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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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