The 2023 edition of the BBA Photography Prize concentrates on global photography in a 600m2 group exhibition at the iconic cultural venue, Kühlhaus Berlin. Showcasing 21 exceptional photographers selected by an acclaimed jury, the exhibition is a symphony of global narratives and a crucial window into the soul of contemporary photography. Between hybrid digital mixed media collages and classic film photography, a myriad of techniques are to be discovered. Six years in the running, the BBA Photography Prize, an international photo award run by BBA Gallery, shines a spotlight on the lens-based creatives that are defining the course of tomorrow’s photography.
Thu, 23 Nov, 18h at Changing Room Christl Mudrak: Working the Land Add to my map
"Working the Land"
Territories
overwritten and reclaimed by nature
visualising a temporal progression
through the vegetation and material decay.
by Christl Mudrak
There will be a casual artist talk at 7 pm on opening night. The installation „Working the Land" by Christl Mudrak is in perpetual progress and derives from her extensive occupation with the site of the Zum Waldsee campsite in Havelland. Since 1995 left behind, the campside exudes an atmosphere of abandonment, desolation, and contamination by human decision or omission.
Mudrak uses this terrain as a working space. She values the work on the supposedly ruined, digs up material, digs in pictures, plants trees, improves the soil, observes wild animals, has a deep well drilled, builds, documents, sorts, and disposes.
Visiting hours: 24-26 November, 12 - 6pm
The event is a part of our series "More-than-human: Music from other species"
You are cordially invited to Florian Raditsch's first solo presentation in Berlin. The work of the Austrian American artist uniquely combines folk art and non-European traditions with the modernism of the early 20th century. Using various techniques and media, he fuses his sources into a new contemporary cosmos permeated by a sensitive awareness of nature. Raditsch grew up in the Sierra Nevada and in the Californian highlands among farmers and dropouts of all orientations. There are numerous thematic overlaps between this influence and the ideas of the early avant-garde. Expressive dance, spiritualism, the IT of the beatniks, and indigenous rituals play just as much a role in it as real fires, whose explosive energy and allegorical presence are given an additional interpretation in their new context in the centre of Berlin. The city and its surroundings were once a hotspot of reformatory ideas in all areas of life, from art and nutrition to education. Today, not a summer goes by without forest fires and the lakes are disappearing before our eyes. Control Burn is the 31st installation in the foyer and corridors of the Kunstverein. The exhibition Manageable Matter by Emma Waltraud Howes opens at the same time.
Thu, 23 Nov 19h, Emma Waltraud Howes Manageable Matter at L40 – Add to my map
Opening and Performance with Kinga Ötvös [itinerant interlude #3]
The Berlin-based Canadian artist oscillates between movement and form, from time-based performance installations to soft sculptures and sound experiments. The exhibition Manageable Matter presents new glass sculptures and graphic scores that explore gravity and grace through variations of glass artichoke hearts.
On the occasion of the opening of Howes'solo show the Hungarian singer and actor Kinga Ötvös will perform in cooperation with the artist. The performance is part of itinerant interludes by Laurie Schwartz.
Thu, 23 Nov 19:00 Film screening FARAH at soft power – Add to my map
directed by Yalda Afsah and Ginan Seidl
Germany 2023, 82', German/Dari with English subtitles
followed by a conversation with Yalda Afsah & Ginan Seidl
FARAH (2023) is a film about adolescence, about growing into and out of the various pre- or self-determined images of oneself. The filmmakers Yalda Afsah and Ginan Seidl first met their protagonist Farahnaz in Afghanistan in 2013: Raised as a boy according to the Afghan “Bacha Posh” tradition, Farahnaz has been confronted from an early age with a binary structured society and the roles it assigns based on gender. The film FARAH follows Farahnaz between ages 17 and 20 through her daily life in Germany. As she navigates quotidian situations – attending school, living in a household run by her sister, hanging out with friends, choosing the right outfit, or deciphering letters from the immigration office –, Farahnaz self-confidently positions herself in a society different from the one she was born into, yet with its own set of constraints. In documentary footage as well as Farahnaz’ own TikTok videos, she renegotiates the roles socially assigned to her – as an immigrant in Germany, as a “girl in boys’ clothes”, as a family member, and as a friend.
With works by: Louise Bourgeois, Candice Breitz, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Antje Engelmann
Daniel Hopp, Niina Lehtonen Braun, Carina Linge, Eva Vuillemin, Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld, Katarina Janečková Walshe
Curated by Katharina Schilling
Following on from the titular work “The Bad Mothe”r by Louise Bourgeois, the group exhibition artistically explores the expectations placed on motherhood. With mothers who are too selfish, too sexy, too self-sacrificing, too "motherly". With mothers who do not fulfill their own expectations and whose life reality is a continuum between self-sacrifice and self-assertion. The exhibition brings together works beyond the clichéd image of family happiness and the eternally mildly smiling mother as is still prevalent not only in depictions of the supermother Mary, but also in social media images.
Coming up! December 7, 2023, 7 pm: Curator’s tour in dialog with Susanne Weiß
Katarina Janeckova Walshe, Givers, 2022, Acryl auf Leinwand, 182 x 279 cm. Courtesy Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin
Fri, 24 Nov, 18-20h Gøneja ✷ Thresholds at Organ Kritischer Kunst - Add to my map
In observance of a rite of passage known as the “ascent to heaven”, neophytes of ancient Egyptian magic walked through the secret passages of the Temple of Edfu to reach its subterranean chambers. Laying in these grave/ womb-like environments in darkness and sensory deprivation for days, the aspiring adepts experienced a complete detachment from their physical bodies that helped to open a portal through which their souls travelled to other dimensions. “Threshold” by Berlin-based Gøneja ✷ presents a series of recent photographs and sculptures that explore contemporary initiatory gateways. It combines a syncretism of subjects that encompasses ancestral body rituals of peculiar practitioners, magical sigils as sculptural objects made of industrial materials, and ancient esoteric symbolism in nude portraits.
25 Nov-17 Dec 2023 Organ Kritischer Kunst Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin
pictured: Hieroglyph & Beyond The Naked Eye 2023 concrete / steel 50 x 35 x 10 cm / 58 x 44 x 11 cm
Fri, 24 Nov 18-21h Opening of Charys Wilson: Losing Eden at BERLIN-WEEKLY– Add to my map
Curated by Anna Ratcliffe
In our time of climate crisis, the greenhouse acts as both a symbol of humanity's destructive powers and global warming, as well as our ability to nurture and care for the natural world. Charys Wilson is a visual artist from Northern Ireland who aims to rekindle the viewer's curiosity in nature. Converting the window of Berlin-Weekly into a greenhouse with plants crafted from recycled materials, she allows contemplative time and space to reconnect with nature.
Event - Artist's Walk: Saturday 25th November, 15:30 – 17:00
Meeting point: Berlin-Weekly, Linienstraße 160, 10115 Berlin
Join artist Charys Wilson on a silent meditative walk, noticing nature in the urban landscape before entering Park am Nordbahnhof, a slice of wilderness in the bustle of the city, followed by hot mulled cider.
Fri, 24 Nov 18-21h Opening of Jan Voss: Was Neues vom Tatort? at Galerie Georg NothelferAdd to my map
The consistent topic of Jan Voss's (*1936) painting is the ordered constellation, but at the same time, constantly moving chaos of a multi-layered situation. In his unmistakable handwriting, his works show our lives as a complex, often chaotic passage of time. In our media-driven times, he reflects the unreasonable sum of signs we must absorb and process every day. Voss experiments with various techniques and materials; there are powerful, color-intensive works on canvas as well as quiet, narrative, and more drawing-like ones. In contrast, there are the paper reliefs, collaged from torn watercolours. Whether canvas, wood and paper relief or watercolour, what they all have in common is the accumulation of various elements of colour and form that interlock, overlap and are connected by lines, signs and fragments of signs.
The book 'TIDINGS' is a playful exploration of the concept of information overload. The form of the analog book challenges the viewer to actively deal with this flood. The reference to the tides in the title suggests a specific structure and rhythm. It is less about translating this rhythm into an exact graphic representation than about the symbolic alternation of high and low tide, mass and emptiness and the search for order in a seemingly endless expanse that can be both attractive and overwhelming in its unmanageability.
"Waves of delicate curves rise and fall on white paper pages in colors ranging from deep blue to pale azure. Changing in form and intensity, in variations and repetitions, the waves set a visual rhythm reminiscent of both the structures of a musical score and a tide chart. However, there is no emptiness here, no ebb. The overlapping, simultaneous tidal representations of several coasts and seas unite several imaginary landscapes into a never-ending, moving tide, a permanent presence.
What seems to mitigate the constant "tide" one is confronted with in "Tidings" is the continuous rhythmic pattern, which, albeit irregular, offers the viewer some calming pauses, and which challenges one to create order through comparison and retrospection, through the search for connections and distancing." (Excerpt from the text "Tidying the tide" by Eleni Mouzourou)
The solo exhibition will feature three distinct series of ink drawings: "Semantic Shadows," "Liminality," and "Beyond the Horizon." "Membranes" is a profound exploration of the concept of membranes as selective barriers that define and protect, both physically and symbolically. In this exhibition, Saša Pancic challenges viewers to contemplate the hidden layers of reality within his drawings. His work transcends mere representation, delving into the depths of perception, bridging the divide between external and internal, physical and psychological, historical and super-historical. Pancic's ink drawings display organic, gestural brushstrokes, evoking a sense of immediacy and depth reduction.
with Christine Atkinson, Lucy Wood Baird, Roberta Gentry, Karl Ljungquist
With artists spanning the media of painting, sculpture, photography, and collage, Night Swimming is a rumination on material's role in translating and documenting records and information. The included artists use diverse material to track time accumulation or record fleeting yet precise moments and events. Producing documents that function as both mementos and translations that are organized and realized via each artist's material and conceptual lexicon. The resultant works create an archive of fluctuating objects, translated snapshots, and material and visual accumulation. The show's title, "Night Swimming," alludes to the experience of attempting to navigate a murky and vast space while only being able to sense what is in your immediate vicinity. The memory of spaces once seen in the light, the instability of buoyancy, and the lack of stillness in the act of swimming in darkness mirrors the disoriented and vulnerable translation of recollection found in the works included in the exhibition. Like the world obscured by night and water, a clear understanding sits just out of reach itself.
until Dec 9 geometric bodies, kitsch and aspects of power at Axel Obiger – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst – Add to my map
Katharina Reich / Saeed Foroghi
Katharina Reich makes “social sculptures”. Her métier is all manner of collections: objects whose use, language and stories are drawn from swaps, loans and refuse. By gathering, arranging and rearranging, she creates spaces that prompt new forms of engaging with origins and histories.
Saeed Foroghi: „Gibst du mir einen künstlerischen Kuss?“ Diese Frage stellte mir meine Mutter, als ich fünf war. Für sie begann die Kunst im Film – nämlich dort, wo das wirkliche Leben endet. In meiner künstlerischen Praxis setze ich mit der Frage „Wann ist Kunst“ statt „Was ist Kunst“ auseinander und dabei erforsche ich das Verhältnis zwischen „Kunst“ und der „Wirklichkeit“.
April Gertler, artist and Zine maker will be giving a RISOGRAPH workshop at WIRWIR Project Space Print and bind your own Zine in an edition of 15! Come with a project or just come and get inspired! Each participant will leave with a one color Zine in an edition of 15! Your Zines will be ready just in time for the holidays!
The workshop has limited spaces available & will be given in English.
