Berlin. Hardly anyone could imagine the water running out here one day. It was kept in motion here in the vaults and walls to keep it fresh. As it falls, it absorbs new energy and oxygen and can breathe. Constant rushing and dripping. The two columns of water connect to a creative dance, other beings always emerge, before they then burst into many molecules in the full force of the fall, and then, taking one last drag, disappear back into the dark vault.
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![](https://www.momentumworldwide.org/wp-content/uploads/Joerg-Schaller_Die-Atmung-1991_2021_Silver-gelatine-Print_75-x-95-cm-from-the-B_W-negative-framed-81-x-101-cm.jpeg")
Die Atmung 1991
2021, Silver gelatine print, 75 × 95 cm from the B/W negative, framed 81 × 101 cm
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Maik Schierloh
Website >
About the work
Maik Schierloh, the accomplished artist/curator, who has also realized extensive exhibition series in a wide variety of places, is called a Dream Catcher: fleeting moments take shape, the world seems as if seen through a veil. Here and there the paint runs down in a dancing manner. One also thinks to trace natural processes: clouds shift, color mist forms, light breaks through, color sends signals. Brown canvas or light cotton are primed and painted with pigment or acrylic paint – initially also with oil – dusted, dotted. The painting mutates from paint application to paint application, from fixation to fixation, from wash to wash, as if matter-changing alchemy were at work here. Again and again, aluminum silver and gold powder is used, which oxidizes to a greenish hue as a result of the washing, but also shines out in larger areas in a luminous insular manner. Some signal red is interspersed with traces of feathers or a play of lines. Abstract animation prevails everywhere. Even the incidental cleaning rags while painting become with their dot structures as “Fabric” to the picture. Glazed wooden panels from old cupboards are palette-like covered with gold leaf islands. These painting processes sometimes drag on for months. In terms of art history, Kandinsky is a great inspirer here with his abstract landscapes. One also thinks of the informal structures of a Wols, of the sprayed urinated and oxidized paintings of Warhol, of the pours of color in the work of Anish Kapoor. Processes are captured and figure. These paintings are connected to the painter’s body movements, each hand movement becomes trace. Painting is an event here.
– Stephan von Wiese
Bio
Maik Schierloh moved to Berlin in 1997 and began planning, organising and executing cultural and art projects and exhibitions (Lovelite, Autocenter, Bar Babette). He made an apprenticeship as organ builder (organ builder Alfred Führer Wilhelmshaven, Germany) and then studied Art at the University of Applied Science Ottersberg, Germany.
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Ohne Titel
2021, Acrylic, oil, gold leaf on canvas, 251 × 70.5 cm
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Nina E. Schönefeld
Website >
About TRUTH LAMP
The TRUTH LAMP is a symbol for the fight for democratic rights and for the fight to withstand politically unstable times.
My strong interest in visionary new artistic developments has led to interdisciplinary video installations. I work with a system of different light sources, sound systems, electronic machines, newly built sculptures, costumes, interiors and video screenings. In many of the video installations, the existing exhibition space was used in such a way that the space seemed like a film set from the projected video work.
My sculptures combine unconventional materials such as animal fur, fetish chains, light bulbs, black miniature tiles, vases or vessels, Asian ceramic gold dragons, luxurious fabrics, furniture parts, small computer screens and technical vintage machines. There is a certain paradox in my objects, but it is intentional: on the one hand they radiate preciousness, sparkling infinity & uniqueness and on the other hand one has associations with abyss, demise and death. A new beginning arises from death, but at the same time you think of transitoriness and decay.
– Nina E. Schönefeld
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Truth Lamp
2021, Mixed media sculptural installation, 30 × 150 × 30 cm
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About B.T.R
Written, Edited & Directed: Nina E. Schönefeld
Director of Photography: Valentin Giebel
Sound & Music: Carlos Pablo Villamizar. / Special thanks to DJ Hell
Selected speeches: Julian Assange – ‘I cannot forgive terrible injustice’, 2017 *** Chelsea Manning – Chelsea
Manning on Wikileaks, trans politics & data privacy, 2018 *** Luvvie Ajayi – Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, 2018 *** Edward Snowden – In Conversation with Edward Snowden, 2019
Starring: Anstasia Keren, Thinley Wingen, Alexander Skorobogatov, Lucie Schoenefeld, Oda Langner, Emil von Gwinner, Keschia Zimbinga, Ana Dossantos, Chantal Hountondji, Nasra Mohamad Mut, Yuko Tanaka Betts, Falko Nickel, Johanna Langner, Anna Esdal, Stella Junghanss, Nina Philipp, Mike Betts, Christopher Schoenefeld, Joanna Buchowska, Alexander Sudin, Andreas Templin, Dirk Lehr, Ginger Fikus, Talia Bakkal, Acelya Bellican, Marlah Lewis, Amira Yasmin, Josephine Lang, Leo Burkhardt, Lisa Nasner, Violetta Weyer, Marina Wilde, Timothy Long, Sean Jackson, Riley Warren, Katja Turnella, Hansa Wisskirchen
Schönefeld’s art examines the contemporary social and political climate. Through unusual mediums, objects and videos, Schönefeld questions the contemporary roles of artists, exploring the relationship between art, blockbuster movies and the present digital age. Her stories imagine a world where, due to drastic political shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival. A concept that perhaps is not so far fetched?
B.T.R Artist statement
B. T. R. (B O R N T O R U N) is a symbol for the fact that the law of the press as the fourth power in the state must be respected.
The fact that nowadays it is possible to influence the political power structure via data sales on social networks is very dangerous for our democracies.
My video work B. T. R. (B O R N T O R U N, 2020), which is also shown in Zionskirche for Points of Resistance, is about the world domination of right wing authoritarian autocracies and the complete prohibition of publication. It is also about the possible extradition of Julian Assange to the US and what this could mean worldwide for the situation of independent publishers, whistleblowers and journalists in the future.
“In case there would be a drastic political change in your country you will need special advice and gear to survive… Get prepared.”
The story of Schönefeld’s video B. T. R. is set in the year 2043 and deals with the subject of authoritarian autocracies and the complete restriction of journalists. It also deals with the possible extradition of Julian Assange to the US and what it could mean for the situation of independent publicists, whistleblowers, and journalists worldwide in the future. In the year 2043 data is the most valuable asset on earth because data is being used to win elections. Authoritarian rightwing governments have the majority worldwide. They have implemented education camps for the youth to gain more power and influence. Movie heroine S.K.Y. grew up in one of those education camps called WHITE ROCK. She doesn’t know anything about her parents. She starts to research about her heritage. During this process, she gets in touch with a group of independent journalists and publishers. They are the most persecuted people on earth which means that they are threatened by prison and death every day. It seems that freedom of speech is lost – forever…
The video B. T. R. was created as a science fiction story but it has its roots in the present time. It shows a future scenario of what could happen when people do not follow political decisions made in their countries and when they do not start to question undemocratic movements. Democracy can be easily lost if the freedom of press as fourth power in a country is restricted. Quotes from the movie like “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play” are taken from leaders of Third Reich – in this case from Joseph Goebbels. But you can find these kinds of statements also in today’s speeches of rightwing parties everywhere in the world. Today rightwing parties in Europe are on the rise (Poland, Hungary, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, etc.), journalists and publishers are put in jail like in Turkey. The parallels between our times in a lot of European countries (especially in Germany) and past times in the 1920ies in Germany are scary. The story of the movie B. T. R. is based on several documentaries. The quoted documentaries deal with Third Reich, Weimar Republic, with strategies of rightwing parties in today’s Europe, with deserters of the rightwing scene like Franziska Schreiber and Heidi Benneckenstein. They also deal with practices of “hunting down” independent journalists, whistleblowers, and publishers like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden & Chelsea Manning.
Andrea Röpke – a German journalist who has published information about the rightwing scene in Germany for decades – was one of the biggest inspirations for the movie. She will never give up filming, researching & publishing even if she is facing violent attacks. Cambridge Analytica’s greatest hack – a Netflix documentary – deals with the dangers of influencing elections by influencing people through data in social networks. In the story of B. T. R. companies similar to Cambridge Analytica are integral part of how parties win elections, the system has been built on lies.
The film basically develops a future scenario in which authoritarian rightwing parties all over the world have taken over power. A free press (according to AFD “press of lies”) has been abolished. In the year 2043 it is no longer possible to express one’s opinion. Independent journalists and publicists are not allowed to report about reality. Rightwing governments have implemented education camps for the youth to gain more power.
The role of heroine S.K.Y. is inspired by rightwing deserter Heidi Benneckenstein. She grew up in a far rightwing family in Germany and had to visit rightwing education camps every school holiday. In 2011 when she was 19 years old she decided to quit this surrounding which is supposed to be very dangerous. She said the initial moment in her life to desert family and friends was when she was pregnant herself. To be forced to put your own child in the same environment based on fear and hate was unbearable for her. She went through hell in her childhood. She was never allowed to question anything and to develop into an independent person with her own opinions. Today finally she is… risking her life every day.
B. T. R. has been intended as a film of the future but has its roots in the present. It is based on detailed research (e.g. on Julian Assange & Edward Snowden, on Cambridge Analytica, on investigative journalism and far rightwing movements).
Bio
Nina E. Schönefeld is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She studied Fine Art in Berlin at UdK, and in London at the Royal College of Art. She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art Theory (Dr. Phil.). For several years she has been lecturing at private art colleges in the field of visual arts. Together with Marina Wilde she founded “Last Night In Berlin”, a cultural project/blog documenting art openings in Berlin. Schönefeld lives and works in Berlin.
Schönefeld’s strong interest in new artistic developments has resulted in interdisciplinary video installations – an overall system of light sources (lamps, movement detectors etc.), sound systems (mixers etc.), electronic machines, computer screens, newly built sculptures, interiors and video projections. The focus of Nina E. Schönefeld’s diverse practice lies on political, social and digital changes in society… phenomena of abrupt shift… escape from political persecution, hacking attacks, nuclear accidents, dictatorships, freedom of speech and a free press… people who are radically different … the lives of hackers and preppers, political activists, investigative journalists, environmental activists, Wikileaks members, NSA employees, data martyrs, political underdogs, hermits, computer gamefanatics, cult members, extremists, the Darknet, Julien Assange, Edward Snowden, the blackout in NY, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the control center of the CIA, the Chaos Computer Club, North Korea, the right wing movement, Children of God, Suprematism, the Bauhaus, Zero, insular colonies, digital inventions and radical social networks…
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B. T. R. (BORN TO RUN)
2020, HD video, 20 min 3 sec
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Kerstin Serz
Website >
About1938
Flowers are often associated with fragility, ephemerality and kitsch, yet in times of political upheaval the meaning of flowers unfolds itself to foster far more connotations than the conventional ones mentioned above. Kerstin Serz paints flowers realistically; thus, asserting a resistance against the contemporary fear of portraying flowers simply as they appear in nature and in their full “beauty”. It is no coincidence that the flower continuously re-emerges as a symbol for resistance and resilience throughout history. Flowers often break through the asphalt of streets and succeed at thriving in such hostile conditions, this shows the innate ambivalence found in flowers, which is the dichotomy between their gracefulness and strength. But precisely this characteristic makes them an ideal symbol for peaceful resistance. During the Second World War the resistance group “Die Weiße Rose” (The White Rose) was established against the Nazi regime. The name further solidifies the correlation between resistance and flowers and their symbolic expression of protest. Whilst the red rose has been increasingly commercialized as an expression for love, the white rose remains a flower of innocence and mourning. The painting depicts an early photo of Sophie Scholl in 1938. She was one of the main activists of “Die Weiße Rose”. Here, a moment is captured, in which she is still unaware of her fatal future. The roses convey a contrast between Sophie Scholl’s unknowingness and the viewer of the painting, who is observing the scene from the present: already aware of the historical consequences that will afflict the resistance group. The composition of the painting is such that the white roses create a circularity: epitomising the threatening concept of historical reoccurrence. The fear of history repeating itself has increased over the past few years. Kerstin Serz successfully bridges the gaps of time by addressing past, present and future simultaneously. Upon viewing the painting carefully, one realises its incompleteness; the flame at the bottom and the ripped part at the top, create a claustrophobic atmosphere: indicating at a “Zeitriss” (a rip in time). On the one hand, one is observing a moment of the past, but on the other hand, Sophie Scholl’s appeal retains its relevance even today: to combat indifference and to vouch for peaceful resistance remains as important as ever. Except that today, we are instigating resistances against “resistances”, particularly against “resistances” of “Querdenker”. Consider the example of a young woman who protested against the lockdown measures and claimed that she felt like Sophie Scholl. It is in such moments, when history becomes distorted, that one has to ask oneself, how could we let this happen? Perhaps time behaves towards history like the black holes, in the painting, behave towards memory; they consume the composition of the painting and thus, symbolise the dangerous process of forgetting, or rather: of collective misremembering.
– Lucille Ling
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1938
2021, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 160 × 130 cm
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About Der Kornblumenträger
Kerstin Serz does not plant cornflowers, but instead paints them in full bloom. They are carried by an unknown messenger, who has a Goldfinch on his shoulder. An article in the taz with the title, Let us plant blue flowers (taz, Lasst uns blaue Blumen pflanzen, 25.03.2019), initiated the artist’s reflection on this topic and the creation of the edition. The cornflower, a popular motif of Romanticism, has since seen multiple transformations in its significance. It became particularly famous through Novalis’ character, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who in one of his dreams observes a cornflower transforming into the face of his recently deceased fiancé. Thus, the flower became a symbol for the unattainable and a desire for Wanderlust. Eichendorff most famously expressed the quest of searching the unsearchable in his poem Die Blaue Blume. Novalis’ story also addresses the merging of human and nature; one of the main motives found throughout Kerstin Serz’s work; she further intensifies this relationship through the inherently surrealistic atmosphere of her paintings. Just like Romanticism fluctuated between a distinct separation of dream and reality and gravitated towards the unification of these two entities, Kerstin Serz seems to be in a perpetual search for a place in which everything: nature and human, dream and reality, can coalesce into one coherent composition. The Goldfinch operates as an intermediator between nature and humans. One of the Goldfinch’s preferred food source is the cornflower; by picking up the seeds of the flower and with the help of the wind, he becomes an important propagator for the plant’s dissemination. Simultaneously, the bird can be seen as a companion of the Cornflower Carrier and representative for a solidarity togetherness against the symbolic usurpation of the cornflower. Nowadays, the flower is often worn like a badge by party members of the AfD. As a consequence, the flower’s significance is increasingly becoming a source of identification for particularly right-winged people. The article in the Taz ends with the appeal that one should not accept this one-sided and narrow symbolism of the cornflower. If the general public started to accept this specifically right-winged interpretation and thus, begins to avoid the flower (by not planting or appreciating it anymore) out of fear of misidentification, then the ideologies and principles attached to the far right, could gain more (symbolic) power. Therefore, Kerstin Serz attempts to neutralise the symbolism of the cornflower, to prevent the flower from being consumed and tainted completely by nationalistic and right-winged connotations. “The Cornflower Carrier” embodies the literal importance of this painting: which is foremost the distribution of an antithetical symbolism of the flower. This is further enhanced through its edition, which enables a facilitated spread of this message. His task is to carry the cornflower as far as possible into other and new contexts.
– Lucille Ling
Bio
Kerstin Serz came to Berlin in the 90s to study at the UdK. The relationships between human figure, animals and plants form the fundamentals of her pictorial themes. By combining these fragmented elements in intricate ways, her work develops a language of the surreal in a cosmos unique to her art.
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Der Kornblumenträger
2021, Fine Art Print on Hahnemuehle Ultra Smooth Paper, 305 gsm, Edition of 111, 18 × 18 cm
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Varvara Shavrova
Website >
Artist statement
My practice is focused on excavating the layers of history through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories. In engaging memory, nostalgia and reflection, I create installations that make connections between historic and current narratives, between the archival and the present. In my current work, I examine the symbols of power and authority whilst investigating their relationship to the individual. The process of empathy is the means of materializing the past into the present. The materiality of my installations is a comment on women’s labour, and include objects made of paper, thread, yarn and fabric, with methodologies of drawing, weaving, embroidery and knitting often combined with digital technologies and the moving image. Thematically, my work often investigates ‘borders’ in physical, geo-political and gendered terms.
In my new and ongoing Threads of Surveillance. Soft Drones Series (2020-2021), I examine the tools of surveillance, question the notion of privacy and address the meaning of civil liberties in the context of a pandemic. By the end of March 2020, nearly 3 billion people, or every 5th person on this planet, found themselves under total or partial lockdown. Quarantine enforcement, contact tracing, flow modelling and social graph-making are some of the data tools that are being used to tackle the covid-19 pandemic. In the various states of emergency that different countries around the world are experiencing today, mass surveillance is becoming normalised. As citizens, we are asked to sacrifice our right to privacy and to give up civil liberties in order to defeat the pandemic. What happens once the state of emergency is over?
Hovering on the intersection of historic appropriation and contemporary reflection, I develop ideas around tangible and intangible flying objects that conjure up various elements of surveillance mechanisms. The hand embroidered drawings of drones are sewn directly onto soft fabric used as interlining for drapery and curtains, thus evoking the sense of domesticity and comfort. That comforting sense of security and domesticity is in stark contrast with the objects that I am depicting, thus reflecting on the notion of surveillance that interferes with the very basics of our daily existence.
The process of making a drawing using thread refers to surveillance methodologies set up as domestic traps. The associations that I am developing are those of insects being trapped in webs, like a fly trapped in a spider’s web, or images of airplanes following flight charts, or surveillance and spy maps used by pilots. The threaded and embroidered drawings will be further developed into sculptural objects that will eventually inhabit the space around them, creating spiders web-like traps, with objects suspended, pulled and stretched within their physical environments, that will trick and lure the viewer inside them.
Bio
Varvara Shavrova is a visual artist born in the USSR who lives and works in Dublin and Berlin. Shavrova studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, and received her Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. Shavrova’s project Inna’s Dream reinterprets the first Soviet amphibious aeroplane designed by her great uncle in 1930s as a site-specific installation at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London 2019, and at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford 2021.Mapping Fates, multi-media installation reflects on Shavrova’s family migration, and includes tapestries and sound, shown in V.I. Lenin’s apartment-museum in St. Petersburg 2017. The Opera portrays the gender fluidity in traditional Peking opera, shown at Temple Beijing and MOMENTUM Berlin 2016, Gallery of Photography Ireland 2014, Venice Biennale of Architecture 2014, Espacio Cultural El Tanque, Tenerife 2011. Shavrova received awards from Arts Council England, Arts Council Ireland, Culture Ireland, British Council, The Prince’s Trust. Shavrova curated multiple international exhibitions and projects, including The Sea is the Limit at York Art Gallery in 2018 and at Virginia Commonwealth University, Doha Qatar in 2019, and Map Games: Dynamics of Change at Today Art Museum, Beijing, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, UK and at CAOS Centre for Contemporary Arts, Terni, Italy in 2008-2010. Shavrova’s works are in public collections of the Office for Public Works and at the Department of Foreign Affairs Ireland, MOMENTUM Collection and IKONO-TV Berlin, Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art Ireland, Minsheng Art Museum Beijing, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Museum of the History of St. Petersburg. Shavrova is represented by Patrick Heide Contemporary Art London. She is currently Artist in Residence at MOMENTUM Berlin.
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Threads of Surveillance. Soft Drones 7
2020, Embroidery, thread, interlining fabric, 25 × 35 cm
Threads of Surveillance. Soft Drones 13
2020, Embroidery, thread, interlining fabric, 25 × 35 cm
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Pola Sieverding
Website >
About the artist
Pola Sieverding is a visual artist working in the field of lens-based media. Pola Sieverding’s works are circling around questions of representation and image production within cultural formations that are defined by various concepts of desire and identification processes. The idea of portraiture in terms of an interpretive reading of the inscriptions of culture in the human body as well as its surrounding architecture is a recurring theme in her work. With photography, video and sound she investigates the physical body as bearer of historical narratives that shape a contemporary discourse on the social body.
Bio
Pola Sieverding studied at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Surikov Institute Moscow and attained her MFA at the University of the Arts Berlin in 2007. She has been invited as an Artist in Residence to Ramallah, Prague and Lisbon and as a visiting lecturer to the International Academy of Art Palestine. From 2016 to 2020 she was teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She was awarded the Work Stipend in the Visual Arts by the Senat of Berlin in 2014 and the Stipend for the Promotion of Junior Achievement in Artistic Fields by the State of Berlin in 2008. Since 2011 she is collaborating with Orson Sieverding on sonic interferences that have been performed at Kunstverein Heidelberg, ReMap 3 in Athens and Kunsthalle Duesseldorf. In 2012 she collaborated with Natascha Sadr Haghighian for her project for dOCUMENTA 13. She has exhibited internationally at Aram Art Gallery, Seoul; Art in General, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin; Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin; Dubai Photo Exhibition, Dubai; NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; MAK Museum für Angewandte und Gegenwartskunst, Vienna; Galerie KnustXKunz, Munich et al. Pola Sieverding lives and works in Berlin.
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Valet #52
2014, Photograph, framed, 10.2 × 8.8 cm
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Barthélémy Toguo
Website >
About the work
In his installations, performances, photography, and watercolor paintings, Barthélémy Toguo explores the regulated flow of people, merchandise, and resources between the developing world and the West. “Men or women are always potential exiles, driven by the urge to travel, which makes them ‘displaced beings’,” he has said. His monochromatic watercolor paintings act as a travel diary, with human-like forms transforming into animal shapes or abstract creatures — formally exploring the notion of border through the mixing of identities. There is a provocative and satirical aspect of Toguo’s practice, in which art and critique are inextricably linked, to address enduring and immediately relevant issues of borders, exile, and displacement. At the core of his practice is the notion of belonging, which stems from his dual French/Cameroonian nationality. Through poetic, hopeful, and often figural gestures connecting nature with the human body, Toguo foregrounds concerns with both ecological and societal implications. Recently, his works have been informed by movements and humanitarian tragedy including #BlackLivesMatter and the refugee crisis. He states, “What guides me is a constantly evolving aesthetic but also a sense of ethics, which makes a difference, and structures my entire approach.”
Bio
Barthélémy Toguo was born in M’Balmayo, Cameroon, in 1967. He currently lives and works between Paris, France, and Bandjoun, Cameroon. In 2011, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature in France. In 2008, he founded Bandjoun Station in his native Cameroon to foster contemporary art and culture within the local community. The community center includes an exhibition space, a library, an artist residency, and an organic farm. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at institutions including Parrish Art Museum, New York; Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etiennne, France; La Verrière by Hermès, Brussels; Fundaçao Gulbenkian, Lisbon; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He has been included in numerous international biennials, including the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2018); the Venice Biennale (2015); the Havana Biennial (2012); Biennale de Lyon, France (2011); the Sydney Biennale (2011); and Biennale de Dakar, Senegal (2018, 2016, 2000). In 2019, Toguo was included in two inaugural exhibitions held at the new Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, and El Espacio 23, Miami, Florida respectively. In 2020, Toguo participates in the group exhibitions Global(e) Resistance, Centre Pompidou, France, and Voyage Voyages, Mucem (The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations), Marseille, France. Toguo’s works are included in public collections worldwide, including Tate Modern, England; Centre Pompidou, France; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and MoMA, New York.
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Welcome Home
2012, Watercolour on paper, 28 × 38 cm
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Günther Uecker
Website >
Bio
Günther Uecker was born in 1930 in Wendorf, Germany. Studying painting at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee from 1949 to 1953, he left East Germany for the West, where he further pursued his artistic training from 1955 through 1958 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Throughout the 1950s, Uecker cultivated a strong interest in meditative practices and purification rituals, and became fascinated with the philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam. He developed rituals of his own, including the repetitive hammering of nails, and proceeded to translate this practice into a central aspect of his work. Hammering dense groupings of nails into panels and readymade objects, he created reliefs that operate between painting and sculpture, and that establish new realms for visual exploration, wherein the patterns of surface, light, and shadow are complex and unpredictable. Multilayered in their meanings, these works are resonant with Uecker’s past, including his memories as a boy of nailing up planks to barricade the windows of his family home at the end of World War II. He also incorporates objects such as monochromatic paint, ash, sand, stone, glass, string, cloth, posts, tree trunks, and other media, using these elemental materials to create works of art imbued with the poetic spirit of order and chaos, creation and destruction. As Uecker declared in 1961, “My objects are a spatial reality, a zone of light. I use mechanical means to overcome the subjective gesture, to objectify, to create a situation of freedom.”
Uecker expanded his practice further in the 1960s by introducing kinetic and electrical elements into his works, while shifting his methodology from precise, geometric patterns to more organic and irregular arrangements. In 1957, Uecker first exhibited with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who founded the Zero Group, which he formally joined in 1961. They advocated for a new art form—a degree zero—to erase the destructive forces by which human experience had come to be conditioned during the war, and which were expressed in the then-prevalent art informel style. Central to the movement were explorations of light, technology, and an expansion beyond traditional two-dimensional confines of the canvas, all of which are explored by Uecker.
After the dissolution of Group Zero in the mid-1960s, Uecker’s work became increasingly performative, incorporating aspects of body, conceptual, and land art. Starting in the 1970s, he has designed stage sets for several operas. He taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1974 to 1995 and was promoted to professor in 1976. In 1978, Uecker created the multipaneled wall relief Von der Dunkelheit zum Licht (From Darkness to Light) for the United Nations Office in Geneva. In 2000, he designed a Reflection and Prayer Room for the reconstructed Reichstag in Berlin.
Uecker participated in documenta, Kassel, in 1964, 1968, and 1977, and the Venice Biennale in 1970. His work has been exhibited at museums around the world, including one-artist exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern (1966); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (1968); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1971); Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf (1975, 2015); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1976); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1982); Instituto Aleman de Madrid (1988); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (1992); Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (1996); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2005); Ulmer Museum, Ulm (2010); Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts (2012); and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana (2014); and the Imam Ali Religious Arts Museum, Tehran (2016). The Central House of Artists, Moscow, staged a retrospective of Uecker’s work in 1988. This exhibition was followed in 1993 by a retrospective at Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, and a large-scale presentation of his oeuvre was organized by Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 2015.
Uecker has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Goslarer Kaiserring in 1983; induction into the German Pour le Mérite order for Sciences and Arts in 2000; the Berliner Bär, B.Z. Kulturpreis, Berlin, in 2005; the Great Federal Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2006; the Jan-Willem-Ring from Dusseldorf in 2010; and the Staatspreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2015. Public institutions that house the artist’s work in their collections include the Art Institute of Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London.
In 2011, L&M Arts exhibited Günther Uecker: The Early Years, the artist’s first major exhibition in New York for over four decades. This exhibition featured the artist’s paintings, panels, and structures dating from the late 1950s through the 1960s. In 2016, Dominique Lévy presented Günther Uecker: Verletzte Felder (Wounded Fields), the first exhibition of his work in London for over fifty years. To create this new body of work, Uecker painted canvas-covered panels with thick white pigment, hammered dense groupings of nails into their surfaces, and split the some of the panels with an axe, creating deep gashes that disrupt the integrity of their surfaces with a striking gesture. In 2019, Lévy Gorvy opens Günther Uecker: Notations uniting new large-scale nail paintings with a collection of watercolors created by the artist during his global travels.
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Kunstpranger
2008, Tree trunk and nails on wooden pallet, 153 × 73 × 70 cm
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Mariana Vassileva
Website >
Nowadays the children in school are not allowed to sing, it is forbidden. We have actual, other problems with the voice and breath today…
– Mariana Vassileva
About the work
In an era witnessing the steady resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism and racism the world over, Mariana Vassileva’s iconic work presents an all too recognizable image. While many governments still seek to curb freedoms of speech, others perhaps exploit free speech in overabundance. As the line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news continues to blur in our over-mediated culture, and information spreading digitally is even more viral than disease, we live in an era where the power of the wrong word has more capacity for destruction than ever before. Vassileva’s Microphone is emblematic of the very necessity for an exhibition such as Points of Resistance.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
Bio
Mariana Vassileva was born in Bulgaria in 1964. Since graduating from the Universität der Künste in 2000, Vassileva continues to live and work in Berlin. Working across varied mediums such as video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Vassileva’s practice is concerned with the poetry that lies beneath the quotidian and the routine. Based upon observation of daily life, her works respond to an element of playfulness inherent in artist and viewer alike. With the curious gaze of a voyeur or of an urban anthropologist, the artist observes people and their surroundings in order to capture a moment of poetic imagery. Watching, and the distance it implies, are both method and subject of a body of work reflecting on human concerns familiar to us all: communication, cultural displacement, relations with self and other, loneliness and the humor hidden within the rhythms of the day-to-day.
Mariana Vassileva is an an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, having shown in major institutions including: Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Tate Britain (UK); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany); Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst (Germany); Kunsthalle zu Kiel (Germany); Edition Block (Berlin, Germany); The Stenersen Museum (Oslo,Norway); Total Museum (Seoul, Korea); Hong Kong Arts Centre (Hong Kong). Mariana Vassileva has participated in several international Biennials, such as: the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, The Beauty and the Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age (2010); the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, Rewriting Worlds (2011); Biennale Vento Sul in Curitiba, Brasil; the First edition of Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina (2007). Her works are held in international Collections in: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany); Rene Block Collection (Berlin, Germany); Koc Museum (Istanbul, Turkey); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel); La Caixa, Caja de Ahorros de El Monte y Fundacion el Monte (Spain); Lemaitre Collection (London-Paris); Kunsthalle Emden (Germany); Lidice Memorial, and in private collections.
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Mikrofon
2017, Mixed media / 2021, Bronze, 150 × 60 × 60 cm
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Bill Viola
Website >
About the work
Color high-definition video on flat panel display
Performers: Sheryl Arenson, Robin Bonaccorsi, Rocky Capella, Cathy Chang, Liisa Cohen, Tad Coughenour, James Ford, Michael Irby, Simon Karimian, John Kim, Tanya Little, Mike Martinez, Petro Martirosian, Jeff Mosley, Gladys Peters, Maria Victoria, Kaye Wade, Kim Weild, Ellis Williams
Photo: Kira Perov © Bill Viola Studio
A group of nineteen men and women from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds are suddenly struck by a massive onslaught of water from a high-pressure hose. Some are immediately knocked over and others brace themselves against the unprovoked deluge. Water flies everywhere, clothing and bodies are pummeled, faces and limbs contort in stress and agony against the cold, hard force. People in the group cling to each other for survival, as the act of simply remaining upright becomes an intense physical struggle. Then, as suddenly as it arrived, the water stops, leaving behind a band of suffering, bewildered, and battered individuals. The group slowly recovers as some regain their senses, others weep, and still others remain cowering, while the few with any strength left assist those who have fallen back to their feet.
Seen in the context of Points of Resistance, this work becomes emblematic of the ethos of this exhibition, celebrating the values which enable us to forge unity from diversity. The deluge in the video, with its connotations of water cannon, invokes the civil unrest and hardships which only seem to grow worse around the world in recent years. We are all in this together. And when we get knocked down, overcoming such hardships is likewise easier in solidarity.
Bio
Bill Viola (b.1951) is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For 40 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single-channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.
Bill Viola received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973 where he studied visual art with Jack Nelson and electronic music with Franklin Morris. During the 1970s he lived for 18 months in Florence, Italy, as technical director of production for Art/Tapes/22, one of the first video art studios in Europe, and then traveled widely to study and record traditional performing arts in the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali, and Japan. Viola was invited to be artist-in-residence at the WNET Channel 13 Television Laboratory in New York from 1976-1980 where he created a series of works, many of which were premiered on television. In 1977 Viola was invited to show his videotapes at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) by cultural arts director Kira Perov who, a year later, joined him in New York where they married and began a lifelong collaboration working and traveling together.
In 1979 Viola and Perov traveled to the Sahara desert, Tunisia to record mirages. The following year Viola was awarded a U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship and they lived in Japan for a year and a half where they studied Zen Buddhism with Master Daien Tanaka, and Viola became the first artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi research laboratories. Viola and Perov returned to the U. S. at the end of 1981 and settled in Long Beach, California, initiating projects to create art works based on medical imaging technologies of the human body at a local hospital, animal consciousness at the San Diego Zoo, and fire walking rituals among the Hindu communities in Fiji. In 1987 they traveled for five months throughout the American Southwest photographing Native American rock art sites, and recording nocturnal desert landscapes with a series of specialized video cameras. More recently, at the end of 2005, they journeyed with their two sons to Dharamsala, India to record a prayer blessing with the Dalai Lama.
Music has always been an important part of Viola’s life and work. From 1973-1980 he performed with avant-garde composer David Tudor as a member of his Rainforest ensemble, later called Composers Inside Electronics. Viola has also created videos to accompany music compositions including 20th century composer Edgard Varèse’ Déserts in 1994 with the Ensemble Modern, and, in 2000, a three-song video suite for the rock group Nine Inch Nails’ world tour. In 2004 Viola began collaborating with director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to create a new production of Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, which was presented in project form by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December 2004, and later at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York (2007). The complete opera received its world premiere at the Opéra National de Paris, Bastille in April 2005.
Since the early 1970s Viola’s video art works have been seen all over the world. Exhibitions include Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987; Bill Viola: Unseen Images, seven installations toured six venues in Europe, 1992-1994, organized by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kira Perov. Viola represented the U.S. at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 with Buried Secrets, a series of five new installation works. In 1997 the Whitney Museum of American Art organized Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey that included over 35 installations and videotapes and traveled for two years to six museums in the United States and Europe. In 2002 Viola completed his most ambitious project, Going Forth By Day, a five part projected digital “fresco” cycle, his first work in High-Definition video, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bill Viola: The Passions, a new series inspired by late medieval and early Renaissance art, was exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2003 then traveled to the National Gallery, London, the Fondación “La Caixa” in Madrid and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. One of the largest exhibitions of Viola’s installations to date, Bill Viola: Hatsu-Yume (First Dream) (2006-2007), drew over 340,000 visitors to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. In 2007 nine installations were shown at the Zahenta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; and Ocean Without a shore was created for the 15th century Church of San Gallo during the Venice Biennale. In 2008 Bill Viola: Visioni interiori, a survey exhibition organized by Kira Perov, was presented in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In 2014, twenty works were shown at the Grand Palais, Paris, in his largest survey exhibition to date, and a few months later, part one of the St. Paul’s commission was installed in the London cathedral, Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water).
Viola has received numerous awards for his achievements, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1989), XXI Catalonia International Prize (2009), and the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2011).
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Tempest (Study for The Raft)
2005, HD video, 16 min 50 sec
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Marta Vovk
Website >
Bio
Marta Vovk (born in 1989 in Lviv, Ukraine; lives and works in Berlin) graduated from Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Berlin in 2017. In terms of content, her artistic practice moves between autobiographical fragments, tenors of sensitivity and a sociocultural touch. Pop-cultural elements go hand in hand with existential questions of the modern, challenged Self. This creates an associative interplay between banality and pathos, self-optimizing performance and anxiety, infantile web culture with its cute kittens and Major Depression. Figures, symbols, advertising items, typos and slogans—each with their distinct messages and network of meanings—emerge simultaneously. Their specific inter-relatedness, however, remains questionable.
Her paintings pursue a strong awareness of their own material with its charged and contextual meanings and references. Primarily, she works with acrylic paint on linen and cotton fabrics. She also likes to use Window Color and spray paint—materials that are commonly regarded as outdated. Formally speaking, her works combine and overlap both visual and graphic elements. The latter are created by using touch-up pencils and colored pencils, thus alluding to formal aspects of stickers and childish doodles. She considers her emotional and personal experiences as an archive of self-referential fragments, motifs, figures and sentences, each of which—during the painting process—are ultimately translated into a visual composition.
As for her installations, She tries to work with the absurdities that are offered to costumers in a world of products. Often, She makes use of abstruse decorative products, feel-good items, feel-at-home goods and thus things that are supposed to generate comfort and ease. This sort of aesthetic, with its seemingly innocent meanings and affects, combined with ist hypocrisy, is something that she sees as provocation. The apparent banal in her works, both from a formal and conceptual perspective, is highly appealing to her. Free of pathos, the great expressive artistic gesture is reduced to a playful hint. What she doesn’t need is truisms in the style of old masters.
Recent group shows of Vovk include Defying Currents, The Shelf by Pandion, Berlin (2018), Sorgen (International) Vol.4, SOX, Berlin, Masters Salon, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp (2017), Böse Blüten Projektraum Bethanien, Berlin (2017) and Quelltext, Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam (2016).
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Deutschstunde (futanari)
2020, Burning on wood, 80 × 60 cm
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Michael Wutz
Website >
About Germania
Germania – Speer and Hitler’s megalomaniac utopia. The gigantic blocks, which retain the aura of the model in their geometry, cut through the chiseled mesh of the historically grown city. Some sections in the periphery resemble aesthetically photographed aerial photographs. In fact, a connoisseur of more recent prints will immediately notice that analog means were also used here: by means of light-sensitive film, a sight was transmitted that was itself captured by photographic means. These elements reproduce a very specific moment: when a photographer shot reconnaissance images of soon-to-be-destroyed Berlin from an airplane in 1943: thus, particles of light that were captured on film at that very moment are captured on the plates half a century later. These analog structures are fused in etching processes with the city structures transferred to the plate by drawing (also Berlin 1943) to form a skeletonized Berlin. Chaotic haptics clash with the monstrous blocks of the model, and yet both points of contrast are woven into a homogeneous texture in the pictorial space. The target object, scouted by the Royal Air Force in 1943, already merges with Hitler’s utopia and, in the process of decoding the artwork, reproduces in the viewer, if he becomes aware of this anachronism, the contradiction of romantic escape from reality/repression and historical-materialistic reality. Both motifs, i.e. the bombed cities of ’45 but also Germania are, however, not simply concrete, isolated phenomena/images. As iconographic elements they are interwoven in a network of – not only but also – national/collective memories and problems. In their interweaving, the two moments exemplify the fabrications of art as a means of critical juxtaposition with the real.
As a point of resistance, this work was removed from the exhibition by request of the artist.
About Tales, Lies and Exaggerations
The animation Tales, Lies and Exaggerations combines various drawn, photographed and filmed documents connected with other projects that Michael Wutz has been working on. The plot was inspired by the ‘Cut-Up’ technique developed by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, as well as by proto-Surrealist authors such as the Comte de Lautréamont. Both these works examine different aspects of dreams and dreaming: its language, mechanisms, symbols and utopian spaces.
Bio
Michael Wutz was born in 1979 in Ichenhausen, Bavaria, Germany. In 2004 he graduated from Schweizer Cumpana Scholarship for Painting in Bucharest. In 2001-2006 he studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin under Prof. Leiko Ikemura. In 2005-2006 Michael Wutz was a Master student under Leiko Ikemura at the UdK Berlin. The artist currently lives and works in Berlin.
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Germania III
2018, Etching on paper, 180 × 240 cm
Tales, Lies and Exaggerations
2011, Video animation, 9 min
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Jindrich Zeithamml
Bio
Jindrich Zeithamml was born on March 25, 1949, in Teplice. From the age of fourteen he studied at the Secondary School of Stonemasonry and Sculpture in Hořice. In 1967 he trained, for one year, as a wood carver in Prague and, at the same time, served as an intern in the Pilsen-based studio of Jiří Hanzálek. In 1968 he joined the Academy of Art in Prague, but was expelled from study just after a year. In 1968 to 1969 he made his living as a stonemason on the Charles Bridge. Then he moved to Pilsen and worked in Hanzálek’s studio. He made his living as a free-lance sculptor within the Czech Fund of Art. In 1972 he emigrated to Germany via Italy. In 1976 to 1982 he studied in Düsseldorf at the State Academy of Art with professor Krick. He had his first exhibition in 1980. In 1985 he was awarded the Gustav Poensgen Prize, next year he received the Hilly stipend. After the fall of communism he shuttled between Germany and the Czech Republic, in 1988 he moved to Prague. In 1995 to 2016 he was a professor at the Academy of Art in Prague.
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Sonnenscheibe
2020, Mdf, gold leaf, 100 × 93 × 3.5 cm
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Ireen Zielonka
Website >
About the work
Left part 1: Headless, you let yourself be carried by what has happened.
Middle part 2: The inner strength is activated and makes everything around you tremble.
Right part 3: One grows beyond oneself. The head is placed back the shoulders. With one’s own courage, one stands firmly on the ground. It’s time to look courageously into the future.
There is hardly a drawing of Zielonka’s in which no philosophical thought is the starting point for an allegorical representation. Her work posits the interactions between society and the individual and the unelected arrested-being with conventions, traditions and origins. Reflection, inquiry and pursuit of knowledge are mandatory as the scouts to act confidently and maturely, she adds. Zielonka’ s work negotiates the divide between what she refers to as the Gesellschaftsspiel (Company Game) and the Gesellschaftsmaschine (Company Machine).
Those who play the machine and those who are played by the machine. Influence has a social dimension, the ratio the individual between the two poles of emancipation and manipulation varies when influence, both external and internal, is introduced and acknowledged. The collage and mirror techniques of the Dadaists and their application in literature by William S. Burroughs (cut-up and fold-in) point to a formal technique, the paradox, introducing the random and the automated as a counterweight to the creative author. She has applied her thoughts to a way of working which is a mixture of strict composition, precision craftsmanship and controlled chaos. Here is where Zielonka’ s work steps away, piece by piece, from the distraction of colour to become refined art, offering room for reflection. Her habit of abstraction provides thoughful content of a particular depth, the kind Max Klinger called the “true organ of imagination” confronting the art of belief in drawing.
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The Shy Stag Beetle
2017, Pen and ink drawing triptych, ink and shellac ink on paper
(86 × 43 cm) + (86 × 86 cm) + (86 × 43 cm)
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MOMENTUM AiR
Varvara Shavrova
Website – Portfolio
3 April – 4 June 2021
ARTIST BIO
Varvara Shavrova is a visual artist born in the USSR who lives and works in London and Dublin. Shavrova studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, and received her Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. Shavrova’s recent project Inna’s Dream reinterprets the first Soviet amphibious aeroplane designed by her great uncle in 1930s Russia, and includes tufted carpet objects and site‑specific drawings, shown at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London (2019). The Mapping Fates multi‑media installation reflects on Shavrova’s family history of migration, and includes tapestries and sound, shown in Lenin’s apartment in St. Petersburg (2017). Shavrova’s project The Opera portrays the gender fluidity in traditional Peking opera. It received international acclaim and included photography, sound and video projections, and was shown at The Temple Beijing (2016), MOMENTUM Berlin (2016), the Gallery of Photography Ireland (2014), the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014), and at Espacio Cultural El Tanque in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2011). Shavrova’s multi‑media project Borders (2007 – 2015) examines the geo‑political tensions between Russia and China and was shown at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, at the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg in Rumiantsevski Palace, and at the Galway Arts Festival in Ireland.
Shavrova has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Tsinghua University in Beijing, at The University of Surrey and at the Leeds University in the UK, and at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Doha, Qatar. She has been awarded as Artist‑in‑Residence in the Irish prisons, where she led a socially engaged project resulting in a large‑scale textile‑based artwork created by the prisoners, supported by the Artists in Prisons grant from the Arts Council Ireland. Shavrova received multiple Awards from Arts Council England, Arts Council Ireland, Culture Ireland, British Council, and Ballinglen Arts Foundation. Shavrova curated international visual arts projects, including The Sea is the Limit exhibition at York Art Gallery (2018) and at Virginia Commonwealth University Arts Qatar Gallery in Doha (2019), examining migration, borders and refugee crisis, and presenting the project at Tate Modern ‘Who Are We?’ public event to mark Refugee Week 2018, in collaboration with Counterpoint Arts and Tate Exchange. Shavrova co‑curated Map Games: Dynamics of Change, international art and architecture project, at Today Art Museum Beijing, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, CAOS Centre for Contemporary Arts, Terni, Italy (2008 – 2010). Shavrova’s works are included in the collections of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, the Office of Public Works Ireland, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Ireland, the MOMENTUM Collection Berlin, the Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art Ireland, and Minsheng Art Museum Beijing.
ARTIST RESIDENCY PROJECT
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice is focused on excavating the layers of history through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories. In engaging memory, nostalgia and reflection, I create installations that make connections between historic and current narratives, between the archival and the present. In my current work, I examine the symbols of power and authority whilst investigating their relationship to the individual. The process of empathy is the means of materializing the past into the present. The materiality of my installations is a comment on women’s labour, and include objects made of paper, thread, yarn and fabric, with methodologies of drawing, weaving, embroidery and knitting often combined with digital technologies and the moving image. Thematically, my work often investigates ‘borders’ in physical, geopolitical and gendered terms.
In my new and ongoing Threads of Surveillance. Soft Drones Series (2020-2021), I examine the tools of surveillance, question the notion of privacy and address the meaning of civil liberties in the context of a pandemic. By the end of March 2020, nearly 3 billion people, or every 5th person on this planet, found themselves under total or partial lockdown. Quarantine enforcement, contact tracing, flow modelling and social graph-making are some of the data tools that are being used to tackle the covid-19 pandemic. In the various states of emergency that different countries around the world are experiencing today, mass surveillance is becoming normalised. As citizens, we are asked to sacrifice our right to privacy and to give up civil liberties in order to defeat the pandemic. What happens once the state of emergency is over?
Hovering on the intersection of historic appropriation and contemporary reflection, I develop ideas around tangible and intangible flying objects that conjure up various elements of surveillance mechanisms. The hand-embroidered drawings of drones are sewn directly onto soft fabric used as interlining for drapery and curtains, thus evoking the sense of domesticity and comfort. That comforting sense of security and domesticity is in stark contrast with the objects that I am depicting, thus reflecting on the notion of surveillance that interferes with the very basics of our daily existence.
The process of making a drawing using thread refers to surveillance methodologies set up as domestic traps. The associations that I am developing are those of insects being trapped in webs, like a fly trapped in a spider’s web, or images of aeroplanes following flight charts, or surveillance and spy maps used by pilots. The threaded and embroidered drawings will be further developed into sculptural objects that will eventually inhabit the space around them, creating spiders web-like traps, with objects suspended, pulled and stretched within their physical environments, that will trick and lure the viewer inside them.
– Varvara Shavrova
In Development:
Shavrova’s practice is focused on excavating the layers of her family’s history in the former Soviet Union, through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories. By engaging memory, nostalgia and reflection, Shavrova creates installations that make connections between historic and current narratives, between the archival and the present. In her work, Shavrova examines the symbols of power and authority whilst investigating their relationship to the individual. The process of empathy is the means of materializing the past into the present. Shavrova’s work is political and responds to the events that have influenced the course of history. Her socially engaged installations often comment on women’s labour, with methodologies of drawing, constructed textiles and digital imaging.
Varvara Shavrova’s proposed new socially engaged project, InFlight, endeavours to reflect on the historic and the archival renderings of flight in the context of current migration and refugee crises. The core of the project engages women from refugee and migrant communities in Berlin, and will be developed during Shavrova’s Artist Residency at MOMENTUM. The project follows on from Shavrova’s investigations into the trajectory of flight, connecting the archival and the historic elements of aerospace and flight with the complex reality of today’s refugee and migrant crises. Approaching the InFlight project almost as an anthropologist, Shavrova proposes to address the duality of meanings of the word ‘flight’ through the symbolism of a parachute, to examine the social fabric at the time of global emergency, and to investigate, through the prism of felt experience and individual’s stories and recollections, the multiple and ongoing emergencies that necessitate flight. Addressing borders, migration and statelessness, Shavrova is interested in investigating the geo-political and socio-economic background against which the current refugee and migrant crisis is unfolding, underpinning the human condition that signifies the states of emergency and flight.
THANKS TO:
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MOMENTUM InsideOut @ CHB Fassadenkino
Presents
Lockdown Schmockdown
16 April – 30 May 2021
Please note that
THE SCREENINGS ON 7 – 30 MAY ARE CANCELLED
due to Lockdown regulations. We hope to resume the program after the end of the Lockdown.
But you can still watch the Lockdown Schmockdown program
as Season 4 of COVIDecameron on the MOMENTUM Channel on IkonoTV!
WATCH on IkonoTV >>
Open-Air Video Program on the Media Façade of
CHB – Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
& on the MOMENTUM Channel on IkonoTV
Gáspár Battha, Marina Belikova, Theo Eshetu, Gülsün Karamustafa, Tamás Komoróczky, David Krippendorff, Júlia Lantos, Éva Magyarósi, Bori Mákó, Map Office, Kate McMillan, András Nagy, Bea Pántya, Qiu Anxiong, Eszter Szabó, Kristóf Szabó, David Szauder, Viktória Traub
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Curated by
Zsuzska Petró, David Szauder, Rachel Rits-Volloch
In Partnership With
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@ Collegium Hungaricum
Dorotheenstraße 12, 10117 Berlin
Corona-Compatible Outdoors with FFP2 Masks and Social Distancing Required
Watch the videos on the outdoor screen. And listen to the sound in real-time on your phone!
Click Here to Listen during the screening times > >
https://stream.radio.co/sb3ec6b52c/listen > >
Every Friday – Sunday @ 8:30 – 10:00pm
PROGRAM CHANGING WEEKLY
& On IkonoTV
Due to the 10pm curfew in Berlin, we are happy that you can also watch the Lockdown Schmockdown video art program as Season 4 of COVIDecameron on the MOMENTUM Channel on IkonoTV any time of the day!
WATCH on IkonoTV >>
With the eyes and hearts of the world still locked onto the terrible aftermath of COVID-19, and with Berlin still in lockdown over a year after the pandemic began, MOMENTUM together with the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin gathers a selection of exceptional artists from the MOMENTUM Collection COVIDecameron exhibition in dialogue with artists from Hungary. Showing video artworks re-contextualized through the prism of life at the time of Corona, this exhibition series of video art in public space is a contemplation through art from elsewhere upon the poetry of the day-to-day as it relates to the changing world we inhabit. Created during the pandemic lockdown in Berlin, this open-air program of video art is our response to the long months of gallery and museum closures, and our gift to a public craving for culture in real-space and real-time. MOMENTUM Inside out and .CHB Façade Kino bring video art out of the gallery and onto the streets for all to see on Berlin’s Museum Island!
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
While Berlin is cautiously looking forward to spring and freedom in these uncertain times, Collegium Hungaricum Berlin has teamed up with MOMENTUM to offer a unique COVID-compatible art experience adjacent to Berlin’s Museum Island. We have gathered a selection of cutting-edge media and video art from Hungary to be shown in dialogue with works from the MOMENTUM Collection, reflecting on our shared experience of a world affected by a global pandemic. Starting on April 16th, the open-air screening program Lockdown Schmockdown, initiated by MOMENTUM IsideOut together with CHB Fassadenkino, will be running every Friday to Sunday from sundown until 11pm, until the end of May.
– Zsuzska Petró
WEEK 1 / 4 / 7
16 – 18 April, 7 – 9 + 28 – 30 May
Eszter Szabó, Dispenser of Delights (2013-2015)
Eszter Szabó’s video is dealing with the notion of waiting for miracles to happen. The weary protagonists exercise self healing rituals, and appear in front of a 3D background with textures of photos from existing real estate advertisements that were downloaded from the internet. The original photos give a very sincere insight into a typical home in today’s Hungary. The movements of the lonely figures were inspired by traces of “sublime beauty” that can be detected in these very familiar spaces.
BIO
Eszter Szabó lives and works in Budapest. She has a master’s degree from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, and a postgraduate degree from Le Fresnoy Studio, France. Eszter has also participated in several workshops and study visits, among others at the Salzburg Summer Academy with Shirin Neshat, in Bielefeld with Artist Unlimited, as well as in Brooklyn, New York with Triangle Arts. Her works have been presented at various solo and group shows around the world, eg. Paris, Bruxelles, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Rome, Salzburg.
Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet (2000)
Gulsun Karamustafa’s 4-channel video installation and soundscape, Personal Time Quartet, was intended as a portrait of the artist’s childhood. Yet now, seen through the prism of Corona-times, this portrait of innocent domesticity instead paints a picture of how many of us have felt during the various pandemic lockdowns, stuck indoors and perpetually repeating the same domestic tasks.
BIO
Gülsün Karamustafa was born in 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. She lives and works in Istanbul and Berlin, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. She received her MFA from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art in 1969. Using personal and historical narratives, Karamustafa explores socio-political issues in modern Turkey, addressing themes including sexuality-gender, exile-ethnicity, and displacement-migration. Her work reflects on the traumatic effects of nation building, as it responds to the processes of modernization, political turbulence, and civil rights in a period that includes the military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980.
Karamustafa is one of the laureates of the 2014 Prince Claus Award, and her recent solo exhibitions include: “Chronographia” at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016-2017); “Swaddling the Baby”, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2016) / Villa Romana, Florence (2015); “Mystic Transport” (a duo exhibition with Koen Thys), Centrale for Contemporary Art, and Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2015-2016); “An Ordinary Love”, Rampa, Istanbul (2014); “A Promised Exhibition”, SALT Ulus, Ankara (2014), SALT Beyoglu, SALT Galata, Istanbul (2013); amongst many others. Karamustafa took part in numerous international biennales, including: 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014); 3rd & 10th Gwangju Biennials (2000, 2014); 4th Thessaloniki Biennale (2013); 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); Singapore Biennial (2011), 3rd Guangzou Triennial (2008); 11th Cairo Biennial (2008); 2nd Contour Video Art Biennale, Mechelen (2005); 1st Seville Biennial (2004); 8th Havana Biennial (2003); 3rd Cetinje Biennial (2003); 2nd, 3rd & 4th Istanbul Biennials (1987, 1992, 1995).
Viktória Traub, Loops (2020/2021)
Viktória Traub’s figures repeat the same ritualistic movements over and over again. These movements are rituals of love, connection and care, which may give joy, or cause pain at the same time. During the past year, some of us experienced isolation, or loneliness, others found the constant companionship of their loved ones rather challenging. Either way, our life in lockdown has once again proven the importance of meaningful personal connections.
BIO
Viktória Traub graduated at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design as an animation artist in 2008. In 2006, she spent a semester at the animation department of ESAD (Escola Superior de Artes e Design) in Portugal. Since her graduation, she has been working as animation director for various production companies. Her short films The Iron Egg and Mermaids and Rhinos have been presented at a series of film festivals around the world. In 2018, the Mermaids and Rhinos was selected by the Association of Hungarian Film Critics as the Animation of the Year. At the moment, she is working on the preproduction of the short animation Shoes and Hooves, as well as GIF-animations and graphic designs.
Qiu Anxiong, Cake (2014)
In a timeless and exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two, Qiu Anxiong’s Cake combines painting, drawing and clay with a discordant soundtrack of mechanical noises. With heart-rate monitors, sirens, and police radio scanners running throughout the soundtrack, and images of wrestlers rendered in a variety of media, this work can be read as particularly emblematic of the struggles of our viral times.
BIO
Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972, Chengdu) is one of China’s most prominent contemporary artists. He studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, and in 2003 he graduated from the University of Kassel College of Art in Germany after six years of studying both contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture. After having worked predominantly in oil painting during his studies in Kassel and having later turned to landscape painting in the tradition of the old Chinese masters, Qiu’s return to Shanghai in 2004 marked a shift in interest towards animations and video art. In his animated films, Qiu co-mingles the classical and the contemporary, using the traditional Chinese ink-and-wash style to transpose contemporary social and environmental issues onto traditional Chinese landscapes, taking the undifferentiated mass of history as his raw material. Qiu’s works are known for their profound and bleak contemplation on the relationship between man and nature, and criticism of mass urbanization and environmental degradation.
Qiu Anxiong’s work is held in numerous museum collections, including: Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, USA; Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas, USA; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, UK; Kunst Haus Zurich, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan; Art Museum of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway. Qiu Anxiong rose to international prominence in the 2006 Shanghai Biennial, and, the same year, received the CCAA Contemporary Art Award from the Shanghai Zhengdai Museum of Modern Art (2006). Subsequently, he participated in numerous international biennales and festivals, including: 3rd Nanjing International Art Festival, China (2016); 1st Animation Film Festival Xi An, China (2012); 4th Ink Painting Art Biennale Tai Pei, Taiwan (2012); 1st Animation Biennale, OCAT Art Center, Shen Zhen, China (2012); Chengdu Biennale, China (2011/2001); 54th Venice Biennale, Italy, Collateral Program (2011); 29th Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil (2010); Busan Biennale, Korea (2010); Nanjing Bienale, China (2010); Animamix Biennial, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2009); 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6), Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2009-2010); 11th Cairo Biennale, Egypt (2008); 2nd Athens Biennial, Greece (2009); 5th Media Biennale, Seoul, Korea (2008); Mediations Biennale, Poznań, Poland (2008); 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008); 16th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2008); 3rd Lianzhou International Photo Festival, China (2007);
Júlia Lantos, Incognito (2020/2021)
Incognito’s main character struggles with the challenges of everyday life. She sees her job as a prison, and the world as a war that is fought with alienation, aimlessness and selfishness instead of weapons. Her only refuge from the cruelty of the outside world is her apartment, while her only companion is a yellow bird, symbolising her desire for freedom. One day, a peculiar cloud appears above her apartment, which triggers an almost supernatural process in her life: she gradually withdraws from society, stops going to work and ignores the world beyond the four walls of her home. However, the outside world cannot be ignored forever, eventually it breaks down the protective walls around her.
BIO
After finishing high-school, Júlia spent a year in Berlin in order to further her professional and personal development. She earnt her bachelor’s degree from the Budapest Metropolitan University in 2018 with her short film Incognito. Since 2018, she has been undertaking illustration and animation projects. Currently, she is finishing her master’s degree. Incognito has been screened at several international film festivals, and won an award at the Alternative Film Festival in Toronto for Best Animated Short Film.
David Szauder, Six Easy Pieces About Nothing (2020-2021)
1 – Personal Rain Snow (2021). 2 – Galactic Drama (2020). 3 – The Philosopher Garden (2020). 4 – Kinetic Amusement (2020). 5 – Joyride /em>(2021). 6 – Cosmic Accident (2020)
“Last June, after almost four months of lockdown, I began to work with animated compositions that depicted imaginary figures in a timeless space, with no other human being in sight. The figures themselves are motionless, while the space they peacefully inhabit shows some kind of cosmic motion. The objects of this environment, as well as the space itself are animated by a mysterious force. The ensuing rhythmic movement renders their experience eternal. The figures are peaceful, pensive, and subdued, yet isolated and perhaps even lonely. They appear as though they were all ‘sitting on the edge of the void…’ – But perhaps, it’s not about the void, and one day, they might swing into action. We’ll see. Will we?” (Dávid Szauder)
BIO
Media artist David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture. Szauder has participated in a variety of international projects as artist and curator. In cooperation with MOMENTUM, previous projects include: “Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014);
WEEK 2 / 5 / 7
23 – 25 April, 14 – 16 + 28 – 30 May
Éva Magyarósi, Garden of Auras (2015)
Éva Magyarósi’s work is a manifestation of poetic visualisation and visual poetry. Her works typically tell us about the mysteries of the female soul, about the body and feelings, displaying polyphonic stories of strange dreams and situations experienced in real life. The pieces often blend strategies of experiencing evanescence through images and narration, and of processing remembrance through making it collective. Her works of art can be interpreted as visual diaries, in which the fictive and the personal past are blended, thus contributing to the literary works of different philosophical theories on time and memory.
BIO
Éva Magyarósi (born in Budapest, 1981) lives and works in Budapest. She graduated at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design as an animation artist in 2005. Éva is represented by Erika Deák Gallery, and has participated in various solo and group shows nationally and internationally, including: Love Stories, Video Forever, Isztambul, 2017; Ghosts, Château du Rivau, Patricia Laigneu Collection, Kochi – Muziris Biennale, Kerala, 2016; Un Instant Forever, Analix Forever, Genova, 2014; Planking and Dreaming, balzerARTprojects, Basel, 2013; Print Biennale, Kairo, Egyipt, 2003.
Éva is a very versatile artist, working in several genres: she writes short stories, creates public sculptures, animations, photos, and drawings, even though she is primarily known for her video art. Her work is a manifestation of poetic visualisation and visual poetry. Her works typically tell us about the mysteries of the female soul, about the body and feelings, displaying polyphonic stories of strange dreams and situations experienced in real life. The pieces often blend strategies of experiencing evanescence through images and narration, and of processing remembrance through making it collective. Her works of art can be interpreted as visual diaries, in which the fictive and the personal past are blended, thus contributing to the literary works of different philosophical theories on time and memory.
Marina Belikova, The Astronaut’s Journal (2016), Animation, 5 min 19 sec
In The Astronaut’s Journal, painted in the frame-by-frame oil on glass technique, the viewer is taken on a journey through memories, fears, hopes and other distant corners, found in one’s inner space. The immersive trip between planets is based on the author’s life story and was inspired by Stanislav Lemm’s Solaris: “Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”
BIO
Marina Belikova is a Berlin based media artist, working with photography, graphic design and 2D animation. She has a background in web and media design. In 2012-2013 she did an M.A. in Communication Design in Kingston University London and in 2016 she graduated from Bauhaus University Weimar with an M.A. in Media Art and Design, making “The astronaut’s journal” as her master thesis. Belikova tells narratives through the old school oil on glass animation technique, where each frame is painted individually and then captured with a camera as stop motion animation. She also works with photography and mixed media, exploring the topics of human memories and interaction between people and urban spaces. Her animation have been screened at multiple film festivals in more than 10 countries and her photo series have received the Bauhaus Essentials Prize and have been shown various exhibitions.
Bori Mákó, Silence (2018)
“My favoured subjects are natural images, landscapes and spaces that still preserve traces of human activities. In my work, I research transitory ethereal atmospheres, that are strongly influenced by the theme of solitude. My multidimensional site-specific video installations are designed to pull the audience into the imaginary world of the video itself. The process of inward attention is essential to me, and I feel that focusing on nature ist the best way to evoke this meditative state.” (Bori Mákó)
BIO
Bori Mákó graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design in 2018 and holds a master’s degree in animation. Her visual language represents different genres of digital painting, and her exhibition portfolio includes large-scale prints, printed publications and video installations. In addition to her artistic work, she participates in animated movie projects. She is a founding member of Hen Studio, and she has been teaching Digital Paintings since 2019.
Kate McMillan, Paradise Falls I (2011) + Paradise Falls II (2012)
A topic made especially poignant in today’s pandemic reality, Kate McMillan’s Paradise Falls is a tribute to the disappeared, to the forgotten sites of distant traumas, to the frailty of personal and historic memory. Drawing parallels between physical and psychological landscapes, McMillan has created moving paintings where ghost-like people flicker in and out of existence, as symbols of fractured histories that disappear from focus, yet continue in our collective psyche as haunting traumas. Seen now, from the epicenter of our pandemic crisis, this begs the question of how will we look back upon, and remember, the time of Corona?
BIO
Kate McMillan (b.1974, Hampshire, UK), lived in Perth, Australia from 1982-2012, relocating to London in 2013. McMillan’s work incorporates a range of media including sculpture, film, sound, installation, textiles and performance. She is interested in the linking narratives of forgetting and place, often focusing on the residue of the past. McMillan’s artworks thus act as haunting memory-triggers for histories and ideas that are overlooked. McMillan has resided on the Board of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) and the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) based in Sydney. She earned her Phd at Curtin University, Perth. In addition to her practice as an artist, she is currently a Lecturer in Contemporary Art in the Department for Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College, London.
McMillan’s work has been featured in various museums and biennales, including: the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Trafo Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Perth Institute for Contemporary Art; John Curtin Gallery, Perth; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Previous solo exhibitions include ‘The Past is Singing in our Teeth’ presented at MOMENTUM in 2017, which, in 2018, toured to the Civic Room in Glasgow and Arusha Gallery for the Edinburgh Arts Festival. Other solo exhibitions include ‘Instructions for Another Future’ 2018 Moore Contemporary, Australia; ‘Songs for Dancing, Songs for Dying’, 2016, Castor Projects, London; ‘The Potter’s Field’, 2014, ACME Project Space, London; ‘Anxious Objects’, Moana Project Space, Australia; ‘The Moment of Disappearance’, 2014, Performance Space, Sydney; ‘In the shadow of the past, this world knots tight’, 2013 Venn Gallery; Paradise Falls, 2012, Venn Gallery; ‘Lost’ at the John Curtin Gallery in 2008, ‘Broken Ground’ in 2006 at Margaret Moore Contemporary Art and ‘Disaster Narratives’ at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts for the 2004 Perth International Arts Festival.
Bea Pántya, Transit (2012)
“If you stay still for a long time, nature will draw you in and absorb you. You can listen to its rhythm, its depth, and explore previously hidden details. Sometimes it moves fast, sometimes it makes only one minuscule movement a day.
My textile sculptures are based on existing and non-existing, living, and decaying forms in nature, abstract shapes and patterns, which are created by time, gravity and different organisms. If you watch them closely, you can see and understand the connection between the textures, colours, dimensions, scents and dynamics. I create gardens, a living and moving world, which can feel different from our universe, yet built from the elements of our reality. Transit is an experimental object animation about the dynamics of devastation and the micro worlds, spaces, and new life forms – the fantasy worlds beyond the humanly observable spheres.” (Bea Pántya)
BIO
Bea Pántya graduated at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2021 as an animation artist. She works with textile sculptures and has participated in several exhibitions in Hungary. Her most recent short films, Transit and Horizon Leap have been presented at a number of international film festivals, such as: the Hungarian Independent Film Festival, 2009 and 2010 (1st prize); IX Videominute, Zaragoza, Spain, 2009 (3rd prize); Naoussa International Film Festival, Greece, 2010; Mediawave Film Festival, Hungary, 2013; International Short Film Festival, Lille, France, 2013; Hiroshima International Animation Festival, Japan, 2013; Montreal Stop-motion Festival, Canada, 2014.
Theo Eshetu, Festival of Sacrifice (2012)
Faith and spirituality is the subject of Theo Eshetu’s Festival of Sacrifice, depicting an ancient cultural tradition, the celebration of Eid-ul-Adha, the Islamic Festival of Sacrifice. Turning the ritual itself into a trance, the video recreates, through its multiplication of images, the kaleidoscopic patterns that highlight the transcendental aspect of the event. In creating aesthetic beauty from images of ritual slaughter, Eshetu shows us how spirituality can locate beauty, hope and a deeper meaning even in times of death and disease.
BIO
Theo Eshetu was born in London 1958, and grew up in Addis Ababa, Dakar, Belgrade and Rome. He now lives and works in Berlin. A pioneer of video art since 1982, Theo Eshetu draws from anthropology, art history, scientific research, and religion—Catholic, African, Muslim, Buddhist—to explore clashes and harmonies of human subjectivity between world cultures in the global context. Though essentially conceptual, and often exploring video’s formal components of time and light, Eshetu’s work is often focused on cultural displacement, and is always grounded in compelling aesthetic components, often achieved through fractal repetition, such as kaleidoscopic mirroring, multi-screen projections, or mosaic-like patterning of images.
Among numerous international awards, Eshetu was Artist in Residence at Tarabya Cultural Academy, Turkey where he completed aspects of production for Altas Fractured (2017) which was featured in Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel in 2017. In 2012 he was Artist in Residence at the DAAD program in Berlin, where he exhibited The Return of the Axum Obelisk at DAADgalerie in 2014. In 2011 he participated the Venice Biennale and the Sharjah Biennale. His work has appeared at: The New Museum, NY; the New York African Film Festival; DIA Foundation’s Electronic Arts Intermix, NY; Snap Judgments at ICP (International Centre for Photography), NY; BAM Cinemateque, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland USA; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Africa Remix at The Hayward Gallery, London; the Venice Film Festival; Roma Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art in Rome; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France; the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; among many other museums, biennales, and film festivals.
WEEK 3 / 6 / 7
30 April – 2 May, 21 – 23 + 28 – 30 May
Tamás Komoróczky, Nondirectionality (2019)
The vertigo-inducing composition of Tamás Komoróczky’s video Nondirectionality (outlook from the tower) evokes the imagery of ancient Christian hermits living in secluded towers. Looking down from the protagonist’s point of view towards the swirling chaos of the world beneath, the feeling of isolation, loneliness and quiet tranquility become palpable. As we are about to enter the second year of the global pandemic, most of us are painfully familiar with the sense of total isolation and the role of the quiet observer.
BIO
Tamás Komoróczky was born in 1963 in Budapest, currently lives and works in Budapest and Berlin. He graduated as painter in 1990, and two years later finished his postgraduate studies in the mural department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest. He also studied in the Video Department of the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany in 1991. Tamás was awarded several scholarships and artist residencies, among others at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin as well as at the European Center for Contemporary Art Actions in Strasbourg. His works have been presented nationally and internationally at a great number of solo and group shows, eg. The Dead Web – The end, Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest, 2020; Public Private Affairs, Ferenczy Múzeumi Centrum – Művészet Malom, Szentendre, 2019; Abstract Hungary, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, 2017; Opus Aquanett, Wissenschaftshafen, Magdeburg, 2017; Video Art Projections on the Manhattan Bridge, New York, 2016; Kritik und Krise #3:Ornament der Brüderlichkeit, Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, Berlin, 2014; PANDAMONIUM PREVIEW / INTERPIXEL, Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, 2014; The Hero, the Heroine and the Author, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2012; Action!, INFERNOESQUE, Berlin, 2010; Screening Room: Contemporary Hungarian Video Artists, Janos Gat Gallery, New York, 2009; Art Forum Berlin (Lada projekt), Berlin, 2008; Focus Istanbul, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2005; Loud and Clear Too, Chinese European Art Center, Xiamen University Art College Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2005; 1. Muestra del Internatcionale Video, El Salvador, San Salvador, 2003; Try again later, Gaswork Gallery, London, 1998; Beyond Belief, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1995.
David Krippendorff, Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015)
David Krippendorff’s Nothing Escapes My Eyes is a time-warping tribute to a changing world where, to a moving soundtrack from the eponymous opera, a would-be Aida sheds tears for a place and time which no longer exist. COVID-19 changed our world forever, leaving gaping holes in the hearts of those who lost loved ones, impoverishing those prevented from working. Yet it also generated a remarkable outpouring of creativity, good will, and good humor as people around the world try to cope, individually and communally, with our changing world in the time of Corona.
BIO
David Krippendorff, born in Berlin in 1967, is a US/German interdisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker. Currently based in Berlin, he grew up in Rome, Italy, and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, Germany, where he graduated with a masters degree in 1997. His works, films and videos have been shown internationally, including: the New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, and Belgrade), as well as in many international art and film festivals worldwide.
Kristóf Szabó, WRONG DATA / empty space (2020)
“In February 2020, I visited the ARCO Madrid fair, and almost immediately after my return to Budapest, Covid-19 reached Europe. My friend from Madrid sent photos of the empty city, which I developed further, and created the first piece of the series. I decided to send out a request to artists around the world to collaborate in a photographic series. Luckily, I received a great number of photos from artists, who helped me to expand the project. We created a global artwork that symbolises the collaboration of artists and, at the same time, draws attention to the defects of the functioning of our society, which we must re-evaluate to avoid further catastrophes.
Due to Covid, a certain error, or glitch occurred in our lives. Previously busy urban spaces have been abandoned, the world has stopped, people are forced to stay at home. The problem was caused by human activity in the first place: by our way of life, excessive travelling, globalisation and international trading. Now that globalisation is at a standstill, CO2 emissions have dropped drastically, and our biological footprint has been considerably lowered in a relatively short time. The newly empty spaces are the true witnesses of our overworked, wasteful lives, and also the proof that we need to change our ways urgently, in order to avoid future tragedies.” (Kristóf Szabó)
Contributors: Kiszner Édua, Antal István, Marcin Idźkowski, Angela Galvan, Gasquk, Kristijonas Dirse, Peter Korcek, Erhan US, Ciro Di Fiore, Elena Kilina, Sangeeth Aiyappa, Vladimir Stepanchenko, Raki Nikahetiya, David Leshem, Haccoun Myriam
BIO
Kristóf Szabó was born in 1988 in Győr (Hungary). He graduated as a graphic artist (2012) and art teacher (2013) at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. In 2011, he studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Kristóf has been using the brand name KristofLab since 2016, in order to highlight the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of his creative process, as well as his media art practice. He is a member of the Ziggurat Project, a Hungarian interdisciplinary ensemble creating artistic performances bridging over various genres of creative output. Kristóf has been working with the group on site-specific experimental projects around Europe since 2015.
Map Office, Viral Operation (2003)
In Viral Operation the Hong Kong artist duo Map Office fly to Berlin from a Hong Kong ravaged by the SARS epidemic, this century’s first major viral outbreak in 2003, for a road trip crossing all possible European land borders on their way to the Venice Biennale. Wearing masks, they are treated as suspect Others, potential contaminants. Now, 18 years later, when we are all wearing masks and travel restrictions abound, we look back at Viral Operation as a social experiment, prefiguring what was to come.
BIO
MAP OFFICE is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (b. Casablanca, 1966) and Valérie Portefaix (b. Saint-Etienne, 1969). This duo of artists/architects has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression that includes drawing, photographs, video, installations, performance and literary and theoretical texts. Their entire project forms a critique of spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space. Their projects have been included in major international art and architecture events, including: the 7th, 11th and 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2000, 2008, 2010), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), the 10th Istanbul Biennale (2007), the 15th Sydney Biennale (2006), and the 52nd Venice Art Biennale (2007).
Laurent Gutierrez is an Associate Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he leads the Environment and Interior Design discipline and the Master of Strategic Design as well as the Master in Urban Environments Design. He is also the co-director of SD SPACE LAB. Gutierrez is currently finishing a PhD on the “Processes of Modernization and Urbanization in China focusing on the Pearl River Delta region.”
Valérie Portefaix is the principal of MAP OFFICE. She received her Master of Architecture degree from the School of Architecture Paris-Belleville and a PhD in Urbanism from the Pierre Mendes University France. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Gáspár Battha & András László Nagy, Parallel Waves (2018)
Inspired by the idea of “levitation”, Parallel Waves makes reference to the tensions induced by this phenomenon and its various forms found in nature: sound and light waves, smoke, wind and gravity or the murmuration of flocking birds. Parallel Waves takes the viewer to another dimension full of wonder, yet fully rooted in scientific facts.
Concept & Animation: Gaspar Battha (gasparbattha.com) & Andras Nagy (andrasnagy.xyz/) | Sound: Adrian Newgent (adriannewgent.nl/)
BIO
Born in Budapest (born in 1988, Hungary), Gáspár Battha spent a considerable part of his childhood in Bergen, Norway. He received his master’s degree in art and media at the University of Arts in Berlin (UdK). He has been working as a freelance art director, motion designer and media artist. Gásoár has produced a great number of independent art projects and has developed multimedia projects for museums, exhibitions and product launch events around the world. He has been guest lecturer at the University of Arts in Berlin since 2014.
David Szauder, Light Space Materia(2020)
Szauder’s film Light Space Materia commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations and a soundtrack made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of the materiality of image and sound. Szauder focuses on the fundamental question of how modern technology could change the formal expression of movement. Just as the Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology, this synergy becomes increasingly important as new technologies of making and viewing images continue to evolve in our over-mediated pandemic age where we engage with the world predominantly through our screens.
BIO
Media artist David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture. David Szauder has participated in a variety of international projects as artist and curator. In cooperation with MOMENTUM, previous projects include: “Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014);
ABOUT .CHB
Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (CHB) was established in 1924 with the aim of facilitating scientific exchange between Hungary and Germany. Today, CHB is active in the fields of both science and culture. Collaboration with Hungarian, German and international organisations plays an essential role in the professional programme of CHB. Between 1973 and 1990, the predecessor of CHB, the old “House of Hungarian Culture” in Karl-Liebknecht Straße, was an integral part of the intellectual community of East Berlin. In 2007, CHB moved to its new, cutting-edge building next to the Museum Island and Humboldt University. Collegium Hungaricum Berlin is part of the worldwide network of Hungarian Cultural Institutes, and a founding member of EUNIC Berlin, the association of European Cultural Institutes.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
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Points of Resistance II
www.points-of-resistance.org
An Outdoor Light Intervention by Bjørn Melhus
for Gallery Weekend 2021
30 April 2021
8:30 – 10pm
@ Zionskirche, Berlin
Zionskirchplatz, 10119 Berlin
POINTS OF RESISTANCE II Supports:
The initiative TOWER TO THE PEOPLE (Bjørn Melhus / LOQI / Galerie Ebensperger)
with Bjørn Melhus’ Light Intervention
SOS // SAVE OUR SOULS
taking place during Gallery Weekend
30 April – 2 May 2021 at 9-10 pm
North Tower Frankfurter Tor, Berlin-Friedrichshain
On Friday night, join the initiative also at Zionskirche, Berlin:
SOS // SAVE OUR SOULS
30 April 2021 at 8:30 – 10 pm
Zionskirchplatz, Berlin-Prenzlauerberg
Presented by POINTS OF RESISTANCE II in cooperation with Zionskirche Berlin
It has become quieter and quieter around the arts and culture scene in the past 14 months, and a sense of lethargy and exhaustion seems to be spreading.
The initiative TOWER TO THE PEOPLE, consisting of the artist Bjørn Melhus, the Gallery Ebensperger and the Art Brand LOQI, would like to invite you and call for the joint action SAVE OUR SOULS – RETTET UNSERE SEELEN this weekend. Video link.
On the three evenings of the Berlin Gallery Weekend – 30.04 to 02.05.2021 – from 21:00 – 22:00 TOWER TO THE PEOPLE are sending an emergency SOS signal by switching on and of the lights in the north tower of the Frankfurter Tor.
On Friday 30 April at 20:30 – 22:00, POINTS OF RESISTANCE II is joining in from the tower of the Zionskirche.
The emergency signal SOS, otherwise used in shipping, will be morsed into the city space.
The light flashing in the tower invites all Berliners to join in by flicking their light switches from their apartments. Whether in the form of the Morse Code — three times short — three times long — three times short — or just by simply switching on and switching off the room light.
Two weeks after the action “Lichterfenster”, where the pandemic victims and their relatives were commemorated, SAVE OUR SOULS is to become a collective cry of distress for mental health and an expression of mutual compassion. In a time when depression and other mental illnesses have massively increased and the lack of art and culture is drying up our souls, the SOS signal is intended to set a common, peaceful, and above all safe sign of hope for all those affected.
SOS SAVE OUR SOULS is the prelude of a series of light art installations by the initiative TOWER TO THE PEOPLE.
MORE INFO ON THE POINTS OF RESISTANCE INITIATIVE:
Introduction
Points of Resistance invites contemporary artists and thinkers from a diversity of places and perspectives to address the many meanings of resistance in today’s complex world. Without taking any singular political position, Points of Resistance gives voice to humanistic viewpoints necessary in an era witnessing the steady resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism and racism the world over. This is as much a sickness of our times as the ongoing pandemic emergency. We hope that Points of Resistance will provide an antidote, if not necessarily a solution, to the ills endangering the hard-won, and relatively short-lived, freedoms of our society – especially in the context of Berlin’s painful history.
Situated in Berlin’s Zionskirche, Points of Resistance invokes the remarkable history of this church as a crucial point of resistance both against the Nazis and during the GDR – from renowned theologian and anti-Nazi activist Deitrich Bonhoeffer who worked in the parish for over a decade until his arrest by the Gestapo, to the numerous opposition groups and human rights activists who’s use of the Zionskirche as a meeting point made it a target of the Stasi until the collapse of the GDR. Upon this historic stage, we assemble a diversity of artistic voices – through painting, photography, sculpture, video, sound, performance, and discussion – reflecting on the mistakes of the past and present in order to celebrate the values which enable us to forge unity from diversity.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
Mission Statement
“Points of Resistance” is a series of exhibitions and projects by artists and non-artists who all take great pleasure in thinking and delight in taking their own position. They also know that we should be concerned with what is important not only for the individual but also for our culture.
The Zionkirche church in Berlin has a distinguished history as a refuge and work space for people who think differently. In all its manifestations, including in its everyday work and loving approach, it has always represented a lived, resolute but also tolerant resistance, right through to the present day. We deliberately chose this special place for our exhibition, for it asks all participants in “Points of Resistance”, whether creators or visitors, to take on a particular responsibility: in the face of the fissures emerging, worldwide, in political, humane and private decision-making practice as a result of fear and inhumanity, our aim is to demonstrate, through artistic positions, attitudes that have the potential to create a spirit of commonality.
The aim of “Points of Resistance” is to be an intellectual and emotional home for people – whatever their background, status, age or views – who are working together to find a possible way of gathering enough strength and enough arguments in the fight against the globalization of indifference; against every form of appropriation and manipulation and for the preservation of the hard-won basic values of democracy. “Points of Resistance” also strives to keep alive the memory of all those people who, time and again, remained true to their beliefs and were prepared to give their lives for these.
Berlin, as the capital of Germany today, is strongly marked by its history: whether as the former capital of the German Reich or as the formerly divided city, subsidized by both systems on either side of the Wall for decades. But it is also marked by the now almost proverbial scandals that have rocked Berlin since the reunification of Germany – the Berlin banking crisis, the debate around the rebuilding of the Berlin Palace, the airport debacle, Berlin’s “poor but sexy” status – and last but not least, of course, coronavirus.
Nonetheless, all the world still wants to move here – and this is no longer only “because Berlin is so cheap”. Despite it all, Berlin is still seen as a cosmopolitan, diverse and, in addition, extremely creative city. And neither have all these scandals dampened the humour of the Berliners themselves yet. “Points of Resistance” picks up on this. And this is what we are building on: the “Berlin Bear” carries his burden with difficulty, but he carries it stoically – and that makes him strong. And we are keeping up with him – giving up is not an option!
– Constanze Kleiner
Initiated by:
With thanks to the
Zionskirche
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MOMENTUM and
co-present:
Future Life Handbook
17 December 2017 – 7 May 2018
Featuring:
aaajiao // Amir Fattal // Mariana Hahn // Law Yuk-mui // Miao Ying // Zijie
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
Academic Director, Dong Bingfeng
OPENING: 16 December @ 14:30 – 18:30
Opening Discussion @ 14:30 – 16:30
@ RMCA Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art
Guangzhou, China
SPEAKERS:
Dong Bingfeng, Curator and Research Fellow, School of Inter-media Art, China Academy of Art, Beijing;
Rachel Rits-Volloch, Founding Director of MOMENTUM;
ARTISTS: Aaajiao, Mariana Hahn, Zijie
MODERATOR: Vivienne Chow, Journalist, Critic and Founder of Cultural Journalism Campus
Performance @ 16:40 – 18:10
Mariana Hahn, Stored-Story Body-Archive
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Future Life Handbook. We would all like to have one of these – a guide on how to keep going in troubling times. As information moves faster and faster, in our race to keep up with it, we are often too busy with the now to look to the future. As the struggle continues between preserving history and rewriting it to fit a new script, it is also becoming ever harder to tell the difference between real and fake news. And, if both our past and our present are continuously reimagined, how are we to forecast our futures? Universal to all of us living in these mediated times, the ubiquity of such issues brings us much closer together.
Artists ‘speaking’ through the autonomous voices of visual languages, translate the world to us in different, unbounded ways. This exhibition brings together the work of six young artists and two curators from China and Berlin. It is designed as a dialogue, as an exchange and elaboration of different perspectives that reflect upon our current moment through a study of the past and a view towards the future.
In bringing to RMCA three young Berlin-based artists from different countries with three Chinese artists we are again opening that gateway to let the voices of today’s generation speak about the issues common to our experience, despite the diversity of our backgrounds.
CURATORAL STATEMENT – RACHEL RITS-VOLLOCH
Berlin: a city of only 3.5 million people, home to 175 museums, over 500 commercial art galleries, and close to 200 non-profit art spaces, has become known internationally as the ‘Art Capital of Europe.’ For almost 30 years it has attracted artists from around the world who, feeding on and into its creative energy, have made it their adoptive home. At the geographical center of Europe, Berlin acts as a vortex, sucking in the cool, bright young things of art, design, media, music and fashion, but also professional people as well as tourists and migrant laborers and refugees. Berlin is a city where everyone always seems to be from elsewhere; it is still rebuilding itself 70 years after World War II; it is a place perpetually atoning for its painful and violent history; and now it re-invents itself through culture.
Guangzhou: a city with a population of over 14 million in the heart of the Pearl River Delta, has historically been a fount of new and radical ideas about art and culture as well as China’s southern gateway to the rest of the world. As it has developed over the past 40 years it has become not only an economic and cultural powerhouse emblematic of change in China but also has turned its face again outwards. In bringing three young Berlin-based artists to RMCA to present work together with Chinese artists, we are again opening that gateway to let the voices of today’s generation speak about the issues common to our experience, despite the diversity of our backgrounds.
The three Berlin-based artists in this exhibition, Amir Fattal, Mariana Hahn, and aaajiao, are as diverse as the city itself and make works that reflect equally broad viewpoints. The selected works are all, in their own ways, ongoing projects. Begun in previous contexts, they have evolved over time, growing through the artists’ ongoing experiences into active laboratories that continue to process the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ into something new.
Amir Fattal (born 1978 in Tel Aviv, Israel) has lived in Berlin since studying at the Universität der Künste,from which he graduated in 2009. He is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schism. Working in the media of video, photography, sculpture, and installation, his work constitutes a focused response to the diverse questions raised by his adoptive city of Berlin, where memory, culture, architecture, indeed every thread in the fabric of this city, are problematized by its history.
Fattal’s video work ATARA, Chapter 1 (2017) is both a science-fiction film set to contemporary opera music, and a reflection on the collective memory of architecture and its symbolic representation in public space. Shot on location, it tells the story of two buildings that used to stand in the same place: the Berliner Stadtschloss and the Palast der Republik. The Stadtschloss, the imperial, royal palace, was built between the 15th and 18th centuries, was severely damaged by Allied bombing in WWII, and in the 1950s its ruins were finally obliterated by the newly constituted Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the grounds of being a symbol of Prussian militarism. A glass and concrete Palast der Republik was built in its place and opened in 1973 as the seat of government, but upon the Reunification of Germany in 1990 it was closed to the public and its rotting hulk, too, was eventually destroyed in 2009, amid much controversy, so that a contemporary copy of the original Stadtschloss could be rebuilt on its site. This is still under construction today and the decision to resurrect the symbol of the ancient castle in order to rehouse Berlin’s ethnographic and historical museums at the centre of the city, is interpreted by many as an absurd and willful erasure of its GDR past and a dangerous rewriting of history. This controversy is keenly felt in a city that perpetually treads a fine line between never forgetting its painful legacy, and reinventing its future.
Shot at several stages in the process of the new building’s construction, Fattal’s work, already three years in the making, is still under construction itself; it will be completed as the building is finished and starts to function as part of the city. ATARA, Chapter 1 imagines a ceremony taking place in the Palace at the moment of its resurrection while its predecessor dematerializes into ghostly memory. Its musical score is based on Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, together with original music by Boris Bojadzhiev, while its narrative follows the movements of an astronaut, who reconstructs, in exacting detail, the historic sculptural elements destined to adorn this otherwise contemporary building. Carrying an iconic lamp from the destroyed Palast der Republik, he wanders through the construction site of the new Stadtschloss – like an explorer in an alien land where some mystic force has merged past and future together.
Mariana Hahn (born 1985 in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany) was educated in London at the Central Saint Martins University of the Arts, and returned to Berlin in 2012. In her performances, installations, and videos, she engages with both archetypical and local legends by weaving a common female mythology between them that enters into dialogue with the present.Stored-Story Body-Archive (2015/17), shown in this exhibition, was initially created during an Artist Residency at Mill6 Foundation in Hong Kong, where she became fascinated by the story of the Zishunü (自梳女) the so-called ‘self-wedded women’ silk workers of the Pearl River Delta, who chose to retain their independence by refusing to marry. Some had fled to Hong Kong in the 1940s, and two were rumored to still live on Lantau island. Mariana Hahn went there to see what traces she could find, happen- ing also to meet one of the last of the old ‘Tanka’ (疍家) Boat Dwellers who fish from the island. Her installation Stored-Story Body-Archive, composed of silk dresses, photographs, videos, postcards, and performance, brings together the stories and crafts of these people with our current state of cultural amnesia and careless disregard for past traditions. The ‘Tanka’ are now forbidden to work beyond the threatening pylons of the newly constructed Hong Kong – Macau Bridge, and the waters surrounding Lantau have become so polluted that they are no longer able to catch enough fish. Crafts, memories and human values are irrevocably lost in the mindless march of progress.
The result of a long period of research, unearthing traces of Hong Kong’s complicated history beneath layers of the present, Stored-Story Body-Archive began as a view of Hong Kong through the eyes of a stranger. For this exhibition, Mariana Hahn brings her journey full circle: chronicling her experiences travelling to Guangzhou, to the origins of the Zishunü sisterhood in the Pearl River Delta, she continues this work by following the path of these remarkable women back to their roots. During an Artist Residency at RMCA, she develops a new performance piece, creating her own story as an independent woman artist following in the footsteps of the local Zishunü silk workers.
aaajiao (born 1984 in Xi’an) is the virtual persona of Shanghai and Berlin-based artist Xu Wenkai. Active online as a media artist, blogger, activist and programmer, aaajiao’s practice is marked by a strong dystopian awareness. His work speaks to new thinking, controversies and phenomena around the Internet, to the processing of data, the blogosphere, and China’s Great Fire Wall. aaajiao’s work is interdisciplinary, extending from post-internet art to architecture, topography, design and beyond, to capture the pulse of the younger generations’ consuming interest in cyber-technology and its use of social media. Body Shadow (2014/17), shown in this exhibition, was initially created as a result of his Artist Residency at MOMENTUM in Berlin in 2014. After this he decided to move to Berlin to maintain a studio parallel to his practice in Shanghai.
Body Shadow brings together, in an entirely unique way, Berlin’s vibrant tattoo culture with ancient Chinese philosophy and medicine. Through research and studio visits to Berlin’s leading tattoo artists, aaajiao devised a way of turning a tattoo inside-out. Rather than making simple, decorative marks on the exterior of the body, he has allowed the energy pathways inside the body to determine the form of the tattoo as biologically personalized images. Combining fractal theory with the science of acupuncture, he developed an algorithm that, when the human body is scanned, creates a 3D image that (reflecting the traditional Chinese medical belief that qi [life force] flows within the body), tracks the activity in its meridian pathways. In this combination of tattoo and algorithm, he has mapped and transplanted his own internal meridian energy onto the surface of his body and then projected it into the gallery space. Started in Berlin in 2014, this ongoing project has been updated this year.
CURATOR STATEMENT – DONG BINGFENG
In Beijing, November heralds a drastic drop in temperature. At first, it cools so gradually that it can hardly be felt but, within a few days, the thermometer abruptly plummets amid strong gales. However many warm, thick clothes you put on, biting winds sweep across the streets, storm straight into your lungs and trigger an
avalanche in your body.
Winter in northern China signifies way more than inexplicable coldness – it demands fundamental changes in daily life, work, social activities, even in one’s sense of taste and smell. Inevitably, people’s diet also simplifies and changes, in spite of some produce being forced in greenhouses or freighted in by costly air transport. Even before it snows, the city is pervaded with pungent smells and familiar sights, unique to the season.
Zijie’s Sweet Potato Project brings back almost all my childhood memories of this season. Born into a rural family in northern China, I’m well acquainted with such produce as potatoes and sweet potatoes. As a child, I didn’t know that sweet potatoes (which have more than 10 other names in Chinese), originated from the faraway continent of South America – I hadn’t even travelled farther than three kilometers from where I lived, so I didn’t have any sense of what a city could be like. For sure, I knew nothing about how to grow them – only about eating them – because I was a lazy child or, perhaps I should say, I was prone to indulge in fantasy. I am happy when a sweet potato is dug out from the soil, it is as if I found a ginseng root which, as we all know from the Chinese classic Journey to the West, bestows longevity. Who would have thought that sweet potatoes come not only from farmland, but also from cities or that they may even serve as a medium or subject for art? Zijie shows us how this simple vegetable can become art and in my imagination there is nothing more important for human life than food, and our choice of it.
When it comes down to making recommendations about life, no one should pay much attention to scientific analysis or to the nonsensical ramblings of academic theorists. As the Chinese saying goes, reading thousands of books is not as enlightening as traveling thousands of miles – in life, there’s nothing more important than personal experience. Each and everyone’s own experiences are abundant enough to compose a thick, colourful book. Other than blunders, and bad luck once in a while, there is plenty of joy and fulfillment in life that is worthy of being recorded. Having said that, one should not daydream too much./p>
My first visit to Hong Kong took place fairly recently. Although in 2000 I had worked in Guangzhou, which was pretty close, I didn’t plan any trip then to the ‘Cosmopolis.’ I am still confused as to why I didn’t and have concluded that I am afflicted with procrastination. But eventually I made it and saw Law Yuk-mui’s solo exhibition Victoria East there. In retrospect, rather than the exhibition’s good looking video installations and meticulously displayed literature and research, my greatest impression was of the city of Hong Kong itself, its bustle and confusion. But to be precise, I was also entranced by such images in the exhibition as a white sun set against the blue sky like a flag, a turbulent stretch of sea, and a bizarre silhouette caught against a skyline – all seemingly obscure and incomprehensible details and clues. But the presence of the artist and her artwork reflected back to me the afflictions and blanks in my own memory. I believe that Law helped me unravel the dilemma of how should we reflect on the past. Should we respect our memories, or observe cultural norms? At the very least, she confirmed my belief that we should keep on moving.
At a time when virtual reality surpasses reality, or when so-called reality is only the externalization of power and capital, the distinction between the real and the virtual is rendered meaningless. The explorative vision and visual methodologies of Miao Ying’s installation Content-Aware, as well as the massive production of images and value judgments we see nowadays, are both trapped in an endless cycle of conscious experience. This artist, in particular, has stressed the randomness and self-destructiveness of such image production in which bad images seem more charming and emotionally charged than industrialized ones. It is a matter well worth celebrating if people still feel entitled to their individual responses. Always daring to be different.
Beijing’s piercing winds see fewer people on the streets. The chills, however, never deter people in some walks of life: mailmen, for instance. The Double 11 Shopping Festival, a Chinese online version of Black Friday, which took place the other day, reportedly broke a record in transaction volume, totaling 25.3 billion $ U.S., up 40 percent from last year. The turnover is undoubtedly record-breaking, if not astronomical, although I didn’t contribute a cent to it or, I should say, I frittered away the chance of buying something in time. Moreover, this event has evolved into a cultural phenomenon – an artistic landscape. Nothing has involved more visuality or participation than this performance-like event. Everybody does everything step by step, including those celebrities who participate, each performing their own roles as they are supposed to, faithfully keeping within their prescribed time span.
In the light of all this, should art exhibitions be steered toward reality? Or should they portray different sorts of personal experience along with authentic memories that may be finally celebrated amidst reality? Maybe in the end we are just like that pathetic man in the movie The Truman Show (1998) who just lives under a surveillance camera? If this is not the case, how can we return to a consideration of reality when we discuss art? In a nutshell, how should we return to the daily perception and experience of life in a direct way – in ways that suit our own body temperatures and odours?
Take it slow – am I still alive?
I believe, for instance, that although it’s smooth and convenient to type on computers, it will never replace pen and paper because this way of writing exudes a sense of reality because it is based on friction.
Life is all about the future, I’d like to say./p>
Mariana Hahn
Mariana Hahn (born 1985 in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin)
Mariana Hahn was educated in London at the Central Saint Martins University of the Arts, and returned to Berlin in 2012. In her performances, installations, and videos, she engages with both archetypical and local legends by weaving a common female mythology between them that enters into dialogue with the present.
Mariana Hahn studied theater at ETI in Berlin and has a degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins University of the Arts in London (2012). Selected exhibitions include the 57th Biennale of Venice collateral event An Ocean Archive (2017); Corpo Festival del Arte Performative, Venice (2017); Performance Festival, Municipal Art Gallery, Kharkiv, Ukraine (2017); Social Fabric, Mill6 Foundation, Hong Kong (2016); the 56th October Salon ‘The Pleasure of Love’, Belgrade, Serbia (2016); Ganz Grosses Kino, Kino International, Berlin (2016); Love, Actually…, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2016); VACANCY, Galerie Crone, Berlin; IV Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Russia (2014); Thresholds; TRAFO Museum of Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland (2013); Works on Paper Performance Series, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2013, 2015); About Face, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2012).
Stored-Story Body-Archive (2015/17)
Stored-Story Body-Archive (2015/17) was initially created during an Artist Residency at Mill6 Foundation in Hong Kong, where Mariana Hahn became captivated by the story of the Zishunü（自梳女）the so-called ‘self-wedded women’ silk workers of the Pearl River Delta, who chose to retain their independence by refusing to marry. Some had fled to Hong Kong in the 1940s, and two were rumored to still live on Lantau Island. Hahn went there to see what traces she could find, happening also to meet one of the last of the old ‘Tanka’ (疍家) Boat Dwellers who fish from the island. This installation contrasts the stories and crafts of these people with our current state of cultural amnesia and careless disregard for past traditions. The ‘Tanka’ are forbidden to work beyond the threatening pylons of the newly constructed Hong Kong – Macau Bridge, and the waters surrounding Lantau have become so polluted that fishermen are no longer able to catch enough fish. Crafts, memories and human values are irrevocably lost in the mindless march of progress. For this exhibition, Mariana Hahn brings her journey full circle: travelling to Guangzhou, to the origins of the Zishunü sisterhood in the Pearl River Delta, she continues the research she began in Hong Kong, following the path of these remarkable women back to their roots. During an Artist Residency at RMCA, she is also developing a new performance piece, creating her own story as an independent woman artist following in the footsteps of the Zishunü silk workers of the Pearl River Delta.
aaajiao
aaajiao (born 1984, Xi’an, China. Lives and works in Shanghai and Berlin)
aaajiao aaajiao is the virtual persona of Shanghai and Berlin-based artist Xu Wenkai. Active online as a media artist, blogger, activist and programmer, aaajiao’s practice is marked by a strong dystopian awareness. His work speaks to new thinking, controversies and phenomena around the Internet, the processing of data, the blogosphere, and to China’s Great Fire Wall. The form of his work is interdisciplinary, extending from post-internet art to architecture, topography, design, and beyond to capture the pulse of the young generations’ consuming fascination with cyber-technology and social media.
aaajiao’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world. His solo exhibitions include: Remnants of an Electronic Past, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (2016); OCAT Contem- porary Art Terminal Xi’an, Xi’an (2016).Upcoming and recent group shows include: Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); unREAL, Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Basel (2017); Shanghai Project Part II, Shanghai (2017); Temporal Turn: Art and Speculation in Contemporary Asia, Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas (2016); Take Me (I’m Yours) (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann and Kelly Taxter), Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Overpo, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2016); Hack Space (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Amira Gad), K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Hong Kong and K11 Art Museum, Shanghai (2016); Globale: Global Control and Censorship, ZKM | Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2015); Thingworld International Triennial of New Media Art, The National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2014); and Transmediale, Berlin (2010). He was awarded the Art Sanya Awards in 2014 Jury Prize, and was nominated for the first edition of OCAT-Pierre Huber Art Prize in 2014.
Body Shadow (2014/2017)
Body Shadow (2014/2017) brings together Berlin’s vibrant tattoo culture with ancient Chinese philoso- phy and medicine. After research and studio visits to Berlin’s leading tattoo artists, aaajiao devised a way of turning a tattoo inside-out by making it a biologically personalized image. Combining the theory of fractals and the science of acupuncture, he developed an algorithm both to scan the human body in 3D and to track the activity in its meridian pathways according to traditional Chinese medical belief. With this knowledge he has designed tattoos that map and transplant this internal energy both onto the surface of his own body and into the gallery space.
Body Shadow was initially created as a result of aaajiao’s Artist Residency at MOMENTUM in Berlin in 2014.
Amir Fattal
Amir Fattal (born 1978 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives and works in Berlin)
Amir Fattal has lived in Berlin since 2009. He is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schism. Working in the media of video, photography, sculpture, and installation, his work forms a focused response to the diverse questions raised by his adoptive city of Berlin, where memory, culture, architecture, indeed every thread in the fabric of the city, are problematized by history.
Amir Fattal was distinguished with the GASAG Art Prize in 2008 and graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009. Based in Berlin to this day, Fattal participated in numerous international group exhibitions. His solo exhibitions include:Mesopotopography, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin (2015); From the End to the Beginning, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin (2014); Parallel Lines, Teapot Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2013); Goral Ehad, St-art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); Shadow of Smoke Rings on the Wall, Artitude Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); Tomorrow Gets Me Higher, Wilde Gallery, Berlin (2010). Selected group exhibitions include: Collection Enea Righi, Museo Fortuny, Venice (2016); Interior / Exterior / Sculpture, Belenius/Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); A Naked Singularity, Studio Garaicoa, Madrid, Spain (2015); Fragments of Empires, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2014-15); A Letter From Dr. Faustus, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014); Fundación Botín, Villa Iris, Santander, Spain (2014); Dahlstrøm & Fattal, Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2013); III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2012); Body Without Body, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011). Fattal was also curator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists.
ATARA, Chapter 1 (2017)
Amir Fattal’s video work ATARA, Chapter 1 (2017) is both a science-fiction film set to contemporary opera music, and a reflection on the collective memory of architecture and its symbolic representation in public space. Shot on location in Berlin, it tells the story of two buildings that used to stand at the same place: the Berliner Stadtschloss and the Palast der Republik. The Stadtschloss, the imperial and royal palace, was built between the 15th and 18th centuries, damaged by Allied bombing in WWII, and in 1950 was finally destroyed by the GDR as a symbol of Prussian militarism. The Palast der Republik, built in its place, was in 1973 opened as the seat of government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, communist ‘East Germany’). This was closed to the public upon German Reunification in 1990, and was destroyed amid much public controversy in 2009 to make way for the rebuilding of a contemporary copy of the Stadtschloss, which is still under construction today. The decision to resurrect the Stadtschloss in order to house and consolidate Berlin’s ethnographic and historical museums, is interpreted by many as a willful erasure of its GDR past and a dangerous rewriting of history. This controversy is keenly felt in a city perpetually treading the fine line between never forgetting its painful past, and reinventing its future.
Shot at several stages during the new building’s construction, this work is still in process and will be completed by a final chapter as the building grows into being. The film follows the life of an astronaut who is reconstructing in exact detail the historic sculptural elements that are destined to adorn the otherwise contemporary building. Carrying an iconic lamp from the destroyed Palast der Republik, he wanders through the construction site of the new Stadtschloss – like an explorer in an alien land where past and future merge.
Law Yuk-mui
Law Yuk-mui (born 1985 in Hong Kong. Lives and works in Hong Kong)
Law Yuk-mui graduated in 2010 from The Chinese University of Hong Kong with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA). She is the co-founder of the artist-run organisation Rooftop Institute. Using image, sound and video installation as her media of preference, and adopting the methodology of field study and collecting, Law often intervenes in nondescript spaces and in the daily life of the city to catch the physical traces of its history, the psychological pathways of its human activities and the marks of time and political power on its geographic space. She often digs beyond the surface of appearances in order to recover micro-histories and fragments of narratives. In her process of making art, she is sensitive to what had remained and finds imaginative ways of re-using and reactivating these traces.
Her works have been extensively exhibited in Asia, including the following exhibitions: Victoria East: FUSE Artist Residency, Videotage, Hong Kong (2017); Talkover/Handover 2.0, 1a space, Hong Kong (2017); ‘The Busan International Short Film Festival,’ South Korea (2017); The 5th Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), Singapore (2016); Time Test: International Video Art Research Exhibition, CAFA Beijing & RMCA Guangzhou (2016); Both Sides Now ii – it was the best of times it was the worst of times, UK, China, Hong Kong (2015); A Room with A View – Her Hong Kong stories through the lens of six female artists, Baptist University, Hong Kong (2015); Here are the years that walk between, a special commission video project by the Hong Kong Sinfonietta (2013); ‘The 2nd Beijing International Film Festival,’ (2012); ‘The Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival’ (2011); ‘The 16th Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Awards’ (2010); Disabled Novel, Cheng Ming Building, New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (2010); Inter-city: Art in Busan, South Korea (2009). Her prose work migration, insomnia, dreams was included in ‘Pocket2: Say Listen’.
Victoria East (2017)
Recreate the vanished sea.
A waterproof camera had been descended 5 to 10 meters under the sea at various spots and at different times to sample images of water. Dou Wei’s (a Beijing-based songwriter in 1990s) single “Mountain and river” offers areference to the tempo of my rough cut. It was said that Dou Wei likeslandscape paintings so this song was an audio representation of a landscape. The moving images of water, level of light penetration and colour were arranged and edited based on the rhythm of the song. This video embodies nonarration but an experience of recreating the sea.
THE LAST COAST (2017)
How to draw a line?
This is Tseung Kwan O’s last coastline by nature. A weldman helps carve this line on a metal plate.Coastline, defining the sea and the land, is shaped by relentless waves and tidal currents. The crack and pattern on rocks reflect the relationship of the sea and the land. Coastline to me represents time, or the outline of time. I intend to associate this coastline with a particular moment in the progress of urban development; I chose 1960s. Tseung Kwan O, then the world’s renowned shipbreaking hub in 1940s, peaked its golden time in 1960s for heavy industries like vessel making, repairing and steel rolling. The gloryhalted when the government announced the newtown planning in 1982 leading to relocation or declineof the industries.
Miao Ying
Miao Ying (born 1985 in Shanghai, China. Lives and works in Shanghai and New York)
Miao Ying was born in Shanghai, China. She holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University and a BFA in New Media Arts from China Academy of Fine Arts. She resides in New York and Shanghai.
Her work highlights the attempts to discuss mainstream technology and contemporary consciousness and it’s impact on our daily lives, along with the new modes of politics, aesthetics and consciousness created during the representation of reality through technology. She deliberately applies a thread of humor to her works and address her Stockholm Syndrome relationship with censorship and self-censorship in the Chinese Internet (The Great Fire Wall).
Her most recent solo exhibitions include: “Miao Ying：Chinternet Plus”, First Look: New Art Online (New Museum, New York, 2016), “Content Aware” (Madein Gallery, Shanghai, 2016), “Chinternet How: a love story” (Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, 2016), “Holding a Kitchen Knife to Cut the Internet Cable” (Folklore of the cyber world: an online Exhibition for the Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale, (2015). She has shown her works at the “After Us” (co-presented by K11 Art Foundation and New Museum,(2017), “.com/.cn” (co-presented by K11 Art Foundation and MoMA PS1, 2017), “The New Normal—Art and China in 2017” (Ullens Center For Contemporary Art, 2017), “Secret Surface” (Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, 2016), etc. In 2016, she has been nominated for Prix YISHU 8 Chine 2016. In 2015, she was nominated for the TAN Asia Prize and the 3rd Huayu Youth Adward.
Content-Aware, the Five Pillars of Awareness: Reclaiming Ownshipship of your Mind, Body and Future(2016)
Content-Aware is a large-scale installation comprising portable exhibition stands of the kind generally used in convention centers. Based on one of the most common Windows desktop backgrounds, the image used in the installation is a computer-generated depiction of a peaceful pastoral setting. This default desktop image has strong connotations of internet cafes and offices, the kinds of places where users have no power to personalize their computers. Five badly photo-shopped versions of the image are shown on large pillars, surrounding a banner with the strangely deflating self-motivational slogan, ‘Reclaiming Ownership of Your Mind, Body, and Future.’
Zijie
Zijie (born in 1985 in Yulin, Guangxi, lives and works in Shanghai)
Zijie is an activist, writer and illustrator. Initially known best for his cartoons, currently, he mainly focuses on such issues as the effects of urbanization and its relation to spatial justice.
His artworks have been exhibited in Mana Contemporary, New York (2017); Yang Art Museum, Beijing (2017); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2015); Times Museum, Guangzhou (2015); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015) – and many other places.
Sweet Potato Planting Project (2015-present)
Sweet Potato Planting Project is a continuation in Guangzhou of Zijie’s ongoing project in Shanghai where, roaming the city’s streets, he has planted sweet potatoes in public spaces and other unused green areas. Sweet potatoes are easy to grow and also express certain ideas about identity – for instance, some Chinese people liken their national identity to the character of sweet potatoes – but, in terms of their plantation and growth, they also maintain a kind of ‘guerrilla’ existence. Roaming the city, anyone may leisurely plant and harvest these tubers or any other edible plants.
But in urban spaces where edible plants are mostly wiped out, is there really leeway for such ‘guerrilla gardening’? Are there enough places for those people who wish to roam freely and escape control?
Zijie will now launch his planting project in Guangzhou, a city very different from Shanghai in that it is regarded as the motherland (or step-motherland) of the sweet potato in China; Here, the months of December and January mark the end of winter and the beginning of spring; the warm climate of southeast Asia enables plants to grow in all seasons and creates a feeling of abundance.
RACHEL RITS-VOLLOCH
Curator
Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch is a graduate of Harvard University with a BA degree in Literature, and holds an M.Phil and PhD from the University of Cambridge in Film Studies. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on visceral spectatorship in contemporary cinema, focusing on the biological basis of embodiment. In 2016-2017, she was Visiting Professor at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, lecturing in its MFA program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” and its PhD program in Artistic Research. She is Director of the non-profit global platform for time-based art, MOMENTUM, which she founded in 2010.
DONG BINGFENG
Academic Director
Dong Bingfeng is a curator and producer based in Beijing. He is a research fellow in School of Inter-media Art, China Academy of Art. Since 2005, Dong Bingfeng has worked as curator in Guangdong Museum of Art and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Deputy Director of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Art Director of Li Xianting’s Film Fund, and Academic Director of OCAT Institute. In 2013, Dong Bingfeng was awarded the “CCAA Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award”. In 2015, he was awarded the Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award of Yishu:Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.In 2017，he was awarded the Robert H.N.Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant.
ABOUT RMCA
The Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (RMCA) is a group of buildings located at the heart of the Guangzhou Redtory Art District. This former industrial area, situated by the Zhujiang River in the centre of the city, has been repurposed for cultural and leisure use and covers 170,000 square metres with over 100 buildings.
Comprised of factories, sheds, offices and warehouses designed by Russian architects at the beginning of the 1950s, the planning and architecture expresses the idealism of the 20th century industrial age. The outer surface of the main museum building (Hall 1) has since been clad in rough corten steel to emphasise its monumental historical significance.
The exhibition spaces of RMCA cover a total area of over 4,000m2 spread across six separate buildings (Halls 1, 2, 3 ,4 ,5 & 6). Halls 1 & 2 are over seven meters high, while the other spaces are more intimate. A workshop space for the Young Artists Programme has just been converted to supplement this. These resources give flexibility for planning many different kinds of exhibitions, performances and events.
RMCA is a private, non-profit Contemporary Art Museum with the complex function of making exhibitions, promoting academic research, organizing artists’residencies, running public programs for schools, universities and adult education, and facilitating exchanges of art, artists and exhibitions both within China and overseas.
ABOUT YOUNG ARTISTS PROGRAMME
It is only since the end of the 1970s that contemporary art has become established in China. First, in the mid-1980s, it was characterized by ‘The New Wave’ then, in the 1990s and after, by ‘New Cynicism’ and ‘Experimental Art,’ but the challenges facing art today demand a radically different approach.
Global flows of capital, and the burgeoning of transnational networks and social media have brought together, and transformed, art’s cultural and political context. A new generation of artists in China, and elsewhere, is facing, and digesting, the effects of this transformation.
This has made an impact on how art is made and thought about. Increasingly, art works adopt the form and discipline of archives as they confront memory and the past from different contemporary points of view, and even the conventions and boundaries of the art exhibition itself are gradually being eroded as art and life interpenetrate in new, unexpected ways.
For the art of today, museums take on the role more of workshops or laboratories as the concerns of artists, curators, designers, architects, intellectuals and the public begin to converge. The aim of the RMCA Young Artists Programme is to provide through exhibitions, residencies and its public activities an ever-broadening platform for this process to take place.
WITH THANKS TO THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF:
EXHIBITION PHOTOS
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Launching The
MOMENTUM Channel
on
www.ikonotv.art
with
COVIDecameron
19 Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection
Shaarbek Amankul / Stefano Cagol / Claudia Chaseling / Nezaket Ekici
Thomas Eller / Theo Eshetu / Doug Fishbone / Gülsün Karamustafa
David Krippendorff / Janet Laurence / Map Office / Kate McMillan
Anxiong Qiu / Nina E. Schönefeld / Martin Sexton / Varvara Shavrova
Sumugan Sivanesan / Mariana Vassileva / Shingo Yoshida
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà
Watch it on www.ikonotv.art > >
Or scroll down to watch the videos below.
Taking as its starting point the original COVIDecameron exhibition, created and launched during the first pandemic lockdown in May 2020, we reprise this online exhibition in an extended edition, made during the second wave of lockdowns in the winter of 2020-21 as the online exhibition launching the MOMENTUM Channel on the art film platform Ikono TV. The first edition of COVIDecameron opened to coincide with the 10th Anniversary of the birth of MOMENTUM in Australia in May 2010, as a parallel event to the 17th Biennale of Sydney. This second extended edition of the exhibition opens on Ikono TV in time for MOMENTUM’s 10th Anniversary in Berlin in February 2011.
Ten months after the initial release of COVIDecameron, the eyes and hearts of the world are still locked onto the enduring threats and far-reaching aftermath of COVID-19. MOMENTUM again gathers 19 exceptional artists from its Collection, and invites you to come see their stories on our channel on Ikono TV and on our website. In our newly post-viral world, where we have come to see that we have been moving too fast and maybe moving too much, COVIDecameron asks us to slow down and retreat from the constant barrage of the now, from the oversaturation of events, invitations and offers, from the instant gratification of unending empty entertainments. This exhibition of art from elsewhere is a retreat from which to safely contemplate the world, a way of travelling without traveling. Moving images move us. On the occasion of its 10th birthday in Berlin, MOMENTUM, the Global Platform for Time-based Art, is proud to share 24 exceptional works by artists from its Collection, re-contextualized here through the prism of life at the time of Corona. COVIDecameron is a thank you to the artists who have entrusted their work to us, and a tribute to all the exceptional artists we have worked with over the years, as well as to our audiences around the globe. We wish you all good health in these precarious times.
Addressing the viral times we live in, COVIDecameron takes its title from Boccaccio’s literary classic, The Decameron. We follow in the fabled footsteps of this author, whose ten storytellers flee the plague in Florence; escaping the dangers of disease in the city, they retreat to the countryside to regale each other with tales of their times. Escaping from the world at large, they instead bring the outside world to life in seclusion through the artistry of their storytelling.
Six-hundred-and-seventy years later, at the dawn of a new decade, we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. With one country after another having once again imposed travel restrictions, and with social distancing continuing to be measured in meters, countries, and continents, we are instructed to seek safety in seclusion from the world and from one another. So, like its medieval namesake, and with a defiant wink in the face of COVID-19, COVIDecameron gathers together the ‘visual stories’ of video works by 19 artists from around the globe, for an exhibition online. These artists from Australia, Bulgaria, China, Ethiopia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkey, the UK, and the US address, each in their own way, a broad array of topics which we have related to the unprecedented anomalies of life in the time of Corona. With social distancing, masks as fashion items, and dubious medical advice from politicians having rapidly become our new normal – and with death tolls continuing to rise in many countries, we all hope will never approach normal – MOMENTUM has combed through its Collection to bring together a selection of works reflecting on the poetry of the day-to-day as it relates to the changing world we inhabit: life leading up to and during COVID-19. Through many voices from many places comes a celebration of otherness; an opening up of the world in these viral times of retreat, a place of safety in which to contemplate the vulnerabilities we all share, and the numerous ways of overcoming them together. The video works assembled for this exhibition celebrate new acquisitions to the MOMENTUM Collection, as well as the works with which MOMENTUM has grown during its first 10 years.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
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Doug Fishbone, Artificial Intelligence, 2018
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With no disrespect intended to the countless many who are suffering at the hands of Corona, nevertheless, it has been a global phenomenon to laugh in the face of the outbreak. Making light of even the greatest darkness is a better survival mechanism than despair, and in that sense, Doug Fishbone’s Artificial Intelligence (2018) also paints an oddly prescient portrait of our times, assembled from images found online. From food shortages in shops, to wildlife taking over our city streets, to a willful denial of our own mortality in the face of all evidence to the contrary, we all hope this is not how the Corona pandemic will end.
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Mariana Vassileva, Morning Mood, 2010
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But perhaps Mariana Vassileva’s Morning Mood (2010) is how it all began – if we are to believe that the virus originated from bats. Shot in Sydney, Australia, during the very days that MOMENTUM drew its first breaths with its inaugural event in Sydney, this portrait of the city’s remarkable bats already makes the jump between species, inverting the animals to show their inherently human characteristics.
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Thomas Eller, THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered), 2020
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Jumping ahead to the present day, Thomas Eller’s THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered) (2020), was made in the midst of the Corona pandemic, while the artist was in lockdown in China. As so much of Eller’s work, it is a self-portrait, yet at the same time, also an intimate portrait of COVID-19; replicating in its form and content the biological basis of the virus. Eller projects himself into the frame in a visually and aurally layered palimpsest. The artist re-duplicates himself, again and again, with each of his copies reciting the complete genetic code of one of the first strains of the SARS-CoV2 virus identified in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 outbreak began. But Eller makes mistakes in the code, scrambling the RNA sequence here, dropping a nucleotide there…. The artist has translated into visual language an approximation of how the virus replicates itself, spreading its genetic information through multiplication, and through mistakes from copy to copy, mutating to create new strains. While the virus ceaselessly copies itself, we hide from it, and from each other. We distance, socially, and wait for a scientific breakthrough, hoping that science will win this race against nature. We should be so lucky if the virus simply stops, as Eller does, and goes away.
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Nina E. Schönefeld, N.O.R.O.C.2.3., 2020
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Nina E. Schönefeld’s N.O.R.O.C.2.3 (2020), also made during the Corona lockdown, but in Berlin, is a dark depiction of our current pandemic times, cast in the guise of dystopian science fiction. Drawing on excerpts of her previous work, together with historical quotations, passages from novels, television series, films, political speeches, stock footage, video portraits and media reports from different periods of history, N.O.R.O.C.2.3 is a narrative video collage that takes the pulse of a pandemic in the digital age.
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Shingo Yoshida
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Moving on from Schönefeld’s sci-fi is Shingo Yoshida’s stark – but equally dystopian – reality. Heathrow Airport: Corona Diary (2020) was shot at the end of April, while the artist was en-route to his native Japan, when many countries worldwide were still in lockdown. Traversing endless escalators and moving walkways from one empty hall to another, the artist glimpses birds flying through deserted terminals, safety announcements made for no one, advertising posters rendered oddly inappropriate in a time of social distancing. This record of an unprecedented present is shown alongside The Summit (2020), another of Yoshida’s recent works. Yoshida’s ghostly journey through an abandoned monument to globalization, is set in contrast to an intergenerational journey to the peak of Japan’s monument to nationhood, as Yoshida brings to life his father’s and grandfather’s dream to place an engraved haiku atop Mount Fuji.
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Heathrow Airport: Corona Diary, 2020
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Map Office
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The Hong Kong artist duo Map Office embark upon a different kind of personal journey in the midst of this century’s first major viral outbreak, SARS. In Viral Operation (2003), the artists, having flown to Berlin from a Hong Kong still ravaged by the SARS epidemic, proceed on a road trip with the aim of crossing as many European land borders as possible on their way to Italy to show their work in the Venice Biennale. Wearing masks throughout the journey, they are treated continuously as suspect Others, potential contaminants. The mask, in Asia often worn as a social nicety, here becomes a dangerous symbol of contagion. And now, 17 years down the line, when we are all wearing masks and borders between countries remain closed, we look back at Viral Operation as a social experiment, prefiguring what was to come. While in Runscape (2010), Map Office chronicle the kind of freedom of movement which, under our current pandemic conditions, has been denied to many around the globe who have been restricted to lockdown in the interests of public health. The narration describing the body as ‘a bullet which needs no gun’, assumes a newly dark undertone in view of today’s repeated warnings of the deadly spread of the virus from person to person. Running the city to map its portrait and redefine its uses of public space, could equally be an elegy to physical communication through space, a right which most of us took for granted before Corona.
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Nezaket Ekici
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In her own elegy for the freedoms of travel, On The Way Safety and Luck (2016), Nezaket Ekici reimagines a farewell ritual which was once commonly practiced in Turkey and many Balkan countries, where friends and family gather to throw water after the vehicles of the departed, so that their journey may flow as smoothly as water. Ekici’s radical re-enactment of this custom, seen through the lens of Corona-times, implies a purification more physical than spiritual, as people around the globe are instructed to soak and scrub to disinfect themselves after every journey outdoors.
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Shaarbek Amankul
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While western medicine has so far failed to find a viable vaccine or cure, it is perhaps time to turn to the ancient shamanistic traditions of other cultures. In Duba (2006) and Sham (2007), Kyrgyz artist Shaarbek Amankul gives us an intimate portrait of cleansing rituals performed by shamans, with the trances, incantations, cries, and grunts, that seem so alien to most of us. Yet in cultures where many still do not trust in science, it can be hoped that faith in alternative forms of healing will safeguard against the ravages of our viral times.
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Theo Eshetu, Festival of Sacrifice, 2012
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Faith is equally the subject of Theo Eshetu’s Festival of Sacrifice (2012), depicting another ancient cultural tradition, the celebration of Eid-ul-Adha, the Islamic Festival of Sacrifice. Turning the ritual itself into a trance, the video recreates, through its multiplication of images, the kaleidoscopic patterns that highlight the spiritual aspect of the event. Eshetu here manages to create aesthetic beauty from images of ritual slaughter.
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Kate McMillan
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Kate McMillan’s Paradise Falls I & II (2011/2012) is a different kind of tribute to the disappeared, to the forgotten sites of distant traumas, to the frailty of personal and historic memory. Drawing parallels between physical and psychological landscapes, McMillan has created moving paintings where ghost-like people flicker in and out of existence, as symbols of fractured and partial histories that disappear from focus, yet can continue in our collective psyche as dark and haunting traumas. Seen now, from the epicenter of our global viral crisis, this begs the question of how, eventually, will we look back upon, and remember, the time of Corona?
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Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet, 2000
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But while we remain in its midst, Gulsun Karamustafa’s 4-channel video installation and soundscape, Personal Time Quartet (2000), intended as a portrait of the artist’s childhood, instead now paints a picture of how many of us have felt during lockdown, stuck indoors and perpetually repeating the same domestic tasks.
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Stefano Cagol, National Pride, 2009
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While Stefano Cagol’s National Pride (2009) turns a clip from Virus, a 1980 apocalyptic sci-fi film, into an audiovisual parable for our times. Transforming the filmic pandemic of the Italian Flu into a wider reflection on influenza, influence, and borders, this capricious work fits firmly into Cagol’s ongoing series of FLU projects; a body of work dating back to 1998 and the first Bird Flu outbreak in Asia in 1997.
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Claudia Chaseling, Murphy the Mutant, 2013
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Claudia Chaseling’s Murphy the Mutant is apocalyptic sci-fi grounded in the harsh reality of the environmental devastation of nuclear waste and munitions. Dealing with the nuclear chain leading to the radioactive contamination of depleted uranium and its toxic aftermath, Murphy the Mutant transposes into a paradoxically sweet atomic allegory the horrific aftermath of the way we wage war in the modern world. While we remain immersed in the terrible aftermath of COVID-19, Chaseling addresses another kind of insidious invisible killer: radiation and its repercussions.
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Sumugan Sivanesan, Children’s Book of War, 2010
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Equally capricious is Sumugan Sivanesan’s A Children’s Book of War (2010), which uses the lighthearted visual languages of animation, computer games, and digital media in a jarring conjunction to address the serious topics of war, sovereignty, and violence. As the experience of the outside world has been for many, during lockdown, restricted to their computer screens, Sivanesan’s dense visual collage of cultural references and Australian colonial history becomes that much more topical today in view of Australia having closed its borders for at least another year in order to safeguard itself from the virus. Herein lies the beauty of distance in pandemic times.
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Martin Sexton
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Martin Sexton’s Bloodspell at first appears to be a travelogue constructed from grainy home videos, only to turn into a transcendental journey into science fiction. Sexton’s works are filmed in the past, screened in the present, and bear portents from the future. Is it a UFO we see hovering above the Mayan temple, or is it something closer to a viral form, waiting for its moment to strike? The temporal and narrative ambiquities persist in Martin Sexton’s Indestructible Truth, intercuting historic footage of Tibet with quotations from Carl Jung, culminating in a UFO hovering over the Tibetan temples. Will we some day look back upon this time of Corona with the wonder of science fiction brought to life? Hollywood has been predicting pandemics for decades. Is art mirroring life, or vise-versa?
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Indestructible Truth, 1958/59-2012
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Qiu Anxiong, Cake, 2014
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In another multi-faceted animated work, Qiu Anxiong’s Cake (2014), combines painting, drawing and clay with a discordant soundtrack of mechanical noises to offer a timeless and exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two. With heart-rate monitors, sirens, and police radio scanners running throughout the soundtrack, and images of wrestlers rendered in a variety of media, this work can be read as particularly emblematic of the struggles of our viral times.
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Varvara Shavrova, The Opera. Three Transformations, 2010-16
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As an artistic analogy for the dramas of our global crisis, the artform of opera can perhaps best capture the heartaches, the soaring emotions, the uncertainties of daily life, both the lack and the overabundance of information, families torn asunder, jobs in peril, relationships strained, nerves fraying, heroines dying alone in attics, and yes, also the joyous moments, the times of calm, the space for contemplation as the world slows down and the music grows softer. Varvara Shavrova’s The Opera. Three Transformations (2010-2016) takes an intimate look at the performers behind the spectacle and the masque of Chinese opera.
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David Krippendorff, Nothing Escapes My Eyes, 2015
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So too does David Krippendorff’s Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015) take us on an intimate journey through identity and history. Krippendorff’s time-warping tribute to a changing world poses a fitting way to round off this exhibition, as a would-be Aida, to a moving soundtrack from the eponymous opera, sheds tears for a place and time which no longer exist. COVID-19 has changed our world forever. It has left gaping holes in the hearts of all those who have lost loved ones. It has impoverished those who were prevented from working, or who had to pay for medical care. Yet it has also witnessed a remarkable outpouring of creativity, good will, and good humor as people around the world try to cope, both in their own ways and communally, with the changing world in the time of Corona. What will be our new normal in post-pandemic times?
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Janet Laurence, Vanishing, 2009/10
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COVIDecameron ends with the meditative soundtrack of deep breathing, snuffling, purring, rumbling, accompanied visually by close-ups of various animals as they inhale…exhale…inhale…exhale. Its not just us humans – the animal kingdom is also at risk from this pan-species pandemic. Janet Laurence’s Vanishing (2009/10) reminds us what COVID-19 has made so strikingly manifest – the most important thing is to keep breathing.
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WITH THANKS TO OUR MEDIA PARTNERS THROUGHOUT THE YEARS:
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MARGRET EICHER
(b. 1955 in Viersen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Margret Eicher works primarily with intricate digital collages produced as large format tapestries woven on a digital loom. Invoking the traditional use of the tapestry as a tool of wealth and power, and commenting on our increasing reliance on digital culture, Eicher fills her tapestries with contemporary icons from our overly mediated age alongside quotations from art history.
“With her media tapestries, Margret Eicher refers directly to the function and effect of the historical tapestry of the 17th century. Since the Middle Ages, tapestries have served representative and political purposes like hardly any other visual medium. In the Baroque era, however, the courtly tapestry unfolded and optimized its functions in the representation of power, in ideological communication and propaganda. If one compares functions of the baroque communication medium with those of contemporary mass media, astonishing parallels emerge. Manipulation of the viewer and philosophical reflection on life stand side by side in a value-neutral manner. Although in the courtly context the propagandistic dispersion and thus the circle of addressees is limited, the intention, method, and effect are structurally similar. In choosing her subjects, Margret Eicher draws from the public image fund of advertising and journalism; of lifestyle magazines or TV series. Combined with set pieces from historical paintings by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Antoine Watteau, or Thomas Gainsborough that correlate in terms of content, they are elaborately digitally processed and finally woven with the aid of computers. By being transformed into a monumental tapestry, the content of the image gains the appearance of legitimacy and power, then as now. The hegemony of advertising media and contemporary information media with their tendencies towards scandalization find a counterpart in this. “Whatever images and visual worlds Eicher appropriates, she relies on one of the basic properties of tapestry to give her pictorial themes a mouthpiece and lend them weight. The tapestry, even if the medium itself is instrumentalized, finds its way back to its original function as a means of communication in the artist’s works and, as a subtle quotation, questions the power of images in today’s world.”
– Katja Schmitz-von Ledebur, Secular Treasury KHM Vienna
Solo exhibitions include: Fotogalerie Wien, Vienna, Austria (2000); Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen, KunstHaus Dresden, Germany (2000); Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2001); Galerie Monika Beck, Homburg, Germany (2002); Galerie Ulrike Buschlinger, Wiesbaden, Germany (2003); Forum Ludwig für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany (2004); Rottweil Forum Kunst, Rottweil, Germany (2005); Galerie Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt,Germany (2006); DAM, Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Berlin, Germany (2006); Kunstverein Mannheim, Museum Liner, Appenzell, Switzerland (2007); Hamburg Galerie Caesar&Koba, Hamburg, Germany (2009); Stade, Schloß Agathenburg, Germany (2010); Erarta-Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian (2011); Goethe-Institut Nancy (F) Strasbourg (F) ARTE /ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); Hamburg Galerie Carolyn Heinz, Hamburg, Germany (2012); Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, Germany (2012); Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Berlin Orangerie Schloss Charlottenburg, Germany (2013); Anger Museum Erfurt, Kunstmuseum Ahlen, Germany (2014); CACTicino, Bellinzona, Switzerland (2014); Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, Berlin, Germany (2015); Gallery Baku, Azerbaijan (2015); Port 25 Mannheim, Germany (2016); Kunstverein Ulm, Germany (2017); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2018); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2020); Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, Germany (2021); Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany (2021); Moritzburg Museum, Hall, Germany (2022-23).
Recent group exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany (2008); Galerie Eugen Lendl, Graz, Austria (2010); Musee des Beaux-Arts de Tournai, Tournai, Belgium (2011); MOCAK, Krakow, Poland (2012); Museum Liner, Appenzell, Switzerland (2012); Rohkunstbau, Berlin/Roskow, Germany (2013); Tichy Foundation, Prague, Czech Republic (2013); MPK, Kaiserslautern, Germany (2014); Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2014); Gallery of Art Critics Palace Adria, Prague, Czech Republic (2015); KHM, Vienna, Austria (2015); Stresa, Italy (2015); Kaiserslautern, Germany (2016); Museum Liner, Appenzell, Switzerland (2017); Leipzig, Germany (2017); Galerie Deschler, Berlin, Germany (2017); Singen, Kunstmuseum, Germany (2017); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2017); Kunstverein Pforzheim , Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin, Kunstverein KunstHaus Potsdam, Germany (2018); Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany (2019); Room Berlin, Germany (2019); Stiftung Staatlicher Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany (2019); Berlin, Germany (2020); MOMENTUM & Kleiner von Wiese, Zionkirche, Berlin, Germany (2021); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Schloss Pillnitz Museum, Dresden Germany (2021); ZKM Karlsruhe/ European Culture Capitale Luxembourg (2022); Boghossian Fondation Villa Empain, Brussels, Belgium (2022).
Zeus Appears To Eva In The Shape Of A Rocket (2013)
Wallpaper Tapestry, color print on paper, 171 x 240 cm
The original tapestry with this motif dates from the year 2007, it measures 235 x 345 cm and is held in a private collection in Trier. Margret Eicher together with Artikel Editions converted the tapestry into a wallpaper edition. The last segment of this nine-part wallpaper is signed by hand. The mural comes in a graphically designed, offset-laminated, numbered and signed graphic tube. MORE INFO > >
Produced by Artikel Editions. MORE INFO > >
The original tapestry Zeus Appears To Eva In The Shape Of A Rocket (2007), and the wallpaper edition shown in this exhibition, refers to the strongly increasing reliance on images in society. It is no longer text and language that primarily shape political, social and individual attitudes, but ubiquitous images whose truth content is usually no longer verified. Invoking academic research in image theory and visual culture alongside quotations from art history, Margret Eicher’s tapestries are about how we think in images. Zeus Appears To Eva In The Shape Of A Rocket is a digital collage assembled from a press photo of a Chinese long-range rocket mounted on a semitrailer and parked in a hangar, embedded within the frame of a Baroque mythical landscape complete with lemurs perched in the heavens and competing for cloud space with winged cupids, gods and goddesses, Lara Croft and soldiers playing video games. Below, in the plane of the border, a reclining female body is seductively intertwined with a python, whose massive coils keep her modesty intact. It is the star model Linda Evangelista, taken from an image advertising the perfume product of a global corporation. She is Eve, become one with the Christian prototype of seduction, the serpent. While Zeus, the king of the gods, transforms himself into a weapon of war to pay homage to her as the ubiquitous symbol of phallic male aggression. This visual allegory, comingling the recognizable tropes of mythology, religion, popular culture and mass media, addresses the most timeless topics since the dawn of mankind: sex and power.
This work, as are all of Eicher’s digital tapestries, is about our addiction to images and the translatability of visual language across all cultures. Margret Eicher reimagines the historical medium and function of the tapestry for the digital age, down to the production of the works on a digital Jacquard loom. By being transformed into a monumental tapestry, the content of the image gains the appearance of legitimacy and power, then as now. Traditionally serving political purposes, depicting royalty and significant occasions of the times, in the Baroque era especially, the courtly tapestry reached the height of its function in the representation of power and communication of ideologies. Eicher makes striking parallels between the functions and visual language of this Baroque communication medium and those of contemporary mass media today. Depicting the movie stars and media icons which are the equivalent of royalty in today’s content-driven digital culture interwoven with diverse symbols from the history of art and architecture, Eicher’s work looks at how media culture repurposes art history, and questions the power of visual communication in the digital age.
Margret Eicher Catalogues
As artist and curator.
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Margret Eicher
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Stefano Cagol
Website – CV
1 November – 31 December 2015
Stefano Cagol is an Italian-born artist. He participated in 55th Venice Biennale (Maldives National Pavilion), 2nd Xinjiang Biennale, 1st Singapore Biennale and presented his works and actions at Kunstmuseum Bochum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Folkwang Museum, Maxxi in Rome, Museion in Bozen, Laznia in Gdansk, Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, Kunstraum Innsbruck, MARTa Herford, among others. He is the recipient of the Terna 02 Prize for Contemporary Art, Rome, and of the VISIT #10 of the RWE Foundation, Essen.
During his Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, the brand new venue CLB Collaboratorium Berlin will devote its first exhibition to Stefano Cagol. For his first solo show in Berlin he will present “The Body of Energy (of the mind)”, a year-long project the artist has developed as a European expedition on search for signs of energy, both physical and cultural energy, triggering a reflection on what is not visible, on resources, on relations.
Stefano Cagol states “Symbols, metaphors, current topics, immediateness, stimulating, communicating, openness, multiple points of view. These are the key words to my relationship with the public. It couldn’t be any other way. The artwork is an opportunity to better understand our own time and future. It’s a sort of mission. In my account art is never closed in itself.”
Stefano Cagol’s residency is generously supported by the VISIT programme of RWE Stiftung für Energie und Gesellschaft gGmbH. Stefano Cagol is recipient of VISIT #10.
“The Body of Energy (of the mind)” at CLB Berlin
Exhibition 7 November – 12 December 2015
The exhibition at CLB Collaboratorium Berlin opening on 6 November features the launch of the book “The Body of Energy (of the mind)” by Stefano Cagol, produced by Revolver Publishing.
Supported by VISIT Programme of the RWE Stiftung für Energie und Gesellschaft gGmbH, the exhibition “The Body of Energy (of the mind)” at CLB Collaboratorium Berlin and the MOMENTUM Residency is the culmination of a year-long project the artist has developed as a European expedition from Norway to Gibraltar on search for signs of energy, both physical and cultural energy, triggering a reflection on what is not visible, on resources, on relations. The show spans from the experience of the travelling project, through video, photo and installation, to new artworks created in Berlin.
Stefano Cagol states “Symbols, metaphors, current topics, immediateness, stimulating, communicating, openness, multiple points of view. These are the key words to my relationship with the public. It couldn’t be any other way. The artwork is an opportunity to better understand our own time and future. It’s a sort of mission. In my account art is never closed in itself.”
During the travelling project the artist enacted his symbolic survey of energy using an infrared camera and involving the public, the architecture and the environment. Involved institutions that hosted the project from October 2014 to March 2015 are, among others, Bergen Kunsthall Landmark, Bergen (NO); Museo MA*GA, Gallarate (IT); Museum Folkwang, Essen (DE); Listen to the Sirenes, Gibraltar (UK); Madre, Naples (IT); MAXXI, Rome (IT); Museion, Bozen (IT); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (CH); ZKM, Karlsruhe (DE); Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (IT).
PHOTOS FROM THE OPENING
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Symposium
How Culture Builds Cities: Berlin and Abu Dhabi
10 December 2016 @ 3 – 4:30pm
At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien
The Symposium is part of the Exhibition
Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates
At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien
9 – 22 December 2016
Presented In Partnership with the Etihad Modern Art Gallery
and Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize
MORE INFORMATION ON ART NOMADS HERE >>
SPEAKERS:
Janet Bellotto, Zayed University, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises
David Elliott, Art Historian, Curator, Writer, Museum Director, Judge of Sovereign Art Prize
Jeni Fulton, Editor-in-Chief of Sleek Magazine
Vanina Saracino, Curator
WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE SYMPOSIUM HERE:
Abu Dhabi and Berlin: two capitol cities redefining themselves through art; cultural capital at work in two radically different cultures; two places which voraciously ingest influences from abroad, yet produce cultural outputs inextricably linked to the identity of each city. Abu Dhabi builds the Louvre and the Guggenheim with the world’s top architects, while Berlin rebuilds its Stadtschloss, re-homes its museums, and brings famous museum directors from London to run its theaters. Is Abu Dhabi going for the “Berlin Effect” of cultural capital? Is this a parallel trajectory, or is there something else at play here? We invite art professionals working in and with the UAE to discuss this and other questions linking the two cities.
Berlin. Home to countless galleries and museums. Adoptive home to countless artists. Berlin has come to be known internationally as the Art Capitol of Europe, attracting artists from around the world. And not only artists. At the geographical center of Europe, Berlin acts as a vortex, sucking in the cool young things of art, fashion, media, music, professionals and tourists, migrant laborers and refugees.
Berlin is a city of nomads where everyone is always from elsewhere, somewhere anywhere but here. It is a city of mobile people and moving images. In willful defiance of its painful history, Berlin, the perpetually evolving city, welcomes everyone. In this age of displacement, Berlin is a city constantly rebuilding itself. On a mission to outgrow its legacy of war, Berlin redefines and rebuilds itself through art and culture.
Abu Dhabi. An oasis in the desert reinventing itself as the art capitol of the Middle East. A culture of pearl divers whose palaces until only fifty years ago were tents, today builds skyscrapers and museums. Adoptive home to the Louvre and the Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi is a city of nomads who build monuments to permanence designed by the world’s greatest architects. Living in a culture of incredibly rapid modernization, Emeraties are balanced on the precarious edge of maintaining their heritage while actively redefining itself through influences from abroad. A city of nomads no longer, Abu Dhabi instead opens itself to the phenomenon of art nomads, aiming to attract cultural tourism, and the ever mobile cultural producers which make it happen.
SPEAKERS:
JANET BELLOTTO
Janet Bellotto is an artist, educator and curator from Toronto, who splits her time teaching in Dubai as an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University. She was the Artistic Director for the 20th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Dubai and engages in projects of cultural exchange. Water, documented events and personal narratives are elements that have shaped Bellotto’s sculpture/installation practice, including mediums of photography, video and performance, while exhibiting internationally in a variety of collective, group and solo exhibitions.
DAVID ELLIOTT
David Elliott sits on the Advisory Boards of both MOMENTUM and The Sovereign Art Foundation, and he served as one of the judges for the inaugural The Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize in 2016, selecting the three finalists shown in Art Nomads – Made In The Emirates. David Elliott is an English born curator and writer. He was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England (1976-1996); Director of Moderna Museet [The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art] in Stockholm, Sweden (1996-2001); Founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2001-2006); the first Director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art [Istanbul Modern] (2007); Artistic Director of The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival for a Precarious Age, the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2008–2010); in 2012 he was Artistic Director of The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art, the 1st International Kyiv Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011-12); he was Artistic Director of A Time for Dreams, the IV International Moscow Biennale of Young Art (2014). David Elliott was the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2008) and Visiting Professor in Museum Studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong (2008/11/13). From 1998 until 2004 he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums of Modern Art).
JENI FULTON
Jeni Fulton is Art and Editor-in-Chief of Sleek Magazine, a Berlin-based print publication covering all aspects of contemporary visual culture. She obtained an M.A. (Hons) in philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and is currently completing her PhD Thesis on “Value and Evaluation in Contemporary Art” at the Faculty for Cultural Theory at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung Berlin. Her PhD thesis examines how different systems of art evaluation (economic, symbolic and institutional) interact in the field of contemporary art to create a concept of contemporary artistic value. She has written catalogue texts for artists including Christian Jankowski. She is bilingual in German and English and is fluent in French.
VANINA SARACINO
Vanina Saracino is a Berlin-based independent curator. Since 2013 she is in charge the contemporary art program on the experimental, non-narrative TV channel ikonoTV and is responsible of external projects with museums and institutions; in 2014, she co-founded the curatorial project OLHO in Brasil, exploring the relationship between contemporary art and Cinema. Other projects include Un lugar habitable es un evento (former museum MAMM, Medellín, Colombia, 2012), Vertical World – approaching gravity (General Public, Berlin, 2012), and the environmental project Art Speaks Out, for ikonoTV (shown at Istanbul Modern, 2015, and COP22, Marrakesh, 2016). Graduated in Communication with a thesis in semiotics of the arts, she holds a masters degree in Arts Management (GIOCA, Università di Bologna) and in Philosophy and Art Theory (UAB, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona). She is a member of the IKT, international association of curators.
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MOMENTUM AiR
Samuel Zeller // Fritz Strempel // Maximilian Brunn //
Heyon Han // Leon Leube
Corona Creatives Residencies
1 May – 23 November 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic, by its very definition, has affected us all worldwide. The first case was recorded in Germany in January 2020, and the first lockdown began in Berlin in March. With travel bans, institutional closures, and an overall sense of uncertainly prevailing, many artists and curators in Berlin were caught between projects and between homes. While MOMENTUM’s scheduled Residency program was on hold due to pandemic travel restrictions, it has been our pleasure to open our program to the local Berlin art community, and to provide an interim home and work place for artists, curators, designers, and architects.
Leon Leube
1 May-15 July 2020
Leon Leube is a German-Filipino artist born in 1992 in Nürnberg, Germany. From 1995 – 2010 he lived in Baguio City and Boracay Island, Philippines. In 2018 he received a Meisterschüler degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Nürnberg from the sculpture class of Prof. Michael Stevenson. Since 2019 he has been living and working in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include The Days Are Just Packed at THE POOL Istanbul, Public Relations Poetik öffentlicher Kommunikation im Spiegel aktueller Kunst at Stadtgalerie Kiel, and Heavy Metal: Erntedank at Kunstpalais Erlangen.
Heyon Han
1 May-15 July 2020
Website
Heyon Han (Born on 22. April 1985 in Busan, Republic of Korea) is a studio based artist, currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. She finished her Fine Art Bachelor at Hongik University, Seoul, Korea, and received a Meisterschuler degree from Prof. Michael Stevenson at the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Nürnberg.
Her multi-disciplinary practice begins with rapid problem-solving technologies and attempts to translate them into materiality. Her interest is to lay bare uneven innovation, by the collaboration of digital culture and real life objects that share in the joy and fear of capitalism.
Samuel Zeller
1 July – 30 September 2020
Website
Geneva and Berlin based Swiss photographer Samuel Zeller (b. 1990, Geneva) approaches his subjects as a well-defined collection of elements he sorts, orders, removes and composes with. Influenced by his previous career in design and by his artist parents, his work is often very disciplined. The rules and principles he created through the years are directing his compositions but that’s his sensitivity that has the last say.
His fine art work is represented by ONE FOUR gallery, Seoul. He’s a member of the Stocksy co-op. He’s also a Swiss ambassador for Fujifilm cameras (X-Photographer).
Fritz Strempel
14 September – 15 November 2020
Website
With a critical mind to the challenges of our time, Fritz Strempel work across the fields of Art, Design, and Science as a Founder, Advisor and Art Director for design and innovation projects. Fritz’s companies and engagements and partners together with build meaningful brands, multisensory technology, and innovation-driven art projects. What binds this interdisciplinary work together is Fritz’s passion to ask the most pressing questions of our time and respond with meaningful, concrete and future-minded ideas.
Maximilian Brunn
30 September – 23 November 2020
Portfolio
Maximilian Brun is a Graphic & UI/UX designer with 5 years of branding experience. He has acquired exceptional skills at visualizing and executing ideas through training as fashion designer. Maximilian has been lived in Japan from 2016-2020 co-creating and evolving the brand identity of two startups from scratch.
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MOMENTUM AiR
Rita Adib
Website – Portfolio
Studio Residency
2 December 2020 – 28 February 2021
Concurrently with her MOMENTUM Studio Residency,
Rita Adib is also taking part in Net//Work, a new British Council Residency
in partnership with Digital Arts Studios (DAS), Belfast and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire
for mid-career artists whose practices engage with digital technologies.
For more information on Net//Work visit:
https://dasnetworkresidency.com
Watch the Studio Visit with Rita Adib presenting her Residency Project:
How can you document the look of a lover?
ARTIST BIO
Rita Adib is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Damascus, Syria and is currently based between Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal and Berlin. She received her degree in architecture from Damascus University, and her degree in fine arts, majoring in sculpture from Concordia University. Her work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions in Beirut and Montreal. She frequently works with public interventions, public sculptures and interactive installations, seeking to collapse the gap between art and viewer, time of creation and time of interaction. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in social activism against political oppression and gender/racial based discrimination.
How do bodies confront and reflect borders? When does time become a barrier and how does the body perceive it as such? Artist Rita Adib explores the relationship between body and time by creating experimental videos where the body is trying to catch the fast movement of the camera as an allegory for racing against time. Adib aims to document the reflection of oneself constantly chasing a lost moment and to deliver the spectrum of feelings observed during that process. This video is shown as an immersive experience, transferring the filmed action onto the architecture of a site-specific installation using projection mapping. The work aims to liberate the moment from its physical space and revive it every time it is cued by the spectator.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes installation, sculpture, painting and video performance. I was born and raised in Damascus, Syria, and moved in 2014, shortly after the beginning of the revolution, to Montreal, Canada, where I continued my studies in art. My work shifted from my former architectural education to sculptural practice focusing on the body as a performative instrument in relationship to public space, and time as an essential factor in measuring that encounter.
My current practice focuses on the performativity of the sculptural piece whether I am the performer, or the participation of the spectator cues the activation of the performance. I explore the possibilities of filming and documenting an action in regards to the question of where would the visual outcome be situated in that liminal space between documentation and video art, and what can be shaped in combining digital art, performance, and sculpture.
Such questions concerning the search for artforms are inseparable from the subject matter of my artistic practice: Borders, both the impalpable and physical, and how does the body face them?
Invisible restraints imprison the body in them. Systematically imposed thoughts about my identity, gender, and sexuality are fed by cultural and sociopolitical factors. In my process to overcome them, my skin becomes a line separating the inside from the outside: the ideas from their visible manifestation. For example, in questioning femininity, long hair is for many the most visible representation of a “full female”. In a liberating process, I decided to disconnect myself from this dynamic. In my art, I explore more possibilities to challenge the invisible restrictions through body movement, documentation, and playing with time by means of editing.
The body also faces the physical borders which can take the form of dividers between countries, check points, social classes. It is the line created to instil separation on the basis of identities, ideologies, beliefs, religions, etc. These barriers become exemplary of discrimination, which can equally transform the body into the obstacle holding itself back.
After my draining experience with barricades and checkpoints throughout years of war which still have not ended, I now question more the absurdity of the concept of the border as a line we are prohibited from crossing. Hence, my work questions the notion of ‘limits’, and how for myself this changes from one place to another, decreasing and increasing according to when and who I am in relationship to my surroundings.
I want to explore these questions: How do bodies confront or reflect borders?
When does time become a barrier and how does the body perceive it as such?
These questions were subsequent to a personal love story that could not continue; our bodies facing political borders drew the end line of this relationship.
While separating, we shared a poem by Mahmood Darwish “we were missing a present”. In this poem Darwish condoles his lover for their separation revealing that timing was the obstacle ending their love story. In response, I’ve had the desire to go back to spaces we occupied together, as a remembrance act, and visit the moments that held our memories.
During this residency, I would like to explore the relationship between my body and time as an obstacle by creating experimentational videos where I will be trying to catch the fast movement of the camera as an allegory for racing against time. I want to document the reflection of oneself constantly chasing a lost moment and try to deliver the spectrum of feelings observed during that process. I want to work on connecting the time of creation and time of reception of a performative action for it to be revived outside of its original space.
After filming this video, I aim to create an immersive experience to transfer the action with its architecture and carry it outside of its temporal frame. I will try to achieve that through projection mapping to transform the indoor space into a momental memorial of that memory. It is an attempt to connect the time of creation and time of reception of a performative action to liberate the moment from its physical space and revive it every time it is cued by the spectator.
Rita Adib Artist Residency Project:
How can you document the look of a lover?
Video Installation on Loop, Original Soundtrack by Akkad Nizamedine
Production Phase (December 2020)
Video Stills – How can you document the look of a lover? (January 2021)
How slow is a glimpse?
How patient is love?
How strong is the border?
How free is a bird?
How light is time?
How deceptive is memory?
How misleading is longing?
While I was filming the action of running around the camera and thinking of my body in relation to a lost moment these questions were triggered.
They accompanied the making process of the video which I shot several times and they shaped the outcome of this experimental video performance.
–Rita Adib
Work in Progress (February 2021)
In Partnership With:
British Council Net//Work Residency
The British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire and Digital Arts Studios (DAS), Belfast are pleased to announce Net//Work, a new residency for mid-career visual artists whose practices engage with digital technologies. Our partner organisations brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in digital art residencies, and we’re delighted to be partnering with them on this programme.
Consisting of site visits, independent studio time, group critiques, peer-to-peer mentoring and workshops, the residencies offer artists a space for reflection, research, practice and skills exchange around digital artistic practices and technologies while growing their creative and professional community.
This year, however, the residency is moving online and our participating artists are from Egypt, Syria, and UK. The residency will be followed by an online exhibition.
Residency period: 18th January – 14th February 2021
Online Exhibition: 3rd May – 7th June 2021
The British Council was founded in 1934 and is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. Arts is a cornerstone of the British Council’s mission to create a friendly knowledge and understanding between the people of the UK and the wider world. British Council finds new ways of connecting with and understanding each other through the arts, to develop stronger creative sectors around the world that are better connected with the UK.
The British Council Visual Arts team are committed to promoting the achievements of the UK’s best artists abroad. The team connect the UK’s visual arts sector with professionals internationally, focusing predominantly on staging and supporting contemporary art projects in areas of the developing world.
For more information about British Council Visual Arts:
http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org
Digital Arts Studios (DAS)
DAS is a charity operating a shared studio space based in Belfast’s cultural Cathedral Quarter. DAS provides invaluable access to the resources essential to the production of and engagement with digital arts. It provides access to digital technologies, equipment and software and delivers a wide range of related training. DAS runs a full programme of national and international artists residencies, public talks, exhibitions and screenings.
DAS has been running a multi-stranded residency programme since 2008. We have hosted over 35 international artists and 150 UK & Ireland artists, on residencies lasting 2 – 4 months. The residency programme provides skills training, access to state-of the-art equipment as well as providing and encouraging networking opportunities with artists and partner arts organisations. DAS offers support to artists working with digital media and technology from production stage to presentation; providing training during the development of new work and support with presentation and dissemination.
DAS delivers an exciting programme of workshops for artists working with new and emerging technologies via its Future Labs Training Programme. DAS currently works in partnership with the British Council to deliver an international residency programme for digital artists and will be hosting online residencies from January 2021.
For more information about Digital Arts Studios (DAS):
http://digitalartsstudios.com/
Wysing Arts Centre
Wysing Arts Centre is a thriving cultural campus of ten buildings across an 11-acre rural site in Cambridgeshire which hosts experimental and thematic residencies for UK and international artists and delivers a critically acclaimed public programme of gallery exhibitions and events.
Wysing supports artists to make new work, explore new ways of working and make new collaborations. Residencies have emerged from ongoing artistic enquiry focusing on Wysing’s position at the geographic margins of two major cities, Cambridge and London, and at its origin as a space for artistic experimentation and innovation. Across 2020, Wysing is putting broadcasting and digital technologies at the centre of all its activity.
For more information about Wysing Arts Centre:
www.wysingartscentre.org
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P R E S E N T
Migrating Images
@ Videotage
Cattle Depot Artist Village,
63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Hong Kong
24 – 31 March 2016 @ 12:00 – 19:00
Featuring:
Lutz Becker // Thomas Eller
Amir Fattal // Gülsün Karamustafa
Morgan Wong // Zheng Bo
Dorotea Etzler
(Click on artists’ names for more info.)
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch and Isaac Leung
Curatorial Statement
Today, most of us live lives of perpetual motion from one piece of information to the next, from one opportunity to the next, and from one place to the next. Mobility – both geographical and social – not so long ago the privilege of the few, is now taken for granted as the entitlement of the majority. Historically having expelled millions, Berlin is still making up for it, reinventing itself as the go-to capital of the mobility age. At the geographical center of Europe, Berlin acts as a vortex, sucking in the cool young things of art, fashion, media, music; professionals and tourists, migrant laborers and refugees. Berlin is a city of migrants where everyone is always from elsewhere. It is a city of mobile people and moving images.
Migrating Images addresses issues of memory, identity and the impact of migration. Throughout the exhibition ‘migrating images’ are revealed through the notion of ‘object memories’ as artists examine how objects, and associations related to them, have been transferred and re-imprinted through historical processes of colonization and migration, moving in this way from one culture to another. The work made by the artists in the exhibition shows different ways in which these ‘migrating images’ have been woven into new lives or realities to establish other meanings and identities in the present. Migrating Images is thus a reflection on the hybridization of cultural practices, and the fact that not only in Berlin, but everywhere in the world, we can all find roots somewhere else; and we all need dreams, stories, legacies and nightmares from somewhere else.
Migrating Images brings together artists who have dissected the historical legacies of their particular cultures to rebuild them into contemporary statements about how cultures, by absorbing one another, defy established borders and concepts of nationhood that have been drawn and re- drawn by political force throughout history. This exhibition focuses on historical time through the lens of technologies that break down moments into images, as well as through the personal experiences of artists whose varied cultural backgrounds also re-frame different historical moments.
The work by the artists in the exhibition – Lutz Becker, Theo Eshetu, Amir Fattal, and Gülsün Karamustafa – encapsulates a wide range of different approaches to experiences of empire, migration, cultural transformation and appropriation. All strongly reflect the viral, diasporic symbolisms of contemporary culture across the world and the different contexts within which they are perceived.
The works selected from Videotage Media Art Collection (VMAC), including Dorotea Etzler’s Film 2 HK 1995 (1997) and Morgan Wong’s Plus-Minus-Zero (2010), they explore the relationship with our surrounding world in the contemporary urban landscape, and how our sense of time and space can be dislocated by artistic interruptions through performance, videography and cinematic language. While Zheng Bo’s Welcome to Hong Kong (2004) still resonates with Hong Kong people’s anxiety and unease in face of the changing social environment and urban landscape a decade later. The three artists from this VMAC’s selection come from different cultural and artistic background, but they all share a common interest in creating new collective and dynamic urban experiences through experimental videography.
Artists and Works
Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet, 2000
CV
Gülsün Karamustafa was born in 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. She lives and works in Istanbul, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. Her work addresses questions of migration, displacement and military dictatorship (during the 1970s she was imprisoned by the Turkish military). She was refused a passport for sixteen years until the mid-80s and, unlike other Turkish artists, could not emigrate or travel. This enforced isolation led her to an analysis of her own situation and context: the city of Istanbul, interior migration and nomadism within Turkey, and the ideological and psychological ramifications of identity.
Gülsün Karamustafa’s work presents migrating images by juxtaposing objects or documented facts with personal, intimate, emotional reactions that may or may not be consonant with them. Personal Time Quartet (2000), a four-channel video installation, re-enacts the artist’s childhood through the eyes of a young girl as she discovers the glassware and elegantly embroidered table linen and bed sheets that once belonged to the artist’s grandparents, or skips crazily amongst the ancient furniture in the family dining room, folds laundry in the kitchen, or, like her alter ego – the artist – once did, paints her nails, obviously for the first time. Through this surrogate family history of memory, furniture and objects stretching back over a century, the artist also refers to times of displacement, migration and unhappiness that have followed her family from the time of the Ottoman Empire to the present.
Theo Eshetu, ROMA, 2010
CV – Website
Theo Eshetu was born in London 1958, and grew up in Addis Ababa, Dakar, Belgrade and Rome. He now lives and works in Berlin. Coming from a background in experimental film and music, Eshetu forges a hybrid language to merge practices of video art and documentary filmmaking, exploring perception, identity, and notions of the sacred through electronic time-based media and optical devices and effects. Eshetu has won numerous awards and has shown worldwide. He is currently developing new work for Documenta14 in 2017.
In ROMA (2010), a three-channel video projection of almost an hour long, Theo Eshetu presents a kaleidoscopic view of the former Roman imperial capital that displays its grandiosity, street life, ritual, theatricality, modernity and sleaziness. Partly in homage to Federico Fellini, the film cuts restlessly between the intimate and the monumental, silence and noise, the banal and the baroque, as different fragments of being imply the paradox of an almost inhumanly overwhelming force. The sensuality of the body is a recurring motif: its sexuality, movement, and discrepancies with the idealised form of ancient Roman power. An epigraph quoting Carl Gustav Jung’s fear of visiting the city strikes a note of neurotic unpredictability. But this is overlaid by a vision of the city as Wunderkammer, an impression mirrored in the eyes of its visitors (or the viewers of this film), as they are induced to marvel, and at times smile, at the absurdity of the range and grandeur of its image.
Amir Fattal, From the End to the Beginning, 2014
CV – Website
Amir Fattal was born in Israel in 1978, and is currently based in Berlin. Fattal graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009, and is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Working in a variety of media ranging from sculpture, installation, photography, video, 3D printing, musical composition, and more, Fattal makes contemporary art which is always subtly political, reflecting conceptually upon the history of art, architecture, minimalism, and modernism.
Israeli artist Amir Fattal’s single-channel video From the End to the Beginning (2014) is based on a live performance of Richard Wagner’s Vorspiel und Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (premiered in 1865). The notes, however, are played in reverse order, disrupting the drama while retaining the music’s lush chromaticism. Through this strategy the artist creates another kind of sense, reversing time, perhaps to start anew by bringing the dead back to life. The piece extends into a consideration of the relationship between the national histories of Germany and Israel, the latter in a sense growing out of the Holocaust. Wagner’s music is still never played there. Fattal implies, as do other artists shown here, that modernity has its own conflicted histories in which conformity has often been enforced under the pretext of freedom.
Lutz Becker, After The Wall, 2000
CV – Website
Lutz Becker was born in 1941 in Berlin, Germany and now lives and works in London, UK. Lutz Becker is an artist, filmmaker, curator and film-historian. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and became a distinguished director of political and art documentaries. A practicing painter, he is also a curator of exhibitions. He collaborated with the Hayward Gallery on The Romantic Spirit in German Art (1994), Art and Power (1995), and Tate Modern on Century City (2001).
Lutz Becker’s sound piece After the Wall (1999/2014) was originally produced for an exhibition of the same title, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Becker, Berlin-born but living for over forty years in London, recorded five different soundscapes of tapping and hammering as the wall was slowly demolished across Berlin. In the process it was transformed from a monumental symbol of oppression into a commodity to be sold in small plastic packs and a destination for tourism. Both the heroism of hope and the banality of commerce can be heard in this beating against the wall as solidarity syncopates into nothingness and the sound of freedom resounds in a void.
Dorotea Etzler, Film 2 HK 1995, 1997
Website
Dorotea Etzler studied architecture and practiced as an architect in Berlin and London. She participated in several international festivals and numerous exhibitions, including 25 hrs at the VideoArtFoundation in Barcelona and the MOOV Festival in New York. Film 2 HK is part of Etzler’s series Nature Cut, which investigates the architectural space in feature films. The architectural space of the original film has been carefully (de)constructed to serve the story and the tension. This deconstruction allows a shift in meaning and provides a strong portrait of the given places.
Zheng Bo, Welcome to Hong Kong, 2014
Website
Zheng Bo grew up in Beijing, China, and studied Fine Arts and Computer Science in the US. His works situate between video art and documentary, and are usually infused with strong social and political messages. Welcome to Hong Kong is a tour guide introduces major sites on Hong Kong island to travelers from Mainland China. She is not an ordinary tour guide – she speaks with two voices, offering different and sometimes conflicting “facts”.
Morgan Wong, Plus-Minus-Zero, 2010
Website
In Plus-Minus-Zero, Morgan Wong’s exploration is a time performance reminiscent of Back To The Future scientific logics. As video is frequently categorized as time based media, this work connects time, distance, technology and travel. Whilst this work is related to a fax work that was commissioned for the exhibition FAX, and shown at Para/Site Art Space, it is also a perfectly autonomous work through the discourse it holds.
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT IN REALIZING THIS PROGRAM
INSTALLTION SHOTS
EVENT PHOTOS
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P R E S E N T
Acentered:
Reterritorised Network of European
and Chinese Moving Image
@ Art Basel Hong Kong
Crowdfunding Lab, Level 3 Concourse,
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
22 – 26 March 2016
During Art Basel Hong Kong Opening Hours
SELECTED WORKS FROM THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION
Featuring:
Qiu Anxiong // Thomas Eller
Janet Laurence // Kate McMillan
Tracey Moffatt // Sumugan Sivanesan
Li Zhenhua
(Click on artists’ names for more info.)
Curatorial Statement
MOMENTUM will take part in Acentered: Reterritorised Network of European and Chinese Moving Image during Art Basel Hong Kong. Presented by the Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative, Acentered is part of the Crowdfunding Lab and curated by Videotage.
The 21st century defines an emerging set of complex relationships between creativity, knowledge, capitalism, and innovative technologies. Today, we live in a world that revolves around networks and necessitates a belief in a future that is powered by the connection of people – a culture that embraces fluidity, collaboration, and creative mobility.
During Art Basel Hong Kong, the Crowdfunding Lab features video art works from the Videotage Media Art Collection, the MOMENTUM Collection, and from other international partners including: Casa Asia (Barcelona & Madrid), Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art/University of Salford Art Collection (Manchester), The Chinese University of Hong Kong/Department of Fine Arts, City University of Hong Kong/School of Creative Media, Connecting Spaces (Hong Kong-Zurich)/Zurich University of the Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University/Academy of Visual Arts, The Hong Kong Institute of Education/Department of Cultural and Creative Arts, and videoclub (London). Videotage also presents a series of roundtable discussions at the booth on a variety of relevant topics in the art world today.
DISCUSSION PROGRAM
Swapped!
Exchange Artists On Exchange
Mar 24, 15:00 – 16:00
@ Crowdfunding Lab, Level 3 Concourse,
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
Speakers:
Rachel Rits-Volloch, Founding Director, MOMENTUM, Berlin
Morgan Wong, Artist, Hong Kong
Moderator:
Kevin Lam, Assistant Curator, Videotage, Hong Kong
A roundtable discussion between artists from Videotage’s Kickstarter campaign, selected by the Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative to be endorsed on their curated page. This campaign supports a trans-national project to raise the awareness on the experiences of immigrants in the epicenters of Asia and Europe – Hong Kong and Berlin – through an artist exchange program. A presentation will be held by Morgan Wong and Rachel Rits-Volloch to discuss the concepts behind the campaign.’
Salon Program:
Collaborative Network – Curating in the 21st Century
25 March, 14:00 – 15:00
@ Auditorium, Entrance Hall 1A, Level 1,
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
How should curating be in the 21st century? By bringing together veteran curators across the globe, this discussion contemplates different views regarding contemporary curating, with a focus on new networking channels.
Speakers:
David Elliott, Freelance Curator, Writer and Art Historian, Berlin
Menene Gras Balaguer, Culture and Exhibitions Director, Casa Asia, Barcelona & Madrid
Isaac Leung, Artist, Curator and Chairperson, Videotage, Hong Kong
Jamie Wyld, Director, Videoclub, London
Moderator:
Adrian George, Deputy Director and Senior Curator, UK Government Art Collection, London
The Dying Institutions:
Museums and Art Schools in the 21st Century
25 March, 16:00 – 17:00
@ Crowdfunding Lab, Level 3 Concourse,
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
Speakers:
Rachel Rits-Volloch, Founding Director, MOMENTUM, Berlin
Louis Ho, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities & Creative Writing, HKBU, Hong Kong
Jonathan P. Harris, Head of School of Art, Faculty of Arts, Design and Media, Birmingham City University, Birmingham
Ying Tan, Curator, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art; Curatorial Faculty, Liverpool Biennial
Chantal Wong, Strategy & Special Projects, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
Moderator:
Iven Cheung, Assistant Curator, Videotage, Hong Kong
Roundtable discussion with curators, art historians, and educators from universities and art institutions across the globe will discuss the future of curatorial and educational practices.
Roundtable Discussion:
Inside Out: The Rise and Rise of the Youtube Generation
26 March, 14:00-15:00
@ Crowdfunding Lab, Level 3 Concourse,
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
Speakers:
Susie Au, Film Director, Installation Artist, Handmade Films, Hong Kong; Chan Ka Ming, Angus Kwok & Yeung Chun Yin, One Letter Horse, Hong Kong; Jan Cho, General Manager, TBWA\ Hong Kong, Head Of Digital, Hong Kong; Ben Tang, Programme Manager in Arts Programme, TV and Advertising Director, Hong Kong; Jamie Wyld, Director, videoclub, London.
Moderator:
Ellen Pau, Founding Director, Videotage, Hong Kong.
Practicing video artists, famous local YouTubers, and film directors host a roundtable discussion exploring the impact of new channels and the rise of artists with non-conventional training, and how that is changing the art-making environment in Hong Kong.
Performance: Startup!
26 March, 16:00-17:30
@ Crowdfunding Lab, Level 3 Concourse,
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
Speakers:
Enoch Cheng, Artist, Hong Kong; Andrew Luk, Artist, Hong Kong; Tang Kwok Hin, Artist, Hong Kong; Mak Ying Tung, Artist, Hong Kong;
Moderator:
Christopher Lee, General Manager, Videotage, Hong Kong.
Local and international artists present their ‘Art Startup,’ an ambition to develop innovative projects in the age of information technology. Visitors are welcome to participate in this art startup event.
Migrating Images:
Strangers In A Strange Place
An Artist Residency Exchange between MOMENTUM Berlin & Videotage Hong Kong
Amir Fattal & Morgan Wong
SUPPORTED BY
MAKE IT HAPPEN!
SUPPORT THE KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN >>
“…trying to start a life in a strange land is an artistic feat of the highest order, one that ranks with (or perhaps above) our greatest cultural achievements…”
Joe Fassler, “All Immigrants Are Artists,” the Atlantic (August 2013)
Videotage (Hong Kong) and MOMENTUM (Berlin) invite you to support Migrating Images, our research-based artist exchange program that aims to capture, explore, and redefine the ephemeral experience of two cities – Hong Kong and Berlin – with video art.
Your contribution will support two artists (one based in Hong Kong and one Berlin) to engage and research the impact of immigrant societies in these two multicultural epicenters, and their research will become the basis of their video art projects to explore the multiple aspects of migration on the community.
Besides exploring issues related to migration, the exchange artists will participate in a series of workshops and lectures in the local art scene during their residencies. After they have returned, they will also play the role of the curator for a show in their home base featuring selection from the collections of Videotage and MOMENTUM respectively. Migrating Images is conceptualized to be a multi-dimensional exchange project that involves the local art communities of the two cities.
Tales of Two Migrating Cities
Both Hong Kong and Berlin are “migrating” in multiple sense of the word. In their histories, both Hong Kong and Berlin have emerged as epicenters of Asia and Europe under continuous waves of immigration. In recent years this movement of people is happening even in a faster pace. In the last decade Hong Kong suddenly finds herself opening its doors to large numbers of new immigrants from mainland China and Southeast Asia, while the demographics of Berlin have also changed dramatically due to newcomers of non-German descent. The current Syrian refugee is an even more pressing issue – especially in the world after the Paris attacks.
Besides the movement of people, both Hong Kong and Berlin are also home to migrating objects. As a former British colony, Hong Kong is still laden with artefacts from its colonial past. This has become an issue of hot debate under Chinese rule – are these objects to be retained or replaced by those that bear marks of the current Chinese regime? On the other hand Berlin’s ethnographic museums are full of objects that remind viewers of their origin and their “migration” during the colonial era. With these commonalities, one might ask: how has this “migrating” experience shaped these cities? How have the culture, religion, and social customs of the immigrant communities impacted these epicenters in Asia and Europe respectively? How has the flow of people changed the city fabric in a visible – or invisible – manner?
ABOUT AMIR FATTAL:
Amir Fattal was born in Israel in 1978, and is currently based in Berlin. Fattal graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009, and is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Coming himself from a migration background, Fattal is concerned throughout his practice with connections between cultures – through their history, memory, architecture, and geographical diaspora which transposes cultures to new and different nations. Working in a variety of media ranging from sculpture, installation, photography, video, 3D printing, musical composition, and more, Fattal makes contemporary art which always subtly political, reflecting conceptually upon the history of art, architecture, minimalism, and modernism.
ABOUT MORGAN WONG:
Morgan Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1984, and is currently lives and works in Hong Kong. Wong graduated from the Slade School of Fine Arts in London in 2013. Wong’s interest in durational performances investigates the irrepressibility of time as a predicament, to recuperate a new consciousness of physicality, time and space. Such a practice follows the vein of phenomenology, and specifically how to become more aware of the relationship between one’s volition and action. The pursuit of timelessness is not only a humanistic quest; its social and political connotations question the fundamental value of an individual as an agency for change.
ABOUT Art Basel
Art Basel stages the world’s premier art shows for Modern and contemporary works, sited in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong. Defined by its host city and region, each show is unique, which is reflected in its participating galleries, artworks presented, and the content of parallel programming produced in collaboration with local institutions for each edition. In addition to ambitious stands featuring leading galleries from around the globe, each show’s singular exhibition sectors spotlight the latest developments in the visual arts, offering visitors new ideas and new inspiration. For further information please visit artbasel.com
ABOUT Videotage
Videotage is a leading Hong Kong-based non-profit organization specializing in the promotion, presentation, creation and preservation of new media art across all languages, shapes and forms.
Founded in 1986, Videotage has evolved from an artist-run collective to an influential network, supporting creative use of media art to explore, investigate and connect with issues that are of significant social, cultural and historical value.
Videotage is dedicated to nurturing emerging media artists and developing the local media arts community. It has organized numerous events and programs since 1986, including exhibitions, presentations (Dorkbot), festivals (Wikitopia), workshops, performances, residency program (FUSE) and cultural exchange programs, as well as continually distributing artworks through its networks and publications; and developing an extensive offline and online video art archive (VMAC).
New initiative Acentered – Reterritorised Network of European and Chinese Moving Image is a project umbrella that interlinks extensive media art institutions in China and Europe. Videotage is planning to further initiate exchanges between Europe and China looking at the future of experimental moving image.
ABOUT the MOMENTUM COLLECTION
The MOMENTUM Collection was established in 2010 through the generosity of a small group of artists who’s work was shown at MOMENTUM | Sydney in May 2010. The donations of their works constituted their investment in MOMENTUM’s then-nascent model as a global and mobile platform for showing time-based art. Five years later, the MOMENTUM Collection has expanded from its original roster of 10 to 32 exceptional international artists. The Collection represents a cross-section of 120 outstanding artworks in a diversity of media: video, performance, photography, painting, collage, and text. It ranges from some of the most established to emerging artists representing 18 countries worldwide: Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Korea, China and Hong Kong, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, Israel, Ethiopia, Poland, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Canada. The growth of the Collection reflects the growth of MOMENTUM itself. While we develop and nurture our relationships with these artists, we continually endeavor to bring their work to new audiences worldwide – both through our web archive, and through cooperations with partners such as LOOP and IkonoTV, as traveling exhibitions, and through educational initiatives such as the Time_Art_Impact Dialogues with Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
[click HERE for more information].
To view the MOMENTUM Collection CLICK HERE >>
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READ HERE THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION CATALOGUE
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WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT IN REALIZING THIS PROGRAM
Salon Program:
Collaborative Network – Curating in the 21st Century
Swapped!
Exchange Artists On Exchange
The Dying Institutions:
Museums and Art Schools in the 21st Century
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MOMENTUM AiR
David Szauder
Website
STUDIO RESIDENCY
1 March – 27 September 2020
Light Space Modulator
In Homage to Moholy-Nagy
5 June – 27 September 2020
Open Studio with the Artist every Friday at 14:00 – 18:00
And during Berlin Art Week:
9 June – 13 September 2020 at 14:00 – 18:00
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
David Szauder – Artist Bio
Media artist David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.
David Szauder has participated in a variety of international projects as artist and curator. In cooperation with MOMENTUM, previous projects include:
“Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014); “INTERSECTION”: Film and Video Art Panel Discussion for Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival, 2014); “THRESHOLDS”: Performance, Exhibition, Discussion (.CHB, Berlin Art Week, 2013); “THRESHOLDS” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013-2014); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “Mass & Mess” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013).
About Light Space Modulator
Taking as his inspiration the eponymous sculpture by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder has re-created his own large-scale 3.5m rendition of this iconic work as a kinetic light and sound sculpture for public space. First premiered in Korea, MOMENTUM brought Szauder’s Light Space Modulator to Berlin for the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus in 2019. Initially installed at the historic Villa Erxleben, Light Space Modulator now moves to the MOMENTUM gallery to serve as a starting point for David Szauder’s visual experiments and re-interpretations of Moholy-Nagy’s work.
Over the course of six months, David Szauder continues to develop his translation of Moholy-Nagy’s seminal ideas into a multi-mediated interactive installation; creating two videos and a soundscape algorithmically derived from the motion and sound of the sculpture: Light Space Materia and Kinetic Study no. 68. In addition, Szauder experiments with adding a virtual component to enable the Moholy Cloud, designed to translate the ambient data recorded by sensors on the sculpture into visual and auditory forms.
Every day throughout the course of the Studio Residency, Szauder completes a Digital Sketch, which he publishes on social media. A selection of these works has been assembled into a series of video animations acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection.
Within the limits of the COVID-19 restrictions, this work-in-progress is punctuated with Open Studio presentations and Artist Talks throughout the course of David Szauder’s Studio Residency.
The original Moholy-Nagy work (151.1 × 69.9 × 69.9 cm), one of the earliest electrically powered kinetic sculptures, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light Space Modulator) holds a central place in the history of modern sculpture. Representing the culmination of Moholy-Nagy’s experimentation at the Bauhaus, it incorporates his interest in technology, new materials, and, above all, light. Moholy sought to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world. He presented Light Prop at a 1930 exhibition of German design as a mechanism for generating “special lighting and motion effects” on a stage. The rotating construction produces a startling array of visual effects when its moving and reflective surfaces interact with the beam of light. The sculpture became the subject of numerous photographs as well as Moholy’s abstract film Lightplay: Black, White, Gray (1930). Over the years the artist and later the museums made alterations to the sculpture to keep it in working order. It is still operational today.
– [citation from Harvard Art Museums, holding the original Light Space Modulator in the Harvard Museum Collection]
The Original: Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator
Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM
ARTIST STATEMENT
One of the greatest Hungarian innovations, and one of the earliest electrically powered kinetic sculptures, Light Prop for an Electric Stage holds a central place in the history of modern sculpture.
Representing the culmination of Moholy-Nagy’s experimentation at the Bauhaus, it incorporates his interest in technology, new materials, and, above all, light. Moholy sought to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world.
Light Prop for an Electric Stage, as Moholy-Nagy referred to it, not only pushes the temporal dimension of art but expands its spatial dimensions into the entire environment, including the viewer, who becomes a surface onto which light is reflected.
It embodies Moholy-Nagy’s goal of pushing art beyond static forms and introducing kinetic elements, in which the volume relationships are virtual ones, i.e., resulting mainly from the actual movement of the contours, rings, rods, and other objects.
To the three dimensions of volume, a fourth: movement – in other words, time – is added.
Moholy’s masterpiece is not just a piece of art, it is the perfect combination of science, art, and innovation.
To Moholy-Nagy’s original design, David Szauder adds a fifth dimension: the virtual.
Szauder’s vision for the Moholy Cloud expands the kinetic interactivity of the sculpture into the realm of connectivity in virtual space. Every moving part of the sculpture contains a sensor engaging with its environment, and through a wireless connection, all the acquired data is visualised to create a virtual Light Space Modulator.
[David Szauder]
ADDITIONAL WORKS CREATED DURING THE STUDIO RESIDENCY
LIGHT SPACE MATERIA
2020, Video, 8 min 27 sec
Created by David Szauder for the exhibition Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM, and subsequently acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/450055147 [/fve]
Translating Moholy-Nagy’s seminal ideas for the Bauhaus into a digital context, David Szauder’s large-scale kinetic light and sound sculpture Light Space Modulator (2020) serves as the basis for his film Light Space Materia in addition to a series of over 100 videos, digital animations, and soundscapes algorithmically derived from the motion and sound of his sculpture. David Szauder’s analysis of the Bauhaus-related kinetics of the original piece focuses on the fundamental question of how modern technology could change the formal expression of movement. The Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology. For this reason, this characteristic always formed an essential basic notion of Szauder’s work and led him to choose computer code when creating the animations. The code contributed to a better understanding of the compositional methods and movements and opened a new door for the perception of the 3-dimensional kinetic world. As the last step, a soundscape was derived from the ambient sound and kinetic movement of Szauder’s Light Space Modulator sculpture using algorithms based on motion analysis. This soundscape accompanies Szauder’s film Light Space Materia, which commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of materiality of the image.
Works from the Digital Sketches Series:
In his ongoing series of Video Sketches, David Szauder hand draws animated collages incorporating family photos and found footage. In the artist’s words, “They are kinds of kinetic systems, structures, moving like the ‘perpetuum mobile’. In my case, the perpetuum mobile is the metaphor of the continually changing inner world of mine. There are a good number of nodes which are connected like impossible machines, and the movements of these nodes create an impossible hierarchy or dominations between the elements of the structure. Occasionally the system strives for completion, but these operations are just alibis, the real aim is to keep the movement endless, the structure closed and the hierarchy sustainable. Easy. Like these sketches.” The works created during Szauder’s Studio Residency and shown here are all related to his analysis of the Bauhaus focus on art and technology which led him to use computer code when creating the animations.
KINETIC STUDY no. 68
2020, Video Animation, 4 min 2 sec
Created by David Szauder for the exhibition Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM, and subsequently acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection
Kinetic Study no. 68 is based on the structure of David Szauder’s Light Space Modulator sculpture. Using algorithms to translate the motion and sound of the sculpture into a 2-dimensional video animation, Szauder breaks down this work into four stages: The Skeleton (Line Art), Colours, Textures, and Collage.
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/455296041 [/fve]
SUPPORTIVE STRUCTURES
2020, Video, 1 min 10 sec
Assemblage of Digital Sketches, including
Motivators , Hanging Around, Sunday Meditation, Kinetic Sunglasses Machine
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/498961609 [/fve]
KINETIC MOVEMENTS WITH SOUND
2020, Video, 5 min 32 sec
Assemblage of 6 Digital Sketches:
Kinetic Stability 1, Kinetic Stability 2, Pendulum, Vertical, Horizontal, Magnetic
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/498959138 [/fve]
With thanks to:
LIGHT SPACE MODULATOR IN PROCESS (6 JUNE 2020)
LIGHT SPACE MODULATOR IN PROCESS (17 JUNE 2020)
LIGHT SPACE MODULATOR IN PROCESS (22 JUNE 2020)
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
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In Partnership With
BEYOND ELYSIUM
Group Exhibition at
Kleiner von Wiese Gallery
Friedrichstrasse 204, 10117 Berlin
OPENING:
Wednesday 23 September at 6 – 11pm
EXHIBITION:
24 September – 14 October 2020
Opening Hours: 3-6pm
MORE INFO on All BEYOND ELYSIUM Artists > >
CHRISTIAN ACHENBACH // NASSER ALMULHIM // CHRISSY ANGLIKER // INNA ARTEMOVA // TOM BIBER // ANDREAS BLANK // ANINA BRISOLLA // CLAUS BRUNSMANN // CLAUDIA CHASELING // ALI DOWLATSHAHI // KERSTIN DZEWIOR // ALI FITZGERALD // DANIEL GRÜTTNER // CHRIS HAMMERLEIN // ANNE JUNGJOHANN // DAVID KRIPPENDORFF // VIA LEWANDOWSKY // MILOVAN DESTIL MARKOVIC // SARA MASÜGER // ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEVA // KIRSTEN PALZ // MANFRED PECKL // DAVID REGEHR // STEFAN RINCK // HUDA AL SAIE // JÖRG SCHALLER // MAIK SCHIERLOH // NINA E. SCHÖNEFELD // KERSTIN SERZ // YASMIN SHARABI // VARVARA SHAVROVA // POLA SIEVERDING // DAVID SZAUDER // VADIM ZAKHAROV // JINDRICH ZEITHAMML // IREEN ZIELONKA
Curated By
Constanze Kleiner, Stephan von Wiese, Rachel Rits-Volloch, Frances Stafford
ELYSIUM
There has never before been a pandemic that, like the rampant Covid 19 infection, can apparently endanger all people on earth at the same time; never before have all people on earth, at the same time, asked themselves the question: What is really important now? Through their shared vulnerabilities, never before have so many people faced the realisation of their similarities. And with so much going wrong in the world, our thoughts can’t help but turn to dreams of a happier beyond. “Elysium”, the island of the blessed as a mythological place, as an ideal or state, is an image that contrasts to the sufferings of this world. As a concept, it is present in many cultures and religions as a utopia, as an idea and as hope. The longing for Elysium is therefore a deeply human need. It has been redesigned and defended again and again, and also in connection with religious supremacy and ideologies instrumentalized in power politics, or simply with the need for anesthesia and intoxication or the right to individual love and sexuality.
In our small exhibition, the Elysian realms are not to be understood as a place of flight from the world. Elysium is not to be found only in the unattainable. You find it – beautiful and mysterious, non-violent and full of humor – even in the middle of everyday life, in the here and now. Elysium is also signified in the heightened moments of life, an intoxication with existence, the moment of happiness. This short exhibition aims to raise awareness of this possibility of fulfilled moments.
We all have only this one world and only this one life – and we have only one duty, namely to find happiness for ourselves and for others. To find our “gap”. This corresponds to the meaning of the Middle High German word for “luck”, which was also “gap”. Nobody can really be happy if they have no chance, no gap in which to realize themselves, and nobody can be “happy” or “successful” in the face of the misery of others. Since Corona, more people around the world have become aware of this than ever before.
It is all the more exciting to be able to tie the the ELYSIUM exhibition in with the themes of the previous large group exhibition by KLEINERVONWIESE and MOMENTUM, “bonum et malum”. What does “bonum et malum” / good and evil mean in our current times? What exactly is paradise today?
The aim of the ELYSIUM exhibition is to interrogate this from a wider perspective and, at the same time, refer to the phenomenon of the connectedness of all people, despite our supposedly profound cultural differences. We all have common roots, as expressed in our cultural histories, which are often older than the history of the respective religions of the various peoples. All Abrahamic religions have a common, geographically localized starting point, namely the city of Uruk, which was a cultural hotspot in Mesopotamia and the hometown of Abraham more than 5000 years ago. However, Gilgamesh, the hero of an even older mythical tale, was also born here. The Sumerian-Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (12th century BC) tells of the search for an earthly paradise.
According to current knowledge, this “Dilmun” (the Sumerian name for a paradisiacal land) is the cultivated land of the gardens in what was then Bahrain and nearby areas. Contemporary research assumes that these Oriental Gardens of Paradise were the inspiration for the Occidental Paradise Garden. Seen in this way, the inspiration for the Garden of Eden of the Jews, Christians and Muslims came from Bahrain and from the Dilmun culture around the Persian Gulf.
In this context, and as a result of initial collaborations with partners from this region, KLEINERVONWIESE & MOMENTUM are also showing two Arab artists, with more to follow. The assembled positions of the ELYSIUM exhibition consciously or unconsciously reflect these interrelationships and – also thinking about the challenges and puzzles of Corona – at the same time the questions: Why do we no longer know about these correlations? Why have we lost our consciousness of what connects us as humans, regardless of where we live and what we believe in? The curators trust in the interplay, correspondence and dissonance of the works, which alternately communicate with, and may reinforce and complement, one another.
Much is currently being rethought in how we live our daily lives and go about our professional lives. Above all, however, when museums and galleries had to close, the Corona crisis showed that work in the artists studios did not come to a standstill. It is especially in times of crisis that we need the clairvoyance of art and its real, sensual knowledge. The ELYSIUM exhibition, and its sister show – BEYOND ELYSIUM – are designed to support art-lovers, artists and their galleries at a time of crisis, and to remind us all that perhaps Elysium can be found in the small miracle of simply bringing people together.
[Constanze Kleiner]
MOMENTUM Collection Artists Featured in ELYSIUM:
Inna Artemova
Inna Artemova, born in Moscow, studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI). For her diploma project, she received the 2nd prize of the Russian Federation. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and started to focus on her work as an artist in the field of painting and drawing. Recently, Inna Artemova has participated in: the Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020), and in 2019, the Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts presented her works in the solo show “Landscapes of Tomorrow”. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Austria and Italy. Additionally, her works were shown at international art fairs in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, the US, and Japan.
Inna Artemova, Utopia #4532 (2020)
ink, marker, pencil on paper, 75 x 110cm
Inna Artemova, Utopia #5569 (2020)
ink, marker, pencil on paper, 75 x 110cm
Inna Artemova, Utopia IX (2017)
oil in canvas, 190 x 140cm
Artemova’s practice remains heavily influenced by her professors at the MArchI in Moscow, the “Paper Architects“, a movement originating in the 1980s that developed futuristic architectural creations never intended to be realized. The visionary projects of the Paper Architects and her experience of the failure of the communist utopia with the fall of the Soviet Union, has led Artemova to explore, through her constructivist painting style, the ideas of architectural utopias from the 1960s up to her own futuristic visions. In creating utopian landscapes and spaces, Artemova interrogates the future of living spaces and their impact upon human relationships. The concept of utopia stands for a space of possibility in human consciousness in which the crucial questions have to be answered again and again: Is there no alternative to the reality in which we live? What will we do in the future? Do we have to fail because of our ideal ideas?
Claudia Chaseling
Claudia Chaseling is a German artist, born in Munich in 1973, currently living and working between Berlin, Germany and Canberra, Australia. She is known for developing the practice of Spatial Painting, comprised of canvases and sculptural paintings with mixed media on objects, walls and floors. The artist has exhibited her works in over fifty solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond. Recent exhibitions in 2017 include solo exhibitions at Magic Beans Gallery in Berlin, and the Wollongong Art Gallery, Australia, as well as a group exhibition at Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York. The “Verlag für zeitgenössische Kunst und Theorie” published her first extensive monograph in 2016. Claudia Chaseling studied at Academy for Visual Arts in Munich, Germany, and Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna, Austria, before graduating in 1999 from the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin, Germany. She received her Masters degree in Visual Arts from both the University of the Arts Berlin, in 2000, and the School of Art, Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, in 2003. In 2019 the artist is completing her PhD in Visual Arts at the School of Art, Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Major grants and scholarships received in Australia and Germany include the DAAD; the Samstag Scholarship; the Studio Award of the Karl Hofer Society; the Australia Council for the Arts Grant in 2014; and the 2015/16 artsACT Project Grant. She has taken part in various international visiting artists programs and artists residencies, including Texas A&M University; Yaddo in New York; the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City; the Australian National University (ANU); amongst others.
This work is presented in parallel to Claudia Chaseling solo exhibition mutopia5 at the Australian Embassy Berlin [also presented by MOMENTUM]. Chaseling’s practice of Spatial Painting, at once 2- and 3-dimensional, takes us on a psychedelic journey through the nuclear chain leading to depleted uranium and its toxic aftermath. metal 2 continues Chaseling’s inquiry into the ways that abstract, non-representational painting can communicate narratives with a socio-political meaning – namely, the radioactive contamination of depleted uranium munitions. The imagery of her Spatial Paintings consists of distorted landscapes, estranged places, mutated creatures and plants whose deformation is caused by radioactive poisoning. Her images, often including text and URLs referencing her source materials, are not predictions of some post-apacalyptic future, but rather the result of her research into historic and ongoing ways in which we continue to poison our planet with radioactive materials.
Claudia Chaseling, metal 2 (2015)
pigments, egg tempera and oil on canvas, 100 x 120cm
“The painting metal 2 seems at first glance to have a biomorphic abstract dynamic. On a closer look, one can decode explosive forms, grenades and even the contour of a particular war plane. The depicted scene is sourced from photos of a US plane in action shooting depleted uranium munitions above a middle eastern landscape. In the middle of the painting, one can see another layer embedded into the painting: the shape of a depleted uranium rocket. The title of the work refers to this part of the painting and the heavy metal ‘uranium’ used in munitions in wars today.”
– Claudia Chaseling
David Krippendorff
David Krippendorff, Silenced with Gold 1 (2017)
Gold leaf on paper
David Krippendorff, born in Berlin in 1967, is a US/German interdisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker. Currently based in Berlin, he grew up in Rome, Italy, and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, Germany, where he graduated with a masters degree in 1997. His works, films and videos have been shown internationally, including: the New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, and Belgrade), as well as in many international art and film festivals worldwide.
David Krippendorff, Silenced with Gold 2 (2017)
Gold leaf on paper
Emerging from Krippendorff’s video work Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015), Silenced with Gold 1 & 2 are part of a series of works on paper superimposing arabic designs in gold leaf onto the musical score for Verdi’s opera Aida. Nothing Escapes My Eyes is about a silent transformation of a place and a human being, both subjected to the melancholy of conforming. The film was inspired by the famous opera Aida, to depict in a metaphoric form current issues of cultural identity, loss and the pressures to conform. The film refers to the following historical event related to this opera: Aida premiered in Cairo in 1871 at the „Khedivial Opera House“. One hundred years later the building was completely destroyed by fire and replaced by a multi storied parking garage. Nevertheless, to this day, the place is still named Opera Square: Meidan El Opera. The film combines this urban alteration with the painful transformation of a woman (actress Hiam Abbass) in the process of shedding one identity for another. With no dialogue, the film is backed by a musical excerpt from Verdi’s Aida whose lyrics express the difficulties of being loyal to one’s country and cultural identity. The personal and urban transformation tackles on issues of identity, loss and disorientation as a result of historical colonialism and contemporary globalization.
Milovan Destil Marković
Milovan Destil Marković was born in 1957 in Yugoslavia/Serbia. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 1986. Having studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Arts, Belgrade, where he graduated in 1983. Marković’s works can be found in numerous public and private collections throughout the world: in between others in the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto/Japan; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin/Germany; Museum of the City of Belgrade/Serbia; Istanbul Art Museum Foundation, Istanbul/Turkey; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade/Serbia; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf/Germany and Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz/Austria, The Artists’ Museum Lodz/Poland. Marković has exhibited extensively in Europe, Asia and in the Americas.
His work was featured at 42nd Venice Biennial Aperto, 4th Istanbul Biennial, 46th Venice Biennial, 6th Triennial New Delhi, 5th Biennial Cetinje, Sao Paulo Biennial, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center New York, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Ludwig Museum for Contemporary Art Budapest, Saarland Museum Saarbrücken, The Artists’ Museum Lodz, National Museum Prague, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Landesmuseum Graz, Kunstmuseum Duesseldorf, Art Museum Foundation – Military Museum Istanbul, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Kunstverein Hamburg, Kunstvoreningen Bergen, Galleri F15 Oslo, Nishido Contemporary Art Tokyo, Fei Contemporary Art Center Shanghai, the 56th October Salon Biennial in Belgrade, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, Museum of Contemporary Art Banja Luka, and many others.
Milovan Destil Marković, Ivory Lipstick Aureole (1992)
gold leaf, lipstick, beewax, paraffin on wood, 26,5 x 22,5 cm
Milovan Destil Marković, Green Lipstick Aureole (2016)
gold leaf, lipstick and paraffin on wood, 26,5 cm x 22,5 cm
Milovan Destil Marković, Lead Aureole (1992)
gold leaf and lead on wood, 26,5 x 22,5 cm
Almagul Menlibayeva
Almagul Menlibayeva, Walking Head (2019), Shamans 02 (2018), Posthuman Shamanism (2019)
inkjet print on archival paper, 110 x 175.76 cm
Video artist and photographer Almagul Menlibayeva holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. She works primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation and her work addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia, de-colonial re-imaginings of gender, environmental degradation, and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies.
In conjunction with her solo exhibition Transformation at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-2017), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Other awards include the ‘Daryn’ State Prize of Kazakhstan (1996), and the ‘Tarlan’ National Award of the Club of Maecenas of Kazakhstan (2003). She was also the Winner of the Grand Prix Asia Art at the II Biennial of Central Asia, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1995) and the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany.
Menlibayeva has gained international recognition by participating in: the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); and the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018).
Selected solo exhibitions include:Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT:Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); Kissing Totems, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, USA (2008). Recent selected group exhibitions include: Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017).
Almagul Menlibayeva made her curatorial debut with Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, co-curated with David Elliott and Rachel Rits-Volloch, organised by MOMENTUM in partnership with the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan (2018).
Almagul Menlibayeva, Dilora (2013)
inkjet on soft Hahnemühle paper, 55 x 50 cm
From the series Milk for Lambs (2010)
In the Steppes of her native Kazakhstan, Menlibayeva stages and films complex mythological narratives, with reference to her own nomadic heritage and the Tengriism traditions of the cultures of Central Asia. The series of works in Milk for Lambs explores the emotional and spiritual residues of an ancient belief system as well as a historic conflict, still resonating among the peoples of Central Asia today, between the Zoroastrian ideology of former Persia, spreading widely across Eurasia and influencing Western politicians and philosophers and the mysterious Tengriism (sky religion) reaching as far as the Pacific Ocean. The nurturing earth goddess Umai and favorite wife of Tengri, the god of the sky, much like Gaia in the Greek mythology, created life on earth out of herself. This figure of the ‘Earth Mother’ symbolizes the close relationship of the people to the land and its given riches, through symbolic rituals of animals and humans feeding off of her body and drinking her milk. Often described as “punk-shamanism,” Menlibayeva’s videos are embedded in theatricality that leads them through a complex set of references — from tribal symbolism to images of the communist industrial past. Milk for Lambs begins as the story of the artist’s grandfather, merging documentation of an annual ritual of the formerly nomadic peoples with a stylised fantasy of their myths and legends.
Kirsten Palz
Kirsten Palz, born Copenhagen 1971. is a visual artist working in Berlin. She holds a degree in Computer Science from the IT-University in Copenhagen and a degree of Fine Arts/ Painting from School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2007, Kirsten Palz initiated her ongoing archive of manuals. The archive is a work in progress consisting today of 317 manuals, including objects, prints on paper and drawings. The manuals engage with various topics, such as dreams, memories, myth, sculpture and social space. Kirsten Palz has shown her works in spaces in Germany and abroad.
Recent works were presented in F******* -Towards New Perspectives on Feminism, Neue Berliner Kunstverein (nbk), Berlin and ff /Temporary Autonomous Zone /2/ in Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin. Palz’s performances frequently take place non-officially in the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg – outside the institution’s listed program – and include readings and experimental guided tours for audiences.
Kirsten Palz’s series of Song Books emerge from her practice of “Sculpture as Writing”, encompassing her manuals and other text-based works. Song Book, Book of Verse, Covid-19 was created especially for the ELYSIUM exhibition, and has been acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection.
Kirsten Palz, Song Book, Book of Verse, Covid-19 (2020)
Limited edition prints, Number of prints: 100 pieces. Stamped and signed by the artist
Nina E. Schönefeld
Nina E. Schönefeld, Free Julian Assange (2020)
print collage, 30 x 40cm
Nina E. Schönefeld (b. 1972 in Berlin) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She studied Fine Art in Berlin (UdK) and in London (Royal College of Art). She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art History. Schönefeld’s art examines the contemporary social and political climate. Through unusual mediums, objects and videos, the artist questions the contemporary roles of artists, exploring the relationship between art, blockbuster movies and the present digital age. Her stories imagine a dystopian world where, due to drastic political and environmental shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival.
Selected recent exhibitions include: ‘Some Demonstrations’, Manifesta / Manifestina, Zurich (2016); solo show at CoGalleries, Berlin (2016); solo show at Fahrbereitschaft, Berlin (2017); Diskurs Gallery, Berlin (2017); Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi, Venice (2018); Goethe Institute, Beijing (2018); BBA Gallery Award Exhibition, Berlin (2018); solo show at Berlinische Galerie, 12 x 12 IBB Video Space (2018); Villa Heike, Berlin (2019); Lage Egal Gallery, Berlin (2019); Mitte Media Festival, Berlin (2019); Made in NY Media Center by IFP, New York (2019); Bamhaus in Luxembourg (2019); Aram Art Museum, Korea (2019).
The future scenarios in schönefeld’s video installations are intricately linked to current political, environmental and social world issues. In video projects like #freejulian assange #freedomofpress #femaleheroes, #hackerontherun, #trilogyoftomorrow, #contamination, #leftwingprepper, #pandemics, #conspiracy & #enemywithin schönefeld tells stories of hackers, journalists, environmental activists and “out of the box people” in general. The focus lies on radical changes and extreme phenomena like democracies developing into autocracies, escape & persecution of political activists, prepping & survival techniques, hacking & whistleblowing, environmental disasters like nuclear accidents, radical digital inventions like the darknet, conspiracy theories and recently on pandemics.
Nina E. Schönefeld, Get The Truth (2020)
print collage, 30 x 40cm
Nina E. Schönefeld, Truth Radio (2019)
installation, found materials: plastic, metal, electronics
Schönefeld’s print collages emerged from a series of media works published on instagram. While her installations made from vintage media objects linked to both autocracies surveillance and the resistance movements struggling against it – old radios, walkie-talkies, monitors, microphones, etc – come out of her video installation Classified Hacker (2019). Echoing the themes of her video work Born To Run (B.T.R.) (2019) and Classified Hacker, Schönefeld addresses the increasing strength of authoritarian autocracies, and the rising restrictions upon journalists and the freedom of speech, as well as the possible extradition of Julian Assange to the US and what this could mean in the future for the situation of independent publicists, whistleblowers and journalists worldwide. Prevalent throughout Schönefeld’s activist practice is a call to start fighting for basic democratic rights.
Varvara Shavrova
Varvara Shavrova, Migrant Crisis Series (12) (2015-16)
graphite and acrylic on watercolour paper, 25 x 28.5 cm
Varvara Shavrova is a visual artist born in the USSR who lives and works in London and Dublin. Shavrova’s practice is focused on excavating the layers of her family’s history through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories. In engaging memory, nostalgia and reflection, Shavrova creates installations that make connections between historic and current narratives, between the archival and the present. Shavrova studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, and received her Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. Shavrova received Culture Ireland awards for her solo exhibitions in Beijing, Shanghai and Berlin, British Council award for individual artists, and Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship awards. Shavrova curated international visual arts projects, including The Sea is Limit exhibition at York Art Gallery (2018) and at Virginia Commonwealth University Arts Qatar Gallery in Doha (2019), examining migration, borders and refugee crisis, Giving Voice exhibition of Mary Robinson’s presidential archive in Ballina library in County Mayo, and Map Games: Dynamics of Change, international art and architecture project, at Today Art Museum Beijing, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, CAOS Centre for Contemporary Arts, Terni, Italy (2008-2010). Shavrova’s works are included in the collections of the Office of Public Works, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the MOMENTUM Collection Berlin, the Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art, Minsheng Art Museum Beijing, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.
Migrant Crisis – Artist Statement
My work examines the themes of migration, borders and borderlines, as they are manifested in Cartesian, territorial, geo-political, and cultural sense. As a Russian who has lived in London and Beijing and now based in Ireland, I belong to the category of many migrant artists who have travelled literally and metaphorically across borders, observing the many ironies and intricacies that they entail, of arbitrary separations and unnatural divisions. Yet in my the works on borders I also observe the long meandering border of rivers and streams, separating land over thousands of years, thereby questioning the relationships between natural and manmade borders, tapping into the ancient origin of societies and cultures fundamentally shaped by such divisions and crossings.
Despite historical notion that borders around the world are permanent, the reality is very different, as borders remain fluid and constantly challenged. Mobility of national borders becomes particularly evident in the light of recent migration from Africa, Asia and the Middle East into Eastern, Central and Western Europe, leading to redefinition and challenges of the existing borders, introduction of tougher border control systems and establishment of new border ethics, that in turn is leading to inevitable transformation of our understanding of the meaning of the term ‘borders’. I am interested in further investigating the mobility of borders in the light of continuing migration across Europe, and in particular developing new works that will reflect on the current state of borders, migration and migrant’s rights.
Variety of approaches I use in order to explore, reflect and comment on migration and borders are multi faceted, and I often work collaboratively, employing a variety of media, including painting, drawing, installation, video, photography and elements of performance. I present my work in the context of traditional institutions, including exhibitions in museums and galleries, whilst exploring alternative approaches and ways of engaging with new audiences, and placing my projects in a wider context of diverse social platforms. I am interested in developing the idea of interpreting the themes of borders, migration and memory through collaborative, participatory and outreach projects, and exploring the themes of borders and migration in the context of projects themselves, where performance borders with sound installation, video migrates into painting, drawings merge with projections.
‘Migrant Crisis’ project renders out the ideas of recent peoples’ movements along, across and through European borders. The work is realized as a deluge of time based drawings created in order to inform a possible end point. These drawings represent the unfolding story associated with the “refugee crisis”, as it has been labeled in the press. I have chosen to catalogue the daily routine of this crisis, its rise in importance through politico-montage and its subsequent fall to the latter regions of the press cycle. In one of the project’s iterations, I have removed it from its paper based origination and created a clustering of the original time based drawings in a looped video, where the work becomes a multiple projection that changes its context from reportage to a multi-level screen installation, that also stimulates a multi sensory response from the viewer.
David Szauder
David Szauder, Hanging Around (2020)
video animation, loop
David Szauder, Motivators (2020)
video animation, loop
Media artist David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.
David Szauder has participated in a variety of international projects as artist and curator. In cooperation with MOMENTUM, previous projects include:
“Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014); “INTERSECTION”: Film and Video Art Panel Discussion for Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival, 2014); “THRESHOLDS”: Performance, Exhibition, Discussion (.CHB, Berlin Art Week, 2013); “THRESHOLDS” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013-2014); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “Mass & Mess” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013).
David Szauder, Sunday Meditation
video animation, loop
David Szauder, Kinetic Sunglasses Machine (2020)
video animation, loop
4 Easy Pieces – Video Sketches – Artist Statement
These four animations, from an ongoing series of video sketches, are hand drawn animated collages incorporating family photos and found footage. They are kinds of kinetic systems, structures, moving like the ‘perpetuum mobile’. In my case, the perpetuum mobile is the metaphor of the continually changing inner world of mine. There are a good number of nodes which are connected like impossible machines, and the movements of these nodes create an impossible hierarchy or dominations between the elements of the structure. Occasionally the system strives for completion, but these operations are just alibis, the real aim is to keep the movement endless, the structure closed and the hierarchy sustainable. Easy. Like these sketches.
ELYSIUM @ Positions Berlin Art Fair 2020
[fve] https://vimeo.com/473730815 [/fve]
ELYSIUM INSTALLATION PHOTOS @ Positions Berlin Art Fair 2020
ELYSIUM OPENING PHOTOS @ Positions Berlin Art Fair 2020
BEYOND ELYSIUM INSTALLATION PHOTOS
BEYOND ELYSIUM OPENING PHOTOS
ELYSIUM
Group Exhibition at
POSITIONS BERLIN Art Fair
10 – 13 September 2020
@ Tempelhof Airport, Hanger 3-4 / Booth C5
Columbiadamm 10, 10965 Berlin
NASSER ALMULHIM // CHRISSY ANGLIKER // TOM BIBER // ANDREAS BLANK // CLAUS BRUNSMANN // CLAUDIA CHASELING // KERSTIN DZEWIOR // DANIEL GRÜTTNER // DAVID KRIPPENDORFF // VIA LEWANDOWSKY // MILOVAN DESTIL MARKOVIC // SARA MASÜGER // ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEV // KIRSTEN PALZ // DAVID REGHER // STEFAN RINCK // JÖRG SCHALLER // MAIK SCHIERLOH // KERSTIN SERZ // OTTO PIENE // ABBAS YOUSIF // JINDRICH ZEITHAMML // IREEN ZIELONKA
Curated By
Constanze Kleiner, Stephan von Wiese, Rits-Volloch, Frances Stafford
In Partnership With
MORE INFO > >
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MOMENTUM and
co-present:
HOMELAND in TRANSIT
EXHIBITION:
1 October – 29 November 2020
1 October – 1 November 2020: Wednesday – Sunday 1-7pm
2 – 29 November 2020: Due to the November Lockdown, we are open only by appointment on info@momentumworldwide.org
VIDEO TALKS:
3 October at 4 – 7pm
Angelika Li moderates Kongkee in Discussion with Yukihiro Taguchi
Curated by Angelika Li
Featuring:
May FUNG // Kongkee // LAW Yuk Mui // LEUNG Chi Wo // MAP Office // Yukihiro TAGUCHI
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Curatorial Statement
The word ‘homeland’ evokes a physical and permanent form on the surface, yet when we dive a little deeper into our memories and emotions, the word urges us to reflect on its complex and shifting nature. The inaugural exhibition of HOMELAND in TRANSIT in 2019 channeled narratives of ‘homeland’ from Hong Kong perspectives: the floating islands, borders and boundaries, unfolding histories of diaspora, the metamorphosis of cultural identity, colonial ideology and beyond.
Despite many differences in our backgrounds, the sense of homeland is constantly being questioned and reinterpreted. How do artists perceive these transformations and how do they represent it in their art?
In only a few months, our world has changed dramatically and each word in this title has developed a wider scope of meanings and expanded relevance: we feel an urgent need to further communicate and encourage more exchanges and discussions. The HOMELAND in TRANSIT VIDEO TALKS, which were launched in Basel in February 2020, continue the exchange and lead to this exhibition taking place at MOMENTUM, with time-based works by 7 artists from Hong Kong and a Berlin-based Japanese artist exploring the notions of migration, self-searching, cultural identity, memory, and our resilience as humans. Water – as an intrinsic and characteristic element of Hong Kong – occupies a strong presence.
Visit Chapter Two of HOMELAND in TRANSIT Here > >
May Fung
Image of a City, 1990, Video, 11 min
With the rapid urbanisation of Hong Kong since the 1970s and an influx of migrants from China, how do Hongkongers perceive the changes of their city and their cultural identity? May Fung is one of the most influential video artists at the forefront of experimental practice in Hong Kong for over three decades. Her work often interweaves local history, cultural landscapes, politics and poetics. Her two works Image of a City (1990) and She Said Why Me (1989) offer images of Hong Kong through a time tunnel from the 1967 Hong Kong riots to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, with footage drawn from the Hong Kong Government Record Service. Through cityscapes marked with architectural references that reflect the parallel worlds of both Chinese and British, the artist channels her emotions and memories along the pivotal transformations and negotiations between the two cultural worlds coexisting in one city. The anxiety and frustration expressed in the works have become self-fulfilling prophecies. What the footage depicts keeps resurfacing through our timeline, as seen in the recent movements in Hong Kong and other parts of the world.
Recordings of scholar Ackbar Abbas’ lecture on the notion of ‘culture in a space of disappearance’ guides us through Image of a City (1990): “Hong Kong…has never seized being a port, a door, a threshold, a passageway. It is a space in transit. Everything is provisional, temporary and ad hoc.” Overlapping the voice of Abbas in the video is Margaret Thatcher’s speech on ‘one country, two systems’. Abbas described Hong Kong as “not so much a place as a space of transit,” whose residents consider themselves as transients and migrants on their way from China to the next place. What is disappearing? Is it something visible or intangible? Is it our heritage and identity, or our sense of belonging? Is it the memory of our past, or our imagination of the future?
She Said Why Me, 1989, Video, 8 min
May Fung’s narratives of disappearance and cityscapes linger with a strong sense of frustration and self-searching in She Said Why Me (1989), in which a blindfolded female protagonist starts her journey from a Tin Hau temple where traditionally fishermen in Hong Kong worship and pray to the deities for protection in the waters. The artist uses the temple as a form of attachment to her heritage. Interwoven with historical footage of focusing on women as objects of surveillance, the protagonist transits into the modern cityscape of the Hong Kong district Central, finding her way among the monuments which represent the colonial era. At one point, she loses her blindfold yet she still moves like a sleep-walker. When she comes to realise her blindfold is no longer there, she starts running aimlessly, but from what and where to? Seemingly lost, with a sense of displacement and despair, the woman acts as the artist’s outlet of emotions through this process of self-searching, venting her frustrations about her gender, cultural identity, the transformation of the city. At the pivotal junction on Queen’s Road Central, she turns and stares back sharply at the camera with anger and fear: ‘Why me?’ She then finds her way, though blindfolded, back to where she came from. That leads us back to the sea, the notion of water.
May Fung (b. Hong Kong 1952, lives and works in Hong Kong) is one of the most influential video artists at the forefront of experimental practice for over three decades in Hong Kong. Her work often interweaves local history, cultural landscapes and politics. Fung is one of the founders of Videotage, a Hong Kong collective promoting experimental video and new media art and the founder of Arts and Culture Outreach, a cultural organisation that has transformed the Foo Tak Building on Hennessy Road into a vertical arts village with artist studios, a bookstore and a rooftop garden. Fung is also an active arts educator, filmmaker, curator and art critic. Her recent exhibition includes Five Artists: Sites Encountered (M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2019).
Kongkee
I Can’t Find Myself, Most of The Time, 2020, Animation, 1 min 56 sec
Greek philosopher Heraclitus had a famous analogy about life: “You cannot step twice into the same river”, which recalls the Chinese philosophy of change in the Yijing (I-Ching or Book of Changes): the only certainty is change, as such each moment is unique. Kongkees latest animations, created in 2020, are anchored by these concepts. Time cannot travel backward, everything is always in a state of becoming. During the process of making animation, with the help of software and tools, characters can flow fluidly back and forth in time, as though existing beyond time itself. Travelling between dimensions, pasts and futures and grabbing hold of the most precious moments; however, the ending has always already been drawn out for the animation characters. In “reality” we are unable to see the future and there is no way of reading the script of our lives. We are part of the current of time. There is a feeling that our destiny, unfinished, is still to be written.
Both videos shown here are silent, focusing the viewers on the movements and visual expressions of the artist. Kongkee uses I can’t find myself, most of the time (2020) as a mouthpiece to project his state of mind. The motion and gestures of the walking man are those of a sleepwalker or someone in a state of dreaming. To the artist, dreaming also feels like walking through water. The walking man has a strong sense of direction but where is he heading? Could it be read as an analogy of the discoordination between the mind and body, consciousness and physical strength? In the water and above the surface, time is lapsing between the two realms. The work becomes a meditation for the artist to release his emotions from what can perhaps be felt – distress and powerlessness. Like a self-reflection, with his head being trapped in a box through the complex process of thinking, he does not seem to be able to escape from the situation.
River, 2020, Animation, 5 min 3 sec
In Kongkee’s River (2020) the familiar daily objects in Hong Kong are floating in the same direction as in I can’t find myself. The colours are vibrant yet the manifestation of the beaten, powerless or lifeless objects evoke fear, melancholia and darkness. What are their stories? Where are they going? Fear often comes from the unknown, uncertainty and instability. Based on the artist’s sensitivity in terms of challenging global situations, people are getting closer and building solidarity, exporting and importing ideas. Along this line of thought, the idea that construction is built on destruction is once again obvious. In reality, we are quite uncertain as to what is coming in the future and can we really write the script and storyboard of our lives like in an animation? In the artist’s words: “there is a feeling that our destiny, unfinished, is still to be written.” One might easily be drowned in this melancholic blackhole of current affairs and situations in her or his homeland. Humans are resilient. By going forward, one shall see hope. In the darkest hour, the slightest ray of light will illuminate the darkness and show us the way.
Kongkee (b. Malaysia 1977, lives and works in Hong Kong) is an animation director and comic artist who is inspired by his city Hong Kong as a natural subject as seen in his comic book Travel to Hong Kong with Blur for his collaboration with the British band BLUR’s album The Magic Whip in 2015. Kongkee’s ‘Comics Detournements: La literature de Hong Kong en bande dessinée’ (co. Chihoi) gained international acclaim in the literary arts communities. In 2017, his comic and co-directed animation short Departure received the Japan TBS channel “DigiCon6 Asia Gold Mention”. In 2018, Kongkee launched a feature-length animation project Dragon’s Delusion with a Kickstarter campaign. He was a member of the jury for the International Competition of the Internationales Trickfilm-Festival, Stuttgart, 2019. The artist graduated from the Fine Arts Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2000. He received his MFA Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong in 2005.
Law Yuk Mui
On Junk Bay, The Plant, 1990-present, Video, 2 min 56 sec, with Cyanotype of plants
Law Yuk Mui’s On Junk Bay, The Plant (1990-present) leads us to revisit the geographical history and metamorphosis of Junk Bay, later known as Tseung Kwan O (TKO), an area of reclaimed land in Hong Kong where the artist used to live. The earliest inhabitants of the area can be traced back to the 13th Century, and major settlements date back to the late 16th Century when small fishing villages were formed in the area. With its geographical advantage on the opposite side of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, shipping industries emerged in Junk Bay the 1960s until 1982 when the local government began the development of TKO as a new town which saw a chain of major reclamation constructions. Notably, the government never uses the old name ‘Junk Bay’.
Law Yuk Mui’s lens not only captures the natural landscape of the area but also the history of its phenomenal land development through reclamation where foreign plants migrated, were transplanted and re-rooted. Through her investigation of Hong Kong cartography and passion in geology, the narratives delve deeper into the contemplation of migration, native vs foreign, borders and the relationship, and negotiation between human and nature.
Law Yuk Mui usies plants as metaphors, where foreign plants are like migrants and refugees transplanted to a new land – as in her parents’ migration from China to Hong Kong. As the speed in Hong Kong is always so fast, the artist strategically paces the video in slow motion to prolong 15 seconds of real life to create time to engage the audience with her subject matter. The distorted sound is excerpted from Hayao Miyazaki’s animation ‘Castle in the Sky’ with its tree trunks growing into the sky offering a sense of future and hope.
Using image, sound and installation as her mediums of preference, and adopting the methodology of field study and collecting, Law Yuk Mui often intervenes in the mundane space and daily life of the city and catches the physical traces of history, psychological pathways of people, the marks of time and political power in relation to geographic space. Law often digs beyond the surface, through which she recovers fragments of narratives and micro histories.
Law Yuk Mui (b. Hong Kong 1982, lives and works in Hong Kong) have been extensively exhibited in Asia, including: Michikusa, Art Tower Mito, Japan (2020); Jogja Biennale (2019); From Whence the Waves Came, Para Site (2018); Art Basel Hong Kong (2018); Future Life Handbook, Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China (2017-2018); Victoria East: FUSE Artist Residency, Videotage, Hong Kong (2017); Talkover/Handover 2.0, 1a space, Hong Kong (2017); Busan International Short Film Festival, South Korea (2017).
Law Yuk-mui received The Award for Young Artist (Media Art Category) from the Hong Kong Arts Development and the Excellence Award (Media Art Category) of The 23rd ifva Awards in 2018. Law graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA). She is the co-founder of the artist-run organisation Rooftop Institute in Hong Kong.
Leung Chi Wo
My Name is Victoria, 2008, Video, 21 min 30 sec
The notion of memory is highlighted in the historic and colonial narratives in Leung Chi Wo’s video ‘My name is Victoria’ (2008). Leung’s practice primarily draws from references and archives with history as a subject matter. He often digs up small details and reveals unknown facts. Eleven years after Hong Kong’s sovereignty changed hands from Britain to China in 1997, the artist created this work in 2008 to explore the perception and interpretation of the name ‘Victoria’. This video work unveils an unfamiliar route in the city: starting from Victoria Road in Kennedy Town, the border of Victoria which was the former capital of the crown colony, to Aberdeen where the British, under the reign of Queen Victoria, landed for the first time in Hong Kong in 1841. Through an open call on the internet, the artist collected forty women’s stories about their name ‘Victoria’, which are narrated by a single female voice in a distinctive soft British accent with music by Franz Schubert playing in the background.
The light-hearted atmosphere in the video juxtaposes the heavy cultural and political issues the work is concerned with. The name ‘Victoria’ carries a majestic air and represents a time in the past in the context of Hong Kong. In these stories, one notices how different generations think about naming, and the artist’s curiosity on how a name is reinterpreted over time and across cultural beliefs. Once a foreign name is transplanted, new meanings are born. Leung brings up these multiple layers of naming with irony and wit. The proper phonetic tranliteration for Victoria in Cantonese is ‘Wai Dor Lei Nga’ which connotes a majestic and elegant air. But it is commonly written as ‘Wik Dor Lei’ literally meaning ‘Region of Profit’ which reflects certain local values and also contradicts or even ridicules the regal background of the name. How does history and the knowledge of history shape our perception and self-recognition?
Leung Chi Wo (b. Hong Kong 1968, works and lives in Hong Kong) is a visual artist whose reflective practice combines historical exploration with conceptual inquiry within a contemporary urban landscape. Ranging from photography, video, text, performance to installation, he is concerned with the undetermined relationship between conception, perception, and understanding, especially in relation to site and history within cultural/political frameworks. He was featured in the first Hong Kong pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and has exhibited in major international institutions including Tate Modern in London, NRW Forum in Dusseldorf, Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, The International Studio & Curatorial Program, and Queens Museum in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include Something There and Never There, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, 2018; This Is My Song, Rokeby, London, 2016; Tracing some places, The Mills Gallery, Hong Kong, 2015; and Press the Button… OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 2015. His work is extensively represented in public collections such as M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong Legislative Council, and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris/San Francisco. Leung has been visiting artist at Institut Kunst of Hochschule Luzern; Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais; Monash University, Melbourne; and Australian National University. He has participated in artist-in-residence programs in New York, Banff, Vienna, and Sapporo. He is co-founder of Para/Site Art Space and is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Media, the City University of Hong Kong since 2010.
MAP Office
MAP Office’s ‘The Book of Waves’ (2018) brings to mind the often forgotten natural geography of Hong Kong, which consists of more than 260 individual islands, though it is better known as a densely populated modern cityscape. Engulfed in the sound of waves recorded from Hong Kong’s Shek O Beach and Big Wave Bay, MAP Office’s video animation of 250 hand-drawn waves and ripples in the nihonga style takes as its starting point the ‘Ha Bun Shu’ of Mori Yuzan, an archive of waves drawn from the Edo period. To achieve the quality of an animation, the artist duo had to imagine what the missing links of waves would be in order to weave the stories together. The traditional technique of handwork merges with new technology through the form of animation. MAP Office construct their own representation of the oceans around the world, which is the core of their current research.
MAP Office (Laurent Gutierrez, b. Casablanca 1966 and Valérie Portefaix, b. Saint-Étienne 1969, both live and work in Hong Kong) is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Gutierrez and Portefaix. This duo of artists has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression. MAP Office projects have been shown in over 100 exhibitions at venues including the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris) and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (Beijing), around 35 Biennales and Trienniales around the world with five contributions to the Venice Biennale in Art and Architecture (2000, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010). Their cross-disciplinary practice has been the subject of a monograph, MAP OFFICE – Where the Map is the Territory (2011). MAP Office received the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2013. Their recent research projects have a strong focus on the ocean and have been shown internationally, including The Story of Amanami, Triennale di Milano 2019; Ghost Island. inaugural Thailand Biennale 2018; Islands, Constellations and Galapagos, Yokohama Biennale 2017; Desert Islands, Singapore Biennale 2016. Their work has been collected internationally by private and private institutions including M+ Museum, Hong Kong; FRAC / Institut d’Art Contemporain (IAC), Villeurbanne, France; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing, China; Deutsche Bank Collection, Hong Kong; Momentum Collection, Berlin; MIACA, Tokyo.
Not only does this work reflect the ocean condition, it also metaphorically represents the life of our city as ups and downs, calm and unsettling, in between the foreseeable and unpredictable. The water element recalls the controversial theory by French scientist Jacques Benveniste that water retains its own memory. If these are all true, can we presume that water also carries evidence of our history?
The Book of Waves, 2018, Animation, 2 min
250 hand drawings on computer screen inspired by Ha Bun Shu by Mori Yuzan, 1917
Sound recorded around Shek O Headland, 2018
Inkjet print on 160gsm Japanese Art Paper
Paper: 27 x 16.2 cm; Box: 28.4 x 17.6 cm
Yukihiro Taguchi
Magu (2012) is a stop-motion animation set in Male, Maldives, by Yukihiro Taguchi, dealing with the objects and memories of a place of transit. Male, the capital of the island country Maldives, is a famous transit hotspot for tourists travelling to the other islands. The majority of its inhabitants consist of locals and migrants. Roaming around the island, the artist encounters the colourful island fabrics, rhizomic and absorbing imprints from daily elements of the vibrant island life and the local environment – wall textures, manhole covers, iron grills and street signs. These fabrics become records of memories and spirits of the place and people. During Taguchi’s stay, he learns from the locals that certain colours represent particular cultural, political or religious ideals and identities, and some colours should be avoided. Colours signify different cultural, social and political meanings in every culture.
Terasu is a Japanese word meaning ‘to illuminate’. In his eponymous video, Taguchi contemplates the notion of darkness and light. Invited to create a site-specific project in Arnsberg, Germany, during the winter, the artist asked himself what would the strategy be when the sky goes dark so early? Taguchi applies his survival instinct, using fire he creates by the most primitive method of hand drilling. The artist draws with the fire across the town in lines and signs, creating soul-like energies, like a magic touch harmonising the contradictory yin and yang, using fire to draw a boat and a waterscape. At the end, the fire is transferred onto torches, and the people from the town draw the signs that represent themselves and their place. These are records of the collective memories and solidarity of people.
Berlin-based Japanese artist Yukihiro Taguchi (b. Osaka 1980, lives and works in Berlin) is known for his unique performative installations and community-based projects which are composed of drawing, performance, animation, and installation. The environment and the interaction with its people are his main source of inspiration from which he interweaves the local stories, traditions, and cultures together to explore spatial experiences, energies, and values in our urban landscapes. Taguchi’s recent exhibitions include Discovery in Kanaiwa, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Japan (2019); Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale, Niigata, Japan (2018); Open ART Biennale 2017, Örebro, Sweden; Project Patch Pass at MILL6 Foundation (2016); and Yukihiro Taguchi, Kunstverein Arnsberg, Germany. The artist graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Painting Department (B.A. in oil painting) in 2004.
Magu, 2012, Stop-Motion Video, 4 min 49 sec
Terasu, Stop-Motion Video, 4 min 44 sec
Hope is not a form of guarantee, it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark. – John Berger
HOMELAND in TRANSIT Video Talks
Video Talks: LEUNG Chi Wo & Valerie Portefaix/MAP Office in dialogue with Angelika Li
Video Talks: May Fung & Law Yuk Mui in conversation with Angelika Li
Video Talks: Kongkee & Yukihiro Taguchi in conversation with Angelika Li
Curator Bio
With expertise and experience in the history of art and architecture as well as cultural management, Angelika Li is committed to engaging with the essence of local culture, heritage and valued stories, and driving a continuous dialogue between local and international communities. Li is the founder of the curatorial project HOMELAND in TRANSIT and is the co-founder of PF25 cultural projects, a research initiative focusing on the everyday life and ecologies of Switzerland and Hong Kong. In 2015, Li was the founding director of MILL6 Foundation bringing it to ICOM museum status and the Award for Arts Promotion by Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2016.
Her previous projects include Tracing some places. Leung Chi Wo (2015); Textile Thinking – The International Symposium at Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art 2016 co- organised with Zhejiang Art Museum; Social Fabric. New works by Kwan Cheung Chi and Mariana Hahn in collaboration with curator David Elliott (2016), Old Master Q: What The @#$% Is Going On? Original Works by Alphonso Wong (2014); Beyond the Paper Screen – An Exhibition of Japanese Erotic Prints from The Uragami Collection (2013) and NEW INK: an exhibition of ink art by post 1970 artists from The Yiqingzhai Collection (2013).
HOMELAND in TRANSIT Logo Design Concept
The Homeland in Transit identity is a neutral alphanumeric typeface with monospace structure mixed with Morse code. Based on the everyday elements we encounter on journeys and travels – train station and airport display boards, baggage tags, boarding passes, electronic tickets – the layout is a mix of simple information presented to be universally and easily understood with incomprehensible codes and symbols applied for professional or technical purposes. Letters, numbers, dots and dashes flow erratically to fill whatever area it needs to cover.
Designed by Donald Mak
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
LIVE VIDEO ARTIST TALK
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SHINGO YOSHIDA
Shingo Yoshida (b. in 1974, Tokyo) received his MA with highest honors from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson in Nice France in 2004. In 2005 he earned a post-graduate diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France, and subsequently in 2007 he received another post-graduate diploma in the Program La Seine of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des BeauxArts de Paris.
He completed the prestigious international artist residencies at Villa Arson Nice France – and was awarded the Fellowship of Overseas Study Programme for Artists by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Government. Yoshida’s work has been shown in many international exhibitions, including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, Chile; Arte tv Creative; Based in Berlin by Klaus Biesenbach, Christine Macel and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
In 2017, MOMENTUM invited him to show his film and photographs made in Siberia in an exhibition for the UN Conference on Climate Change, COP23. Subsequently, his work came to be acquired by the Art Collection of the Ministry of Environment, Germany. In 2016, his film works entered the collections of three major institutions in Berlin: the Berlinische Galerie, the Akademie der Künste, and Fluentum.
I travel to many countries around the globe, which makes my work site-specific. It is essential that I adapt to the lifestyle and social codes of each new environment. What I have learned while searching for almost forgotten and hidden legends or myths is that humans live in a state of powerlessness in the face of nature. My existence as a human is a humble one. And yet, over the course of my life, this sense of meaninglessness has been periodically disrupted by encounters with the magnificent, especially in nature.
My main goal as an artist is to reconstruct my memories of such experiences. Paradoxically, since becoming aware of how small my own existence is, I have felt the need to investigate it. I do this by means of comparison: I search for legends and myths hidden somewhere in the world that are in danger of being forgotten. This is why I continue to undertake long journeys.
I believe that by examining societies at the micro-level (as micro-societies), there are many hidden stories to be discovered. I try to find micro-societies and investigate their cultures in order to achieve a broader understanding of the world.
My work is a journey, so to speak, that entails everything from the moment I leave my house until I reach my destination. Life is a series of instant moments, and I think my challenge is not to ask whether I should live earnestly or what I have reached, but how I lived and what kind of work I am going to leave behind. Therefore, my work changes and grows with the course of my own life.
[Shingo Yoshida]
HEATHROW AIRPORT: Corona Diary (2020)
Video, 7 min 49 sec
On loan for COVIDecameron, courtesy of the artist.
Heathrow Airport: Corona Diary (2020) was shot at the end of April, while the artist was en-route to his native Japan, when many countries worldwide were still in lockdown. Yoshida had not set out to make an artwork out of his journey home, but was so captivated by the anomaly of an empty airport – normally one of the world’s busiest temples to transit – that he could not resist recording the surreal spectacle.
Like an explorer documenting his discovery, traversing endless escalators and moving walkways from one empty hall to another, the artist glimpses birds flying through deserted terminals, safety announcements made for no one, advertising posters rendered oddly inappropriate in a time of social distancing.
[Rachel Rits-Volloch]
THE SUMMIT (2019/20)
Video (4K ProRes 422 HQ), 23 min 54 sec
Translations of the HAIKU in the video:
下界まで断崖富士の壁に立つ 山口誓子
[Standing atop a sheer cliff of Mt. Fuji continuing down to the world below]
Seishi YAMAGUCHI
大沢崩れ覗きてすくむ登山靴 北舟子 (祖父)
[Looking down Osawa Kuzure my feet tremble]
Hokushushi
初富士に一礼頂に父の句碑 南舟子 (父 : 菊次郎)
[Making a bow to Mt. Fuji on New Year, where stands a stone tablet inscribed with my father’s haiku]
Nanshushi
This is the portrait of the artist as a young man. Shingo Yoshida was born in 1974 (nineteen hundred and seventy-four) – the same year a group of people chose to carry a giant stone to the highest peak of Mount Fuji, the “Emblem of Japan” that has been revered since ancient times. This symbolic gesture executed by the artist’s father ‒ and grandfather ‒ was as reckless as the young artist’s decision 23 (twentythree) years later to leave his country of birth and to move to France. His artistic work is from the beginning largely autobiographical, the long list of travels and exhibitions describes accurately the process by which a young man reaches maturity and self-awareness. But the exhibition shows something more, this is an invitation “au voyage”. Shingo Yoshida is not walking alone, we are always on his side, travelling with him carefully in the movement of the images, we are freezing with him as he climbs to the top of Mount Fuji, we are starving with him, then resting together – with him and with the ghosts. We are looking out over the wide sea of clouds, we are walking in the night with him and abandoning our fears in the darkness… Like Dedalus, the genius artist and fictional alter ego of his creator, the Irish poet James Joyce, Shingo Yoshida is “A man of genius (who) makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery”. Like Deadalus, the famous figure of Greek mythology and father of Icarus, Shingo Yoshida bravely ventures into the labyrinth of landscapes and cities, and we are following him to the exit, gently climbing to the summit of the mountain and/or wandering through the gallery space.
Shingo Yoshida is also this impressionist painter, thirsting for panoramas and freedom. He is this photographer who paints and draws with light, he is literally that camera man who continuously fixes everything throughout his journeys, his body is a photo tripod, his head the camera and his eyes the lens, he can’t help but think of the world in artistic and poetic frames. Since this first mile-stone, lead by his forefathers, the artist travels the world in search of the marvellous, he represents the ability to wander, detached from the society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of the particular. Strolling through the cities of the world, Shingo Yoshida is a Flâneur, an urban explorer but he can also contemplate a landscape, look at a stone, peruse a forest or walk over the clouds. But listen carefully, the artist is talking and this is not a monologue. His language is a vocabulary of images, it is also a language coloured with lights. “Summit” ‒ the name of this exhibition does not only mean the peak of a mountain, it also means a meeting, and this is exactly what happens tonight. We are here ‒ attentive viewers ‒ reunited to celebrate the artist Shingo Yoshida and his own vision of the world. And we are here ‒ attentive listeners ‒ reunited with Shingo Yoshida, exactly 23 (twenty-three) years after he left to live his dreams.
Pierre Granoux, artist‒curator
(started in Gibraltar, finished in Berlin, Jan 28 ̶ Feb 4, 2020)
mutopia 5
Claudia Chaseling
– Spatial Painting –
At the Australian Embassy Berlin
30 June – 30 October 2020
[Currently restricted public access due to COVID-19 regulations]
MORE INFO > >
David Szauder
Light Space Modulator
In Homage to Moholy-Nagy
Viewing by Appointment
5 June – 30 September 2020
Please contact: staff@momentumworldwide.org
@ MOMENTUM
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
MORE INFO > >
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mutopia 5
Claudia Chaseling
Spatial Painting
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
Design by Emilio Rapanà
30 June – 30 October 2020
At the Australian Embassy Berlin
Wallstrasse 76-79
[Currently restricted public access due to COVID-19 regulations]
Splashes of bright colors in biomorphic forms. Shapes and hues redolent of crackling, explosive energy. Large format works overflowing the gallery walls. Visitors to an exhibition of Claudia Chaseling’s work are confronted with a psychotropic saturation of visual information interlaced with occasional text and the URLs of source materials for Chaseling’s research. For what seems initially to be pure abstraction, is in fact so much more. Chaseling began her “mutopia” series in 2011, honing her technique of Spatial Painting to focus on visualizing the nuclear chain that leads to radioactive contamination and its mutative effect on living things. Chaseling’s inquiry into the ways that abstract, non-representational painting can communicate narratives with a socio-political meaning – namely, the radioactive contamination of depleted uranium munitions – became the subject of her practice-based PhD, awarded by the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra in 2019. Chaseling’s body of work, informed by her dissertation, is on show at the Australian Embassy in her own home city of Berlin – a tribute to her 21 years of living between Australia and Germany and the Embassy’s commitment to highlighting Australian-German artistic links, even in these precarious times.. This exhibition was realized during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and resulting lockdown, at a time when most other cultural institutions were canceling or postponing their programs. The new site-specific work made especially for this exhibition was able to be completed in time only because the artist obtained her materials the day before shops closed for the lockdown. And while the eyes and hearts of the world were focused on the viral threat and aftermath of COVID-19, Claudia Chaseling, working in her studio throughout the lockdown, was addressing another kind of insidious invisible killer: radiation and its repercussions.
“mutopia 5” is an exhibition of Spatial Painting featuring 15 works, ranging in media from painting to watercolor, sculpture, print, and video. Encompassing a decade of Claudia Chaseling’s artistic practice, this body of work takes us on a psychedelic journey through the nuclear chain leading to depleted uranium and its toxic aftermath. Chaseling’s preoccupation with the mutations caused by radiation poisoning is somehow rendered even more relevant now, in the time of COVID-19, when suddenly we are all learning so much more about the mutations of viral strains, about the mistakes made at a cellular level, the glitches in genetic code causing mutations. As the title of this exhibition suggests, this is the 5th iteration of the “mutopia” body of work. And true to its subject matter, with each iteration, the exhibition mutates into something new, adapting to the architecture of its space with the creation of new site-specific works. “Mutopia” – Claudia Chaseling’s verbal paradox, comingling the terms mutation and utopia – has been her core subject matter since 2011, with the creation of “Murphy the Mutant”, Chaseling’s graphic novel of watercolors animated on video. This narrative work effectively describes her fixation upon the enduring environmental devastation of nuclear waste and munitions, transposing into a paradoxically sweet atomic allegory, akin to a children’s book, the horrific aftermath of the way we wage war in the modern world.
Illustrating the trajectory of her practice over the past decade, this early work – and her only video to date – is shown in this exhibition alongside Chaseling’s newest 9-meter long site-specific Spatial Painting, “mutopia 5”, made fore the Australian Embassy Berlin,. The visual language Chaseling has created and the imagery in her work consists of distorted landscapes, poisoned places, mutated creatures and plants whose deformation is caused by radioactive contamination. Her images are not predictions of some post-apocalyptic future, but rather the result of her research into historic and ongoing ways in which we continue to poison our planet with the byproducts of wars and nuclear accidents. To ground the psychedelic fantasy of her imagery in the harsh realities of the nuclear chain her work exposes, Chaseling embeds within her paintings quotations and URLs referencing her source materials, mapping the places polluted by depleted uranium, an environmental contaminant that is a derivative waste product of nuclear power and nuclear weapons technology.
The tension in Claudia Chaseling’s practice of Spatial Painting lies precisely in the gap between its form and its content. Visually striking, beautifully colorful, the work is seductive, attracting the eye to its complexity of layers; in the artist’s own words “dissolving landscapes into compositions of toxic colour that comprise negative shapes and abstract forms”. Because the topics Chaseling addresses are ugly, she strives to keep her work from becoming too aesthetic, using negative space, leaving gaps within her imagery to leave room for interpretation. Just as her work can be read on the levels of both form and content, Chaseling builds a duality of perspective into the foundations of her practice. Striving for the moment “when a painting becomes an environment”, the artist “proposes a novel understanding of spatiality, one that reaches beyond formalism, reaching into today’s political landscape…to awaken our attention to environmental damages caused by man-made radioactive radiation, which is mutating nature”. Chaseling’s terminology “Spatial Painting” refers to this technique of producing sociopolitically inflected works which are at once 2 and 3-dimensional, created in such a way that when seen from a particular point of view, the works come to appear paradoxically flat. This is no easy feat in a practice where the works tend to morph into the architecture of their exhibition space, overflowing the bounds of their canvases, exploding onto the ceilings, melting onto the floors, oozing onto the walls to bend around corners. In the past, much of Chaseling’s expanded painting has been created within the exhibition space itself, and accordingly designed to be temporary, existing only for the duration of each show. However, taking a new direction in her practice, her most recent Spatial Painting “mutopia 5” was made during the 3 months of pandemic lockdown entirely in the artist’s studio, but with the site-specific point of perspective designed for the architecture of the exhibition space at the Australian Embassy.
It took a global pandemic to stop the world in its tracks under the threat of an invisible killer which pays no heed to national borders or political will. Yet Claudia Chaseling has been painting another such invisible killer for over a decade. Why is it that no amount of media coverage and political protest – no amount of outrage at dirty bombs and weapons testing – can stop the invisible killer of radiation poisoning our planet? Why could not the global tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl or Fukushima also stop the world in its tracks? This exhibition is a warning, a wake-up-call exploding onto our retinas in poison pigments, and invading our consciousness with information we should find as terrifying as any pandemic. As the artist maintains, “mass destruction is enabled by mass distraction”. Using her visual language of Spatial Painting to both inform and protest about the fatal status quo of global energy and arms industries, Claudia Chaseling has for over a decade persevered in focusing our attention on the pernicious weapon of mass destruction which is depleted uranium. Yet in designating this body of work “mutopia”, she does so with hope for a better future. “Mutopia” – Claudia Chaseling’s verbal paradox, comingling the terms mutation and utopia, is perhaps not the oxymoron it first appears to be. Mutations in the DNA of living things caused by radioactive isotopes is the stuff of sci-fi horror. Yet, from the very beginning of life on this planet, genetic mutation has also been a survival mechanism. Without such mutations over the course of millennia, we would not exist. If we enable our planet to survive long enough, perhaps we too may change into something better.
MOMENTUM is proud to present Claudia Chaseling’s solo exhibition “mutopia 5”, as part of its 10th Anniversary Program, celebrating the foundation of MOMENTUM in Sydney, Australia in 2010. The exhibition was realized as part of the foyer exhibition program at the Australian Embassy Berlin, which hosts visual arts showcases by Australian artists and German artists connected with Australia.
[Rachel Rits-Volloch]
[All quotations are taken either from conversations with the artist, or from Claudia Chaseling’s PhD dissertation, “Spatial Painting And The Mutative Perspective: How Painting Can Breach Spatial Dimensions And Transfer Meaning Through Abstraction”, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 2019.]
mutopia 5 Exhibition Tour with Claudia Chaseling
ARTIST BIO:
Dr. Claudia Chaseling is an international artist, born in Munich and living and working in Berlin and Canberra, Australia. She received a Masters degree in Visual Art, from the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK), and in 2019 Chaseling completed her studio-based PhD in visual arts, with a focus on spatial painting, at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Her work has been exhibited in over sixty solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, Australia and Europe. She has been featured in the X-Border Biennial, Finland; the Lueleå Biennial, Sweden; and the Lorne Biennial, Australia. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Art Gallery Nadezda Petrovic, Cacak, Serbia; Wollongong Art Gallery, Australia; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Krohne Art Collection, Eifel, Germany; Yuill Crowley Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Kunstverein Duisburg, Germany; Art-in-Buildings, New York City and Milwaukee, US; among others. Chaseling has taken part in international artist residency programs, including: Art Omi and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, USA; Texas A&M University, USA; and the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. The Verlag für zeitgenoessische Kunst und Theorie Berlin published her first extensive monograph in 2016.
The Making-Of mutopia 5:
70 Days in the Artist’s Studio
NOW (2020)
Claudia Chaseling in collaboration with Emilio Rapanà
digital print and 10 water colours on paper and canvas 190cm x 390cm
A new artwork made for mutopia 5, which we were required to remove from this exhibition due to it’s political content.
Publications by Claudia Chaseling
Source Material:
Selections from the Artist’s Research into Depleted Uranium
[Click on each title to follow the links.]
The film which launched the artist’s fixation on Depleted Uranium:
“Deadly Dust” Documentary, Frieder F. Wagner, Germany, 2006 > >
This exhibition was realised thanks to the generous support of:
And thanks to our Media Partners:
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
by Ruppert Bohle
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SHINGO YOSHIDA
(b. 1974 in Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works in Marseille, France)
Shingo Yoshida received his MA with highest honors from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson in Nice France in 2004. In 2005 he earned a post-graduate diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France, and subsequently in 2007 he received another post-graduate diploma in the Program La Seine of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Yoshida completed the prestigious international artist residencies at Villa Arson, Nice, France (2013), and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France (2007-8), among many others. In 2017, MOMENTUM invited him to show his film and photographs made in Siberia in an exhibition for the UN Conference on Climate Change, COP23. Subsequently, his work came to be acquired by the Art Collection of the Ministry of Environment, Germany. In 2016, his film works entered the collections of three major institutions in Berlin: the Berlinische Galerie, the Akademie der Künste, and Fluentum.
Yoshida’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, including: Berlinische Galerie, Museum for Modern Art & Videoart at Midnight, Berlin, Germany (2020); Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, Loko Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2020); S.Y.P. Art, Tokyo, Japan (2019); Mikiko Sato Gallery, Hamburg, Germany (2018); Pavillon am Milchhof, Berlin, Germany (2018); UN Conference on Climate Change, COP23, Ministry of Environment, Berlin & Bonn, Germany (2017); ikonoTV (2017); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, Gunma, Japan (2016); Tokyo Wonder Site / Kunstraum Kreuzberg-Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2016); ‘POLARIZED! Vision’ Competition Winner, Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland (2015); Mulliqi Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Prishtina, Kosovo (2016); Instituto Zappa, Accademia Di Brera, Viale Marche, Milan, Italy (2016); Onufri International Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (2016); Videoart at Midnight #67, Babylon Cinema, Berlin, Germany (2015); Istanbul Modern Museum, Turkey (2015); 60th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (2014); Villa Arson Nice Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2013); Arte TV Creative, France-Germany (2013); 66th Cannes Film Festival, France (2012); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, Chile (2012); Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris, France (2012); 22nd, 23rd, 27th FID International Film Festival, Marseille, France (2011, 2012, 2016); ‘Based in Berlin’ by Klaus Biesenbach, Christine Macel and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Berlin, Germany (2011); Rencontres Internationales Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2007, 2012); Sonom 07, Festival of UNESCO Universal Forum of Cultures, Monterrey, Mexico (2007); Lyon Biennale, France (2005); NCCA Natuional Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2005), among many others.
Photographer and video artist Shingo Yoshida finds inspiration in travelling, myths, traditions and the overwhelming beauty of nature. With a practice based on seeking out what is normally hidden from view, Yoshida considers the world as his studio and therefore a place of constant creation. In his video and photographic works Yoshida expresses his deep reverence for nature and its power.
I travel to many countries around the globe, which makes my work site-specific. It is essential that I adapt to the lifestyle and social codes of each new environment. What I have learned while searching for almost forgotten and hidden legends or myths is that humans live in a state of powerlessness in the face of nature. My existence as a human is a humble one. And yet, over the course of my life, this sense of meaninglessness has been periodically disrupted by encounters with the magnificent, especially in nature.
My main goal as an artist is to reconstruct my memories of such experiences. Paradoxically, since becoming aware of how small my own existence is, I have felt the need to investigate it. I do this by means of comparison: I search for legends and myths hidden somewhere in the world that are in danger of being forgotten. This is why I continue to undertake long journeys.
I believe that by examining societies at the micro-level (as micro-societies), there are many hidden stories to be discovered. I try to find micro-societies and investigate their cultures in order to achieve a broader understanding of the world.
My work is a journey, so to speak, that entails everything from the moment I leave my house until I reach my destination. Life is a series of instant moments, and I think my challenge is not to ask whether I should live earnestly or what I have reached, but how I lived and what kind of work I am going to leave behind. Therefore, my work changes and grows with the course of my own life.
[Shingo Yoshida]
THE SUMMIT
2019/20, Video, 23 min 54 sec
Translations of the HAIKU in the video:
下界まで断崖富士の壁に立つ 山口誓子
[Standing atop a sheer cliff of Mt. Fuji continuing down to the world below]
Seishi YAMAGUCHI
大沢崩れ覗きてすくむ登山靴 北舟子 (祖父)
[Looking down Osawa Kuzure my feet tremble]
Hokushushi
初富士に一礼頂に父の句碑 南舟子 (父 : 菊次郎)
[Making a bow to Mt. Fuji on New Year, where stands a stone tablet inscribed with my father’s haiku]
Nanshushi
“On August 20th, Shōwa 49 (1974), a stone tablet inscribed with a haiku was set atop Mt. Fuji. This was my father’s near-reckless project – to fulfill the dream of my grandfather who was a haiku poet — to bring a stone tablet to Kengamine next to the observatory on Mt. Fuji, the highest peak of Japan worshipped as its symbol from ancient times.”
[Shingo Yoshida]
Following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, Shingo Yoshida embarks upon a journey to the peak of Mt. Fuji – Japan’s national monument. The Summit was made at the height of the global pandemic lockdown in the winter of 2020, when the closest most of us got to travelling was looking through old photographs or watching films about far-away places. Yoshida chose this time of travel bans and closed borders in which to undertake this most personal of journeys, travelling back to Japan from Berlin in order to re-live his forefathers’ dream to place his grandfather’s poetry atop Mount Fuji.
The Summit is a film of static shots and mobilized photographs. In an interplay between photography and moving image, the video comingles images filmed by the artist in his ascent up the mountain, with historic footage of the construction of the observatory at its peak, and family photographs from 1974 – the year of the artist’s birth – of his father and grandfather placing a boulder engraved with the haiku written by Yoshida’s grandfather beside the observatory. This intergenerational journey through a timeless landscape is the work of an artist who approaches his practice like an explorer, inviting us to accompany him on his travels.
[Rachel Rits-Volloch]
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NEZAKET EKICI
Nezaket Ekici (born in Kırşehir, Turkey in 1970) studied art pedagogics, sculpture and performance in Munich and Braunschweig, Germany. She then began working with performance and completed a master’s degree in Performance Art with Marina Abramovic. She has exhibited internationally, with a total of more than 120 different performances on 4 continents in more than 100 cities and 30 countries. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Stuttgart.
Nezaket Ekici’s videos, installations and performances are often process-based, asking viewers to derive their own emotional and intellectual interpretations. In her work, complex, often controversial topics are suspensefully countered by their aestheticizing presentation. Ekici frequently uses her own Turkish origins and education as a subject of tension, pitting her background against her living environment in present-day Germany. Cultural, geographic and individual boundaries, transgressions, gender, cross-border connections and authorial bodies are central to Ekici’s works. By highlighting these themes in everyday life and placing them in a new context, she aims to interconnect every element to form a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Major exhibitions include; Forum Migration, Tiroler Landesmuseen Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck, Austria (2018); Mother Tongue, Oslo Museum, IKM, Oslo, Norway (2017); Under Surveillance & Zeitgeist (solo), Goethe-Institut, Dublin, Ireland (2017); Einwand (solo), KAS Foundation, Berlin, Germany (2017); Nezaket Ekici (solo), Villa Massimo, Rome, Italy (2017); Alles was man besitzt, besitzt auch uns (solo), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany (2015); Einzelausstellung: Zwei Welten, Kunstverein Augsburg, Germany (2014); Neighbours – Contemporary Narratives from Turkey and Beyond, Istanbul Modern, Turkey (2014); Personal Map, to be continued… (solo), in cooperation with Marta Herford, De Bond, Cultuurcentrum Brugge, Belgium (2013). Ekici has received 15 separate project grants from the Goethe Institute for projects around the world. Major collections include; Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh ; MOMENTUM Collection Bangladesh; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; GASAG Aktiengesellschaft Berlin, Germany; Kunstmuseum Heidenheimm Germany; The Foundation Frances, France; Culturale Pamplona, Spain; Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Turkey and Koc Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, Turkey.
ON THE WAY SAFETY AND LUCK (2016)
HD Video, 34 min 19 sec
MOMENTUM Performance Archive.
In the performance On the Way, Safety and Luck, Ekici, a constant traveler, evokes her childhood memories concerning a farewell ritual she witnessed during her early childhood in Turkey and later also in Germany. Each time a Turkish family had to travel and leave home, either to go back to their old home in Turkey or to the new home in Germany, the members of the family or neighbors who are left behind used to come out in the street with buckets of water, throwing water behind the cars of those who are departing. This custom is also known in many other Balkan cultures. It used to be (and sometimes still is) observed in Bulgaria and Serbia. The use of water in this leave-taking ritual has the meaning of good luck and safe journey, which should come to pass as easily and smoothly as ‘running water’. The meaning of water here is also as a means of spiritual purification and change.
In re-enacting this custom in a rather radical manner, Ekici may imply that travel and leaving home nowadays is not always motivated by personal decisions but by other forces such as poverty and war. Seen, furthermore, through the lens of Corona-times, it implies a purification more physical than spiritual, as people around the globe are instructed to soak and scrub to disinfect themselves after every journey outdoors.
The iteration of Ekici’s performance shown here, from the MOMENTUM Performance Archive, was filmed in the context of MOMENTUM’s exhibition HERO MOTHER (2016), performed at the opening of the exhibition. Previously, On the Way, Safety and Luck has been presented at: the Thessaloniki Performance Festival, Parallel Programme of the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011); and the Festival Künstlerinnenverband Bremen, 7. Bremer Kunstfrühling, Güterhalle (2011).
VEILING AND REVEILING (2010)
Video, 24 min 17 sec
Whether in Germany or in the artist’s native Turkey, the question of the Tschador’s meaning and effects remains controversial. How do streamlined notions of feminine beauty intersect with a headscarf’s political and religious references? For Ekici, stories of Turkish students donning wigs to conceal their forbidden headscarves at university, or methods of transporting beauty products beneath the veil, have led her to question if women can ever truly wear head coverings out of free will. In the video performance Veiling and Reveiling, Ekici wears a Tschador in which various items are concealed: a wig, make-up, purse, bra, dress, tights, jewelry, shoes, artificial eyelashes. The video begins when the individual pieces are produced from the pockets of the Tschador and concludes when the veil has been fully redecorated, a wilful inversion of public and private space.
Veiling and Reveiling acquired a further signification in the time of Corona. Does a burka become the ultimate form of safety gear? As Ekici meticulously dresses herself in lingerie and make-up, donned on top of the burka she is wearing, she subverts the normative function of the burka, to comic effect. But, if viral ticking time bombs are indeed walking our streets, this practice may start to look like a good idea for everyone.
Following an exhibition of another of Ekici’s works, Atropos, at MOMENTUM Sydney in 2010, the artist donated Veiling and Reveiling to the MOMENTUM Collection.
VEILING AND REVEILING Exhibition History
2009
– Marta Herford Museum, Germany (the first edition of Veiling and Reveiling is in the Marta Herford Museum collection)
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JANET LAURENCE
(b. 1947 in Sydney, Australia. Lives and works in Sydney.)
Janet Laurence is recognized as one of the most accomplished Australian artists. Bridging ethical and environmental concerns, Laurence’s art considers the inseparability of all living things and represents, in her words, “an ecological quest”. For over 35 years, Laurence has explored the interconnection of all living things – animal, plant, mineral – through her multi-disciplinary practice. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, photography and video, she has employed diverse materials to explore the natural world in all its beauty and complexity, as well as the environmental challenges it faces today. Researching historical collections and drawing on the rich holdings of natural history museums, her practice has, over time, brought together various conceptual threads, from an exploration of threatened creatures and environments to notions of healing and physical, as well as cultural, restoration. Exploring notions of art, science, imagination, memory, and loss, Janet Laurence’s practice examines our physical, cultural and conflicting relationship to the natural world through site-specific, gallery, and museum works. Laurence creates immersive environments that navigate the interconnections within the living world. Her work explores what it might mean to heal, albeit metaphorically, the natural environment, fusing this sense of communal loss with a search for connection with powerful life-forces. Laurence’s work alerts us to the subtle dependencies between water, life, culture and nature in our eco-system. Her work reminds us that art can provoke its audience into a renewed awareness about our environment.
Janet Laurence is well known for her public artworks and site-specific installations that extend from the museum and gallery into the urban and landscape domain. Recent significant projects and commissions include: a commission with The Australian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne (2017); an installation for The Pleasure of Love, October Salon, Belgrade (2016); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, for the Paris Climate Change Conference (2015) and FIAC, Paris (2015), followed up by the installation Deep Breathing at the Australian Museum, Sydney (2016); Tarkine for a World in Need of Wilderness, Macquarie Bank Foyer, London (2011); In Your Verdant View, Hyde Park Building, Sydney (2010); Waterveil, CH2 Building for Melbourne City Council; Memory of Lived Spaces, Changi T3 Airport Terminal, Singapore; Elixir, permanent installation for Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan (all 2006); The Australian War Memorial (in collaboration with TZG Architects), Hyde Park, London (2003); In the Shadow, Sydney 2000 Olympic Park, Homebush Bay (2000); Veil of trees, Sydney Sculpture Walk (with Jisuk Han); 49 Veils, award-winning windows for the Central Synagogue, Sydney (with Jisuk Han, 1999); The Edge of the Trees (with Fiona Foley), Museum of Sydney (1994); and The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Australian War Memorial, Canberra (with TZG Architects, 1993).
Laurence has participated in numerous international Biennales and exhibitions. Major exhibitions include: The Entangled Garden of Plant Memory, Yu Hsiu Museum, Taiwan (2020); the major survey exhibition Janet Laurence: After Nature curated by Rachel Kent, MCA, Sydney (2019); Matter of the Masters, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017); Inside the flower, IGA Berlin, Berlin (2017); Force of Nature II, curated by James Putnam, The Art Pavilion, London (2017); the 13th Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador (2016); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Australian Museum, Sydney (2016); Anthropocene, Fine Arts Society Contemporary, London (2015); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Muséum National D’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, (2015); Plants Eye View, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong (2013); After Eden, Tarrawarra Museum of Art (2013) and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2012); Memory of Nature, Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie, New South Wales (2011); 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); In The Balance: Art for a Changing World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2010); Clemenger Award, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2009); Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan (2003, 2006); Ferment, Faculty of Art & Design Gallery, Monash University, Melbourne (2002); 9th Biennale of Sydney (1992); and Australian Perspecta (1985, 1991, 1997).
Laurence’s work is included in many Museum, University and Corporate collections as well as within architectural and landscaped public places, worldwide, including: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Museum Kunstwerk, Eberdingen, Germany; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Seibu Collection, Tokyo; World Bank Collection, Washington DC; University of New South Wales, Sydney; University of Western Australia, Perth.
Laurence is a recipient of Rockefeller, Churchill and Australia Council Fellowships, and the Alumni Award for Arts, UNSW. She was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW, a former Board Member of the VAB Board of the Australia Council, was Visiting Fellow at the NSW University Art and Design, and held the 2016/17 Hanse-WissenschaftKolleg (HWK) Foundation Fellowship. In 2015 Laurence was the Australian representative for the COP21 / FIAC, Artists 4 Paris Climate Exhibition, showing a major work at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. In 2019 Laurence had a major solo survey exhibition, After Nature, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.
“These are the days of violent extinctions, of global dimming and moving dust bowls, of habitat fragmentation, ice melt, and plundered lives. Animals are experiencing all this loss, and if we could better hear the waves of their agony, we would know this and be tormented. We would know that for the rest of our lives we will hear a growing chorus of increasingly diverse voices…”
– Debbie Bird Rose
VANISHING
2009/10, Video, 9 min 16 sec
Vanishing is Janet Laurence’s first video work, made during a residency at the Toranga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. Intended to be shown as a 2-channel immersive installation, the video is composed of extreme close-ups of the bodies of various animals breathing. As they inhale…exhale…inhale…exhale the images are accompanied by a meditative soundtrack of deep breathing, snuffling, purring, rumbling. The sound of the breathing shifts and changes but creates a slow rhythm that connects to our own breath. The work continues Janet Laurence’s focus on bringing into art the threat mankind poses to to our fragile natural environment and to those that inhabit it.
After working primarily in photography and installation, Laurence began an ongoing filmic study of animals both in the wild and in nature reserves. She has developed a filming technique in which she uses infrared night cameras – similar to those used by naturalists, as many animals are primarily active at night – in order to achieve a negative effect and distorted, ghostly coloration. Originally shown as a two-screen installation, this single channel version was specially released for the MOMENTUM Collection following the artist’s participation in a panel on art and science in MOMENTUM’s inaugural event in Sydney in 2010 .
“This ecological crisis demands we shift our focus from a human-centred perspective to a broader multispecies, environmental approach, for how else are we to live ethically and find our place in this world.”
– Janet Laurence
GRACE
2012, Video, 5 min 22 sec
“This is one of a series of videos made during my research in wildlife sanctuaries, using hidden cameras specialized for zoology research. In projection, the videos are altered and slowed… I want to bring us into intimacy with these animals and to reveal our interconnection… I want to bring us into contact with the life-world. With a focus on the animals and their loss, I think about the loneliness of the last one of a species. What was their death? I wonder about their umwelt, the unique world in which each species lives. The bubble of sensation.
This notion is powerfully articulated by the biologist Jacob von Uexküll, who has enabled rare insight into the worlds animals inhabit. An organism’s umwelt is the unique world in which each species live, the world as its body represents it, the world formed by the very form of the organism. It is a sensory world of space, time, objects and qualities that form perceptual signs for living creatures. I think it’s important to find this link in order to find compassion and care for developing a real relationship with other species we have to share the planet with.”
– Janet Laurence
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STEFANO CAGOL
Stefano Cagol (Trento, 1969) graduated from the Accademia di Brera in Milan and received a post-doctoral fellowship at Ryerson University in Toronto. He lives and works in Revo’, Trentino, South Tyrol, Italy. Cagol’s artistic research confronts broad-ranging topics integral to our times, turning is prodigious practice into an interconnected reflection on climate change in the Anthropocene; the viral spread of images and ideas; and the notion of the border and its various manifestations: mental, physical, cultural, political, communicative, or between individuals and collectives. Cagol’s practice, often conceptual, stemming out of a work-in-progress methodology, is takes shape in various media, such as performances and actions, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and publications.
Cagol is the recipient of prestigious awards, including: the Italian Council Award (2019), the VISIT Award of the RWE Foundation, Innogy Stiftung (2014); and the Terna Prize (2009). Cagol has participated in many international biennales, including: the 14th Curitiba Biennial, Brazil (2019); the 2nd OFF Biennale, Cairo, Egypt (2018); Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); the 2nd Xinjiang Biennale, China (2016); the 55th Venice Biennale in the Maldives National Pavilion (2013); the 54th Venice Biennale with a solo collateral event (2011); the 4th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2006); and the 1st Singapore Biennale (2006).
Stefano Cagol has undertaken 2 Artist Residencies at MOMENTUM. The first, in 2015, was part of Cagol’s project The Body of Energy (of the mind), for which he was the recipient of the VISIT Award from the RWE Foundation, Innogy Stiftung. Cagol developed this project as a year-long expedition spanning Europe’s northern-most to southern-most tips, on a search for signs of energy. Encompassing both physical and cultural energy, this project assumed many forms, triggering reflections on what is not visible, on resources, on relations. Cagol’s Artist Residency culminated in his first solo show in Berlin, presenting The Body of Energy (of the mind) at CLB Collaboratorium Berlin.
MORE INFO on Stefano Cagol’s 2015 Residency at MOMENTUM >>
Cagol’s second Artist Residency at MOMENTUM was undertaken in 2019-20, with the project THE TIME OF THE FLOOD. Beyond the Myth Through Climate Change, for which he won the 6th edition of the Italian Council Award (2019). Also a year-long research project, initiated in Berlin, and moving on to Tel Aviv & Jerusalem, Rome & Venice, to consider how the Biblical story of The Flood can be re-imagined in terms of climate change in the Anthropocene.
MORE INFO on Stefano Cagol’s 2019-20 Residency at MOMENTUM >>
Selected solo exhibitions and projects include: MA*GA Art Museum, Gallarate, Italy (2019); Stefano Cagol: The Consequences Of Vacua ,C+N Canepaneri, Milan, Italy (2017); in 2014-2015, his solo project “The Body of Energy (of the mind)” was presented at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, at Madre in Naples, at Maga in Gallarate, at Museion in Bolzano, at Kunsthalle St. Gallen, at ZKM in Karlsruhe and at Museum Folkwang in Essen; Westergasfabriek Cultuur park in Amsterdam (2012); Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk (2012); Museion in Bolzano (2012); ZKM in Karlsruhe (2012); 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, collateral event (2011); Manifesta 7, parallel event (2008); NADiff in Tokyo (2007); 4th Berlin Biennale, special project (2006); 1st Singapore Biennale, satellite event (2006); Platform in London (2005); Mart – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (2000).
Selected group exhibitions include: ZKM, Karlsruhe (2019); C+N Canepaneri, Milan, Italy (2019); Riccardo Crespi Galleria, Milan, Italy (2016); WhiteBox, NY, USA (2016); Museion, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bolzano, Italy (2015); WhiteBox, NY, USA (2014); Maldives Pavilion at 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia (2013); Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery in Moscow (2013); Kunstraum Innsbruck (2012); El Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires (2012); SUPEC – Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, Shanghai (2010); White Box, New York (2010); MARTa Herford (2009); HVCCA – Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill (2008); IKOB – Internationales Kunstzentrum Ostbelgien, Eupen (2003); Palazzo della Triennale in Milan (1997); Video Forum at ART 27’96 Basel (1996). Permanent public art commissions include Istituto Martino Martini in Mezzolombardo for Autonomous Province of Trento (2012); Trento sud gate for A22 Autostrada del Brennero SpA (2011); Parco Mignone for Council of Bolzano (2007); Beurschouwburg in Brussels (2007-2012). Artist in residence include Air Bergen (2014); Drake Arts Center in Kokkola (2013); VIR Viafarini-in-residence in Milan (2013); BAR International by Pikene på Broen in Kirkenes (2010); International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York (2010); Leube Group’s Art Program in Gartenau (2003); Künstlerhaus in Salzburg (1996). Awards include Terna Prize 02 for Contemporary Art (2009), Rome; Targetti Light Art prize, Florence (2008); Murri Public Art prize, Bologna (2008). Shortlists include Art & Ecology International Artists Residency by RSA – Royal Society for Arts, London (2008); MapXXL mobility program by Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes, Paris (2005).
Stefano Cagol has participated in many artist residencies and received fellowships including: Cambridge Sustainability Residency; Air Bergen; Vir-Viafarini-in-Residence in Milan; BAR International in Kirkenes; International Studio and Curatorial Program ISCP in New York; International Center of Photography in New York.
NATIONAL PRIDE, 2009
Video, 2 min 02 sec
On loan for COVIDecameron, courtesy of the artist.
Stefano Cagol’s National Pride (2009) turns a clip from “Virus”, a 1980 apocalyptic sci-fi film, into an audiovisual parable for our times in the age of Corona. Transforming the filmic pandemic of the Italian Flu into a wider reflection on influenza, influence, and borders, this capricious work fits firmly into Cagol’s ongoing series of FLU projects; a body of work made particularly relevant today, and dating back to 1998 and the first Bird Flu outbreak in Asia in 1997.
MORE INFO on Stefano Cagol’s FLU Projects >>
Another manifestation of Cagol’s FLU projects includes his Power Station intervention at the Singapore Biennale (2006), and Bird Flu / Vogelgrippe (2006), taking place in Trento, Bolzano, Innsbruck, Munich, Nuremberg, Leipzig, and culminating at the Berlin Biennale. Cagol describes the latter as “A mental and physical trip into the center of Europe, between real and unreal fears, physical and mental influences. Bird Flu / Vogelgrippe is an acute febrile highly contagious viral disease, or a power to influence persons or events, especially power based on prestige.” Out of these initiatives arose the 5-year project FLU POWER FLU (2007-2012), taking the form of public interventions, highlighting contemporary influences, beliefs, pre/misconceptions and belonging. Power, in various forms extends its influence to our daily lives yet our notion of power and its extent of influence is often, perhaps deliberately, overlooked. Moving and interacting within/outside “centers of power” of past and present Europe, be it cultural, political or financial, FLU POWER FLU aptly questions their authority and invites reflexivity, yet inevitably becomes an accomplice in these power games.
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TRACEY MOFFATT
(b. 1960 in Brisbane, Australia. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia and New York, USA.)
Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists of international renown. Since her first solo exhibition in Sydney in 1989, she has had numerous exhibitions in major museums around the world. Working in photography, film and video, Moffatt first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film “Night Cries” was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film, “Bedevil,” was also selected for Cannes in 1993. In 1997, she was invited to exhibit in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, and a major exhibition of Moffatt’s work was held at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997/98, which consolidated her international reputation.
Having begun her career as an experimental filmmaker and as a producer of music videos, Moffatt eventually focused on filmmaking and cross-media practices after gaining acclaim as a photographer. Her investigation of power relations, which by the late 1990s often revolved around the relationship between Australian Aborigines and white colonial settlers, more recently engages contemporary media and the nature of celebrity.
Known for her non-realist narratives reconstructed from pre-existing sources, Moffatt uses experimental cinema devices such as audio field recordings and low tones to provide playfully ironic commentary on the subjects of her found footage.
Major survey exhibitions of Moffatt’s work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003–4), the Hasselblad Centre in Göteburg, Sweden (2004), the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2011), the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2014) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2016). In 2006, she had her first retrospective exhibition Tracey Moffatt: Between Dreams and Reality in Italy, at Spazio Oberdan, Milan. In 2007 a major monograph, The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt by Catherine Summerhayes was published by Charta Publishers, Milan. A solo survey exhibition featuring all seven video montage works at the Museum of Modern Art, New York opened in May 2012. In 2016, Christine Macel curated Moffatt’s montage film Love in Prospectif Cinéma at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. She has been selected for the Biennales of Gwangju, Prague, São Paulo, Sharjah, Singapore and Sydney. In 2017 she represented Australia at the 57th Biennale of Venice, with the exhibition My Horizon curated by Nathalie King.
Moffatt was the recipient of the 2007 Infinity Award for Art by the International Center of Photography, New York honouring her outstanding achievement in the field of photography. Her work is held in major international collections including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London. In 2016 Moffatt was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to the visual and performing arts as a photographer and filmmaker, and as a mentor and supporter of, and role model for Indigenous artists.
GARY HILLBERG
Gary Hillberg worked with Tracey Moffatt on all 8 films in the Hollywood Montage series, spanning 16 years of their collaborative practice, from the first montage work created in 1999 to the latest in 2015. The films, all playing with and upon our fascination with cinema, are: Lip (1999), Artist (2000), Love (2003), Doomed (2007), REVOLUTION (2008), Mother (2009), Other (2010), The Art (2015).
Gary Hillberg received a Certificate of Proficiency, Film and Television Editing from AFTRS in 1981 and has been working as an experimental filmmaker and music video producer since the late 1980s.Hillberg has edited three commercial films: With Time to Kill (1984), Broken Highway (1993), and Hayride to Hell (1995), and presents regular movie reviews on RRR Melbourne’s weekly Film Buff’s Forecast. He currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.
DOOMED
2007, Video, 9 min 21 sec
This fast-paced montage of film clips takes Hollywood’s fixation with death and disaster to its ultimate cinematic end. “Doomed” comprises cut-and paste editing techniques in a highly entertaining and blackly-humorous take on the bleak side of our current psychological landscape. Moffatt’s film looks at both entirely fictional and reconstructed disastrous events. Each scene carries a particular cargo of references. They occupy their own unique symbolism and filmic territory – the poignant, sublime and epic, the tragic, the B-grade and downright trashy. The accumulation of scenes creates a narrative whole comprised of parts. Moffatt plays with the ‘disaster’ genre, re-presenting representations.
Looking at the forms of filmic entertainment, as well as ‘art as entertainment’, she addresses what it is about death and destruction that we invariably find so entertaining. Music manipulates. The soundtrack builds and peaks – emotive, and a central device in journeying through the sequence to climactic effect. It is important that the title ‘Doomed’ has the quality of the not yet destroyed. It is a description that is applied to individuals, families, lovers, politics, and nations – an observation made from the outside and yet containing the possibility (read hope) that situations can be salvaged.
OTHER
2009, Video, 6 min 30 sec
“OTHER is a fast-paced montage of film clips depicting attraction between races. Marlon Brando looks at Tahitian girls and Samantha from Sex and the City ogles an African American football player in the men’s locker room. Seven minutes of gazing and touching and exploding volcanoes. Very funny, very hot.” – Tracey Moffatt
Tracey Moffatt’s fast-paced montage videos compile scenes from film and television programs selected in response to a particular theme or coding. This is the penultimate work in a suite of 8 videos made over the last decade; the previous works include ‘Lip’ (1999), ‘Artist’ (2000), ‘Love’ (2003), ‘Doomed’ (2007), ‘Revolution’ (2008), ‘Mother’ (2009), and more recently, the final work in the series, ‘The Art’ (2015). ‘Other’ (2009) is one of the most mesmerizing of the series as it edits together scenes of interracial encounters. It opens with first contact sequences, films in which the beach and the shallow waters are a zone of encounter between ships and canoes, between Europeans and non-Europeans. It then moves to images of looking, of two different peoples meeting for the first time and appraising each other visually. As imagined by Hollywood and TV directors, this is a moment of both curiosity and desire, where glances become lingering and erotically charged.
The next sequence moves from first encounters to quite literally first contact, when brown and white touch. Again curiosity is mingled with desire and an erotic tension crackles through these images. From touch we shift back to the eyes, but now vision is highly eroticised, looking has become a physical conduit to arousal and the gaze is embedded into a bodily response. Intercut are scenes of Westerners losing their sense of propriety and themselves when encountering an ‘other’, a moment when their own social structures erode.
A kitsch frenzied depiction of the other as threatening, feverish, abandoned and erotic informs the next selection of scenes in which running and dancing, from faux-tribal gatherings to frenzied hysterical choreographed sequences move closer and closer to orgiastic sexual abandonment.
In the final sequences desire is consummated in wild encounters which transgress race and gender. Humorously intercut with these are images of men hugging each other, an implied repressed homosexual subtext which is still unable to be depicted in mainstream cinema while we see frenzied hetereosexual couples and women making love to each other with abandonment. The video culminates in some literally explosive moments in which revel in the clichés of cinematic sexual orgasm: fires burn, volcanoes erupt and finally planets explode.
Moffatt utilises the clichés of cinematic representation of the ‘other’ to trace a pop culture history of how the west has represented its encounters with countries and peoples that are not itself. These mainstream representations somewhat hilariously reveal more about the cultures that made and consumed these films than the countries, peoples and histories they purport to depict. The ‘other’ here is a people and a place where the transgression of race, gender, and cultural norms can be imagined but which has little to do with any anthropological reality. As the clichés pile up this work is hugely entertaining, fast paced and sexy as it rolls through 60 years of moving image history. It also reiterates how desire, looking, power and the cinematic experience are so closely intertwined.
– From Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection page: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/143.2011/
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DOUG FISHBONE
Doug Fishbone, is an American artist living and working in London. He earned his BA from Amherst College in the US in 1991, and MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 2003, and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004. Selected solo exhibitions include: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland (2020); Tate Britain, London (2010-11), Rokeby, London (2010-11, and 2009), Gimpel Fils, London (2006) and 30,000 Bananas in Trafalgar Square (2004). Selected group exhibitions include: the Jewish Museum, London (2019); a collateral show at the 56th Venice Biennale in (2015); Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, Tate Britain (2010), Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2008); Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery (2008), London; British Art Show 6, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester (2006). He performs regularly at both international and UK venues, including appearances at London’s ICA and Southbank Centre.
His film and performance work is heavily influenced by the rhythms of stand-up comedy – he was described by one critic as a “stand-up conceptual artist” – and examines some of the more problematic aspects of contemporary life in an amusing and disarming way. Using bizarre combinations of found images from the internet, Doug Fishbone uses satire and tragicomic humor in his films, performances and installations to critically examine consumer culture, mass media, and its corollary, the underground and avant-garde. He is particularly interested in examining questions of relativity and perception, and how audience and context influence interpretation.
Fishbone’s 2010 film project Elmina, made in collaboration with Revele Films in Ghana, had its world premiere at Tate Britain in 2010 and was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria in 2011. Elmina was recently voted no. 35 on Artinfo’s survey of the 100 most iconic artworks of the past 5 years. He is currently at work on a follow-up, to be filmed in Ghana.
Fishbone’s practice is wide-ranging, using many different popular forms in unexpected ways. He curated Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, a bespoke art/crazy golf course featuring some of the UK’s leading artists, at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and in the same year, he collaborated with the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, one of the nation’s most prestigious Old Masters collections, on a solo project involving switching one of the Gallery’s masterpieces with a replica made in China. Other recent projects include a series of guided bus tours in Aberdeen as part of the Look Again Festival in 2016, and a series of riverboat performances on the River Thames called Doug Fishbone’s “Booze Cruise”, originally commissioned as part of the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival in 2013 and 2014. His project Artificial Intelligence (2018) was commissioned by werkleitz within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and Co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union, and he took part in the exhibition “Jews, Money, Myth” at the Jewish Museum, London in 2019. He will be presenting a major new commission at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork Ireland in 2020.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLEGENCE (2018)
Video, 2 min 38 sec
On loan for COVIDecameron, courtesy of the artist.
Spanning from the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 to the shortages of sausages in the German Democratic Republic to the Mahabharata, Artificial Intelligence offers an unusual perspective on the rise and fall of human civilization through the prism of the chaos of 20th- century Europe. Two years after its creation, MOMENTUM shows the video in the context of the Corona pandemic in the COVIDecameron exhibition. Making light of even the greatest darkness is a better survival mechanism than despair, and in that sense, Doug Fishbone’s Artificial Intelligence, made two years before the Corona pandemic, paints an oddly prescient portrait of our times assembled from images found online. From food shortages in shops, to wildlife taking over our city streets, to a wilful denial of our own mortality in the face of all evidence to the contrary, we all hope this is not how the Corona pandemic will end for us.
Whereas the video Artificial Intelligence remains on loan to MOMENTUM for COVIDecameron, the original artwork embeds this video in a singular installation for public space.
The installation, Artificial Intelligence, is a machine that dispenses wisdom in return for a 10-cent investment. A short meditation on time, impermanence and loss, it was originally installed in the Marktplatz in Halle, Germany, in the city’s main square, where it was commissioned by the werkleitz Festival with funding from the European Union.
Assuming the form of a conventional touch-screen kiosk like those found in cities and public spaces all over the world, the piece grants a moment of pause to consider the fragility and vanity of our daily lives, though with a light-hearted touch. A machine that might normally do something very straightforward, like process a ticket or parking receipt, or issue directions to tourists, has been re-tooled into something strange, injecting a brief dose of ambiguity into the daily urban routine. The piece is a kind of art robot of the lowest order – a mechanized deliverer of intellectual content, but already outmoded and behind the times. After all, who pays for anything with cash any more, let alone ten-cent coins? In this way it reflects an ambivalence towards AI, as it stands poised to replace huge swathes of human labour and make many of us redundant in the process. Sitting outside contemporary financial logic, it finds an awkward space to occupy – offering a potentially useless product (the artist’s speculation on the state of the world) at a price that is virtually free.
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MAP OFFICE
MAP OFFICE is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (1966, Casablanca, Morocco) and Valérie Portefaix (1969, Saint-Étienne, France). This duo of artists/architects has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression including drawing, photography, video, installations, performance, and literary and theoretical texts. Their entire project forms a critique of spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space. Humour, games, and fiction are also part of their approach, in the form of small publications providing a further format for disseminating their work. Their cross-disciplinary practice has been the subject of a monograph, MAP OFFICE – Where the Map is the Territory (2011), edited by Robin Peckham and published by ODE (Beijing). Map Office was the recipient of the 2013 edition of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize.
Laurent Gutierrez is co-founder of MAP Office. He earned a Ph.D. of Architecture from RMIT. He is a Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he leads the Master of Design Programs and the Master of Design in Design Strategies as well as the Master of Design in Urban Environments Design programs. He is also the co-director of Urban Environments Design Research Lab.
Valérie Portefaix is an artist and architect. She is the principal and co-founder of MAP Office. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art, and a Master of Architecture, she earned a Ph.D. of Urbanism from University Pierre Mendes France. She is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
MAP Office projects have been exhibited in major international art, design and architecture events including: Guangzhou Image Triennial (forthcoming 2017); 6th Yokohama Triennale (2017); 4th Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2016); Ullens Contemporary Art Centre, Beijing (2013); 7th Asia Pacific Triennial (2012); 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); 6th Curitiba Art Biennale (2011); 7th, 11th and 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2000, 2008, 2010); Evento 1st Bordeaux Biennale (2009); 4th Tirana International Contemporary Art Biannual (2009); 2nd Canary Island Biennale (2009); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); 52nd Venice Art Biennale (2007); 15th Sydney Biennale (2006); 1st Paris Triennial (2006); 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005); 1st, 6th Singapore Biennale (2006, 2016); 2nd, 3rd and 5th Hong Kong- Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale (2007, 2009, 2013); 1st Architectural Biennial Beijing (2004); 1st Rotterdam Architecture Biennale (2003).
Artist Statement
The relation between body and territory is at the center of MAP Office’s artistic research-based production. With twenty years of multifaceted navigations (research, publication, exhibition), our practice has evolved across multiple fields and disciplines. Along the way, the intentional shift from medium and audience (Biennale, Gallery, Museum, Film Festival…) has created opportunities to explore new territories in visual arts and across disciplines. In the recent years, a specific focus on islands and other liquid territories has been developed as a subject/object of studies. Through these investigations and after more than a decade of exploring globalization and urbanization effects in Hong Kong and China, the practice is now investigating a new geography of archipelagos that characterize the transient and globalized environment of the Anthropocene age.
The geographical navigation of both real and imaginary territories goes along various processes of mapping techniques (observing, collecting, cataloguing and representing) as well as strategic and tactic approaches by method of appropriation. Mapping, as a mode of formulating a proposition, often results in a form of an archive to serve the purpose of developing a visual artifact able to communicate the main intention as well as a critical viewpoint. More recently, the development of fictions has become the mode of investigating those questions, leading our practice towards the invention of new mythological narration as a form of re-territorialisation of a hyper-real environment. The recording through the use of drawing, photo or video documentation often ends up into a narrative or performative form of communication.
Question articulated around the limit of visibility and invisibility becomes a dominant issue in our practice. With a focus on the atmospheric condition, we often refer to Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria – a spectacle of making ghosts come alive. MAP Office’s project often uses the figure of the flaneur, and the drifting navigations as a mode of operating and drawing phantasmagoric images to represent and characterized the world we are living in.
[MAP OFFICE]
VIRAL OPERATION (2003)
Video, 7 min 47 sec
On loan for COVIDecameron, courtesy of the artists.
Produced in response to the open call to reflect on possible routes from Jerusalem and Berlin to Venice for the Utopia Station project of the 2003 Venice Biennale, Viral Operation seizes upon the figurations of unintentional biological threat and the maintenance of the state and body by experimenting with the devolution of borders within the potentially utopian platform of continental Europe. Presented as a short video, the project follows MAP Office as they arrive in Berlin via the Hong Kong International Airport wearing the surgical masks that are considered, at least in greater China, a social nicety more than anything threatening. During the time of SARS, however, this appearance coupled with their point of origin made them a potential contaminant to the geographic health of the region; leaving the airport, they are accompanied by armed security guards.
As they make a point to cross as many land borders in central and eastern Europe as possible on their way to Italy, this situation remains much the same. Driving through checkpoint after checkpoint, they are asked to remove their masks for identification purposes (because, as the viewer is reminded, covering the face is illegal, as is the continued video documentation of these exchanges). As in other projects like Maskbook and Second Line, the mask functions as an over-determined signifier of identity and desire; in this case, however, it becomes a visual clue to a condition that does not actually exist; using this simple mechanism to test the durability of the European dream, it becomes clear that the body and the border are an enabling pair as much as they are political combatants.
[Robin Peckham]
RUNSCAPE (2010)
HD Video, 24 min 18 sec
Runscape is a film that depicts two young men sprinting through the public spaces of Hong Kong, almost invariably via the visual mode of the long shot, while a narrator describes this action through the rhetoric of post-structuralist urban theory. This narration makes repeated reference to a range of texts from the psychogeographical dérive of urbanism in Guy Debord and the Situationists to the biopolitical machines of Gilles Deleuze to the literary styles of Jean-Luc Nancy. The runners both follow existing paths and establish new ones, moving in straight lines through crowds and across rooftops while also using exterior walls as springboards for less-likely forms of motion. This is, however, far from parkour; it is a much more purposeful action that claims a certain territory or at least trajectory described within the narration through the image of the body as a “bullet that needs no gun. A soundtrack contributed by Hong Kong rock band A Roller Control complements this aesthetic violence, guiding the eye and ear of the viewer across this novel interpretation of the definition and uses of public space. In this action, invisible facades are constructed across a grid that spans the area between the codified signs of polished facades, an open-ended and performative notion of being-in-transit.
[Robin Peckham]
Runscape was shown along with “Viral Project” (2003) at MOMENTUM’s exhibition during Berlin’s 2011 Gallery Weekend, with Runscape subsequently gifted to the MOMENTUM Collection. In collaboration with MOMENTUM, MAP OFFICE returned to Berlin the following year to gather footage for Runscape Berlin, a work comprised of video and photography mapping the city of Berlin through its cinematic history.
“Why running in Berlin? Runscape Berlin proposes to break through historical lines and building blocs, to bypass new political borders and barricades, to be naked in the ruins of the gigantic worksite of the city. Running activates a new form of intensity in a city lacking of density. In Berlin, the urban substance opens on undefined fields where new personal histories can be written.”
[MAP OFFICE]
RUNSCAPE – ANAYLISIS by MELISSA LAM
The City is growing Inside of us…
A political act of defiance of the Urban Authority
With its surveillance and restrictions on movement.
[Excerpt from Runscape]
In 1996, when Jean Baudrillard first published “The Conspiracy of Art” he scandalized the international art community by declaring that contemporary art had no more reason to exist. The question of aesthetic banality and retreat from issues of public life and “the real” are questions that have plagued the art world for centuries, from the very first copied Renoir apple to Tino Sehgal or Sophie Calle experiences that anthropologically mix aesthetics, art and life. Baudrillard has since become interested in the simulations of reality set forth by film and vice versa.
In film, the work of simulation becomes drama, a comparative drama that seeks to simulate reality. Runscape is used to knit together the geography of Hong Kong, a cartography that trades on the idea of mapping by running through the streets (a young man is seen pounding / racing through the streets purposefully, in stark contrast to the plethora of crowds that are slowly inching forward along the traffic jammed pavement of Causeway Bay.) The runner dodges past pedestrians, runs diagonally through meticulously urban planned plazas, up flights of stairs and through the shopping malls of Hong Kong in order to appropriate the city on his own terms. The direction of his sprint, the contour of his cityscape is directed by his own desires, a remapping of cartography that allows him to remake the city in his own image. In Runscape, the idea is that a single individual can remap the cartography of the city, to redefine the city on each individual’s terms, to make each city mapping unique to each individual rather than a grouping of concepts, random census tracts, defunct neighborhoods and property blocks. The runner is at times cooperating with the city, in running along the stairs and sidewalks that are mandated, at other times, he jumps over unsuspecting walls and leaps over fences, pitting the city as an adversary, a challenge to his movement, testing the limitations of the concrete jungle as it slowly comes alive with the unorthodox use of its cityscape.
Political and cultural boundaries collapse as the figure jumps over districts in Causeway Bay, Central, and Aberdeen. The runner stitches a new type of geographical exploration that reimagines the terrain on a new mapped media. References and location systems zip by a sprinting figure in a rapidly moving short film where motion, major landmarks and assorted cultural topography become simply a simulation, simulacra of importance. Runscape is about the seduction of film as moving photography, images of Hong Kong flash by us in blinding images knit together only by the running figure as he races across the entire city.
The runner becomes also a performer, as he leaps and jumps, sprinting through the city, catching the eye of the strolling pedestrians as he breaks out of conventional modes of behavior, putting his body in action, moving faster than the city, as if internally pushed forward, as if fleeing or listening to a voice that was slowly speaking outside of everyone else’s sound register. The culture of the walking figure derived from the French Flaneur, the American Beat Poets, all contextualized and used in exploring and connecting the city streets. Runscape explores the liminal notions between film as public art with the city as landscape and cartography. The film knits the city together in a geography intersecting private and public space. The runner acts as artistic intervention creating an impact on the space itself. This is a creation of an unexplained inexplicable artwork on the street as it blurs the line between performance, a happening, fear, trauma, physical exercise, and rebellion.
American cartographer, Arthur H Robinson stated that stated that a map not properly designed “will be a cartographic failure.” Robinson also stated, when considering all aspects of cartography that “map design is perhaps the most complex. A map must be fit to its audience. Map Office’s Runscape is a new kind of map that explores the history of running, forms of mapping, data, space and time, multiple dimensions, language and the body. Runscape uncovers the influence and possibilities of mapping in our world today. Maps have become easier to create, change, develop collaboratively and share. Depicting geographical areas, mindscapes and digital realms alike, these multidimensional maps express endlessly interconnected ideas and issues.
Going back to the beginning of his “postmodern” phase, Baudrillard begins his important essay “The Precession of the Simulacra” by recounting the feat of imperial map-makers in a story by Jorge Luis Borges who make a map so large and detailed that it covers the whole empire, existing in a one-to-one relationship with the territory underlying it. It is a perfect replica of the empire. After a while the map begins to fray and tatter, the citizens of the empire mourning its loss (having long taken the map – the simulacrum of the empire – for the real empire). Under the map the real territory has turned into a desert, a “desert of the real.” In its place, a simulacrum of reality – the frayed mega-map – is all that’s left.
Runscape is a bravura performance by Map Office in which they use the figure of a boy to stitch the city together in a mapping that creates a territorial relationship between the runner who runs, and the territory or terras that is beneath his feet. The city map does not exist without his performance. The runner, nor does his physical running exist outside of the map. When the runner stops, the city (like Borge’s map) will leave us in tattered ruins, and dissemble into nothing so much as a simulacrum of it’s former self.
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NINA E. SCHÖNEFELD
Nina E. Schönefeld (b. 1972 in Berlin) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She studied Fine Art in Berlin (UdK) and in London (Royal College of Art). She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art History. Together with Marina Wilde she founded “Last Night In Berlin” a cultural project/blog that documents art openings in Berlin. Schönefeld’s art examines the contemporary social and political climate. Through unusual mediums, objects and videos, the artist questions the contemporary roles of artists, exploring the relationship between art, blockbuster movies and the present digital age. Her stories imagine a dystopian world where, due to drastic political and environmental shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival.
Selected recent exhibitions include: ‘Some Demonstrations’, Manifesta / Manifestina, Zurich (2016); solo show at CoGalleries, Berlin (2016); solo show at Fahrbereitschaft, Berlin (2017); Diskurs Gallery, Berlin (2017); Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi, Venice (2018); Goethe Institute, Beijing (2018); BBA Gallery Award Exhibition, Berlin (2018); solo show at Berlinische Galerie, 12 x 12 IBB Video Space (2018); Villa Heike, Berlin (2019); Lage Egal Gallery, Berlin (2019); Mitte Media Festival, Berlin (2019); Made in NY Media Center by IFP, New York (2019); Bamhaus in Luxembourg (2019); Aram Art Museum, Korea (2019).
N. O. R. O. C. 2. 3. (2020)
HD Video, 8 min 3 sec
On loan for COVIDecameron, courtesy of the artist.
N. O. R. O. C. 2. 3. (2020) is a video project that is a direct reaction to the situation we are facing in times of coronavirus COVID-19. The story of N. O. R. O. C. 2. 3. is set in the year 2023 nevertheless has its roots in current world developments. Under the title N. O. R. O. C. 2. 3. life during a worldwide pandemic crisis is transported through gloomy dark images. It is about the feeling of constant insecurity and a panicky, invisible threat coming through the world wide web.
The video is based on portraits of four independent women and a large pool of research materials. Historical quotations, passages from novels, series and films, political speeches, stock footage, video portraits, and media reports from different periods of our history are put together in a kind of narrative video collage to create a “psycho-gram” of the time during a pandemic in the digital age.
This narrative is accompanied by intense scenes, all of which take place at night. In the center: four female protagonists roaming through empty cities whose silence conveys a deceptive feeling. Looking for a way out, knowing all the facts via the internet, they do not know what the next day will bring. The optimistic conclusion at the end: Out of stagnation grows something new.
“I’m not afraid because all this seems very unreal to me. Hold on! I’m scared because people die every day. Is it a game or a dream? It’s a test that we are being subjected to and that will end soon. Isn’t it? I ask myself what would be worse: that life goes on as before? Or, nothing is as it once was? The reality is too big, too enormous, too present. Reality eats us up from the inside.”
(N. O. R. O. C. 2. 3.)
And yet the only thing defining a worldwide crisis like this is “unreal” information coming from the world wide web combined with a massive loss of control. Having to know everything but being unable to do anything as a citizen is quite unique. Everyone is therefore in the middle of a huge psychological experiment.
Director of Photography
Valentin Giebel
Starring
Ana Dossantos
Chantal Hountondji
Nasra Mohamad Mut
Keschia Zimbinga
Selected Songs & Sounds
Johann Sebastian Bach: “The Toccata and Fugue in D minor”
C. C. Scene Dark Background Music
Hospital Background Intensive Care Sounds
The Hot Zone Trailer (sounds & voices)
Quotes & Inspirations
Arno Deister im Interview: “Wir alle sind in einem riesigen psychologischen Experiment”, Tagesspiegel
Leïla Slimani: “Ich habe keine Angst, weil mir all das sehr unwirklich erscheint”, FAZ
Sheri Fink: ‘Code Blue’: A Brooklyn I.C.U. Fights for Each Life in a Coronavirus Surge, New York Times
“Wenn’s hart auf hart kommt, gehört man halt doch nicht dazu”, ZEIT Online
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). “Sweating-Sickness”. Encyclopædia Britannica
La Zone Official Trailer
Other Places: Pathos-II (SOMA)
Pandemics Official Trailer
Walking at night in Aokigahara forest
The Hot Zone Official Trailer
Ghost Recon Wildlands
Virus Official Trailer
Lucie Schönefeld: “Thoughts of a Teenager”
Christian Drosten: “Das Coronavirus”, NDR Podcast
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NINA E. SCHÖNEFELD
(b. 1972 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin and Ibiza, Spain.)
Interdisciplinary video artist Nina E. Schönefeld studied at the University of Arts in Berlin (UDK) and at the Royal College of Art in London. In addition to her visual art practice, she is a lecturer in Fine Art at various private art colleges. Together with Marina Wilde she founded “Last Night In Berlin” a cultural platform documenting art openings in Berlin. She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art Theory (Dr. Phil.). Schönefeld is half Polish and half German. Critiquing the contemporary social and political climate, the future scenarios in her art works are closely linked to current political, ecological and social issues in the world. Her sculptures and set designs for her video installations are composed of various light sources, sound systems, electronic machines, costumes, interiors and video projections. Through the use of these unusual mediums, objects and videos, Schönefeld questions the contemporary roles of artists, exploring the relationship between art, blockbuster movies and the present digital age. Her stories imagine a dystopian world where, due to drastic political and environmental shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival.
Recent exhibitions include, in 2022: Video Installation @Habibi Kiosk, Münchner Kammerspiele / Art Speaks Out @COP27, EGYPT @Ikono TV / TRILOGY OF TOMORROW @Haus am Lützowplatz / Sirens are calling from the shadows @A:D:CURATORIAL Gallery / OH MY DATA @Diskurs Gallery Berlin / HAZE CITY @Artspring-Festival in Berlin / A portrait of Spirits @Berlin Bark Gallery. In 2021: Facing New Challenges: Cities @Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, Germany / States Of Emergency @MOMENTUM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin / DECEMBER’S CHILDREN @Lage Egal, Berlin / Corona Culture @Alte Münze, Berlin / The Circle @CICA MUSEUM, Gyeonggi-Do, Korea / Gods & Monsters @Kunstverein Familie Montez, Frankfurt a.M., Germany / SWAB Barcelona Art Fair 2021 (Lage Egal), Barcelona, Spain / Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Arts Festival (NeMaf), Seoul, Korea / HER Power @Art Life Foundation, Hong Kong, China / Embark @129 GALLERY (Western Comfort Boat), Berlin / Points of Resistance @Zionskirche (MOMENTUM / KleinerVonWiese Gallery), Berlin / SIGNALE @ARTSPRING-Festival in Berlin / Roppongi Art Night @Roppongi Art Festival, Tokyo, Japan.
In 2020: Facing New Challenges: Water @Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, Germany / D1G1TAL S3CR3TS @Die Digitale, Weltkunstzimmer, Düsseldorf, Germany / At the Limit @Kunsthalle Bratislava Museum, Slovakia / Boxenstopp @KWADRAT Gallery, Berlin / Beyond Elysium @Kleiner Von Wiese Galerie, Berlin / Something True @Schau Fenster, Berlin / #Payetonconfinement @Galerie la Pierre Large, Strasbourg, France / COVIDecameron @ MOMENTUM / Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin / N.O R.O.C.2.3. @Contemplatio Art, Germany / L’Artiste Et Les Commissaires @Lage Egal, Berlin. In 2019: L.E.O.P.A.R.T. @Philipp Haverkampf Galerie, Berlin / Trilogy of Tomorrow @Galerie la Pierre Large, Strasbourg, France / Show Me Your Selfie @Aram Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea / Salon Hansa: InterINTIMES AutoPORTRAIT @Lachenmann Art Konstanz, Germany & Frankfurt/Main, Germany / SHOW ME YOUR SELFIE @DISKURS Gallery, Berlin / Topographies of The Stack @Alternative Culture Making Art Space, Shenzhen, China / Water(Proof) @Federation Square, Melbourne, VIC Australia / Zeit, sich zu berauschen @Salon Gallery, Berlin / +1 @Safe Gallery, Berlin / Water(proof) @ MOMENTUM / Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin / Anima Mundi Festival 2019 – Consciousness @Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi, Venice, Italy / Anima Mundi Arts Festival @THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space, Venice, Italy / Il est temps de s’enivrer @Bamhaus Luxembourg, Luxembourg / Kommunizierende Röhren 2 @Salon Rene Holm, Berlin / Mitte Media Festival 2019, Berlin / Light Year 48: Digital Fairy Tales: Vengeance is Mine @Manhattan Bridge / The Leo Kuelbs Collection, New York, U.S. / Digital Fairy Tales: Vengeance is Mine @Made In NY Media Center by IFP, New York City, U.S. / ? Art Is My Revenge @Lage Egal, Berlin / Villa Heike & Other Stories @Villa Heike, Berlin / #Notsoawhitecube @Lage Egal, Berlin. And many more.
B.T.R. (BORN TO RUN) (2020)
HD Video with sound 20’3”
Video and installation artist Nina E. Schönefeld critiques the contemporary social and political climate, exploring the relationship between art, popular culture and mass media in the present digital age. Her stories imagine a near future of all too possible dystopias where, due to drastic political shift, we need to fight for our basic democratic rights. B.T.R. is set in the year 2043 in a dystopian future of authoritarian autocracies and restrictions on journalism, where data is the most valuable asset on earth, and authoritarian right-wing governments have implemented youth education camps to gain power and influence. The film’s hero, SKY, grew up in one such education camp, WHITE ROCK. Knowing nothing about her parents she begins to research her heritage, getting in touch with a group of independent journalists and publishers, the most persecuted people on earth, threatened by prison and death every day. In this allegory of a not far-distant future, it seems that freedom of speech is lost forever. The video B.T.R. is intended as a preventative measure against such dystopias. It was created as a film of the future but has its roots in the present. It is based on detailed research on Julian Assange and Edward Snowden; on Cambridge Analytica and the pervasive power of data mining; on the crucial role of investigative journalism and the need for freedoms of the press; on the stories of deserters from the far-right.; and on the growing strength of far-right movements around the world, which leads Schönefeld to draw frightening parallels with conditions which led to the rise of Fascism in Germany in the 1920s.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
“The movie B. T. R. (Born To Run) is set in the year 2043 and deals with the subject of authoritarian autocracies and the complete restriction of journalists. It also deals with the possible extradition of Julian Assange to the US and what it could mean for the situation of independent publicists, whistleblowers, and journalists worldwide in the future. In the year 2043 data is the most valuable asset on earth because data is being used to win elections. Authoritarian rightwing governments have the majority worldwide. They have implemented education camps for the youth to gain more power and influence. Movie heroine S.K.Y. grew up in one of those education camps called WHITE ROCK. She doesn’t know anything about her parents. She starts to research about her heritage. During this process, she gets in touch with a group of independent journalists and publishers. They are the most persecuted people on earth which means that they are threatened by prison and death every day. It seems that freedom of speech is lost – forever…
The video B. T. R. was created as a science fiction story but it has its roots in the present time. It shows a future scenario of what could happen when people do not follow political decisions made in their countries and when they do not start to question undemocratic movements. Democracy can be easily lost if the freedom of press as fourth power in a country is restricted. Quotes from the movie like “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play” are taken from leaders of Third Reich – in this case from Joseph Goebbels. But you can find these kinds of statements also in today’s speeches of rightwing parties everywhere in the world. Today rightwing parties in Europe are on the rise (Poland, Hungary, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, etc.), journalists and publishers are put in jail like in Turkey. The parallels between our times in a lot of European countries (especially in Germany) and past times in the 1920ies in Germany are scary. (see here). The story of the movie B. T. R. is based on several documentaries (see below). The quoted documentaries deal with Third Reich, Weimar Republic, with strategies of rightwing parties in today’s Europe, with deserters of the rightwing scene like Franziska Schreiber and Heidi Benneckenstein. They also deal with practices of “hunting down” independent journalists, whistleblowers, and publishers like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden & Chelsea Manning.
Andrea Röpke – a German journalist who has published information about the rightwing scene in Germany for decades – was one of the biggest inspirations for the movie. She will never give up filming, researching & publishing even if she is facing violent attacks. Cambridge Analytica’s greatest hack – a Netflix documentary – deals with the dangers of influencing elections by influencing people through data in social networks. In the story of B. T. R. companies similar to Cambridge Analytica are integral part of how parties win elections, the system has been built on lies.
The film basically develops a future scenario in which authoritarian rightwing parties all over the world have taken over power. A free press (according to AFD “press of lies”) has been abolished. In the year 2043 it is no longer possible to express one’s opinion. Independent journalists and publicists are not allowed to report about reality. Rightwing governments have implemented education camps for the youth to gain more power.
The role of heroine S.K.Y. is inspired by deserter Heidi Benneckenstein. She grew up in a far rightwing family in Germany and had to visit rightwing education camps every school holiday. In 2011 when she was 19 years old she decided to quit this surrounding which is supposed to be very dangerous. She said the initial moment in her life to desert family and friends was when she was pregnant herself. To be forced to put your own child in the same environment based on fear and hate was unbearable for her. She went through hell in her childhood. She was never allowed to question anything and to develop into an independent person with her own opinions. Today finally she is… risking her life every day.”
[Nina E. Schönefeld]
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Nina E. Schönefeld
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COVIDecameron
19 Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection
Online Exhibition of Video Art
Launched on 12 May 2020, during the 1st COVID19 Lockdown in Berlin
On the occasion of MOMENTUM’s 10th Anniversary
Shaarbek Amankul / Stefano Cagol / Nezaket Ekici / Thomas Eller
Theo Eshetu / Doug Fishbone / Mariana Hahn / Gülsün Karamustafa
David Krippendorff / Janet Laurence / Map Office / Kate McMillan
Tracey Moffatt & Gary Hillberg / Anxiong Qiu / Nina E. Schönefeld
Varvara Shavrova / Sumugan Sivanesan / Mariana Vassileva / Shingo Yoshida
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà
With the eyes and hearts of the world locked onto the threat and aftermath of COVID-19, MOMENTUM gathers 19 exceptional artists from its Collection, and invites you to come see their stories on our website. In our newly post-viral world, where we have come to see that we have been moving too fast and maybe moving too much, COVIDecameron asks us to slow down and retreat from the constant barrage of the now, from the oversaturation of events, invitations and offers, from the instant gratification of unending empty entertainments. This exhibition of art from elsewhere is a retreat from which to safely contemplate the world, a way of travelling without traveling. Moving images move us. On the occasion of its 10th birthday, MOMENTUM, the Global Platform for Time-based Art, is proud to share 25 exceptional works by artists from its Collection, re-contextualized here through the prism of life at the time of Corona. COVIDecameron is a thank you to the artists who have entrusted their work to us, and a tribute to all the exceptional artists we have worked with over the years, as well as to our audiences around the globe. We wish you all good health in these precarious times.
Addressing the viral times we live in, COVIDecameron takes its title from Boccaccio’s literary classic, The Decameron. We follow in the fabled footsteps of this author, whose ten storytellers flee the plague in Florence; escaping the dangers of disease in the city, they retreat to the countryside to regale each other with tales of their times. Escaping from the world at large, they instead bring the outside world to life in seclusion through the artistry of their storytelling.
Six-hundred-and-seventy years later, at the dawn of a new decade, we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. With one country after another having closed their borders, and with social distancing continuing to be measured in meters, countries, and continents, we are instructed to seek safety in seclusion from the world and from one another. So, like its medieval namesake, and with a defiant wink in the face of COVID-19, COVIDecameron gathers together the ‘visual stories’ of video works by 19 artists from around the globe, for an exhibition online. These artists from Australia, Bulgaria, China, Ethiopia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkey, the UK, and the US address, each in their own way, a broad array of topics which we have related to the unprecedented anomalies of life in the time of Corona. With social distancing, masks as fashion items, the bizarre phenomenon of global toilet paper shortages, and bad medical advice from politicians having rapidly become our new normal – and with death tolls continuing to rise in many countries, we all hope will never approach normal – MOMENTUM has combed through its Collection to bring together a selection of works reflecting on the poetry of the day-to-day as it relates to the changing world we inhabit: life leading up to and during COVID-19. Through many voices from many places comes a celebration of otherness; an opening up of the world in these viral times of retreat, a place of safety in which to contemplate the vulnerabilities we all share, and the numerous ways of overcoming them together. The video works assembled for this exhibition celebrate new acquisitions to the MOMENTUM Collection, as well as the works with which MOMENTUM has grown during its first 10 years.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
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Tracey Moffatt
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In an exhibition of art from elsewhere, celebrating otherness and taking place amidst a global pandemic, what better way to open COVIDecameron than with Tracey Moffatt – the first artist to have launched the MOMENTUM Collection in 2010 – with two works from her Hollywood Montages series made together with Gary Hillberg. Doomed (2007) and Other (2009), both beautifully collaged from clips of popular films, are, in turn, comically rousing celebrations of our fascination with global disaster and the perilous attractions of otherness.
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Doug Fishbone, Artificial Intelligence, 2018
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With no disrespect intended to the countless many who are suffering at the hands of Corona, nevertheless, it has been a global phenomenon to laugh in the face of the outbreak. Making light of even the greatest darkness is a better survival mechanism than despair, and in that sense, Doug Fishbone’s Artificial Intelligence (2018) also paints an oddly prescient portrait of our times, assembled from images found online. From food shortages in shops, to wildlife taking over our city streets, to a willful denial of our own mortality in the face of all evidence to the contrary, we all hope this is not how the Corona pandemic will end.
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Mariana Vassileva, Morning Mood, 2010
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But perhaps Mariana Vassileva’s Morning Mood (2010) is how it all began – if we are to believe that the virus originated from bats. Shot in Sydney, Australia, during the very days that MOMENTUM drew its first breaths with its inaugural event in Sydney, this portrait of the city’s remarkable bats already makes the jump between species, inverting the animals to show their inherently human characteristics.
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Thomas Eller, THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered), 2020
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Jumping ahead to the present day, Thomas Eller’s THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered) (2020), was made in the midst of the Corona pandemic, while the artist was in lockdown in China. As so much of Eller’s work, it is a self-portrait, yet at the same time, also an intimate portrait of COVID-19; replicating in its form and content the biological basis of the virus. Eller projects himself into the frame in a visually and aurally layered palimpsest. The artist re-duplicates himself, again and again, with each of his copies reciting the complete genetic code of one of the first strains of the SARS-CoV2 virus identified in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 outbreak began. But Eller makes mistakes in the code, scrambling the RNA sequence here, dropping a nucleotide there…. The artist has translated into visual language an approximation of how the virus replicates itself, spreading its genetic information through multiplication, and through mistakes from copy to copy, mutating to create new strains. While the virus ceaselessly copies itself, we hide from it, and from each other. We distance, socially, and wait for a scientific breakthrough, hoping that science will win this race against nature. We should be so lucky if the virus simply stops, as Eller does, and goes away.
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Nina E. Schönefeld, N.O.R.O.C.2.3., 2020
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Nina E. Schönefeld’s N.O.R.O.C.2.3 (2020), also made during the Corona lockdown, but in Berlin, is a dark depiction of our current pandemic times, cast in the guise of dystopian science fiction. Drawing on excerpts of her previous work, together with historical quotations, passages from novels, television series, films, political speeches, stock footage, video portraits and media reports from different periods of history, N.O.R.O.C.2.3 is a narrative video collage that takes the pulse of a pandemic in the digital age.
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Shingo Yoshida
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Moving on from Schönefeld’s sci-fi is Shingo Yoshida’s stark – but equally dystopian – reality. Heathrow Airport: Corona Diary (2020) was shot at the end of April, while the artist was en-route to his native Japan, when many countries worldwide were still in lockdown. Traversing endless escalators and moving walkways from one empty hall to another, the artist glimpses birds flying through deserted terminals, safety announcements made for no one, advertising posters rendered oddly inappropriate in a time of social distancing. This record of an unprecedented present is shown alongside The Summit (2020), another of Yoshida’s recent works. Yoshida’s ghostly journey through an abandoned monument to globalization, is set in contrast to an intergenerational journey to the peak of Japan’s monument to nationhood, as Yoshida brings to life his father’s and grandfather’s dream to place an engraved haiku atop Mount Fuji.
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Heathrow Airport: Corona Diary, 2020
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Map Office
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The Hong Kong artist duo Map Office embark upon a different kind of personal journey in the midst of this century’s first major viral outbreak, SARS. In Viral Operation (2003), the artists, having flown to Berlin from a Hong Kong still ravaged by the SARS epidemic, proceed on a road trip with the aim of crossing as many European land borders as possible on their way to Italy to show their work in the Venice Biennale. Wearing masks throughout the journey, they are treated continuously as suspect Others, potential contaminants. The mask, in Asia often worn as a social nicety, here becomes a dangerous symbol of contagion. And now, 17 years down the line, when we are all wearing masks and borders between countries remain closed, we look back at Viral Operation as a social experiment, prefiguring what was to come. While in Runscape (2010), Map Office chronicle the kind of freedom of movement which, under our current pandemic conditions, has been denied to many around the globe who have been restricted to lockdown in the interests of public health. The narration describing the body as ‘a bullet which needs no gun’, assumes a newly dark undertone in view of today’s repeated warnings of the deadly spread of the virus from person to person. Running the city to map its portrait and redefine its uses of public space, could equally be an elegy to physical communication through space, a right which most of us took for granted before Corona.
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Nezaket Ekici
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In her own elegy for the freedoms of travel, On The Way Safety and Luck (2016), Nezaket Ekici reimagines a farewell ritual which was once commonly practiced in Turkey and many Balkan countries, where friends and family gather to throw water after the vehicles of the departed, so that their journey may flow as smoothly as water. Ekici’s radical re-enactment of this custom, seen through the lens of Corona-times, implies a purification more physical than spiritual, as people around the globe are instructed to soak and scrub to disinfect themselves after every journey outdoors. Ekici’s Veiling and Reveiling (2010) can equally be read through the prism of our strange times. Does a burka become the ultimate form of safety gear? In this video performance, Ekici meticulously dresses herself in lingerie and make-up, donned on top of the burka she is wearing. Inverting private and public, she subverts the normative function of the burka, to comic effect. But, if viral ticking time bombs are indeed walking our streets, this practice may start to look like a good idea for everyone.
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On the Way Safety and Luck, 2016
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Veiling and Reveiling, 2009
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Shaarbek Amankul
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While western medicine has so far failed to find a viable vaccine or cure, it is perhaps time to turn to the ancient shamanistic traditions of other cultures. In Duba (2006) and Sham (2007), Kyrgyz artist Shaarbek Amankul gives us an intimate portrait of cleansing rituals performed by shamans, with the trances, incantations, cries, and grunts, that seem so alien to most of us. Yet in cultures where many still do not trust in science, it can be hoped that faith in alternative forms of healing will safeguard against the ravages of our viral times.
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Theo Eshetu, Festival of Sacrifice, 2012
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Faith is equally the subject of Theo Eshetu’s Festival of Sacrifice (2012), depicting another ancient cultural tradition, the celebration of Eid-ul-Adha, the Islamic Festival of Sacrifice. Turning the ritual itself into a trance, the video recreates, through its multiplication of images, the kaleidoscopic patterns that highlight the spiritual aspect of the event. Eshetu here manages to create aesthetic beauty from images of ritual slaughter.
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Mariana Hahn, Burn My Love, Burn, 2013
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In the spirit of finding beauty in suffering, Mariana Hahn conceives her own beautiful ritual of personal sacrifice. In her video performance Burn My Love, Burn (2013), the artist confronts the death of a loved one through a ritual of mourning, consuming the ashes of burnt poetry, numbing her suffering on the frozen ice. The tragic reality of our pandemic times is that countless people around the globe are in mourning for loved ones unfairly taken from them by an invisible killer, as yet poorly understood.
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Kate McMillan
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Kate McMillan’s Paradise Falls I & II (2011/2012) is a different kind of tribute to the disappeared, to the forgotten sites of distant traumas, to the frailty of personal and historic memory. Drawing parallels between physical and psychological landscapes, McMillan has created moving paintings where ghost-like people flicker in and out of existence, as symbols of fractured and partial histories that disappear from focus, yet can continue in our collective psyche as dark and haunting traumas. Seen now, from the epicenter of our global viral crisis, this begs the question of how, eventually, will we look back upon, and remember, the time of Corona?
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Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet, 2000
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But while we remain in its midst, Gulsun Karamustafa’s 4-channel video installation and soundscape, Personal Time Quartet (2000), intended as a portrait of the artist’s childhood, instead now paints a picture of how many of us have felt during lockdown, stuck indoors and perpetually repeating the same domestic tasks.
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Stefano Cagol, National Pride, 2009
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While Stefano Cagol’s National Pride (2009) turns a clip from Virus, a 1980 apocalyptic sci-fi film, into an audiovisual parable for our times. Transforming the filmic pandemic of the Italian Flu into a wider reflection on influenza, influence, and borders, this capricious work fits firmly into Cagol’s ongoing series of FLU projects; a body of work dating back to 1998 and the first Bird Flu outbreak in Asia in 1997.
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Sumugan Sivanesan, Children’s Book of War, 2010
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Equally capricious is Sumugan Sivanesan’s A Children’s Book of War (2010), which uses the lighthearted visual languages of animation, computer games, and digital media in a jarring conjunction to address the serious topics of war, sovereignty, and violence. As the experience of the outside world has been for many, during lockdown, restricted to their computer screens, Sivanesan’s dense visual collage of cultural references and Australian colonial history becomes that much more topical today in view of Australia having closed its borders for at least another year in order to safeguard itself from the virus. Herein lies the beauty of distance in pandemic times.
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Qiu Anxiong, Cake, 2014
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In another multi-faceted animated work, Qiu Anxiong’s Cake (2014), combines painting, drawing and clay with a discordant soundtrack of mechanical noises to offer a timeless and exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two. With heart-rate monitors, sirens, and police radio scanners running throughout the soundtrack, and images of wrestlers rendered in a variety of media, this work can be read as particularly emblematic of the struggles of our viral times.
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Varvara Shavrova, The Opera. Three Transformations, 2010-16
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As an artistic analogy for the dramas of our global crisis, the artform of opera can perhaps best capture the heartaches, the soaring emotions, the uncertainties of daily life, both the lack and the overabundance of information, families torn asunder, jobs in peril, relationships strained, nerves fraying, heroines dying alone in attics, and yes, also the joyous moments, the times of calm, the space for contemplation as the world slows down and the music grows softer. Varvara Shavrova’s The Opera. Three Transformations (2010-2016) takes an intimate look at the performers behind the spectacle and the masque of Chinese opera.
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David Krippendorff, Nothing Escapes My Eyes, 2015
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So too does David Krippendorff’s Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015) take us on an intimate journey through identity and history. Krippendorff’s time-warping tribute to a changing world poses a fitting way to round off this exhibition, as a would-be Aida, to a moving soundtrack from the eponymous opera, sheds tears for a place and time which no longer exist. COVID-19 has changed our world forever. It has left gaping holes in the hearts of all those who have lost loved ones. It has impoverished those who were prevented from working, or who had to pay for medical care. Yet it has also witnessed a remarkable outpouring of creativity, good will, and good humor as people around the world try to cope, both in their own ways and communally, with the changing world in the time of Corona. What will be our new normal in post-pandemic times?
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Janet Laurence, Vanishing, 2009/10
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COVIDecameron ends with the meditative soundtrack of deep breathing, snuffling, purring, rumbling, accompanied visually by close-ups of various animals as they inhale…exhale…inhale…exhale. Its not just us humans – the animal kingdom is also at risk from this pan-species pandemic. Janet Laurence’s Vanishing (2009/10) reminds us what COVID-19 has made so strikingly manifest – the most important thing is to keep breathing.
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WITH THANKS TO OUR MEDIA PARTNERS THROUGHOUT THE YEARS:
COVIDecameron
19 Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection
On the occasion of MOMENTUM’s 10th Anniversary
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DAVID SZAUDER
(b. 1976 in Hungary. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Media artist and curator David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Buildingscape, an initiative to turn construction sites into venues for public art. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.
David Szauder has participated in a variety of international projects as artist and curator. In cooperation with MOMENTUM, previous projects include:
“MOMENTUM InsideOut: Lockdown Schmockdown” at CHB Collegium Hungaricum (Berlin, 2021); “Light Space Modulator” at MOMENTUM (Berlin, 2020); “Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014); “INTERSECTION”: Film and Video Art Panel Discussion for Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival, 2014); “THRESHOLDS”: Performance, Exhibition, Discussion (.CHB, Berlin Art Week, 2013); “THRESHOLDS” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013-2014); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “Mass & Mess” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013).
LIGHT SPACE MATERIA
2020, HD Video, Digital Animation, 8 min 27 sec
David Szauder’s film Light Space Materia (2020) translates Bauhaus ideas on technology, new materials, and light into a digital context, upgrading an iconic work of the 1930’s into a 3D digital animation and algorithmically derived soundscape. Taking as his inspiration the kinetic light and sound sculpture Light Space Modulator (1930) by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder re-created his own large-scale rendition of this iconic work – Light Space Modulator (2020). Szauder subsequently used this installation as the basis upon which to make a series of over 100 videos, digital animations, and soundscapes. David Szauder recontextualizes into digital media the driving principal of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s aim to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world.
Szauder’s analysis of the Bauhaus-related kinetics of the original piece focuses on the fundamental question of how contemporary technology could change the formal expression of movement and capture the physicality of materials in a digital context. The Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology. This characteristic forms the essential basis of Szauder’s work, which applies computer code to create his animations and soundscapes derived from the ambient sound and kinetic movement of his Light Space Modulator sculpture using algorithms based on motion analysis. This soundscape accompanies Szauder’s film Light Space Materia, which commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of the materiality of the image, along with film footage of the original Light Space Modulator and of Szauder’s reinvention of this work.
Works from the Digital Sketches Series:
In his ongoing series of Video Sketches, David Szauder hand draws animated collages incorporating family photos and found footage. In the artist’s words, “They are kinds of kinetic systems, structures, moving like the ‘perpetuum mobile’. In my case, the perpetuum mobile is the metaphor of the continually changing inner world of mine. There are a good number of nodes which are connected like impossible machines, and the movements of these nodes create an impossible hierarchy or dominations between the elements of the structure. Occasionally the system strives for completion, but these operations are just alibis, the real aim is to keep the movement endless, the structure closed and the hierarchy sustainable. Easy. Like these sketches.”
KINETIC STUDY NO.68
2020, Video, 4 min 21 sec
SUPPORTIVE STRUCTURES
2020, Video, 1 min 10 sec
Assemblage of Digital Sketches, including
Motivators , Hanging Around, Sunday Meditation, Kinetic Sunglasses Machine
KINETIC MOVEMENTS WITH SOUND
2020, Video, 5 min 32 sec
Assemblage of 6 Digital Sketches:
Kinetic Stability 1, Kinetic Stability 2, Pendulum, Vertical, Horizontal, Magnetic
Watch here the Spotlight interview with David Szauder
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DOUBLE AGENTS II
Between Artists/Curators/Collectors
Rethinking Roles and Practices in the Arts
15 November 2019 @ 6 – 10pm
At KleinervonWiese, Villa Erxleben
Douglasstrasse 28, 14193 Berlin
Next edition of our series “DOUBLE AGENTS” in cooperation with:
Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE, Babette Woltemath/WarenArt Gallery, and Freehome
At 19:00
Special guest is Sean Daniel, member of Magpie ART COLLECTIVE, visiting from South Africa,
in dialogue with Babette Woltemath (artist, designer, collector and founder of WarenArt Gallery).
They will discuss Magpie’s up-cycled art practice in the context
of South African art and design.
Magpie Art Collective was established in 1998 by designer Scott B. Hart and social-entrepreneur Ashoka Fellow. Shane A. Petzer, fine artist Sean Daniel, and administrator Richard Panaino joined in 2006 as magpie expanded and the collective relocated from Cape Town to the Barrydale Studio where they are now based. In addition to the studio creations, Magpie undertake commissions and installations as well as participate in exhibitions. Magpie also produces a range of exciting craft-project-linked products with M-Art-Projects. They link themselves with M-Art-Projects to the surrounding community by engagement with local community – income generation projects, crafters and civil society endeavours.
The Magpie Art Collective believe the work they do links art and design with meaningful commercial and social entrepreneurism. Their creations are environmentally conscious, produced from a broad range of media and often utilizing found or recycled elements.
Made from recycled plastic and water bottles and repurposed plastic packaging, the works selected for this exhibition exemplify Magpie’s aesthetic of using found objects and detritus to create things of beauty out of what we would normally consider trash. The works in this exhibition are shown courtesy of Waren Art.
Double Agents brings together accomplished players on the international art stage to address a diversity of professional strategies and mechanisms for success in today’s competitive art word. The traditional dynamic between artist and gallery is changing as rapidly as new communications platforms, societal norms, and economic incentives arise. We all have to wear multiple hats in order to keep up with the explosion of knowledge and opportunity across multiple fields – to play more than one role in the perpetually shifting dynamics of today’s art world.
Be it artist, curator, collector, art dealer, publisher, professor, institutional, corporate, non-profit, governmental, or private interest – the lines between roles need to blur to enable diverse and experimental approaches to artistic production and consumption. Double Agents is an ongoing series of discussions each bringing together exceptional people who work across many fields at once in order to tell their stories and share ideas. The first Double Agents discussion takes place in the context of “bonum et malum”, the inaugural exhibition of Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE at the Villa Erxleben.
FEATURING:
Anita Ackermann, Nasser Almulhim, Chrissy Angliker, Oded Arad, Inna Artemova, Max Beckmann, Andreas Blank, Anina Brisolla, Karol Broniatowski, Claus Brunsmann, Thomas Leo Chapman IV, Claudia Chaseling, Antonina Denisiuc, Kerstin Dzewior, Amir Fattal, Mafalda Figueiredo, Doug Fishbone, Daniel Grüttner, Mariana Hahn, Janes Haid-Schmallenberg, Stefan Hain, Chris Hammerlein, Simon Heser, Monika Immrova, Miru Kim, Franziska Klotz, Wanda Koller, David Krippendorff, Milan Kunc, Jani Leinonen, Via Lewandowski, Sarah Lüdemann, Paul Maciejowski, Milovan Destil Markovic, Sara Masüger, Almagul Menlibayaeva, Tracey Moffatt, Jennifer Oellerich, onformative, Ulrich Panzer, Françoise Pétrovitch, Otto Piene, Aurora Reinhard, Gerhard Richter, Stefan Rinck, Kerstin Serz, Jörg Schaller, Maik Schierloh, Thomas Schütte, David Ariel Szauder, Dagmar Uhde, Mariana Vassileva, Elisabeth Wagner, Michael Wutz, Zakharov Vadim, Jindrich Zeithamml
MORE ON THE “BONUM ET MALUM” >>
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
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MOMENTUM AiR
Nelya Korzhova and Roman Korzhov
18 – 28 October & 30 November – 8 December 2019
NELYA KORZHOVA
Artist and curator Nelya Korzhova (born in 1963) works in the media of painting, photography, objects, installations, with her practice based on the principle of distant contemplation. Her curatorial projects, emerging from a focus on social sculpture, eschew the concept of art as
a ready-to-consume object. Rather, she identifies with the concept of “no man’s land”, where the viewer is invited to become part of the event in order to see what it’s for.
From 1997 to 2014, Nelya Korzhova was the organizer (together with Roman Korzhov) and art director of the Samara Regional Public Charitable Foundation “Center for Contemporary Art”. Together with Roman Korzhov, in 1999 she founded the international Shiryaevo Biennale of Contemporary Art, initiating the concept of the “Nomadic Show” — a processional exhibition engaging the public with art while moving through space. From 1999 to the present, Nelya Korzhova is the curator of the main project and artistic director of the Shiryaevo Biennale.
Korzhova has curated many projects and programs, including: “Cover
of Daily Routine”, “Fascism Now”, “Nine Months of Feelings”, “Another Freedom”, “Visiology”, “Wonders of Idleness”, “Street as a Museum — Museum as
a Street”, “Volga. Zero”, amongst others. She is the author of articles on contemporary art, a compiler of catalogues, and a lecturer.
Nelya Korzhova was the nominee of the State Innovation Prize in 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017. She worked at the Volga and Central Volga branches of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) / ROSIZO from 2007 to 2017. Nelya Korzhova lives and works in Samara.
ROMAN KORZHOV
Artist and curator Roman Korzhov (born in 1964) was from 1997 to 2014 the organizer (together with Nelya Korzhova) and the chairman of the Samara Regional Public Charitable foundation “Center for Contemporary Art”. This was the first profile institution in Samara, actively engaged in the search for new forms of communication of contemporary art in the social environment and the development of international dialogue. From 1999 to the present, he is the founder (together with Nelya Korzhova) and the commissioner of the international Shiryaevo Biennale of Contemporary Art.
Roman Korzhov has initiated many projects and programs: “Open Spaces”, “Independent Artistic Scholarship” (within the program of sister cities Samara and Stuttgart), “The Art of Communication” (Institute for International Relations of Germany, IfA, Stuttgart, Germany), “Ecology of Perception”, “Visionology”, “Street as a Museum — a Museum as a Street”, “Volga. Zero”, amongst others.
Korzhov was the Nominee of the National Innovation Prize in 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017. He has worked at the Volga branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) since 2007. And since 2015 he has served as Director of the Central Volga branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art / ROSIZO. Roman Korzhov lives and works in Samara.
More info on the Shiryaevo Biennale Exhibition >>
More info on the Christmas Art Market >>
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/391265302 [/fve]
Nelya Korzhova presents Shiryaevo Biennale at Double Agents Symposium
More info here >>
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT
ABOUT TMU
The Trust for Mutual Understanding was established in 1984 by an anonymous American philanthropist as a private, grantmaking organization dedicated to promoting improved communication, closer cooperation, and greater respect between the people of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries in Eastern and Central Europe. TMU’s program reflects her conviction that grantmaking can make a contribution to that process by supporting international face-to-face contact and professional interaction. TMU’s mission has been shaped by the belief that creative international collaboration encourages global harmony. TMU continues to support East-West exchanges in the arts and environment, reflecting the founder’s appreciation of the importance of culture and ecology in people’s lives. Before 1985, there was relatively little American funding for such activities, and what support there was — mainly governmental — was often restricted by political considerations. It remains TMU’s goal to enable talented people to come together from different countries to freely share ideas and stimulate creativity in a nonpolitical context.
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INNA ARTEMOVA
(b. Moscow, USSR. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Born in Moscow, Inna Artemova studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI). For her diploma project, she received the 2nd prize of the Russian Federation. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and started to focus on her work as an artist in the field of painting and drawing. Recent major exhibitions include: “Points of Resistance” with MOMENTUM, Berlin (2021); the Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); and the Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts presented her works in the solo show “Landscapes of Tomorrow” (2019). She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Austria and Italy. Additionally, her works were shown at international art fairs in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, the US, and Japan.
Artemova’s practice remains heavily influenced by her professors at the MArchI in Moscow, the “Paper Architects“, a movement originating in the 1980s that developed futuristic architectural creations never intended to be realized. The visionary projects of the Paper Architects and her experience of the failure of the communist utopia with the fall of the Soviet Union, has led Artemova to explore, through her constructivist painting style, the ideas of architectural utopias from the 1960s up to her own futuristic visions. In creating utopian landscapes and spaces, Artemova interrogates the future of living spaces and their impact upon human relationships. The concept of utopia stands for a space of possibility in human consciousness in which the crucial questions have to be answered again and again: Is there no alternative to the reality in which we live? What will we do in the future? Do we have to fail because of our ideal ideas?
Utopia #4532
2020, ink, marker, pencil on paper, 75 x 110cm
Utopia #3275
2019, 36 x 53cm , ink, marker, pencil on paper
Utopia #4532 (2020) and Utopia #3275 (2019) are two out of a series of over 40 diverse works sharing the title of Utopia. Yet while the definition of utopia is the dream of a perfect society, these particular paintings evoke a sense of impending cosmic cataclysm more so than an idealized state of perfection. Whether meteors crashing through the cosmos, or the viral structures with which we have become all too familiar in the past year of pandemic, or the aftermath of some volatile force, these works send a suitably ambiguous message about the future and the present. Contriving to comingle a notion of existential threat with the sense of the sublime, these works can be seen as portraits of our precarious times. Having witnessed first-hand the collapse of the Communist utopia in her native Soviet Union, Artemova’s utopias are fragile constructivist visions in a state of constant flux; exploding, imploding, teetering on the edge of a perilous balance, or perhaps already being rebuilt. Every collapse presents the hope of a new beginning; a renewed dream of a more perfect future. Utopias are too often built on the ashes of their opposites.
[Rachel Rits-Volloch]
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GULNUR MUKAZHANOVA
(b. 1984 in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. Lves and works in Berlin, Germany.)
Gulnur Mukazhanova graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty (2006), and the Weissensee Art Academy in Berlin, Germany (2013). Her interdisciplinary practice focuses on textile art, but also encompasses photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Mukazhanova’s art is a confrontation of two different cultures but also a dialogue between them. From her Central Asian roots she keeps a strong physical relation to traditional materials that are not only used for their aesthetics but have a symbolic and historic meaning. Mukazhanova’s work is influenced by Kazakh textile traditions, with felt and lurex fabrics as her most important materials. She addresses identity problems and the transformations of traditional values of her culture in the age of globalisation. Mukazhanova’s works are her reflection upon current kazakh society. They aim to critically illuminate the tensions between the individual, the post nomadic developed identity, and the alienation wrought by global information and media culture.
Mukazhanova has participated in international biennales such as: A Time for Dreams, IV Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, Moscow, (2014); and the Krasnoyarsk Biennale, Russia (2015). In 2018 she participated with Iron Woman in the groundbreaking exhibition Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, at MOMENTUM, Berlin. In 2022, Mukazhanova participated in the prestigious Artist Residency program at CHAT – Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile, in Hong Kong. Selected recent exhibitions include: Mimosa Haus, London, UK (2022); Davra Art Collective, Dokumenta XV, Kassel, Germany (2022); Kulturforum Ansbach, Germany (2021); Asia Now, Paris, France (2022, 2021, 2019); MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany (2022, 2021,2018); Aspan Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2018); Wapping Power Station, London, UK (2018); National Museum, Astana, Kazakhstan; (2017); Daegu Art Factory, Daegu, South Korea (2017); Artwin Gallery, Moscow, Russia (2016); HWK Leipzig, Germany (2013); Freies Museum, Berlin, Germany (2013); Tengri-Umai Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2010), amongst many others. Her work is held in international collections, including: MOMENTUM, Fondazione 107, Turin, Italy; Krasnoyarsk Museum, Russia; La Metive, Moutier-d’Àhun, France.
IRON WOMAN (2010)
Installation: nails, screws, metal wire, chain, 40 x 30 x 5 cm
The sculptural installation Iron Woman, was one of the first works Gulnur Mukazhanova created after moving to Berlin from her native Kazakhstan. In this work, the artist undertakes a personal research of female identity in her Central Asian culture. The sculptural object made of metal nails and chains takes the form of an intimate undergarment, which was worn by the artist in a related series of photographs. With Iron Woman, Mukazhanova explores a woman’s body in the conflict zones of sensuality and ideology – at the intersections of personal and social environment, of ethnic vs. global culture, of modernity vs. tradition. Significations of sexuality move between the prohibited and the accessible, the exotic and the familiar, the fetishized and the mundane, the carnal and the sacred. Within this evocative object exists the duality of a very personal point of female resistance, alongside a loudly feminist cry against female oppression in its multitude of forms.
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SHAARBEK AMANKUL
(b. 1959 in Bishkek. Lives and works in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and Germany.)
Shaarbek Amankul (b. 1959, lives and works in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) is a curator and interdisciplinary artist working with a variety of media: ceramic, sculpture, installation, performance, video and photography, in addition to conceptual research projects. Amankul holds art and history degrees from Frunze Art College, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (1980) and Kyrgyz National University (1989), respectively. Amankul founded the international artist group Art Connection (2001-2006), the first art initiative in Kyrgyzstan focused on environmental issues. Amankul’s conceptual and curatorial work also includes the extensive art platform B’Art Contemporary, which he founded in 2007 to instigate a critical arts dialogue between the communities of Central Asia and the global art world.
B’Art Contemporary, amongst the very first contemporary art initiatives in Kyrgyzstan, is an artistic research platform which considers art as an essential facilitator of critical dialogue on environmental, social, economic and cultural issues faced by the societies of Central Asia. To continue his mobile art practice and artistic research, in 2011 Shaarbek Amankul founded the Nomadic Art Camp, a series of nomadic art projects in Kyrgyzstan, using the practice of the traditional way of life of nomads as a source of inspiration for contemporary art practices. The project, continuing to this day, focuses on the relationship between art and the political, economic and social processes at the intersection of issues of globalization, migration and bio-cultural diversity.
DUBA
2006, Video, 6 min 56 sec
Shamans are healers who use traditional practices to cure people of ailments, triggering natural forces on a subconscious level to help overcome illness. On screen, there’s only a close-up of a face – the fascinating physiology of a trance – a shaman performing a ritual. The title of the work ‘Duba’ means ‘cleaning the soul’. In Kyrgyz culture scientific explanations can be ineffective since many people do not trust logic.
The realm of informal medicine and inexplicable phenomena is often more convincing than science. This era of complex conditions of social upheaval and rapid changes within the fields of technology and communication lead to feelings of inadequacy and a loss of identity. People therefore turn to shamans to obtain treatment for their illnesses. The irrational is a form of restoration of lost identity.
[Shaarbek Amankul]
SHAM
2007, Video, 4 min 21 sec
Like Duba, this work documents a cleansing ritual. The unconventional appears most likely to gain a foothold in the Post-Soviet Era of no fixed paradigms. In this place, they believe in and hope for miracles. And only the shaman can enter a trance. In this state of mind, they read prayers, they yawn and cry from excitement; they scream and belch from sicknesses of both body and mind.
Strange how they meditate, scratching and beating one another. And afterwards, according to credible sources, they often don’t remember what happened to them. They will conclude that everything happened by the will of higher powers. Once they’re purified and blessed like this, they can live on more peacefully.
[Shaarbek Amankul]
Both Duba and Sham entered the MOMENTUM Collection when Shaarbek Amankul undertook a 1-month Artist Residency at MOMENTUM AiR in January-February 2020, having previously participated in MOMENTUM’s exhibitions WATER(Proof) (2019) and BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and other Mythical Places (2015).
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David Szauder
Light Space Modulator
In Homage to Moholy-Nagy
Presentation by the Artist every Friday at 14:00 – 18:00
5 June – 27 September 2020
And during Berlin Art Week:
9 June – 13 September 2020 at 14:00 – 18:00
We resume normal gallery hours: 9 – 27 September, 13:00 – 19:00
& Viewing by Appointment. Please contact: staff@momentumworldwide.org
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Taking as his inspiration the eponymous sculpture by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder has re-created his own large-scale 3.5m rendition of this iconic work as a kinetic light and sound sculpture for public space. First premiered in Korea, MOMENTUM brought Szauder’s Light Space Modulator to Berlin for the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus in 2019. Initially installed at the historic Villa Erxleben, Light Space Modulator moved to the MOMENTUM gallery in March 2020 for a 6-month Studio Residency with David Szauder.
This exhibition of David Szauder’s work in progress comprises the process and results of his work over the course of his Studio Residency, in which he continued to develop his translation of Moholy-Nagy’s seminal ideas into a multi-mediated interactive installation; creating two videos and a soundscape algorithmically derived from the motion and sound of the sculpture – Light Space Materia and Kinetic Study no. 68.
Within the limits of the COVID-19 restrictions, this work-in-progress is punctuated with Open Studio presentations and Artist Talks throughout the course of David Szauder’s Studio Residency and Exhibition.
The original Moholy-Nagy work (151.1 × 69.9 × 69.9 cm), one of the earliest electrically powered kinetic sculptures, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light Space Modulator) holds a central place in the history of modern sculpture. Representing the culmination of Moholy-Nagy’s experimentation at the Bauhaus, it incorporates his interest in technology, new materials, and, above all, light. Moholy sought to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world. He presented Light Prop at a 1930 exhibition of German design as a mechanism for generating “special lighting and motion effects” on a stage. The rotating construction produces a startling array of visual effects when its moving and reflective surfaces interact with the beam of light. The sculpture became the subject of numerous photographs as well as Moholy’s abstract film Lightplay: Black, White, Gray (1930). Over the years the artist and later the museums made alterations to the sculpture to keep it in working order. It is still operational today.
– [citation from Harvard Art Museums, holding the original Light Space Modulator in the Harvard Museum Collection]
The Original: Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator
Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM
ARTIST STATEMENT
One of the greatest Hungarian innovations, and one of the earliest electrically powered kinetic sculptures, Light Prop for an Electric Stage holds a central place in the history of modern sculpture.
Representing the culmination of Moholy-Nagy’s experimentation at the Bauhaus, it incorporates his interest in technology, new materials, and, above all, light. Moholy sought to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world.
Light Prop for an Electric Stage, as Moholy-Nagy referred to it, not only pushes the temporal dimension of art but expands its spatial dimensions into the entire environment, including the viewer, who becomes a surface onto which light is reflected.
It embodies Moholy-Nagy’s goal of pushing art beyond static forms and introducing kinetic elements, in which the volume relationships are virtual ones, i.e., resulting mainly from the actual movement of the contours, rings, rods, and other objects.
To the three dimensions of volume, a fourth: movement – in other words, time – is added.
Moholy’s masterpiece is not just a piece of art, it is the perfect combination of science, art, and innovation.
To Moholy-Nagy’s original design, David Szauder adds a fifth dimension: the virtual.
Szauder’s vision for the Moholy Cloud expands the kinetic interactivity of the sculpture into the realm of connectivity in virtual space. Every moving part of the sculpture contains a sensor engaging with its environment, and through a wireless connection, all the acquired data is visualised to create a virtual Light Space Modulator.
[David Szauder]
ARTIST BIO
David Szauder
Media artist David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.
David Szauder has participated in a variety of international projects as artist and curator. In cooperation with MOMENTUM, previous projects include: “Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014); “INTERSECTION”: Film and Video Art Panel Discussion for Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival, 2014); “THRESHOLDS”: Performance, Exhibition, Discussion (.CHB, Berlin Art Week, 2013); “THRESHOLDS” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013-2014); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “Mass & Mess” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013).
WORKS SHOWN TOGETHER WITH LIGHT SPACE MODULATOR
LIGHT SPACE MATERIA
2020, Video, 8 min 27 sec
Created by David Szauder for the exhibition Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM, and subsequently acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/450055147 [/fve]
Translating Moholy-Nagy’s seminal ideas for the Bauhaus into a digital context, David Szauder’s large-scale kinetic light and sound sculpture Light Space Modulator (2020) serves as the basis for his film Light Space Materia in addition to a series of over 100 videos, digital animations, and soundscapes algorithmically derived from the motion and sound of his sculpture. David Szauder’s analysis of the Bauhaus-related kinetics of the original piece focuses on the fundamental question of how modern technology could change the formal expression of movement. The Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology. For this reason, this characteristic always formed an essential basic notion of Szauder’s work and led him to choose computer code when creating the animations. The code contributed to a better understanding of the compositional methods and movements and opened a new door for the perception of the 3-dimensional kinetic world. As the last step, a soundscape was derived from the ambient sound and kinetic movement of Szauder’s Light Space Modulator sculpture using algorithms based on motion analysis. This soundscape accompanies Szauder’s film Light Space Materia, which commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of materiality of the image.
KINETIC STUDY no. 68
2020, Video Animation, 4 min 2 sec
Created by David Szauder for the exhibition Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM, and subsequently acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection
Kinetic Study no. 68 is based on the structure of David Szauder’s Light Space Modulator sculpture. Using algorithms to translate the motion and sound of the sculpture into a 2-dimensional video animation, Szauder breaks down this work into four stages: The Skeleton (Line Art), Colours, Textures, and Collage.
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/455296041 [/fve]
Drawing on techniques developed in his ongoing series of Video Sketches, Szauder hand draws animated collages incorporating family photos and found footage. In the artist’s words, “They are kinds of kinetic systems, structures, moving like the ‘perpetuum mobile’. In my case, the perpetuum mobile is the metaphor of the continually changing inner world of mine. There are a good number of nodes which are connected like impossible machines, and the movements of these nodes create an impossible hierarchy or dominations between the elements of the structure. Occasionally the system strives for completion, but these operations are just alibis, the real aim is to keep the movement endless, the structure closed and the hierarchy sustainable. Easy. Like these sketches.”
PARALLEL SCREENING:
Moholy-Nagy’s Dynamik der Großstadt (2006)
Filmic experiment after Lászlò Moholy-Nagy
35 mm, 16 mm / Super 8 mm / DV-PAL and VHS, 3-channel video, 13:48 min. loop
Project team: Nike Arnold, Prof. Dr. Andreas Haus, Aline Helmcke, Frank Hoppe, Frédéric Krauke, Walter Lenertz
Production: UDK-Berlin
In his avant-garde film “Dynamics of the Big City” László Moholy-Nagy portrays the endless flow of big-city life. It is one of the first attempts in the history of film to visually capture the manifold moments of movement in a modern metropolis. The foto film “Dynamics of the Big City” (1921/1922) became part of a new genre that emerged in the 1920s in several places at once: the Big City Symphony (even though Moholy-Nagy’s film could only be realized posthumously). The working group of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UDK Berlin implemented the sketch as a 3-screen projection in their interpretation of “Dynamics of the Big City – A Filmic Experiment after László Moholy-Nagy”.
Installation at Gallery Kleiner von Wiese, Villa Erxleben, Berlin, December 2019 – January 2020
With thanks to:
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
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POLIS
In Cooperation with PENINSULA
Official program VORSPIEL | Transmediale & CTM
Opening: 24 January 2020 at 6 – 10pm
Exhibition Hours: 25 & 26 January at 1 – 7pm
Featuring
Alterazioni Video
Guerra e Pace
28′ 37″, 2018
War and Peace is a film that focuses on the phenomenon and the aesthetics of fake news. Today more than ever we are overwhelmed by a flood of news that comes from multiple channels and in this enormous chaos of information we don’t have the tools to recognize what is true and what is false, so every news loses its truth, up to the point that there are no more news but only fake news as Alexander Dugin states in this film, ‘In the post-modern era, facts are not important anymore but only how they are told matter; news that has a greater impact on people are those that win the war of the images we live every day. ‘ The protagonists of the film speak different languages and the use of subtitles becomes a tool to modify the sentences expressed by them, crippling the meaning as in the fake news mechanism.
Ambaradan
34′ 09″, 2015
Ambaradan is a movie shot by Alterazioni Video in Ethiopia. The artists imagine a near future, possible, where autonomous groups of indigenous people resist the advancement of modernization by reorganizing themselves into nomadic tribes, sufficiently technological and independent. A tribal culture imagined with the eyes of a 15-year-old “tumblr-dependent”, where symbols, hairstyles and languages of the net overlap with the traditional, ancestral and shamanic ones of the tribes of the Omo valley. The current situation foresees that these tribes, among the most spectacular and isolated of Africa, will be relocated in temporary estates away from the Omo River, on which the largest dam in Africa is about to be completed, an ambitious project of Italian origin that has the disadvantage of having to eradicate the natives from the Omo Valley. Alterazioni Video is part of this intricate situation and will try to create together with the natives new cinematic icons about an epic and possible future.
About PENINSULA
Peninsula is a non-profit association founded in 2014 by a group of mostly Italian artists, curators, musicians, art critics and designers who settled in the German capital during the past decade.
Peninsula is an interdisciplinary platform that presents exhibitions and projects in collaboration with Berlin’s international art scene. It is a meeting place and a multidisciplinary area of expression for all those who are interested in culture. It aims at creating a fertile ground for dialogue and confrontation on the contemporary moment while promoting one of the most interesting aspects of this cultural panorama: a cosmos in which the artistic realities of different countries around the world merge and expand.
MORE INFO HERE >>
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MOMENTUM AiR
Shaarbek Amankul
Website – Portfolio
12 January – 12 February 2020
SHAARBEK AMANKUL
ARTIST TALK &
VIDEO SCREENING
9 February 2020 @ 4pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997, Berlin
MORE INFO BELOW
PROJECT PRESENTATION
22 January 2020 @ 7pm
The Land where Horses Run Free
Artist Talk by Shaarbek Amankul
@ TOP – Transdisciplinary Project Space
Schillerpromenade 4, 12049 Berlin
MORE INFO > >
Shaarbek Amankul (b. 1959. Lives and works in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) is a curator and interdisciplinary artist working with a variety of media: ceramic, sculpture, installation, performance, video and photography, in addition to conceptual research projects. Amankul holds art and history degrees from Frunze Art College, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (1980) and Kyrgyz National University (1989), respectively. Amankul founded the international artist group Art Connection (2001-2006), the first the art initiative in Kyrgyzstan focused on environmental issues. Amankul’s conceptual and curatorial work also includes the extensive art platform B’Art Contemporary, which he founded in 2007 to instigate a critical arts dialogue between the communities of Central Asia and the global art world.
B’Art Contemporary, amongst the very first contemporary art initiatives in Kyrgyzstan, is an artistic research platform which considers art as an essential facilitator of critical dialogue on environmental, social, economic and cultural issues faced by the societies of Central Asia. To continue his mobile art practice and artistic research, in 2011 Shaarbek Amankul founded the Nomadic Art Camp, a series of nomadic art projects in Kyrgyzstan, using the practice of the traditional way of life of nomads as a source of inspiration for contemporary art practices. The project, continuing to this day, focuses on the relationship between art and the political, economic and social processes at the intersection of issues of globalization, migration and bio-cultural diversity.
Scroll Down for Extended Artist Bio
Watch the video of the Shaarbek Amankul’s artist talk at MOMENTUM:
SCREENING PROGRAM
Flight of the Blind Eagle
2019, video performance, 1’ (designed to loop)
Kyrgyzstan has gone through a difficult path of searching for happiness and selfhood. Having passed through many historical ages, the Kyrgyz people still have not found an autonomous and holistic vision of themselves – as individuals, a people, a society, a state – and a path toward their future development. Today, such rethinking is a paramount task for society. Eternity has a special grace – it opens its veils even when we are blind and blind others. It gives freedom of choice even when we deprived ourselves and others of freedom. [Shaarbek Amankul]
Untitled
2019, video performance, 1’ (designed to loop)
As one hypothesis, suggests that in order to move forward, visions of historical identification must be critically examined as the phantoms of consciousness they are. These figures, literally burdened by different headwear, are dressed in the color worn by woman exploring new universes and ghosts from another time or mind, their movements bound to one another in a counter-argument to the nomadic symbol of impossible autonomy. Both a figurative image and a literal image, whose very body is visually fragmented, becoming part of the landscape itself. [Shaarbek Amankul]
Drinking the Wind
2020, 5’
For centuries, the nomadic people coexisted with animals; they were indispensable helpers living in symbiosis. Intercutting film footage from 1965 taken from the Kyrgyz State Film Archive, with a video performance shot by Amankul, this work investigates mythologies of the figure of the nomad, both in Kyrgyz culture and global ideology. How can Central Asia continue to draw from the traditional idea of the nomad so crucial to cultural history, while moving past clichés and into transformative models about contemporary identity? What to do locally for survival in the globalizing world? Does breaking with old archetypes necessitate the loss of history? [Shaarbek Amankul]
End of Nature
2010/2020, 3 channel video, 3’
Designed as a 3-channel video installation, this project reminds us of our dependence on nature – destroying it we destroy our habitat and thus destroy ourselves. Our sense of omnipotence is a myth; as humans, our well-being depends on the well-being of nature. The work is a manifesto calling for the preservation of biological and cultural diversity as a part of our identity. In a country riddled with Uranium mines, and a legacy of selling its natural resources to support foreign interests, the destruction on the screen can be seen as but a chilling preface to the devastation ahead. With original footage shot in 2010, however, this work was made after the Kyrgyz government ban on Uranium mining in 2019.
Kok Boru / Grey Wolf (Capricornus AUTHORITIES)
2011, 1’09” (original 5’)
Kok Boru, the national game of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, has its origins in traditional nomadic culture, when hunters and shepherds would go after the wolves decimating their livestock. According to legend, having caught up with the pack, they would pick up running wolves from the ground, throwing them between each other almost playfully. The game today requires teams on horseback to throw a dead sheep or goat into their opponent’s goal on the playing field. The cultural origins of the game are combative. While playing Kok Boru, men and horses were taught to be fearless, courageous, and daring; qualities needed by warriors. ‘Kok Boru’, translated as ‘Grey Wolf’, is viewed by many today as their primary link to the cultural legacy of their forebears as nomads.
Duba
2006, 3’05″ (original 6’56″)
Shamans are healers who use traditional practices to cure people of ailments, triggering natural forces on a subconscious level to help overcome illness. On screen, there’s only a close-up of a face – the fascinating physiology of a trance – a shaman performing a ritual. The title of the work ‘Duba’ means ‘cleaning the soul’. In Kyrgyz culture scientific explanations can be ineffective since many people do not trust logic. The realm of informal medicine and inexplicable phenomena is often more convincing than science. This era of complex conditions of social upheaval and rapid changes within the fields of technology and communication lead to feelings of inadequacy and a loss of identity. People therefore turn to shamans to obtain treatment for their illnesses. The irrational is a form of restoration lost identity. [Shaarbek Amankul]
Sham
2007, 4’20″
Like “Duba”, this work documents a cleansing ritual. The unconventional appears most likely to gain a foothold in the Post-Soviet Era of no fixed paradigms. In this place, they believe in and hope for miracles. And only the shaman can enter a trance. In this state of mind, they read prayers, they yawn and cry from excitement; they scream and belch from sicknesses of both body and mind. Strange how they meditate, scratching and beating one another. And afterwards, according to credible sources, they often don’t remember what happened to them. They will conclude that everything happened by the will of higher powers. Once they’re purified and blessed like this, they can live on more peacefully.
Circumcision
2011, 3’43″ (original 4’10″)
Documenting the traditional circumcision ceremony of the artist’s nephew, this work is another chapter in the portrait of his nation, which Shaarbek Amankul unblinkingly captures on film, from intimate familial moments to explicit scenes viscerally impossible to watch. During the modernization of Kyrgyzstan in Soviet times, the tradition of circumcision was banned, but was nevertheless performed in secret in often unsanitary conditions without appropriate medical instruments. Today this right of passage is performed in official institutions by countless families free to practice their cultural and religious traditions.
Song
2007, 4’35″
This work is yet another chapter in Shaarbek Amankul’s portrait of life in his culture; everyday moments, both fleeting and eternal, abstract and real, poetic and commonplace. It is both a portrait of the many normally invisible, a cleaning lady polishing the floors, and a strikingly individual close-up of an idiosyncratic character.
New Society
2006, 1’
The video New Society shows poor villagers on the outskirts of the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, emptying aid packages of bottled water onto the arid ground so they can recycle the plastic for cash. The devastating irony by which the normally environmentally sound practice of recycling results in the wastage of water is a reflection upon the economic privation and shortsightedness wherein a population comes to prefer the quick cash from recycling to the water itself. This twisted take on the water economy is devoted to the search for social identity on the part of thousands of residents of the suburbs of Bishkek. This work looks at the population who left their villages after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to remain marginalized to this day by the city infrastructure through unemployment and poverty.
Artist
2011, 1’ (original 9’40″)
This is a documentary portrait of a disabled street artist in Bishkek. Unable to use his arms, Tolon paints with his legs, selling his work in underground passages around the city. Not a prurient glimpse of the carnivalesque, rather this is an homage to one individual’s strength of will. Surviving through the dexterity of his legs – eating, drinking, drawing pictures, calculating money – he paints lusciously colorful pictures of popular stars and singers. A figure both abject and heroic, there is in his work something really original.
We Need To Live
2007, 4’33″
Editing documentary footage within a poetic structure, Amankul’s videos have tracked the fundamental social, political and cultural changes that have taken place in Kyrgyzstan since it gained independence from the USSR in 1991. During this time there has been considerable civil unrest and a move from a secular to an Islamic state culture. The two-channel film examines, in brutal counterpoint, the tragic discrepancies between propaganda and reality, as well as the ludicrous faces of state power, inhumanity, wastage of resources and civil unrest.
VATAN / Homeland
2007, 4’34″
Another work in the series of video-portraits of Kyrgyzstan, capturing the many contradictions of a culture ravaged by political and religious colonization, regime change, and modernization, still in search of its post-Soviet identity. Expanding upon the tragic, and at times absurd counterpoints of the human condition in Kyrgyzstan, Amankul shows us an Eastern Bazar, passers-by and cripples, traders and beggars; dancing girls and a border post; demonstrations and moments of revolutionary turmoil; the beating of “enemies of the people” at rallies; and acts of self-immolation; celebrations and riots, the dark and light sides of life; and a lullaby to appease the passions, a mother’s request for clemency.
Lenin Stands – Lenin Fell Down
2003, 1’30″
With the advent of Communism in Kyrgyzstan, pre-Soviet ways of life were transformed as nomads became fighters for an international revolution, farmers became citizens, and Muslims became atheists. In the central square of Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, Lenin’s sculpture proudly stood from 1982 to 2003. In an almost comic case of cultural confusion, even after gaining their independence, masses of former communists came to pray beneath this statue; the worship of Communist ideology giving way to the mass prayers of Ramadan. Lenin towered above this square until 2003, when he was brought down from the facade of the Historical Museum (the Museum of Revolution until 1992), and moved to its backyard. This procedure, though oddly ceremonial, was not advertised by local authorities. This work captures a rare historic moment – Lenin in flight, suspended between a past of failed ideologies, and an uncertain future. The ceremony of the changing of the guard – so appropriate to this notable event – is ironically incidental to it, taking place every day at this location, and clearly oblivious to Lenin’s historic flight.
Puzzle of Identity
2020, 1’30″ (designed to loop)
The collapse of the USSR with its idea of communism has led to a new renaissance of Islam in post-soviet Kyrgyzstan. Every year during the holy month of Ramadan, thousands of Muslims – many of whom in the past were devoted custodians of communist ideology – gather for a collective holiday prayer on the central square near the Lenin monument and the Parliament of the Kyrgyz Republic. Historically, the square hosted grand Soviet parades glorifying socialism. Today it is a space for strictly framed religious practices. The influence of Islam is growing at an enormous speed. On one hand western civilization replaces socialist values, on the other hand traditional values and spirituality based on religion have revived. [Shaarbek Amankul]
Transformation
2005, project documentation video, 12’14″
Transformation is a project curated by Shaarbek Amankul as part of his Nomadic Art initiatives, inviting international artists to examine the social and political issues of Central Asia: the movement from a totalitarian crisis of public and political life to open civil society. The project took place 2005 amidst the derelict buildings of a former secret soviet military base which produced uranium from the waters of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. Here the ruins of the architecture represent not merely potential ecological catastrophe, in their echoing of Chernobyl, but in the casting off of a place through the implacability of capitalism. This contradiction, the history and reason for the existence of the buildings opposed to the natural surroundings, embodies inspiration for investigations of topics such as spirituality, globalization, international terrorism, and dictatorship. [Shaarbek Amankul]
Selected Group Exhibitions
Beyond numerous exhibitions held in various countries of the Soviet Union, he has exhibited in US, Europe, Asia like World Contemporary Art 98, Los Angeles, 1998; Art in Action, Oxford, 1999; No Mads Land, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2002; Transforma, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2002; 43rd Premio Suzzara, Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea di Suzzara, Italy, 2003); Central Asian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale/videoarchive, 2005; Intersection, Modern Art Gallery, Ulan Bator, 2007; 2nd Singapore Biennale, 2008; Zindan/Vatan/Duba, Kunsthalle/Spiegel, Lothringer13, München, 2009; Biennale Cuvée, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, 2009; The View from Elsewhere, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2009; Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane, 2009; Changing Climate: New Media and Video Art from Central Asia, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2009; 22nd Les Instants Vidéo Festival, Marseille, 2009; Video and Performance Art Festival, Ramallah, 2011; Between Heaven and Earth: Art from the Centre of Asia, Gallery Calvert 22, London, 2011; Introspection, Ya Gallery, Kyiv, 2013; Crossroad: Contemporary Art from Central Asia & Caucasus, Sotheby’s, London, 2013; Video from Elsewhere, Edinburgh, 2013, Edinburgh; Call and Response with George Steinmann, Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, 2014; Balagan! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Others Mythical Places, Kühlhaus-Berlin, 2015; Flight of a Blind Eagle, Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts, Bishkek, 2017; Posttotal, Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts, Bishkek; Collection, Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts, Bishkek, 2019; Water(Proof), MOMENTUM, Kunstquatier Bethanien, Berlin, 2019; Planet Art Festival of Nature, Kühlhaus-Berlin, 2019; Water(Proof), Federation Square Melbourne, 2019; Shamanism and Contemporary Artists, Gallery 46, London, 2020; Waldwolfwildnis, Museum Villa Rot, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, 2020; Project Stoa 169, Polling, Germany (Sculpture Park opening to the public 2022).
International Artist Residencies
House of Art Foundation USSR (1989-91, Latvia); Berkshire Artist’s Settlement (1998, NY); International Artist in Residence Krems (2003, Austria); Print Graphic Academy (2005, Austria); Vermont Studio Center (2005, USA), CECArtslink Global Art Lab (New York / San Francisco); International Artist Residence Villa Waldberta (2011, Germany); MOMENTUM (2020, Berlin, Germany).
Conferences & Symposiums
Urban Ceramic (1996, Tashkent, Uzbekistan); Ceramic in Artchtecture UNESCO (1997, Samarkand, Uzbekistan); 10th Istanbul Biennale Conference “International Discourse vs. Local Vibrancy: Challenges and Opportunities in the Practice of Art in Central Asia” (2007, Istanbul); CIMAM Annual Conference “Contemporary Institutions as Producers in Late Capitalism” (2007, Vienna); Intersection: Contemporary Art (2007, Ulan Bator, Mongolia); Art Hub / New Silk Road (2009, Bangkok, Tailand); International Sculpture and Land Art (2009, Bad Tolz, Germany); CIMAM Annual Conference “Common Ground for Museums in a Global Society” (2010, Shanghai); International Terracotta Art (2010, Eskishekir, Turkey); General Assembly of International Academy of Ceramic (2014, Dublin); Culture Summit (2017, Abu Dhabi); International Colloquium in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture “Home & Journey around the Globe” (2019, Bishkek), Asia Art Space Network Forum (2019, Gwangju).
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT
ABOUT TMU
The Trust for Mutual Understanding was established in 1984 by an anonymous American philanthropist as a private, grantmaking organization dedicated to promoting improved communication, closer cooperation, and greater respect between the people of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries in Eastern and Central Europe. TMU’s program reflects her conviction that grantmaking can make a contribution to that process by supporting international face-to-face contact and professional interaction. TMU’s mission has been shaped by the belief that creative international collaboration encourages global harmony. TMU continues to support East-West exchanges in the arts and environment, reflecting the founder’s appreciation of the importance of culture and ecology in people’s lives. Before 1985, there was relatively little American funding for such activities, and what support there was — mainly governmental — was often restricted by political considerations. It remains TMU’s goal to enable talented people to come together from different countries to freely share ideas and stimulate creativity in a nonpolitical context.
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DOUBLE AGENTS VI & VII
Between Artists/Curators/Collectors
Rethinking Roles and Practices in the Arts
12 January 2020 @ 1 – 11pm
At KleinervonWiese, Villa Erxleben
Douglasstrasse 28, 14193 Berlin
We are happy to invite you to the launch of “DOUBLE AGENTS” – our new series of Salon Discussions co-hosted by:
Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE and MOMENTUM.
PROGRAM:
13:00
Opening of the outdoor kinetic light sculpture by
David Ariel Szauder “Light Space Modulator”
Homage to Moholy-Nagy
Introduction: Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch, MOMENTUM
MORE INFO HERE >>
14:00
DOUBLE AGENTS, Talk VI
Dr. Dorothee Bauerle-Willert
art historian, dramaturge and curator
Lecture on “Creation and Imaginary Paradise”
16:00
DOUBLE AGENTS, Talk VII
onformative studio for digital art and design
Cedric Kiefer, artist and founder
Lecture on the topic: “Digital Art and Real Estate – creating room for the future
www.onformative.com
MORE INFO HERE >>
18:00
“KOHLE” live in concert
Bitch Coin aka Chérie from Warren Suicide and the String Theory,
The Capital aka Hannes Marx from Marx und Pitchtuner,
Yany Money Cashflow aka Yaneq from RADIO ARTY
and Dany Cash aka Daniel Gahn
KOHLE jams with exclusively GEMA-free grooves.
MORE INFO HERE >>
Double Agents brings together accomplished players on the international art stage to address a diversity of professional strategies and mechanisms for success in today’s competitive art word. The traditional dynamic between artist and gallery is changing as rapidly as new communications platforms, societal norms, and economic incentives arise. We all have to wear multiple hats in order to keep up with the explosion of knowledge and opportunity across multiple fields – to play more than one role in the perpetually shifting dynamics of today’s art world.
Be it artist, curator, collector, art dealer, publisher, professor, institutional, corporate, non-profit, governmental, or private interest – the lines between roles need to blur to enable diverse and experimental approaches to artistic production and consumption. Double Agents is an ongoing series of discussions each bringing together exceptional people who work across many fields at once in order to tell their stories and share ideas. The first Double Agents discussion takes place in the context of “bonum et malum”, the inaugural exhibition of Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE at the Villa Erxleben.
FEATURING:
Anita Ackermann, Nasser Almulhim, Chrissy Angliker, Oded Arad, Inna Artemova, Max Beckmann, Andreas Blank, Anina Brisolla, Karol Broniatowski, Claus Brunsmann, Thomas Leo Chapman IV, Claudia Chaseling, Antonina Denisiuc, Kerstin Dzewior, Amir Fattal, Mafalda Figueiredo, Doug Fishbone, Daniel Grüttner, Mariana Hahn, Janes Haid-Schmallenberg, Stefan Hain, Chris Hammerlein, Simon Heser, Monika Immrova, Miru Kim, Franziska Klotz, Wanda Koller, David Krippendorff, Milan Kunc, Jani Leinonen, Via Lewandowski, Sarah Lüdemann, Paul Maciejowski, Milovan Destil Markovic, Sara Masüger, Almagul Menlibayaeva, Tracey Moffatt, Jennifer Oellerich, onformative, Ulrich Panzer, Françoise Pétrovitch, Otto Piene, Aurora Reinhard, Gerhard Richter, Stefan Rinck, Kerstin Serz, Jörg Schaller, Maik Schierloh, Thomas Schütte, David Ariel Szauder, Dagmar Uhde, Mariana Vassileva, Elisabeth Wagner, Michael Wutz, Zakharov Vadim, Jindrich Zeithamml
MORE ON THE “BONUM ET MALUM” >>
FEATURING:
Anita Ackermann, Nasser Almulhim, Chrissy Angliker, Oded Arad, Inna Artemova, Max Beckmann, Andreas Blank, Anina Brisolla, Karol Broniatowski, Claus Brunsmann, Thomas Leo Chapman IV, Claudia Chaseling, Antonina Denisiuc, Kerstin Dzewior, Amir Fattal, Mafalda Figueiredo, Doug Fishbone, Daniel Grüttner, Mariana Hahn, Janes Haid-Schmallenberg, Stefan Hain, Chris Hammerlein, Simon Heser, Monika Immrova, Miru Kim, Franziska Klotz, Wanda Koller, David Krippendorff, Milan Kunc, Jani Leinonen, Via Lewandowski, Sarah Lüdemann, Paul Maciejowski, Milovan Destil Markovic, Sara Masüger, Almagul Menlibayaeva, Tracey Moffatt, Jennifer Oellerich, onformative, Ulrich Panzer, Françoise Pétrovitch, Otto Piene, Aurora Reinhard, Gerhard Richter, Stefan Rinck, Kerstin Serz, Jörg Schaller, Maik Schierloh, Thomas Schütte, David Ariel Szauder, Dagmar Uhde, Mariana Vassileva, Elisabeth Wagner, Michael Wutz, Zakharov Vadim, Jindrich Zeithamml
MORE ON THE WEINACHTSFEIER >>
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
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MOMENTUM AiR
Stefano Cagol
Website – Portfolio
1 November 2019 – 7 February 2020
The Time of the Flood: Beyond the Myth through Climate Change
The Time of the Flood: Beyond the Myth through Climate Change, Stefano Cagol’s year-long international artistic research initiative, began in Berlin on 1st November 2019. By the time Cagol completed his Artist Residency at MOMENTUM on 10th February 2020, he had produced three new video works, a number of performative interventions throughout the city, countless photographs, several Art Salon presentations, a symposium at the Italian Cultural Institute, Berlin – and the world had irrevocably turned upside down. Cagol developed his concept for Time of the Flood long before the first cases of COVID-19 were registered in Germany in January 2020. His concept, to re-contextualize the biblical story of the Flood within our current climate emergency, remains a crucial and timely reflection on the devastating impacts we humans have on our planet. Yet who could have imagined at the start of this project just how prophetic and timely it would prove to be? Man’s pervasive impacts upon nature – whether in the form of global warming resulting in melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or the unleashing of new deadly viruses – has been a persistent focus throughout Cagol’s practice, from his ongoing series of FLU projects begun in 1988 following the first outbreak of Bird Flu in Asia in 1987, to his melting Ice Monolith at the Venice Biennale in 2013, up to the many issues raised by Time of the Flood. What began as a reflection upon the intersections of art, ecology, and technology, acquired an even greater urgency in being realized amidst a global pandemic. The Time of the Flood travelled after Berlin to Rome, Venice, Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. That Cagol was able to continue his multi-city project despite persistent travel restrictions and institutional closures, is simply remarkable. That he did so not only during the continued escalation in climactic catastrophes, with deadly floods, fires, and storms raging throughout the world – but also at the time of the greatest global public health emergency of recent history, is indicative of the urgent relevance of his work in our seemingly apocalyptic times. It was our great privilege to host Stefano Cagol at MOMENTUM and to nurture the first steps of The Time of the Flood, with thanks to the Italian Council and all the cultural partners in this project.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
BIO
Stefano Cagol (Trento, 1969) graduated from the Accademia di Brera in Milan and received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Government of Canada at Ryerson University in Toronto.
In 2019 he holds a solo show at MA*GA Art Museum in Gallarate, participates in the exhibition Writing the History of the Future at ZKM in Karlsruhe and in the Curitiba Biennale. He took part in the 2nd OFF Biennale Cairo, Manifesta 11, 55th Venice Biennale and 1st Singapore Biennale. Among the awards, he is recipient of the Visit # 10 of Innogy Foundation and the Terna Prize for Contemporary Art #2.
DOWNLOAD CATALOGUE
IT’S ALL ABOUT GIVING AND TAKING ENERGY
THE TIME OF THE FLOOD.
Beyond the myth through climate change
Italian artist Stefano Cagol has chosen Momentum as his project partner for “THE TIME OF THE FLOOD. Beyond the myth through climate change”, a residency project lasting 10 months from November 2019 to August 2020 located in different cities, Berlin, Tel Aviv / Jerusalem, Rome and Venice, which will give life in progress to wide-ranging results.
The first phase of the project starts in Berlin on November 1, 2019, where Stefano Cagol will be in residence for three months at the artist residency of Momentum in Prenzlauer Berg.
Cultural partner is the IIFCA Italy-Israel Foundation for Culture and the Arts. Project supported by the Italian Council (6th Edition, 2019) program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.
Art, science, myth. Starting from a symbolic image like the universal flood, in the project “THE TIME OF THE FLOOD. Beyond the myth through climate change” Stefano Cagol will address global issues such as extreme weather events, rising sea levels, the disappearance of glaciers, the mutation of winds, energy flows, opening a new scenario within his research that for years addresses the different pieces of the complex relationship of imbalance with nature. It is those phenomena – defined as “hyperobjects” by the philosopher Timothy Morton – that we do not always see, but are already in front of our eyes, that strike all, hyperdiffused, but at the same time are difficult to grasp, changeable, multiform, inconstant. Just as water, currents, winds, heat, energy and their reactions to anthropogenic interferences can be considered.
The artist takes a clear cue from the moment we are living, «We monitor what is happening around us like never before, yet our relationship with nature has never escaped us as much as now,» explains Cagol. He describes the residence as «a journey of research towards the genesis of the concept of the universal flood”, and concludes “Maybe a mode of purification. Certainly a thought on the most precious goods: water and energy. A mystical and global theme at the same time.”
The project starts from an articulated period of residence and the collaboration with Rachel Rits-Volloch, founder of Momentum, and with Giorgia Calò, curator and part of the IIFCA Italy-Israel Foundation for Culture and the Arts, aiming at giving life to multiform developments, based on the continuous research of the interaction in progress with other institutions, museums, cities, artists, scientists and curators, as well as with the widest possible audience, including public presentations, workshops and participative performances, as examples of an “activist aesthetic”, as Jeni Fulton defines Stefano Cagol’s practice. His art is an experience of knowledge, a critical look at the world, capable of constantly questioning the viewer and reacting to what is about to happen.
Stefano Cagol with the project THE TIME OF THE FLOOD. Beyond the myth through climate change won the 6th edition of the Italian Council (2019) promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, selected by a committee composed of Bartomeu Marí Ribas, director of MALI – Museo de Arte de Lima; Marco Scotini, director of the department of Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA; Claudio Varagnoli, architect and lecturer at the University of Chieti; Angela Vettese, art historian, critic and lecturer at the IUAV in Venice.
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DOUBLE AGENTS
Between Artists/Curators/Collectors
Rethinking Roles and Practices in the Arts
@ Salon Villa Erxleben
Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE
Douglasstrasse 28, 14193 Berlin
We are happy to invite you to the launch of “DOUBLE AGENTS” – our new series of Salon Discussions co-hosted by:
Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE, FREEHOME, and MOMENTUM.
Speakers:
Roman Korzhov & Nelya Korzhova
artists, curators, directors of the Shiryaevo Biennale
Roman Korzhov is also director of National Center of Contemporary Art (NCCA) Samara
Constanze Kleiner
founder of Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE, co-curator ‘bonum et malum’
Via Lewandowsky
artist ‘bonum et malum’, professor
Rachel Rits-Volloch
founder of MOMENTUM, co-curator ‘bonum et malum’
Inga Rück
art historian, co-founder of Art Affairs, real estate dealer
Maik Schierloh
artist ‘bonum et malum’, curator, co-founder of Autocenter and Bar Babette
Zakharov Vadim
artist ‘bonum et malum’, curator, founder of FREEHOME
Double Agents brings together accomplished players on the international art stage to address a diversity of professional strategies and mechanisms for success in today’s competitive art word. The traditional dynamic between artist and gallery is changing as rapidly as new communications platforms, societal norms, and economic incentives arise. We all have to wear multiple hats in order to keep up with the explosion of knowledge and opportunity across multiple fields – to play more than one role in the perpetually shifting dynamics of today’s art world. Be it artist, curator, collector, art dealer, publisher, professor, institutional, corporate, non-profit, governmental, or private interest – the lines between roles need to blur to enable diverse and experimental approaches to artistic production and consumption. Double Agents is an ongoing series of discussions each bringing together exceptional people who work across many fields at once in order to tell their stories and share ideas.
The first Double Agents discussion takes place in the context of “bonum et malum”, the inaugural exhibition of Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE at the Villa Erxleben. MORE INFO >>
Nelya Korzhova – The Shiryaevo Biennale
Constanze Kleiner – Die Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin
Via Lewandowsky – Der Sozialismus Siegt
Rachel Rits-Volloch – Making MOMENTUM
Maik Schierloh – Autocenter & Bar Babette
Vadim Zacharov – Artist Us Institution 1978 — 2019
Speakers’ Bios
CONSTANZE KLEINER
Constanze Kleiner has more than 20 years of experience in the field of art and culture. After majoring in Slavic Studies and German Language and Literature, she devoted herself to initiating cultural projects. Kleiner started her career as a founder and managing partner of the White Cube Berlin GmbH, together with her partner, the artist Coco Kühn. In partnership with the artist Thomas Scheibitz, and the curator Heike Föll, she realized the exhibition project 36x27x10 in Berlin’s former “Palace of the Republic”. The success of this exhibition led to the conception and realization of the Temporary Kunsthalle, a privately funded, ephemeral exhibition hall for contemporary art. Constanze Kleiner headed the Temporary Kunsthalle as managing partner and was responsible for the concept and implementation from 2007 to 2009. In 2009, she was offered to become a partner of White Cube Productions Ltd, a company that was mainly focused on contemporary art production.
Since then, Constanze Kleiner was supporting several international exhibition projects as curator and adviser. In 2012, she curated Gregor Schneider’s STERBERAUM in partnership with the National Museum in Szczecin. In the same year, she was invited to become a partner of the Polish company Baltic Contemporary SPZOO, which won the competition, announced by the city of Szczecin, to determine the operating partner for the new municipal exhibition-venue for contemporary art. From November 2012 until October 2013 she was building up this new institution – TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art – in the role of Artistic Director, responsible for the exhibition and educational programming. During this time, Kleiner realized five international exhibitions at TRAFO, with partners such as the Musarara School of Art and the MusararaMix Festival; in Jerusalem, Israel, the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, and MOMENTUM, as well as solo exhibitions by renowned artists such as Christian Jankowski and Ryszard Wasko.
Since 2014, she has been Chairperson of the TRAFO art foundation, and founder of Schlachthaus Fresh&Fine Art Gallery. In 2019, Constanze Kleiner established Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE, opening in its new location at the Villa Erxleben in September 2019 with the inaugural exhibition, bonum et malum
ROMAN KORZHOV
Artist and curator Roman Korzhov (born in 1964) was from 1997 to 2014 the organizer (together with Nelya Korzhova) and the chairman of the Samara Regional Public Charitable foundation “Center for Contemporary Art”. This was the first profile institution in Samara, actively engaged in the search for new forms of communication of contemporary art in the social environment and the development of international dialogue. From 1999 to the present, he is the founder (together with Nelya Korzhova) and the commissioner of the international Shiryaevo Biennale of Contemporary Art.
Roman Korzhov has initiated many projects and programs: “Open Spaces”, “Independent Artistic Scholarship” (within the program of sister cities Samara and Stuttgart), “The Art of Communication” (Institute for International Relations of Germany, IfA, Stuttgart, Germany), “Ecology of Perception”, “Visionology”, “Street as a Museum — a Museum as a Street”, “Volga. Zero”, amongst others.
Korzhov was the Nominee of the National Innovation Prize in 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017. He has worked at the Volga branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) since 2007. And since 2015 he has served as Director of the Central Volga branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art / ROSIZO. Roman Korzhov lives and works in Samara.
NELYA KORZHOVA
Artist and curator Nelya Korzhova (born in 1963) works in the media of painting, photography, objects, installations, with her practice based on the principle of distant contemplation. Her curatorial projects, emerging from a focus on social sculpture, eschew the concept of art as
a ready-to-consume object. Rather, she identifies with the concept of “no man’s land”, where the viewer is invited to become part of the event in order to see what it’s for.
From 1997 to 2014, Nelya Korzhova was the organizer (together with Roman Korzhov) and art director of the Samara Regional Public Charitable Foundation “Center for Contemporary Art”. Together with Roman Korzhov, in 1999 she founded the international Shiryaevo Biennale of Contemporary Art, initiating the concept of the “Nomadic Show” — a processional exhibition engaging the public with art while moving through space. From 1999 to the present, Nelya Korzhova is the curator of the main project and artistic director of the Shiryaevo Biennale.
Korzhova has curated many projects and programs, including: “Cover
of Daily Routine”, “Fascism Now”, “Nine Months of Feelings”, “Another Freedom”, “Visiology”, “Wonders of Idleness”, “Street as a Museum — Museum as
a Street”, “Volga. Zero”, amongst others. She is the author of articles on contemporary art, a compiler of catalogues, and a lecturer.
Nelya Korzhova was the nominee of the State Innovation Prize in 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017. She worked at the Volga and Central Volga branches of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) / ROSIZO from 2007 to 2017. Nelya Korzhova lives and works in Samara.
VIA LEWANDOWSKY
Via Lewandowsky studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden from 1982 until 1987. Starting in 1985, he organised subversive performances together with the avant-guarde group, Autoperforationsartisten, that undermined the Communist art authorities of Eastern Germany (GDR). In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, he left the GDR and subsequently moved to West Berlin. Since then, he has traveled extensively and has lived for extended periods in New York, Rome, Peking, and Canada. He now resides in Berlin.
Via Lewandowsky works in diverse artistic media, predominantly sculptural-installation works and exhibition scenographies with architectonic influences. By the 1990s his work had already begun to incorporate elements of Sound Art; this has since become an important and integral part of much of his performance work. Lewandowsky’s interest in a nation’s construction of identity exposes a political dimension in his work, especially notable in his installations in public spaces and in his performances.
Dominant recurring themes in Lewandowsky’s body of work include: misunderstanding as a failure of communication and the deformation and deconstruction of meaning. Lewandowsky’s practice often represents the process behind his ideas. The artist is neither looking for something conclusive, a definitive ending, nor complete destruction, but rather for the constructive moment within a process of destruction. This identification of the in-between moment is highlighted by the work’s inherently satirical content, which does not try to elicit pathos from its audience. His working method and the effectiveness of its artistic results are often characterized by opposites. Elements that are controlled, staged and constantly emerging also have spontaneous, unexpected, and thus lively qualities. Humoristic, seemingly lighthearted works viewed a second time contain gruesome, brutal moments that can turn the comedic into the disturbing. His preference for tragicomedy, absurdity and paradox as well as the Sisyphean drama of continuous repetition and futility of action link Via Lewandowsky’s art with Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus. The ironic breaks with everyday life, the intrusion of the strange into the familiar, often domestic realm take place in his work by using the detritus of the German bourgeoisie: cuckoo clocks, DIY garden sheds, parakeets or bureaucracy.
RACHEL RITS-VOLLOCH
Rachel Rits-Volloch is the Founding Director of MOMENTUM, the Global Platform For Time-Based Art. Launched in 2010 in Australia as a parallel event to the 17th Biennale of Sydney, MOMENTUM moved to Berlin in 2011. She is currently also the Chief Curator of photoBERLIN, an annual professional workshow launching in Berlin in 2020. In 2016-2017, she was Visiting Professor in art theory and curatorial studies at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, lecturing in the MFA program in Public Art and the PhD program in Artistic Research. She is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in Literature, and holds an M.Phil and PhD from the University of Cambridge in Film Studies. Born in USSR, she grew up in the US, and worked in UK, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Istanbul, Sydney, and now Berlin.
MOMENTUM’s mission is to continuously reassess the growing diversity and relevance of time-based practices, with an aim to support artists and artistic innovation in Berlin and worldwide. MOMENTUM’s program is composed of local and international Exhibitions, Artist and Curator Residencies, Video Art in Public Space Initiatives, a Performance Program and Archive, an Education Program and Archive, and a growing Collection. Since MOMENTUM’s inception in May 2010, Rachel Rits-Volloch has curated or produced over 100 Exhibitions and Events worldwide, showing the work of over 600 artists, as well as over 60 Education Events, in addition to an ongoing program of Artistic Research Residencies which has so far hosted 45 international artists, alongside a diversity of related programming.
INGA RÜCK
Inga Rück has a Masters in Art History, Psychology, and Sociology. After working as Sales Manager of Michael Fuchs Galerie and Director of the Schinkel Pavilion, amongst other things, she is now the co-founder of the art consultancy Art Affairs.
Art Affairs works predominantly with corporate clients. Corporate art contributes to an innovative and cosmopolitan organizational culture and shapes a modern working environment. Contemporary art can be put into play to emphasizes the objectives of a company. Art as a medium of corporate culture draws attention to a creative working environment but also conveys openness, higher risk tolerance, and corporate cultural responsibility. Art Affairs merges business and art into a sustainable unit, developing customised art concepts for economic and financial groups and the tourism industry. Artworks by German and international artists are carefully selected by a team of architects, artists, and curators to develop well-conceived and aesthetically coordinated art concepts to reflect the architectural premises and professional focus of companies. Visual Arts in company context supports creative work processes and encourages communication and discussion. The effect of contemporary art is an essential factor of external representation and can symbolize cosmopolitanism or regional solidarity.
MAIK SHIERLOH
Maik Schierloh is an artist/curator, born in 1968 in Wilhemshaven, Germany. After his apprenticeship as Organ Builder, he studied Art at the University of Applied Science Ottersberg, Germany, in 1993 – 1996. Until 1996 we was a member of the ARTiV Artist Group. In 1997 Schierloh moved to Berlin and began planning, organising and executing cultural and art projects and exhibitions. His early initiatives include Club Project Lovelite, a venue for concerts, exhibitions, theatre, whch he ran in 1998 – 2008. From 2001 – 2018, he was also the co-founder of Autocenter, in collaboration with Joep van Liefland, one of Berlin’s most iconic project spaces. [www.autocenter-art.de/exhibitions/program – www.autocenter-rediscovery.de] In 2009 – 2016, Schierloh initiated the education initiative, Autocenter Summer Academy [www.autocenter-summeracademy.de], engaging experts from the Berlin art scene to lecture on their practice. Since 2003, Maik Schierloh also runs the bar and art space Kosmetiksalon Babette [www.barbabette.com]. In 2017, he began an ongoing initiative to restore a historic building in the countryside near Berlin for arts usage [www.gutshaus-philadelphia.com].
VADIM ZAKHAROV
Vadim Zakharov was born in the USSR in 1959. He is an artist, editor, archivist of the Moscow Conceptual art scene, collector. Since 1979 he has participated in exhibitions of unofficial art and collaborated with such artists as: V. Skersis, S. Anufriev, I. Chuikov, A. Monastyrski, Y. Leiderman. In 1982–1983 he participated in the AptArt Gallery, Moscow. Since 1992 till 2001 he has published the “Pastor” magazine and founded the Pastor Zond Edition. In 2006 he edited book “Moscow Conceptualism”. His retrospective was held at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2006. He represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with the project “DANAE”. Since 2016 he organized exhibition space “FREEHOME-Artist to Artist” in Berlin. He lives and works in Berlin.
FREEHOME – The Artist to Artist project is the brainchild of an artist who uses his modest resources – his own apartment, his personal and professional relationships, and his own money – to start an open exchange of opinions among artists, critics, gallery owners, curators, art collectors, and people of other professions. The idea is to boost this communication through additional means, such as working out a model of “activity”, offering ways of “functioning in culture”, and using the artist’s creative energy to find a way out of the routine patterns of contemporary art.
This event also serves as a preview for the forthcoming exhibition at MOMENTUM,
curated by Roman Korzhov & Nelya Korzhova,
directors of the Shiryaevo Biennale
A program of videos from the Shiryaevo Biennale archive is on show at Salon Villa Erxleben
19 October – 2 November 2019
Shiryaevo Biennale: Central Russian Zen
Opens at MOMENTUM on 27 October 2019 at 4:00 – 8:00pm
@ MOMENTUM Kunstquartier
Bethanien Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Realised with thanks to:
About SHIRYAEVO BIENNALE >>
Founded in 1999 by artist/curators Roman Korzhov & Nelya Korzhova, the Shiryaevo Biennale is the oldest active international biennale of contemporary art in Russia, and is also the largest cultural event in the Central Volga region. The main project is held in the ancient Russian village of Shiryaevo, while the parallel program takes place in sites across Samara, on the opposite bank of the Volga river. One of the most important components of the biennale’s structure is the International Creative Laboratory, which conducts a kind of contemporary art experiment within a traditional Russian village. Over the course of two weeks, the artists live directly in the locals’ homes, immersed in the local culture, creating works responding directly to the local environment. The results of these encounters is itself a creative act, offered to the wider public over the course of one day, in the form of a collective, performative procession: the “Nomadic Show.”
From its original founding up through 2013, the Shiryaevo Biennale was organized by the Samara Regional Public Charity Fund. Since 2007, the Volga Regional Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) has served as co-organizer. Starting in 2016, the biennale is organized by the Volga Regional Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) and ROSIZO, with support from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Culture of the Samara Region. From 1999 through 2018, Roman Korzhov has served as the commissioner of the biennale, while Nelya Korzhova has served as the curator of the main project. Over 180 international artists have participated in the Shiryaevo Biennale since its inception.
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SHIRYAEVO BIENNALE
Central Russian Zen
Featuring:
Anonymous Artist // Andreas Baer // Ulli Berg // Anya Charikov-Mickleburgh
Nonna Goryunova & Francisco Infante // Vanessa Henn // Ingela Ihrman
Rustam Khalfin // Jürgen Kierspel // Roman Korzhov // Nelya Korzhova
Sergey Leibgrad // Diana Machulina // Galim Madanov // Pia Maria Martin
Sergey Maslov // Yerbossyn Meldibekov // Jannis Owaked // Vito Pace
Hanns-Michael Rupprechter // Serious Collision Investigation Unit Coalition
Siram & Mare Tralla // Merzedes Sturm-Lie // Andrey Syaylev
Georgy Trjakin-Bukharov // YUNRUBIN (Joanne Pang Rui Yun & Jonas Rubin)
& documentation of Shiryaevo Biennale 1999-2018
OPENING:
27 October 2019 @ 4:00 – 8:00pm
EXHIBITION:
27 October – 1 December 2019
Extended by Appointment to 6 December 2019
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin 10997
Organizers:
Central Volga Branch of the NCCA as part of ROSIZO,
MOMENTUM Platform for Time-based Art, Berlin
With the support of:
Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, State Museum and
Exhibition Center “ROSIZO”, International cultural project “Russian Seasons”.
Curated by:
Nelya and Roman Korzhov (Samara, Russia),
Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch (Berlin, Germany)
The Central Volga Branch of the NCCA as part of ROSIZO,
together with the MOMENTUM Platform for Time-Based Art (Berlin),
in the framework of the international cultural project Russian Seasons in Germany 2019,
present the exhibition Shiryaevo Biennale: Central Russian Zen.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
The exhibition is a metaphorical reflection on the experience of the oldest active international biennale of contemporary art in Russia, which has been held since 1999 in the ancient Russian village of Shiryaevo on the Volga bank, one of the most beautiful places of the Samara bend surrounded by the Zhiguli Nature Reserve on all sides. The Shiryaevo Biennale was intended and carried out as an international experimental project by renowned Russian curators Nelya Korzhova and Roman Korzhov, the founders of the Samara Regional Public Charity Foundation “The Centre for Contemporary Art” with active contribution from Hanns-Michael Rupprechter and Stuttgarter Kunstverein from Germany, as well as a group of artists from Kazakhstan headed by Rustam Khalfin.
The exhibition is based on the archive of the biennale: photos, videos, objects and installations from the personal collection of Nelya Korzhova and Roman Korzhov. However, at the same time, the exhibition goes beyond the traditional retrospective and creates an idea of the biennale’s authentic image for the widest audience. The conceptual solution of the exhibition is a large-scale video chronicle of the project, together with artifacts of the performances — it is a total installation representing a kind of mental map of Shiryaevo. The exposition gives an opportunity to feel the unique atmosphere of the biennale, reflects the ideas of contemplative and performative nature of the event and becomes a starting point for a conversation about the history of its creation.
The strategy of the Shiryaevo Biennale is aimed at finding new forms of contemporary art communication in social environment. The form of the main biennale project, “Creative Laboratory” and “Nomadic Show”, is Nelya Korzhova’s original idea uniting the Eastern concept of nomadism, referring to free movement and wandering, and the Western concept of a “show”, a public presentation. The space for creation and display during the “Nomadic Show” is the entire village of Shiryaevo, with the surrounding landscape: the Volga, mountains, mines, lake shore, village houses and streets.
As an artistic phenomenon, the “Nomadic Show” is designed as a form of spiritual awakening, evolving in time and space and changing the experience of those who participate in it. It makes visitors follow a unique route and experience the meditative qualities of the Central Volga landscapes, a kind of “Central Russian Zen” reflecting the biennale’s setting for contemplation, intangibility, emptiness, and absence of any tracks left behind.
The Shiryaevo Biennale offers not only an alternative to the traditional functioning of art within the framework of the “white cube” concept, but also a strategy of independence from the vertical of power in art. Created by “artists for artists” the biennale turned out to be resistant to shocks and succeeded in surviving as a special experience of international co-creation. The condition of artists’ living in the houses of local residents is seen as a way of creating a perfect environment for artistic expression. The main idea of this experiment is to give an artist a chance to start working from scratch, without feeling the pressure from his or her established image and the art market.
Today the Shiryaevo Biennale is amongst the internationally renowned contemporary art events in Russia. Throughout the years the biennale has hosted artists and curators of special programs from Russia, Kazakhstan, Germany, France, Great Britain, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Denmark, the USA, the Netherlands, Singapore, Norway and India. Over 180 international artists have participated in the Shiryaevo Biennale since its inception in 1999.
– Nelya Korzhova & Roman Korzhov
EXPLORE HERE THE SHIRYAEVO BIENNALE ARCHIVE >>
DESIGN OF THE EXHIBITION
Drawing from the photographs, videos, objects and installations of the Shiryaevo Biennale archive, this exhibition does not resemble a traditional retrospective. Instead, it attempts to provide a wider audience with an authentic sense of the biennale and its creative evolution from the moment of its founding in 1999 until the present day. The display takes the form of a total installation, within which artists’ works are embedded. Video covers the perimeters of the walls with fragments of the “Creative Laboratory” and “Nomadic Shows” of Shiryaevo Biennales from 1999 up until 2018. Projecting the audiences into the exhibition space, the videos on the walls and ceiling highlight the processional aspect of the “Nomadic Show”, demonstrating the polyphony of the individual perspectives and the experiences of diverse participants of the biennale — artists, curators, local inhabitants, and spectators. Embedding the audiences traversing the Shiryaevo landscape into the architecture of the MOMENTUM gallery probes the concepts of “place”, “process” and “time”, as it brings together the impressions of the spectators passing through, allowing each viewer to arrive at the artist’s concept by his or her own means, to together share the experience, and through that process, to become part of what they understand as the artwork. Interspersed amongst the videos are rare artifacts saved from the “Nomadic Shows” of previous years; objects which were used within performances or installations from the past 20 years of the Shiryaevo Biennale. An important principle of the Shiryaevo Biennale is that it does not leave traces, putting its accent on the field of the immaterial, so that almost all of the artists’ projects are dismantled at the end of the exhibition, leaving only those interventions that became a part of the natural landscape or the daily life of the local inhabitants.
Materials for this exhibition have been loaned from the private collection of Nelya Korzhova and Roman Korzhov, the video collection of the Volga Branch of the ROSIZO-NCCA (camera: Svetlana Demyanova and Vladimir Bezdenezhnykh), and the press archives of GTRK Samara, SKAT, and Bol’shaya Derevnya
Nelya Korzhova
The exhibition is accompanied by an educational program at the MOMENTUM venue and at the partner sites of the project in Berlin.
PREVIEW:
Double Agents Artist/Curator Talk: 19 October
Shiryaevo Biennale Video Preview: 19 October – 2 November 2019
At Salon Villa Erxleben
Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE, Douglasstr. 24-28, 14193 Berlin
MORE INFO >>
Artists Participating in the Shiryaevo Biennale 1999 – 2018:
Hanns-Michael Rupprechter, Ulli Berg, Andreas Baer, Juergen Kierspel, Regis Pinault, Marlene Perronet, Rustam Khalfin, Sergey Maslov, Georgy TryakinBukharov, Zauresh Madanova, Galim Madanov, Nelya Korzhova, Roman Korzhov, Oksana Stogova, Francisco Infante, Nonna Goryunova, Angela Arsinkey, Vanessa Henn, Viktor Vorobyov, German Vinogradov, Tutti Frutti group, Evgeny Ryabushko, Elena Vorobyova, Yerbossyn Meldibekov, Jonas Valatkevicius, Martin Rogers, Nata Morozova, Vladimir Logutov, Andrey Syaylev, Kira Subbotin, Natalya Syzgantseva, Nikita Volchenkov, Vito Pace, Ilya Polyakov, Natalya Elmanova, Sergey Krivchikov, Alexey Zaytsev, Stephan Koeperl, Sylvia Winkler, Ellen Rein, Natalya Fomicheva, Alexandr Ovchinnikov, Elena Morozova, Peter Haury, Elke Hammelstein, Iris Hellriegel, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Vazgen Rakhlavuri Tadevosyan, Gerd Viedmajer, Viktoria Lomasko, Diana Machulina, Diego Sarramon, Natalya Samkova, Anna Orekhova, Alexandr Korneyev, Alexey Kallima, Arpine Tokmajan, Sergey Balandin, Artem Ivashkin, Ignat Daniltsev, Vitaly Stadnikov, Oleg Lyuboslavsky, Svetlana Subbotina, Joe Lee, Yulia Zhdanova, Ruediger Schestag, Yuri Albert, Anna Brochet, Bertrand Vallet, Gero Goetze, Marie-Helene Dubreuil, Yulia Zhdanova, Romain Gibert, Mari Kartau, Alexey Kostroma, Gert Mezger, Sabine Pfisterer, Emmanuel Rodoreda, Krishna Subramania, Mare Tralla, Anfim Khanykov, Matthias Holland-Moritz, Alexander Schikowski, Jochen Gerbert Schloder, Zvetofor group, «Escape» program, Georg Zaiss, Anna Korzhova, Andrey Kuzkin, Emilie Pischedda and Valentin Souquet, Haim Sokol, Manfred Unterwerger, Wolfgang Spaeth, Greta Weibull, Klas Eriksson, Ingela Ihrman, Kalle Brolin and Kristina Muentzing, Elena Dendiberya and Anatoly Haiduk, Janno Bergman, Andrus Joonas, Martina Geiger-Gerlach, Kathrin Sohn, Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb, Rosa Ruecker, Ivan Lungin, Pia Maria Martin, Susanna Messerschmidt, Astrid Nylander, Calle Holck, Johanna Karlin, Swetlana Heger, Katrin Hornek, Martial Verdier, Gabriel Feracci, Lewden Martin, Sybille Neeve, Alexandr Zaytsev, Mikhail Lezin, Ivanhoe, Vladimir Arkhipov, Serious Collision Investigation Unit Coalition group (Felix Gmelin, Alan Armstrong, Joakim Forsgren, Mikael Goralski, Amanda Hårsmar, Ronak Moshtaghi, Kjersti Austdal), Paulo Paes, Radesign group (Anton Rakov, Yulia Ratieva), Darya Emelyanova, Dmitry Kadyntsev, GKP group (Vitaly Cherepanov, Anna Mineeva), Dominika Skutnik, Marek Frankowski, Antibody Corporation, (Adam Rose, April Pollard), Eryka Dellenbach, Merzedes Sturm-Lie, André Talborn, Alexey Trubetskov, Olga Kiselyova, Alisa Nikolaeva, Nicolas Courgeon, S’ilTePlait group (Bernard Touzet, Théophile Péju, Pierre-Loup Pivoin, Raphaël Saillard), Club Fortuna group (Kurdwin Ayub, Xenia Lesnievski, Julia Rublov, Sarah Sternat, Nana Mandl), Maarten Heijkamp, Thomas C. Chung, U / n Multitude group (Nikita Spiridonov, Elena Zubtsova, Ilya Fomin), YUNRUBIN group (Joanne Pang Rui Yun, Jonas Rubin), Maria Kryuchkova, Ilya Samorukov, Ciro Vitale, Pier Paolo Patti, Charles Antoine Blais Métivier, Sora Park, Ginais San Andres Chorres, Olesya Mund, Natalia Vikulina, Natalia Skobeeva, Anya Charikov-Micleburgh, Anya Mohova, Piyali Ghosh, Stefano Bergamo, Saodat Ismailova, Ayatgali Toleubeck, Semyon Voronov, Anastasiya Ryabova, Varvara Gevorgizova, Maria Kryuchkova, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble: (Ivan Bushuev, Oleg Tanzov, Mikhail Dubov, Eugeny Subbotin, Ilya Rubinstein, Victoria Korshunova), Oleg Zaharkin, Kirill Yakunin, Maxim Yakunin, Kajsa Haagen, Efren Arcoiris, Jose Hernandez, Virginie Rochetti, Yannis Ouaked, Gustav Hellberg
NELYA KORZHOVA
Artist and curator Nelya Korzhova (born in 1963) works in the media of painting, photography, objects, installations, with her practice based on the principle of distant contemplation. Her curatorial projects, emerging from a focus on social sculpture, eschew the concept of art as
a ready-to-consume object. Rather, she identifies with the concept of “no man’s land”, where the viewer is invited to become part of the event in order to see what it’s for.
From 1997 to 2014, Nelya Korzhova was the organizer (together with Roman Korzhov) and art director of the Samara Regional Public Charitable Foundation “Center for Contemporary Art”. Together with Roman Korzhov, in 1999 she founded the international Shiryaevo Biennale of Contemporary Art, initiating the concept of the “Nomadic Show” — a processional exhibition engaging the public with art while moving through space. From 1999 to the present, Nelya Korzhova is the curator of the main project and artistic director of the Shiryaevo Biennale.
Korzhova has curated many projects and programs, including: “Cover
of Daily Routine”, “Fascism Now”, “Nine Months of Feelings”, “Another Freedom”, “Visiology”, “Wonders of Idleness”, “Street as a Museum — Museum as
a Street”, “Volga. Zero”, amongst others. She is the author of articles on contemporary art, a compiler of catalogues, and a lecturer.
Nelya Korzhova was the nominee of the State Innovation Prize in 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017. She worked at the Volga and Central Volga branches of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) / ROSIZO from 2007 to 2017. Nelya Korzhova lives and works in Samara.
ROMAN KORZHOV
Artist and curator Roman Korzhov (born in 1964) was from 1997 to 2014 the organizer (together with Nelya Korzhova) and the chairman of the Samara Regional Public Charitable foundation “Center for Contemporary Art”. This was the first profile institution in Samara, actively engaged in the search for new forms of communication of contemporary art in the social environment and the development of international dialogue. From 1999 to the present, he is the founder (together with Nelya Korzhova) and the commissioner of the international Shiryaevo Biennale of Contemporary Art.
Roman Korzhov has initiated many projects and programs: “Open Spaces”, “Independent Artistic Scholarship” (within the program of sister cities Samara and Stuttgart), “The Art of Communication” (Institute for International Relations of Germany, IfA, Stuttgart, Germany), “Ecology of Perception”, “Visionology”, “Street as a Museum — a Museum as a Street”, “Volga. Zero”, amongst others.
Korzhov was the Nominee of the National Innovation Prize in 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017. He has worked at the Volga branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) since 2007. And since 2015 he has served as Director of the Central Volga branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art / ROSIZO. Roman Korzhov lives and works in Samara.
ANONYMOUS ARTIST
Trap-2 (100 Rubles in a Trap)
Part of Haus Zwei Installation by
Serious Collision Investigation Unit Coalition, 2016
ANDREAS BAER
Memory, 1999
ULLI BERG & GALIM MADANOV
Border, 1999
ANYA CHARIKOV-MICKLENBURG
Part of the trans-cultural project “Shibbolet”, 2018
NONNA GORYUNOVA & FRANCISCO INFANTE
Photo Series, 1999
VANESSA HENN & YERBOSSYN MELDIBEKOV
Attila, 2001
Kiss, 2001
INGELA IHRMAN
Zoological Museum of Shiryaevo, 2011
RUSTAM KHALFIN & SERGEY MASLOV
The Flag of Chingiz-Khan, 1999
JÜRGEN KIERSPEL, SERGEY LIEBGRAD,
SERGEY MASLOV, HANNS-MICHAEL RUPPRECHTER
& GEORGY TRJAKIN-BUCKAROV
Crazy Horses, 1999
ROMAN KHORZOV
Event Horizon, 2013
ROMAN KHORZOV & NELYA KHORZOVA
Quarry, Part 1 & 2, 2000
DIANA MACHULINA
Russian, 2007
PIA MARIA MARTIN
Holy Waters, 2013
SERGEY MASLOV
The Future Will Never Arrive, 1999
YERBOSSYN MELDIBEKOV
Holy Waters, 2013
JANNIS OWAKED
Essence of Shiryaevo, 2018
VITO PACE
Interactice Object the Socialdemocratic Landscape in Russia, 2013
HANNS-MICHAEL RUPPRECHTER
Multivitamin Cocktail, Part I & II, 1999
SIRAM & MARE TRALLA
Interactice Object the Socialdemocratic Landscape in Russia, 2013
MARZEDES STURM-LIE
Emerging from the Shadows, 2016
ANDREY SYAYLEV
Subjective, 2009
GEORGY TRJAKIN-BUKHAROV
Baba Klava’s Home, 1999
YUNRUBIN (Joanne Pang Rui Yun & Jonas Rubin)
Dollar Hauler on the Volga, 2016
DOWNLOAD CATALOGUE
SHIRYAEVO BIENNALE: CENTRAL RUSSIAN ZEN 2017
2017 Exhibition curated by Roman Korzhov, Nelya Korzhov. Co-curator Alexander Burenkov
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT
WITH THANKS TO OUR MEDIA PARTNERS
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
OPENING PHOTOS
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Coinciding with Berlin Art Week
bonum et malum
OPENING: 7 September 2019 at 15:00 – 23:00
EXHIBITION: 8 September 2019 – 12 January 2020
Anita Ackermann // Nasser Almulhim // Chrissy Angliker // Oded Arad // Inna Artemova // Max Beckmann // Andreas Blank // Anina Brisola // Karol Broniatowski // Claus Brunsmann // Thomas Leo Chapman // Claudia Chaseling // Antonia Denisiuc // Kerstin Dzewior // Amir Fattal // Mafalda Figueiredo // Doug Fishbone // Daniel Grüttner // Mariana Hahn // Stefan Hain // Janes Haid-Schmallenberg // Chris Hammerlein // Simon Heser // Immrová Monika // Miru Kim // Franziska Klotz // Wanda Koller // David Krippendorff // Milan Kunc // Jani Leinonen // Via Lewandosky // Sarah Lüdemann // Paul Maciejowski // Milovan Destil Markovic // Sara Masüger // Almagul Menlibayaeva // Tracey Moffatt // Jennifer Oellerich // onformative // Ulrich Panzer // Francoise Pétrovitch // Otto Piene // Aurora Reinhard // Gerhard Richter // Stefan Rinck // Kerstin Serz // Jörg Schaller // Maik Schierloh // Thomas Schütte // David Ariel Szauder // Dagmar Uhde // Mariana Vassileva // Elisabeth Wagner // Michael Wutz // Vadim Zakharov // Jindrich Zeithamml
Curated by Constanze Kleiner,
Stephan von Weise, Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, Rachel Rits-Volloch
@ KLEINERVONWIESE
Villa Erxleben
Douglasstrasse 28, D-14193 Berlin
Opening Times during Berlin Art Week:
11. – 15.09. / 12:00 – 23:00
Normal Opening Hours:
Do – Sa. 12 – 18:00, and by appointment
MORE INFO HERE >>
FACEBOOK EVENT >>
bonum et malum
The KLEINERVONWIESE gallery is opening its new rooms in the Villa Erxleben in Berlin Grünewald with the exhibition “bonum et malum”.
The monumental and simultaneously playful Wilhelminian period building from the year 1907, with its magnificent park, is the size of a grand collector’s villa. It is debatable, however, whether it was ever such a building, for the traces of its once very affluent owner, the banker Julius Erxleben, have faded over time.
A personal relic from his life is an ex libris he applied to the works in his library. It shows the Tree of Knowledge rooted in old books and the snake winding round the tree trunk. Similarly, a banner, high up in the air, snakes round the tree, bearing the prophecy from the snake’s mouth: “Eritis sicut deus scientes bonum et malum” – You will be like God, knowing good and evil. In those turbulent, exploratory years of the Wilhelmine period at the beginning of the last century, Julius Erxleben chose this precise passage from Genesis as his favourite: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” A kind of guarantee, which Goethe’s Mephisto also wrote in his student’s album.
A self-fulfilling prophecy, we would say today. Because today we really are like God, and perhaps we’ve even gone a step further. On our incessant hunt for the lost Paradise, we paint good and evil grey – just as we do with gender – and we are therefore both: simultaneously liberating and destructive and courageous and arrogant. We eat muck, but are otherwise liberal and unisex, living through the Anthropocene together, in next to no time, godlike.
An age that bears no resemblance to any that has gone before, and in which the human being threatens to celebrate his future existence in a self-created, global cesspit, surrounded by recycled air, recycled water and recycled earth! And in fact as a sensitively constructed, hybrid being consisting of natural and artificial intelligence with an everyday mixture of digital and virtual reality, whose predominantly white male existence, lengthened to 200 earth years – and, on top of that, expanded to include a pixel avatar –, will be lived out within a precisely calculated glass radius.
The next question is: “Is this the end of temptation?”
But in the passage he chose from Genesis, was it perhaps the snake that Julius Erxleben, a man who did not hide his wealth, liked best of all? And did he also like the fact that Eve’s curiosity was stronger than her fear of punishment? Perhaps he also liked, above all, the idea that God had created much more than Paradise?
This is what we read as his very personal logo. Because an ex libris is nothing other than this. It signals the mindset of the person who uses it. Similar to the motto we attach to our WhatsApp or Linkedin account today.
We do not know today whether the prediction from Genesis was met with enthusiasm by Julius Erxleben, or whether it actually made him feel melancholic. The fact is that he seemed to attach great importance to it.
“You will be like God, knowing good and evil”, says the snake, holding the apple out to Eve, who cannot help but bite into it. And then God expels Adam and Eve from Paradise. At least, that’s how the story we all know goes.
But what if the Fall from Grace actually liberated Adam and Eve? Liberated them from the enclosure of Paradise and redeemed them from the eternal symmetry of harmony?
What if God did not primarily create Paradise, but rather everything else? Everything that is not Paradise and is without harmony and does not need a barrier – i.e. neither protection nor defence? Perhaps, for two thousand years, we have been caught up in a colossal misunderstanding.
What if the idle Eve and the even idler Adam simply got on God’s nerves, and he sent them the snake so that they would finally wake up and learn to see what he had created?
The “opening of the eyes” begins with the desire for the apple and then, after the enjoyment of the fruit, with the perception of one’s own self – and thereby the perception of the Other as a counterpart. It means a change in perspective, whereby the person who has learned to see now looks at things differently, perceives them differently, sees something that had not previously been within their scope of perception, and feels something that was not there before.
Spontaneous desire and the loss of the paradisiacal condition of innocence, with all its consequences, are inextricably linked with one another. Like good and evil, like original sin and original freedom. Art is no different. It is the ability to unite original sin and original freedom with one another – for the sake of knowledge.
So, humans escaped Paradise, but what have they actually learned up to now? They repeatedly slip away, try to elude the path of knowledge, level out good and evil and strive for one thing only: to bring back what has been lost! So they create paradises wherever they can: very tiny ones in the form of annual holidays with a fenced off beach area and full board. But also gargantuan ones: initially set up in the form of national boundaries, enclosed by hot and cold wars, later in various cyber versions – ignited within the network between influencers and consumers on Facebook & Co., driven by the insatiable need for security, delineation, belonging and power – and likewise contested by titanic battles which today, however, mostly take place on the world’s stock exchanges. And so it goes on!
Poor God – when will they stop putting up new fences? When will they finally be cured of their paradise psychosis? For back then, once they finally had Paradise behind them, it was initially their idleness that evaporated into the vast expanses of the world, and they became, for the time being, sinewy and beautiful, evil and good. From now on, Adam listened to Eve, who showed him the way, and he desired her. Sending the snake at that time was actually, above all, an act of God’s pure mercy! After all, he could always rely on female curiosity: Eve would certainly take the apple – the symbol of desire – and take Adam with her!
But whom should God send today?
The devil and the good Lord are not only in the detail but also in the painstaking legwork!
“Eritis sicut deus scientes bonum et malum” – enduring this, not only for a moment, but permanently – including relapses – is an infinite task.
You will be like God, knowing good and evil – from 7 September 2019!
The opening exhibition by KLEINERVONWIESE in the former Villa Erxleben in Grunewald plays out the different aspects of this – hopefully – infinite story.
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
Weihnachtsfeier
Christmas Art Market at Salon Villa Erxleben
1 – 22 December 2019
Every Sunday in December
at 2 – 6pm
@ Salon Villa Erxleben
Gallery KLEINERVONWIESE
Douglasstrasse 28, 14193 Berlin
MORE INFO HERE >>
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Fake News and Superfictions:
A Performance-Lecture
By
Dr. Peter Hill
16 December 2018
13:00 – 14:00
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
FAKE NEWS and SUPERFICTIONS
www.superfictions.org
Peter Hill’s concept of The Superfiction began in 1988 in the gap between installation art and literary fiction. Over the years, it evolved into a way of linking any two or more (mostly) human activities through the postal system, the internet, psychogeography, and adventurism. His first exhibition, Faking It (Edinburgh, 1988), was followed by his creation of The Museum of Contemporary Ideas (1989 – ongoing) supposedly the world’s biggest new museum on New York’s Park Avenue. His work asks, how do we know what is true or false in any given visual statement? He is currently on a three- year round-the-world lecture tour called Fake News and Superfictions. Be prepared. You might find yourself entering a lecture and leaving a novel or an art installation – united in a time-based performance called “Life”. Peter Hill’s performance-lecture is delivered in four fifteen minute fragments, selected from an archive of 50 individual fragments encompassing Hill’s expansive career in generating realities out of fictions as artworks.
In the first fragment, he looks at truth and fiction in the rise of populism, the lies of Donald Trump and the Brexit “Leave Campaign”, and sets those against historical precedents in politics and the arts, including Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds (1938), George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), the cover-up of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), and the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewisnky case. He also references recent exhibitions dealing with fake news and superfictions, including Fake News (National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, UK), Jonas Staal’s Steve Bannon A Propaganda Retrospective, The Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, The Theatre is Lying, opening this week at ACCA in Melbourne, and the upcoming Venice Biennale the theme of which is Fake News. This fragment concludes with some examples from Peter Hill’s Contemporary Archive (1989 – ongoing).
The second fragment draws on memoir and diary entries. He reflects on Charles Dickens’ notion of “the best of times and the worst of times” in relation to his own experience of working as a lighthouse keeper off the west coast of Scotland in 1973. This is contrasted with the trauma he experienced after witnessing the IRA Guildford pub bombings in 1974. Much of Hill’s obsession with truth and falsehood stems from the police falsification of evidence relating to the so-called Guildford Four. They were entirely innocent, and served fourteen years in prison for a crime they did not commit. Hill’s creation of the fictional group Made in Palestine Made in Israel reflects on ”the lottery of birth” and the fictive nature of the nation state.
A third fragment looks at Peter Hill’s Museum of Doubt, and how it is inspired by ideas from the philosophy of science including falsificationism (Sir Karl Popper), Paradigm Change (Thomas Kuhn) and anarchistic theories of knowledge (Paul Feyerabend). This contrasts with the populist extremes of fake news, the hoax, and the April Fool’s prank. It includes works by one of his many fictive groups AAA (Art Against Astrology), and young artists who explore notions of Doubt and Self-Doubt, such as Molly Kent (Edinburgh).
The fourth and final fragment focuses on Peter Hill’s Museum of Contemporary Ideas (1989 – ongoing) supposedly the world’s biggest new museum when it opened on New York’s Park Avenue in August 1989. He describes its eventual détournement into an art installation and novel called The Art Fair Murders (12 months, 12 cities, 12 art fairs, and 12 murders). Hill describes how, since 1993, he has created fictional art fair installations within museums and commercial galleries, and disguised his own trauma within the artworks that are framed by the money, ostentation and “supermarket values” of the contemporary art fair booth. Within these fictional settings he places art objects such as his Hermann Nitsch Shower Curtain from his Museum Shop series. He will also describe the use of psychogeography and structured walks in his artworks. Hill concludes this fragment with a few historical and contemporary examples of artists who have created what he calls Superfictions, including Marcel Broodthaers, Guillaume Bijl, General Idea, Cindy Sherman, Martin Kippenberger, Billy Apple, the Seymour Likely group, IRWIN, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Alexa Wright, Xu Bing, SERVAAS, Rodney Glick, Eve Anne O’Regan, Patrick Pound, Sarah Ryan, Jacquelene Drinkall, Cameron Bishop, Michael Vale, Adeline Kueh, Laresa Kosloff, Robert Zhao Renhui, Mathieu Briand, 4 Square Laundry, Michael Candy, Molly Kent, and Rachel Maclean.
ARTIST BIO
Dr Peter Hill is an artist, writer, and independent curator, born in Glasgow and now based in Australia. He is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Between 2014 – 2017 he was external examiner for Goldsmiths School of Art at La Salle College of the Arts, Singapore. The topic of Peter’s studio-based PhD (RMIT 2000) was Superfictions: New Uses for Fiction in Contemporary Art Practice. He is currently artist-in-residence at PHASMID (GAG Projects) in Berlin, as part of an on-going round the world lecture-and-residency tour (2017 – 2020) called Fake News and Superfictions.
As an artist, Peter Hill has exhibited in the Biennale of Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; and he has made countless ephemeral artistic interventions around the world. He is working on a Fake News and Superfictions pop-up project for Venice, to coincide with the 2019 Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times. Peter Hill has work in private and public collections in New York, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, and Melbourne.
As an art writer, over the past thirty-five years, Peter has written for Frieze, ARTnews, Artpress, Art Monthly (London), Artmonthly Australasia, Art+Text, Neue Bildende Kunst, Design, Interview, Vault, Tension, World Art, Art Collector, MUSEUM, Galeries, Aspects, Artlink, Artist Newsletter, Artscribe, ALBA, Performance, Studio International, Asian Art News, Island, Australian Book Review, The London Review of Books, over 100 catalogues, and many daily newspapers. His book Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper (Canongate, Edinburgh; Rogner and Bernhard, Berlin; Grove Atlantic, New York) won Scotland’s main literary prize, a Saltire Award, in 2004. He is currently completing two books, Curious About Artists: Encounters with 50 Contemporary Artists, from Marina Abramovic to Rachel Maclean, and The After-Sex Cigarette a novel and art installation (1989 – ongoing).
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WATER(PROOF)
Exhibition for Food Art Week 2019: Water
Shaarbek Amankul // Andreas Blank // Stefano Cagol // Nezaket Ekici // Yuya Fujinami // Giovanni Giorgi + Nuha Saegh + Nuwella // Iara Guedes + Tereza Guedes // Tainá Guedes // HALEKE Collective (Aki Nakamura, Anastasia Putsykina, Sugano Matsusaki) // Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying // Shaakira Jassat // Joanna Keler // Klara Kirsch // Janet Laurence // Gabriela Lesmes // Magpie Art Collective // Shahar Marcus // Almagul Menlibayeva // India Rose Klap // Nina E. Schönefeld // Lotti Seebeck // Shingo Yoshida
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Tainá Guedes
OPENING:
10 August 2019 @ 6:00 – 10:00pm
EXHIBITION:
11 August – 15 September 2019
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanein
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin 10997
Performance Program and FAW Festival:
17 August 2019
@ Steinplatz
10623 Berlin
Food Art Week 2019: Water campaign by Almagul Menlibayeva
Food Art Week, created by artist/chef Tainá Guedes in 2015, is a non-profit project, whose mission is to promote positive change in our environment and society by asking how ‘what we eat and how we eat it’ is irrevocably affecting our environment. With a new thematic focus each year, the topic of Food Art Week 2019 is WATER. Life on our planet started in the water. Like our planet, we ourselves are 70% water. Yet many living beings have no access to clean water. Plastic pollution, nanoparticles, pesticides and antibiotics are damaging our freshwater and oceans. Only 2% of the total water on our planet is clean.
To address these issues, WATER(PROOF), MOMENTUM’S exhibition for Food Art Week 2019: WATER, brings together renowned international and Berlin-based artists and specially commissioned performance programs by students of Mathilde ter Heijne’s class at Berlin’s University of the Arts (UdK) and students in the Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology, and Education program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Pollenzo, Italy). With works installed in the exhibition at MOMENTUM, along with a performance program at the FAW Festival in Steinplatz, in this breadth of artistic perspectives, through video, installation, performance, photography, and design, we engage in a broader international dialogue on the deterioration of our environment.
Shown at MOMENTUM, Shaarbek Amankul’s video New Society, documents the devastating ironies of economic privation in his native Kyrgystan, where poor villagers drain the contents of water bottles into the arid earth, preferring the quick cash from recycling to the water itself. Environmental artist Janet Laurence addresses the fragility of water as a vital resource through her installation H2O: Water Bar, activated during the exhibition opening by a water-tasting performance. Stefano Cagol’s video performance amidst the ice of the Arctic Circle, Evoke, Provoke [the border], raises issues of mankind’s unrelenting impact upon even the harshest of environments. Almagul Menlibayeva’s photo series illustrates this year’s Food Art Week, while her film, Transoxiana Dreams, documents the desertification of the Aral Sea, poetically following the plight of fishermen who now have to drive for hours from their village to reach the rapidly shrinking sea. Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus’s video performance Salt Dinner is set within another shrinking sea, Israel’s Dead Sea. What looks like an absurd aquatic picnic is in truth a brutal endurance test for both artists; the excess of salt they are consuming with the sea water being as lethally dehydrating as the midday sun. Nina E. Schönefeld’s video Dark Waters takes place in another poison sea. Set in a dystopian future where the oceans are poisoned with plastic and only jelly fish can survive in their waters, this film sadly bears more resemblance to truth than science fiction.
The River is Never the Same River, Iara and Tereza Guede’s butoh-inspired performance for the opening of the exhibition, enacts through the language of movement the plight of such polluted waterways. Shingo Yoshida’s video Réprouvé is striking for its very absence of water; turning a garbage strewn wasteland in Chile into a beautiful sound installation, it is nevertheless a frightening glimpse of what our planet may soon look like if we do not take better care of it, and if we do not curb overproduction of waste. The plastics clogging such landscapes the world over are repurposed into beautiful light objects by South African artists Magpie Art Collective, and are mirrored in Imitation, the simulated waterfall created by Joanna Keler, where plastic flows across a rocky streambed. In another artful imitation, Andreas Blank fashions out of quartz a perfect replica of a plastic bag. In Landscape Metaphor II, Blank highlights the enduring impact on our environment of the litter we disregard too easily: by virtue of being carved in stone, these apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. India Rose Klap has also created a plastic bag, only hers provides a solution to the plastics filling our oceans and landfills: Klap’s plastic bags are edible. Giving us all food for thought, her bags are served during the opening of the exhibition in a Plastic Soup. Shaakira Jaasat’s Tea Drop also posits a solution to a future of impending water shortages: she has created a device to condense water vapor out of the surrounding atmosphere. Jaasat’s tea machine is as beautiful in its impracticability as Nezaket Ekici’s Water To Water, the documentation of her performance at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee, where over the course of several laborious hours she manually filters five pitchers of lake water, drunk with varying degrees of reluctance by her audience.
These and the other outstanding works situated in Steinplatz for Food Art Week may be only tangentially about food, and yet each work illustrates in its own way the vast diversity in which water impacts upon the cycle of life on our planet. From the desertification of climate change to the predicted floods of melting glaciers, water is as deadly in its scarcity as it is in excess. And yet, life cannot exist without it. WATER(PROOF) is about such paradoxes. In our utter dependence on water, we nevertheless contrive to poison and squander it. Nothing is waterproof, in the sense of being impervious to water, when water is perceived as integral to most every industry which sustains our lifestyles and quality of life. Yet our lifestyles are poisoning our planet. WATER(PROOF) assembles the positions and experiences of over twenty international artists, each proving, in their own way, the precarious paradoxes of the cycles of water consumption and production, integrally linked to what we eat and how we eat it.
FOOD ART WEEK CONCEPT:
The topic of Food Art Week 2019 is WATER.
Life on our planet started in the water. We, ourselves are 70% water, like our planet. Yet our oceans suffocate, our rivers are polluted, many living beings have no access to clean water. Plastic pollution, nanoparticles, pesticides and antibiotics are damaging our freshwater and oceans. Only 2% of the total water on our planet is clean.
By 2025, half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas. Industrialized livestock farming is draining and polluting water, threatening our planet’s most precious resource. Globally, 29% of the water footprint for agricultural production goes to raising animals. 98% of that water is to grow their feed.
Water scarcity is a critical challenge to the future of sustainable food production. Since the water footprint for beef is six times larger than for pulses, our meat consumption is throwing the planet off-balance.
We want to address with the selected artists and venues, different artistic perspectives – informative, narrative, empathetic, surprising and more.
The events will gather together famous, as well as young and upcoming artists. For the entire month the visitors will have the opportunity to discover the intersection between the wide panorama of modern and contemporary art and the increasingly popular (healthy) food culture in the selected cities. Through performances, dining events and exhibitions the festival will aim to present how food can be the medium of artworks and how it can open a dialog between thoughts and emotions. Food Art Week focuses on discovering the different connections between art and food by exploring the worlds of design, photography, collage, performance, food experiences and books related to this topic.
In addition to the exhibition at Momentum Worldwide, Food Art Week is occupying Steinplatz, a public space in Berlin across from the University of the Arts (UdK), for the whole month of August, with greenhouses designed by Tainá Guedes, one in collaboration with BSR and the other with the Bio Water Rheinsberger Preussenquelle, that will host educational art installations on the subject of the festival. On Saturday 17th of August, there will be curated art performances, workshops for kids and adults lead by NGO restlos glücklich, a panel discussion, and info booths from environmental organisations working on water preservation.
Food Art Week Berlin this year takes place in August in collaboration with MOMENTUM, UdK, Programm der Kulturagenten für Kreative Schule Berlin, Berliner Stadtreinigung (BSR), Rheinsberger Preussenquelle and Stabstelle Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung und internationale Projekte Bezirksamt Charlottenburg- Wilmersdorf von Berlin.
Food Art Week, created by artist Tainá Guedes in 2015, is a non-profit project, whose mission is to promote positive change in our environment and society by raising awareness about many important topics related to our eating habits. It is the first contemporary art and food festival focused on educating people through various activities which includes exhibitions, workshops, panel discussions, talks, performances and film screenings. It has been held in various cities since 2015, including Berlin (2015, 2017), Bologna (2017), Paris (2016, 2018) and Mexico City (2018).
With a special focus on sustainability, animals and human rights, and environmental-social-economic issues, the festival analyses this year’s theme “water” and how the production and consumption of our food is affecting this essential natural resource.
Program for Food Art Week Festival
17 August 2019 @ Steinplatz, Berlin Charlottenburg:
ARTISTS
Shaarbek Amankul
New Society
2017, digital video, 2’40” (long version 7′)
The video New Society shows poor villagers on the outskirts of the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, emptying aid packages of bottled water onto the arid ground so they can recycle the plastic for cash. The devastating irony by which the normally environmentally sound practice of recycling results in the wastage of water is a reflection upon the economic privation and shortsightedness wherein a population comes to prefer the quick cash from recycling to the water itself. This twisted take on the water economy is devoted to the search for social identity on the part of thousands of residents of the suburbs of Bishkek, (the so called “circle of self-builders”). This work looks at the population who left their villages after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to remain marginalized to this day by the city infrastructure through unemployment and poverty.
Shaarbek Amankul – BIO
Shaarbek Amankul (b. 1959 in Bishkek, Kyrgystan, lives and works in Bishkek) is one of the leading artists and curators driving the emergence of Central Asian contemporary art. In his art practice he has shown work throughout Europe, Central, Asia, and the US. Through his curatorial practice, he strives to build a dialogue with other artists and audiences by organizing international artist retreats and exhibitions in Europe and in his native Kyrgyzstan. Since 2011, he has been running the Nomadic Art Camp, an annual international platform for young artists, providing much needed opportunities for artists from the region. Amankul is also the founder and director of the B’Art Art Center in Kyrgyzstan, which he founded in 2006.
Andreas Blank
Landscape Metaphor II
2014, sculpture, quartz
German artist Andreas Blank is a sculptor working exclusively with stone. He is conscious of his chosen medium as a material reflecting the very substance of time; in its strata are recorded the ages of the planet. In Landsape Metaphor II (2010) Andreas Blank fashions out of quartz a perfect replica of a plastic bag, turning his art to sculpting the detritus of our planet. In so doing, Blank creates an ideal metaphor for the enduring impact on our environment of the litter we consider so ephemeral. In his sculptural practice, Andreas Blank combines the abstract and the realistic, the conceptual as well as the technical. He sources stones from quarries from all over the world, carves them with elaborate deliberation and assembles them into deceptively realistic objects of the everyday. Only upon close inspection one discovers that light bulbs, transport boxes and plastic bags are made of marble, alabaster or sandstone. The gravity of stone, in Blank’s work, acquires the seemingly casual character of the mundane and wasteful. And yet by virtue of being carved in stone, these apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. The first in his series of plastic bag scultpures, Landsape Metaphor, is in the Collection of the Ministry of the Environment, Berlin.
Andreas Blank – BIO
Andreas Blank was born in Ansbach in 1976. He attended the Karlsruhe State Academy of Art (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and was Meisterschüler under Prof. Klingelhöller. He held a scholarship with the German National Academic Foundation and received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2009 he was a finalist for the New Sensations Award by Channel 4 and the Saatchi Gallery. He lives and works in Berlin.
Stefano Cagol
Evoke Provoke [the border]
2011, HD video, 12’30”
The impact which mankind has upon the natural environment is at the root of this work created at Kirkenes, in the Norwegian Arctic Circle, during one of the periods Cagol spent abroad as an artist-in-residence. Cagol staged a series of emblematic actions that he filmed with a video camera, in total solitude, immersed in a fascinating but hostile natural environment, in extreme climactic conditions. The setting seems to be cloaked in twilight, barely dispelling the darkness, and the temperature is 25 degrees below zero. In those frozen lands, Cagol tries to communicate in one way or another, using different forms of signaling. He endeavours to modify the landscape, to light it up, to melt the snow with a flame, but every attempt at interaction with this harsh environment is in vain. The irony here is not lost. While one man cannot make a visible impact upon this frozen landscape, the impact of mankind as a whole is all too devastating. For Cagol in this case the border is precisely the one between himself, his body and his mind, the extreme nature that surrounds him, and the impact which mankind has upon this natural environment. Evoke Provoke (The Border) was shown at the solo exhibition Concilio in the church of San Gallo, as a collateral event at the 54th Venice Biennale, and is held in the MOMENTUM Collection.
Stefano Cagol – BIO
Stefano Cagol (b. 1969 in Trento, Italy) received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, after having graduated from the Accademia di Brera in Milan. He participated in Manifesta 11 and Manifesta 7; at the 55th Venice Biennale, invited by the Maldives Pavilion; at the 54th Venice Biennale with a solo collateral event; and at the 1st Singapore Biennale. In 2017 a still from Evoke Provoke [the border] becomes part of the Collection of the German Ministry of Environment (Sammlung Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Deutschland), and he is part of the grand inaugural exhibition curated by Veit Loers at Haus Mödrath – Räume für Kunst in Cologne. In 2014-2015 his solo project “The Body of Energy (of the mind)” was presented at a series of European museums, such as the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Madre Museum in Naples, Maga Museum in Gallarate, Museion in Bolzano, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Museum Folkwang in Essen, Landmark / Bergen Kunsthall. Among grants and awards he won the Visit prize of Innogy Foundation in 2014 (Germany) and the Terna Prize for Contemporary Art in 2009 (Italy). He has been selected for many artist in residence programs including: Ruhr Residence 2016; Cambridge Sustainability Residency 2016; Air Bergen; BAR International in Kirkenes; International Studio and Curatorial Program ISCP in New York; ICP-International Center of Photography in New York. Stefano Cagol Lives and works in Trento.
Nezaket Ekici
Water To Water
2015, video documentation of live performance
Having participated in FAW2017, we are proud to invite Nezaket Ekici back to Water(Proof) for FAW2019 with documentation of her performance Water To Water (2015), and her video performance together with Israeli performance artist and filmmaker Shahar Marcus, Salt Dinner (2012).
In her performance Water To Water (2015), commissioned for her solo exhibition at Berlin’s Haus am Waldsee, Nezaket Ekici transforms the dirty water of the lake into drinkable water which her assistants offer to the spectators. With a performance practice indebted in equal measure to the visual opulence of the theatrical and the physical excesses of the durational, Ekici here embodies the spectacle of our water cycle. Seemingly floating above the lake in a voluminous red gown which also forms her water delivery system, Ekici laboriously pulls water up from the lake, bucket by bucket, and operates a hand-pumped water filter to channel the clean water through her dress into pitchers held by her assistants below. The performance, lasting several hours, results in five pitchers of water, drunk with varying degrees of reluctance by the audience. Ekici embodies through her own labor and sweat a metaphor for the invisible process delivering clean water to our taps. This most essential of resources is what we most often take for granted. Ekici’s performance subtly asks the questions at the back of all our minds: How clean is our water, really? And how much longer will we have clean water on tap?
Nezaket Ekici – BIO
Nezaket Ekici (b. 1970 in Kırşehir, Turkey) studied art pedagogy, art history, and sculpture at Ludwig Maximilian University and the Fine Arts Academy, Munich, and received her MA degree in art pedagogy (1994–2000). Thereafter, she studied performance art with Marina Abramovic at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig, where she received her BFA and MFA (2001–04). Nezaket Ekici recently participated in the prestigious international Artist Residency Programs of the German Academy in Rome at the Villa Massimo (2016-2017), and the German Foreign Ministry Residency in Tarabia, Istanbul (2015-2016). Recent group exhibitions include: 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel (2015); The Pleasure of Love, 56th October Salon, Belgrade (2016); The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi (2016); MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakau (2016); Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden (2016); Tel Aviv Museum (2016/2017); Gabriele Münter Preis, Akademie der Künste, Berlin & Frauenmuseum, Bonn (2017); Oslo Museum (2017); Tiroler Landesmuseum Innsbruck (2018); Sanatorium Istanbul (2018); The Gallery for Israeli Art at the Tivon Memorial Center (2018); Seoul Museum, Seoul (2018); Großen Kunstschau,Worpswede (2018/19); Museum of Islamic Art and Near East Culture Be‘er Sheva (2019). Nezaket Ekici lives and works in Berlin and Stuttgart.
Yuya Fujinami
0,01
2019, performance
Over 97% of world’s water supply of water is found in oceans and is too salty for drinking, irrigation, and most industrial and household needs. Of the remaining 3%, approximately 2% is in the form of glaciers and polar ice caps. Most of the rest is found underground, and much of that is too difficult or too expensive to tap. Lakes and rivers, which are the major sources of the world’s drinking water, account for less than 0.01% of Earths’s total water. In his new solo creation for the FAW 2019, Yuya Fujinami explores through his movement the quality of water and environment. Its dynamics, rhythm, shapes and how contaminated elements like plastics have influence on nature. Of the 300 million tons of plastic produced around the world each year.
Yuya Fujinami – BIO
Yuya Fujinami (b. 1988 in Saitama, Japan) began his dance and gymnastics education in Saitama, Japan, and completed his studies at the Hamburg Ballet School of John Neumeier. After graduation he was engaged with several theaters and had the opportunity to work with international choreographers such as Jan Pusch, Roy Assaf, Stephan Thoss, Katrin Hall, and Annabelle Bonney, among others. Since 2015, he has been working as a freelance artist based in Berlin, and has been a frequent collaborator of Constanza Macras/Dorky Park, as well as a performer with Emmanouella Dlianiti, Massimo Gerardi, and various other independent choreographers. His first collaboration with Emmanouella Dlianiti received the audience award for Best Duo in 2017 at the ninth Internationales SoloDuo Festival in Cologne. In 2018, his second collaboration between Emmanouela Dolianiti and the director Hristina Vasic Tomse, led to the duet E T H E R E A L which was co-produced by Constanza Macras/Dorkypark and EX-teater. Yuya Fujinami lives and works in Berlin.
Iara Guedes
The River is Never the Same River
2019, performance (with Tereza Guedes)
Iara Guedes and her Mother Tereza are Japanese Brazilian multidisciplinary artists. For FAW2019, they present the latest performance in a series begun in 2017 on the theme of the anthropocene: the new geological age wherein the impact of the human being on nature becomes a significant and permanent layer on planet Earth. This series, titled Beyond Narayama Mountain: An Anthropocenophagic Ballad, refers to Japanese director Keisuke Kinoshita’s film about Obasuke’s legendary practice in Japan, where the elders are sacrificed to leave enough resources for younger gnerations to survive. The series reflects on today’s values in relation to the past, present and future; eliding moral judgment, conclusions and explicit discourses with the intention of establishing a delicate interaction between dream and reality.
The River is Never the Same River presents on one side an entity; a hybrid of the spirit of the planet Earth, Pachamama, Mother Nature, Virgin Mary, Shaman. On the other side the spirit of a polluted river. Pachamama blesses the space and audience while the spirit of the river undergoes an exorcism, removing the dirt from within. Though this performance is strongly influenced by Japanese Butoh dance, it is not Butoh. Aesthetically, it takes from Butoh the use of make up to erase the person within the body. And in a more philosophical way, it takes from Butoh the lack of moral judgment, the nothingness and self-annulment. As in Butoh, the performance is not about virtuosity and explicit statements. It suggests signs that can be interpreted symbolically by the audience so they can become viewer-creator.
Iara Guedes – BIO
Iara Guedes (b. 1976 in São Paolo, Brazil) is a Japanese-Lebanese-Brazilian artist, performer and director based in Berlin Germany. As an interdisciplinary artist, experiment is key for Guedes. She examines her own experiences and feelings as a migrant creature to invite her audience and collaborators to constantly shape the moment, the ephemeral state of being present, and to adapt to circumstances of their environment through transformation. Her practice breaks down boundaries between conceptual and theatrical performance, and finds in Japanese Butoh a philosophical and visual component layered by digital animation and effects to build immersive, cathartic, anthropophagic experiences. Using audiovisual elements as poetic layers for a sensorial activation, her work is focused on living forms and that which connects all of us: evolutionary processes, dualities, cycles, repetitions, transformations. Guedes studied dance and performance at the University of Communication and Arts of the Body (PUCSP) from 1999 to 2002. In parallel to her performance and dance studies, she grew interested in animation and its possibilities with performance. Graduating in Digital Cinema from the International Academy of Cinema and Animation at Melies School in 2010, she is dedicated to apprehending the practice of computer graphics and related technologies to create an environment where live performance could be incorporated.
Tereza Guedes – BIO
Tereza Guedes, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, was born in Brazil in 1947. She has degrees in Philosophy and Art from the University of Sao Paulo, having studied with Decio Pignatari, one of the founders of Brazilian Concrete Poetry. She founded Entretempo Studio in 1976. Until the studio closed in the mid-’90s, it was known for its exemplary silkscreen technique and for working with many outstanding artists, including concrete poet Augusto de Campos and visual poets André Vallias and Walter Silveira. Tereza Guedes also managed the artist residency program at Sacatar Foundation in Bahia, Brazil.
Tainá Guedes
Water Conservation Project (2019), installation
The Water Conservation Project is an installation of four greenhouses in Berlin’s Steinplatz, containing artworks and workshops for the public, on view 1-31 August 2019.
Preserve water. Plant a bottle. Every water bottle contains a message aiming to contribute to the preservation of our planet. Add yours. Please contribute with a sentence, a poem, or an idea on how to preserve water. Every bottle drop counts. Go to: https://www.foodartweek.org/water-conservation-project
Help raise awareness about the importance of each of us contributing to the existence of life on this planet. Answers given by participants will be also available on an online platform, having a national and international reach. The art action will be promoted on the artist’s social media channel, as well Food Art Week and Entretempo Kitchen Gallery.
Leave your message. Leave your poem. Leave your idea on how to preserve water on planet Earth. Your message will be added to the installation:
https://www.foodartweek.org/water-conservation-project
Tainá Guedes – BIO
Tainá Guedes (b. 1978 in São Paolo, Brazil) is a Berlin-based artist, food activist, book author and former cook. Through diverse projects, she works on how we conceive food in a cultural and social context. Art becomes an extension of the kitchen – and food a common base for expressing and sharing thoughts and ideas. Tainá’s work explores the political and social impact of food as a manifestation of history, sociology, geography, science, philosophy and communication. She is the founder of Entretempo Kitchen Gallery and Food Art Week, now in its 5th year.
Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying
Femme Homard, Dada Tai-Chi
(2019), performance
For FAW2019, Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying is commissioned to create a new performance for Steinplatz. In an homage to Dali, Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying sees her performance as “gestures of hope or desperation – a simple cry of survival”. Femme Homard is a work in development since 2016, continuously evolving with each iteration in response to the world’s excesses.
Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying – BIO
Throughout her performances, France-based Taiwanese artist Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying (b. 1950 in Taipei, Taiwan), conveys her legacies resulting from this two-fold cultural substance. She embraces ancestral Chinese rituals of Tai-Chi, martial arts, and traditional dances, which she conceptualizes and reinterprets in a contemporary fashion.
This duality brands the essence of her artistic approach, where revisited costumes and make-up meet with glorified accessories, thus creating her own style and vocabulary to redefine symbolic figures anew. Chinese opera is given a choreographic dance twist and transformed into an utterly dramaturgical act in which the artist, like an alchemist in search of the philosopher’s stone, morphs her body by means of inspired and motivated gestural. Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying is the founder of: “The Cabaret of Performance”, 52 rue JB Pigalle, Paris France; the artist residency “Chantons Aux Vaches”, Migné, France; and Founder & Creative “Miss China”, France.
Shaakira Jassat
Tea Drop
2019, aluminium, glass, nut wood
As the threat to earth’s natural resources rises exponentially, our ‘available-on-demand’ mentality seeks to be refreshed. Can this initiate an alternative for the way we consume daily resources? Tea Drop is a tea machine, which condenses water vapor from the surrounding humid atmosphere. It functions on its own timeframe, so one has to wait for the tea vessel to be filled up with water, before it can be boiled and ready for making tea. Learning that it takes 30 liters of virtual water to produce one single cup of tea, led me to do field research on tea farms in Asia. There I discovered that water is a by-product of processing tea and harvested tea leaves are dependent on the weather and subject to time. On a symbolic level, Tea Drop aims to recapture this precious resource, whilst giving power back to the environment.
Shaakira Jassat – BIO
After having completed her BSc. In Interior Architecture at the University of Pretoria, Shaakira Jassat (b. 1983 in Johannesburg, South Africa) worked in in that field in Johannesburg for 7 years. In order to expand on her possibilities as a designer, she moved to the Netherlands to study at the Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2013. Shaakira Jassat regards herself as a design researcher and activist. She uses the tools design is able to offer her to express her passion for the way the world functions and how we all behave in it. She believes that design should function as a form of social engagement and that it is up to designers to alter the status quo. Shaakira Jassat lives and works in the Netherlands
Janet Laurence
H2O: Water Bar
2016, site specific installation: various rain and spring waters, scientific glass vessels, acrylic containers, mirrors, wood
For FAW2019 we have commissioned a new site-specific version of Janet Laurence’s H2O: Water Bar, realized at MOMENTUM by Leslie Ranzoni. Installed as a glistening laboratory with scientific glass vessels, H2O: Water Bar is a participatory installation, allowing visitors to sample a variety of water sourced from diverse regions of Germany, and to better understand the complexity and fragility of this vital resource. Renowned Australian artist Janet Laurence is known for her work with the environment, often undertaken together with scientists engaged in international conservation initiatives. Laurence’s practice is a direct response to contemporary ecological catastrophes, positioning art within the essential dialogue of environmental politics to create and communicate an understanding of the impact that humans have upon the threatened natural world, in order to restore our vital relationships with it.
Janet Laurence – BIO
Janet Laurence (b. 1947 in Sydney, Australia) is among Australia’s most established artists. In 2015 she was the Australian representative for the COP21/FIAC, Artists 4 Paris Climate Exhibition for the UN Climate Conference in Paris, for which she created Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef and Coral Collapse Homeopathy, both shown in this exhibition. Further selected recent international projects and exhibitions include: the 57th Biennale of Venice (2017); Veiling Medical Glass, A Medicinal Maze, Novartis Campus, Sydney (2017); The Treelines Track, Bundanon, Australia (2017); GASP: Parliament, Hobart, Tasmania (2017); Inside the Flower, IGA Berlin (2017); Schloss Biesdorf, Centre for Art and Public Space, Berlin (2017); Fellowship at the Hanse-WissenschaftKolleg (HWK), Germany (2016-2017); H2O Water Bar, Paddington Water Reservoir, Sydney (2016); Deep Breathing (Resuscitation for the Reef), Australian Museum, Sydney (2016); Cuenca Bienal, Cuenca, Ecuador (2016); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (2015); The Skullbone Experiment: A Paradigm of Art and Nature, Queen Victoria Museum, Tasmania (2014); Animate/Inanimate, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healsville, Victoria, Australia (2013); 1⁄2 Scene, Australia China Art Foundation Shanghai (2013); SCANZ: 3rd Nature, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2013); After Eden, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2012); The Alchemical Garden of Desire, McClelland Gallery, Victoria, Australia (2012). Janet Laurence is a recipient of Rockefeller, Churchill, and Australia Council Fellowships, and the Alumni Award for Arts, University of New South Wales. She was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a former Board Member of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, and is a Visiting Fellow at the New South Wales University Art and Design. Janet Laurence lives and works in Sydney.
Magpie Art Collective
(Sean Daniel, Ashoka Fellow, Scott B. Hart, Richard Panaino, Shane A. Petzer)
Magpie Art Collective courtesy of Waren Art.
In response to FAW2019’s topic, WATER, a selection of Magpie Art Collective’s light objects will be shown. Made from recycled plastic and water bottles and repurposed plastic packaging, the works selected for this exhibition exemplify Magpie’s aesthetic of using found objects and detritus to create things of beauty out of what we would normally consider trash. The works in this exhibition are shown courtesy of Waren Art.
Magpie Art Collective – BIO
Magpie art collective was established in 1998 by designer Scott B. Hart and social-entrepreneur Ashoka Fellow. Shane A. Petzer, fine artist Sean Daniel, and administrator Richard Panaino joined in 2006 as magpie expanded and the collective relocated from Cape Town to the Barrydale Studio where they are now based. In addition to the studio creations, Magpie undertake commissions and installations as well as participate in exhibitions. Magpie also produces a range of exciting craft-project-linked products with M-Art-Projects. They link themselves with M-Art-Projects to the surrounding community by engagement with local community – income generation projects, crafters and civil society endeavours. The Magpie Art Collective believe the work they do links art and design with meaningful commercial and social entrepreneurism. Their creations are environmentally conscious, produced from a broad range of media and often utilizing found or recycled elements.
Shahar Marcus
Nezaket Ekici & Shahar Marcus Salt Dinner
2012, video performance, 3’19”
Turkish/German artist Nezaket Ekici and Israeli artist Shahar Marcus together address geopolitical and environmental forces through the medium of performance in their video Salt Dinner (2012). Shot in the scorching heat of Israel’s Dead Sea, their performance ironically confronts human endurance with the extremes of nature and culture. In this actual and political hotbed, Muslim and Jew share an opulent feast. Whether a wedding or a wake remains unclear, but what looks like an absurd aquatic picnic is in truth a brutal endurance test for both artists. The excess of salt they are consuming with the sea water is as lethally dehydrating as the midday sun. Shot in a rapidly shrinking ocean in a part of the world fought over for millennia, this international summit offers no solutions for political and environmental stability.
Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus both work separately as artists but started to collaborate on projects in 2012. Their ongoing project In Relation revolves around an exploration of time, space, culture, religion, and the often absurd ways in which people interact with the environment. In this, as a German-based Muslim and an Israeli-based Jew, they collaborate on performances and videos that bridge cultures and religions as well as the long distances between Berlin and Tel Aviv. Focusing on the origin of the latin word relatio (relation), meaning ‘bringing back’, they set out to bring back a knowledge that has been forgotten by most of us: a relation with ourselves and our environment. Since 2012 they have produced ten video works together: Salt Dinner, Sand Clock, Floating Ourselves, Clean Coal, Fossils, Fields of Breath and Lublin Beach, TBQ, all concentrating on the Ancient Greek aphorism γνῶθι σεαυτὸν: know thyself.
Shahar Marcus – BIO
Shahar Marcus (b. 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel) studied Linguistics and History of Art at the University of Tel Aviv. Marcus primarily works in the medium of performance and video art. His initial works dealt with the exploration of his own body and its limitations- incorporating various perishable materials, such as dough, juice and ice. His body served as an instrument, a platform on which various ‘experiments’ took place: lying on the operating table, set on fire, dressed in a ‘bread suit’ and more. Food is also a major theme in Marcus’s works. For instance, his recurrent use of bread as a symbol of essentiality and survival is juxtaposed with military symbols. By working with food, a perishable, momentary substance and by turning it into a piece of clothing or a set, Marcus also flirts with art history; transforming arbitrary objects and materials into something immortal and everlasting. Shahar Marcus is an active artist for over a decade and has exhibited at various art institutions, both in Israel and around the world, including: The Tate Modern; The Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Copenhagen Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biennale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and at other art venues in Poland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, USA, and Turkey. His works are in many important museum collections, such as: The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, as well as intuitions in Poland and Italy. Shahar Marcus lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Almagul Menlibayeva
Transoxania Dreams
2011, HD video
Almagul Menlibayeva has been commissioned to create a series of works for the FAW2019 campaign. We are also proud to screen her video Transoxania Dreams (2011). Menlibayeva films mythological narratives placed and staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. She leads her audience to the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation politics.
The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxiana lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. Menlibayeva visually walks the viewer through a vacant landscape and a symbolic dream whereby the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures (Centaurs) on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the image of the Greek mythological figure of the Centaur, Menlibayeva creates alluring hybrid beings, both sexually charged and bizarre. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadruped, part person part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers. In Transoxiana Dreams Menlibayeva, a pictorial sorceress herself, breeds an eccentric storyline and fantastical imagery extracted deeply from her own atavistic repertoire; leading us visually through an existing, yet unimaginable, landscape in a distant and hypnagogic world.
Almagul Menlibayeva – BIO
Video artist and photographer Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR) holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. She works primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation and her work addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as social, economic, and political, transformations in Central Asia, de-colonial re-imaginings of gender, environmental degradation, and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies.
In conjunction with her solo exhibition Transformation at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-2017), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. She was also the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany. Menlibayeva has gained international recognition by participating in: the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); and the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018). Selected solo exhibitions include: Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); Kissing Totems, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, USA (2008). Recent selected group exhibitions include: Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017). Almagul Menlibayeva lives and works in Almaty and Berlin.
India Rose Klap
Plastic Soup
Interactive performance
For the opening of Water(Proof0, we invite India Rose to make her Plastic Soup performance, sharing with visitors this most unusual of meals.
The amount of plastic waste that ends up in the ocean is growing at a fast pace. This is not only the waste we throw on the streets, but also the microplastics that remain after washing synthetic clothes or that come from cosmetic products. About 8 million metric tons of plastic waste ends up in the ocean each year, if this doesn’t stop there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. To address this problem, India Rose created a recipe for a consumable intervention; a futuristic bouillabaisse; the edible plastic soup. The recipe has been printed upon a bio-plastic bag. The bags are made from cassava, they are 100% biodegradable and they dissolve in warm water. The bags can be used as a binder and garnish for the soup. India Rose makes her edible plastic soup in both fish and vegan versions. To serve the bouillabaisse fish version as sustainably and deliciously as possible, she uses the residual products of fish production; she makes the soup with the fish trimmings and bones. These parts of the fish are usually thrown away, but often contain most of the flavor. The word bouillabaisse comes from the two French verbs: bouillir (to boil) and abaisser (to reduce heat, i.e., simmer), which means that the recipe includes more of a preparation method then a fixed recipe. The bouillabaisse was originally a dish made by fishermen. They prepared the dish on the beach after returning from fishing. In a pot filled with seawater they cooked all the fishes that they couldn’t sell, added some locally available vegetables and herbs. Plastic is harmful to the sea and its inhabitants but a new type of bioplastic might bring the solution. There are a lot of products on the market that are being sold as environment-friendly products. Biodegradable bags sound amazing, but often they leave behind substances that are toxic to both the sea, animals and plants. But bioplastic bags that are made out of cassava and other plant-based materials, those bags are not only biodegradable but also recyclable, they soften in cold water and within months they are converted into carbon dioxide, water and biomass. When they are put in warm water they dissolve. In that way, they are also safe to consume for the inhabitants of our planet.
India Rose Klap – BIO
Being the daughter of a chef, India Rose (b. 1995 in Amsterdam, Netherlands) grew up in a Spanish tapas restaurant. She played with octopuses and crayfish and did afternoon naps in paella pans. From an early age she spent many hours in the kitchen, which is how she grew up with an enormous love for food. With her art projects she tries to make the consumer aware of the problems in the food industry with a real portion of ‘food for thought’. At the same time she wants to reassure the consumer, by providing a series of possible solutions. She bundles all concepts, culinary experiences, and recipes she creates in the utopian manual for the kitchen of tomorrow. An ever growing collection of creations which are far from standard, sometimes not even feasible so far. But they do form the steps towards a better food industry. The utopian manual exists both online and as a printed version. The printed version is made from agricultural waste products and is embedded with seeds. Because of this, the utopian manual can be transformed into a vegetable garden. The utopian manual is filled with many creations; the recipe for the edible plastic soup is one of them. India Rose Klap lives and works in Amsterdam.
Nina E. Schönefeld
Dark Waters
2018, 4K video, 15’55”
Dark Waters is set in the year 2029. All the oceans are so contaminated with plastic waste that they have become death zones. The only creatures still able to live there are poisonous jellyfish. The government is trying to keep this eco-disaster secret. The film narrates the risky quest for the truth by helicopter pilot Silver Ocean. The movie deals with the social, environmental and political climate of today and our future world. It questions the contemporary roles of female characters and heroes, exploring the relationship between art and the present digital age. The movie story imagines a world where, due to drastic environmental changes, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival.
Nina E. Schönefeld – BIO
Nina E. Schönefeld (b. 1972 in Berlin) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She studied Fine Art in Berlin (UdK) and in London (Royal College of Art). She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art History. Together with Marina Wilde she founded “Last Night In Berlin” a cultural project/blog that documents art openings in Berlin. Schönefeld’s art examines the contemporary social and political climate. Through unusual mediums, objects and videos, the artist questions the contemporary roles of artists, exploring the relationship between art, blockbuster movies and the present digital age. Her stories imagine a dystopian world where, due to drastic political and environmental shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival. Selected recent exhibitions include: ‘Some Demonstrations’, Manifesta/Manifestina, Zurich (2016); solo show at CoGalleries, Berlin (2016); solo show at Fahrbereitschaft, Berlin (2017); Diskurs Gallery, Berlin (2017); Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi, Venice (2018); Goethe Institute, Beijing (2018); BBA Gallery Award Exhibition, Berlin (2018); solo show at Berlinische Galerie, 12 x 12 IBB Video Space (2018); Villa Heike, Berlin (2019); Lage Egal Gallery, Berlin (2019); Mitte Media Festival, Berlin (2019); Made in NY Media Center by IFP, New York (2019); Bamhaus in Luxembourg (2019); Aram Art Museum, Korea (2019).
Shingo Yoshida
Réprouvé
2018, 4K video, 3’37”
Photographer and video artist Shingo Yoshida finds inspiration in travelling, myths, traditions and the overwhelming beauty of nature. Yoshida considers the world as his studio and therefore a place of constant creation. In his video and photographic works Yoshida expresses his deep reverence for nature and its power, as well as his sense of wonder at encountering new cultures and ways of living. Shot in Calama, Chile, Shingo Yoshida’s film Réprouvé takes us through a garbage-strewn wasteland at the edge of the city, where the artist creates an oasis of beauty, turning discarded bear bottles into a sound installation. In an exhibition about water, Réprouvé is striking for its very absence of water. Creating beauty in the most unlikely of places, it is nevertheless a frightening glimpse of what our planet may soon look like if we do not take better care of our most necessary natural resource – water.
Shingo Yoshida – BIO
Shingo Yoshida, born in 1974 in Tokyo, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Yoshida received his MA with highest honors from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson in Nice France in 2004. In 2005 he earned a post-graduate diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France, and subsequently in 2007 he received another post-graduate diploma in the Program La Seine of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts de Paris. in 2013 Yoshida completed the prestigious international artist residencies at Villa Arson Nice France – Centre National d’Art Contemporain, and was awarded the Fellowship of Overseas Study Programme for Artists by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Government. Yoshida’s work has been shown in many international exhibitions, including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007, 2012); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, Chile (2012); the 60th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany, (2014); Videoart at Midnight #67: Shingo Yoshida, BABYLON, Berlin (2015); POLARIZED! Vision Competition Winner, Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland (2015); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, Gunma, Japan (2016); Mulliqi Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Prishtina, Kosovo (2016); Instituto Zappa (Accademia Di Brera) Viale Marche, Milan, Italy (2016); Onufri International Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (2016); IkonoTV (2017). In 2016 Shingo Yoshida’s works entered into the following Collections in Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Akademie der Künste, and Fluentum.
ACADEMIC PARTNERS
Members of Mathilde ter Heijne’s class for Time-Based Media and Performance at
UdK (Universität der Künste, Berlin)
For FAW 2019 we are cooperating with Mathilde ter Heijne’s class at the UdK to create a performance program focused on the issues addressed by this edition of FAW, namely sustainable practices in consumption, conservation, and distribution of water, and how this intrinsically ties in to how we eat and how we live
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
HALÉKÉ collective
Transwater
2019, Live Performance
Celebrate water, celebrate together! Transwater is a ceremony for water. The water we drink and clean ourselves with is transparent and tasteless to our eyes and tongue. According to the researches by Masaru Emoto, water is able to respond and feel the human’s emotions. The water crystals will change their shapes from ugly to beautiful, depending on the nature of speech or thoughts. There will be three types of brainwashed water for the tasting in the ceremony: Good water, bad water and ignored water. The Good water is treated with compliments and beautiful sentences. The bad water got harassed and violated with insults, while the ignored water got left neglected. Will the taste of the water be changed by the way humans treats it? Or does the human mind change the taste of water? The transwater will run through your body with its emotion and memory.
HALÉKÉ collective
(Aki Nakamura, Anastasia Putsykina and Sugano Matsusaki)
HALÉKÉ collective was formed in 2019 in Berlin by Aki Nakamura (1990, b. Japan), Anastasia Putsykina (1994, b. Russia) and Sugano Matsusaki (1992, b. Japan). Aki studied scenography drama and film at the Tama Art University in Tokyo (BA), Sugano studied sociology and anthropology at the Keio University in Tokyo (BA) and currently she and Anastasia are studying fine arts in Berlin at the University of the Arts with Prof. Mathilde ter Heijne. HALÉKÉ focuses on the rituality of food and the performativity of eating. The codes and choreographed customs and manners that circulate around the way people cook, eat and consume food tend to change their meaning depending on the context, in which they are performed. Theses changes will be addressed in performances and interventions by HALÉKÉ.
Joanna Keler
Imitation
2017, Photographs
What does the human create? How does it affect nature? How does nature affect the human? How are their relationships built? Where is the line between human and nature? Where is the line between the artificial and the natural? As part of the project Research of the natural and artificial the intervention in the mock waterfall in Berlin’s Victoria Park is looking for answers to all of these questions. In this work Joanna was inspired by visual similarities between the natural and the artificial, between water and cellophane and by the waterfall in the park itself, which is itself imitating a mountain landscape. She created a space where two artificial things meet each other and simulate nature.
Joanna Keler – BIO
After moving in 2017 from St.Petersburg to Berlin Joanna Keler (b. 1988 in Gus-Khrustalnyi, USSR) is attending the Berlin University of the Arts in the Class for Performance and Time Based Media. Through various media she researches society relationships and works with the topic of politics, migration and influence of digital media. Most important for Joanna Keler is the spectator, because she strongly believes that communication and participation with and through art endows the viewer with experience, which itself is the first step on the way to changes.
Klara Kirsch
SWEATONIC
2019, Live Performance
In a late capitalist society where water has long become a tradable commodity global warming drives people to new business ideas. While temperatures are rising dramatically and the little remaining fresh water is in high demand sweat becomes a valuable resource. A fluid naturally produced by the body consisting of 99% water, full of electrolytes, some sugar and amino acids gets recycled and transformed into a product that revolutionizes the cooling supply for the human organism. SWEATONIC. In this performance the visitors will have the chance to witness the first transformation process before the product launch. By donating their own sweat they can become active protectors of the human cooling system in times of climate change. Don’t waste those valuable components if they can be processed and returned to the body – become part of the SWEATONIC movement!
Klara Kirsch – BIO
Klara Kirsch was born in Speyer in 1995. After working on an organic farm in Japan she started studying at the University of Fine Arts Berlin (UdK) in 2015 where she joined the classes of Jimmy Robert and Ming Wong. In 2017 she studied at Emily Carr University of Art and Design Vancouver for one semester. Since 2018 she has been in Mathilde ter Heijne’s class for performance and time based media.
Gabriela Lesmes
Migraciones
2019, Installation: dehydrated and pulverised orange peel,
lemon peel, red roses
Migraciones is a piece where different edible elements have been dehydrated and pulverised. Is a piece a where a decision has to be made for it to either mutate or keep its form.
Gabriela Lesmes – BIO
Gabriela Lesmes (1991, Bogotá, Colombia) Is a Berlin based artist. She studied Stage Design in Colombia and she’s currently studying Sculpture at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee Berlin. Although her practice is not limited to one discipline she mainly works with installation, collage, drawing and sculpture all of them are flirtations between knowledge and sensitivity.
Lotti Seebeck
Stay Hydrated xox
2019, Video Diary
The human body is around 70% water! So is the earth surface! Coincidence? Maybe not! How often do you water your body insides? Of the 2 litres of liquid that I consume daily, maybe only 30% are pure H2O. The rest comes as coffee, tea, juice and beer,which makes me happy in the moment but gives my body all sorts of extra stimulation and processing work. For the month of August, I want to find out if (my) life is possible on the base of water – pure and untreated as it comes off the grounds and where to find it. I will share my process of water-infused and water seeking living on social media and invite you all to join me on the journey.
Lotti Seebeck – BIO
Lotti Seebeck’s work circles around community activation through conversation, skill and knowledge sharing and body-world exploration. She has lived, worked and studied in Hildesheim and London and recently joined the class for performance and time based media at UdK Berlin.
https://woym.de
https://lottiseebeck.wordpress.com
Students of the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Pollenzo, Italy), in the Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology,
and Education Program
The the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG) was founded in 2004 with a focus on a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to food and sustainability. It was founded by the Slow Food movement, in the area where this movement began. The different programs host students from all over the world and various lecturers, such as academics, farmers, food producers, artists, and many others. For FAW2019 Tainá Guedes developed a project with members of the Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology, and Education program at UNISG.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Giovanni Giorgi,
Nuha Saegh & Nuwella
Unfiltered
2019, Live Performance
This performance talks about the impact of pesticides on people’s health and environment. We usually think of pesticides only as something that is contained in food and we tend to forget about fact that water gathers these substances in fields and makes them circulate.
Still, we hear from many scientists that the water that we drink or use is cleared out from pesticides and that it contains only a small and non-harmful amount. Unfortunately, this solution does not erase the many issues that are connected to the use of certain kinds of pesticides and, more broadly, to our food production: there are many health problems concerning the use of pesticides, especially for humans or for other natural species that are staying in direct contact with them, right in the fields where they are sprayed; these issues include different types of cancers, infertility, malformations, and animal migrations that change the local ecological balance.
The students of UNISG (Pollenzo, Italy), Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology, and Education, will perform a piece called “unfiltered” to raise awareness on the existence of these problems in those areas where these are “not filtered” from water, as it instead happens for the one people consume in many urban spaces, for example. The information concerning these problems will be directly revealed on what constitute a direct target for pesticides and a system for which we all usually feel a lot of concern: the human body. The performance will include a pesticide-sprayer person and one “unfiltered body”, to be observed by the audience and that will communicate to them the problems related to this current reality.
Concept:
Giovanni Giorgi (from Prato, Italy; student at UNISG)
Performing artists:
Nuha Saegh (from Aleppo, Syria; student at UNISG);
Nuwella (Kenya/Canada/Berlin; Founder of “Ó Water”)
Giovanni Giorgi
Born in Florence in 1995 and grown up in Prato, Italy, his background is in gastronomy; after undergoing the undergraduate degree at UNISG and approaching the world of food journalism, his interest in creating narratives and exploring different dimensions of how food can make the world more sustainable, he decided to apply to the Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology, and Education at UNISG to discover how art can be a powerful key for conveying narrations and for community building. He is currently working as a design intern at Food Art Week.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
Initiated by Tainá Guedes and
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT
WITH THANKS TO OUR MEDIA PARTNERS
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
OPENING PHOTOS
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MOMENTUM AiR
Curator-in-Residence
24 June – 13 August 2019
Elena Shtromberg
Website – CV
18 July @ 7 – 9pm
Encounters in Video Art from Latin America
Reception & Curator’s Talk
with screening of Defiant Bodies
19 – 28 July @ 1-7pm
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME:
Video Art In Latin America
Video Program Screenings
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanein
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin 10997
Watch the video of the Elena Shtromberg’s curator’s talk at MOMENTUM:
CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW TO READ THE PROGRAMS:
19 July @ 1-7pm
ECONOMIES OF LABOR
SONIA ANDRADE (Brazil, XIMENA CUEVAS (Mexico), LUIS GÁRCIGA (Cuba), KARLO ANDREI IBARRA (Puerto Rico), GLENDA LEÓN (Cuba), JESSICA LAGUNAS (Nicaragua), CINTHIA MARCELLE (Brazil), ADRIÁN MELIS (Cuba)
JASON MENA (Puerto Rico), PATRICIO PALOMEQUE (Ecuador), MARTÍN SASTRE (Uruguay), TATYANA ZAMBRANO (Colombia)
20 July @ 1-7pm
DEFIANT BODIES
GERALDO ANHAIA MELLO (Brazil), JAVIER BOSQUES (Puerto Rico), UNIDAD PELOTA CUADRADA (Ecuador), ERIKA & JAVIER (Paraguay), ADRIANA GARCÍA GALÁN (Colombia), MARIANA JURADO RICO (Colombia), LETICIA PARENTE (Brazil), BERNA REALE (Brazil), COLECTIVO ZUNGA (Colombia)
21 July @ 1-7pm
THE ORGANIC LINE
ANALÍVIA CORDEIRO (Brazil), DONNA CONLON & JONATHAN HARKER (Panama), SANDRA DE BERDUCCY (Bolivia), REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO (Guatemala), CAO GUIMARÃES AND RIVANE NEUENSHWANDER (Brazil), MAGDALENA FERNÁNDEZ (Venezuela), LUIS MATA & JUAN CARLOS PORTILLO (Venezuela), LOTTY ROSENFELD (Chile), REGINA SILVEIRA (Brazil), ANTONIO PAUCAR (Peru)
24 July @ 1-7pm
BORDERS AND MIGRATIONS
ALEJANDRA ALARCÓN (Bolivia), LUCAS BAMBOZZI (Brazil), JAVIER CALVO (Costa Rica), JOSÉ CASTRELLÓN (Panama), DONNA CONLON & JONATHAN HARKER (Panama), MARIA LAET (Brazil), RONALD MORÁN (El Salvador), MIGUEL ANGEL RÍOS (Argentina), ALEX RIVERA (US), MARIO GARCÍA TORRES (Mexico)
25 July @ 1-7pm
STATES OF CRISIS
PÁVEL AGUILAR (Honduras), ANGIE BONINO (Peru), GLORIA CAMIRUAGA (Chile), ANNA BELLA GEIGER (Brazil), GABRIELA GOLDER (Argentina), DIEGO LAMA (Peru), CARLOS MOTTA (Colombia), OSCAR MUÑOZ (Colombia), JOSÉ ALEJANDRO RESTREPO (Colombia), NICOLÁS RUPCICH (Chile), CHARLY NIJENSOHN (Argentina)
26 July @ 1-7pm
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
PATRICIA BUENO & SUSANA TORRES (Peru), ALEJANDRA DELGADO (Bolivia), JUAN MANUEL ECHAVARRÍA (Colombia), ADELA GOLDBARD (Mexico), ALEJANDRO LEONHARDT & MATÍAS ROJAS (Chile), CLEMENTE PADÍN (Uruguay)
ENRIQUE RAMÍREZ (Chile), ERNESTO SALMERÓN (Nicaragua)
On 27 – 28 July @ 1-7pm
All the Video Programs will be Screened Back-to-Back
BIO
Elena Shtromberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Utah. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American visual culture, with a specific focus on Brazil and the U.S.-Mexico border region. Her book, “Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s” (University of Texas Press, 2016) explores visual forms of critique and subversion during the height of Brazilian dictatorship by tracing how the encounter of artistic practice with information and systems theories redefined the role of art in society. Her interdisciplinary research interests extend to gender and media studies, cultural studies, as well as communications, geography and postcolonial theory. She has been the recipient of grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and DAAD, among others. During her research leave in 2011-12 she was a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She has also curated a number of exhibitions, the latest among them a co-curated survey entitled “Video Art in Latin America” which opened in September 2017 at LAXART (an alternative art space in Los Angeles), part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative PST: LA/LA. She is now working on a co-edited volume, “Encounters in Video Art of Latin America” (Getty Publications, 2020) and a scholarly monograph on the role of historical memory in video art titled “Fugitive Memories”.
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Video Art In Latin America
MOMENTUM is proud to bring to Berlin the outstanding body of research presented in “PACIFIC STANDARD TIME: Video Art In Latin America”. The program of video screenings will be opened and introduced by Elena Shtromberg on 18 July at 7-9pm, to be followed by daily screenings of the individual programs, ending with all the programs shown together on the weekend of the 27-28 July.
More than 60 works of video art from Latin America, many never before seen in the U.S., were presented in a landmark exhibition at LAXART from September 17 through December 16, 2017 as part of the Getty’s city-wide art initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Organized by LAXART in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute (GRI), Video Art in Latin America surveys groundbreaking achievements and important thematic tendencies in Latin American video art from the 1960s until today.
“We have worked with hundreds of artists, curators, and scholars in more than a dozen countries to trace historical narratives of the field,” said Glenn Phillips, head of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute and co-curator of the exhibition. “Very few museums and research collections in the United States contain video work from Latin America. Through this exhibition and our ongoing research, we seek not only to expose audiences to an important medium of artistic expression from Latin America, but also to provide resources and access for future research and scholarship.”
The exhibition is part of an ongoing Getty Research Institute research project undertaken by the exhibition curators Glenn Phillips (GRI) and Elena Shtromberg (University of Utah) on projects related to video art in Latin America since 2004. Since 2013, Shtromberg and Phillips have been conducting extensive research in Latin America, visiting with artists, curators, and scholars and organizing several major public screenings.
The emergence of video art in Latin America is marked by staggered and multiple points of development across more than a dozen artistic centers over a period of more than 25 years. The earliest experiments with video in Latin America began in Argentina and Brazil in the 60s and 70s, respectively. In the late 1970s artists in Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico began to use video. Artists in Chile, Cuba, and Uruguay took up the medium in the 1980s and the 1990s and 2000s saw video art movements emerging in Ecuador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.
“In the latter part of the 20th century, early portable video equipment, in particular the Portapak, represented a decentralized media outlet for voicing opposition. At this time, video artists positioned the body as the site of expression in traumatic political contexts,” said co- curator Elena Shtromberg. “Contemporary video artists in Latin America are continuing to pursue social themes, exploring ideas about gender, ethnic, and racial identity as well as the consequences of social inequality, ecological disasters and global violence.”
At LAXART, in Hollywood, visitors encountered several immersive video art installations in the center of the exhibition space as well as three galleries featuring single channel videos arranged in six thematic programs which include: The Organic Line; Defiant Bodies; States of Crisis; Economies of Labor; Borders and Migrations; Memory and Forgetting. An important feature of the exhibition was a specially curated library adjacent to the gallery spaces. This publicly accessible library functioned as a Video in Latin American Art study room featuring dozens of books on the subject, including many books that are out-of-print or otherwise hard to find in the U.S.
The Getty Research Institute is an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust. It serves education in the broadest sense by increasing knowledge and understanding about art and its history through advanced research. The Research Institute provides intellectual leadership through its research, exhibition, and publication programs and provides service to a wide range of scholars worldwide through residencies, fellowships, online resources, and a Research Library. Additional information is available at www.getty.edu.
MORE INFO HERE >>
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PACIFIC STANDARD TIME:
Video Art in Latin America
Video Program Screenings
19 – 28 July 2019
Curated by Elena Shtromberg
18 July @ 7 – 9pm
Encounters in Video Art from Latin America
Reception & Curator’s Talk
with screening of Defiant Bodies
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin 10997
CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW TO READ THE PROGRAMS:
19 July @ 1-7pm
ECONOMIES OF LABOR
SONIA ANDRADE (Brazil, XIMENA CUEVAS (Mexico), LUIS GÁRCIGA (Cuba), KARLO ANDREI IBARRA (Puerto Rico), GLENDA LEÓN (Cuba), JESSICA LAGUNAS (Nicaragua), CINTHIA MARCELLE (Brazil), ADRIÁN MELIS (Cuba)
JASON MENA (Puerto Rico), PATRICIO PALOMEQUE (Ecuador), MARTÍN SASTRE (Uruguay), TATYANA ZAMBRANO (Colombia)
20 July @ 1-7pm
DEFIANT BODIES
GERALDO ANHAIA MELLO (Brazil), JAVIER BOSQUES (Puerto Rico), UNIDAD PELOTA CUADRADA (Ecuador), ERIKA & JAVIER (Paraguay), ADRIANA GARCÍA GALÁN (Colombia), MARIANA JURADO RICO (Colombia), LETICIA PARENTE (Brazil), BERNA REALE (Brazil), COLECTIVO ZUNGA (Colombia)
21 July @ 1-7pm
THE ORGANIC LINE
ANALÍVIA CORDEIRO (Brazil), DONNA CONLON & JONATHAN HARKER (Panama), SANDRA DE BERDUCCY (Bolivia), REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO (Guatemala), CAO GUIMARÃES AND RIVANE NEUENSHWANDER (Brazil), MAGDALENA FERNÁNDEZ (Venezuela), LUIS MATA & JUAN CARLOS PORTILLO (Venezuela), LOTTY ROSENFELD (Chile), REGINA SILVEIRA (Brazil), ANTONIO PAUCAR (Peru)
24 July @ 1-7pm
BORDERS AND MIGRATIONS
ALEJANDRA ALARCÓN (Bolivia), LUCAS BAMBOZZI (Brazil), JAVIER CALVO (Costa Rica), JOSÉ CASTRELLÓN (Panama), DONNA CONLON & JONATHAN HARKER (Panama), MARIA LAET (Brazil), RONALD MORÁN (El Salvador), MIGUEL ANGEL RÍOS (Argentina), ALEX RIVERA (US), MARIO GARCÍA TORRES (Mexico)
25 July @ 1-7pm
STATES OF CRISIS
PÁVEL AGUILAR (Honduras), ANGIE BONINO (Peru), GLORIA CAMIRUAGA (Chile), ANNA BELLA GEIGER (Brazil), GABRIELA GOLDER (Argentina), DIEGO LAMA (Peru), CARLOS MOTTA (Colombia), OSCAR MUÑOZ (Colombia), JOSÉ ALEJANDRO RESTREPO (Colombia), NICOLÁS RUPCICH (Chile), CHARLY NIJENSOHN (Argentina)
26 July @ 1-7pm
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
PATRICIA BUENO & SUSANA TORRES (Peru), ALEJANDRA DELGADO (Bolivia), JUAN MANUEL ECHAVARRÍA (Colombia), ADELA GOLDBARD (Mexico), ALEJANDRO LEONHARDT & MATÍAS ROJAS (Chile), CLEMENTE PADÍN (Uruguay)
ENRIQUE RAMÍREZ (Chile), ERNESTO SALMERÓN (Nicaragua)
On 27 – 28 July @ 1-7pm
All the Video Programs will be Screened Back-to-Back
BIO
Website – CV
Elena Shtromberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Utah. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American visual culture, with a specific focus on Brazil and the U.S.-Mexico border region. Her book, “Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s” (University of Texas Press, 2016) explores visual forms of critique and subversion during the height of Brazilian dictatorship by tracing how the encounter of artistic practice with information and systems theories redefined the role of art in society. Her interdisciplinary research interests extend to gender and media studies, cultural studies, as well as communications, geography and postcolonial theory. She has been the recipient of grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and DAAD, among others. During her research leave in 2011-12 she was a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She has also curated a number of exhibitions, the latest among them a co-curated survey entitled “Video Art in Latin America” which opened in September 2017 at LAXART (an alternative art space in Los Angeles), part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative PST: LA/LA. She is now working on a co-edited volume, “Encounters in Video Art of Latin America” (Getty Publications, 2020) and a scholarly monograph on the role of historical memory in video art titled “Fugitive Memories”.
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Video Art In Latin America
MOMENTUM is proud to bring to Berlin the outstanding body of research presented in “PACIFIC STANDARD TIME: Video Art In Latin America”. The program of video screenings will be opened and introduced by Elena Shtromberg on 18 July at 7-9pm, to be followed by daily screenings of the individual programs, ending with all the programs shown together on the weekend of the 27-28 July.
More than 60 works of video art from Latin America, many never before seen in the U.S., were presented in a landmark exhibition at LAXART from September 17 through December 16, 2017 as part of the Getty’s city-wide art initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Organized by LAXART in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute (GRI), Video Art in Latin America surveys groundbreaking achievements and important thematic tendencies in Latin American video art from the 1960s until today.
“We have worked with hundreds of artists, curators, and scholars in more than a dozen countries to trace historical narratives of the field,” said Glenn Phillips, head of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute and co-curator of the exhibition. “Very few museums and research collections in the United States contain video work from Latin America. Through this exhibition and our ongoing research, we seek not only to expose audiences to an important medium of artistic expression from Latin America, but also to provide resources and access for future research and scholarship.”
The exhibition is part of an ongoing Getty Research Institute research project undertaken by the exhibition curators Glenn Phillips (GRI) and Elena Shtromberg (University of Utah) on projects related to video art in Latin America since 2004. Since 2013, Shtromberg and Phillips have been conducting extensive research in Latin America, visiting with artists, curators, and scholars and organizing several major public screenings.
The emergence of video art in Latin America is marked by staggered and multiple points of development across more than a dozen artistic centers over a period of more than 25 years. The earliest experiments with video in Latin America began in Argentina and Brazil in the 60s and 70s, respectively. In the late 1970s artists in Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico began to use video. Artists in Chile, Cuba, and Uruguay took up the medium in the 1980s and the 1990s and 2000s saw video art movements emerging in Ecuador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.
“In the latter part of the 20th century, early portable video equipment, in particular the Portapak, represented a decentralized media outlet for voicing opposition. At this time, video artists positioned the body as the site of expression in traumatic political contexts,” said co- curator Elena Shtromberg. “Contemporary video artists in Latin America are continuing to pursue social themes, exploring ideas about gender, ethnic, and racial identity as well as the consequences of social inequality, ecological disasters and global violence.”
At LAXART, in Hollywood, visitors encountered several immersive video art installations in the center of the exhibition space as well as three galleries featuring single channel videos arranged in six thematic programs which include: The Organic Line; Defiant Bodies; States of Crisis; Economies of Labor; Borders and Migrations; Memory and Forgetting. An important feature of the exhibition was a specially curated library adjacent to the gallery spaces. This publicly accessible library functioned as a Video in Latin American Art study room featuring dozens of books on the subject, including many books that are out-of-print or otherwise hard to find in the U.S.
The Getty Research Institute is an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust. It serves education in the broadest sense by increasing knowledge and understanding about art and its history through advanced research. The Research Institute provides intellectual leadership through its research, exhibition, and publication programs and provides service to a wide range of scholars worldwide through residencies, fellowships, online resources, and a Research Library. Additional information is available at www.getty.edu.
MORE INFO HERE >>
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OPENING PHOTOS
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MOMENTUM AiR
Mariana Hahn
Website
18 February – 11 March 2019
ARTIST BIO
Mariana Hahn’s work poetically interrogates the concept of human fate, story telling and language through the use of photography, performance and video.
Believing that ‘weaving’ can be a metaphor for self-autonomy, her practice is based on thinking of the body as a bearer of continuously woven narratives and that the human being too takes part in making fate, making story. She understands making story as an active, conscious and physical act.
She often uses textiles to take the place of the human body, the textile itself becoming the narrative of a living archive.
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ARTIST BIO
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MOMENTUM AiR
Almagul Menlibayeva
CV – Website
13 – 24 February 2019
ARTIST BIO
Video artist and photographer Almagul Menlibayeva holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. She works primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation and her work addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia, de-colonial re-imaginings of gender, environmental degradation, and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies.
In conjunction with her solo exhibition Transformation at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-2017), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Other awards include the ‘Daryn’ State Prize of Kazakhstan (1996), and the ‘Tarlan’ National Award of the Club of Maecenas of Kazakhstan (2003). She was also the Winner of the Grand Prix Asia Art at the II Biennial of Central Asia, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1995) and the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany.
Menlibayeva has gained international recognition by participating in: the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); and the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018).
ARTIST BIO
Selected solo exhibitions include: Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); Kissing Totems, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, USA (2008). Recent selected group exhibitions include: Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017).
Almagul Menlibayeva made her curatorial debut with Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, co-curated with David Elliott and Rachel Rits-Volloch, organised by MOMENTUM in partnership with the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan (2018, more info here >).
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ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEVA
(b. 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR. Lives and works in Almaty and Berlin)
Almagul Menlibayeva is a video artist, photographer, and curator. Menlibayeva, holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. Working primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation, Menlibayeva’s practice addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as: the social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia; de-colonial re-imaginings of gender; environmental degradation; and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. In 2018, she was co-curator, together with David Elliott and Rachel Rits-Volloch, of the groundbreaking exhibition Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, which took place at MOMENTUM in Berlin’s Kunstquartier Bethanien in partnership with the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
In conjunction with her solo exhibition ‘Transformation’ at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-17), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Among other notable awards, she was the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany, and shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Hong Kong (2020). Previous awards include the ‘Daryn’ State Prize of Kazakhstan (1996), and the ‘Tarlan’ National Award of the Club of Maecenas of Kazakhstan (2003). She was also the Winner of the Grand Prix Asia Art at the II Biennial of Central Asia, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1995).
Menlibayeva participated in numerous international Biennales, including: Mardin Biennale, Turkey (2022); Asian Arts Biennale, Taiwan (2021-22); the Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2020, 2012); the Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Channels Festival, International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Cairo Biennial, Egypt (2019); the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); amongst many others.
Selected recent solo exhibitions include: De. Groen Fine Art Collection, Arnhem, Netherlands (2019); Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); among others.
Selected recent group exhibitions include: Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2020); Yarat Art Foundation, Baku, Azerbaijan (2020); Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF), Tunis, Tunisia (2019); M HKA, Antwerpen, Belgium (2019); Museum of Fine Art, Shymkent, Kazakhstan (2019); RMIT, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2018); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017); Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2016); National Centre for Contemporary Art ( NCCA), Moscow, Russia (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Strasbourg, France (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art Arnhem, Netherlands (2014); Singapore Art Stage, Singapore (2014); MoMA PS1, NY, USA (2013); ZKM- Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien Technologie, Karlsruhe, Germany (2012); amongst many others.
TRANSOXANIA DREAMS
2011, HD Video, 23 min
Almagul Menlibayeva’s film tells a tale of ecological devastation in the guise of a mythological narrative staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. Transoxania Dreams (2011) is filmed in the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation policies. The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxania lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. Menlibayeva visually walks the viewer through a vacant landscape and a symbolic dream whereby the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures (Centaurs) on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the image of the Greek mythological figure of the Centaur, Menlibayeva creates alluring hybrid beings, both sexually charged and bizarre. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadrupeds, part person part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers. In Transoxania Dreams, Menlibayeva, a pictorial sorceress herself, breeds an eccentric storyline and fantastical imagery extracted from her own atavistic repertoire; leading us visually through an existing, yet unimaginable, landscape in a distant and hypnagogic world.
ALTAR OF THE EAST
1. Tokamak (2016/18), photograph on aludibond, 150 cm X 100 cm (pictured left)
2. Altar of the East (2016/18), photograph on aludibond, 100 cm X 150 cm (pictured middle)
3. The Constructor (2016/18), photograph on aludibond, 150 cm X 100 cm (pictured right)
Tokamak (depicted above on the left) depicts the KTM Tokamak, the experimental materials-testing thermonuclear fusion reactor that started operation at the National Nuclear Center in Kurchatov, Kazakhstan in June 2017. As well as being a celebration of the triumph of new technology, this work also evokes memories of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War, in particular Kurchatov’s central role in the Soviet-era nuclear weapons tests. It is seen here alongside post-independence Kazakhstan’s ambitious plans for the development of nuclear power.
The image Altar of the East (in the center), depicts the Soviet-era control panel in Kurchatov for detonating nuclear weapons. The iconic ‘Button’ of Cold War dread is pictured in this triptych of images as a relic of a past era giving way to a future of science and technology where women play the central roles, as depicted in The Constructor (on the right), a photo-collage superimposing a woman’s face onto images of the construction of Kazakhstan’s new capital Astana.
This tryptich was shown in 2018 in Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, an exhibition organized by MOMENTUM in partnership with the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan. This show comprises work in a wide-range of media by 20 artists created from 1945 to the present. Emerging Kazakh women artists are prefaced in the show by a group of eminent forerunners who have remained more or less invisible within the history of Soviet, Kazakh and world art. Against the tumult of Stalinist repression and its aftermath, the work of these women has forged a bridge between traditional Kazakh arts, crafts and ways of living, the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s and ‘30s, socialist realism and a completely new approach to art making that emerged from the beginning of the 1980s. The works that these great grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, and daughters of contemporary Kazakh art have produced reflect the melting-pot of ideas and influences between east and west arising from Kazakhstan’s history of tumultuous political and social change. Bread & Roses took place in parallel to the Focus Kazakhstan Artist Residency Exhibition at the MOMENTUM Gallery, also in the Kunstquartier Bethanien.
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SAULE SULEIMENOVA
SAULE SULEIMENOVA graduated from the Kazakh State Academy of Architecture and Construction in 1996, and was awarded an MFA from the Kazakh National University of Arts in 2013. She has been a member of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan since 1998. She works with mixed media, creating images and sculptures from plastic bags in a process she describes as ‘waste collage’. Residual Memory, her current project, revisits the traumatic history of Kazakhstan by recycling reproductions of little-known photo documents into collages made of waste. Still painful themes such as the Zheltoksan (the Kazakh youth riots in 1986), and the Asharshylyk (the colonial genocide resulting from Stalin’s Collectivization policies during 1932-1933), give her practice an edge of activism. Awards include: Fellowship of the President of Kazakhstan (1998); Laureate of the Shabyt, Zhiger and Tengri Umai awards; Laureate ‘For creative achievements’ in the №1 Choice of the Year, Kazakhstan, 2017; Shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2017; Nominated for the Singapore Art Prize 2017; Nominated to Prince Claus Foundation Art Prize 2016.
Her selected exhibitions include: Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2018); Somewhere in the Great Steppe: Contemporary Art from Kazakhstan, Erarta Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2017-2018); Somewhere in the Great Steppe: Skyline, National Museum of Kazakhstan, Astana (2017). Culture Summit 2017, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Dis/Possessed. A Question of Spirit and Money, Manifesta 10, Folium, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); One Belt One Road, Federation of Women, Sotheby’s, Hong Kong; 56th Venice Biennale in the Why Self project (2015); 5th Moscow Contemporary Art Biennale in the Migrants project of RSGU (2013); ARTBATFEST Almaty Contemporary Art Festival (2013, 2014, 2015); East of Nowhere, Foundation 107, Turin, Italy (2009); Kazakh: Paintings By Saule Suleimenova, Townsend Center, Berkeley University, USA, 2005.
THE THREE BRIDES (2018)
As a result of her Focus Kazakhstan Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Saule Suleimenova spent two months living and working in Berlin in the Autumn of 2018. Working for the first time in diverse media new to her practice, such as video and a variety of printing practices, Suleimenova explored new ways of working beyond her usual practice of ‘waste collage’. The Three Brides is a silkscreen print, made in the Kunstquartier Bethanien print workshop, based on Sulemeinova’s 2015 work The Three Brides (plastic bags on plastic tablecloth on wooden board), one of five Sulemeinova works featured in MOMENTUM’s exhibition, Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists (2018).
Extrapolating from her usual practice of recreating found and archival images from non-traditional media, like plastic bags and plastic tablecloths, Sulemeinova here revisits her own composition of The Three Brides, in the form of a silkscreen print. The social status of kelin/brides in Kazakh society is the most unprotected. Traditionally, a girl taken into a new family would lose all the privileges of a beloved daughter, only to find herself at the bottom of the social ladder until she gives a birth to a son. The image of the brides itself is based on an archival photograph (1869, from the collection of Prof. Alkey Margulan) depicting three teenagers wearing Kazakh traditional wedding dresses.
