Happy Pride, kids! Long weekend who? There are more events on June 9th than all the month combined. Let us look at some highlights.
THIS WEEK
Thu, 8 Jun 19h at Haus am Lützowplatz opening WHO BY FIRE: On Israel
With works by Durar Bacri (Tel Aviv), Michael Halak (Haifa), Leon Kahane (Berlin), Ariane Littman (Jerusalem), Ella Littwitz (Tel Aviv), Avner Pinchover (Tel Aviv), Shlomo Pozner (Berlin), Ariel Reichman (Berlin), Fatma Shanan (Tel Aviv), Dina Shenhav (Tel Aviv), Relli de Vries (Tel Aviv), Amir Yatziv (Tel Aviv)
Curated by Liav Mizrahi (Tel Aviv) in dialogue with Dr. Marc Wellmann
June 9, 2023, 11 am at Haus am Lützowplatz (HaL)
Roundtable Discussion: Artists of the exhibition in conversation with curator Liav Mizrahi, moderated by Dr. Marc Wellmann
Fri, 9 Jun 19-22h at alpha nova & galerie futura Die Hände mit den Füßen fassen with: Dana Lorenz
in curatorial collaboration with Katharina Koch and Sylvia Sadzinski
Dana Lorenz explores how biographical experiences, social origins and traumas actively inscribe themselves in the body and leave their traces. How do social exclusions shape bodies? How do processes of discrimination concerning class and sexuality, as well as the resulting emotions and affects, manifest themselves in bodies? How is the perception of bodies shaped by our social position? Sensitively but also humorously, Dana Lorenz negotiates the body as a grasping, touching, holding, biting, fighting, crunching, sticky, gentle, resilient, wafting product of society, which is, however, at the same time also its actor. The dialogically interrelated works create a spatial installation that bears witness to connections between biographical memories and personal coping strategies, linking them to aesthetics of the early 2000s and the present. Lorenz creates moments of liberation, rebellion and physical unruliness. So-called bad feelings are reinterpreted and make it clear that our real strength is to be found in vulnerability. Grasping hands with feet thus becomes a queer and feminist infrastructural critique of the body and its structural and temporary environments.
Disorder as stimulation. The small sculptures in Susanne Piotter's Artefakt series evoke an impression of architecture, reminiscent of building shells and architectural failures without function. As autonomous objects, they are a plea for imperfection. Harriet Groß's installation Interferenz records phenomena of amplification and extinction. Like waves hitting obstacles, competing ideas set the space into rhythmic oscillations and turn into strings of an instrument.
Finissage: Sunday, 9 July, 4-7 pm
Fri, 9 Jun 19h at L40 The Bureau of Melodramatic Research High Heel Communism
Performance Cry-Baby during the opening: How to Win Hearts and Influence People, with Irina Gheorghe and Mădălina Dan, 20h
High Heel Communism will be the first large-scale presentation of the work of the Romanian duo The Bureau of Melodramatic Research in Germany. The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR) was founded in 2009 in Bucharest by artists Irina Gheorghe (b. 1981) and Alina Popa (1982-2019) as an institution whose aim is to investigate the role of emotions, as key elements of melodrama, in a wider social context. In the Bureau’s practice, a subjective, affected and highly emotional genre is brought into the space of a rigorous investigation. Melodrama provides not only a subject for research, but also a working method. The project High Heel Communism is the first work developed by The Bureau of Melodramatic Research after Alina Popa’s premature death in 2019. The idea of equality produced with the technological support of the heel is in keeping with the Bureau’s concerns and methodologies: an instrumentarium belonging to the production of a stereotypical image of femininity provides the context for a reflection on wider socio-political themes.
For the exhibition at the Kunstverein, the project was developed into a mixed media installation including photographs, mannequins, costumes, prints, performances, as well as a newly produced 16mm film. The film starts from existing footage from the shooting of the titular photograph and the opening performance at the exhibition Heart Beat Detection Systems in Bucharest 2022. From there it expands into a wider reflection on ideas of social equality, gender representation and the role of the high heel as a symbolic instrument of subversion.
A new performance was developed in connection with the film. Premiere with Irina Gheorghe and Silvia Costin on 7 July 2023, 20h.
Fri, 9 Jun 19h at L40 Opening of Carlos Noronha Feio (lasst blumen wachsen!): Public installation in the foyer, open Mo-Sa during office hours.
The new installation in the foyer of L40 is one of the first that the Portuguese artist produced as part of his text series. It exists in several language variants, which Noronha Feio sees as an integral part of the work. Originally Russian, the expression derives from the ‘poem on flowers’ by Soviet non-conformist poet Genrikh Sapgir. In this poem, Sapgir talks to various professional groups from different parts of life. He addresses them directly, ultimately questioning their work and asking them to grow flowers instead. “Grow Flowers, grow ideas, grow the seedlings of your own making, and cultivate yourself and others.”
Fri, 9 Jun 21h at Schloss Biesdorf The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song / Postsocialist Time Slips
Videoartfestival under the trees, in the Schloss Biesdorf Park; in cooperation with District*Schule ohne Zentrum Hi! This is us, the non-white, non-straight, inter-mixed and left-winged diasporic outcasts, a swarm of half-mongrels from the former colonies of today’s empires. How to tell a story of us becoming ourselves? Our roots are convoluted like mangroves. What chain of events led to such a result? How did we become conscious, independent, postsocialist, creolized and queer?
krёlex zentre, Postsocialist Time Slips / D’EST 2023.
D’EST #Cycle 2: Text: krёlex zentre, Postsocialist Time Slips / D’EST 2023. Image: Schloss Biesdorf um 1910 (Bezirksmuseum Marzahn-Hellersdorf)
Síu Phạm: Sing an Idle song (2019)
Lucine Talalyan: post DIY (2014) www.d-est.com
curated by krёlex zentre, Nhà Sàn Collective und Fehras Publishing Practices mit Ulrike Gerhardt und Suza Husse
Sat, 10 Jun 14-16h at einBuch.haus ma-eum: Wondering Minds- finissage
A new artist's book, 'Endlich Ruhe' will be released, and the artist, Jeong Hwa Min, will be present. Exhibition View_ Jeong Hwa Min, ‘ma-eum: Wondering Minds’, einBuch.haus, 2023 (photo: Hyemi Cho)
Sat, 10 Jun 18h at soft power e.V. Opening Plural Perspectives
curated by Dereck Marouço Sant'Anna da Silva- with Alice Creischer, Aykan Safoğlu, Edgar Calel, Jota Mombaça and Mukenge/Schellhammer
The exhibition project Plural Perspectives aims to reveal contemporary dynamics and a diversity of perspectives on physical sites that carry a symbolic meaning in the city of Berlin. Curated by Dereck Marouço Sant'Anna da Silva, the project connects public space with artistic practices that develop new conversations with monuments, buildings or institutions to reflect and review versions of history endorsed by the state and capital.
Five artistic positions were invited to create works in relation to five sites in the city: Alice Creischer (Mall of Berlin), Aykan Safoğlu (Siegessäule), Edgar Calel (Sarotti Factory), Jota Mombaça (Haus der Berliner Konferenz), and Mukenge/Schellhammer (Humboldt Forum). Between June 10–25, the new commissions will be presented at soft power, itself located at one of the sites, the former Sarotti factory in Tempelhof, exhibiting some of the relations that arose from the dialogue between the artworks and the places they respond to. Simultaneously, each work takes a presence on the streets through posters in the direct vicinity of the respective site, mapped out on an interactive website. The critical relationship established between the works, the exhibition and the urban space aims to decentralise the experience of contemporary art by engaging the passers-by, and to insert other narratives into the social-urban fabric.
Tue, 13 Jun 18-21h at einBuch.haus Book Nomad abC(art book in China) Art Book Fair
In this exhibition project einBuch.haus will showcase 55 books that reveal the observations and reflection of different cultural perspectives. Following the concept of Book NomadeinBuch.haus added 5 local publications to the book list.
einBuch.haus selection for the Book Nomad project:
° Mikyung Song, White House (nomadelab Publishing, 2019)
° Wie-yi T. Lauw, Dunkle Paarung (backbonebooks, 2021)
° Rahel Zoller and Asami Murakami, Title / タイトル (2020/21)
° Jumping He (Ed.), Another Reading. Contemporary Book Design from China (Hesign, 2023)
° Lim Kyung Yong and Helen Jungyeon Ku (Ed.), Publishing as Method: Ways of Working Together in Asia (Mediabus Seoul, 2023)
Thu, 15 Jun 9 am at Art Laboratory Berlin: MATTER OF FLUX Festival: Women/ FLINTA* in Art, Science and Technology- 15 – 18 June 2023
More information on the Festival Program with Abstracts and Biographies is HERE
The MATTER OF FLUX festival takes place in the framework of the group exhibition MATTER OF FLUX in which artists explore the use of menstrual fluid for tissue culture, propose new modes of care within the context of female and nonbinary health and discuss both traditional forms and new possibilities of reproduction. Six clusters – CRITICAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, LEAKY CYCLES, TECHNOLOGIES/ SENSORS/ INTERFACES, PLANT ENCOUNTERS, ALTERNATIVE KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION and HYDRO-RELATIONS – offer workshops, talks, performances, zine-making lounges and more over the four days. In addition there will be a Smell workshop as well as artist studio, exhibition and laboratory visits.
Art Laboratory Berlin
@ PA58, Prinzenallee 58, 13359 Berlin, (opposite of ALB)
The festival takes place during all four days at PA58, except studio, lab and exhibition visits as well as the club night.
Thu, 15 Jun 18-24h at gr_und Opening Other people’s clothing
with: Kévin Desbouis, Pati Hill, Charlotte HouetteI curated by: Fiona Vilmer (Les Bains-Douches) und gr_und
Exhibition, Live Music (Cesar Palace), Publication (Suckcess 2)
Other people's clothing is a group show with Kevin Desbouis, Pati Hill, Charlotte Houette, curated by Fiona Vilmer. In partnership with Les Bains-Douches (Alençon) & Gr_und (Berlin).
The first occurrence of the exhibition Other people's clothing took place at the art centre Les Bains-Douches in France. For this second part of the exhibition hosted by Gr_und, other people's clothing presents itself as a version that suggests another way of appearing, continuing its investigation into attitudes of disappearance and possible fictions of self. The works by Kevin Desbouis, Pati Hill and Charlotte Houette, brought together for this exhibition, play with surface effects of attraction, suspicion and a promised intensity that operate through tactics of diversion, or what might be identified as a special effect or a joke. The exhibition questions the possible ways of being and being situated in reality, with the idea that something is always - and already - happening elsewhere, by summoning mechanisms of fictions and shifts within their own practice. These phenomena of absorption evoke, through their forms, more or less dramatic, more or less comical changes of state.
On the occasion of the Project Space festival, we will launch the edition of "Suckcess 2" by Kevin Desbouis, followed by a concert by Cesar Palace, the unstoppable drummer of La Colonie de Vacances (and the late Electric Electric).
