Focus Kazakhstan Symposium
SYMPOSIUM
Sunday 30 September @ 3 – 7pm
At MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Part of the Exhibition:
Bread & Roses
Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists
PARTICIPANTS:
David Elliott, Almagul Menlibayeva, Rachel Rits-Volloch:
Curators of Focus Kazakhstan Berlin – Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists and the Focus Kazakhstan Artist Residency Exhibition (2018)
Aliya de Tiesenhausen and Indira Dyussebayeva:
Curators of the Focus Kazakhstan London exhibition Post-nomadic Mind (2018)
Diana T. Kudaibergenova:
Sociologist and scholar at Cambridge University
Dina Nurpeissova:
Founder of Berlin’s Central Asian cultural association Steppenboot
Nari Shelekpayev:
Einstein Fellow at Berlin’s Einstein Forum and Visiting Professor at the University of Rome
Bojana Pejić:
Curator of Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2009/10), Good Girls: Memory, Desire, Power (2013), and co-curator of HERO MOTHER: Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism (2016)
Anar Aubakir, Gaisha Madanova, Aigerim Ospanova, Saule Sulemeinova, Gulmaral Tatibayeva:
Artists in Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists and the Focus Kazakhstan Artist Residency Exhibition
PROGRAM:
3:00
David Elliot
Bread & Roses: Colonization and Identity in Kazakh Art
3:30
Aliya de Tiesenhausen & Indira Dyussebayeva
On “Post-Nomadic Mind” (London) and the Current Discourse on Contemporary Art and Identity in Kazakhstan
4:00
Bojana Pejic
Spaces of Self-Definition: on Theories of Identity
4:30
Discussion: Knowing Lidya Blinova
Almagul Menlibayeva, Saule Sulemeinova, David Elliott (moderator)
Knowing Lidya Blinova
5:00
Nari Shelekpayev – Shame, Power, and the Female Body: on Political Practices of Uyat in Contemporary Kazakhstan
5:20
Panel Discussion: Naming Shame: Uyat in Kazakh Culture
Nari Shelekpayev, Bojana Pejic, Aliya de Tiesenhausen, Almagul Menlibayeva, Diana T. Kudaibergenova, Indira Dyussebayeva, Dina Nour (moderator)
Artist Talks:
6:00
Aluan: Exhibition on Paper
Gaisha Madanova in discussion with David Elliott on Aluan and how it fits into her practice as artist and curator.
6:15
From the Perspective of Now: Two Generations of Kazakh Women Artists
Almagul Menlibayeva, Gaisha Madanova, Anar Aubakir, Aigerim Ospanova, Saule Sulemeinova, Gulmaral Tatibayeva, Rachel Rits-Volloch & David Elliott (moderators)
7:00
Symposium Closes.
ANAR AUBAKIR
Anar Aubakir: Born 1984 in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan. Anar Aubakir’s paintings, often shown in complex installations, emanate a disquieting poetic symbolism that, while referring to stories and relationships she has encountered in Kazakhstan, suggest a much broader reference. She completed an MA at the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty; in 2010 she won the best realist painting award in the Russian Art Week competition in St. Petersburg as well as the 1st painting prize in the Week of Kazakhstan Art competition in Almaty. Her work was awarded the Cholpan-Ata City Award in Kyrgyzstan in 2016. She is also the organizer of the first traveling exhibitions to have taken place since Kazakhstan became independent. From 2013 to 2017, she organized more than a dozen exhibitions, in which over 20 artists participated, which have travelled to Pavlodar, Semey, Aktobe, Atyrau, Kostanay, Karaganda, Temirtau, Kokshetau, Petropavlovsk, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Aktau and Astana. In each of the cities she conducted master classes in painting and interdisciplinary art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held in Almaty (2010) and Astana (2015.) Her works are in museum collections in Kazakhstan and Tatarstan.
INDIRA DYUSSEBAYEVA
Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek is an independent curator and co-founder of Interntional Art Development Association (IADA), a non-profit organisation supporting and promoting contemporary art from Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Indira studied History of Art at University College London (UCL) and holds an MSc in Finance from Cass Business School, City University London. In her early career, she worked for several years in the financial services industry. With IADA, Dyussebayeva has organised numerous international projects. She co-curated the collateral exhibition of Kazakhstan, ONE STEP/PE FORWARD at the 55th Biennale of Venice (2013), as an initiative for the creation of the national pavilion of Kazakhstan. She curated the solo show of British-Israeli artist Zadok Ben-David, The Other Side of Midnight (2014), which was the first international exhibition at the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Together with her partners, she organised Protagonists, Invisible Pavilion, an artist residency for artists from Kazakhstan, during the 56th Biennale of Venice (2015). In addition, she has participated in curating projects in the non-profit sections of the Vienna Art Fair, Art Dubai, and Art 15.
David Elliott
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). He is Hon President of the Board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London. A specialist in Soviet and Russian avant-garde, as well as in modern and contemporary Asian art, he has published widely in these fields as well as on many other aspects of contemporary art. In 1996 he was co-curator of Kunst und Macht im Europa der Diktatoren 1930 bis 1945 at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and in 2000-2001 was Artistic Director of the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Ludwig Museum, Budapest and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. In 2011 he curated Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia at Calvert 22, London. He is the Chief Curator of BALAGAN: Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, organized by MOMENTUM.
Diana T. Kudaibergenova
Diana T. Kudaibergenova is a cultural and political sociologist. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Center of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University, Sweden. Her main research interest concerns the social theory of power. Kudaibergenova studies different intersections of power relations through realms of political sociology, with a particular focus on nationalising regimes and nationalism in the new states of post-soviet space, cultural sociology, gender studies, and socio-legal studies. She published her first book in January 2017, Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature. Elites and Narratives, exploring the ways national ideas and narratives were produced, contested and rewritten in the very new genre of Soviet literature in modern Kazakhstan. Her second book, currently in production, addresses the comparative political sociology of nation-building, power struggles and new political elites in post-Soviet states. Kudaibergenova’s work on socio-legal studies of citizenship, minorities, and nation- as well as state-building is connected to this aspect of her research. She also works on gender and contemporary art fields to test similar questions of power relations, agency, and power contestations in societies that go through tremendous socio-cultural transformations.
Gaisha Madanova
Gaisha Madanova was born in Alma-Ata, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1987. In 2009, she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of Almaty College of Construction and Management. In 2018, she graduated from the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (Sculpture class, Prof. Hermann Pitz). Gaisha Madanova in her artistic practice using different mediums and techniques (silkscreen print, nitro-frottage, video, photo, installations) and her art is based on the questions to reveal the relationship between artificial and natural existence. Topics like watching and being watched, the body as an expression of the inner self or the strategies of transformations and displacement can be seen as links through the different series of her works. She is also engaged in the curatorial practice (special project DIYALOG: New Energies, OMV section at the VIENNAFAIR; contemporary art educational program VIDEO[ARTiFACT], Klaus vom Bruch; special project mikro[smART]raiony, Refunc group, ARTBATFEST; video-art program Internal Storage – Not Enough Space? Garage Museum of Contemporary Art) and since 2012 has been involved in different projects organized by Goethe- Institut Kazakhstan. Since 2007 Gaisha Madanova is a founding member of the international art collective Artpologist (Art+Antropology), since 2014 member of the Munich based art collective Roundabout and since 2016 co-founder of Kazakhstan based art communicational platform ARTCOM. Gaisha Madanova is the founder and editor-in-chief of the first in Kazakhstan conceptual art magazine ALUAN – EXHIBITION ON PAPER. Temporarily based between Kazakhstan and Germany.
Almagul Menlibayeva
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).
Dina Nurpeissova
Born in 1983 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Nurpeissova has been based in Berlin since 1999. She studied history of art, musicology and cultural sciences at the University of Tübingen, and La Sapienza in Rome. She has worked at cultural festivals in Europe and Kazakhstan: Hors Pistes (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Astana Art Fest (Kazakhstan), Ruberoid (Acud Macht Neu, Berlin), Panke Parcours. She is the founder of the cultural association “Steppenboot e.V.” in Berlin. She is also a musician and DJ.
Aigerim Ospanova
Aigerim Ospanova: Born 1991 in Astana, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Kazakhstan. Multimedia artist Ospanova Aigerim graduated with a BA from the Academy of Art in Almaty. Aigerim’ practice extends to installation, performance art, painting and video art. Selected exhibitions include: “India” in Almaty; “Beautiful Place Burabai” in Almaty; the open-air exhibition of young artists organized by the Union of artists of Almaty; “Always life” Central State Museum of Almaty; “Exhibition of the young artists”, contemporary art festival “Artbat Fest7”, Almaty; “Astana ArtFest”, Astana; “QWAS” bilocal transcultural exhibition, Zurich-Almaty; “Act of creation” contemporary art festival “Artbat Fest8”, Almaty; “Time and Astana: after future”, State Museum, Astana. Aigerim was invited to the symposiums: “Sacral folk songs” (Elabuga, Russia); “Images of Place and Time” (Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia); Art symposium “Made in Astana” (Astana, Kazakhstan); “Sheich Zayed Festival” (Abu-Dhabi, UAE). Also she participated in video project “Transformation” by Almagul Menlibaeva; in the video-performance “The Bitter Gift” by Askhat Akhmediyarov; in workshop on performance with Waldemar Tatarchuk (Labyrinth Gallery, Polland), 2017 Kazakhstan; and in workshop on performance with Roger Hill (UK) Almaty Art Center, 2017 Almaty Kazakhstan.
Bojana Pejić
Bojana Pejić (b. 1948 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia) is an art historian, writer, curator, and educator. From 1977 to 1991 she was curator at the Student Cultural Center of Belgrade University. Since 1991, she has been based in Berlin. She was guest professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin (2003), at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University in Oldenburg, Germany (2006/2007), and at the Central European University, Faculty of Gender Studies, in Budapest (Winter 2013). She was chief curator of the exhibition After the Wall – Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe (1999), organized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, which was also presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Budapest (2000) and at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2000-2001). In 2008 she curated the international exhibition Artist-Citizen, the 49th October Salon in Belgrade (Serbia). She was chief curator of the exhibition Gender Check at MUMOK, Vienna (2009-2010) and Warsaw (2011). She is the editor of Gender Check: Art and Theory in Eastern Europe – A Reader (2010). She curated the international exhibition Good Girls: Memory, Desire, Power at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest (2013) and co-curated the international exhibition HERO MOTHER – Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism, at MOMENTUM, Berlin (2016). Currently, she is a guest lecturer at the Bauhaus University in Weimar in the MFA program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” (2014 – present).
RACHEL RITS-VOLLOCH
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 dissertation on visceral spectatorship in contemporary cinema, focusing on the biological basis of embodiment. In 2016-2017, Rachel Rits-Volloch was Visiting Professor at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, lecturing in the MFA program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” and the PhD program in Artistic Research. Rachel Rits-Volloch founded MOMENTUM in 2010 in Sydney, Australia, as a parallel event to the 17th Biennale of Sydney. MOMENTUM moved to Berlin in January 2011, and since that time has evolved into a non-profit global platform for time-based art, with headquarters at the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center. MOMENTUM’s mission is to continuously reassess the growing diversity and relevance of time-based practices, with an aim to act as a bridge between international art communities, supporting 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 70 international exhibitions showing works by over 500 artists, in addition to ancillary education programming, artist residencies, and related projects. Born in Riga, USSR, Rachel Rits-Volloch is currently based in Berlin, having previously lived and worked in the US, UK, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sydney.
Nari Shelekpayev
Nari Shelekpayev is the 2018 Einstein Fellow at the Einstein Forum and Daimler & Benz Foundation; an Associate Fellow at the International Research and Training Group ‘Diversity’ (2016-2019) formed by Universities of Trier-Saarland and Université de Montréal; and Visiting Professor at the Università di Roma La Sapienza (Musicology Department, 2/2018-3/2019). In the past, he was Doctoral Fellow-in-Residence at the Canadian Center for Architecture; Research Fellow at Free University of Berlin (2016-2017), and has held numerous other academic positions. Shelekpayev completed PhD thesis on: “Ottawa, Brasília, Astana: the Invention of post-Colonial Capital Cities, 1850-2000.”
Saule Suleimenova
Saule Suleimenova: Born 1970 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Kazakhstan. 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: 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.
Gulmaral Tatibayeva
Born 1982, Scherbakty, Pavlodar Region, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan. Gulmaral Tatibayeva received a Bachelor degree in design from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in 2002. She is a member of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan; the Eurasian Designers Union; the Eurasian Creative Guild; and the art group ‘KADMII QYZYL’. She has participated in many national and international exhibitions and competitions; she won the Grand Prix in the Astana city competition for the best billboard design to promote family values (2014) and has exhibited in the First Astana Art Salon; ‘Plein Air Aktobe 2015’, an international symposium of Art; the new media lab in EXPO-2017 at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; AstanaArtFest, Astana Contemporary Art Centre (2015); International Festival of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, (2017); the Eurasia Sculpture Biennale – International Biennial Of Sculpture Art, Astana (2017); ‘Days of Culture of Kazakhstan in Turkey’, Istanbul (2017). Her works may be found in museums in Kazakhstan, and private and public collections in Kazakhstan, Jordan, Turkey, Holland, Russia, and Great Britain.
Aliya de Tiesenhausen
Aliya de Tiesenhausen, PhD, is an independent scholar of Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asian art who was born in Kazakhstan and works in London. She is the author of Central Asia in Art: from Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics, I.B. Tauris, 2016. She received her doctoral degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in 2010. She worked as an icon specialist at Christie’s London; assisted with the production of the film Kazakhstan Swings; taught theory seminars for the MA programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art; organised the Beyond Borat symposium on contemporary Kazakhstan culture; and co-convened the conferences Framing the Other: 30 Years after Orientalism at the Courtauld, and Russian Orientalism through Art Production and Education at the Cambridge Central Asia Forum. Dr de Tiesenhausen makes regular public presentations, including: The Curious Case of Kazakhstan – the Influential Role of Women in an Emerging Art Market at the Association for Art History Annual Conference (2017), and Contemporary Kazakhstani artists working abroad at the Central Asia Forum, Warwick (2018). She participated in numerous publications on these subjects, including guest editing the issue on art for the Cambridge Central Asia Reviews, Volume 1, Issue 2: pages 69-148, Cambridge Scientific Publishers, 2016. She contributed to The Eastern Connection: Depictions of Soviet Central Asia, Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski, eds.; Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe [1945-1989], Budapest – New York, Central European University Press, 2016. Dr. de Tiesenhausen compiled sections on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in the ArtAsiaPacific Almanac 2010. She also wrote the Introduction to Treasures of Kazakhstan, exh. cat., London: Christie’s, 2010.
Focus Kazakhstan Artist Residency Exhibition
FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN:
1 June – 21 October 2018
Artist Residency Exhibition
25 September – 20 October 2018
@ MOMENTUM Gallery
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Exhibition Opening Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12:00 – 7:00pm. Closed Mondays
FEATURING:
Beibit Asemkul, Anar Aubakir, Liliya Kim,
Ykylas Shaikhiyev, Saule Sulemenova, Gulmaral Tatibayeva
A Cultural Exchange Partnership between
the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan and MOMENTUM Berlin
Curated by:
Rachel Rits-Volloch, Director of MOMENTUM
David Elliott, Chief Curator & Vice Director of Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China
Almagul Menlibayeva, Artist
Organized by:
The National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan
&
MOMENTUM Berlin
Showing works by 7 artists created during their 2-month Artist Residencies at MOMENTUM, this exhibition is a reflection upon Berlin through Kazakh eyes. These works, produced during the artists’ first trips to Berlin, and for some their first trips abroad, encompass a cultural dialogue between their traditions and the condition of the contemporary nomad. Dealing with topics ranging from wartime histories to personal histories, today’s refugees and migrants to the nomadic migrations of the artists’ grandparents, the Focus Kazakhstan: Artist Residency Show exemplifies the talents of young artists never before seen in Berlin. Focus Kazakhstan: Berlin is a 6-month cooperation between MOMENTUM and the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan resulting in two parallel exhibitions taking place at the Kunstquartier Bethanien on 25 September – 20 October 2018: Bread and Roses, Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists and The Artist Residency Exhibition.
FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN BERLIN is a 6-month cooperation between the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan and MOMENTUM Berlin, involving Artist Residencies for 7 young artists held from 1 June to 1 October 2018, and two parallel exhibitions be held on 25 September – 20 October 2018. Focus Kazakhstan Berlin: BREAD & ROSES and the Artist Residency Show, organised by Momentum Worldwide at the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center, are part of the Focus Kazakhstan initiative implemented by the National Museum of Kazakhstan in association with the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Kazakhstan within the framework of the program Ruhani Zhangyru. Focus Kazakhstan, a cultural initiative to bring contemporary art from Kazakhstan to an international audience, is comprised of four different exhibitions, each with varying artists and curators, taking place between June 2018 to March 2019 in Berlin, London, Jersey City (USA), and Suwon (Korea).
Participating Artists
BEIBIT ASEMKUL
Beibit Asemkul: Born 1985 in Uzynagash, Almaty region, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Beibit Asemkul studied at the Republican College of Art, Almaty (1998-2004), and in the painting faculty of the Kazakh National Academy of Arts, Almaty (2004-2009). Since 2012, Asemkul has been a lecturer at the Kazakh National University of Arts, Astana. Selected exhibitions and awards include: “After 52 days” (2017), Center for Contemporary Arts ACAC, Astana; “Grand Pale. International Exhibition of Contemporary Art”, ART CAPITAL, Paris (2017); Art Fest, Astana (2017); 2016 – China. Urumqi International Exhibition of Artists. Plein Air; Grand Prix 2016 -Made in Astana, Republican competition of young artists; 2016 – “Cadmium Red”, NEONOMAD, Astana National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan; 2016 – “Infinity 3”, Gallery Hassanat, Astana; 2016 – “Infinity 2”, Korean cultural center of Astana; 2015- 1st place at the republic plein air competition among young artists of Kazakhstan, Aktau; 2014- solo exhibition “Secret of tenderness”, National Library of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana; 2013- Winner of the “PATRIOT” award of Republic of Kazakhstan; 2013 – International Exhibition of Young Artists, CHA Moscow; 2012- Winner of “Daryn” the State Prize of the Republic of Kazakhstan; 2012 – Winner of the Prize Fund of the first President of Kazakhstan – in the field of culture and art; 2012 – 1st place gold medal at the International exhibition New York Realism Fine Art. USA; 2012 – solo exhibition “POJIGRAFOMANIA” Palace of Independence. Astana; 2011 – “Discover the World of Art”, first solo exhibition at the Museum of First President of Republic of Kazakhstan; 2010 – Winner of the XIII international festival “Shabyt”, Grand Prix.
ANAR AUBAKIR
Born 1984 in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Anar Aubakir’s paintings, often shown in complex installations, emanate a disquieting poetic symbolism that, while referring to stories and relationships she has encountered in Kazakhstan, suggest a much broader reference. She completed an MA at the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty; in 2010 she won the best realist painting award in the Russian Art Week competition in St. Petersburg as well as the 1st painting prize in the Week of Kazakhstan Art competition in Almaty. Her work was awarded the Cholpan-Ata City Award in Kyrgyzstan in 2016. She is also the organizer of the first traveling exhibitions to have taken place since Kazakhstan became independent. From 2013 to 2017, she organized more than a dozen exhibitions, in which over 20 artists participated, which have traveled to Pavlodar, Semey, Aktobe, Atyrau, Kostanay, Karaganda, Temirtau, Kokshetau, Petropavlovsk, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Aktau and Astana. In each of the cities she conducted master classes in painting and interdisciplinary art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held in Almaty (2010) and Astana (2015.) Her works are in museum collections in both Kazakhstan and Tatarstan.
LILIA KIM
Lilia Kim: Born 1969 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Karaganda, Kazakhstan.
Lilia Kim, a member of the Artists’ Union of Kazakhstan, graduated from the Karaganda Pedagocical Institute (KarPi) in the graphic arts department in 1991. Recent solos exhibitions include: “Made in Karaganda”, Ular Gallery (Almaty, Kazakhstan); “Eco-Love” (Karaganda, Kazakhstan); “When the soul smiles” (Karaganda, Kazakhstan); “The Cost of Meaning” (Astana, Kazakhstan); “A Look at Asia” (Astana, Kazakhstan); “Who Is It” (Karaganda, Kazakhstan); “Shining Spheres”, Museum Iso (Karaganda, Kazakhstan); “Oriental Motives”, Nagornaya Gallery (Moscow, Russia); “Music in colors”, Ufa Gallery (Russia); “L’artigiano in fiero”, the International Handicraft Exhibition (Milan, Italy). Awards include: Grand Prix of the international competition, nomination “Master”, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Winner of the republican contest “Sheber”, Kazakhstan; Prize-winner of spring salon, gallery “Kulanshi”, Kazakhstan. International artist residencies include: Central Asia Art Month – residence for artists, Abu Dhabi, UAE, with participation in the exhibition, “Days of Kazakhstan culture in the Emirates”.
YKYLAS SHAIKHIEV
Yklas Shaikhiev: Born 1995 in Kyzylorda region, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Shaikhiev Ykylas earned a Bachelors from the KazNPU in Almaty, and is currently completing his MFA at the same university. Ykylas’s practice steers towards the conceptual, combining abstract images with realistic forms. The artist is interested in the paradoxicality that arises at the points of intersection of the modern and archaic.
SAULE SULEIMENOVA
Saule Suleimenova: Born 1970 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Kazakhstan.
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 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 waste collages. Still painful themes such as the Jeltoksan (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: 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.
GULMARAL TATIBAYEVA
Gulmaral Tatibayeva: Born 1982, Scherbakty, Pavlodar Region, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Gulmaral Tatibayeva received a Bachelor degree in design from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in 2002. She is a member of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan; the Eurasian Designers Union; the Eurasian Creative Guild; and the art group ‘KADMII QYZYL’. She has participated in many national and international exhibitions and competitions; she won the Grand Prix in the Astana city competition for the best billboard design to promote family values (2014) and has exhibited in the First Astana Art Salon; ‘Plein Air Aktobe 2015’, an international symposium of Art; the new media lab in EXPO-2017 at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; AstanaArtFest, Astana Contemporary Art Centre (2015); International Festival of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, (2017); the Eurasia Sculpture Biennale – International Biennial Of Sculpture Art, Astana (2017); ‘Days of Culture of Kazakhstan in Turkey’, Istanbul (2017). Her works may be found in museums in Kazakhstan, and private and public collections in Kazakhstan, Jordan, Turkey, Holland, Russia, and Great Britain.
The title FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN was initially coined by MOMENTUM and was subsequently extended to cover all four international exhibitions taking place in 2018 within the framework of the Ruhanyi Zhangru initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan: “Modern Kazakh Culture in the Global World”. FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN takes place in Berlin (MOMENTUM), London, Seoul, and New York.
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Focus Kazakhstan Residency Part 2
MOMENTUM AiR
FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN
1 June – 21 October 2018
Artist Residency Program Part II
Anar Aubakir, Aigerim Ospanova, Saule Suleimenova, Gulmaral Tatibayeva
1 August – 1 October 2018
A Cultural Exchange Partnership between
the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan and MOMENTUM Berlin
Curated by:
Rachel Rits-Volloch & Almagul Menlibayeva
Organized by:
The National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan
&
MOMENTUM Berlin
UPCOMING EVENTS:
She Shamans – Felt-Making Workshop
WORKSHOP: 8 – 9 September @ 12-5pm
[Participants need not stay for the full duration]
Workshop led by Almagul Menlibayeva, with Anar Aubakir, Aigerim Ospanova, Saule Suleimenova, Gulmaral Tatibayeva
Shamanistic Feminism translates traditions of folk art from the Kazakh Steppe to the Kunstquartier Bethanien. A Project for making a large felt hanging for the Focus Kazakhstan Bread & Roses exhibition at MOMENTUM. Anyone may participate. Participants will receive an exhibition catalogue (upon publication), where their names will be listed in relation to this work. Participants can drop in and drop out at any time during the course of the 2-day workshop. We recommend a minimum of two hours. Refreshments will be served.
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Participating Artists
ANAR AUBAKIR
Born 1984 in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Anar Aubakir’s paintings, often shown in complex installations, emanate a disquieting poetic symbolism that, while referring to stories and relationships she has encountered in Kazakhstan, suggest a much broader reference. She completed an MA at the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty; in 2010 she won the best realist painting award in the Russian Art Week competition in St. Petersburg as well as the 1st painting prize in the Week of Kazakhstan Art competition in Almaty. Her work was awarded the Cholpan-Ata City Award in Kyrgyzstan in 2016. She is also the organizer of the first traveling exhibitions to have taken place since Kazakhstan became independent. From 2013 to 2017, she organized more than a dozen exhibitions, in which over 20 artists participated, which have traveled to Pavlodar, Semey, Aktobe, Atyrau, Kostanay, Karaganda, Temirtau, Kokshetau, Petropavlovsk, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Aktau and Astana. In each of the cities she conducted master classes in painting and interdisciplinary art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held in Almaty (2010) and Astana (2015.) Her works are in museum collections in both Kazakhstan and Tatarstan.
SAULE SULEIMENOVA
Saule Suleimenova: Born 1970 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Kazakhstan.
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 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 waste collages. Still painful themes such as the Jeltoksan (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: 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.
AIGERIM OSPANOVA
Aigerim Ospanova: Born 1991 in Astana, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Kazakhstan.
Multimedia artist Ospanova Aigerim graduated with a BA from the Academy of Art in Almaty. Aigerim’ practice extends to installation, performance art, painting and video art. Selected exhibitions include: “India” in Almaty; “Beautiful Place Burabai” in Almaty; the open-air exhibition of young artists organized by the Union of artists of Almaty; “Always life” Central State Museum of Almaty; “Exhibition of the young artists”, contemporary art festival “Artbat Fest7”, Almaty; “Astana ArtFest”, Astana; “QWAS” bilocal transcultural exhibition, Zurich-Almaty; “Act of creation” contemporary art festival “Artbat Fest8”, Almaty; “Time and Astana: after future”, State Museum, Astana. Aigerim was invited to the symposiums: “Sacral folk songs” (Elabuga, Russia); “Images of Place and Time” (Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia); Art symposium “Made in Astana” (Astana, Kazakhstan); “Sheich Zayed Festival” (Abu-Dhabi, UAE). Also she participated in video project “Transformation” by Almagul Menlibaeva; in the video-performance “The Bitter Gift” by Askhat Akhmediyarov; in workshop on performance with Waldemar Tatarchuk (Labyrinth Gallery, Polland), 2017 Kazakhstan; and in workshop on performance with Roger Hill (UK) Almaty Art Center, 2017 Almaty Kazakhstan.
GULMARAL TATIBAYEVA
Gulmaral Tatibayeva: Born 1982, Scherbakty, Pavlodar Region, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Gulmaral Tatibayeva received a Bachelor degree in design from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in 2002. She is a member of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan; the Eurasian Designers Union; the Eurasian Creative Guild; and the art group ‘KADMII QYZYL’. She has participated in many national and international exhibitions and competitions; she won the Grand Prix in the Astana city competition for the best billboard design to promote family values (2014) and has exhibited in the First Astana Art Salon; ‘Plein Air Aktobe 2015’, an international symposium of Art; the new media lab in EXPO-2017 at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; AstanaArtFest, Astana Contemporary Art Centre (2015); International Festival of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, (2017); the Eurasia Sculpture Biennale – International Biennial Of Sculpture Art, Astana (2017); ‘Days of Culture of Kazakhstan in Turkey’, Istanbul (2017). Her works may be found in museums in Kazakhstan, and private and public collections in Kazakhstan, Jordan, Turkey, Holland, Russia, and Great Britain.
The FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN Artist Residencies and Exhibitions take place within the framework of the Ruhanyi Zhangru initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan: “Modern Kazakh Culture in the Global World”.
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Focus Kazakhstan Residency Part 1
MOMENTUM AiR
FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN BERLIN:
1 June – 21 October 2018
Artist Residency Program Part I
Beibit Asemkul, Liliya Kim, Ykylas Shaikhiyev
1 June – 31 July 2018
Open Studio Exhibition: 21 – 29 July 2018
OPENING: 21 July @ 5-9pm
OPEN STUDIO: 22, 25-29 July @ 1-7pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
A Cultural Exchange Partnership between
the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan and MOMENTUM Berlin
Curated by:
Rachel Rits-Volloch & Almagul Menlibayeva
Organized by:
The National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan
&
MOMENTUM Berlin
Participating Artists
BEIBIT ASEMKUL
410000, Installation with canvas, enamel, whips, charcoal, paper, photographs, durational performance (2018)
Beibit Asemkul: Born 1985 in Uzynagash, Almaty region, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Beibit Asemkul studied at the Republican College of Art, Almaty (1998-2004), and in the painting faculty of the Kazakh National Academy of Arts, Almaty (2004-2009). Since 2012, Asemkul has been a lecturer at the Kazakh National University of Arts, Astana. Selected exhibitions and awards include: “After 52 days” (2017), Center for Contemporary Arts ACAC, Astana; “Grand Pale. International Exhibition of Contemporary Art”, ART CAPITAL, Paris (2017); Art Fest, Astana (2017); 2016 – China. Urumqi International Exhibition of Artists. Plein Air; Grand Prix 2016 -Made in Astana, Republican competition of young artists; 2016 – “Cadmium Red”, NEONOMAD, Astana National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan; 2016 – “Infinity 3”, Gallery Hassanat, Astana; 2016 – “Infinity 2”, Korean cultural center of Astana; 2015- 1st place at the republic plein air competition among young artists of Kazakhstan, Aktau; 2014- solo exhibition “Secret of tenderness”, National Library of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana; 2013- Winner of the “PATRIOT” award of Republic of Kazakhstan; 2013 – International Exhibition of Young Artists, CHA Moscow; 2012- Winner of “Daryn” the State Prize of the Republic of Kazakhstan; 2012 – Winner of the Prize Fund of the first President of Kazakhstan – in the field of culture and art; 2012 – 1st place gold medal at the International exhibition New York Realism Fine Art. USA; 2012 – solo exhibition “POJIGRAFOMANIA” Palace of Independence. Astana; 2011 – “Discover the World of Art”, first solo exhibition at the Museum of First President of Republic of Kazakhstan; 2010 – Winner of the XIII international festival “Shabyt”, Grand Prix.
LILIA KIM
Traces, detail from installation of 56 works, linocut on paper (2018)
Lilia Kim: Born 1969 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Karaganda, Kazakhstan.
Lilia Kim, a member of the Artists’ Union of Kazakhstan, graduated from the Karaganda Pedagocical Institute (KarPi) in the graphic arts department in 1991. Recent solos exhibitions include: “Made in Karaganda”, Ular Gallery (Almaty, Kazakhstan); “Eco-Love” (Karaganda, Kazakhstan); “When the soul smiles” (Karaganda, Kazakhstan); “The Cost of Meaning” (Astana, Kazakhstan); “A Look at Asia” (Astana, Kazakhstan); “Who Is It” (Karaganda, Kazakhstan); “Shining Spheres”, Museum Iso (Karaganda, Kazakhstan); “Oriental Motives”, Nagornaya Gallery (Moscow, Russia); “Music in colors”, Ufa Gallery (Russia); “L’artigiano in fiero”, the International Handicraft Exhibition (Milan, Italy). Awards include: Grand Prix of the international competition, nomination “Master”, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Winner of the republican contest “Sheber”, Kazakhstan; Prize-winner of spring salon, gallery “Kulanshi”, Kazakhstan. International artist residencies include: Central Asia Art Month – residence for artists, Abu Dhabi, UAE, with participation in the exhibition, “Days of Kazakhstan culture in the Emirates”.
YKYLAS SHAIKHIEV
One, Two, and One, Two Again, digital photo (2018)
Yklas Shaikhiev: Born 1995 in Kyzylorda region, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Shaikhiev Ykylas earned a Bachelors from the Kazakhstan National Pedagogical University in Almaty, and is currently completing his MFA at the same university. Ykylas’s practice combines abstract images with realistic forms. The artist is interested in the paradoxicality that arises at the points of intersection of the modern and archaic.
The FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN BERLIN Artist Residencies and Exhibitions take place within the framework of the Ruhanyi Zhangru initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan: “Modern Kazakh Culture in the Global World”.
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Focus Kazakhstan
Focus Kazakhstan Berlin
Exhibitions:
OPENING: 25 September at 19:00 – 22:00
SYMPOSIUM: 30 September at 15:00 – 18:00
EXHIBITION: 26 September – 20 October 2018
@ MOMENTUM Gallery,
& Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Exhibition Opening Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12:00 – 7:00pm. Closed Mondays
BREAD & ROSES:
Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists
Anar Aubakir, Lidya Blinova, Bakhyt Bubikanova, Ganiya Chagatayeva, Natalia Dyu, Vera Ermolaeva, Zoya Falkova, Aisha Galimbaeva, Tatiana Glebova, Gulfairus Ismailova, Kreolex Zentr (Maria Vilkovisky & Ruthie Jenrbekova), Gaisha Madanova, Aigerim Mazhitkhan, Almagul Menlibayeva, Gulnar Mirzagalikova, Gulnur Mukazhanova, Katya Nikonorova, Saule Suleimenova, Gulmaral Tatibayeva and Elena Vorobyeva
go to the info about the artists below ↓ ↓
@ Studio 1
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Focus Kazakhstan: Bread and Roses is an exhibition of four generations of Kazakh women artists organised 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 and Roses takes place in parallel to the Focus Kazakhstan Artist Residency Exhibition at the MOMENTUM Gallery, also in the Kunstquartier Bethanien.
Focus Kazakhstan
Artist Residency Exhibition
Saule Suleimenova, Beibit Asemkul, Anar Aubakir, Gulmaral Tatibayeva, Liliya Kim, Ykylas Shaikhiyev, Aigerim Ospanova
@ MOMENTUM Gallery
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Showing works by 7 artists created during their 2-month Artist Residencies at MOMENTUM, this exhibition is a reflection upon Berlin through Kazakh eyes. These works, produced during the artists’ first trips to Berlin, and for some their first trips abroad, encompass a cultural dialogue between their traditions and the condition of the contemporary nomad. Dealing with topics ranging from wartime histories to personal histories, today’s refugees and migrants to the nomadic migrations of the artists’ grandparents, the Focus Kazakhstan: Artist Residency Show exemplifies the talents of young artists never before seen in Berlin. Focus Kazakhstan: Berlin is a 6-month cooperation between MOMENTUM and the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan resulting in two parallel exhibitions taking place at the Kunstquartier Bethanien on 25 September – 20 October 2018: Bread and Roses, Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists and The Artist Residency Exhibition.
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Artist Residency Program
A Cultural Exchange Partnership between
the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan and MOMENTUM Berlin
Curated by:
Rachel Rits-Volloch, Director of MOMENTUM
David Elliott, Chief Curator & Vice Director of Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China
Almagul Menlibayeva, Artist
Organized by:
The National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan
&
MOMENTUM Berlin
FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN BERLIN is a 6-month cooperation between the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan and MOMENTUM Berlin, involving Artist Residencies for 7 young artists held from 1 June to 1 October 2018, and two parallel exhibitions be held on 25 September – 20 October 2018. Focus Kazakhstan Berlin: BREAD & ROSES and the Artist Residency Show, organised by Momentum Worldwide at the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center, are part of the Focus Kazakhstan initiative implemented by the National Museum of Kazakhstan in association with the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Kazakhstan within the framework of the program Ruhani Zhangyru. Focus Kazakhstan, a cultural initiative to bring contemporary art from Kazakhstan to an international audience, is comprised of four different exhibitions, each with varying artists and curators, taking place between June 2018 to March 2019 in Berlin, London, Jersey City (USA), and Suwon (Korea).
BREAD & ROSES: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists
The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too. (Rose Schneiderman, 1911)
Rose Schneiderman was a Polish-American labour union leader and women’s rights activist who never visited Kazakhstan. Her words are invoked here because they make a poetic case for an international equality of genders, based not only on suffrage and access to the bare necessities of life, but also for common rights to culture, work and a full life, well lived. This exhibition of the work of four generations of Kazakh women artists examines how such ideas and aspirations have developed there from the late 1930s to the present.
Since 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Kazakhstan has transformed into a strategic command post at the crossroads of central Asia. From the earliest times, people, goods, ideas, religions and ideologies had flowed freely along the Silk Road. Now they begin to do so again. But the transition from nomadic steppe to bustling modern economy has been far from straightforward or happy.
From the beginning of Russian colonisation in the 19th century, Kazakhstan’s remoteness from the capital made it a suitable place for massive exile. In the soviet period, this role expanded dramatically with mass purges and the accompanying need for an ‘archipelago’ of gulags. This, with the disastrous famine that resulted from Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture in 1932/33, is still commemorated by artists, and others, in Kazakhstan as an inhumane, barbarous episode.
Despite the suppression of national identity, the awakening of national imagination reached a head in December 1986 when mass demonstrations of Kazakh students flared in Almaty, quickly spreading throughout the country. The security forces arrested and killed a large but unconfirmed number of people. Reference to this is also made in art.
The exhibition focuses on how themes and motifs from Kazakh history and culture have combined with those of modernity in a present-day critique of colonial and patriarchal values.
Its first section examines the legacy of the classical Russian avant-garde, repressed by Stalin, as well as of folk art, its Kazakh doppelgänger. It is followed, during the 1950s and ‘60s, by the emergence of the first generation of Kazakh women artists to work within the system of socialist realism, acting and designing for film and theatre as well as making paintings.
The present is intimated by the reawakening of autonomous, non-official art in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s by people who struggled to establish a new sense of identity out of the ruins of the past. The last section, from 2005 to the present, concentrates on the birth of a new generation of independently-minded contemporary artists, more concerned with the present than the past, working across many different media in the cities of Almaty, Karaganda and Astana, the new capital.
– David Elliott
DOWNLOAD BREAD & ROSES CATALOGUE
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(click on the name to see the bio below)
PHOTO GALLERY OF BREAD & ROSES EXHIBITION
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Aubakir Anar
Born 1984 in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan
Anar Aubakir’s paintings, often shown in complex installations, emanate a disquieting poetic symbolism that, while referring to stories and relationships she has encountered in Kazakhstan, suggest a much broader reference. She completed an MA at the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty; in 2010 she won the best realist painting award in the Russian Art Week competition in St. Petersburg as well as the 1st painting prize in the Week of Kazakhstan Art competition in Almaty. Her work was awarded the Cholpan-Ata City Award in Kyrgyzstan in 2016. She is also the organizer of the first traveling exhibitions to have taken place since Kazakhstan became independent. From 2013 to 2017, she organized more than a dozen exhibitions, in which over 20 artists participated, which have travelled to Pavlodar, Semey, Aktobe, Atyrau, Kostanay, Karaganda, Temirtau, Kokshetau, Petropavlovsk, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Aktau and Astana. In each of the cities she conducted master classes in painting and interdisciplinary art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held in Almaty (2010) and Astana (2015.) Her works are in museum collections in Kazakhstan and Tatarstan.
ARTIST STATEMENT: In 1976 my parents bought a house in Pavlodar in the north of Kazakhstan. Following family tradition, my mother and father, both being the oldest children, were responsible to their parents for their younger brothers and sisters. Our house became a common home for close relatives, as well as for distant relations who came to the city from nearby collective and state farms – and even for close family friends. In 2009 Marina and her son Timur appeared in our family. I often asked her and her son to pose for me as I could see that their interesting faces harboured uneasy stories. Marina frequently spoke about her happy previous life in Kabardino-Balkaria [in the north Caucasus] and planned to go back there as soon as possible. Marina first came to Kazakhstan in the spring of 1944, when the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR decided to deport Balkars, of which she is one, from their homeland. An earlier famine had killed a large number of indigenous Kazakhs, and it was decided to recolonize these territories by people from other nationalities. Marina and her family found themselves in the Sherbaktinsky district of the Pavlodar region. Many who had been deported returned to their homeland after Stalin’s death, but the story of Marina and Timur was different. In 2010 Marina decided to take her son ‘home’, hoping that according to the traditions of her people, older relatives would help her son arrange his life. She sold all her belongings in the village and came to Pavlodar, where her son was working. Beside a friend of her mother, she knew no one and she settled in the house next to us. Timur had been born and raised in Kazakhstan and it was difficult for him to imagine living in another place, but Marina could not stay in a strange house for a long time – at one point she even lived in her son’s car. Then my parents invited her to our house. Marina’s plan collapsed when her son had a serious traffic accident and a criminal case was brought against him. This trial lasted over a year. During this time Marina lived in our house with her son. But her desire to leave became almost overwhelming. Step by step, Marina managed to remove all charges against her son. Finally she bought train tickets and they went to the station, but on the platform she had a heart attack. In the ambulance she died. Timur buried his mother in Pavlodar and stayed in Kazakhstan. Marina’s mother refused to participate in her funeral; her daughter’s plan for a joyful reunion with her family and new life in her home of Kabardino-Balkaria remained only a dream. Home includes paintings and other works that express the preservation of nomadic spiritual and moral values in the face of the ruinous heritage left by the Soviet Union. Even when exhausted by the systematic ethnocide in the 20th century, my native Kazakh people have managed to maintain their sense of humanity by opening their arms to many others who have been deprived of means of subsistence during their time of forced deportation. In Home I have composed a composite portrait of a traditional Kazakh family – one which always had a place for people in need. By doing this, I raise the question of whether the Kazakh people will succeed in transferring such high standards to future generations. – Anar Aubakir |
Lidya Blinova
(1948-1996) Born in Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR. Lived and worked in Almaty.
Lidya Blinova’s parents both worked as architects, her grandfather was a priest and mystic. She graduated from the Architecture and Construction Institute in Almaty and her subsequent work encompassed architecture, art, poetry, sculpture, jewelry, book design, acting, and cinema. By inclination she was a radical. She jointly developed ideas with Rustam Khalfin, her partner, (who described her as his ‘Alter Ego’) whom she had first met in 1962, at the age of fourteen, in the graphic studio of Alma-Ata’s Palace of Pioneers. Khalfin’s idea of the pulota – a keyhole into a fragmented world of space, time, and image – originated with Blinova. Formed by the simple gesture of folding a fist and looking through the hole in its middle, it created what she described as the ‘ultimate plastic object,’ replete, at the same time, with fullness and emptiness. At the end of the 1960s, Blinova’s earliest work was wooden sculpture made in the studio of Isaak Itkind, a primitivist and friend of Mark Chagall who had been imprisoned in Kazakhstan. She also encountered Pavel Zaltsman, a close associate of avant-garde painter Pavel Filonov in Leningrad, who had been interned in Karlag and, after his release in the mid-1950s, worked as an artist, art teacher and designer in the film industry. From the 1970s, she both organized and was a participant in non-official art exhibitions held in private apartments in Almaty that showed autonomous works by pupils of Vladimir Sterligov. (See also bio of Tatiana Glebova.) Both Blinova and Khalfin refused to work in any official capacity in order to concentrate on their own different forms of creative activity; Blinova often supported herself by producing and selling small sculptural forms as jewelry. In 1986, she worked as Production Designer on director Sergei Bodrov’s first film The Non-Professionals and, the following year, as costume designer for Sergei Solovyov’s film The Stray, White and The Speckled (1985). She also made puppet shows for children. Bringing together many different strands of interest that included shamanism, linguistics, structuralism, psychology and tantrism, she encouraged a conceptual approach in both her own work and that of her friends while also being aware of the emotional and sensual imperative of art. In 1995 she designed a series of catalogues on contemporary Kazakh artists for the Soros Foundation in Almaty, made Finger Ornaments, her conceptual photo-series of different mudras, and presented her installation Poem for a Cat at the Kokserek Gallery which also published the text of the work. In 2011 her work was posthumously represented in the exhibition Between the Past and the Future: Minus 20. The Archeology of Relevance at the Kasteyev Art Museum in Almaty.
LIDYA BLINOVA (1948-1996) Lidya Blinova, Untitled Sculpture [Self Portrait] (1966-69) wood, 85x70x70cm Courtesy of the Said Dzhienbayev Collection Lidya Blinova, Finger Ornaments (1995) series of 10 photographs, B/W, PVC backing, 29x201cm Courtesy of the artist’s estate Lidya Blinova, Poetry for Cats (1995) installation: text on paper, size variable Courtesy of the artist’s estate Lidya Blinova, Lidya Blinova: Pulota (2018) video, single-channel, HD, sound, 17’,16:9. Directed by Saule Suleimenova (b. 1970) Courtesy of the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, and Ruhani Zhangyru Prologue The wind whipped the atmosphere. And everything sublunar under the moon After buzzing out the day like combs, The overgrown gardens were bothered But what did we see? A tizzy swept over the old garden. 1. The learned pussycat, dismayed and aggrieved, And the pussycat in the coach? For every piece of iron in the womblike contraption Oh, the running in place, the maundering 2. Oh, the trellised mirrors of old aporias! 3. Madness’s abyss beckoned to the pussycat. The straps and traces were lost in a blink, 4. It is a pity their important chat 5. Then the breeze blew in our direction, “Listen, I’ve seen your face before. “With a gaze now joyful, now sad, you kept watch “Take courage, take courage, you have friends, Then the moon, which burned like copper, 6. The moon summoned a wave to its side. 7. Wisps of phosphoric foam sputtered. 8. By morning, the sea tour was over. 9. The tide rolled out, and towards the sea And then a prickly eyelid opened a bit The golden bark hastened to take 10. ………………………………………… ………………………………………… The incident was settled with sanity The heavy door cut off, like a tail, She climbed a steep cascade, The End The Warlock For a hundred coins and a bottle of hooch There were twelve rooms, besides the boudoir, What of it? The old ennui And in the oracle of ancient days, – Lidya Blinova |
Bakhyt Bubikanova
Born 1985 in Aktobe, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Bakhyt Bubikanova graduated from the painting and sculpture department of the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty in 2008. With a mixed-media practice encompassing video, performance, photography, drawing, painting, collage, and installation, she has been actively exhibiting her work since 2005. Since 2010, she has been teaching in the Kasteyev School of Fine Arts and Design. In 2014, she was given the First President’s Award for merits in the field of Kazakh contemporary art. Her selected solo exhibitions include: Homo, Almaty (2010); The Казахелiанский Superethnos, Atmosphere Art Space, Almaty (2014). Recent group exhibitions include: The Nomads, Artwin Gallery, Moscow, Russia (2015); Shymkent Art Days, Shymkent, Kazakhstan (2016); Elsewhere, Floodlight Foundation, London (2017); Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan, Yarat Contemporary Art Center, Baku, Azerbaijan (2017); Painting Resistance, Aspan Gallery, Almaty (2017); Postcolonial Art of Asia, GEDOK Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe Germany (2018); Art Dubai, UAE (2018). Intrenational Biennales include: A Time for Dreams, the Fourth International Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2014).
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Bakhyt Bubikanova, Sebastian (2013), video, 2’5” This is the story about the life of Saint Sebastian, who was bound and pierced with arrows for his faith – but remained alive. In the current situation, any public political statement, one that often includes the artist’s body, is akin to the history of Sebastian. It is doubtful whether anyone will shoot you with arrows nowadays, but artists still have to punish themselves to prove and declare what they believe. And so this work is more like a biography of an ordinary person who harnesses themselves and waits.
Bakhyt Bubikanova, New Year’s Post Cards (2014), series of 5 photomontages I started my search in contemporary art from working on postcards using collage. These 2015 New Year’s cards (in the Chinese calendar this was the Year of the “Goat”) was made as a proposal for distribution via the internet. The format of collage is very suitable for our country, as it reflects how we collect fragmentary information: classical Roman columns with curtains; girls and boys who base their style of dress and behaviour on what they see on the internet and TV; a traditional Kazakh feast on a Soviet New Year’s Eve, (with the Red Star of the USSR instead of the star of Bethlehem); rituals of blessing (Bata) and the cult of sacrifice with bowls of meat and qazi (sausage-like food): an eclecticism of styles and symbols that, at the same time represents, one unique picture of identity: Eurasian collaboration.
Bakhyt Bubikanova, Boztorgay (2018), video, 6’10” In the video I sit on a decorative hill, against the backdrop of pyramids. I am listening to music, crying out in time with the melody of the hit song ‘Boztorgay’, written by Kenen Azirbayev and performed by Meirambek Bespaev, that became popular in the ‘90s. In my childhood, I heard it many times on a cassette tape recorder at home. It was my father’s favorite song and tells the sad story of an orphan. For me this song is a symbol of the Kazakh country. The modern culture of Kazakhstan is riven through with tragedies: wars, famine, repressions. We can observe this in the colour of our paintings, in our music, theatre and cinema, even in our tradition of zhoktau (song lamentations). – Bakhyt Bubikanova |
Ganiya Chagatayeva Born 1956 in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Ganiya Chagatayeva graduated from the department of Graphic Design in the Moscow Art and Industry Academy (former Stroganov Academy) and taught at the Zhurgenov Kazakh National Academy of Arts. She participated in the seminars of Vyacheslav Koleichuk, a post-constructivist sound and kinetic artist and Aleksandr Lavrentiev, a designer and grandson of Aleksander Rodchenko, which were held with the assistance of VNIUE Moscow (Moscow Technological University). She is a member of the Union of Artists and the Union of Designers. Chagatayeva works at the junction of painting and graphics, also making objects and installations, and teaching.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Eastern wisdom says: Our world is a stream of metaphors and symbols in a pattern. Behind the boundaries of the visible world lies a clear divine order. In nature, everything is structured and subordinated to one’s own laws of harmony and rhythm. The laws of rhythm are the breath of the universe, resonating through art. The rhythmic formation of the inner environment of human perception is the desire to look beyond the visible. I search for my own understanding in the world and for a universal beginning that may be found in pre-figurative states. This is a conceptual experiment in the style of abstract expressionism. Overcoming the plane of the horizon, by opening inner perspective, and reflecting on the laws of harmony and rhythm, the highest order may be found hidden in the crystallization of symbolic thinking behind the visible chaos of nature. This makes it possible to create new spatial rhythms and images by finding new forms.
Ganiya Chagatayeva, House (2005), video performance, 4’40” Ganiya Chagatayeva, Transforming Object, Bird I-III (2005), series of 3 photographs
The southern shore resembled an almost uninhabited island, above which stood the dilapidated remains of a military facility. The building – a monster, like a vampire, dug into the body of Lake Issyk-Kul [in Kyrgyzstan]. The squares of the concrete beams divided the room into blocks and pools. Like blood vessels, huge rusty pipes intertwined the space. On the walls hung “stalactites” from bird dung and on the floor – fallen off plaster similar to an egg shell. In the huge openings of the windows the watery surface of Issyk-Kul pulsated like blue satin splinters. In an uninhabited, abandoned room – a tied dog … Such a sight looked as absurd as the empty pools on the shore of the lake. Subsequently, I included this dog in the credits of the film under the name “Stalker”. Throughout the whole area there was amazingly sparse vegetation and only the poisonous ephedra bush splendidly dissolved in its bright red berries. Near the building grew a curved, dried out tree, I gave it a new name – “Ephedrevo” and decorated it with green leaves from the ephedra. A dried tree, a black dog, cellars, catacombs, labyrinths… On the second floor, there was a ledge inside a room, possibly the remains of a balcony. At this point I started to make my first huge “Nest” object. It symbolized the “heart” of the building, it animated the space, and returned life to it. All the coast was neatly furnished with large porous rocks. They had smooth curved forms, and like sculptures they rose against a background of bright, small stones. The idea behind the video-performance was – to paraphrase a common metaphor – turning a pupa into a butterfly. In the film, the action had to move in the reverse order – the butterfly’s transition to the pupa-cocoon, and then from the cocoon-net to the likeness of a worm. The trapper hunts for the Bird – his double, which lives in the heart of the destroyed building. Bird tracks are lost in the sky, returning as a cloud. The sculptural basis of the action is the square (the bird) and the circle that limits it (the net). A catcher with a net can follow the bird to the shore, looking for it inside the building. In an act of transformation, the bird disappears among the coastal rocks. The net symbolizes a cocoon, stasis, a cage, our ego. Having been caught in the cocoon-net, the Bird tears it up, as the image of a pathetic, helpless creature, creeping out like a worm. The idea of the duality of consciousness is expressed in the images of the Hunter and the Bird in one person. The artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, afterwards, beautifully depicted his moment of birth from the cocoon-net. “Nest”, “Ephedrevo”, “The Fallen Cloud”, “Footprints”, photographs – my independent art objects entered the video performance and merged into the drama of the film. The sunny days seemed to have been ordered for our symposium and ended with this ‘graduation work’. The house saw us off with empty blue eye sockets, then the berries of the “Ephedrevo” dropped. Inside the house, in a large nest, the dog “Stalker” slept. – Ganiya Chagatayeva |
Natalya Dyu Born 1976 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Natalya Dyu studied Fine Arts at the Buketov Karaganda State University, in the faculty of mechanical drawing. Selected exhibitions include: BALAGAN!!! Contemporary art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2015); Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, Calvert 22, London (2011); East of Nowhere. Contemporary Art from Post-Soviet Central Asia, Fondazione 107, Turin, Italy (2009). International Biennales include: the 2nd International Antakya Biennial, Antakya, Turkey (2010); Qui Vive?, 2nd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia (2010); What Keeps Mankind Alive?, 11th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2009); So Close Yet So Far Away, 2nd International Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale, Incheon Art Platform, Korean-Chinese Cultural Center Gallery, Korea (2009); M’ARTIAN FIELDS: Collaboration, curated by Irina Yashkova, 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, M’ARS Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia (2009); Muzikstan, Central Asian Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2008).
Natalya Dyu,I Love Naomi and Naomi Loves Fruits (2001), video, 4’27” In I Love Naomi and Naomi Loves Fruits (2001) the artist is filmed in pink pyjamas sitting on the toilet, a place to dream, where she obsessively soliloquizes a fantasy about her life and that of the supermodel, Naomi Campbell. Her comparative daydream both highlights and temporarily obliterates what is an unbridgeable void between the aspirations of neo-liberal consumerism and reality.
Natalya Dyu, So Naive, So Fluffy… (2009), video, 4’54” In So Naïve, So Fluffy (2009), the artist plays the part of a young girl dreaming on her bed, writing out names and words onto labels that she then sticks onto the backs of a flock of small chickens that chaotically and noisily run through her bedroom. The labels fall off, creating unreadable messages on her bedsheet, punctuated by the shit of the birds. |
Vera Ermolaeva (1893-1937) Born in Petrovsk, Russian Empire. Murdered in Dolinka Camp, KARLAG, Karaganda, Kazakh SSR.
Artist, designer, and illustrator Vera Ermolaeva came from a wealthy, noble family and, at the age of 10, was crippled by a fall from a horse; from this time she could walk only with crutches. She went to different schools in Paris, Lausanne and St Petersburg, graduating from the Princess A.A. Oblenskaya Academy in 1910. From 1911 to 1914, she studied at the private art school of painter Mikhail Bernstein, travelled to Paris and began to move in advanced Cubo-Futurist circles in Petrograd. In 1916, she became a member of Bezkrovnoe ubiitsvo (‘Bloodless Murder’), a group of futurist artists, and designed the sets and costumes for Ilya Zdanevich’s play Yanko 1. She also became interested in icons, folk art, broadsheets (lubki) and painted shop signs, amassing a large collection of the latter that she donated to the Petrograd City Museum where, for a time, she worked. In 1917 she joined the artists’ collectives Svoboda iskusstvu (‘Freedom for Art’) and Iskusstvo i Revoliutsia (‘Art and Revolution’) and met the writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1918 she became a founder member of the Segodnya (‘Today’) publication house and began to illustrate books, including three works by Natan Vengrov and ‘Pioneers’, a Russian translation of a poem by Walt Whitman. In 1919 she was sent to Vitebsk to work as a teacher in the People’s Art School, which Mark Chagall had founded and invited Kazimir Malevich to teach there. His flat, abstract style of Suprematism strongly influenced Ermolaeva’s work and took over the school, creating a rift between his approach and that of Chagall. In 1920 she made set designs for the opera Pobeda nad solntsem (‘Victory over the Sun’ 1913), by Mikhail Matyushin and Aleksei Kruchenykh for which Malevich had made the original designs – particularly the ‘Black Square’ backdrop – that later he claimed to be the origin of Suprematism. Together with Malevich and his students, she formed UNOVIS (The Creators of the New Art) – a research laboratory for studying the development of art, colour, spirituality and artistic form in the revolutionary climate of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Following her return to Petrograd/Leningrad in 1923, she directed the Colour Laboratory in GINKhUK (the State Institute of Artistic Culture) of which Malevich was both the General Director and Head of the Department of Painting Culture. GINKhUK was closed by the State in 1926, after it had been criticised in the Press for being ‘a State-supported monastery’ and Malevich had been arrested and interrogated for three months. During the late 1920s Ermolaeva also closely associated with the Oberiuty (The Association for Real Art), a group of advanced writers and performance artists, including Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky, both later suppressed, with whom she collaborated by illustrating their books. From 1925, working with the DetGIz (the Children’s Division of the State Publishing House), where she met Tatiana Glebova [see below], she explored new ideas and formats for children’s books. In 1929, with former members of UNOVIS, she formed a new group that elaborated Malevich’s synthesis of abstraction and realism in the light of the dramatic changes that were then taking place throughout the country during the First Five Year Plan. Desolation in the countryside was a recurrent theme and, in her illustrations for Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Goethe’s Reynard the Fox, she shifted her focus towards books for adults.
VERA ERMOLAEVA |
Zoya Falkova Born 1982 in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Zoya Falkova graduated with a Masters degree in Architecture from the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Almaty, in 2004. She has participated in many contemporary art exhibitions and festivals in the former Soviet Union and Europe, including the unofficial pavilion of Kazakhstan at the 57th Biennale of Venice (2017). Also in 2017, she was nominated for the Singapore Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Art Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include: PLAYINGTHEWOMAN, Esentai Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2017); Disappearing Peninsula/Southern Siberia, Kyiv, Ukraine (2018). Falkova’s area of interest is the study and deconstruction of colonial and post-colonial practices, both gendered, political, and ecological. She works in installation, sculpture, media art, photography, painting, and drawing, and also creates poetic texts.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Zoya Falkova, EVERMUST (2017), object: artificial leather, filler, chain ‘The punching bag in the form of a woman’s torso is both a female portrait and the expression of a social climate in which violence is not only considered the norm but may even be a sign of love.’ – Zoya Falkova |
Aisha Galimbaeva (1917–2008): Born in the Kazakh SSR. Lived and worked in Kazakhstan.
Aisha Galimbaeva is one of the most important pioneers of women’s art in Kazakhstan. She was a Laureate of the State Prize of the Kazakh SSR (1972) and was also awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of the Badge of Honour. A painter, production designer for film and theatre, and educator, she is noted for her colourful and realistic depictions of the changing social and psychological position of women in Kazakhstan during the mid-20th century. By the age of 17, she had received a diploma from the N.V. Gogol Art College in Almaty; she graduated from the Alma-Ata Art College in 1943 and worked at the Аll-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow and the MosFilm Studios that, from 1941 to 1943, was evacuated to Alma-Ata as a result of the war, where film director Sergei Eisenstein directed the first part of his epic Ivan The Terrible. After the war, she became a professor at the Alma-Ata Art institute and the Graphics and Art department of the Kazakh Abai State Pedagogical Institute. In the 1950s she was a designer on The Daughter of the Steppes (1954), A Poem About Love (1954) and other films, working closely with Pavel Zaltsman, an avant-garde artist who was an associate of Pavel Filonov, one of the charismatic leaders of the Leningrad art scene. In her paintings, costume and set designs, she recuperated and made popular again traditional dress, decorations and modes of life that had virtually disappeared. Although she worked in the official genre of socialist realism, when she painted factories, the landscape or collective farms in the countryside, it was through a Kazakh rather than Soviet prism. Two of her portraits of farm brigade leaders from the 1980s shown in this exhibition combine the almost disappearing official style with an unbridled modernist romanticism. From 1951 she was a member of the Artists’ Union of Kazakhstan, USSR. She died in Almaty in 2008.
AISHA GALIMBAEVA (1917 – 2008) Aisha Galimbaeva, Portrait of Work Brigade Leader, M. Abenova (1984) Aisha Galimbaeva, Portrait of the Leader of the Shepherds’ Brigade in the Ulguli State Collective Farm (Sovkhoz), Zhanalyksky district, Kazina (1985) AISHA: The Works of Aisha Galimbaeva (2018) Courtesy of the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, Ruhani Zhangyru, and Kazakhfilm Film poster for The Daughter of the Steppes (1954), designer unknown |
Gulfairus Ismailova (1929-2013) Born in the Kazakh SSR. Lived, and worked in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Considered one of Kazakhstan’s ‘mothers of contemporary art’, painter, actor, film and theatre director, and production designer for film, theatre, and opera, Gulfairus Ismailova first studied at the Almaty Art College in 1944, and then at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1950 – 1956). She is one of the first Kazakh artists to adapt the rules of Soviet Socialist Realism to take into account the history, national traditions and reality of Kazakhstan. Initially acclaimed as a star in Yefim Aron’s film Botagoz (1957), her influence also extended across painting, theatre design, and education and she became simultaneously a member of the Soviet unions for cinematographers, theatre workers and artists. She worked with Pavel Zaltsman, an avant-garde artist and designer from Leningrad who had worked closely with Filonov, an association that had a strong impact on her work as an artist. In the early 1970s, Ismailova became the chief designer of the Kazakh State Opera and Ballet Theatre, where she worked for 16 years. During her lifetime, she participated in major exhibitions in Kazakhstan, Russia, GDR, UK, Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain, Japan, and France. Her works are held in museum collections throughout Kazakhstan. She was awarded the Tarlan Award for Contribution to Art (2002); the honour of the People’s Artist of Kazakhstan (1987); Honoured Artist of Kazakhstan (1985); the Order of Friendship of Peoples; the Order of the Badge of Honour (1959) and the Order of Parasat.
Gulfairus Ismailova, Costume design for Er-Targyn, an opera-ballet by E. Brusilovsky based on an ancient Kazakh heroic epic (1967) Gulfairus Ismailova, Costume design for Kyz Zhibek, a folk ballet by E. Brusilovsky (1967) Gulfairus Ismailova, Costume designs for Kozy Korpesh and Bayan-Sulu, a folk ballet by E. Brusilovsky (1971) GULFAIRUS: Gulfairus Ishmailova and Soviet National Cinematography (2018) Courtesy of the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, Ruhani Zhangyru, and Kazakhfilm Film poster for Botagoz (1957) designer unknown |
KREOLEX ZENTR (Maria Vilkovisky, Ruthie Jenrbekova)
Maria Vilkovisky, born 1971 & Ruthie Jenrbekova, born 1973, in Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSSR. Live and work in Almaty, Kazakhstan and Vienna, Austria. Maria Vilkovisky is a poet, musician, performer, curator, and an employee of Kreolex Zentr, working together with her partner artist Ruth Jenrbekova. With a practice focusing on poetry, experimental sound & vocal, performance, music, writing, queer and feminist theory, Vilkovisky studied at the Kazakh National Kurmangazy Conservatory, Almaty (1991-1996), the Musagethes Literary School for Writers (2008), and the Moscow Curatorial Summer School (2013). Ruthie Jenrbekova has since 1997 has been involved in various artistic and curatorial activities as a performance artist, educator, film-maker, graphic designer, writer, and employee of Kreolex Zentr, working together with her partner artist Maria Vilkovisky. Currently working on her PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, Jenrbekova also completed the Moscow Curatorial Summer School (2013), the Musagethes Literary School for Writers (2008), Almaty, and an MA in Urban Ecology at the Biological faculty of Kazakh State University (1995). Her practice focuses on Arts-based research methodologies, performance art, experimental audio and video, comparative anthropology, new materialisms, and feminist ontologies. Selected exhibitions include: Escapism Training Program, group exhibition, Fabrika CCI, Moscow (2018); Human Rights: 20 Years After, group exhibition, Artmeken gallery, Almaty (2017); In Edenia, a City of the Future, exhibition, Yermilov Center, Kharkiv, Ukraine (2017); Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan, group exhibition, YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan (2017). Symbiosis, international artistic and research exhibition, Almaty Botanical Garden (2016); A – Art, F – Feminism, An Actual Dictionary, group exhibition and conference, DAR Institute, Moscow (2015). Selected joint artistic and curatorial projects include: Inhuman Rights Watch & Listen, sound installation, Artmeken gallery, Almaty (2017); Superformance. Typology of Actions, interactive staged performance, shown at SIGs Space, Almaty (2017); Intermedia 5, interactive theatricalized presentation, Bishkek (2016), Intermedia 3, interactive theatricalized presentation of Central Asian Mental Map, Rosa’s House of Culture, Saint Petersburg, in the framework of The Chto Delat School for Engaged Art (2016). Key conferences include: Queering Paradigms VIII. Fucking Solidarity: queering concepts on/from a Post-Soviet perspective, international conference, Department for English and American Studies, University of Vienna (2017); Body discourses / Body politix conference, Humboldt University Berlin, [presentation Self-Exoticism in Contemporary Art & Media in Kazakhstan] (2015); The Concepts of the Soviet in Central Asia symposium, SHTAB, Bishkek [presentation Creolization in Central Asia: Outlines for Social Compositionism] (2105).
ARTIST STATEMENT: This video as an example of how our organization functions. Being a conceptual project in the genre of imaginary institutions, Kreolex Zentr tries to retain many identities, which we realise may produce some difficulties in understanding our work. What sense does it make to call ourselves a phantom cultural institution? While not seeking to clarify this question univocally, we, nevertheless, wish to provide lucid explanations of what we do. Our productions seem often simple and amateur; they stretch across a wide range of different formats and means of expression in order to gain a certain educational momentum. This short video was commissioned by the Kreolex HQ for promotional purposes and is meant to make our performances accessible to even wider audiences. – Kreolex Zentr |
GAISHA MADANOVA
Gaisha Madanova: Born 1987 in Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSSR. Lives and works in Munich, Germany, and Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Gaisha Madanova graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Almaty College of Construction and Management in 2009. In 2018 she graduated from the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (in the Sculpture class of Prof. Hermann Pitz). In her artistic practice she uses different media and techniques – such as silkscreen print, nitro-frottage, video, photo, installations – basing her work on the investigation of questions that reveal the relationship between artificial and natural existence. Topics like ‘watching and being watched’, ‘the body as an expression of the inner self’ or ‘the strategies of transformations and displacement’ can be seen as links through different series of her works. Madanova is also engaged in curatorial practice, including projects such as: DIYALOG: New Energies, OMV section at the VIENNAFAIR; the contemporary art educational program VIDEO[ARTiFACT], Klaus vom Bruch; special project mikro[smART]raiony, Refunc group, ARTBATFEST, Almaty; video-art program Internal Storage – Not Enough Space?, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Since 2012 Madanova has also been involved in different projects organized by Goethe-Institut in Kazakhstan. Since 2007 Madanova has been a founding member of the international art collective Artpologist (Art+Antropology), since 2014 she has been a member of the Munich-based art collective Roundabout, and since 2016 co-founder of Kazakhstan-based art communication platform ARTCOM. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the first conceptual art magazine in Kazakhstan: ALUAN – Exhibition On Paper.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Gaisha Madanova, Beam Me to the Presence (2017) This work was first made for UTOPIUM, a group exhibition produced by the Julian Rosefeldt project class for the library of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich in 2017. – Gaisha Madanova
Installation Text: |
GULNUR MUKAZHANOVA
Born 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). 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: 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).
ARTIST STATEMENT: In these works, the artist undertakes a personal research of identity using two different media – photography and objects made of metal. She 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 translated by the photos move between the accessible and the prohibited, between the carnal and the sacred. Gulnur Mukazhanova, Mankurts in the Megapolis (2011-12) The title Mankurts in the Megapolis reflects this loss, as well as the fact that we have forgotten our origins. In Central Asia, the concept of mankurtism describes the loss of national roots, traditional values and culture. Previously it referred to slaves, called mankurts, who completely lost the memory of their past life under duress. Today, this term is used to describe people who have, consciously or unconsciously, adopted other cultural values. This loss of memory concerns the displacement of manners, morals and even language; a not uncommon phenomenon in the time of globalization. The symbolic form of the wedding gown is understood worldwide. In earlier times, when each culture had its own original form of bridal gown, it displayed an immense wealth of material, ritual and cultural diversity. Since the beginning of the 20th century the white bridal fashion has been established almost all over the world, and many people now regard it as their own deeply rooted tradition. The new set of values that characterize contemporary life in Kazakhstan have become so embedded, that it seems almost impossible to connect them with ancient nomadic traditions. Perhaps, because we are no longer nomadic, this no longer makes sense. I should like to know, what we, as a new generation, should keep and discard. If we want to keep certain traditions, we must be able to believe in them, and not just imitate their form. This is often seen in the new designs for saukele [traditional Kazakh wedding head dresses], where originally meaningful symbols have become little more than primitive forms of ornamentation. The least we can do is to appreciate the meaning and the wisdom of the traditions which have been passed down to us from our ancestors. Reflecting upon this, I wonder whether it makes any sense at all to worry, or if it would be better to live simply in the flow of events without thinking about them? However, I think that if we wish to meet this process of change with dignity, without being just one of the herd, we have to be prepared to examine both our thoughts and our emotions. Only in this way will we get to know who we are. |
The title FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN was initially coined by MOMENTUM and was subsequently extended to cover all four international exhibitions taking place in 2018 within the framework of the Ruhanyi Zhangru initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan: “Modern Kazakh Culture in the Global World”. FOCUS KAZAKHSTAN takes place in Berlin (MOMENTUM), London, Seoul, and New York.
Andi and Lance Olsen Kunst Salon
Your Words Are Only Guesses:
an intersemiotic reading/screening of works-in-progress
Kunst Salon with Andi and Lance Olsen
Sunday, 22 April 2018
Screening: 22 – 29 April 2018
Throughout Berlin Gallery Weekend
Opening Hours: Wed – Sun, 1 – 7pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Following their exhibition in May-June last year, There’s No Place Like Time: A Novel You Walk Through, MOMENTUM is proud to welcome back Andi & Lance Olsen as Artists-in-Residence, 6 March -1 May 2018.
Unveiling for the first time their works-in-progress, Lance Olsen reads from his novel, My Red Heaven, about Berlin in 1927 and the rise of a deadly populism at the heart of a thriving center for artists, writers, and intellectuals. All fences seemed down, all possibilities open, and the future unimaginable. This novel-in-progress incorporates photographs of lost spaces around Berlin by Andi Olsen and Michael Kroetch.
Andi and Lance Olsen also screen for the first time a new video by fictional artist Alana Olsen. Set in the American desert, vYour Words Are Only Guesses investigates the toxic sublime using visual, textual, and sonic erasure as a metaphor for ecological dissolution. Your Words Are Only Guesses reflects Alana Olsen’s continued interest in desertscapes around the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and the erasure of that environment through human impact on the air, water and land. It is also about the complex act of reading, about trying to make self-conscious that which our culture has made invisible, about the consequences of reading one way rather than another. The screening will continue through 29 April 2018, throughout Berlin Gallery Weekend.
A work-in-progress, Your Words Are Only Guesses is part of a collaborative, multimodal installation by Andi & Lance Olsen entitled There’s No Place Like Time: A Novel You Walk Through
Your Words Are Only Guesses (HD video, work-in-progress) attributed to Alana Olsen
text by Lance Olsen
video by Andi Olsen
sound engineers: Juanfe Rehm, Tricone Studio, Funkhaus Berlin
Andi Olsen is an assemblage, computer-generated collage, and experimental video artist. Her videos have been exhibited in such venues as the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore) & Greenhouse Berlin (Germany), & have screened at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), Revolving Museum (Lowell), & at literary and artistic events in Banff, Cologne, Munich, Paris, Rouen, Szeged, Warsaw, & across the United States. Her art has been exhibited & published around the country & abroad. Her ongoing solo project, Hideous Beauty, is a Cabinet of Wonders composed of short videos, assemblages, & collage texts exploring the idea of monstrosity & the generative possibilities inherent in the processes of decay.
Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative writing. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. He is known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge. In 2015-2016 he was a guest of the D.A.A.D. Berlin Artists Program. In 2013 he served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction Fellow at the American Academy also in Berlin. A Guggenheim and N.E.A. fellowship recipient, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 1996-1998, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he is professor of innovative narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.
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KUNST SALON VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni and Sean Gallup
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. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 1986. Defining himself as a conceptual painter, Marković has exhibited extensively in Europe, Asia, Australia, and in the Americas. 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.
Marković’s work has been 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.
SUNSET!
Sunset on 16.02.2016 in Bundanon, NSW, Australia.
2016, Pigments on Canvas, 70 x 70 cm
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, Markovitch 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.
His works contain short text quotations from pornographic literature, politics and banking; representations of the world of power and oppression. Marković’s 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. Sunset! is a landscape painting, taking as its subject the date and location of a sunset witnessed by the artist while on an Artist Residency in Bundanon, NSW, Australia.
2021, 5 framed prints, ink print on paper, each 29 x 42 cm (53 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
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Milovan Destil Marković
David Krippendorff
DAVID KRIPPENDORFF
(b. 1967 in Berlin. Lives and works in Berlin.)
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, and was 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 earlier work focused on Hollywood films and investigated underlying ideologies in iconic movies such as The Wizard of Oz, Gilda, Gone With the Wind, and West Side Story. His more recent work has shifted away from found material towards the creation of a personal visual vocabulary based on original footage, but still using products of our collective culture as a departure point and inspiration.
Krippendorff’s works, films and videos have been shown in major international institutions and Biennales, including: the New Museum (New York, USA); ICA, Institute of Contemporary Art (London, UK); Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany); Museum On The Seam (Jerusalem, Israel), RMCA, Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (Guangzhou, China); Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art (Chengdu, China); Aram Art Museum (South Korea). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, and Belgrade), as well as in many international art and film festivals worldwide.
Selected recent exhibitions include: Minor Universes: Technology-led Emotions, Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art, Chengdu, China (2022); Gilded, Schloss Biesdorf, Berlin, Germany and Chateau de Nyon, Switzerland (2022); States of Emergency, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2021); Parallel Worlds, Ruhsor Museum of Contemporary Art, Samarkand, Uzbekistan (2021); Art from Elsewhere, Kunsthaus R3, Ansbach, Germany (2021); Timescapes, K.P.Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Points of Resistance, MOMENTUM & KvW, Zionskirche, Berlin (2021); 2nd Bienal Internacional de Asunción, German-Paraguayan Cultural Centre, Paraguay (2020); Elysium, MOMENTUM & KvW, Berlin (2020); In weiter Ferne so nah, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, (2020); COVIDecameron, MOMENTUM (2020); Show Me Your Selfie, Diskurs, Berlin, and Aram Art Museum, Goyang Cultural Foundation, South Korea (2019); Bonum et Malum, MOMENTUM & KvW, Villa Erxleben, Berlin (2019); Connections and Fractures, RMCA – Redtory Museum for Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China (2019); Word Up!, C24 Gallery, New York, USA (2019); Power Struggle, Mah-e Mehr Gallery, Teheran, Iran (2019); Für Immer Blau, Kunstverein Duisburg & Villa Waldsteige, Germany (2018); Møenlight Sonata, Kunsthal 44Møen, Møen, Denmark (2018); The Women Behind, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel (2018); and numerous others dating back to 1999.
NOTHING ESCAPES MY EYES
2015, Video, 14 min 9 sec
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]
Watch here the Spotlight interview with David Krippendorff
aaajiao
aaajiao
aaajiao (b. 1884, Xi’an, China. Lives and works in Shanghai and Berlin)
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 — and 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, Switzerlan (2017); “Shanghai Project Part II”, Shanghai, China (2017); “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). His solo exhibition includes: “Remnants of an Electronic Past”, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, UK (2016); OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal Xi’an, China (2016), among others. 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.
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’ 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.
As it relates to his native China, 404404404 becomes a 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.
Watch here the Spotlight interview with aaajiao
Claudia Chaseling
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. Chaseling’s work is included in the major survey exhibition and publication “DISSONANCE. Platform Germany” (2022) edited by Mark Gisbourne & Christoph Tannert.
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.
Murphy the Mutant
2013, Video, 13 min 58 sec
Murphy the Mutant is a 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.
International scientific research has proven the irreversible radioactive pollution caused by depleted uranium weapons. 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.
metal 2
2015, Pigments, egg tempera and oil on canvas, 100 x 120 cm
Claudia Chaseling’s practice is characterised as Spatial Painting. At once 2- and 3-dimensional, her work encompasses painting, sculpture, and installation; the works leaping off the gallery walls. Chaseling creates swirls of organic from, upside down landscapes with reversed perspective and bright fluorescent wave structures with political content. 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.
“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
metal 2 has been previously shown in the solo exhibition site-mutative painting at the Magic Beans Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2017).
Publications by Claudia Chaseling
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Claudia Chaseling
Amir Fattal
AMIR FATTAL
(b. 1978 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives and works in Berlin.)
AMIR 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. Since 2020, Fattal is the Founding Director of Geisted, the platform for digital art, new media and immersive experience.
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 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: Gender-Bender Time Traveller, Geisted, Berlin (2022); Points of Resistance, MOMENTUM, Zionskirche Berlin (2021); Floating Presence, Humboldt Carre, Berlin (2020); Connections and Fractures, RMCA – Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China (2019); Bonum et Malum, Villa Erxleben, Berlin (2019); Future Life Handbook, Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China (2017-18); Collection Enea Righi, Museo Fortuny, Venice (2016); ID Festival, Radialsystem, Berlin (2016); Interior / Exterior / Sculpture, Belenius/Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); A Naked Singularity, Studio Garaicoa, Madrid, Spain (2015); Wo der Ort beginnt, Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin (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); and many more dating back to 2007.
ATARA (2019)
ATARA 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 vastly different, and ideologically opposite, buildings that used to stand upon 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 upon German Reunification in 1990, and was destroyed amid much public controversy in 2006-2008 to make way for the rebuilding of a contemporary copy of the Stadtschloss in 2013-2020. In 2021 this new (re)building was opened to the public as the Humboldt Forum Museum. The decision to resurrect the Stadtschloss in order to move and consolidate all Berlin’s ethnographic and history of science museums, is a highly contentious one, interpreted by many as Germany’s 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, nearly 80 years after the end of WWII – a city perpetually treading the fine line between never forgetting its painful past, and reinventing its future.
Shot at several stages during construction of the new building, ATARA imagines 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. In a sci-fi synchronicity of timelines, the film follows an astronaut wandering through the construction site of the new Stadtschloss, carrying an iconic lamp from the destroyed Palast der Republik – like an explorer in an alien land where past and future merge. The haunting score is based on the opera Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner, together with original music by Boris Bojadzhiev. Starting with the Liebestod aria, 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.
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Amir Fattal
Für Babette
Für Babette
8 March 2018
@ Bar Babette
Karl-Marx-Allee 36, 10178 Berlin
MOMENTUM is proud to co-host together with Berlin Art Link and Schlachthaus. fresh&fine art an evening of art, drinks, and music on International Women’s Day – all to SAVE BAR BABETTE!
DON’T FORGET TO SIGN THE PETITION TO SAVE BAR BABETTE!
Just click here and fill in the form! > >
Music by:
DJ and Sound Artist Mieko Suzuki
Art by:
Inna Artemova // Mariana Hahn // Bjørn Melhus // Andi Olsen // Jesus Pastor // Varvara Shavrova // Ming Wong
All-night floor-to-ceiling art!
9:00pm – 10:00pm
complimentary welcome drink
9:30pm – 10pm
Performance by Mariana Hahn
The Oracle of Babette
10pm – late
Immersive DJ set by Mieko Suzuki
More than just a party to celebrate women and art, this event will also help prevent the disappearance of yet another Berlin underground cultural landmark: Unless a petition reaches 11,000 signatures, Kosmetiksalon Babette will be forced to shut. Follow this link to sign the petition and save one of Berlin’s most unique art event venues:
SAVE BAR BABETTE – SIGN THE PETITION: http://barbabette.com/petition/
About Kosmetiksalon Bar Babette > >
Bar Babette is an architectural icon located in a former GDR cosmetic salon on Karl Marx Allee. Originally a place for women to pamper themselves with rare luxuries, this artist-run bar and art venue is the perfect place to celebrate International Women’s Day. Artist Maik Schierloh is the creative force not only behind Bar Babette, but also, together with Joep van Liefland, founded the much loved art space Autocenter.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
No Sunshine (1997), video, 6 min
Depicting pairs of infantile doppelgängers floating in a space that evokes their own interior world, NO SUNSHINE is a tragicomedy that explores the images—or rather the remembered images—of childhood, and the ensuing questions of identity. Triggering associations of the sexless toy figures of Playmobil, which set the stage for the perception of the world and the playful coming to terms with it for many children, the childhood projection is played out further as the figures sing a duet in the childlike voices of Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. Taken to such pseudo-romantic and cliche-ridden extremes of what constitutes childhood in the eyes of the entertainment industry, this work delves in its inherent absurdity and goes as far as to hint to the popular patterns of explanation and the reception of psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s. Looking back into the past, at the toy model, means dissolution, an implosion in a vacuum. Dissolving the idyllic romantic image of childhood, NO SUNSHINE mirrors the images of television memories and in their alienated otherness points them back towards the medium.
Bjørn Melhus, born 1966, is a German-Norwegian media artist. In his work he has developed a singular position, expanding the possibilities for a critical reception of cinema and television. His practice of fragmentation, destruction, and reconstitution of well-known figures, topics, and strategies of the mass media opens up not only a network of new interpretations and critical commentaries, but also defines the relationship of mass media and viewer anew. Originally rooted in an experimental film context, Bjørn Melhus’s work has been shown and awarded at numerous international film festivals. He has held screenings at Tate Modern and the LUX in London, the Museum of Modern Art (MediaScope) in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, amongst others. His work has been exhibited in shows like The American Effect at the Whitney Museum New York, the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, solo and group shows at FACT Liverpool, Serpentine Gallery London, Sprengel Museum Hanover, Museum Ludwig Cologne, ZKM Karlsruhe, Denver Art Museum among others.
There’s no Place Like Time (1988/2018), video, 2 min 19 sec
We are proud to welcome Andi Olsen back to Berlin for an artist residency at MOMENTUM, after her exhibition, together with Lance Olsen at MOMENTUM in May-June 2017: There’s No Place Like Time: A Novel You Walk Through. The video work There’s No Place Like Time, shown here, is an avant-pop appropriation and manipulation of one of the most famous Merrie Melodies cartoons, Duck Amuck: the long-distance call, the stutter step, the instant where nothing happens—again and again. Beyond Daffy Duck’s universal existential wrestling match with time, Judy Garland’s voice as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz rewrites and re-rights the predetermined cultural expectations of gendered domesticity.
American artist Andi Olsen works with assemblage, computer-generated collage, and experimental video. Her videos have been exhibited in such venues as the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore) & Greenhouse Berlin (Germany), & have screened at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), Revolving Museum (Lowell), & at literary and artistic events in Banff, Cologne, Munich, Paris, Rouen, Szeged, Warsaw, & across the United States. Her art has been exhibited & published around the country & abroad. Her ongoing solo project, Hideous Beauty, is a Cabinet of Wonders composed of short videos, assemblages, & collage texts exploring the idea of monstrosity & the generative possibilities inherent in the processes of decay.
Utopia (2017), oil on canvas, 110 x 115 cm
Berlin-based Russian artist Inna Artemova is a painter of re-imagined histories. Using archival images and found material from period publications, Artemova reconstructs fantastical images. Her paintings are visual collages of alternative nostalgias rooted in a past that never was.
Mieko Suzuki is a Japanese DJ and sound artist who has been based in Berlin since 2007. Grounded in hauling deep bass, Mieko’s sets create a constant tension between the delicate, the raw and the daring. Folding together and finding connections between the subtle textures and qualities of different genres, Mieko’s experimental approach always gives careful attention to the space and to the people. Noise and warm ambience, rhythm and industrial resonance are improvised together to submerge you in a big adventure of electronic sound.
Windows on the World (2014),
video, 3 min 11 sec
This work focuses on the concept of “future” in Chinese modernity, and in particular, how it is manifested in the unlikely relationship between sci-fi and 20th century Cantonese opera.
The former has been at the core of Chinese modern reformation, the latter is viewed more as a potent modern national identifier, than as a continuous art form, surviving from pre-modern times unaltered.
Gender-bending Singaporean media artist Ming Wong is renowned for refined video works that reimagine excerpts from art films and world cinema. Wong not only researches, plans, directs and produces the films; he also casts himself portraying multiple primary characters, irrespective of language, gender or ethnicity. Through his distinctive and at times humorous translations and reinterpretations of classic film scenes, Wong builds layers of social structure, introspection and cinematic language, questioning how identity is both constructed and disseminated.
The Opera: Three Transformations (2010/16), Timelapse Video, 3 min 41 sec
Varvara Shavrova is an interdisciplinary Russian artist based in London and Dublin, having previously lived in China for six years. Für Babette screens her work from the MOMENTUM Collection. The Opera: Three Transformations focuses on the transformation of two famous 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.
Shavrova’s projects include over 20 solo exhibitions in Dublin, Galway, Sligo, London, Los Angeles, Berlin, Frankfurt, Moscow, St.Petersburgh, Shanghai and Beijing, and a number of curatorial visual arts projects, artistic initiatives and group exhibitions in Ireland, UK, Italy and China. Shavrova curated a number of international group projects, including ‘Through the Lens: new media art from Ireland’ in Beijing where she co-ordinated visual arts programme for the First Festival of Irish Culture at Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City, in 2008. Shavrova’s recent projects include ‘The Opera’, a multi-media six screen projected installation at Espacio Cultural El Tanque, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in November 2011. ‘The Opera’ solo exhibition at the Gallery of Photography Ireland opened Dublin Chinese New Year Festival 2012 and toured to Limerick City Art Gallery and Ballina Arts Centre in 2012. Shavrova participated with a solo project ‘Mirrors on the Opera’ in 2012 Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, and took part in ‘New Irish landscapes’ group show at the Three Shadows Photography Arts Centre in Beijing in 2013, as part of the Irish Culture Festival. Shavrova received a number of international awards and fellowships including Culture Ireland grants, London Arts Board grant, Ballinglen Arts Foundation fellowship awards and Prince’s Trust artist’s travelling award. Shavrova’s works can be found in important public and private collections, including Department of Foreign Affairs, Arts Council England, Museum of Modern Art Moscow, among others.
Inhabited Silence (2017), photo series (Spain)
Inhabited Silence is a series of portraits of the nuns of the “Sacred Heart” who one day chose to dedicate their lives to faith. It is almost possible hear the rustle of quiet habits, the soft step of sandals on the terrazzo floor, the echo of the halls and prayers. A dialogue inhabited by women who look towards the light, raising the eyes in an attitude of contemplation. Baring their gestures and their faces, they offer us their souls. In silence. Jesus Pastor developed this project by visiting the prayer space of these nuns every morning at 7am and staying with them quietly and reading the Bible. After some time, he mentioned his intention of making their portraits, with natural light coming through a window.
Berlin-based Spanish photographer Jesus Pastor balances his practice between art, fashion, and documentary. Specializing in portraiture, Pastor discovers remarkable subjects, drawing from them untold stories captured in the evocative moment of an image.
Site Specific Performance
In her performances, installations, and videos, Berlin-based German artist Mariana Hahn engages with both archetypical and local legends by weaving a common female mythology between them that enters into dialogue with the present. Concerned with women’s histories and folklores across many cultures, Hahn develops complex narratives reimagining these women’s stories. Für Babette presents a new performance commissioned for this occasion.
THIS EVENT IS A PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN:
IN COOPERATION WITH
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Andi & Lance Olsen
MOMENTUM AiR
6 March – 1 May 2018
KUNST SALON
Your Words Are Only Guesses:
an intersemiotic reading/screening of
works-in-progress
Artist talk: 22 April 2018
@ 3pm to 5pm
Listen here the podcast of the talk >>
Screening: 22 – 29 April 2018
Opening hours Wed – Sun, 1 – 7pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
ARTIST STATEMENT – RESIDENCY PROJECT:
We are proud to welcome back Andi & Lance Olsen after their MOMENTUM exhibition in May-June 2017: There’s No Place Like Time: A Novel You Walk Through.
During their Residency, Andi and Lance Olsen will expand their collaborative multimodal installation There’s No Place Like Time: A Novel You Walk Through by creating a new video by fictional artist Alana Olsen. Set in the American desert, Your Words Are Only Guesses will investigate the toxic sublime using visual, textual, and sonic erasure as a metaphor for ecological dissolution.
Lance Olsen will continue work on his novel-in-progress, My Red Heaven, about Berlin in 1927 and the rise of a deadly populism at the heart of a thriving center for the artists, writers, and intellectuals. All the fences seemed down, all the possibilities open, and the future unimaginable. The novel will incorporate photographs of lost spaces around Berlin taken by Andi Olsen and Michael Kroetch.
MORE INFORMATION:
CLICK HERE for EXHIBITION: There’s No Place Like Time: A Novel You Walk Through > >
Andi Olsen is an assemblage, computer-generated collage, and experimental video artist. Her videos have been exhibited in such venues as the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore) & Greenhouse Berlin (Germany), & have screened at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), Revolving Museum (Lowell), & at literary and artistic events in Banff, Cologne, Munich, Paris, Rouen, Szeged, Warsaw, & across the United States. Her art has been exhibited & published around the country & abroad. Her ongoing solo project, Hideous Beauty, is a Cabinet of Wonders composed of short videos, assemblages, & collage texts exploring the idea of monstrosity & the generative possibilities inherent in the processes of decay.
Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative writing. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. He is known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge. In 2015-2016 he was a guest of the D.A.A.D. Berlin Artists Program. In 2013 he served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction Fellow at the American Academy also in Berlin. A Guggenheim and N.E.A. fellowship recipient, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 1996-1998, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he is professor of innovative narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.
Marc Lee
MOMENTUM AiR
21 January – 10 February 2018
ARTIST BIO
Marc Lee (born 1969) is a Swiss media artist. Since 1999, he has created network-oriented interactive projects, interactive installations, media art, internet art, video and performance art. Throughout his practice, Marc Lee experiments with information and communication technologies. His artworks reflect the visions and limits of our information society through a close scrutiny of its creative, cultural, social, economic and political aspects.
His works have been exhibited in numerous major museums and new media art exhibitions including: ZKM, Karlsruhe; New Museum, New York; Transmediale, Berlin; Ars Electronica, Linz; HMKV, Dortmund; HeK, Basel; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Read_Me Festival, Moscow; CeC, Dehli; MoMA, Shanghai; ICC, Tokyo; Nam June Paik Art Center, Media Art Biennale, and MMCA, Seoul; amongst many others.
Marc Lee’s works are held in private and public collections including: the Federal Art Collection Switzerland, Bern; ZKM, Karlsruhe; HeK, Basel; and Fotomuseum, Winthertur. He has won many prizes and honorary mentions at international festivals, including “Interaction” and “Software” Awards at Transmediale Berlin, and the Social-Media-Art-Award at Phaenomenale Wolfsburg, amongst others.
A graduate of Basel University of Art and Design (FHNW) and of Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Marc Lee also lectures and teaches workshops on art and software art in many universities, including: the China Academy of Art (CAA) Hangzhou; Strelka Moscow; Shanghai Institute of Visual Art (SIVA); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul; ZHdK Zurich; amongst others.
ARTIST STATEMENT – RESIDENCY PROJECT:
None Place
(new work in production, 2018)
During his Residency at MOMENTUM, Marc Lee is developing a new app-based artwork. None Place will be an interactive net-based installation with two mirroring projections and a mobile phone or tablet as interface. In this installation, the audience will be able see and hear what’s happening in real-time around the world. The endless flow of countless stories enables the viewer to experience how our world is constantly changing and how more and more places are becoming “non-places”, as described in Marc Augé’s book and essay Non-places. We become an observer and at the same time we can actively participate and became live performers.
We have lived in different eras, but we also coexist in the new century. We also live in different places: in Los Angeles, Shanghai, Sydney, Zurich and other parts of the world. We can be different persons: women, men, children, but also ourselves. Time, places and identities change in the web, in social networks and also in reality. This is real, this is the truth, this is our reality. None Place captures and reflects this kind of real; our lives, our time, our places, our identities, the profound digital information and communication revolutions and the changing role and works of artists.
By moving the smartphone or tablet, audiences will be able to choose Shanghai or any other city. Projected onto virtual building fronts, you now see images, sounds or videos which users post on social media networks in real-time. Futuristic as it may seem, this is how your place might look like in 100 years. The animations on the display follow your movements. You walk along the exhibition-space and, at the same time, you move virtually between the buildings. They rise up to different heights, forming a skyline. For each chosen place, the app looks for current posts on social media and projects them onto the virtual building fronts. The user can walk around in the chosen virtual city and interact with the app by walking and moving the mobile device. By clicking on a building front, a new post is searched and projected in in real-time. By clicking many times, the building will sink into the ground. The collages of images and sounds on the virtual cityscape keep changing as new posts are sent continuously, even if you choose the same city twice. From one city to another, our world and our places are changing continuously to be experienced as increasingly similar non-places.
Station Paradox
STATION PARADOX
A dialogue between artists from Korea and the MOMENTUM Collection.
aaajiao <> Claudia CHASELING <> JANG Jaerok <> Kira KIM + Hyungkyu KIM <> Zinu KIM <> David KRIPPENDORFF <> Hye Rim LEE <> Milovan Destil MARKOVIĆ <> Jihye PARK
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Jung Me Chai, Assistant Curator, Gyusik Lee
OPENING: 26 January 2018 @ 7:00 – 11:00pm
ARTIST TALK: 28 January @ 3:30 – 4:30pm
STATION PARADOX Explained: Jung Me Chai, JANG Jaerok, Zinu KIM, David KRIPPENDORFF, Gyusik LEE, Rachel Rits-Volloch
EXHIBITION: 27 January – 11 March 2018
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanein
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin 10997
This exhibition is a dialogue between artists from Korea and from Berlin working with painting, video art, installation, and performance. As the title suggests, cultural dialogue can often highlight the paradoxes inherent to questions of identity and shifting perspectives. The artists selected for this exhibition, each in their own way, push the boundaries of the expected: from Claudia Chaseling’s spatial paintings spilling out of the canvas and exploding off the gallery walls; to the transfigurative paintings of Milovan Destil Markovic, translating a digital language onto his canvases; the hyperrealist calligraphic ink painting of Jang Jaerok; the meditative emotional journeys of Jihye Park’s and David Krippendorff’s films; the socially conscious videos of Kira Kim and Hyungkyu Kim; the zany performances of Zinu Kim; the digital animations of Hye Rim Lee; and aaajiao’s interrogation of our post-internet culture. The works in this exhibition push the limits of their form, highlighting the paradoxes in how we perceive the world through the shifting perspectives of cultural landscapes mediated through technologies of viewing. Nothing here is quite what it seems.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a dual language (english/korean) catalogue. The opening of STATION PARADOX on 26 January 2018 coincides with the opening of the CTM Festival of Digital Culture, also at the Kunstquartier Bethanien. By way of this exhibition, MOMENTUM is proud to show works by three artists never before seen in Berlin – Jang Jaerok, Hyungkyu Kim, and Jihye Park – and to welcome four new artists and their works to the MOMENTUM Collection – aaajiao, Claudia Chaseling, David Krippendorff, and Milovan Destil Marković.
ARTISTS and their WORKS
404 (2017), ink, sponge roller, dimensions variable
404 is the error message which appears on blocked websites in China. Translating the digital message back into analog form, 404 (2017) is aaajiao’s subtle commentary on censorship and the flow of information in our digital culture. The message is always the same, no matter the diversity of content it is covering from view. Entirely site-specific, this work takes a new form with each installation; multiplying the message 404 in a diversity of forms and contexts.
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 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, born 1984 in Xi’an, China, is the virtual persona of Shanghai and Berlin-based artist Xu Wenkai. aaajiao’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world. Upcoming and recent 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); Overpop, 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). His solo exhibition includes: Remnants of an Electronic Past, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (2016); OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal Xi’an, Xi’an (2016), among others. 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.
Another Landscape-Frankfurt Hbf (2018), Korean ink and Acrylic on Korean Paper, 360 x 180 cm
Jang Jaerok, since his early career, has examined everyday life in capitalist societies through contemporary images made from traditional Korean ink painting. What appear to be black and white photos are actually photo-realist ink paintings expressed meticulously through light and shade of ink. His subject is largely the material objects of desire: luxury cars, jewels, chandeliers, and monumental industrial architecture. JAEROK characterises his mission as an artist as “The method I use is Asian painting. Asian painting is neither an imitation of nature nor expression of mind, which is different from the method of Western paintings. At the same time, I explore the world through the pixels of images. I use traditional Asian painting as a form, and for content, I examine the reality of the absurd human civilization that has been mythicized in the name of rationality. The form is photographic images fabricated by the 0s and 1s of the binary system. I question the issues of the 21st century, in the firm belief of the dialectical pattern of the immense human history.”
“Jang was fascinated by huge artificial structures and sophisticated machines. Consequently, his Korean paintings somewhat look like architectural drawings on graph paper measured with a ruler. In his paintings, we cannot find traditional features of Asian painting like drawing with one stroke of a brush or cheerful vitality. We live in a world full of machinery and artificial structures. He does not only show surface of neatly cut machines or structures; they feel like bizarre, scary anatomical charts of human body.” (Another Landscape (Brooklyn Bridge) catalog text, Busan Biennale).
Jang Jaerok is a Korean artist born in Seoul in 1978. He lives and works in Seoul, Korea. Jaerok’s artistic sense has been inspired since childhood by his mother who is a traditional calligrapher. He completed a BA in Asian painting at Dan-kook University and an MA at Hong-ik University. He is currently a PhD candidate in art at Hong-ik University. He has exhibited at many museums in Korea including the Seoul Museum of Art, Gansong Museum, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeongnam Art Museum, and the Pohang Museum of Steel Art. Recently he participated in the main exhibition at the Busan Biennale (2016) where he extended his work by adding installation to his traditional Korean ink painting of contemporary images. Recent international exhibitions include: Westwerk e.v., Hamburg, Germany (2016); Musee Adam Mickiewicz, Paris, France (2016); and other museums and galleries in China, Japan, Germany, and New York.
Take a Docent Tour (2018), site specific performance
Zinu Kim has worked as a tour guide and docent at museums and galleries in Germany since 2008. For this exhibition, he will make a series of guide performances, acting as a docent at the exhibition. He will be helping visitors appreciate the exhibition as a performer, occupying the space somewhere between the artworks and the audience. Reprising his role as a gallery guide, Zinu Kim’s performance at the exhibition engenders a wilful ambiguity between what some may perceive as a docent tour, while others might experience it as art. In this direct address to the audience, the artist poses the question, when an artist does a performance that is closely linked to his or her job for a living, how will the audience draw the line between art and life?
Zinu Kim was born in South Korea in 1979. He studied Oriental Painting at Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea, and Fine Art at Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Hamburg, Germany. Sine 2016, he has worked and lived in Berlin. He creates paintings that combine two different cultures: German and Korean. He also does performances to share ideas and topics found in his everyday life. Zinu Kim has shown his works in exhibitions in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and Korea.
Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015), HD Video, 13’43”
Nothing Escapes My Eyes is about a silent transformation of a place and a human being. Inspired by the texts of Edward W. Said, the poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Verdi’s opera Aida, the film depicts in a metaphoric form current issues of cultural identity, loss and the pressures to conform. With no dialogue, the film is backed by a musical excerpt from 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.
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.
Black Rose v1 (2016), 3D digital animation, 4’45”
Hye Rim Lee’s work questions the role of new technology in image-making and representation, reviewing aspects of popular culture in relation to notions of femininity and looking at the way fictional animated identities are propagated within contemporary culture. Her work has developed through the critical and conceptual evolution of her animated character TOKI, the principal component of her ongoing TOKI/Cyborg Project (2002-present). Hye Rim has positioned her work at a progressive interface between Eastern and Western popular culture, and the exploration of how new technologies, through the intersection of computer gaming, cyber culture, and animamix, influence contemporary myth-making. Black Rose v1 continues the ongoing TOKI mythscape, with a soundtrack composed by Hye Rim Lee and Jiyeon Won. TOKI’s story is a narrative of an infinite dream where TOKI the shapeshifter afloat in her fantasy world, becomes a Princess, a Queen and a Rose.
Crystal City Spun (2008), 3D digital animation, 3’17”
An earlier work from the TOKI/Cyborg Project, Crystal City Spun opens with a cityscape of spinning dildo towers. Out of the landscape emerges TOKI, a highly stylized curvaceous, warrior-cum-vixen who draws upon the Japanese tradition of Manga, Korean animamix and Western ideals of sexuality and beauty. TOKI exists in a fantasyland ripe with sexual energy. To sadistically erotic effect, a dragon taps TOKI’s exposed nipple with the tip of his pointy claw. This titillation sends TOKI into a pirouette. She stops only when whipped by the dragon’s whiskers, sparking the crystallization of both the landscape and its characters. Steeped in sexual innuendo, Crystal City Spun is a fantasyland where dream and reality mix. The video has a paradoxically playful, childlike quality invoking fantasy and toys, while alluding to the darker side of obsession and addiction. Hye Rim Lee’s ongoing series challenges the conventions of the traditionally male-dominated worlds of game structure and 3D animation, specifically when it comes to virtualized images of women.
Hye Rim Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, and is based between New York, Auckland (New Zealand), and Seoul. She graduated with degrees in time-based arts and music from, respectively, the Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, New Zealand (2003) and the Ewha Women’s University, Seoul, Korea (1985). Hye Rim Lee’s work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions at: Kukje Gallery Seoul; Max Lang Gallery, New York; Kate Shin New York; Freight+Volume, New York; Gallerie Volker Diehl, Berlin; Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver; MoCA Shanghai; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona; Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand; Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, NZ; San Jose Museum of Art, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; SeMA, Seoul, Korea; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, NZ; Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, NZ. She has participated in numerous international Biennales, including: collateral exhibitions in the 54th and 53rd Venice Biennales; the Incheon Women’s Art Biennale, Incheon, Korea; Animamix Biennale, China (2011); Samsung Media Exhibition, Daegu, Korea (2011); The World Expo (2010), Shanghai. Hye Rim was awarded Artist Residencies at Ssamzie Space, Seoul, and at ISCP, New York. She was a Visiting Fellow at Auckland University of Technology in 2013, and was a finalist of the Wallace Art Awards in 2016. Hye Rim Lee’s works are held by major public and private collections, including: SeMA (Seoul Museum of Art) Korea; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealan; Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, NZ; Te Papa (The National Museum of New Zealand) Wellington; The University of Auckland, NZ; Ernst&Young, NZ; Saatchi&Saatchi NZ; Hara Museum, Japan: National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA); Byron Aceman Collection (BAC), Canada. Hye Rim Lee currently works with Venice Projects, Venice, Italy; 12 Gallery, Queenstown/Auckland, NZ; and Waterfall Mansion & Gallery, New York.
Rumination (2017), HD video, 6’30”
Rumination captures a man from various angles who has a deadpan face and seems lost in thought. In this video work, Jihye Park intends to interpret the multilayered psychological state of anxiety caused by underlying conflicts in our closest relationships and our desire for possession as “the moment of absence”. Jihye Park, throughout her practice as a video artist, explores relationships and their reciprocity. Her contemplations of relationships are not about grandiose interactions, but are about those close to our everyday lives such as dating, love, jealousy, sympathy, etc. The most intimate of relationships are the spatial identities that are infused with unfathomable levels of convention, mythology, and formalities. The seemingly simple person-to-person meeting ground is actually festered with underlying basic conflicts, a complicated and complex place where innumerous conventions and desires that control individuals collide, exchange, and compromise with the other. The violence that lies concealed in such familiar and close relationships is all the more dangerous because it is masked, and because it is born of intimacy. Through this form of violence concealed in everyday life, Park investigates the identity of the potential desire that exists within the relationship between human beings and while the work does not portray a distinct event it does exude a rather bizarre sense of psychological unease.
Jihye Park was born in Busan in 1981 and currently lives and works in Seoul. She received both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Goldsmiths, University of London. Jihye Park portrays a human’s psychological state driven by his/her underlying desire, and the conflicting and contradictory emotions a human undergoes using the video format. She combines symbolic elements from fairytales/fables, myth, actual incidents and personal experiences to recreate the essence of ambition and lust dormant in close relationships. Her works have been shown internationally, including: La Compagnie, (Marseille, France); Westwerk e.V, (Hamburg, Germany); Busan Biennale, (Busan, Korea); OVNi, (Nice, France); Sanshang Contemporary Art Museum, (Hangzhou, China); Art Stage Singapore, Korea Platform, (Singapore, Singapore); SongEun Artspace, (Seoul, Korea); Korean Cultural Centre, (London, UK); Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), (New Delhi, India); Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, (Rome, Italy). She is currently participating at Seongnam Cultural Foundation Residency program, Creative space of public art Sinheungdong.
yesterday is tomorrow (2018),
leaf aluminium, aluminium, egg tempera and oil on wall, floor and 2 oviform canvasses; 500 x 200 x 300 cm
Claudia Chaseling’s practice is characterised as Spatial Painting. At once 2- and 3-dimensional, her work encompasses painting, sculpture, and installation; the works leaping off the gallery walls. Chaseling creates swirls of organic from, upside down landscapes with reversed perspective and bright fluorescent wave structures with political content. 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. yesterday is tomorrow (2018) is a new site specific work made especially for this exhibition. This spatial painting has a particular view point from which the work is composed. Seen from this single point, optically, the work looks paradoxically flat. Yet stepping out of this particular persecutive, the work explodes off the gallery walls, melting onto the floor, oozing onto the adjacent wall. Contained within the 2 small oviform paintings within the work, are two links to online sources for the artist’s research into depleted uranium. One leads to the documentary by Frieder Wagner about the use of depleted uranium munitions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djv8UyrrC34 >>.
The other link leads to an article about how the west historically and currently uses other countries to test their weapons:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/14/military-weapons-history-the-west-bombs >>.
The imagery in both paintings is of the MOB bomb that was dropped on Afghanistan in 2017, and surrounding the landscape.
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 zeitgenoessische 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. The artist is currently 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.
Kira KIM, A weight of Ideology _ The Letters to North _ Let me know how are you? _ On the yellow Sea (2013), HD Video, 10min
In this video work, a letter describes a brief thought on Korean North-South relations, starting from a trifling thing – naengmyeon noodles. The content of this letter addressed to an unspecific person in North Korea is banal. The narrative in this letter – that one remembered someone in North Korea when eating naengmyeon – ends with the common Korean greetings: “you don’t skip meals”. This letter, however, is not ordinary. Its content carries no serious ideology or thought. In this prologue-like work the artist asks questions such as “what are ideal North- South relations?”, and “with what ideology do we see the world?”, arguing that our discussion on unification with North Korea should be from the heart, to preserve equal, basic human life and to respect human beings, not any logic of political, national, or economic ideologies.
Kira KIM & Hyungkyu KIM X, Hear the Wind_Across the Border (2017), 4K video, 12min
Hear the Wind_Across the Border is a video using an experimental filmmaking technique called ‘360-degree time lapse’. This film portrays four symbolic sites where the Republic of Korea’s political, economic and historical contexts intersect from a contemplative view through the 2016 ‘axis of time’. In particular, the 360-degree camerawork is especially meaningful in that it captures the landscape of ‘time and space’, which human vision alone cannot capture. Such broadened perspective leads to the question of what is the eye of the camera gazing at, in other words, where is the camera located? The artists explore four sites which represent the historical and political symbolization of the Republic of Korea, recording each site using 360-degree video and making montages of them. By doing so, they capture time and space on a single screen while recording the history of the present through a novel technology of vision.
The four sites in the artist’s work reflect the ironic history and reality of the Republic of Korea in a symbolic manner. The first site, the Yongsan redevelopment area in Seoul, is a representative space which symbolizes the Republic of Korea’s shallow capitalism. The second site, the observatory at Yeonmijeong in Ganghwado, embraces the more than 500-years-long history of repeated invasions and divisions in its entirety in one place. The third, Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, is the place where the passion for new politics was ignited in the Republic of Korea in 2016. Lastly, the DMZ (demilitarised zone between North and South Korea), is one of the places which have a sharp ideological conflict from the viewpoint of the outside world, but regardless of this political sensitivity, the wind in this area flows calmly and silently, revealing irony as if nothing ever happened in the past.
Kira Kim working together with Hyungkyu Kim ’characterise their practice as, “We are interested in the social and cultural position of an individual as well as and in the desire of a group that is contrary to that of an individual. In our work we examine historical events and human activities related to human behaviors and habits, social inequality and prejudice, the contradiction between myth and religion, ideology, and the individual. This examination is founded upon an understanding of the artist’s role in a sociocultural and political context to address and share the human nature of desire and agony with the public through art. As for methods, we would like to integrate visual art into community programming, choreography, music, and other genres. Conceptually, we are looking for the intersection where a concept develops into a form of art. Sometimes, this examination feels like it is fantasy yet it is a reflection of contemporary society shown through a language of humor and visual signs. In our projects, a multitude of cultural symbols are presented. This is to represent the spectacle of contemporary society with its social structure that is dotted with fundamental contradictions. Our spectrum of visual languages include but are not limited to: collecting, elegant painting, collage, site-specific installation, and video that deal with the history of an individual or events.”
Kira KIM was born in 1974 in Korea, and currently lives and works in Seoul. He received his BFA and MA at the Kyoungwon University of the fine Art and sculpture, in Sungnam, South Korea in 1993-2003, and eared an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2007. International exhibitions include: the Animax Biennale (2017); ART:1 Museum Jakarta Indonesia; Artist of the Year, MMCA, Korea (2015); Transfer, Korea-NRW (2011-2012); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2013), Kunstverein Hagen, Germany (2013); Common good _ Every clime the mountain, Doosan Art Center, Korea (2011); Super-Mega-Factory, Kukje Gallery, Seoul (2009); A Palace of Mirages, King’s Lynn Arts Centre, UK (2009); MOCA Taipei (2014); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; SEMA Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; Samsung Leeum Museum, Korea; The Guild, Mumbai, India; Liverpool Biennial, UK (2010); Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Kunstverein Bochum, Germany; Santral Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; The Bienniel of Graphic Arts, Slovenia; Prague Biennale, Karlin Hall, Czech Republic; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy; Nanjing Museum, China; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Argentina; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile; amongst others.
Hyungkyu KIM was born in 1983, in Yeoncheon, which is near the DMZ in South Korea. He majored in communication and media arts, and is currently working as a director of music videos, films, and advertisements in Seoul. The artist mainly focuses on the narratives, relationships and forms viewed through a camera, and is interested in contemplating the views, locations and implications of a camera based on time. Recently, he has begin studying video works that use 360-degree camerawork and flattening with multiple cameras. He was selected as one of the 3 final winners of the 2017 VH Award, participated in the Ars Electronica Residency Program, and won the Grand Prix of VH Award in 2017.
It Really Fills My Mouth / Morning (2013), pigments on canvas, 86 x 250 cm
Sunset! (2016), pigments on canvas, 70 x 70 cm. Sunset on 16.02.2016 in Bundanon, NSW, Australia.
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, Markovitch 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. His works contain short text quotations from pornographic literature, politics and banking; representations of the world of power and oppression. Marković’s 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. In the case of the two works shown in this exhibition, Sunset! is a landscape painting, taking as its subject the date and location of a sunset witnessed by the artist while on an Artist Residency in Bundanon, NSW, Australia. While It Really Fills My Mouth / Morning is a quotation from The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the infamous autobiography of Catherine Millet (the French writer, art critic, curator, and founder and editor of the magazine Art Press).
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. Markovic’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. Markovic 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, and many others.
ABOUT the CURATORS
Jung Me Chai is the Founder of DISKURS Berlin, a non-profit art space and residency program which initiates, arranges, and develops an international network of contacts between the contemporary art scenes in Germany and Korea. Jung Me studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Prof. Fritz Schwegler and at the Rietveld Academy audio visual media. From 2011 to 2013 she worked as project manager for the project “Transfer Korea – NRW ” at the NRW Kultursekretariat. She currently works as a freelance curator and as assistant curator at the Kunstmuseum Bochum. She has curated exhibitions such as: No More Daughters And Heroes, Aram Art Gallery, The Goyang Cultural Foundation, Korea // Organ Mix, Total Museum, Korea // Kleines Affektchen (Part Film, Video, Performance), Museum Bochum. She contributed articles to Wolgan Misul (Print), Artnow (Print), amongst other publications.
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 dissertation on visceral spectatorship in contemporary cinema, focusing on the biological basis of embodiment. In 2016-2017, Rachel Rits-Volloch was Visiting Professor at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, lecturing in the MFA program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” and the PhD program in Artistic Research. Rachel Rits-Volloch founded MOMENTUM in 2010 in Sydney, Australia, as a parallel event to the 17th Biennale of Sydney. MOMENTUM moved to Berlin in January 2011 as a non-profit global platform for time-based art, with headquarters at the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center. 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 65 international exhibitions showing works by over 450 artists, in addition to ancillary education programming, artist residencies, and related projects.
Jung Me Chai
The word Paradox is found in fields of academia as well as popular culture. The ancient Greek word Paradoxa is a compound of Para and Doxa. Para has many meanings, but is mostly used to infer opposition, beyond or abnormal. Doxa is understood as notion or opinion. In general, Paradoxa is classified into twelve categories such as philosophy, logic, mathematics, physics, economics and politics, and the range of its interpretations can be varied and complex. The term Station could be interpreted as transformation rather than as the conventional interpretation of where travel begins. So, it would be interesting to examine the influences of paradox and transformation in the world of contemporary art and culture.
The extravagantly successful American artist Jeff Koons´ legal battles over custody of his son with his ex-wife La Cicciolina (Ilona Staller) is well known in the art world. His mirror-finish stainless steel with transparent color coated sculptures reflect his private life ironically. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins with, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” His abrupt transformation and subsequent struggle symbolize a mechanism of political power as well as sexual obsession. Ironically, it sparks the negative implications of paradox and transformation that has inspired many artists.
What does it mean therefore for artists from Korea and Berlin, and how do they deal with notions of paradox and transformation? It might seem perplexing and paradoxical at first sight. Another Landscape-Frankfurt Hbf, by JANG Jaerok was inspired by the ceiling of the Central Railway Station in Frankfurt am Main. Using the method of Asian painting in ink, it appears surprisingly hyper-realistic. The huge ceiling structure, consisting of lines and dots in black and white, cannot be seen in the entire figure. Another Landscape-Frankfurt Hbf evokes the strange beauty of monumental industrial architecture. KIM Zinu works as a tour guide for a living. A tour guide is one of the professions that capitalism created. Being in a group as a tourist, the individual experiences the danger of being fed passive thoughts rather than thinking for themselves. A semi-improvised performance as a docent at the exhibition expresses the ambiguity of identity-transformation. KIM Kira eats Pyongyang Naengmyeon in his video work, A weight of Ideology _ The Letters to North _ Let me know how are you? _ On the yellow Sea. Naengmyeon is a noodle dish served cold. Is ‘Eating Pyongyang Naengmyeon’ and ‘Send a Message in a Bottle’ extending the account of reality to emphasize the performative aspects of a political ideology which got lost? PARK Jihye’s video work Rumination contains neither storytelling nor inversion. However, PARK questions the notion of the human psychological state, fairy tales, myths and personal experience. A commonality between the paintings of Claudia CHASELING and Milovan Destil MARKOVIC is the use of fluorescence and intense colour. The wall installation yesterday is tomorrow by Claudia Chaseling can be read as a painting with the element of radioactive poison. She highlights and builds images in a demanding process about environmental issues that cause bizarre genetic mutations. Compared to the themes of distorted nature by Claudia Chaseling, Milovan Destil Markovic transforms the barcode into a colourful deformation in his work It Really Fills My Mouth / Morning. 404 describes the communication error that commonly occurs on the Internet. China-born artist, aaajiao poses questions about the politically influenced acts that claim control not only of individuals, but also the suppression of digital society by a political interest. LEE Hye Rim’s animation, Crystal City Spun, humorously expresses the limited phantom of the Phallus through the collective movement of the artificial penis. David KRIPPENDORFF took 3 years to finish his monumental video work, Nothing Escapes My Eyes, which is inspired by Verdi’s opera Aida. His critical and poetic introduction to cultural imperialism questions loss, cultural identity and transformative fiction. This kind of dialog consists of a set of conceptual and ideological spaces which goes beyond conventional cultural disciplines. The subjective perception of paradox and transformation of the participating artists offer a platform for a further paradox.
Rachel Rits-Volloch
STATION PARADOX is a dialogue between two curators and ten artists from Korea and from Berlin working with painting, video art, animation, installation, and performance. As the title suggests, cultural dialogue can often highlight the paradoxes inherent to questions of identity and shifting perspectives. Juxtaposing artists from Korea with an international array of Berlin-based artists from China, Italy, Serbia, and Germany, this exhibition, by way of its diversity of media and perspectives, takes the viewer on a journey through a complex geography of interpenetrating landscapes: cityscapes, political landscapes, emotional landscapes, fantasyscapes, memoryscapes, cyberscapes. This exhibition takes the premise that our cultural landscape is itself a paradox; like the works shown here, an assemblage of contradictory yet interrelated elements. Though driven by different motivations and media, the stories told by these works are interwoven in a complex social fabric of shared concerns about our world today.
The physical landscapes of South Korea and its border with the North are the subject of Kira Kim and Hyungkyu Kim’s 360-degree video work greeting the viewer upon entering the exhibition. In a second video work, Kira Kim extends his views on the ideological landscape of North-South relations in Korea, imagining a letter to the North, delivered in the only way available to him; as a message in a bottle cast into the sea in a meeting of ideological and physical landscapes. Worries over precarious political relationships with North Korea are a global concern in our current historic moment of rising nuclear tensions. The devastating consequences of nuclear testing are the focus of Claudia Chaseling’s ongoing series of spatial paintings, spilling out of the canvas and exploding off the gallery walls. Inscribed with a steganography of URLs related to her research, the abstract 3-dimentional painting invites us to engage the landscapes of the internet in order to navigate its meanings. The virtual landscape of cyberspace is brought into analogue focus in aaajiao’s ink print of the code 404, denoting the error message which appears on blocked websites in China, and the standard global message for a failure to connect. Whether through censorship or technical fault, one can get lost in this digital landscape. The alphanumeric language of our digital culture is mirrored in Milovan Destil Marcović’s barcode paintings. Also portraying codified language as painting, Marcović goes one step further, translating memoryscape and landscape into the systematic optical language of the barcode; depicting in one work, a quotation from a scandalous autobiography, and in another, the physical coordinates and time of a particular sunset. From transfigurative landscapes, we move to the hyper-real. Jang Jaerok’s exquisitely crafted photorealist painting of a German architectural landmark here speaks to David Krippendorff’s video tribute to the defunct landmark of the Cairo Opera House. Krippendorff’s singular portrait of a physical space across time, is equally an emotional portrait of human heartbreak. Such emotional landscapes are likewise explored in Jihye Park’s mesmerizing video where the simple action of a man sitting in his idling car gives rise to a profusion of possible readings of his drives and desires. Female desire in its most blatant and appropriated forms is the subject of Hye Rim Lee’s ongoing series of 3D digital animations. Lee’s fantasyscapes, modeled as an interface between Eastern and Western popular culture, pose a hyper-feminized challenge to the mostly male perspectives of computer gaming, animamix, and cyberculture. Navigating all these diverse landscapes is Zinu Kim’s performance as an exhibition guide. Re-appropriating a professional role as an artwork in a willful ambiguity between art and life, Kim leads the viewer on a physical journey through the gallery space and the many landscapes of this exhibition.
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT IN REALIZING THIS EXHIBITION
IN COOPERATION WITH
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Down Under
To mark the end of 2017, which is the year of friendship between Australia and Germany, MOMENTUM holds two concurrent shows with an all-Australian line-up, taking us back to our Australian roots (MOMENTUM having been founded in Sydney before moving to Berlin in 2011).
MOMENTUM’s two exhibitions, taking place in parallel at the Kunstquartier Bethanien, are:
Kate McMillan’s solo show The Past Is Singing In Our Teeth,
and DOWN UNDER featuring three Australian women from the MOMENTUM Collection: Kate McMillan, Janet Laurence, and Shonah Trescott.
CLICK HERE FOR The Past Is Singing In Our Teeth > >
Kate McMillan, Janet Laurence, Shonah Trescott
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
9 – 22 December 2017
OPENING 8 December @ 7-10pm
@ MOMENTUM, Kunstquartier Bethanein
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin 10997
DOWN UNDER brings together three Australian artists from the MOMENTUM Collection – Kate McMillan, Janet Laurence, and Shonah Trescott – all of whom engage in their practice with the impact that humankind has upon our planet, both through mankind’s role in relation to the environment, and through the construction and re-construction of memory, and how this impacts upon our perceptions of past and future. How reliable is memory when the act of re-membering itself is prone to so many reconstructions of the past? How can we foresee the future, when we can’t even agree on a past? How different is our perspective on both our internal and external landscapes when viewed by artists from the other hemisphere?
Kate McMillan’s works from the MOMENTUM Collection, the video diptych Paradise Falls I & II (2011/12), are shown alongside more recent works, such as the three part photo series entitled The Vast Structure of Recollection (2017), in which she explores the relationship between body memory and landscape, and her video installation The Island Is Silent (2017), which she made during her Artist Residency at the National Center of Contemporary Art (NCCA) St. Petersburg, on the island of Kronstadt. Using film, photography and sculpture, McMillan explores how the intense residue of memory can be located through quiet gesture, landscape, and the objects we carry around with us. Exploring internal and external landscapes alike, McMillan’s practice encompasses an open-ended dialogue between abstraction, felt experience and memory; a sort of visual poem. She premiers a new body of work in her solo show The Past is Singing in My Teeth, taking place in parallel to this exhibition.
Paradise Falls I (2011/12), HD Video, 2’49”
Paradise Falls I (2011/12, courtesy of the MOMENTUM Collection) is the philosophical culmination of the time McMillan spent in Switzerland in 2011 as well as her ongoing PhD project into the forgetting of the history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, Western Australia. This significant body of work highlights a shift in her practice, evidenced by a dark and moody palette and the combination of figurative and abstract works that set up an interplay between landscape, memory, forgetting and history. Working across a diverse range of mediums including painting, collage, photography, film and sculpture, this exhibition examines the complex and sustaining residue of these overarching themes. The works cover a range of specific landscapes including Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, the Black Forest in Germany and the winter landscapes of Switzerland. With a focus on island sites and places that exist in isolation, the works attempt to draw parallels between physical landscapes and the psychological landscapes of the artist’s own memories, broader cultural histories and stories.
Paradise Falls II (2011/12), HD Video, 3’28”
Paradise Falls II (2011/12, courtesy of the MOMENTUM Collection) follows a man as he rows towards the silhouette of a craggy island off the coast of Wadjemup/Rottnest. He too appears and disappears from sight, finally lost to the inky black of the ocean. These characters are stand-ins for fractured and partial histories that disappear from focus, yet continue in our collective psyche as dark and haunting traumas. The films are like moving paintings, heavily referencing the romantic tradition of Germanic landscape painting. Unsurprisingly then the work of artists such as Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901) and Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) become distant cousins to McMillan’s oeuvre. The artist acknowledges and even embraces these quotations but she also holds them in a critical eye as part of an enlightenment ideology that has helped us to forget. Through engaging with the viewing process we participate in a re-remembering, acknowledging the shady edges of things, but also baring witness to the beauty of sadness that is contrary to the horrors of forgetting history.
The Island Is Silent (2017), Video Installation, 3’20”, salt, plaster
The Island Is Silent (2017) takes as its starting point the story of Russian Poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) eating her poems to conceal them during the period of Stalinist oppression. McMillan recreates this act using poems she wrote in Pittman’s shorthand, a rapid method of writing used by her mother for taking dictation. She recalls illegible notes left around the family home recording shopping lists, draft letters and other texts she could not decipher as a child. During McMillan’s residency in St Petersburg with NCCA in 2016, she taught herself Pittman’s shorthand. In The Island is Silent we can see McMillan slowly eating her own words as she stands within a cork-lined film set constructed in her studio. The cork room is a reference to Marcel Proust who famously wrote In Search of Lost Time (1913) from a cork lined bedroom in Paris. The cork creates a physical and sound barrier from the outside world. For Akhmatova and McMillan, the body becomes a container of secrets, of lost information – an island of isolation that serves as a barrier to the outside world.
The footage of McMillan eating the poems is then overlayed with interrelated footage, including images of Fort Alexander on the island of Kronstadt, recorded during her NCCA Residency. The fortress island built in the Gulf of Finland by Alexander the Great served to protect St Petersburg from outside invasion. The Island is Silent also incorporates the cavernous structure inside Fort Alexander; the stone and concrete tunnel system forms a giant oesophagus mirrored with found footage of an endoscopy. These cavernous spaces were used by scientists to test for vaccines on animals in the early 20th century. This connects to other Archival film sequences from a Cold War covert germ warfare experiment called ‘Operation Cauldron’ on the Isle of Lewis in Britain in 1952. Removed from their context and presented in their mute state, the reworked footage suggests polarised divisions are unclear and meaningless. The structure of the film is more like a moving collage, refusing a narrative – instead attempting to allude to the sensation of oppression, isolation and of being deep within the body. Conflating the personal and the political, drawing analogies between the present and the past, the work continues McMillan’s interest in seeing connections between all things. The sound, composed by Cat Hope, and titled ‘Shadows’ is played by two instruments who shadow each other throughout the score.
The Vast Structure of Recollection (2017), 3 prints: c-type photograph, torn, digitised and printed onto archival cotton rag
The Vast Structure of Recollection (2017) is an edition of three prints. Each print provides an insight into different aspects of Kate McMillan’s work: a photograph from a site visit to Pontikinisi in Greece for the development of The Moment of Disappearance (2014); a film still of my clenched hand used in two film works, Tuned Darker (2015) and Stones for Dancing, Stones for Dying (2016) – both of which indicate a material and aesthetic shift central to the development of a number of important sculptural works; and a collaged film-still from the work The Island is Silent (2017), also shown here.
Kate McMillan’s solo exhibition, The Past Is Singing In Our Teeth (2017), is concurrently on view at Projecktraum in the Kunstquartier Bethanien, downstairs from the MOMENTUM gallery. The Past Is Singing In Our Teeth extends the notion that artworks, objects and even smells can serve as an umbilical cord back in time, thus functioning as an intermediary into the past – in this case, a fictional past reinvented in the absence of women’s histories. Like a conjuring or a haunting, it seeks to draw a line around the things that sit at the periphery of our vision. In particular, it imagines a lost archive of women’s knowledges, a remembrance of which is triggered through the recovery of sacred objects and landscapes. A mixed-media collage, The Past is Singing in our Teeth reconstructs a labyrinth of lost things through a film-based installation incorporating projected films, photography, sound, performance and sculpture. During the exhibition opening, the sculptures will be ‘performed’ as musical instruments by Perth-based percussionist Louise Devenish based on a score written by Australian composer Cat Hope.
Kate McMillan’s work incorporates a range of media including sculpture, film, sound, installation and photography. McMillan is interested in the linking narratives of forgetting and place, often focusing on the residue of the past. Her artworks thus act as haunting memory-triggers for histories and ideas that are over-looked.
Previous solo exhibitions include 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. Her work has been featured in various museums and biennales, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Trafco 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 and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney.
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. In 2015 McMillan was included in ‘StructuralObject HouseProject27’ curated by Linda Persson at a site in Greenwich, London, alongside other artists such as Bridget Currie and Laure Provoust.
Since 2002 she has also undertaken residencies in London, Tokyo, Basel, Berlin, Sydney, Beijing and Hong Kong. She 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. Her PhD (2014) explored the capacity for Contemporary Art to unforget colonial histories. McMillan lectures on the Masters Program in the Department for Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College, London. She has also guest lectured at The Ruskin, Oxford University. Her PhD is currently being developed into a book called ‘Contemporary Art & Unforgetting: Methodologies of Making in Post-settler Landscapes’, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.
Her work is held in private collections around the world, as well as in the Christoph Merian Collection, Basel; Soho House Collection, London; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Wesfarmers Arts Collection; KPMG; Murdoch University, Australia; University of Western Australia and Curtin University, Australia.
Renowned Australian artist Janet Laurence is best 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 three series are shown here: the Vanishing series, depicting endangered animals on the verge of extinction; Chlorophyll Collapse, a series addressing the extinction of plants endemic to the anthropocene; and Deep Breathing, shot while working with scientists researching corral collapse in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and commissioned for Artists 4 Paris Climate, the exhibition program for COP21, the UN Climate Change Conference which took place in Paris in 2015.
The Other Side Of Nature / Panda (2014), HD video 9’18”
Dingo (2013), HD video 4’9″
Reflecting on the loneliness of the last of a species, The Other Side of Nature / Panda (2014), and Dingo (2013), shot in nature reserves in Chengdu, China and Victoria, Australia, chronicle in intimate proximity the lives of animals that could soon be the last of their kind.
“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.” (Debbie Bird Rose)
Transplant: a Forest for Chlorophyll Collapse (2017), Installation: wood, glass, plexiglass, plants, drawings, 3D printed objects (in cooperation with Leslie Ranzoni)
Transplant: a Forest for Chlorophyll Collapse revisits Janet Laurence’s Inside the Flower installation which she made for IGA Berlin 2017. The IGA work formed an experiential contemporary medicinal garden, immersing the viewer into our historical, spiritual and mythological relationship with psychotropic plants; an invitation to understand medicinal plants in a time of biochemical intelligence, when their roles in nature and history are being reconsidered. The Cellular Vitrines from Inside the Flower are here transplanted into a gallery context to bring renewed life to broken, fallen trees. Are they regeneration cells or medicines, analgesics for our wounded world? The world was once forest. The trees used in this installation are the remnants of the destruction waged this year by Berlin’s autumn storms, felling trees throughout the city. A medicinal garden sprouts out of the detritus of winds and floods symptomatic of global warming and endemic to the anthropocene, posing the the hopeful possibility of healing our planet.
Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), HD video 32’58”
Janet Laurence’s video Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), and accompanying photo series Corral Collapse Homeopathy (2015) were created for the UN Climate Conference,COP21, in Paris. Shot in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – a World Heritage site which is the planet’s largest living, and rapidly dying, structure – this series of works envisions a hospital for the Reef’s threatened corals and other marine species, making visible the otherwise invisible devastation beneath the surface of the sea, and offering hope for the healing of the marine world from the consequences of global warming and human impact. If we can care for marine life in the same way that we care for our own species, there is a chance of deflecting environmental catastrophe. Laurence’s work is an emergency response: a hospital for the Reef in this time of ecological crisis, intended to aid survival and effect transformation.
Corral Collapse Homeopathy No. 8 (2015), series of 10 photo
Janet Laurence 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 Corral Collapse Homeopathy, both shown in this exhibition. Further selected recent international projects and exhibitions include: Matter of the Masters, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017-18); Lost Habitats, Nautilus Exhibition, Oldenburger, Germany (2017); Warning Shot, Topography of Art, Paris (2017); Moving Plants, Rønnebæksholm, Denmark (2017); Force of Nature, The Art Pavilion, curated by James Putnam, London (2017); 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); AUFTRAG LANDSCHAFT, Schloss Biesdorf, Berlin (2017); The Pleasure of Love, October Salon, curated by David Elliot, Belgrade (2016); H2O Water Bar, Paddington Water Reservoir, Sydney (2016); Deep Breathing (Resuscitation for the Reef), Australian Museum, Sydney (2016); Cuenco Bienal, Cuenco, 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, 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, and at the Hanse-WissenschaftKolleg (HWK), Germany (2016-2017).
Shonah Trescott is an award winning Australian artist, known for her work centering around mankind’s relationship with the natural world. Her work focuses on how humans create, interact with and impact upon the material and cultural landscapes we inhabit. The text-based works shown in this exhibition, Ode to Paris (2017) and Kyoto Protocol (2014) both take as their starting points two documents which are the most crucial international agreements designed to mitigate climate change.
Ode to Paris (2017), print on paper
Shonah Trescott’s Ode to Paris (2017, courtesy of the MOMENTUM Collection) is a surreal poem created in the ‘cut-up’ method devised by avant-garde Dadaist Tristan Tzara in How To Make a Dadaist Poem (1920):
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
Using this method Shonah Trescott created Ode to Paris after Donald Trump announced in the ‘Rose Garden’ in July 2017 that the USA would withdraw from the Paris agreement, reached at the UN Conference on Climate Change, COP21. The entire ‘Paris Agreement’ document of over 7,500 words becomes a red cloud as a reference to the rose garden, a narrative lost in a rambling and incoherent stream of ‘alternate facts’. Created from the very document which aimed to unify the world in setting a target to keep global mean temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, the very meaning of the agreement becomes no longer legible, and by the nature of chance even describes such antipodal sentences to the intent of the agreement. All at once this word cloud could be read both as a sobering manifesto, an incomprehensible warning of the gravity of the ‘business as usual’ road ahead, while simultaneously ridiculing a president who insists with child-like defiance that the USA stands alone as the only non signatory to the Paris Agreement.
Kyoto Protocol (2014), silkscreen on paper x 24
Also shown here is an earlier work, Kyoto Protocol (2014, courtesy of Gallery Eigen+Art), resulting from Shonah Trescott’s participation in a scientific expedition to the Arctic. In 2012 Shonah was invited by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research as Artist in Residence in the high Arctic, where she lived and worked with the scientific community at the German/ French AWIPEV Koldeway Station, Ny-Alesund, Svalbard. Probing the meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory, here in the most northerly settlement of the world she observed the ecological and human impact caused by anthropogenic environmental negligence and climate disruption. Shonah took the approach of a true artistic expedition to record and to document her concerns with the landscape; a process she sees as relating human culture and function to its surroundings. Diverging from her usual practice of painting, Shonah’s Arctic experience caused her to explore the mediums of photography, printmaking, and video, as she archived and captured the dark and light side of the high Arctic.
Probing the meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory, Shonah observed the ecological and human impact caused by anthropogenic environmental negligence and climate disruption. Questioning the current lack of international protection of the Arctic environment, Shonah began looking at environmental treaties alongside the past and current exploitation of the land taking place in the Arctic region. Using the Kyoto Protocol (an international Protocol aimed at collaboration between nations to curb emissions) as a canvas to comment on our society’s addiction to fossil fuels, we see the evident shock she felt on seeing and experiencing first-hand the aggressive and continued exploitation of the Arctic environment through mining for coal and other minerals. These existing industrial processes which obliterate the intended impact of the Kyoto Protocol are highlighted in Shonah’s work Kyoto Protocol (2012), where she uses carbon to address the damage it continues to effect on the environment. In a layered practice filtered through multiple studies and techniques ranging from ink blots, mono-prints, photocopies and then silkscreen reproductions, Shonah addresses, through the idea of the carbon copy, our heavy (man made) carbon footprints. But these silk screen prints also hold a personal story which harks back to the landscapes of Shonah’s childhood in a town nestled in a valley in NSW Australia which is one of the largest coal mining areas in the country. It is her experience and memory of chimney stacks and scarred landscapes which re-occur in these prints. Here she plays with the idea of the reproduction and repetition of transforming something banal into something inherent and familiar, blurring the line between beauty of atmosphere and destruction of vistas. The familiar forms, smells, plumes and silhouettes of black carbon she found in the Arctic was, as she states, ‘is a testament which is all too close to home’. This screen print edition is a timely reminder of this international protocol which is presently subject for re-evaluation.
Shonah Trescott (b. 1982) is an Australian artist based between New York City and Berlin. She graduated from the National Art School, Sydney, Australia in 2005 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in painting. She has been the recipient of many awards and residencies including ‘La Cite Internationale Des Arts’ residency Paris, the ‘Leipzig International Arts Program’ Leipzig and the Martin Bequest Traveling Art scholarship. In 2011 she was an artist fellow of the ‘Hanse- Wissenschaftskolleg for Advanced Study’ ‘Arts in Progress Program’ and in 2012 she was the first artist of the residency project ‘Expedition Kunst und Wissenschaft’, a collaboration between the HWK and the AWI (‘Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research’) where she spent one month in Svalbard at the ‘AWIPEV Koldeway Station’. Her work is held in public and private collections in Germany, Australia, USA, Puerto Rico, and Japan. She exhibits with Eigen+Art Germany, Ando Gallery Tokyo and Dominick Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
The Past is Singing in our Teeth
To mark the end of 2017, which is the year of friendship between Australia and Germany, MOMENTUM holds two concurrent shows with an all-Australian line-up, taking us back to our Australian roots (MOMENTUM having been founded in Sydney before moving to Berlin in 2011).
MOMENTUM’s two exhibitions, taking place in parallel at the Kunstquartier Bethanien, are:
Kate McMillan’s solo show The Past Is Singing In Our Teeth,
and DOWN UNDER featuring three Australian women from the MOMENTUM Collection: Kate McMillan, Janet Laurence, and Shonah Trescott.
The Past is Singing in Our Teeth
9 – 22 December 2017
OPENING: 8 December @ 7-10pm
PERFORMANCE: 8 December @ 8-8:30pm
Percussionist Louise Devenish performing a composition by Cat Hope
“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object…” (Proust 1922: 45)
“When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.” (Richard Martin, 20 Responses to The Past is Singing in Our Teeth, quoting Stephen Grosz)
The Past is Singing in our Teeth extends the notion that artworks, objects and even smells can serve as an umbilical cord back in time, thus functioning as an intermediary into the past – in this case, a fictional past reinvented in the absence of women’s histories. A mixed-media collage, The Past is Singing in our Teeth reconstructs a labyrinth of lost things through a film-based installation incorporating projected films, photography, sound, performance and sculpture. Like a conjuring or a haunting, it seeks to draw a line around the things that sit at the periphery of our vision. In particular, it imagines a lost archive of women’s knowledges, a remembrance of which is triggered through the recovery of sacred objects and landscapes.
Filmed in three UK locations – the Welsh Borders, the Kent coast and a Hampshire lake, as well as film sets (memory rooms) constructed in the artist’s studio, the exhibition traces the journey of a young girl as she rediscovers a heritage of knowledge and power. The work stitches together recreations of memories, combined with their physical remainders in the present day – objects, ephemera, locations and sounds. The films are inter-dispersed with photographs, spoken word and poetry, attempting to articulate the way memory inflects and informs the present, not as a series of linear and knowable narratives, but as constantly changing, ambiguous, beautiful and haunting residue.
These filmic spaces become points of access into a world that is somewhat disjointed from language, a world that is felt and internalised, carried in the body, played out and recreated in present day events. A central mechanism in this work is the creation of a series of sculptural objects that slip in and out of roles – functioning at once as props, as sculptures, and as musical instruments that form the basis for the film score: a ‘spell making’ dress befit with numerous pockets, that house sculptures / percussion objects / relics; a silver necklace decorated with children’s teeth; percussion stands for various sculptures and percussion objects; shorthand poems; silk fabrics with film stills printed on them which act as veils and barriers throughout the installation. Many of these objects will be ‘performed’ as the score is restaged with percussionists in a live performance during the opening.
The Past is Singing in our Teeth plays with ideas include the repeating of history, the presence of linked signs, archetypes, place and the objects we carry alongside us throughout our lives. The interplay between what is lost and what remains, the repetition of certain behaviours, the seeking out of certain systems and themes become the visual language of the work. So, whilst the impetus for the work begins with the artist’s own biographical engagement with time and memory, the concepts expand outwards, inviting viewers to connect to the work through their own experiences and ideas. The work is quiet, refusing monumentality – instead framing a precarious and fragile movement through the world. Like a psychoanalytic investigation, the construction of the work becomes a tenuous relationship between the real and the unreal, what is known and what is not.
ARTIST BIOS
Kate McMillan
Kate McMillan’s work incorporates a range of media including sculpture, film, sound, installation and photography. McMillan is interested in the linking narratives of forgetting and place, often focusing on the residue of the past. Her artworks thus act as haunting memory-triggers for histories and ideas that are over-looked. Prior to this exhibition ‘The Past is Singing in Our Teeth, previous solo exhibitions include ‘Songs for Dancing, Songs for Dying’ at Castor Projects in London in 2016.
In October 2017 her work will be on exhibition during Frieze Week in London as a finalist in the Celeste Prize curated by Fatos Üstek. In July 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 July 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, curated by Kate Bryan, British art historian and global head of collections at Soho House.
In April 2016 McMillan took part in ‘Acentered: Reterritorised Network of European and Chinese Moving Image’ during Art Basel Hong Kong, presented by the Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative, Acentered was part of the Crowdfunding Lab and curated by Videotage. In June 2015 McMillan was included in ‘StructuralObject HouseProject27’ curated by Linda Persson at a site in Greenwich, London, alongside other artists such as Bridget Currie and Laure Provoust. In April 2015 McMillan presented an exhibition of small sculptures and experimental films at Moana Project Space in Perth, Australia entitled ‘Anxious Objects’. In November 2014 Kate staged a project three years in development with Performance Space in Sydney that was presented at Carriageworks, entitled ‘The Moment of Disappearance’, curated by Bec Dean. The five channel film and installation included a new sound work composed by Cat Hope and recorded with the London Improvisers Orchestra.Previous solo exhibitions include ‘The Potter’s Field’, 2014, ACME Project Space, London; ‘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 has been featured in various museums and biennales, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Trafco 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 and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney.
Since 2002 she has undertaken residencies in Russia, London, Tokyo, Switzerland, Berlin, Sydney, China and Hong Kong. McMillan has been the recipient of numerous grants including more recently an International Development Grant from the British Council and Arts Council England; and in 2015 a New Work Grant from the Australia Council, which she also received in 2011 and 2009. In 2013 McMillan was awarded a Fellowship from the Department of Culture and the Arts (Western Australia) and a Mid-Career Fellowship in 2008.She has resided on the Board of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) based in Sydney and has worked as a Peer and an Advisor for the Australia Council for the Arts. Her PhD (2014) explored the capacity for Contemporary Art to unforget colonial histories. McMillan is a part-time Teaching Fellow at King’s College, London where she lectures on the Masters Program in the Department for Culture, Media and Creative Industries.
She is also an External Examiner for Brighton University, UK and has guest lectured at The Ruskin, Oxford University. McMillan has taught at Open University via Curtin University, Australia; Coventry University and the University of Creative Arts, Farnham. Her PhD is currently being developed into a book called ‘Contemporary Art & Unforgetting: Methodologies of Making in Post-settler Landscapes’, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. She is also undertaking research into gender equality in the contemporary art world, which will also be published in 2018.Her work is held in private collections around the world, as well as in the Christoph Merian Collection, Basel; Soho House Collection, London; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Wesfarmers Arts Collection; KPMG; Murdoch University, Australia; University of Western Australia and Curtin University, Australia.
Cat Hope’s music is conceptually driven, using mostly graphic scores, acoustic /electronic combinations and new score-reading technologies. It often features aleatoric elements, drone, noise, glissandi and an ongoing fascination with low frequency sound. Her composed music ranges from works for laptop duet to orchestra, with a focus on chamber works, and in 2013 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to develop her work, as well as fellowships at the Civitella Ranieri (Italy) and the Visby International Composers Residency (Sweden). Her practice explores the physicality of sound in different media, and has been discussed in books such as Loading the Silence (Kouvaris, 2013), Women of Note (Appleby, 2012), Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett, 2011) as well as periodicals such as The Wire, Limelight, and Neu Zeitschrift Fur Musik Shaft.
Her works have been recorded for Australian, German and Austrian national radio, and her work has been awarded a range of prizes including the APRA|AMC Award for Excellence in Experimental Music in 2011, and the Peggy Glanville Hicks composer residency in 2014. She has founded a number of groups, most recently the Decibel new music ensemble, the noise improv duo Candied Limbs, and the Abe Sada and Australian Bass Orchestra bass projects. She has also founded and written pop songs for Gata Negra (1999-2006).Cat Hope is currently Professor of Music at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia where she is Head of the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music.
Reviews of Cat Hope:
“one of the most important voices of modern Australian music” Thomas Meyer, JazzNMore, 2017.
“a superstar of Australian new music” Alex Turley, Realtime133, 2016
“Intense and dramatic” Chris Reid, Realtime, 2017
“highly successful musical innovation” Chris Reid, Realtime, 2017
“… of the five works on the program, composer Cat Hope was the most successful…she shows that “new music” can be both accessible and relevant.” Joephine Giles, Aussie Theatre, July 2012.
“.. work of great psychological and theatrical impact” Chris Reid, Realtime, 2011.
Louise Devenish is a Perth-based percussionist whose practice incorporates performance, directing, research and education. Her work with contemporary, world and interdisciplinary ensembles includes co-directing the percussion duo The Sound Collectors, directing Piñata Percussion, percussing for electro-acoustic sextet Decibel and curating the annual Day of Percussion, a full-day event exploring percussion via performances and workshops. Louise works regularly with Speak Percussion (Vic) as a percussionist and contributor to Sounds Unheard. She has also performed with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, Synergy Percussion (NSW), Clocked Out Duo (Qld), redfishbluefish (USA) and was a core
member of Tetrafide Percussion (2004- 2010). Louise has performed throughout Australia, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Vietnam. Highlights have included performances at the Nagoya and Shanghai World Expos, Percussive Arts Society International Convention (USA), Ojai Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, Melbourne Festival, Tongyeong International Music Festival, and more. An advocate of Australian music, Louise has commissioned over 40 percussion works and has recently completed a Doctor of Musical Arts degree researching the development of Australian contemporary percussion music, which culminated in the show Australian Music for One Percussionist. In 2012 she studied at the University of California San Diego with Steven Schick. Louise is Head of Percussion at the University of Western Australia School of Music, where she also teaches world music and musicology, and she is also a lecturer for the acting and music departments at WA Academy of Performing Arts. Her research is published in Musicology Australia, Resonate, Percussive Notes and PERCUSscene.
With thanks for the generous support in realizing this exhibition:
OPENING PHOTOS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
PERFORMANCE VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
Landscapes of Loss
Landscapes of Loss
The Exhibition for the UN Climate Change Conference, COP23
3 – 5 November in Berlin // 6 – 17 November in Bonn
An Initiative of the Ministry of Environment, Berlin > >
Landscapes of Loss
The Exhibition for the UN Climate Change Conference, COP23
Featuring:
Andreas Blank, Stefano Cagol, Nezaket Ekici & Shahar Marcus, Miru Kim,
Janet Laurence, Reifenberg, Stefan Rinck, Erwin Wurm, Shingo Yoshida
Curated by Constanze Kleiner & Rachel Rits-Volloch
3 – 5 November 2017
Stresemannstraße 128 – 130, 10117 Berlin
6 – 17 November 2017
The video works from this exhibition will also be shown at COP23
for the duration of the UN Climate Change Conference:
@ UNFCCC Secretariat, Bonn
Platz der Vereinten Nationen 1
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), adopted 25 years ago, this year holds the 23rd World Climate Conference in Germany under the presidency of the Fiji Islands. Diplomats, politicians and representatives of civil society from all over the world meet in Bonn on 6-17 November 2017 to reach the target set by the Paris Climate Change Agreement at COP21 in 2015: to limit global warming to below two degrees Celsius and to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. The World Climate Conference in Bonn will be the largest intergovernmental conference ever held in Germany. Up to 25,000 participants from 197 nations around the world, as well as around 500 non-governmental organizations and more than 1,000 journalists are expected. In this context, we are proud to present Landscapes of Loss in Berlin and Bonn for the 23rd World Climate Conference.
Landscapes of Loss at Berlin’s Ministry of Environment, is the exhibition for the UN Climate Change Conference, COP23, bringing together ten international artists with strong links to Berlin, who, each in their own way, address mankind’s role in relation to the environment. Through video, photography, and sculpture, this exhibition is designed as an antidote to the hyper-immediacy of the lives we live. Landscapes of Loss invites us to disengage from our phones, to stop tweeting and messaging, to switch off the data stream, to opt out of the constant barrage of the now and immerse ourselves in our planet – from the Arctic tundra of Siberia, to the deserts of the Middle East, and the jungles and seas of the Antipodes – while we still can. As the world’s climate change experts convene in Bonn in mid-November for COP23, Landscapes of Loss creates a space of contemplation and time for reflection upon the role we all play in halting the disastrous deterioration of our planet’s climate. It is not only at the governmental level that drastic changes must be made to mitigate the human impact on the environment. The damage already done will be healed through a transformation of the attitudes, expectations, and actions of every one of us. Yet this is a race against time; decisions implemented now will take years to show results. In this age of instant gratification, we need to re-learn how to think in the long-term. Landscapes of Loss asks us to stop and take the time to experience our planet at its most fragile; abandon the urgency of the now to reconnect with the rhythms and needs of the natural world.
From endangered species to the deterioration of the Great Barrier Reef, Australian artist Janet Laurence confronts us with the beauty and loneliness of creatures that could soon be the last of their kind. With the works of German sculptors Andreas Blank and Stefan Rinck, we turn from the ephemeral landscape and its vanishing creatures to the solid permanence of stone. Whether ironically recreating the detritus of our planet or populating it with totems of an alternative mythology, both artists work consciously with stone as a material reflecting the very substance of time; in its strata are recorded the ages of the planet. Berlin-based Israeli artist Reifenberg also addresses the detritus polluting our environment, working throughout his practice with plastic bags recycled into the medium of his art. Italian artist Stefano Cagol and Japanese artist Shingo Yoshida each ventured on long journeys into the Arctic to record mankind’s impact upon nature at its most extreme, and at its most threatened from the impacts of climate change; from Cagol’s solitary sojourn in the Norwegian Arctic Circle, to Yoshida’s documentation of communities surviving outside of time, straddling the International Date Line in the Siberian Arctic Circle. Out of the frozen north we visit the burning sands of Israel’s Negev Desert with Turkish/German artist Nezaket Ekici and Israeli artist Shahar Marcus. In this actual and political hotbed, time is running out, and Muslim and Jew alike are turned into human sand-clocks measuring how quickly we are getting nowhere with solutions for political and environmental stability. Likewise, Korean/American artist Miru Kim engages with the desert in Jordan’s Wadi Rum. In positioning the fragility of her own body within the drama of this natural landscape, she succeeds in highlighting the fragility of the landscape itself. Austrian artist Erwin Wurm brings us out of the jungles and seas, the Arctic wastes, and the scorching deserts, back into the city. Our urban landscape is an environment changing as rapidly as our natural one. In confronting through absurdity our place in the urban landscape, the humor inherent to these scenarios gives us hope that humanity will find a way to fit into all the world’s landscapes, however fragile the balance.
ARTISTS AND WORKS
This exhibition ranges from the ephemeral landscape and its vanishing creatures, to the solid permanence of stone. 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 Untitled (2010) Andreas Blank fashions out of quartz a perfect replica of a plastic bag, turning his art to sculpting the detritus of our planet, recreating in timeless stone the all too temporary objects of the day-to-day. Untitled (2010) is on loan for this exhibition from the Collection of the Ministry of the Environment.
Landscape Metaphor (2014), sculpture, quartz
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. Andreas Blank‘s stone encarved trompe l’oeils seem casual at first sight. However, his arrangements are precisely staged and after closer inspection one discovers that light bulbs, transport boxes and plastic bags are made of marble, alabaster or sandstone. 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 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 the seemingly casual character of the mundane and wasteful. Questioning the obvious and transforms traditional ideals and values, the geographical and cultural identity of the stone and the memorial function of stone-sculpture in general subvert our usually impermanent relation to the objects we use.
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. The artist 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.
Evoke Provoke [the border] (2011), HD video 12’30”
Stefano Cagol (Trento, 1969) 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.
Turkish/German artist Nezaket Ekici and Israeli artist Shahar Marcus together address geopolitical and environmental forces through the medium of performance in their video Sandclock (2012). Shot in the burning sands of Israel’s Negev Desert, their performance ironically confronts human endurance with the extremes of nature and culture. In this actual and political hotbed, time is running out, and Muslim and Jew alike are turned into human sand-clocks measuring how quickly we are getting nowhere with 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 seven video works together: Salt Dinner, Sand Clock, Floating Ourselves, Clean Coal, Fossils, Fields of Breath and Lublin Beach, all concentrating on the Ancient Greek aphorism γνῶθι σεαυτὸν: know thyself.
Sandclock (2012), HD video 5’7″
Nezaket Ekici was born in 1970 in Kırşehir, Turkey, and lives and works between Berlin and Stuttgart. She 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 Resedency Programs of the German Aacademy 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; Gabriele Münter Preis, Akademie der Künste, Berlin & Frauenmuseum, Bonn, 2017.
Shahar Marcus was born 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel, and lives and works in Tel Aviv. He studied Linguistics at the University of Tel Aviv (1993–1997), and continued his studies for an M.A. in History of Art (1999–2004) at the University of Tel Aviv. Selected solo exhibitions include: Going, Going Gone, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa (2015); All is Gold, The Municipal Gallery, Rehovot (2014); Solo project at Threshold Gallery, India Art Fair, New Delhi (2013); 1,2,3 Herring, MoCA Hiroshima, Hiroshima (2012); The Curator, The Petach Tikva Museum of Art; The Memorial Employee, Dana Art Gallery, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai (2011); Bread & Bunker, Mediations Biennale, Poznań (2010).
Korean/American artist Miru Kim, in her Camel’s Way series (2012), immerses herself in the world’s deserts for over two years. The Camel’s Way follows her journey to deserts around the world, including the Arabian Desert, the Sahara in Mali, Morocco, and Egypt, the Thar in India, and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, where she lived with desert nomads, slept in caves, and photographed herself with camels. In the work shown in this exhibition, the female nude, an archetype since the dawn of western art history, is transposed to the sands and mountains in a 3-week journey through Jordan’s Wadi Rum Desert. In positioning the fragility of her own body within the drama of this natural landscape, Miru Kim succeeds in highlighting the fragility of the landscape itself.
Wadi Rum, Jordan, Arabian Desert 3 from the The Camel’s Way series (2012), photograph
Miru Kim was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts in 1981, but was raised in Seoul, Korea. She moved to New York in 1999 to attend Columbia University, and in 2006 she received an MFA in painting from the Pratt Institute. Miru Kim is a New York-based artist and explorer. Her first series, Naked City Spleen is based on her exploration of urban ruins such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, sewers, catacombs, factories, hospitals, and shipyards. Her next series, The Pig That Therefore I am juxtaposes her skin against the pig’s skin in industrial hog farms to explore the changing relationship between humans and animals. Currently she is working on a book about her body of work, The Camel’s Way.Miru’s work has been featured in many international publications, and is held in public collections including: the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Hanmi Photography Museum; Leeum Samsung Museum of Art; Borusan Contemporary, Turkey; and the Addison Gallery of American Art.
SHINGO YOSHIDA
Japanese artist Shingo Yoshida ventured on a long journey into the Arctic to record mankind’s impact upon nature at its most extreme. Yoshida’s journey in his film The End of Day and Beginning of the World (2015) took him to Siberia, to the point where the Arctic Circle crosses the 180th Meridian, the basis for the International Date Line separating two consecutive calendar days. Inspired by local Chukchi folklore and customs, this film is a journey into a place where nature rules, and mankind clings to the traditions of their ancestors in order to survive. Straddling the border between two days, it is a place of strong mythologies and magical landscapes; an environment of extremes which defies man-made borders and mankind’s influence, yet is still perilously close to destruction from climate change.
The End of Day Beginning of the World (2015), 4K Video 22’8″
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. In his photo series Journey to the Center of the Earth, Yoshida travels to Iceland to envision his own reinterpretation of Jules Verne’s eponymous book.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (2014), photograph
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.
Of the ten artists in this exhibition, renowned Australian artist Janet Laurence is most 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, shot while working with scientists researching corral collapse in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and commissioned for Artists 4 Paris Climate, the exhibition program for COP21, the UN Climate Change Conference in 2015.
The Other Side Of Nature / Panda (2014), HD video 9’18”
Dingo (2013), HD video 4’9″
Reflecting on the loneliness of the last of a species, The Other Side of Nature / Panda (2014), and Dingo (2013), shot in nature reserves in Chengdu, China and Victoria, Australia, chronicle in intimate proximity the lives of animals that could soon be the last of their kind.
“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.” (Debbie Bird Rose)
Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), HD video 32’58”
Janet Laurence’s video Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), and accompanying photo series Corral Collapse Homeopathy (2015) were created for the UN Climate Conference,COP21, in Paris. Shot in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – a World Heritage site which is the planet’s largest living, and rapidly dying, structure – this series of works envisions a hospital for the Reef’s threatened corals and other marine species, making visible the otherwise invisible devastation beneath the surface of the sea, and offering hope for the healing of the marine world from the consequences of global warming and human impact. If we can care for marine life in the same way that we care for our own species, there is a chance of deflecting environmental catastrophe. Laurence’s work is an emergency response: a hospital for the Reef in this time of ecological crisis, intended to aid survival and effect transformation.
Corral Collapse Homeopathy No. 8 (2015), series of 10 photo
Janet Laurence 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 Corral 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); Cuenco Bienal, Cuenco, 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.
Berlin-based Israeli artist Reifenberg addresses the detritus polluting our environment, working throughout his practice with plastic bags recycled into the medium of his art. In Oil Spill 12.10 (2010) he fashions a lightbox recreating the satellite image of an oil spill; ironically using the petroleum-based material of the ubiquitous plastic bag to depict one of the many man-made catastrophes to devastate our planet. In using the trash of consumerist excess and a pollutant of our environment as the material of his artworks, Reifenberg’s works live from the inner tension between commodity fetishism and worthlessness, the world of consumerism and decay, colourful splendor and environmental destruction. And in making Oil Spill 12.10 into a lightbox, Reifenberg adds the tension between the sacred and profane; creating out of trash the likeness of a stained glass window, only to depict demise of our environment in its mosaic of colours.
Oil Spill (2010/2017), lightbox
Reifenberg was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1960 and studied Philosophy of Aesthetics at Gideon Ofrat in Tel Aviv. Reifenberg left his homeland during the Lebanon War in 1982, and since 1988 he has lived and worked in Berlin. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including: Museo Metropolitano, Lima, Peru (2015); Stiftung Zollverein, Essen (2014); dotLand, Peninsula, Berlin (2014); Musraramix Festival, Jerusalem (2014); Natura Naturata, WiE Gallery, Berlin (2014); Conjunction, Greenhous, Berlin (2014); Capilla del Arte UDLAP, Mexico (2014); Marta Traba, Sao Paulo (2013); Pool, MUDAC, Lausanne (2013); Memory of Present, coup de des, Berlin (2012); Green Bag – Movement, Nachahmung Empfohlen!, Iberia Center, Peking (2012)
German artist Stefan Rinck is a sculptor working exclusively with the solid permanence of stone. Conscious of the timelessness of his medium, Stefan Rinck creates creatures reminiscent of a bygone age of totems and effigies. In the series of five sculptures shown in this exhibition – Die Streichwürstin (2017), Chiaroscuro (2014), Gibbons don’t have good press (2014), Roo (2013), and Unicorn (2009) – Stefan Rinck builds an alternative mythology, pitting man-made time against the timelessness of imagination, populating our world with eternal creatures of stone able to withstand any extinction.
Gibbons Don’t Have Good Press (2014), sculpture, sandstone
Stefan Rinck was born in 1973 in Homburg/Saar, and currently 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. Stefan Rinck has had many gallery and museum exhibitions, including: Sorry We`re Closed (Brussels), Vilma Gold (London) and Patricia Low Contemporary (Gstaad, St. Moritz), de Hallen (Haarlem), Gallery Rüdiger Schöttle (Munich), The Breeder (Athens), Galeria Alegria (Madrid), Cruise&Callas and Klara Wallner Gallery (both in Berlin). He participated in the Busan Biennale in South Korea and at the Vent des Foret in France where he has realized permanent public sculptures.
In this exhibition, celebrated Austrian artist Erwin Wurm brings us out of the jungles and seas, the Arctic wastes, and the scorching deserts, back into the city. Our urban landscape is an environment changing as rapidly as our natural one. The way people have lived upon this planet for millennia in family groups and villages is well on its way to being replaced by the megacity, with millions living and working packed into faceless high-rises. Erwin Wurm’s photo series of one-minute sculptures, Leopoldstadt (2004), confronts through absurdity our place in the urban landscape. The solitary figures posing incongruously in empty streets could be seen as a sign of urban alienation, but the humor inherent to these scenarios gives us hope that humanity will find a way to fit into our landscape, however fragile the balance.
Erwin Wurm came to prominence with his One Minute Sculptures, a project that he began in the late 1980s. In these works, Wurm gives written or drawn instructions to participants that indicate actions or poses to perform with everyday mundane objects. These sculptures are by nature ephemeral, and by incorporating photography and performance into the process, Wurm challenges the formal qualities of the medium as well as the boundaries between performance and daily life, spectator and participant. While in this series he explores the idea of the human body as sculpture, Wurm consistently works within the liminal space between high and low, merging genres to explore what he views as a farcical and invented reality. While Wurm considers humor an important tool in his work, there is always an underlying social critique of contemporary culture.
Leopoldstadt, 07 (2004), one-minute performance photograph
Erwin Wurm was born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur/Styria, Austria, and lives and works in Vienna and Limberg, Austria. He graduated from the University of Graz, Austria, in 1977, and Gestaltungslehre University of Applied Art and the Academy of Fine Art, Vienna in 1982. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Austrian Pavilion, the 54th Biennale of Venice (2017); 21er Haus, Belvedere, Vienna (2017); Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg, Germany (2017); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2017); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil (2017); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2016); Schindler House, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, West Hollywood, CA (2016); Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Thailand (2016); Indianapolis Museum of Art, IL (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, Poland (2013); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2012); and Dallas Contemporary, TX (2012). Select group exhibitions include: Performing for the Camera, Tate Modern, London (2016); Precarious Balance, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch, New Zealand (2016); Desire for Freedom, Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, Poland (2013); HEIMsuchung: Uncanny Spaces in Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2013); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); and Temporary Structures: Performing Architecture in Contemporary Art, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, USA (2011). Wurm’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including Albertina, Vienna; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
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, Rachel Rits-Volloch was Visiting Professor at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, lecturing in the MFA program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” and the PhD program in Artistic Research. Rachel Rits-Volloch is Director of the non-profit global platform for time-based art, MOMENTUM, which she founded in 2010.
Having been founded in Sydney, Australia, as a parallel event to the 17th Biennale of Sydney, in 2011 MOMENTUM moved to Berlin to the thriving Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center. 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, Performance and Education Programs and Archives, and a growing Collection. Since MOMENTUM’s inception in May 2010, Rachel Rits-Volloch has curated or produced over 65 international exhibitions showing works by over 500 artists, in addition to ongoing education programming, artist residencies, and related projects. Rachel Rits-Volloch is currently based in Berlin, Germany.
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, Kleiner began her curatorial career as founder and managing partner of the production company White Cube Berlin, which realized the exhibition project 36x27x10 in Berlin’s former Palast der Republik (2005). When this iconic landmark was torn down, Kleiner founded the Temporary Kunsthalle on the same site. Constanze Kleiner headed the Temporary Kunsthalle as managing partner and was responsible for concept and implementation from 2007 to 2009. From November 2012 until October 2013 she was the first Chief Curator of the newly founded TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland. In 2017 Kleiner founded her peripatetic gallery Schlachthaus Fresh&Fine Art, with an ongoing exhibition program throughout multiple venues in Berlin.
Constanze Kleiner has worked as curator and advisor on many international exhibitons, including: Gregor Schneider, STERBERAUM, National Museum in Szczecin, Poland (2012); Ryszard Wasko, Genesis, TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland (2012); Christian Jankowski, The Eye Of Dubai, National Museum in Szczecin, Poland (2013); THRESHOLDS, MOMENTUM Berlin, Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland (2013); Sanatorium Artist Residency Exchange, MOMENTUM Berlin and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland (2013-2014); WE ALL LOVE ART, Schlachthaus Fresh& Fine Art, Berlin (2017); The Landscape In Us, Schlachthaus Fresh& Fine Art, Berlin (2017); Landscapes of Loss, for the UN Climate Conference COP23, Ministry of Environment, Berlin (2017).
Hole Within the Whole
For Berlin Art Week 2017 MOMENTUM presents:
Hole within the Whole
An interdisciplinary exhibition with installation, animation, and performance by
HOBART HUGHES
8 September – 8 October 2017
OPENING: 8 September @ 7-10pm
PERFORMANCES:
Friday, 8 September @ 8 – 8:30pm
Sunday, 10 September @ 5 – 6pm
MOMENTUM AiR Open Studio
Performance & Artist Talk with Hobart Hughes
10 September @ 5-6pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
ARTIST BIO
Hobart Hughes [aka John Hughes] (b. 1954) is an Australian artist, filmmaker, sculptor, painter, animator, musician and performer, active since the early 1980s. Since 1995, Hobart Hughes has been a lecturer at COFA, the College of Fine Art in Sydney, Australia. Hobart Hughes is Artist-in-Residence at MOMENTUM AiR: 15 August – 16 September 2017.
From 1984 to 1988 Hughes was the co-founder [with Bruce Currie] and performer with the multimedia arts/theatre group Even Orchestra whose events incorporated music, film, puppetry and performance art in a variety of settings. While producing short animated films in both Super 8 and 16mm such as Germ of an Idea [1984] and Crust [1987] and the short drama Public Knowhow [1985] [nominated for an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Short Drama] Hughes also animated and directed music videos including Let’s Cook [1982], Close Again [1983], So Strong [1985] for the band Mental as Anything and for Laughing Clown’s Eternally Yours [1984]. The music video for Let’s Cook was later screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. During the 1990s Hughes produced a number of web projects including A History of Walking [1996] while also producing short films such as Dark Aisle and Because You Can [both 1992] that were screened on SBS Television. Hughes work during the 2000’s continued to explore his interests in sculpture and installation, many works featuring video and performance components such as Epiphany, a video installation at Ivan Doherty Gallery in 2007, and Placed, at Damien Minton Gallery, 2008. Single channel film/video works such as The Wind Calls Your Name [2004] demonstrated Hughes’s ability to carry his trademark concerns into new media. In 2008 his animated short Removed was featured in the exhibition Figuring Landscapes at Tate Modern.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Imprinted, Part 1: Hole Within The Whole
During his Artist Residency at MOMENTUM AiR, Hobart Hughes is developing the first part of a major installation/performance work entitled “Imprinted”. Through performance, sculpture and animation, the work explores an allegorical rift in space-time.
The artist writes: “When the mind disengages from conscious thought, what happens to all the energy that was previously occupied with running a myriad narratives and emotions? For the purposes of this work, I call this energy a wormhole. The structure of the work is a kind of “art collider”, derived from an absence or void in the perception of reality. As unconscious connections form or break apart, awareness can expand around everyday events and bend consciousness so as to imbue space with greater or lesser significance. The work explores how narrative forms and reforms around these ruptures.
The project comprises video, video installation, animation, sculpture, narrative and performance by creating a series of apertures or holes, both physical and metaphoric. I try to create works that are held in a liminal position where contradictory positions, mentalities, narratives or realities may be explored simultaneously. This is not something that I apply to the work, it is inherently part of my perception and method.
Having animation as part of my practice has made me even more acutely aware of the ability to replicate a space while constructing a viewer consciousness. I have always perceived animation as a kind of consciousness mapping, in the sense of ideas mapped into space via sequences on a time molecular level (of the single frame). Animation is by default a reconstruction of space/time through a prism of pattern and context. The term I’d like to use is ‘Speculative Kinematics’”.
– Hobart Hughes
WATCH “Book Worm Hole”:
[fve] https://vimeo.com/238417603 [/fve]
Conciousness
How I make me
You think and I am
But for once I’m doing the talking
I’m you
Literally
but you don’t get it
It’s like the future is remembered and the past is to be discovered
It’s flowing in an unfamiliar direction
So you keep yourself, wrongly, to your thoughts
Your me
And doubt the whole idea
But despite yourself
You dig the hell out of me and that makes for a kind of heaven sometimes
But because you think you’re not me you struggle
I can’t imagine
things
without you
you can’t think
things
without me
If we weren’t made for each other
We’d be beside myself
But sometimes
it’s a core current
like a cartoon Mexican mouse
are my thoughts animating life.
Is that moving drawing alive?
This only happens when we forget
who is why
WATCH HOBART HUGHES’S RESIDENCY RECORD
[fve] https://vimeo.com/235390693 [/fve]
OPENING PHOTOS
Photo Credit: Sara Valcárcel
Hobart Hughes
MOMENTUM AiR
CV – Website
15 August – 16 September 2017
[fve] https://vimeo.com/235390693 [/fve]
For Berlin Art Week 2017 MOMENTUM presents:
Hole Within the Whole
Installation & Performance by Hobart Hughes
8 September – 8 October 2017
OPENING 8 September @ 7-10pm
MOMENTUM AiR Open Studio
Performance & Artist Talk with Hobart Hughes
10 September @ 5-6pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
ARTIST BIO
Hobart Hughes [aka John Hughes] (b. 1954) is an Australian artist, filmmaker, sculptor, painter, animator, musician and performer, active since the early 1980s. Since 1995, Hobart Hughes has been a lecturer at COFA, the College of Fine Art in Sydney, Australia. Hughes’s work is marked by a poetic wistfulness combining gentle humour, poetry and the body in motion.
From 1984 to 1988 Hughes was the co-founder [with Bruce Currie] and performer with the multimedia arts/theatre group Even Orchestra whose events incorporated music, film, puppetry and performance art in a variety of settings. While producing short animated films in both Super 8 and 16mm such as Germ of an Idea [1984] and Crust [1987] and the short drama Public Knowhow [1985] [nominated for an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Short Drama] Hughes also animated and directed music videos including Let’s Cook [1982], Close Again [1983], So Strong [1985] for the band Mental as Anything and for Laughing Clown’s Eternally Yours [1984]. The music video for Let’s Cook was later screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. During the 1990s Hughes produced a number of web projects including A History of Walking [1996] while also producing short films such as Dark Aisle and Because You Can [both 1992] that were screened on SBS Television. Hughes work during the 2000’s continued to explore his interests in sculpture and installation, many works featuring video and performance components such as Epiphany, a video installation at Ivan Doherty Gallery in 2007, and Placed, at Damien Minton Gallery, 2008. Single channel film/video works such as The Wind Calls Your Name [2004] demonstrated Hughes’s ability to carry his trademark concerns into new media. In 2008 his animated short Removed was featured in the exhibition Figuring Landscapes at Tate Modern.
ARTIST STATEMENT – RESIDENCY PROJECT:
Imprinted, Part 1: Hole Within The Whole
During his Residency at MOMENTUM, Hobart Hughes is developing the first part of a major installation/performance work entitled “Imprinted”. Through performance, sculpture and animation, the work explores an allegorical rift in space-time.
The artist writes: “When the mind disengages from conscious thought, what happens to all the energy that was previously occupied with running a myriad narratives and emotions? For the purposes of this work, I call this energy a wormhole. The structure of the work is a kind of “art collider”, derived from an absence or void in the perception of reality. As unconscious connections form or break apart, awareness can expand around everyday events and bend consciousness so as to imbue space with greater or lesser significance. The work explores how narrative forms and reforms around these ruptures.
The project comprises video, video installation, animation, sculpture, narrative and performance by creating a series of apertures or holes, both physical and metaphoric. I try to create works that are held in a liminal position where contradictory positions, mentalities, narratives or realities may be explored simultaneously. This is not something that I apply to the work, it is inherently part of my perception and method.
Having animation as part of my practice has made me even more acutely aware of the ability to replicate a space while constructing a viewer consciousness. I have always perceived animation as a kind of consciousness mapping, in the sense of ideas mapped into space via sequences on a time molecular level (of the single frame). Animation is by default a reconstruction of space/time through a prism of pattern and context. The term I’d like to use is ‘Speculative Kinematics’”.
– Hobart Hughes
Beating the Meat
BEATING THE MEAT
ARTIST TALK with CONCEPTUAL COOKING
With: Nezaket Ekici, Mariana Hahn, Ian Haig, Sarah Lüdemann, and Li Zhenhua
13 July @ 7-10pm
At Momentum, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
"Beating the Meat" Artist Talk and Conceptual Cooking from Momentum Worldwide on Vimeo.
Part of the Exhibition
FLESH on FLESH
7 July – 6 August 2017 @ MOMENTUM Berlin
In Cooperation With
In 2017 with the theme “vs. Meat”, Berlin Food Art Week addresses topics such as human and animal rights, conscious consumption, environmental issues and sustainability. We are many, and as we all must eat, our diet has a huge influence on our environment. How we deal with our nature and animals, the overproduction, food quality, the impact on the planet and its cultures? These are the issues that are brought to the stage, using art and food to bring attention and awareness.
Inverting the vegetarian premise of this edition of Food Art Week, MOMENTUM uses the occasion of our partnership to engage with five artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and our Artist Residency Program (MOMENTUM AiR) who work with meat as an artistic medium, and as an effective commentary upon cultural practices and taboos. Raw meat, the very visceral building block of all animal life, whether in a kitchen or under a surgeon’s knife, is a substance which in some elicits hunger, in others disgust. Indifference is not an option – especially in this exhibition where the artists each in their own way, some gruesome and others humorous, subvert the loaded meanings of meat.
ARTIST’S TALKS VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni and Mizuki Kin
The Intermedial Moment
ARTIST TALK
The Intermedial Moment
Andi & Lance Olsen
in conversation with
Cécile Guédon
Sunday 28 May @ 3 – 4pm
At Momentum, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Part of the Exhibition
There’s No Place Like Time – A Novel You Walk Through
By Andi & Lance Olsen
There’s No Place Like Time is a novel you walk through. It takes the form of a real retrospective of videos dedicated to the career of Alana Olsen, one of America’s most overlooked experimental video artists who never existed. An interplay of videos, texts, objects, and interventions, There’s No Place Like Time forms a multimodal installation that translates Alana’s life (which began as a fictional character in Lance’s novel, Theories of Forgetting [2014], based on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty) into a three-dimensional reality. Andi and Lance Olsen’s collaboration explores the relationship between the visual and the verbal as it redefines the page, novel and gallery space. As well, There’s No Place Like Time thematically investigates the problematics of identity construction and historical knowledge.
CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXHIBITION >>
Andi Olsen is an assemblage, computer-generated collage, and experimental video artist. Her videos have been exhibited in such venues as the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore) & Greenhouse Berlin (Germany), & have screened at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), Revolving Museum (Lowell), & at literary and artistic events in Banff, Cologne, Munich, Paris, Rouen, Szeged, Warsaw, & across the United States. Her art has been exhibited & published around the country & abroad. Her ongoing solo project, Hideous Beauty, is a Cabinet of Wonders composed of short videos, assemblages, & collage texts exploring the idea of monstrosity & the generative possibilities inherent in the processes of decay.
Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative writing. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. He is known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge. In 2015-2016 he was a guest of the D.A.A.D. Berlin Artists Program. In 2013 he served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction Fellow at the American Academy also in Berlin. A Guggenheim and N.E.A. fellowship recipient, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 1996-1998, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he is professor of innovative narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.
Cécile Guédon is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, Department of Comparative Literature (July 2015-June 2018).
She was previously a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Romance Languages and Literatures /Visual and Environmental Studies Departments at Harvard University (August 2014-June 2015) and a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Intermediality at the University of Groningen (Sept. 2012-July 2014). She was awarded her PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies in July 2014 (London Consortium, Birkbeck College, under the supervision of Daniel Albright, Harvard University and Steven Connor, Cambridge University). Prior to this, she has completed an M.A. ès Lettres Modernes (Nanterre-Paris X, 2004, Very High Hons) followed by a DEA in Comparative Literature (La Sorbonne-Paris-IV, 2005, Very High Hons) and an M.A. in European Culture on a Marie Curie Fellowship awarded by the European Commission (UCL, London, 2007, Distinction).
CÉCILE GUÉDON
Her doctoral dissertation is mainly concerned with modernist aesthetics, the notion of gesture and the phenomenon of abstraction across the arts. She has published papers for journals such as the ‘International Journal for the Humanities’ (2007), ‘Quaderni di Synapsis’ (2008), ‘Static’ (2009), and a number of entries in the ‘Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism’ (2013). Various chapters in edited volumes are forthcoming in 2016 (Routledge, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, de Gruyter). Her monograph ‘Abstraction in Motion: A Choreographic Approach to Modernism’ is currently under review (2015).
During the academic year 2009-2010, she has held a Visiting Scholar position at the CRAL (EHESS, Paris) under Georges Didi-Huberman’s supervision; she has then collaborated in 2010-2011 with the International Research Training Group Interart at the Institut für Theater- und Tanzwissenschaft (FU, Berlin) under the supervision of Gabriele Brandstetter–on a DAAD Research Scholarship.
Between 2007 and 2015, she has presented papers at some 35 conferences in the UK, USA, Canada, and Europe; among other prizes she has received three awards for the best paper delivered by a post-graduate student (Harvard, ACLA, 2009; Stanford, SDHS, 2009; Berlin Academy for the Arts and Sciences, 2010).
She is member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed journal Evental Aesthetics (UCLA/University of Southern California).
Emily Geen Kunst Salon
Emily Geen
in conversation with
Maria Kossak
21 June 2017
Emily Geen is a Canadian visual artist, currently based in Victoria BC on Canada’s west coast, completing her two-month Residency at MOMENTUM. During her time at MOMENTUM, Emily’s work has evolved in response to her encounters with the architectural history of Berlin, as well as to the character of its urban (and digital) landscape. Emily has further developed her practice of recording video through panes of semi reflective glass, creating a translucent, spatially contingent layering of imagery. Emily has also revisited her interest in analogue photography by shooting multiple exposure 35mm images of Berlin using a plastic toy camera. The amateur quality of the camera produces soft focus images and unpredictable results. She has been using it to photograph one of the first things she noticed upon arriving in Berlin: the towering exposed firewalls of many apartment buildings. Her interest in these was at first mainly an aesthetic one – she finds these voids of flatness amongst the otherwise richly layered urban landscape to be abrupt phenomenological pauses. Their potential as visual residue of Berlin’s volatile history is very compelling to Emily. In addition to these projects, she has begun implementing processes new to her practice which use Google Street View as a point of departure. It surprised Emily to find that while scrolling along the streets of Berlin on this virtual platform, that many of the homes and businesses are blurred out. Emily is interested in drawing aesthetic and conceptual parallels between the swaths of blurry self-censorship that pepper the streets of Berlin and the blank quality of the exposed firewalls.
Maria Kossak is a visual artist, born in Warsaw, who grew up in Berlin. She studied at the University of Fine Arts (UdK) and earned recognition there for a body of innovative artwork that incorporated analogue and digital techniques. Her academic path included a one-year scholarship at the University of Sydney (2006). She graduated from the UdK in 2008 in the fields of painting, sculpture and photography. Kossak currently lives and works in the Berlin. Maria Kossak’s visual language ranges from figurative to abstract, depending on the individual project. Her methodology incorporates objects of multiple dimensions and combines analogue and digital processes. Traditional and contemporary printing such as lithography, etching, screen-print are mixed with digital imaging on glass, wood or canvas. These hybrid forms of expression are often complemented by painting and the traditionally female ‘crafts’ of textile work and embroidery. Many of Kossak’s works allude to Eastern European iconography, as well as to the canonic Western styles of Art Nouveau and Abstract Expressionism. One of her central themes concerns the historic-cultural qualities of „gold”, and its ambivalent mediation between material power and spiritual transcendence. She explores the persistent human curiosity in the intrinsic substance of gold and its many surrogates, looking to it as an index of a more general system of social values. Maria Kossak’s work is currently featured in the inaugural exhibition, We All Love Art curated by Ryszard Wasko, of MOMENTUM’s partner gallery, Schlachthaus.fresh&fine art, which opened on June 17th.
MORE INFO ON EMILY GEEN RESIDENCY AT MOMENTUM HERE >>
KUNST SALON VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
Flesh on Flesh
For Food Art Week 2017 MOMENTUM presents:
FLESH on FLESH
An Exhibition of Artists
from the MOMENTUM Collection
and Residency Program
Featuring:
Nezaket Ekici, Mariana Hahn, Ian Haig, Sarah Lüdemann, Li Zhenhua
and guest starring Jan Svankmajer
OPENING
6 July 2017 @ 7-10pm
EXHIBITION
7 July – 6 August 2017
ARTIST TALK with CONCEPTUAL COOKING
13 July @ 7-10pm
BEATING THE MEAT
with
Nezaket Ekici, Mariana Hahn, Ian Haig, Sarah Lüdemann, and Li Zhenhua
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE >>
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
In Cooperation With
In 2017 with the theme “vs. Meat”, Berlin Food Art Week addresses topics such as human and animal rights, conscious consumption, environmental issues and sustainability. We are many, and as we all must eat, our diet has a huge influence on our environment. How we deal with our nature and animals, the overproduction, food quality, the impact on the planet and its cultures? These are the issues that are brought to the stage, using art and food to bring attention and awareness.
Inverting the vegetarian premise of this edition of Food Art Week, MOMENTUM uses the occasion of our partnership to engage with five artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and our Artist Residency Program (MOMENTUM AiR) who work with meat as an artistic medium, and as an effective commentary upon cultural practices and taboos. Raw meat, the very visceral building block of all animal life, whether in a kitchen or under a surgeon’s knife, is a substance which in some elicits hunger, in others disgust. Indifference is not an option – especially in this exhibition where the artists each in their own way, some gruesome and others humorous, subvert the loaded meanings of meat.
Please scroll down for detailed descriptions of the artists and their works:
Berlin/Bremen-based German artist Sarah Lüdemann bases her practice on repetition and the act of looking. Her non-narrative video installations and performances can simultaneously take on epic form and repeat a single gesture or action until it looses its original purpose and gains a new, underlying meaning. Lüdemann’s work demands concentration and the willingness to look beyond surfaces, a practice that requires both the artist’s and the viewer’s engagement over time. This extended period of visual reflection and subsequent delayering of identity mirrors the process of psychological examinations of self, social and gender roles, religious beliefs, rituals and modes of perception and (re)presentation. Usually quiet but gently and cunningly persistent, Lüdemann’s works insist on an authorial presence that forcefully and consistently questions power structures within hierarchical systems. Through her works, she examines the nature of communication, language, movement and ideologies.
At the same time conceptual and sensual, her pieces embrace both mind and body, effectively inviting a holistic engagement with dislocated meanings. Lüdemann finished an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins/Byam Shaw in 2011. In 2009 she was selected for an influential residency with Mona Hatoum. She has additionally been awarded the South Square Trust Award and was shortlisted for the Arts & Humanities Research Council BGP Award in 2010. Her work has been exhibited widely and internationally, including at Printed Matter, New York / Goethe Institute Cairo, Egypt / Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin / Hayaka Arti, Istanbul, Turkey / Trafo, Szczecin, Poland / LYON Biennale de la Danse, La lavoir public, Lyon, France / Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden, Germany / HDLU, Zagreb, Croatia / October Salon, Belgrade, Serbia / and multiple shows at Momentum Worldwide.
Schnitzelporno (2012)
Commissioned for MOMENTUM’s first emerging artist series, About Face, held in Berlin (2012) and London, Schnitzelporno is a durational performance-for-video in which an unidentifiable Lüdemann beats a piece of meat for a total of 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.”
Installed as large projection, the sound in Schnitzelporno is overwhelming; each stroke of the tenderizer reverberates strongly and with a deep base that imbues the space, to the extent that it causes physical vibrations. The sound must be played through high quality speakers, either directed into the space, or installed inside a bench so that viewers sitting on it can literally feel the vibrations from below.
Nezaket 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 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.
Born in Kırşehir, Turkey in 1970, Ekici 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. In 2016-17, Nezaket Ekici is a fellow of the prestigious Villa Massimo Residency of the German Academy in Rome. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Stuttgart.
Flesh (no pig, but pork) (2011)
Credits:
Performance Installation since 2011,
originally presented at: Performance Festival, Dani hrvatskog performansa , Varazdin, 5-8.5.2011
Photo by: Edoardo Tomaselli. Camera by: Vedran Hunjek.
Edited by: Branka Pavlovic
16:9 HD, mov/Mp4, Color, Sound 9:35 min.
Duration of the Live Performance: 45 min.
The artist kneels in a pile of pork from freshly slaughtered pigs. 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.
For over 15 years Nezaket Ekici has pursued performative and participatory strategies in her artistic practice. In doing so she consistently faces up to the image of a woman and an artist 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 negligée and yellow rubber gloves to wallow in pork meat, sniffing the forbidden raw flesh.
Ian Haig is an Australian artist who, since 1994, has worked as a Senior Lecturer in Media Art and Expanded Studio Practice at the School of Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). His work has been exhibited in galleries and video/media festivals around the world, including exhibitions at: The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; The Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Artec Biennale – Nagoya, Japan; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Art Museum of China, Beijing; Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden-Rot, Germany. In addition his video work has screened in over 120 Festivals internationally. In 2003 he received a fellowship from the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council and in 2013 he curated the video art show Unco at The Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles.
Ian Haig works across media, from video, sculpture, drawing, technology-based media and installation. Haig’s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning. His body-obsessed themes can be seen throughout a large body of work over the last twenty years. Previous works have looked to the contemporary media sphere and its relationship to the visceral body, the degenerative aspects of pervasive new technologies, to cultural forms of fanaticism and cults, to ideas of attraction and repulsion, body horror, the defamiliarisation of the human body and cartoon abjection.
IAN HAIG
Website
The mutating conditions of the body overwhelm our screens; from television, cinema, the mobile phone and computer screen. The materiality of the body is ever present on screen – the history of Hollywood, is the history of the body – so intimate is our relationship with the screen it can be considered an extension and outgrowth of our own biology. The screen becomes a projection of our desires, obsessions and perversions.
Ian Haig’s recent work has largely focused on the confrontation of the body and its relationship to the contemporary media landscape. Haig works in an interdisciplinary fashion, evolving his practice at times to include sculptural elements in his time-based works, particularly sculptural works of bodily materiality which explore a visceral aesthetic. During his Residency at MOMENTUM, Haig will continue his research on how the video screen and technology can be considered as extensions of our own biology – the body as a screen, and the screen as bodily material – and furthermore, how bodily confrontation can be activated through time-based media. Haig will research, develop, and produce a major new video work exploring visceral simulation of the human body in his multi-screen video work Untitled Syndrome.
Meat Friends on the Internet (2014)
The icon for a blank Facebook profile is re-configured to appear as a head consisting of visceral meat, layers of fat and tissue. This newly imagined Facebook profile is grounded not in the non body of a virtual place marker but the individual profile as bodily materiality.While Facebook results in the over sharing of personal information, such a notion is perversely represented here as the skinned human body – the veneer of our exterior selves broken down and our interiors revealed, left on display within the network of social media.
Organphilia:
A Lover of Organs (2017)
Organphilia depicts a new kind of internal human organ: a mutation that is part liver, colon, heart, kidneys and adrenal glands. Organphilia depicts the impossible fantasy of the internal body. An organ that has new kinds of untapped uses and functions while reconfiguring the bodies’ biology.
Automated Tongues
(Good Taste) (2016)
The work consists of electronically automated tongues: Good taste as a culturally programmed and automated/mechanical response.
Blood Brain Barrier (2015)
The body without a body…The body as parts, broken down, dis-organised and re-assembled. The real body, the abject body, the unreal body.
Human Test Pattern (2015)
The mediated body: New human biology in a state of progress, waiting to begin. The new DNA program will commence shortly.
Fleshify the World: Planet of the Inner Body (2014)
Framed as a series of oversized endoscope or colonoscopy videos – The inner body is represented as an alien planet, unexplored as an unknowable zone of otherness. The inner space of the body as alien terrain.
The inner body is often unseen, off limits and hidden from view: the inverse to the over visibility of our exterior selves. Fleshify the World: Planet of the Inner Body is a work that revels in the strangeness of our messy and wet interiors.
My view of the interior body here is not only alien, but potentially post human, an endoscope onto the future body, that is part human and part something else…
Three video projectors project the work in a space onto 3 different walls, surrounding the viewer in visceral body interiors. Normally endoscopes and colonoscopy videos are used for clinical and diagnostic purposes, however my work explores such terrain for its visceral aesthetic potential. The work is accompanied by a soundtrack.
Skin Freak (2012)
The video screen as a portal to visceral bodily material and matter is played out in Skin Freak. The screen as an extension of our own viscera, a new biological/technological outgrowth of our corporeal bodies. Skin Freak offers a textural exploration of the surface and skin of some kind of creature. Slowly breathing, the skin appears closer to raw exposed meat, opposed to the smooth perfection of the idealized texture of the flesh. In Darwinian terms we are just chunks of meat and we don’t look like evolving anytime soon. A short video excursion into the abject bodily surface of flesh, meat and screen.
Li Zhenhua has been active in the artistic field since 1996, his practice mainly concerning curation, art creation and project management. He is also a professional chef with an ongoing program of food art events. Amongst many other accomplishments, since 2010 he has been the nominator for the Summer Academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee Bern (Switzerland), as well as for The Prix Pictet (Switzerland). He is a member of the international advisory board for the exhibition “Digital Revolution”, at the Barbican Centre, London, in 2014. In 2014 he also co-curated MOMENTUM’s exhibition “PANDAMONIUM: Video Art from Shanghai”. Since 2014, Li Zhenha has been the Film Curator for Art Basel Hong Kong. In 2016, he was the Artistic Director of the “First New New Media Festival” in Guandong, China, and in 2017 he was the Artistic Director of the opening exhibition of the A4 Art Museum in Chengdu, China. Li Zhenhua has edited several artists’ publications, including “Yan Lei: What I Like to Do” (Documenta, 2012), “Hu Jieming: One Hundred Years in One Minute” (2010), “Feng Mengbo: Journey to the West” (2010), and “Yang Fudong: Dawn Mist, Separation Faith” (2009). A collection of his art reviews has been published under the title “Text” in 2013. http://www.bjartlab.com | http://www.msgproduction.com
Us
2 eggs, honey, sugar, oil, soya sauce
dimension variable
2017
Honey, lets have some soya sauce.
Sugar, lets just wait for the sunset.
Its just a morning, another morning, the sunlight is bright, hope no ants will come to us, its ticklish and dirty, hope mouses shall stay away, they shall take us apart, hope birds only sing for us, its a beautiful day.
Goat Head Soup (2009):
This early video work by Mariana Hahn was made while she was a student in London. Having visited the meat market in Covent Garden at dawn, she returns to her studio with the head of goat, which she proceeds to make into an artwork.
BIO
Berlin-based German performance and multi-media artist Mariana Hahn is currently showing in the 57th Venice Biennale collateral event An Ocean Archive. Hahn studied theater at ETI in Berlin and has a degree in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in London (2012). Along with many international exhibitions, following her performance of I Sweat You in MOMENTUM’s emerging artist series About Face (2012), Hahn has twice more exhibited in the gallery: Burn My Love, Burn, which was shown as part of the exhibition Missing Link (2013), and Empress of Sorrow, commissioned and performed during MOMENTUM’s month-long performance series Works on Paper (2013).
One of the great Czech filmmakers, Jan Svankmajer was born in 1934 in Prague where he still lives. He trained at the Institute of Applied Arts from 1950 to 1954 and then at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts (Department of Puppetry). He soon became involved in the Theatre of Masks and the famous Black Theatre, before entering the Laterna Magika Puppet Theatre where he first encountered film. In 1970 he met his wife, the surrealist painter Eva Svankmajerova, and the late Vratislav Effenberger, the leading theoretician of the Czech Surrealist Group, which Svankmajer joined and of which he still remains a member. Svankmajer made his first film in 1964 and for over thirty years has made some of the most memorable and unique animated films ever made, gaining a reputation as one of the world’s foremost animators, and influencing filmmakers from Tim Burton to The Brothers Quay.
His brilliant use of claymation reached its apotheosis with the stunning 1982 film Dimensions of Dialogue. In 1987 Svankmajer completed his first feature film, Alice, a characteristically witty and subversive adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, and with the ensuing feature films Faust, Conspirators of Pleasure, Little Otik, and Lunacy in 2005 Svankmajer has moved further away from his roots in animation towards live-action filmmaking, though his vision remains as strikingly surreal and uncannily inventive as ever. He has also exhibited his drawings, collages and ‘tactile sculptures’, many of which were produced in the mid-1970s, when he was temporarily banned from film-making by the Czech authorities. His films are shown in major museums worldwide, including at the 54th Biennale of Venice.
Meat Love (1989)
A knife chops two slices off a chunk of fresh meat. The first slice, using a nearby spoon as a hand mirror, admires itself. Similar admiration is expressed by the second slice, which slaps the first slice on its ‘rear’, causing it to cry out and retreat coyly behind a tea-towel. The second slice switches on the radio, and persuades its companion to dance ‘cheek to cheek’ to the sound of an old 1920s recording.
One slice jumps into a plate of flour and teasingly ‘splashes’ the other. Soon, the two slices are writhing ecstatically in the flour. Their passion is short-lived, however, as almost immediately afterwards they are skewered and fried.
BEATING THE MEAT ARTIST TALK AND CONCEPTUAL COOKING:
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/237906325 [/fve]
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
OPENING VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
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Cécile Guédon
Cécile Guédon
Curatorial Residency
May 2017
Cécile Guédon is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, Department of Comparative Literature (July 2015-June 2018).
She was previously a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Romance Languages and Literatures /Visual and Environmental Studies Departments at Harvard University (August 2014-June 2015) and a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Intermediality at the University of Groningen (Sept. 2012-July 2014). She was awarded her PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies in July 2014 (London Consortium, Birkbeck College, under the supervision of Daniel Albright, Harvard University and Steven Connor, Cambridge University). Prior to this, she has completed an M.A. ès Lettres Modernes (Nanterre-Paris X, 2004, Very High Hons) followed by a DEA in Comparative Literature (La Sorbonne-Paris-IV, 2005, Very High Hons) and an M.A. in European Culture on a Marie Curie Fellowship awarded by the European Commission (UCL, London, 2007, Distinction).
Her doctoral dissertation is mainly concerned with modernist aesthetics, the notion of gesture and the phenomenon of abstraction across the arts. She has published papers for journals such as the ‘International Journal for the Humanities’ (2007), ‘Quaderni di Synapsis’ (2008), ‘Static’ (2009), and a number of entries in the ‘Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism’ (2013). Various chapters in edited volumes are forthcoming in 2016 (Routledge, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, de Gruyter). Her monograph ‘Abstraction in Motion: A Choreographic Approach to Modernism’ is currently under review (2015).
During the academic year 2009-2010, she has held a Visiting Scholar position at the CRAL (EHESS, Paris) under Georges Didi-Huberman’s supervision; she has then collaborated in 2010-2011 with the International Research Training Group Interart at the Institut für Theater- und Tanzwissenschaft (FU, Berlin) under the supervision of Gabriele Brandstetter–on a DAAD Research Scholarship.
Between 2007 and 2015, she has presented papers at some 35 conferences in the UK, USA, Canada, and Europe; among other prizes she has received three awards for the best paper delivered by a post-graduate student (Harvard, ACLA, 2009; Stanford, SDHS, 2009; Berlin Academy for the Arts and Sciences, 2010).
She is member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed journal Evental Aesthetics (UCLA/University of Southern California).
There’s No Place Like Time
There’s No Place Like Time:
A Novel You Walk Through
A restropective of video artist Alana Olsen
//
A multimodal installation by Andi and Lance Olsen
27 May – 25 June 2017
OPENING:
Saturday 27 May 2017 @ 7 – 10pm
ARTIST TALK:
Sunday 28 May @ 3 – 4pm
The Intermedial Moment: Andi & Lance Olsen in conversation with
Cécile Guédon, Lecturer in Intermediality at the Faculty of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Watch here the video of the talk >>
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
There’s No Place Like Time is a novel you walk through. It takes the form of a real retrospective of videos dedicated to the career of Alana Olsen, one of America’s most overlooked experimental video artists who never existed. An interplay of videos, texts, objects, and interventions, There’s No Place Like Time forms a multimodal installation that translates Alana’s life (which began as a fictional character in Lance’s novel, Theories of Forgetting [2014], based on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty) into a three-dimensional reality. Andi and Lance Olsen’s collaboration explores the relationship between the visual and the verbal as it redefines the page, novel and gallery space. As well, There’s No Place Like Time thematically investigates the problematics of identity construction and historical knowledge.
CLICK FOR MORE INFO: www.zweifelundzweifel.org > >
Andi Olsen is an assemblage, computer-generated collage, and experimental video artist. Her videos have been exhibited in such venues as the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore) & Greenhouse Berlin (Germany), & have screened at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), Revolving Museum (Lowell), & at literary and artistic events in Banff, Cologne, Munich, Paris, Rouen, Szeged, Warsaw, & across the United States. Her art has been exhibited & published around the country & abroad. Her ongoing solo project, Hideous Beauty, is a Cabinet of Wonders composed of short videos, assemblages, & collage texts exploring the idea of monstrosity & the generative possibilities inherent in the processes of decay.
Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative writing. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. He is known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge. In 2015-2016 he was a guest of the D.A.A.D. Berlin Artists Program. In 2013 he served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction Fellow at the American Academy also in Berlin. A Guggenheim and N.E.A. fellowship recipient, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 1996-1998, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he is professor of innovative narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.
ANDI & LANCE OLSEN – ARTIST STATEMENT
There’s No Place Like Time is a three-dimensional “novel” you can walk through. It takes the form of a real retrospective of videos, texts, objects and interventions dedicated to the career of Alana Olsen, one of America’s most overlooked experimental video artists who never existed, who also happens to be Lance’s protagonist from his novel, Theories of Forgetting (2014).
Alana’s experimental short videos (set in Berlin, Jordan, the U.S. Southwest, and elsewhere) span about 40 years: from her first forays into video-making as a child, through her investigations of the form in college, to her fully imagined works as an adult. During her later years, the videos reveal her attempt to explore various modes of innovation — employing a greater and greater use, for example, of text in her undertakings by way of erasures; the deployment of dubbed narratives at odds with the grammar of the visual pieces; and the investigation of words as another kind of image. Alana’s daughter, Aila, an art-critic and conceptual artist living in Berlin, curates the exhibition of her mother’s videos and provides a catalogue, biographical information and plaques describing her mother’s evolving aesthetics/obsessions and how each work fits into her development as an innovative video artist.
This collaborative project grows out of Lance’s novel, Theories of Forgetting, composed of three narratives. The first involves the story of Alana, a middle-aged video artist struggling to complete a short experimental documentary about Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the Great Salt Lake meets remote desert about a 100-mile drive northwest of Salt Lake City in Utah. The second involves the story of Alana’s husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance in Jordan’s Wadi Rum while on a trip there both to remember and to forget in the aftermath of Alana’s unexpected death. The third involves footnotes added to Hugh’s section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic and conceptual artist living in Berlin who discovers her father’s manuscript after his disappearance.
Theories of Forgetting and There’s No Place Like Time partake, then, in a larger project: a conversation with the conventional codex and the relatively recent flourishing of the book-art movement — namely, with works that consciously or unconsciously form a reaction against corporate mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in our digital age.
There’s No Place Like Time, the word “novel” is placed between quotation marks, then, because this project is not embodied in a traditional codex. Rather, it becomes a text one can walk through in a gallery space, and Alana’s character is developed through the videos, objects, plaques, novel and fictional catalogue.
The deep-structure thematics of both Theories of Forgetting and There’s No Place Like Time partake in Robert Smithson’s notion of “entropology,” a neologism the earthwork artist borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss that contains within itself both the words entropy and anthropology. Entropology, Lévi-Strauss writes in World on Wane, “should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of [the] process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms.” For Smithson, entropology embodied “structures in a state of disintegration” — but not, provocatively, in a negative sense, not with a sense of sadness and loss. Rather, for Smithson entropology embodied the astonishing beauty inherent in the process of wearing down, wearing out, undoing, of continuous de-creative metamorphosis at the level, not only of geology and thermodynamics, but also of entire civilizations, and, ultimately, of the individuals living within them — like dying Alana, like forgetting and unforgetting Hugh, like Aila’s increasingly unfurling attempts to make sense of her father’s narrative, like me, like you.
In There’s No Place Like Time, we are interested at the level of character in Alana’s evolution as a human being as evinced through her art — through those short experimental videos she makes over the course of some four decades — and in how her daughter reads/constructs her mother through them, how that reading/construction reveals who Aila is behind the faux-authoritative voice she must by convention adopt in the catalogue and plaques she composes as curator of the exhibition of her mother’s videos. In other words, our supposition is that all writing, whether “critical,” “scientific,” or “creative,” is a form of spiritual autobiography. And to that extent we’re interested as well in how all biographies are, at the end of the day, not about the subject at hand so much as they are autobiographies about the problematics of historical knowledge and the fraught use of the third-person pronoun. We’re interested thematically in the realization such an exhibition invites of the entropologic processes at play within us all at a cellular level; how those processes are so present to us that they have become virtually impossible to see; how our cultures have taught us, by and large, to view them as a kind of subgenre of the horror film when in fact (as Smithson has it) they are simply (and perhaps even wonderfully) documentaries about who we are; in a very real way, after all, as Samuel Beckett maintained, “My mistakes are my life.”
Aesthetically, we’re interested, ultimately, in questions concerning intersemioticity — in the relationship, that is, between the visual and the verbal, in how one might begin to trouble such an easy binary. How does a specific medium (if we think not only of the codex or a website, but also, say, of the grammar of the gallery, as different sorts of media) affect the message it attempts to convey? Or, to put it another way, how do various technologies affect how various arts are expressed and experienced? How does one in 2016 write the contemporary — by our lights the essential task of any artist in any field at any point in history — and how does that writing (in the word’s most encompassing sense) help us re-imagine what a page is, what a novel, a gallery, what a narrative is as we navigate these concepts in a hypermedial format, or as we stroll through them in the shape of a three-dimensional novel? And how do such questions help us to think about what constitutes that always-already troubled and troubling term the experimental here, now?
ABOUT THE WORKS
Dreamlives of Debris
(Date unknown; 22:45.)
Dreamlives of Debris is a retelling of the minotaur myth. In Dreamlives of Debris however, the minotaur isn’t a monster with bull’s head and human’s body, but rather a deformed girl whose parents hide her away in the labyrinth below Knossos She calls herself Debris, and possesses the ability to hear, see, and feel the thoughts, memories, desires, pasts and futures of others throughout history.
This video/sound/text collaboration imagines the labyrinth, not just as a structure, but as a way of knowing, a way of being, an extended and dense metaphor for our current sense of presentness, of always being awash in massive, contradictory, networked, centerless data fields that may lead everywhere and nowhere at once.
Where the Smiling Ends
(1984; 7:20 min.)
Anthropology of loneliness capturing the moment, not when a photograph is taken, but just after, when one returns once again from the public to the private.
[ audio: Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, op. 11 ]
Scarred
(1986; 17:33 min.)
The world continuously writes upon us, reminds us where we’ve been, that that place is real. Children treat their scars like badges of honor.
Lovers treat them like miraculous secrets. Old married couples treat them like familiar road signs. I don’t want to die without any scars, a character in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club declares at one point. There is never any worry of that.
There’s no Place Like Time
(1988; 2:19 min.)
Avant-Pop appropriation & manipulation of one of the most famous
Merrie Melodies cartoons, Duck Amuck, & the existential moment:
the long-distance call, the stutter step, the instant where nothing happens—where Nothing happens—again & again.
[Audio manipulation: Judy Garland’s voice as Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz]
Trace
(1991; 1:42 min.)
(excerpt from damaged film; original length 22 min.; no shot is longer
than 20 frames)
Olsen surreptitiously films performance artist Tehching Hsieh on the streets of New York during his non-performance performance during which he made art, but didn’t exhibit it. She reverses & complicates the
clichéd dynamics of the male gaze by becoming the female voyeur, Hsieh the subject made object, then complicates the complication by adopting the role of visual colonizer, Hsieh the Asian unwittingly colonized, thereby pointing to the fact that we are all complicit in the construction & enactment of unequal & multivalent networks of power. No one is ever innocent.
Self-portrait
(2000)
Enter & you find your vision crammed with people staring at you. Audio is 100% absent. Almost nothing changes while you stand there except
almost imperceptible shifts in postures, facial muscles. You are simply being noted: perceived, briefly marked down, acknowledged, studied, assessed, judged. You sense you areparticipating in one sort of event even as it sneaks up on you that you are actually participating in another.
Denkmal
(2006; 4:33 min.)
1213 photos of the Wannsee Conference Center outside Berlin, where the Final Solution was announced, transformed into a film accompanied
by an undoing of Adolf Eichmann’s testimony during his 1961 trial in Israel.
The aural manipulation consists of the phrases:
Zufriedenheit; das Ergebnis der Wannsee Conference; and zum Ergebnis der Wannsee Conference
[[ there. ]]
(2010; 5:40 min.)
Shot at various music concerts in Berlin, [[ there. ]]celebrates musicians giving themselves over to presence—a being there that paradoxically removes the musician from the seat, the room, the quotidian world in which he or she ostensibly resides. By being fully there, in other words, the player finds him or herself somewhere else.
Theories of Forgetting
(2016; 6 min.)
Olsen’s final film: a montage obsessed with Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, Spiral Jetty, whose incongruous narration recounts the story
of a man standing in front of a video monitor in the Istanbul Modern, popping pills, until that narration is erased.
Family film and Alana’s 1st childhood film
Family footage (1:30 min.)
Alana’s childhood film (56 sec.)
One minute & thirty seconds of family footage my brother found among
my mother’s belongings. Here she is learning you can run across your
front yard with your eyes closed, playing a game with the neighborhood kids, for no reason at all. Here she is learning we don’t have to be anywhere.
Zweifel & Zweifel Galerie
www.zweifelundzweifel.org
Learn more about Alana Olsen at Zweifel & Zweifel Galerie, the first to host a retrospective of her work.
[design by Rotem of qiryat gat]
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
In Process: Amir Fattal and Clark Beaumont
For Berlin Gallery Weekend 2017
MOMENTUM AiR Presents Our New BERLIN & BEYOND Series:
IN PROCESS:
Two Parallel Solo Exhibitions by Amir Fattal & Clark Beaumont
Amir Fattal: Tristan Resurrected
&
Clark Beaumont: The O Zone
21 April – 21 May 2017
OPENING
Friday 21 April @ 6 – 10pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Live Performance: Premiere of The O Zone by Clark Beaumont
Sunday 30 April @ 6 – 7pm
@ Studio 2
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/218154038 [/fve]
The two parallel exhibitions Tristan Resurrected and The O Zone bring together Berlin-based Israeli artist Amir Fattal with the Australian artist duo Clark Beaumont to address the process of artistic production. In Process showcases two new works still in development: Amir Fattal’s Tristan Resurrected, and Clark Beaumont’s The O Zone. In production for over three years, Tristan Resurrected is a work of many parts and iterations, having been publicly screened since 2014 in a variety of versions. To their audiences at the time, each iteration was a completed artwork. And yet the work continues to evolve to this day: re-edited, re-shot, re-imagined. Clark Beaumont are also presenting a new performance piece in a stage somewhere prior to completion. Co-mingling two great issues of our time, Climate Change and Sex, The O Zone is the new work Clark Beaumont have been developing during their Artist Residency at MOMENTUM. Re-writing, rehearsing, re-imagining are also integral steps to their process. But what sparks the moment when these works will finally be finished? How do the artists know when they’re really truly done? These parallel exhibitions delve into the process of production to ask what is a finished artwork? At which point does the process overtake the product? The artists will address these and other questions at the Artist Talk marking the Opening of the exhibitions on 30 April 2017. And The O Zone will be premiered as a live performance on Gallery Weekend, Sunday 30 April at 6-7pm.
Tristan Resurrected
In production for over three years, Amir Fattal’s Tristan Resurrected is a work of many parts and iterations. The first work in Fattal’s Wagner cycle was shown as a live performance in the Kunstquartier Bethanien in 2014, and was later re-staged as a video work From the End to the Beginning, which was shown in MOMENTUM’s exhibition Fragments of Empires in 2014-15. The next part of the cycle, ATARA, was screened at MOMENTUM in 2016, only to be re-shot, re-edited, and re-presented here by the artist in an entirely new version which manifests as a development of all these pieces.
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 and the Palast der Republik. The video follows a ceremony that takes place in the Palace during a moment when one building is being resurrected and another building is transcending into a ghost. It deals with the collective memory of architecture and its symbolic representation in public space. The music is based on the Liebestod song from the opera Tristan and Isolde, sung by Isolde after Tristan’s death. The score was made by copying the last note as the first note and proceeding in this way until a new ‘mirrored’ piece was formed. The live recording of this piece forms the soundtrack to Fattal’s From the End to the Beginning (2014). This recording was then reversed backwards digitally, to become the soundtrack to ATARA, and forming another play on the idea of resurrection.
Amir Fattal (b. in Tel Avivi in 1978) 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 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 problematised by its history.
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 was curator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists.
With thanks to the generous support of:
The O Zone
Developed during their Artist Residency at MOMENTUM (29 Jan – 30 April 2017), Clark Beaumont’s The O Zone unpacks two of the greatest issues of our time – Climate Change, and Sex – simultaneously. Climate Change is a controversial topic that is too big for everyday folks to understand & actively care about for a sustained period of time; our eyes fog over. Yet our planet needs collective action now, so what can we do? What keeps people’s attention? SEX! Sex sells, but sex is mostly only used & discussed in our culture in a one-dimensional way; one that’s objectifying, glossy, patriarchal. The O Zone will playfully weave between the two topics, using each subject to disarm the other, and open up the complex issues and perspectives surrounding both. Clark Beaumont will use these topics to question and analyse ourselves, our behaviour, ethics and values. They will examine the power that emotions have over logic on our brains; how we are hardwired to value short-term over long-term rewards and thinking; and how both of these attributes stop us from being able to see ourselves and our world clearly. The work will mash up written and found text – including facts, estimations, intimate thoughts, and personal stories – as well as organic and austere choreography made in collaboration with Berlin choreographer, Mirjam Soegner. Building on their recent work, also shown in this exhibition, Clark Beaumont use MOMENTUM’s facilities within the historic Kunstquartier Bethanien as a rich resource to experiment, develop and refine their use of theatrical elements within their practice. The O Zone will also be shown at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art (Victoria) group exhibition, Greater Together, later in 2017.
ALSO SHOWN IN THIS EXHIBITION:
Missing One Another (2016)
Excerpts of live performance, performed at Brisbane Festival, 7″
Written, performed, produced, and directed by Clark Beaumont
Choreographer: Grayson Millwood
Sound Composer: Denis Altschul
Script Editor: Alex Brinkworth
Lighting Designer: Alex Brinkworth
Missing One Another is a one hour live performance that takes aim at the greatest obstacle in our quest for authentic connection and mutual understanding – the assumption that we are all on the same page and that we’re experiencing the same thing. Deconstructing previous lived experiences throughout the performance, the artists delve into the murkiness of memory and multiplicity of reality; They dismantle their assured perspectives, unravel into chaos and dissolve into one-ness.
Now and Then (2016)
Performance-Video, 6″34′
Performed, produced, and directed by Clark Beaumont
Now and Then is a performance-video installation that wrestles with the largely private, and complex spaces of lived experience. In the work, the artists float in a dark bed of water, their bodies continuously drifting towards and apart from one another, as though caught in a strange orbit. Accompanied by an eerie soundtrack, their tango manically jolts between smooth, inevitable pulls, and disjointed, random collisions. Through the work, the artists’ question the belief that any relationship is predestined rather than formed through proximity, chance and circumstance; and explore the transient states of connection and disconnection.
Stay Up (2015)
Video, 22″ on loop
Stay Up shows a close-up of one of the artist’s attempting to hold a fixed smile. It is the smile that film actors are taught to develop—unnaturally wide, that shows both teeth and gums— a mimicry of joy which is achingly uncomfortable to sustain. This work wrestles with the public and private spaces of emotion and perception; the duplicity between states of welcome and discomfort, connection and disconnection, reality and pretence.
Sarah Clark (b. 1991 in Brisbane, Australia) and Nicole Beaumont (b. 1990 in Sydney, Australia), are the Australian artistic collaboration, Clark Beaumont. Using performance, video and installation, their practice explores ideas and constructs surrounding identity, interpersonal relationships, intimacy and female subjectivity. Their collaboration focuses on their individual and intersubjective experiences, using themselves as the subjects of their work and, their collaboration, as a proxy for relationships in general. Their works often explore the intersection between performativity and authenticity, as well as the shifting dynamic between performer and viewer.
Clark Beaumont have presented live performances, videos and installations, nationally and internationally since 2010. Notably, in 2013, the collaboration exhibited work in Kaldor Public Art Project’s 13 Rooms, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Klaus Biesenbach. In 2014, they held a solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, and were selected as the QAGOMA Melville Haysom Memorial Art Scholarship recipient. Recently, they have presented live performances at the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide), Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne) and Queensland University of Technology Art Museum as part of Performance Now, curated by Roselee Goldberg. In 2015, the duo participated in Marina Abramovic’s Australian artist residency and exhibited in QAGoMA’s survey exhibition ‘GOMA Q: Queensland Contemporary Art’. They are currently undertaking a series of residencies in Berlin, a project that is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
MORE ABOUT CLARK BEAUMONT’S ARTIST RESIDENCY @ MOMENTUM AiR >>
With thanks to the generous support of:
OPENING VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
PERFORMANCE BY CLARK BEAUMONT
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
Ian Haig
Ian Haig
MOMENTUM AiR
1 July – 23 August 2017
Ian Haig is an Australian artist who, since 1994, has worked as a Senior Lecturer in Media Art and Expanded Studio Practice at the School of Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). His work has been exhibited in galleries and video/media festivals around the world, including exhibitions at: The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; The Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Artec Biennale – Nagoya, Japan; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Art Museum of China, Beijing; Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden-Rot, Germany. In addition his video work has screened in over 120 Festivals internationally. In 2003 he received a fellowship from the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council and in 2013 he curated the video art show Unco at The Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles.
Ian Haig works across media, from video, sculpture, drawing, technology-based media and installation. Haig’s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning. His body-obsessed themes can be seen throughout a large body of work over the last twenty years. Previous works have looked to the contemporary media sphere and its relationship to the visceral body, the degenerative aspects of pervasive new technologies, to cultural forms of fanaticism and cults, to ideas of attraction and repulsion, body horror, the defamiliarisation of the human body and cartoon abjection.
The mutating conditions of the body overwhelm our screens; from television, cinema, the mobile phone and computer screen. The materiality of the body is ever present on screen – the history of Hollywood, is the history of the body – so intimate is our relationship with the screen it can be considered an extension and outgrowth of our own biology. The screen becomes a projection of our desires, obsessions and perversions.
Ian Haig’s recent work has largely focused on the confrontation of the body and its relationship to the contemporary media landscape. Haig works in an interdisciplinary fashion, evolving his practice at times to include sculptural elements in his time-based works, particularly sculptural works of bodily materiality which explore a visceral aesthetic. During his Residency at MOMENTUM, Haig will continue his research on how the video screen and technology can be considered as extensions of our own biology – the body as a screen, and the screen as bodily material – and furthermore, how bodily confrontation can be activated through time-based media. Haig will research, develop, and produce a major new video work exploring visceral simulation of the human body in his multi-screen video work Untitled Syndrome.
Ian Haig, 4 screen video work, 2017
Created at MOMENTUM AiR
One preoccupation of 20th century modernism was the the deformation of the human body and face. Depicted in a variety of different paintings and sculpture the face was consistently altered, cut up, and distorted. This reconfiguration and mutation of the face is now echoed in contemporary culture and notions of body dysmorphia (or digitised dysmorphic disorder). Amplified by selfie culture and social media and a growing perception that one’s body is thought to look wrong and doesn’t adhere to ‘normal’ images of the ‘standard’ body. Untitled Syndrome brings together the modernist white cube gallery with the mediated, monstrous visualisations of digitised dysmorphia and the disfigured contemporary face.
Using images of contemporary art galleries and museums in Berlin, the work considers the gallery as a site of purity, taste and sanctification which separates itself from the real world outside. Untitled Syndrome considers how the traditional boundaries of the art gallery and life are Increasingly eroding through the new authority of the internet and social media.
Hal Foster spoke of the return of the real and the return to the body in art in the 1990s, it is my position that twenty years later in 2017 we see the return to the body, but unlike 1990s’ abject art’ the contemporary media environment has amplified an awareness of our own bodily abjection. Foster too talks how increasingly ones own subjecthood is affirmed by the destruction of other bodies on screen. The body has returned, but in a very different way to 1990s abject art or earlier incarnations of body art in the 1960s. The explosion of the current contemporary media sphere and our relationship to technology puts the corporeal body back onto the cultural radar where we are often confronted and forced to re-familarise ourselves with our own bodies, their fragility and biological corporeality all amplified by the omnipresence of its aesthetic opposite: the rational and logical technological media landscape. However in direct contrast to the digital screen and technology’s perfection, speed, resolution, rationality our bodies are primitive, irrational, messy and abject. I plan to research how screen based media can be explored to extend such an area of inquiry.
Untitled Syndrome is a new body of work that will depict a series of contemporary manipulated artificial bodies. These bodies have no place in the world, born of software, their manufactured reality presenting a new kind of naturalism. They are possibly representations of computer generated avatars gone wrong, bodily simulations that have failed. As such, they are the inverse of computer simulations that depict the idealized state of the body, (for example, in PlaySation games or superhero movies) populated by well-formed and normative computer simulations of the human form. Untitled Syndrome on the other hand will present the broken body, the mutant, and rejected simulations of the human body.
A selection of 7 video works by Ian Haig was included in:
FLESH on FLESH
An Exhibition of Artists
from the MOMENTUM Collection and Residency Program
Featuring:
Nezaket Ekici, Mariana Hahn, Ian Haig, Sarah Lüdemann, Li Zhenhua
and guest starring Jan Svankmajer
OPENING
6 July 2017 @ 7-10pm
EXHIBITION
7 July – 6 August 2017
PERFORMANCES & ARTIST TALK
13 July @ 7-10pm
ARTIST DIALOGUE Beating the Meat with Ian Haig and Sarah Lüdemann
PERFORMANCE & CONCEPTUAL COOKING by Mariana Hahn & Li Zhenhua
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Emily Geen
Emily Geen
1 May – 30 June 2017
Emily Geen is a Canadian visual artist currently based in Victoria BC on Canada’s west coast. Originally from Lake Country, BC, Emily completed her BFA at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (2012), followed by her MFA at the University of Victoria (2015). Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout BC & Alberta. She has recently been included in several group shows in Vancouver, including INDEX 2016 at Gallery 295 and the inaugural Lind Prize Exhibition curated by Presentation House Gallery as a part of Capture Photography Festival. In 2016 Emily attended the Banff Centre for a residency exploring notions of new materiality. In 2017 her work will be shown at Toronto’s Gallery 44 in their annual emerging artist feature, Proof 24. She currently teaches photography sessionally at the University of Victoria.
RESIDENCY PROJECT
In her art practice, she works between recorded images and materials, investigating the perceptual conditions of looking and memory, as they exist across time and space. She explores these notions with images both still and moving. Some are found images from salvaged family archives, while others are captured digitally in our present condition. The recorded images she chooses to work with comment on our human inclination to delineate and preserve lived experience. They often involve subject matter such as human or vehicle activity within the landscape, architecture and horizon lines. The subjects and their framing often suggest a desire to add structure and containment to the groundlessness of experience, but the ways in which the subjects are filtered through her artistic process results in abstraction and an affirmation of this groundlessness instead. The subjectivity of perception is facilitated.
During her residency at MOMENTUM, Emily Geen aims to further develop the methodologies of her practice, in particular for her work in video installation. She is interested in expanding the possibilities for how she navigates between the gesture of recording, the accumulation of imagery, and physical experience in her work. Some past works have subtly referred to tourism, or perhaps more specifically, the way in which the camera can facilitate engagement with new surroundings and experiences. As a newcomer to Berlin, Emily will seek to observe how her position as a foreigner influences the way she develops imagery in her work. Thematics of architecture and human activity within the urban landscape will continue to play important roles in her work to be developed while in residence. She is interested in folding architectural materiality into her installation practice, and plans to utilize custom built structures and/or unconventional surfaces into her projection sites.
ON GOING RESEARCH AT MOMENTUM AIR
During her time in residence with MOMENTUM so far, Emily’s work has evolved in response to her encounters with the architectural history of Berlin, as well as to the character of its urban (and digital) landscape. This has taken several forms.
As intended, she began her residency by using her existing methodology of recording video through panes of semi reflective glass. This process creates a translucent, spatially contingent layering of imagery. Using her glass/camera recording device, she created a new work shot from the windows of the residency apartment. The piece consists of three channels lined up in a panoramic format. Emily uses a loose narrative structure for this piece, in which she pictures herself between tasks (opening/closing windows, working at a desk, etc). Amongst these activities are shots where the camera/glass device pans from one side of the room to the other, including views through the apartment windows and out onto the street below. At moments the narrative imagery dissolves into abstraction, as out of focus window frames and sections of wall and sky appear to become a series of moving colour fields. Parallel notions of the self, interiority, and exteriority are explored.
Alongside the development of this video work, Emily has also revisited her interest in analogue photography by shooting multiple exposure 35mm images of Berlin using a plastic toy camera. The amateur quality of the camera produces soft focus images and unpredictable results. She has been using it to photograph one of the first things she noticed upon arriving in Berlin: the towering exposed firewalls of many apartment buildings. Her interest in these was at first mainly an aesthetic one – she finds these voids of flatness amongst the otherwise richly layered urban landscape to be abrupt phenomenological pauses. However, she later learned that often these windowless walls are now visible due to bombing that occurred during WWII. Their potential as visual residue of Berlin’s volatile history is very compelling to Emily. She began using the toy camera to create multiple exposures that specifically aimed to layer two of these blank facades on top of one another, as if to draw attention to them by comparison. While the layering of firewalls remains the central strategy for exposing her rolls of film, the unpredictability of working with this camera has encouraged her to expand the scope of what she records. The series situates the firewalls amongst the broader vernacular of urban surfaces that comprise Berlin. Other motifs such as the glassy canals, windows on the S-bahn, and remaining sections of the Berlin wall have found their way into her images.
In addition to these projects, Emily has begun implementing processes new to her practice which use Google Street View as a point of departure. It surprised Emily to find that while scrolling along the streets of Berlin on this virtual platform, that many of the homes and businesses are blurred out. Google Street View automatically blurs out faces and license plates, but individuals must request any further blurring. This option was introduced in response to privacy concerns that arose when the platform was introduced in Germany in 2009. Emily is interested in drawing aesthetic and conceptual parallels between the swaths of blurry self-censorship that pepper the streets of Berlin and the blank quality of the exposed firewalls. To do to this, Emily has been using screen recordings and screen shots to highlight these relationships. Most recently, Emily created several screen prints using a Google Street View image where she isolates the forms of both an exposed firewall and a blurred out building facade, replacing them with painterly gradients.
EMILY GEEN – ARTIST STATEMENT
The impulse to capture lived experience through the camera is always accompanied by the problems of framing and fixing. It becomes an effort in translating corporeally understood space, and emotionally understood events, into pictures. We want to contend with lived experience, and containing it pictorially seems like a plausible way to do this. However, reducing our perceptions to flattened photographic fragments leaves out much of what we aspire to preserve. With that said, my studio practice recognizes a certain futility inherent in the photographic, and instead seeks to decompress, regenerate and offer new perceptual relationships to pictures.
To achieve this, I work through several forms of artistic inquiry. Some of my practice involves found snapshots salvaged from recent history, while other projects use images I record in our present condition, both still and moving. My work with found family snapshots is focused on creating sculptural assemblages and installations. I purposefully work with images that appear amateur and naïve: ones that are exemplary of the photographer’s struggle to capture their experience. I then extrapolate upon the photographic gestures and subject matter found in these recorded moments by involving physical objects and materials. Within these sculptural scenarios, I find that propping, folding, pinning, reflecting, scanning, re-photographing, and re-printing are some of the ways that I am able to interact with the pictures.
In my recent projects involving video, I have made durational recordings of the landscape by means of a self-invented recording device. This device consists of a video camera and a pane of semi-reflective glass erected upon a wooden platform that is supported by a tripod. The tinting of the glass is about 50% reflective, allowing the camera to see through the glass, but also receive a reflection of anything adjacent. This results in a simultaneous superimposition of the surroundings on each side of the glass. The angle of the camera in relation to the glass determines the scope of view. I have experimented with duplicating the set up to involve two cameras, each recording through their own piece of glass simultaneously, as well as allowing the camera to see past the edge of the glass, creating vertical delineations in the resulting recordings. The videos are often presented on an immersive scale, and seem to oscillate between recognition and abstraction.
Both bodies of work tend to involve subject matter that highlights notions of spatial delineation and containment, such as roadways, doorways, balconies, yards, and horizon lines. My aesthetic responses to these subjects often include strategies layering and stacking that acknowledge the reality of the image as a surface, drawing attention to textures and edges. These choices in content and form comment on the human inclination to add structure and containment to the groundlessness of experience. Yet, the abstraction inherent in the resulting works affirms this groundlessness instead. The viewer is presented with familiar things tinted with beauty and nostalgia, but their familiarity is rearranged in such a way that we are asked to reconsider the nature of the image, and the role of the picture. The subjectivity of perception is facilitated as viewers navigate their own memories and associations against the phenomenological and unfamiliar presence of the work itself.
[fve] https://vimeo.com/227424937 [/fve]
With thanks to the generous support of:
Janet Laurence
Janet Laurence
20 March – 30 April 2017
Janet Laurence’s Residency at MOMENTUM takes place in parallel with her participation in the prestigious IGA show, for which she is creating a public art installation in the form of a garden of medicinal plants. Along with creating the new work for her IGA installation, Janet Laurence will exhibit work at MOMENTUM. Janet Laurence is a leading Australian artist whose multi-disciplinary practice is a direct response to contemporary ecological catastrophes. Laurence creates metaphoric propositions based on scientific knowledge and her own first-hand experience of threatened environments. She sees her role as an artist not as one of didacticism or activism, but as an interpreter of the natural world and the devastation it is facing in the Anthropocene – our current epoch of human-induced environmental change.
Inside the Flower
13 April 2017- 15th October 2017 pm
@ IGA Berlin
Inside the Flower (2017), Janet Laurence, IGA Pavillion:
An experiential contemporary medicinal garden that immerses one into the historical, spiritual and mythological relationship with psychotropic plants. The total work forms a living and museological Wunderkammer. Artwork elements form a link between historical folklore and our current use of medicinal plants, all centered around their natural toxicity. These elements within form both a botanical display and a laboratory-like performative space.
IGA Berlin: https://iga-berlin-2017.de/en
The IGA berlin 2017 is a festival celebrating international garden design and green lifestyles in the city. It is a showcase of contemporary garden and landscape design, a place of learning and experimentation, a platform for intercultural dialogue and a laboratory for innovation. Beyond the diverse horticultural exhibitions, the state-owned grün berlin gmbh is using the iga berlin 2017 to initiate pioneering projects and showcase exhibits on sustainable lifestyles. Under the motto ‘an ocean of colours’ it seizes on the diversity and fascinating contradictions in the city of Berlin, surprises visitors with modern ideas and generates new ideas for contemporary garden exhibitions. With the IGA, Berlin is presenting itself to international guests as a sustainable, green city that is setting the course for a pleasant urban future in a cosmopolitan and innovative way.
Views of a Landscape – Art at the IGA:
At the invitation of the iga berlin 2017, internationally renowned artists and creative people have developed location-specific works within a curated process under the direction of Katja Aßmann. they play with our conventional way of seeing things, tell stories, reflect and challenge. they invite guests visiting the iga berlin 2017 to spend time looking and listening closely. the accessible ‘mirror labyrinth’ by the well-known danish artist jeppe hein (dk), the artificial ‘los angeles garden’ by martin kaltwasser (de) and artist gorch wenske’s fairy tale figures ‘brought to life’ by anna rispoli (it) in the gardens of the world will all remain as permanent attractions in the gardens of the world once the exhibition has ended.
IGA also includes temporary artworks by:
Seraphina Lenz (DE), Erik Göngrich (DE), Jeanne von Heeswijk (NL), Janet Laurence (A) and Michael Sailstorfer (DE)
Inside the Flower
Clark Beaumont
MOMETUM AiR
Clark Beaumont
Studio Residency
29 January – 30 April 2017
EXHIBITION & PERFORMANCE
Clark Beaumont: The O Zone
21 April – 21 May 2017
OPENING
Friday 21 April @ 6 – 10pm
Artist Talk
7 – 8pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
PERFORMANCE:
Premiere of The O Zone by Clark Beaumont
Sunday 30 April @ 6 – 7pm
@ Studio 2
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Sarah Clark and Nicole Beaumont, are the Australian artistic collaboration, Clark Beaumont. Using performance, video and installation, their practice explores ideas and constructs surrounding identity, interpersonal relationships, intimacy and female subjectivity. Their collaboration focuses on their individual and intersubjective experiences, using themselves as the subjects of their work and, their collaboration, as a proxy for relationships in general. Their works often explore the intersection between performativity and authenticity, as well as the shifting dynamic between performer and viewer.
Clark Beaumont have presented live performances, videos and installations, nationally and internationally since 2010. Notably, in 2013, the collaboration exhibited work in Kaldor Public Art Project’s 13 Rooms, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Klaus Biesenbach. In 2014, they held a solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, and were selected as the QAGOMA Melville Haysom Memorial Art Scholarship recipient. Recently, they have presented live performances at the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide), Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne) and Queensland University of Technology Art Museum as part of Performance Now, curated by Roselee Goldberg. In 2015, the duo participated in Marina Abramovic’s Australian artist residency and exhibited in QAGoMA’s survey exhibition ‘GOMA Q: Queensland Contemporary Art’. They are currently undertaking a series of residencies in Berlin, a project that is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
During their residency with MOMENTUM, Clark Beaumont will develop a new one-hour live performance work, The O Zone, which will unpack two of the greatest issues of our time – Climate Change, and Sex – simultaneously. In the artists’ own words:
“Climate Change is a controversial topic that is too big for everyday folks to understand & actively care about for a sustained period of time; our eyes fog over. Yet our planet needs collective action now, so what can we do? What keeps people’s attention? Sex! Sex sells, but sex is mostly only used & discussed in our culture in a one-dimensional way, one that’s objectifying, glossy & patriarchal. The work will playfully weave between the two topics, using each subject to disarm the other & open up the complex issues & perspectives surrounding both.
We will use these topics to question & analyse ourselves, our behaviour, ethics & values. We will examine the power that emotions have over logic on our brains, how we are hardwired to value short-term over long-term rewards & thinking, & how both of these attributes stop us from being able to see ourselves & our world clearly. The work will mash up written & found text – including facts, estimations, intimate thoughts & personal stories – as well as organic & austere choreography.
Following on from our Abramovic residency in 2015, our performance practice has naturally expanded to include a cross-disciplinary approach between Theatre and Visual Art. The residency broadened our understanding of Contemporary Performance Art & provoked us to consider the medium’s relevance now, as well as moving forward. This development has been excelled by our time in Berlin, arguably the epicentre of contemporary performing arts, where we have experienced ground-breaking performances & engaged in fruitful artistic dialogues with practitioners from diverse backgrounds.We will develop this project in Berlin during our MOMENTUM residency, under the mentorship of curator Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch, and in collaboration with Berlin choreographer, Mirjam Soegner.”
[Clark Beaumont, 2017]
Building on their most recent work, Clark Beaumont will use MOMENTUM’s facilities within the historic Kunstquartier Bethanien as a rich resource to experiment, develop and refine their use of theatrical elements within their practice. The O Zone will also be shown at the ACCA (Victoria) group exhibition, Greater Together later in 2017.
With thanks to the generous support of:
PERFORMANCE BY CLARK BEAUMONT
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
(UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD
[UN]SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD
An Exhibition from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar MFA Program
“Public Art and New Artistic Strategies”
[UN]SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD
Angelica Baron // Vincent Brière // Vienne Chan // Rafaella Constantinou // Sophie Foster // Kathryn Gohmert // Anke Hannemann // Yihui Liu // Matthew Lloyd // Nasir Malekijoo // Mila Panić // YunJu Park // Mariya Pavlenko // Denise Rosero Bermudez // Feng Runze // Malak Yacout Saleh // Saša Tatić // Sze Ting Wong // Yi Weihua // Ina Weise
(UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD is an artistic research project
by the MFA-Program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies / Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und neue künstlerische Strategien”,
Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
resulting in two exhibitions in Weimar/Buchenwald and in Berlin.
Curated by: Bojan Vuletić, Anke Hannemann, Ina Weise
Coordinated by: Jirka Reichmann
In cooperation with Rachel Rits-Volloch
EXHIBITION:
20 – 24 January 2017 | Opening 20 January @ 3:00pm
@ Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, Former Disinfection Hall
Weimar Opening Hours 10:00 am – 4:00 pm (closed on Monday)
27 – 29 January 2017 | Opening 27 January @ 7:00pm
With Live Performance by Vienne Chan
@ MOMENTUM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Opening Hours: Sat & Sun: 1:00 – 7:00 pm
MASTERCLASS:
29 January 2017 @ 1:00 – 6:00pm
In Cooperation with Atsuko Mochida‘s BETHANIA Installation
@ Tokyo Wondersite, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Artist & Curator Talks:
Clark Beaumont >> Artists
Marek Claasen >> Director, ArtFacts.Net
Amir Fattal >> Artist
Mark Gisbourne: Writer, Curator, Art Historian
Sharon Horodi >> Artist & Curator of Musraramix Festival and Art-ID Festival in Jerusaem
Elana Katz >> Artist
David Krippendorff >> Artist
Anne Maier >> Head of Press, Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Angela Schneider >> Chief Curator, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (Retired)
Stephan von Wiese: Writer, Curator, Art Historian, Director of Contemporary Art, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf (Retired)
Irina Yurna >> Trust for Mutual Understanding, Head of Berlin Office
Introduction:
(UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD is a project of the Master of Fine Arts course of study Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University Weimar in cooperation with the Buchenwald Memorial. Between November 2016 and February 2017 an interdisciplinary art production facility has been established for the international students under the guidance of guest researcher Bojan Vuletić to artistically research the present-day significance of Buchenwald. Together with the artistic assistants Anke Hannemann and Ina Weise, MFA-program coordinator Jirka Reichmann, the cooperation partners, academic experts and the student body, an exhibition project within the Buchenwald Memorial has been devised which focuses on the presence and the absence of sound, language, and voice in relation to Buchenwald as a site. Composer, physicist and internationally renowned artist Bojan Vuletić, who takes great delight in experimenting between various fields of art and science, was invited as artistic director.
His broad scientific and musical education, his vast experience in leading interdisciplinary projects as well as his theatre work provides an excellent basis for this special project. Also outstanding is guest researcher Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch, who is responsible for the theory component of the course, and for the theoretical examination of this issue. As director of MOMENTUM – an internationally renowned platform for time-based-art, located within the Künstquartier Bethanien in Berlin – she made it possible for (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD to travel to Berlin after the initial exhibition in Weimar.
I want to express my gratitude to all the people and institutions who have been involved in making this exhibition project and publication possible. In particular, I would like to thank the Kreativfonds of Bauhaus University Weimar for their generous support.
Prof. Danica Dakić
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Curatorial Statements:
Art does not stand apart from the world and its complicated histories. Art is always and inextricably of and about the world. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ art. To be a good artist, one must be a historian, a writer, a philosopher, an anthropologist, a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, a detective, a poet, whose language is image and sound. The 18 works by 20 artists from 14 countries which comprise the exhibition (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD encompass an equal diversity of views built upon the personal experiences of a multiplicity of cultures by individuals who have come to the Bauhuas-Universität, Weimar, to continue their study of contemporary art in the MFA degree program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies. In coming to Weimar from Asia, the Middle East, North and South America, and across Europe, they encounter a living city built upon the most complex of paradoxes; the juxtaposition of some of the greatest minds and talents in the history of German art, culture, and politics – Goethe, Schiller, the founders of the Weimar Republic, and those of the Bauhuas – with the unspeakable legacy of the Holocaust in the form of the Buchenwald concentration camp within walking distance from the city center. Confronting these seemingly mutually exclusive layers of history, these artists are asked to address the universal truth of the Holocaust through the rarifying lens of personal understanding, through the breadth of their experiences, emotions, and senses – with a particular focus on the sense of sound, and its opposite, silence. The resulting works – encompassing video and audio installations, performance, photography, sculptural installation, sound sculpture, transcribed choreography, and conceptual works – all address the particular history of Buchenwald as a physical place alongside the communal history of the horrors it represents. These works address history through its echoes in the present; an auditory analogy which is used equally to express sound and memory.
Just as the artists in this exhibition translate their diversity of backgrounds and approaches into visual art, so too is the exhibition itself an act of translation. Opening first at a gallery in the former Disinfection Building in the Buchenwald Memorial, the exhibition subsequently travels to the MOMENTUM Gallery in Berlin, to be translated and re-formed within the context of another historic building: the Kunstquartier Bethanien. Originally a religious institution built as a hospital and school for nurses in 1847 by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the Bethanien remained an active hospital until 1970. Since that time, it fought off threats of demolition to turn itself into a cultural institution with a colorful history full of squatters and anarchists, punk concerts and citizens’ collectives, activists and artists who thrive there to the present day. Situated only a few meters away from the former path of the Berlin Wall, the Bethanien built around itself a cultural community at the apex of the divide between East and West. Divided no longer, Berlin nevertheless is inevitably defined by its paradoxical legacies of astounding cultural and scientific output alongside the horrors of the Third Reich and the repressive division which followed it.
Opening first at a gallery in the former Disinfection Building in the Buchenwald Memorial, the exhibition subsequently travels to the MOMENTUM Gallery in Berlin, to open on Holocaust Memorial Day. What will happen when we translate an exhibition made for the Buchenwald Memorial to the Kunstquartier Bethanien, a historic building perpetually reinventing itself? From former disinfection hall to former hospital; from a place of death to a locus of life; how will the works in the exhibition be altered through this new context?
This second iteration of (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD opens in parallel to the CTM Festival for Adventurous Music and Art in the Kunstquartier Bethanien. CTM is a major international festival dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music, as well to as the diverse range of artistic activities in the context of sound culture. It takes place concurrently and cooperatively with the Transmediale Festival for Art and Digital Culture. Together, the two festivals annually comprise one of the most important moments in Berlin’s art calendar. CTM 2017, entitled Fear Anger Love, is focused on a confrontation with emotion and sensation. Music and sound conjure emotions more intensely than most art forms, creating meaning while transcending language through felt physical experience. CTM 2017 opens with the words of Victor Hugo: “Music expresses that which cannot be said yet about which it is impossible to remain silent.” By the same token, (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD confronts the unspeakable legacy of the Holocaust, translating the impossibility of silence into works of sound art.
MOMENTUM is proud to present the second iteration of (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD, the translation of the exhibition from the Buchenwald Memorial in Weimar to Berlin’s Kunstquartier Bethanien and CTM Festival. MOMENTUM is a non-profit platform for time-based art, active worldwide since 2010, with headquarters in Berlin at the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center. MOMENTUM focuses on video, performance, new media, and sound, while continuously seeking innovative answers expanding an understanding of the question ‘What is time-based art?’. Through an active program of international Exhibitions, Artist and Curator Residencies, Video Art in Public Space Initiatives, a Performance Program and Archive, an Education Initiative and Archive, and a growing Collection, MOMENTUM addresses the notion of time-based art in the context of both historical and technological development. Visual languages continue to evolve in concert with the technologies which drive them, and it is the role of visual artists to push the limits of these languages. As the world speeds up, and time itself seems to flow faster, MOMENTUM provides a program focused on the growing diversity and relevance of time-based practices, by taking hold of the moment to explore how time-based art reflects the digitization of our societies and the resulting cultural change.
Having founded MOMENTUM in Australia as a parallel event to the 17 Biennale of Sydney, and built it up into a thriving international institution based in Berlin, it is my great privilege in 2016-17 to act as a Visiting Professor at the Bauhaus University, Weimar. It has been a great pleasure to work with such a bright and talented group of artists on the realization of this exhibition. My thanks to all of them, and to the professors and staff of the MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies who have worked so hard to realize this far-reaching project.
Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch
Founding Director, MOMENTUM
Visiting Professor, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
THREADSUNS
Threadsuns
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
Paul Celan
Creating art in the context of the Holocaust seems impossible and futile. The genocide executed by Germany and its collaborators during the Third Reich leaves us devasted and speechless, and the systematic eradication and destruction of culture through facism and barbarism still echoes today. But these echoes need to be opposed by democratic means and rituals of commemoration – and art has always taken part in this struggle. The special project (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD within the postgraduate degree programme in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the BAUHAUS University in Weimar combines art works by 20 artists from 14 nations who are balancing between their subjective artistic ideas and the many responsabilities, rules and connotations that are involved when creating art in relation to the Buchenwald Memorial. It was essential to find different approaches to what has happened at the space of the former concentration camp: its perfidious system of oppression, human exploitation and destruction, its close ties to Weimar, its surroundings and the corruption of its humanistic cultural heritage.
The collective process started with a hike from the train station along the Blutstrasse of Weimar to Buchenwald. This was followed by a historical overview and a guided tour at the Buchenwald Memorial by Daniel Gaede. A week later historian Ronald Hirte conducted excavations at a war-era camp dump site together with the artists, who were finding relics such as remains of toothbrushes, shoe soles, crockery, barbed wire, tubes of tubepaste and a personal metal cross attached to fabric. With utmost sensitivity Daniel Gaede and Ronald Hirte managed to uncover political, historical and structural dimensions of the camp as well as traces of personal human tragedies. Guided tours and researches throughout Weimar and its Stadtarchiv opened views on how strongly the city was connected to Buchenwald.
Of course the lectures of this semester reflected the Shoah and art within its context. Within my lectures entitled SPEECHLESS AND UNHEARD I have focused on principles of silence and sound, correlated and uncorrelated noise, acoustics and architecture, the acts of speaking and listening in regards to artistic processes and the negative usage of sound.
Rachel Rits-Volloch covered in her theoretical lectures under the title EARS HAVE NO EYELIDS: ON THE SPECTATORSHIP OF SOUND the construction of memory and remembrance, theories of spectatorship and languages of perception as they relate to the Shoah and the socio-cultural site-specificity of the locus of Buchenwald. Anke Hannemann and Ina Weise compiled background research as well as application-oriented guidence in their practical lecture series.
In collaboration with the contemporary ACC Gallerie Weimar Amnon Barzel (the founding director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin) and artists like Nate Wooley, Naomi T. Salmon and the art collektiv Projekt Kaufhaus Joske offered different views on the corresponding subjects.
In different steps the artists developped visions for their works for (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD which finally embodied into concrete pieces. Parallely, the group exhibited at the museum in the former Disinfection Building of Buchenwald Concentration Camp and the MOMENTUM Gallery at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin were planned and curated together with the artists, the main challenge was being that of the composition of 18 very different art pieces are to function for each individual art work and the exhibition in its entirety.
I deeply thank Dr. Sonja Staar and Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch for their openness and helpfulness in the actual realization of the exhibitions, Daniel Gaede and Ronald Hirte for showing us how to look at Buchenwald in the most human way, the staff members Jirka Reichmann, Ina Weise and Anke Hannemann for the beautiful collaboration and each participating artist for their enormous effort and contribution to (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD.
Bojan Vuletić
Visiting Professor, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
(Click on each artist’s name to see their bio and the work description below.)
Angelica Baron & Rafaella Constantinou
Vincent Brière
Vienne Chan
Sophie Foster
Kathryn Gohmert
Anke Hannemann
Feng Runze & Yihui Liu
Matthew Lloyd
Nasir Malekijoo
Mila Panić
YunJu Park
Mariya Pavlenko
Denise Rosero Bermúdez
Malak Yacout
Saša Tatić
Ina Weise
Joephy Sze Ting Wong
Yi Weihua
Angelica Baron & Rafaella Constantinou Angelica Baron was born Bogota, Colombia (1985), and is currently based in Weimar, Germany. She graduated from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, with a Diploma – BA Visual Arts with an emphasis in Graphic Expression. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In her artistic practice she is interested in an interdisciplinary approach to socio-political transformations, in a humorous, plaintive, skeptical and hopefully serious manner. She finds in art an effective place to engage with or engender change within broader political, social, and ideological conditions. Since graduating, Baron has exhibited her work in a number of group exhibitions, including; Festival Ladyfest 4/5 (Cali, 2011. Bogota, 2012), Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación CMPR (Bogota, 2015), 2nd Berliner Herbstsalon, Maxim Gorki Theatre (Berlin, 2015), Kultursymposium Weimar organized by Goethe Institute (Weimar, 2016) Tomorrow We Will Explain* the artistic prologue of »Am Fluss / At the River« initiative by Kunsthaus Dresden (Dresden, 2016). Baron is the co-founder of Lobas Furiosas, an international feminist collective, lately published in the seventh issue of HYSTERIA – Hysterical Feminisms. She was also awarded the DAAD Study Scholarship in the Fields of Fine Art, Design/Visual Communication and Film (October 2015 – October 2017). Rafaella Constantinou was born in 1991 in Paphos, Cyprus. In 2009-2010 she entered the Technological University of Athens – Department of Conservation of Works of Art. In 2010-2015 she attended the Athens School of Fine Arts, through the IKY Scholarship Foundation, Cyprus. Since 2016 she attends the Master Degree Program in Bauhaus Universität Weimar – Public Art and New Artistic Strategies, through a DAAD Scholarship. She has participated in several group exhibitions, amongst which in 2016; Acts of Engagement Cycle 1, ATHENS BIENNALE AB5TO6 ‘OMONOIA’, Athens; Ex-ils, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Visual approaches to the poetry of Odysseas Elitis, Zografeio Mandoulides, Istanbul. Rafaella Constantinou’s practice focuses on the scope of art in the public realm through an ongoing relation between the private and the public sphere. The artistic line of Constantinou’s works expands on the perception of space and the relation to it, focusing on ephemeral or permanent artworks in areas of the city and collaborations between fields where art and architecture alternate the limits of practicality and the notion of function. |
50°59’58.7″N 11°18’56.9″E, 2017
Performance | Video Installation “Stone, of course, cannot be destroyed. All one can do is move it around. In any case, it will always outlast the men who use it. For the moment it supports their determination to act.”1 A pilgrimage between Weimar and the area of Ettersberg in which the artists translocate two rocks taken from the Ilm Park and the Buchenwald forest, respectively. The performance addresses the complex issue of public remembrance and memory making; the video leads to a reflection on the relationship among place, void and commemoration. In an attempt to relate the city of Weimar with the former concentration camp of Buchenwald, the artists understand the places as territories of exchange that are profoundly linked. They create an in-between space, a heterotopia, by filling up the void of the stones. The in-between space that connects the two territories is an ongoing dialogue; a contact sign that remains unnoticed when experiencing each location separately. 1. Camus, Albert, 1970. Lyrical and Critical Essays (Vintage International). Vintage Books ed. Edition. Vintage, pp. 127 |
Vincent Brière
Vincent Brière is a Canadian born artist. He uses performance, installation, video and ephemeral projects in public space to explore the factors contributing to social commitment and complacency. His work has been presented at R.I.P.A. Performance [Montreal, 2016], Eastern Bloc [Montreal, 2015], at Encuentro MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas [Montreal, 2014]. He also took part in art residencies at Vidéographe [Montreal, 2016], Praxis Art Actuel [Sainte-Thérèse, 2011], at the Public Art Mentorship Program of the City of Calgary [Calgary, 2015] and at Conscience Urbaine’s Espace Libre pour la Culture [Montreal, 2015]. Brière has a BA in Studio Arts from Concordia University [2015] and is currently a Master candidate at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in the MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies. |
Home, 2017
Video Installation What is the appropriate response to violence and its legacy? How do you surpass feelings of horror, sadness, powerlessness and hatred? If moving on and resilience had a form, what would it look like? Alongside being a memorial site, Buchenwald is also a place where people live, have families, grow up and grow old. Two former caserns, barracks originally built to house the SS-Totenkopfverbände in charge of running the concentration camp, are now being used as apartment buildings for people to rent. In Home, video images of the former caserns and their surroundings are juxtaposed to an audio interview conducted with a local resident, in which their personal experience and reasons for living in Buchenwald are detailed. One can be repulsed by the horrors of history and deny them to some extent. Or one can learn the facts and move on while being careful to not repeat them. Life goes on and nothing seems to stop it, not even the most horrifying injustices of Nazi Germany. Special thank you to interviewees Peter and Christoph, and to Andreas Kühn for German translation. |
Vienne Chan
Vienne Chan was born in Hong Kong (1980), and studied Cultural Studies and Religion at McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal. She began making experimental videos in 2007. In 2012, her practice took a turn into public and socially engaged art, using art as a tool to address problems and to create points of discussions. Her work V’lair (2012) was awarded the Jury prize in video at Besetzt: Diskurse zu Kunst, Politik und Ästhetik at Platform 3 (Munich), and Deutschlands offene Grenzen für UNESCO Welterbe (2016) was awarded a Bauhaus Essentials Prize. Vienne has shown in exhibitions at venues such as Plataforma Revólver (Lisbon), CCA Tel Aviv, Kunsthaus Dresden and the Armory Center (Los Angeles). She is currently an MFA Candidate in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and is a recipient of a Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Scholarship. |
Amateur, 2017
Audio Installation “When I decided to learn to play the cello as an adult, I knew that I would never become a classical concert cellist. Although I do enjoy being able to play a few pieces of Bach every now and then, I know at best I would be an amateur. Listening to all the recordings of cellists, and or even just child cellists on Youtube, this thought becomes more concretised as a fact and not just a feeling. Facing Buchenwald and the subject of the Holocaust, one of the most heavily discussed events in modern history by some of the greatest thinkers, I only feel speechless and unable. I do not have anything to contribute in any meaningful way. In this vein, I can only turn towards the personal as a response to the assignment. As an amateur, I will take my cello bow and draw it on a clothes-drying rack.” |
Sophie Foster
After completing a Combined Honors degree in 2010 specialising in contemporary drawing, art history and English literature at Newcastle University, Sophie Foster remained in the city working as a contemporary artist gaining recognition throughout the North East of England. She accomplished her first solo exhibition Transitions: At a Snail’s Pace (2012) with the National Glass Centre in Sunderland, a progression from her ‘living sculpture’ conceived and performed at 25 Stratford Grove in October 2010. In 2013 she was awarded a residency at Northumbria University, working in their paper studio, a unique facility for the research, teaching and scholarship of paper in relation to fine art, conservation and archiving. Since then she has been invited to participate in group shows both locally and internationally including Paper, Table, Wall & After (2015) at The Taiwan National University of Arts, Taipei, a show involving 38 invited artists who utilise the special properties of paper within their work. Sophie Foster’s work focuses on outdoor environments and involves natural, durational process such as light, water and earth. She often gives herself a journey to take with rules to follow, responding to the landscape there and then through experimental mark making, performance and film. She currently studies on the MFA program New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus Universität, Weimar. |
Returning a Place to a Known, Earlier State, 2017
Performance | Photo Installation Over the years the natural landscape of the quarry site at Buchenwald Memorial has gradually taken over, yet it still holds resonance to the physical labour that was carried out there. As an act of conservation, a site is marked within the quarry area with the intention of digging up the buried pieces of limestone within it. The stones are then cleaned and archived. This act of conservation not only gives these natural objects importance, but pays homage to the archaeological value of digging up the past. Returning all of the stones back to their exact same spot attempts to leave the landscape undisturbed. The idea to preserve the past becomes a contradiction; there has been a clear change in the landscape without actually changing anything. The absurdity of cleaning the stones only to be buried again relates to the Quarry’s initial purpose, an instrument of terror, where the hard, physical labour endured was pointless, humiliating and futile for all that worked there. Once complete, there is no trace of the physical action, with the only witness being the artist herself. Therefore the audience is requested to build an image of the excavation process through the written and photo documentation presented, very similarly to how past events are perceived within memorials of remembrance. |
Kathryn Gohmert
Kathryn Gohmert [1983, USA] received a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Texas at Austin before relocating to the UK, and then to china. While based mainly in shanghai from 2008 – 2013, Gohmert worked in a succession of studios and project spaces throughout china that include the former 696 Weihai Lu area [Shanghai], Songzhuang Artist Village [Beijing], and M50 [Shanghai]. Vurrent areas of focus include illustration, painting, performance, installation and mixed media work. Gohmert is currently based in Weimar and Berlin, Germany. More info on www.kathryngohmert.com |
Geistmaschine (Buchenwald), 2017
Sounding Sculpture Geistmaschine is an invention built to amplify both the presence of the viewer and memory, using its own form and mechanics as catalyst. Constructed primarily of birch wood, this sculpture’s exterior houses a hidden motor. Knocking is initiated by a mechanical arm inside the work when a sensor notes the viewer’s presence. A machine’s acoustic knocking is programmed to be released at alternating speeds and intervals, only becoming activated when the sensor clearly marks a viewer moving away from its placement in a space. Touching the viewer’s senses with a lingering feeling of uncertainty about what may or may not have been heard, while in retreat from the seemingly inanimate work, is a means of duplicating a very specific kind of haunting native to our collective, human past: when we allow hard lessons to move from our periphery, we most need their reminders. |
Anke Hannemann
Anke Hannemann (*1980, GDR/Germany) Studied English Literature and Art History at Technical University Dresden, Conceptual Art at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Sound and Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was trained in the restoration of mural paintings and leaf gilding at the restoration workshop Gunter Preuss, Meißen. Her artistic work includes installation and site-specific intervention, video, performance and sound. She is currently doing her Ph.D. in Fine Arts dealing with the topic “The artist and the reconstruction of identity – On the trauma of architectural deconstruction (after the end of the GDR)”. Besides her artistic practice, Hannemann works as an independent curator and teaches at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in the MFA-program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies”. Lives and works in Leipzig and Weimar. |
Dance like there is no tomorrow – A choreography based on the cleaning staff routine of Buchenwald Memorial, 2017 Transcribed Choreography If one could Based on the pace and routine of Buchenwald’s Memorial cleaning staff, the artist tries to understand their part in maintaining the place as a dance, creating a choreography for them. |
Feng Runze & Yihui Liu
Feng Runze is an artist from China, born in 1990. Feng earned a Bachelor Degree in Industrial Design GDUT (Guangzhou, China) in 2013. Subsequently he worked as a container architect and product manager in Shenzhen for 3 years, working in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Foshan, with jobs ranged from product design to container architecture, from marketing to product manager. These diversified occupational experiences gave him a lot of chances and inspirations to combine different fields together to create something new. His art works mainly discuss the dynamic relationship between people and space, meanwhile, exploring the perfect union of art and technology. He tries to make public art more functional, beyond the impact of aesthetics. Currently, he is pursing an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar. Yihui Liu is a visual artist, designer and illustrator, born in 1990 in China. She finished her Bachelor degree in Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and Master degree in Communication University of China. Currently she is living and studying in Germany for her second Master program in Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Since 2008 Liu Yihui’s practice has involved computer painting, combines painting, Chinese calligraphy, Ukiyo-e (Traditional Japanese prints and paintings), film art, and stage design. In 2013, she worked for a Chinese internet company Baidu as visual designer and illustrator for two years, then she began to use more technological ways to create and show art. In 2015, she finished her own Illustration book and online APP, THE LITTLE PRINCE. |
Spieldose , 2017
Sounding Scultpure | Video Installation “Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.“  – The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Spieldose is a wooden box (100 cm * 100 cm * 120 cm) with a crude xylophone mechanism installed inside. When a viewer turns the handle, beaters will randomly hit different parts of the xylophone, creating a mechanical, ringing sound that may be linked to childhood memories of a musicbox. Yet the roughness of the sound makes it a present experience and thereby connects past and present, personal memory and history. Spieldose is installed inside the forest nearby the former concentration camp of Buchenwald. When the audience stands in the forest, they may hear birds and other animals calling and moving, the wind swaying the trees and leaves, while also being able to reflect on the past of the former camp. The moment the audience becomes active and decides to play the box, the ringing, comfort and mechanical tones will connect with its acoustic environment, the sound of the forrest and the people visiting. Spieldose is dedicated as a commemoration to the victims of Buchenwald. |
Matthew Lloyd
Matthew Lloyd was born in Cheshire UK, (1988) and is based in Liverpool UK, and Weimar Germany. Since graduating from The Liverpool John Moores Art and Design Academy, with a BA (Hons) Graphic Arts: Illustration, (2010), the artist has exhibited his work in a number group shows including: Liverpool Art Now Part 1, The Bohemia Space (Liverpool 2011), Passion For Freedom 7, Unit 24 Gallery, (London), and HOT-ONE-HUNDRED Artist in the UK, Schwartz Gallery (London 2013). Solo shows include: I Don’t Believe In…, The Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool Biennial 2010), Something Nothing Nothing Something / A Manifesto I, Fallout Factory Gallery (Liverpool Biennial 2012). Matthew Lloyd was also awarded the GlogauAIR Berlin Art Residency, (December 2013 – June 2014) where the artist presented his first public work {I} Billboard Installation, Glogauaer Strasse (Berlin 2014). |
You Cannot Hear I? (Buchenwald, Forest), 2017
Video Installation “Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?” – Jean-Paul Sartre, Morts Sans Sepulture 1
In his highly-criticized famous dictum, Adorno’s claim to ‘write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ was not meant to prevent writers and artists from reacting to the inconceivableness of the Holocaust, but to understand its limitations in the act of its representation. Adorno, along with Lyotard, had concerns of how can something, as a response, be able to represent such a traumatic event, when the event itself has rendered the properties and tools for it to be represented, useless. It becomes in this important uselessness where the video installation, You Cannot Hear I? (Buchenwald, Forest) is to recognize not only the prohibition, and complexities of representing what is truly unrepresentable, but also that of the survivors of the Holocaust. To the point where the artist can translate, because of the lack of an understanding of their testimony, has even made their own survival, into a unique degree of worthlessness, and how their own voices have to remain stuck in their throats. Filmed between the former camp and city of Weimar, the video is to become a purgatorial act. Where the artist claims, that the evaluation of the Holocaust has rendered it into a religious narrative, an unattainable thing, a void no mortal is able to reach or comprehend. Between these two worlds, the artist presents himself within the manipulated forest, reminiscent that of a gatekeeper, offering a particular song that has to be ‘listened’ before anyone might wish to approach this unimaginable event, while covertly asking ‘if one can joke, can one cope?’
1. Quote from Theodor Adorno essay ‘Commitment’ (London: Verso 1977) PP 188-9 |
Nasir Malekijoo
Nasir Malekijoo, born in 1984 in Tehran, Iran, is a graduate of “drama studies”. After graduation, he started to create a variety of plays with an eclectic approach towards “experimental theater” and “European theater”. As a writer, director, set and costume designer and actor, he tries to portray a unified monolithic world that is defined and developed by his own individual mindset. He has been seriously and professionally involved in the Iranian theater industry since 2006. His tendency to visual arts has made him inclined to a particular type of dramatic art which is called “visual theater”. His main mindset in drama, as he himself calls it, is “theater as a cartoon”. He regards bitter satire (grotesque) as one of the most prominent elements of his works and tries to portray the stereotyped anomalies in human life in an exaggerated way. He is currently pursuing an MFA in the field of “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimer, Germany. |
A requiem for silence, 2017
Video Installation For the artist, blocking the ear is a symbol of silence. A requiem for silence consists of a sculpture of painted clay and dripping bee wax captured in a video performance. With this video work, the artist is seeking a footprint of innocent people who were imprisoned in Buchenwald between the years 1937 and 1945, imagining their suppression and their common tragedy in the concentration camp. Dropping wax onto an ear is an icon of physical forcefulness which was imposed onto them as prisoners under barbaric and starving conditions and torture. A requiem for silence is supposed to remind the spectators of the destinies of the victims of the further concentration camp. The artist’s effort is to visualize the auditory aspects of sound in a poetic ambience. |
Mila Panić
Mila Panić born in 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina currently lives between Weimar, Germany and Banja Luka, BiH. In 2014 she graduated from Academy of Arts in the University of Banja Luka, Department of Painting. In 2013 she attended the International Summer Academy in Salzburg, in the course “Arte Util” taught by artist Tania Bruguera. As a DAAD scholarship holder, in 2015 she enrolled in the master degree program of Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, which she currently attends. In 2014 she co-founded ‘APARTMAN’ art project for the popularisation of contemporary art in BiH. Mila Panić is the winner of several scholarships and grants as well as the Award for best student work in the field of visual art, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary art of Republic of Srpska in 2014. She was shortlisted for ZVONO Art Award for the best young artist in 2014 in BiH and 6.namaTREba.biennale – Share too much History, more Future! award for the best young video artist in BiH. Her works were presented in numbers of regional and international exhibitions, biennales, festivals and presentations including: 25th Slavonski Biennale, Museum of Visual Art (Osijek, CRO, 2017); 14×14 Donumenta, MSURS, (Banja Luka, BiH, 2016); ‘Contemporary Thesaurus’, Museum of Contemporary art of Vojvodina (Novi Sad,Serbia, 2016); 2. Berliner Herbstsalon, Imaginary Bauhaus Museum, Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin, Germany, 2015); Paraflows. X DIGITAL MIGRATION, Kunstlerhaus (Wien, Austria,2015); ‘How we quit the forest’, Sala LaMetro, during INCUBARTE festival (Valencia, Spain,2015); XI Biennale for Young artists, organised by national Museum of Con- temporary Art (Skoplje.Macedonia,2014), etc. |
Untitled, 2017
Video Installation The artist questions different statements which could be made and what is one’s responsibility as an artist and as an observer while dealing with the space of Buchenwald Memorial through the simple act of lighting a cigarette within this space and its vast history. On this special site a daily and simple action is not as easily understood nor naive. |
YunJu Park
YunJu Park is a South Korean Artist and Writer. She has participated in Artist Residency programs in ZK/U Berlin (2016); Incheon Art platform, Korea (2016); Jaio Contemporary Art, Japan, (2013); Triangle Art Association, New York (2010); Ssamzie Nongbu Art Company, Korea (2009). Solo Exhibitions include: Incheon Art Platform, Korea (2016); Space Can Foundation, Seoul, Korea (2015); Your Action Is Prohibited, Arts Pace Hotel, Boan, Seoul (2014); Gallery Biim, Seoul (2012), first exhibition Sponsored by Seoul National Museum of Art (2011). |
Directivity As A Demonstration Behavior, 2017
2-Channel Video Installation ‘Impossibility’ as an interpretation of silence, becomes the performative focus for the artist work. From small and quiet to heavy and loud, certain objects are trying to reach the sky, and overcome the horizon of the ‘impossibility’ within dual acts of throwing and falling. These acts, the artist considers, could be related to political and or historical statements. As within the physical movements of the performance: directivity is to become important, and is shown within the contrast between artificial intention and natural results. Where the purpose of trying to throw objects into the sky, may demonstrate the striving for freedom and justice against oppressing power. The artist claims, “when objects fall to the ground they make a sound, if throwing the object means expressing an opinion, the loudness can be correlated with strength and aggression. We are impossibly hopeful sometimes, even though all attempts work on a level of ‘impossibility’, one must sometimes have to do something, in order to raise one’s voice for justice and human rights. For, ‘impossibility’ becomes an option when it reaches into those of the hopelessness. The ‘impossibility’ takes the role within the silence, and the continual actions of the visual, within this performance.” |
Mariya Pavlenko
Mariya Pavlenko is a Ukrainian artist and designer, based in Kyiv, Wroclaw and Weimar. Mariya graduated from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, Ukraine, and is currently a student of the international program “Art in Public Space and New Artistic Strategies” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Mariya Pavlenko works with reconstruction of collective memory through personal experience, taking this as a strategy that confronts ideological usage of artistic practices in neo-liberal society. Her works deal with such topics as aesthetics of modernity, history of her homeland and tension between religion and economy. She set up a number of personal shows in Kyiv, Ukraine, as well as participated in group exhibitions worldwide, among which “Tomorrow we will explain”, public space/Kunsthaus Dresden; “The School of Kyiv” Bienniale, Kyiv, Ukraine; “Revolution of dignity”, Wilson Center, Washington, USA; Art Kyiv Contemporary IX, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine; “Long way to the freedom”, Ukrainian Institute of Contemporary Art in Chicago, USA; “I’m a drop in the ocean”, MOCAK, Krakow, Poland, and Künstlerhaus, Wien, Austria; “Civil mysticism”, Modern Art Research Institute, Kyiv, Ukraine. |
Вирва-Klangmal, 2017
Audio Guide What do we know about the things that we have never experienced? Reflecting on ideas of Walter Benjamin about the language of things1, as well as well Fredric Jameson’s concept of time’s present2, Вирва3-Klangmal collects remains of the original place (including beech wood, relief of the place and climate features) that visitors of the former concentration camp, Buchenwald, can find today in the same condition, and for this reason in the same way experience. Focused on experiencing of natural and social phenomena, as well as traces of original objects that can be recognized as renovated, the audio guide provides an alternative journey through locations of sound memorial that are not appropriated by the history of the place. Songs: Basement, Borders, Fear, Pressure, Wood, Stone in my Shoe, Pohovannya (Поховання), Green Tree with Green Bird House, Rituals, Warmth, Sea, Incline, Stones, Wind, Colder, Frozen, Vyrva (Вирва), Grass. |
Denise Rosero Bermúdez
Born in Quito-Ecuador in 1991, Denise Rosero Bermúdez is an architect, designer and artist currently based in Germany. In 2009 she entered the Architecture and Design College in Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She achieved her title in architecture in 2014 and has been practicing professionally ever since. Her experience in the field includes architectural and interior design in small and large scales, conservation and heritage, construction and (most importantly) public urban projects for social and urban development. In 2012 she participated in the XVIII Panamerican Biennale of Architecture in Quito-Ecuador, themed “Necessary Architecture, Necessary Cities”. In 2013 she attended the International Workshop from Universidad de los Andes in Cartagena – Colombia, themed “Heritage in a Consolidated City”; in which she and her team gained an honorable mention for their project and were nominated for Best Social Awareness Video. In 2014 she presented her Architectural Thesis: “Recovery and Appropriation of Public Space as a Consolidator of Communities: Production and Commerce Center for Sangolquí-Ecuador” in which nontraditional urban practices focus on societies and the common spaces they inhabit; clearly showing the investigation area she leans towards. In 2016 she began her MFA degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus Universität-Weimar. Currently developing a Site Specific Sound Installation entitled “Echoes of Buchenwald”. |
Echoes of Buchenwald, 2017
Site-Specific Audio Installation The murmurs of the past will echo constantly in our memories, like an infinite song encountering our thoughts and reminding us of the fragility of human nature. The longing witness that is the city of Weimar, could attest to the unspoken stories that have occurred, and – as ghosts – refresh our memories of the foregone. Beneath the surface of the present and the noise of the passing time, we might hear the whispers of those who walked our paths before us and soundlessly learn from their words. We shall pay close attention to the vast memories of the cities, because there is no entity that can link us closer to the past. And if, by walking through our mundane activities, we were to perceive the compositions of memories sounding loudly in our minds, we should listen closely and try to understand. Because our silent witnesses are loudly humming, they have eternal memory and they want us to never forget. Appraise the echo, grasp it intently; because history has painted the city with its melody. |
Malak Yacout
Malak Yacout is an Egyptian artist, currently studying in the Public Art and New Artistic Strategies M.F.A at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She graduated in 2015 from the American University in Cairo, having conducted exchange semesters at Bard College and at Parsons at the New School, New York. In 2015-16, Yacout spent a year working as a researcher at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. She has participated in group exhibitions at AUC’s Sharjah Gallery, the Greek Campus, the Peacock Art Gallery and Medrar, where her work, A Priori Markings, has won two Roznama art prizes. Malak Yacout’s work shows interest in issues of time, semiotics, structuralism, and epistemology. She is currently exploring names, language and meaning in the context of the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp. |
(Un)titled, 2017
Site-specific Public Art Installation The misleading name “Häftlingskantine” (“Prisoners’ Canteen”) does not invoke experiences of actual Buchenwald prisoners desperately fighting for scraps of nutrition. Neither does “Sonderbau” (“Special Building”) reflect its intended purpose in the former Buchenwald concentration camp. The same applies to “Buchenwald”, “Hospital”, “Kleines Lager” (“Little Camp”): the names fail to represent their meanings. Yet, do even labels like “Holocaust” or “Blutstrasse” (“Blood Road”) truly reflect the meanings they supposedly signify? What alternative names might have been more appropriate? Is it even possible to represent meaning through language at all? Untitled, a site-specific public art installation, makes the observation that language seems to carry a weight beyond simple representation. If language does not only signify but also adds meaning, then how do these additions shape and reconstruct our knowledge? Is knowledge derived only from observable, rational truth or is it also shaped by language? In a survey conducted in the streets of Weimar, passers-by try to rename the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp and its spaces. The sounds of these alternative names are clearly and interruptingly substituted into original radio excerpts about Buchenwald. Displayed in Weimar’s newspaper building vitrines, copies of original newspapers are manipulated to replace and cover names of Buchenwald and its spaces with handwritten names. Documentation is displayed at the Buchenwald Memorial. |
Saša Tatić
Saša Tatić was born 1991 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and graduated from the Academy of Arts at the University of Banja Luka in 2014. Currently she is attending MFA studies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, in the Department of Public Art and New Artistic Strategies as a DAAD Scholarship holder. Tatić is one of the co-founders of the art project for popularization of contemporary art “APARTMAN”. She is the winner of several awards and praises in the field of visual arts, including the jury award at the ‘’60 seconds’’ Film Festival in Copenhagen. In 2013, Tatić was a finalist of “Henkel Art.Award”. She has been actively exhibiting since 2013 in numerous regional and international exhibitions and festivals. |
Jedem das Seine, 2017
Performative action The gate of the former concentration camp Buchenwald, faced towards the inside, bears the inscription “Jedem das Seine”. Through planned performative action the gate should have been taken off the hinges and rotated in a way that the inscription changes its facing and becomes properly readable from the side when entering the camp. Turning the position of the inscription would have placed it into a different context, which would provide a new interpretation of reading the proverb. The maxim, that should stand as a simple and memorable guide for living, would fulfill its meaning by serving as a reminder faced to the free side of the former camp. As a substitute for the planned two channel video documentation of the action, manipulated photographs display the replacement of the inscription of the gate, including sights from in- and outside, in a way that an observer can visualize and distinguish the difference of meaning accomplished by creating a new context of observation. |
Ina Weise
Ina Weise was born in 1985 in Dresden, Germany. She studied Design at the Academy of Applied Arts in Schneeberg, Germany. After extended periods abroad in Linz, Austria, Łódź, Poland and in Chicago, US she graduated with a Masters degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 2014. Her works include site-specific performances and temporary interventions in public space. Weise is co-founder of the artist collective FREIZEIT (freizeit.work) and board member of the open workshop ROSENWERK of Konglomerat e.V. (konglomerat.org). She is currently working as artistic assistant of the international MFA-Program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. More info on inaweise.com |
Consider the Chewing Gum, 2017
Installation The conservation and subsequent scientific examination of archaeological objects helps us to further understand our shared histories. Objects entrusted to conservationists are primarily selected based on their scientific or cultural-historical significance, leaving behind troves of unexpected, and uninspected, objects that are parts of our common environment. These banal entities might be regarded as rubbish, standing for excess, laziness, or nerves, or they might hold in their material, silent human imprints, acting as emotional storage bins. The artist presents a piece of (chewed) chewing gum for scientific consideration. It will be subject to a thorough examination and presented in an archival display. The proposition is that chewing gum can be reimagined as an energetic fossil, in which physical traces of the act of mastication, as well as the immaterial traces of the chewing human’s emotional life, are inscribed. Consider the Chewing Gum shows the limits of science in decoding complex human emotions and offers a new way to explore the emotional imprints that linger in our everyday practices and the objects associated with them. |
Joephy Sze Ting Wong
Joephy Sze Ting Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1989. She obtained her BA from the Academy of Visual Arts in Hong Kong Baptist University in 2012. Currently she is pursuing her MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She works with diverse media, including site-specific installation, public art and painting. Wong uses installation as a condition to experiment with people and locations charged with memories. She challenges the definition of space and encourages uncertainties and unpredictable happenings in her installations. Her exhibitions include: Hack Project, Oil Street Art Space, Hong Kong (2016); Ghost Walk, Fringe Club, Hong Kong (2015) ; Find Arts Exhibition, 2014-PMQ, Hong Kong (2014); Make a different, MaD@ Social Innovation tour, Seoul, Korea (2013); Kowloon City Book Festival, MaD@九龍城書節 (2012); Hawkerama, DeTour, Hong Kong (2012) ; Market Forces, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong (2012); Aus eins . zwei ende, Mesa Wong & Joephy Wong Joint Exhibition, AVA Gallery, Hong Kong (2011) |
An Interview , 2017
Sounding Installation No matter how hard we try to dig out the closest possible correspondence to what actually happened, it seems that the story of the truth changes and is shaped over time. History is a story about the past and we who tell or write it, as well as we who hear or read it, lose parts of narration in between. To uncover the truth in historical documentations, surviving witnesses are typically presented in an interview situation. In An Interview the artist borrows interview questions of the documentary movie Shoah, in which director Claude Lanzmann recounts the story of the Holocaust through interviews with witnesses, perpetrators and survivors, to interview beer bottles of the brands “Deinhardt” and “Ehringsdorfer”, which were supplied to the SS in Buchenwald during the Second World War and still exist in Weimar nowadays. The interviews were recorded in different places within Weimar city and are presented in an installation in which sound is emerging from the finished beer bottles. |
Yi Weihua
Yi Weihua is visual artist and designer from China, born in 1986. She graduated from Tianjin Academic of Fine Art [TAFA] — Public Art Faculty with Bachelor Degree in 2009. In 2012-2016 Yi worked as Design Lead at UrbanArtProject(UAP), Shanghai, an Australian company which specializes in Public Art. Currently she is studying in the MFA program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Yi’s works is an ongoing investigation into the boundaries of Public Art and its identities. Her art practice uses reduplicative elements and encourages interactive participation. She believes local urbanism heritage is an essential foundation for art in public space, aiming to create public art which generates new common memories for its audiences. He exhibitions include: “Region” Public Art, Tishman office, Shanghai, China, and “Emerge” Public Art, Westin Hotel, Hainan, China in 2014; “Pearl” Public Art, Camphorwood Residence, Wuxi, China in 2012; “Made by Volkswagen“ Exhibition, Beijing, China, and “Twelve Facies” Johnnie Walker Exhibition, Beijing, China in 2011, Published in “Vision” Magazine 04/2011; and INBAR Shanghai Expo Exhibition, Shanghai, China in 2010. |
Welcome to Join the Parade, 2017
Installation Grass flourishes on the muster-ground of the former concentration camp of Buchenwald. And the site of the tragedy has now become an ambience for tourist photos and sometimes artistic expression. We try to understand the history of the Holocaust from all kinds of sources and we hear and imagine, research and study about this heavy, highlighted part of history. But what is the real intention of doing this? What can we change or influence? Welcome to Join the Parade is an art installation with a symbolic gateway and an array of screens with a spotlight placed in front that illuminates the installation and might project shadows of spectators on each screen if they decide to stand on a specific spot. Through such an interaction, the perception of the screens might shift from still objects to a living march towards the gateway. Through audience participation this art work questions the perspectives when people face history nowadays. Is it a march to a destination, is the gateway an entry or an exit? Are we as an audience onlookers or part of the parade? |
Artist & Curator Talks:
Clark Beaumont >> Artists
Marek Claasen >> Director, ArtFacts.Net
Amir Fattal >> Artist
Mark Gisbourne: Writer, Curator, Art Historian
Sharon Horodi >> Artist & Curator of Musraramix Festival and Art-ID Festival in Jerusaem
Elana Katz >> Artist
David Krippendorff >> Artist
Anne Maier >> Head of Press, Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Angela Schneider >> Chief Curator, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (Retired)
Stephan von Wiese: Writer, Curator, Art Historian, Director of Contemporary Art, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf (Retired)
Irina Yurna >> Trust for Mutual Understanding, Head of Berlin Office
EXHIBITION PHOTOS
Photo Credit: Vincent Briere
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Art Nomads
ART NOMADS:
Made in The Emirates
9 – 22 December 2016
Khalid Al Banna // Ahmed Al Faresi // Reem Al Ghaith // Khalid Al Qasabi // Abdulqader Al Rais // Maisoon Al Saleh // Jamal Al Suwaidi // Maitha Demithan // Lamya Gargash // Dr. Najat Makki // Salama Nasib // Taqwa //
& The Sovereign MENA Art Prize Finalists:
Hazem Harb, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Walid Al Wawi
Curated by David Szauder, Zsuzsanna Petró & Rachel Rits-Volloch
In Partnership with the Etihad Modern Art Gallery
and Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize
Opening: 9 December @ 7 – 10pm
At Studio 1 & MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin
Symposium
10 December 2016 @ 3 – 4.30pm
How Culture Builds Cities: Berlin and Abu Dhabi
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
More info on the symposium here >
In the frame of the exhibition Art Nomads – Made in Berlin,
MOMENTUM in collaboration with the Sovereign Art Foundation presents
the finalists of the Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize from the UAE:
Hazem Harb // Nadia Kaabi-Linke // Walid Al Wawi
More info on the artists here >
To know more about the exhibition Art Nomads – Made in Berlin
visit the exhibition website here >
and the facebook page here >
Curatorial Statement
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. 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 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.
Art Nomads – Made in Berlin and Made in the Emirates are two sister exhibitions bridging two capitol cities redefining themselves through art; two radically different cultures following parallel trajectories; two places which voraciously ingest influences from abroad, yet produce cultural outputs inextricably linked to the identity of each city.
From Abu Dhabi comes an exhibition of art from the United Arab Emirates. A young art, new to figuration, it is unsullied by the overbearing preconceptions of western art history, in the most exciting stages of finding its own voice. Showcasing the work of 16 artists, 60% of whom are women, it is a co-curation by Zsuzsanna Petró of the Etihad Modern Art Gallery, David Szauder, and Rachel Rits-Volloch of MOMENTUM, who is responsible for the Sovereign MENA Art Prize program and the symposium accompanying the exhibition, taking place at Berlin’s Bethanien Art Center on 9-22 December 2016, in cooperation with the Etihad Modern Art Gallery. Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize program presents work by artists based in the UAE who were selected as finalists in this year’s inaugural prize. The exhibition is accompanied by a symposium on cultural capital: 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 this a parallel trajectory? Is Abu Dhabi going for the “Berlin Effect” of cultural capital? We invite art professionals working in and with the UAE to discuss this and other questions linking the two cities.
From Berlin, the city of art nomads, comes an exhibition of art from elsewhere, about otherness, on the move to somewhere else. Showcasing the work of approximately 30 artists, it is a co-curation by 3 Berlin-based curators – David Szauder, Rachel Rits-Volloch, and Constanze Kleiner. While the origins of these artists spans the entire world, Berlin is the unifying force which links them. Whether they came to study or teach or attend one of the city’s prestigious artist residencies or simply to soak up the vibe, this group of exceptional artists form the core of Berlin’s art nomads. The exhibition opens at the Etihad Modern Art Gallery in Abu Dhabi in February 2017.
Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize finalists from the UAE
Nadia Kaabi-Linke Black is the New White (2012) Poster print on paper, 117x175cm Nadia Kaabi-Linke was born in Tunis, Tunisia, 1978, and raised in Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. She graduated from the University of Fine Arts, Tunis, in 1999, and earned a PhD at Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2008. Growing up between Tunis, Kiev, and Dubai, and now residing in Berlin, Kaabi-Linke’s personal history of migration across cultures and borders has greatly influenced her work. With subtlety and concision, her works give physical presence to that which tends to remain invisible, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape and control them. Kaabi-Linke takes inspiration from the forgotten or misused urban spaces around her. Black is the New White consists in a poster displaying an advertisement, which promotes an imaginary clothing line of male Gulf Arab dress, consisting of a black kandoura and ghutra, under the imaginary brand “Joseph Van Helt”. Glossy photos in magazine or posters tell us what we should wear, even when the clothes or accessories advertised can be unflattering or even, in the case of high heels, painful. But if the way we dress is often dictated by persuasive advertising, it can also be the result of powerful traditions, such as the black abaya that women wear in the Gulf countries. For Kaabi-Linke the abaya is an instrument of control, preventing women from going outdoors, because of the inconvenience of wearing black clothing in hot weather. In Black is the New White, Nadia Kaabi-Linke aims to undermine tradition through the visual language of advertising, promoting an equivalent outfit for men, a black kandoura. For Kaabi-Linke, the question is simple: if women accept to wear black in the hot sun, why could not men do the same? The name of the imaginary brand is inspired by the story of Joseph, or Yûsuf, one of Jacob’s sons (Genesis 1:39 in The Bible and Sūrah 12 in the Qur’an). Joseph story is about a man of exceptional beauty. Envied by his brothers, he then became the victim of women’s passions. After being wrongly accused by women whose advances he rejected, he was sent to prison. For Kaabi- Linke, more than a story about a man, Joseph is a metaphor of women’s destiny. Just like Joseph was jailed because of his beauty, women in traditional Islamic countries veil their face and body in a black cloth, for the same reason. Kaabi-Linke has had solo exhibitions at Centro de Arte Moderna, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon and the Mosaic Rooms, London in 2014, as well as Dallas Contemporary, Texas in 2015. Selected group exhibition highlights include shows at Bahrain National Museum, Manama, Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul and Museum of Modern Art, New York, all in 2013; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark in 2014; and Marta Herford Museum, Germany and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, both in 2016. She has participated in numerous biennales, including Venice Biennale 2011, Liverpool Biennial 2012 and Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala, India 2012. |
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About The Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF)
The Sovereign Art Foundation is a charity founded in 2003 in Hong Kong, which is now also registered in the UK, Singapore and South Africa. SAF runs the annual Sovereign Asian Art Prize with the purpose of raising money to help disadvantaged children. Since its inception, SAF has raised over US$5 million for charities and artists worldwide, while the Sovereign Asian Art Prize has become the largest award for the arts across Asia.
SAF funds projects using art as education, rehabilitation and therapy for disadvantaged children. The Sovereign Asian Art Prize is now in its 12th year and is the biggest, best known and most prestigious arts prize in the Asia region. In 2016, SAF launched its inaugural MENA Art Prize, for the Middle East & North Africa region.
More info on www.sovereignartfoundation.com
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
SYMPOSIUM
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
With thanks for the generous support in realizing this exhibition:
Talks Actually
Love, Actually…Talks, Actually…
Symposium & Performance
26 November @ 3 – 7pm
The Symposium is part of the Exhibition
Love, Actually…
At MOMENTUM
9 October – 27 November 2016
PARTICIPANTS:
David Elliott, curator of The Pleasure of Love, the 56th October Salon
Bojana Pejić, curator of the 49th October Salon
Jasmina Petković, producer of the October Salon
Rachel Rits-Volloch, director of Momentum Worldwide
Artists:
Andreas Blank, Mariana Hahn, Leiko Ikemura, Aleksandar Jestrović, David Krippendorff,
Franziska Klotz, Johanna Kandl, Via Lewandowsky, Sarah Lüdemann,
Milovan Destil Marković, Bjørn Melhus, Kirsten Palz, Mariana Vassileva
SCHEDULE
Performance: 15:00 – 15:30
Sarah Lüdemann, Return of the chthonian – This Is My Land
PANELS:
Panel 1: 16:00-16:45
The October Salon: History of the Salon and The Pleasure of Love
Speakers: David Elliott, Bojana Pejić, Jasmina Petković
Panel 2: 16:45-15:30
From Salons to Biennales to Belgrade.
Moderator: David Elliott. Speakers: Leiko Ikemura, David Krippendorff, Franziska Klotz, Johanna Kandl, Via Lewandowsky, Milovan Destil Marković, Bjørn Melhus
Panel 3: 17:30-18:15
Building Collections out of Exhibitions. Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and the October Salon Collection in dialogue with their curators.
Moderator: Rachel Rits-Volloch. Speakers: Andreas Blank, Aleksander Jestrović, Mariana Hahn, Sarah Lüdemann, Kirsten Palz, Mariana Vassileva
Exhibition Viewing: 18:15-19:00
Title: Return of the Chthonian – This Is My Land
Artist: Sarah luedemann
Recording Date: 26/11/2016
Duration: 02 min 34 sec
Part of Love, Actually… Exhibition
PERFORMANCE @ 3:00 – 3:30pm
Return of the chthonian – This Is My Land
i am an anthropologist, an awkward surrealist, poetic road kill. i am the naked hunter, an Amazonian goddess, an oozing bitch. i am a magician, i am Alice. i am no feminist, my darlings!
let me make a mark, scratch the surface, scratch myself,
do not dislocate your body, dig in your brain for your animal ancestry – in order to sense the storm.
dynamite me! rip me apart and put me back together. blow my bones, sing for my flesh. make it all vibrate at higher frequencies, so I can reach for the stars.
that which built the cosmos was androgyne – total sex – without the bang there would have been no planet earth.
– Sarah Lüdemann
The October Salon: History of the Salon and The Pleasure of Love
Speakers: David Elliott, Bojana Pejić, Jasmina Petković
From Salons to Biennales to Belgrade
Moderator: David Elliott. Speakers: Leiko Ikemura, David Krippendorff, Franziska Klotz, Johanna Kandl, Via Lewandowsky, Milovan Destil Marković, Bjørn Melhus
Building Collections out of Exhibitions.
Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and the October Salon Collection in dialogue with their curators
Moderator: Rachel Rits-Volloch. Speakers: Andreas Blank, Aleksander Jestrović, Mariana Hahn, Sarah Lüdemann, Kirsten Palz, Mariana Vassileva
SPEAKERS
David Elliott
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). He is Hon President of the Board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London. A specialist in Soviet and Russian avant-garde, as well as in modern and contemporary Asian art, he has published widely in these fields as well as on many other aspects of contemporary art. In 1996 he was co-curator of Kunst und Macht im Europa der Diktatoren 1930 bis 1945 at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and in 2000-2001 was Artistic Director of the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Ludwig Museum, Budapest and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. In 2011 he curated Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia at Calvert 22, London. He is the Chief Curator of BALAGAN: Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, organized by MOMENTUM.
Bojana Pejić
Bojana Pejić (born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia), is an art historian and curator, living in Berlin since 1991. Having studied History of Art at the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Belgrade, from 1977 to 1991 she was curator at the Student Cultural Center of Belgrade University and organized many exhibitions of Yugoslav and international art. She started to write art criticism in 1971 and was editor of art theory journal “Moment, Belgrade” (1984 – 1991). She organized an international symposium “The Body in Communism” at the Literaturhaus in Berlin in 1995. She was Chief Curator of the exhibition After the Wall – Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe organized by David Elliott at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (1999), which was also presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Budapest (2000), and at HamburgerBahnhof, Berlin (2000-2001). She was one of the co-curators of the exhibition Aspects/Positions held in the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Vienna in 1999. Between 2002 and 2004, she was one of international advisers of the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto (Japan) where she also curated a retrospective of Marina Abramovic (2003), which also toured to Morigame (Japan). In 2003, she had the Rudolf Arnheim guest professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin (history of art). She was adviser of the project De/Construction of Monument organized by the Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo where she also held seminars at the Academy of Fine Arts dedicated to the “Communist Body.” (2004-2005) In May 2005 she has defended her Ph.D. “The Communist Body – An Archeology of Images: Politics of Representation and Spatialization of Power the SFR Yugoslavia (1945 -1991)”. She was a Maria Goeppert-Mayer guest professor for International Gender Research at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University in Oldenburg (2006-2007). Bojana Pejić is the chief curator of Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2009-2010) at MUMOK, Vienna and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. She is also the editor of the “Gender Check Reader”. Dr. Bojana Pejić teaches at the Bauhuas University in Weimar and works as an independent curator and writer.
JASMINA PETKOVIĆ
Jasmina Petrovic, based in Belgrade, graduated in 2002 from the Department of Serbian Language and Literature at the University of Belgrade. As a producer and organizer at the Belgrade Cultural Center, she curated exhibitions and organised projects since 2008, where she started with the exhibition Exposing\Underline memories in the Sentetjen-Museum of Modern Art. In 2009 she produced the visual program BELEF09, followed by the international project The Culture Lobby (an archive of cultural memory) in 2010. In 2013 Petrovic organized the International Film Artist, curated by Zorana Đaković Minniti, and in 2014, in cooperation with the White Chapel Gallery in London. In 2015 she initiated various projects, such as the Resonate Festival and Grey Matter together with Ivana Šijak in the Museum of Belgrade, as well as the Russian Avangard in the Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade. In 2008 Petrovic began to produce and organize her first October Salon, in cooperation with the curator Bojana Pejic, the 49th October Salon titled Artist-Citizen, a citizen of the artist. Subsequently she also organized the 50th October Salon in 2009, Circumstances, curated by Branilava Andjelkovic, as well as the 52th October Salon in 2011, Time to get acquainted, curated by Alenka Gregorič and Galit Eliat, and the 53th October Salon in 2012, Gud Lajf, curated by Branislav Dimitrijevic and Mika Hanula. Also under her supervision was the 55th October Salon in 2014, Things that disappear, curated by Nikolaus Schaffhausen and Vanessa Miller, in the City Museum Belgrade, and this year’s 56th October Salon, Salon Pleasure of love, curated by David Elliott, took place in the Museum of Belgrade and the Belgrade Cultural Center.
RACHEL RITS-VOLLOCH
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 dissertation on visceral spectatorship in contemporary cinema, focusing on the biological basis of embodiment. Having been a university lecturer in film studies and visual culture, her focus moved to contemporary art after she undertook a residency at A.R.T Tokyo. Rachel Rits-Volloch founded MOMENTUM in 2010 in Sydney, Australia, as a parallel event to the 17th Biennale of Sydney. MOMENTUM moved to Berlin in January 2011, and since that time has evolved into a non-profit global platform for time-based art, with headquarters in Berlin at the thriving art center, Kunstquartier Bethanien. 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.
In 2016-2017, Rachel Rits-Volloch is currently Visiting Professor at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, lecturing in the MFA program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” and the PhD program in Artistic Research. Born in Riga, USSR, Rachel Rits-Volloch is currently based in Berlin, having previously lived and worked in the US, UK, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sydney.
MARIANA HAHN
Born in 1985, Schwäbisch Hall, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
Mariana Hahn’s work interrogates the universal fallacy of human fate through the use of photography, per- formance and video. Believing that ‘weaving’ can be a metaphor for human autonomy, her practice is based on thinking of the body as a bearer of continuously woven narratives. She o en uses textiles to take the place of the human body, the textile itself becoming the narrative of a living archive. Her work feeds from sociological, mythological, folkloric and anthropologi- cal sources, as well as from experience of everyday life.
Selected solo exhibitions: Freunde von Freunden (Friends of Friends), Space, Berlin; Social Fabric, Mill6 Foundation, Hong Kong (2016); VACANCY, Crone Berlin, Berlin; Works On Paper, MOMENTUM, Berlin; Distant le er, present now, Month of Performance Art, Berlin; Residency program, Mill6 Foundation, Hong Kong (2015); Kolibri, Berlin; Torso no Torso, IV Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2014); 24h Ste in, Club Storrady, Szczecin; Burn My Love Burn, Trafo Station, Museum of Contemporary Art, Szczecin; Works on paper.
Selected group exhibitions:Missing Link, MOMENTUM, Berlin; Burn my love burn, Hayaka Arti, Istanbul (2013).
Selected performances: Social Fabric, Mill6, Hong Kong, AAA, HK, Art Basel HK2016, An Ocean Archive (2016); Distant Le er Present Now, MOMENTUM, Berlin, Performance Lecture, Mill6, Hong Kong (2015).
Selected collections: MILL6 Foundation, Hong Kong and MOMENTUM Worldwide, Berlin.
LEIKO IKEMURA
Born 1951 in Tsu City, Mie Prefecture, Japan. Lives and works in Berlin and Cologne.
www.leiko.info
Leiko Ikemura studied foreign languages at the University of Osaka (1970–72). She moved to Europe 1972 and since that time has lived in Spain, Switzerland and Germany. Since 1991 she has worked as a professor at the Berlin University of Arts.
Selected solo exhibitions: Leiko Ikemura. …und plötzlich dreht der Wind, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2016); Leiko Ikemura. Retrospektive, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Cologne (2015); Leiko Ikemura. Pioon, The Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, Sonderausstellung Preisträger Cologne Fine Art, Cologne (2014); Leiko Ikemura: i-migration, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (2013); Korekara oder die Heiterkeit des fragilen Seins, Museum für Asiatische Kunst—Staatliche Museen Berlin (2012); Leiko Ikemura: Trans guration, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo / Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Tsu (2011); Leiko Ikemura, August-Macke-Preis Ausstellung, Sauerland-Museum Arnsberg (2010); Leiko Ikemura. Tag, Nacht und Halbmond, Museum zu Allerheiligen, Scha hausen (2008).
Selected group exhibitions:Macht. Wahn. Vision. Rapunzel & Co. Von Türmen und Menschen in der Kunst, Arp Museum, Remagen, Wild Heart: Art Exhibition of German Neo-Expressionism Since the 1960s, China Art Museum Shanghai (2014);Von Japonismus zu Zen. Paul Klee und der Ferne Osten“, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Back to Earth. Die Wiederentdeckung der Keramik in der Kunst, Gerisch- Sti ung Neumünster (2013); Beyond Memory, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem (2012); Fukushima and the consequences, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011); 100 Jahre Hetjens-Museum. Faszination des Fremden: China-Japan-Europa, Hetjens-Museum. Dusseldorf, Emotional Drawing—SOMA Museum of Art, Seoul (2009).
DAVID KRIPPENDROFF
Born 1967 in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin. www.davidkrippendor.com
David Krippendor is a video and experimental lmmaker. He grew up in Rome and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin where he graduated with a Master’s degree in 1997.
Selected exhibitions and screenings: New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem).He has also participated in three Biennales (Prague Biennial, Mediation Biennial Poznań and the Video Biennial in Tel Aviv).
FRANZISKA KLOTZ
Born in 1979 in Dresden, Germany. Works and lives in Berlin.
www.franziska-klotz.de
Franziska Klotz’s increasingly abstract paintings still suggest landscapes, scenes, or objects that are derived from photographs or reports she has seen or read about.
Selected solo exhibitions: Franziska Klotz, Galerie Kornfeld Berlin (2016); H3P04 Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin (2014); Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin (2013); Klotz / Die Jagd, Galerie Wolfsen Aalborg (2012); Ka’aguy, Charim Ungar Contemporay Berlin (2011); Franziska Klotz, Charim Wien, Vienna; Nowhere Right Here!, Cerasoli Gallery, Los Angeles (2009); Klotz, Galerie Davide Di Maggio,Berlin (2006); New Painters: part one, Galerie Davide Di Maggio, Milano; Max Ernst Award Exhibition, Galerie am Schloss, Brühl (2005).
Selected group exhibitions: BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, Max Liebermann Haus, Berlin (2015); IV. Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2014); SALONDERGEGENWART, Hamburg (2013); Tracing Paper, Charim Galerie, Vienna, Berlin/Budapest 20 Virag, Judit Gallery Budapest (2012); Budapest/Berlin 20, Hungarian Embassy Berlin (2011); MAL WAS DEUTSCHES, Hangar-7, Salzburg, Projekt 09, Charim Ungar Contemporary, Berlin, Fairytale of Berlin, Scion Installation, L.A., Culver City (2009)wasistdas, LOFT19, Paris (2008)
JOHANNA KANDL
Born 1954 in Vienna, Austria. Lives in Berlin and Vienna.
www.galerieandreasbinder.de
Johanna Kandl studied painting in Vienna and Belgrade. Although texts and image seems to be mutually exclusive in her work, they contradict each other in ways that are both critical and sardonic.She evokes the ‘blessings’ of the neo-liberal world in slogans, and marks their hollowness and mendacity in sketchily painted scenes that depict situations and people located at the economic and cultural margins of society: beggars, black marketeers, pe y traders, the denizens of spoil heaps and scrap yards.
Selected projects and exhibitions: The Turn, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Wien (2016), Politischer Populismus, Kunsthalle Wien, Konkrete Kunst, Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Turning Points, Buda Palace, Budapest (2015); Zehntausend Täuschungen und hun- der ausend Tricks, 21er Haus, Wien, Glück, Kra werk Wolfsburg, (2014); Liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, The Collection as a Character / The Character of a Collection, MUHKA, Antwerpen (2013); You only live twice, Camera Austria, Graz (2012); Wunder, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, other possible worlds, NGBK, Berlin, FAQ Serbia, ACF NY,Viel Glück und Erfolg, Kunstverein Nordhorn; Over the Counter, Műcsarnok, Budapest (2011).
BJØRN MELHUS
Born 1966 in Kirchheim unter Teck, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
www.melhus.de
Bjørn Melhus studied photography in Stuttgart from 1985 to 1987 and Fine Arts with a major in Film/Video at the Braunschweig University of Art from 1990 to 1997. In his short films and installations, Melhus focuses critically on mass media and how it represents global ideas and trends. He uses film and television footage as a basis from which, by means of exaggera- tion, to deconstruct stereotypical themes, figures and patterns of perception. At the same time, he disrupts the seemingly fixed relationship between media and audience to open up views on the essential nature of human interaction.
Selected Exhibitions: Bjørn Melhus has participated in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York, the 8th International Biennial of Istanbul, the FACT
in Liverpool, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, the Ludwig Museum
in Cologne, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Denver Art Museum, as well as others. Since 2003, he has been a professor of Fine Arts/Virtual Realities at the School of Art and Design, Kassel.
VIA LEWANDOWSKY
Born 1963 in Dresden, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
www.vialewandowsky.de
Via Lewandowsky studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (1982–1987). Since moving from Dresden he travelled extensively and has lived for extended periods in New York (Fellowship at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center—today MoMA PS1,1991– 1992), Beijing (Fellowship Beijing Case, 2005), Los Angeles (Fellowship Villa Aurora, 2009) and Rome (Fellowship Villa Massimo, 2011).
Selected solo exhibitions: Hokuspokus, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (2016); Hokuspokus, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Es ist Zeit, Galerie Karin Sachs, Munich (2015); ab-surdus, MOMENTUM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, Korrekturen/Correzioni, Casa di Goethe, Rome (2014); Welternährungs, Galerie Martina De erer, Frankfurt/Main (2013); Termin für eine Pointe, Andrae Kaufmann Gallery, Berlin (2012); e.g. 9, 42 etc., Galerie Charim, Vienna, Archäologie der Ähnlichkeit, Galerie Karin Sachs, Munich (2011).
Selected group exhibitions: Gegenstimmen, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Ende vom Lied, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Passion.Fan Behaviour and Art, Ludwig Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Über die Unmöglichkeit des Seins, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (2016);Der Raum zwischen den Personen kann die Decke tragen. Sammlung IvoWessel, Weserburg—Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen, Dresden.?—Arbeiten mit der Stadt, Three art projects in public spaces, Dresden; Kunst für alle, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2015); Outer Space. Faszination Weltraum, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, In Furs—KB OUTSIDE / 40 Jahre Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2014); Ausweitung der Kampfzone. 1968–2000. Die Sammlung Teil 3, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, La Grande Magia. Selected Works from the UniCredit Art Collection, MAMbo, Bologna (2013); The Last Analog Revolution. A Memory Box, Galerie8, London, Villa Massimo, Works of the servitors of the year 2011, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2012); Heimatkunde—30 Künstler blicken auf Deutschland, Jewish Museum Berlin, Art On Lake, City Park Lake, Budapest (2011).
SARAH LÜDEMANN
Born 1981,Cologne,Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
www.sarahluedemann.com
Sarah Lüdemann studied Linguistics, Psychology and Fine Art at Cologne University (2001–2005). She was selected for a residency with Mona Hatoum at the Fundación Marcelino Botín in 2010 and later that year received a scholarship to study an MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, which she completed with distinction in 2011.
Selected exhibitions: Sarah Lüdemann’s work has been exhibited widely and internationally,including at Printed Ma er, New York, the Goethe Institute Cairo,Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin, Hayaka Arti, Istanbul, Trafo, Szczecin, LYON, Biennale de la Danse, La lavoir public, Lyon and HDLU, Zagreb.
Selected collections: MOMENTUM Worldwide, Berlin; Collegium Polonicum collection, Słubic; Mutzen-bacher Restaurant, Berlin; Piracy Book Collection AND Publishing, London; To q House,Sao Paulo and in private collections in England, Germany, Portugal, Israel, Croatia, Hungary and Brazil.
MILOVAN DESTIL MARKOVIĆ
Born 1957 in Čačak, Serbia. Lives and works in Berlin and Belgrade.
www.markovic.org
Milovan DeStil Marković (born 9 November 1957, in Čačak, Yugoslavia, today Serbia) is Serbian visual artist, who began his career in the early 1980s. Active for over two decades, he is recently described as father of Transfigurative Painting and the Text Portrait. Visiting Professor Art in Context at the University of Arts, Berlin.
Selected exhibitions: Drei-Häuser-Kunst-Pfad, Eifel; Daun-Steinborn; At the Bo om of the Poem, Lennox House, Australian National University, Canberra; Roundup, Bundanon Trust, Bundanon, NSW (2016);a rose is a rose, is a rose, Woelkpromenade, Berlin (2015); Lada 2014, Umetnički paviljon “Cvijeta Zuzorić”, Belgrade; 50 umetnika iz zbirke MSUB—Jugoslovenska umetnost od 1951 do 1989 godine, Kuća legata, Belgrade; Conjunction, GreenhouseBerlin, Berlin (2014); BrandSchutz / Mentalität der Intoleranz,Jener Kunstverein, Jena; Drei-HäuserKunst-Pfad, Eifel 2013; Daun-Steinborn, Vent Vidi Vici, Collection Vol.4; Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Kumamoto (2013); Sichtwechsel, Werke aus der Sammlung des n.b.k. Video-Forums, Nordstern Videokunstzentrum, Gelsenkirchen; Berliner Zimmer, HDLU Meštrović Paviljon, Zagreb (2012).
KIRSTEN PALZ
Kirsten Palz, born Copenhagen 1971. Lives and works 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.
MARIANA VASSILEVA
Born 1964, Antonovo, Bulgaria. Lives and works in Berlin.
Vassileva studied pedagogy at Veliko Turnovo University, Theatre Art in Leipzig and Visual Arts at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.
Selected solo exhibitions: Balance, So a Art Gallery, So a (2015); M V, Kunstverein Ruhr e.V., Essen, Fold & Break, DNA-Gallery, Berlin (2013); Solo Video 2002–2012, Holbeinhaus, Augsburg, Goethe-Institut, Lyon, Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca (2012); The Gentle Brutality of Simultanity, Starkwhite, Auckland (2011); Because I Dream, I Am Not, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney (2010); Just a Play, DNA-Gallery, Berlin (2009).
Selected group exhibitions: Walk the Line, Wolfsburg Museum, Wolfsburg (2015); Inhabiting the World, Busan Biennale 2014 (2014); I see you, Kunsthalle Detroit, Inner Journeys, Maison Particulière, Brussels, Painting and Contemporary Media, Paco das Artes, São Paulo (2013); Beyond Time—International Video Art Today, Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Good Night, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, East is West, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Hors-pistes 2012, un autre mouvement des images, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (MNAC), XVIII. Rohkunstbau, Berlin (2012); Transitland, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina So a, Madrid, The Beauty of Distance. Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, 17. Biennaleof Sydney (2010).
Selected collections: La Caixa Caja de Ahorros de El Monte y Fundacion el Monte, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
ALEKSANDAR JESTROVIĆ
Aleksandar Jestrović or Jamesdin was born on the 27th April 1972 in Zagreb, Croatia, ex-Yugoslavia.
jamesdin.wordpress.com
He obtained his master degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 2000 in the class of Čedomir Vasić. Besides painting and multimedia art he is occupied in basketball. He has never been convicted and has served the army.In October 2011 in “Art in Kontext“ he did a master program at UDK Berlin with Professor Wolfgang Knapp. Since 2000, he has exhibited at various solo and group exhibitions in Belgrade and abroad. His art works, or rather his concepts, are a brutal social analysis of a society obsessed with its own representation in the contemporary media system. For his work he won the prize of the Veličković Fondation for drawing, the prize of Belgrade Cultural Center for Octobar salon and the Belgrade Faculty of Art ” Big prize for painting Rista i Beta Vukanović “. Lives and works in Berlin and Belgrade.
Solo exhibitions: 2015 –Bulky Luggage/ Sperrgepäck,Theater im Pfalzbau , Ludwigshafen Serbinale & Offene Welt Festivals, Ludwigshafen, Germany; 2014-„ Večiti student” (“Langzeitstudent”) Dom Kulture Studentski Grad, Belgrad, Serbia (curator: Maida Gruden)and “Monkey Bussines” Humboldt Mensa, Berlin, Germany (curator: Veronika Beckh);2012-ŠVERC KOMERC/Smuggle, Trade-City gallery Požega, Serbia and Preslišavanje 6, with Milena Putnik and Dragana Stevanović, Gallery Remont, Belgrade, Serbia; 2011-STOKA SA ISTOKA/ EASTERN HILLBILLIES, Exhibition of the recipient of the award at the 50th October Salon in 2009; -The Art Gallery The Cultural Centre оf Belgrade, Serbia; 2010- KO KOGA JEBE?/ WHO IS FUCKING WHO?, curator Jani Pirnat,Gallery of erotic art Račka, Celje, Slovenia; 2009–HURRY U ARE LATE, The White Tube project, curator Medeleine Park, Oslo, Norway; 2008-NH5-SZ1, gallery Remont, Belgrade, Serbia and Nova slika, Nenad Kostić, Nikola Marković i Jamesdin, gallery Vinko Perčić, Subotica, Serbia; 2007-Tunnel of Love, gallery Studenski grad, Belgrade, Serbia; -Nikola Markovic, Dragan Djordevic and Jamesdin, Nolit warehouses, Belgrade, Serbia; 2005-COLONIA 2001 gallery Remont, Belgrade, Serbia; 2004-CHAKRE/A4 gallery Remont, Belgrade, Serbia; 2002-FLIPER Gallery Dom Omladine, Belgrade, Serbia; 2001-120 pictures in 60 minutes video work with Isidora Ficovic,gallery SKC, Belgrade, Serbia; 2000-IZLOŽBA PASA/ DOG SHOW, gallery SULUJ, Belgrade, Serbia.
Residency Hale Ekinci
Hale Ekinci
1 – 31 July 2016
Hale Ekinci (b. 1984 in Karamursel, Turkey) is a Chicago-based Turkish interdisciplinary artist and Assistant Professor of Art at North Central College, teaching a variety of courses in the Digital Art field. She spent her childhood and much of her young adult years in Turkey, a homeland brought in and out of focus throughout her works. She completed her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago. Focusing on narrative and intercultural connections, her works vary from illustration and mixed media collage to video and installation.
During her residency in Berlin and her international travels, Hale Ekinci photographs homes, habitats, architecture, statues, and people from all aspects of life and collages them into mixed-media drawings. Through the combination of illustration with digital collage transfers of these photos, she crafts colourful and symbolic pattern-based images on paper. Cultural traditions, political issues, mutated memories, idioms, and translations are the backbone of her work. Personal experiences and current social issues embellished with made-up Kafkaesque details along with old shamanistic rituals make the basis of the non-linear stories she tells in her work. She creates interconnected forms that combine the reality of daily life at different locales in a way that intertwines different people, architecture and sociopolitical issues, using mixed-media drawings that explore these relationships through visual metaphor. In a way she translates each culture’s narratives of the human condition into visual concoctions that together reimagine and guide a connected global human experience.
Applying similar techniques of collage to the moving image, Ekinci also worked on the video art project “Almanci (Germaner)” (see below) for her Residency work at MOMENTUM. Based on an original story she wrote during her time in Berlin, the video takes place at a Turkish traditional ceremony of “asking permission to marry”, and explores the stereotypes of Turkish immigrant identity as seen from both Turkish and German perspectives. Using a combination of field video, green screen, still images, and drawings, she crafts a magical realist world where family relations, identity stereotypes, rituals, and women’s issues result in a tense scene that reflects the universal bizarreness of traditions and stereotypes.
Almanci Bride (Germaner Gelin)
by Hale Ekinci
Open Studio
23 July 2016
At MOMENTUM
Open Studio
9 July 2016
At MOMENTUM
IkonoTV Natural Habitats
NATURAL HABITATS
MOMENTUM Collection Carte Blanche
for
‘ikonoTV’s special programming Art Speaks Out 2016’
1 – 30 November 2016
Every Tuesday and Friday – Three Times per Day:
9pm Berlin / NY / Shanghai Time
[Berlin Time: 9pm, 3am, 3pm]
Stefano Cagol // Thomas Eller // James P. Graham // Janet Laurence // Kate McMillan
Selected Works from the MOMENTUM Collection
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
Watch the trailer:
Program:
Janet Laurence, The Other Side of Nature (Panda)
Kate McMillan, Paradise Falls I
Janet Laurence, Dingo
Kate McMillan, Paradise Falls II
Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef
Thomas Eller, THE White Male Complex, #5 (Lost)
Janet Laurence, Grace
Stefano Cagol, Evoke Provoke (the border)
James P. Graham, Chronos
Discussion about sustainability of the environment is intrinsically linked to the sustainability of basic human rights. Seeking to preserve the natural habitats of the animals and plants of the forests and oceans, also maintains our human natural habitat, prolonging access to clean air, clean water, the ability to grow food, and the hope to live peacefully.
The accelerating phenomenon of urbanization is fuelled by the multiple causes of migration: refugees fleeing war zones, economic migrants fleeing poverty, those escaping famines brought on by desertification and changing climates. As these migrants all gather together in megacities, the question of how to live in an urban context itself becomes an environmental issue. With our natural habitat shifting inexorably from the rural to the urban, we need to nurture the knowledge of how to live with nature in order to ensure that our natural surroundings do not become only memories for future generations.
Natural Habitats brings together 5 artists from the MOMENTUM Collection from countries as diverse as Australia, Italy, England, and Germany, all of whom have visited sites of environmental change and human disaster to create subtle works reflecting upon our changing planet. Janet Laurence’s films capture the tragic beauty of animals on the verge of extinction and the disappearing habitats of the Great Barrier Reef. Kate McMillan’s works revisit the sites of historical traumas, now forgotten, dwarfed by natural beauty. Thomas Eller’s perpetually drowning White Male is doing so in the very waters of Lampedusa where so many migrants lost their lives. Stefano Cagol confronts the ice caps of the Arctic Circle with the destructiveness of man. While James P. Graham presents a microcosm of mankind’s natural habitat.
Artists and Works:
STEFANO CAGOL
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. The RWE Foundation VISIT program supported Cagol’s Artist Residency at MOMENTUM and his year-long project culminated in an exhibition in berlin. In 2015 Cagol undertook an Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, in parallel with his solo show inaugurating the new venue CLB Collaboratorium Berlin. For his first solo show in Berlin he presented “The Body of Energy (of the mind)”, a year-long project the artist has developed as an expedition spanning Europe’s northern-most to southernmost tips, 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.”
READ MORE ABOUT STEFANO CAGOL’S ARTIST RESIDENCY AT MOMENTUM HERE >>
Evoke Provoke (the border) (2011)
The love and hate that Cagol feels towards boundaries, both physical and mental, is at the root of this work created at Kirkenes, in the Arctic Circle, during one of the periods he spent abroad as an artist in residence. The artist staged a series of emblematic actions that he filmed with a video camera. In total solitude, immersed in a fascinating but hostile nature, in conditions bordering on the extreme, like the place where the actions were carried out. For Cagol in this case the border is precisely the one between himself, his body and his mind, and the nature that surrounds him. The setting seems to be cloaked in twilight, barely dispelling the darkness, and the temperature is 25 degrees below zero. In those frozen lands, he tries to communicate in one way or another, using different forms of signalling. He endeavours to modify the landscape, to light it up, to melt the snow with a flame, but every attempt at interaction is in vain. The video was shown at the solo exhibition Concilio in the church of San Gallo, as a collateral event at the 54th Venice Biennale.
[Excerpted from Stefano Cagol Works 1995 | 2015]
THOMAS ELLER
Thomas Eller (b. 1964, Coburg) started his studies in Fine Arts at the Hochschule der Künste of Berlin. After his forced dismission, he went on to graduate in Sciences of Religion, Philosophy and Art History from the Freie Universität, Berlin. He has worked as research assistant at the Science Center for Sociology in Berlin (WZB), is the founder of online art magazine artnet.de, where he served as editior-in-chief and was appointed managing director for the German branch of artnet AG, as well as executive director and artistic director of Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin. Eller is a member of various institutions, including the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA) and the Steering Committee for Creative Industries at the Chamber of Commerce in Berlin (IHK). In his photos-sculptures, Eller manifests a desire to review our relationship with perception, through a confrontation between the viewer, the process of reception and the image, by deliberately destabilizing the picture. He has received various prizes, including the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Prize (1996), the Villa-Romana Prize (2000), the Art Omi International Art Center (2002) and the Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize from the Akademie der Künste Berlin (2006). Recent exhibitions include his solo ‘The ego Show – A Group Exhibition’ at Autocenter, Berlin (2010) and group exhibitions ‘The Name, The Nose’ at MuseoLaboratorio Ex Manifatture, Tabacchi (2013). Eller is the co-curator of PANDAMONIUM’s partner-exhibition ‘The 8 of Paths: Art in Beijing‘, opening at the Uferhallen in Berlin.
THE White Male Complex, #5 (Lost) (2014)
Shot on Lampedusa in 2014, on the beach infamous for its migrant traffic, Eller lives the plight of so many who wash up on that shore. 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 is surreal, thousands of African migrants are our reality. Like Isaac Julien’s 2010 work Ten Thousand Waves, on the deaths of Chinese migrant cockle pickers on the shores of the UK, Eller in his own language tackles the watery deaths of migrant workers as a sadly universal suffering, devoid of markers of place or time.
JAMES P. GRAHAM
James P. Graham has been working full-time as an artist for 10 years, most notably 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. His decision to pursue a career as a fine artist followed a two-year sabbatical, during which he refused all commercial work in order to concentrate on creating his first purposeful artworks in 2002-3. These were screen-based, experimental film works using Super 8 film and 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. By mainly using landscape and nature, his work often references the now disused term scientia sacra, permeating chosen locations and objects with a metaphysical and ontological significance. As well as interpreting and re-creating notions of “sacred space,” his work is infused with ideas that derive from intuitive and ritualistic sources. The results can be enticingly intangible, and in some cases, totally immersive. 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.
Chronos (1999)
Chronos 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. It was shot on location in Rajastan India between February and March 1999. Originally funded by Channel 4 Television UK in 1999, Chronos was selected by and later donated through co-curator James Putnam for screening in the MOMENTUM Sydney exhibition (2010).
JANET LAURENCE
Australian artist Janet Laurence‘s work explores a poetics of space and materiality through the creation of works that deal with our experiential and cultural relationship with the natural world. Her work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. It occupies the liminal zones and meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Laurence’s practice includes both ephemeral and permanent works as well as installations that extend from the museum/gallery into both urban and landscape domain. Her work, centered on living nature, bleeds between the architectural and the natural world, physically and metaphorically dissolving these boundaries. Her spaces are immersive and reflective, creating a play between perception and memory. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underlying themes. Laurence’s work is represented in major Australian and international collections and has been included in many national survey exhibitions.
Grace (2012)
“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
Dingo (2013)
“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
The Other Side Of Nature / Panda (2014)
“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
Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (2015)
Using the example of the Great Barrier Reef – inscribed as World Heritage since 1981 – and its symbolic weight, Janet Laurence invites the spectator to imagine the possibility of healing the marine world from the consequences of global warming and human activity: a space recalling a resuscitation unit reveals the plight of the coral reef and proposes a plan of action. With permission from the Australian Museum which will subsequently exhibit the work, in July 2015 the artist visited Lizard Island station where vital research for the future of coral are ongoing. The installation of which this video is an integral part is presented at the entrance of Grande Galerie de l’Evolution at the National Museum of Natural History which has loaned specimens for its realization. An accompanying video is projected at the Tropical Aquarium of Palais de la Porte Dorée. This project is part of the UN backed initiative for COP21.
KATE McMILLAN
Kate McMillan has exhibited throughout Australia and overseas since 1997. In 2013 she relocated to London from Australia, where she has spent much of her life, to undertake a number of projects, which include the filming of four ambitious new works funded in part by one of two Creative Development Fellowships awarded annually across all artforms by the Department for Culture and the Arts, Western Australia. The work will be presented by Performance Space, Australia in Sydney, Tasmania and the United Kingdom in 2014 and will include a major monograph on McMillan’s practice. >McMillan is a Phd candidate at Curtin University under the supervision of Dr Anna Haebich (author of Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000). She has been funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award to complete her Phd which examines the forgetting of the history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island. She currently holds an Academic Post with Open University, Australia. Previous solo exhibitions include 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. She has been included in various group exhibitions over the last few years including at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Gertrude Street Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Govett Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand and the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney.
Paradise Falls I (2011/12)
Paradise Falls I is the philosophical culmination of the time McMillan spent in Switzerland in 2011 as well as her ongoing PhD project into the forgetting of the history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, Western Australia. This significant body of work highlights a shift in her practice, evidenced by a dark and moody palette and the combination of figurative and abstract works that set up an interplay between landscape, memory, forgetting and history. Working across a diverse range of mediums including painting, collage, photography, film and sculpture, this exhibition examines the complex and sustaining residue of these overarching themes. The works cover a range of specific landscapes including Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, the Black Forest in Germany and the winter landscapes of Switzerland. With a focus on island sites and places that exist in isolation, the works attempt to draw parallels between physical landscapes and the psychological landscapes of the artist’s own memories, broader cultural histories and stories.
Paradise Falls II (2011/12)
Paradise Falls II follows a man as he rows towards the silhouette of a craggy island off the coast of Wadjemup/Rottnest. He too appears and disappears from sight, finally lost to the inky black of the ocean. These characters are stand-ins for fractured and partial histories that disappear from focus, yet continue in our collective psyche as dark and haunting traumas. The films are like moving paintings, heavily referencing the romantic tradition of Germanic landscape painting. Unsurprisingly then the work of artists such as Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901) and Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) become distant cousins to McMillan’s oeuvre. The artist acknowledges and even embraces these quotations but she also holds them in a critical eye as part of an enlightenment ideology that has helped us to forget. Through engaging with the viewing process we participate in a re-remembering, acknowledging the shady edges of things, but also baring witness to the beauty of sadness that is contrary to the horrors of forgetting history.
DaoJiao Art Festival
THE 1st DAOJIAO NEW NEW ART FESTIVAL >>
Artistic Director: Li Zhenhua
Curatorial Team: Rachel Rits-Volloch, ABI (Art Bureau of Investigation)
Media Facade Program:
Selected Works from the MOMENTUM Collection
Video Program Featuring:
Qiu Anxiong, Stefano Cagol, Theo Eshetu, Mark Karasick, Hannu Karjalainen, Janet Laurence, Kate McMillan, Tracey Moffatt, Varvara Shavrova, Sumugan Sivanesan
Read the E-Catalog of the Selection from the MOMENTUM Collection >>
MORE ABOUT THE 1st DAOJIAO NEW NEW ART FESTIVAL >>
PHOTOS OF THE FESTIVAL
MOMENTUM Collection Hors Pistes
at
16 – 24 September 2016
Cake (2014)
by Qiu Anxiong
featured in the selection
Zing Zing Asia
Monday, September 19 @ 16:00
At UPLINK FACTORY, Totsune build. 1F, Udagaywacho, Shibuyaku, Tokyo
READ MORE ABOUT THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION HERE > >
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
Hors Pistes[Off Tracks]is an moving image art Festival promoting experimentation of new forms of art, organized by the Centre Pompidou since 2006.
Well known for introducing international new talents, HORS PISTES showcases a selection of works, a mirror of the uniqueness of the Cinemas of Centre Pompidou, focusing on diversity.
Created to explore the most innovative and avant-garde trends of today’s interdisciplinary creation, HORS PISTES brings together art and moving images through screenings, live performances, installations and eventful workshops.
Every year HORS PISTES gives to diverse audiences the opportunity to be immersed in the off-beat universe of multidisciplinary art and media, to explore the breaks and shifts which emerge in contemporary forms of films and narrative and triggers new boundaries.
ABOUT CAKE
After working 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 video art.
Marked by the same quiet detachment and timelessness as his previous works, but now combining painting, drawing and clay in his animations, Cake offers an exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two. This work was premiered in PANDAMONIUM: Media Art from Shanghai, a co-production by MOMENTUM and Chronus Art Center, at MOMENTUM Berlin 2014.
Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972, Chengdu) was born in the capital of Sichuan province in the southwest of China. There, he studied under the progressive artistic practice of Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. Qiu and his friends collectively founded a bar which became a hub for the blossoming underground music and art circles in Sichuan, and his colleagues included He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Shen Xiaotong. 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. Qiu has exhibited broadly internationally, having studied contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany.
In 2004 he began teaching at Shanghai Normal University and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Qiu received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in 2006 and has exhibited widely, including a recent solo-show, titled Qiu Anxiong, The New Book of Mountains and Seas II at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, Denmark (2013) and group exhibition ‘Ink Art’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2013). He is one of the artists undertaking the PANDAMONIUM Residency, and will be producing new work for this show.
Why Exhibition
For Berlin Art Week
Opening: 13 September 2016 @ 7pm
Exhibition: 14 – 22 September 2016 @ 3 – 8pm
Curated by Constanze Kleiner & Isabel Bernheimer
@ Ballhaus Secret Garden, Gartenstrasse 6, Berlin
Featuring Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection:
Janet Laurence, Sarah Lüdemann, Fiona Pardington
&
Andreas Blank, Jan Cuck, Via Lewandowsky, Viet Bang Pham, Hella Santarossa, Daniele Sigalot,
Alexandra Vogt, Gabriela Volanti, Johannes Vetter
Exhibition initiated by BC – Bernheimer Contemporary in cooperation with Constanze Kleiner, MOMENTUM, and Moritzgruppe
The world’s broadest question.
(Or why we find ourselves at a parting of the ways).
In English, the word “Why?” is homonymic with the letter Y, a beautiful character that can also be read as a sort of parting of ways, a fork in the road.
The question “why?” asks about cause, asks about the causative conditions of realities in the past. In response to a why question, one can immediately pose the next why question – as children do – until the chain of causality leading to the observed event is comprehensible, or one simply chooses to stop asking.
A gap always remains, however, in the answer to a why question, since the goal and purpose of a causal relationship – whether past or present – remain open and hidden. Why? is therefore a question about causes. Thus the word “why” is supplemented with the question “to what purpose?” – with a question about the future, with a question about “where to?” In art, this vision of the future may flash in an anticipatory way alongside the question of cause. In addition to “why?” art inquires “what for?” and, with it, “where is it heading”?
[Text by Constanze Kleiner]
MOMENTUM Collection Artists Featured in Y – WHY:
CORAL COLLAPSE
from Reef Resuscitation Project, Homeopathy [10 works in total] (2015).
Kodak metallic C type photographic paper, processed in RA-4 chemistry. 126 x 86cm.
Originally created for Artists 4 Paris Climate 2015 and FIAC 2015.
Janet Laurence is a leading Australian artist whose multidisciplinary practice is a direct response to contemporary ecological catastrophes. Laurence creates metaphoric propositions based on scientific knowledge and her own first-hand experience of threatened environments. She sees her role as an artist not as one of didacticism or activism, but as an interpreter of the natural world and the devastation it is facing in the Anthropocene – our current epoch of human-induced environmental change. 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 both site specific, gallery and museum works. Experimenting with and working in varying mediums, Laurence continues to create immersive environments that navigate the interconnections between all living forms. Her practice has sustained organic qualities and a sense of transience, occupying the liminal zones, or places where art, science, imagination and memory converge.
Janet Laurence lives and works in Sydney. She has been a recipient of both a Rockefeller and Churchill Fellowship an Australia Council Fellowship and the Alumni Award for Arts,University of UNSW. Laurence was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW, a former Board Member of the VAB Board of the Australia Council and is currently a Visiting Fellow at COFA NSW University. Laurence exhibits nationally and internationally and has been represented in major curated and survey exhibitions worldwide. Her work is included in many museum, university, and corporate collections as well as within architectural and landscape public places.
HOKEY POKEY PENNY LICK (2014).
Life-size Video Installation. 31.09 min, looped.
Snakes smell with their tongues and receive information they use to hunt their prey.
Humans taste with their tongues and engage in sexual activity.
Hokus Pokus.
Hokey pokey, slang for ice cream sold by street vendors, or “hokey-pokey” men. Penny lick, the accompanying small glass for serving the ice cream for one penny. Licked clean by the customer and returned for reuse.
Sarah Lüdemann grew up on a farm amongst an eclectic selection of animals and surrounded by the planes of the Northern German country side. She studied Linguistics, Psychology and Fine Art at Cologne University from 2001 until 2005, lived in Norway, Italy, England and Holland to learn four languages and was selected for an influential residency at Fundación Marcelino Botín, Villa Iris with Mona Hatoum in 2010. Later that year she received the South Square Trust Award to study an MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, which she completed with distinction in 2011. Her work has been exhibited widely and internationally, including at Printed Matter, New York / Goethe Institute Cairo, Egypt / Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin / MOMENTUM, Berlin / Hayaka Arti, Istanbul, Turkey / Trafo, Szczecin, Poland / LYON Biennale de la Danse, La lavoir public, Lyon, France / Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden, Germany / HDLU, Zagreb, Croatia / October Salon, Belgrade, Serbia.
www.fionapardington.blogspot.rs
YOUNG HAWK, HAG STONE AND PAPER NAUGHTILUS, RIPIRO BEACH (2014).
Photo printed on canvas with substrate. 150 x 100cm. From the EX VIVO Series.
Pardington’s practice often draws upon personal history, recollections and mourning to breath new life into traditional and forgotten objects. Her work with still life formats in museum collections, which focuses on relics as diverse as taonga (Māori ancestral treasures), hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now-extinct buia bird, calls into question our contemporary relationship with a materialized past as well as the ineffable photographic image. Likewise, her series of still-lives using found objects, family relics, and detritus from New Zealand’s beaches, commingles art historical transitions with the questions facing our culture and our planet today.
Dr Fiona Pardington was born in Auckland. She 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. Fiona has worked as a lecturer, tutor, assessor and moderator on many photography, design and fine arts programmes at New Zealand universities and polytechnics.
Fiona was named a Knight (Chevalier) in the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres) in 2016. Other distinguished fellowships, residencies, awards and grants include the Moet & Chandon Fellow (France) in 1991-92, the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in both 1996 and 1997, the Ngai Tahu residency at Otago Polytechnic in 2006 and both a Quai Branly Laureate award; La Residence de Photoquai and the Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2011.
Her work has been included in several important group exhibitions and biennales including: 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, Museum of Contemporary Art; Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography, 1989, Constructed Intimacies, 1989 and NowSeeHear 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.
MORE ABOUT THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION >>
PHOTOS OF THE EXHIBITION OPENING
Photo Credit: Foto: Maria Kossak © Berlin-Warszawa @rtpress / „Y – Warum“ / Berlin Art Week 2016 / Secret Garden Berlin / www.moritzgruppe.de
Love Actually
8 October – 27 November 2016
Love, Actually…
Nezaket Ekici, Mariana Hahn, Gülsün Karamustafa, Janet Laurence,
Sarah Lüdemann, Tracey Moffatt, Mariana Vassileva
Opening Performance by Mariana Hahn @ 6 – 8pm
Opening: 8 October @ 5 – 9pm
An Interactive Performance with the Artist Reading an Oracle from Clarice Lispector’s Stream of Life ‘Aqua Viva’
Exhibition: 9 October – 27 November 2016
Symposium Program: 26 November 2016 @ 3 – 7pm
PARTICIPANTS:
David Elliott, Curator of The Pleasure of Love, the 56th October Salon
Bojana Pejić, Curator of the 49th October Salon
Jasmina Petković, Producer of the October Salon
Rachel Rits-Volloch, Director of Momentum Worldwide
Artists:
Andreas Blank, Mariana Hahn, Leiko Ikemura, Aleksandar Jestrović, David Krippendorff,
Franziska Klotz, Johanna Kandl, Via Lewandowsky, Sarah Lüdemann,
Milovan Destil Marković, Bjørn Melhus, Kirsten Palz, Mariana Vassileva
SCHEDULE
Performance: 15:00 – 15:30
Sarah Lüdemann, Return of the chthonian – This Is My Land
PANELS:
Panel 1: 16:00-16:45
The October Salon: History of the Salon and The Pleasure of Love.
Speakers: David Elliott, Bojana Pejić, Jasmina Petković
Panel 2: 16:45-15:30
From Salons to Biennales to Belgrade.
Moderator: David Elliott. Speakers: Leiko Ikemura, David Krippendorff, Franziska Klotz, Johanna Kandl, Via Lewandowsky, Milovan Destil Marković, Bjørn Melhus
Panel 3: 17:30-18:15
Building Collections out of Exhibitions. Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and the October Salon Collection in dialogue with their curators.
Moderator: Rachel Rits-Volloch. Speakers: Andreas Blank, Aleksander Jestrović, Mariana Hahn, Sarah Lüdemann, Kirsten Palz, Mariana Vassileva
Exhibition Viewing: 18:15-19:00
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin
MORE ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM HERE >>
Works from the MOMENTUM Collection by Artists Featured In
The Pleasure Of Love: the 56th October Salon in Belgrade
Love, Actually… showcases works from the MOMENTUM Collection by 7 outstanding women artists who are also participating in the The Pleasure Of Love: the 56th Belgrade October Salon. Just as Belgrade’s Pleasure of Love focuses on emotion, on both the pleasure and pain which together constitute love, so too are the works in Love, Actually… tied together by the common thread of love, in its many forms. The love depicted by these works from the MOMENTUM Collection ranges from the literal acts of love and sex in Tracey Moffatt’s climactic video Other, to the accoutrements of love, as Nezaket Ekici (un)dresses herself in her video performance Veiling and Revealing; from the meat love of Sarah Lüdemann’s Schnitzelporno, to animal love in Mariana Vassileva’s Morning Mood, and love of animals in Janet Laurence’s Grace; from the love of childhood innocence in Gülsün Karamustafa’s Personal Time Quartet, to the frigidly self-tormenting love of Mariana Hahn’s video performance Burn My Love Burn. We are proud to bring together these treasures from the MOMENTUM Collection, and in this way to bring a small part of The Pleasure Of Love: Belgrade’s 56th October Salon, to Berlin.
ABOUT
The Pleasure Of Love: the 56th October Salon
Curated by David Elliott
23 September – 6 November 2016
@ The Belgrade City Museum
& The Cultural Center of Belgrade
Belgrade, Serbia
Plaisir d’amour ne reste qu’un moment, Le chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie.
The pleasure of love lasts only a Moment. The grief of love lasts a lifetime.
– Jean-Paul-Égide Martini
‘The pleasure of love lasts only a moment – while – the grief of love lasts a whole life through.’ The opening lines of this 18th century French poem and love song sketch out a pathetic paradox within daily life that still reverberates in the present. Transposed here as the subject of the 56th Belgrade October Salon, ‘The Pleasure of Love: Transient Emotion in Contemporary Art’ examines art in its social and political contexts, contrasting its humane aesthetic values with far less benevolent forces of power and control… In an existential, materialist age of contemporary politics in which public life is characterised, with relatively few exceptions, by bureaucratic obfuscations of vested interests, greed, mendaciousness, stupidity and anger, the 56th Belgrade October Salon focuses on love, the exact opposite of such hateful characteristics, as both a subject and prism through which to view the world.
The first Autumn Salon was organized in Paris in 1903 as an antidote to the blindness of the art establishment by accepting artists who had no other place to show their work. Paintings were exhibited by, the as yet unknown, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, François Picabia, Paul Gauguin and many others. The 56th Belgrade October Salon, a distant relative of this initiative, pays homage to this illustrious past by showing a number of artists who do not yet have an international platform for their work alongside already established artists. It will also reflect on what transient pleasures, and its opposite, signify when expressed in art today.
In 1784 Jean-Paul-Égide Martini composed Plaisir d’Amour, a classic love song based on a poem by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian who, one of many victims of the Terror of the French Revolution died in 1794. But Florian’s words have echoed across time to still speak in the present, both in Martini’s original arrangement and deformed into kitsch, at once eternal and fleeting. Fully aware of such historical vicissitudes and paradoxes, this October Salon concentrates on what role emotion plays in contemporary art and how it may be framed in ways that are neither banal nor kitsch. This may include the not-so-simple pleasures of love, humor, horror and any other perspectives that art may bring to bear on the fragility of human experience and life which, in itself, may have a transient or long-lasting impact.
The Pleasure of Love, the 56th October Salon, is composed of 60 artists from 27 countries, including Serbia, the Balkan region and the world at large. The Salon takes place in the Belgrade City Museum and in the Cultural Center of Belgrade from the September 23rd until the 6th of November.
– David Elliott
MORE ABOUT THE 56th OCTOBER SALON >>
Love, Actually…
Featuring:
NEZAKET EKICI
Nezaket 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 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. Born in Kırşehir, Turkey in 1970, Ekici 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.
Veiling and Reveiling, 2010
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 goods 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, bag, 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 willful inversion of public and private space.
The Tube, 2013
This performance, re-enacting her 2008 work, TUBE (duration 30 minutes), is based on the 1925 Otto Dix painting Anita Berber. Dix’s painting of Berber, a dancer and actress who was considered the embodiment of the 1920′s femme fatale, depicts her in a tight, red dress. Ekici, in turn, squirms and dances her way into a five meter long, red cloth tube with overly long arms. Behind Ekici, a projection depicts the artist in a snow-covered Canadian landscape, wearing the same red dress. The audience is thus confronted with two different yet corresponding worlds on the threshold of two mediums: the live performance, its projected mirror, and everything that happens in the space in between.
MARIANA HAHN
Born in Schwaebisch Hall in the south of Germany, Mariana Hahn studied theater at ETI in Berlin and has a degree in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in London (2012). Following her performance of I Sweat You in MOMENTUM’s emerging artist series About Face (2012), Hahn has twice more exhibited in the gallery: Burn My Love, Burn, which was shown as part of the exhibition Missing Link (2013), and Empress of Sorrow, commissioned and performed during MOMENTUM’s month-long performance series Works on Paper (2013).
Burn My Love, Burn, 2013
The work Burn My Love, Burn explores the body as the carrier of historical signature. By inscribing a poem on a shroud that once belonged to her recently passed grandmother – and then burning and consuming its remains – Hahn examines the relationship between text, memory making, and the human – particularly female – form. The work is composed of the remaining performance relics, video stills, and the video itself.
“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 it creates a new one, adding on to the net of connotations the figure has toward words. 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
Live Performance by Mariana Hahn
An Interactive Performance with the Artist Reading an Oracle from Clarice Lispector’s Stream of Life ‘Aqua Viva’
i will read peoples oracle, share this with them in an intimate fashion.
i read the oracle from Clarice Lispectors stream of life, all my art works have their name from this book.
basically the names of the art works are the oracle reading of/for the art works.
this performance is about giving, sharing a moment with people.
its affirmative to life and open. how love should be.
– Mariana Hahn
Previously performed at Social Fabric, curated by David Elliott at Mill 6 Foundation, Hong Kong
GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA
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. 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. Ostensibly reverting to historical lore, Karamustafa’s artistic comments oscillate actually between sensual meta-narratives and ironic-critical stories about the present situation, addressing themes of identity and migration, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism. Since the end of the late 1990s, she has often used already existing materials and images of oriental or occidental origin that she fragments, dismantles and reassembles in order to contrast ‘private’ with ‘public’ by referring to every-day life, culture, art history, and the media.
Personal Time Quartet, 2000
The video and sound installation Personal Time Quartet 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 the work is turned on anew, the four channels never synchronize, instead producing each time a new quartet to accompany the looping images. The four-part video Personal Time Quartet is concerned with the point of in- tersection between the artist’s own personal biography and the history of her home country. Having been invited to an exhibition of German domestic inte- riors from various periods in the twentieth century at the Historical Museum in Hanover, Karamustafa was inspired by what she saw there to take a closer look at the similarities between her own childhood reminiscences and these muse- ological German living spaces. The timeframe (or ‘personal time’) covered by these four video’s begins in the year of her father’s birth and ends in the early days of her own childhood. A video screen placed in each of the rooms shows the same young girl – the artist’s alter ego – engaged in various activities. We see her skipping with a skipping rope (dining room, 1906), sorting and folding laundry (kitchen, around 1913), opening cupboards and drawers (living room and parents’ bedroom, around 1930) and painting her nails (room from the 1950s). The films themselves, however, were not shot inside the museum, but rather in her apartment in Istanbul. Viewing them therefore gives rise to the most diverse associations. The girl skipping suggests a carefree childhood, the nail-painting a concern with the artist’s own femininity, the folding of laundry could be read as preparation for her future role of housewife, while 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, therefore, Karamustafa not only debunks the local or national specificity of certain styles, but at the same time exposes just how similar the evolution of (female) identity can be, even in very disparate cultures.
– Barbara Heinrich,from Gülsün Karamustafa. My Roses My Reveries,Yapi Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık A.Ş, Istanbul, 2007.
JANET LAURENCE
Australian artist Janet Laurence‘s work explores a poetics of space and materiality through the creation of works that deal with our experiential and cultural relationship with the natural world. Her work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. It occupies the liminal zones and meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Laurence’s practice includes both ephemeral and permanent works as well as installations that extend from the museum/gallery into both urban and landscape domain. Her work, centered on living nature, bleeds between the architectural and the natural world, physically and metaphorically dissolving these boundaries. Her spaces are immersive and reflective, creating a play between perception and memory. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underlying themes. Laurence’s work is represented in major Australian and international collections and has been included in many national survey exhibitions.
Grace, 2012
Donated by the artist to the MOMENTUM collection in 2013, “Grace” can be considered a meditation on the relation between energy sources and their visualization, the origins of material, ethics and interconnected, environmental networks.
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. 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 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
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
SARAH LÜDEMANN
Repetition and the act of looking are strong features in Sarah Lüdemann’s work. Her non-narrative video installations and performances can simultaneously take on epic form and repeat a single gesture or action until it looses its original purpose and gains a new, underlying meaning. Lüdemann’s work demands concentration and the willingness to look beyond surfaces, a practice that requires both the artist’s and the viewer’s engagement over time. This extended period of visual reflection and subsequent delayering of identity mirrors the process of psychological examinations of self, social and gender roles, religious beliefs, rituals and modes of perception and (re)presentation. Usually quiet but gently and cunningly persistent, Lüdemann’s works insist on an authorial presence that forcefully and consistently questions power structures within hierarchical systems. Through her works, she examines the nature of communication, language, movement and ideologies. At the same time conceptual and sensual, her pieces embrace both mind and body, effectively inviting a holistic engagement with dislocated meanings. Lüdemann finished an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins/Byam Shaw in 2011. In 2009 she was selected for an influential residency with Mona Hatoum. She has additionally been awarded the South Square Trust Award and was shortlisted for the Arts & Humanities Research Council BGP Award in 2010.
Schnitzelporno, 2012
Commissioned for MOMENTUM’s first emerging artist series, About Face, held in Berlin (2012) and London, Schnitzelporno is a durational performance-for-video in which an unidentifiable Lüdemann beats a piece of meat for a total of 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
Installation & Performance: return of the chthonian – this is my land
i am an anthropologist, an awkward surrealist, poetic road kill. i am the naked hunter, an Amazonian goddess, an oozing bitch. i am a magician, i am Alice. i am no feminist, my darlings!
let me make a mark, scratch the surface, scratch myself,
do not dislocate your body, dig in your brain for your animal ancestry – in order to sense the storm.
dynamite me! rip me apart and put me back together. blow my bones, sing for my flesh. make it all vibrate at higher frequencies, so I can reach for the stars.
that which built the cosmos was androgyne – total sex – without the bang there would have been no planet earth.
– Sarah Lüdemann
TRACEY MOFFATT
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.
In the span of her 25 year career, Moffatt has held more than 100 solo exhibitions of her work in Europe, the United States and Australia, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Hasselblad Centre in Goteburg, Sweden; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Tracey Moffatt was the recipient of the 2007 Infinity Award for art by the International Center of Photography, New York. In 2017, Tracey Moffatt will become the first indigenous artist to represent Australia in the Venice Biennale.
Other, 2009
As one of the founding collection donations following MOMENTUM’s first benefit exhibition, “Other” incorporates film techniques – splicing film clips, combining chronologies, creating and dissolving narratives – that parallel MOMENTUM’s questioning of time-based art.
“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
MARIANA VASSILEVA
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.As her artist’s statement asserts, she “transforms objects, situations and manners, and presents them in another reference on a lyrical level. … In this process, one is animated toward a heightened sensibility of daily variations.”
Morning Mood, 2010
Morning Mood (2010) was shot in the Sydney Botanical Gardens after Vassileva’s participation in the 17th Sydney Biennale, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age (2010). The early morning routines of these bats as they resist the onset of the day and squabble with each other evoke the viewer’s potential for both differentiation and identification. Turning her camera to a creature perhaps more frequently associated with darker themes like blood and night, Vassileva captures the uncanny warmth of their morning moods. A single bat burrowing his face in his wings and reluctantly stretching his neck is eminently relatable, as are the sounds and rhythms of many bats gathering on the branches of a tree. As the three and a half minute long video loops over and over, we confront not just the strange humanity of these bats’ morning routine, but also perhaps the very animalistic qualities of our human routines. – Jenny Tang
The Color of the Wind, 2014
The Color of the Wind (2014) was made during Mariana Vassileva’s residency at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) in St. Petersburgh / Kronstadt, Russia, in March, 2014. In this video-performance, Vassileva con- joins the motif of a blank canvas and her own, human figure, traversing the urban and natural landscapes of Kronstadt – St. Petersburgh’s main sea- port and century-old army-town. As a historical site for political struggle, to which Kronstadt’s famous fortifications unrelentingly attest, we now won- der what it is that is being fought for in Vassileva’s act of silent protest. “Why did you not write anything on the banner?”, people on the street asked her. Be it an act of empathy and concern within the context of Russia’s current cultural climate of censorship and infringement of freedom of expression, or an invitation for people to consider for themselves what it is that should be written on it, Vassileva’s poetic visual language captivates the viewer, as we are addressed in a narrative mode, while never granting us the comfort to passively sit back and read.
Watch the performance
“Return of the chthonian – This Is My Land”
by Sarah Lüdemann
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
PHOTOS OF THE OPENING
Photo Credit: Réka Horváth
NonStopMedia Festival
at
2 – 9 September 2016
Kharkiv Municipal Gallery
Kharkiv, Ukraine
5 September 2016
Video Program Featuring:
Qiu Anxiong, Stefano Cagol, Thomas Eller, Theo Eshetu, Mark Karasick, Hannu Karjalainen, Janet Laurence, Map Office, Kate McMillan, Tracey Moffatt, Martin Sexton, Varvara Shavrova, Sumugan Sivanesan, Mariana Vassileva, Li Zhenhua
READ MORE ABOUT THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION HERE > >
NonStopMedia is a Biennale international festival held in Kharkiv since 2003. The Festival includes a competition program for young artists, an educational platform in the field of contemporary art and a broad programme of satellite events.
READ MORE ABOUT NonStopMedia Festival HERE >>
Daily updates on the NonStopMedia Festival VIII 2016 HERE >>
MOMENTUM’s Director, Rachel Rits-Volloch, sits on the jury of NonStopMedia Festival VIII.
This year’s Festival Winner is:
Oleksii Tovpyha, Yolka (The Christmas Tree)
A 5-channel synchronised installation of monitors placed around a christmas tree, each presenting, in sequence, excerpts from the New Year’s addresses of all of Ukraine’s Presidents since independence. The presidential speeches, taken from the first or last years in office of each Ukranian President, are edited in such a way as to create humorous narratives reflecting on the question, what has changed in Ukranian society – especially in its representation of power and political rhetoric – since independence?
Oleksii Tovpyha Bio:
Born 1990 in Kharkiv. Educated as a mathematician.
And the Runner-Up is:
Alekseienko Mykhailo, The Road Home
Artist Text:
This work doesn’t need description. The viewer is given complete freedom in interpretation. The project “The Road Home” consists of two parts: 1. The main video (the artist’s return home); 2. Additional three-channel video (Homecoming stranger observed by 3 artists, documenting the process).
Alekseienko Mykhailo Bio:
Born 1989 in Kiev. 2013 graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (Kiev). Member and one of the founders of group «JOD» (2013) and art squat “Hayat” (2011). Member KYIV AIR (artist-in-residence in 2013) the first Kyiv residence for young artists. Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine (2015). Gaude Polonia scholarship holder (2016). Lives and work in Kiev.
Solo Exhibitions:
2015 «Endless project» Mala Galereya (Small Gallery) of Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine.
2013 «Freebiel» art squat “Hayat”, Kiev.
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2016 «Art Under Fire» Silent Barn Gallery, New York, United States.
2015 «Shelter» The Window, Paris, France. 2015 «Rock Paper Scissors» Le Générateur, Paris, France.
2014 «COLLECTIVE MEMORY TRACES» [.BOX] Videoart project space, Milan, Italy. «IX ART-KYIV Contemporary 2014» ” Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine. «GogolFest 2014», Kiev, Ukraine. «Postcards from Maidan» Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland. International Video Art Festival “NOW&AFTER’14”, “MEMORY MIGRATION”, State Museum of GULAG, Moscow, Russia. «View of the Crimea», Karas Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine. «THE SHOW WITHIN THE SHOW» Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine. «NEW UKRAINIAN DREAM» Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine. «Solving the problem» Mala Galereya (Small Gallery), Kyiv, Ukraine.
2013 «M. N. P.» (Museum of nonexistent objects), Odessa, Ukraine. «Book Arsenal» Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine.
2012 «Urban SHIT» Kiev, Ukraine. «Book Arsenal» Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine.
2010 All-Ukrainian Biennial of Graphic IM. G. Yakutovych, CHA, Kiev, Ukraine.
2009 Triennial Graphics, CHA, Kiev, Ukraine.
2008 All-Ukrainian Biennial of Graphic IM. G. Yakutovych, CHA, Kiev, Ukraine.
Awards:
2014 International Festival of Video Art “NOW & AFTER ’14” (Special Prize).
2011 Academic drawing competition in Kharkiv (III place).
2010 Picture contest Eleva (III place)
For NonStopMedia Festival VIII Education program, Rachel Rits-Volloch delivered a lecture entitled:
Hero Mother, Hero Artists, and Heroic Curators:
Building an Independent Art Space, A Case Study
ABSTRACT:
MOMENTUM is a non-profit platform for time-based art, active worldwide since 2010, with headquarters in Berlin at the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center. Working on a model of international partnerships and cooperations, 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 Archive, and a growing Collection.
HERO MOTHER: Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism is the ironic title of MOMENTUM’s most recent show, an international exhibition of 30 women artists from 20 countries, focusing on the role of gender, citizenship, nationalism, migration and personal freedom, as well as relations between artists and state structures. The scale and impact of this show, like so many other major international projects leading up to it, makes it difficult to imagine that MOMENTUM is not a Kunsthalle, but rather an independent art space with a permanent staff of only two people and no institutional funding or steady sponsorship.
So how do we do it all? Looking back at the 6 years of MOMENTUM’s existence, this talk is a tribute to the many artists, curators, and institutions which have enabled great art to happen against all odds by heroically sharing time, resources, and ideas. This talk is an acknowledgement of the power of cooperation in an age of competition for scarce resources. It is a recognition of what can be achieved through naiveté, inspiration, and a little bit of insanity.
THANKS TO:
Stefano Cagol
STEFANO CAGOL
(b. 1969 in Trento, Italy. Lives and works in Trento.)
Stefano Cagol (Trento, 1969) graduated from the Accademia di Brera in Milan and received a post-doctoral fellowship at Ryerson University in Toronto. 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).
The RWE Foundation VISIT program supported Cagol’s Artist Residency at MOMENTUM in 2015 and his year-long project culminated in his first solo show in Berlin inaugurating the new exhibition space CLB Collaboratorium Berlin. Stefano Cagol presented “The Body of Energy (of the mind)”, a year-long project the artist has developed as an expedition spanning Europe’s northern-most to southernmost tips, on search for signs of energy, both physical and cultural energy, triggering a reflection on what is not visible, on resources, on relations. In 2014-2015 Cagol’s solo project “The Body of Energy (of the mind)” was also 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.
READ MORE ABOUT STEFANO CAGOL’S 2015 ARTIST RESIDENCY AT MOMENTUM HERE > >
In 2019 Stefano Cagol was awarded the prestigious Italian Council grant for The Time of the Flood: Beyond the Myth through Climate Change. Cagol began his year-long international artistic research initiative in Berlin with a Residency at MOMENTUM on 1 November 2019 – 10 February 2020, producing three new video works, a number of performative interventions throughout the city, countless photographs, several Art Salon presentations, and a symposium at the Italian Cultural Institute, Berlin. The overall project, The Time of the Flood (2020-21), is composed of 7 video performances realized by Stefano Cagol throughout a series of international artist residencies and exhibitions in Berlin, Venice, Rome, Vienna, and Tel-Aviv. Seeing art, science and myth in continuous dialogue, Cagol re-contextualizes the biblical story of The Flood within our current climate emergency and the devastating impacts we humans have upon our planet.
READ MORE ABOUT STEFANO CAGOL’S 2019-20 ARTIST RESIDENCY AT MOMENTUM HERE > >
“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]
EVOKE PROVOKE (THE BORDER)
2011, Video, 17 min 35 sec
The love and hate that Cagol feels towards boundaries, both physical and mental, is at the root of this work created at Kirkenes, in the Arctic Circle, during one of the periods he spent abroad as an artist in residence.
The artist staged a series of emblematic actions that he filmed with a video camera. In total solitude, immersed in a fascinating but hostile nature, in conditions bordering on the extreme, like the place where the actions were carried out. For Cagol in this case the border is precisely the one between himself, his body and his mind, and the nature that surrounds him.
The setting seems to be cloaked in twilight, barely dispelling the darkness, and the temperature is 25 degrees below zero. In those frozen lands, he tries to communicate in one way or another, using different forms of signalling. He endeavours to modify the landscape, to light it up, to melt the snow with a flame, but every attempt at interaction is in vain.
The video was shown at the solo exhibition Concilio in the church of San Gallo, as a collateral event at the 54th Venice Biennale.
[Excerpted from Stefano Cagol Works 1995 | 2015]
Residency Alysha Creighton
Alysha Creighton
27 June – 24 July 2016
Alysha Claire Creighton (b. 1986 Vancouver, Canada) is an intermedia artist from Vancouver, BC. She holds a BA in Visual Art from Trinity Western University and an MFA in Drawing and Intermedia from the University of Alberta. Her performance-based practice draws on her background in dance and movement, exploring moments of physical, social and psychological tension between people though drawing, photography and video.
Recent projects include her site-specific project Waiting Room at the Bleeding Heart Art Space, her solo exhibition Proximities at the Art Gallery of St. Albert, and a video installation as part of the 2013 Alberta Biennial. She teaches Drawing and Intermedia courses at the University of Alberta and also works as a lead artist at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts where she assists artists with developmental disabilities in bringing their ideas to life through digital animation.
During her Residency in Berlin, she plans to move into new territory, as she further develops her practice to include performance explicitly. Through her work she investigates the emerging quality of connection as it is formed and informed by the technologies that we use and which also use us. Asking questions such as: What is the texture of nearness? Is a table not a technology that connects us? She seeks to unravel the qualities of nearness – ways of being and becoming together. In so doing, she creates space for a subtle ethics of proximity to emerge; one that acknowledges our enmeshment with our technologies and one another. Her work is very driven by viewer interaction and experience, and so for this specific project she will by the use of screens, video and performance open a space to consider the ways that technologies intervene in our lives.
Mask
by Alysha Creighton
Performance held on 23rd July 2016 at MOMENTUM, Berlin
[fve] http://vimeo.com/191641261 [/fve]
Open Studio
23 July 2016
At MOMENTUM
Open Studio
9 July 2016
At MOMENTUM
Hero Mother Symposium
Let’s Conclude
The HERO MOTHER Symposium & Finissage
12 June @ 1 – 9pm
The Symposium is part of the Exhibition
HERO MOTHER
Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism
Curated by Bojana Pejić and Rachel Rits-Volloch
14 May – 12 June 2016
Guided Tour with Bojana Pejić and Rachel Rits-Volloch:
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/181466329 [/fve]
Symposium Videos:
RESISTING THE LIMITS OF NOW
By Bojana Pejić
ARTIST PANEL
With Nguyen Trin Thi, Sasha Pirogova, Mariana Vassileva,
Marina Belikova, moderated by David Elliott
BACK TO BALAGAN!!!
By David Elliott
MOTHERS, HEROES AND HISTORY’S PLAYGROUND
By Laima Kreivyte
FEMEN ACTIVISM
Bojana Pejić in discussion with
two members of FEMEN Germany
ARTIST PANEL
with Else Twin Gabriel, Nezaket Ekici and Selma Selman,
moderated by Bojana Pejić
Closing Performance You Have No Idea by Selma Selman:
Speakers:
Marina Belikova
Marina Belikova is an artist, born in Moscow, Russia. Between 2005-2011 she studied Graphical web-design & E-commerce in the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and then in 2011 moved to the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (Technical University) and graduated with an honours degree. In 2012-2013 she did an M.A. in Communication Design: Graphic Design in Kingston University London. In 2013 she started her degree at Bauhaus University Weimar, where she is currently doing an M.F.A. in Media Art and Design.
Nezaket Ekici
Nezaket Ekici’s video, installations and performances are often process-based and ask viewers to derive their own emotional and intellectual interpretations. Activated by the audience, the use of her body as a means of expression becomes a vital material in her work, where complex, often controversial topics are 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.
Born in Kırşehir, Turkey in 1970, Ekici 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 Abramović. 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.
David Elliott
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). He is Hon President of the Board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London. A specialist in Soviet and Russian avant-garde, as well as in modern and contemporary Asian art, he has published widely in these fields as well as on many other aspects of contemporary art. In 1996 he was co-curator of Kunst und Macht im Europa der Diktatoren 1930 bis 1945 at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and in 2000-2001 was Artistic Director of the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Ludwig Museum, Budapest and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. In 2011 he curated Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia at Calvert 22, London. He is the Chief Curator of BALAGAN: Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, organized by MOMENTUM.
else (Twin) Gabriel
Else Gabriel came to prominence within circles of the GDR art scene during her time at the Dresden Art Academy in the mid 1980s. After becoming a member of the notorious group Autoperforationsartisten, Gabriel began collaborating with artists such as Michael Brendel, Volker (Via) Lewandowsky and Rainer Görß. Their performative works became synonymous with challenging GDR ideology, using shocking techniques such as self-mutilation to question the repressive teaching methods used within schools and universities. After meeting Ulf Wrede (now her partner and father to their two children) in the late 1980s, they began their long term collaborative project under the name else Twin Gabriel in 1991. Their work spans across digital and performative mediums, with themes ranging from social/political repression, late capitalism, the family system and reconfiguring German identity (post-Wall), whilst introducing humour and the absurd into everyday situations. Else Gabriel has been a professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee since 2009.
FEMEN
FEMEN is an international women’s movement of brave topless female activists painted with the slogans and crowned with flowers. FEMEN female activists are the women with special training, physically and psychologically ready to implement the humanitarian tasks of any degree of complexity and level of provocation. FEMEN activists are ready to withstand repressions against them and are propelled by the ideological cause alone. FEMEN is the special force of feminism, its spearhead militant unit, modern incarnation of fearless and free Amazons. We live in the world of male economic, cultural and ideological occupation. In this world, a woman is a slave, she is stripped of the right to any property but above all she is stripped of ownership of her own body. All functions of the female body are harshly controlled and regulated by patriarchy. Separated from the woman, her body is an object to monstrous patriarchal exploitation, animated by production of heirs, surplus profits, sexual pleasures and pornographic shows. Complete control over the woman’s body is the key instrument of her suppression; the woman’s sexual demarche is the key to her liberation. Manifestation of the right to her body by the woman is the first and the most important step to her liberation. Female nudity, free of patriarchal system, is a grave-digger of the system, militant manifesto and sacral symbol of women’s liberation. FEMEN’s naked attacks is a naked nerve of the historic woman-system conflict, its most visual and appropriate illustration. Activist’s naked body is the undisguised hatred toward the patriarchal order and new aesthetics of women’s revolution.
(More information here: http://femen.org/about-us/)
Laima Kreivytė
Laima Kreivytė is an art critic, curator and lecturer at Vilnius Academy of Arts and European Humanities University. She participates in feminist art and research projects and works with artists group Cooltūristės. Exhibitions she has curated include Lithuanian pavilion in 53rd Venice Biennale, Baltic Mythologies in 3 Prague Biennale, Woman’s Time in National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Space Travellers in AR/GE Kunst Gallery Museum, Bolzano among others.
Nguyen Thrin Thi
Nguyen Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based independent filmmaker and video/media artist. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories and examined the position of artists in the Vietnamese society. Nguyen studied journalism, photography, international relations and ethnographic film in the United States. Her films and video art works have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions including Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; and Singapore Biennale 2013. Nguyen is founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and the moving image art in Hanoi since 2009. She’s also a member of NhaSan Collective, the longest-running alternative art space in Hanoi.
Bojana Pejić
Bojana Pejić (born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia), is an art historian and curator, living in Berlin since 1991. Having studied History of Art at the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Belgrade, from 1977 to 1991 she was curator at the Student Cultural Center of Belgrade University and organized many exhibitions of Yugoslav and international art. She started to write art criticism in 1971 and was editor of art theory journal “Moment, Belgrade” (1984 – 1991). She organized an international symposium “The Body in Communism” at the Literaturhaus in Berlin in 1995. She was Chief Curator of the exhibition After the Wall – Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe organized by David Elliott at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (1999), which was also presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Budapest (2000), and at HamburgerBahnhof, Berlin (2000-2001). She was one of the co-curators of the exhibition Aspects/Positions held in the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Vienna in 1999. Between 2002 and 2004, she was one of international advisers of the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto (Japan) where she also curated a retrospective of Marina Abramovic (2003), which also toured to Morigame (Japan). In 2003, she had the Rudolf Arnheim guest professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin (history of art). She was adviser of the project De/Construction of Monument organized by the Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo where she also held seminars at the Academy of Fine Arts dedicated to the “Communist Body.” (2004-2005) In May 2005 she has defended her Ph.D. “The Communist Body – An Archeology of Images: Politics of Representation and Spatialization of Power the SFR Yugoslavia (1945 -1991)”. She was a Maria Goeppert-Mayer guest professor for International Gender Research at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University in Oldenburg (2006-2007). Bojana Pejić is the chief curator of Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2009-2010) at MUMOK, Vienna and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. She is also the editor of the “Gender Check Reader”. Dr. Bojana Pejić teaches at the Bauhuas University in Weimar and works as an independent curator and writer.
Sasha Pirogova
Pirogova is a performance and video artist, for her the two disciplines are inter-connected. The people in Pirogova’s work adapt automatically to the mechanics of their physical environments, relinquishing their autonomy to the rhythm and structure of the work. Her video-performance BIBLIMLEN (2013) is a behind-the-scenes look at Moscow’s Russian State Library (the former Lenin Library), in which the interior architecture of the building becomes an active co-author of the piece. An earlier video-performance, QUEUE (2011), based on Vladimir Sorokin’s novel of the same name (1983), is a nervous but ‘bizarrely funny saga of a quintessential Russian institution, the interminably long line’ (NYT, 2011). Creating an absurdist choreography of hysterics, dependence and clanship, Pirogova takes pains to replay the text through dance to identify the queue as not a physical but a psycho-social contemporary condition. After graduating from the Physics Department at Moscow State University in 2010, she received a degree in 2014 from the Rodchenko Art School in Video and New Media in Moscow. She has been awarded prizes at the Extra Short Film Festival, ESF (2012) as well as the Innovation Prize in the ‘New Generation’ category (2014). She has participated in various exhibitions, such as Burning News, Hayward Gallery, London (2014), I saw lightning, Udarnik, Moscow (2014) and in the Manifesta 10, parallel program, St. Petersburg (2014). Working with performance, she has also participated in different festivals, including: the 6th International Festival of Video, Performance and Technology, Lisbon (2014), VIII Andrei Tarkovsky International Film Festival, Ivanovo (2014), Cinedans Dance on Screen Festival, Amsterdam (2014) and Now & After International Video Art Festival, The State Museum of GULAG, Moscow (2014).
Selma Selman
Selma Selman is an artist of Romani origins. Her work is representative of her life struggles and the struggles of her community. Selman utilizes a multiplicity of art mediums, ranging from performance, painting, and photography to video installations, in order to express herself as an individual, a woman, and an artist. Her work, though personal, is also political. Selman defines herself as an artist of Roma origins, and not a Romani artist. The difference is subtle, but critical: through her work, Selman seeks to speak to the universal human condition, utilizing her background as a lens through which she can understand the entirety of the human experience. In her work, she wishes to break down prejudices that stereotype her community as a collective, robbing members of their right to individual expression. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 from Banja Luka University’s Department of Painting, where she studied under the supervision of Veso Sovilj, and worked with renowned Bosnian performance artist Mladen Miljanović, who represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 55th Venice Biennial in 2013. Selman participated in Tania Brugera’s International Summer Academy in Salzburg, “Arte Util” (Useful Arts) in 2013. She was a fellow for the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary the following year. That year, Selman was also the recipient of the prestigious “Zvono Award”, given to the best young artist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, winning her a residency in New York City. Her work has been shown at numerous international festivals and exhibitions, including the Luxembourg City Film Festival, Sarajevo’s PichWise Festival, Slam Fest in Osijek, the Summer Academy is Salzburg, BL-art festival in Banja Luka, and the Perforation Festival: A Week of Live Art in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Thus far, she has had several solo exhibitions, with “Me postojisarav – Postojim – I exist” being her first solo show in the United States, exhibited at Dreamland Gallery. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Syracuse University, where she also works as a teaching assistant.
Mariana Vassileva
Vassileva’s work looks at how boundaries are tacitly implied. She is interested mainly in experiencing ‘the boundary’, the fine line between the known and unknown, the accepted and unaccepted, in a manner that is resonant with a sense of balance. It comes back to her own personal experiences and her movement between places, leaving the communist regime and her beloved family in Bulgaria behind. Vassileva’s home was and is always Bulgaria, in the northern part of the country where her mother still lives. From this perspective, her work has always reflected another world, a world outside or beyond where she is. This sense of otherness inspires Vassileva, introducing an autobiographical and biographical approach, between the self and the other, between personal and social needs, between needs and dreams, are recurrent themes spreading throughout her work. Mariana Vassileva moved to Berlin in 1989. She has studied pedagogy and psychology at Veliko Turnovo University. After this, she wanted to study art in the Academy of Art in Sofia, but instead worked as one of the artist-professors. She first went to Leipzig to study theatre and to prepare herself for art school, where two years later, she was accepted into the Universität der Künste in Berlin. After her studies, she worked for about three years in scenography for a film company, drawing large-format mountain- and cityscapes for film backdrops. Then, by virtue of some sales of her early work, Vassileva was able to devote herself to being an artist full-time.
PHOTOS OF THE SYMPOSIUM AND FINISSAGE
Photo Credit: Camille Blake
Hero Mother
Beyond BALAGAN ! ! !
HERO MOTHER:
Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women
Rethinking Heroism
Marina Abramović // Maja Bajević // Yael Bartana // Marina Belikova // Tania Bruguera // Anetta Mona Chișa & Lucia Tkačova // Danica Dakić // Nezaket Ekici // Fang Lu // else (Twin) Gabriel // Gluklya/Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya // Stefanie Gromes & Katrin Hafemann // Sanja Iveković // Elżbieta Jabłońska // Zuzanna Janin // Adela Jušić // Elena Kovylina // Katarzyna Kozyra // Almagul Menlibayeva // Tanja Muravskaja // Hajnal Németh // Ilona Németh // Nguyen Trinh Thi // Sasha Pirogova // Selma Selman // Milica Tomić // Anna-Stina Treumund // Mariana Vassileva // Anastasia Vepreva
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ARTISTS & WORKS >>
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch and Bojana Pejic
HERO MOTHER Exhibition opening
at Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin
[fve] http://vimeo.com/169308367 [/fve]
Guided tour of the exhibition with
Bojana Pejić & Rachel Rits-Volloch
[fve] http://vimeo.com/181466329 [/fve]
Exhibition Opening Performance
On the Way Safety and Luck
By Nezaket Ekici
[fve] http://vimeo.com/169343220 [/fve]
Exhibition Closing Performance
You Have No Idea
By Selma Selman
[fve] http://vimeo.com/170964709 [/fve]
14 May – 12 June 2016
@ Studio 1 & MOMENTUM Gallery
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin Kreuzberg
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12 pm – 7 pm
Opening 13 May @ 7 – 11 pm
Opening Performance @ 7 – 8:30 pm
NEZAKET EKICI: On The Way Safety And Luck
Symposium @ 12 June 2016
Closing Performance: SELMA SELMAN, You Have No Idea
MORE INFO ON THE SYMPOSIUM HERE >>
Curated by
Bojana Pejić & Rachel Rits-Volloch
Production: Olga Wiedemann
Production Assistants: Karen Andersen, Maddy Martin, Laura Sanguineti, Elle Sinclair
Design: Emilio Rapanà
HERO MOTHER is an international exhibition of 30 women artists from 20 countries. It is part of MOMENTUM’s program for 2016, consisting of a series of events, residencies and exhibitions called BEYOND BALAGAN, which inquires into contemporary art and its relation to life. HERO MOTHER follows on from the major exhibition BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places curated by David Elliott, which was held in three venues in Berlin from 14 November till 23 December 2015. “Balagan” is a popular and much used exclamation in contemporary Russia and the places Russian culture has spread to, that describes, with celebratory gusto, a farce, a mess, the most unholy of cock-ups, and at the same time the most joyful of celebrations, the most unrestrained debauchery, the ‘functional dysfunctional’.
The title of the exhibition HERO MOTHER is derived from Soviet, or rather Stalinist practice. The honorary title “Hero Mother” and the medal bestowed with it, established on 8 July 1944 by Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, was awarded to Soviet women who raised at least ten living children. Before it was abolished in 1991, upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, more than 430,000 women had received this state honor. In 2008, the Russian Federation replaced this award with the “Order of Parental Glory”, downscaling the honor to celebrate the smaller accomplishment of only seven children. This award is also still given to mothers in some post-communist states, such as Belarus or Kazakhstan. What was originally conceived as an incentive to repopulate a country ravaged by war and to encourage women in their patriotic duty to their motherland, today sounds like an absurd punch-line of a Soviet joke.
Or rather not? What has changed for women since the communist era? Did women who in state socialism used to be “working mothers” become today something “else”? Have they become women-citizens? How are we to define heroism in a democratic setting? Could we say it is social disobedience and resistance? Having in mind the new “familiarism” ideologies and the ideal of stay-at-home mothers, which were promoted by the post-communist governments already in the early 1990s, and which are today aggressively endorsed by nationalist parties all over Eastern Europe (and not only there), the figure of the ‘Mother’ or the ‘Mother of the Nation’ occupies the central role. It is indicative that as soon as the Eastern European democratic parliaments had been established around 1990, the very first law most of them tried to pass was the law controlling women’s bodies, namely, the anti-abortion bill. (The “nationalization of women’s bodies” succeed only in Poland where abortion became illegal in 1992). Yet the conservative agenda which exhumes such an exaggeration of ‘family values’ at the cost of personal freedoms to choose alternative lifestyles is only one of many indications of a turning back of the clock to a time before the hard-won victories of feminism and gay rights struggled across Europe.
HERO MOTHER focuses on the role of gender, citizenship, nationalism, migration and personal freedom, as well as the relation between the artists and institutions, such as the state structures. Some of the artists in this exhibition who address serious social issues use the old feminist strategy based on the Bachtenian “power of laughter” showing their civil disobedience and taking the role of “unruly” citizens, while others treat these topics with seriousness and even melancholy. Some works deal with personal, familial and collective women’s memories and female heritage, which are usually lost in the course of the grand narrative of (national) history. Other artists, dealing with the issue of (their own) motherhood, do not deny the condition of motherhood per se; they question the manners in which “being-mother” becomes manipulated by threatening nationalist ideologies – ideologies which, in linking motherhood and nation, are today being exhumed by controlling power.
HERO MOTHER looks at the ramifications of traditionalist political forces, as they are unleashed upon women, the queer community and other minorities at a time of increasingly resurgent conservative values. The limitless possibilities of contemporary art, along with its capacity to turn the world on its head through parody and laughter, have invested it with a socio-political edge, unrecognized since the historical avant-garde, that has become part of a growing worldwide movement for non-violent action. This exhibition and discursive program will look beyond feminist and queer critiques to address how contemporary art can act as a mirror to a world turned on its head, and specifically how humor, farce, and parody can form the strongest tools of social engagement and change.
The artists invited to take part in MOMENTUM’s exhibition HERO MOTHER are contemporary women who are either born in, or are based in, the states that used to (or still) practice state socialism. It will present the work of women artists from places with communist legacies – including Germany – whose work addresses and defies, through a variety of media, the frighteningly regressive political agendas in many Eastern European countries today, and out this in the context of broader developments worldwide.
Because MOMENTUM’s focus is time-based art, the works shown in this exhibition will integrate time into their form and their content, including – but not limited to – video, performance, installation, public art, situationist action, interactive works and social engagement, sound, photography, text, and web-based work. This exhibition accordingly invokes time-based art practices to explore the legacies of cultural histories that have constantly changed over time. As Berlin’s only platform focusing exclusively on time- based art, MOMENTUM 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 perspectives re-frame different historical moments.
< < CLICK HERE TO READ THE CURATORIAL TEXT BY BOJANA PEJIĆ > >
“RESISTING THE LIMITS OF NOW”
(Click on the name to see the bio and the work description below)
Maja Bajević [Bosnia & Herzegovina]
Yael Bartana [Israel/Germany]
Marina Belikova [Russia/Germany]
Tania Bruguera [Cuba]
Anetta Mona Chișa & Lucia Tkáčová [Romania & Czech Republic]
Danica Dakić [Bosnia & Herzegovina/Germany]
Nezaket Ekici [Germany/Turkey]
else (Twin) Gabriel [Germany]
Fang Lu [China]
Gluklya / Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya [Russia]
Stefanie Gromes & Katrin Hafemann [Germany]
Sanja Iveković [Croatia]
Elżbieta Jabłońska [Poland]
Adela Jušić [Bosnia & Herzegovina]
Elena Kovylina [Russia]
Katarzyna Kozyra [Poland]
Almagul Menlibayeva [Kazakhstan]
Tanja Muravskaja [Estonia]
Hajnal Németh [Hungary]
Ilona Németh [Slovakia]
Nguyen Trinh Thi [Vietnam]
Sasha Pirogova [Russia]
Selma Selman [Bosnia & Herzegovina]
Milica Tomić [Serbia]
Anna-Stina Treumund [Estonia]
Mariana Vassileva [Bulgaria]
Anastasia Vepreva [Russia]
Marina Abramović
Born 1964 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form, creating some of the most historic early performance pieces and continues to make important durational works. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits in works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. From 1975–88, Abramović and the German artist Ulay performed together, dealing with relations of duality. Abramović returned to solo performances in 1989. She has presented her work at major institutions in the US and Europe, including the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,1985; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990; Neue National Galerie, Berlin, 1993, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1995. She has also participated in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976 and 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel (1977, 1982 and 1992). Recent performances include “The House With The Ocean View” at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York in 2002, and the Performance “7 Easy Pieces” at Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2005. In 2010, Abramović had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in “The Artist is Present” at Museum of Modern Art, New York. Using herself and the public as medium, Abramović performed for three months at the Serpentine Gallery in London, 2014; the piece was titled after the duration of the work, “512 Hours”. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for the video installation and performance “Balkan Baroque.” In 2008 she was decorated with the Austrian Commander Cross for her contribution to Art History. In 2013, the French Minister of Culture accepted her as an Officer to the Order of Arts and Letters. In addition to these and other awards,Abramović also holds multiple honorary doctorates from institutions around the world. Abramović founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. The institute inhabited its most complete form to date in 2016 in collaboration with NEON in “As One”, Benaki Museum, Athens. |
The Hero, 2001
Single Channel Installation, 14’ 22’’ As Abramović’s art in general, this work, performed and filmed in Spain, is based on stillness and endurance. Abramović dedicated it to her father, who personally appeared in her earlier installations, such as Balkan Baroque (1996), but who died the same year of this performance. In the artist’s personal recollection, he refused to surrender throughout his life: he refused to surrender as an antifascist, communist and soldier in the Yugoslav partisans’ army; and he rejected to submit during the 1990s when the Serbian nationalists publically denied the role of antifascist resistance in WWII, officially exposing it to oblivion. The song heard in the video is the national anthem of the Socialist or Titoist Yugoslavia – “Hey Sloveni” (Hi, Slaves), beautifully sung by Marica Gojević, a former Abramović’ student. The Hero is an homage the daughter pays to her deceased father, and the white flag may stand for his death as his only act of surrender. In that sense it is also a work of mourning: not only over the father’s absence, but also the absence of Yugoslavia, his and her country of origin, which vanished through a series of nationalist wars. |
Maja Bajević
Born 1967 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Maja Bajevic (Bosnia and Herzegovina / France) is an artist who takes a critical and witty approach to art in order to pinpoint dualities in human behaviour, in particular those involving power. The power of history is opposed to the power of choice and interpretation: in this view Bajević particularly considers political power and patriarchy in relation to the exclusion of women from cultural record. Collective memory to collective amnesia, objective accounts to subjective storytelling and imagination – as a construction in progress, fluid and unstable (the presence of scaffolding in her work is not fortuitous), whose shifts and derivations react to contradictory stimuli, are all important threads in her work. Her work is about opening questions rather then giving answers, where every answered question opens a new territory with new brackets that give place to the unforeseen or the yet unspoken, in an never-ending continuum. Bajevic’s work, ranges from video, installation, performance and sound to text, crafts, drawing, printmaking, machinery and photography. Bajevic was the holder of the Collegium Helveticum residency in Zurich (2001); DAAD residency, Berlin (2007) and IASPIS residency, Stockholm (2009). She has been teaching at the MA studies of l’Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Lyon (2001); Università luav di Venezia, BA and MA (2004 – 2008); MA studies, Bauhaus university, Weimar, Germany (2010). Her work is part of the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), France; MACBA, Barcelona, Spain; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Erste Foundation, Vienna, Austria; Sammlung Essl, Vienna, Austria; Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway amongst others. |
Women at Work — Washing Up, 2001
Five-day Performance / Video, 18’ 09” This work belongs to the series of three performances entitled Women at Work, which the artist carried out together with a group of women-refugees who had been displaced from Srebrenica after the massacre in July 1995. The first was held in Sarajevo (1999) and the second in Chateau Voltaire in France (2000). The work started in Sarajevo, where Bajević together with Muslim women, embroidered on very fragile fabric three famous sentences by former Yugoslav president Tito, such as, “A country that has youth like ours should not worry for its future.” The meaning of these political slogans, embroidered here in Bosnian, Turkish and English, has been washed out through military interventions in the former Yugoslavia, and has become rather ironic. The performance, lasting five consecutive days, took place in a women’s hamam (public bath) in Istanbul and was held during the opening of the 7th Istanbul Biennial. There, Zlatija Efendić, Fazila Efendić and the artist washed the fabric with political slogans over and over again, until it fell to pieces. The event could be attended only by women, and presumed an active participation of the visitors who could access it by passing through a cleansing rite of bathing. The process of washing has a sacred connotation in many cultures. Psychologically, cleaning is known as a traditional female reaction to pain, loss, death or stress.
How Do You Want To Be Governed?, 2009 Video , 10’ 39’’ The performance is a reenactment of the video work, Was ist Kunst?, which conceptual artist Raša Todosijević from Belgrade made in 1976. Occupying the position of power (of the artist) he endlessly repeats the question, addressing a silent young woman. In her video, Bajević makes a twist: this time it is the artist who is being torturously questioned and not the one asking the question: how she wants to be governed and be positioned in a democratic society. Adding to the estrangement of the setting is a voice-over that repeats the same question not as the interrogator but in a disinterested speaker-like voice, as if the bureaucratic character of the question is being accepted in the question itself and presumes that there will not be any answer. The question thus becomes a pure execution of power for power’s sake. |
Yael Bartana
Born 1970 in Kfar-Yehezkel, Israel. Yael Bartana’s films, installations and photographs explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Her starting point is the national consciousness propagated by her native country, Israel. Central to the work are meanings implied by terms like “homeland”, “return” and “belonging”. Bartana investigates these through the ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of the nation state. In her Israeli projects, Bartana dealt with the impact of war, military rituals and a sense of threat on every-day life. Between 2006 and 2011, she has been working in Poland, creating the trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned, a project on the history of Polish-Jewish relations and its influence on the contemporary Polish identity. The trilogy represented Poland in the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice (2011). In recent years Bartana has been experimenting and expanding her work within the cinematic world, presenting projects such as Inferno (2013), a “pre-enactment” of the destruction of the Third Temple, True Finn (2014), that came into being within the framework of the IHME Festival in Finland, and Pardes (2015) which was shot during a spiritual journey in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Her latest work, Simone The Hermetic, is a site-based sound installation that takes place in future Jerusalem. |
Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), 2010
Poster 84.1 x 59.4 cm The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP) was initiated by Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana in 2007 and since then has acquired international recognition and support. The founding wish of the JRMiP is to write new pages into a history that never quite took the course we wanted. We call for the return of 3.300.000 Jews to Poland to symbolize the possibility of our collective imagination – to right the wrongs history has imposed and to reclaim the promise of a utopian future that all citizens deserve. Neither mono-ethnic nor mono-religious, it is internationalist and open to all refugees and outcasts. Horizontally inter-connected like a network, it needs no central leader. It is a political experiment. [From www.jrmip.org] The First International Congress of the JRMiP was held in Berlin (11 till 13 May, 2012) within the framework of the 7th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art. This work is integrally linked to the series of work presented in the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 – the trilogy of video works And Europe Will Be Stunned (Nightmares, 2007; Wall and Tower, 2009; Assasination, 2011) – when in an unprecendented and highly political decision for a national pavilion, Israeli artist Yael Bartana was chosen to represent Poland. |
Marina Belikova
Born 1988 in Moscow, USSR. Marina Belikova is an artist, born in Moscow, Russia. Between 2005-2011 she studied Graphical web-design & E-commerce in the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and then in 2011 moved to the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (Technical University) and graduated with an honours degree. In 2012-2013 she did an M.A. in Communication Design: Graphic Design in Kingston University London. In 2013 she started her degree at Bauhaus University Weimar, where she is currently doing an M.F.A. in Media Art and Design. |
The Lines, 2013 – 2015
Photographs and Text, 44 x 28 cm The human body can be a great storyteller. It carries all sort of marks – birthmarks, vaccination marks, scars from childhood or sport accidents, surgeries, burns from cooking or inattentive smokers, and so on. Some of those have dramatic or funny stories behind them, some are from long forgotten insignificant accidents, but all of them are traces of life – history as told by the body. And some marks happen to be self-inflicted. This topic is rarely discussed, neither by the ones involved, nor by the people around them. Unlike the common view, associating self-harm almost exclusively with depression or anxiety, the reasons behind it are very diverse, as are the backgrounds of the people featured in this series: UK, Russia, Estonia, Iran and Australia. [Marina Belikova, 2016] |
Tania Bruguera
Born 1968 in Havana, Cuba. One of the leading political and performance artists of her generation, Bruguera researches ways in which Art can be applied to the everyday political life; focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics. Recognized as one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, shortlisted for the #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award 2016, she is a 2015 Herb Alpert Award winner, a Hugo Boss Prize finalist, a Yale World Fellow and is the first artist-in-residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). In 2013 she was part of the team creating the first document on artistic freedom and cultural rights with the United Nation’s Human Rights Council. Tania’s work has explored both the promise and failings of the Cuban Revolution in performances that provoke viewers to consider the political realities masked by government propaganda and mass-media interpretation. In 2014, she was detained and had her passport confiscated by the Cuban government for attempting to stage a performance about free speech in Havana’s Revolution Square. She had planned to set up a microphone and invite people to express their visions for Cuba. In May 2015, she opened the Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt, in Havana. Her work was exhibited at Documenta 11, Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Guggenheim and Van Abbemuseum among others. She lives and works in New York and Havana. |
Migrant Manifesto, Immigrant Movement International, 2011
Text Piece With her concept of “useful art” (Arte Útil), Tania Bruguera seeks “to imagine, create, develop and implement something that, produced in artistic practice, offers the people a clearly beneficial result.” “Today, after working on the Arte UÌtil concept, I see myself as an initiator (rather than a performer or even an artist). By that I mean that what I’m doing is setting up the conditions for things to happen, where the audience has as much responsibility as I do for where the work goes. It is a way to acknowledge that with social and political public work we do not own all the work and that the ways by which these works can be sustained are by the intervention, care and enthusiasm of others. … There are many people that think that because I have proposed things like Arte UÌtil and what I call ‘political-timing-specific art’ I’m renouncing art; it is actually the contrary, it is claiming the right that art has to be redefined as an active part of other things, it is the rights artists have to be more than producers.“ [Tania Bruguera, in an interview with Tom Eccles, December 2015] |
Anetta Mona Chișa & Lucia Tkáčová
Born 1975 in Nădlac, Romania. Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová have been working in collaboration since 2000. Born in Romania and Slovakia, their works highlight issues surrounding Eastern European History, gender relations, the individual vs the masses, as well as satirizing their identity as female artists working in an Art world predominantely populated by Western men. Through their more performative works, Chişa and Tkáčová use the the idea of the ‘female duo’ to subvert and question artistic/social traditions. The use of two strong bodies, collaborating and working together, transform the female body into a site of strength, rather than a site of male fantasies and enforced gender stereotypes. The duo work across a variety of media including video, drawing and sculpture, often employing performance, intervention, language and game tactics in their acts. They both graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and currently live and work in Prague. |
Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Let’s Conclude), 2008
Video, 11’ 13’’ Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Let’s Conclude) depicts a group of majorettes marching across an urban space, apparently performing a generic choreography. However, the majorettes, instead of following the usual dance routine, actually broadcast a message coded in Semaphore, an outdated naval signal language. The message performed by the majorettes is the concluding part of Manifesto della donna futurista, written in 1912 by the French poet, playwright and performance artist Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953); it was her response to Marinetti’s infamous call, in the 1909 Manifesto del Futurismo, for the “scorn of woman.” De Saint Point’s manifesto anticipated a strong woman as a role model who would re-appropriate her instincts and vital strength in spite of a society which condemned her to weakness. Instead, she advocated the concepts of the woman-warrior and “female virility.”
Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better., 2011
Video, 7’ 57’’ The clenched fist pointing to the sky is an archetypal image of human disobedience, an image of the power of the weak, of courage and vanity. We re-created this symbol as an ephemeral inflatable sculpture, a huge “harmless” toy. The performance is conceived like a puppet show, a play in which the object is controlled by strings. The action turns into a reversed play, in which the “marionette” is at the same time the hand that moves the strings, whereas we become like living puppets. The interplay of idolatry and iconoclasm emphasizes the slippery area between control and subversion, hopes and resignation, creating a paradoxical relation between the followers and the transcending power of the idea. [A.M. Chișa & L. Tkáčová] This work was produced for the Romanian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011, where the artists represented Romania together with Ion Grigorescu. |
Danica Dakić
Born 1962 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Danica Dakić’s scope of work extends from video and film to photography and installation. Her works hark back to traditional art historical compositions, staging scenes with members from socially and economically marginalised backgrounds to act out their own narratives, giving her work a politically charged subject matter and theatrical aesthetic that explores issues surrounding identity and existence amongst the socially disadvantaged. Dakić studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Sarajevo, the Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade, and the Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf. Since 2011 she has been a professor at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, where she heads the international MFA-program „Public Art und New Artistic Strategies“. Her work is in public collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Generali Foundation, Vienna, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, the Landtag of the state NRW in Düsseldorf, and the National Gallery of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo. Dakić currently lives in Düsseldorf and Weimar, Germany. |
Jelica Dakić by Danica Dakić, 2012
Photography / Text, 68 x 49.5 cm Rad je svjesna ljudska djelatnost. The sentence in Serbo-Croat quotes a Marxist definition of labour, which was often told by the mother Jelica to her daughter. Through this statement, the mother is advising the daughter on how to adjust her energy inputin relation to its outcome. In this work the artist merges a personal reminiscence with a collective memory. A photograph, taken in Opatija (Croatia) in 2010, belonging to the artist’s private archive, portrays Jelica Dakić, the mother of the artist (who lives in Bosnia), in a hotel room, on a vacation taken together with her daughter who has long lived abroad. |
Nezaket Ekici
Born 1970 in Kırşehir, Turkey. Nezaket Ekici’s video, installations and performances are often process-based and ask viewers to derive their own emotional and intellectual interpretations. Activated by the audience, the use of her body as a means of expression becomes a vital material in her work, where 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. Born in Kırşehir, Turkey in 1970, Ekici 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. |
Disguise, 2013
Video / Performance, 9’ 56’’ Nezaket Ekici developed the idea for this work from her earlier performance Permanent Words (2009), in which she also hangs upside down reciting newspapers, quotations from the Quran and personal statements concerning the condition of women in the Islamic world with all its benefits and disadvantages. In her new video performance Disguise she takes a step further, showing a woman that not only hangs up-side down, but who is hindered to act and to talk because of black plaster that covers hear head, face and mouth. The artist becomes less and less comfortable in her situation, when she is forced to shut up by plaster covering her mouth and a man’s hands holding her head. And even if this work clearly deals with women’s place in Islamic societies, it also point out that women’s rights are restricted nowadays in many places, despite the Western view that equality exists.
On the Way Safety and Luck, 2011/2016
Video / Performance, 34′ 19″ 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. |
else (Twin) Gabriel
Born 1962 in Halberstadt, GDR. Else Gabriel came to prominence within circles of the GDR art scene during her time at the Dresden Art Academy in the mid 1980s. After becoming a member of the notorious group Autoperforationsartisten, Gabriel began collaborating with artists such as Michael Brendel, Volker (Via) Lewandowsky and Rainer Görß. Their performative works became synonymous with challenging GDR ideology, using shocking techniques such as self-mutilation to question the repressive teaching methods used within schools and universities. After meeting Ulf Wrede (now her partner and father to their two children) in the late 1980s, they began their long term collaborative project under the name else Twin Gabriel in 1991. Their work spans across digital and performative mediums, with themes ranging from social/political repression, late capitalism, the family system and reconfiguring German identity (post-Wall), whilst introducing humour and the absurd into everyday situations. Else Gabriel has been a professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee since 2009. |
Kind als Pinsel, 2007
Video / Performance, 6’ 14’’ The camera performance “Die Erziehung der Hirse” is a moral poem, which, without a touch of irony, Berthold Brecht wrote praising the “great harvester” Joseph Stalin. Paul Dessau composed the music for the poem in 1952-54. I selected parts from this choral piece and sung these parts of it myself. The music forms the background for the images remaining in my memory or the memories I “felt” or dreamed about during my childhood in the GDR, which are filmed with a Super-8 camera. “Kooperatorke” was a Soviet name for a special type of corn. [else (Twin) Gabriel]
Billett Parnass, 1999/2000 Video, 22’ 59’’ The focus is on the construction of a figure with faults – husband and mother, intoxicated Russian and upright Central German, once in front of the Christmas tree, once in the production, mute, brilliant, serious, mindless and somehow from another time. Else Gabriel and Ullf Wrede drove to the Harz Mountains to collect keepsakes, clichés and fairytale images and to produce a pseudo-portrait of the East German-style, Protestant rigidity of tolerance. In the video Else Gabriel plays the father, her son Linus plays his daughter and everyone else plays everyone else. |
Fang Lu
Born 1981 in Guangzhou, China. Fang Lu’s primary medium is video, seeing the camera as a tool to transform the everyday into an alternative reality, as well as an important instrument in activating her role as performer in her work. Her work considers the reality of being a female artist in China as well as her identity as a Chinese artist studying in the US. Fang Lu received her BFA from Graphic Design department at School of Visual Art in New York in 2005, and MFA from the New Genres department at the San Francisco Arts Institute in 2007. She is co-founder of Video Bureau, an independent video archive resource in Beijing and Guangzhou. She lives and works in Beijing. |
Sea of Silence, 2015
Video, 29’ The work is centered on the idea of speaking about love as a form of action. Three woman protagonists, as three distinctive individuals, talk to the camera about specific events and experiences when they encounter love. They are situated in a remote desert. This untamed environment is a new habitat for them to pursue a new form of living. [Fang Lu] This work was made during the artist’s stay at the Artport residency program in Israel. Sea of Silence is the first in a series of works about women’s experiences of love. The second work in this series, Secret of the Supermoon, was produced by MOMENTUM in 2015 as the result of Fang Lu’s artist residency at MOMENTUM. This series of works addresses heroism in a private rather than political context. Chinese artist Fang Lu transcends questions of culture and nationhood in reminding us that women’s battles are fought on many fronts, and that personal acts of strength can be as heroic as public acts of resistance. |
Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya)
Born 1969 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Russia. Gluklya is a Russian artist working internationally, exploring the field of research based art, as well as participatory and multidisciplinary projects where she experiments with video, performance and installations. Her work is continually shifting between different disciplines: One of her main preoccupations in her work currently is challenging social hierarchy, uniting people within her projects from different corners of society – Migrants and dancers, pensioners and students, the marginalised and professors, minors and elderly ladies. Through this dialogue, Gluklya creates a new language of expression, giving her works a multi-layered and challenging dimension. Together with her colleague Tsaplya, she founded the FFC /Factory of Found Clothes project, (1996-2012), which became one the most recognizable feminist projects internationally. Gluklya and Tsaplya are considered as pioneers of Russian performance. In 2002 she also became a member of the Chto Delat group, a multidisciplinary platform uniting artists, philosophers and activists. |
Clothes for Demonstration Against False Election of Vladimir Putin, 2011 – 2015
Installation (Textiles, Handwriting, Wood) The idea for this work appeared during the time of the first big protests in Russia, beginning in December 2011, against Putin’s false elections. It was unpredictable for everybody; because of the complete a-politicization of our society, none of us could have imagined, even the day before, that it might happen. Later, in 2012, I decided to incorporate the spirit of protest and political uprising at different demonstrations into my long-term project Utopian Clothes. Clothes hanging on sticks represent a new type of demonstration banner that makes the voices of protesting people visible and gives a voice to people who cannot speak. Each item of clothing has its own story and aura and represents a certain voice, a precise position in society. Gradually the number of clothes with protest expressions grew into its own series with the project title Clothes for Demonstrations. Insofar as the language of protest in Russia has only started to take shape, any diversity among protests, any artistic expression, might be valuable in developing a shared spirit of resistance. The installation Clothes for demonstration against the false election of Vladimir Putin 2011 – 2015 represents the memory of the first outburst of free will of the Russian people, who have awoken from a long, long sleep. [Gluklya / Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya] The installation Clothes for demonstration against the false election of Vladimir Putin 2011 – 2015 was shown at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. |
Stefanie Gromes & Katrin Hafemann
Born 1981 in Berlin, Germany. Stefanie Gromes is working as a freelance film writer for the public service broadcasting company (NDR/ARD Television) in Hamburg, in the current affairs department, since 2012. She also works for the department “Die BOX/ lab for creative storytelling in documentaries“. Katrin Hafemann is working as a freelance film writer for the public service broadcasting company (NDR/ARD Television) in Hamburg, in the department of current affairs, since 2002. She also works for the department of “Die BOX/ lab for creative storytelling in documentaries“. |
7 Tage…FEMEN, 2015
NDR, Documentary, 30’ After long research, Stefanie Gromes and Katrin Hafemann managed to realize this documentary film together with the members of the FEMEN activist group in Germany. It is film based on mutual trust. The FEMEN activist feminist movement originated in Ukraine around 2007, and soon spread worldwide. Klara and Zana launched the German branch together in 2012. Since then, they, like their co-fighters acting internationally, protest against pornography, prostitution and animosity towards women in Islamism. In doing so, they expose their own nudity: “Society can get our tits, but only with the message,” says Zana. What motivated German women to such radical rebellion and what is the price they pay for it? Through a number of interviews, this film offers personal answers, proving that today the slogan “personal is political” has preserved its old meaning while acquiring new forms. |
Sanja Iveković
Born 1949 in Zagreb, Croatia. Sanja Iveković was raised in Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and belongs to the artistic generation covered by the umbrella term New Art Practice that emerged after ’68. Ivekovic’s work is marked by the critical discourse with the politics of images and body. The analysis of identity constructions in media as well as political engagement, solidarity and activism belong to her artistic strategies. She has been working with performance, video, installation and actions in the public domain since the 1970s. Her work from the 1990s deals with the collapse of socialist regimes and the consequences of the triumph of capitalism and the market economy over living conditions, particularly of women. |
Our Beautiful, 1998
Video, 25’ This video was commissioned in 1998 as a clip by the coalition of Croatian women’s NGOs as a part of the campaign opposing violence against women. It consists of a single shot, showing a face of a beautiful woman, who slowly turns, exposing the other part of her face, which is battered. The Croatian national anthem, Our Beautiful (“Lijepa naša“), is heard at the beginning of the video along with the first chord of the anthem: “Our beautiful homeland, oh, our hero land…” An attempt to broadcast this clip on Croatian national TV has, alas, failed. Croatian intertitle reads: 45% of battered women are victims of their partners.
Invisible Women of Solidarity (6 out of 5 million), 2009
Screen Prints, 72 x 51.8 cm This series depicts six women who were influential in establishing the Polish liberation movement of Solidarity, yet whose roles were marginalized, if not entirely erased in the official narrative of the movement. The work stands as a “monument to invisible women” and as many other of Iveković’s projects, it questions the constructions of collective memory and historical amnesia. Here, Iveković seemingly reverses the historical cannon, shedding light on six key women in the movement by presenting their portraits and next to them their full biographies. In presenting the portraits white on white, the artist refers to the official historical narratives which enact various forms of silencing women as historical actors.
GEN XX, 1997 – 2001 6 Photographic Prints, 100 x 70 cm Project GEN XX is a series of photo works designed in the form of magazine advertisements, published between 1997-1998 in Croatian independent periodicals and women’s journals such as Arkzin, Zaposlena, Frakcija, Kruh i ruže and Kontura. The women on the photographs are fashion models whose faces are familiar to the general public. The names and short bios collaged on the photographs belong to those Croatian women who had been captured and/or died as antifascists during WWII. Ljubica Gerovac, sisters Baković, Nada Dimić, Dragica Končar, Anca Butorac, who had been proclaimed “National Heroes” in socialist Yugoslavia, were well known to the generations who matured during the socialist period. The artist’s mother, Nera Šafarić, is represented by an original photograph of herself, two years before she was deported to Auschwitz, where she remained till the liberation. In the post-communist age, those women are either unknown or have been erased from the collective memory. |
Elżbieta Jabłońska
Born 1970 in Olsztyn, Poland. The art of Elżbieta Jabłońska, often described as post-feminist, offers an amiably ironic commentary on the status and role of women in a traditional society, interweaving women’s everyday activities into art in a good-natured way. In her works, the artist uses and transforms cultural stereotypes and clichés associated with the notion of woman and femininity, playing an intelligent game with them, but full of humor and warmth. Elżbieta Jabłońska received her MA degree in 1995 from the Fine Arts Department, Nicholas Copernicus University in Torun, where she has been teaching since 1996. She lives and works in Bydgoszcz. She works in different media, often through space-and-time-related activities. In 2003 Jabłońska received the Spojrzenia (Views) 2003 Award of the Cultural Foundation of the Deutsche Bank. |
Supermother, 2002
3 Photographs , 100 x 130 cm Jabłońska is an artist whose prime artistic concern is questioning the concept of domesticity that is historically associated with the “woman’s sphere.” In her series Supermatka (Supermother) she, on the on hand, challenges the myth of The Polish Mother (Matka Polka) embedded in Polish national imagination for centuries, insisting on a mother’s endurance and self-sacrifice. In this series Jabłońska addresses a new set of archetypal demands. Clad in the costumes of cartoon superheroes, the artist poses with her son as the defender of home and family, referring to her role as both natural caregiver and entertainer. These works, on the other hand, point out contradictory cultural paradigms that pit tradition and Catholicism against the rising tide of consumerism, technology, and Western values, denounced by the right-wing catholic women’s organizations in Poland. As many other Polish women artists, Jabłońska destabilizes this mythology via a self-ironizing game. |
Zuzanna Janin
Born 1961 in Warsaw, Poland. Zuzanna Janin is a visual artist and former teen actor. Having at one time starred in the Polish series Szalenstwo Majki Skowron (Madness of Majka Skowron), Janin now uses her theatrical background to create sculpture, video, installation, photography and performances. Janin’s work is particularly interested in the human condition, examining past memories and personal history in an attempt to establish a material a relationship with them.
Her work has been shown in a variety of spaces, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Foundation Miro, Barcelona, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, National Gallery Zacheta, Warsaw, Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Haifa Mu- seum of Art, Haifa, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Jeu de Pomme, Paris, Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthalle, Bern, Hoffmann Sammlung, Berlin, and TT The THING, NY. Janin has also taken part in the Sydney Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Liverpool Biennale, and the 54th Venice Biennale. |
Lost Butterfly, 2016
Video, 40’ 56’’ Lost Butterfly narrates a story of lost and found memory. Zuzanna Janin, the artist and the daughter, is reconstructing here the memory about her mother, the painter Maria Anto, whose painting, entitled Zuzanna Goes to the Ball (1961), was dedicated to her still unborn daughter. This work had been exhibited at the Sao Paolo Biennial in 1963, but since that time it has been lost. This painting never returned to its home country, Poland, and in the archives of the painter, who died in 2006, there was only a black and white photograph of a later version of the lost image. The journey to Brasil, which the daughter decided to take, was a detective-like investigation about the lost object of desire; at the same time the journey was a way of re-enacting a family memory, which, being a memory about a Polish woman painter, belongs as well to the (Polish) cultural memory.
The End. Chapter 1. A Trip to Fear, 2013 Video, 25’ 10’’ The first part of the video project “THE END” is based on the artist’s journey from Poland to Russia, where Janin travelled in a gesture of solidarity with the imprisoned members of the Russian feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot. Focusing on a single geographic location to illustrate two parallel stories, the artist documents her journey to a country town on the banks of the Kama River where Masha from Pussy Riot was then imprisoned, and where, generations before, Janin’s own great grandfather had also been imprisoned, sent into a slavery in exile in a gulag. Sharing the fate of many other orphaned children from Warsaw. A Trip to Fear is also a personal trip into the depths of personal and collective memory, which revolves around empathizing with those people who risk their freedom and comfort to struggle for a better tomorrow, as well as denouncing evil and oppression. It is an act of solidarity with those who suffer shame, fear, humiliation, degradation and exclusion. It is also a call for artistic freedom.
Majka Skowron. My Heroine for Today, 2016 Project on Facebook / print posts from Facebook, dimension variable (ca. 200 pieces), project in progress Situated on the Facebook page of the artists’ fictional alterego Majka Skowron, this work takes the form of daily posts by the artist about women – both extraordinary and ordinary –who inspire her. Majka Skowron is the name of the hero of a Polish television program of the 1970’s, The Madness of Majka Skowron (1975), still viewed today as a cult classic. As a child actress, Zuzanna Janin played Majka throughout the run of the program. In 2009 – 2012 she made a series of 9 video works entitled Majka from the Movie, where she mingles excerpts of the original footage with re-staged scenes played by her own daughter, documentary news footage of world events, and found footage from Eastern and Hollywood movies and music, thus merging investigations into the history of art and film with a focus on rebellion. Maintaining the fictional character of Majka Skowron as her alterego on Facebook, Janin yet again reveals herself through the lens of a social media. Majka Skowron, now grown up, returns to her role of provocateur, using the media of Facebook to highlight the true stories of women who have been wronged or forgotten by society. |
Adela Jušić
Born 1982 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Born in Sarajevo and growing up during the Bosnian War (1992-1995), Adela Jušić’s rhetoric is predominantly entwined with issues surrounding memory, personal tragedy and the reality of conflict. Through processing her experiences mainly through the medium of video (The Sniper, 2007), Jušić’s work is at once cathartic and objective, looking at events from a distance in order to critique and reconsider the nature of war. Her preoccupation with war also examines patriarchal conditions and enforced gender stereotypes in Bosnia. As a young woman working and living in Bosnia, and as someone who “does not fit Bosnia’s stereotypical idea of what a woman should be” (Jušić, 2015), the artist has been branded a social outsider and condemned for her untraditional view of gender. In response to this, Jušić founded the Association for Art and Culture, CRVENA, an organisation working on a number of cultural and feminist projects in Sarajevo. In 2013, Jusic also completed an MA degree in Democracy and Human Rights in South East Europe at the Sarajevo and Bologna University. Adela Jusic has won the Young Visual Artist Award for the best young Bosnian artist in 2011, Henkel Young Artist Price CEE in 2011 and award of Belgrade October Salon in 2013. |
The Sniper, 2007
Video, 4’ 09’’ The aggressor’s sniper campaign against the population of the besieged Sarajevo during the last war was an inhuman violation of the rules and customs of war, directed principally towards civilians. My father had been a member of the Bosnian Army from the outset of the war through 3 December 1992 when, as a sniper, he got killed by a sniper bullet which hit him in the eye. Right before his death I found his notebook into which he continuously, over several months, listed how many soldiers he had killed during his combat assignments. [Adela Jušić] Revealing how wartime memories are intertwined with family and childhood memories, Jušić reminds us of the power of autobiographical work in questioning history and conflict. What is called into question in The Sniper is the reality of war itself, in an attempt to go beyond nationalist, ethnic or religious issues, which have been the main point of discussion throughout the post-war period. |
Elena Kovylina
Born 1971 in Moscow, USSR. Kovylina spent thirteen years receiving a classical Soviet art education until she was accepted to the Art and Media School, Zurich, in 1996. Since then, Kovylina’s period of experimentation eventually led her to her preferred medium: performance. Her pieces are shocking, distrurbing and hypnotising, using her body as a site of danger (where she often inflicts potential physical harm onto her and others) in order to question the conventions, tradtions and dogmas of society. In 1991 Kovylina graduated from Moscow State Academic Art School, “Memory of 1905” for Visual Arts. From 1993 to 1995 she studied at the Surikov Art Institue. From 1996 to 1998 she studied at the Art and Media School in Zurich (installation, performance, video). In 1999 she graduated from the course “New Artistic Strategies” at the Georges Soros Centre of Contemporary Art in Moscow.. In 2003 she received a diploma from the Faculty of Media Art at the University of Arts Berlin (Udk Berlin), where she studied under professor Rebecca Horn. |
Carriage, 2009
Video, 4’ 43’’ Appropriating a sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic film, Battleship Potemkin (1925), Kovilyna uses her feminist gaze to produce yet another iconic image: The Carriage. Eisenstein produced his dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in Odessa, when the crew of the battleship Potemkin rebelled in 1905 against their officers. He was concerned with staging of heroic events as a great collective (male) tragedy, which naturally required (male) sacrifice. Kovilyna, in contrast, is focusing on one single moment of the rebellion: the baby’s pram running down the Odessa steps. This sequence may suggest that mothers must be ready for sacrificing their children for the sake of revolutionary change; but at the same time Carriage is about women’s helplessness to control and protect their lives and the lives of their offspring, not only during social rebellions but in general.
New Woman, 2012
Video, 5’ 56’’ This specific new woman, with no resemblance to anyone else, has always existed amongst – or even within – millions of women of the past; women who, perhaps, could only dream such a self during the night when baby care, housekeeping and other feminine obligations were over for a little time – until the next day’s obligations came. The innovative potential of women was long supressed from finding its application in society due to prescribed traditional roles. A woman with education for centuries remained a rare phenomenon, too. A woman wearing the academic mantle of a Master is a clear sign of her good education. This is, however, a figure of the Newest Times. One like her would have been burned centuries ago. [Elena Kovylina] |
Katarzyna Kozyra
Born 1983 in Warsaw, Poland. For years Kozyra’s art has been moving the public opinion, often sparking polemics. As a sculptor, photographer, performance artist and filmmaker, the artist consistently questions stereotypes and socio-political discourses to critical revision. Her works raise the most fundamental issues of human existence: identity and transience, life and death, religion and sex. She explores the area of cultural taboos and clichéd behaviors embedded in our everyday life. Although Kozyra is classified as a new media artist, her use of multiple techniques makes an attempt to label her art difficult. Kozyra is a leading figure of contemporary art whose work has been widely recognized and awarded as one of the finest examples of Polish art on the international arena. Kozyra’s activities became crucial for the development of the new artistic movement known as Critical Art and heavily influenced the shape of contemporary culture, often constituting a starting point for a broader discussion. She received, among others, the Award of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (Warsaw 2011) and the Paszport Polityki award (Warsaw 1997). She was granted the DAAD scholarship (Berlin 2003) and the Kościuszko Foundation scholarship (New York 2000). In 1999, she received an honorable mention at the 48th Venice Biennale for the video installation Men’s Bathhouse in the Polish Pavilion. In 2011 she obtained her Doctor’s Degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A year later, she established the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, which focuses on supporting women’s activities in the area of culture and art. In 2013 the Huffington Post named Kozyra one of ten most important female artists of the new millennium. Since 2010 she has been working on her autobiographical film. In 2014 she won the Polish Film Institute/ Museum of Modern Art award at the 39th Film Festival in Gdynia for her idea for an experimental movie Project X. |
Punishment and Crime, 2002
7 Channel Video Installation (Colour) The title of the work, Punishment and Crime, is borrowed from the Dostoyevsky’s novel. In Kozyra’s work the act of destruction is in and of itself a punishment. In this multi-channel installation she explores one side of male behaviour and fascinations, showing a group of men and boys engaged in paramilitary activities. For them, the weapons and explosives are not simply a hobby but a deep passion. Free of any ideals or ideological goals, their obsession appears primal and atavistic. The artist documents the actions and activities of this group. On one level, these resemble innocent childhood war games, while on another, due to the genuine danger and violent force of real weapons, bullets and explosives, they are closer to actual military operations. The faces of the participants are camouflaged with masks representing faces of pin-up girls or Playboy models. This transposition of gender softens the effect of danger and fear without depleting the authenticity and documentary character of the footage. |
Almagul Menlibayeva
Born 1969 in Alma Ata, Kazakh SSR. Menlibayeva graduated from the Academy of Art and Theatre in Almaty in 1992. A video, photographic and performance artist, her works are usually shot in the dramatic landscapes of Kazakhstan and its surrounding region and frame the political present and past within the diverse mythologies that still haunt the land. She has been awarded a number of prizes: the Main Award, KINO DER KUNST, International Film Competition, Munich (2013), KfW Audience Award, Videonale 13, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2011) and the Art and Culture Network Program Grant, Open Society Institute Budapest (2011). She has also exhibited in the Azerbaijan pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and in the 1st International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Kyiv, (2012). |
Milk for Lambs, 2010
Video, 11’ 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. 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.
Headcharge, 2007
Video, 12’ 35’’ In the video Headcharge, the story, which casually begins in a restaurant in the city of Almaty, gradually slips into a disturbing ritual performed by the female protagonists. We see several urban young women eating a sheep’s head and, to increase the shock value of the scene, feeding each other. The grotesque juxtaposition of archaic beliefs with today’s “urban attitude” of the protagonists derails the reality of the story. Step by step, through increasingly unruly takes of the camera, the film gives way to a parallel reality, referring to shamanistic travels between worlds. As often occurs in Menlibayeva’s films, the female protagonists allude to the Persian mythological image of “peri”-female creatures ranking on a spectrum between angels and evil spirits. Accentuating the ambiguity of peri, whose image is very popular in Central Asia, the artist refers to the current shifts of the feminine condition, which occurs with the progressing Islamization of the countries in the region. |
Tanja Muravskaja
Born 1978 in Pärnu, Estonia. Tanja Muravskaja is a photo artist whose work probes issues surrounding the construction and definition of identity and nationality. Her work critiques and interrogates the meaning of nationalism in modern-day Estonia and how – through complex cultural and political processes – neo-nationalism has become part of the national identity. Many of Muravskaja’s works look at conflicts driven to a significant degree by nationalistic animosity and overkill situations fueled by an inflated sense of patriotic pride in the recent history of the ‘new’ Estonia. The artist strives to analyse and understand the new Estonian identity in a country with a heterogeneous ethnic make-up. She also explores these issues from her personal standpoint as an Estonian-born Russian speaker of Ukrainian descent. She studied photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA 2010) and the University of Westminster and currently lives and works in Tallinn. |
They, Who Sang Together, 2008
Photographs, 8 Portraits Out of a Series of 12, 110 x 87 cm On 23 August 1989, together with their Latvian and Lithuanian neighbors, Estonians linked hands to form a human chain, composed of over 2 million people, stretching 600 kilometers from Tallinn to Vilnius via Riga. And they sang. The Singing Revolution was a political process that took place in the four years from 1987 to 1991, which led to the Independence of the three Baltic states. Almost two decades after the historic events they engineered, Muravskaja presents emotionally charged large-scale portraits of the leaders of Estonia’s “Singing Revolution.” Here are the key figures engaged in the process of regaining independence in Estonia: Jüri Adams, Ignar Fjuk, Liia Hänni, Tunne Kelam, Mart Laar, Marju Lauristin, Ülo Nugis, Mart Nutt, Lagle Parek, Edgar Savisaar, Enn Tarto and Heinz Valk. The enormous size and dark tones of the photos emphasize the historical significance of the event. The series comes across as a monument to something that has been accomplished and a moment that has passed. By the time the portraits were created, a number of those portrayed had left politics; their involvement refers to a wider presence: to the fact that the state of affairs in 2007 had not come overnight, and that the people portrayed had all contributed to this development. |
Hajnal Németh
Born 1972 in Szony, Hungary. Hajnal Németh works predominantely in video, photography and installation, often using different layers of sensory experiences, in particular sound and music. Her main point of reference in her work is her native Hungary, as well as her fascination with memory, chance and human experience (Crash, 2011). The artist 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; Kunsthalle, Budapest; 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. She was representing Hungary at the Venice Biennale 2011. |
False Testimony, 2013
An Installation consisting of: False Testimony (Version 3), 2013 Operatic Short Film, Full HD, Stereo, 17’ Reduction, 2012 Sheet Music Installation, 11 transcriptions of the original testimony of Móric Scharf given before the court in 1883. Loud Place, 2012 Photo Series, 40 x 80 cm Inscriptions: Courtesy of Galerie Patrick Ebensperger The subject of False Testimony is the Tiszaeszlár Trial of 1883. Following the disappearance of a 14-year-old girl, Eszter Solymosi, on April 1, 1882, in the Hungarian village of Tiszaeszlár, local rumors and suspicions of Jewish ritual murder led to a high-profile murder case in the summer of 1883. Relying heavily on forensic medicine, the prosecution’s case was not proved against the 14 male Jewish defendants, who were proclaimed not guilty on August 3. The trial was closely interwoven with the birth of modern anti-Semitism in Hungary: shortly after the verdict and a spite of anti-Semitic riots around the country, Hungary’s first National Antisemitic Party (1883-1892) was formed. “Tiszaeszlár” later became an important element in the radical Right’s historical narrative and subsequent constructions of national martyrology. The series of photographs entitled Loud Place documents the contemporary right-wing cult of Eszter Solymosi and the grave erected in her honor in 1994. The video False Testimony (version 3), works with the transcript of Miklós Erdély’s classic 1981 film Verzió. The film by Erdély refers to the Tiszaeszlár case, especially the inculcation of the testimony upon the 14-year-old crown witness Móric Scharf. The boy stated that the Jews killed the girl in order to use her blood at the approaching Passover. The lyrics for the songs in the choral performance are based on rephrased fragments of the film’s dialogues, the structure follows the method of secret inculcation and forced learning: mastering the false testimony, the validation of a lie on the level of testimony, the course of the fictitious conception through the psyche, its registration by external and internal forces, its development into conviction and its ultimate and fatal proclamation. |
Ilona Németh
Born 1963 in Dunajská Streda, Slovakia. Ilona Németh is an artist, organiser and curator based in Slovakia and Hungary. She is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, part of the leading Studio IN and the International education programme Open Studio at the Department of Intermedia. While in the nineties her work concentrated mostly on body politics, installation art and visual pregnancy, by the early 2000s her work began to shift towards public art and socially engaged work. The question of identity, the relationship between private history, politics and ideology, issues of the public sphere within a contextual approach are the main characteristics of her art. In 2001 Ilona Németh exhibited Invitation for a Visit in the Pavilion of the Czech and Slovak Republic at the Venice Biennial (with Jiří Surůvka) and she participated in editions of Prague Biennale (2005, 2007, 2011). |
Zsófia Meller, 2012
Video, 10’ 30’’ Ilona Németh’s interview with the Marxist philosopher Ágnes Heller (b. 1929) is a documentary video named after Heller’s grandmother, Zsófia Meller, who at the end of the nineteenth century had enrolled as the very first female student at the University in Vienna. Heller tells: “I’ve chosen women from my family, who grew out of the limitations of the so called ‘female role.’ My mother did not grow beyond women’s roles, only women who became intellectuals achieved this.” A moment later, surprisingly for a serious thinker of her generation, she issues this personal statement “I never wanted to be beautiful. But I always wanted to be smart.” Commenting on the achievements of the women intellectuals in her Jewish family with whom she shares a passion for knowledge, she states: “Simply said this is not about education, this is about freedom. I think that a prerequisite for a truly significant cultural achievement is personal freedom.” This work should have been a key piece in the Németh retrospective to be held in a major museum in Budapest in 2011. However, at that time, Heller, a Marxist and a Jew, was compromised as she found herself in the focus of politically motivated campaign of discrediting in Hungary. In such a hysterical cultural climate, Ilona Németh decided to cancel her retrospective exhibition. Her reasons for such a decision are explained in her video interview, *Endnote (2011), also shown in this exhibition.
*Endnote, 2011 In cooperation with Endre Koronczi *Endnote is a fine piece of institutional critique presented in a form of an interview. This conversation between the artist and Endre Koronczi belongs to her larger project from 2011 entitled Dilemma. The boiling point was reached when the artist had to face a dilemma of either accepting to have her retrospective in a state-run museum without reflecting on the ongoing external issues (such as the public lynching Ágnes Heller was exposed to at that time); or reacting to them in some way, decisively changing the exhibition itself. The answer to this dilemma was putting a completely new strategy in place – instead of the exhibition, instead of the vernissage, the artist confined the visitors to the museum’s lobby: there, she presented two videos, one of which was *Endnote, in which she reflects on the situation and talks about the professional and personal dilemma concerning the canceling of her exhibition (which was later shown in Slovakia and the Czech Republic). |
Nguyen Trinh Thi
Born 1973 in Hanoi, Vietnam. Nguyen Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based independent filmmaker and video/media artist. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories and examined the position of artists in the Vietnamese society. Nguyen studied journalism, photography, international relations and ethnographic film in the United States. Her films and video art works have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions including Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; and Singapore Biennale 2013. Nguyen is founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film and the moving image art in Hanoi since 2009. She’s also a member of NhaSan Collective, the longest-running alternative art space in Hanoi. |
Song to the Front, 2011
Video (b/w), 5’ 23’’ Song to the Front> abstracts a feature-length 1970s Vietnamese war propaganda film and its aesthetic and political elements into a 5-minute vignette. Set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which represented a sacred pagan ritual in pre-Christian Russia where a young girl dances herself to death to propitiate the god of Spring, Song to the Front deconstructs the melodramatic and romanticized elements of the original social-realist drama. Playing with the original plot line in an ambiguous manner, the artist creates an imaginative space for the viewer to reinterpret what were intended to be very literal epics that enforced an ideological view, transforming a gritty war film to a romanticized drama of love.
Eleven Men, 2016
Single Channel Installation, 28’ Eleven Men is composed of scenes collaged from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films featuring the same central actress, Nhu Quynh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career, most of the appropriated movies – from 1966 to 2000 – were produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio. |
Sasha Pirogova
Born 1986 in Moscow, USSR. Pirogova is a performance and video artist, for her the two disciplines are inter-connected. The people in Pirogova’s work adapt automatically to the mechanics of their physical environments, relinquishing their autonomy to the rhythm and structure of the work. Her video-performance BIBLIMLEN (2013) is a behind-the-scenes look at Moscow’s Russian State Library (the former Lenin Library), in which the interior architecture of the building becomes an active co-author of the piece. An earlier video-performance, QUEUE (2011), based on Vladimir Sorokin’s novel of the same name (1983), is a nervous but ‘bizarrely funny saga of a quintessential Russian institution, the interminably long line’ (NYT, 2011). Creating an absurdist choreography of hysterics, dependence and clanship, Pirogova takes pains to replay the text through dance to identify the queue as not a physical but a psycho-social contemporary condition. After graduating from the Physics Department at Moscow State University in 2010, she received a degree in 2014 from the Rodchenko Art School in Video and New Media in Moscow. She has been awarded prizes at the Extra Short Film Festival, ESF (2012) as well as the Innovation Prize in the ‘New Generation’ category (2014). She has participated in various exhibitions, such as Burning News, Hayward Gallery, London (2014), I saw lightning, Udarnik, Moscow (2014) and in the Manifesta 10, parallel program, St. Petersburg (2014). Working with performance, she has also participated in different festivals, including: the 6th International Festival of Video, Performance and Technology, Lisbon (2014), VIII Andrei Tarkovsky International Film Festival, Ivanovo (2014), Cinedans Dance on Screen Festival, Amsterdam (2014) and Now & After International Video Art Festival, The State Museum of GULAG, Moscow (2014). |
Motherland, 2016
Video / Performance, 9′ In this video-performance, Pirogova works in a very special location: the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptow Park, which was completed in 1949. Designed by the Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Viktorovich Vuchetich, the sculptural ensembles and friezes arrayed throughout the memorial park strictly follow the conventions of Socialist Realism. Pirogova works with the statue of the Motherland, which is here represented as a mourning woman, weeping over her (Soviet) sons fallen in WWII. As in memorial statuary in general, this representation of nationalized motherhood (should) remind us of female – mother’s – sacrifice: indeed after any war, women were usually compelled to mourning and melancholy. Being a hero often refers to the past and is usually condensed in the granite memory of statues – but it’s also the most important quality for the present, the present of Motherland. In the video performance Motherland, the performer tries to adopt the details, poses, gestures, and materiality of the monument – trying through physical appropriation to learn heroism, strength or how to weep the future with honor. The looped video refers to an infinite number of such attempts.” [Sasha Pirogova] |
Selma Selman
Born 1991 in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Selma Selman is an artist of Romani origins. Her work is representative of her life struggles and the struggles of her community. Selman utilizes a multiplicity of art mediums, ranging from performance, painting, and photography to video installations, in order to express herself as an individual, a woman, and an artist. Her work, though personal, is also political. Selman defines herself as an artist of Roma origins, and not a Romani artist. The difference is subtle, but critical: through her work, Selman seeks to speak to the universal human condition, utilizing her background as a lens through which she can understand the entirety of the human experience. In her work, she wishes to break down prejudices that stereotype her community as a collective, robbing members of their right to individual expression. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 from Banja Luka University’s Department of Painting, where she studied under the supervision of Veso Sovilj, and worked with renowned Bosnian performance artist Mladen Miljanovic, who represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 55th Venice Biennial in 2013. Selman participated in Tania Brugera’s International Summer Academy in Salzburg, “Arte Util” (Useful Arts) in 2013. She was a fellow for the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary the following year. That year, Selman was also the recipient of the prestigious “Zvono Award”, given to the best young artist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, winning her a residency in New York City. Her work has been shown at numerous international festivals and exhibitions, including the Luxembourg City Film Festival, Sarajevo’s PichWise Festival, Slam Fest in Osijek, the Summer Academy is Salzburg, BL-art festival in Banja Luka, and the Perforation Festival: A Week of Live Art in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Thus far, she has had several solo exhibitions, with “Me postojisarav – Postojim – I exist” being her first solo show in the United States, exhibited at Dreamland Gallery. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Syracuse University, where she also works as a teaching assistant. |
Saltwater (at 47), 2015
Video, 5’ 45’’ The video Salt Water (at 47) is about my mother and her first contact with the sea. Her big wish was always to see for herself if it is really salty, like she heard it was. In this video, I captured that first moment and her reaction. The phrase ‘at 47’ refers to her lack of documents when she came from Kosovo to Bosnia. Culturally, the act of a woman leaving her paternal home to live with her ‘husband’ is perceived as a marriage, whether or not it is officially recognized by the state or religious authorities. At that time in particular, there was no concept of simply ‘living together’. Hence, at thirteen, she was unofficially married to my then seventeen-year old father, but the marriage was not state-certified. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, she was left stateless. In 2014, after many discussions with authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she managed to obtain Bosnian citizenship. After 47 years, she received her first passport. I decided to make her wish come true. I took her on a vacation to the sea. [Selma Selman]
Do Not Look into Gypsy Eyes, 2014 Video, 5’ 04’’ “Do not look into Gypsy eyes” is a mantra of the hyper-sexualized “Roma” woman. A Roma woman is exotic, erotic and exciting. On the same token she is a bit too dangerous, a bit too “dirty”, a bit too desirable – a woman whose eyes will seduce you, put a spell on you, and curse you. This work is based on the stereotypes and prejudices about the Romani woman. As a member of this community, as a woman and artist, I want to provoke the audience to attention against discrimination and the commodification of the female body. [Selma Selman] |
Milica Tomić
Born 1960 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Milica Tomić is a conceptual artist, researching, unearthing and bringing to public issues related to the economy, political violence, trauma and social amnesia; with particular attention to the ‘short circuit’ between intimacy and politics. As a response to the commitment to social change and the new forms of collectivity it engenders, Milica Tomić has made a marked shift from individual to collective artistic practice. She is a founding member of the new Yugoslav art/theory group, “Grupa Spomenik” [Monument Group] (2002), and founder of the project Four Faces of Omarska (2010). Milica Tomić is professor and head of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the TU Graz and professor at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art /NTNU in Norway [2014/15]. |
One Day, Instead of One Night, a Burst of Machine-Gun Fire Will Flash, If Light Cannot Come Otherwise (Oskar Davičo – Fragment of a Poem), 2009
Video, 10’ The video documents actions Tomić carried out in her hometown, Belgrade, between September and October 2009. Walking around the city carrying a plastic shopping bag in her left hand, and a Kalashnikov in the right one, she revisited forgotten sites in Belgrade where successful antifascist actions took place during World War II. Not once was she approached, or stopped, by the passersby. (Would it be different if the Kalashnikov were not carried by a tall blond woman, but carried by, let’s say, a bearded man with a dark complexion?) The passion and civic dedication of those still living protagonists of WWI actions are expressed in the audio interviews playing in the background of the video. They are denied and forgotten today but they form a striking contrast to the general lethargy and disinterest of the present. The title of this work is borrowed from a poem by Serbian and Yugoslav novelist and poet of Jewish origin, Oskar Davičo (1909-1989), who spent first two years of WWI in an Italian prison as an antifascist, and then joined the Yugoslav partisan army in 1943. |
Anna-Stina Treumund
Born 1982 in Tallinn, Estonia. Anna-Stina Treumund is a queer and feminist artist from Estonia. Since 2006 her art has been focused on giving visibility to the local queer community that has been hidden and coated by homophobia and misogyny supported by the media and politicians, due to ignorance and the Soviet past. As one of the first self-identified lesbian Artists in the country, Treumund has been committed to deconstructing stereotypes of lesbian women in modern Eastern European society. Treumund started her PhD studies where she is deconstructing the heteronormative culture through remakes of art works. Recently she has been using the materials and language of the BDSM culture because of its gender, race, sexuality and class deconstructions. Treumund started a feminist culture festival LadyFest Tallinn in 2011. |
Mothers, 2011
Video, 12’ 55’’ Mothers is a documentary work and focuses on the legal and everyday problems of lesbian parents in Estonia. In recent years, several heated media debates have occurred in Estonia on the topic of sexual minorities, mostly centered on the drafting of the same-sex partnership law. The right of same-sex couples to family life became topical in 2009, when the Viimsi Rural Municipality Government changed the procedure for paying social benefits, in order to deprive the children of a lesbian couple of the travel and food benefits provided by the local government. In such fundamental disputes about the concept of family, people often forget that families different from hetero-normative social conventions exist, despite the pro and contra arguments that are presented in the media; that children often live in these families, who, along with their parents, are legally more vulnerable than traditional hetero families. |
Mariana Vassileva
Born 1964 in Bulgaria. Vassileva’s work looks at how boundaries are tacitly implied. She is interested mainly in experiencing ‘the boundary’, the fine line between the known and unknown, the accepted and unaccepted, in a manner that is resonant with a sense of balance. It comes back to her own personal experiences and her movement between places, leaving the communist regime and her beloved family in Bulgaria behind. Vassileva’s home was and is always Bulgaria, in the northern part of the country where her mother still lives. From this perspective, her work has always reflected another world, a world outside or beyond where she is. This sense of otherness inspires Vassileva, introducing an autobiographical and biographical approach, between the self and the other, between personal and social needs, between needs and dreams, are recurrent themes spreading throughout her work. Mariana Vassileva moved to Berlin after leaving Bulgaria at the time when the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1989. She has studied pedagogy and psychology at Veliko Turnovo University. After this, she wanted to study art in the Academy of Art in Sofia, but instead worked as one of the known artist- professors. She first went to Leipzig to study theatre and to prepare herself art-school, where two years later, she was accepted into the Universität der Künste in Berlin. After her studies, she worked for about three years in scenography for a film company, drawing large-format mountain- and cityscapes for film backdrops. Then, by virtue of some sales of her early work, Vassileva was able to devote herself to being an artist full-time. |
Flying and Other Daily Necessities, 2016
Artificial Materials, 600 x 120 x 120 cm The artist transforms still life and movement through visual representation into new energetic harmony. She is not interested in the physical act of the movement, but in the mental process behind it. In a minimal way, she transforms objects, situations and manners, and presents them in another reference on a lyrical level. The spectator begins to appreciate the work through the emotional movement into a strangely represented world. In this process, one is animated toward a heightened sensibility of daily variations. Flying and Other Daily Necessities presents the ambiguous condition of freedom and bondage, loneliness and connection. A figure engaged in the ultimate the ultimate freedom of solitary flight is still connected to the earth through an umbilical cord.
The Gentle Brutality of Simultaneity,, 1981-2016 Photograph (C Print), 50 x 35 cm Mariana Vassileva creates works that deal with different aspects of everyday life. She works across both sculpture and digital media to present subtle meditations on seemingly insignificant daily activities. Her art, based on observation, often reflects on idyllic and poetic imagery and yet, through the comparison of seemingly still and subtly moving elements, an uncanny tension is created. This pathological restlessness embodies Vassileva’s central themes – that is, the search for selfhood, interpersonal relationships, repression, freedom and escape. [David Elliott] The Gentle Brutality of Simultaneity is an artwork made from a historical document of selfhood – a photograph of a young Vassileva, machine gun in hand, on a firing range. Membership in the Young Pioneers was mandatory for all good Communists, not only in the artist’s country of birth Bulgaria, but throughout the Eastern Bloc. The artist, smiling in the photograph as a champion marksman, now looks back ironically upon her participation in this socialist model on the Western Boy Scouts. |
Anastasia Vepreva
Born 1989 in Archangelsk, USSR. Anastasia Vepreva is an Artist and curator from St. Petersburg, Russia. She has received a double MA from Smolny College, SPBU, St. Petersburg and Bard College, NY, USA. She later graduated from The school of Engaged Art a part of the group “Chto Delat”. Vepreva is a historian by training, focusing on the analysis of discourse of historical memory i.e, Memory Studies. She works in a number of mediums: photography, performance, collage, drawing and text. Along with her fascination with memory, Vepreva’s work explores systems of oppression and the idea of death. In her earlier works Verpreva took a satirical approach to the institutional sexism within Russian media, coating her works with a layer of black humour. She has been published in the Art Leaks Gazette and is the co-curator of Lucy Lippard’s feminist workshop. She participated in the NORDWIND festival, PLURIVERSALE III, IV The Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, The 6th Moscow Biennale, Manifesta 10, 35th Moscow International film festival. |
She Has To, 2013
Video , 4’ 49’’ Many women in Russia believe that they already have enough rights and freedoms, so they don’t understand why and what feminists struggle against. They don’t realize that they are in the centre of a media storm, a huge chthonic monster that tries to enforce its cruel rules everywhere. But if you divert your attention away from it just for a second, you’ll realize its horrible absurdity, and you’ll never remain the same as before. And you’ll understand the main thing that you don’t have to do anything to anybody. [Anastasia Vepreva] She Has To is a mirror held up to contemporary Russian culture – a video work made of found footage of a Russian talk show in which younger women ask their elders for advice about how to save their marriages. |
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INSTALLATION PHOTOS
Photo Credit: Marina Belikova
PHOTOS OF THE PERFORMANCE
Photo Credit: Petra Fantozzi
PHOTOS OF THE OPENING
Photo Credit: Petra Fantozzi
PHOTOS OF THE SYMPOSIUM AND FINISSAGE
Photo Credit: Camille Blake
MOMENTUM BOX
MOMENTUM BOX EXHIBITIONS
5 March – 30 April 2016
Featuring a Selection of Videos Presented at
GANZ GROSSES KINO for KIK EIGHT>>
Hannu Karjalainen // Bjørn Melhus
Theo Eshetu // David Krippendorff // Varvara Shavrova
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
5 – 20 March 2016
Hannu Karjalainen
The House Protects the Dreamer (2014)
16 mm film scanned to HD Video, sound, 14’8″
THE HOUSE PROTECTS THE DREAMER is an experimental narrative film about a fictive modern architect’s creative process. The dreamlike film follows the architect and her assistant producing experiments that verge on the absurd. It is a film about faith, disillusionment and renewal. The film was shot in and around a 1960 Aulis Blomstedt villa in Helsinki and features Heli Haltia and Dwayne Strike. Music composed by Infinite Livez and Hannu Karjalainen.
23 March – 3 April 2016
Bjørn Melhus
Freedom & Independence (2014)
4K Video, sound, 15′
FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE confronts neoliberal elitist thinking using generic media fragments of religious prophecies about the end of time in the setting of a privatized habitat marked by architectures of megalomania. It is a tour de force using elements of fairy tales, musicals, comedy and horror films to scour our global psyche for ingrained promises of salvation, childhood traumas and the work ethic as it is affected by our desire for self-improvement.
6 – 10 April 2016
Theo Eshetu
The Festival of Sacrifice (2012/2016)
Single-channel version of a 6-channel video installation, sound, 16′
THE FESTIVAL OF SACRIFICE depicts the ritual slaughter of a goat at the end of Ramadan, filmed by Eshetu on the Kenyan island of Lamu. 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 images. Music composed by Theo Eshetu. Shown here in a single-channel version of a ten-channel installation, MOMENTUM celebrates the addition of this phenomenal work to the MOMENTUM Collection.
13 – 17 April 2016
David Krippendorff
Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015)
HD, color, stereo, 13’43”
NOTHING ESCAPES MY EYES (2015) is about a silent transformation of a place and a human being. Inspired by the texts of Edward W. Said, the poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Verdi’s opera Aida, the film depicts in a metaphoric form current issues of cultural identity, loss and the pressures to conform. With no dialogues, the film is backed by a musical excerpt from 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.
20 April – 30 April 2016
Varvara Shavrova
The Opera (2010)
HD Video, sound, single-channel version of a 6-channel installation, sound, 21’23”
THE OPERA was originally commissioned (2010) as a multi-channel video projection for the Espacio Cultural El Tanque, an empty oil tank in Tenerife, and subsequently shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. This work is an insight into the fragile world as well as social and human aspects of the Peking Opera, one of China’s most revered aspects of cultural heritage. The Opera focuses on the transformation of the Peking Opera artists from male to female, and from female to male. Shavrova investigates issues of personal identity, sexuality and gender bending as they are manifested by both traditional and contemporary culture in modern day China. 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. MORE INFO HERE >>
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Theo Eshetu
THEO ESHETU
(b. 1958 in London. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Ethiopian artist 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, Theo 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 numerous prestigious international awards, Theo Eshetu is a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, USA, and was Artist in Residence at Tarabya Cultural Academy, Turkey, between 2016 and 2018, where he completed 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 DAAD Gallery in 2014.
Theo Eshetu’s installation Till Death Us Do Part (1980s) has become part of the permanent collection of MoMa, New York. His work has been shown at major museums worldwide, including: 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; Tate Britain, London; the Venice Film Festival; Roma Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art in Rome; the American Academy in Rome; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France; the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels; the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, among many others. Eshetu has participated in major international Biennials, including: the Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2020), Shanghai Biennale, China (2017), Documenta14 in Athens and Kassel (2017), Dak’Art (2016), the Kochi Muziris Biennial, India (2014-15); the Italian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the 10th Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2011); amongst others.
FESTIVAL OF SACRIFICE
2012, Video, 18 min
The celebration of Sacrifice harks back to the very origins of religious thought. All religions begin with a sacrifice. Festival of Sacrifice is a pattern made up of a composition of repetitions which recalls the traditions of Islamic art. This work 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]
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 images. The emotional and aesthetic aspects of ritual religious practices are here heightened by the musical soundtrack of the work.
The Festival of Sacrifice was made while Eshetu was a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Residence Program in Berlin in 2012, and shown in Eshetu’s solo exhibition, The Return of the Axum Obelisk, at the DAAD Gallery, Berlin, in 2014.
Luana Perilli Residency 2016
Terna Prize Artist Residency at MOMENTUM
with
Luana Wojaczek Perilli
4 April – 19 May 2016
Luana Wojaczek Perilli (b.1981, Roma) graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma in 2010, where she currently lives and works in Rome. She was awarded with several residency grants: Pan Studios Program, Pan Museum, Napoli (supervised by Daniel Buren) in 2010; Art Omi, New York, grant by Dena Foundation in 2008 and Cité Internationale des Arts, grant by Incontri Internazionali D’Arte, Paris, in 2008 and 2004. Recent shows include: ‘Q.I vedo’, Napoli (), ‘Solitary shelters’ at The Gallery Apart, Roma, IT; ‘All for one’ at Medium Galerie, Bratislava, SK; ‘Roommates-Coinquilini Luana Perilli /Carola Bonfili’, MACRO, Roma, IT. Perilli has contributed to numerous group shows, including the 2014-15 Kochi Muziris Biennale in MOG Goa Museum, India; Internaturalità in PAV, Torino; Patria Interiore-interior homeland Golden thread Gallery, Project Space, Belfast; ITALIENISCHE KUNST HEUTE, Stadtgalerie, Kiel; Museum Biedermann, Donaueschingen; RE-generation, MACRO, Roma; Omaggio a Graziella Lonardi Buontempo , PAN, Napoli; An intimate story – Cotroneo Collection, MAMM Multimedia Art Museumof Moscow, Moscow.Perilli is currently professor of Multimedia Installation at Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and professor of Art Sudio and Drawing at Cornell University in Rome.
During her Residency in Berlin, Luana Wojaczek Perilli will further deepen her investigation into post-critical collective awareness and the perception of nature.
The history of the city itself provides a great range of provoking issues and locations that recently changed paths of use and meaning, as they became taken over by necessity, as well as by a will to activate a new awareness in the interpretation of spaces.
These locations are a large field for Perilli’s artistic investigation, alongside her interest in the idea of shelters, leftovers and post-failure perception of the environment.
During her first part of the residency in spring last year, Perilli encountered one of the lost places in Berlin, a former bunker, a former place for protection and safety, now a playground, a climbing park, a place where people endanger themselves was created on top of it. This juxtaposition in post-war monuments, their randomly chosen new usage was part of Perilli’s investigation in Berlin. In a Kunst Salon her new ideas and research so far was presented.
The critical shift and the ecological issues related to urban beekeeping and urban crops will inspire a new corpus of works made of videos, drawings and sculptural installations. She will continue her research into this, in the second part of her Residency with MOMENTUM. Perilli will dedicate special attention to issues around collective intelligence.
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Song of Olimpia
6 May 2016
@ 19.00 – 20.00
Song of Olimpia is a performative open ended introduction to Luana Wojaczek Perilli’s project LEOPOLD-O, with sound design by Alberto Picciau. LEOPOLD-O is a project that deals with community identities while undergoing crisis – starting from communal life of eusocial insects to difficult heritage appropriation. The full project will be informed by video, performances and a refugees puppet theatre. This is a work in progress undertaken for the MOMENTUM Artist Residency.
Song of Olimpia is inspired by Aldo Leopold’s writings against the ‘Boostering spirt’ of the 1920’s – his criticism of capitalism, written before capitalism came to be defined as such – and by the anti-bourgeoise tale “der Sandmann” by E.T.A. Hoffmann. The event will take the form of a performance-lecture blending with fictional storytelling, sound, dance, video, and puppet play. The audience will be invited to engage with the puppets and with the artist after the piece.
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Queen, the Rose and the Farmworker,
A Tale on Free Climbing Society
Luana Wojaczek Perilli in conversation with Sumugan Sivanesan
[fve] https://vimeo.com/133138552 [/fve]
Momentum Videotage
In Cooperation With
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)
MAKE IT HAPPEN!
SUPPORT THE KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN >>
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 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 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 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 >>
READ HERE THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION CATALOGUE
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Exhibition:
Migrating Images
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 // Theo Eshetu
Amir Fattal // Gülsün Karamustafa
Morgan Wong // Zheng Bo
Dorotea Etzler
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
Lutz Becker, After The Wall, 2000
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.
Theo Eshetu, ROMA, 2010
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
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.
Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet, 2000
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.
Zheng Bo, Welcome to Hong Kong, 2014
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”.
Dorotea Etzler, Film 2 HK 1995, 1997
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.
Morgan Wong, Plus-Minus-Zero, 2010
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.
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Talk Ma Li Elana Katz
ARTIST TALK
Migrating artists – How does it impact their practice?
A dialogue between Ma Li & Elana Katz
Moderated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
In cooperation with USArtBerlin
Monday February 29 @ 18.00 – 20.00
At Momentum Worldwide, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Due to the increased globalisation of the art world and the rising opportunities for Artist Residencies all around the world, artists are compelled to be mobile and flexible. Moving to evolve their art has become a crucial part for most artist’s practice. However everyone grew up somewhere and carries their cultural heritage. How do the two things work together? What can be gained? Is the artwork changing due to the setting in which it is created or exhibited?
Ma Li a Chinese born artist, living in San Francisco and currently completing her Residency here in Berlin with MOMENTUM will discuss with artist Elana Katz, an American artist based in Berlin, whose recent work is concentrated in the Balkans. Katz is a board member of the organisation USArtBerlin, working with artists emigrated to Berlin. Both share the experience of migrating to different places for their art practice and their work. In the dialogue they will talk about these experiences and reflect on how they are influenced by their cultural heritage, their migration background but also the possibilities inherent in a mobile lifestyle.
Elana Katz is a conceptual artist working primarily in the medium of performance art. Katz’s work confronts cultural conventions, critically examines the complexity that lies within contradictions, and thus aims to create an experience of unlearning the assumed. Her grants have included the DAAD Graduate Studies Grant for Germany (2010), Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (2011), and her ongoing work Spaced Memory (2011-present), has been realized in cooperation with the U.S. Embassy of Kosovo, the Embassy of Israel in Serbia, and the Goethe Institute of Bucharest. Katz has exhibited/performed at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium (2011), Diehl CUBE Berlin (2013), P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York (2013), Gallery 12 HUB, Belgrade (2014), Kunstwechsel, Aachen (2015), and DNA Berlin (2015). She studied in New York at the Parsons School of Design and earned a Meisterschülerin title from the Universität der Künste Berlin (Klasse Katharina Sieverding) in 2010. Katz has been based in Berlin since 2008.
Balagan David’s lecture
BALAGAN!!! LECTURE
The Old Woman Who…?
BALAGAN and the Russian/Soviet Avant-Garde 1906-1953
By David Elliott
At Brandenburger Tor Stiftung am Max Liebermann Haus
Pariser Platz 7, 10117, Berlin
Watch the video (excerpt):
Balagan ICI Lectures
BALAGAN!!! LECTURE SERIES
At ICI Institut for Berlin Cultural Inquiry Berlin
Christinenstr. 18-19, Haus 8, 10119, Berlin
Trickster Art: Celebrating Chaos, Challenging Misrule
With David Elliott, Preciosa De Joya,
Hillel Schwartz & Hans Scheuer
19th November 2015
What is to be Undone? Trickery as Political Resistance
With Rosa Barotsi, Katarzyna Kozyra,
Via Lewandowski & Helena Bassil-Morozow
26th November 2015
Tricksters are folkloric figures found in numerous cultures, seeming- ly dreamed up – or springing out of nowhere – to provide ways of un- dermining, ridiculing or resisting everything that is wrong, fucked up, unfair in the world, from the tyranny of gods and sovereigns, to social inequality, to the existential injustice of mortality and suffering. As “the creative idiot, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby” (Lewis Hyde), trickster crosses every boundary and confuses every distinction. Michel Serres took the tricksy god Hermes – patron of communication, but also of theft, interruption and secrets – as his guiding figure and alter ego, in order to weave together and traverse disparate cultural spheres with randoneés, “expeditions filled with random discoveries.” Trickster circumvents the logic and techniques of power through a mixture of cunning and naivety, discovering new possibilities as much through foolishness and error as through devious shifts of identity and perspective.
The exhibition BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places – taking its name from a popular ex- clamation used in contemporary Russian to indicate a farce, a mess, chaos – features works that in one way or another engage with such unruly states. Might it be that today’s tricksters are to be found in the creative political activity of artists and cultural practitioners attempt- ing to respond to the oppressive mess they find all around them? Could the disarming, oblique ways in which the trickster takes on states of misrule that cannot be challenged face-on be a particularly apt strategy for resistance in times of turbo-capitalism: embracing chaos to turn it against itself? Are hegemonic oppressive forces a necessary condition for the emergence of tricksters – in fact, do the tricks and machinations of power themselves form the prototype and genesis of the trickster? As opposed to its traditionally embodied and most often male form, is the trickster of today more a mode than a figure, fragmenting and multiplying into an array of inanimate and collective forms?
Two connected events at the ICI Berlin will follow these and other leads. This first event looks for tricksters and their traces, both human and nonhuman, in contemporary art and culture. The second considers the concept of trickery in artistic and mediatic practice, and the ways it may open up alternative possibilities for resistance and deflection of power.
Fang Lu Kunst Salon
Fang Lu
in conversation with
Rachel Rits-Volloch
15 October 2015
Chinese Video Artist Fang Lu was in Berlin as the Artist-in-Residence of the BERLIN BEIJING ARTIST PROGRAM, initiated by GEKA e.V. – Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Chinesischen Kulturellen Austausch Association for German-Chinese Cultural Exchange – and BMW, on this occasion coordinated by MOMENTUM, with the support of Sammlung Hoffmann.
Fang Lu (b. 1981 in Guangzhou China) received her BFA from Graphic Design department at the School of Visual Art in New York in 2005, and MFA from the New Genres department at the San Francisco Arts Institute in 2007. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing (2013); Pekin Fine Arts, Hong Kong (2013), Arrow Factory, Beijing (2012), Space Station, Beijing (2010), Borges Libreria Institute of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou (2011); and in group exhibitions such as The 8 of Paths, Uferhallen Berlin (2014), My Generation in Tampa Museum (2014), 28 Chinese in Rubell Family Collection Miami (2013/14), On/Off in Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (2012), Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial (2012), CAFAM Future Exhibition (2012), We Remember the Sun in Walter & McBean Gallery in San Francisco (2008). She lives and works in Beijing.
Fang Lu is also the Co-Founder of Video BureauVideo Bureau, a non-profit organization that aims to provide a platform to exhibit, organize and archive video art. It has two spaces: one in Beijing and the other one in Guangzhou. The mission of Video Bureau is to collect and organize artworks of video artists in order to build a video archive that welcomes research and viewing. As an institute open to the public, every two months Video Bureau features a new artist added to the archive, and hosts related events.
MORE INFO ON
FANG LU RESIDENCY
AT MOMENTUM
HERE >>
KIK Eight
MOMENTUM and Kunst-im-Kino
present
GANZ GROSSES KINO
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch, Constanze Kleiner, David Szauder
4 March 2016 @ 9pm – late
At Kino International
Karl-Marx-Allee 33, 10178 Berlin
Featuring:
Qiu Anxiong, Lutz Becker, Andreas Blank, Ronald de Bloeme, Nicky Broekhuysen, Sarah Choo,
Nezaket Ekici, Thomas Eller, Theo Eshetu, Amir Fattal, Annika Glass / Miguel Wysocki,
Paula Godínez, Mariana Hahn, Constantin Hartenstein, Bart Hess, Olaf Holzapfel,
Jarik Jongman, Yuan Goan-Ming, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hannu Karjalainen, Ola Kolehmainen,
David Krippendorff, Jan Kuck, Via Lewandowsky, Joep van Liefland, Sarah Lüdemann,
Bjorn Melhus, Tracey Moffatt, David Mozny, Timea Oravecz, Reynold Reynolds,
Stefan Rinck, Maik Schierloh, Gary Schlingheider, Martin Sexton, Varvara Shavrova,
Roman Soroko, Amanda Szabo, David Szauder & Anna Reka Baktay, Mariana Vassileva,
Alexandra Vogt, Gabriela Volanti, Wiebke Maria Wachmann, Clemens Wilhelm, Clara Winter
Ikono.TV presents
in three film-playlists works from:
Botticelli, Böcklin, Bruegel, Caravaggio, Courbet, Delacroix,
Dürer, C. D. Friedrich, Gericault, van Gogh, Goltzius, Goya,
Hiroshige, Hokusai, Mayakowsky, Mondrian, Piranesi
Ganz Grosses Kino is a common expression in German slang – a description of any dramatic event, on or off the screen, often used ironically as a mockery of the theater of daily life. Cinema has always been a way of traveling without traveling – moving images move us.
In an era of unprecedented mobility, life is becoming increasingly cinematic, as the fictions of the big screen blur into the realities of the daily news. Disaster scenarios with wars, bombs, disease, natural catastrophe, irrevocably rising sea levels. Is it Hollywood or CNN? Is art mirroring life or vise versa?
While many struggle to survive, we, the fortunate, surf. We surf the web, the slipstream, the information age. We are constantly connected via smartphones iPads and apps; inundated with images, texts, and tweets; relentlessly bombarded with events, invitations, and offers. We 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. But as more and more people relocate, our open borders can sadly result in closing minds.
Throughout Europe, nationalism is on the rise; otherness exacerbated by openness. Borders increasingly open to the right few still snap shut to the many others. 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, somewhere anywhere but here. It is a city of mobile people and moving images.
Berlin is a pit-stop in the race of upward mobility; a place in-between; an ideal stage for acting out the stories of otherness; a screen onto which to project our lives as we zoom past onto the next bright distraction in this era of impermanence.
Ganz Grosses Kino is an exhibition of art from elsewhere, about otherness, on the move to somewhere else. It is a co-curation by 3 Berlin-based curators – Rachel Rits-Volloch of MOMENTUM, Constanze Kleiner, and David Szauder, with contributions from ikonoTV, and students of Bjørn Melhus’s Virtual Realities class at Kassel University. It is a timeless exhibition of time-based art, placing the human dramas of the Old Masters alongside the digital dramas of our age.
From Caravaggio to the present, human dramas remain the same throughout the ages: war and disease, love and beauty, religious turmoil. These are the realities of life, the subject of art, and in this era of mass information and weapons of mass destruction, our global political context is the greatest Grosses Kino of all: Kino International!
Using the setting of this iconic movie theater to reflect on the theater of life and art in Berlin, ‘Ganz Grosses Kino’ is our response to living in an age of displacement and distraction in a city perpetually rebuilding itself, ever evolving into somewhere else.
Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972, Chengdu) was born in the capital of Sichuan province in the southwest of China. There, he studied under the progressive artistic practice of Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. Qiu and his friends collectively founded a bar that became a hub for the blossoming underground music and art circles in Sichuan, and his colleagues included He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Shen Xiaotong. 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. Qiu has exhibited broadly internationally, having studied contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany.
In 2004 he began teaching at Shanghai Normal University and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Qiu received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in 2006 and has exhibited widely, including a recent solo-show, titled Qiu Anxiong, The New Book of Mountains and Seas II at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, Denmark (2013) and group exhibition ‘Ink Art’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2013). He is one of the artists undertaking the PANDAMONIUM Residency, and will be producing new work for this show.
‘Cake’ (2012)
Year Produced: 2014
Medium: Video
Duration: 6 min 2 sec
After working 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 video art.
Marked by the same quiet detachment and timelessness as his previous works, but now combining painting, drawing and clay in his animations, Cake offers an exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two.
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.
After the Wall (2012)
Sound piece
A sound installation commissioned for the exhibition After the Wall held at the Moderna Museet Stockholm in 1999, also curated by David Elliott. Its five constituent sound montages are based on original recordings made at the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall 26 years ago, 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.
Andreas Blank was born in Ansbach, Germany in 1976. He attended the Karlsruhe State Academy of Art (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and studied in the class of Harald Klingelhöller. He has been accredited with a German National Academic Foundation scholarship, and received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in London. Blank lives and works in London and Berlin.
What seems casual and random in Andreas Blank´s sculptures, cold and distant, are rather rare stones from quarries around the world, processed and carved in a tedious working process. Utilizing classical sculptural technique, Blank creates marble, alabaster, sandstone and limestone sculptures resembling everyday objects. In the discourse of image and likeness, they lose their functional purpose, transcending into pure, formalistic objects. Historically intended primarily for political representation or religious devotion, Andreas Blank’s stone sculptures question a (post) modernist nihilism.
Still Life (2012)
In an era in which imagery is increasingly superseding language, Ronald de Bloeme (NL,*1971) analyses the origin of signals and the components of their persuasiveness. How do producers of visual language manage to manipulate neutral form and colour in a way that they induce a subconscious process of identification for the largest possible number of individuals of a specifically defined target group? To what extent does red next to white evoke a flag or the packaging of a chocolate bar?
Through appropriation, deconstruction and manipulation using a computer Ronald de Bloeme transforms image templates of our consumer society. He censors existing text and eliminates any figurative references, creating a pure geometric language, which he again combines and distorts into arresting compositions. These are then transferred to canvas with competing colourful layers of high-gloss and matt enamel paint. The resultant expansive surfaces capture our attention through the combination of colour and use of various techniques, with a suggestive impact analogous to the original advertising medium’s intention.
Slips serie 6 (2012)
Nezaket 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 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.
Born in Kırşehir, Turkey in 1970, Ekici 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.
Veilling and Reveilling
Year Produced: 2009
Medium: Video Performance on DVD PAL
Duration: 24 min 17 sec (on loop)
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 goods 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, bag, 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 willful inversion of public and private space.
Thomas Eller (b. 1964, Coburg) started his studies in Fine Arts at the Hochschule der Künste of Berlin. After his forced dismission, he went on to graduate in Sciences of Religion, Philosophy and Art History from the Freie Universität, Berlin. He has worked as research assistant at the Science Center for Sociology in Berlin (WZB), is the founder of online art magazine artnet.de, where he served as editior-in-chief and was appointed managing director for the German branch of artnet AG, as well as executive director and artistic director of Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin. Eller is a member of various institutions, including the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA) and the Steering Committee for Creative Industries at the Chamber of Commerce in Berlin (IHK). In his photo-sculptures, Eller manifests a desire to review our relationship with perception, through a confrontation between the viewer, the process of reception and the image, by deliberately destabilizing the picture. He has received various prizes, including the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Prize (1996), the Villa-Romana Prize (2000), the Art Omi International Art Center (2002) and the Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize from the Akademie der Künste Berlin (2006). Recent exhibitions include his solo ‘The ego Show – A Group Exhibition’ at Autocenter, Berlin (2010) and group exhibitions ‘The Name, The Nose’ at MuseoLaboratorio Ex Manifatture, Tabacchi (2013). Eller is the co-curator of ‘The 8 of Paths: Art in Beijing‘, opening at the Uferhallen in Berlin (2014).
THE White Male Complex #5[Lost]
Year Produced: 2014
Medium: HD Video
Duration: 11 min 25 sec
Shot on Lampedusa in 2014, on the beach infamous for its migrant traffic, Eller lives the plight of so many who wash up on that shore. 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 is surreal, thousands of African migrants are our reality. Like Isaac Julien’s 2010 work Ten Thousand Waves, on the deaths of Chinese migrant cockle pickers on the shores of the UK, Eller in his own language tackles the watery deaths
Amir Fattal (b. in Tel Avivi in 1978) 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 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 problematised by its history.
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 was curator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists.
Frieze
Frieze (2015), a series of 3D printed reliefs that were generated digitally out of photographs, taken from the Internet, of historical buildings in varying states of dila- pidation. Sculptural meditations on loss and memory, these reliefs are accompanied by storyboards that, stylistically echoing the triumphalist narratives of the friezes of ancient Assyria, Sumeria, Babylon, Greece or Rome, expose how victory is currently expressed by destruction and why these historical monuments have become ideological battlegrounds.
Two Colomns
The series of column installations are a hybrid of plinths with a modernistic/minimalist form and the museum vitrine, a structure that protects valuable objects.
Inside the vitrines are lamps from the ‘60s and ‘70s both from East and West Germany that Fattal collected over the course of four years from flea markets in Berlin. By placing these lamps inside the glass vitrines, these ‘cheap’ second-hand lamps become precious historical objects.
The style of the lamps is both rooted in ‘20s German design related to ideas of the ‘Crystal Palace’ as well as to the era of Germany’s division when production systems were separated into east and west.
The use of light evokes reflections about memorial objects and feelings of nostalgia.
High Speed running in a top university’s gym. looking great. Being fit, beautiful, smart, feminin and strong at the same time, at any time. Maintaining the images as uploaded on social media. In fact impossible but day-to-day reality. From September 2014 to August 2015 Annika Glass was studying Chinese at National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei. NTU is generally considered to be one of the best universities in Taiwan. The videos were shot in the NTU gym, which is not only used for exercising, but also for taking selfies or performing any other kind of self-portrayal and self-staging activities.
Split Time
Mariana Hahn was born in Schwäbisch Hall and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She received a Fine Arts degree from the University of the Arts, London in 2012. Hahn poetically questions human fate as a universal condition through photography, performance and video. Hahn’s 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. Hahn often uses textiles that take the place of the human body, the textile itself becoming the carrier of the living narrative. Conceptually her work feeds from sociological and anthropological theories, as well as from the every day. In all of Hahn’s works one finds a story line, which does not follow chronological order but instead can be followed at any point in the narrative. Hahn has exhibited her work internationally, at museums, galleries and festivals.
Burn My Love
The work Burn My Love, Burn explores the body as the carrier of historical signature. By inscribing a poem on a shroud that once belonged to her recently passed grandmother – and then burning and consuming its remains – Hahn examines the relationship between text, memory making, and the human – particularly female – form. Split between the remaining performance relics, video stills, and the video itself.
“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 it creates a new one, adding on to the net of connotations the figure has toward words. 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.”
Constantin Hartenstein is an artist based in Berlin and New York. He studied “Art and Media” at University of the Arts Berlin; and graduated with honors in 2009. In 2010, he was awarded the Meisterschüler degree (post-graduate M.F.A.) at Braunschweig University of Art studying “Fine Arts“ with Candice Breitz
Hartenstein participated in several artist in residency programs such as Lower East Side Artists Alliance Inc. New York, Geumcheon Art Space Seoul (KR), Triangle Arts Association New York (USA), Grand Central Art Center Santa Ana (USA), Flux Factory New York (USA) and Künstlerdorf Schöppingen (GER). He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards such as Kraft Prize for New Media (USA), LOOP Discovery Award (shortlist), Kunstpreis Haus am Kleistpark (shortlist), IFA Künstlerkontakte project grant (GER/CN), Kunststiftung NRW grant (GER), video art prize BRAWO (GER), project grant Stichting Stokroos (NL) and the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft studio grant (GER). In 2012, he was selected to participate in the “VISIO emerging video artists” program in Florence, Italy.
His works are included in public and private collections; and have been exhibited and screened at international galleries and institutions.
Alpha
Medium: HD video projection (via HDMI signal)
Duration: 11:22 min (loop)
Codecs: ProRes HQ or H.264
The first letter of the Greek alphabet, Alpha has come to denote “the first of
anything.” Animal researchers use the word to signify dominance, applying it to the leader of the pack, who is first in power and importance. Among humans, an Alpha-Male is defined as “a man tending to assume a dominant role in social or professional situations, or thought to possess the qualities and confidence for leadership.”
This project is based on a subliminal soundtrack called ‘Be the Alpha Male’. The narration is re-enacted by three muscular men. The resulting multi-layered video is presented as a larger than life projection.
A former assistant of Anselm Kiefer, Jarik Jongman uses both his own photographs and anonymous pictures found in flea markets, books, magazines and on the Internet as a starting point for his engagement with archetypal imagery.
Dutch born, he studied in Arnhem and has had numerous exhibitions in London, Berlin, Switzerland, Amsterdam and at the 53rd (2009) and 54th (2011) Venice Biennale in collateral events. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
Facing Revolt
Year Produced: 2012
Series: (de)facing revolt: ten- thirty individual paintings, portraits
Medium: Oil on canvas with water-soluble marker, pen and egg
Duration: 2 min 22 sec
Size: 80 x 80 cm
Jongman’s (de)facing revolt is a series of painted portraits of icons of the contemporary art world: some of the richest and most influential players of our time, which he subsequently, with the help of the audience, defaced. The result of this interactive performance is a series of mutilated, paint bombed and blowtorched images, reminiscent of the damaged murals and toppled statues of ousted dictators across the world.
As a political comment claimed within the safety of a gallery’s walls, Jongman’s work self-consciously reflects on the purposelessness of art in the art world today – a symbolic statement without risk, a salon revolution without victims, but a system in which the artist must still abide in order to survive.
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. 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.
Personal Time Quartet
Year Produced: 2000
Medium: 4-Channel Video Installation
Duration: 2 min 33 sec
The video and sound installation Personal Time Quartet 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 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 the work is turned on anew, the four channels never synchronize, instead producing each time a new quartet to accompany the looping images. The four-part video is concerned with the point of intersection between the artist’s own personal biography and the history of her home country.
Hannu Karjalainen was born in 1978 in Haapavesi, Finland. He graduated from The University of Arts (now Aalto University) in 2005 with an MA in Photographic Arts. Karjalainen was awarded the Young Artist of the Year prize in 2009 in Tampere Art Museum in Finland and he received the Turku Biennale Prize in 2007. His work – comprising mostly of video and photography – has been shown in galleries and museum shows around the world, most recently in the International Biennale of Photography in Bogota, Colombia as well as in solo shows in Oulu Art Museum in Finland and Braverman Gallery in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Personal Time Quartet
Medium: 16mm film scanned to digital, 5.1 surround sound,
Duration: 14 minutes 08 seconds
The House Protects the Dreamer is an experimental narrative film about a fictive modern architect’s creative process. The dreamlike film follows the architect and her assistant producing experiments that verge on the absurd. It is a film about faith, disillusionment and renewal.
The film was shot in and around a 1960 Aulis Blomstedt villa in Helsinki and features Heli Haltia and Dwayne Strike. Music composed by Infinite Livez and Hannu Karjalainen.
The full version of the film premiered in gallery Hippolyte in Helsinki, in september 2014.
Ola Kolehmainen, artist (M.A.), was born in Helsinki Finland. He studied four years of Journalism at the Helsinki University, before entering to the University of Art and Design Helsinki (UIAH) to study photography. During his study years he also worked as freelance pictures editor in the national TV-news graphic department. Since spring 2005 Kolehmainen has lived and worked in Berlin.
His 1st solo exhibition in 1995 as a student at University of Art and Design photography department was shortlisted for Photograph Finlandia Award in Helsinki and for European Photography Award in Bad Homburg, Germany. Since 1995 Kolehmainen has had over 30 solo shows in galleries and museums. Also his work has been shown globally in over 90 group shows. He has published 4 monographs. Kolehmainen works appear in various Public, Company and Private collection in five continents. The Royal Institute of British Architects awarded Kolehmainen the RIBA honorary Fellowship (Hon FRIBA) 2015.
Statement on works 1923 and Geometric Light I:
Artist Ola Kolehmainen’s works are about space, light and color. Recently time has been added as the 4th element. Photography is his medium. And architecture is starting point for the works. The selection of the photographed edifices is based on research and studies of the architects and their ideologies and thinking. Interlinks and influences between the architects creates an additional interesting dimension for the buildings.
Building called Workers’ Club
A theater designed by Alvar Aalto 1925 in Finland. Aalto was famous for denying his own influences. Worker´s Club was an exception. In 1923 Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino visited Stockholm and Gunnar Asplund, who was Aalto´s idol. Asplund’s design for the Stockholm city library had a huge impact for Aalto’s workers’ club building. Ironically Asplund’s library was erected two years after the Workers’ Club was finished. The legacy of Aalto is immense. His concepts are still very valid and interpreted to language of contemporary architecture.
Geometric light 1
Work origins from a social housing building by Richard Bofill’s Taller de Arquitectura. Bofill´s architect office conceived this complex construction called La Muralla Roja in 1973. Workgroup extended the idea of Le Corbusier’s Modulor. Le Corbusier used the Modulor system in scaling the architectural proportion. It was a continuation of the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous “Vitruvian Man” and the work of Leon Battista Alberti.
David Krippendorff is a US/German artist, video- and experimental film maker born in Berlin in 1967.
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 three Biennials (Prague, Poznan and Tel Aviv). He lives and works in Berlin.
Building called Workers’ Club
Year Produced: 2015
Medium: HD, color, stereo
Duration: 13min 43sec
Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015) is about a silent transformation of a place and a human being. Inspired by the texts of Edward W. Said, the poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Verdi’s opera Aida, the film depicts in a metaphoric form current issues of cultural identity, loss and the pressures to conform. With no dialogues, the film is backed by a musical excerpt from 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.
Born in Hannover in 1978, lives in Berlin since 2004.
His focus lies on conceptional and performance art. This can be expressed through criticism of the unreflected awkward decadency of our nowadays society or even by playful constructions of reality. His ideas and conceptual art is expressed through all different kinds of media: sculptures, installations, video works, performances and design.
In contrast to conventional conceptual art he attaches great importance to the philosophical foundation of his work as well as their aesthetically immaculate design. In October 2013 he presented his design – the T.TABLE – at JR Gallery Berlin to a selected audience and therefore received considerable national and international press attention. Since June 2014 Jan Kuck has been represented by Bernheimer Contemporary. Currently he is preparing national and international solo- & group-exhibitions.
T.TABLE
Year: 2013-2016
Medium: Sculpture
Technic: mixed media (stainless steel, wood veneer, glass, leather)
Edition: open
Dimensions: 275 x 152 x 76 cm
The interactive room sculpture T.TABLE has the ability to morph from an elegant office or dining room table to a unique Ping-Pong table.
The characteristic lines that mark every Ping-Pong table are illuminated by LEDs underneath the surface of the wood. When the LEDs are turned off no lines are visible, showing only the normal tabletop to the viewers.
All metal pieces consist of hand polished steel and retain their mirroring sheen without any use of chrome.
A shatterproof glass net sits in a specially fitted recess underneath the tabletop, alongside four magnetically attached leather-bound paddles. Finally, the base and the tabletop together resemble a large T shape, connecting the name of the object with its form.
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 travelled 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. He is most familiar for his sculptural-installation works and exhibition scenographies with architectonic influences such as Gehirn und Denken: Kosmos im Kopf [Brain and Thinking: Cosmos in Mind: 2000] displayed at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. 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. (e.g., Oh tu nove verde [Oh You Green Nine: 2011]; Applaus [Applause: 2008]).
Via Lewandowsky
When an abstract form becomes an attitude or where function does change form does change we are in the mind of someone thinking..
Listening to the sound of an organic shape forced to be square raises the question: who knows a damm thing about temptation.
Joep van Liefland (born 1966 in Utrecht) is a contemporary conceptual artist from Netherlands. He lives and works in Berlin.
His work focuses on the phenomenology of media and their transformation. He is particularly interested in the matter of impermanence and disappearance that are closely connected to the technological progress. Using the example of technology, Joep van Liefland addresses the process of alteration and transformation as well as the universal concepts that underlie the transition from old to new.
For his art pieces, Joep van Liefland uses various outdated distribution and storage devices. He arranges them into space-filling installations, as in the work series „VIDEO PALACE“, or uses them to create sculptures, wall objects, screen prints, and collages.
Since 2001, Joep van Liefland runs, together with Maik Schierloh, the art space AUTOCENTER in Berlin where international art positions are presented regularly.
2013-1 (Information 4)
Year: 2013
Medium: Bronze Sculpture (Unique)
Dimensions: 67,5x20x12,5cm
The artistic practice of Joep van Liefland is distinguished by a precise, almost archaeological investigation of video technology. He works with a great number of forms of expression and media at the intersection between the analog and the digital and at the same time, persistently, stringently–nearly monomaniacally–insists on continually examining the assembled artifacts anew from different perspectives.These artifacts belong to a continually growing collection of more than 50,000 video cassettes, boxes of remote controls and instructions, piles of used televisions as well as early computers and assorted information technology. In his installation Video Palace, which has been shown in different versions since the early 2000s, van Liefland mixes and remixes all of these elements. In this way, a number of groups of work have developed, which the artist has combined in various contexts: silkscreen printing, assemblage, sculpture and installation elements.
Lüdemann’s works are generally on the cusp between seductive sensuality and utter brutality, serenity and irritation. She is moving on a psychological plane – an emotional, yet highly analytical landscape – that is informed by personal emotions, Greek mythology, spirituality, religion, pornography and gender studies. Lüdemann studied Fine Art, English linguistics, psychology, philosophy and education at Cologne University and then moved to Norway, Italy, England and Holland to learn four languages and provoke her alter-egos. In 2010 she was selected for an influential residency in Spain with Mona Hatoum and later that year received a scholarship to study in the MA Fine Art Course at Central Saint Martins, which she completed with distinction in 2011. Her work has been exhibited widely and internationally, including at Printed Matter, New York / Goethe Institute Cairo, Egypt / Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin / Hayaka Arti – Istanbul, Turkey / Trafo – Szczecin, Poland / LYON Biennale de la Danse – La lavoir public, Lyon, France / HDLU, Zagreb, Croatia.
Schnitzelporno
Year: 2012/2016
Medium: video, tenderizer (used), beef, sound (loop)
“It’s a peculiar apparatus,” said the Officer to the Traveller, gazing with a certain admiration at the device […] As you see, it consists of three parts. With the passage of time certain popular names have been developed for each of these parts. The one underneath is called the Bed, the upper one is called the Inscriber, and here in the middle, this moving part is called the Harrow. […] The name fits. The needles are arranged as in a harrow, and the whole thing is driven like a harrow. […] There in the Inscriber is the mechanism which determines the movement of the Harrow, and this mechanism is arranged according to the diagram on which the sentence is set down. […] Do you understand the process? The Harrow is starting to write. […] In this way it keeps making the inscription deeper for twelve hours. […] But how quiet the man becomes around the sixth hour! The most stupid of them begin to understand. It starts around the eyes and spreads out from there. A look that could tempt one to lie down under the Harrow. Nothing else happens. The man simply begins to decipher the inscription. He purses his lips, as if he is listening. You’ve seen that it’s not easy to figure out the inscription with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.”
Excerpts from The the Penal Colony, Kafka, 1919
Gold
Year: 2016
Medium: print with pubic hair and golden acrylic, found paper and wooden frame
Dimensions: 47 x 37,5 cm
I print with my pubic hair and golden acrylic onto paper. A gesture, so primitive and lumpen, like a dog that pisses on lampposts to mark its territory. It is like that we place ourselves in the world. The mark in itself golden, delicate, fine, discreet. Pussy riot deluxe? Seduction and dominance? Expression of female powers? Gold always the color of the gods, enlightenment, nirvana and the vagina a symbol of the Great Mother, the Origin of the World (Corbet), the beginning of it all.
Bjørn Melhus, born 1966, is a German-Norwegian media artist. In his work he has developed a singular position, expanding the possibilities for a critical reception of cinema and television. His practice of fragmentation, destruction, and reconstitution of well-known figures, topics, and strategies of the mass media opens up not only a network of new interpretations and critical commentaries, but also defines the relationship of mass media and viewer anew.
Originally rooted in an experimental film context, Bjørn Melhus’s work has been shown and awarded at numerous international film festivals. He has held screenings at Tate Modern and the LUX in London, the Museum of Modern Art (MediaScope) in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, amongst others. His work has been exhibited in shows like The American Effect at the Whitney Museum New York, the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, solo and group shows at FACT Liverpool, Serpentine Gallery London, Sprengel Museum Hanover, Museum Ludwig Cologne, ZKM Karlsruhe, Denver Art Museum among others.
Freedom & Independence
Year: 2012/2016
Medium: video, tenderizer (used), beef, sound (loop)
FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE confronts neoliberal elitist thinking using generic media fragments of religious prophecies about the end of time in the setting of a privatized habitat marked by architectures of megalomania. It is a tour de force using elements of fairy tales, musicals, comedy and horror films to scour our global psyche for ingrained promises of salvation, childhood traumas and the work ethic as it is affected by our desire for self-improvement.
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.
Other
Year: 2009
Artist: Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hilberg video collaboration
Duration: 7 min
“Other” incorporates film techniques – splicing film clips, combining chronologies, creating and dissolving narratives. “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.”
Timea Anita Oravecz, born in Budapest 1975, graduated in 2007 with BFA from Accademia di Belle Arti, Department of Sculpture, Venice and then an MA under Professor Olafur Eliasson at Institut fur Raumexperimente (2009-2011). She now lives and works in Berlin.
She has won several grants including: MOSTYN Open Award, UK, Fellowship Residency Program Kamov, (Croatia), Fellowship Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT, (Berlin), New York Prize at the Triangle Arts Association (New York), DAAD Fellowship Awarded Artist, UDK Berlin, and more.
Timea Anita Oravecz’s works have been shown internationally, Solo shows include: Camping Europa, Spor Klubu, Berlin (2014), Nothing that Exists or Happens is Symmetrical, CHB Berlin (2013) and Transparent rooms – nach hause, Galerie M, Berlin (2010) – Group Exhibitions: MOSTYN Open 19, curated by Adam Carr, Mostyn Gallery, UK (2015), Future Nows, curated by Olafur Eliasson, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2014), Exuberant Politics, Iowa City and Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, USA (2014), Drifting, curated by Valerie Smith, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2013), In other words, NGBK and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2012), in addition to showing in Krakow, Hungary, New York, Vienna, United Kingdom and more.
Time Lost
Year: 2007
Medium: Hand embroidered on textile, framed, series I – III
Dimension: each 70 × 60 cm
Taking the shape of embroideries, Time Lost presents the administrative
documents for which the artist had to apply during the nine years she spent travelling in a presumably borderless and united Europe as an art student and scholarship holder from Central Europe. Oravecz tried to
meet the bureaucratic requirements as best as she could. Accordingly, she embroidered every letter, code, stamp and signature on the »forms«, even though the task proved time-consuming, senseless and, due to the countless details, simply impossible – not to mention that she occasionally hurt herself with the needle. (BH)
Instant Bag
Year: 2006
Medium: object, mixed media, series VIII – XIII
Inside the young Hungarian artist Tímea Anita Oravecz’s Instant Bags, one finds accurately stored personal objects and various clothing items: what at a first seem to be simple suitcases at a second glance reveal their true nature: that of various wooden compartments, cardboard boxes and used materials of a modest value. These “small boxes”, with their strong symbolism, enclose the identity of a person to whom those objects belong: a traveller or an emigrant, and starting from simple towels, shirts or shoes everything we observe transforms into emotional tension. This tension evokes and suggests a consideration of problems that come together with migration – whether permanent or not, that will take the migrant away from his nation of origin, into a new one, unknown and of uncertain reception. In moving what imposes crossing of geographical and cultural boundaries the objects that one decides to take with oneself become the story of one’s life, one’s history and in a way, it represents that what one is leaving behind. A survival kit becomes in that way a tangible sign of the painful selection one had to make at the moment of departure, lived through without a certainty of a future return. In this way, other objects are added to the ones that represent physical needs of everyday life, maybe even useless, but still symbols of attachment to everything that is familiar, a memory, and from which one does not whish to separate. These extremely emotionally charged works originate from the starting enquiry, that is, from the questionnaires that the artists wants the public to fulfil involving them thus in her project. The suitcases become representations of an identity, an archive of personal memories that unites the present and the past: by observing these instant bags we are asked to compare ourselves with the typical human condition of wandering, of migration, the everlasting symbol of a painful separation, searching, change, reconstruction.
(Giulia Camin)
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 at Sorry We`re Closed (Brussels), Vilma Gold (London) and Patricia Low Contemporary (Gstaad, St. Moritz) , de Hallen (Haarlem),Gallery Rüdiger Schöttle (Munich), The Breeder (Athens), Galeria Alegria (Madrid), Cruise&Callas and Klara Wallner Gallery (both in Berlin). He participated at the Busan Biennale in South Corea and at the Vent des Foret in France where he realized permanent public sculptures.
Behemoth
Year: 2014
Medium: Sculture Dolorit (Diabas)
Dimension: H 55 cm x B 25 cm x L 20 cm
My sculptures are not pretending to look like modern art. They look more like primitive art out of an ethnological museum, gargoyles from gothic cathedrals and reliefs from medieval Romanesque church’s. One of my role models is Picasso because he too had used primitive elements in his work. Even though I admire Michelangelo and the sculptors of the baroque I am not interested in refinement and virtuosity. Accordingly brutal I carve the figures out of quadratic stone blocks. The iconographical figures I carve out of stone are findings from old medieval pattern books, forgotten cellar figures from Greek mythology, shady characters from the literature from Bulgakow to Zola and gods out of old codecs. The appeal of these stone figures is shifty and ambivalent. On the one hand they are physically present on the other hand representatives from a spiritual world. For me they seem to be guards of a parallel world, of a secret sanctuary. They warn us not to come too close to them.
Maik Schierloh was born in 1968 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. He is a professional organ- and harmonium builder and studied fine arts painting at the FH Ottersberg (until 1996). From 1993 to 1996 he collected first artistic experiences in the art group ARTiV. Since 1997, he has been living as an artist in Berlin and has, besides various solo and group exhibitions, run the cultural project Lovelite. Since 2003, he has also run the bar Kosmetiksalon Babette.
Behemoth
Gary Schlingheider was born in the early 1980s in Detmold, Germany, a little town located in the northwest of Germany. Detmold was his home throughout his childhood and early adolescence. After finishing school and an apprenticeship in geriatric nursing in 2006, Gary moved to Düsseldorf where he passed his A-level examinations. Shortly after, Gary enrolled in the Nursing Science program at the University of Bochum, a field of study he remains highly interested in. Since his early childhood, Gary has always interpreted the nature, people, and culture surrounding him in a creative way, composing sketches, sculptures, drawings, and paintings to this end. In 2008 Gary decided to focus on his artistic career and moved to Bielefeld to work at Künstlerhaus Lydda as an instructor and assistant for sculpture. This deeper involvement with art, both organising and participating in expositions, prompted Gary to assume an even deeper focus on his own creative efforts. He enrolled in the Fine Arts program at UDK(University of Arts) Berlin in 2010, where he was a student in the classes of both Pia Fries and Gregory Cumins. Gary Schlingheider is a student in the class of Christine Streuli and preparing his Master’s Thesis to finish University and graduate in the summer 2016.
Behemoth
Martin Sexton is a London-based artist and writer who began his career as a science-fiction writer. Without a formal background in fine art, Sexton considers his point of view to be more akin to that of a writer. Or as John-Paul Pryor of DAZED Digital has described, Sexton is “a raconteur of both constructed and real mythologies.” Sexton calls his works ‘futiques,’ a portmanteau alternatively evoking the terms future, critique, and antique. Sexton’s futiques are filmed in the past, screened in the present, and bear portents from the future. The layering of multiple temporalities in Sexton’s videos along with his narrative strategies, (primarily scrolling first-person text) lend them an ambivalent presence: who, or what, exactly can we consider the author?
Futiques
Born in a family of artists and educated in Moscow Polygraphic Institute, Varvara Shavrova lived and worked in Moscow, London, Beijing and Dublin where she is currently based.
Shavrova’s projects include over 20 solo exhibitions and curatorial projects in London, Dublin, Los Angeles, Berlin, Frankfurt, Moscow, St.Petersburgh, Shanghai and Beijing. Shavrova received a number of awards, including Fellowship from Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland, British Council Visual Artist’s Award, Dublin City Council Visual Arts Award and Culture Ireland Awards for individual artists.
Shavrova’s solo projects include ‘The Opera’, a multi-media six screen projected installation commissioned by Espacio Cultural El Tanque, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, in 2011. ‘The Opera’ explores complexities of life and work of traditional Peking opera actors and gender fluidity associated with this art form, juxtaposed with harsh reality of living in modern day China. In 2012 ‘The Opera’ project was shown at the Gallery of Photography Ireland, touring to Limerick City Art Gallery, Ballina Arts Centre, and Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, in 2012. In 2014 ‘The Opera’ was presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and at The First Biennale of Photography and Video Art in Chongqing, China.
The Opera
Year: 2010
Medium: Video
Duration: 21:23
Originally commissioned (2010) as a multi-channel video projection for the Espacio Cultural El Tanque, an empty oil tank in Tenerife, and subsequently shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, 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 Berlin premiere of The Opera in “Ganz Grosses Kino”p resents the single-channel version of the work.
The Opera 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.
Roman Soroko (Poland), lives and works in Berlin.
Collecting 16 mm and S8 mm films. Working on film installations, mostly 16 mm.
Dirty Cinema Talkies
Year: 2016
Medium: Film installation
Dimension: 3 x 16 mm projection on loop
This work searching for visual and sound correlation. Film tape gives a possibility to playwith its structure. I´m focusing on tricky transition between the motion pictures into the sound.An abstract pictures play the role, and they are turning to be use also as an optical track. In thismatter, I´m looking for such a mixing of the original destiny of the pictures and I´m decomposing them, putting them into the new context. Working on found footages, I´m exploring a different layers of the cinematic background. Triple projection guide us in the cinema sculpture situation.Each pictures is related to each others, sound is mechanically synced to the picture from another projection.
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.
As her artist’s statement asserts, she “transforms objects, situations and manners, and presents them in another reference on a lyrical level. … In this process, one is animated toward a heightened sensibility of daily variations.”
From the Series Treasure is Everywhere
Year: 2008
Medium: Fabric, metal, synthetic material, wood, 2 light bulbs
Dimension: 200 x 120 x 50 cm
From treasured moments to treasured objects, our existence is encapsulated by the search for treasures, or for things to treasure. The installation, “Treasure is Everywhere”, speaks of the motive force within us all, the energy and enthusiasm which motivates us, and which can also spread to illuminate other things. Rachel Wolloch
Just a Game
Year: 2016
Medium: Neon, Barbwire, Wood
Dimension: 110×65 cm
Borderlines are inside and outside our bodies and mind – visible and invisible.
To be loved, to be free…to have enough for living and developing yourself and the people you love.
Is this possible?
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PHOTOS OF THE EVENT
(photos by Oliver Watersheid, Varvara Shavrova & Via Lewandowsky)
Ma Li
1 January – 29 February 2016
Bio
Ma Li (b. Fuzhou, China) is an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Using both traditional and nontraditional media, Ma Li formulates dreamlike worlds influenced in part by her background in choreography and upbringing in a collectivist society. Originally from Fuzhou, China, She has a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Shanghai Dong Hua University, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2014). She has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Knight Foundation; a fellowship from La Napoule Art Foundation; and the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award. She has been a resident artist at Recology San Francisco, Vermont Studio Center, Elsewhere Museum, among others. Ma Li has exhibited her work in a range of museums and galleries, including solo shows such as Gathering Among Stars, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2015); and Seeing, Peeping, and Scrying, Alter Space, Peephole Gallery, San Francisco (2015). Group shows include Zhong Gallery (Berlin), A.I.R Gallery (Brooklyn), Gallery 825 (Los Angeles), SOMArts (San Francisco), and Root Division (San Francisco), amongst others. Of note is inclusion of her work in the Nion Mcevoy Art Collection and reviews of her work in China Daily, VOA, KQED, and other leading publications.
Project Description
During her residency at MOMENTUM Ma Li will explore the possibilities of combining time-based materials in her projects. Having previous worked primarily with interactive performance and installation, her research at MOMENTUM will focus on how time-based materials can support and provide an additional level of experience for participatory projects. In experimenting with ways of using the element of video in her practice, Ma Li is planning to film footage with selected participants at various historical and monumental locations in Berlin. From the resulting footage, she will produce a video based on the choreography of connection between the participants in the video performance. In addition, Ma Li will execute a live performance, which will include the screening of her video work. The entire performance / installation will be documented. Ma Li is especially interested in exploring if and how the incorporation of video into live performance can add to the participatory experience of the spectators.
Ma Li, “The Ascent of Azure Dragon”, Video Still (2014)
Prinivethao: Space Salutation
Sasha Pirogova & Ma Li
Performance on the Opening night of the Exhibition
Sasha Pirogova: A Retrospective
More Info HERE >>
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/158640830 [/fve]
MOMENTUM Artists-in-Residence Sasha Pirogova and Ma Li draw on their upbringing in the collectivist societies of Russia and China in their interactive performance work. Coming to contemporary art through a background in physics and chemical engineering, respectively, and having both trained in contemporary dance, the choreography of bodies moving through space is integral to their ways of working. Brought together for the first time through MOMENTUM AiR, Sasha Pirogova and Ma Li are here also making their first cooperative project.
Thinking about the macro scale of space and its projection to the micro level of human beings, Ma Li and Sasha Pirogova team up for a “play game” and invite the audience to take part in a ceremony which enacts a supernova explosion triggered by the merging of two white dwarfs. Please join us in imagining a new geographical landscape without borders and separations on the occasion of the opening of the CTM Festival 2016 “New Geographies”.
EXHIBITION OPENING
(photos by Tiare Maldonado Hucke)
Ma Li Exhibition
Artist-In-Residence Exhibition
Ma Li
BITS EN ROUTE
26 February – 27 March 2016
Opening 25 February @ 19.00
OPENING PERFORMANCE @ 19.00 – 21.00
Private Screening
By Ma Li
ARTIST TALK
Migrating artists – How does it impact their practice?
A dialogue between Ma Li & Elana Katz
Monday February 29 @ 18.00-20.00
At Momentum Worldwide, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Curated By Olga Wiedemann
Time based art is interwoven with the digital revolution as no other contemporary art field. Therefore MOMENTUM is very proud to present Bits en Route, an exhibition by MOMENTUM Artist-in-Residence Ma Li (1 Jan – 29 Feb 2016) People of Ma Li’s generation were born into a digital age, growing up and living with technology, often learning its language before learning the alphabet.
The digital age and, with it, pervasive technology have entered our lives almost entirely. Technology is integral to most jobs and most of our leisure time,. But what is our relationship to technology, and how does it change the interactions between human beings?
Ma Li is reflecting on these issues through her works. Technology changes our perception of various things, sometimes on a small scale, other times immensely. Therefore Ma Li raises the question: If technology dramatically changes our perception of distance, time and intimacy, what have we been missing? Or what do we gain? Urban life without technology through media, phones, apps etc. is almost impossible now. Every step of the way our personalized technology gadgets accompany us. Without them one might even be lost. Where is our destination?
Ma Li, living in the hub of technological inventions, the “tech city” of San Francisco, was inspired for this exhibition by her work as an Uber driver: a connection between two people made possible through the Uber app and creating a rather intimate atmosphere in the car. For a brief moment, Ma Li was part of the life of a complete stranger, who was chatting with her, talking with loved ones on the phone or having a conversation with another passenger. These interactions sounds created in this short intervention mirrorconvey so much, about the busy, fast and hectic urban environment we now live in.
These recordings and experiences are the basis for her 13 channel video installation. Having intimate moments created through these technologies, the piece also questions what makes us human by comparing the emotionless google voice of the navigation system to the authentic self-expression through movements by the traffic police. In this exhibition Ma Li continues her ongoing interest in creating an architectural language through a system of choreography. This 13-channel work includes elements of video, projection and sound, to create a completely capturing experience for the viewer.
For the opening night at MOMENTUM Ma Li will present Private Screening – a one-on-one performance – questioning the possibility of creating intimacy through technology. Join the artist for this unique experience!
Artist Bio
Ma Li (b. Fuzhou, China) is an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Using both traditional and nontraditional media, Ma Li formulates dreamlike worlds influenced in part by her background in choreography and upbringing in a collectivist society. Originally from Fuzhou, China, She has a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Shanghai Dong Hua University, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2014). She has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Knight Foundation; a fellowship from La Napoule Art Foundation; and the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award.
She has been a resident artist at Recology San Francisco, Vermont Studio Center, Elsewhere Museum, among others. Ma Li has exhibited her work in a range of museums and galleries, including solo shows such as Gathering Among Stars, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2015); and Seeing, Peeping, and Scrying, Alter Space, Peephole Gallery, San Francisco (2015). Group shows include Zhong Gallery (Berlin), A.I.R Gallery (Brooklyn), Gallery 825 (Los Angeles), SOMArts (San Francisco), and Root Division (San Francisco), amongst others. Of note is inclusion of her work in the Nion Mcevoy Art Collection and reviews of her work in China Daily, VOA, KQED, and other leading publications.
MORE INFO HERE ON MA LI’S RESIDENCY AT MOMENTUM >>
Artist-In-Residence: Ma Li – Bits en Route (Video of installation)
[fve] https://vimeo.com/momentumworldwide/review/492464818/6096ad6ba7 [/fve]
“Migrating artists – How does it impact their practice?” A dialogue between Ma Li & Elana Katz
[fve] https://vimeo.com/158640710 [/fve]
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Sasha Pirogova
13 November 2015 – 1 February 2016
Bio
Sasha Pirogova is a performance and video artist, for her the two disciplines are inter-connected. After graduating from the Physics Department at Moscow State University in 2010, she received a degree in 2014 from the Rodchenko Art School in Video and New Media in Moscow. She has been awarded prizes at the Extra Short Film Festival, ESF (2012) as well as the Innovation Prize in the ‘New Generation’ category (2014). She has participated in various exhibitions, such as Burning News, Hayward Gallery, London (2014), I saw lightning, Udarnik, Moscow (2014) and in the Manifesta 10, parallel program, St. Petersburg (2014). Working with performance, she has also participated in different festivals, including: the 6th International Festival of Video, Performance and Technology, Lisbon (2014), VIII Andrei Tarkovsky International Film Festival, Ivanovo (2014), Cinedans Dance on Screen Festival, Amsterdam (2014) and Now & After International Video Art Festival, The State Museum of GULAG, Moscow (2014).
Project Description
Life imposes some rules that occasionally we have to follow. Sometimes unexpectedly they change. Sasha Pirogova investigates the system in which we live in a playful mode, using the rules of Russian outdoor games that are based on active and passive, controlling and resisting roles.
Recently a huge amount of prohibitions were again re-introduced in Russia which influence the private life of a person. Through her staged performances, Sasha Pirogova aims to capture movements and gestures that could disappear forever under these circumstances.
Winner of the New Generation Award, Sasha Pirogova is acclaimed for both her videos and performances, both of which are shown in BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, curated by David Elliott.
More Info on BALAGAN!!! Exhibition HERE >>
“BIBLIMLEN”, Video Still (2013)
“House 20, Apartment 17”, Video Still (2014)
Prinivethao: Space Salutation
Sasha Pirogova & Ma Li
Performance on the Opening night of the Exhibition
Sasha Pirogova: A Retrospective
More Info HERE >>
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/158640830 [/fve]
MOMENTUM Artists-in-Residence Sasha Pirogova and Ma Li draw on their upbringing in the collectivist societies of Russia and China in their interactive performance work. Coming to contemporary art through a background in physics and chemical engineering, respectively, and having both trained in contemporary dance, the choreography of bodies moving through space is integral to their ways of working. Brought together for the first time through MOMENTUM AiR, Sasha Pirogova and Ma Li are here also making their first cooperative project.
Thinking about the macro scale of space and its projection to the micro level of human beings, Ma Li and Sasha Pirogova team up for a “play game” and invite the audience to take part in a ceremony which enacts a supernova explosion triggered by the merging of two white dwarfs. Please join us in imagining a new geographical landscape without borders and separations on the occasion of the opening of the CTM Festival 2016 “New Geographies”.
EXHIBITION OPENING
(photos by Tiare Maldonado Hucke)
Balagan Follow Up
BEYOND BALAGAN!!!
BALAGAN!!! Artist-In-Residence
SASHA PIROGOVA: A Retrospective
Also featuring the BALAGAN!!! Performances,
Symposium and Lecture Videos.
29 January – 21 February 2016
Curated By Rachel Rits-Volloch and Olga Wiedemann
BALAGAN!!! Artist-in-Residence, Sasha Pirogova’s videos Queue and BIBLIMLEN, awarded with the Innovation Prize in the Category New Generation, were shown in MOMENTUM’s BALAGAN!!! Exhibition (MOMENTUM 14 November – 23 December 2015). MOMENTUM is now proud to present a Retrospective of Pirogova’s young but coherent oeuvre, which evolves from her background in dance and the physics of motion.
Pirogova’s videos show the poetry of movement, a world where bodies speak without words. Interior and exterior spaces trigger these sometimes choreographed, sometimes spontaneous, sequences of dance always linked to spaces and objects. In City Practices the protagonists act on impulses induced by the structure of the Constructivist style House of Culture in Moscow and its refurbishment, setting free new energies in an old, traditional and static space. Her videos interact in a particularly sensitive way to the iconic architecture.
You sleep all night and then you don’t… is set in a kitchen, playing on the possibilities inherent in this domestic scenery. The kitchen, a place of fixed rituals – preparing food, enjoying dinner – a common space, where movements almost act independently. Pirogova and her dance partner, squeezed between kitchen furniture, smoothly glide through the room, creating a wonderfully absurd sequence.
With a keen sense of detecting absurdities in every day life, the artist interweaves the old with the new, history with the present, people’s stories with her own. Static becomes fluid, when The Russian State Library in Moscow is turned from a structured prison into a humorous playground in her award-winning work BIBLIMLEN. Pirogova’s spell unfolds through the narrow corridors and quiet reading halls, enchanting the visitors, the books and the monument itself. The subtle humour of out of dances between bookshelves and sounds interrupting the strict silence – unburden the books of their loneliness.
Having stumbled onto video art through a fascination with the body in motion, Pirogova has within a short period created an inspiring series of works. House 20, Apartment 17 enacts all of Pirogova’s stylistic ingredients – telling stories through the motion of bodies in space. Pirogova’s gift is to bring out the humour in mundane absurdities through the collision of choreography with chance. House 20, Apartment 17 is a former communal apartment turned pop-up art space where Pirogova was invited to a group show. It was also, coincidentally, the former residence of her grandfather. Re-enacting family tales from years ago, his mother putting up the curtains, him playing football, the architecture is again put under a spell, the spell of the past, which breathes life back into these old structures.
Accompanying Sasha Pirogova: A Retrospective, MOMENTUM presents the Videos of Performances, Lectures and the Symposium of BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places (Berlin, 13 Nov – 23 Dec 2015).
Sasha Pirogova is a performance and video artist. For her the two disciplines are inter-connected. After graduating from the Physics Department at Moscow State University in 2010, she received a degree in Video and New Media in 2014 from the Rodchenko Art School in Moscow. She has been awarded prizes at the Extra Short Film Festival, ESF (2012) as well as the Innovation Prize in the ‘New Generation’ category (2014). She has participated in various exhibitions, such as BALAGAN!!!, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2015); Burning News, Hayward Gallery, London (2014); I saw lightning, Udarnik, Moscow (2014) and in the Manifesta 10, parallel program, St. Petersburg (2014). Working with performance, she has also participated in different festivals, including: the 6th International Festival of Video, Performance and Technology, Lisbon (2014), VIII Andrei Tarkovsky International Film Festival, Ivanovo (2014), Cinedans Dance on Screen Festival, Amsterdam (2014) and Now & After International Video Art Festival, The State Museum of GULAG, Moscow (2014).
MORE INFO HERE ON SASHA PIROGOVA’S RESIDENCY AT MOMENTUM >>
Prinivethao: Space Salutation
Sasha Pirogova & Ma Li
Performance on the Opening night of the Exhibition
Sasha Pirogova: A Retrospective
More Info HERE >>
[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/158640830 [/fve]
MOMENTUM Artists-in-Residence Sasha Pirogova and Ma Li draw on their upbringing in the collectivist societies of Russia and China in their interactive performance work. Coming to contemporary art through a background in physics and chemical engineering, respectively, and having both trained in contemporary dance, the choreography of bodies moving through space is integral to their ways of working. Brought together for the first time through MOMENTUM AiR, Sasha Pirogova and Ma Li are here also making their first cooperative project.
Thinking about the macro scale of space and its projection to the micro level of human beings, Ma Li and Sasha Pirogova team up for a “play game” and invite the audience to take part in a ceremony which enacts a supernova explosion triggered by the merging of two white dwarfs. Please join us in imagining a new geographical landscape without borders and separations on the occasion of the opening of the CTM Festival 2016 “New Geographies”.
YOU SLEEP ALL NIGHT AND THEN YOU DON’T…, 2012, 4′
The starting point for the film was Russian musician Peter Mamonov’s composition “You Sleep All Night and Then You Don’t…”. The filmmaker was curious about providing it with a dialogue expressed in movement, limited by the framework of an everyday-life situation which everyone of us encounters sooner or later because sometimes our body is more eloquent than words.
CITY PRACTICES, 2012, 5’+3′
This set of videos illustrates the exploration of interior and exterior spaces of the great monument of constructivism – ZIL house of culture. The choreography is the result of spontaneous reactions to the particular environment or objects offered by ZIL.
BIBLIMLEN, 2013, 10′
The short film BIBLIMLEN interweaves performance, video, and interaction with the environment. The Russian State Library (formerly Lenin Library) acts as a co-author with its architecture and inner texture creating the characters who communicate with the ambiance and elements of the library structure.
QUEUE, 2014, 10′
This video is based on Vladimir Sorokin’s novel ‘The Queue’ (1983), “a bizarrely funny saga of a quintessential Russian institution, the interminably long line” (NYT, 2011). Creating an absurdist choreography of hysterics, dependence and clanship, Pirogova takes pains to replay the text through dance to identify the queue as not a physical but a contemporary psycho-social condition. [David Elliott]
HOUSE 20, APARTMENT 17, 2014, 9′
During an artists residency at PovArt in summer 2014, Pirogova was provided with the former communal apartment at Povarskaya street, house 20, apartment 17, where later the exhibition would be held. Pirogova writes “When you learn something about a space it comes to be filled with images. And if you know too much, then it is almost impossible to be in it, they follow you. If it was possible to get rid of the past and live only here and now, with each new event erasing the previous one… My grandfather used to live near Arbat street about 20 years before he married my grandmother. Only that summer I asked him about the address. It was Povarskaya street, house 20, apartement 17.
J’AI UNE QUESTION, 2015, 6′
Begun during Pirogova’s artist residency at the Cite des Artes in Paris, the work was completed in Moscow and Leipzig. Pirogova was fascinated to find unreal images in everyday life. Shot in three cities, the film becomes the artist’s investigation into the fine line between the real and the imagined.
AGON, 2015, 16′
This video was filmed on the production floor of a working brewery. Pirogova transforms this architecture into a stadium, a field for competition, the metaphysical arena where the confrontation of the most influential areas of human activity is held. Competition in this representation is not a process but an end in itself. Despite the fact that each competitor strives to bring on a change in the structure of the “machine”, to undermine the system from the inside, the expected response does not occur and the whole activity is converted into an endless routine. (Yuriy Yurkin)
Also featuring the BALAGAN!!! Performances,
Symposium and Lecture Videos.
PERFORMANCES
ZIP GROUP
PROTEST AEROBICS
(DISTRICT OF CIVIL RESISTANCE), 10′
At Brandenburger Tor Stiftung am Max Liebermann Haus,
13 November 2015
ZIP Group, an artist-collective from Krasnodar, provides the warm-up for BALAGAN!!! with their expert instruction in stretching and strength training routines guaranteed to improve your flexibility and cardio-vascular fitness in protest. Performed in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate for the Opening of the BALAGAN!!! Exhibition.
Under the collective name of ZIP (an acronym that denotes the name of Krasnodar’s main art space, situated in the former premises of a factory manufacturing measuring instruments, Zavod Izmeritelnykh Priborov) the group has created a small autonomous zone of contemporary art in the city. The summer of 2011 saw them found the self-proclaimed Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KICA), the city’s first independent and experimental art space, and a new intellectual/art milieu for the younger generation has started forming around it. Reversing the party-inspired unanimity of the Soviet avant-garde’s ‘agitational’ propaganda of the 1920s and ‘30s, ZIP have designed an environment that actively encourages dissent. Their Civil Resistance District, comprising B. O. P. s (Booths for One-man Pickets), bunkers, control platforms, ‘plumbic fists’ and information stands, has been deployed in actual demonstrations.
SASHA FROLOVA
AQUAAEROBIKA, 25’ 24”
At Kühlhaus Berlin,
13 November 2015
Moscow-based artist and current holder of Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World award, Sasha Frolova kicks off BALAGAN!!! with her renowned Aquaaerobika performance for the opening night of the exhibition. Frolova uses her body to work in different media – sculpture, inflatables, dance, music and performance – in which the different kinds of movement, colour and energy it generates are the dominating elements. A hybrid between the puppet-like figures of Oscar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Triadisches Ballet (1922), whirling dervishes and Lady Gaga on acid, she employs outlandish costumes, electronic music and dance to melt into the abstract forms of her colourful inflatable sculptures and to create a sense of awe and wonder in the viewer – a cyber-beauty of latex, speed and sound. AQUAAEROBIKA, a collective performance project that she both directs and performs, was first presented in Saint Petersburg and Venice in 2013, and has since toured widely.
Frolova graduated in 2002 from the Art School of the Stroganov Moscow Higher College of Art and Industry in Moscow and extended her studies in Graphic Design at the National Institute of Design (2004-08) and on the New Art Strategies (Contemporary Art) course at the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems (2006) under the tutorship of Joseph Backstein. For ten years she was assistant to the eminent performance artist and objectmaker Andrey Bartenev. She was finalist of the Arte Laguna Special Prize for a solo show in Venice in 2013 and took part in the finalists’ group exhibition in the Arsenale where she was awarded a special exhibition prize. She was a finalist of the Kandinsky Prize (Young Artist Project of the Year nomination) in Moscow, 2009. Her solo shows include the Frederica Ghizzoni Gallery, Milan (2014); FRBR, in the parallel programme of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011); Albinism, Aidan Gallery, Moscow (2010); and Cyber Princess, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2009). She has also presented her work: in London at the Whitechapel Gallery, Riflemaker Gallery, and at the Russian Winter Festival in Trafalgar Square; in Kyiv at Gogolfest; in Hamburg at Kampnagel; and in Moscow at the Shushev State Museum of Architecture and the National Centre of Contemporary Art (NCCA).
YERBOSSYN MELDIBEKOV
SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER, NOVEMBER, 25’ 24”
At Kühlhaus Berlin,
14 November 2015
Meldibekov’s work has focused on the ‘collapse of culture’ in post-Soviet Central Asia: its political and social disarray, with rival political and commercial ‘tribes’ clashing over distribution of power and wealth. Focusing on political and social change, Meldibekov works across a variety of media that includes installation, sculpture, photography video and performance. Dramatising the absurd paradoxes of the contemporary art world, his performance September – October – November. Asian Prisoner, made specially for BALAGAN!!! reprises an action made in Berlin seventeen years previously. Then, as now, the Kazhak artist is a prisoner, bound by the culture in which he finds himself, a punishing kangue around his neck as an antiquated, stereotypical symbol. Yet he is not alone. Is not the art world itself also a kind of prison?
Meldibekov graduated from the State Institute of Theatre and Fine Arts, Almaty in 1992. He has exhibited internationally with various solo shows, including: Mountains of Revolution, Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong (2014), The Revolution in the Mountains, Jozsa Gallery, Brussels (2013) and Peak of Lenin, Galleria Nina Lumer, Milan (2013). He has also participated in the Central Asian Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, (2013), the 1st Kyiv Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012) and Between Heaven and Earth – Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, London, Calvert 22 (2011).
LEONID TISHKOV
THE ANATOMY LESSON OF THE DABLOID, 27’ 25”
At Kühlhaus Berlin,
14 November 2015
Tishkov is widely known for his DABLOIDS, a social and artistic project initiated in the early 1990s directly after the fall of the Soviet Union. These bright red, kidney-shaped creatures, consisting of little heads on large feet, may be understood as emblems of the burden of personal experience, views and prejudices within a transformed ‘democratic’ world. They spawn their own culture with clothes, flags and banners in an ironical artistic representation of symbols and opinions that refer to homeland, nationality and religion. As such, DABLOIDS become child-like, but potentially vicious, expressions of familiar ideologies, languages, histories and social identities. As well as making a special DABLOID installation for BALAGAN!!!, Tishkov revisits both his early medical training and the famous painting. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt in his performance of The Anatomy Lesson of the DABLOID.
Tishkov initially trained as a doctor, graduating in 1979 from the I.M. Sechenov Medical University in Moscow but, from the early 1980s, began to work as an artist, making cartoon-like books and paintings that commented in an absurd way on ideology and social change. Since that time his work has expanded to include installation, video, theatre and performance. His solo shows include The Arctic Diary, Krokin Gallery, Moscow (2011); In Search of the Miraculous (Selected works, 1980-2010), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2010); Looking Homeward, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2007). His work has also been exhibited in the 11th Krasnoyarsk Biennale (2015), the Moscow Biennale (2009) and the Singapore Biennale (2008) as well as in the museum shows Eye on Europe – 1960 to Now, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Berlin – Moscow/ Moscow- Berlin 1950-2000, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2002).
OLYA KROYTOR
CUBE, 66’ 23”
At Kühlhaus Berlin,
18 November 2015
Kroytor’s work moves between durational performance and the production of drawings and collages. Cube (2015), a new work made specially for BALAGAN!!!, brings all aspects of her work into play. Kroytor confines herself within a life-sized cube, its surfaces covered by paper. Hidden from view, she sketches on the inside of the cube until the surface of the paper is worn away. Once there is room for her to escape, she leaves. The marks of her ‘imprisonment’ remain.
Kroytor attended the Moscow Museum of Modern Art Free Workshops in 2007 and graduated in art from the Moscow State Pedagogical University in 2008, the following year she gained a diploma from the Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2012 she was a Kandinsky Prize nominee in the ‘Young Artist’ category and in 2014 was shortlisted for the Kuryokhin Award the ‘Art in Public Spaces’ category. Her solo shows include Time That Exists, SRC Dawn, Vladivostok (2015), 8 Situations, ArtWin Gallery, Moscow (2015), Extra, Gallery Room, Moscow (2014), ChtoNichto, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011) and Split Personality, Regina Gallery, (2011).
SASHA PIROGOVA
LET’S PLAY, WHY NOT?, 33’ 02”
At Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin,
16 December 2015
Life imposes some rules that occasionally we have to follow. Sometimes unexpectedly they change. Sasha Pirogova investigates the system in which we live in a playful mode, using the rules of Russian outdoor games that are based on active and passive, controlling and resisting roles.
Recently a huge amount of prohibitions were again re-introduced in Russia which influence the private life of a person. Through her staged performances, Sasha Pirogova aims to capture movements and gestures that could disappear forever under these circumstances.
Winner of Moscow’s New Generation Award, Sasha Pirogova is acclaimed for both her videos and performances. An amalgam of two performances premiered during the opening week of BALAGAN!!!, the performance Let’s Play, Why Not? was staged at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart as part of MOMENTUM’s exhibition BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, curated by David Elliott.
LECTURES
The Old Woman Who…? BALAGAN and the Russian/Soviet Avant-Garde 1906-1953
By David Elliott
At Brandenburger Tor Stiftung am Max Liebermann Haus
Trickster Art: Celebrating Chaos, Challenging Misrule
With David Elliott, Preciosa De Joya,
Hillel Schwartz & Hans Scheuer
At ICI Berlin, Institute for Cultural Inquiry
What is to be Undone? Trickery as Political Resistance
With Rosa Barotsi, Katarzyna Kozyra,
Via Lewandowski & Helena Bassil-Morozow
At ICI Berlin, Institute for Cultural Inquiry
SYMPOSIUM
The Russians Have a Word For It: BALAGAN and the World Outside
With Kathrin Becker, Ekaterina Degot, Volker Diehl, David Elliott,
Gabriele Knapstein, Bojana Pejić, Asia Żak Persons
At Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
BALAGAN: AN INTRODUCTION
By David Elliott
BALAGAN IN LENINGRAD AND ST. PETERSBURG
By Kathrin Becker
SEXING-UP “EASTERN EUROPE”
AFTER THE WALL, GENDER CHECK, BALAGAN
By Bojana Pejić
BEFORE, INSIDE, AND BEYOND BALAGAN
By Ekaterina Degot
BEYOND BALAGAN
With Bojana Pejić, Katya Degot, Volker Diehl, David Elliott,
Gabriele Knapstein, Asia Żak Persons
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Balagan Symposium Hamburger Bahnhof
SYMPOSIUM
The Russians Have A Word For It:
BALAGAN and the World Outside
Wednesday 16 December @ 14:00 – 20:00
At Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin
Invalidenstraße 50-51, 10557
Symposium Videos:
BALAGAN: AN INTRODUCTION
By David Elliott
BALAGAN IN LENINGRAD AND ST. PETERSBURG
By Kathrin Becker
SEXING-UP “EASTERN EUROPE”
AFTER THE WALL, GENDER CHECK, BALAGAN
By Bojana Pejić
BEFORE, INSIDE, AND BEYOND BALAGAN
By Ekaterina Degot
BEYOND BALAGAN
With Bojana Pejić, Katya Degot, Volker Diehl, David Elliott,
Gabriele Knapstein, Asia Żak Persons
BALAGAN!!!
Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union
and Other Mythical Places
Curated by David Elliott
14 November – 23 December 2015
Speakers:
Kathrin Becker
Kathrin Becker is a Berlin based curator and writer who currently works as the head of the Video-Forum of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.). Having studied art history and Slavic languages in Bochum, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, she made her first experiences as a curator in the field of cultural exchange between Russia and the West. From the late 1990s, Becker developed an international curatorial profile and worked in the field of the interference of popular and high cultures, global visual languages, and institutional practice as a method of cultural foreign policies between Western, East European and Middle Eastern societies.
Kathrin Becker has curated numerous exhibitions in institutions such as Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin; National Centre For Contemporary Art, Moscow; P.S. 1 Museum / The Institute of Contemporary Art, New York; National Museum for Contemporary Art, Oslo; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Mies van der Rohe Pavillon, Barcelona; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; Gallery of the Capital Prague; Kunst-Werke Berlin / KW Institute for Contemporary Art; Moscow House of Photography. She has curated solo shows including artists such as Nairy Baghramian, Ursula Biemann, Louise Bourgeois, Kajsa Dahlberg, Maryam Jafri, Laura Horelli, Allan Kaprow, Takuji Kogo / John Miller, Christiane Möbus, Andrei Monastyrski, Matthias Müller, Hajnal Németh, Dmitri A. Prigov, Laure Prouvost, Oliver Ressler, Ira Schneider, Anatoly Shuravlev, Ming Wong, Yevgeny Yufit, Vadim Zakharov / Niklas Nitschke, David Zink Yi, and Artur Zmijewski and group shows such as Stalin’s Choice – Soviet Socialist Realism 1932-1956; Flight – Departure – Disappearance. Moscow Conceptual Art; Can you hear me? 2nd Ars Baltica Triennial of Photographic Art; Remake Berlin; No more bad girls? and Feminismen. In 2012, Kathrin Becker worked as the curator of the 3rd Moscow International Biennial For Young Art (MIBYA). In 2014, she realized the International Symposium Video Trajectories that looked at contemporary video art practice from the perspectives of presentation, technological change, production and the public. Kathrin Becker has published widely in exhibition catalogues and magazines and served on numerous curatorial teams, advisory boards and juries.
Ekaterina Degot
Ekaterina Degot is a Moscow-born art historian, writer, and curator, Artistic Director at the Academy of Arts of the World, Cologne, and professor at the Alexander Rodchenko Moscow School of New Media and Photography in Moscow. Her recent curatorial projects include: What Did the Artist Mean by That?, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2014 (with Yuri Albert), Monday Begins on Saturday, First Bergen Assembly, Bergen, Norway, 2013 (with David Riff). She co-edited Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade (Chicago University press, 2013). Degot is laureate of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory (2014).
Degot’s work focuses on aesthetic and sociopolitical issues in Russia and Eastern Europe, predominantly in the post-Soviet era. She has worked as a senior curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery. In 2001, she curated the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennial. Shows she has co-curated include Body Memory: Underwear of the Soviet Era (with Julia Demidenko; City History Museum, St Petersburg, 2000, City Museum, Helsinki, Volkskundemuseum, Vienna, a.o.); Berlin-Moskau / Moskau-Berlin 1950-2000 (with Juergen Harten a.o., Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the History Museum, Moscow, 2003-04), and European Atelier (Central House of Artists, 2009), Soviet Idealism (Musée de l’art wallon, Liège, 2005) and If. Ukrainian Art in Transition (PERMM art museum, Perm, 2010). Together with Cosmin Costinas and David Riff, she curated the First Ural Industrial Biennial in Yekaterinburg under the title Shockworkers of the Mobile Image (2010). In 2011 she presented (with Joanna Mytkovska and David Riff) Auditorium Moscow – a self-educational initiative, a place for meeting and discussion, and an international exhibition. In 2012, she curated Art After the End of the World, the discussion platform of the First Kiev Biennial of Contemporary Art Arsenale, and Time/Food in Stella Art Foundation in Moscow, with Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda. Together with David Riff she curated the first Bergen Assembly under the title Monday begins on Saturday in 2013. She has worked as art columnist for the newspaper Kommersant, and from 2008 until 2012 she was senior editor of www.openspace.ru/art, an independent online magazine of art news, art criticism and cultural analysis. She regularly contributes to Artforum, Frieze and e-flux magazine. Her books include: Terroristic Naturalism (1998), Russian 20th-Century Art (2000) and Moscow Conceptualism (with Vadim Zakharov, 2005). She recently co-edited Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade (with Ilya Budraitskis and Marta Dziewanska, 2013).
Volker Diehl
Volker Diehl, born in Neheim-Hüsten (now Arnsberg), is a gallerist and curator. Having studied art history in Münster and at the Free University of Berlin, he subsequently worked as assistant to the curators Christos Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal on the international art exhibition “Zeitgeist” at Martin Gropius Bau Berlin in 1982. After seven years of working at Berlin’s gallery Folker Skulima, in 1990 he took over the gallery and re-named it Volker Diehl. In 1996 – 2002 Diehl became the co-funder and director of the international art fair Art Forum Berlin. From 2000, gallery Volker Diehl expanded with several branches in Berlin, and 2008 marked the opening of DIEHL + GALLERY ONE in Moscow, which ran for two years. In 2013 Diehl opened a project space in Berlin called Diehl CUBE.
David Elliott
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). He is Hon President of the Board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London. A specialist in Soviet and Russian avant-garde, as well as in modern and contemporary Asian art, he has published widely in these fields as well as on many other aspects of contemporary art. In 1996 he was co-curator of Kunst und Macht im Europa der Diktatoren 1930 bis 1945 at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and in 2000-2001 was Artistic Director of the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Ludwig Museum, Budapest and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. In 2011 he curated Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia at Calvert 22, London. He is the Chief Curator of BALAGAN: Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, organized by MOMENTUM.
Gabriele Knapstein
Dr.Gabriele Knapstein (b. 1963) is an art historian, living in Berlin. Her PhD thesis on the event scores by Fluxus artist George Brecht was published in 1999. Since 1994, she is working as a curator for the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) and other institutions. In 2001 together with Hou Hanru and Fan Di’an, Knapstein curated the exhibition Living in time. 29 contemporary artists from China at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. Since 2003, she has worked as curator at Hamburger Bahnhof, becoming Head of Exhibitions in 2012. Since 1999, Knapstein has been working on the realization of the ongoing series Works of Music by Visual Artists. Selected recent exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof: Susan Philips. Part File Score (2014), Wall Works (2013-2014), Ryoji Ikeda. db (2012), Architektonika. Art, Architecture and the City (2011-2012), Bruce Nauman. Dream Passage (2010). She was involved in organizing the exhibition After the Wall. Art and culture in post-Communist Europe (2000–2001), curated by David Elliott and Bojana Pejić, which took place at Hamburger Bahnhof and Max Liebermann Haus.
Bojana Pejić
Bojana Pejić (born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia), is an art historian and curator, living in Berlin since 1991. Having studied History of Art at the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Belgrade, from 1977 to 1991 she was curator at the Student Cultural Center of Belgrade University and organized many exhibitions of Yugoslav and international art. She started to write art criticism in 1971 and was editor of art theory journal “Moment, Belgrade” (1984 – 1991). She organized an international symposium “The Body in Communism” at the Literaturhaus in Berlin in 1995. She was Chief Curator of the exhibition After the Wall – Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe organized by David Elliott at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (1999), which was also presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Budapest (2000), and at HamburgerBahnhof, Berlin (2000-2001). She was one of the co-curators of the exhibition Aspects/Positions held in the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Vienna in 1999. Between 2002 and 2004, she was one of international advisers of the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto (Japan) where she also curated a retrospective of Marina Abramovic (2003), which also toured to Morigame (Japan). In 2003, she had the Rudolf Arnheim guest professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin (history of art). She was adviser of the project De/Construction of Monument organized by the Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo where she also held seminars at the Academy of Fine Arts dedicated to the “Communist Body.” (2004-2005) In May 2005 she has defended her Ph.D. “The Communist Body – An Archeology of Images: Politics of Representation and Spatialization of Power the SFR Yugoslavia (1945 -1991)”. She was a Maria Goeppert-Mayer guest professor for International Gender Research at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University in Oldenburg (2006-2007). Bojana Pejić is the chief curator of Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2009-2010) at MUMOK, Vienna and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. She is also the editor of the “Gender Check Reader”. Dr. Bojana Pejić teaches at the Bauhuas University in Weimar and works as an independent curator and writer. She is co-curator together with Rachel Rits-Volloch of the upcoming follow-up exhibition to BALAGAN!!!, entitled Beyond BALAGAN – Hero Mother – Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism (2016).
Asia Żak Persons
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Asia Żak Persons (b. in 1971 in Krakow, Poland) initially organised the Month of Photography before opening in 2008, together with Monika Branicka, ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery in Berlin, where artists from different generations with strong ties to Eastern Europe and Conceptual and Avant Garde Art are represented. Also in 2008, together with Monika Branicka, she co-founded the ŻAK BRANICKA Foundation in Krakow, Poland, that strives to help those artists by supporting projects outside the gallery as well as with publications. Asia Żak Persons was a board member of ViennaFair for many years and is a regular contributor for catalogues and books of contemporary art.
BALAGAN!!! SYMPOSIUM
AND PERFORMANCE BY SASHA PIROGOVA
Stefano Cagol
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.”
“The Body of Energy (of the mind)” at CLB Berlin
Opening 6 November @ 7:00pm
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).
MOMENTUM InsideOut at Bar Babette Presents:
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.
INSTALLATION SHOTS
THE OPENING PHOTO GALLERY
THE BAR BABETTE EVENT
Geraldine Ondrizek residency
MOMENTUM AiR
Geraldine Ondrizek
15 August – 15 December 2015
Geraldine Ondrizek is an artist and professor of art at Reed College in Portland Oregon working at the intersection of art and biological science for the last twenty years. She earned her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle, and her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Since 2001 she has worked with geneticists and biologists to gather and compose images of human cellular tissue and genetic tests that relate to ethnic identity and disease. The architectural-scaled works she creates house medical information. They have been shown widely in galleries, museums and research hospitals, including 34 solo exhibitions and numerous group shows.
She is the recipient of the 2014 Hallie Ford Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ford Family Foundation; two Oregon Arts Commission and Hallie Ford Career Development Grants; a Houston Foundation Grant; four Culture Grant, Levine Fund and Mellon Foundation Faculty Research Awards; and an Oregon Council on the Arts Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at France, England, New York, Germany, Pennsylviana, Colorado, and Germany. Ondrizek has lectured at various universities. Her work has been shown at NASA, The University of Houston, FIU Gallery, the Detroit Museum of Art, The Portland Art Museum, The Sheldon Museum, The Western Washington University Gallery, The Shenman Gallery, The IMSS in Chicago, The Miller Gallery at Carnegie–Mellon University, as well as other places, including ZKM | Center for Art and Media during her stay in Germany.
Geraldine Ondrizek, “Cellular”, Video Still (2012)
Revisiting Eugenics in the Age of Genetics:
Geraldine Ondrizek will continue the research on the history of eugenics practices she began with the exhibition ‘Shades of White’ opening at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon this September. Whereas Shades of White focused on race and skin color, she will now focus on eugenics and mental illness. Eugenicists were convinced that conditions such as insanity, feeblemindedness, epilepsy, pauperism, alcoholism, and other forms of social deviance were fundamentally hereditary. She will visit the most significant archives on eugenics at the Freie University in Berlin that holds the archives of The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.
This research and visual investigation will result in an installation that will be composed of several projections of cellular formations and malformations, genetic sequences that show physical and metal differences, historical, personal and statistical information as well as new and significantly positive research on mental ability. She will make the space a fully interactive, theatrical and space that has a many moveable silk panels that capture projected images when moved by the viewers/participatory audience. This work will enable the viewer to be surrounded by the voices of many and she hopes that they will get a new perspective on racial categorization. She has been invited to show this work at Central Bookings’ Haber Space, A Gallery of Art and Science in New York City in 2016.
Research and Studio Work based on findings from the Max Plank Archive at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Dr. Georg Geipel’s hand and fingerprint studies (1930-1960). Installation by Geraldine Ondrizek for her Berlin Open Studio on 29 Nov 2015.
OPEN STUDIO with GERALDINE ONDRIZEK
29 November 2015
@ Reinickendorfer Strasse 15, 13347 Berlin
6:00 – 19:00
The installation will continue through 15 December 2015 and can be seen by appointment at: ondrizeg@reed.edu
During her Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Ondrizek’s research at the archives of the Max Planck Institute focus on the work of Dr. Georg Geipel, an anthropologist and statistician who worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin from 1930 -1960. Geipel used methods of dermatoglyphics and dactyloscopy for the study of fingerprints and handprints to link these patterns to inheritance. This sytem was not new, in fact Widler used it beginning in 1904. However Geipel rigorously assigned mathematical coordinates to the lines, curves, breaks, negative spaces and intersections in the hand and fingerprint. Through these measurements he was able to identify inherited hand lines, similarities in identical twins based on embryology and racial difference. Although his ability to identify genetic inheritance was significant, his evaluation and conclusions based on racial difference and mental ability done for the KWI during the war were both incorrect and seriously problematic.(1) However, he did continue to refine his mathematical identification systems after the war and was able to mathematically prove that these marks are unique for each of us and that they are carried within family lines. His system, which primarily measures the breaks and intersections of the lines in the fingerprint and handprint, is used in biometric data scanners today.
The history of biometric data skips the 1930’s-50’s because of the negative associations. However, the effects of taking biometric data then, and the effects of taking it now, as a method of surveillance and identity codes for each human being, is hauntingly similar.
Ondrizek has had the privilege to look at thousands of Geipel’s handprint studies, and has focused on those of identical twins from the 1950’s-60’s. Twin studies have continued to be of vital importance to genetics as they show the subtle difference in the genetic make up of each human being based on embryology. By making a project with these prints, Ondrizek aims to honor those who unknowingly offered their identity markers for science. It is highly unlikely that they would have known how their personal mark would have been used to establish the system we use now. However, the knowledge gained, for better or worse, is part of a system of biometric data collection that begins at birth with the taking of a child’s hand prints and has become the standard measure of our identify worldwide.
The research and art work Ondrizek is doing here in Berlin during the MOMENTUM residency manifests in a series of studio projects to be shown at an Open Studio event on 29 November 2015, and will be comprised of a set of books of the handprints and the geometric patterns used, a video of the archive as well as experiments and proposals for works to be done in the US in 2016-2017. The research done in Berlin will be further developed once Ondrizek returns to the US and will include her own biometric and genetic profile.
WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE OPEN STUDIO ARTIST TALK WITH GERALDINE ONDRIZEK:
Bar Babette InsideOut 2015
MOMENTUM_InsideOut Together With Bar Babette
Present
The MOMENTUM AiR Exhibition
Linda Carrara, Fang Lu, Gerri Ondrizek
22-23 October 2015 @ 8pm – Late
At Bar Babette
Karl-Marx-Allee 36
MORE ABOUT MOMENTUM Artists-in-Residence >>
Linda Carrara
I’m a Still-Life (2014)
12 min.
The objects represented by Linda Carrara come from everyday life, but are here utilised as primary forms rather than mundane objects. They assemble into a metastructure and reassemble in forever changing compositions while questioning the visible world. This still-life no longer refers to inanimate everyday objects. This is the painting itself that becomes the object; of unknown origin, ageless, and endlessly processable. The painting itself is made into a malleable thing prone to a long questioning gaze. The object of representation has always been a mediator of thought.
I’m a Still-Life is a documented action shot in a single sequence. If it can be defined technically as a video, it has neither beginning nor end, nor duration and it is not unique. Every movement causes a break, generates a new scene and involves the future whose potential is yet infinite. These interactions become the tool of a mental dialogue between the neutral presence of the material object and the evocative potential it inspires.
Lovers Are Artists [Part One] (2012)
18 min (originally shown as 4 channel installation on TVs), silent
Casting: Guan Xiao
Camera: Hai Li
Installation Photos: Wang Wei
A stop-motion video composed out of thousands of images shot in the traditional hutongs of Beijing. The images depict a lone female figure going about her daily activities of buying vegetables and eating yoghurt; but before long these mundane tasks turn towards the kooky and nonsensical as the items become immersed in fictional games and scenarios that yield no discernible outcome nor serve any functional purpose. Not unlike the artistic process, these apparently meaningless gestures are founded upon internal imbalances that inform an individual’s perspective on the world and impact their encounters with reality…
[Text by Pauline Yao, Read More on Amorous Acts at Arrow Factory >>]
Gerri Ondrizek
Cellular (2012)
12 min.
Sound made with AMF, atomic force microscope
Cellular is a film of a blast pore, or a multiple cell embryo. More than 200 hours of still images of each embryo were made with Atonics Micro fire digital cameras mounted on Olympus stereomicroscopes and made into a film using Astor IIDC imaging software. My colleague at Reed College, Steve Black, professor of developmental Biology and Zoology., provided me with a lab space to make the films of the blast pore. I worked with his lab assistant Allison Egar to make a film of development which was used for the still images. To make my film, I edited 10 film sections to overlap and repeat the phases of development just before a recognizable body is evident. Each segment represents the different eggs in the process of development. Each is edited prior to full gestation, creating a loop of endless potential.
The film Cellular is overlayed with the recording of The Sound of Cells Dividing.
The Sounds of Cells Dividing
Since 2003, nanotechnology and the AMF (atomic force microscope) pioneered by James Giminski, Professor of Chemistry at UCLA and Andrew Pelling Associate Professor of Biophysics at the University of Ottawa, enables researchers to also touch a cell. Like the blind reading brail or a hand touching the pulse, the needle of the AMF can touch cells which are less than half the diameter of a human hair. This touch can also record the sound the cell emits when dividing or dieing. Through touching and hearing rather than only seeing, an entirely new knowledge base has emerged, one that artists have known, that of multiple sensory knowledge. What we can now listen to within a cell has revolutionized our knowledge of cellular gestation, division and the relationships within the interior architecture of our body.
The sounds one is hearing in the film Cellular is five tracks of healthy to damaged cells diving and dieing. I accessed these recordings from James Gimzewski Professor of Chemistry at UCLA and Andrew Pelling Associate Professor of Biophysics at the University of Ottawa. The recorded cells vibrating at the nanoscale, with amplified vibration (or oscillation) of the cells, bring them into the range of human hearing. This new area of study is called “sonocrology”. The main tool for learning about cell sounds is the atomic force microscope (AFM). Instead of using optics to show an image, the AFM uses a very fine tip to feel a cell in the same way a needle is used to feel the pattern of vibrations pressed into vinyl records. Gimzewski and Pelling have found that cells with cancer or other diseases give off very low and strained frequencies while healthy cells give a more pleasant sound. Sonocytology has proven to be a noninvasive way to detect disease. In 2007, Gimzenwski used nanotechnology to demonstrate that metastatic cancer cells are softer than healthy cells. The study represented one of the first times researchers have been able to take living cells from human cancer patients and use nanotechnology to determine which were cancerous through touch.
PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT
Fang Lu
Berlin Beijing Artist Program Residency
(initiad by GEKA e.V. & BMW)
17 August – 1 November 2015
The BERLIN BEIJING ARTIST PROGRAM, initiated by GEKA e.V. – Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Chinesischen Kulturellen Austausch * Association for German-Chinese Cultural Exchange – and BMW, this year features an Artist Residency with FANG LU, a chinese Video Artist, coordinated by MOMENTUM, with the support of the Sammlung Hoffmann.
Fang Lu (b. 1981, Guangzhou China) is a Chinese video artist. She received her BFA from Graphic Design department at School of Visual Art in New York in 2005, and MFA from the New Genres department at the San Francisco Arts Institute in 2007. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Boers-li Gallery, Beijing (2013); Pekin Fine Arts, Hong Kong (2013), Arrow Factory, Beijing (2012), Space Station, Beijing (2010), Borges Libreria Institute of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou (2011); and in group exhibitions such as the 28 Chinese in Rubell Family Collection Museum in Miami, My Generation in Tampa Museum (2014), On/Off in Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (2012), Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial (2012), CAFAM Future Exhibition (2012), We Remember the Sun in Walter & McBean Gallery in San Francisco (2008). She lives and works in Beijing.
Fang Lu is also the Co-Founder of Video Bureau, a non-profit organization that aims to provide a platform to exhibit, organize and archive video art. It has two spaces: one in Beijing and the other one in Guangzhou. The mission of Video Bureau is to collect and organize artworks of video artists in order to build a video archive that welcomes research and viewing. As an institute opens to the public, every two months Video Bureau features a new artist added to the archive, and hosts related events.
Still from ‘Sea of Silence’
A video By Fang Lu
A video By Fang Lu
The production of the sequel to “Sea of Silence” in Berlin is made possible by the generous support of the Sammlung Hoffmann.
Erika and Rolf Hoffmann began collecting contemporary art in 1968 for the inspiration and stimulation of living with it. Today, Erika Hoffmann opens her home to the public on Saturdays to share this experience with others. Sammlung Hoffmann is a private collection of contemporary art in all media. The collection is on display in Erika Hoffmann’s living and work spaces, which have been open to the public since 1997, upon appointment.
TOURS
Visitors are invited to join guided tours on Saturdays, in groups of up to ten. For approximately 90 minutes, a guide will serve as a moderator of sorts, hoping to spark conversation rather than simply presenting facts or accepted art-historical truths. Because a single visit could only provide an overview of the current selection, the guides decide which rooms to enter—based on their guests’ interests. The selection of works is installed in an associative manner. It is meant to offer a personal encounter with art that may impart a more lasting impression in this private setting than it would leave in a museum. There are no wall texts or captions that provide the artist’s name, the work’s title, or its year of production. The idea is to allow visitors a more immediate and emotional access to the works, while guides can provide additional information.
CURATOR
Erika Hoffmann updates the selection of works and rearranges the installation every July. Some pieces return to storage, others are moved to new locations. Works from storage often end up next to recent acquisitions. In this, Erika Hoffmann creates new relationships, explores the strengths of works in unexpected contexts, and sets out to uncover additional meanings.
The Berlin Beijing Artist Program Residency was initiated by GeKA e.V., the Association for German-Chinese Cultural Exchange, and BMW. The residency supports the artistic development and international careers of Chinese and German artists. It enables emerging talents to live and work in novel cultural contexts for a defined time-period. This Residency Program, active 2014 – 2016, enables each year two young artists (one Chinese, one German, ideally with at least one female artist) to spend two months working either in Berlin or Beijing. The artists are selected by a jury of established art world professionals. At the end of the residency period (2016), it is planned that all the residency artists are invited to exhibit their new works in Berlin, to acquaint a larger audience with their work.
WATCH
FANG LU CONVERSATION WITH RACHEL RITS-VOLLOCH
AT SAMMLUNG HOFFMANN
HERE >>
The shooting of the work
(Photos by Marina Belikova)
Linda Carrara
Terna Prize Artist Residency
at MOMENTUM
with
10 September – 25 November 2015
Linda Carrara (b. 1984, Bergamo, Italy) is a visual artist. She graduated from ACCADEMIA DI BELLE ARTI DI BRERA in 2007 with a Bachelor in Contemporary art. She completed her Master at KASK SCHOOL GENT in 2015 at the Multi-media department, and did her internship with Michael Borremans.
Between 2006 and 2012 she worked as assistant for Vincenzo Ferrari, Conceptual and poetry visual Italian artist. Since 2010 she has exhibited her work in several private galleries and Italian Museums. She participated in a group show in Moscow in Fabric space, in the collective exhibition “ma patience a des limited” in Dubois Friedland Gallery in Bruxelles, and in the exhibition of the Benetton collection in the Foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino, Italy. Her works are in several private collections, such as the Benetton, Terna, Fondazione Rivoli2, Borroni, and Ceres Collections. She works and lives between Gent-Bruxelles and Milano.
VACUUM STATE
acrylic on canvas and projection of light, 2013
Linda Carrara’s painting is made of simple shapes and structures. That is to say, objects, insofar as they correspond to those features. Their representation mainly emphasizes spatial dimensions, volumes and lines, with an economy of means that makes the interaction they have with each other sensitive, rather than their own constitution or appearance. In this, the main interest is not the object as a material thing, but the object as a taut space, connected to the related objects. This is a dynamic ecosystem, an organization of fullness and emptiness that offers the mind ways to perceive the world, without the world. Life without life. (Herve Ic, 2015)
During her Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Linda Carrara continues her research on architecture as the abstract space of thinking. She will go deeper into the question of projection of light on canvas, and she will analyze the relationship between the shadow and light of the canvas, the relation with the space that surrounds it and the enigma between the projection of light and light of the painting.
OPEN STUDIO with LINDA CARRARA
7 November 2015
@ CENTRUM, Reuterstraße 7, 12053 Berlin
6:00 – 10:00pm
Open studio event
Installation shots
I See Video Art Festival
4 & 5 November 2015
8:00 – 10:30pm
Video Screenings with Q&A
Ulu Braun // Wojtek Doroszuk // Thomas Eller // Amir Fattal // Niklas Goldbach // James P Graham // Constantin Hartenstein // Mark Karasick // Yuan Keru // Map Office // Bjørn Melhus // Tracey Moffatt & Gary Hillberg // Neozoon // Erkka Nissinen // Li Ran // Franz Reimer // Julia Charlotte Richter // OQ Rizki Utama // Clemens Wilhelm // Lu Yang // Li Zhenhua
MOMENTUM is proud to host the launch of the I SEE International Video Art Festival, including a selection of works from the MOMENTUM Collection.
“The more that I see the less that I know for sure” – John Lennon
The I SEE International Video Art Festival is an initiative of the artists Constantin Hartenstein and Clemens Wilhelm, launched in 2013. In 2015, the second edition of the I SEE International Video Art Festival will once again reveal the latest developments in contemporary video art. The festival will be launched in Berlin (Germany) at MOMENTUM, and then travel to Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen (China) to connect these four vibrant video art scenes.
Focusing on four main curatorial themes, the presented videos will give a fascinating insight into how artists deal with the current challenges and opportunities of the digitalized world we live in. The festival sets out to present ground-breaking video art works by emerging and well-known international artists who examine the impact of technological and aesthetic inventions. Three screening programs – “THE END OF THE IMAGE AS WE KNOW IT”, “POST EVERYTHING”, “THE ANIMAL WITHIN” – present unique artistic approaches to animalistic instincts, the omnipresent influence of technology on society and concepts of post-futures. In addition, the program „AUTO ANALYSIS“ will present a selection of seven works from the Momentum Collection that explore the relationship between a subject and its self-perception towards transformative environments.
PROGRAM 1: THE END OF THE IMAGE AS WE KNOW IT
Li Ran // Constantin Hartenstein // Julia Charlotte Richter // Bjørn Melhus // Lu Yang // OQ Rizki Utama
THE END OF THE IMAGE AS WE KNOW IT examines constructed digital entities and re-values social norms. It bends the boundaries of original content and newly created context in a consumer-driven reality. In treating the frame as a space to break apart filmic forms and narratives, the works in the program look at ways to juxtapose diverse ranges of assembling narratives and stylistic elements. How are the images of the past reassembled in the present? Would you like to become an alpha-male overnight? Is the image of an old white male ruling class still adequate? How does the experience of war change the image of home? What if there was a superhero with the special forces of a uterus? How can your family appear more happy in photos?
PROGRAM 2: POST EVERYTHING
Niklas Goldbach // Franz Reimer // Clemens Wilhelm // Erkka Nissinen
The POST EVERYTHING program points out the relationship between innovative aesthetics which transform cultural output and the past as a resource for the construction of the present and the future. It shows a world which fetishizes the new as a surplus value. The program brings together works by artists who attempt to paint a picture of the making of future through the constant transformation of the past and present. A small step forward can already mean shaking up all definitions. Can you turn a desert into a utopian city? How do we relate to world-changing media events? Are we happy with simulacra instead of the real things? And how to be an artist in a hyperreal world?
PROGRAM 3: THE ANIMAL WITHIN
Neozoon // Ulu Braun // Yuan Keru // Wojtek Doroszuk
THE ANIMAL WITHIN combines videos which deal with a new kind of wild behaviour and creative expression – either within ourselves or as a reaction to a vanishing fauna. Inspired by 17th century painting, hunting videos on youtube or Hitchcockian scenarios, this program presents works that elaborate upon spiritualism, emotional tension between mankind and the wilderness, as well as facing death as a reminder to the animalistic nature of our being. What do we feel after we shoot an animal? Why do birds look at us with disinterest? What happens to the soul in the forest? What is the difference between humans and dogs?
PROGRAM 4: AUTO ANALYSIS
(Program Curated from the MOMENTUM Collection)
Mark Karasick // Tracey Moffatt // Thomas Eller // Li Zhenua // Map Office // James P. Graham // Amir Fattal
The MOMENTUM 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 17 countries worldwide. This program shows seven video art works that explore the relationship between a subject and its self-perception towards transformative environments. What is going on in a child‘s mind? Do we need „others“ to define our self? How lost is the white male? Are dogs the better humans? Can you run away from your self? How much time is a beard? How romantic are ruins?
ORGANIZERS
I SEE International Video Art Festival
MOMENTUM Berlin
Times Museum
CO-ORGANIZERS
OCT Art and Design Gallery
Institute for Provocation Beijing
PARTNERS / SPONSORS
Goethe-Institut
Stiftung Mercator
AG Kurzfilm
The PhotoPhore
SPECIAL THANKS TO
Times Property
China Residencies
Basics09
Photo Gallery, MOMENTUM Berlin
Photo Gallery, Insitute for Provocation (Beijing)
Photo Gallery, OCT Art and Design Gallery (Shenzhen)
Photo Gallery, Times Museum (Guangzhou)
Photo Gallery, LP Art Space (Chongqing)
Photo Gallery, Organhaus (Chongqing)
Water(proof) Federation Square
WATER(PROOF)
At Federation Square
Shaarbek Amankul // Stefano Cagol // Nezaket Ekici
Janet Laurence // Shahar Marcus // Almagul Menlibayeva
Nina E. Schönefeld // Shingo Yoshida
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Tainá Guedes
PUBLIC SCREENING:
1 – 30 September 2019
@ Federation Square, Melbourne
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.
MOMENTUM is Berlin’s platform for Time-Based Art: Video, Performance, New Media, Sound, and in our cooperation with Food Art Week, also Food. To address the crucial issues raised by Food Art Week 2019: WATER, we present a video program by renowned international artists engaged in a broader dialogue on the deterioration of our environment. Shaarbek Amankul’s (Kyrgystan) 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 (Australia) addresses the fragility of our oceans in her video Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef, created for the UN Climate Conference, COP21, in Paris. This work envisions a hospital for the Reef’s threatened corals and other marine species in this time of ecological crisis, making visible the otherwise invisible devastation beneath the surface of the sea. Stefano Cagol’s (Italy) 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 (Kazakhstan) 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 (Turkey) and Shahar Marcus’s (Israel) 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 (Germany) video Dark Waters takes place in another poison sea. Set in a dystopian future where the oceans are poisoned with plastic and only jellyfish can survive in their waters, this film sadly bears more resemblance to truth than science fiction. Shingo Yoshida’s (Japan) 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. Nezaket Ekici’s Water To Water, the documentation of her performance at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee museum, poses a beautifully impractical solution to a future of impending water shortages. 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 video works in our program 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 eight 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.
ARTISTS
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.
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 (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.
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.
Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), HD video 32’58”
Janet Laurence’s video Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), and accompanying photo series Corral Collapse Homeopathy (2015) were created for the UN Climate Conference,COP21, in Paris. Shot in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – a World Heritage site which is the planet’s largest living, and rapidly dying, structure – this series of works envisions a hospital for the Reef’s threatened corals and other marine species, making visible the otherwise invisible devastation beneath the surface of the sea, and offering hope for the healing of the marine world from the consequences of global warming and human impact. If we can care for marine life in the same way that we care for our own species, there is a chance of deflecting environmental catastrophe. Laurence’s work is an emergency response: a hospital for the Reef in this time of ecological crisis, intended to aid survival and effect transformation.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
Initiated by Tainá Guedes and
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT
WITH THANKS TO OUR MEDIA PARTNERS
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Anxiety and Artificial Intelligence
On Autopilot: Anxiety and Artificial Intelligence
Transmediale 2016 Proposal
Curated by Jeni Fulton and Rachel Rits-Volloch, with Aaajiao
Part of:
The Chronus Art Center Residency in Artificial Intelligence at MOMENTUM
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
MOMENTUM and Chronus Art Center (CAC), two non-profit art institutions from Berlin and Shanghai respectively, with a shared focus on Time-Based Art and New Media, here join forces to address a topic which is increasingly prevalent in the anxieties of popular culture: Artificial Intelligence (AI). While AI is beginning to be increasingly addressed as both a subject and a medium by artists in the West, in China this is still a new and virtually unexplored artistic field. Taking this unique historical moment as a starting point, MOMENTUM and CAC will build on the success of previous cooperations, such as our 2014 exhibition PANDAMONIUM: Media Art From Shanghai, to look at China’s role in this newly emerging field. With MOMENTUM’s role as a bridge between international art communities with a mission to explore how time-based art reflects the digitization of our societies and the resulting cultural change, and CAC’s stated mission being to bring to the public awareness of the impending post-human reality and the resulting social and political implications by accentuating the dynamic synergy of art and science as a response to the challenges and opportunities that contemporary media society has given rise to – the topic of AI, and the position of Chinese media artists within an international context will be explored through an involved engagement with the Berlin art community and with audiences at Transmediale.
The talks, workshops, and presentations proposed will be created specifically for Transmediale 2016, but are part of a long-term cooperation between MOMENTUM and Chronus Art Center involving an Artist Residency Exchange in Artificial Intelligence. The participating Chinese artists will be selected from a shortlist of the leading artists working in the field. The jury for the final selection has not yet convened. We will inform Transmediale as soon as the selection is made. The presentations made for Transmediale 2016 will form a part of our Residency research, while the works produced as a result of this Residency and documentation of presentations and events at Transmediale will be shown in an exhibition on Artificial Intelligence at MOMENTUM, in parallel with Transmediale 2017.
The Chronus Art Center Residency in Artificial Intelligence at MOMENTUM
MOMENTUM will host 2 Chinese artists, selected by CAC, working with Artificial Intelligence to participate in a Research Residency beginning with participation in workshops/presentations at Transmediale in January 2016, and resulting in the creation of new work to be shown in a group exhibition on Artificial Intelligence – ‘On Autopilot’: Art and Artificial Intelligence – at MOMENTUM in parallel with Transmediale in January-February 2017. The other artists participating in this group show will be selected by a jury of MOMENTUM curators and external experts in the field. This jury has not yet convened. This exhibition will include documentation of all work and events done for this project at Transmediale. These workshops and presentations will form the basis for the artistic research for the creation of new works for the exhibition. The aim is for the exhibition to travel to Chronus Art Center in 2017, including the Transmediale material.
On Autopilot: Anxiety and Artificial Intelligence
Google’s head of technology, Ray Kurzweil, recently predicted that we will achieve human-level artificial intelligence (AI) by 2029. Stephen Hawking, the renowned physicist, has warned repeatedly and urgently that we require robot ethics, else we are in serious danger of computers that will obliterate their human creators. AI is both utopic and destructive, and this duality has fascinated writers from Karel Capek who coined the term ‘Robot’ in 1920, to Stanislew Lem and Isaac Asimov. Its fascination has endured in popular culture, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis via Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to I, Robot and Ex Machina. Recently, artists such as Ian Cheng, Lars TCF Holdhus, Yuri Pattinson, Cecile B. Evans and Harm van den Dorpel have programmed chatbots, created virtual tour guides, and breathed life into primitive animated communities. All works address a situation where the computer is treated as a “metaphor for an organism, not as a mere calculator.” Artistic interest in AI is thriving, and it is creating new forms of art.
With the theme of the 2016 edition of the Transmediale being that of the anxieties surrounding cultural production and life under digital capitalism, out of the four main strands, two lend themselves to artists working with themes of AI: Anxious to Make and Anxious to Share. The first stream looks at cybernetic automation, DIY culture and industrial production. What are the functions of production and creation under this aegis? In terms of AI, this can be understood as the intersection between machine intelligence, machine creation and human participation. The second stream, Anxious to Share, examines how information sharing is happening, both large scale through social media such as Facebook and Twitter, but also on smaller, more localised platforms, such as private WeChat or WhatsApp groups. One of the questions posed is ‘from a non-human perspective, are new scales of sharing emerging?’ In 2014, Twitter estimated that 8.5% of its users were bots. Twitter (and other social media) can be seen as large-scale experiments for the interaction between (primitive) AI and human agents. This opens up many avenues for artistic intervention, which can lead to workshops and participatory events, such as Pecha Kucha sessions.
MOMENTUM curators Rachel Rits-Volloch and Jeni Fulton will work closely with Shanghai-Based groundbreaking media artist and curator Aaajiao and the curatorial team of CAC to select 2 Chinese artists working in the fields of AI or machine intelligence and its interaction with human life and society, to come to Berlin for a 5-month Residency in Artificial Intelligence in January – May 2016. For Transediale 2016, these artists will present their work and artistic research as performance-lectures, with interactive installations open to audience participation. The curatorial team, including Aaajiao working from Berlin and networked with his extensive studio in Shanghai, will furthermore curate the presentation of related work by Chinese artists with participatory workshops to discuss and assess the artistic work being done in AI around the world and how China can emerge into this field. These workshops will be framed around the format of Pecha Kucha, with a presenation by all participants followed by an open discussion moderated by the curator of each section. We propose to hold daily Pecha Kucha events throughout the duration of Transmediale with topics selected by the curators and an open call to participants.
Because our juries have not yet convened to select the Chinese artists participating in the Residency, nor the other artists in the resulting group exhibition ‘On Autopilot’: Art and Artificial Intelligence, it is not possible to list all the participants at this time. This is very much a process-based project, which will unfold as participating artists are selected (by October 2015). Works presented as simple installations on monitors or laptops will be chosen from the shortlist of candidates for the CAC Residency in Artificial Intelligence and the On Autopilot Exhibition. The artists and curators will propose topics for each Pecha Kucha session and a shortlist of invited participants, with the rest being invited through an open call through our combined networks. MOMENTUM will document all these events and presentations for public display in our online Archive, and for inclusion in later iterations of the exhibition.
AI is, by its very nature, a cross-disciplinary field involving media art, computer programming, mediated interfaces, participatory and performative projects, just for a start. Transmediale audiences will be engaged on multiple levels through hybrid formats which at once exhibit and create, teach and learn. As traditionally Transmediale has attracted a mainly Western/US/European audience, it would be of significant benefit to involve artists working outside this geographical field of discourse, especially at this crucial moment when, in China, artistic work with AI is a newly emerging field.
Project Curators: Rachel Rits-Volloch & Jeni Fulton
Co-Curator, Participant: Xu Wenkai (Aaajiao)
RACHEL RITS-VOLLOCH, PhD – Founding Director, MOMENTUM
Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch 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. She wrote her dissertation on visceral spectatorship in contemporary cinema, focusing on the biological basis of embodiment. Having lectured in film studies and visual culture, her focus moved to contemporary art after she undertook a residency at A.R.T Tokyo. Rachel Rits-Volloch is currently based in Berlin, having previously lived and worked in the US, UK, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sydney. nRachel Rits-Volloch founded MOMENTUM in 2010 in Sydney, Australia, as a parallel event to the 17th Biennale of Sydney. Since that time, MOMENTUM has evolved into a non-profit global platform for time-based art, with headquarters in Berlin at the thriving art center, Kunstquartier Bethanien.
JENI FULTON, PhD – Associate Director, MOMENTUM
Jeni Fulton is Associate Director at MOMENTUM. She is also the Art and Commissioning Editor for 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.
XU WENKAI (AAAJIAO):
http://www.eventstructure.com
http://cornersound.com
Xu Wenkai (Aaajiao) (b. 1984, Xi’an) is one of China’s foremost media artists, bloggers and free culture developers. Having studied physics and computers, Xu Wenkai is self-taught as an artist and new media entrepreneur. In his works he focuses on the use of data and its various forms of display. In 2003 he established the sound art website cornersound.com and in 2006 he founded the Chinese take on the blog We Make Money Not Art: We Need Money Not Art. He is devoted to Processing, an open-source visual programming software, Dorkbot, a non-profit initiative for creative minds and Eventstructure, an interdisciplinary center for art, media, technology and academic research based in Shanghai and founded by Xu. In his works, Aaajiao focuses on the use of data and its various forms of display and on the processes of transforming content from reality to data and back again. His most significant contribution to the field of new media in China is a social one, as he act a as a vector for the interpretation and communication of international and local trends in the artistic use of software. Recent exhibitions include his solo-show titled The Screen generation, at C Space (2013) and chi K11 Art Space in Shanghai and at 9m2 Museum in Beijing (2014) and group-exhibition TRANSCIENCE – INTRACTABLE OBJECTS at Taikang Space in Beijing (2014). He participated in Transmediale (2010) and in PANDAMONIUM: Media Art from Shanghai at MOMENTUM (2014).
RELATED MATERIAL:
Article on Artificial Intelligence in Contemporary Art published by Jeni Fulton:
https://www.academia.edu/14461469/Artificial_Intelligence_in_Contemporary_Art
(A presentation format now expanded to a global network founded by Mark Dytham in Tokyo in 2003):
Previous cooperations between MOMENTUM and CAC:
PANDAMONIUM: Media Art from Shanghai (2014) >>
The PANDAMONIUM Artist Residency >>
The Best of Times the Worst of Times Revisited (2014) >>
MOMENTUM is a Gallery, a Project Space, a Collection, an Archive, a Residency, a Public Art Initiative, a Salon, and a Network active worldwide since 2010. MOMENTUM is a non-profit and non-commercial platform for time-based art, with headquarters in Berlin at the Kunstquartier Bethanien. Through our program of Exhibitions, Education, Public Video Art Initiatives, Residencies, and the Collection and Performance Archive, we are dedicated to providing a platform for exceptional artists working with time-based practices. MOMENTUM’s mission is to continuously reassess the growing diversity and relevance of time-based practices, always seeking innovative answers to the question, ‘What is time-based art?’. As the world speeds up, and time itself seems to flow faster, MOMENTUM seeks to explore how time-based art reflects the digitization of our societies and the resulting cultural change. By enabling Exhibition, Discussion, Research, Creation, Collection, and Exchange, MOMENTUM is a platform which challenges the notion of time-based art in the context of both historical and technological development. Positioned as both a local and global platform with a vast international network, MOMENTUM serves as a bridge joining professional art communities, irrespective of institutional and national borders. The long-term Goals of MOMENTUM are: Building Knowledge, Building Audiences, Supporting Artists and Artistic Innovation, bringing to Berlin work by international artists that would not otherwise have been seen here, and ensuring an international audience for exceptional local artists. The key ideas driving MOMENTUM are: Collaboration, Exchange, Education, Innovation, and Inspiration. With a non-exclusive and non-elitist view, MOMENTUM believes ART IS FOR EVERYONE.
The MOMENTUM Residency, dedicated to artistic research into time and temporality, houses up to 3 artists or curators at a time. With weekly supervision by the Residency Coordinator, and with the daily support of the curatorial team, MOMENTUM offers a process-based Residency, wherein artists are given individual guidance and support with the research and development of their work. Drawing on MOMENTUM’s extensive network of contacts in both the visual arts and the broader cultural field, the Residency arranges talks, workshops, studio and gallery visits, and other events in order to connect art professionals who mutually benefit from collaboration and exchange. As a platform active globally, MOMENTUM is committed to documenting its activities and making these available as educational resources for both art professionals and the general public.
Established in 2013, Chronus Art Center (CAC) is China’s first nonprofit art organization dedicated to the presentation, research / creation and scholarship of media art. CAC with its exhibitions, residency-oriented fellowships, lectures and workshop programs and through its archiving and publishing initiatives, creates a multifaceted and vibrant platform for the discourse, production and dissemination of media art in a global context. CAC is positioned to advance artistic innovation and cultural awareness by critically engaging with media technologies that are transforming and reshaping contemporary experiences.
Since its founding by the entrepreneur Dillion ZHANG, independent curator LI Zhenhua, and artist HU Jieming, CAC has organized a series of solo and group exhibitions, among them “Extra Time” by the Indian artist collective Raqs Media, and “The Best of Times, The Worst of Times” curated by David Elliott. In 2014 CAC presented Jeffrey Shaw and HU Jieming, an exhibition featuring two noted media artists, and “Pandamonium” in partnership with MOMENTUM, Berlin, and co-curated by David Elliott and LI Zhenhua. CAC also launched educational and fellowship programs in collaboration with a number of art institutions including the China Academy of Arts (Hangzhou), V2_Institute for Unstable Media (Rotterdam), and the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, among others. Located in the M50 Creative Park near the Suzhou River in Shanghai and occupying a multifunctional space of 800 square meters, CAC provides the public with a year-round exhibition calendar, lecture and workshop series and other special programs.
Beginning in 2015, under the artistic direction of ZHANG Ga, a curator and professor of media art, and with the support of a newly established international advisory board consisted of leading scholars, artists and museum professionals, CAC has restructured its programming by launching a series of interdisciplinary projects, including an ambitious research / creation–oriented fellowship and commissions project, thematic exhibitions and educational programs that contextualize historical and present day media art conditions, expanded global collaboration and exchange. CAC brings to the public awareness of the impending post-human reality and the resulting social and political implications by accentuating the dynamic synergy of art and science as a response to the challenges and opportunities that contemporary media society has given rise to.
Varvara Shavrova
The Opera
20 – 30 April 2016
Finissage 30 April @ 13.00
Gallery Weekend Brunch & Artist Talk
Varvara Shavrova in dialogue with Li Zhenhua
Matryoshka: Layers of Transformation in Peking Opera:
How Contemporary Artists Look at Traditional Chinese Opera
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
Originally commissioned as a multi-channel video projection for the Espacio Cultural El Tanque, an empty oil tank in Tenerife, and subsequently shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, 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.
Website – CV – Vimeo Channel
Varvara Shavrova was born in Moscow and studied fine art at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. After 15 years in London, she moved to Beijing, where she lived and worked for over five years. Now based in Dublin, Shavrova has shown in numerous public institutions and has curated significant exhibitions in Russia, China, Ireland and the UK. Her work is in many important public and private collections worldwide. The Opera projection in Berlin is supported by Culture Ireland.
Li Zhenhua
Website
Li Zhenhua is a Beijing/Zurich-based multi-media artist, curator, writer and producer for international and Chinese contemporary culture. Li Zhenhua has been active in the artistic field since 1996, his practice mainly concerning curation, art creation and project management. Since 2010 he has been the nominator for the Summer Academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee Bern (Switzerland), as well as for The Prix Pictet (Switzerland). He is a member of the international advisory board for the exhibition “Digital Revolution” at the Barbican Centre in the UK in 2014, received as member of the international advisory board for Videotage and Symbiotica in 2015. Li Zhenhua has edited several artists’ publications, including Yan Lei: What I Like to Do (Documenta, 2012), Hu Jieming: One Hundred Years in One Minute (2010), Feng Mengbo: Journey to the West (2010), and Yang Fudong: Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2009). A collection of his art reviews has been published under the title Text in 2013. He is the founding-director of Beijing Art Lab, a virtual and physical platform for art, research, and exchange, as well as of co-founder of Chronus Art Center, Shanghai. He is currently head-curator of Art Basel Hong Kong’s Film section (2015-16) and many other international initiatives.
PREVIEW – The Opera Trailer:
PREVIEW – Time Lapses:
Previous exhibitions
(Click on the images to see more detailed info)
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[fve] http://player.vimeo.com/video/217852431 [/fve]
PHOTOS OF THE TALK
Photo Credit: Kirill McGowan
Keegan Luttrell
Keegan Luttrell
10 June – 12 August 2015
Keegan Luttrell is a multi-media artist living and working in Leysin, Switzerland. She completed her MFA in sculpture at Mills College in Oakland, California in 2013. She graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008 with a BFA in Art History, Theory and Criticism and a concentration in Photography. She has shown works in San Francisco, Oakland, Brooklyn, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Aix-en-Provence, France, Geneva Switzerland and Athens and Santorini, Greece. She is a recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan fellowship award and the Betsy Worden Memorial Fund Scholarship. In Leysin, she teaches visual art at an international boarding school.
““Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state …”
– The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
During her residency, Keegan Luttrell investigates the affects of institutionalization and the nature of time in an isolated state. Drawing inspiration from where she currently lives, a small mountain town in Switzerland that famously housed patients in Sanatoriums throughout the early 1900s, her research revolves around one’s relationship to time when removed from the outside world. Through creating various simulated lenses to these imagined worlds, a shift of what is real and what is perceived is depicted through portals and slivers of built and simulated environments. Through video, sculpture and performance, Luttrell has used her art practice and studio space to channel the behaviors of the isolated and the means and ways one builds a relationship to the awareness of time.
PHOTOS OF THE OPEN STUDIO
(photos by Marina Belikova)
Sara Alavi Residency 2015
Terna Prize Artist Residency at MOMENTUM
with
Sara Alavi
1 May – 24 July 2015
Sara Alavi (b.1979, Tehran) is an Iranian artist based in Milan. She studied painting at the Art Department of Alzahra University in Tehran, concluding her studies in 2002. She moved to Rome in 2006 to continue her studies in multimedia projects at La Sapienza University, which she completed in 2010. Since 2011 she lives and works in Milan where she received her second level Degree in Painting at Accademia Di Belle Arti di Brera.
We are sure that the shadows exist because we can see them. Existence concerns what can be defined, yet the only thing definable in case of a shadow is what creates it: light and a barrier.
Shadow is where the light does not exist. To talk about a shadow, we point out to the barrier that obstructs the light. The Shadow leads us to the barrier. It is our anticipation of the barrier obstructing the light that helps us recognize this undefinable thing — an undefinable thing that has the power of refreshing us in hot summer days.
It seems paradoxical that something undefinable can produce tangible feelings. Shadow persists in existing through our definitions.
As a matter of experience, for every material object, there corresponds the possibility of its shadow; but when we turn off the light, Shadow ceases to exist. So relying on our senses, its existence is not monumental but ephemeral.
Rather than a solid material, Shadow is a contradictory possibility. It is an elusive being between a déjà vu or a prediction.
Shadow resembles the possibilities like hope and despair. For every material object (or every event with material consequences), there corresponds the possibility of hope and despair. Hope indicates a barrier that gives rise to it. In a city destroyed in war, or in a living creature in a mortal condition, hope and despair coexist. Despair is the endless doubt that the shadow is merely an illusion.
PHOTOS OF THE OPEN STUDIO
(photos by Marina Belikova)
BALAGAN!!!
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EXHIBITIONS
BALAGAN!!!
CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE FORMER
SOVIET UNION AND OTHER MYTHICAL PLACES
Opening 13 November
14 November — 23 December 2015
75 Artists from 14 Countries from the Former “East”
Curated by David Elliott
Produced by MOMENTUM
[fve] http://vimeo.com/145039902 [/fve]
EXHIBITION at:
MOMENTUM
Mariannenplatz 2
10997 Berlin
Stiftung Brandenburger Tor
am Max Liebermann Haus
Pariser Platz 7
10117 Berlin
Kühlhaus am Gleisdreieck
Luckenwalder Str. 3
10963 Berlin
OPENING HOURS – ALL VENUES:
Frid & Sat @ 12 – 8pm
Mon, Wed, Thurs, Sun @ 12 – 6pm
Closed Tuesdays
16 December 2015 at 2 – 8pm
The Russians Have A Word For It: BALAGAN and the World Outside
Speakers:
Kathrin Becker // Ekaterina Degot // Volker Diehl // David Elliott //
Gabriele Knapstein // Olaf Kühl // Bojana Pejic // Asia Zak Persons
— by David Elliott
Balagan knows no borders. Although the contemporary condition of the world is almost impossible to categorise, the Russians have a single word for it that describes, with celebratory gusto, a farce, a mess, a SNAFU, the most unholy of cock-ups. What existentialism was for war-ravaged Europe, or ‘normality’ for the Cold War, balagan is for the whole world today.
BALAGAN!!! is therefore the framework for an exhibition curated by David Elliott in Berlin, for MOMENTUM and the NORDWIND Festival 2015, that shows contemporary art from just one part of the world, those countries that comprised the former USSR and its allies. In 1999 Elliott conceived the travelling exhibition AFTER THE WALL. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, that measured cultural change one decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, twenty-five years after this momentous event, he shows a world where chaos and misrule, along with the social comedy that results from it, are lovingly shown in art as artists struggle to digest and reconcile what they have experienced and integrate this with their dreams of a new and different way of life.
The exhibition will take place from 14 November to 23 December in three venues: the museum spaces of the Max Liebermann Haus in Pariser Platz, next to the Brandenburg Gate, the rough industrial interiors of Kühlhaus, a former refrigeration plant on Gleisdreiecke, and in MOMENTUM, part of the Bethanien Art District in Kreuzburg. At the same time works by some artists in the exhibition will be shown in Hellerau in Dresden and kampnagel in Hamburg. A lecture, symposium and performance programme will also be organised in co-operation with ICI and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
The story of BALAGAN is strongly embedded within all the arts, particularly in the commedia dell’arte that underwent a revival in Russia immediately before and after the Revolution. Derived from the Turkic and Persian for ‘a wooden platform’, the original Russian word meant ‘fairground’, or the lightly constructed booths that characterised them. By the 18th century it had become associated with the activities of the people who worked there: puppeteers, clowns and jesters who made fun of and satirised established order.
In 1906, writer and poet Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) finished his play Balaganshchik (variously translated as The Fairground Booth or The Puppet Show), the St. Petersburg première of which was directed by the avant-garde theatre director and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), who also played Pierrot, its lead role. The riotous events of the opening night proved to be the first salvo in a continuing volley of artistic coups that lasted until the repression of the early 1930s. Blok’s intent in presenting such a dysfunctional masquerade to the public was to explode the social pretensions of Realist and Symbolist theatre by exposing its melodramatic clichés yet, in doing this, he was exposed the pain and drama of his times as well as on his personal experience and relationships. The creative fusion between the political, social and the personal is the impetus for BALAGAN!!! today.
Even during the dark years of Stalinist repression BALAGAN continued underground. While Europe was torn apart by World War II, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) completed his critical masterwork Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In this he regarded the upside-down-world of carnival as both a safety valve and a vision of a better life that depended, amongst other things, on the subversive effect of exhibiting publicly the private functions of the human body.1 Cultural dichotomies such as spirit and body, ‘high’ and ‘low’, rich and poor, sacred and profane were revealed as methods of social control, the disruption of which he highlighted in the grotesque realism of Rabelais’ writings and time. In the face of oppression laughter was an uncontrollable, therapeutic, liberating force. The revolutionary politics of laughter and the cathartic release that it promises are a central subject of the BALAGAN!!! exhibition.
(Click on the name to see the bio and the work description below)
Afrika (Sergey Bugaev)
Vyacheslav Akhunov
Shaarbek Amankul
Evgeny Antufiev
Lutz Becker
Blue Noses Group
Sergey Bratkov
Yvon Chabrowski
Olga Chernysheva
Valery Chtak
Chto Delat?
Vladimir Dubossarsky
Andrej Dubravsky
Natalia Dyu
Sasha Frolova
Ivan Gorshkov
Georgy Guryanov
Dmitry Gutov
Sitara Ibrahimova
Nikita Kadan
Polina Kanis
Krištof Kintera
Francizka Klotz
Irina Korina
Egor Koshelev
Katarzyna Kozyra
Olya Kroytor
Gaisha Madanova
Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe
Natalie Maximova
Yerbossyn Meldibekov
Almagul Menlibayeva
Boris Mikhailov
Ciprian Mureşan
Kriszta Nagy (Tereskova)
Deimantas Narkevičius
Ioana Nemes
Pavel Pepperstein
Pirate TV
Sasha Pirogova
Mykola Ridnyi
Arsen Savadov
Mariya Sharova / Dmitriy Okruzhnov
Haim Sokol
Slavs and Tatars
Leonid Tishkov
Aleksandr Ugay
Oleg Ustinov
Anastasia Vepreva
VMS Group
Stas Volyazlovsky
Viktor Vorobyev / Elena Vorobyeva
Vadim Zakharov
Sergey Zarva
ZIP Group
Artur Žmijewski
Constantin Zvezdochotov
AES+F
Tatiana Arzamasova (b.1955 Moscow, USSR) The collaboration between Arzamasova, Evzovich and Svyatsky began 1987 as AES, however, after fashion photographer Fridkes joined the group in 1995 it became known as AES+F. Arzamasova and Evzovich both conceptual architects, graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute State Academy (MARCHI) (1978 and 1982), Svyatsky graduated from the Moscow University of Printing Arts in the department of book design (1980). The many projects that have made employing this wide range of skills have been recognised by a number of awards: Pino Pascali Prize, 18th Edition, Foundation & Museum Pino Pascali, Italy (2015), Nordart Festival, Main Award, Germany (2014), Kandinsky Prize, Russia (2012). AES+F have also exhibited their work in numerous international venues, the most recent include: 001 Inverso Mundus. AES+F, the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2015) Triumph Gallery, Moscow (2015), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2012), 1st Kyiv Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012), Melbourne Festival (2011) and the 17th Sydney Biennale (2010). Their practice includes computer-based art, photography, performance, drawings, sculpture, objects and video installation. AES+F bring together many different, usually conflicting, taboos in their work, such as youth culture, religion, gender issues, class or ethnicity, to create an overall critique of contemporary consumerism and desire. The laughter invoked by parody, sarcasm or allegory not only mimics the effect of a safety valve in times of oppression, but also offers a critical vision for a better life as the world is turned upside down.As in a medieval morality play, the banality of today’s consumerism with its social and financial vices, is made evident and tangible. Inverso Mundus(2015), the title of their vast moving video ‘frieze’ shown here does just this: the poor become rich, the wise behave as fools, saints degenerate into sinners, the weak grasp power. No expression of power or entitlement is spared as the artists slice through the cortex of capitalism to expose its poverty of thought and value. |
AFRIKA (Sergey Bugaev)
Born 1966 in Novorossiysk, USSR) Bugaev is an artist, curator and sometime musician who grew up in the southern Russian port city of Novorossiysk. In 1981 he moved to Leningrad where he met and became friends with such leaders of the unofficial cultural scene as artist Timur Novikov (1958 –2002) and the rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov (b. 1953). He soon started to make art himself under the pseudonym ‘Afrika’ and, in 1983, joined the ‘New Artists’ movement Novikov had founded the previous year. In 1987 he played the lead role of Bananen in the cult film Assa, directed by Sergei Solovyov, that drew Russian rock music out of the counterculture into the mainstream and expressed a young generation’s desire for openness and freedom under perestroika. In 1990 he was co-founder, with Irena Kuksenaite, Olessya Turkina and Viktor Mazin, of Kabinet, a theoretical journal of art and psychology. His work focussed on performance, installation and the fabrication of strange objects that all reflected the consequences of misgovernment and the rapidity of change in Russia in the years after the breakup of the USSR. He also, with Novikov, provided an important contact between St. Petersburg and influential western artists such as John Cage and Robert Rauschenburg Recent group exhibitions of his work include: Club of Friends, Calvert 22 Gallery, London (2014) and Assa: the last generation of Leningrad’s avant-garde art, Russian Academy of Fine Arts Museum, St. Petersburg (2013). His solo shows include, amongst others: The Good Ballerina is Always Right, I-20 Gallery, New York (2008), Sergei Bugaev Afrika, Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg (2008) and his representation in the Russian Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999). The two works by Afrika shown here use the silk ceremonial banners of the Soviet era as exotic objets trouvés. In the earliest of these, Quasi-Dream (1995), a joint portrait of Lenin and Stalin is appropriated and embroidered over by images of hallucinogenic mushrooms and textual references to Roman Jacobson (1896 – 1982), the Russian American pioneer of linguistic structuralism.The lush naturalism of this work is in stark contrast to the embroidered child-like forms in Twin Portraits of Gusinsky and Berezovsky at the Moment of the Sale of the Remnants of their Motherland (2000). The glum faces in this work represent the Russian Oligarchs and former media tycoons Vladimir Gusinsky (b.1952) and Boris Berezovsky (1946 –2013) who in 2000 were both targeted by Vladimir Putin when he became President as part of his promised anti-oligarch campaign. Both were investigated for financial malfeasance and had to leave Russia to avoid imprisonment. |
Vyacheslav Akhunov
Born 1948 in Osh, Kyrgyz SSR Akhunov graduated from the Moscow Surikov Art Institute in 1979, afterwards working independently as an artist, writer and philosopher. Since 1980 he has lived and worked in Tashkent, producing works using collage, painting, installation, performance and moving image as well as writing numerous essays and novels. Since 2000, he has been investigating the possibilities of new media, especially video, often appearing in his works himself. His work tackles the ironies of perceived cultural marginality as well as the power of difference. He also examines change and inequality in the region in which he lives, commenting obliquely on the rise of collective religiosity in what was previously a secular society. His work is always focused on the integrity and responsibility of the individual in whatever structure of power he or she may be situated. Akunov has designed national pavilions for Uzbekistan for the World Expos in Aichi, Japan (2005) and Hanover (2000). As an artist he has participated in such exhibitions as the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the 1st Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012), Revolution vs Revolution, Beirut Art Center (2012), Documenta 13, Kassel (2012), Between Heaven and Earth, Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, Calvert 22, London (2011), Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011), and Atlas. How To Carry The World On One’s Back?, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2011). Allee of Superstars (2015), the work Akunov has made especially for this exhibition, is both a celebration and condemnation of political buffoonery. It consists of a long narrow red carpet with the faces of carefully selected international politicians printed in stars on its surface. As if they were at the entrance to a Hollywood premiere, visitors are invited to enjoy the ridiculousness of their moment of celebrity by walking on the carpet and laughing as each new face is stepped on and recognised. |
Shaarbek Amankul Born in 1959 Bishkek, Kyrgyz SSR) Amankul graduated with degrees in art and history from the Kyrgyz State College of Arts (1980) and the Kyrgyz National University (1989) respectively. He has participated in a number ofseveral residencies abroad as well as in exhibitions at the following museums and art spaces: Kunstmuseum Thun (2014), Yay Gallery (2013, Baku), 50 Years of Video Art (2012, Marseille, Tokyo), International Video Art (2011, Ramallah), Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, Calvert 22 (2011, London), 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), Kunsthalle/Spiegel, Lothringer13 (2009, Munich), OK Center for Contemporary Art (2009, Linz), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (2009, Sydney), Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern ArtBrisbane (2009), 22ndLes Instants Vidéo (2009, Marseille), 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008), Modern Art Gallery (2007, Ulan Bator), Kunsthaus Gazometer (2006, Liechtenstein). 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. Vatan (2007) and Ketsin (2010), the twofilms shown in BALAGAN!!! examine the tragic discrepancies between propaganda and reality in statements of ‘motherland’ as well as the ludicrous faces of state power, inhumanity,wasteage of resources and civil unrest.Ketsin depicts the second revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 after five years of relative stability and expands the perspective on the wastefullness and absurdity of human action already shown in Vatan. Since 2007 Mr. Amankul has been founding director of the organizational development and creative initiatives at B’Art Contemporary, a non-profit organization in Bishkek that researches and promotes art development in Kyrgyzstan and continue his artistic research method of the several projects in Kyrgyzstan. |
Evgeny Antufiev Born 1986 Kyzyl in Tuva, ASSR. Antufiev graduated from Moscow’s Institute of Contemporary Art Problems in 2009; in the same year he was awarded the Kandinsky Prize in the ‘Young Artist’ category. His solo exhibitions include Seven Underground Kings or a Brief Story of the Shadow, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2015), Immortality Forever, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2015), Twelve, wood, dolphin, knife, bowl, mask, crystal, bones and marble – fusion. Exploring materials, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (2013), Exploring The Material: Absorption, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2012), and such group exhibitions as The Empty Pedestal Ghosts from the Eastern Europe, Museo Civico Archeologico. Bologna (2014) and Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011). Antufiev’s primitive-looking works revolve around his conviction that that ‘…in the wake of the general collapse of the space of myth, the knowledge of it becomes the basis for creativity and perception of reality’. The ostensible naivety of his works, therefore, fills a vacuum in an increasingly urban alienated environment by re-injecting into it primal elements of signification and meaning. In some sense, his works are almost a parody of folk art – those shown here seem to have affinities Siberian and northern Russian indigenous art – yet their voodoo ‘roughness’ also implies retribution for environmental mutation and social disturbance as well as a critique of the slickness of contemporary art. The hand embroidery and stitching in these works also relates to the artist’s own story and that of his family. Re-using found objects, that integrate the violent or abject histories of nameless figures into an unfinished narrative, he reflects on both past and present in which political control and sudden, violent disappearance have been a fundamental part of everyday life. |
Lutz Becker Born 1941 in Berlin, Germany. Lutz Becker is a filmmaker, artist and curator, who graduated under Thorold Dickinson from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. In recent years, he worked extensively on the reconstruction of Sergei Eisenstein’s film ¡Que Viva Mexico!, whilst working as well as a curator. He participated with a video installation in the 1st Kyiv Biennale (2012) and in The Best of Times, the Worst of Times, CAC, Shanghai (2014). As a curator he worked on Salomon Nikritin – George Grosz: Political terror and social decadence in Europe between the Wars, SMCA, Thessaloniki (2014) and Modern Times – Responding to Chaos, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2010). Working mainly with video and film, the three-channel film installation The Scream (2012) is both homage to the Ukrainian filmmaker Aleksandr Dovzhenko (1894 –1956) and an elegy relating to the failure of the revolution that, at one time, he clearly supported. Dovzhenko structured his films poetically, with pastoral simplicity set in contrast against modernist self-consciousness. Echoing the title of Edvard Munch’s famous painting, Becker has created a montage of segments from Dovzhenko’s films, based on dramatic interactions and accidental synchronicities of images and scenes, to tell a story about violence, horror and forlorn hope firmly rooted within the Ukrainian countryside and land, both of which become protagonists in this work. |
Blue Noses Group
Aleksandr (Sasha) Shaburov Shaburov graduated from Sverdlovsk Academy of Architecture and Arts (1986), and Sverdlovsk Art School (1985), Mizin graduated from the Novosibirsk Architectural Institute (1984). The Blue Noses group was created in 1999, after they both met on the project Shelter Beyond Time, where they simulated the experience of life in a bunker after a nuclear catastrophe. From time to time the group includes other members and sometimes they perform with the Novosibirsk Rock group Nuclear Elk. In 2008 they were nominated for the Kandinsky Prize. Sometimes they exhibit as solo artists but as the Blue Noses they have been shown in Random Coincidences, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg (2014), From Siberia with Love, 1999-2009, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Nantes (2010/11), Retrospective 1999-2009, Fotoloft Gallery, Moscow (2010), Proletarian Conceptualism, M&J Guelman Gallery, Moscow (2010), The Naked Truth, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York (2008) and the 50th and 51st Venice Biennales (2003, 2005). The Blue Noses are the Tricksters of their generation and derive their name not only from the bitter cold of the places they were born, but also, ironically, from the itinerant Blue Blouses – groups of agit-prop performers who in the early years of the Revolution travelled around factories and the countryside disseminating the communist message. Known for the satirical and often provocative works in which they appear, that encompass photography, video, performance and installation, they always use low-tech methods of production in order to parody and critique different aspects of Russian society, art, politics, and religion. Their works are marked by roughness and a crude, dark humour, even to a level of autism, that has encouraged some to regard them as Holy Fools – contemporary equivalents of Yurodivy – the mendicants who, during medieval times, were believed to be both insane and touched by God. Their photo-panel The Era of Mercy (2005), one of their works shown in BALAGAN!!! – a homage to a vandalised wall painting by Banksy, the British street artist – depicted two Russian policemen locked in a passionate embrace in a snowy birch forest. In 2007, this was refused an export license by the then Minister of Culture on the grounds that it was both ‘erotic’ and a ‘disgrace to Russia’ and should therefore not be shown in a public exhibition in France. |
Sergey Bratkov Born 1960 in Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR. Bratkov graduated in Industrial Electronics at the Polytechnic Academy of Kharkov in 1983 but, like Boris Mikhailov, his friend, taught himself photography and became a member of the Vremya (Time), a group of underground artists who pushed far beyond official boundaries to confront such Soviet ‘taboos’ as individual sexuality and volition. Out of this, with Mikhailov and Sergil Solonskij, he formed the Fast Reaction Group, which produced absurd performances or tableaux, such as If I were a German (1994), that imagined in black and white photographs an ironic pornographic Arcadia of SS Officers in German-occupied Ukraine. He has won many awards and has had a number of solo shows, including Spell, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2014), Chapiteau Moscow, Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin (2013), the Innovation Prize in Contemporary Visual Art, NCCA Moscow (2010), Glory Days, (Winterthur, Madrid and Hamburg 2008-10), and the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). Recent group shows include Borderline. Ukrainian art 1985-2004, Pinchuk Art Centre. Kyiv (2015), Faces now. European portrait photography since 1990, Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2015) and Photomania-2015, Baltic Biennale of Photography, Kaliningrad (2015). Three large prints by Bratkov from the Chapiteau Moscow series (2012), each containing two montaged photographs, are shown in BALAGAN!!! (There are sixty images in the series). These works reflect Bratkov’s description of everyday life in Moscow as a circus Big Top ‘so comical that the first thing it brings to mind is the circus and clowns with sad make up on their faces… Each movement in a theatrical performance is symbolic and filled with ideas, whereas in the circus the crowd gathers for a spectacle, which is closer to reality and therefore also more risky. In the circus, a lion may eat its tamer, and a trapeze artist…can crash on the ground. But the most important thing in the circus is the expectation of a miracle. Moscow is a city in which risk and magic are incredibly concentrated. Thousands of people go there each year in the hope of a miracle. The city is a myth in which you can get fabulously rich, marry a princess and triumph over a two-headed dragon. It is a place where fairy tale beauty and riches live next to infinite ugliness and poverty; the two are so tightly knit together that the one can no longer exist without the other. When the “Moscow Circus” voted to stick with its Ringmaster for the long haul, two questions spring to mind: when the public is no longer laughing but caught in tense silence, maybe it’s time to change the repertoire, as well as the Ringmaster? And, for the future, when will a real miracle happen and the circus disappear?’ With sardonic humour, Bratkov, a connoisseur of urban grotesque, portrays everyday life as a succession of ugly, monstrous and meaningless collisions out of which he wrests abstract allegories of a world gone mad. In these large photo-panels, he dissects the body of a city that has lost its soul and replaced it with successions of mindless mutations or with the robotic motions of marionettes that appear to have run out of control. |
Yvon Chabrowski Born 1978 in Berlin, GDR. Chabrowsky studied philosophy before completing her MA in photography at the Leipziger Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. In 2007 she has received DAAD scholarships to Cairo (2007) and New York (2008). Recently her work has been included in Labour at Eigen+Art, Berlin, fuck the system, A&V, Leipzig, and A Time for Dreams, the IV Biennale of Young Artists, Moscow, (2014). Her video installation Afterimage / Protest is based on a collection of media images of protests found on the Internet. First we hear the sound of steps, then we see on the large video screen how people arrange themselves into a group until the image of a street fight is recreated. The iconography of these enactments is based on images of recent demonstrations in Istanbul and Cairo, but these scenes could also be several centuries old. They uncover something akin to an underlying skeleton of resistance that resurfaces in the images of media reports on resistance. The slowness of the re-enactment and the freezing of movement into tableaux vivants weakens the inevitability of the plot, upon which they are based. As a result it opens up a new space of possibility. |
Olga Chernysheva Born 1962 in Moscow, USSR. Chernysheva studied first at the Moscow Cinema Academy in 1986 and then at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam in 1995/96. Her art, which includes films, photographs, paintings, drawings and object-based works, reflects the ever-changing, turbulent, unstable time through which she has lived and is based on the careful observation of often unwitting subjects. Whatever the medium, her works lyrically investigate the fabric of individuality and self-sufficiency at a time of crumbling values and infrastructures. Chernysheva concentrates on the relationships between object and figure, in particular, on the ways in which people, and the spaces they inhabit, co-exist uneasily or in an absurd way. Her work has been shown in different international solo exhibitions, including: Peripheral Visions, GRAD, London (2015), Olga Chernysheva, Pace London, London (2014/15), Compossibilities, Kunsthalle Erfurt (2013), Olga Chernysheva, Foxy Production, New York (2011), In the Middle of Things, BAK, Utrecht (2011), Olga Chernysheva, Calvert 22, London (2010); she represented Russia at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). As both observer and chronicler, Chernysheva reflects the multi-layered anthropology of post-Soviet society throughout her work, while examining the role of the artist with a singular mix of lyricism, humour, and melancholy. In her video Trashman (2011) she continues her investigation into ‘typical characters under typical circumstances’ within the context of illegal migrant labourers from the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union who moonlight, working ‘invisibly’, in poorly paid temporary jobs. In this case, the hero of her film clears the rubbish from multiplex cinemas. In White Lines – on the Ground, Dark Lines – in the Sky(2012) filmed from the window of her apartment, she choreographs a formal ballet of communication and labour as workmen endlessly install vast lengths of light coloured underground cable that she counterpoints with the ever present ‘black spaghetti’ of existing telephone lines in the sky. Respecting the historical and linguistic spirit of BALAGAN!!! Chernysheva has made a special work for the exhibition: a life-size drawing of a contemporary Moscow ‘Pierrot’. |
Valery Chtak Born 1981 in Moscow, USSR. In 1998 Chtak joined the School of Contemporary Art, an informal art school founded by Avdey Ter-Oganyan. Afterwards, with other young artists from this school, he formed the Radek Community in which he took part in different actions (2000-2005). His work has been shown widely, including his solo exhibitions: Do not come closer, Trenchcoat Gallery, Moscow (2014), This is not a nightmare, Red October Gallery, Moscow (2013), Author Unknown, Mironova Gallery, Kyiv (2012); he also participated in Not Museum, part of the Manifesta 10 parallel program in St Petersburg (2014) and in the group show In Search of Horizon, LDZ, Riga (2014). Collecting trash and re-cycling it in grafitti-like paintings has become Chtak’s trade mark. Inspired by the example of Lawrence Weiner, his works often include riddle-like or impenetrable texts. In 2010 his friend, Alexei Buldakov wrote the following about his work: ‘Chtak’s pictures are like grafitti on the walls of toilet stalls in an ideal city of the sun populated entirely by midgets, all of them artists or conceptual poet-politologists. […] Chtak reproduces chaos, and by doing so, he orders it. He introduces order without imposing form. His painting is rather on the side of formlessness and incompleteness. Every painting has a void, an unmarked space, the paintings aren’t fully populated. They are in a state of becoming, and continue to develop even after he has already painted them. Chtak constantly slips away and eludes finished forms; in fact, he’s a prime example of an artist-bum who starts lots of projects and never finishes anything. Maybe that’s why his pictures look like rantings and ravings, but not sick or senile ravings, but the cheerful ravings of an aggressive schizophrenic, a text that “invokes that oppressed bastard race that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations, resisting everything that crushes and imprisons. Or, as the artist puts it: “It’s cool to go off.”’* *Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, London: Verso 1998, p. 4 |
Chto Delat? Collective founded in St Petersburg in 2003. The name of this group, meaning in Russian What is to be done? is a common question asked everywhere, but it is also the title of an influential social novel written by philosopher, journalist and literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky in 1863 that, in 1902, Lenin appropriated for a political pamphlet, subtitled Burning Questions of Our Movement, inspired by Chernyshevsky’s book. The members of this group come from a wide range of different backgrounds: art, dance, philosophy, theory, performance, design and literature. Using the media of video, performance, intervention, publication and installation, their practice has tracked and commented on the profound changes that have taken place in Russian society and official ideology since perestroika. Sometimes they present a general view of its social and historical development, at others they focus on particular traumatic events that they regard as typical of the whole. The collective has had solo shows in many international venues including: Time Capsule. Artistic Report on Catastrophes and Utopia, Secession, Vienna (2014/15), KOW, Berlin (2015), Chto Delat – Was tun?, Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam (2014/15), The excluded. The moment of danger, Kunstbunker, Forum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Nürnberg (2014) and Chto Delat? Perestroika: Twenty Years After: 2011-1991, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln (2011). They have also participated in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and the 1st International Biennale of Kyiv (2012). The collective aims to combine art with activism and political theory by problematizing social, political and economic change as the basis of their work. The absurd, callous effects of corruption, racism, gender discrimination or violence are highlighted through songspiels (musical commentaries) and lehrstück (learning plays), Brechtian devices that encourage viewers/audiences to unpack events for themselves by considering alternative methods of reasoning. The installation shown in BALAGAN!!! combines two previous works: Russian Woods wand The Tower. The former combines a Greek chorus with the aesthetics of a children’s school play in a violent, grim fairy tale of animal life in the forest. But childish fears of the ‘woods’ are revealed as reality when intercut with snatches from TV newsreels that show orchestrated, mindless, gopnik (urban thug) violence against different groups and minorities. The Tower, a video songspiel that bleeds out into an installation of smothering, visceral red tentacles is based on the conflict around the planned Okhta redevelopment in St Petersburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in which the objections of local heritage groups and residents have been consistently ignored in favour of the Gazprom Corporation’s application to build a 403-metre-high skyscraper, environmentally damaging and completely out of keeping with its surroundings. |
Vladimir Dubossarsky Born 1964 in Moscow, USSR. Dubossarsky graduated from the Moscow Art College (of the 1905 Revolution) in 1984 and, from 1988 to 1991, studied at the Surikov State Art Institute. From 1994 he has worked collectively with Alexander Vinogradov (b. 1963, Moscow) but from 2014 he has also made works by himself. Working in a range of media, the duo have had solo shows in various venues, including: Moscow Vanishing Reality, Museum of Moscow (2014), Painters of Russian Life, Kunsthal KAde, Amersfoort (2013), Retrospective, Winzavod Centre for Contemporary Art and Triumph Gallery, Moscow (2012), X. Ten, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv (2012), Khimki Life, Wilma Gold Gallery, London (2011), On the Block, Charlotte Moser Gallery, Geneva (2010) and Danger! Museum, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice (2009). Initially they took inspiration from the propaganda paintings of the Soviet era in a parody of Socialist Realism that created an illusion of a non-existent paradise. But they also included in these works outside influences, such as the lurid advertising of Hollywood film posters or sleazy porn flicks. In 2001, their work moved away from a depiction of former Soviet fantasies to incorporate ideas from advertising, mass media and celebrity culture, often interpolating these images into banal, kitsch or absurd situations in reference to the newly forming Russian national identity. In his solo work Dubossarsky has ostensibly moved away from carnival chaos towards a more sardonic view of the present. Two large paintings are shown in BALAGAN!!!: In a typically strange reflection of contemporary geopolitics, Happy Childhood (2014) looks back to the era of Stalin with a found, battered, full-length portrait of the Great Leader, yet it is flanked on one side by adoring Disney-like fairies carrying candles, while on the other, in an exotic bamboo landscape, cartoon pandas are bewailing the Leader’s empty chair. What we may ask is the state today of Russian Chinese relations? In Merry Christmas! (2015), we are brought undeniably up to date in an ‘official’ seasonal portrait of President Putin and Chancellor Merkel yet, although they are shown together, there is little communication between them: their body language and expressions suggest that they are enjoying private jokes and may even originate from different planets. |
Andrej Dubravsky Born 1987 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Dubravsky originally studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava from which he graduated in 2012. A precocious talent, he specialised in painting while still a student and won the First Prize in the VUB / Intesa Sanpaolo Foundation Award for Painting for Young Artists (2012). His solo shows have included The Exciting Mysterious Aquarium, Depot in Petržalka, Bratislava (2013) and Golden Sands at the Jiři Švestka galleries in Berlin and Prague (2012/13). His style of painting is inspired by the Old Masters yet the vulnerable male subjects that often feature in his work express a frailty emphasised by the appearance of enigmatic masked figures with bunny-ears. Dubravsky explains his absurd collision of an outdated ideal of feminine beauty with lithe, naked young men as follows: ‘Boys with bunny ears represent young greenhorns like me. The bunnies are some sort of Fauns from the pictures of old masters, but with a kinky, contemporary twist.’ In these works he introduces visitors into a dark, obscure yet intimate world, where the distinctions between guest, visitor and voyeur are easily blurred. |
Natalia Dyu Born 1976 in Karaganda, Kazakh SSR. With a degree from the Buketov Karaganda State University Department of Fine Arts and Mechanical Drawing, Dyu works mainly in video. Her works have been exhibited in Kazakhstan as well as in India, Korea, Greece, Germany, Mexico, the UK and the United States. She participated in the Busan Biennale, Busan (2014), Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art for the Centre of Asia, Calvert 22, London (2011), Liberty / Freedom, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2010), Is There Any Hope for an Optimistic Art? Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2010) and in EXIT, Almaty (2009). Although her approach may seem ironic, her works are fully immersed in social reality, unravelling the processes through which habits are formed, expectations are created and dreams are constructed. The bitter-sweet video Happystan (2007) is set to the soundtrack of a sentimental love ballad written and performed by Aliya Belyaeva whose oligarch husband was imprisoned at the time of its making. The film’s imagery presents a hard and dispassionate look at the economic and social conditions of the vast majority of Kazakh people, particularly women, highlighting with poignant and tragic humour the discrepancy between the naïve optimism of the lyrics and the harsh, colourless realities of everyday life. |
Sasha Frolova Born 1984 in Moscow, USSR. Frolova graduated in 2002 from the Art School of the Stroganov Moscow Higher College of Art and Industry in Moscow and extended her studies in Graphic Design at the National Institute of Design (2004 – 08) and on the New Art Strategies (Contemporary Art) course at the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems (2006) under the tutorship of Joseph Backstein. For ten years she was assistant to the eminent performance artist and object maker Andrey Bartenev. She is the current holder of Andrew Logan’s London-based Alternative Miss World award. She had a solo show in the Frederica Ghizzoni Gallery, Milan (2014) was finalist of the Arte Laguna Special Prize for a solo show in Venice in 2013 and took part in the finalists’ group exhibition in the Arsenale where she was awarded a special exhibition prize. She was a finalist of the Kandinsky Prize (Young Artist Project of the Year nomination) in Moscow, 2009. AQUAAEROBIKA, a collective performance project that she both directs and performs, was first presented in Saint Petersburg and Venice during 2013 and has since toured widely. Her solo shows include FR BR, in the parallel programme of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011), Albinism, Aidan Gallery, Moscow (2010) and Cyber Princess, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2009). She has also presented her work: in London at the Whitechapel Gallery, at the Rifle maker Gallery and at the Russian Winter Festival in Trafalgar Square; in Kyiv at Gogolfest; in Hamburg at Kampnagel; and in Moscow at the Shushev State Museum of Architecture and the National Centre of Contemporary Art (NCCA). Frolova uses her body to work in different media – sculpture, inflatables, dance, music and performance – in which the different kinds of movement, colour and energy it generates are the dominating elements. A hybrid between the puppet-like figures of Oscar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Triadisches Ballet (1922), whirling dervishes and Lady Gaga on speed, she employs outlandish costumes, electronic music and dance to melt into the abstract forms of her colourful inflatable sculptures and to create a sense of awe and wonder in the viewer – a cyber-beauty of latex, speed and sound. As part of the opening celebrations of BALAGAN!!! Frolova will be making a special performance. Her large, inflatable sculptures conjure images of alien body parts and vectors of energy that stand in their own right but also integrate with her performances. Lyubolet (2008), a coiling uterine fantasy in eau de nil latex that also suggests the ready-to-strike mandibles of a Preying Mantis, is sited in the first gallery of BALAGAN!!! in Kühlhaus. |
Ivan Gorshkov Born 1985 in Voronezh, USSR. After graduating from the Fine Arts Department of the Voronezh State Pedagogical University in 2008, Gorshkov co-founded the Voronezh Centre for Contemporary Art. He is a two times recipient of the grant for young Russian artists from the GARAGE Centre for Contemporary Culture, Moscow and has already had the following solo shows: The Way of King’s Pie, Diehl Cube, Berlin (2015), Instant Bliss, Knoll Galerie, Vienna (2013/14) and Boiling point, Galerie L’Aleatoire, Paris (2011). He has also participated in the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013 & 2011) and in the Moscow Biennale for Young Art (2010). Working across media, but concentrating mainly mainly on sculpture and painting, he combines different media in surprising ways by bringing unexpected materials and forms together and covering them with layers and glazes of strange enamel colours so that they resemble ‘an abstract, violent storm’. His sculptures, opaque, dark and mysterious, appear to have landed from another world. The process of fabricating the work is also important to him, smelting, casting, hammering and welding metal into chaotic, illogical form. The rough, hand-made-ness of this process is not only a matter of surface for him but also of fundamental form. |
Georgy Guryanov Born 1961 in Leningrad, USSR – 2013 St. Petersburg, Russia. Guryanov studied at the Vladimir Serov School of Art in Leningrad (1975), but left after one year. He became a leading figure in the Leningrad avant-garde during the 1980s, playing as drummer in Viktor Tsoi’s rock band Kino (1984–90), and worked closely with such artists as Timur Novikov and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, appearing as a guest on Mamyshev-Monroe’s Pirate TV. He was a member of the New Artists movement from 1982, from 1986, a founding member of the ‘Friends of Vladimir Mayakovsky’ and, from 1989, a professor at Novikov’s New Academy of Fine Arts. His many solo shows included Sailors and Heaven, D137 Gallery. St. Petersburg (2004), Painting, XL Gallery, Moscow and Gallery D-137, St. Petersburg (2003), Georgy Gurianov: paintings, photos, graphics, Gallery D-137, St. Petersburg (2001) and at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1997). His work was also shown in Club of Friends. Timur Novikov’s New Artists and the New Academy, Calvert 22, London (2014) and After the Wall. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Stockholm, Budapest and Berlin (1999/2000). A leading member of the St. Petersburg Neo-Academicians, Guryanov was a dandy, making himself his art work. His drawings and paintings were inspired by the values of classical art but he always added a contemporary twist. Using the muscular perfection of Greek and Roman statuary as a starting point, he incorporated contemporary political, gender and social issues into his work, often depicting sailors, athletes or soldiers, and using the faces of his artist friends, or even himself, in ways that were unapologetically homoerotic. Traktoristka (2002), the painting shown in BALAGAN!!! refers back to the styles and subjects of Socialist Realism, but this is neither a pastiche nor a satire, the figure has a wholly new intensity and severity. |
Dmitry Gutov Born 1960 in Moscow, USSR. A graduate of the Institute of Art, Sculpture and Architecture at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, Gutov works with painting, photography, video and installation. He has had many solo shows, including Rembrandt: a different perspective, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2015), Life is hard, but thankfully, brief, Triumph Gallery, Moscow (2014), Fugue. A growing bout of excitement with blackouts and memory decoders, Bourse Art Museum, Riga (2014), No Surprises, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2013), Genius Needs an Orgy, Triumph Gallery Moscow (2013) and Relativism is dialectics for idiots, Scaramouche Gallery, New York (2010). He has also participated in numerous international group shows, such as A clear and unseen presence in the city, NCCA, Moscow (2015), Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014/15) and Unrest of Form. Imagining the Political Subject, Secession, Vienna (2013). In critical dialogue with the art of the former Soviet Union, Gutov also scrutinises Western values, consumerism and modernity in a similarly way, while reflecting on the different paths that contemporary art has taken in different parts of the world and on the significance of this for art. Many of his paintings revolve around how ideas of originality have become submerged by the consumerism of the art market that favours art made within its own image. In his work, Gutov tries to disrupt this pattern that he feels is inimical to art. He has acknowledged the work of the Marxist art and literary critic Mikhail Lifshitz (1905 – 1983) as vital for the development of his own view of art. The collages and paintings shown in BALAGAN!!! strongly reflect this ironic perspective. |
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Sitara Ibrahimova Born 1984 in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR. Ibrahimova is a photographer who has covered the plight of refugees and victims of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, women’s prisons, mental health hospitals, and early marriage in Azerbaijan. She has worked for Eurasianet.org, the Red Cross, and the British Council in Azerbaijan and has taken master classes with photographers Rena Effendi, Inta Ruka, Lucia Nemcova, and Rudo Prekop. Her work has been shown at the 2012 Tbilisi Photo Festival, the 2009 Inter Photo Festival Camp in the Czech Republic, the 2007 Photonic Moments Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and exhibited at galleries and museums in Europe and the South Caucasus. In 2010, Ibrahimova curated the exhibition ART BAZAAR, bringing together the work of contemporary young artists in Baku. She received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Baku State University in 2004 and a bachelor’s degree in still photography from the Film and Television School of Performing Arts Prague in 2010. Her video A Boy is GOOD a Girl is NOT (2013) shows how gender discrimination starts even before birth. One of the musts of the traditional Azerbaijani family is the birth of a boy. Like in many traditional cultures this leads to the gradual gender imbalance since you can control the future by having, or not having, an abortion. The other side of the problem is the state of mind of a woman in that environment: she is transformed into an instrument for achieving an archaic cultural norm, based on the value of a baby-boy. This documentary video tells the stories of several women who gave birth to baby-girls. It shows how cynical people are about traditional cultural norms and how absurd this is in the flow of the modern life. |
Nikita Kadan Born 1982 in Kiev, Ukrainian SSR. Kadan studied under Mykola Storozhenko at the National Academy of Fine Art, Kyiv, graduating in 2007. Having been nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2009, he won it in 2011. He is a member of different artists’ collectives: R.E.P. (from 2004) and HUDRADA (from 2008) of which he is also co-founder. His solo shows include Poland magazine, Ya Gallery Art Centre, Kyiv (2015), Limits of Responsibility, Campagne Première, Berlin (2014/15), Everybody wants to live by the sea, Viafarini DOCVA, Milan (2014), Kyjev Hotel, Bratislava – Cinema, Gandy Gallery, Bratislava (2013). He also has exhibited in the 1st and 2nd Kyiv Biennales of Contemporary Art (2012/15). Kadan works in an interdisciplinary way, collaborating with activists, architects or others, in a wide range of different media that include objects, constructions, paintings, graphics, installations and posters. The recent political unrest and armed conflict with Russia has inevitably surfaced in his work, both in reference to the extended occupation of Maidan Square in Kyiv (2014) – he has made a form of commemoration of this event by focussing on the ‘gardens’ that the demonstrators made while they occupied the square – and in the tense, changed atmosphere of the whole country. In BALAGAN!!! Kadan presents a new site-specific ‘tower’ that, while continuing the cycle of previous works related to the language of Soviet neo-modernism, also refers to the transformed social and political climate. In this work, the triumphal, colonial Soviet column is topped by a flimsy structure that references both a GULAG watchtower and the structures built by early Christian Stylites to separate themselves from the world and mortify their flesh. Kadan sees this structure not only as a meditation on different significations of power, but also as an unstable and dangerous ‘image of a totalitarian saint who regards the world from the safety of his asceticism’ – a criticism, perhaps, of the role of the artist in times of duress. |
Aleksey Kallima Born 1969 in Groznyy, Chechen-Ingush ASSR. Kallima graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Krasnodar in 1988. He curated his own project the France Gallery from 2001 to 2005 and in the following year was given an award in the Contemporary Arts section of the Innovation Prize in Moscow. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including: Audience, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2015), Gray days. Bright dreams, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2013), All for Sale, Regina Gallery, London (2012), as well as group shows The new story-tellers in Russian art of the XX – XXI centuries, The Russian Museum, Saint-Petersburg (2015), Upward, Museum of Moscow (2014) and the Russian pavilion in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). ‘A refugee from his native Groznyy and witness of its storming, the Russian Aleksey Kallima acts as a patriot of Chechnya in Moscow and in his works refers to the theme of the Chechen war. The artists develops the theme of the province in a harsh way, in opposition to generally accepted democratic norms, without national exotica, natural beauty, the adornment of historical and regional traditions. The Chechens for Kallima are the inhabitants of roads and roadsides; they wear Adidas, drink Coca-Cola and smoke Turkish Marlborough. The global brands receive an unexpected boost of energy, becoming the marks of saboteurs and terrorists. Returning to figurative expressive language, the artist has freed the picture from its responsibilities to realism, having placed it in the dimension of will and imagination. Will is personified by the Chechens, the wild power of the new millennium, bringing death to the old epoch.’ [Aleksandr Evangely] |
Polina Kanis Born 1985 in St. Petersburg, USSR. Kanis graduated from the Herzen State Pedagogical University in St Petersburg in 2006 and studied art at the Rodchenko School of Art, Photography and Multimedia in Moscow in 2011. She was shortlisted for the ‘Innovation Prize’ and awarded the ‘Kandinsky Art Prize’ (Young Artists) in 2011. Her solo exhibitions include: Formal Portrait, Manifesta 10, First Cadets’ Corpus, St. Petersburg (2014), New Flag, New Holland Gallery, St Petersburg (2013), 1,2,3,4, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv and Triumph Gallery, Moscow (2012). Working primarily with video, Kanis re-examines stereotypical tropes or memes that have survived from the former Soviet Union by highlighting their bizarre strangeness. Treading a fine line between performance and documentation, she reflects on the ideological usage of parades and military festivities in the past, by presenting them in an equivocal way in the present. In Workout (2011), she plays the commanding role of an aerobics instructor in a Moscow park creating a strange hybrid between the totalitarian sports cult of the Soviet era and contemporary, imported western pop culture. A similarly provocative juxtaposition is also evident in Formal Portrait (2014), shown in BALAGAN!!! in which a young woman acrobatically, ritually and repeatedly climbs up a thin metal pole on a motorcycle sidecar. The artist describes ‘The eternity of expectations’ as the ‘ key motif’ of this work ‘… we hear the roar of the engine as a symbol of a readiness to action. The pole has been prepared, the figures obediently come together to form a flag – this endless repetition is fated to remain in eternity, without ever becoming a moment in history…’ In Celebration (2014), also in this exhibition, the repressive behavior and actions of the everyday are played out in an atmosphere of lugubrious celebration as soldiers dance with each other in a large but plain room. The men in uniform, casually dressed, move like automatons. Referring to current restrictive proposals about sexual orientation in Russia, this dance is hardly a celebration, but a joyless and absurd assertion of alienation at every level in which there can be no meaning or purpose. |
Krištof Kintera Born 1973 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. After first studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Kintera graduated from the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam in 2004. He has three times been a finalist in the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (1999, 2001, 2003) and has had many solo exhibitions, including Your Light is My Life at the Kunsthal Rotterdam (2015), I am not you at the Tinguely Museum, Basel (2014) and Bad News at the Jiři Švestka Gallery, Berlin (2013). His work was also shown in the travelling exhibition After the Wall. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Stockholm, Budapest, Berlin 1999-2000. Since the mid-1990s Kintera’s social critique of politics, economy and excessive consumption has run throughout his sculpture, installations, videos and performances. By engineering striking juxtapositions between mundane, second-hand or discarded objects, he skillfully creates absurd or provocative perspectives on common dreams and nightmares that reflect, with dark, unforgiving humour, about the ways that power and desire affect us all. The hunched, all-consuming horned beast in Bad News (2011) and the febrile shudders of the inverted trunks that carry the weight of the world’s mass in their fragile roots in Nervous Trees (2013) invoke a progressive, modernist past turned on its head – countermanded by a primitive, primeval present. |
Francizka Klotz Born 1979 in Dresden, GDR. In 2000 Klotz enrolled in the Department of Painting at the Art Academy in Weissensee, choosing in 2005 the one-year master class of Werner Liebmann. Katarina Grosse and Hanns Schimansky, both professors at Weissensee, also had an impact on her work. The sharp pine green of felled trees and the scattered browns of shattered wood and bare earth in the paintings shown in BALAGAN!!! mark the vast crater of an actual asteroid impact that took place in the isolated Siberian forest of Tunguska in 1908. Flickering dabs of red paint in a bleak, snowy landscape, imagined from a photograph, define the uniforms of Japanese rescue workers. This is based on a newspaper report she had seen about the Fukushima Power Plant meltdown in 2011, itself the cataclysmic effect of a fatal and tragic tsunami. ‘My paintings mostly depict landscapes, but at the same time I feel the urge to escape the classical tradition of landscape painting. While the wrath of nature has always been an important aspect of this genre, the understanding of nature itself was based on the idea of a recurrent cycle of growth and decline. In my paintings I question whether this idea is outdated, as the impacts of man-made climate-change seem to be irreversible. I therefore use motifs connected to catastrophic events, both man-made and natural, in a way that is pessimistic and yet still searching for an unseen healing hand. Krater (2013) and Kathedral (2014) show the rotten trees of a devastated forest. They are part of a group of paintings that started out from the still recovering landscape around Tunguska in Siberia which suffered a cataclysmic meteorite impact in 1908.’ ‘The work Gap (2012), is one of a group of works depicting the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan. I sometimes wonder if I am searching for hope while painting the most nightmarish phenomena of nature.’ |
Irina Korina Born 1977 in Moscow, USSR. After graduating from the Stage Design Faculty of the Russian Theatre Academy, Moscow in 2000, where she participated in an exchange program with the Valand Academy of the University of Gothenburg, she then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, graduating in 2005. She has worked as a stage designer for many companies: Teatr.doc, the Taganka Theatre and Moscow Arts Theatre, for example, and she alternates this with her production as an artist. On three occasions she has been awarded the Soratnik [Comrade] Prize for Contemporary Art Professionals, an award judged by other artists (2006, 2009, 2012) as well as, on two occasions, the NCCA Innovation Prize Contemporary Art Award (2008, 2014). She has had many solo exhibitions including: Scales of Desire, City Gallery, Ostrava, (2014/15) Refrain, Stella Art Foundation, Moscow (2014), Winter Crops, XL Gallery, Moscow (2014), Armed with a Dream, Manege, Moscow (2013), Demonstrative Behavior, Scaramouche, New York (2012), Installations, Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2009), Comma 13, Bloomberg Space, London (2009) and the Russian Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Korina primarily works by making objects or large, often immersive, installations, using found materials or cheap goods bought from hardware stores or thrift shops, that all make clear reference to the social, political and economic changes taking place around her. Infographics (2014), an ornamental series of tactile, wall mounted roundels, is made up of different fragments of brightly colored textiles in different analytical Pie Charts, the divisions of which indicate economic distribution or demographic change. In her site-specific installation Chapel (2013), remodeled specially for BALAGAN!!!, Korina refers not only to the ways in which the public spaces of cities have been carved up and made private – the chapel is surrounded by a high wall and an impenetrable forest – but also to the shift in belief from State Socialism to an equally unthinking religiosity, devoted either to the powerful Orthodox Church, or to the many different cults that since the early 1990s have proliferated in Russia. The design of the chapel’s stained glass adds to the alarm in that its imagery is more socialist or cultist than religious. Korina is concerned here, as in all of her works, with questions of value and belief. What do we share, and what separates us, in a climate that respects neither humanity nor faith? |
Egor Koshelev Born 1980 in Moscow USSR. Before studying Art History, Koshelev had graduated in 2003 from the Department of Monumental Painting at the Stroganov State University of Arts and Industry in Moscow. His PhD thesis (2006) focused on late Renaissance, Mannerism and the Baroque and concentrated particularly on the work of Tintoretto; he now works as a lecturer on contemporary Russian art at the Moscow State Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts. Koshelev won the STRABAG Art Award International in 2012 and his paintings, installations and graphic art have been shown in such exhibitions as Pictures from the Underground, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2014), The Art of Translation, Parallel program of Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg (2014), Altars of Love and Rebellion, STRABAG Kunstforum, Vienna (2012/13), The Last Artist and the Exhibition that Never Happened, ArtBerloga, Moscow (2011). Influenced by the Italian Old Masters, his monumental paintings ask the question: how may an artist interweave contemporary themes both with classical painting and with the monumental style of the former Soviet Union? His answer combines seriousness with parody. Socialist Realism was once a politically correct style that he now turns on its head by quoting it in relation to contemporary political issues and aesthetic clichés. The robust figuration of his work is a world apart from that of the Moscow Conceptualists but it is no less effective in opening up different ways of looking. The surrealistic, Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere of Koshelev’s painting Lecture (2014), one of two shown here, suggests an allegory of didacticism gone mad. While, The World’s Famous Matryoshka Show (2015), in an obvious reference to current hostilities by irregular Russian forces in Ukraine as well as the story of the Trojan Horse: it shows armed, masked soldiers climbing out of the bodies of the mother-like Matryoshka, a national Russian folk symbol, souvenir and gift. |
Katarzyna Kozyra Born 1963 in Warsaw, Poland. After studying German Philology, Kozyra graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw in 1993 and completed, in 1998, a Postgraduate degree in Graphic and Book Art in the New Media Workshop in Leipzig. She has received various awards, including honourable mention from ArtsLink, New York (1999), the DAAD Scholarship, Berlin (2003) and the Polish Minister of Culture Award (2011). She has also had a number of large international touring exhibitions of her work including Looking for Jesus, Poland, Jerusalem, New York, Berlin (2014-15), Katarzyna Kozyra: Master of Puppets, Schmela Haus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2012) and In Art Dreams Come True, Prague, Tel-Aviv, Berlin (2008-2012). In 1999-2000 her work featured in After The Wall. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Stockholm, Budapest, Berlin. A leading figure in the Polish ‘critical art’ movement during the 1990s, Kozyra’s strongly autobiographical, confrontational work attracted considerable attention both within and outside Poland, often eliciting strong responses and heated public discussions. Her eccentric sense of humour continuously tests the boundaries of conventional expectation by focussing on social taboos, myths and gender-stereotypes. In her work Man’s Bathhouse (1999), she donned a beard and prosthetic penis as a man in a public bathhouse and in many other works she has consistently highlighted the presence of those who are otherwise excluded or marginalized by society. Combining elements of visual arts, theatre, performance, dance and choreography, her fairy tales and fables, in the form of videos, photo-works and installations, straddle the line between the idyllic and the grotesque, setting the perfect scene on which to stage a clash between the sanctimonious and the sacrilegious. Other works concentrate on her own insecurity and physical frailty, as well as on that of others, as she struggles to complete what seem to be insurmountable tasks. Summertale (2008), part of her series of videos In Art Dreams Come True, is a vivid contemporary fairy tale unfolding into horror. In a narrative resembling Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the dwarves are female and Snow White appears as three characters: Maestro (Grzegorz Pitułej, teacher of singing), Gloria Viagra (Berlin-based drag queen) and the artist herself, dressed like Alice in Wonderland. The tranquil and idyllic atmosphere of the female dwarves’ world is brutally disturbed by the arrival of these three characters. That the status quo needs to be restored, no matter what the cost, renders Summertale into an engaging, if disquieting and violent, moral parable. In Diva. Reincarnation (2005), also part of the same series, Kozyra is locked in a double cage – literal and symbolic. Encased in a grotesque prosthetic body and imprisoned in an oversized birdcage, she sings the Olympia aria from Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Tunelessly trilling away, this ‘diva’ is reincarnated as a grotesque, primeval, quasi-erotic ‘Venus’ in a discordant, perverse parody of the performance of femininity. In Cheer Leader (2006), the third work from this series, Kozyra reprises gender related clichés dressed as a pom-pom girl singing Gwen Stefani’s What Are You Waiting For? in a music video set in the changing room of a men’s gym. In between the dance sequences she returns to characters she played in previous works acting as a diva or a man. Combining elements of visual arts, theatre, performance, dance and choreography, her fairy tales and fables, in the form of videos, photo-works and installations, straddle the line between the idyllic and the grotesque, setting the perfect scene on which to stage a clash between the sanctimonious and the sacrilegious. Other works concentrate on her own insecurity and physical frailty, as well as on that of others, as she struggles to complete what seem to be insurmountable tasks. |
Olya Kroytor Born 1986 in Moscow, USSR. Olya Kroytor attended the Moscow Museum of Modern Art Free Workshops in 2007 and graduated in art from the Moscow State Pedagogical University in 2008, the following year she gained a diploma from the Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2012 she was a Kandinsky Prize nominee in the ‘Young Artist’ category and in 2014 was shortlisted for the Kuryokhin Award the ‘Art in Public Spaces’ category. Her solo shows include Time That Exists, SRC Dawn, Vladivostok (2015), 8 Situations, ArtWin Gallery, Moscow (2015), Extra, Gallery Room, Moscow (2014), ChtoNichto, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011) and Split Personality, Regina Gallery, (2011). Kroytor’s work moves between durational performance and the production of drawings and collages. In Point of Support (2013) she stood for hours on end, alone in the open air, on a narrow four-metre-high column. Cube (2015), a new work she has made specially for BALAGAN!!! brings all aspects of her work into play: she will confine herself within a life-sized cube, its surfaces covered by paper. Randomly, she will sketch on the inside of the cube until the surface of the paper is worn away. Once there is room for her to escape she will leave. The marks of her ‘imprisonment’ will remain. |
Gaisha Madanova Born 1987 in Alma Ata, Kazakh SSR. From 2004 to 2009 Madanova studied architecture at the Almaty College of Construction and Management and in 2012 moved to study art in Munich under Hermann Pitz at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. She combines an interest in art with anthropology to engage in the visual exploration of urban landscapes. Much of her work has the quality of ongoing research The Syndrome of Learned Helplessness, the work she is showing in BALAGAN!!! refers to a passive sense of powerless that remains long after the conditions that have created it have been removed. For her it is a metaphor of the social and political conditions in which many people live today. She describes this work as follows: ‘The basis for these works were photo illustrations from a book, The Magical Power of Stretching (Sovet Sport Publishing, 1990), which describes exercises for enhancing mobility and reducing mental stress. The subjects of the photographs, in their stretched poses, appear helpless, defeated, inanimate, and any attempt to breathe life into them would be doomed from the start. These photo illustrations reminded me of a syndrome described in 1967 by the American psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, which they called ‘learned helplessness’ and which may appear after several unsuccessful attempts by a person to change their negative circumstances. According to their research, it is not the unpleasant circumstances themselves that cause the syndrome, but rather the person’s experience of the uncontrollability of these events. They become helpless when they accept that their actions change nothing. They abandon any further attempt to solve their problems using their own resources. But the loss of belief in their own capacities and in the possibility of effecting change continues, even when the adverse circumstances have been removed. It seems to me that the syndrome of learned helplessness corresponds to the spirit of the time in which we live and is characteristic not only of individuals, but of whole communities, cultures and countries.’ |
Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe Born 1969 in Leningrad, USSR – 2013 Bali, Indonesia Legend has it that, although Mamyshev-Monroe may have spent a few fleeting moments studying art, the critical moment in his career came during his statutory period of National Service in the Red Army, when he first began to dress as Marilyn Monroe in honour of his mother whom he thought looked like her. Discovered photographs of him in drag led to his discharge and psychiatric care. He made way to the magic city of Leningrad where he met artists Timur Novikov, Georgy Guryanov and Sergey Bugaev/Afrika and became a vibrant member of the underground. With Novikov and Yuris Lesnik as cameraman, he presented Pirate TV from his apartment for three years from 1987. He formulated the discipline of ‘Monroe-ology’ and eventually, unwittingly, was recognized as a social media icon for gay rights, particularly after his unexpected tragic death in a shallow Bali swimming pool. In 2014 he was posthumously honoured with the 2013 Innovation Prize of the 9th All-Russian Competition in Contemporary Art; in 2007 he had won the Kandinsky Prize. His work has been shown widely and, since his demise, a number of large retrospective exhibitions have taken place: Archive M, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2015), The Life of The Remarkable Monroe, Novy Museum, St. Petersburg (2014), Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg (2014) – a selection of his video work. All these exhibitions have substantial catalogues. By adopting different roles and genders, this legendary artist punctured the superficial veneer of glamour that had increasingly begun to characterize post-communist high society to replace it with a tragic, human vulnerability symbolized by the fate of that glamorous Hollywood film star. In Pirate TV, he played the role of a dysfunctional chat show host, interviewing visiting artists and curators and going to art exhibitions, as well as acting out the roles of his namesake Marylin, and many other notables from the world stage. In the works shown in BALAGAN!!! he appears variously as Prince Igor, Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Lolita, heroes and heroines from Russian folk tales, Vladimir Putin and other political figures. Throughout his films, photographs, collages, performances and paintings, he brings burlesque together with sympathy and humanity in a unique hybrid that has become his enduring legacy. |
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Natalie Maximova Born 1986 in Moscow USSR. Maximova graduated from the Moscow State University of Design and Technology in 2009 and then studied photography at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia from 2012 to 2015. In her carefully researched series of documentary photographs True Self (2013), she looks specifically at the melting, dissolution or changing of genders in portraits and interviews with people from different parts of Russia for whom their gender and biological sex are not necessarily the same. She describes this work as follows: ‘Our gender and biological sex are not necessarily congruent and any discrepancy between them can lead to serious psychological discomfort. From childhood the life of transsexuals is a struggle for the right to live in harmony with oneself. They are constantly faced with a dialogue of two personalities: the inner ‘I’ that is longing for a different gender identity and the ‘I’ that corresponds to their biological sex. My series of photographs depicts people from different gender communities. Each portrait is followed by a quote from our conversations which help us to perceive the realities in which they live — as well as their bravery and the significance of the steps they have to take on their way to their true selves.’ |
Yerbossyn Meldibekov Born 1964 in Shymkent, Kazakh SSR. Meldibekov graduated from the State Institute of Theatre and Fine Arts, Almaty in 1992. He has exhibited internationally with various solo shows, including: Mountains of Revolution, Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong (2014), The Revolution in the Mountains, Jozsa Gallery, Brussels (2013) and Peak of Lenin, Galleria Nina Lumer, Milan (2013). He has also participated in the Central Asian Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, (2013), the 1st Kyiv Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012) and Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, London, Calvert 22 (2011). Meldibekov’s work has focused on the ‘collapse of culture’ in post-Soviet Central Asia: its political and social disarray, with rival political and commercial ‘tribes’ clashing over distribution of power and wealth. He also refers to the collapse of civil society in this area, referencing continuing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Focusing on political and social change, Meldibekov works across a variety of media that includes installation, sculpture, photography video and performance. Approaching art from an anthropological as well as a psychoanalytical point of view, he creates scenarios in which physical mutations reflect both historical and social transformations. Dramatising the absurd paradoxes of the contemporary art world, his performance September – October – November. Asian Prisoner, made specially for BALAGAN!!! reprises an action made in Berlin seventeen years previously. Then, as now, the Kazhak artist is a prisoner, bound by the culture in which he finds himself, a punishing kangue around his neck as an antiquated, stereotypical symbol. Yet he is not alone. Is not the art world itself also a kind of prison? |
Almagul Menlibayeva Born 1969 in Almaty Kazakh SSR. Menlibayeva graduated from the Academy of Art and Theatre in Almaty in 1992. A video, photographic and performance artist, her works are usually shot in the dramatic landscapes of Kazakhstan and its surrounding region and frame the political present and past within the diverse mythologies that still haunt the land. She has been awarded a number of prizes: the Main Award, KINO DER KUNST, International Film Competition, Munich (2013), KfW Audience Award, Videonale 13, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2011) and the Art and Culture Network Program Grant, Open Society Institute Budapest (2011). Her work has been shown widely including: Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen (2014/15), Empire of Memory, Ethnographic Museum, Warsaw (2013) and An Ode to the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck (2013). She has also exhibited in the Azerbaijan pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), in the 1st International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Kyiv, (2012), and in Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, Calvert 22, London (2011). Menlibayeva shows two works in BALAGAN!!! In her five-channel video installation Kurchatka 22 (2012), she visits the desert wasteland of Semipalatinsk, the former Soviet chief nuclear test site. Interspersing documentary with elements of mythical fantasy, she films its derelict condition and interviews old country people, survivors of the tests and radiation, that have always resided there and who relate their experience of the early ‘test’ explosions. Woven through these memories, this arid landscape, and the derelict remains of once busy offices and laboratories, is the presence of enigmatic female spirits – peris, avian-human hybrids – who reoccupy this blighted land. Memory is dissected as a collective living organism. Her experimental documentary Transoxiana Dreams (2011) addresses the social, economic and ecological condition of the peoples living in the vast region of the Aral Sea, which is now rapidly receding and becoming a desert because of present inaction and the misguided and self-defeating irrigation policies of the Soviet era. Following the fishermen’s long drive to water that used to be on their doorstep, she portrays the impact of global change on the inhabitants of an area that formerly thrived with tourism, beaches and fishing fleets. But they now live in the desolation of a constantly expanding desert. |
Boris Mikhailov Born 1938 in Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR. Mikhailov initially studied electrical engineering but during the 1960s taught himself photography and began recording, with sarcastic and poetic humour, the sub-culture of the factory in which he worked and his friends, while excavating bizarre examples of everyday Soviet life. He has received many awards: including the Goslar Kaiserring (2015), the Hasselblad Foundation International Award (2000) and the Albert-Renger-Patzsch-Price (1997) and has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions such as Boris Mikhailov. Die Bücher. 1968-2012, Sprengel Museum Hanover (2013), TIME IS OUT OF JOINT. FOTOGRAFIEN 1966–2011, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2012) and Boris Mikhailov: Case History, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011). One of the leading non-conformist artists in the former Soviet Union, Mikhailov has moved in his work from a sardonic view of the everyday to an allegorical approach that encompasses the vast social and political transformations of Russia and Ukraine since perestroika. During the early 1990s, he formed (with Sergey Bratkov and Sergil Solonskij) the Fast Reaction Group in Kharkhov (Kharkiv) that employed carnivalesque satire to confront deep conflicts within the embryonic state of Ukraine by referring back to the time of its Nazi occupation during World War II. In a grotesque parody of classical sculpture, I Am Not I (1992), the triptych of self-portraits shown in BALAGAN!!!, Mikhailov brings together, within the melancholic frame of his own naked body, both the frailty and monstrosity of humanity when faced by events it cannot control. |
Ciprian Mureşan Born 1977 in Dej, Romania. Mureşan is a co-editor of VERSION, an artist-run magazine and, since 2005, has been editor of IDEA art + society magazine. His work has been recently exhibited in Your survival is guaranteed by treaty, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2015), Ciprian Mureşan, Wilkinson Gallery, London (2015), The Suicide Series , Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2014) and Ciprian Mureşan, Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2014), All that work for nothing! That’s what I try to do all the time! Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2013), Stage and Twist , Tate Modern Project Space, London/ Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2012), Dead Weights , Museum of Art, Cluj (2012) and 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). Mureşan works with digital media but also makes drawing and installations, dealing primarily with themes of tension, war, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. As an artist who has experienced social transition and the shift of political regimes from authoritarian communism to capitalism, he offers his audience dramatised inverted representations of social practice. The historic sense of imbalance and social neurosis in his work finds its embodiment in children and animals who are frequently the heroes of his video works. In his single-channel video Dog Luv (2009) a ludicrous Orwellian puppet show, dogs pronounce and declaim enthusiastically about a range of political issues and injustices with each one barking vigorously their agreement or dissent. Within an unsettling vacuum between command and debate, Mureşan ironises human values by examining the dangers and opportunities of counteracting repression. Disquietingly, the moral miasma of his ‘dog eat dog world’ highlights the similarities as well as the differences between characteristics usually regarded as unrelated: violence and innocence, premeditation and immaturity, altruism and arrogance. |
Kriszta Nagy (Tereskova) Born 1972 in Szolnok, Hungary. Nagy graduated from the Painting and Inter-media Faculties of the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts in 1998 and at the same time was a singer and song writer for the pop group Tereshkova, named after the first female astronaut. Nagy has always combined her work as a painter with an awareness of pop culture, media presence and gender issues. Her earliest oil paintings enlarged and copied pages from her diaries – sketches of everyday objects mashed together with handwritten texts. This fragmentary approach brought together, often with humor, banal absurdity with a more intimate or emotional view of life that was also reflected in her songs. Her photographic work, I Am A contemporary Painter, a large poster billboard, was shown in After the Wall. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe (Stockholm, Budapest, Berlin, 1999/2000). For over ten years she has exhibited with Godot Gallery, Budapest: I paint portraits (2014); I Paint For Museums, Not For Above Your Couch (2006) and in 2009 -10 her work was included in Gender Check, Mumok, Vienna (2009/10). Working with performance, painting, photography and collage, Nagy has continued to engage with social and political change and has provoked considerable controversy as people have struggled to understand the relationships between what she depicts, and how she depicts it, and outside events. Previously, she has exhibited her naked body in a performance and, in 2006, circulated a photo-shopped portrait of herself defecating in front of parliament at a time of violent street demonstrations. After 2010, when ultra-conservative nationalist politician Viktor Orbán became Prime Minister of Hungary with a two-thirds majority in Parliament, she began to make a large series of Warholesque paintings of the leader based on one of his election posters. But she embellished these variously with folk and religious motifs, Hungarian flags, marajuana leaves, advertisements, nationalist symbols and texts. Nagy describes her motive for making these works: Lots of people are unhappy, and emotions run high. That’s what I paint: the fact that all this has found its way into the most intimate parts of our lives, dividing families, love and friendships, even though we live in a democracy. Public response to these works has been mixed and a number of Orbán’s supporters, including his wife, have purchased examples along with people of opposite political persuasions. In these works, the artist never admits her political views, Nagy lampoons the cult of leadership familiar from the years of Communist rule by overlaying the ‘sacred’ image of the head of state with other images that may be either supportive of or antipathetic to his ethos. In this laconic puppet show of many such images, all based on one face, Nagy reveals power and weakness as little more than masks. She encourages the viewer to dig beneath the surfaces of appearance in search of a deeper moral compass, rather than to be seduced by the easy politics of events. ‘In Hungary, politics has outgrown its own limitations, its framework, it has encroached into the private sphere of people, to such an extent, that for me and my generation it hasn’t been a lived experience, we recognize its methods from history only. Politics has penetrated way into our private lives, right up to our bedrooms. This is why I introduce it as projected prints on patterned bed-linen, tapestry, tablecloths and religious icons. The series had a huge impact on Hungarian public life, breaking out of the tight, narrow circle of art. It precipitated unpredictable passions and sentiments from both sides, the right and the left. People can no longer argue in a sober, serene manner, their political views divide them, they can no longer share a ‘bed or table’. And precisely because everybody has lost their sanity, I have decided that officially, I would not take sides. To do otherwise would endanger both my career and the goodwill of my friends. The war that is taking place at present, I do not have to win, my task is to depict what is taking place here and now. The pictures work as a Rorschach test, everyone can see in them whatever they wish. I think this contributes to the great success of my work, and to the successful sale of the pictures.’ [Kriszta Nagy] |
Deimantas Narkevičius Born 1964 in Utena, Lithuania. Trained as a sculptor at the Art Academy in Vilnius, his work became widely known, when he represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). Working now mainly with film and video, his works have been widely shown, as in Archaeology of Memories, KGB Corner House, Riga (2015), DEIMANTAS NARKEVIČIUS, Maureen Paley, London (2015), Deimantas Narkevičius: Da Capo, MSU-Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2014), Deimantas Narkevičius: Cupboard and a Song, MNAC-The National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Romania (2014), Deimantas Narkevičius – Da Capo, Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2013) and About Films, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2012). His work was also included in After the Wall. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Stockholm, Budapest, Berlin (1999/2000). Narkevičius’s films reflect on his past as well as on the heritage of Lithuania, his home country, but in the context of the histories it shares with others.The Head (2007), a film he put together from broadcast Television footage. is an investigation of, and reflection on, the installation of the Karl Marx monument in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) that 7.1 metres hall and weighing approximately 40 tons still stands in the city. After renaming the city Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1953, the East German government commissioned Lev Kerbel, a Russian sculptor, to make this work. It had been originally planned to cast it in Russia and move it to Germany but, for many reasons, this could not be done and the work was eventually fabricated in Germany. The monument was inaugurated in 1971 in front of a crowd of 250,000 people. At a time when, through the whole of Russia and Eastern Europe, the monuments of Communism have been taken away or destroyed, Narkeviius’s film tells another story through the words of the artist and the people of Chemnitz. Even though the reason for putting the sculpture there has disappeared, the work remains, still powerful although shorn of its significance. |
Ioana Nemes Born 1979 in Bucharest, Romania – 2011 New York, USA. Nemes’s first vocation was as a professional handball player but, at the age of 21, she turned to art after a serious knee injury. She studied photography at the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest under Iosif Kiraly graduating in 2005 and quickly began to work in a way that showed a wide ranging concern for the hidden mechanisms behind the linguistic, visual and psychological systems that usually define reality. Her work has been widely exhibited and has appeared in such international exhibitions as Report on the Construction of a Space Module, New Museum, New York (2014), Monthly Evaluations, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK (2014), Times Colliding, Art in General, New York (2011), On the Threshhold, Jiři Švestka Gallery, Berlin, Communism Never Happened, Charim Gallery, Vienna (2011) and On Joy, Sadness and Desire, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (2009) and the 11th Istanbul Biennale (2009). During her tragically short career Nemes became one of the best known Romanian conceptual artists. Her work reflected a strong interest in fashion, design, scenography and science along with the possibility of a non-progressive avant-garde that questioned the dominance of chronology as a critique of present day hubris. Such an idea underlay the sophisticated primeval quality of her installation The white team (Satan) 2009 shown here, as well as the concerns that led to her Times Colliding exhibition held in New York during 2011. |
Pavel Pepperstein Born 1966 in Moscow, USSR. Pepperstein was born into a family of artists; his mother Irina Pivovarova was an author of children’s books and his father Viktor Pivovarov was a well- known painter. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 1985 to 1987 and, back in Moscow, was in 1987 co-founder – with Sergei Anufriev and Yuri Liederman – of the avant-garde group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics. In the context of glasnost and perestroika, their main interest was in experimenting with language and meaning particularly in a fusion of western philosophy, Asian region and Orthodox theology in the language of psychiatry and pharmacology. Since 1989, Pepperstein has worked as an independent artist, art critic, theorist and rap musician. His recent solo exhibitions include The Future Enamoured with the Past, Multi Media Art Museum Moscow MAMM (2015), Landscapes of the Future, Kewenig Galerie, Cologne, (2012), Ophelia, Regina Gallery, London (2012), Studies of American Suprematism, Galerie Kamm, Berlin (2013), Murder, She said! Galería Kewenig, Palma de Mallorca (2013), Debris of the Future Pace Gallery, London (2014), Holy Politics, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2014). He also participated in Manifesta 10 (2014), showing work in the main building of the Hermitage. This Tree Saved Me (2014) and The Faun and the Nimph (2015), the two paintings shown in BALAGAN!!! bring together shared primeval mythologies with different aspects of modernity. The former work refers to an age of innocence when man was part of nature and is rendered in a ‘primitive’ style that makes reference to Mayakovsky’s ROSTA posters. The age-old erotic fascination of a faun with a nymph in the other painting, however, is incongruously set against the cosmic ideolology and high prices of Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism. |
Pirate TV Pirate TV (PTV) was a collective set up in Leningrad by Timur Novikov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe and Juris Lesnik operating between 1988 and 1992. As an alternative to television in the Soviet Union under perestroika, PTV developed various television formats, news show, music videos, fictional film and TV series among others, together with the performance artist Mamyshev-Monroe serving as host, using drag alter-egos. An important component here was spoofing traditional TV programs. PTV was distributed in the form of VHS cassettes and shown during alternative artist meetings. In this chaotic and discursive series of parodies of western TV in which special guests – such as Novikov, Georgy Guryanov, the German curator Kathrin Becker and and British pop musician Brian Eno – were invited into the studio, visits were also made to artists’ studios and to exhibition openings where, in various personae, Mamyshev-Monroe commented on current events. Pirate TV also broadcast ‘The death of remarkable people’, a soap opera in which Mamyshev-Monroe played the main roles. Here is an extract from ‘John and Marilyn’, the first film in the series: Happy birthday, Mr. President.. A subsequent episode in the series was Adolph and Eva, set in the Berlin Bunker in the last years of the Third Reich. |
Sasha Pirogova Born 1986 in Moscow, USSR. Pirogova is a performance and video artist, for her the two disciplines are inter-connected. After graduating from the Physics Department at Moscow State University in 2010, she received a degree in 2014 from the Rodchenko Art School in Video and New Media in Moscow. She has been awarded prizes at the Extra Short Film Festival, ESF (2012) as well as the Innovation Prize in the ‘New Generation’ category (2014). She has participated in various exhibitions, such as Burning News, Hayward Gallery, London (2014), I saw lightning, Udarnik, Moscow (2014) and in the Manifesta 10, parallel program, St. Petersburg (2014). Working with performance, she has also participated in different festivals, including: the 6th International Festival of Video, Performance and Technology, Lisbon (2014), VIII Andrei Tarkovsky International Film Festival, Ivanovo (2014), Cinedans Dance on Screen Festival, Amsterdam (2014) and Now & After International Video Art Festival, The State Museum of GULAG, Moscow (2014). The people in Pirogova’s work adapt automatically to the mechanics of their physical environments, relinquishing their autonomy to the rhythm and structure of the work. Her video-performance BIBLIMLEN (2013) is a behind-the-scenes look at Moscow’s Russian State Library (the former Lenin Library), in which the interior architecture of the building becomes an active co-author of the piece. An earlier video-performance, QUEUE (2011), based on Vladimir Sorokin’s novel of the same name (1983), is a nervous but ‘bizarrely funny saga of a quintessential Russian institution, the interminably long line’ (NYT, 2011). Creating an absurdist choreography of hysterics, dependence and clanship, Pirogova takes pains to replay the text through dance to identify the queue as not a physical but a psycho-social contemporary condition. |
RECYCLE Group Founded in 2006 in Krasnodar, Russia. Recycle Group was formed by Andrey Blokhin (b. 1987) & Georgy Kuznetsov (b. 1985) in 2006. Since 2008 the artists have regularly participated in various group shows in Moscow, St Petersburg and other Russian cities. In 2010 they won the prestigious Kandinsky Prize ‘Young Artist’ category for their Reverse project and since that time their works have been regularly showcased in international galleries and contemporary art spaces in France, Italy, Great Britain, USA and Belgium. In 2012, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow hosted their large solo show Paradise Network, which attracted a wide audience. The artists have also participated in the programme of the Venice Biennale (2011/2013/2015) and their large-scale, plastic mesh installations have covered the façade of the Grand Palais during Art Paris (2013) as well as the façade of London School of Economics. Their works have been acquired by a number of public collections. In The Gifts of the Gods (2014) an ironical examination of everyday consumption, abundance and commoditisation, the members of the RECYCLE GROUP echo the ideals and forms of a classical frieze but within the precincts of a supermarket. In this massive, monochrome, plastic-mesh relief, the ecstatic abandon of ancient bacchanalian rituals is equated with the frenzied consumerism of lines of contemporary shoppers in a mall as the goods topple down upon their heads. An abundance of goods is offered here and the artists make a parallel between ancient Greek pagan festivities, with their lavish sacrifices, and the desire for consumption elevated to the status of a religion, which has become a hallmark of the 21st century. A scene of consumer frenzy is reminiscent of ancient Greek bas-reliefs, depicting hunt scenes, athletic contests or solemn sacrifices to the gods. The artists have a carefully articulated attitude towards modern materials and technology, and have used plastic mesh for this work, since its semi-transparent structure echoes the ephemerality of material goods, which displace each other at terrific speed. Obvious criticism of the issues of our time and a moralising tone, however, are not characteristic of the Recycle Group’s work. Irony remains their principal tool in their articulation of a consumerist rather than divine commedia. |
Mykola Ridnyi Born 1985 in Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR. A graduate of the Sculpture Department of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (2008), Ridnyi works as an artist and curator. From 2005 to 2012 he curated the gallery- art laboratory SOSka in Kharkiv, a non-profit artists’ space, and also worked with this group as an artist. He was awarded the stipendium program of the Polish Ministry of Culture in Krakow (2015), the DAAD residence program for artists and curators, Berlin (2014) and was shortlisted for the Malevich award (2014) and the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2013). Various venues have shown his work in the following solo exhibitions: Shelter, Visual Culture Research Centre, Kyiv (2014), Labour Circle, Centre for Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski (Bank Pekao Project Room), Warsaw (2012) and Documents, Art Arsenal gallery, Kyiv (2011). He has also participated in various group shows: the main exhibition and Ukrainian Pavilion in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Gallery Vartai, Vilnius (2015), Grammar of Freedom/ 5 Lessons, Museum for Contemporary Art GARAGE, Moscow (2015), Through Maidan and Beyond, Architekturzentrum, Vienna (2014), Sister Europe, Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (2014) and the 1st Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012). Ridnyi works in a variety of media including video, installation and sculpture. He is particularly concerned with the idea of public space in his work: how it is formed, signified, represented and protected. Kharkiv has been at the front line of the current armed conflict with Russian separatists and he has documented this in his work, setting it alongside changing representations of nationhood in Ukraine over the past twenty-five years. His new film Five Episodes (2015), a work still in progress is shown in BALAGAN!!! It incorporates documentary footage of old monuments being torn down, new monuments being put up in their place, the resistance in Maidan Square in Kyiv, retaliatory police action, and the effects of the recent armed violence where he lives. |
Arsen Savadov Born 1962 Kiev, Ukrainian SSR. 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. His works have been shown in many exhibitions, including: 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). 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, at the time of the economic restructuring of newly formed Republic of Ukraine, he moved to work in disused industrial plants, initially in the coal fields of Donetsk. His Donbass-Chocolate (1997) series of large photographs made there show in close detail the semi-naked, coal-dust-caked bodies of former miners, once the Stakhanovite hero-workers of the Soviet Union, now garbed, pathetically and vulnerably, by the wispy fronds of ballerinas’ tutus. Savadov’s latest photo series Commedia dell’Arte in Crimea (2012), a reference to both balagan and to Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’, sets the traditional story of Pierrot, Harlequin and Columbine in the timeless spaces of the mansions, coasts, and forests of Crimea, brought up to date by reference to the current armed conflict with Russia. In this absurd, melancholic allegory of fratricidal strife, these figures seem frozen, unable to act, without conviction or future. |
Mariya Sharova / Dmitriy Okruzhnov Dmitry Okruzhnov Okruzhnov studied at the Ivanovo Art College from 1999 to 2004, the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow from 2004 to 2010 and the Contemporary Art School attached to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art from 2013 to 2014. He has been awarded two medals by the Russian Academy of Arts. Sharova studied at the Ivanovo Art College from 2004 to 2005, the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow from 2005 to 2011) and at the Contemporary Art School attached to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art from 2013 to 2014. Since 2012 they have lived and worked together in Moscow. Dmitry Okruzhnov and Maria Sharova, two painters working together, produce an impression in their vast paintings that is reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s black comedy Weekend (1967). They manage this by patching images together off the internet and by assembling them in monstrous, multi-perspectival renditions of freeways, overpasses and riots. Modern man has forgotten how to observe reality. Increasingly we look at the world through gadgets: TVs, computers, cameras, phones. We build our conception of the world out of the knowledge we derive from the screen. Various fragments of information are collected and a new world is built with their help. There is a similarity with the grandiose décor of an imaginary theatre, where screens and passages are used to conjure up plots and where the spectator, knowing full well that he is viewing deceits, still continues to believe in what is happening. Visual information, which ought to make everything patent, in fact plunges us deeper into the precarious space of interpretations and questions. The works shown from the Surrounded by Reality (2015) project are part of an encompassing pictorial installation that literally swallows the viewer. Viewers appear to be inside the news environment until they are overwhelmed by it and vanish. Combining printing on banner fabric with painting produces an eerie mixture of mass production and handicraft. The result is mixture of flickering grey pixels, the atoms of the graphic structure of any computer, and the pictorial representation of actual events torn from their context in an unpredictable, chaotic new narrative with its own explosions and festivities. The real world has been replaced by fakes and simulacra. |
Haim Sokol Born 1973 in Archangelsk, USSR. Sokol graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1996 B.A., 2004 M.A.) and in 2007 studied at the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art; since this time he has been based in Moscow. He is a teacher at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia, Moscow and has been nominated two times for the NCCA Innovation Prize (2008, 2014). In 2009 he won the Special Stella Art Foundation Prize. His work has been exhibited in many different venues: Spartacus. Time New Romans, NCCA, Moscow (2015)/Centre of Creative Industries Fabrika, Moscow (2014), Premonition, Rendom Gallery, Moscow (2013) and Ambivalence, Anna Nova Gallery, S. Petersburg (2012). Sokol works in a variety of media, including video, installation and sculpture, using a variety of found materials such as worn out tools, floor cloths and cleaning implements. He inhabits the periphery of reality and fantasy, mixing them together to tell stories about the present by showing terrible events from the past within a parodic framework. In the installation shown in BALAGAN!!! an amateur performance of Katchachurian’s high Soviet ballet Spartacus by Central Asian gastarbeiter contrasts the story of the revolt against the Roman Empire by slaves with the racist violence and exploitative labour market that cohabit in Moscow today. |
Slavs and Tatars Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low), focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. They have exhibited in major institutions across the Middle East, Europe and North America, including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, 10th Sharjah, 8th Berlin, 3rd Thessaloniki, and 9th Gwangju Biennials. Select solo engagements include MoMA, NY (2012), Secession, Vienna (2012), Dallas Museum of Art (2014), Kunsthalle Zurich (2014) and NYU Abu Dhabi (2015). The artists’ lecture-performances, on topics ranging from transliteration as language in drag to Slavic Orientalism have been presented extensively at universities, museums, and various institutions. Slavs and Tatars have published several books, including Mirrors for Princes (JRP|Ringier / NYU Abu Dhabi), Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010), Not Moscow Not Mecca (Revolver/Secession, 2012), Khhhhhhh (Mousse/Moravia Gallery, 2012), Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (Book Works, 2013) as well as their translation of the legendary Azeri satire Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve (JRP-Ringier, 2011). |
Leonid Tishkov Born 1953 in Nizhniye Sergi, USSR. Tishkov initially trained as a doctor, graduating in 1979 from the I.M. Sechenov Medical University in Moscow but, from the early 1980s, began to work as an artist, making cartoon-like books and paintings that commented in an absurd way on ideology and social change. Since that time his work has expanded to include installation, video, theatre and performance and has been presented internationally: over the past decade his installation Private Moon has travelled to Austria, France, Japan, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan and his solo shows include The Arctic Diary, Krokin gallery, Moscow (2011), In Search of the Miraculous (Selected works, 1980-2010), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2010), and Looking Homeward, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2007). His work has also been exhibited in the 11th Krasnoyarsk Biennale (2015), the Moscow Biennale (2009) and the Singapore Biennale (2008) as well as in the museum shows Eye on Europe – 1960 to Now, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006), Berlin – Moscow/ Moscow- Berlin 1950 – 2000, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2002). Tishkov is widely known for his DABLOIDS, a social and artistic project initiated in the early 1990s directly after the fall of the Soviet Union. These small, and large, bright red, kidney-shaped creatures, consisting of little heads on large feet, may be understood as emblems of the burden of personal experience, views and prejudices within a transformed ‘democratic’ world. They spawn their own culture with clothes, flags and banners in an ironical artistic representation of symbols and opinions that refer to homeland, nationality and religion. As such, DABLOIDS become child-like, but potentially vicious, expressions of familiar ideologies, languages, histories and social identities. Tongue-in-cheek, the artist once warned ‘Foreign Dabloids can be dangerous’ – a truth clearly demonstrated in his 1998 short video, War with Dabloids as well as by the xenophobic paranoia that is presently sweeping Europe. As well as making an special DABLOID installation for BALAGAN!!!, Tishkov will be revisiting both his early medical training and the famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt in his performance of The Anatomy Lesson of the Dabloid. |
Aleksandr Ugay Born 1973 in Archangelsk, USSR. Sokol graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1996 B.A., 2004 M.A.) and in 2007 studied at the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art; since this time he has been based in Moscow. He is a teacher at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia, Moscow and has been nominated two times for the NCCA Innovation Prize (2008, 2014). In 2009 he won the Special Stella Art Foundation Prize. His work has been exhibited in many different venues: Spartacus. Time New Romans, NCCA, Moscow (2015)/Centre of Creative Industries Fabrika, Moscow (2014), Premonition, Rendom Gallery, Moscow (2013) and Ambivalence, Anna Nova Gallery, S. Petersburg (2012). Sokol works in a variety of media, including video, installation and sculpture, using a variety of found materials such as worn out tools, floor cloths and cleaning implements. He inhabits the periphery of reality and fantasy, mixing them together to tell stories about the present by showing terrible events from the past within a parodic framework. In the installation shown in BALAGAN!!! an amateur performance of Katchachurian’s high Soviet ballet Spartacus by Central Asian gastarbeiter contrasts the story of the revolt against the Roman Empire by slaves with the racist violence and exploitative labour market that cohabit in Moscow today. |
Oleg Ustinov Born 1984 in Rostov-on-Don, USSR. Oleg Ustinov works with different media – sculpture, painting, installation and sound-art – and has developed two major artistic directions in his work. The first is concerned with a provocative interaction with the Media in which public response becomes a key part. One such work is Alexander Zaloopin — the creation of an imaginary singer and Russian star of the internet who performs in the innovative genre of ‘gay-chanson’; another is Administration shown here. His second direction is concerned with developing a new approach in abstract mark-making typified by the formal research in his IDM series that is related to the visual mapping of electronic music and dance. In 2013 Ustinov, a Rodchenko School graduate, caused havoc with the Russian media in his home town of Rostov-on-Don by manufacturing official looking notices signed simply ‘The Administration’, that asked the residents of housing blocks to look out for and report to the Town Hall any indications of sexual ‘abnormality’. Most people took them seriously and were nonplussed. Some tried to phone the published telephone number either to make a report or protest, others ignored them completely. Soon, when the rash of absurd notices and public reactions to them continued to increase, the newspapers and television got hold of this story that had extended far beyond opinions on the definition of ‘deviant’ to turn into a detective mystery tracking the origin of the notices. Ustinov’s work is a re-creation of one of one of his notices posted in a public hallway along with documentation of the many different public responses to his action. |
Anastasia Vepreva Born 1989 in Archangelsk, USSR. Anastasia Vepreva works in a variety of media, including photography, video, installation, performance, collage, drawing and text. Her video triptych, Requiem For Romantic Love (2015), part of her Movement series, is a compilation of found footage depicting romantic scenes from cinema and other aspects of popular culture. In this requiem, or dance of death, she parodies the idea of romance as a perfect decoration for patriarchal marriage to expose contradictions within it that are often accepted as ‘natural’: he beats her and then he brings her flowers; dead drunk, he promises her the stars of the heavens; he sleeps around but he always comes back home. Jealousy and possessiveness, ‘traditional values’ that define the dark side of romance, slowly corrode the dignity of both partners. Unless recognized, its deathly impact pollutes countless generations and its vapid, false promise erodes a clear conscience and common decency. In earlier work she has examined and made fun of the institutional sexism within Russian Media and particularly the ways in which some women bolster their own lack of status. Her video installation She Has To (2013) focuses on the absurd content of Reality Shows in which young women ask their elders for advice about how to save their marriages. With unintentional black humour, grotesque hags, in voices distorted by the artist, unfailingly and repeatedly lay the blame on the young wife for ‘failing to look after their “men” properly’. |
VMS Group Anna Abazieva The VMS group was shown in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2010), the State Tretyakov Art Museum, Moscow (2002), and the Guelman Gallery, Moscow (2000). Kovylina studied at the Surikov Art Institute, Moscow (1995), the F+F School for Art and Media Design, Zurich (1998) and the Universität der Künste Berlin (2003) and has established a high reputation and has exhibited widely as a performance artist. Satirising the military march pasts in Red Square every May Day during the Soviet era, and the inevitably male symbology of the rockets and guns of the tanks, female power is revealed as these two young naked women, self avowed ‘Heroines from the East’, gleefully straddle the armaments while receiving equally symbolic offerings of red carnations strewn in their path. Feminism, identity and openness are the key motives in their cooperation. Approaching controversial themes with an aggressive critique, they are at this time one of the most important groups of women artists in the whole region. |
Stas Volyazlovsky Born 1971 in Kherson, Ukrainian SSR. Volyazlovsky has worked in a range of media: with graphic art, videos, objects, photographs, textiles and collages, but he is best known for what he has described as chanson art, drawings and paintings on pre-used fabrics that comment on contemporary political events, often with a scurrilous broadside text, drawn in the style of lubki (traditional Russian folk art prints) or of GULAG tattoos. He was awarded the International Malevich Prize in 2010 and his work has been exhibited widely, including Kiosk Between Two Towers, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2011), Chanson Art, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2008) and in groups shows such as The Team I Can’t Live Without, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2013), the 1st Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012), Past, Future Perfect, Calvert 22, London, and the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art at the GARAGE Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2009). His textiles tell legends and tales, where he sometimes takes on a role himself. Their combination of political wordplays and sexual double entendres with humorously explicit illustrations draw the viewer into a wondrous, surreal and conflicted world. Provocatively, what he sees as the excesses and abuses of today he depicts as national folk myths, wrapping them up as ‘the art of the people’. |
Viktor Vorobyev / Elena Vorobyeva Elena Vorobyeva Elena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev work as artists, writers and curators. A couple, they began working together on conceptual art projects during the early 1990s Their work has been shown in a range of different international venues including 1st Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art, (2012), Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, Calvert22, London, (2011), Kazakhstan Blue Period, Impronte Contemporary Art Milan (2010), Postmonument, 14th International Sculpture Biennale, Carrara, (2010), Lonely at the The Top, MUKHA, Antwerp (2009), Time of the Storytellers, Kiasma Museum, Helsinki (2007) and Progressive Nostalgia. Contemporary Art from the former USSR, Luigi Pecci Centre, Prato (2007) and the 51st and 53rd Venice Biennales (2005, 2009). From the matrix of Central Asia, the Vorobyevs’ work has focussed on the past remnants of everyday life in the former Soviet Union, on how these have been transformed after independence, and what they represent in the present. One of the images in Kazakhstan Blue Period (2002-05), the group of works work shown here, portrays a school where the former Soviet red paint has been roughly obliterated by blue. Another photograph shows a tall, sad boy, standing in front of a Soviet block of flats. A pointed blue party-hat is awkwardly perched on his head making him seem like a Pierrot from a Central Asian commedia dell’arte. Elena Vorobyeva wrote about this work in 2005: ‘After the Republic declared its independence, the Kazakh flag became blue. To be more precise, its colour, kok in the Kazakh language, means both ‘blue’ and ‘green’. It can refer to ‘sky blue’, while its derivative koktem means ‘Spring’ and kokteu means ‘becoming green’. Fraught with endless associations – the ‘Eternal Blue Sky’ in the local religion of Tengriism, the nauryz, the pagan celebration of Spring, the blue domes of Islamic mosques, a dream of the vast expanse of the inaccessible ocean – the color blue was accepted by the people as the best, most ‘appropriate’, colour to represent our country. The people of Kazakhstan love the colour blue…Kok is Kazakhstan’s best selling shade of paint. Everything is painted with it: fences, kiosks, walls, benches, even the crosses on graves. Objects of the “Blue Period’ are everywhere, in the strangest places and combinations…..It has spread throughout Kazakhstan, adding an optimistic lustre to the dim nature of our lives. In this way our society, ‘yearning after’ a, perhaps non-existent, bygone integrity, has reacted to the instability and fluidity of this transitional period…..Aspirations of unity…identificatory signs – splashes of color that not only designate membership of a concrete community, but also signify belonging to both the ‘Divine’ as well as to a Power far greater. Perhaps it’s just a kind of good luck charm….’ |
Vadim Zakharov Born 1959 in Dushanbe, Tajik SSR. A graduate of the Moscow State Teachers’ Training Institute, Zakharov has worked as an artist, archivist, editor, collector, book designer and as publisher of the magazine ‘Pastor’. He has been awarded numerous prizes, such as the Best Work in the Visual Art section of the ‘Innovation Prize’, Moscow (2006), the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship at the American Academy, Rome (2007) and the Kandinsky Prize, Moscow (2009). His recent exhibitions include Postscript after RIP (a sarcophagus-like installation of his extensive archive of video documentation of Moscow artists’ exhibitions from 1989 until 2014), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015), Movie on One Page, Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art, Salzburg (2015), A Space Odyssey, The 2nd CAFAM Biennale, Beijing (2014), Danaë in the Russian pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and 25 years on one page, State Tretyakov Museum, Moscow (2006). Since 1978, Zakharov has been an active participant in the Moscow unofficial art scene as well as a leading proponent and chronicler of Moscow Conceptualism. From the absurd texts in his earliest enigmatic paintings of speech-bubble-elephants, he has built his work on a relationship between utterance, action and sign, not unlike the experiments of the Russian Futurists with zaum. The paintings exhibited in BALAGAN!!! are made in response to the fleeting movements of projections of old films as he becomes engaged in a hypnotic dance with their flickering images. Sometimes, these works remain in their painted form, at others they are photographed and exhibited in series. A third element in this work is the film of the artist painting over the image of the film that enables him to establish this primary image. The two appropriate themes chosen for BALAGAN!!! are Zakharov’s renditions of F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Aleksandr Medvedkin’s Happiness (1935). |
Sergey Zarva Born 1973 in Krivoi Rog, Ukrainian SSR. Zarva studied painting at the Grekov Art College in Odessa, graduating in 1992. His work has been exhibited widely, his solo shows including The Library of Optimism, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2013), and Three new projects («Ogonyok» «Family Album», «Honours Board»), Collection Gallery, Kiev (2010). He participated also in the following recent group exhibitions: Fortune Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2014), The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the 1st Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art, and Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011). Grotesque faces, evocative of Egon Schiele’s portraits, painted roughly in a brown palette are a trademark of Zarva’s work. Using thick layers of paint, he has taken and ‘redesigned’ the personalities from different front pages of Ogonyok, an illustrated news magazine rather like LIFE begun in the Soviet era. Leaving these ‘stars’ in a state of derangement, tourism, consumerism and popular culture, along with the ‘winners’ in the predatory neo-liberal state, are all dragged into his dark limelight, that unmasks these people and their flaws in front of the viewer. The two large paintings shown in BALAGAN!!! Disco (2005) multiplies this grotesque com media on a monumental scale. |
ZIP Group Founded in 2009 in Krasnodar. Under the collective name of ZIP (an acronym that denotes the name of Krasnodar’s main art space, situated in the former premises of a factory manufacturing measuring instruments, Zavod Izmeritelnykh Priborov) the group has created a small autonomous zone of contemporary art in the city. The summer of 2011 saw them found the self-proclaimed Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KICA), the city’s first independent and experimental art space, and a new intellectual/art milieu for the younger generation has started forming around it. Reversing the party-inspired unanimity of the Soviet avant-garde’s ‘agitational’ propaganda of the 1920s and ‘30s, ZIP have designed an environment that actively encourages dissent. Their Civil Resistance District, comprising B.O.P.s (Booths for One-man Pickets), bunkers, control platforms, ‘plumbic fists’ and information stands, has been deployed in actual demonstrations. A full-size example is shown outside, while inside the exhibition videos show them in action; drawings and a model illustrate how they all function together. In a demonstration these objects provide both protection and means of communication among participants and transform a simple protest into an organised civil uprising. The B. O. P. or B. I. P. (Booth of Individual Picketing) is a legally allowed ‘protester’s agitation costume’. At the same time it also serves as a protective bunker and a protester’s ‘tank’ as it is able to carry more placards than a single person and provides physical protection from attack. The ‘Shelter/Refuge’ is disguised as a high voltage transformer station. A protester can quite comfortably hide inside it. In addition, it can communicate with others and covertly survey the environment. The ‘Command Tower’ is designed both for scouting and for the coordination of the actions of protesters in the ‘B.I.P’s. It is also equipped with a loud-speaker for campaigning. An interactive model shows an operation in a ‘resistance district’ in action. and tracks the movements of the ‘B.I.P.’s along with the locations of the ‘Shelter/Refuges’ and ‘Command Towers’. Each of these objects has a practical, crucial use. They have been tested out in action by artists on the streets of Krasnodar, Almaty and Perm. |
Artur Žmijewski Born 1966 in Warsaw, Poland. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw (1995), Żmijewski studied there under the performance and installation artist Grzegorz Kowalski. He is currently working as Arts Editor for Krytyka Polityczna, a journal of political critique. He was curator of the Berlin Biennale (2012) and was awarded the Ordway Prize at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 2010. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including: Pracując, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2012/13), Democracies, HMKV, Dortmund (2012) and Videozone / Artur Żmijewski, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (2012). The Mess, Teatre Dramatyczny, Warsaw (2011), Following Bauhaus, A Foundation, Liverpool, (2010) and Artur Żmijewski, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009). A radical artist, who provokes his viewers with an insistence on the politics of aesthetics and the primacy of human values, Żmijewski works mainly in photography and video. He returns to social trauma like a bad tooth, it gives him pain but cannot be ignored. His video KR WP (2000), shown in BALAGAN!!! features a group of armed soldiers from the country’s crack Honour Guard Unit carrying out ceremonial drill in front of the camera. The action then moves inside where the men have taken off their clothes and cavort nakedly with their rifles in the mirrored space of a ballet studio. In a parody of vulnerability and innocence one could almost believe these soldiers were children, Żmijewski described this work as ‘… a musical and a masquerade, but also a serious story about the defenseless body hidden under the uniform. A tender film about men.’ |
Constantin Zvezdochotov Born 1958 in Moscow, USSR. Zvezdochetov graduated in 1981 from the Moscow Art Theatre School, where he studied stage design. His work has been exhibited widely within Russia and abroad, including his solo shows Given Up, Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2009-10), Hello Dear Boltansky!, Paperworks Gallery, Moscow, (2007) and Gallery D137, St. Petersburg (2006). His recent group exhibitions include the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), Upward!, Museum of Moscow (2014), The Team I Can’t Live Without, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2013), Progressive Riot, Museo Pecci, Milan (2012), Russian Pop Art, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (2007), Angels of History, MUHKA, Antwerp (2007), Moscow-Berlin/ Berlin Moscow, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, (2003-04). A leading figure in the Moscow art scene during perestroika, he participated at that time in such influential artists’ groups, as APTART, Mukhomor, and The Avantgarde Club (CLAVA). Influenced by folk art, popular prints, caricatures and comix, his paintings, environments and installations evoke an absurd parallel reality in which the past is brought together with the present in a gruesome car crash that captures the balagan of contemporary life. Zvezdochotov’s large oil painting Tipi di Mosca: tifosi o paparazzi (Moscow Types: Soccer Fans or Paparazzi, 2003) builds on the idea of traditionally picturesque depictions of Moscow professions but within an absurd juxtaposition of the historical and the contemporary. The left hand panel reflects traditional Russia and appears to be based on an old print of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 but set in view of the statue of Pushkin in the centre of Moscow. Instead of soldiers, however, the combatants are the fanatical supporters of two rival Moscow football teams – Spartak (Red and White) and Dinamo (blue and white) – each with their own flags. On the right hand panel, described by letters in the Roman alphabet, supporters in their favourite colours with matching ballet dancers’ tutus mince clumsily and suggestively in Red Square in front of the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate. As on the other panel, there is evidence of conflict, overlaid here by the ludicrous effeminacy of the dancing supporters in their costumes. Perhaps this is a comment on the demonstratively emotional ways in which some of the players behave during matches? Both sides are overviewed, and chased, by ever-present cameras of the paparazzi. |
David Elliott is a curator, writer and teacher who has worked as director of modern and contemporary art museums and related institutions in Oxford, Stockholm, Tokyo, Istanbul, Sydney, Kiev and Moscow. A specialist in Soviet and Russian avant-garde, as well as in modern and contemporary Asian art, he has published widely in these fields as well as on many other aspects of contemporary art. In 1996 he was co-curator of the Council of Europe exhibition Art and Power. Europe under the Dictators, 1930 to 1945 at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and in 1999-2000 was, with Bojana Pejić, Artistic Director of the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe. In 2011 he curated Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia at Calvert 22, London; 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 and, in 2014, Artistic Director of A Time for Dreams, the IV International Biennale of Young Art in Moscow. In 2016 he will be Artistic Director of Les Plaisirs d’Amour, the biennial 56th October Salon in Belgrade. He is a visiting professor in Curatorial Studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong and chairman of the board of Triangle Arts Network/Gasworks, London.
NORDWIND is one of the largest festivals for the arts from the European north. NORDWIND presents the work of contemporary artists from the Nordic and Baltic countries in four European cities every two years: Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Bern. The aim is to promote new artistic impulses and to transmit them all over Europe. According to this mission the program is just as diverse in terms of represented aesthetics, content and artistic disciplines. Founded in 2006 in Berlin, NORDWIND has now grown into a sustainable operating platform. NORDWIND is co-producer, initiator and promoter. The platform consolidates a network of institutions, artists and sponsors and promotes a continuous international exchange. The results of this work are presented every two years in the NORDWIND festival and, since 2014, supplemented by smaller topics in the festival-free years.
The thematic focus of the sixth festival edition in 2015 is the relationship between Europe and Russia. Titled “BALAGAN!!!” the festival this year focuses on the eastern neighbors, on Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. The BALAGAN!!! Exhibition, curated by David Elliott, is realised in cooperation with the international platform for time-based media art, MOMENTUM.
PHOTOS OF THE PRESS CONFERENCE
PHOTOS OF THE OPENING
PHOTOS OF THE INSTALLATION AT MAX LIEBERMANN HAUS
Photo Credit: Marina Belikova
PHOTOS OF THE INSTALLATION AT KÜHLHAUS BERLIN
Photo Credit: Marina Belikova
PHOTOS OF THE INSTALLATION AT MOMENTUM
Photo Credit: Marina Belikova
Publishing
Publishing
MOMENTUM Exhibition Catalogues
Scheiße • 夏色 Zhou Xiaohu Solo Exhibition & Video Bureau presenting Zhou Xiaohu
Scheiße • 夏色
Zhou Xiaohu Solo Exhibition
& Video Bureau presenting Zhou Xiaohu
OPENING 12 September 2015 @ 18:00
13 September – 1 November 2015
12 September (SAT) 18:00-21:00
13 September (SUN) 15:00-17:00
18 September (FRI) 18:00-20:00 (Berlin Art Week)
19 September (SAT) 18:00-20:00 (Berlin Art Week)
26 September (SAT) 3 October (SAT) 10 October (SAT) 17 October (SAT) 24 October (SAT) 31 October (SAT) 1 November (SUN) |
15:00-17:00 |
MOMENTUM is proud to present the first solo show in Germany of the pioneering Chinese video and animation artist Zhou Xiaohu. It is curated by English-born curator and writer, David Elliott, who has worked extensively on contemporary Asian art.
Scheiße • 夏色, German slang for faeces and a popular expletive, the artist’s choice for the exhibition’s title, is intended to reflect not upon his view of art but on the conditions in which all work is made, including art. This idea is clearly expressed in Das Kapital No. 1 – Questionnaire Show, (2015), a new site-specific performance and installation Zhou has made for this exhibition which has developed out of concerns that have run as a decisive element throughout his previous work.
Here, Zhou invokes sleazy peep shows and the sultry, inviting glances of Amsterdam “window girls” as ready-mades for a performance. A scantily clad actor reclines in a glass booth, telephone in hand; how she speaks and the style of her presentation mimics the live phone-ins on the adult channels of German TV. But on entering this exhibition visitors are presented with a choice: either they stand and watch or, if they pick up the handset, they are thrust into a scripted exchange of a completely unexpected order.
Instead of revolving around titillation, or the recital of a price-list of future delights, the exchange consists of an ideological ‘discussion’ about a new economic system. This is driven by a complex set of questions developed by the artist that question the economic and social status and role of the performer in the context of wider questions about the Chinese and world economies.
The visitor may either respond or remain silent. The exchange evolves into a kind of questionnaire, bound by common causes and emotions, that are related to global questions that affect us all – about power, economy, statehood, aspiration, communication, interpretation and misunderstanding.
Zhou Xiaohu is a member of the Chinese generation that experienced in childhood the hysterical, random cruelties of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the wild elation of the country ‘opening itself to the world’ throughout the 1980s. Like many others, he has greeted the booms and busts of both ideology and economics since that time with a mixture of incredulity and scepticism. Conflicting ideas: power and weakness, love and harshness, beauty and ugliness, naivety and cynicism, oppression and freedom, run as leitmotifs throughout his films, animations, installations and performances. Yet he has always been careful to expose these by casting a humane but provocative perspective on the different processes, forms, and media he feels are appropriate for his subject.
Zhou’s whole body of work may be seen as part of a longstanding Chinese artistic tradition in which the inner reflections of an individual collide with the wider political contexts within which they find themselves. Yet it may also be placed within a more recent current of scepticism that focuses on the discrepancies between dominant ideology and economic policy. This he treats in a range of different media, using surreal, absurdist narratives and situations that may be understood as both parodies and allegories of what he sees before him.
Accompanying this new work, MOMENTUM is also showing two of Zhou’s early animated videos that reflect on the body – physical, gendered and political – in radically different ways: The Gooey Gentleman (2002) and Conspiracy (2004), show him making violent drawings on his own skin of the transforming bodies of others. These are accompanied by Secret (2012), an animated video projection on two painted aluminium panels, that seem to be depicting someone being shot….
During the exhibition, viewing access to an archive of all his films will also be made available through Video Bureau at MOMENTUM.
Website – CV
Zhou Xiaohu (b. 1960 Changzhou, lives and works in Shanghai) was one of the first contemporary artists in China to work experimentally with sculptural ideas of video and animation. These works often reflect upon power, the role of the media, and the identity of the artist. Equally important are his social interventions that treat contemporary social paradoxes as ‘ready-mades’ that allow him to formulate art and society assemblages, or what he calls “collaborative installations”. The work of Zhou Xiaohu has been exhibited at MoMA, New York, USA; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK; Kunst Museum, Bern, Switzerland; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China; and the International Center of Photography, New York, USA and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Wien, Austria.
Zhou Xiaohu has participated in such art exhibitions as the Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China (2002); Seville International Art Biennale, Seville, Spain, (2004); China Now, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2004); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia (2006); The Real Thing, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK (2007); Not Soul For Sale, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London, UK (2010); the 8th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju Art Museum, Korea (2010); and Pandamonium: Media Art from Shanghai at MOMENTUM, Berlin (2014). Zhou Xiaohu was awarded the CCAA Award in 2002 and 2006; and in 2014-2015 he is the recipient of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program award to live and work in Berlin for one year.
David Elliott is an English born curator and writer. He has been Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England (1976-96), Director of Moderna Museet 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 17th Biennale of Sydney (2008 – 2010), Artistic Director of the 1st Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011-12), and Artistic Director of the 4th International Biennale of Work by Young Artists in Moscow (2014-2014). He is a visiting professor in curatorship at the Chinese University in Hong Kong and chairman of the board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London. In 2016 he will be Artistic Director of the biennial October Salon in Belgrade, Serbia.
资本论No.1—问卷秀
Das Kapital No.1—Questionnaire show
Installation with Performance: Questionnaire show, tunnel installation, interactive phone and questionnaire.
同谋 Conspiracy 2004
Two channel animation video projection:6 min 12 sec
秘密 Secret 2012
Animation video projection on painting: 3 min 20sec
蜜糖先生 The gooey gentleman 2002
Animation Video:4 min 20 sec
THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION
(photos by Marina Belikova)
THE ARTIST TALK
(photos by Marina Belikova)
Scheisse by Zhou Xiaohu – artist talk from Momentum Worldwide on Vimeo.
In parallel to the exhibition we present a comprehensive archive of Zhou Xiaohu’s video works presented by Video Bureau.
Video Bureau
In parallel with the opening of Scheisse at MOMENTUM, Video Bureau inducts Zhou Xiaohu into their archival holdings, with his video works and texts about his work available to view at the Video Bureau spaces in Beijing and Guangzhou, and at MOMENTUM concurrently with Zhou Xiaohu’s solo exhibition.
Video Bureau is a non-profit organization that aims to provide a platform to exhibit, organize and archive video art. With two spaces in Beijing and Guangzhou, the mission of Video Bureau is to collect and organize artworks of video artists in order to build a video archive that welcomes research and viewing. As an institute opens to the public, every two months Video Bureau features one artist’s video works, and hosts related events.
LOOP Barcelona 2015
Two MOMENTUM curated programmes
Presented at LOOP Barcelona 2015
@ Media Lounge
4 – 6 June 2015
Selected Works from the MOMENTUM Collection
Featuring:
Eric Bridgeman // Osvaldo Budet // Nezaket Ekici // Thomas Eller
James P. Graham // Mariana Hahn // Zuzanna Janin
Gülsün Karamustafa // Mark Karasick // Hannu Karjalainen
Janet Laurence // Gabriele Leidloff // Sarah Lüdemann // MAP Office
Kate McMillan // Tracey Moffatt // Qiu Anxiong // Martin Sexton
Sumugan Sivanesan
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 >>
READ HERE THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION CATALOGUE
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BEYOND THE IMAGE: SOUND
MOMENTUM curated programm for Ikono TV
Featuring:
Lutz Becker // Amir Fattal // Gülsün Karamustafa // Hannu Karjalainen // Janet Laurence
Lutz Becker, After The Wall, 2000 | |
Amir Fattal, From the End to the Beginning, 2014 | |
Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet, 2000 | |
Hannu Karjalainen, Nanjing Grand Theatre, 2012 | |
Janet Laurence, Vanishing, 2009/10 |
We are proud to lead a Professionals Meeting for LOOP Studies:
A Two-Way Street: Cultivating Collections Through Cooperation & Inquiry
Following the founding principle of casting light on the current trends in video art and presenting these to the general public, LOOP continues to focus on the advancement of aspiring young artists, while also presenting established positions of video art. LOOP teams up with an international community of gallerists, artists, curators, collectors and institution directors to develop projects worldwide which aim to explore critically the capacities of video and film in today’s contemporary art discourses and contribute to the exchange of ideas that drive the artworld forward. Every year, LOOP hosts LOOP Barcelona, the main meeting point and highlight for the international video art community that through its three sections -Fair, Festival & Studies-, brings together an accurate selection of contemporary video art works, premieres new productions, features exhibitions, specific projects and screenings, and displays a large programme of talks dealing with current discussions and positions of video art.
Throughout the year, LOOP undertakes a myriad of projects that develops in collaboration with leading international agents and that materialize in different formats and locations: from comissioned projects to touring exhibitions in leading venues, programmes of talks and screenings, among others. LOOP is also home to a living archive of video and film resources accessible online that includes vast documentation on relevant topics for the video studies: from papers, video recordings, interviews, publications and a growing cartography of the agents of the video art field.
Open studio
MOMENTUM Artists-in-Residence OPEN STUDIO
featuring Keegan Luttrell and Sara Alavi
22nd of July
19:30
Hochstraße, 45 13357 Berlin
(Adjacent to the Humboldthain S-bahn)
How do we experience time in an isolated state? How do shadows produce vivid feelings? Sara through her installation will provoke our thinking and will make us doubt things we considered as given. She will attempt to make us ponder about what we expect and how we react when an outcome has turned out differently. Furthermore, she closely examines a so common object, the chair, and the numerous thoughts and situations with which it is connected, throughout the world.
Keegan simulates circumstances of isolation and how they could affect a human mind, body or environment. Her multi-media installations make us rethink the lapse of time and the deviation from normal. How does our perception change when we are outside the social environment? How do we interact with the new elements around us? Could we feel isolated even within our safety net?
“Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state … Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.”
– The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
During her residency, Keegan Luttrell investigated the affects of institutionalization and the nature of time in an isolated state. Drawing inspiration from where she currently lives, a small mountain town in Switzerland that famously housed patients in Sanatoriums throughout the early 1900s, her research revolved around one’s relationship to time when removed from the outside world. Through creating various simulated lenses to these imagined worlds, a shift of what is real and what is perceived is depicted through portals and slivers of built and simulated environments. Through video, sculpture and performance, Luttrell has used her art practice and studio space to channel the behaviors of the isolated and the means and ways one builds a relationship to the awareness of time.
Sara Alavi makes us rethink our belief that shadows exist just because we can see them. Existence concerns what can be defined, yet the only thing definable in the case of a shadow is what creates it: light and a barrier.
Shadow is where the light does not exist. To talk about a shadow, we point out to the barrier that obstructs the light. It is our anticipation of the barrier obstructing the light that helps us recognize this undefinable thing. It seems paradoxical that something undefinable can produce tangible feelings. Shadow persists in existing through our definitions.
As a matter of experience, for every material object, there corresponds the possibility of its shadow; but when we turn off the light, Shadow ceases to exist. So relying on our senses, its existence is ephemeral. It is an elusive being between a déjà vu or a prediction.
Shadow resembles the possibilities like hope and despair. For every material object, there corresponds the possibility of hope and despair. Hope indicates a barrier that gives rise to it. In a city destroyed in war, or in a living creature in a mortal condition, hope and despair coexist. Despair is the endless doubt that the shadow is merely an illusion.
CV – Website
Keegan Luttrell is a multi-media artist living and working in Leysin, Switzerland. She completed her MFA in sculpture at Mills College in Oakland, California in 2013. She graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008 with a BFA in Art History, Theory and Criticism and a concentration in Photography. She has shown works in San Francisco, Oakland, Brooklyn, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Aix-en-Provence, France, Geneva Switzerland and Athens and Santorini, Greece. She is a recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan fellowship award and the Betsy Worden Memorial Fund Scholarship. In Leysin, she teaches visual art at an international boarding school.
CV
Sara Alavi (b.1979, Tehran) is an Iranian artist based in Milan. She studied painting at the Art Department of Alzahra University in Tehran, concluding her studies in 2002. She moved to Rome in 2006 to continue her studies in multimedia projects at La Sapienza University, which she completed in 2010. Since 2011 she lives and works in Milan where she received her second level Degree in Painting at Accademia Di Belle Arti di Brera.She is the current recipient of the Terna Prize which awarded her a residency here in Berlin.
PHOTOS OF THE EVENT
(photos by Marina Belikova)
The Queen, the Rose and the Farmworker Kunstsalon
A Tale on Free Climbing Society
Luana Perilli in conversation with Sumugan Sivanesan
27 June 2015
Luana Perilli (b.1981, Roma) graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma in 2010, where she currently lives and works in Rome. She was awarded with several residency grants: Pan Studios Program, Pan Museum, Napoli (supervised by Daniel Buren) in 2010; Art Omi, New York, grant by Dena Foundation in 2008 and Cité Internationale des Arts, grant by Incontri Internazionali D’Arte, Paris, in 2008 and 2004. Recent shows include: ‘Q.I vedo’, Napoli (), ‘Solitary shelters’ at The Gallery Apart, Roma, IT; ‘All for one’ at Medium Galerie, Bratislava, SK; ‘Roommates-Coinquilini Luana Perilli /Carola Bonfili’, MACRO, Roma, IT. Perilli has contributed to numerous group shows, including the 2014-15 Kochi Muziris Biennale in MOG Goa Museum, India; Internaturalità in PAV, Torino; Patria Interiore-interior homeland Golden thread Gallery, Project Space, Belfast; ITALIENISCHE KUNST HEUTE, Stadtgalerie, Kiel; Museum Biedermann, Donaueschingen; RE-generation, MACRO, Roma; Omaggio a Graziella Lonardi Buontempo , PAN, Napoli; An intimate story – Cotroneo Collection, MAMM Multimedia Art Museumof Moscow, Moscow.Perilli is currently professor of Multimedia Installation at Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and professor of Art Sudio and Drawing at Cornell University in Rome.
Learn more about Luana Perilli’s Terna Prize Artist Residency at MOMENTUM >>
ABOUT SMUGAN SIVANESAN
Sumugan Sivanesan is a self-described ‘anti-disciplinary’ artist and a transcultural radical. His eclectic practice is concerned with the legacies of colonialism, the experience of cultural difference, and diaspora. Sivanesan often engages with the theory of ‘necropolitics’ coined by the Cameroonian philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe. Building upon and going beyond the Foucauldian notion of biopower, the domain of life over which power has taken control, ‘necropolitics’ asserts that contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death has reconfigured the relationships between resistance, sacrifice, and terror.
Beyond the Image Sound on IkonoTV
BEYOND THE IMAGE: SOUND
MOMENTUM Carte Blanche program broadcast on
3 June – 3 July 2015
Featuring:
Lutz Becker // Amir Fattal // Gülsün Karamustafa
Hannu Karjalainen // Janet Laurence
Since the 70s, Berlin has attracted some of the most avant-garde musicians from around the globe, with a strong upsurge of experimental music in the 90s set within the rich atmosphere of possibility that marked the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, Berlin’s sound-scene continues to take a leading role on the international stage, with key yearly events such as Atonal, MaerzMuzik and CTM and permanent platforms such as N.K. Projekt, Ausland and Errant Bodies that stand at the forefront of their field. Sound in Berlin has maintained its status as a realm of emancipatory, political and artistic potential. Its current focus, however, has shifted from music to sound-art, though the line distinguishing these is thin and fluctuating. Increasingly, Berlin’s music venues offer installations and auditory experiments with space and new technologies, rather than what one might conventionally describe as a ‘concert’.
Within this backdrop and inspired by recent events in the city, as well as the rich discourse that they have engendered, for the past year MOMENTUM has been engaging more closely with sound. This has been marked by various new acquisitions to the Collection that redefine and expand our very understanding of time-based art. It has also entailed a revaluation of some of the older works in our Collection, in which the sonic elements have proven highly deserving of more focussed attention. In this sense, our explorations into sound are also exemplary of the way in which we engage with our collection; keeping it alive by continuously revisiting it from different perspectives and continuously questioning the nature and relevance of time-based art.
For LOOP 2015 and specifically within its strand Beyond the Image: Sound, MOMENTUM proposes a programme that represents 6 distinct artistic strategies is which sound takes on a decisive role. In them, the relationship of sound to the moving image is highly diverse, ranging from its imaginative or mnemonic potential in the absence of imagery, to sound as a powerful means to arouse empathy in direct relation to the moving image, to sound as the main content, superseding the primacy of that which is depicted on the screen. It is due to the rich diversity within its delimited focus that this programme is aimed to foment a critical reconsideration of the agency of sound within time-based art: an element that is often overseen or taken for granted, especially within the moving image, but that has immense emotive and even physical effects on the viewer/listener.
Lutz Becker, After The Wall, 2000
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, where he graduated under Thorold Dickinson 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).
Becker re-visits a sound installation commissioned for the exhibition After the Wall held at the Moderna Museet Stockholm in 1999 and subsequently in Berlin in 2000 at the Hamburger Bahnof, also curated by David Elliott. Its five constituent sound montages are based on original recordings made at the fall of the Berlin Wall. MOMENTUM presents the sound sculpture After The Wall in the context of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Wall 25 years ago, 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 the idealogical empire of Communism.
Amir Fattal, From the End to the Beginning, 2014
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. Fattal’s overarching concerns are the cultural connections between Germany and Israel – countries inexorably linked through their history, memory, culture, architecture, and the geographical diaspora which resulted in mass migrations, transposing cultures to new and different nations. The territory of Israel was once part of the Ottoman Empire, and then later administered by the British, yet the very creation of Israel is the legacy of the failed attempt to start the new Third Reich.
From the End to the Beginning is based on a live performance of Richard Wagner’s Vorspiel und Liebestod sequence played in reverse order. The video version of this performance was filmed in the big hall of the Berlin Funkhaus, built in the late 1950s as East Berlin’s new radio station, after musicians could no longer travel freely between the two sections of the city. Following the process of abstraction in music, theatre and light installation, this work is also a reflection on cultural taboos and historical memory. Wagner’s works remain banned from public performance in Israel and have become a symbol for the catastrophic ramifications that anti-Semitism can cause. Rewriting Richard Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’ line by line, fragmenting it to copy the last note as the first note, much as the Hebrew alphabet is read, the performance creates a new conceptual work challenging contemporary perceptions of historical and cultural readings to illustrate how culture is always an assemblage of the fragments of others.
Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet, 2000
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. 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. Ostensibly reverting to historical lore, Karamustafa’s artistic comments oscillate actually between sensual meta-narratives and ironic-critical stories about the present situation, addressing themes of identity and migration, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism. Since the end of the late 1990s, she has often used already existing materials and images of oriental or occidental origin that she fragments, dismantles and reassembles in order to contrast ‘private’ with ‘public’ by referring to every-day life, culture, art history, and the media.
The four-part video Personal Time Quartet is concerned with the point of in- tersection between the artist’s own personal biography and the history of her home country. Having been invited to an exhibition of German domestic inte- riors from various periods in the twentieth century at the Historical Museum in Hanover, Karamustafa was inspired by what she saw there to take a closer look at the similarities between her own childhood reminiscences and these muse- ological German living spaces. The timeframe (or ‘personal time’) covered by these four video’s begins in the year of her father’s birth and ends in the early days of her own childhood. A video screen placed in each of the rooms shows the same young girl – the artist’s alter ego – engaged in various activities. We see her skipping with a skipping rope (dining room, 1906), sorting and folding laundry (kitchen, around 1913), opening cupboards and drawers (living room and parents’ bedroom, around 1930) and painting her nails (room from the 1950s).
Hannu Karjalainen, Nanjing Grand Theatre, 2012
Finnish-born, Berlin-based artist Hannu Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School. Woman on the Beach is a photograph activated into a subtle poetic motion, rewarding the viewer for taking the time to watch it unfold. In subsequent work Karjalainen uses the medium of the moving image to reflect back upon painting and the material qualities of paint. Colour is an elusive subject matter. It is intangible and abstract as much as it is coded, branded and harnessed for different purposes. Hannu Karjalainen is particularly interested in how meaning is attributed to a colour, and how this mechanism can be exploited by re-contextualization, using colour and its supposed meaning as a critical tool to investigate the world around us. In an ongoing series of works that turn classical portrait photographs into moving color palets, Karjalainen again mobilizes the traditionally still image. Looking at painting through photography, its role becomes reversed.
Nanjing Grand Theatre explores the memory inherited in an architectonic site. The Nanjing Grand Thetre, a western classical style building designed by Chinese architects originally housed western cinema in the 1930s Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution the building was dedicated to Beijing Opera and temporarily called Revolution Concert Hall. Now renamed Shanghai Concert Hall, the building is a prime location for classical music concerts. The massive construction plans in the Shanghai city centre called for the demolition of the building several times, as it was both in the way of a highway and a metro line. Finally a different solution was found: in early 2000s the building was moved from it’s original location by lifting the whole 5650 ton building up 3.38 meters and dragging the building to a new location some 70 meters southeast. The video work is shot on the original site of the concert hall, where an elevated highway now passes through the city. Passing lights and shadows take human forms as we hear snippets from the soundtrack of the very first film screened in Nanjing Grand Theatre, Broadway (1929). The film adaptation of the musical is now deemed lost in its original form, with only an edited version made from separate silent and talkie versions existing.
Janet Laurence, Vanishing, 2009/10
Australian artist Janet Laurence‘s work explores a poetics of space and materiality through the creation of works that deal with our experiential and cultural relationship with the natural world. Her work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. It occupies the liminal zones and meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Laurence’s practice includes both ephemeral and permanent works as well as installations that extend from the museum/gallery into both urban and landscape domain. Her work, centered on living nature, bleeds between the architectural and the natural world, physically and metaphorically dissolving these boundaries. Her spaces are immersive and reflective, creating a play between perception and memory. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underlying themes. Laurence’s work is represented in major Australian and international collections and has been included in many national survey exhibitions.
Vanishing is Janet Laurence’s first video work, made during a residency at the Toranga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. 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 involvement on a MOMENTUM panel on art and science.
Founded by Elizabeth Markevitch, IkonoTV is a unique television channel broadcasting art and only art 24/7 on HD. Offering a pure visual experience, an ever-changing playlist of art films is produced in close collaboration with more than 400 international artists, over 200 collections, archives and the most important museums of the world. All productions are free from additional sound or commentary, allowing an international audience to be exposed to a completely new approach to the arts of all epochs, from antiquity to contemporary art. Your television screen is transformed into a lively painting, a window straight into the worlds leading museums and galleries. In the conviction that everyone should have access to art in their homes, IkonoTV is viewable in more than 30 countries worldwide (average technical HD reach: 37 million households) through IPTV’s in Germany and France, through IPTV and ArabSat in the MENASA region, and internationally on our HD web stream.
Luana Perilli Residency 2015
Terna Prize Artist Residency at MOMENTUM
with
Luana Perilli
1 May – 26 June 2015
Luana Perilli (b.1981, Roma) graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma in 2010, where she currently lives and works in Rome. She was awarded with several residency grants: Pan Studios Program, Pan Museum, Napoli (supervised by Daniel Buren) in 2010; Art Omi, New York, grant by Dena Foundation in 2008 and Cité Internationale des Arts, grant by Incontri Internazionali D’Arte, Paris, in 2008 and 2004. Recent shows include: ‘Q.I vedo’, Napoli (), ‘Solitary shelters’ at The Gallery Apart, Roma, IT; ‘All for one’ at Medium Galerie, Bratislava, SK; ‘Roommates-Coinquilini Luana Perilli /Carola Bonfili’, MACRO, Roma, IT. Perilli has contributed to numerous group shows, including the 2014-15 Kochi Muziris Biennale in MOG Goa Museum, India; Internaturalità in PAV, Torino; Patria Interiore-interior homeland Golden thread Gallery, Project Space, Belfast; ITALIENISCHE KUNST HEUTE, Stadtgalerie, Kiel; Museum Biedermann, Donaueschingen; RE-generation, MACRO, Roma; Omaggio a Graziella Lonardi Buontempo , PAN, Napoli; An intimate story – Cotroneo Collection, MAMM Multimedia Art Museumof Moscow, Moscow.Perilli is currently professor of Multimedia Installation at Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and professor of Art Sudio and Drawing at Cornell University in Rome.
During her Residency in Berlin, Luana Perilli will further deepen her investigation into post-critical collective awareness and the perception of nature.
The history of the city itself provides a great range of provoking issues and locations that recently changed paths of use and meaning, as they became taken over by necessity, aswell as by a will to activate a new awareness in the interpretation of spaces.
These locations are a large field for Perilli’s artistic investigation, alongside her interest in the idea of shelters, left overs and post-failure perception of the environment.
This critical shift and the ecological issues related to urban beekeeping and urban crops will inspire a new corpus of works made of videos, drawings and sculptural installations. Perilli will dedicate special attention to issues around collective intelligence.
Queen, the Rose and the Farmworker, A Tale on Free Climbing Society
Luana Perilli in conversation with Sumugan Sivanesan
Unfamiliar Show at Millerntor Gallery
UNFAMILIAR SHOW
Selected Works from the MOMENTUM Collection
2 – 5 July 2015
At Millerntor Gallery
Heiligengeistfeld 1, 20359, Hamburg
Featuring:
Eric Bridgeman // Nezaket Ekici // Theo Eshetu
Amir Fattal // Gülsün Karamufa // Tracey Moffatt
Martin Sexton // Sumugan Sivanesan
ERIC BRIDGEMAN
Eric Bridgeman is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Papua New Guinea and currently based in Brisbane, Australia. Bridgeman commenced his Bachelor of Photography at the Queensland College of Art in 2005, majoring in Art Practice under the guidance of Ray Cook, Marian Drew and Jay Younger. He spent his final year in 2008 experimenting in Interdisciplinary Sculpture, which saw the beginnings of his works for The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules (2008/09). In 2008, the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) selected this work for inclusion in The New Fresh Cut, giving Bridgeman the exposure and support to further the two-year long project. From this breakthrough opportunity, Bridgeman’s work attracted support and opportunities from organizations and institutions such as Next Wave Festival (Melbourne), Gallery 4A (Sydney), Australia Council for the Arts, Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney) and the University of Queensland Art Museum (Brisbane).
The Fight, 2008
In 2009, Bridgeman traveled through remote parts of the Chimbu Province, his mother country, in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. As he was born in Australia, he became increasingly conscious of his own “white” Australian presence. The Fight is based on ethnographic conventions, from National Geographic to Irving Penn, which once aided in the promotion and consumption of PNG as Australia’s next frontier. Bridgeman filmed two groups of men from his own clan, the Yuri. Through acting out Western stereotypes of tribal war, The Fight parodies the history of representation and the subsequent impact on the national and cultural identity of PNG.
NEZAKET EKICI
Nezaket 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 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. Born in Kırşehir, Turkey in 1970, Ekici 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.
Veiling and Reveiling, 2010
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 goods 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, bag, 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 willful inversion of public and private space.
THEO ESHETU
Theo Eshetu was born in London 1958, and grew up in Addis Ababa, Dakar, Belgrade and Rome. He now lives and works in Berlin. 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, 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.
Questa è vita [That’s Life], 1986
Both Resignation and Affirmation, this early experimental video work by Theo Eshetu faces the inherently racist quality of television headon, transforming it into a celebratory Anthem of Black pride. Part biographic expression of interracial conflicts, the artist seeks an understanding of a video poetic through ritual, make-up, gestures, postures and dances, clothes, nudity and the blury pixels of the video signal. This work aims to both destroy and celebrate the possibilities of an a Art for Television : QUESTA E’ VITA (which synonymously in Italian sound like Questa e’ Video, This is Video,) explores new forms of video-making and the artist’s search for a new video language by going back to his African roots. Following the form of American Jazz musicians experimenting with new sound by going back to their African roots and the early cut-up method of hip Hop musicians, Questa e’ Vita is a Pop Video to Art Blakey’s drum solo in “Orgy in Rhythm”. [TE]
Whereas Theo Eshetu is a contributing artist to the MOMENTUM Collection, Questa è vita is not represented in the Collection.
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. Fattal’s overarching concerns are the cultural connections between Germany and Israel – countries inexorably linked through their history, memory,
culture, architecture, and the geographical diaspora which resulted in mass migrations, transposing cultures to new and different nations.
Atara, 2015
The video installation Atara is dealing with different layers of the concept of resurrection in the context of German history. It combines together a reversed version of the Liebestod song from the opera “Tristan und Isolde” by Richard Wagner – that Fattal previously recorded together with an orchestra at the Berliner Funkhaus – together with a video taken at the workshop of the Berliner Stadtschloss in Spandau, where the new Baroque-style stone facade of the Stadtschloss is currently being rebuilt. The word Atara in Hebrew means crown, which is used in a famous Talmud expression meaning “restore to it’s former glory“. The video is dealing with a process that is taking place ‘out of time‘ or ‘out of space‘, in this case, breaking the historical narrative of creation and destruction in the context of two buildings that used to stand at the same place in Berlin: the Berliner Stadtschloss and the Palast der Republik. Their story brings together different epochs in the political history of Berlin and their aesthetics reflect the changing ideologies that they used to represent. It is asking the question: what does it mean to build a Baroque style palace in the year 2015 in a state with no monarchy? [AF]
Whereas Amir Fattal is a contributing artist to the MOMENTUM Collection, Atara is not represented in the Collection.
GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA
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. 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. Ostensibly reverting to historical lore, Karamustafa’s artistic comments oscillate actually between sensual meta-narratives and ironic-critical stories about the present situation, addressing themes of identity and migration, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism. Since the end of the late 1990s, she has often used already existing materials and images of oriental or occidental origin that she fragments, dismantles and reassembles in order to contrast ‘private’ with ‘public’ by referring to every-day life, culture, art history, and the media.
Personal Time Quartet, 2000
The video and sound installation Personal Time Quartet 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 the work is turned on anew, the four channels never synchronize, instead producing each time a new quartet to accompany the looping images. The four-part video Personal Time Quartet is concerned with the point of in- tersection between the artist’s own personal biography and the history of her home country. Having been invited to an exhibition of German domestic inte- riors from various periods in the twentieth century at the Historical Museum in Hanover, Karamustafa was inspired by what she saw there to take a closer look at the similarities between her own childhood reminiscences and these muse- ological German living spaces. The timeframe (or ‘personal time’) covered by these four video’s begins in the year of her father’s birth and ends in the early days of her own childhood. A video screen placed in each of the rooms shows the same young girl – the artist’s alter ego – engaged in various activities. We see her skipping with a skipping rope (dining room, 1906), sorting and folding laundry (kitchen, around 1913), opening cupboards and drawers (living room and parents’ bedroom, around 1930) and painting her nails (room from the 1950s). The films themselves, however, were not shot inside the museum, but rather in her apartment in Istanbul. Viewing them therefore gives rise to the most diverse associations. The girl skipping suggests a carefree childhood, the nail-painting a concern with the artist’s own femininity, the folding of laundry could be read as preparation for her future role of housewife, while 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, therefore, Karamustafa not only debunks the local or national specificity of certain styles, but at the same time exposes just how similar the evolution of (female) identity can be, even in very disparate cultures.
Barbara Heinrich,from Gülsün Karamustafa. My Roses My Reveries,Yapi Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık A.Ş, Istanbul, 2007.
TRACEY MOFFATT
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. 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. Ostensibly reverting to historical lore, Karamustafa’s artistic comments oscillate actually between sensual meta-narratives and ironic-critical stories about the present situation, addressing themes of identity and migration, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism. Since the end of the late 1990s, she has often used already existing materials and images of oriental or occidental origin that she fragments, dismantles and reassembles in order to contrast ‘private’ with ‘public’ by referring to every-day life, culture, art history, and the media.
Other, 2009
As one of the founding collection donations following MOMENTUM’s first benefit exhibition, “Other” incorporates film techniques – splicing film clips, combining chronologies, creating and dissolving narratives – that parallel MOMENTUM’s questioning of time-based art.
“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
MARTIN SEXTON
Martin Sexton is a London-based artist and writer who began his career as a science-fiction writer. Without a formal background in fine art, Sexton considers his point of view to be more akin to that of a writer. Or as John-Paul Pryor of DAZED Digital has described, Sexton is “a raconteur of both constructed and real mythologies.” Sexton calls his works ‘futiques,’ a portmanteau alternatively evoking the terms future, critique, and antique. Sexton’s futiques are filmed in the past, screened in the present, and bear portents from the future. The layering of multiple temporalities in Sexton’s videos, along with his narrative strategies (primarily scrolling first-person text) lend them an ambivalent presence: who, or what, exactly can we consider the author? Sexton’s first encounter with MOMENTUM was at MOMENTUM Sydney in 2010, where curator James Putnam included “Bloodspell (Mexican UFO)” (1972-2012) as part of The Putnam Selection, a program of seven films by British artists. In 2012, Sexton donated “Bloodspell (Mexican UFO)” and “Indestructible Truth (Tibet UFO)” (1958-59) to the MOMENTUM Collection. When the MOMENTUM Collection was shown at the Musraramix Festival in Jerusalem in May 2012, Sexton traveled to Jerusalem to represent the artists in the collection.
Bloodspell (Mexican UFO), 1973 – 2012
With its low-fi analogue aesthetic and jerky zoom shots, “Bloodspell (Mexican UFO)” (1973-2012) begins like your parents’ home travel videos. Characteristically of Sexton’s videos, however, our cameraman himself does not appear. Instead, a scrolling first-person narrative describes a remote Mayan temple controlled by the cosmos. The lasting enigma of “Bloodspell” comes towards the video’s end, as the camera transitions from its documentary role into a tool of abstraction and mysticism. As the music swells and kaleidoscope-like patterns drift across the screen, we watch a flying saucer land on top of a Mayan temple. Without comment or guidance from the narrator, Sexton leaves us to probe our own potential for belief or disbelief.
SUMUGAN SIVANESAN
Sumugan Sivanesan is a self-described ‘anti-disciplinary’ artist and a transcultural radical. His eclectic practice is concerned with the legacies of colonialism, the experience of cultural difference, and diaspora. Sivanesan often engages with the theory of ‘necropolitics’ coined by the Cameroonian philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe. Building upon and going beyond the Foucauldian notion of biopower, the domain of life over which power has taken control, ‘necropolitics’ asserts that contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death has reconfigured the relationships between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. Sivanesan’s first collaboration with MOMENTUM was during MOMENTUM Sydney in 2010, where he performed “What’s Eating Gilberto Gil” (2010), a performance/lecture exploring our common history of cannibalism and its contemporary legacies. In February 2012, Sivanesan proposed to perform a new work, “The Anticolonials” (2012) at MOMENTUM Berlin. “The Anticolonials” traced the past and present of anti-colonial politics. Along with his new performance/lecture, MOMENTUM exhibited a retrospective of Sivanesan’s video works.
A Children’s Book of War, 2010
A Children’s Book of War made its fortuitous entrance into the MOMENTUM Collection while curator Rachel Rits-Volloch was in the process of organizing Sivanesan’s video retrospective at MOMENTUM. After spending the day with Sivanesan reviewing his videos, Rits-Volloch asked him to play a neglected yellow icon on his desktop. While Sivanesan insisted that the work was merely a short animation, quite different from his other works, Rits-Volloch immediately registered the impact of the work. The immediate impact of A Children’s Book of War lies, perhaps, in its jarring conjunction of war, sovereignty, and violence with a format usually reserved for much more lighthearted topics. With its dominant color palette of black and bright yellow, A Children’s Book of War incorporates iconography as diverse as Julian Assange, the Sydney Opera House, and the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. In the accompanying text to the work, Sivanesan 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. With its haunting last paragraph, Sivanesan reminds 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 that are felt and suffered always elsewhere:
“When Captain Cook first made contact, 18 years before Governor Phillip and the First Fleet arrived an act of violence pre–empted the war that was to follow.
It’s a war that a lack of recognition of Indigenous Sovereignty helps to perpetuate.
A war that the civic revolt at Redfern revealed. A war not likely to end any time soon.”
About Millerntor Gallery
The Millerntor Gallery is the international urban arts, music and cul-ture festival for creative engagement. Initiated by Viva con Agua and the FC Sankt Pauli, it is both a social art gallery and a cultural festival in the Millerntor stadium. Various target groups are addressed and moti-vated to engage themselves socially, through the universal languages of art, music and football. For 5 days a year, the Millerntor stadium is transformed into a platform for dialogue and exchange, locally, inter-nationally as well as at an intercultural level.
By means of trans-genre art works, film presentations and a diverse musical, cultural and edu-cational programme, it aims to address the question of how a positive change to the world can be instigated. Thereby, opportunities of inter-action and participation turn the audience into participants, and cre-ate a meaningful community, even beyond the event itself. The profits generated by the art sales are donated to Viva con Agua e.V., in order to improve the worldwide water and sanitary supply.
Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #12 with David Medalla
Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #12
Physical Ghosts and other Tales:
A Virtual Impromptu by David Medalla
David Medalla in dialogue with Shi Handao
17th MAY 2015
At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.
With work ranging from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation and performance, David Medalla constantly shifts between situationist, surrealist and conceptualist tactics. Admitted to Columbia University at the age of 12, he studied and performed alongside some of the most preeminent scholars, artists and critics of the twentieth century, including Marcel Duchamp, who once honored him with a “medallic” object. Medalla’s work has been included in such exhibitions as Harald Szeemann’s Weiss auf Weiss (1966) and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969), as well as 1972’s DOCUMENTA 5. Medalla has a longstanding history as a founder and director of various projects, ranging from the Signals Gallery in London in 1964, which exhibited international kinetic art, to the Exploding Gallery in 1967, an international group of multi-media artists highly influential in counterculture circles. While much of his work is deeply rooted in the underground, avant-garde scene in London, he became increasingly known for his series “Cloud Canyons”: thick bubbles that form random shapes and patterns against the light. Medalla additionally founded the Mondrian Fan Club in New York in 1994 with Adam Nankervis, co-curator for MOMENTUM’s joint exhibition A Wake, and founded and directed the London Biennale in 1998, a makeshift free arts festival concocted through word-of-mouth invitation. Medalla has lectured at the Sorbonne, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, MoMA, the University of the Philippines, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Warwick and Southampton and the Slade School of Fine Art, St. Martin’s. In 1997 he was awarded the DAAD artist grant to work in Berlin, and he has recently exhibited at the New Museum in New York, where the curator hailed his “Cloud Canyons No. 14” as an iconic sculpture of contemporary art. He lives and works in New York, London and Paris.
Shi Handao holds an MA degree from SAIC and is currently artistic director at Ray Art Center, as well as curator and critic.
WATCH THE TALK:
Amir Fattal BuildingScape
Premiering on Berlin Gallery Weekend!
1st & 2nd of May
9:00pm – midnight
Projected on the facade at Französische Straße 56-60, Berlin
(the future Palais Varnhagen)
Click HERE for more information and full program of events >>
Atara, 2015
Video installation by Amir Fattal
The video installation Atara is dealing with different layers of the concept of resurrection in the context of German history. It combines together a reversed version of the Liebestod aria from the opera Tristan Und Isolde by Richard Wagner and images taken at the workshop of the Berliner Stadtschloss in Spandau, where the new Baroque-style stone facade is being constructed for the rebuilding of the Stadtschloss. The word ‘Atara’ in Hebrew means crown, which is used in a famous Talmudic expression meaning “to restore to it’s former glory“.
The video Atara is dealing with a process that is taking place ‘out of time’ or ‘out of space’, in this case bringing the historical narrative of creation and destruction into the context of two buildings that used to stand at the same place in Berlin: the Berliner Stadtschloss and the DDR’s Palast der Republik. The parallel story of these two buildings brings together different epochs in the political history of Berlin, while their aesthetics reflect the changing ideologies that they used to represent. Atara is asking the question: what does it mean to build a Baroque style palace in the year 2015?
Atara transforms the artistisinal workshop in Berlin’s Spandau into a space station, and the artists who work there on the creation of the sculptural façade into astronauts. The video follows their technical process and the historical references that they are using in creating a place that was lost 70 years ago. It shows the combination of the old traditional stone carving technique together with the long process of creating the different elements and figures by using old photographs and some of the original remains of the original palace. The process combines sculptung in clay, making silicone molds, plaster positives and later stone carving. The process as a whole becomes a metaphor for the attempt to re-frame the historical events that took place in Germany during the 20th century, and the ongoing attempt to transcend into a new era.
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. Fattal’s overarching concerns are the cultural connections between Germany and Israel – countries inexorably linked through their history, memory, culture, architecture, and the geographical diaspora which resulted in mass migrations, transposing cultures to new and different nations. The territory of Israel was once part of the Ottoman Empire, and then later administered by the British, yet the very creation of Israel is the legacy of the failed attempt to start the new Third Reich.
BuildingScape is a Berlin-based company that develops artistic, architectonic and urban media interventions and concepts to accompany and promote the construction process of pivotal European building projects. The primary aim is to transform what is often perceived to be a social inconvenience in the form of major construction sites into living urban interventions that creatively address the process of urban transformation and development. With this frame of thinking, BuildingScape addresses the building of future architectural and cultural icons within their immediate and broader social context. To achieve these objectives, BuildingScape designs innovative artistic interventions within and upon the structures of construction sites, including large-scale video projections in public space, and the commissioning of site-specific works through artist residencies. By bringing contemporary art into direct contact with urban development in public space, BuildingScape transforms the process of construction into cultural and social experience that is as innovative and inspiring as it is entertaining and educational. BuildingScape was founded in 2014 by Can Togay (former Director of the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin), David Szauder (artist and curator), and Thomas Hölzel (collector and developer).
Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #11 with Zuzanna Janin
Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #11
Zuzanna Janin’s Poetics of Combat:
Beyond Victory and Defeat
Zuzanna Janin in dialogue with Lin Yu
19th APRIL 2015
At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.
Zuzanna Janin, born in 1961 in Poland, is a visual artist and former teen actor. Having at one time starred in the Polish serial Szalenstwo Majki Skowron (Madness of Majka Skowron), Janin now uses her theatrical background to create sculpture, video, installation, photography and performances. Her work has been shown in a variety of spaces, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Foundation Miro, Barcelona, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, National Gallery Zacheta, Warsaw, Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Jeu de Pomme, Paris, Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthalle, Bern, Hoffmann Sammlung, Berlin, and TT The THING, NY. Janin has also taken part in the Sydney Biennale, Istanbul Bienniale, Liverpool Biennale, and the 54th Venice Biennale.
Lin Yu is a writer and art critic, editor of ArtReview Asia. Since she starts to work with the British art magazine ArtReview in 2013, she has founded its sister magazine ArtReview Asia, a critical magazine distributed in pan-Asia area. Prior to this position, she was the founding editor of LEAP (2009-2012). Her practice ranges from writing, editing, art and culture criticism to curating. Her recent curatorial project ‘Timur Si-Qin: Biogenic Mineral’ is now on show at Magician Space, Beijing until 17 May 2015. She currently lives and works in Shanghai.
WATCH THE TALK:
Times of Passage: on the Decorative and its Rites
Times of Passage: on the Decorative and its Rites 22 March 2015 At the main dome of the Neue Synagoge, Only by invitation |
more information here >>
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Guido Nosari (MADRE) (b. 1984, Bergamo) is a Berlin/Milan-based artist mainly working with textile. Originally a painter and draughtsman, after receiving his degree in Fine Arts from Brera Art Academy in 2010, his artistic production underwent a two-year long period of intermission. This was broken in 2012, when he resumed his practice by sewing fabrics and weaving threads onto his canvasses. For Nosari, the act of sewing manifests an enclosing and trapping of temporalities within the non-navigable chaos of unmediated time. This process holds a ritual quality that allows him to approach the otherwise inaccessible zones of his thought. Nosari has had various solo-exhibitions in galleries including Maria Cilena (2014-15) and Casa Testori (2011) and his work has been acquired by various museum and private collections in Italy. He has been selected for the 2015 Berlin Textile Biennale and is currently pursuing an Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Berlin, in which he researches the implications of decontextualizing his practice.
The idea that we all share an emptiness that I do not know, unnerves me. My research is focused on following this absence that escapes me every time I try to grasp it. To understand how much is common amongst human beings. In sewing I feel safe, because it creates a space and a time that is determinate. A way to follow. My thoughts are wrapped and tied, close to my dead.
The chaos grinds silences.
– Guido Nosari
Lutz Becker
Lutz Becker
Lutz Becker is a filmmaker, artist and curator. Born in Berlin, he has lived and worked in London for most of his adult life. 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, Lutz Becker 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 and 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 an artist in 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!.
In addition to Lutz Becker’s work as artist and film maker, he is also a curator, specialising in Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism. He curated for Tate Modern the Moscow section of Century City (2001); 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.
After the wall
1999/2014, Limited Edition Vinyl Record, 39 min 46 sec
1999/2014, Sound Sculpture on loop, 37 min 18 sec
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 Budapest and Berlin. MOMENTUM originally presented the sound sculpture After the Wall in our exhibition Fragments of Empires in the context of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2014. Together with The Vinyl Factory, we also produced a limited edition vinyl record of After the Wall. This work was subsequently acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection. 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.
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.
AFTER THE WALL – Potsdamer Platz |
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AFTER THE WALL – Invalidenstrasse |
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AFTER THE WALL – Checkpoint Charlie |
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AFTER THE WALL – Brandanburger Tor |
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AFTER THE WALL – Night |
Works on Paper III
Works on Paper III
3 May – 5 July 2015
Produced by Emilio Rapanà
Performances: May 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 |
Exhibition: 6 June — 5 July 2015 |
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Featuring:
Marina Belikova // Richard Berger // Andreas Blank
Isaac Chong Wai // Paul Darius // Amir Fattal // ƒƒ
Zeno Gries // Mariana Hahn // David Medalla // Adam Nankervis
Melisa Palacio Lopez & Noise Canteen // Kirsten Palz // Zhou Xiaohu
For the MPA-B Month of Performance Art Berlin 2015, MOMENTUM reprises its month-long program of Performance Sundays entitled WORKS ON PAPER. WORKS ON PAPER III inverts classic assumptions of paper as a medium, inviting performance artists to approach paper not as a static blank canvas, but as a dynamic source of conceptual and performative possibility. Bringing together a diverse group of international artists based in Berlin, MOMENTUM invites them to work on paper and with paper to activate all the possibilities of the medium in unexpected ways. WORKS ON PAPER III generates a dialogue between performance artists confronted with the challenge of working with paper, and artists whose medium is paper, given the challenge of working with performance, invoking the breadth of performance art to reimagine paper: this most traditional of artistic media.
Taking place every Sunday in May (3, 10, 17, 24 & 31) from 3-6pm, WORKS ON PAPER III takes the form of a cumulative series of performances – with each subsequent performance engaging with the artifacts resulting from the works preceding it in the series. By generating a cumulative, site-specific series through the appropriation of the remains of one another’s performances, the artists in WORKS ON PAPER challenge and reinvigorate the notion of the stationary, disengaged exhibition. What, they ask, is the life of performance after the event concludes? Whether engaging in durational performance, instruction pieces, physical and social architecture, live performance in tandem with other media, sculpture, dance, poetry, or text, these artists challenge expectations of working with the traditional medium of paper in real-time.
Each performance is documented on video, and from 6 June to 5 July 2015, MOMENTUM will exhibit these videos alongside the artifacts in a gallery exhibition.
(click on the icons below to read the full information about each work)
Marina Belikova Website Marina was born in Moscow, Russia. From 2005-2011 she studied Graphic Web Design & E-commerce at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. From 2012-2013 she completed an M.A. in Communication Design: Graphic Design at Kingston University, London. In 2013 she began her M.F.A. in Media Art and Design at Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar. |
Re:mémorer In a landmark 2010 paper in Nature, Schiller (then a postdoc at New York University) and her NYU colleagues, including Joseph E. LeDoux and Elizabeth A. Phelps, published the results of human experiments indicating that memories are reshaped and rewritten every time we recall an event. (reference) The project is inspired by a theory claiming that every time we remember something, we do not access the original memory, but rather recall our remembrance of the event. Every time we remember something, our memory is being re-written, the newer memory overwriting the previous one. On the other hand, nowadays we store a lot of our memories in the digital form in order to preserve them safe and unchanged, but doing that we still keep endlessly copying and reproducing them in all the different mediums. Do they really stay unchanged, even being saved digitally?
The project idea is to visualise these transformations of our memories.
In the end we will see how the same event is being altered in time through four different points of view. |
Richard Berger Richard Berger, born 1981 in Wuppertal, is a Berlin-based artist. After finishing his studies in social work in 2006 he then began his studies in physical education, philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Kassel, graduating in 2012 and 2013. There he developed his interest in art, taking courses in contemporary dance and theater while working at the Staatstheater Kassel. In 2011 he had his first big stage performance under the direction of contemporary dance choreographer Johannes Wieland at the Staatstheater. Berger moved to Berlin during his studies in philosophy and moved his practice to fine art, with a focus on sculpture. Translating his theoretical knowledge of humanities and social science into form, his plastic works revolve around dialectic pairs like the perceptible and the imperceptible or believing and knowing. He often makes use of scientific materials and techniques to stimulate and play with the curiosity of the viewer. |
A Lack of Information What is a simple sheet of paper usually created for? Since its invention it gives the user the possibility to structure his or her thoughts and bring them into concrete material form. The owner usually uses paper as a medium through which to transfer his or her inner world to the outside and make it visually perceptible. At the same time the sheet of paper is used as a storage medium. The information on it will be stored until it is no longer interesting. In particular, the artist usually tries to produce content on the paper which is interesting for a longer period, especially if the work is made for a viewer. The viewer gets the chance to perceive the visual content and build up his or her own personal thoughts or ideas from it.
This performance plays with the idea of not satisfying the expectations of the viewer to take part in his structured thoughts on paper. It plays with hiding and destroying instead of showing and storing. If the content is not shared, is there still content? Is the viewer trying to slip into the role of the artist and create his or her own information in front of his inner eye? Or is it just confusing? |
Andreas Blank Website 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. Andreas Blank‘s stone encarved trompe l’oeils seem casual at first sight. However, his arrangements are precisely staged and after closer inspection one discovers that light bulbs, transport boxes and plastic bags are made of marble, alabaster or sand stone. 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 in 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 and values on the ordinary and present. |
Untitled – A Sculptural Performance At first glance, Andreas Blank’s desk appears to be like any ordinary desk. On top, some paraphernalia are neatly displayed; a half-full cup, a box and a documentation folder. The desk could be found in any artist’s studio or any workspace for that matter. However, upon closer inspection, each element (including the trestle table itself) has been meticulously hand carved from a variety of precious stones, sourced from quarries from all over the world. In this way, the work relates to the history of stone carving within art history and sculpture, where materials such as marble, alabaster and limestone were traditionally used to sculpt objects of political or religious significance.
Blank, however, plays tricks with our expectations and perceptions. By treating mundane objects in a similar traditional and precise manner, he provides the everyday with a monumental status. For example the crumpled A4 white sheet of paper, in a black frame, that modestly occupies a spot on one of the exhibition walls. Upon closer inspection it is actually carved from white marble (the paper) and black alabaster (the frame). From a distance, this work could be viewed as a pun on modernist nihilism, but up close, reveals a material sensibility that goes beyond a simple juxtaposition of abstraction and reality. |
Isaac Chong Isaac Chong Wai is an artist from Hong Kong and MFA candidate in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar. He received his BA in Visual Arts (Hons.) from the Academy of Visual Art at Hong Kong Baptist University. He works with diverse media, including performance, site-specific installation, public art, video, photography and multimedia. His work, “I’m not changing the color of history – The Sarajevo White Roses,” is selected to be shown at Macura Museum in Serbia in 2015. Chong’s work, “I Dated a Guy in Buchenwald,” was selected for the Moscow Biennale for Young Art 2014. His video, “Equilibrium No.8 – Boundaries,” received honorary mention at the Award of the 2nd OZON International Video Art Festival in Katowice, Poland in 2013. He was awarded the first runner-up prize for the 2012 Hong Kong Contemporary Art Award. He participated in IAM (International Art Moves) in Dresden, Germany in 2012. Chong had his solo-exhibition at the Academy of Visual Arts Gallery in Hong Kong in 2011. He lives and works in Berlin. |
The Shape of Missing Violence 5-7 participants are invited to perform in “The Shape of Missing Violence.” Each of the participants is required to hold a knife and stay still. They stand in front of a wall within a “frame” which is made of black adhesive tape in rectangle shape. When the performance starts, the artist adjusts their postures and, later, uses the same black adhesive tape to “fill” everything within the frame. Afterwards, the wall and the bodies of the participants are covered with black tapes, while their heads and the knives are still visible; then, their heads are covered with black tape and, finally, the knives are covered as well. Once participants realize that their body is completely covered, they can move slightly, expanding the tapes from “inside” (not destroying them) and come out from the tapes. They leave the knife, which is stuck on the wall, behind the tapes. In the end, the shapes of the leaving traces of their bodies are shown while the knives are invisible. |
Paul Darius Paul Darius studied in the Sculpture Department of The Art Academy Berlin with Prof. Karin Sander, Prof. Albrecht Schäfer and Prof. Eran Schärf. He graduated with a Meisterschüler Degree in 2014. His artistic practice is linked to a close engagement with daily experiences that become the source and inspiration for his work. The development of his work is associated with a creative concern for light, movement, bodily perception and direction of the spectator’s attention–all leading to installations that combine objects, photography, video, drawing, printing and paraphernalia of daily life. |
I Believe I Can Fly The performative character is not delivered by the action of the artist, but transferred to the audience. It is not a forced one but understood as an affordance, liquidating the clear division of an „acting“ artist and the „receiving“ audience. |
Amir Fattal Amir Fattal (born in Israel in 1978) is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Fattal’s overarching concerns are the cultural connections between Germany and Israel – countries inexorably linked through their history, memory, culture, architecture, geographical diaspora, and the mass migrations that transpose cultures to new and different nations. Fattal graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009, and is currently based in Berlin. |
Frieze The “Frieze” performance is a creation of a frieze-like storyboard over a long role of paper using silk screen printing.
The main focus of the performance seeks to deal with the different representations of storytelling and history of the region–the Arab media, ISIS propaganda and the perspective of Western media. The process of the printing is one of documentation and erasure and the balance between east and west. |
ƒƒ ƒƒ is a living and evolving network of artists, operating since 2011. ƒƒ is a way of working and communicating through art that grows out of collaborations and discussions in close personal contact. Through friendships and alliances we make art that is an essential element of our lives. Art is a field in which we move and meet, while creating and transforming it. We are different, having each our own language and history. Our heterogeneity is our strength. Feminism for us means equality for all: human beings of all genders and all origins. |
Pfffffffff, To Gather Instant Purification Performed by: Franziska Böhmer, Kai Dieterich, Mathilde ter Heijne, Linards Kulless, Ewa Majewska, Karolina Majewska, Christoph Mühlau, Cosmo Roitmann, Phillip Roitmann, Janne Schäfer, Kerstin Schröder, Ulrika Segerberg, Magda Tothova, Dorota Walentynowicz, Zorka Wollny, … Smells and sounds form the starting point of the participatory performance of the collaborative ƒƒ, which will improvise with the artefacts resulting from the previous performances in WORKS ON PAPER III. The audience is encouraged to take part in the transformation of the exhibition. As the final performance in this Performance Series, ƒƒ together with the audience, effectively re-appropriate the preceding performances and the curation of the resulting exhibition. |
Zeno Gries Zeno Gries is a visual artist based in Leipzig. Studying Media Art at the Academy for Visual Arts (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) in Leipzig since 2013, he is primarily working in the field of video, installation and performance. His works, at the moment almost exclusively self-portraits, are a study in how the environment reflects onto himself–sometimes dissecting his feelings and emotions, and other times dissecting his thoughts on and relationships to other people and things. He has been working with the Kunstraum E in Leipzig since 2014. He is not only curating exhibitions, but also, through a series of events, looking behind the scenes of the artistic process, from the idea, to the creation and the reflection of an artwork. |
Progress “I sleep more, so I can work better.”, “I can take time off now, I‘ve earned it.” Those are things heard many times. Doing nothing, relaxing, or recuperating seems to always need a justification which, most of the time, is work.
Zeno Gries visualises this attitude to life in the performance “Progress” in which, although he views this critically, he cannot stop such thoughts and words from coming to him. In the performance the artist’s body becomes a machine, printing the same words over and over again on a seemingly endless strip of paper. This poses the question, where do the instructions come from? And how can one stop it? |
Mariana Hahn In Hahn’s works she investigates the question of a universal fate which – outside of the individually experienced – might inscribe itself upon our figures. In order to awaken questions and memories that lay within us, that make us want to understand what it is, that has made us who we are, she chooses very different media; such as performance, video, drawing and photography. |
Distant Letter Present Now FEELING IS A FACT AND MY BODY IS A MONUMENT OF THAT FACT
everything is body, the world is body I am body. Absolute body. the phrases found on the letters that the spectator( reader) receives are part of an internal instant dialogue between body and the inscriptions found on it and vice versa, they are a poem of my body, the poem acts as an externalization of the body, imprinted onto paper. the letter travels to the reader from a distance, a past and yet finds actuality in the instance of reading. all the parts of the poem could be put together in any order but also as single phrases they are the sum of the whole. the words are sometimes abstract, sometimes clear inscriptions that i find on my body, sometimes as strange and painful lacerations or as in other times as tiny laughing currents. as i write them onto paper they take on a new form, and also pass away for me, or i for them? they move from a distance into an absolute presence the instance they move toward me from that distance and are extracted by passing them through my fingers, thereafter they are hardly tangible for me, they become intelligible to me. there is no sense of remorse toward that act, as it has the taste of a life saving action. they are handed on to the reader and as he/she borrows the words they inscribe themselves into his body. There always tends to be a difficulty to reconcile language directly to a body, due to the autonomy of language. As soon as words have been written down they become part of a different reality, so connecting them with the body, with this organic form, with the body’s story will seem artificial as a result the body can only function as artifact, as an effigy of the scripture. The reader will lend the phrases a thousand different meanings as he/she extracts these from recollecting his/her own memories and carefully knitting these together with the phrase on the letter. Like that they will find a general objective and value. the body lends itself to the reader as sculpture, sculpture as a felt thought, the face is hidden, the face is too fleeting and too referential, I find the face too masked to be able to discern a clear dialogue from it.
The artist isn’t present, and yet she is since the body anticipates the presence of the artist, she isn’t there in as much as she doesn’t actively interact with the reader, while the phrases inflict movement into the space by creating an adjacent space between reader and body. |
David Medalla David Medalla (born 1942) is a Filipino international artist. His work ranges from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation and performance art. He lives and works in London, New York City and Paris. Medalla was born in Manila, the Philippines, in 1942. At the age of 12 he was admitted to Columbia University in New York upon the recommendation of American poet Mark van Doren. He studied ancient Greek drama with Moses Hadas, modern drama with Eric Bentley, modern literature with Lionel Trilling, modern philosophy with John Randall and attended the poetry workshops of Léonie Adams. In the late 1950s he returned to Manila and met Jaime Gil de Biedma (the Catalan poet) and the painter Fernando Zóbel de Ayala, who became the earliest patrons of his art. In the 1960s in Paris, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard introduced his performance ‘Brother of Isidora’ at the Academy of Raymond Duncan, later, Louis Aragon would introduce another performance and finally, Marcel Duchamp honoured him with a ‘medallic’ object. His work was included in Harald Szeemann’s exhibition ‘Weiss auf Weiss’ (1966) and ‘Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form’ (1969) and in the DOCUMENTA 5 exhibition in 1972 in Kassel. In the early 1960s he moved to the United Kingdom and co-founded the Signals Gallery in London in 1964, which presented international kinetic art. He was editor of the Signals news bulletin from 1964 to 1966. In 1967 he initiated the Exploding Galaxy, an international confluence of multi-media artists, significant in hippie/counterculture circles, particularly the UFO Club and Arts Lab. From 1974 – 1977 he was chairman of Artists for Democracy, an organisation dedicated to ‘giving material and cultural support to liberation movements worldwide’ and director of the Fitzrovia Cultural Centre in London. In New York, in 1994, he founded the Mondrian Fan Club with Adam Nankervis as vice-president. Between 1 January 1995 and 14 February 1995 David Medalla rented a space at 55 Gee Street London, in which he lived and exhibited. He exhibited seven new versions of his biokinetic constructions of the sixties (bubble machines; and a monumental sand machine). These machines were constructed after Medalla’s original designs, by the English artist Dan Chadwick. The exhibition also featured large-scale prints of his New York ‘Mondrian Events’ with Adam Nankervis, and five large oil paintings on canvas created by David Medalla in situ at 55 Gee Street. Another important feature was a monumental animated neon relief entitled ‘Kinetic Mudras for Piet Mondrian’ constructed by Frances Basham using argon and neon lighting after Medalla’s original idea and designs. Medalla also invited artists to perform at the space. David Medalla has lectured at the Sorbonne, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art of New York, Silliman University and the University of the Philippines, the Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht, the New York Public Library, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Warwick and Southampton in England, the Slade School of Fine Art, St. Martin’s. |
Chinoiserie in Potsdam: A Paper Fantasy The performance is a celebration of the invention of paper and printing in Ancient China and will feature an impromptu by David Medalla as the T’ang Dynasty master Wu Dao-zi and Adam Nankervis as the Taoist master Chuang-tzu. |
Adam Nankervis Adam Nankervis is an artist and curator who has infused social, conceptual and experimental practice in his lived-in nomadic museum, museum MAN, and his ongoing project ‘another vacant space.’. His immersion into the experimentation of social sculptural forms and aesthetic collisions are a trademark of his art. His ongoing project ‘another vacant space.’, re-manifested in Berlin, Wedding in 2011, since first being found in an abandoned shoe shop on Mercer Street NYC in 1992. The project focuses on the re-emergence of the hidden in subject, content and theory, the ephemeral, exploring the art of creative destruction and reconstruction, inviting both contemporary artists and the historical. His curatorial practice is infused within his own projects, and singularly, Johannesburg Biennale 1997, LIFE/LIVE Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville Paris, Los Angeles Biennale 2001, Museum MAN/ Blurprint of The Senses Liverpool Biennale, 2004/ 2006, A Spires Embers, Arsenal Kiev 2009,’ iIsolation’, Izolyatsia Donetsk, Ukraine 2010, including, A Wake, with Rachel Rits-Volloch and Leo Kuelbs, Dumbo Arts Center, NYC November 2012. He will be performing in Mons Belgium with David Medalla, and installing a temporary site in the city of another vacant space. during Mons, Atopolis The Capital Of Culture program 2015. Nankervis, in collaboration with David Medalla, formed The Mondrian Fan Club, & is the International Coordinator of the London Biennale 2000–2012 which was founded as a free-form artist initiative. |
past present/future tense Nankervis´action is an erasure of singular memories of his life in the Australian desert, (1988/1990) and Aboriginal settlements, which are facing closure, and community displacement by political maneuvering, to create a relic, a vacant space, a string of forgotten threads on paper, for a concealed installation locked behind glass. Nankervis is colloborating acoustically with English artist/ filmmaker James Edmonds on past present/future tense. Edmonds works with painting, 8mm film and sound, to create ongoing personal chapters, filmic installments, exploring memory as photographic residue. |
Melisa Palacio Lopez Melissa Palacio Lopez is a Physics Engineer at the National University of Colombia and is currently a student of the Media Art and Design (M.F.A.) program at the Bauhaus University, Weimar. In parallel to her studies on plastic arts and contemporary dance, she gives workshops and courses in Colombia, USA and Europe. Creating pieces where body movement, science concepts and visual effects can merge, she explores the possibility to combine different languages to express science through art and vice versa. Noise Canteen: Bert Liebold Bert Liebold is the rhythm section of pleines & liebold. Parallel to architecture studies at Bauhaus Universität, Weimar, in the nineties he intensified drum education. He played in different cover bands within a wide range of styles from metal to funk and pop. After a short trip into the world of Latin and African percussion he worked as a drum circle facilitator. Step by step, he immersed in extended software-based sound exploration. Together with Ulf Pleines he finally founded pleines & liebold and the noise canteen network. Bert Liebold about his musical approach and “live sound building”: “We use a variable technical setup. Mostly one of us starts with a single sound or sequence. After a few moments we’re totally involved. The coincidence of musical purposes, multiple mixed sound structures, human interaction, influences of space and architecture produces each time a very unique, openminded situation. It’s like discovering a hidden world.” Noise Canteen: Ulf Pleines The musical education of Pleines started at the age of six with piano, followed by some years of clarinet. Early interest in synthesizers led him to pop bands and sound experiments. Jobs as an architect brought him to London, New York and Tokyo, where he worked with field recordings. With postgraduate studies in media and electroacoustic music he combined photography, space and sound. Recently he focuses on audio at the border between noise and music. |
S P A C E The concept of space is one of the most mysterious and deep notions that fascinates me. As it is a vast notion to analyze, I decided to delimit the area of study and consider it from three different points of view thanks to the conceptions of the french philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the philosopher and scientist Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and the physicist Albert Einstein. Each of them presents a perception of the concept space and I connect these three through a complete narrative as the conceptual background for the project.
The starting point is related with the ideas of Gilles Deleuze: “The territory is the property of the animal and go out of it is venture. There is no way out of a territory without an effort for finding a new territory”. There, I’m pointing out my own relation with my territory creating and influencing my own space. The body is a shadow, but it’s not only Melissa; it’s of all those bodies that create a vector to go out of their own territory to found a new territory, which can be transformed through the personal adventure. However, in this adventure there is something that doesn’t change, even with the experience of risk and discover, there are aspects of our lives that we preserve since they are the immutable of a human being. Leibniz affirmed that the space is a concept which could be used according the relationship between the body and its order of coexistence. Then, the body breaks the personal territory. The images run into new geometries, places, cities or streets making new sounds in other languages, weathers and velocities. To finish the adventure, the body is placed in a new place/landscape where the conceptions of Einstein will be considered: Space and time are interwoven as a single continuum named spacetime and it is not conceived as a plane but as a warped non-euclidian geometry influenced by surrounding masses and energy, that is to say, by the strength of gravitational fields.
The animation sketches and dance are related with geometries of geodesical forms, where space and time show their curvature influenced by gravity. This design works around the mutable and immutable when crossing personal territory. |
Kirsten Palz Kirsten Palz, born 1971 in Copenhagen, 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 currently consisting 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 both 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. |
Dance 001 variation 1 Dance 001 |
Zhou Xiaohu Zhou Xiaohu (born 1960 in Changzhou) is a pioneer of video animation in China and one of the first artists to work sculpturally with this medium. Although originally trained as an oil painter, he began using computers as an artistic tool in 1997. As one of China’s most well-known and prolific contemporary artists, he specializes in inducing confusion and bafflement, making viewers question the evidence of their senses and their assumptions about the so-called ‘facts’. He has since experimented with stop-frame video animation, video installation and computer-gaming software, whereby the interlayering of images between moving pictures and real objects has become his signature style. Working across performance, photography, installation, sculpture, video, and animation, Zhou’s practice reflects the documentation of history in a digital age, where particular details become privileged, fabricated, altered, and/or omitted. Zhou’s recent shows include his participation in PANDAMONIUM at MOMENTUM (2014), Tate Liverpool’s The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China (2007) and solo-exhibitions at Long March Space in Beijing (2009-10) and at BizArt Center in Shanghai. Zhou Xiaohu is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Berlin’s prestigious DAAD. |
A Collective Exercise “The Good Person of Szechuan” Eight participants will wear light-colored clothes. There will be black tapes sticking on their clothes which become a part of calligraphy. They will jump until the words “The Good Person of Szechwan” are aligned through the idea of trial and error. This project aims at capturing a perfect “Good Person”. |
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT:
Photo Gallery, May 3
(photos by Marina Belikova)
Photo Gallery, May 17
(photos by Petra Fantozzi)
Photo Gallery, May 31
(photos by Kai Dieterich, Hanae Utamura and Dian Zagorchinov)
Li Zhenhua
Li Zhenhua
Li Zhenhua is a Beijing/Zurich-based multi-media artist, curator, writer and producer for international and Chinese contemporary culture. He is the founding-director of Beijing Art Lab, a virtual and physical platform for art, research, and exchange, as well as of Mustard Seed Garden. He is currently head-curator of Art Basel Hong Kong’s Film section (2015). Since 2010 he is nominator for the Summer Academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee Bern (Switzerland), as well as for The Prix Pictet (Switzerland). He was a member of the International Advisory Board for ‘Digital Revolution’ at the Barbican Centre in 2014, jury-member for the Transmediale Award in 2010 and advisor for Leonardo, Journal of Arts, Science and Technology.
In 2010 he was chief planner for the Shanghai eARTS Festival. He has participated in various symposia on new media art in leading galleries and museums around the world, such as ZKM Karlsruhe (2003), Walker Art Centre Minneapolis (curated the WAVE project) and Guangzhou Museum. Li has exhibited in the Ghuangzhou Triennale (2005) and in ‘Beam me Up’ at the new media art institution plug.in in Basel, Switzerland. His first solo-exhibition, ‘NOTHING IS EVERYTHING’ was held at Galerie Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2012.
He has produced the first international new media art festival MAAP, at Beijing Millennium Museum in 2002 and brought the London festival ‘onedotzero moving image’ to Beijing’s Today Art Gallery in 2004. Li was project manager and producer of the ‘Synthetic Time: Media Art China’ at NAMOC (National Art Museum of China) in 2008, curator for ‘CINA CINA CINA’ in CCCS Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, and of the 3rd Nanjing Triennial. In 2006, Li was appointed executive producer of the Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium.
Li has edited several artists’ publications, including ‘Yan Lei: What I Like to Do’ (Documenta, 2012), ‘Hu Jieming: One Hundred Years in One Minute’ (2010), ‘Feng Mengbo: Journey to the West’ (2010), and ‘Yang Fudong: Dawn Mist, Separation Faith’ (2009). A collection of his art reviews has been published under the title ‘Text’ in 2013.
GOD, a dog is better than me
2010, Video, 3 min 31 sec
I am a dog that barks for a hundred years, but I cannot awake the Chinese.
Ma Hsiang-po (1840–1939), Chinese Jesuit priest, scholar and educator and one of the founders of Aurora University, Fu Jen Catholic University and Fudan University.
Strolling on the beach, talking to friends about local life during his visit to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Li Zhenhua encounters a dog, playing with a log. Fascinated by its behaviour, he films it with his iPhone. In the film, we observe the animal blissfully engrossed in his game, as he digs a hole around it, takes it into the waves and out again, to no particular end. In this fragment of daily life, the dog’s unconscious needs appear nonsensical, much like we would seem to an alien observer, if viewed from above. But in this behaviour, Li attempts to capture something fundamental to creativity and often lacking in our own conduct, as we persist to live consumed in self-importance and in a continuously dissatisfied strife for success and recognition. The dog in GOD, a Dog is better than me has no sense of chronological evolution, the main element obscuring our vision and detaching us from daily life, according to the artist. Her focus is on the most basic and immediate: the here and now. Earning her Li’s sympathy and admiration and with some sadness in the realization that he will never attain such a state, this film is an ode to play, creativity, intuition and a lesson in forgetting.
Originally trained as a chef, Li Zhenhua once asked curator and art critic Li Xianting what it means to curate. “I do not know”, he replied. Frustrated by the state of Chinese contemporary art, its market and fixation on the prestigious and the “big things”, Li abandoned the kitchen in 1996 and began curating independent exhibitions in Beijing to support local artists. He is currently the chief proponent of contemporary video-art in China and has contributed greatly to its development and to its increasing presence on the international stage. In 2005, stimulated by input from friends, Li began to make art, alongside his curatorial practice. He describes the hands-on, spatial activity of art-making as a horizontal engagement, as opposed to the verticality that typifies curatorial practice; from the top down. His ready-made machines – robots made from refrigerators and televisions, for instance – are made to trigger interaction with the viewer. Li attempts to create a space wherein nostalgia is thwarted in favour of constructing memory through alienation. For him, the screen-based experience offers the strongest sense of community, collective experience, social responsibility, action and activism, all equally central in his curatorial approach.
In art, mass-communication is unavailing, “it does not need the public notion”. Li understands the intimate and the small to be significantly more compelling, wherein the viewer experiences the possibility to interpret and to think on a personal level. In GOD, a dog is better than me, the viewer can hold the animal in its hands, walk around or sit down and privately observe. The video-player is reminiscent of a photo-frame, its weight emphasizing its presence as an object, rather than merely a video, inciting physical interaction rather than passive viewing.
Intersection InsideOut
MOMENTUM_InsideOut Screening
For Cinema Total, part of the Berlinale International Film Festival
10 – 16 February 2014
20:00 – 24:00
FEATURING:
Theo Eshetu // Bjørn Melhus // Reynold Reynolds // Sarah Choo Jing // Bence Fliegauf
Curated by:
David Szauder, Fanni Magyar, Francoise von Roy, Rachel Rits-Volloch
Venue:
Media Facade, Collegium Hungaricum, Dorotheenstrasse 12, 10117 Berlin-Mitte
A selection of video works illustrating Cinema Total’s special focus on the intersection of film and video art, screened after dark on .CHB’s panorama window – the Medienfassade.
Bjorn Melhus, Policia, 2007
Bjorn Melhus (born 1966, Kirchheim unter Teck) is a German-Norwegian media artist. In his work he has developed a singular position, expanding the possibilities for a critical reception of cinema and television. His practice of fragmentation, destruction, and reconstitution of well-known figures, topics, and strategies of the mass media opens up not only a network of new interpretations and critical commentaries, but also defines the relationship of mass media and viewer anew.
Through a synchronised sound and light projection that evokes a helicopter gunship in battle, Murphy creates a disturbingly imaginative portrayal of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Operating a dramatic reduction to abstract fields of colour, the visual onslaught is concentrated on, as well as intensifying, the violent soundscape of guns and rotating helicopter blades. The videolight sequence is based on sound snippets from the movie Blue Thunder (USA, 1982), which was one of the early 80’s media rehabilitation of Vietnam war veterans in civilian society. By re-integrating war veterans into a civilian society, the war itself was subconsciously brought to America and turned the air space above the urban landscape of Los Angeles into a battlefield. In Murphy the visible stream of colored light and the absence of the image itself creates an imaginary movie that possibly connects to the first draft of the screenplay for Blue Thunder which featured Frank Murphy as more of a crazy main character with deeper psychological issues, who went on a rampage and destroyed a lot more of the city. Murphy is a true abstract Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Exhibiting a paradoxically static yet active Mexican police helicopter, appearing to be simultaneously vigilant and pointless, it is as if suspended on it’s way to an emergency operation. Acting as a biting commentary on the hollowness of the Mexican state, where country’s security apparatus imposes surveillance systems that fails to offer security, Policia delineates the paradox of control in contemporary Mexican society. In a country that is being increasingly militarized and where drug barons and paramilitary organizations are eroding the political and legal structures of the state, the suspended helicopter points to the increasingly blurred boundaries between the various groups competing for power.
Tracey Moffatt, Night Cries, 1989
Tracey Moffatt (born 1960, Brisbane) is an Australian photographer and filmmaker. Moffat began her career as an experimental filmmaker and as a producer of music videos, and she continued making films after establishing herself as a photographer. She uses obscure references to issues of sexuality, history, representation and race. In the late 1990s she focused on the relationship between Australian Aborigines and white colonial settlers. The use of photogravure and deliberately flawed prints heightens the ambience, informed by late 19th century photography as well as by Expressionist cinematic techniques of shadow and distortion. The typically atmospheric, dreamlike quality of these works creates a space in which actors can embody wider sexual and social conflicts. Moffatt’s work since 2000 has retreated from specific locales and subject matter and become more explicitly concerned with fame and celebrity.
Her works often deal with indigenous issues and questions black and white relationships. Drawing on manifold aesthetic icons from both withe and black Australia in her photo series and films, Moffatt presents her agenda of life in contemporary Australia in highly stylized terms. Her short film Night Cries is engaged with the older movie’s problematic ideologies of race and power relations. The short telling a story of an adopted middle-aged Aboriginal women who is bound to care for her dying white mother, both of them being entrapped within their histories. They are shown to embody the tension between the white education and an Aboriginal parentage. The Technicolor aesthetics of Night Cries studio landscape and interior are set against the chilling soundscape of the titular cries, thus creating a cinematic style torn between melodrama and the Gothic.
Bence Fliegauf, Milky Way, 2007
Bence Fliegauf (born 1974, Budapest) learnt all aspects of his industry. After training as a stage designer, he worked on film sets as well. He also worked as an arts journalist and made television documentaries for various Hungarian broadcasters. Even without the official sanction of the film academy, he soon convinced the trade of his talent and skills. Fliegauf has completed his films there ever since. He has so far made three highly distinctive full-length fiction films, one long documentary, and a handful of experimental shorts. A highly thoughtful and involved film maker, Fliegauf is heavily involved in the technicalities of film making alongside the metaphysics of moving image creation.
Milky Way is perhaps Fliegauf’s most experimental film yet, it is always accessible and mesmerizingly beautiful. It consists of ten lengthy landscape shots filmed with a static Scope camera, most of them featuring subtly modulated sound and human figures engaged in what initially appear to be strange, arcane rituals. There’s no overall plot though the painterly scenes proceed from night through various exquisitely captured daylight hues and back to night again – but each vignette suggests some sort of small, mysterious narrative, be it suspenseful, sad or drily funny.
Reynold Reynolds, Secret Life, 2008
Reynold Reynolds (born 1966, Central Alaska) influenced early on by philosophy and science, and working primarily with 16mm as an art medium. Reynold Reynolds has developed a film grammar based on transformation, consumption and decay. Detailed evolving symbols and allusive references create a powerful pictorial language based on Reynolds’ analytical point of view. By subtly altering the regular conditions of life and watching their effects, he transfers the experimental methods of science to filmmaking, where he frames reality in his laboratory and changes one variable at a time to reveal an underlying causality.
Secret Life (2008) explores the edges of our human perception, where time does pass but is almost impossible to observe. This is the first part of the Secrets Trilogy, portrays a woman trapped in an apartment with a life of its own. She moves at a mechanical speed and her mind is like a clock whose hands pin the events of her life to the tapestry of time; reflected in the mechanical eye of the camera. Her thoughts escape her and come to life, growing like the plants that inhabit the space around her: living, searching, feeling, breathing and dying.
Choo Jing Sarah, The Hidden Dimension, 2013
Choo Jing Sarah (born 1990, Singapore) is a Multidisciplinary Fine Artist who has recently graduated from the Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art Design and Media. Focusing on the relationship between space and time, Choo’s work depicts identifiable moments and characters within contemporary Singaporean society. Intentionally constructed and staged, the artist reflects upon local social and cultural norms.
Solitude has become a significant issue in today’s society. In her recent work, Choo reflects upon this phenomenon. In The Hidden Dimension she questions the effectiveness of the relief offered by daily routines. Seven members of her family are depicted engaged in trivial acts of self-occupation. At exactly the same point in the film, in an unexpected cadence, they simultaneously break from their self-imposed Sisyphean distraction and look out into the audience and each other.
Theo Eshetu, Lightning Strikes, 2009
Theo Eshetu (born 1958, London) his childhood was spent between Ethiopia, Senegal and Yugoslavia, among other nations. Theo Eshetu has worked in media art since 1982, creating installations, video art works, and television documentaries. As a video maker, he explores the expressive capabilities of the medium and the manipulation of the language of television. Exploring themes and imagery from anthropology, art history, scientific research, and religious iconography, he attempts to define how electronic media shapes identity and perception. World cultures, particularly the relationship of African and European cultures, often inform Eshetu’s work.
Lightning Strikes (2009) is being shown to coincide with Theo Eshetu’s exhibition The Return of the Axum Obelisk at the DAAD Galerie, running from Feb 1 – March 15th 2014. The Obelisk of Axum was taken as a war trophy from Ethiopia to Rome by Mussolini’s army during the Italian occupation of 1935. Since the signing of a peace, treaty in 1942 it became the subject for debate as to whether it should be returned to Axum or not. Over the years support for its restitution grew, but neither political or historical arguments, nor a legal battle to full fill a contractual commitment, succeeded in having the Obelisk returned. Further research into its structural conditions to withstand the process of dismantling and remounting resulted in a declaration that it was simply too fragile to be returned. It was only in 2002, when the Obelisk was damaged by a lightning strike struck by lightning, that the decision to have it returned was made.
Guido Nosari Residency
Guido Nosari
4 January – 1 April 2015
Guido Nosari (MADRE) (b. 1984, Bergamo) is a Berlin/Milan-based artist mainly working with textile. Originally a painter and draughtsman, after receiving his degree in Fine Arts from Brera Art Academy in 2010, his artistic production underwent a two-year long period of intermission. This was broken in 2012, when he resumed his practice by sewing fabrics and weaving threads onto his canvasses. For Nosari, the act of sewing manifests an enclosing and trapping of temporalities within the non-navigable chaos of unmediated time. This process holds a ritual quality that allows him to approach the otherwise inaccessible zones of his thought. Nosari has had various solo-exhibitions in galleries including Maria Cilena (2014-15) and Casa Testori (2011) and his work has been acquired by various museum and private collections in Italy. He has been selected for the 2015 Berlin Textile Biennale and is currently pursuing an Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Berlin, in which he researches the implications of decontextualizing his practice.
The idea that we all share an emptiness that I do not know, unnerves me. My research is focused on following this absence that escapes me every time I try to grasp it. To understand how much is common amongst human beings. In sewing I feel safe, because it creates a space and a time that is determinate. A way to follow. My thoughts are wrapped and tied, close to my dead.
The chaos grinds silences.
– Guido Nosari
A TALLIT FOR THE NEUE SYNAGOGE
Hence, in this project I will attend a place where prayers of different worship have joined each other.
For all the shadows in the memories of the Centrum Judaicum.
Everything starts in the dome of the New Synagogue. The city is nothing but a grid, if we look at it from above, and from the dome we have this privilege. The dome is a central point within this grid – a grid of meanings. With this project, the floor of the dome of the Neue Synagoge becomes the place where these meanings become interwoven and are made visible.
The first phase is to identify exactly where in the space of the dome’s floor the cardinal points are located. Through this gesture, I map the urban grid on the floor of the dome.
Subsequently, all places of different worship within the region of Berlin will be located, be they Catholic, Protestant, Islam, Hindu, or Jewish. By identifying them on the map of Berlin, I will position them relative to the dome,
with points along the circumference of the floor. The floor thereby becomes a central point on which all connections between different religious traditions meet.
In the second phase, each point that allows me to look in the direction of each differents space of worship will be connected to all other points along the circumference through the technique of thread crochet. The choice for this technique is essential to produce the idea of slowness and handmade work, but also of resistance. A good dialoge requires all of the above.
This process will result in a real skeleton of spatial relationships between all places of worship in Berlin. This skeleton is made with blue thread, respecting the Jewish tradition by recovering the idea of the blue that is present in tzitzit (the knotted thread that is attached to the tallit), which allows one to connect between all of the points on the earth and God. To finalize this phase, all of the threads will be sewn together, to be fixed within the grid.
In the third phase, each space that remains open between the structure of the crochet skeleton will be covered with a different fabric. This will result in a unique and fully colored tapestry covering the full area of the floor of the dome.
By combining all of the threads with different fabrics, I create a single mantle that makes all of the experiences and memories covered by the great Tallit symbollically connected with God and all other traditions. Each fabric is different, in the same way that everyone has a story, each of which is part of the dialogue. By doing so, I respect every single story in initiating a new opportunity of dialoge.
During this process, all of the architectural discontinuities along the floor (such as staircases, tubery, columns, etc.) will be respected by circumventing them, thereby marking the actual topography that is integral to the dome. In this way, the piece will be made into the Neue Synagoge, as a site-specific work.
Once completed and having covered the entire floor, the dome of the Neue Synagogue will have become a space of possibility for dialogue, to create mutual understanding and to share the history of the Centrum Judaicum . It is for this dialogue that we work and for the same that I pray.
During this project, it is my intention to continue with two peculiarities: the first is to record the working-process while it is being executed, to result in a final video that shows the progress of its composition. The video will record only the floor of the dome. The second will be to welcome anyone who wants to attend as I work, to engage in dialogue and to explain its reasons and meanings.
Some examples of how the tapestry will look like, from my previous work:
In the fourth and final phase, the tapestry will be removed from the dome and relocated into various exhibition spaces.
This has three basic layers of meaning: the first is that anyone who encounters the piece in different contexts remembers that there has been a place where dialogue has been possible, and that this place is there, before the eyes of the visitor, as incontrovertible proof.
Secondly, it manifests that any place can be elected as a place of dialogue. This project only exposes that potential. In fact, every place is inevitably a crossing point of meanings, because the space of man is first and foremost a space of meaning. Finally, it is a reflection on man’s tendency to cover space with significance. The meanings that man gives to that which surrounds him are like a cloak that covers everything, multiplying in various layers of space. Only by exhibiting the work in different contexts is it possible to make visible this omnivorous potential of significance.
Fragments of Empires Kunst Salon
25 January 2015
David Elliott in conversation with
Theo Eshetu, Amir Fattal and Sophia Pompéry
The Kunst Salon is a part of the Fragments of Empires Exhibition,
read the full information about the Exhibition here >>.
Fragments of Empires is an exhibition of contemporary art that addresses issues of memory, identity and the impact of migration through three different time-based media: sound, film and photography. Throughout the exhibition ‘fragments of empires’ 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 colonisation and migration, moving in this way from one culture to another. Although originally circumscribed by imperial ambition, the work made by the artists in the exhibition shows different ways in which these fragments have been woven into new lives or realities to establish other meanings and identities in the present.
Berlin in the 21st Century sits on the intersection of many immigrant cultures and nations, as people from all over the world flock to the city. In recent years, Berlin has come to be especially known for attracting the world’s leading artists. Equally, Berlin is famous for the wealth of cultural artifacts housed in its museums. This convergence, in this capital city, of creative and historical culture with the world’s migrant cultures is often remarked upon, but it has not yet been closely considered in terms of the convergence of the different colonial legacies of the many populations that inhabit Berlin. Fragments of Empires is thus a timely 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.
Reflecting upon the lasting legacies as diverse as the British, Byzantine, French, Ottoman, Roman Empires within the context of Berlin’s particular struggle with the painful histories of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, this exhibition extends the remits of history through artistic innovation. Fragments of Empires 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. The opening of the exhibition in Berlin in early November will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The work by the artists in the exhibition – Kader Attia, Lutz Becker, Theo Eshetu, Amir Fattal, Gülsün Karamustafa, Fiona Pardington, and Sophia Pompéry – 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. In Fragments of Empires, MOMENTUM is bringing these seven artists together for the first time.
This exhibition accordingly invokes time-based art practices to explore the legacies of cultural histories that have constantly changed through the passing of time. As Berlin’s only platform focusing exclusively on time-based art, MOMENTUM 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.
Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #10 with Doug Fishbone
Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #10
The Contemporary Jester
Humor, satire and role-play in Doug Fishbone’s politics of mass-media representation
Doug Fishbone in dialogue with Shen Qilan
22th MARCH 2015
At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.
Doug Fishbone, an American artist based in London, often uses satire and humor in his films, performances and installations to critically examine consumer culture, mass media, relative perception and context. His work frequently forces the viewer to confront his-or-her own interpretive backgrounds. By combining a variety of found images from Google Image Search, Fishbone illustrates and undermines his own confrontational, repulsive and funny monologues on contemporary media and its corollary, the underground and avant-garde. Fishbone is best known for his project 30,000 Bananas, a mountain of ripe bananas installed in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square and later given away to the audience for free. In 2004, his work was included in the British Art Show 6, a national touring exhibition held every five years in celebrate of the best of contemporary British art. Fishbone had his first major solo project at Gimpel Fils in London in 2006, and he performed at the Hayward Gallery in 2007. He has since performed live at the ICA, exhibited at Rokeby, London, Tate Britain, the 2008 Busan Biennale and in Switzerland, Japan and Korea. He was heralded as one of the art world’s “Future Greats” by Art Review magazine. Most recently, Fishbone has recently produced a feature-length action film, Elmina, that connects two vastly different audiences of the Western art world and the African home video market. Filmed in Ghana with major Ghanaian celebrities, the movie’s only artistic intervention is the insertion of Fishbone, a white American artist, as the lead role in a completely African production. The work fully adopts Ghanaian film making conventions, taking advantage of the shared language used and the low cost structure of the Ghanaian home video industry. In this new project Fishbone continues to examine the complex relationship between perception and reality and the politics of representation while simultaneously asking wider questions about race, globalization and notions of a shared visual language. (Rokeby Gallery, London). Born in New York in 1969, Fishbone earned an MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College in 2003 and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004.
Dr. Shen QilanD is an expert on arts and culture and a member of the editorial board of BOOKTOWN Magazine. She holds a master of philosophy from Fudan University and obtained her Ph.D. at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany. Prior, she was Director of the editorial department of Art World magazine (2010-2011), and later Chief Editor of Arts and Director of International Projects at Shanghai Insight Media (China South Publishing & Media Group). Qilan is dedicated to cultural projects between Europe and China and became chief advisor, editor, and co-author of Europe-China Cultural Compass — Orientation for Cultural Cooperation between China and Europe. She organizes events and gives lectures at different cultural institutions. Qilan was invited as “Kulturvermittler”, a scholarship awarded by the Goethe-Institute to visit Berlin, and was invited as a speaker to the 5th World Summit on Arts and Culture in Melbourne, Australia.
WATCH THE TALK:
Qiu Anxiong
QIU ANXIONG
(b. 1972 in Chengdu, China. Lives and works in Shanghai, China.)
Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972, Chengdu) is one of China’s most prominent contemporary artists. Brought up in the capital of Sichuan province in the southwest of China. There, he studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute under the progressive artistic practice of Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. Qiu and his friends collectively founded a bar which became a hub for the blossoming underground music and art circles in Sichuan, and his colleagues included He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Shen Xiaotong. 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. In 2004, he made Shanghai his permanent home, and 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 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);
Selected solo exhibitions at major museums include: Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2013/2009); OCAT, Shenzhen, China (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). Museum group exhibitions 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); UCCA Art Museum, Beijing, China (2012); Istanbul Modern Art Museum, Turkey (2011); Mingsheng Museum, Shanghai (2011); Times Art Museum, Guangzhou (2011); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2010); Museum of Unknown, Art House, Shanghai (2010); Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Korea (2009); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany (2008), Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany (2008); The National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2008); National Musem of Modern Art Osaka, Japan (2008); Museum of Modern Art, Grand-duc Jean, Luxembourg (2008); Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (2007); Arstrup Fearnleys Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); San Diego Museum of Art, USA (2007); Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China (2006).
CAKE
2014, Video Animation, 6 min 2 sec
Qiu Anxiong’s Cake 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 the age of Corona.
This work was premiered in PANDAMONIUM: Media Art from Shanghai, a co-production by MOMENTUM and Chronus Art Center, at MOMENTUM Berlin (2014).
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. In adding clay to his repertoire of visual tools, alongside paint and ink, Qui follows in the footsteps of Jan Svankmajer, the father of Czech surrealist animation. This ability to combine classical aesthetics with contemporary technology distinguishes his work, which owes as much of a debt to South African artist William Kentridge, a pioneer of hand-drawn animation.
Creating for the Future
CREATING FOR THE FUTURE:
THINKING ABOUT THE UNTHINKABLE
@ MOMENTUM BERLIN
Online & Print Exhibition
Curated by Cao Dan and Li Zhenhua
Web-site for the Online Exhibition
Featuring:
Aaajiao • Addie Wagenknecht • Bi Rongrong • Chen Dongfan • Chen Xiao
Cheng Ran • Danh Vo • David Siepert + Stefan Baltensperger • Feng Bingyi
Frank Tang • Hu Weiyi • Iris Long + Cedar Zhou • Jiang Jun
9mouth • Liao Wenfeng • Liu Guoqiang • Quynh Dong • Shi Yijie
Shi Yong • Song Ta • Tan Tian • Wu Juehui • Xu Qu • Yang Junling • Yuan Keru
(click on the icons below to read the full information about each work)
9mouth Website 9mouth, born 1988 in Jingzhou, China, is a photographer who now lives in Beijing. Taking photography as an expressive method and an artistic language, he documents the awakening self-awareness of contemporary females, as well as engages with the current reality. 9mouth has obtained the Outstanding Photographer Award at The 5th China Jinan International Photography Biennial and has been selected to be on as one of the Post–85s Elite List which is held by the renowned City Pictorial magazine. At the same time, he has self-published “Youth”, “After”, “Emma” and “F Love.” His work in Today Art Museum, Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Aura Gallery, Msbad Space, and many other places. Moreover, 9mouth is also works as a free-lancer writer and model who has worked closely with many clients such as Fujifilm, Lane Crawford, MaxMara, I.T, Lomography and other brands. |
#Last night I dreamed 9mouth# I don’t know when it started, but there are always people on microblogs sending me private messages saying that they dreamt of me. There’s more and more of them, and their dreams are many and varied (of course, erotic dreams are more common). So I started the topic #Last Night I Dreamt Of 9months, recording the respondents’ dreams and collecting more and more of them. I’m the type of person who dreams every time I sleep, and I began to look for connections between these dreams. So I combined my dreams and theirs, creating a response to their dreams of me. |
aaajiao Website Aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) (b. 1984, Xi’an) is one of China’s foremost media artists, bloggers and free culture developers. Having studied physics and computers, Xu Wenkai is self-taught as an artist and new media entrepreneur. In his works he focuses on the use of data and its various forms of display. In 2003 he established the sound art website cornersound.com and in 2006 he founded the Chinese take on the blog We Make Money Not Art: We Need Money Not Art. He is devoted to Processing, an open-source visual programming software, Dorkbot, a non-profit initiative for creative minds and Eventstructure, an interdisciplinary center for art, media, technology and academic research based in Shanghai and founded by Xu. In his works, Aaajiao focuses on the use of data and its various forms of display and on the processes of transforming content from reality to data and back again. His most significant contribution to the field of new media in China is a social one, as he act a as a vector for the interpretation and communication of international and local trends in the artistic use of software. Recent exhibitions include his solo-show titled ‘The Screen generation’, at C Space (2013) and chi K11 Art Space in Shanghai and at 9m2 Museum in Beijing (2014) and group-exhibitions ” PANDAMONIUM – Media Art From Shanghai” (Momentum, Berlin, German, 2014) and ‘TRANSCIENCE – INTRACTABLE OBJECTS’ at Taikang Space in Beijing (2014). |
Limited Landscape, Unlimited “Finite Limitless Landscape” comes at the end of the “Object” series. The landscape on the screen rises and falls in and out of a blue screen, allowing the colour blue to represent both the sea level and its theoretical implication of immateriality. |
Addie Wagenknecht Website Addie Wagenknecht (b. 1981, United States) is an artist who investigates the cultural connection between technology and social interaction. Constructing installations, interventions, paintings and sculpture, she reverse-engineers reality into condensed bits, building a space in between sculpture and lived experience. In her work, complexity, dark sides and hacked systems without rules emerge, as sharp wit collapses the conceptual distance between yes and no, or ones and zeros. Playing with the contemporary anxieties of post-Snowden information culture, she builds objects that contemplate power, beauty and networked consciousness. The recipient of a 2014 Andy Warhol Foundation grant, Wagenknecht is best known for leadership in the open source hardware movement, and as a member of the collective Free Art & Technology (F.A.T.) Lab. In 2007, she cofounded NORTD Labs, an international research and development collaborative with Stefan Hechenberger, which produces open source projects that have been used and built by millions worldwide. An emerging visual artist and member of F.A.T. Lab, her work has been exhibited internationally, including groups shows at the Museum of Modern Art and Phillips auction house in New York; LEAP, Berlin; Haus für electroniches Künste, Basel, Switzerland; MU Eindoven, The Netherlands; Istanbul biennial, Turkey; Museumsquartier and MAK in Vienna; Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Gaîté Lyrique, Paris; Beit Ha’ir Museum, Tel Aviv, and many festivals such a Glitch 2014 at Rua Red gallery in Dublin. Her projects have been featured in a numerous papers, books, and magazines, including TIME, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Art, Vanity Fair, BUST, Vice and The Economist. Past residencies have included Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York; Culture Lab at Newcastle University, UK; Hyperwerk Institute for PostIndustrial Design in Switzerland, and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Presently chair of the MIT Open Hardware Summit, she holds a Masters from the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program and a BS in computer science from the University of Oregon. Wagenknecht’s first solo exhibition in the US, Shellshock, will open November 2014 at bitforms gallery in New York. Wagenknecht lives and works in Austria. |
Agras Dusk Blackhawk is a tool-assisted activist drawing series started by the artist in 2007. The process uses simple flying instructions such as “roll over”, “take off” and “touch down”. The new work is a fusion of heat and ultraviolet rays, clearly showing the artist’s initial explorations of propylene on canvas. Photo courtesy: bitforms gallery, New York. |
Bi Rongrong Born in 1982 in Ningbo, Zhejiang, lives and works in Shanghai. 2008 Master of Chinese painting, Sichuan University, 2010 Master of Painting Department of the Netherlands Frank Mohr Institute, after graduation have participated in artist residency program in the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom. Had participated in the exhibition there: “The Landscape is Called Sweet Faith” (Museum aan de A7, Netherlands, 2011), “Zone Autonome Mutualisee” (Vivarium, France, 2012), “gas station five” (Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, 2012), “boom” (Bund 18 temporary Art Space, Shanghai, 2013), “7: 3 Colors” (World Financial Center, Shanghai, 2013), “out of bounds” (Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, 2014), the “shadow shapes “(Quartet Contemporary Art Center, Nanjing, 2014)” Personal collectivism “(around the gallery, Shanghai, 2014) and so on. |
A Letter to Future—Manchester CMYK 04/14 Outside, scenery and objects unceasingly flit past. It is indistinct in its overlapping, distinct inits distance, leaping in its rapid change, beautiful in its unfamiliarity, yet profound in its familiarity. Countless fragments gradually cause it to take shape, or settle, or hover, being sought after, being forgotten. I fold it, open it, extend it. Toward it, I am determined, and I am unsure. |
Chen Dongfan Graduated in China Academy of Art, Chen Dongfan works and lives in New York and Hang Zhou. |
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Chen Xiao Chen Xiao was born in Shanghai in 1984. |
A Terrible Beauty Now and in time to be, – Yeats |
Cheng Ran Cheng Ran was born in Inner Mongolia in 1981 and is currently based in Hangzhou (China) and Amsterdam. In 2013, He has participated in the Residency Artists Studio Project in the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in Netherlands. Cheng’s oeuvre mostly consists of video and film, as well as photography and installation works. Cheng’s video works are praised for its eclectic form in which films are integrated into the poetic culture of contemporary age. His works convey a young perspective on the unsolvable issues in life, such as problems regarding identity, and life and death, and the anguish felt by young Chinese people living through the globalized Chinese culture and cultural policy. Recent exhibitions include KINO DER KUNST film festival in Munich, Germany, and also the 26th European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, Germany “Moving Image in China: 1988-2011 (a retrospective that surveys the brief history of Chinese video art, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2011), “Farewell to Post-colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial” (Guangdong Art Museum, 2008), “The Tell-tale Heart” (James Cohan Gallery Shanghai and New York, 2010, 2011), “In A Perfect World…; (curated by former Hammer Museum curator James Elaine, Meulensteen Gallery, New York, 2011), etc.. Cheng Ran has also received a nomination for the “2013 Absolut Art Award”.In 2011, he won the “Best Video Artist”in Dead Rabbit Awards held by online art magazine Randian. In 2014, Cheng Ran received a nomination for “The Best Young Artist of this year” in The AAC Awards. |
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Danh Vo Danh Vo studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Denmark and the Städelschule, Frankfurt. He was the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize, New York (2012), the BlauOrange Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken, Berlin, Germany (2007) and was a nominee for the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, Berlin, Germany (2009). He participated in the Venice Biennale (2013) and has exhibited his work in such institutions as the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2013), the Art Institute of Chicago (2012), the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2012), the National Gallery of Denmark (2010), Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2009), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008). |
02.02.1861 The French missionary Saint Jean-Théophane Vénard sent a hand-written letter to his father before his martyrdom in Vietnam. Fu Dan’s co-operation with his father PhungVohas created this ongoing project, “02.02.1861”. |
Feng Bingyi Feng Bingyi (b. 1991, Ningbo) is a young emerging talent in the Chinese art scene. Having studied under Yang Fudong at the China Academy of Art, she follows in his footsteps with her focus on cinematic traditions, while employing a poetic language. Distancing herself from the chains of external reality, she looks for inspiration within her internal impressions, which she expresses in the forms of installations, photography, documentary and animation. After receiving both the Outstanding Graduation Work Award and the China Academy of Art Scholarship from the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou in 2013, Feng continued her studies at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts in London in 2014. Though she has been exhibited in China alongside well-established contemporary artists, she has never before been shown in Berlin. |
Clitche Yesterday, they sprayed pesticide in an elevator. Because the day before, this elevator was filled with hundreds of insects. Three days ago, they cleaned the kitchen, and the trash piled up in the kitchen spawned these several hundred insects. So today, I feel dizzy. They don’t know that this orchid-fragranced pesticide has the same killing effect on androids. They have unwittingly become android hunters. They don’t know. Android hunters always sing this song to me. My speech has become cliché. Analysis is self-negation. They don’t know. Youth has no particular reference; this is a fuzzy concept, usually explained on some sort of pretext. If you don’t want to interpret it, “every individual can experience varying periods of stupidity” is probably nearest. |
Frank Tang Tang Kai Yiu is a Hong Kong based artist whose artworks look into the performative elements of Chinese painting. As an emerging artist, Tang received his Bachelor of Visual Arts(Hons) from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010. In 2012, he won Louis Mak Chinese Painting Award and got Grant Award from Muses Foundation for Culture and Education Limited. In university, his works are well-recognised and that he won Yau Sang Cheong Chinese painting Award of AVA in 2009 and an AVA Award in SOLOS Graduation Show 2010. His artworks have exhibited in art organizations and galleries in Germany, Hong Kong, ShenZhen and Taiwan. |
Experience with Chinese Landscape Painting Each epoch, each person’s way of fulfilling the “Way” is different. For an artist in modern Hong Kong, the natural landscape has become a luxury good, and one must pay dearly in exchange for a small slice of mountain or seascape. Bringing a piece of paper and pen with him, he wanders around areas of everyday life drawing landscape paintings. This video recording engenders the tension between reality and the artist’s state of mind – he strives desperately to find a piece of tranquil landscape in this bustling metropolis, forcing himself to find the true meaning of fulfilling the “Way”, living in a dystopia of the heart. |
Hu Weiyi Hu Weiyi (b. 1990, Shanghai) is the son of Hu Jieming and now continuing his studies as a graduate student of Zhang Peili at the Media Department of the China Academy of Art, after having graduated from the Department of Public Art at the China Academy of Art in 2012. Hu is a multimedia artist and curator, whose work combines video, installation, sculpture, action, and sound. In 2012 he curated a young artists exhibition titled The Bad Land, in which the occupation of a public crossroad in Shanghai functioned to address the limits between art and life, public and private. Recent exhibitions include The Overlapping Reflection at the 2nd Zhujiajiao Contemporary Art Exhibition in Shanghai and The Summer Session at V2 in Rotterdam, both in 2013. His work has been shown for the first time during ‘PANDAMONIUM, Media Art from Shanghai’, organized by MOMENTUM in May 2014. |
Flirt “I Silently Wait For The Light To Pass Through Me” breaks the emerging style of the flattening of film. Spontaneous rays of light link people or objects together, forming shadows.Here the light becomes the source of an intrinsic connection, or a deeply-held fate, creating mutual connections between illuminated objects and people, reorganizing the possibilities between images, and creating narrative connections in the space. |
Iris Long & Cedar Zhou The work of I & C (Cedar and Iris) combines elements of computer science, visual art and storytelling, using real-world generated data to create multi-sensory experiences. They co-curated Information in Style: information visualisation in the UK, art and design exhibition at the CAFA Art Museum in 2013, and an archive data visualisation show about Chinese contemporary art, the CCAA WOW at Power Station of Art, Shanghai in 2014. They have also exhibited internationally at venues including Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK, Waterman Art Centre in London, UK, OCT-LOFT Art Terminal, Shenzhen, China, and Audi City Beijing, China.Cedar has a MA degree from the Central Saint Martin Collage of Art and design, University of Arts London and a MFA from the Goldsmiths Collage, University of London. Iris has a master degree from the Royal College of Art. |
Surveillance Surveillance is a impromptu performance, co-operated with Sharky(red) and George(black). During the performance, Sharky & George are being tracked by a real-time analysis system indicating both their moving speed and distance covered by their movements. In the performance, Sharky & George are “talking” to each other on the latest news from online news service in real time. The news is up-dated in 10-second intervals. The real-time analysis system keeps track of Sharky & George’s movements, and project the processed information back onto them in real time. |
Jiang Jun Jun Jiang was born in Shanghai in 1982, graduated from Prof. Aernout Mik’s class at Kunstakademie Münster in 2013, received title Meisterschüler of Aernout Mik. Jiang currently lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou. |
Shanghai SOHO Fuxing Plaza In the past few years, the aesthetic of the white box has gradually entered everyday spaces in China; new train stations, art galleries, subway stations, and shopping malls, all representing sterile, neutral, holy, pure experiences of space, indicating absolute modernity. At the same time, the white cubes of art spaces and of commercial spaces have blended together, forming a stereotyped and repetitive homogeneity. This work is a critique of these homogenous aesthetics. |
Liao Wenfeng Liao Wenfeng was born in Jiangxi Province (P.R.China) in 1984. In 2006 he graduated from the Total Art Studio of China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He lived in Shanghai from 2006 to 2012. Since 2012 he lives in Berlin. |
Before, there was something called ‘Future’ |
Liu Guoqiang Liu Guoqiang, born in 1988, Shandong Province, China. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts now lives in Hangzhou. Important exhibitions: 2012 Beijing Today Art Museum “Future Career” Finalist 2012 Xinjiang Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art Biennial 2014 “Earth memorandum” |
Public Bench Amidst hurried passers-by is an immobile bench, upon which restsa body that does not seem to flit by. With time compressed, the passers-by seem like spirits stopping by the wayside, the dust of nothingness. Speed is time, time is space, the two extremes of the bench and immobility, longing for travel, longing for stillness. A witness to time. |
Quynh Dong Quynh Dong (originally Đồng Thị Như Quỳnh) was born on the 25 December 1982 in Hanoi’s seaport, Hai Phong, in Northern Vietnam. From 2000 to 2004 she attended the Design School in Biel/Bienne for a degree in graphic design, graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Bern University of Arts and earned her Master of Arts in Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. Today Quynh Dong lives in Zürich, where she will work as a recipient of the BINZ39 award until 2012. In her work she examines the geographical shift of specific cultural elements from Vietnam to Switzerland and vice versa. Through performances, videos and watercolors her art is present at different places, institutions and festivals. In 2008 Quynh Dong’s work “Das Aquarium” (“The Aquarium“) won the Aeschlimann-Corti scholarship, and was subsequently shown at the Centre Pasquart Art Centre in Biel/Bienne. In 2009, during the performance festival Hesperides II at the Cantonal Museum for Fine Arts in Lausanne, Quynh Dong participated with “Mein Heimatland” (“My Home Country“) and “Gestern” (“Yesterday“), while Franz Erhard Walther presented his performance “5×2 Holzblöcke” (“5×2 Wooden Blocks“) (1969-2009). In 2010 she took part at the Swiss Art Award Basel. Dong was a Fellow in the Summeracademy 2011 in Zentrum Paul Klee Bern, where Pipilotti Rist was the curator. This year she will participate with a performance at The Young Art Fair in Basel. |
Adi and Herman at the barbecue party “Adi and Arman At the barbecue party” shows three camera-phone photos, and attempts to preserve the image on scrap paper. By displaying it on a blank screen, the artist questions the notion of “form”. |
Shi Yijie Shi Yijie (b. 1989, Zhanjiang, Guang Zhou) graduated from Fine Arts Academy of Guangzhou, the Fifth studio, currently lives in Guangzhou. He participates in several art projects of HB Station, exhibited in Minsheng Art Museum and the AM art space. |
The 26th July, Notes of Surveillance “Perhaps you haven’t realised it, but this family has a visitor. An invisible detective in dire straits, doing his utmost to be diligent. |
Shi Yong Shi Yong (b. 1963) works and lives in Shanghai, graduated from the Fine Art Department of the Shanghai Light Industry College in 1984. His major solo exhibitions include: “Think Carefully, Where Have You Been Yesterday?” (BizART, Shanghai, 2007) and “Realistic reality: Shi Yong Solo Show” (2577 Creative Garden, Shanghai,2007). “The Heavenּ The World, Solo Show by Shi Yong in 2 Parts” ( ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai, 2004)and Pingyao International Photography Festival (PIP), Project by Shi Yong, Pingyao, Shanxi. His recent selected group exhibitions include: “V&P” (ShanghART Beijing, Beijing, 2014), “Study” (Jewelvary & Art Boutique, Shanghai,2014) , “Just As Money is the Paper” ( The gallery is the room, Osage Shanghai, 2014), “Off Site Programme, Slient Film”,( Ikon Gallery, Fletchers Walk, central Birmingham,U.K, 2014). |
How Future looks like? I often have a kind of desire to blur writing and figures, to abstract it even to the point of erasure. Only after concealing something can you become interested in investigating the result of hiding it. Here, I longitudinally cut and reorganised this poster in the name of art. The information it contains has not disappeared, but it is hidden in an anonymous form in 113 re-cut and re-ordered strips: the future is so beautiful, and so abstract. |
Song Ta |
Population and Family Planning Bureau This is part of the 2009 work, “Functionary” – I took the name of a work unit from one of 61 county-level government administrative offices. Its full name is “Office of Population and Family Planning”. It is a particular government department that has arisen from a particular period of history in China. |
Stefan Baltensperger & David Siepert Stefan Baltensperger (*1976) grew up in Zurich, Switzerland. David Siepert (*1983) grew up in the Black Forrest in Germany and later moved to Switzerland. Both Stefan and David attended the Basel School of Fine Arts, and hold a master degree from Zurich University of the Arts. They began collaborating in 2007 while still being undergraduate students and work from their Zurich studio ever since. Baltensperger + Siepert’s artistic practice reflects critically upon social, cultural, and political issues. By immersing themselves in diverse systems, they aim to expose and manipulate them. Since 2010 the focus of their work has been on political matters and on developing an understanding of postcolonial structures. |
Dancing Queen The title of Stefan and David’s latest work comes from ABBA’s 70s disco classic of the same name, which also plays in the background of the recording. In a scene in the video, electronic toy soldiers crawl forwards. Occasionally, a soldier will halt, pretending to fire a gun before carrying onward. In “Dancing Queen”, Stefan and David have opened for the audience a seemingly simple but greatly profound horizon, questioning the everyday practice of violent military force. |
Tan Tian Tan Tian (b. 1988, Beijing) received his BA from Kingston University of Fine Art, London in 2009. Currently lives and works in Beijing. His recent shows include the The 2nd ‘CAFAM Future’ Exhibition (2015), CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China, ‘From The Manic Ego To The Wise Superego’ (2014), Times Art Museum, Beijing, China, ‘Start Ups’ (2014), Matthias Kuper Gallery, Beijing, China, ‘Attached’ (2014), Force Gallery, Beijing, China, ‘Memo II’ (2014), Whitespace, Beijing, China. |
Get married first, then achieve goals This work is part of the fifth section of my project “How I Became A Modern Artist”, entitled “Fundamental Qualities Of A Modern Artist”. It’s a copy of my marriage certificate. As I see it, having a stable household, not causing trouble for oneself, and having support in one’s life is an extremely important factor in allowing modern artists to focus on creative work. Because of this, “First Wive, Then Thrive” is a fundamental quality one must have to become a modern artist. |
Wu Juehui Wu Juehui (b. 1980), is the cutting-edge artist of China’s new media art, working with cross-border-amalgamation, concerning interactive art, bio-art, media theater to show the plurality of art creation. Wu’s saying that “Art as the antimatter of science and technology.” shows his perspective upon the relation between art and science. In recent years, he focuses on the “potential interface” between art and science, between body and media in collaboration with institutes such as Tsinghua University, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University. Since 2009, Wu has been trying to intrude and reproduce the sense organs via popular technology in the “Organ Project”. In the same year, in collaboration with TASML, he started the long-term art project “Brain Station” based on BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) technology. Wu has participated in several national and international media art exhibitions and festivals, such as “ZERO1 Biennial”,” Translife – International Triennial of New Media Art”,“Synthetic Times – Media Art China 2008″, “Creators Project 2012”, “SHIFT- Electronic Arts Festival”. In 2010, Wu Juehui and Shao Ding founded the art group “MeatMedia”, focusing on the “Emotional Interface” in an attempt to find a balance between the“Dry media”and the“Wet media”. Wu Juehui is also a co-founder of “UFO media lab” – the leading new media artist collective in China that focuses on the social application of new media art. In 2014, Wu starts using several media to simulate the deviations during the procedure of creating, resulting in a series of creatures of meaningless, namely the ‘Mistake Creature’. |
If I were USB If I were a flash drive, if the future still has flash drives. |
Xu Qu Xu Qu (b. 1978, Jiangsu Province) graduated with MFA in Fine Arts and Film at Braunschweig University of Art, and currently lives and works in Beijing. From the “51 m2 #11” at Taikang Space to the project “Xi Sha, South China Sea Projekt #1” and the “Upstream”, Xu Qu’s art practice has always been discussing the aesthetic considerations behind social connections through direct movements. However, although he adopts direct movements as before, he attempts to get rid of any unnecessary elements that distract the theme, using the minimalism to simplify the picture. The ultimate goal of the artist is to examine the ultimate target of anthropic aesthetics, and what kind of values and thoughts that the confrontation or mixture of different aesthetic experiences would bring us in different eras. |
Custom I “Habit I” describes the process by which a tortoise, flipped onto its back by someone’s foot, struggles to flip itself over. It investigates the subtle exchange between humans and animals. |
Yang Junling Yang Junling (b. 1986, Tianjing) graduated from the New Media Department of the China Academy of Art in 2008, currently based in Beijing. He is co-founder and member of Double Fly Art Center, and member of company. Selected group and solo exhibitions include: ‘POLYPHONY II’ (AMNUA NanJing China, 2014), ‘GET IT LOUDER’ (Beijing, 2014), ‘Wu Qing Exhibitio’ (HeiQiao Transparent-space, Beijing, 2014), ‘The 8 of Paths’ (Berlin, 2014 ), ‘WAVE’ (18 Gallery at Bund 18, Shanghai, 2013). |
Future Banknote If one limits oneself to thinking solely of the Internet as the future of money, paper money as a medium of exchange ceases to be a necessity. However, expanding the scope of future technology allows paper money to go more in the direction of science fiction. |
Yuan Keru Yuan Keru was born in Hangzhou in 1990, she received her BAF from New Media Arts Department of China Academy of Art. She is currently lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou. Recent selected exhibitions include: ‘Brewing’, Free Creation of ‘Installation: The Creativity of The Lingering Art’ (Fine Arts Literature, 2014), ‘Sound of The Deity, A Salted Encounter’ (Art Sanya, Sanya, Hainan, 2014). |
Monoaware Reflecting on humanity, one never ceases to ponderthings that fly – it is a practice as old as religion. They are most profound and graceful things, always in a contradictory, intimate relationship. Like rock, sand, men, women, skin, kisses, soil, memory, bodies, and fading scars. Thus brightness, the seaside, releases the seahawk into the sunset and back. |
Originally existing as an exhibition in print and online curated by Cao Dan and Li Zhenhua for LEAP – the art magazine for contemporary China, MOMENTUM now brings ‘Creating the Future: Thinking about the Unthinkable’ to Berlin in real time and three-dimensional space, to literally LEAP off the page, off the screen, and into our gallery space.
After an enduring focus on so-called ‘Net Art’ since the mid-90s, which saw artists challenging the necessity or relevance of physical exhibition spaces, in recent years the term ‘post-internet art’ has come to dominate art discourse. Widely misunderstood, this term does not imply that we have in any way moved beyond net-based technologies – the main ground for the strong resistance to this term. Like ‘post-modernism’, and with a similarly counterintuitive and misleading choice of terminology, the ‘post’ in ‘post-internet art’ refers to a revisiting or reworking of the methods derived from internet art, rather than a break from it.
Whereas Net Art dealt directly with new digital strategies and mainly existed on the web itself, post-internet art applies these methods into a much wider range of fields, often to create physical objects in the real world.
This exhibition can be positioned as a curatorial exploration of this tendency or need to create crossovers between the on and the offline. Integrating the printed and digital versions of the exhibition within the now physicalized exhibition itself, it presents one and the same selection of works in the three main forms by which the public comes into contact with art today; a mise en abyme of exhibition-media with a gallery show of a virtual exhibition. Within the curators’ aim to create “a microcosm of the relationship between art and media”, at MOMENTUM the exhibition allows for an in-depth consideration of how pre-internet, net, and post-internet media may affect this relationship. It is a threefold exhibition – a series of déjà vu’s in the real, the reproduced and the virtual.
— Isabel de Sena
A LETTER TO THE FUTURE
An Exhibition Online and On Paper
Cao Dan
“Thinking about the Unthinkable,” comes from a work of the same name published in the 1960s by preeminent American futurist and Hudson Institute founder Herman Kahn. Kahn’s text analyzes and imagines the possible aftermath of nuclear war, directly dealing with various specific crises and circumstances with which mankind might be faced, all while maintaining a typically optimistic futurist faith in the possibility of this future human society to find a path to survival. Over fifty years later, we are in the midst of Kahn’s “future”: on one hand, improvements in democracy and science have brought mankind unparalleled safety and well-being, with continued progress in our control of the outside world giving a sense of exponentially increasing prosperity; on the other hand, the dangers of nuclear war, limited resources, climate change, pollution, and health epidemics are omnipresent, with anxiety about the future affecting our conceptions of identity, faith, and ethics, as well as other more subtle and intrinsic notions. How should we think about the future? Can the immediate or distant future really be thought of? Can our thinking affect the future? … Questions like these laid the basis for the subject of this exhibition, “Creating for the Future: Thinking about the Unthinkable”.
This exhibition has specifically enlisted renowned curator, Li Zhenhua to help LEAP and LEAP LABS to organize both the online and print exhibitions. The theme of this years exhibition is “Creating for the Future: Thinking about the Unthinkable.” For this year’s special edition, we have invited 25 young artists to use their own idea of an “image” to create a “Letter for the Future.” These images may end up being a composition of frames of memories made in order to connect to an unknown world; they may implore conceptual methods to create a realistic narrative; they might even delve into the realm of the not yet existent in order to explore the boundaries of reality and imagination… The lives and creations made by artists of this new generation are intertwined with the multitude of images that barrage them daily from all corners of the earth. It is both the most natural and most comfortable way through which these artists can express themselves.
CREATING FOR THE FUTURE
Li Zhenhua
From print media to the content and development of apps, art has been pushed forward by the transmission of information, and while small, this event exists as a microcosm of the relationship between art and the media. Perhaps not even Mcluhan or Neil Postman could predict our current reality: today’s media now extends beyond what is real and has delved into a manifestation of self-obsession. But, then again, maybe this is a reality they predicted at one time. If we are to say that the transmission of information is what brought about the current state of the world –and with it modern civilization— then isn’t it too hollow to say that the only thing the so-called second and third revolutions brought about is the vague concept of the “information age”?
Revolution often comes quietly, but it’s not because nobody is paying attention. Instead, it’s because we as people naturally accept a certain reality, one that accepts the creation of change. The information age began similarly without a sound. Just like the upgrade from a 286 to 386 computer, the pursuit of increased efficiency has caused us to crave new technology.
Besides adapting to the times around it, art creates its own spirit within an era. At the same time, art –as a force that existed before this time, and which will continue to exist after— brings with it both skepticism towards the present and worries about the future. This self-conflicting reality is one which artists have been unable to untangle, even as art begins to blur the boundaries between it and other disciplines –boundaries that it gets close to, but never crosses.
All the artists invited to “Creating for the Future” exist within this specific reality and are trying to find a way to respond to its current situation, or the situation of the future it will create.
Artists and their works are diverse in the way in which they are able to give us opportunities to think at exactly the right moment. To make us think: how will the future unfold? At the same time, art can also remove itself from these constructs, as if it were passing through the universe overcoming any sense of time or space. Art transforms media into becoming a reflection or observation. Through changing existing relationships and fostering new ones, art can create new connections that push our imaginations forward with an inertia that only comes when one has expectations for the future. When that scale tips, it’s like starting a landslide.
I once planed a “future media” issue for Vision Magazine, in which I hoped to discuss the role of print media. With this current project, however, I hope to be able to derive more specific creative methods from the artists themselves, and look to better understand how to best link print media and multi-media software. Inevitably, artists must be the ones to complete this practice. However, Cheng Ran’s scripts, Hu Weiyi’s imprints, Xu Wenkai’s fictitious landscapes, and Quynh Dong’s poetry and spaces did not respond to the essence of “Thinking the Unthinkable.” Instead, they focus specifically on working towards a future that is on the verge of occurring. These artists get very close to approaching reality through directly linking the future to the present and therefore bring the subjects of their work into every aspect of their lives. That is not the point of this project. Unfortunately, herein lies the paradox of “Thinking the Unthinkable”: in order to ascertain the future, perhaps hope must come in the form of an escape from reality. The protagonists of most stories do not make it to the future. When their moment comes to approach it, they look back to the earliest ancestors of humanity or moments from times past, yet towards the future their thoughts are nothing more than emptiness.
WITH THANKS FOR GENEROUS SUPPORT IN REALIZING THIS EXHIBITION
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THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION
(photos by Marina Belikova)
THE INSTALLATION SHOTS
(photos by Marina Belikova)
Fiona Pardington Residency
Fiona Pardington
23 September – 13 November 2014
Fiona Pardington’s work investigates the history of photography and representations of the body, examining subject-photographer relations, medicine, memory, collecting practices and still life. Her deeply toned black-and-white photographs are the result of specialty hand printing and demonstrate a highly refined analogue darkroom technique. Of Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Scottish descent, Pardington’s practice often draws upon personal history, recollections and mourning to breath new life into traditional and forgotten objects. Her work with still life formats in museum collections, which focuses on relics as diverse as taonga (Māori ancestral treasures), hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now-extinct buia bird, calls into question our contemporary relationship with a materialized past as well as the ineffable photographic image.
Pardington holds an MFA and PhD in photography from the University of Auckland and has received numerous recognitions, including the Ngai Tahu residency at Otago Polytechnic in 2006, a position as Frances Hodgkins Fellow in both 1996 and 1997, the Visa Gold Art Award 1997, and the Moet and Chandon Fellowship (France) from 1991-92. Born in 1961 in Devonport, New Zealand, Pardington lives and works in Waiheke Island, New Zealand.
Fiona Pardington’s still life series Organic is part of MOMENTUM Collection. More info here.
Fiona Pardington took part in a Kunst Salon with a workshop in collaboration with Janet Laurence, to develop ideas and frameworks for an upcoming project with MOMENTUM.
Pardington will also take part in the forthcoming MOMENTUM exhibition FRAGMENTS OF EMPIRES (7th Nov 2014 – 1 Feb 2015), along with 6 renowned international artists. Click here for more info.
With the generous support of Two Rooms Gallery (Auckland).
Watch ‘Naturally’ Kunst Salon with Fiona Pardington:
[fve] http://vimeo.com/117583130 [/fve]
Further reading:
Rhana Devenport, ‘Foreword’, in: Fiona Pardington. The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, ed. Kriselle Baker, Elizabeth Rankin (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2011). ORDER MONOGRAPH HERE
Fiona Pardington, (From PhD thesis) ‘Towards a Kaupapa of Ancestral Power and Talk’ (to request full thesis, please contact isabel@momentumworldwide.org)
Andrew Paul Wood, ‘Ex Vivo’
Andrew Paul Wood, ‘Lux et Tenebris’
For her Residency at MOMENTUM, Pardington will be creating her first-ever installation piece for Fragments of Empires, to open on November 7th. This installation is the result of an extensive period of research into and deep engagement with the history and significance of Blanke Helle, an ancient ritual lake situated in Berlin’s Tempelhof-Schöneberg district. In Pardington’s own eloquent words:
There’s a large part of my practice that turns on my intuitive engagement with the day and the things I come in to contact with that day. I am always travelling and collecting in nature.
I discovered Blanke Helle within a few days of arriving in Berlin. I had been made aware before i left about the Norse Goddess Hel, but didn’t expect to find such an important physical link to the deity when I arrived. Right in Berlin! Our goddess in Aoatearoa /New Zealand is Hine Nui Te Pō, the Great Lady of the Night. Every people have their Death Goddess, who is both ancient and contemporary simultaneously, ever changing and ever staying the same.
I’m interested in Hel and Hine Nui Te Pō as powerful deific masks who both speak loads in respect to their own deep indigeneity, both Norse and Maori. How they intertwine during my residency is similar to the way bloodlines intertwine when coloniser and colonised meet and create new people and a new whakapapa/genealogy is created. Certainly I am the product of many of those meetings, with Maori, Scottish, Irish and English whakapapa.
Blanke Helle is a glacial kettle lake remainder, a still, dark, ancient holy pond in Berlin’s Alboinplatz. According to local folk tradition, there was a sacrificial stone altar beside the great lake tended by a pagan priest, and Hel (who was believed to dwell at the bottom of the lake) would send up black bulls that emerged from the water. These bulls would help the priest clear the land, and work it. The land itself was blessed, and would provide plenty of grain that kept the priest well fed.
But as the priest grew old, he took it as a sign when one day a Christian monk appeared at the lake that his time on Midgard was ending. He asked the holy man to continue to look after the place of sacrifice. But after the pagan priest had passed from the world of the living the monk refused to honour a pagan Goddess. Hel was greatly displeased and sent Her massive bulls, the now extinct Auroch, foaming up from the water after the monk, whom they killed. Since then, it is said in some versions of the local folk tales that instead of waiting for others to sacrifice to Her in an age of Christianity, that the Goddess Herself lures victims to Her holy waters, and takes them as drowned sacrifices.
Leafy suburbia masks a past of human sacrifice… Hel is a half-rotted goddess, both beautiful woman and skeletal form in one. She is a goddess of bare necessity, only speaking the truth and loving and protecting the dead. She’s meeting me on my fleeting sojourn in Berlin, and I’m talking to her about my country Aotearoa/New Zealand, and about the people I come from.
Dr. Fiona Pardington
Studio Atahu
Aotearoa/New Zealand
See Fiona Pardington’s AiR Visual Diary: