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About Inverso Mundus

Engravings in the genre of “World Upside Down”, known since the 16th century, depict such scenes as a pig gutting the butcher, a child punishing his teacher, a man carrying a donkey on his back, man and woman exchanging roles and dress, and a beggar in rags magnanimously bestowing alms on a rich man. These engravings contain demons, chimeras, fish flying through the sky and death itself, variously with a scythe or in the mask of a plague doctor.

The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian “reverse, the opposite” and the Old Italian “poetry,” and Mundus – the Latin “world,” hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In our interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a multichannel video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.

About Last Riot 2, Tondo #13

The virtual world generated by the real world of the twentieth century is growing exponentially, like an organism in a Petri dish. Crossing its own borders in to new zones, it absorbs its founders and mutates in to something absolutely new. In this new world real wars look like a game on www.americasarmy.com. Prison torture appears more like the sadistic exercises of modern-day valkyries. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment in to a fantasy landscape of a new epoch

This paradise is a mutated world where time is frozen and the past is neighbor to the future. Its inhabitants are devoid of gender, becoming more like angels. This is a world where the severe, the vague or the erotic imagination appears natural in the artificial unsteadiness of 3D perspective. The heroes of the new epoch have only one identity, that of participants in the last riot. Each fights both self and the other, there’s no longer any difference between victim and aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethics.

Bio

First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Arzamasova, Evzovich, and Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies. They define their practice as a kind of “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture.

AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations of striking originality that have come to define both the AES+F aesthetic and the cutting edge of the medium’s capacities. The second of the series, The Feast of Trimalchio (2009), appeared in Venice in 2009, and the third, Allegoria Sacra (2011), debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. United as The Liminal Space Trilogy, this tour-de-force series was premiered in September 2012 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Moscow Manege, the central exhibition hall of the artists’ home city, and has since been shown on many occasions at various museums and festivals. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Inverso Mundus was later shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals all over the world.

Between 2016 and 2019, AES+F have also worked in set design for theater and opera. The artists created their first video set design for Psychosis, a reinterpretation of Sarah Kane’s famous play, 4:48 Psychosis, directed together with Alexander Zeldovich. Psychosis premiered at Electrotheater Stanislavsky in Moscow in June 2016. In 2019, the group premiered their first opera together with the Italian opera director Fabio Cherstich, a reimagined Turandot acclaimed by critics as audacious and visionary. Turandot was created as an international co-production at the initiative of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, together with Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and Lakhta Center in St. Petersburg.

For more than a decade, works by AES+F have been showcased in signature festivals and biennial exhibitions of contemporary art around the world, including — in addition to Moscow and Venice — those of Adelaide, Gwangju, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Kochi-Muziris, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Vancouver, and many others. Their work has also been featured in influential events devoted to new media — such as ARS Electronica (Linz), Mediacity Seoul and Video Zone (Tel Aviv) — and photography — such as FotoFest (Houston), Les Rencontres d’Arles and Moscow’s Photo Biennial.

The group had more than 100 solo exhibitions at museums, exhibition spaces, and commercial galleries worldwide. AES+F works have been shown in such prestigious venues as the ZKM (Karlsruhe), HAM (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tate Britain (London), MAXXI and MACRO Future (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires), and many others.

Their works appear in some of the world’s principal collections of contemporary art, such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), MOCAK (Kraków), Sammlung Goetz (Munich), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), and the Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania), Centre de Arte dos de Mayo (Madrid), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris), the Vanhaerents Art Collection (Brussels), Taguchi Art Collection (Tokyo), and many others. Their work is also well represented in some of Russia’s principal national museums, such as The State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), the National Center for Contemporary Art, and the Multimedia Art Museum (Moscow).

AES+F received Sergey Kuryokhin Award 2011, the main award of the Kandinsky Prize 2012, the main award of the NordArt Festival 2014, and Pino Pascali Prize 2015 (18th Edition) – all for the project Allegoria Sacra. AES+F were also awarded a Bronze Medal (2005) and a Gold Medal (2013) by the Russian National Academy of Fine Arts.

Inverso Mundus/em>
2015, HD video (1-channel version), 38 min

Last Riot 2, Tondo #13/em>
2006, Digital collage, c-print (⌀150 cm on canvas, 80 x 80 cm on paper)

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Artist Statement

The focus of Chrissy Angliker’s work lies in creating a balanced relationship between the controllable and uncontrollable. Chrissy depicts that concept through the relationship she is cultivating with her medium of paint. For every intentional mark, the nature of the medium is challenging it. The artist is searching for a sense of grace in the transition between these two opposing elements. The theme of her work arose from her feeling of life itself being a balance between control and chaos. “As people, we have intentions, but must anticipate the intervention of outside forces beyond our power.” The finished paintings capture the relationship created by aiming to balance these extremes to capture a whole, and frank representation of the subject.

Bio

Chrissy Angliker is a Brooklyn-based Swiss/American artist who regularly shows in both her native and adopted countries. She was born in Zurich and raised in Greifensee and Winterthur. Chrissy’s artistic inclinations emerged at an early age. Beginning in 1996 she was fortunate to study with the Russian artist Juri Borodatchev, who became her artistic mentor for several years. In 1999 at age 16, Chrissy moved to the US to study Fine Art at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Mass. In 2002, Chrissy had her first solo show at Gallery Juri in Winterthur, Switzerland. Seeking to broaden her means of expression, she then pursued a degree in Industrial Design at the Pratt Institute in New York. After spending her post- graduate years working in the design field, Chrissy shifted her creative expression back to painting in 2008. Her art is focused on visually translating her perception of herself in relationship to the world. Chrissy’s work has been shown in Europe and the US, and has been featured in several international publications. She has been commissioned to collaborate with several companies, among AOL, Burton and Wired Magazine. Her most recent solo show, Bodies of Water, was held at the Swiss Consulate in New York.

Ocean Swim II
2020, Acrylic on canvas, 76 × 76 × 2 cm

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About the work

Utopia XI is one out of a series of over 40 diverse works sharing the title of Utopia. On show in Points of Resistance, this particular painting evokes a sense of impending cosmic cataclysm more so than an idealized state of utopia. Whether meteors crashing through the cosmos, or the viral structures with which we have become all too familiar in the past year of pandemic, Utopia XI sends a suitably ambiguous message about the future, contriving to comingle a notion of existential threat with the sense of the sublime.

Artemova’s practice remains heavily influenced by her professors at the MArchI in Moscow, the Paper Architects, a movement originating in the 1980s that developed futuristic architectural creations never intended to be realized. The visionary projects of the Paper Architects and her experience of the failure of the communist utopia with the fall of the Soviet Union, has led Artemova to explore, through her constructivist painting style, the ideas of architectural utopias from the 1960s up to her own futuristic visions. In creating utopian landscapes and spaces, Artemova interrogates the future of living spaces and their impact upon human relationships. The concept of utopia stands for a space of possibility in human consciousness in which the crucial questions have to be answered again and again: Is there no alternative to the reality in which we live? What will we do in the future? Do we have to fail because of our ideal ideas?

Bio

Born in Moscow, Inna Artemova studied architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI). For her diploma project, she received the 2nd prize of the Russian Federation. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and started to focus on her work as an artist in the field of painting and drawing. Recently, Inna Artemova has participated in: the Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020), and in 2019, the Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts presented her works in the solo show Landscapes of Tomorrow. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Austria and Italy. Additionally, her works were shown at international art fairs in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, the US, and Japan.

Utopia XI
2018, Oil on canvas, 190 × 140 cm

Lutz Becker

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About the work

The Berlin Wall was first breached on 9th November 1989, as the result of popular mass meetings and demonstrations within the GDR. It was not demolished at a single stroke, but over days and weeks was slowly chipped away as people from East and West joined together to obliterate a hated symbol of oppression. This was the first in a chain of events that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain. Europe was freer than it had ever been before! And the ramifications spread the world-over! In 1989 the whole of Berlin rang and rocked to the liberating sound of hammers and pickaxes as the Wall was demolished. It was intended to build a better world without any walls.

Artist and film-maker Lutz Becker made a montage of these percussive sounds as the opening work in After the Wall

Artist Statement

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, symbolised the end of the separation of the City of Berlin, as well as that of Germany into an Eastern and a Western state. It marked, for everybody to see, the final collapse of Communism. It was a moment in history that promised to the people of Germany and other Europeans a new beginning. The significance of the Berlin Wall extended far beyond the city, beyond the borders of Germany. It epitomised the Cold War confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and the NATO alliance. The Wall separated the spheres of interest between Communism and Capitalism. On 13. August 1961 the government of East Germany, the GDR, began to seal off East Berlin from West Berlin by means of barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles. The underground and railway services of Greater Berlin were severed and West Berlin was turned into an island within GDR territory. A solid wall gradually replaced the provisional fence. It was made up of concrete segments of a height of 12 feet and was 165 miles long. A trench ran parallel to it to prevent vehicles from breaking through. There was a patrol corridor behind it, watch towers, bunkers and electric fences.

It appeared to the population of Germany that the split of their country and of Berlin would last forever. In 1989, as a reaction to Gorbachov’s reforms in the Soviet Union and massive unrest in their country, the government of the GDR decreed the opening of the Wall on 9. November 1989. In the following days and months demolition workers began with tearing it down. On 1. July 1990 the GDR gave up her statehood and merged with West Germany. For the Germans the demolition of the wall was an act of liberation. It gave hope for a future in which unhindered communication and freedom of movement would be everybody’s natural right. Within days of the ‘opening’ of the wall its terrifying symbolism lost its power. Millions of people came to Berlin to look at the now defunct wall and to take a piece of it with them to remember this moment of history. Hundreds of people attacked the graffiti covered surfaces of the Wall, eroding it bit by bit. The so called ‘Mauerspechte’, wall-peckers as opposed to woodpeckers, worked on the Wall day and night; their hammering, knocking and breaking sounds travelled along the many miles of Wall. The high-density concrete of the structure worked like a gigantic resonating body; its acoustic properties created eerie echoes driven by the random percussion of the hammering.

– Lutz Becker

Bio

Lutz Becker is a filmmaker, artist and curator from Berlin who lives and works in London. He is of a generation still affected by the aftermath of the WW2, the rebuilding of Germany and the student’s revolt of the late 60s. His films, videos and curatorial projects have been shown internationally. His paintings are in institutional and private collections. As a student in London he embraced the forward looking spirit of abstraction and artistic internationalism. This led him towards the painterly procedures of informel. He got interested in the synthetic sound structures of electronic music which lead him towards the making of experimental abstract films at the BBC. His preoccupation with movement and time influenced much of his film and video work. Becker is a director/producer of political and art documentaries such as Double Headed Eagle, Lion of Judah and Vita Futurista to name a few as well as TV productions, such as Nuremberg in History.

He participated as a guest artist at the First Kiev Biennale in 2012 with the video installation, The Scream and is currently preparing the reconstruction of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Que viva Mexico!. Besides the work as artist and film maker he is an expert on Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism. He curated for Tate Modern the Moscow section of Century City 2001 and for the State Museum of Modern Art, Thessaloniki, Construction: Tatlin and After 2002, for the Estorick Collection, London, a survey of European photomontage Cut & Paste 2008, for Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, a show of 20th Century drawings Modern Times: Responding to Chaos 2010. Most recently he co-curated Solomon Nikritin – George Grosz, Political Terror and Social Decadence in Europe between the Wars at the State Museum of Modern Art, Thessaloniki.

Lutz Becker’s sound sculpture, After the Wall, re-visits a sound installation commissioned for the exhibition After the Wall held at the Moderna Museet Stockholm in 1999, curated by David Elliott. Its five constituent sound montages are based on original recordings made at the fall of the Berlin Wall. After its installation in Stockholm it travelled subsequently to the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. MOMENTUM originally presented the sound sculpture After the Wall in the exhibition Fragments of Empires in the context of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2014. The soundscapes captured in After the Wall – a discordant cacophony of hammering and banging – are derived from the recorded sounds of thousands of people across Berlin wielding hammers and chisels to break down the Wall.

Tom Biber

Harz IV Vorbereitungsbild
2016, Oil on wood, 41.5 × 13.29 cm

Andreas Blank

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About the works

In his sculptural practice, Andreas Blank combines the abstract and the realistic, the conceptual as well as the technical. He sources stones from quarries from all over the world, carves them with elaborate deliberation and assembles them as sometimes consciously stylized, and other times deceptively realistic objects of the everyday. In his precise installations, the apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. Whether marble, alabaster, or porphyry, material historically used to serve religious or political functions, has in Blank’s hands acquired a seemingly casual and fragmentary character. The geographical and cultural identity of the stone and the memorial function of stone-sculpture in general refer to the value of each object. Blank questions the obvious and transforms traditional ideals, subverting the value of the ordinary and mundane. In a discourse of image and likeness, things lose their functional purpose, transcending into pure, formalistic objects. Stone sculptures, which historically were intended primarily for political representation or religious devotion, in Andreas Blank’s works come to question a (post)modernist nihilism. His works succeed to condense time and narrative structures, stretching the limits of traditional sculpture.

Bio

Andreas Blank was born in Ansbach (Germany) in 1976. He attended the Karlsruhe State Academy of Art (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and was student of Prof. Harald Klingelhöller. He held a scholarship with the German National Academic Foundation and received his Master of Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2009 he was a finalist for the New Sensations Award by Channel 4 and the Saatchi Gallery. Blank lives and works in Berlin.

Untitled
2019, Marble, 25 × 25 × 110 cm

Planes
2021, Marble, Quartz, 47 × 27 × 85 cm

Anina Brisolla

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Bio

Anina Brisolla‘s works combine researched digital imagery, computer-generated images and digital printing techniques with analog drawing or painterly components. She condenses these into graphic works, collages and objects, moving images and video loops. In her work, Brisolla reflects on privatization and the resulting power relations within the multifaceted relationships of humans, nature, and space.

Anina Brisolla studied fine arts in the Netherlands and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has recently shown her work in solo shows at KanyaKage, SMAC and Blake & Vargas in Berlin and in group exhibitions at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Radialsystem in Berlin and Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna. Anina Brisolla lives and works in Berlin.

true_false.001
2020, Ink and ink eraser on paper, 29.95 × 21 cm, 30 × 24 cm framed

Claus Brunsmann

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About the works

Summer of Love is part of his Police Series (2009–2015), originally planned to be a group of paintings centered around the motif of social justice, order, death wish, and impressionism.

Claus Brunsmann’s work oscillates between figurative and abstract art and covers a broad range of form and content. The paintings are characterized by a multi-layered penetration of the medium and its tradition and are deeply rooted in the history of art. At the same time, they open up traditional imagery to unfamiliar interpretations and ways of seeing modern media. Claus Brunsmann’s works testify to the power of a painting, which aesthetically manufactures, or even invents, the reality in the image.

Summer of Love
2009, From Police Series, Liquitex on paper (framed), 70 × 100 cm

Claudia Chaseling

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About the work

The work shown in this exhibition is part of Claudia Chaseling’s extensive series she entitles Small Paintings. Sky Can Be More Blue, created during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, is a dream of better days and more open times; a way of traveling without travelling during periods of closed borders. This work is no less powerful for its diminutive scale. The ‘Small Paintings’ were begun in 1998 when the artist was living in NY, and resumed throughout her diverse periods of living abroad. Painting over postcards she collects throughout her life’s journey, Chaseling approaches this aspect of her practice as a kind of diary, inscribing each work with text relating to her experiences.

Claudia Chaseling’s predominant practice is that of wall-size paintings and large-scale site specific installations. The visual language Chaseling has created and called Spatial Painting and the imagery in her work consists of distorted landscapes, poisoned places, mutated creatures and plants whose deformation is caused by radioactive contamination and environmental toxins. A decade ago she created the graphic novel animated on video, Murphy the Mutant, which became an anchor for her work to follow. This narrative work effectively describes her ongoing fixation upon the enduring environmental devastation of nuclear waste and munitions, transposing into a paradoxically sweet atomic allegory, akin to a children’s book, the horrific aftermath of the way we wage war in the modern world. The diverse body of works encompassing Claudia Chaseling’s practice, from Spatial Painting to graphic novels, watercolor, sculpture, print, and video, all deal with the facts and the consequences of today’s socio-political systems and their effects on the environment.

Chaseling’s work, in its entirety, forms an ongoing point of resistance against the global arms industry and the nuclear chain which leads to the radioactive contamination of depleted uranium munitions and their toxic aftermath. Her work results from meticulous research into historic and ongoing ways in which we continue to poison our planet with the byproducts of wars and nuclear accidents. Using her visual language of Spatial Painting to both inform and protest about the fatal status quo of global energy and arms industries, Claudia Chaseling has for over a decade persevered in focusing our attention on the pernicious weapon of mass destruction which is depleted uranium.

Bio

Claudia Chaseling is an international artist, born in Munich, Germany. She received a Masters degree in Visual Art, from the University of the Arts in Berlin and a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Art) from the Australian National University in Canberra. Chaseling is known for the practice of Spatial Painting, site-mutative biomorphic abstract murals, which cover walls, floors and ceilings. These works are drafted from one particular viewpoint, to distort and dissolve the familiar geometry of the space, whilst carrying socio-political meaning. Claudia has exhibited her work in over sixty solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, Australia and Europe. Her work has been featured in the X-Border Biennial, Finland; the Luela Art Biennial, Sweden; and the Lorne Biennial, Australia; amongst others. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Art Gallery Nadezda Petrovic, Cacak, Serbia; Wollongong Art Gallery and Yuill Crowely Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Kunstverein Duisburg and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and most recently with MOMENTUM in collaboration with the Australian Embassy, Berlin, Germany; further with Art in Buildings in Milwaukee and New York City, USA, of which the NYC exhibition radiationscape has been featured in the New York Times. Major grants and scholarships received continuously – include those of the German DAAD and Karl Hofer Society Award; the Australian Samstag Scholarship, Australia Council for the Arts Grant, artsACT Grants, IGNITE Career Fund and the Postgraduate Award. Claudia Chaseling has taken part in various international visiting artists programs and residencies, among others at Art Omi and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, at the Texas A&M University and at the Australian National University. The Verlag für zeitgenoessische Kunst und Theorie Berlin published her first extensive monograph in November 2016.

Sky Can Be More Blue
2020, Mixed technique on postcard, approximately 10 × 15 cm

Chto Delat?

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About the work

Project authors: Chto Delat? Olga Egorova (Tsaplya); Dmitry Vilensky; Natalia Pershina (Gliuklya); Nikolai Oleinikov Director: Olga Egorova (Tsaplya) Composer: Mikhail Krutikov Screenplay: Tsaplya, Dmitry Vilensky, Gliuklya Camera and lighting: Artem Ignatov Sound: Sergei Knyazev Set design: Nikolai Oleinikov, Dmitry Vilensky.

Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup is a video structured in the form of a song that conveys and analyses a key episode in the final period of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. In August of 1991 an unprecedented popular uprising against the established order took place. This uprising represented the end of the Soviet period and was deemed by the West to be the final triumph of democracy in Russia. This film is part of the trilogy Songspiels that the collective Chto Delat? made between 2008 and 2010, in which it uses the term created by Bertolt Brecht (“songspiel”) as a perversion of singspiel (German popular opera). The video speaks ironically about the epic genre that tinges certain historical processes, such as the one that meant the end of the Cold War and plays with a distanced re-writing of history.

Shown in Points of Resistance in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche, the format of the songspiel invokes the tradition of choral church music, while furthermore addressing the remarkable history of this church as a crucial point of resistance during the GDR. With the proximity of the Zionskirche within meters to the former path of the Berlin Wall (on the East side!), and to the struggles of the many once trapped within it, Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup takes on a particular significance in light of Berlin’s divided past – a legacy that exists to this day in the ongoing tensions between East and West.

Bio

The collective Chto Delat? (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in Peters- burg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.

The group was constituted in May 2003 in St. Petersburg in an action called The Refoundation of Petersburg. Shortly afterwards, the original, as yet nameless core group began publishing an international newspaper called Chto Delat?. The name of the group derives from a novel by the Russian 19th century writer Nikolai Chernyshevs- ky, and immediately brings to mind the first socialist worker’s self-organizations in Russia, which Lenin actualized in his own publication, What is to be done? (1902). Chto Delat sees itself as an artistic cell and also as a community organizer for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicizing “knowledge production”.

In 2013, Chto Delat initiated an educational platform—School of Engaged Art in Pe- tersburg and also runs a space called Rosa’s House of Culture. From its inception, the collective has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper focused on the ur- gent issues of Russian cultural politics, in dialogue with the international context. In 2014 the collective withdrew from the participation in Manifesta 14 in Petersburg as a local protest against the developing the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and with this act has triggered a current debate on the participation and boycott of art events.

The artistic activity is realizing across a range of media—from video and theater plays, to radio programs and murals—it include art projects, seminars and public campaigns. The works of the collective are characterized by the use of alienation effect, sur- real scenery, typicality and always case based analyses of a concrete social and political struggles. The aesthetics of the group is based also on heretic unpacking the artistic devices offered by Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Luck Godard and Reiner Fassbin- der. The collective make a strong focus on the issue of cultural workers labour rights.

These activities are coordinated by a core group including Tsaplya Olga Egoro- va (artist), Artiom Magun (philosopher), Nikolay Oleynikov (artist), Natalia Pershina / Glucklya (artist), Alexey Penzin (philosopher), Alexander Skidan (poet and critic), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher), Dmitry Vilensky (artist) and Nina Gasteva (choreo- grapher).

Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup
2008, Video, 26 min 23 sec

Brad Downey

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About Pretending to Be in Control

Police doing AcroYoga or acrobats wearing full combat gear of the French CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité). Four of them pile on top of each other on a park bench, their heads lying relaxed on each other’s chest, looking up at the sky. In another constellation, one of them is lying on his back like a beetle, balancing a partner on his armorclad hands and feet. Their identity is concealed under the visors of the helmets. The absurdity and the playfulness of the scenes are amusing, since the executive of the state power is ridiculed or portrayed in a peaceful, lovable light.

However, it can only be a parallel universe in which the expensive military uniforms are not used for defense or force, but for acrobatics and flirting. Make Love Not War.

(The CRS are comparable to the German riot police, i.e. used in large scale demonstrations. The predecessor organization was the paramilitary groupes mobiles de réserve of Vichy France)

– Nadia Pilchowski

Pretending to Be in Control
2018, Digital photographs, 95 × 147 cm, 93 × 140 cm

About Melania

The cause for the erection of the monument to Melania is Brad’s first visit to Slovenia in the summer of 2018, when he discovered that it is the birthplace of the First Lady of his homeland. Another motivation could certainly be the aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of her husband. So Brad decided to commemorate this contradiction named Melania together with a team of Slovenian colleagues and the local community. After choosing and buying the poplar tree and after meeting and bringing Maxi – an amateur chainsaw sculptor, born in the same month of the same year and in the same maternity ward as Melania – into the project, the monument was unveiled last year in Rožno, near Sevnica, on the day when the American people celebrate the declaration of their independence.

One part of the art project is also the documentary film, a portrait of Maxi, which shows the crucial steps in the making of the sculpture. Brad and his colleagues then began to make replicas of the statue, based on the cast of the original. Exactly one year after the unveiling, on the 4th of July 2020, unknown perpetrators burned down the monument in Rožno. Brad then removed it and, joining forces with the local community that took care of the monument and its surroundings, erected a bronze replica. Melania is a multi-layered project that is simply not allowed to conclude by everything that is happening around it.

– Karlo Hmeljak

Melania
2019, Sevenica Slovenia, digital video, 12 min 11 sec

Melania (media analysis)
2020, Sevenica Slovenia, digital video, 8 min 11 sec

About MELANIA

The MELANIA Bronze edition by Brad Downey is a detailed miniature of the original bronze sculpture installed by the US artist on a tree stump near Melania Trump’s Slovenian hometown. Originally created by a Slovenian artist with a chainsaw from a tree trunk, the world’s first sculpture of the American First Lady reflects both the anti-immigrant policies of the 45th U.S. President and the paradox of his own wife’s immigrant background.

The sculpture received worldwide media coverage. The first wooden version was set on fire by an unknown person on July 4, 2020, the American national holiday, and was subsequently replaced by Downey with a full-size bronze. The edition of eighty was produced in Slovenia.

Bio

Brad Downey is a Berlin-based, Kentucky-born conceptual artist. His hyper-diverse approach allows him recognition across multiple art fields. Working across media, he employs spontaneous sculptures, abjected assemblages, unsolicited interventions, silent alterations, and slapstick formalism. By challenging, adapting and manipulating rather than by accepting given forms, norms, and regulations of artistic production, Downey’s rather anti-authoritarian work ventures into uncharted territories and somehow evades an unambiguous definition. In spite of this, his work always evinces a taste for comic anarchy and a love of physical engagement and improvisation.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Reverse Culture Shock, MU, Eindhoven (2018); Vernissage, Overcoat Gallery, Moscow (2017); Souvenirs, Ruttkowski; 68, Cologne (2015); Damaged Goods, Cuadro Gallery, Dubai (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Skin-Fade, Disconnected, Slick-Back, Simulaker Gallery, Novo Mesto (2018); Cultural Hijack, Archip, Prague (2017); Art and the City: Graffiti in the Internet Age, Electromuseum, Moscow (2017); Essentials, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017); Planet B, NRW Forum, Duesseldorf (2016); Wertical I, Michael Horbach Foundation, Cologne (2016). Downey was awarded Stiftung Kunstfonds for his catalogue publication Slapstick Formalism: Process, Project, Object.

MELANIA
2020, Bronze edition, 52 × 17 × 12 cm

Thomas Draschan

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About the work

Thomas Draschan’s work speaks to us in a lexicon of found footage, cut-up DADA-style, and re-imagined into an absurdist analysis of our cultural fixations, reconfigured into the imagination of a better world. Drawing on a treasure trove of imagery from popular culture, with references to history and philosophy, Draschan imbues his deceptively quirky imagery with a complex depth of narrative, for those who wish to dive deep to see it.

Artist Statement

A New Hope is from a series of Collages that incorporate people who have become icons of popular culture. Andy Warhol has used Sigmund Freud’s image, as have many artists, from the surrealists till now. I am less playing with Freud’s ideas here, but with the public persona and kitchen psychology that Freud is standing for.

Nonetheless I highly recommend reading his writings first hand.

Continental Divide is an exploration of ritual as such. Unlike my other film work, it is extremely slow paced. a syncretistic meta-religious series of images in dreamlike transformation.

Freude is a film trying to mimic a visual orgasm. It’s trying to have sex with your retina.

Bio

After studying theater and journalism in Vienna, Thomas Draschan studied film at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at the Cooper Union in New York. He worked on numerous film projects, was managing director of the Hessian film office and director of the 1st International Film Festival in Frankfurt. His film, To The Happy Few (2003), was awarded the Hessian Film Prize.

A New Hope
2016, Archival print on rag-paper

Continental Divide
2010, Video animation, 9 min 44 sec

Freude
2009, Video animation, 2 min 5 sec

Kerstin Dzewior

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Artist statement

In my paintings I react to what I see, think and feel. I am a painter and have been managing a specialist optician shop in Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg for 15 years. My studio is integrated in the optician shop. “Painting means learning to see”. I decided to start showing my pictures in public in 2014 and had the great honor to exhibit together with well-known artists. In 2015 I co-founded the artist community FO YOU. Since then, I organize and curate large exhibitions on a regular basis.

Her Mind
2020, Oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm

Red Boxing Gloves
2021, Oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm

Untitled
2019, Oil on canvas, 50 × 30 cm

Margret Eicher

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Artist statement

With her media tapestries, Margret Eicher refers directly to the function and effect of the historical tapestry of the 17th century. Since the Middle Ages, tapestries have served representative and political purposes like hardly any other visual medium. In the Baroque era, however, the courtly tapestry unfolded and optimized its functions in the representation of power, in ideological communication and propaganda. If one compares functions of the baroque communication medium with those of contemporary mass media, astonishing parallels emerge. Manipulation of the viewer and philosophical reflection on life stand side by side in a value-neutral manner. Although in the courtly context the propagandistic dispersion and thus the circle of addressees is limited, the intention, method, and effect are structurally similar. In choosing her subjects, Margret Eicher draws from the public image fund of advertising and journalism; of lifestyle magazines or TV series.

Combined with set pieces from historical paintings by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Antoine Watteau, or Thomas Gainsborough that correlate in terms of content, they are elaborately digitally processed and finally woven with the aid of computers. By being transformed into a monumental tapestry, the content of the image gains the appearance of legitimacy and power, then as now. The hegemony of advertising media and contemporary information media with their tendencies towards scandalization find a counterpart in this. “Whatever images and visual worlds Eicher appropriates, she relies on one of the basic properties of tapestry to give her pictorial themes a mouthpiece and lend them weight. The tapestry, even if the medium itself is instrumentalized, finds its way back to its original function as a means of communication in the artist’s works and, as a subtle quotation, questions the power of images in today’s world.”

– Katja Schmitz-von Ledebur

It’s a Digital World 3
2021, Digital collage, jacquard woven tapestry, 310 × 185 cm

Nezaket Ekici & Shahar Marcus

Nezaket Ekici Website >

Shahar Marcus Website >

About the work

Video trilogy, designed to be shown as a 3 Channel Video Installation. For Points of Resistance, the videos are exceptionally being presented in a single-channel screening format.

1. Geniza (2017) 8:42 min. Filmed in Tel Aviv Forest
2. La Scala (2017) 5:09 min. Filmed in Rome
3. Sea of Life (2018) 10:56 min. Filmed in Istanbul

The trilogy TBQ (Tora, Bible, Quran) is a research project, trying to find out, how the different cultures and religions deal with holy books. The Abrahamic religions have many things in common, but are different as well. According to Jewish and Islamic belief, God and Archangel Gabriel directly disclosed the Word of God to Abraham, Moses and Mohammad. Therefore the Holy Scripture is indistinguishable from God, and cannot be harmed or disposed of in any way. Whereas in Christian belief, Jesus, as son of God on earth, disclosed the Word. In consequence the Holy Bible is only the vehicle for the Word of God, but not by itself holy.

The overall question is: Can a holy book lose its holiness? All great religions relating to Abraham (Jewish, Christian and Islamic) adhere to the belief that a holy book will remain holy for all eternity. Thus, a holy book cannot and should not be discarded but rather requires special handling.

The artists focus mainly on the emotional involvement of all believers and the way, people dedicate themselves to their belief and to holy books. Therefore the artists want to give back to each outdated holy book a part of the deserved respect, applicable not only for one religion but for all three Abrahamic religions. Hence, the artists strive to restore the divinity to the unrightfully cast-off holy books and return them to their rightful place. In this light, the artists want to respect the specific ways religions developed in handling outdated holy books.

In the trilogy TBQ the artists show performance-rituals, using outdated holy books to revive their holy meaning and to free them from their unearned silence. The inner core of performance art is the ritual act itself, which shows similarities with the religious practice by means of repetition.

Geniza (2017), video, 8:42 min

Performers: Shahar Marcus, Nezaket Ekici
Video Photographer: Eyal Sibi
Stills Photographer: Maya Sharabani
Editor: Eyal Sibi
Sound Editor: Janja Loncar
Art: Caroline Atone
Assistants: Noga Rozman, Maya van Soest, Shiran Friedland
Copyright 2017, Shahar Marcus & Nezaket Ekici

According to Jewish law, outdated and unreadable holy books have to be stored in a place, called Geniza (persian „ginzakh“ = “treasury”), which was usually a room attached to a synagogue or a hole in the ground to hide away unreadable holy books. Can a holy book loose it ́s holiness? All great religions relating to Abraham (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) give the same answer to this question: A holy book will be holy for eternity. Therefore holy books cannot easily be thrown away but need special treatment.

Geniza, was produced in December 2016, in a forest near Tel Aviv and addresses the Jewish religion through the ancient custom of Geniza. The work deals with the ritual wherin books that were thrown in pirate caves under the pretext of Geniza undergo a process of restoration, so that at the end they are returned to their original purpose and their glory is restored, forming a shrine under the stars.

La Scala (2017), video, 5:30 min

Performers: Nezaket Ekici, Shahar Marcus
Video Photographer: Andrea Benedetti
Still Photographer: Fabio Bernardo
Editor: Andrea Benedetti
Sound Editor: Janja Loncar
Assistants: Gao Chang, Li Zirui

Thanks to: British School at Rome, Christopher John Smith, Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo, Dr. Joachim Blüher, Deutsche Botschaft beim Heiligen Stuhl, Msgr. Oliver Lahl

Copyright 2017, Shahar Marcus & Nezaket Ekici

La Scala was produced in May 2017 in Rome. The artists use elements of the Catholic religion in the video work: they walk on their knees on steps as pilgrims do at the Santa Scala in Rome in order to get closer to Jesus; they mount mirrors on their backs as done in ancient times to reflect the image of Maria into the sky; they use bibles on a red carpet and incense to bless outdated bibles.

“During the Middle Ages, the pilgrim, once arrived to the site of the holy relic, would take out of his robes a covered mirror. He would then uncover it to reflect the relic, then take it back to his home. When arriving to his land, he would reveal again the mirror, and reflect back the holy vision of the relic he believed was kept within it. The artists return to this ancient tradition and collect the holy books while reflecting their divinity to the sky as they progress on their knees towards the church of Santa La Scala.”

Sea of Life (2018), video, 10:54 min.

Video Photographer: Baran Sasoglu
Still Photographer: Canberk Hasan Karacay
Editor: Eyal Sibi
Sound Editor: Janja Loncar
Assistants: Guler Asik, Gunes Huseyinkulu, Shay Govhary Saldis
Technician: Malte Yamamoto
Boat drivers: Burhanettin Peksoysal, Oruc Sena

Copyright 2018, Shahar Marcus & Nezaket Ekici

Istanbul was specifically chosen for three main reasons: the primary one lies in Turkey’s geographical location – the Bosphorus as a connection between East and West. From a historical and social standpoint Turkey was ruled by the Byzantine kingdom, one of Christianity’s strongholds, only to be later conquered and ruled by Islamic occupation, and to be reborn as modern-day Turkey under Ataturk, who separated state from religion. However, in recent years, Turkey is moving back towards Islamic influence.

Marcus and Ekici preform one final act – they fill buckets with seawater, pouring them onto holy books they have ritually carried through the city. They then fill chalices with this ritual water and sail far out to sea, where they pour the water back into the sea, by which symbolically they pour the spirituality of the books into the sea.

Nezaket Ekici

Bio

International performance artist Nezaket Ekici (b. 1970 in Kirsehir, Turkey) has been living in Germany since 1973. She holds an M.A. in Art Pedagogy, and studied Art History and Sculpture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Fine Arts Academy Munich (1994-2000). From 2001 to 2004 she studied Performance Art under Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. She received a degree in Fine Arts as well as an MFA degree.

Ekici has been presenting her work in national and international exhibitions since 2000: Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich; The Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; 25. May Museum Belgrade; PAC Milano; Venice Biennale; P.S.1 New York; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei/ Taiwan; Poznan Biennale; Curiciba Biennale; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Istanbul Modern; Marta Herford; Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; KunstWerke Berlin; Oslo Museum; The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Total Museum Seoul.

In 2013/2014, she was an artist in Residency at the Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul and in 2016/2017, she got Rome Prize and was an artist in Residency at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome. In 2018 she received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Award, and In 2020 she was an artist in residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York, sponsored by the International Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin. Ekici’s work includes mainly performance, video and installation. She presented more than 250 different performances in over 60 countries, more than 170 cities on 4 continents. She lives and works in Berlin, Stuttgart and Istanbul.

Shahar Marcus

Bio

Shahar Marcus (b. 1971 in Israel) is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in video, performance and installations. Marcus has exhibited at various art- institutions, both in Israel and around the world, including: The Tate Modern; MoCA Hiroshima, Japan; The Hermitage, Russia; The Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Charlottenburg, Copenhagen- Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biannale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Paris-Beijing Gallery, France; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Benaki Museum, Greece; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland; MAXXI, Italy and at other art- venues in Polland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, the USA and Turkey.

Collaboration:

The two artists Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus work together since 2012 in collaboration, calling their overall project In Relation. Within that time, several works have been realized and shown in exhibitions worldwide. Amongst other areas of interest, both artists are working as well on religious topics. Shahar grew up with Jewish religion, Nezaket with Muslim religion and is as well connected with the Christian religion by being married to a German catholic.

Geniza
2017, 8:42 min. Filmed in Tel Aviv Forest

La Scala
2017, 5:09 min. Filmed in Rome

Sea of Life
2018, 10:56 min. Filmed in Istanbul

Amir Fattal

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About the Artwork

In an untitled series of large silkscreens made with dust, pigment and lacquer printed on sheet aluminium, Fattal has focuses on images of recent acts of cultural desecration and destruction as they have been depicted throughout the Arab media, often using film supplied by the perpetrators themselves. As a counterpoint to this destructive orgy, not without irony, the series also includes a magnificent example of western conservation: the double headed lion from the Ishtar Gate in Berlin. For Fattal, this example of nineteenth-century cultural booty safely preserved from those who would now destroy it, presents a lively paradox: this regal, heroic heraldic image could also suggest a less admirable two-facedness that the West has often shown in its transactions in this region and continues to manifest in its cultural relations.

Throughout the diverse aspects of his multi-media practice, Amir Fattal’s work highlights present events and attitudes in reference to historical images or narratives. Both as silent witnesses and repositories of memory, Fattal appropriates and adapts chosen examples of previous art, architecture, photography or music as disruptive ‘objects’ in order to create an aesthetic unease out of which patterns of behavior or archetypical responses may be extrapolated. Fattal’s images and objects may, on first sight, seem innocent yet, when reproduced within the framework of his abiding concern with the fragility of life and culture, their associations become redolent of either barbarism or mortality; sometimes of both at the same time. In this respect he has become a protagonist of the cultivation and exposition of what could be described as memory subsumed within the continuing life of objects: fragments of the past living on and transformed by the present. His Jewish-Iraqi descent (both his parents were born in Baghdad, and he is first generation Israeli), as well as his current life as an artist in Berlin, have heightened a sense of tension that runs throughout his work, balancing delicately between the necessities for atonement and reconciliation.

The work shown in Points of Resistance is part of a body of work in which Fattal focuses on the systematic cycles of destruction of historical and religious monuments that have characterised warfare in the Middle East, Afghanistan and North Africa over the past twenty years. The propensity for iconophobia and iconoclasm (as well as for their opposite, iconolatry) has been present in the three monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) since their inception and has recurred periodically throughout their histories as part of a broader ideological struggle for power. Recent manifestations of this struggle, however, particularly those perpetrated by Islamic groups, have demonstrated a strong, almost theatrical, media awareness in which destruction represents not so much a tool of ideology but, under the pretext of obliterating blasphemy, embodies the desire to eclipse both history and memory by shaming and denying them at the same time, rather in the same way that marauding soldiers violently rape the people they vanquish. In these works, the rape of memory is Fattal’s main subject. His meditations on loss and memory expose how victory is currently expressed by destruction and how these historical monuments have become ideological battlegrounds.

Bio

Amir Fattal was distinguished with the GASAG Art Prize in 2008 and graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009. Based in Berlin to this day, Fattal participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Acclaimed solo exhibitions include: Mesopotopography, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin (2015); From the End to the Beginning, Kunstquerier Bethanien, Berlin (2014); Parallel Lines, Teapot Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2013); Goral Ehad, St-art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); Shadow of Smoke Rings on the Wall, Artitude Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); Tomorrow Gets Me Higher, Wilde Gallery, Berlin (2010). Selected group exhibitions include: Collection Enea Righi, Museo Fortuny, Venice (2016); Interior / Exterior / Sculpture, Belenius/Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); A Naked Singularity, Studio Garaicoa, Madrid, Spain (2015); Fragments of Empires, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2014-15); A Letter From Dr. Faustus, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014); Fundación Botín, Villa Iris, Santander, Spain (2014); Dahlstrøm & Fattal, Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2013); III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2012); Body Without Body, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011). Fattal is also curator and initiator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists.

Fattal is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Working in the media of video, photography, sculpture, and installation, his work forms a focused response to the diverse questions raised by his adoptive city of Berlin, where the memory, culture, architecture, indeed every thread in the fabric of this city is problematized by its history.

Untitled
2015, Industrial dust, raw pigment and lacquer on aluminum , 106 × 71 cm

Doug Fishbone

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About the work

The Jewish Question looks at the various stereotypes and misconceptions about Jews and money over the years. It examines these questions through the prism of Doug Fishbone’s father’s experience growing up in the Jewish community of the East End of London, as well as his family’s broader immigration history rooted in fleeing antisemitism in Europe. The film uses humor to debunk many of the more outlandish conspiracies that surround ideas of Jews and money, and the position of Jews in the world in general. The film was commissioned as part of Jews, Money, Myth, a major exhibition exploring the role of money in Jewish life, at the Jewish Museum in London in 2019. It has subsequently screened at the Kassel Festival in Germany and the UK Jewish Film Festival in London.

Shown in Points of Resistance in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche, The Jewish Question is seen in the context of Berlin’s painful history, and particularly, the remarkable history of this church as a crucial point of resistance against the Nazis, led by renowned theologian and anti-Nazi activist Deitrich Bonhoeffer who worked in the parish for over a decade until his arrest by the Gestapo.

Bio

Doug Fishbone is an American artist living and working in London. His film and performance work is heavily influenced by the rhythms of stand-up comedy – he was described by one critic as a “stand-up conceptual artist” – and examines some of the more problematic aspects of contemporary life in an amusing and disarming way. He is particularly interested in examining questions of relativity and perception, and how audience and context influence interpretation. He earned a BA from Amherst College in the US in 1991, and MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 2003. Selected solo exhibitions include Tate Britain, London (2010-11), Rokeby, London (2010-11, and 2009), Gimpel Fils, London (2006) and 30,000 Bananas in Trafalgar Square (2004). Selected group exhibitions include Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, Tate Britain (2010), Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2008); Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery (2008), London; British Art Show 6, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester (2006). He performs regularly at both international and UK venues, including appearances at London’s ICA and Southbank Centre.

Fishbone’s 2010 film project Elmina, made in collaboration with Revele Films in Ghana, had its world premiere at Tate Britain in 2010 and was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria in 2011. Elmina was voted no. 35 on Artinfo’s survey of the 100 most iconic artworks of the past 5 years in 2012. Fishbone’s practice is wide-ranging, using many different popular forms in unexpected ways. He curated Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, a bespoke art/crazy golf course featuring some of the UK’s leading artists, at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and in the same year, he collaborated with the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, one of the nation’s most prestigious Old Masters collections, on a solo project involving switching one of the Gallery’s masterpieces with a replica made in China. Other recent projects include a series of guided bus tours in Aberdeen as part of the Look Again Festival in 2016, and a series of riverboat performances on the River Thames called Doug Fishbone’s “Booze Cruise”, originally commissioned as part of the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival in 2013 and 2014. His project Artificial Intelligence (2018) was commissioned by werkleitz within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and Co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union, and he exhibited a specially commissioned video The Jewish Question in the exhibition Jews, Money, Myth at the Jewish Museum, London in 2019.

He has performed at many major venues, including the Hayward Gallery, ICA London, the Southbank Centre, Hauser and Wirth Somerset, and the Royal Academy. Fishbone is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Yinka Shonibare Foundation, an organization which fosters international cultural exchange established by the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare.

The Jewish Question
2019, HD Video, 10 min

Daniel Grüttner

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Bio

Daniel Grüttner, born on December 13th, 1979 in Rotenburg an der Wümme, initially studied human medicine at the University of Leipzig from 2000 to 2002. He then switched to studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he finally became a master student of Prof. Siegfried Anzinger. In 2005 he started exhibiting. In 2008 he moved to Berlin, where Grüttner now lives and works. Since 2009 he has been an artist in residence at the Starke Foundation in Berlin.

Daniel Grüttner’s first exhibition was Daniel Grüttner – Bilder at Galerie Sammler in Leipzig in 2006, and the most recent exhibition was Beyond Elysium at Kleiner Von Wiese in Berlin in 2020. Daniel Grüttner is mostly exhibited in Germany, but also had exhibitions in Austria, Spain. Grüttner has 4 solo shows and 26 group shows over the last 14 years. Grüttner has also been in one art fair but in no biennials. The most important show was on 17/13 at Kunstgruppe in Cologne in 2013. Other important shows were at CCA Andratx in Andratx and Werkstadt Graz in Graz. Daniel Grüttner has been exhibited with Herbert Willems and Leiko Ikemura.

Einszweidreivier
2021, Oil on canvas, 140 × 120 cm

Chris Hammerlein

Bio

Chris Hammerlein makes ceramic sculptures as painterly stories using a blend of material: glazed burnt clay, ink, and watercolour. Hammerlein’s sculptures are inspired by nature and diverse folklores and mythologies. Acting as metaphors for the human condition, his works are composed of beasts and mythical figures staged, with humour and irony, in dramatic moments.

Chris Hammerlein’s work is included in various collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

John Isaacs

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Bio

John Isaacs first studied biology in the south of England in Exeter. He would later use the knowledge of evolution and nature he obtained there in his art. He considers it his task to connect the rational, scientific view of flora, fauna and, in particular, humans with human qualities such as emotions, humour, and intuition. In 1988, he decided to study art and went to Cheltenham Art College in Gloucestershire for three years. He received the title of Master of Sculpture in London at the renowned Slade School of Fine Art.

In 1996, he earned a scholarship in Los Angeles and from 1999 to 2000 he was a resident artist at Imperial College in London. In 2005, he was a guest lecturer at the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, and in 2015 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. The art of Isaacs, who lives and creates in Berlin, has been presented in many solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad and has been regularly represented in group exhibitions in many galleries and museums, including at the beginning of his career in the 1990s in the context of the Young British Artists.

Past Errors of Judgement Made Real in the Future Lives Affected
2010, Wood, steel, plastic, leather, rubber, 210 × 115 × 95 cm

Anne Jungjohann

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About the work

Anne Jungjohann’s practice is an act of resistance against the tyranny of the canvas. Her subtly inflected works are 3-dimensional paintings, sculptures made from canvas. ‘We do not see the world in straight rectangular lines, so why must artists’ representations of the world be delimited by these dimensions?’, the artist asks us in every work she creates. Literally thinking outside the box, Jungjohann folds her painted canvases into forms she installs in dialogue with the spacial architecture.

Ohne Titel
2015, Acrylic, ink on canvas, 20 × 22 × 1 cm

gesimst nr. 5
2014), Acrylic, ink on canvas, 23 × 13 × 4 cm

Untitled
2015, Acrylic, ink on canvas, 32 × 19 × 7 cm

Gülsün Karamustafa

Extended Bio >>

About the work

Gülsün Karamustafa’s Memory of a Square (2005), juxtaposes scenes of family life not linked to any place or time with a collage of 50 years of documentary footage of Istanbul’s famous Taksim Square. The documentary sequences trace the history of Taksim Square from 1930 to 1980. They allude to harrowing incidents such as the September 1955 pogrom, when organised mobs attacked the minority Greek community; the military coup of May 1960; ‘Bloody Sunday’ in February 1969, when protestors were attacked by right-wing thugs; and 1 May 1977, when hundreds were killed or injured after gunmen opened fire on the crowds celebrating May Day. This highly charged site has played a crucial role in political and cultural change throughout the history of the Turkish Republic and continues to does so long after this work was made. From the annual May Day protests to the infamous Gesi Park protests of 2013, Taksim Square is a physical space pivotal to the history of resistance in contemporary Turkey. In the context of this exhibition, the duality juxtaposing scenes of enclosed domesticity with the most iconic point of resistance in modern day Turkey, can’t help but bring to mind our current situation of recurring lockdowns in parallel to growing global unrest.

Artist Stetement

Memory of a Square was done for the exhibition Center of Gravity curated at Istanbul Modern in 2005 by Rosa Martinez. Public squares write the history of collective memory. This film displays personal vs. collective history, crisscrossing between the two. While on one screen you see a family, on the other the images flowing are of an entirely documentary nature. The family is one single family for all times. They sit somewhere near the square. They hear the sounds, maybe they see something but we don’t see what they are seeing. What we see are the documentary images flowing on the second screen. Maybe this is what we need to say anyway. Therefore, we have a dual feeling about the square. The film begins with the good times on the square; it begins with the erection of the statue in the 1930s, and even before that, the first balloon that was launched from the Taksim Square during the Ottoman era. Then we move on to the dramatic events of September 6-7, followed by May 27 when we now have a bayonet planted in the middle of the square. The images that follow are of the Bloody Sunday of 1970, which is followed by images we really would prefer not see from May 1, 1977. The film ends in the 1980s with the houses around Taksim square being expropriated and demolished so that the Tarlabaşı road could be built. This film was screened in many places around the world and it was actually received with empathy because there is the fact that this square – at which such a family is looking– can change any day and can also be found anywhere in the world. In other words, if we replace this square by one from, say, Argentina, or China, or Greece, and we can keep the family but change the images of the square; it’s a film that can be watched with the same feeling everywhere. The music is an original composition done for the film by Selim Atakan.

Bio

Gülsün Karamustafa was born in 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. She lives and works in Istanbul and Berlin, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. She received her MFA from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art in 1969. Using personal and historical narratives, Karamustafa explores socio-political issues in modern Turkey, addressing themes including sexuality-gender, exile-ethnicity, and displacement-migration. Her work reflects on the traumatic effects of nation building, as it responds to the processes of modernization, political turbulence, and civil rights in a period that includes the military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980. Dduring the 1970s Karamustafa was imprisoned by the Turkish military dictatorship. She was refused a passport for sixteen years until the mid-80s and, unlike other Turkish artists, could not emigrate or travel. This enforced isolation led her to an analysis of her own situation and context: the city of Istanbul, interior migration and nomadism within Turkey, and the ideological and psychological ramifications of identity.

Gülsün Karamustafa is one of the laureates of the 2014 Prince Claus Awards that are presented to individuals or organisations whose cultural actions have a positive impact on the development of their societies. Karamustafa’s solo exhibitions include: “Chronographia” at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016-2017); Swaddling the Baby, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2016) / Villa Romana, Florence (2015); Mystic Transport (a duo exhibition with Koen Thys), Centrale for Contemporary Art, and Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2015-2016); An Ordinary Love, Rampa, Istanbul (2014); A Promised Exhibition, SALT Ulus, Ankara (2014), SALT Beyoglu, SALT Galata, Istanbul (2013); Mobile Stages; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2008); Bosphorus 1954, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2008); Memory of a Square / 2000-2005 Video Works by Gülsün Karamustafa, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2006); Black and White Visions, Prometeo Gallery, Milan (2006); PUBLIC/ PRIVATE, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (2006); Memory of a Square, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2006); Men Crying presented by Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris”, Galerie Immanence, Paris (2005); Galata:Genoa (Scavere Finestrini), Alberto Peola Gallery, Torino (2004); Mystic Transport, Trellis of My Mind, Musée d’Art et Histoire Geneva, (1999), among others. Gülsün Karamustafa took part in numerous international biennales, including: the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014); the 3rd and 10th Gwangju Biennials (2000, 2014); the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale (2013); the 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); Singapore Biennial (2011), the 3rd Guangzou Triennial (2008); the 11th Cairo Biennial (2008); Contour the 2nd Video Art Biennale, Mechelen (2005); the 1st Seville Biennial (2004); the 8th Havana Biennial (2003); the 3rd Cetinje Biennial (2003); and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th International Istanbul Biennials (1987, 1992, 1995).

Memory of a Square
2005, Video (1-channel version), 17 min

Franziska Klotz

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About the work

Franziska Klotz’s large abstract painting in oozing tones of fiery red, pink, and gold places the viewer right up against a cordon of riot police. We are caught within the haze of tear gas, the smoke making our eyes water and our vision blur. In our unquiet era of pandemic, protests, and political upheavals the world over, we are almost too familiar with such images from the daily news. Yet no images safely separated from us by a screen can have quite the same impact of proximity, implicating us in the threat of imminent violence. Or is it, perhaps, protection from violence?

Klotz entitled this work Leviathan in a tribute to the philosophy of Hobbes, for whom Leviathan is the symbol of unlimited and indivisible state power. The Human, in Hobbes’s word view, is by nature a selfish being intent on self-preservation, finding the security of living together only in the institution of the state. The state protects people from themselves – but does this security come at the price of freedom? According to Hobbes, the Leviathan is necessary to overcome the chaotic original state of societies, namely the war of “all against all” and to create lasting peace and order. The basis for this is a social contract in which all members of a society renounce their ancestral freedoms and rights and transfer them to the state/sovereign, who thereby becomes the all-powerful state or the Leviathan, a mortal god who can protect people from themselves and defend them against other people.

Bio

Franziska Klotz (born 1979 in Dresden) is a painter. For her, painting is not a medium “among many”, not at all; it is the medium in which she puts all her energy, time, heart, and soul into, and she expertly explores its potential. Colours, the interaction with them, their effect and materiality are her world (her subject). Her painting is in the most real sense of the word a handicraft; she is hands-on, paints with her fingers, palm, she presses, rubs, smears, literally transfers her energy onto her paintings, and they acquire their intensity and allure from her state of mind and gestures. Meanwhile, she loves oil paint, its sensuality and materiality.

Leviathan
2020, Oil on canvas, 190 × 230 cm

David Krippendorff

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About the work

Kali is a short film inspired by Nina Simone’s rendition of Pirate Jenny, the song from the Brecht/Weil Three Penny Opera. The lyrics of the song have been rewritten to become a monologue, performed by actress Hiam Abbass in Arabic (with English subtitles). The film has been shot with two cameras, a main one and a surveillance camera placed further away from the actress. It is conceived as a two-channel installation, with the footage from the main camera as a large projection and the surveillance camera film presented on a monitor within the same venue, and synchronized with the large projection.

The film tackles issues of oppression, exploitation and injustice. The title refers to the Hindu goddess associated with Empowerment, Time and Change. Although presented as dark and violent, Kali is also a figure of annihilation of evil forces. It perfectly reflects the spirit of the text, an angry plea to vengeance over injustice and oppression.

Gone With the Wind (1939) is a movie that has now been condemned for its racist depiction of the South. For the drawing Burning (2021) I have chosen a still from Gone With the Wind of the burning of Atlanta, one of the pivotal moments in the film that most strongly condemns the civil war.

By eliminating the characters in the film still, and removing the image from its original context, this image of burning buildings also takes on new associations which resonate with images from the Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality in the summer of 2020.

Bio

David Krippendorff is a German artist, video- and experimental filmmaker. Born in Berlin, he grew up in Rome (Italy) and studied art at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin (Germany), where he graduated with a masters degree in 1997. His works, films and videos have been shown internationally, a.o. at New Museum (New York), ICA (London), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem). He has participated in four Biennials (Prague, Poznan, Tel Aviv, Asunción). He lives and works in Berlin.

Kali
2017, HD video, 8 min 57 sec

Burning
2021, Pencil on paper, 70 × 100 cm

Via Lewandowsky

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Bio

Via Lewandowsky (*1963 in Dresden) is a contemporary artist based in Berlin. He studied at the Dresden University of Fine Arts from 1982 to 1987. Between 1985 and 1989 he organized subversive performances with the avant-garde group “Auto-Perforations-Artisten”, which subverted the official art scene of the GDR.

His multimedia practice focuses on sculptural-installational works and exhibition scenographies with architectural influences. His leitmotifs are always the misunderstanding as a result of failure of communication, as well as the processual. An ironic refraction of the everyday, the intrusion of the foreign into the familiar, mostly domestic, realm, often happens by using insignia of the German bourgeoisie (e.g. a cuckoo clock, or a budgie). His predilection for the tragic-comical, the absurd and paradoxical, as well as the Sisyphean motif of the constant repetition and futility of action connect his art with Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus.

Via Lewandowsky’s works have been shown worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Jewish Museum, Berlin (2020), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019), Bongsan Cultural Center in South Korea (2019), Shedhalle, Zurich (2018), David Nolan Gallery, New York (2017), Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig (2016) or Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2015).

Höhere Wesen? Hm? [Higher Beings? Huh?
2012, Canvas, wood, framed behind glass, 35 × 35 cm

Jani Leinonen

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About the work

Jani Leinonen is known for his provocative, yet playful works criticizing capitalism and our self-centered consumerist society of today by subverting the symbols and systems of commodity exchange, politics and the marketing strategies through which they operate. In his practice, the artist often pinpoints timely issues and dares the viewer to think outside of one’s comfort zone by taking the most saturated aspects of our modern world and re-presenting them in constantly thought-provoking ways. Inspired by popular culture, corporate brands, and marketing strategies, Leinonen shamelessly adapts the same tactics, turning his objects into articles of ridicule, clichéing our agreed marketing society and every-day economies. What is displayed, though, are not goods but an artistic allegorization that appropriates these marketing strategies only to unhinge their underlying assumptions about value and appropriateness. Leinonen’s entire practice can be viewed as a form of resistance against the norms of the capitalist status quo.

Bio

Jani Leinonen (b. 1978 lives and works in Helsinki) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2002 and his works have been exhibited in widely in Finland and internationally, i.e. at the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial, Galerie Gmurzynska, Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen, Frankfurter Kunstverein and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. In 2015 Leinonen had a successful retrospective exhibition at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki called The school of Disobedience, which continued to ARoS Aarhus in 2016. In December 2016 Leinonen was also awarded the Finland Prize by the Ministry of Education and Culture, which is given in recognition of a significant career in arts, an exceptional artistic achievement, or a promising breakthrough. The artist’s projects include releasing a series of commercial-like videos of Kellogg’s character Tony the Tiger navigating a grown-up world of prostitution, police violence and suicide bombers (2015); opening a hoax fast food restaurant called Hunger King in Budapest, Hungary (2014) to fight against the anti-homeless acts of the Hungarian government; founding a fake terrorist organization called the Food Liberation Army who kidnapped and executed Ronald McDonald, the mascot of McDonald’s fast food chain in 2011. In 2019 the artist made worldwide headlines when his artwork McJesus, 2015 (depicting a crucified Ronald McDonald) caused violent protests outside the Haifa Museum in Israel, where the sculpture was included in an exhibition called Sacred Goods. And in early 2019 he turned the Engadin gallery Stalla Madulain into a chapel with stained glass artworks.

We Find Love in Hopeless Place
2019, Hand painted ceramic melting colour on glass, 99 × 155 cm

MAP Office

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About the work

Created in 2010, a decade before the civil unrest in Hong Kong of 2019-20, Runscape takes on an added significance when viewed in light of the long-term anti-government protests which rocked Hong Kong in recent years. Runscape is a film that depicts two young men sprinting through the public spaces of Hong Kong, almost invariably via the visual mode of the long shot, while a narrator describes this action through the rhetoric of post-structuralist urban theory. This narration makes repeated reference to a range of texts from the psychogeographical dérive of urbanism in Guy Debord and the Situationists to the biopolitical machines of Gilles Deleuze to the literary styles of Jean-Luc Nancy. The runners both follow existing paths and establish new ones, moving in straight lines through crowds and across rooftops while also using exterior walls as springboards for less-likely forms of motion. This is, however, far from parkour; it is a much more purposeful action that claims a certain territory or at least trajectory described within the narration through the image of the body as a “bullet that needs no gun”. A soundtrack contributed by Hong Kong rock band A Roller Control complements this aesthetic violence, guiding the eye and ear of the viewer across this novel interpretation of the definition and uses of public space; positing the body in motion as an act of civil defiance.

Runscape is used to knit together the geography of Hong Kong, a cartography that trades on the parallel ideas of mapping and civil disobedience by running through the streets. The runner dodges past pedestrians, runs diagonally through meticulously urban planned plazas, up flights of stairs and through the shopping malls of Hong Kong in order to appropriate the city on his own terms. The runner becomes also a performer, as he leaps and jumps, sprinting through the city, catching the eye of the strolling pedestrians as he breaks out of conventional modes of behavior, putting his body in action, moving faster than the city, as if internally pushed forward, as if fleeing or listening to a voice that was slowly speaking outside of everyone else’s sound register. The culture of the walking figure derived from the French Flaneur, the American Beat Poets, all contextualized and used in exploring and connecting the city streets. Runscape explores the liminal notions between film as public art with the city as landscape and cartography. The film knits the city together in a geography intersecting private and public space. The runner acts as artistic intervention creating an impact on the space itself. This is a creation of an artwork on the street, as it blurs the line between performance, happening, physical exercise, and rebellion.

Bio

MAP Office is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (1966, Casablanca, Morocco) and Valérie Portefaix (1969, Saint-Étienne, France). This duo of artists/architects has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression including drawing, photography, video, installations, performance, and literary and theoretical texts. Their entire project forms a critique of spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space. Humour, games, and fiction are also part of their approach, in the form of small publications providing a further format for disseminating their work. Their cross-disciplinary practice has been the subject of a monograph, MAP OFFICE – Where the Map is the Territory (2011), edited by Robin Peckham and published by ODE (Beijing). Early 2013, Map Office was the recipient of the 2013 edition of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize.

Laurent Gutierrez is co-founder of MAP Office. He earned a Ph.D. of Architecture from RMIT. He is a Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he leads the Master of Design Programs and the Master of Design in Design Strategies as well as the Master of Design in Urban Environments Design programs. He is also the co-director of Urban Environments Design Research Lab.

Valérie Portefaix is an artist and architect. She is the principal and co-founder of MAP Office. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art, and a Master of Architecture, she earned a Ph.D. of Urbanism from University Pierre Mendes France. She is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

MAP Office projects have been exhibited in major international art, design and architecture events including: Guangzhou Image Triennial (forthcoming 2017); 6th Yokohama Triennale (2017); 4th Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2016); Ullens. Contemporary Art Centre, Beijing (2013); 7th Asia Pacific Triennial (2012); 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); 6th Curitiba Art Biennale (2011); 7th, 11th and 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2000, 2008, 2010); Evento 1st Bordeaux Biennale (2009); 4th Tirana International Contemporary Art Biannual (2009); 2nd Canary Island Biennale (2009); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); 52nd Venice Art Biennale (2007); 15th Sydney Biennale (2006); 1st Paris Triennial (2006); 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005); 1st, 6th Singapore Biennale (2006, 2016); 2nd, 3rd and 5th Hong Kong- Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale (2007, 2009, 2013); 1st Architectural Biennial Beijing (2004); 1st Rotterdam Architecture Biennale (2003).

Their publications include: Our Ocean Guide (2017); Unreal Estates of China (2007); The Parrot’s Tale (2007); My PRD Stories (2005), HK LAB 2 (2005); HK LAB (2002); Mapping HK (2000); among many others publications on the « Made in China » phenomenon and other, related issues. Their first film City of Production has been selected for the official competition at: 38th International Film Festival Rotterdam 2009, 33rd Cinéma du Réel Paris 2009, 1st Migrating Forms New York 2009, and presented at: 10th Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2008).

Runscape
2010, Video, 24 min 18 sec

The City is growing Inside of us…
A political act of defiance of the Urban Authority
With its surveillance and restrictions on movement.

– [Excerpt from Film]

Shahar Marcus

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About the work

The work Seeds explores the phenomenon of the buried mines that exist in Israel and the world over, exposing how these areas still carry the consequence of the war within their soil while supporting the new populations who must inhabit the conflict area. It examines the power of the present moment in these places where efforts are beginning to shift these death zones into places that consciously affirm life, embracing continuity in the very place where it once was blocked.

Bio

Shahar Marcus (b. 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel) studied Linguistics and History of Art at the University of Tel Aviv. Marcus primarily works in the medium of performance and video art. His initial works dealt with the exploration of his own body and its limitations – incorporating various perishable materials, such as dough, juice and ice. His body served as an instrument, a platform on which various ‘experiments’ took place: lying on the operating table, set on fire, dressed in a ‘bread suit’ and more. Food is also a major theme in Marcus’s works. For instance, his recurrent use of bread as a symbol of essentiality and survival is juxtaposed with military symbols. By working with food, a perishable, momentary substance and by turning it into a piece of clothing or a set, Marcus also flirts with art history; transforming arbitrary objects and materials into something immortal and everlasting. His most recent works deal with local political issues, by approaching iconic Israeli landmarks with a critical and humorous point of view. Thus, Marcus reflects on his own heritage, environment and the creation of local historical narratives. His works are influenced by the visual language of cinematography along with familiar themes and tributes to art Shahar Marcus is an active artist for over a decade and has exhibited at various art institutions, both in Israel and around the world, including: The Tate Modern; The Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Copenhagen Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biennale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and at other art venues in Poland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, USA, and Turkey. His works are in many important museum collections, such as: The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, as well as intuitions in Poland and Italy. Shahar Marcus lives and works in Tel Aviv.

Seeds
2012, HD Video, 5 min 3 sec

Milovan Destil Marković

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About the work

Saint Lothar is one of works comprising Marković’s Homeless Project, a series of Text Portraits based on 75 interviews with homeless men in Berlin, Belgrade, Tokyo, and Shanghai.

Translation of the Saint Lothar Text Portrait – fragment from 60 min. video-interview with homeless man Lothar Georke, made in Berlin in 2004:

God only gave us one nose, ‘cos we couldn’t’ve stuck two in the glass, we’d’ve had to lap up our wine… course, it’s a shame in’t it. Yeh, but I’ve no other motto left in my life, no sir, not since I saw that protest would be no good. Oh, I’m past the age of protest, what can I say? I don’t mean I agree with all that, but I’ve got so far now, I say what good can I do, it’ll soon be all over, yeh, like they say, yeh, I can’t change anything – don’t want to these days, sometimes takes a long time before you get it, see that all you’re doing is running around, for some folk or other to manipulate, an object of manipulation, that you’re being exploited some’ow, for their interests. Yeh, one way or another, it makes you sad, some’ow, yeh, so you say: fuck off, all of you, what the hell, yeh, That’s about it, In’t it, don’t know anything else. All be let out now, will it, eh.

View the full interview with Lothar Georke >

Artist Statement

The basis behind portraits of the homeless is using language and text, and not pictures as much in the traditional sense. I wanted to create a portrait out of an interview, bringing together the interview and the picture. An interview is already a kind of portrait. My creative work consists in choosing a central passage, a still, that is transfigured as an image. The subject would be recast as a global phenomenon, but this time anchored locally, and it should be an antithesis to glamour, fame and femme fatale images. Homelessness is a phenomenon of the city that occurs worldwide but is strongly centered in the local. The homeless in Homeless Project are men without house or home. In traditional societies, the man built the house in which the woman then settled…

I had not expected to get so much information about the state, social politics and society. That really surprised me, about how people lived in the GDR, that people also sent their mothers flowers, that in everyday life, people lived as people did in, say, Regensburg. Between East and West there is not such a great difference. But there are crucial differences that make one man homeless and not another: places where there was war or economic upheavals or floods, acts of God. The differences naturally include the cultural background and the moral climate. In India, for example, everyone gives the beggar money. In Germany, however, they expect him to find a respectable job. I learned a lot about the different cultures from what the subjects had to say….

Art is inherently political, and everything that goes on in the public sphere relates to its role. But as an artist, it is one thing to give a big speech and another to go beyond and find a way to draw attention to the work situation and the homeless. That requires give and take. That is a suggestion but not yet a solution. A solution? Such a project makes a momentary ripple and makes sure that different people deal with the subject of homelessness. Because everyone is potentially homeless.

– Milovan Destil Markovic

Bio

Milovan Destil Marković (b. in 1957 in Čačak, Serbia) is a visual artist who has exhibited extensively in Europe, Asia, Australia and in the Americas. His work was featured at 42nd Venice Biennial (Aperto ’86), 4th Istanbul Biennial, 46th Venice Biennial, 6th Triennial India New Delhi, 56th 49th 24th October Salon Belgrade Biennale, 2018 Lorne Sculpture Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Kumamoto, MoMA PS1 New York, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Saarland Museum Saarbrücken, The Artist’s Museum Lodz, National Museum Prague, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, MSURS Museum of Contemporary Art Banja Luka, Landesmuseum Graz, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, National Gallery Athens, Art Museum Foundation Military Museum Istanbul, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Kunstverein Hamburg, Kunstvoreningen Bergen, Kunstverein Jena, Galleri F15 Oslo, Nishido Contemporary Art Tokyo, Fei Contemporary Art Center Shanghai, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana and many others.

Saint Lothar
2013, Gold leaf on steel (text cut out of steel), 100 × 40 cm

Sara Masüger

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About the work

In an era witnessing the steady resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism and racism the world over, Sarah Masüger’s delicate sculptures of human ears take on a stark significance. While many governments still seek to curb freedoms of speech, others perhaps exploit free speech in overabundance. As the line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news continues to blur in our over-mediated culture, and information spreading digitally is even more viral than disease, we live in an era where the power of the wrong word has more capacity for destruction than ever before. Fake news is but a new term for a tactic used since the dawn of language: propaganda. We hear it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly—but what defines us as individuals is how we choose to interpret, to understand, and to act. Shown in the context of points of Points of Resistance, Masüger’s ears bear silent witness to the history of resistance in the Zionskirche, and to the ongoing need for resistance in in present times.

– Rachel Rits-Volloch

Bio

Born 1978 in Zug (CH), lives in Zurich. Studied at the University of the Arts in Bern and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Her sculptural works focus on the dialogue between fleeting material and the permanent as well as remembering as a process of distortion. Exhibitions include Migros Museum, Zurich (2014), Kunsthaus Zug (2015), Art Museum St. Gallen (2016). Awards include Zuger Werkjahr (2014), Cahiers d’Artistes (2014).

I Talk To You Later
2017, Series of tin sculpture, each piece approx. 10 × 8 × 3 cm

Kate McMillan

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About the work

The Lost Girl is an immersive film-based installation by Dr Kate McMillan centered around the fictional character of a cave-dwelling girl on the east coast of England. Using DH Lawrence’s book of the same name as a starting point, the film narrates the experiences of a young woman seemingly alone in a dystopian future, with only the debris washed up from the ocean to form meaning and language.

It is set within a future-time which suggests the decimation of civilisation as we now know it, bereft of other people. The character attempts to create a past and a future from the debris that is washed up from the ocean. She is without language and prior knowledge and must make sense of her existence only through detritus. The film combines various research interests including the Anthropocene; the role of creativity in forming memory and the consequences of neglecting female histories. “This work exists in the blurred space between autobiography and imagination. Its setting, Botany Bay, is the namesake of the first site of contact between the British and the indigenous Gadigal people of the Eora Nation in what is now called Sydney. McMillan was brought up on the northern coastal plain of Perth, Australia, a landscape with an uncanny resemblance to Botany Bay and which is also Mooro, home to the Whadjuk Noonghar people. A regular visitor to Botany Bay as a child visiting English relatives, her choice of this landscape as backdrop to Le Pera’s experiences infuses the film with her own individual memories alongside collective memories of colonial displacement and violence in Australia. The deserted spaces speak of the absence of their original populations. The survivors of such violence across the globe are now disproportionately affected by the impact of anthropogenic climate change, as the legacy of colonialism continues to determine survival or destruction.”

– Excerpt from catalogue text by Dr Jessica Rapson

Bio

Dr Kate McMillan (b.1974, Hampshire, UK; 1982-2012, Perth, Australia) is an artist based in London. She works across media including film, sound, installation, sculpture, and performance. Her work addresses a number of key ideas including the role of art in attending to impacts of the Anthropocene, lost and systemically forgotten histories of women, and the residue of colonial violence in the present. In addition to her practice, McMillan also addresses these issues in her activist and written work. She is the author of the annual report Representation of Female Artists in Britain commissioned by the Freelands Foundation. Her recent academic monograph Contemporary Art & Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes: Empire of Islands (2019, Palgrave Macmillan) explored the work of a number of first nation female artists from the global south, whose work attends to the aftermath of colonial violence in contemporary life. McMillan is currently a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at King’s College, London.

McMillan’s work has been featured in various museums and biennales, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Trafo Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Perth Institute for Contemporary Art; John Curtin Gallery, Perth; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. McMillan’s work is held in private collections around the world, as well as in the Christoph Merian Collection, Basel; Soho House Collection, London; The Ned 100, London; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Wesfarmers Arts Collection; KPMG; Murdoch University, Australia; University of Western Australia and Curtin University, Australia; and the MOMENTUM Collection.

Previous solo exhibitions include The Past is Singing in our Teeth presented at MOMENTUM in 2017, which, in 2018, toured to the Civic Room in Glasgow and Arusha Gallery for the Edinburgh Arts Festival. Other solo exhibitions include Instructions for Another Future 2018 Moore Contemporary, Australia; Songs for Dancing, Songs for Dyin, 2016, Castor Projects, London; The Potter’s Field, 2014, ACME Project Space, London; Anxious Objects, Moana Project Space, Australia; The Moment of Disappearance, 2014, Performance Space, Sydney; In the shadow of the past, this world knots tight, 2013 Venn Gallery; Paradise Falls, 2012, Venn Gallery; Lost at the John Curtin Gallery in 2008, ‘Broken Ground’ in 2006 at Margaret Moore Contemporary Art and ‘Disaster Narratives’ at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts for the 2004 Perth International Arts Festival.

Her work was part of ‘All that the Rain Promises and More’ curated by Aimme Parrott for the 2019 Edinburgh Arts Festival. In March 2018 McMillan presented new work for Adventious Encounters curated by Huma Kubakci at the former Whiteley’s Department store in West London. In June 2018 she produced a new film based installation for RohKunstbau XXIV festival at the Schloss Lieberose in Brandenburg curated by Mark Gisbourne. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Celeste Prize curated by Fatos Üstek. In 2016 she was invited to undertake a residency in St Petersburg as part of the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) where she developed new film works which were shown at the State Museum of Peter & Paul Fortress in Russia in 2017. In early 2017 she was selected to be in the permanent collection at The Ned, for Vault 100, a new Soho House project which reversed the gender ratio of the FTSE 100 by showing the work of 93 women and 7 men. In 2016 McMillan took part in ‘Acentered: Reterritorised Network of European and Chinese Moving Image’ during Art Basel Hong Kong, curated by Videotage.

>>View more work by Kate McMillan<<

The Lost Girl
2020, HD Video, 7 min 15 sec

Sound developed in collaboration with James Green.
Video Installation, designed to be projected onto cardboard, beach sand, found debris.
For Points of Resistance, this work is exceptionally being presented in a screening format.

Almagul Menlibayeva

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About the work

Almagul Menlibayeva films mythological narratives staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. In Transoxania Dreams she leads her audience to the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation politics. The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxiana lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. Menlibayeva visually walks the viewer through a vacant landscape and a symbolic dream whereby the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures (Centaurs) on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the image of the Greek mythological figure of the Centaur, Menlibayeva creates alluring hybrid beings, both sexually charged and bizarre. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadruped, part person part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers. In Transoxiana Dreams Menlibayeva, a pictorial sorceress herself, breeds an eccentric storyline and fantastical imagery extracted deeply from her own atavistic repertoire; leading us visually through an existing, yet unimaginable, landscape in a distant and hypnagogic world.

Bio

Almagul Menlibayeva (born in 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR; lives and works in Almaty and Berlin) is a video artist, photographer, and curator. Menlibayeva, holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. She works primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation and her work addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia, de-colonial re-imaginings of gender, environmental degradation, and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. In 2018, she was co-curator of the groundbreaking exhibition Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, which took place in Berlin’s Kunstquartier Bethanien.

In conjunction with her solo exhibition Transformation at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-2017), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Other awards include the Daryn State Prize of Kazakhstan (1996), and the Tarlan National Award of the Club of Maecenas of Kazakhstan (2003). She was also the Winner of the Grand Prix Asia Art at the II Biennial of Central Asia, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1995) and the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany.

Menlibayeva has gained international recognition by participating in: the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); and the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018).

Selected solo exhibitions include: Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); Kissing Totems, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, USA (2008). Recent selected group exhibitions include: Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017).

Transoxania Dreams
2011, HD Video, 23 min

Robert C. Morgan

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“I am particularly proud of the fact that this Church is associated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I discovered the letters of Bonhoeffer many years ago in the 1960s when I was actively reading the work of German theologians. Bonhoeffer offered a moving account of his activist position combined with his deeply moving spiritual concerns.”

– Robert C. Morgan

Bio

Robert C. Morgan is a writer, artist, critic, art historian, curator, and educator. Knowledgeable in the history and aesthetics of both Western and Asian art, Morgan has lectured widely, written hundreds of critical essays (translated into twenty languages), published monographs and books, and curated numerous exhibitions. He has written reviews for Art in America, Arts, Art News, Art Press (Paris), Sculpture Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic. His catalog essays have been published by Gagosian, Pace, Sperone Westwater, Van Doren Waxter, White Cube (London), Kukje (Seoul), Malingue (Hong Kong), and Ink Studio (Beijing).

Since 2010, he has been New York Editor for Asian Art News and World Sculpture News, both published in Hong Kong. Many consider his book, The End of the Art World (Allworth, 1998), a classic in predicting the loss of critical judgment in art and its future direction as a marketing and investment phenomenon. In addition, he has written books and edited anthologies, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Cambridge University Press, University of Minnesota Press. George Braziller, Inc. and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. In 1999, he was awarded the first ARCALE prize in International Art Criticism in Salamanca (Spain), and the same year served on the UNESCO jury at the 48th Biennale di Venezia.

In 2002, he was invited to give the keynote speech in the House of Commons, U.K. on the occasion of Shane Cullen’s exhibition celebrating the acceptance of The Agreement with Northern Ireland. In 2003, Dr. Morgan was appointed Professor Emeritus in Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and, in 2005, became a Senior Fulbright Scholar in the Republic of Korea. In 2011, he was inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg; and, in 2016, the Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, acquired The Robert C, Morgan Collection on Conceptual Art.

Much of his work since the late 1990s has focused on art outside the West with books translated and published in Farsi, Korean, and Chinese. He continues to work with contemporary ink artists in the People’s Republic of China on whom he has frequently lectured and written. He has twice been invited to the Islamic Republic of Iran where he has lectured and juried major exhibitions. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, he has continued a parallel involvement as an artist (since 1970). Having had numerous exhibitions in past years, a major survey of his paintings and conceptual works was shown at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City (2017), which published a detailed catalog focusing on his artistic career.

YIN / YANG(2012/13)
metal pigment and acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 cm

Matthias Moseke

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Artist Statement

Painting for me means lived freedom, in the process and in the result. In informal there are the least restrictions – for me and the viewer alike. It is amazing how differently my offerings are perceived on the associative level. On the emotional level, the composition, which is always the heart of my images, has an effect.

The permanent look ahead, my own demand and the expectation from the outside to constantly create and show something new, often stands in the way of a more intense reflection. To dive into the deeper memory of my images is analysis and positioning at the same time—again and again I learn and create from the structures, materiality and color depth.

– Matthias Moseke

Bio

Non-representational painting continuously represents the foundation of Moseke’s artistic work. Composition as a core theme, opposing or plane structures, impasto color surfaces, clear ductus and a reduced palette are characteristic of Moseke’s work. Intuition and concept do not act as opposing approaches—they are mutually dependent, forming emotional pictorial spaces with determined settings. Moseke has lived, with interruptions, in Berlin since 1982. In the mid-nineties he studied fine arts with Professor Westendorp in Ottersberg. Numerous exhibitions and projects have taken him throughout the Republic, to Belgium, Italy and Taiwan.

Lu
2011, Oil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm

Jan Muche

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Artist Statement

My picture Capa interprets a portrait photo of the famous, and by me much admired, photographer Robert Capa, whose likeness was snapped by his partner Gerda Taro in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Capa’s melancholic look tells a lot about the situation in Spain at that time, and foreshadows the failure of the struggle for a better society by authoritarians from the right but also from the left. His girlfriend dies soon after in an attack by the German Condor Legion. To show courage often requires a high price. We hope for better times.

– Jan Muche

Bio

Jan Muche is a 46 year old artist. Jan Muche is a German male artist born in Herford, Ostwestfalen, NW (DE) in 1975. Jan Muche’s first exhibition was Klasse Hödicke at Universität der Künste Berlin – UdK in Berlin in 2003, and the most recent exhibition was Jan Muche – Farbtrakt at Galerie Schlichtenmaier in Grafenau in 2020. Jan Muche is mostly exhibited in Germany, but also had exhibitions in Italy, United States and elsewhere. Muche has 26 solo shows and 158 group shows over the last 17 years (for more information, see biography). Muche has also been in 10 art fairs but in no biennials. The most important show was Glass and Concrete: Manifestations of the Impossible at Marta Herford in Herford in 2020. Other important shows were at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Jan Muche has been exhibited with Sven Drühl and Axel Anklam.

Capa
2019, Acrylic, ink and boat varnish on canvas, 170 × 130 cm

Gulnur Mukhazhanova

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About the work

The sculptural installation Iron Woman, was one of the first works Gulnur Mukazhanova created after moving to Berlin from her native Kazakhstan. In this work, the artist undertakes a personal research of female identity in her Central Asian culture. Through a sculptural object made of metal nails and chains, taking the form of an intimate undergarment which the artist also models in a series of photographs, Mukazhanova explores a woman’s body in the conflict zones of sensuality and ideology – at the intersections of personal and social environment, of ethnic vs. global culture, of modernity vs. tradition. Significations of sexuality move between the prohibited and the accessible, the fetishised and the mundane, the carnal and the sacred. Within this evocative object exists the duality of a very personal point of female resistance, alongside a loudly feminist cry against female oppresion in its multitude of forms.

Bio

Gulnur Mukazhanova graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty (2006), and the Weissensee Art Academy in Berlin, Germany (2013). Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses textile art, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Mukazhanova’s art is a confrontation of two different cultures but also a dialogue between them. From her Central Asian roots she keeps a strong physical relation to traditional materials that are not only used for their aesthetics but have a symbolic and historic meaning. While living in Germany she has come to confront questions of feminism, globalization, and ethnology.

Mukazhanova has participated in international Biennales such as: A Time for Dreams, IV Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, Moscow, (2014); and the Krasnoyarsk Biennale, Russia (2015). Her solo exhibitions include: Artwin Gallery, Moscow, Russia (2016); Iron Women, Almaty, Tengri-Umai Gallery (2010); Wertlösigkeit der Tradition, Kazakhstan-German Society, Berlin (2010). Her work is held in international private collections: Fondazione 107, Turin, Italy; Krasnoyarsk Museum, Russia; La Metive, Moutier-d’Àhun, France.

Selected recent group exhibitions include: Focus Kazakhstan: Bread & Roses, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2018); All the World´s Collage, Aspan Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2018); Astana Art Show, TSE Art Destination Gallery, Astana, Kazakhstan (2018); Focus Kazakhstan: Post-nomadic Mind, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London (2018); Cosmoscow, international contemporary art fair, Moscow, Russia (2018); Interlocal, in association with Blue Container on the New Silk Road, Duisburg, Germany (2018); Time & Astana: After Future, National Museum, Astana, Kazakhstan (2017); The Story Retells, Daegu Art Factory Daegu, South Korea (2017); Expo 2017: Future Energy, Astana, Kazakhstan (2017); Metamorphoses, Pörnbach Contemporary, Pörnbach, Germany (2016); Did you know… ?, Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2016); Cosmoscow, Moscow, Russia (2015); Dissemination, Stadtgalerie Brixen, Brixen (Bressanone), South Tyrol (2014); Nomads, Artwin Gallery, Moscow (2014); Synekdoche, Freies Museum, Berlin, Germany (2013).

Iron Woman
2010, Installation: nails, screws, metal wire, chain, 40 × 30 × 5 cm

Kirsten Palz

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About the works

Chronicle of Extinction, made for this exhibition, marks the start of a new series of work for Kirsten Palz, while remaining true to her conceptual practice of “Sculpture as Writing”, encompassing her manuals, songbooks, and other text-based works. It is shown here in Points of Resistance together with her songbook Below the Sun (2020), both addressing the devastating impacts of mankind upon our planet. With the format of the songbook invoking the choral traditions of church music, both works together are a cry against the ecological devastation mankind is wreaking upon our planet; it is a song of mourning for the disappeared and still disappearing species that once inhabited this earth with us; it is a needed reminder; a sad farewell.

Artist statement

Below the Sun (2020) was written against the backdrop of rising global temperatures. The score’s theme centers on the sun as the most powerful energy resource in our solar-system and its relationship to ancient mythology and modern science. On Christmas Day 1968, the Apollo 17 mission delivered a complete photographic image of the Earth, which went down in history as the “Blue Marble”. The visual depiction showed a fragile, glassy-looking object and its implication was responsible for a growing ecological awareness in the decades that followed. However, more than 50 years later, human impact on the planet through consumerism and environmental destruction has brought the world’s ecology onto the verge of destruction. Below the Sun was written against the backdrop of rising global temperature. It’s a song about the sun as the most powerful energy resource in our solar-system. Further more, the sun with its voluminous burning mass, was central for ancient mythology and modern science alike.

Chronicle of Extinction (2021) consists of twelve individual editions that form the beginning of an ongoing archive. Each of the twelve editions lists twelve extinct species. The applied scientific classification system compiles information on kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species for each extinct member.

The first selection, presented as part of Points of Resistance, comprises:

VOID 01 ACTINOPTERYGII ray-finned fishes

VOID 02 AMPHIBIA shrub frogs

VOID 03 AVES birds

VOID 04 AVES birds

VOID 05 BIVALVIA molluscs

VOID 06 GASTROPODA snails and land slugs

VOID 07 INSECTA owlet moths

VOID 08 LILIOPSIDA lilies

VOID 09 MAGNOLIOPSIDA flowering plants

VOID 10 MAGNOLIOPSIDA flowering plants

VOID 11 MAMMALIA rodents

VOID 12 REPTILIA reptiles

Each extinction creates a void.

Each extinction is irreversible.

Bio

Born 1971 in Copenhagen, Denmark Lives and works in Berlin. Kirsten Palz is a visual artist working in Berlin. She holds a degree in Computer Science from the IT-University in Copenhagen and a degree of Fine Arts/ Painting from School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2007, Kirsten Palz initiated her ongoing archive of manuals. The archive is a work in progress consisting today of 410 manuals, including objects, prints on paper and drawings. The manuals engage with various topics, such as dreams, memories, myth, sculpture and social space. Kirsten Palz has shown her works in spaces in Germany and abroad.

Chronicle of Extinction
2021, Print on paper, open edition, 30.5 × 68 cm

Below the Sun
2020, Print on paper, edition of 100, 29.7 × 42 cm

Manfred Peckl

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About Soil

This delicate image, painted using the very soil the plant grows out of, depicts a weed common to all cities, and remarkable for its capacity to grow anywhere, no matter how adverse the conditions. So subtle it is often overlooked, this is, nevertheless, the resistance of nature against concrete.

Artist statement

“I found it so beautiful, especially in a church setting, to place world destruction as coming from heaven.

The Skyamonds, as the sculpture group is called (there are more) are, after all, artifacts of total destruction. Covered with the whole universe known to us, and several times, following the theory of parallel universes, a super-meltdown must have taken place, which let the antimatter together with the matter ever become a form, a lump. This, as a testimony of ex-existence has landed in our reality as an artifact of the end of the world. Atom, as the biggest force known to us, hematoma as linguistic modification in the result an injury.

Landed as asteroids, they harbor a new beginning in the catastrophe… this is how planets are created?”

– Manfred Peckl

Bio

The Austrian artist Manfred Peckl (*1968) lives and works in Berlin. From 1988-1990 he studied at the University of Art and Design in Linz, followed by the Städelschule in Frankfurt under Professor Raimer Jochims. The starting point for Peckl’s works are maps and advertising posters from public space, which he cuts into even strips with a shredder and then sorts them according to color. In the summer term 2004 and winter term 2005 he had a teaching assignment for “New Forms of Painting” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz. In 2017 Peckl was deputy professor for painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.

Soil
2019, Aquarelle, soil on paper, 32 × 26 cm

Flash
2008, Resin, fiberglass, wood, paper, UV-varnish, approx. 60 × 50 × 40 cm

Hämatom
2008, Resin, fiberglass, wood, paper, UV-varnish, approx. 130 × 100 × 100 cm

Saphir
2008, Resin, fiberglass, wood, paper, UV-varnish, approx. 90 × 70 × 80 cm

Otto Piene

Bio

The German artist Otto Piene (* 1928 in Laasphe/Westphalia) is one of the great pioneers and innovators in 20th century art. Still trained as a painter, he turned away from classical art forms as early as the mid-1950s and instead opened up new space for art. Otto Piene´s pioneering amalgamation of art, science and technology have made him one of the most influential personalities of post-war art. Through founding the artists’ group ZERO in 1958 with Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker – also an artist in this exhibition – Piene proclaimed a new era in Western art, developing numerous projects and events that took place in public spaces outside galleries and museums. His grid, smoke and fire paintings, his light rooms and kinetic light ballets created during this period stand for a visionary combination of nature and science and art that was novel at the time. His eclectic ouevre includes painting, drawings, reliefs, kinetic installations, participative performances and environments that focus on the concepts of light, dynamics, and movement. With his fire, smoke and light works, he has been a permanent representative at Documenta and the Venice Bienniale since 1959. These open artistic approaches culminated in numerous interdisciplinary projects in public space in the late 1960s through his move to the United States and through his work as an MIT professor and as director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS, Cambridge, Massachusetts). Nearby, in Groton, Massachusetts, he developed his “Art Farm” with his wife Elizabeth Goldring. Together with scientists and other artists, Piene realized so-called Sky Art Events and Sky Art Conferences starting in 1968: Otto Piene let air- or helium-filled sculptures rise into the sky above buildings, stadiums, rivers, landscapes worldwide – including his monumental rainbow for the closing ceremony of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The open works, each developed collectively and often colorful, became signs of hope and peace worldwide.

Der bemooste Stein
2014, 78 × 58 cm

Stefan Rinck

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About the work

The Zion Church in its neo-Gothic masonry continuously experienced again and again acts of courage and despair – but above all a repeated carrying on and not giving up of the values we have gained over generations. As an analogy to this, we show in our exhibition, among other things, the “Lastenbär”, a sandstone sculpture by Stefan Rinck. The work shows a bear that has to constantly carry an oversized, far too heavy masonry stone on its back and yet continues to walk unflinchingly, looking – almost droll – as if it doesn’t mind so much in the end.

This sculpture – completely disconnected from the intention of the artist who created it back in 2010 – has become a sign for this exhibition and, if possible, will later remain in larger form in the outdoor area of the Zion Church as a temporary memorial and anchor point for a series of subsequent exhibitions until it can move to a permanent location. Based on the spontaneous reactions of many viewers, it seems as if many narratives converge in this work by Stefan Rinck.

On the one hand, the Lastenbär is a work of art, but on the other hand, it also seems to be able to function as a “mascot”. Very often, in fact, he has been identified as a “Berlin bear” – albeit one that has to carry a heavy load of his heritage. It is a curatorial decision to take up the disarmingly positive feedback on Stefan Rinck’s work, not only from the art public, to make him a landmark. And for what all artists, and all those who will have made possible the exhibition POINTS OF RESISTANCE from Easter Sunday and also the concert TRES MOMENTOS (composer Sven Helbig) on April 26, want to achieve: Namely, a sincere discussion – no matter how heated – about all that is important to us. A discussion that can also result in opposing points of view, which must be respectful and tolerant – so that peace remains.

It is an experiment whether such a small sandstone bear, as it will be shown in the context of the exhibition, can achieve so much. It will depend on the commitment of all visitors to the exhibition, on whether people will also like this Berlin bear, and also on who else will turn out to support this project. The sculpture will be realized by the artist and the gallery only in exchange for covering the costs. If more money is raised from the fundraising planned after Easter, it will be used for charitable purposes.

Among other things, there will be a round table discussion on this experiment, hosted by Christian Posthofen, philosopher, author and lecturer, on the topic: “Heteretopias – The Church, the Resistance and the Bear”.

– Constanze Kleiner

Bio

Stefan Rinck is a German visual artist who was born in 1973 in Homburg/Saar. He studied Art History and Philosophy at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken and Sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe. Stefan Rinck has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including de Hallen (Haarlem), Sorry We`re Closed (Brussels), Nino Mier Gallery (Los Angeles), Vilma Gold (London), Semiose (Paris), Gallery Rüdiger Schöttle (Munich), The Breeder (Athens), Galeria Alegria (Madrid), Klara Wallner Gallery (Berlin) and Cruise&Callas (Berlin).

He participated at the Busan Biennale in South Corea and at the Vent des Fôret and La Forêt d’Art Contemporain in France where he realized permanent public sculptures. In 2018, the work The Mongooses of Beauvais was permanently installed in the city of Paris at 53-57 rue de Grennelle (Beaupassage). He is in following public collections: CBK Rotterdam (NL), Musée de la Loterie (BE), Sammlung Krohne (DE), FRAC Corse (FR).

Lastenbär
2007, Sandstone sculpture, 26 × 16 × 25.5 cm

Jörg Schaller

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About the work

The picture comes from a B/W series made in the Müggelsee waterworks in 1991. At that time, you could climb over walls, step through a certain window and then you were inside. It was still at the time of the most incredible discoveries in the wild east of Berlin. Hardly anyone could imagine the water running out here one day. It was kept in motion here in the vaults and walls to keep it fresh. As it falls, it absorbs new energy and oxygen and can breathe. Constant rushing and dripping. The two columns of water connect to a creative dance, other beings always emerge, before they then burst into many molecules in the full force of the fall, and then, taking one last drag, disappear back into the dark vault.

Die Atmung 1991
2021, Silver gelatine print, 75 × 95 cm from the B/W negative, framed 81 × 101 cm

Maik Schierloh

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About the work

Maik Schierloh, the accomplished artist/curator, who has also realized extensive exhibition series in a wide variety of places, is called a Dream Catcher: fleeting moments take shape, the world seems as if seen through a veil. Here and there the paint runs down in a dancing manner. One also thinks to trace natural processes: clouds shift, color mist forms, light breaks through, color sends signals. Brown canvas or light cotton are primed and painted with pigment or acrylic paint – initially also with oil – dusted, dotted. The painting mutates from paint application to paint application, from fixation to fixation, from wash to wash, as if matter-changing alchemy were at work here. Again and again, aluminum silver and gold powder is used, which oxidizes to a greenish hue as a result of the washing, but also shines out in larger areas in a luminous insular manner. Some signal red is interspersed with traces of feathers or a play of lines. Abstract animation prevails everywhere. Even the incidental cleaning rags while painting become with their dot structures as “Fabric” to the picture. Glazed wooden panels from old cupboards are palette-like covered with gold leaf islands. These painting processes sometimes drag on for months. In terms of art history, Kandinsky is a great inspirer here with his abstract landscapes. One also thinks of the informal structures of a Wols, of the sprayed urinated and oxidized paintings of Warhol, of the pours of color in the work of Anish Kapoor. Processes are captured and figure. These paintings are connected to the painter’s body movements, each hand movement becomes trace. Painting is an event here.

– Stephan von Wiese

Bio

Maik Schierloh moved to Berlin in 1997 and began planning, organising and executing cultural and art projects and exhibitions (Lovelite, Autocenter, Bar Babette). He made an apprenticeship as organ builder (organ builder Alfred Führer Wilhelmshaven, Germany) and then studied Art at the University of Applied Science Ottersberg, Germany.

Ohne Titel
2021, Acrylic, oil, gold leaf on canvas, 251 × 70.5 cm

Nina E. Schönefeld

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About TRUTH LAMP

The TRUTH LAMP is a symbol for the fight for democratic rights and for the fight to withstand politically unstable times.

My strong interest in visionary new artistic developments has led to interdisciplinary video installations. I work with a system of different light sources, sound systems, electronic machines, newly built sculptures, costumes, interiors and video screenings. In many of the video installations, the existing exhibition space was used in such a way that the space seemed like a film set from the projected video work.

My sculptures combine unconventional materials such as animal fur, fetish chains, light bulbs, black miniature tiles, vases or vessels, Asian ceramic gold dragons, luxurious fabrics, furniture parts, small computer screens and technical vintage machines. There is a certain paradox in my objects, but it is intentional: on the one hand they radiate preciousness, sparkling infinity & uniqueness and on the other hand one has associations with abyss, demise and death. A new beginning arises from death, but at the same time you think of transitoriness and decay.

– Nina E. Schönefeld

Truth Lamp
2021, Mixed media sculptural installation, 30 × 150 × 30 cm

About B.T.R

Written, Edited & Directed: Nina E. Schönefeld

Director of Photography: Valentin Giebel

Sound & Music: Carlos Pablo Villamizar. / Special thanks to DJ Hell

Selected speeches: Julian Assange – ‘I cannot forgive terrible injustice’, 2017 *** Chelsea Manning – Chelsea

Manning on Wikileaks, trans politics & data privacy, 2018 *** Luvvie Ajayi – Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, 2018 *** Edward Snowden – In Conversation with Edward Snowden, 2019

Starring: Anstasia Keren, Thinley Wingen, Alexander Skorobogatov, Lucie Schoenefeld, Oda Langner, Emil von Gwinner, Keschia Zimbinga, Ana Dossantos, Chantal Hountondji, Nasra Mohamad Mut, Yuko Tanaka Betts, Falko Nickel, Johanna Langner, Anna Esdal, Stella Junghanss, Nina Philipp, Mike Betts, Christopher Schoenefeld, Joanna Buchowska, Alexander Sudin, Andreas Templin, Dirk Lehr, Ginger Fikus, Talia Bakkal, Acelya Bellican, Marlah Lewis, Amira Yasmin, Josephine Lang, Leo Burkhardt, Lisa Nasner, Violetta Weyer, Marina Wilde, Timothy Long, Sean Jackson, Riley Warren, Katja Turnella, Hansa Wisskirchen

Schönefeld’s art examines the contemporary social and political climate. Through unusual mediums, objects and videos, Schönefeld questions the contemporary roles of artists, exploring the relationship between art, blockbuster movies and the present digital age. Her stories imagine a world where, due to drastic political shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival. A concept that perhaps is not so far fetched?

B.T.R Artist statement

B. T. R. (B O R N T O R U N) is a symbol for the fact that the law of the press as the fourth power in the state must be respected.

The fact that nowadays it is possible to influence the political power structure via data sales on social networks is very dangerous for our democracies.

My video work B. T. R. (B O R N T O R U N, 2020), which is also shown in Zionskirche for Points of Resistance, is about the world domination of right wing authoritarian autocracies and the complete prohibition of publication. It is also about the possible extradition of Julian Assange to the US and what this could mean worldwide for the situation of independent publishers, whistleblowers and journalists in the future.

“In case there would be a drastic political change in your country you will need special advice and gear to survive… Get prepared.”

The story of Schönefeld’s video B. T. R. is set in the year 2043 and deals with the subject of authoritarian autocracies and the complete restriction of journalists. It also deals with the possible extradition of Julian Assange to the US and what it could mean for the situation of independent publicists, whistleblowers, and journalists worldwide in the future. In the year 2043 data is the most valuable asset on earth because data is being used to win elections. Authoritarian rightwing governments have the majority worldwide. They have implemented education camps for the youth to gain more power and influence. Movie heroine S.K.Y. grew up in one of those education camps called WHITE ROCK. She doesn’t know anything about her parents. She starts to research about her heritage. During this process, she gets in touch with a group of independent journalists and publishers. They are the most persecuted people on earth which means that they are threatened by prison and death every day. It seems that freedom of speech is lost – forever…

The video B. T. R. was created as a science fiction story but it has its roots in the present time. It shows a future scenario of what could happen when people do not follow political decisions made in their countries and when they do not start to question undemocratic movements. Democracy can be easily lost if the freedom of press as fourth power in a country is restricted. Quotes from the movie like “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play” are taken from leaders of Third Reich – in this case from Joseph Goebbels. But you can find these kinds of statements also in today’s speeches of rightwing parties everywhere in the world. Today rightwing parties in Europe are on the rise (Poland, Hungary, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, etc.), journalists and publishers are put in jail like in Turkey. The parallels between our times in a lot of European countries (especially in Germany) and past times in the 1920ies in Germany are scary. The story of the movie B. T. R. is based on several documentaries. The quoted documentaries deal with Third Reich, Weimar Republic, with strategies of rightwing parties in today’s Europe, with deserters of the rightwing scene like Franziska Schreiber and Heidi Benneckenstein. They also deal with practices of “hunting down” independent journalists, whistleblowers, and publishers like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden & Chelsea Manning.

Andrea Röpke – a German journalist who has published information about the rightwing scene in Germany for decades – was one of the biggest inspirations for the movie. She will never give up filming, researching & publishing even if she is facing violent attacks. Cambridge Analytica’s greatest hack – a Netflix documentary – deals with the dangers of influencing elections by influencing people through data in social networks. In the story of B. T. R. companies similar to Cambridge Analytica are integral part of how parties win elections, the system has been built on lies.

The film basically develops a future scenario in which authoritarian rightwing parties all over the world have taken over power. A free press (according to AFD “press of lies”) has been abolished. In the year 2043 it is no longer possible to express one’s opinion. Independent journalists and publicists are not allowed to report about reality. Rightwing governments have implemented education camps for the youth to gain more power.

The role of heroine S.K.Y. is inspired by rightwing deserter Heidi Benneckenstein. She grew up in a far rightwing family in Germany and had to visit rightwing education camps every school holiday. In 2011 when she was 19 years old she decided to quit this surrounding which is supposed to be very dangerous. She said the initial moment in her life to desert family and friends was when she was pregnant herself. To be forced to put your own child in the same environment based on fear and hate was unbearable for her. She went through hell in her childhood. She was never allowed to question anything and to develop into an independent person with her own opinions. Today finally she is… risking her life every day.

B. T. R. has been intended as a film of the future but has its roots in the present. It is based on detailed research (e.g. on Julian Assange & Edward Snowden, on Cambridge Analytica, on investigative journalism and far rightwing movements).

Bio

Nina E. Schönefeld is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She studied Fine Art in Berlin at UdK, and in London at the Royal College of Art. She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Art Theory (Dr. Phil.). For several years she has been lecturing at private art colleges in the field of visual arts. Together with Marina Wilde she founded “Last Night In Berlin”, a cultural project/blog documenting art openings in Berlin. Schönefeld lives and works in Berlin.

Schönefeld’s strong interest in new artistic developments has resulted in interdisciplinary video installations – an overall system of light sources (lamps, movement detectors etc.), sound systems (mixers etc.), electronic machines, computer screens, newly built sculptures, interiors and video projections. The focus of Nina E. Schönefeld’s diverse practice lies on political, social and digital changes in society… phenomena of abrupt shift… escape from political persecution, hacking attacks, nuclear accidents, dictatorships, freedom of speech and a free press… people who are radically different … the lives of hackers and preppers, political activists, investigative journalists, environmental activists, Wikileaks members, NSA employees, data martyrs, political underdogs, hermits, computer gamefanatics, cult members, extremists, the Darknet, Julien Assange, Edward Snowden, the blackout in NY, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the control center of the CIA, the Chaos Computer Club, North Korea, the right wing movement, Children of God, Suprematism, the Bauhaus, Zero, insular colonies, digital inventions and radical social networks…

B. T. R. (BORN TO RUN)
2020, HD video, 20 min 3 sec

Kerstin Serz

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About1938

Flowers are often associated with fragility, ephemerality and kitsch, yet in times of political upheaval the meaning of flowers unfolds itself to foster far more connotations than the conventional ones mentioned above. Kerstin Serz paints flowers realistically; thus, asserting a resistance against the contemporary fear of portraying flowers simply as they appear in nature and in their full “beauty”. It is no coincidence that the flower continuously re-emerges as a symbol for resistance and resilience throughout history. Flowers often break through the asphalt of streets and succeed at thriving in such hostile conditions, this shows the innate ambivalence found in flowers, which is the dichotomy between their gracefulness and strength. But precisely this characteristic makes them an ideal symbol for peaceful resistance. During the Second World War the resistance group “Die Weiße Rose” (The White Rose) was established against the Nazi regime. The name further solidifies the correlation between resistance and flowers and their symbolic expression of protest. Whilst the red rose has been increasingly commercialized as an expression for love, the white rose remains a flower of innocence and mourning. The painting depicts an early photo of Sophie Scholl in 1938. She was one of the main activists of “Die Weiße Rose”. Here, a moment is captured, in which she is still unaware of her fatal future. The roses convey a contrast between Sophie Scholl’s unknowingness and the viewer of the painting, who is observing the scene from the present: already aware of the historical consequences that will afflict the resistance group. The composition of the painting is such that the white roses create a circularity: epitomising the threatening concept of historical reoccurrence. The fear of history repeating itself has increased over the past few years. Kerstin Serz successfully bridges the gaps of time by addressing past, present and future simultaneously. Upon viewing the painting carefully, one realises its incompleteness; the flame at the bottom and the ripped part at the top, create a claustrophobic atmosphere: indicating at a “Zeitriss” (a rip in time). On the one hand, one is observing a moment of the past, but on the other hand, Sophie Scholl’s appeal retains its relevance even today: to combat indifference and to vouch for peaceful resistance remains as important as ever. Except that today, we are instigating resistances against “resistances”, particularly against “resistances” of “Querdenker”. Consider the example of a young woman who protested against the lockdown measures and claimed that she felt like Sophie Scholl. It is in such moments, when history becomes distorted, that one has to ask oneself, how could we let this happen? Perhaps time behaves towards history like the black holes, in the painting, behave towards memory; they consume the composition of the painting and thus, symbolise the dangerous process of forgetting, or rather: of collective misremembering.

– Lucille Ling

1938
2021, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 160 × 130 cm

About Der Kornblumenträger

Kerstin Serz does not plant cornflowers, but instead paints them in full bloom. They are carried by an unknown messenger, who has a Goldfinch on his shoulder. An article in the taz with the title, Let us plant blue flowers (taz, Lasst uns blaue Blumen pflanzen, 25.03.2019), initiated the artist’s reflection on this topic and the creation of the edition. The cornflower, a popular motif of Romanticism, has since seen multiple transformations in its significance. It became particularly famous through Novalis’ character, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who in one of his dreams observes a cornflower transforming into the face of his recently deceased fiancé. Thus, the flower became a symbol for the unattainable and a desire for Wanderlust. Eichendorff most famously expressed the quest of searching the unsearchable in his poem Die Blaue Blume. Novalis’ story also addresses the merging of human and nature; one of the main motives found throughout Kerstin Serz’s work; she further intensifies this relationship through the inherently surrealistic atmosphere of her paintings. Just like Romanticism fluctuated between a distinct separation of dream and reality and gravitated towards the unification of these two entities, Kerstin Serz seems to be in a perpetual search for a place in which everything: nature and human, dream and reality, can coalesce into one coherent composition. The Goldfinch operates as an intermediator between nature and humans. One of the Goldfinch’s preferred food source is the cornflower; by picking up the seeds of the flower and with the help of the wind, he becomes an important propagator for the plant’s dissemination. Simultaneously, the bird can be seen as a companion of the Cornflower Carrier and representative for a solidarity togetherness against the symbolic usurpation of the cornflower. Nowadays, the flower is often worn like a badge by party members of the AfD. As a consequence, the flower’s significance is increasingly becoming a source of identification for particularly right-winged people. The article in the Taz ends with the appeal that one should not accept this one-sided and narrow symbolism of the cornflower. If the general public started to accept this specifically right-winged interpretation and thus, begins to avoid the flower (by not planting or appreciating it anymore) out of fear of misidentification, then the ideologies and principles attached to the far right, could gain more (symbolic) power. Therefore, Kerstin Serz attempts to neutralise the symbolism of the cornflower, to prevent the flower from being consumed and tainted completely by nationalistic and right-winged connotations. “The Cornflower Carrier” embodies the literal importance of this painting: which is foremost the distribution of an antithetical symbolism of the flower. This is further enhanced through its edition, which enables a facilitated spread of this message. His task is to carry the cornflower as far as possible into other and new contexts.

– Lucille Ling

Bio

Kerstin Serz came to Berlin in the 90s to study at the UdK. The relationships between human figure, animals and plants form the fundamentals of her pictorial themes. By combining these fragmented elements in intricate ways, her work develops a language of the surreal in a cosmos unique to her art.

Der Kornblumenträger
2021, Fine Art Print on Hahnemuehle Ultra Smooth Paper, 305 gsm, Edition of 111, 18 × 18 cm

Varvara Shavrova

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Artist statement

My practice is focused on excavating the layers of history through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories. In engaging memory, nostalgia and reflection, I create installations that make connections between historic and current narratives, between the archival and the present. In my current work, I examine the symbols of power and authority whilst investigating their relationship to the individual. The process of empathy is the means of materializing the past into the present. The materiality of my installations is a comment on women’s labour, and include objects made of paper, thread, yarn and fabric, with methodologies of drawing, weaving, embroidery and knitting often combined with digital technologies and the moving image. Thematically, my work often investigates ‘borders’ in physical, geo-political and gendered terms.

In my new and ongoing Threads of Surveillance. Soft Drones Series (2020-2021), I examine the tools of surveillance, question the notion of privacy and address the meaning of civil liberties in the context of a pandemic. By the end of March 2020, nearly 3 billion people, or every 5th person on this planet, found themselves under total or partial lockdown. Quarantine enforcement, contact tracing, flow modelling and social graph-making are some of the data tools that are being used to tackle the covid-19 pandemic. In the various states of emergency that different countries around the world are experiencing today, mass surveillance is becoming normalised. As citizens, we are asked to sacrifice our right to privacy and to give up civil liberties in order to defeat the pandemic. What happens once the state of emergency is over?

Hovering on the intersection of historic appropriation and contemporary reflection, I develop ideas around tangible and intangible flying objects that conjure up various elements of surveillance mechanisms. The hand embroidered drawings of drones are sewn directly onto soft fabric used as interlining for drapery and curtains, thus evoking the sense of domesticity and comfort. That comforting sense of security and domesticity is in stark contrast with the objects that I am depicting, thus reflecting on the notion of surveillance that interferes with the very basics of our daily existence.

The process of making a drawing using thread refers to surveillance methodologies set up as domestic traps. The associations that I am developing are those of insects being trapped in webs, like a fly trapped in a spider’s web, or images of airplanes following flight charts, or surveillance and spy maps used by pilots. The threaded and embroidered drawings will be further developed into sculptural objects that will eventually inhabit the space around them, creating spiders web-like traps, with objects suspended, pulled and stretched within their physical environments, that will trick and lure the viewer inside them.

Bio

Varvara Shavrova is a visual artist born in the USSR who lives and works in Dublin and Berlin. Shavrova studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, and received her Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. Shavrova’s project Inna’s Dream reinterprets the first Soviet amphibious aeroplane designed by her great uncle in 1930s as a site-specific installation at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London 2019, and at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford 2021.Mapping Fates, multi-media installation reflects on Shavrova’s family migration, and includes tapestries and sound, shown in V.I. Lenin’s apartment-museum in St. Petersburg 2017. The Opera portrays the gender fluidity in traditional Peking opera, shown at Temple Beijing and MOMENTUM Berlin 2016, Gallery of Photography Ireland 2014, Venice Biennale of Architecture 2014, Espacio Cultural El Tanque, Tenerife 2011. Shavrova received awards from Arts Council England, Arts Council Ireland, Culture Ireland, British Council, The Prince’s Trust. Shavrova curated multiple international exhibitions and projects, including The Sea is the Limit at York Art Gallery in 2018 and at Virginia Commonwealth University, Doha Qatar in 2019, and Map Games: Dynamics of Change at Today Art Museum, Beijing, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, UK and at CAOS Centre for Contemporary Arts, Terni, Italy in 2008-2010. Shavrova’s works are in public collections of the Office for Public Works and at the Department of Foreign Affairs Ireland, MOMENTUM Collection and IKONO-TV Berlin, Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art Ireland, Minsheng Art Museum Beijing, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Museum of the History of St. Petersburg. Shavrova is represented by Patrick Heide Contemporary Art London. She is currently Artist in Residence at MOMENTUM Berlin.

Threads of Surveillance. Soft Drones 7
2020, Embroidery, thread, interlining fabric, 25 × 35 cm

Threads of Surveillance. Soft Drones 13
2020, Embroidery, thread, interlining fabric, 25 × 35 cm

Pola Sieverding

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About the artist

Pola Sieverding is a visual artist working in the field of lens-based media. Pola Sieverding’s works are circling around questions of representation and image production within cultural formations that are defined by various concepts of desire and identification processes. The idea of portraiture in terms of an interpretive reading of the inscriptions of culture in the human body as well as its surrounding architecture is a recurring theme in her work. With photography, video and sound she investigates the physical body as bearer of historical narratives that shape a contemporary discourse on the social body.

Bio

Pola Sieverding studied at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Surikov Institute Moscow and attained her MFA at the University of the Arts Berlin in 2007. She has been invited as an Artist in Residence to Ramallah, Prague and Lisbon and as a visiting lecturer to the International Academy of Art Palestine. From 2016 to 2020 she was teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She was awarded the Work Stipend in the Visual Arts by the Senat of Berlin in 2014 and the Stipend for the Promotion of Junior Achievement in Artistic Fields by the State of Berlin in 2008. Since 2011 she is collaborating with Orson Sieverding on sonic interferences that have been performed at Kunstverein Heidelberg, ReMap 3 in Athens and Kunsthalle Duesseldorf. In 2012 she collaborated with Natascha Sadr Haghighian for her project for dOCUMENTA 13. She has exhibited internationally at Aram Art Gallery, Seoul; Art in General, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin; Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin; Dubai Photo Exhibition, Dubai; NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; MAK Museum für Angewandte und Gegenwartskunst, Vienna; Galerie KnustXKunz, Munich et al. Pola Sieverding lives and works in Berlin.

Valet #52
2014, Photograph, framed, 10.2 × 8.8 cm

Barthélémy Toguo

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About the work

In his installations, performances, photography, and watercolor paintings, Barthélémy Toguo explores the regulated flow of people, merchandise, and resources between the developing world and the West. “Men or women are always potential exiles, driven by the urge to travel, which makes them ‘displaced beings’,” he has said. His monochromatic watercolor paintings act as a travel diary, with human-like forms transforming into animal shapes or abstract creatures — formally exploring the notion of border through the mixing of identities. There is a provocative and satirical aspect of Toguo’s practice, in which art and critique are inextricably linked, to address enduring and immediately relevant issues of borders, exile, and displacement. At the core of his practice is the notion of belonging, which stems from his dual French/Cameroonian nationality. Through poetic, hopeful, and often figural gestures connecting nature with the human body, Toguo foregrounds concerns with both ecological and societal implications. Recently, his works have been informed by movements and humanitarian tragedy including #BlackLivesMatter and the refugee crisis. He states, “What guides me is a constantly evolving aesthetic but also a sense of ethics, which makes a difference, and structures my entire approach.”

Bio

Barthélémy Toguo was born in M’Balmayo, Cameroon, in 1967. He currently lives and works between Paris, France, and Bandjoun, Cameroon. In 2011, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature in France. In 2008, he founded Bandjoun Station in his native Cameroon to foster contemporary art and culture within the local community. The community center includes an exhibition space, a library, an artist residency, and an organic farm. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at institutions including Parrish Art Museum, New York; Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etiennne, France; La Verrière by Hermès, Brussels; Fundaçao Gulbenkian, Lisbon; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He has been included in numerous international biennials, including the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2018); the Venice Biennale (2015); the Havana Biennial (2012); Biennale de Lyon, France (2011); the Sydney Biennale (2011); and Biennale de Dakar, Senegal (2018, 2016, 2000). In 2019, Toguo was included in two inaugural exhibitions held at the new Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, and El Espacio 23, Miami, Florida respectively. In 2020, Toguo participates in the group exhibitions Global(e) Resistance, Centre Pompidou, France, and Voyage Voyages, Mucem (The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations), Marseille, France. Toguo’s works are included in public collections worldwide, including Tate Modern, England; Centre Pompidou, France; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and MoMA, New York.

Welcome Home
2012, Watercolour on paper, 28 × 38 cm

Günther Uecker

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Bio

Günther Uecker was born in 1930 in Wendorf, Germany. Studying painting at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee from 1949 to 1953, he left East Germany for the West, where he further pursued his artistic training from 1955 through 1958 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Throughout the 1950s, Uecker cultivated a strong interest in meditative practices and purification rituals, and became fascinated with the philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam. He developed rituals of his own, including the repetitive hammering of nails, and proceeded to translate this practice into a central aspect of his work. Hammering dense groupings of nails into panels and readymade objects, he created reliefs that operate between painting and sculpture, and that establish new realms for visual exploration, wherein the patterns of surface, light, and shadow are complex and unpredictable. Multilayered in their meanings, these works are resonant with Uecker’s past, including his memories as a boy of nailing up planks to barricade the windows of his family home at the end of World War II. He also incorporates objects such as monochromatic paint, ash, sand, stone, glass, string, cloth, posts, tree trunks, and other media, using these elemental materials to create works of art imbued with the poetic spirit of order and chaos, creation and destruction. As Uecker declared in 1961, “My objects are a spatial reality, a zone of light. I use mechanical means to overcome the subjective gesture, to objectify, to create a situation of freedom.”

Uecker expanded his practice further in the 1960s by introducing kinetic and electrical elements into his works, while shifting his methodology from precise, geometric patterns to more organic and irregular arrangements. In 1957, Uecker first exhibited with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who founded the Zero Group, which he formally joined in 1961. They advocated for a new art form—a degree zero—to erase the destructive forces by which human experience had come to be conditioned during the war, and which were expressed in the then-prevalent art informel style. Central to the movement were explorations of light, technology, and an expansion beyond traditional two-dimensional confines of the canvas, all of which are explored by Uecker.

After the dissolution of Group Zero in the mid-1960s, Uecker’s work became increasingly performative, incorporating aspects of body, conceptual, and land art. Starting in the 1970s, he has designed stage sets for several operas. He taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1974 to 1995 and was promoted to professor in 1976. In 1978, Uecker created the multipaneled wall relief Von der Dunkelheit zum Licht (From Darkness to Light) for the United Nations Office in Geneva. In 2000, he designed a Reflection and Prayer Room for the reconstructed Reichstag in Berlin.

Uecker participated in documenta, Kassel, in 1964, 1968, and 1977, and the Venice Biennale in 1970. His work has been exhibited at museums around the world, including one-artist exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern (1966); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (1968); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1971); Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf (1975, 2015); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1976); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1982); Instituto Aleman de Madrid (1988); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (1992); Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (1996); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2005); Ulmer Museum, Ulm (2010); Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts (2012); and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana (2014); and the Imam Ali Religious Arts Museum, Tehran (2016). The Central House of Artists, Moscow, staged a retrospective of Uecker’s work in 1988. This exhibition was followed in 1993 by a retrospective at Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, and a large-scale presentation of his oeuvre was organized by Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 2015.

Uecker has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Goslarer Kaiserring in 1983; induction into the German Pour le Mérite order for Sciences and Arts in 2000; the Berliner Bär, B.Z. Kulturpreis, Berlin, in 2005; the Great Federal Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2006; the Jan-Willem-Ring from Dusseldorf in 2010; and the Staatspreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2015. Public institutions that house the artist’s work in their collections include the Art Institute of Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London.

In 2011, L&M Arts exhibited Günther Uecker: The Early Years, the artist’s first major exhibition in New York for over four decades. This exhibition featured the artist’s paintings, panels, and structures dating from the late 1950s through the 1960s. In 2016, Dominique Lévy presented Günther Uecker: Verletzte Felder (Wounded Fields), the first exhibition of his work in London for over fifty years. To create this new body of work, Uecker painted canvas-covered panels with thick white pigment, hammered dense groupings of nails into their surfaces, and split the some of the panels with an axe, creating deep gashes that disrupt the integrity of their surfaces with a striking gesture. In 2019, Lévy Gorvy opens Günther Uecker: Notations uniting new large-scale nail paintings with a collection of watercolors created by the artist during his global travels.

Kunstpranger
2008, Tree trunk and nails on wooden pallet, 153 × 73 × 70 cm

Mariana Vassileva

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Nowadays the children in school are not allowed to sing, it is forbidden. We have actual, other problems with the voice and breath today…

– Mariana Vassileva

About the work

In an era witnessing the steady resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism and racism the world over, Mariana Vassileva’s iconic work presents an all too recognizable image. While many governments still seek to curb freedoms of speech, others perhaps exploit free speech in overabundance. As the line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news continues to blur in our over-mediated culture, and information spreading digitally is even more viral than disease, we live in an era where the power of the wrong word has more capacity for destruction than ever before. Vassileva’s Microphone is emblematic of the very necessity for an exhibition such as Points of Resistance.

– Rachel Rits-Volloch

Bio

Mariana Vassileva was born in Bulgaria in 1964. Since graduating from the Universität der Künste in 2000, Vassileva continues to live and work in Berlin. Working across varied mediums such as video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Vassileva’s practice is concerned with the poetry that lies beneath the quotidian and the routine. Based upon observation of daily life, her works respond to an element of playfulness inherent in artist and viewer alike. With the curious gaze of a voyeur or of an urban anthropologist, the artist observes people and their surroundings in order to capture a moment of poetic imagery. Watching, and the distance it implies, are both method and subject of a body of work reflecting on human concerns familiar to us all: communication, cultural displacement, relations with self and other, loneliness and the humor hidden within the rhythms of the day-to-day.

Mariana Vassileva is an an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, having shown in major institutions including: Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Tate Britain (UK); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany); Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst (Germany); Kunsthalle zu Kiel (Germany); Edition Block (Berlin, Germany); The Stenersen Museum (Oslo,Norway); Total Museum (Seoul, Korea); Hong Kong Arts Centre (Hong Kong). Mariana Vassileva has participated in several international Biennials, such as: the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, The Beauty and the Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age (2010); the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, Rewriting Worlds (2011); Biennale Vento Sul in Curitiba, Brasil; the First edition of Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina (2007). Her works are held in international Collections in: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany); Rene Block Collection (Berlin, Germany); Koc Museum (Istanbul, Turkey); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel); La Caixa, Caja de Ahorros de El Monte y Fundacion el Monte (Spain); Lemaitre Collection (London-Paris); Kunsthalle Emden (Germany); Lidice Memorial, and in private collections.

Mikrofon
2017, Mixed media / 2021, Bronze, 150 × 60 × 60 cm

Bill Viola

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About the work

Color high-definition video on flat panel display

Performers: Sheryl Arenson, Robin Bonaccorsi, Rocky Capella, Cathy Chang, Liisa Cohen, Tad Coughenour, James Ford, Michael Irby, Simon Karimian, John Kim, Tanya Little, Mike Martinez, Petro Martirosian, Jeff Mosley, Gladys Peters, Maria Victoria, Kaye Wade, Kim Weild, Ellis Williams

Photo: Kira Perov © Bill Viola Studio

A group of nineteen men and women from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds are suddenly struck by a massive onslaught of water from a high-pressure hose. Some are immediately knocked over and others brace themselves against the unprovoked deluge. Water flies everywhere, clothing and bodies are pummeled, faces and limbs contort in stress and agony against the cold, hard force. People in the group cling to each other for survival, as the act of simply remaining upright becomes an intense physical struggle. Then, as suddenly as it arrived, the water stops, leaving behind a band of suffering, bewildered, and battered individuals. The group slowly recovers as some regain their senses, others weep, and still others remain cowering, while the few with any strength left assist those who have fallen back to their feet.

Seen in the context of Points of Resistance, this work becomes emblematic of the ethos of this exhibition, celebrating the values which enable us to forge unity from diversity. The deluge in the video, with its connotations of water cannon, invokes the civil unrest and hardships which only seem to grow worse around the world in recent years. We are all in this together. And when we get knocked down, overcoming such hardships is likewise easier in solidarity.

Bio

Bill Viola (b.1951) is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For 40 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single-channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.

Bill Viola received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973 where he studied visual art with Jack Nelson and electronic music with Franklin Morris. During the 1970s he lived for 18 months in Florence, Italy, as technical director of production for Art/Tapes/22, one of the first video art studios in Europe, and then traveled widely to study and record traditional performing arts in the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali, and Japan. Viola was invited to be artist-in-residence at the WNET Channel 13 Television Laboratory in New York from 1976-1980 where he created a series of works, many of which were premiered on television. In 1977 Viola was invited to show his videotapes at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) by cultural arts director Kira Perov who, a year later, joined him in New York where they married and began a lifelong collaboration working and traveling together.

In 1979 Viola and Perov traveled to the Sahara desert, Tunisia to record mirages. The following year Viola was awarded a U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship and they lived in Japan for a year and a half where they studied Zen Buddhism with Master Daien Tanaka, and Viola became the first artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi research laboratories. Viola and Perov returned to the U. S. at the end of 1981 and settled in Long Beach, California, initiating projects to create art works based on medical imaging technologies of the human body at a local hospital, animal consciousness at the San Diego Zoo, and fire walking rituals among the Hindu communities in Fiji. In 1987 they traveled for five months throughout the American Southwest photographing Native American rock art sites, and recording nocturnal desert landscapes with a series of specialized video cameras. More recently, at the end of 2005, they journeyed with their two sons to Dharamsala, India to record a prayer blessing with the Dalai Lama.

Music has always been an important part of Viola’s life and work. From 1973-1980 he performed with avant-garde composer David Tudor as a member of his Rainforest ensemble, later called Composers Inside Electronics. Viola has also created videos to accompany music compositions including 20th century composer Edgard Varèse’ Déserts in 1994 with the Ensemble Modern, and, in 2000, a three-song video suite for the rock group Nine Inch Nails’ world tour. In 2004 Viola began collaborating with director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to create a new production of Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, which was presented in project form by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December 2004, and later at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York (2007). The complete opera received its world premiere at the Opéra National de Paris, Bastille in April 2005.

Since the early 1970s Viola’s video art works have been seen all over the world. Exhibitions include Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987; Bill Viola: Unseen Images, seven installations toured six venues in Europe, 1992-1994, organized by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kira Perov. Viola represented the U.S. at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 with Buried Secrets, a series of five new installation works. In 1997 the Whitney Museum of American Art organized Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey that included over 35 installations and videotapes and traveled for two years to six museums in the United States and Europe. In 2002 Viola completed his most ambitious project, Going Forth By Day, a five part projected digital “fresco” cycle, his first work in High-Definition video, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bill Viola: The Passions, a new series inspired by late medieval and early Renaissance art, was exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2003 then traveled to the National Gallery, London, the Fondación “La Caixa” in Madrid and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. One of the largest exhibitions of Viola’s installations to date, Bill Viola: Hatsu-Yume (First Dream) (2006-2007), drew over 340,000 visitors to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. In 2007 nine installations were shown at the Zahenta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; and Ocean Without a shore was created for the 15th century Church of San Gallo during the Venice Biennale. In 2008 Bill Viola: Visioni interiori, a survey exhibition organized by Kira Perov, was presented in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In 2014, twenty works were shown at the Grand Palais, Paris, in his largest survey exhibition to date, and a few months later, part one of the St. Paul’s commission was installed in the London cathedral, Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water).

Viola has received numerous awards for his achievements, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1989), XXI Catalonia International Prize (2009), and the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2011).

Tempest (Study for The Raft)
2005, HD video, 16 min 50 sec

Marta Vovk

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Bio

Marta Vovk (born in 1989 in Lviv, Ukraine; lives and works in Berlin) graduated from Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Berlin in 2017. In terms of content, her artistic practice moves between autobiographical fragments, tenors of sensitivity and a sociocultural touch. Pop-cultural elements go hand in hand with existential questions of the modern, challenged Self. This creates an associative interplay between banality and pathos, self-optimizing performance and anxiety, infantile web culture with its cute kittens and Major Depression. Figures, symbols, advertising items, typos and slogans—each with their distinct messages and network of meanings—emerge simultaneously. Their specific inter-relatedness, however, remains questionable.

Her paintings pursue a strong awareness of their own material with its charged and contextual meanings and references. Primarily, she works with acrylic paint on linen and cotton fabrics. She also likes to use Window Color and spray paint—materials that are commonly regarded as outdated. Formally speaking, her works combine and overlap both visual and graphic elements. The latter are created by using touch-up pencils and colored pencils, thus alluding to formal aspects of stickers and childish doodles. She considers her emotional and personal experiences as an archive of self-referential fragments, motifs, figures and sentences, each of which—during the painting process—are ultimately translated into a visual composition.

As for her installations, She tries to work with the absurdities that are offered to costumers in a world of products. Often, She makes use of abstruse decorative products, feel-good items, feel-at-home goods and thus things that are supposed to generate comfort and ease. This sort of aesthetic, with its seemingly innocent meanings and affects, combined with ist hypocrisy, is something that she sees as provocation. The apparent banal in her works, both from a formal and conceptual perspective, is highly appealing to her. Free of pathos, the great expressive artistic gesture is reduced to a playful hint. What she doesn’t need is truisms in the style of old masters.

Recent group shows of Vovk include Defying Currents, The Shelf by Pandion, Berlin (2018), Sorgen (International) Vol.4, SOX, Berlin, Masters Salon, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp (2017), Böse Blüten Projektraum Bethanien, Berlin (2017) and Quelltext, Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam (2016).

Deutschstunde (futanari)
2020, Burning on wood, 80 × 60 cm

Michael Wutz

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About Germania

Germania – Speer and Hitler’s megalomaniac utopia. The gigantic blocks, which retain the aura of the model in their geometry, cut through the chiseled mesh of the historically grown city. Some sections in the periphery resemble aesthetically photographed aerial photographs. In fact, a connoisseur of more recent prints will immediately notice that analog means were also used here: by means of light-sensitive film, a sight was transmitted that was itself captured by photographic means. These elements reproduce a very specific moment: when a photographer shot reconnaissance images of soon-to-be-destroyed Berlin from an airplane in 1943: thus, particles of light that were captured on film at that very moment are captured on the plates half a century later. These analog structures are fused in etching processes with the city structures transferred to the plate by drawing (also Berlin 1943) to form a skeletonized Berlin. Chaotic haptics clash with the monstrous blocks of the model, and yet both points of contrast are woven into a homogeneous texture in the pictorial space. The target object, scouted by the Royal Air Force in 1943, already merges with Hitler’s utopia and, in the process of decoding the artwork, reproduces in the viewer, if he becomes aware of this anachronism, the contradiction of romantic escape from reality/repression and historical-materialistic reality. Both motifs, i.e. the bombed cities of ’45 but also Germania are, however, not simply concrete, isolated phenomena/images. As iconographic elements they are interwoven in a network of – not only but also – national/collective memories and problems. In their interweaving, the two moments exemplify the fabrications of art as a means of critical juxtaposition with the real.

As a point of resistance, this work was removed from the exhibition by request of the artist.

About Tales, Lies and Exaggerations

The animation Tales, Lies and Exaggerations combines various drawn, photographed and filmed documents connected with other projects that Michael Wutz has been working on. The plot was inspired by the ‘Cut-Up’ technique developed by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, as well as by proto-Surrealist authors such as the Comte de Lautréamont. Both these works examine different aspects of dreams and dreaming: its language, mechanisms, symbols and utopian spaces.

Bio

Michael Wutz was born in 1979 in Ichenhausen, Bavaria, Germany. In 2004 he graduated from Schweizer Cumpana Scholarship for Painting in Bucharest. In 2001-2006 he studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin under Prof. Leiko Ikemura. In 2005-2006 Michael Wutz was a Master student under Leiko Ikemura at the UdK Berlin. The artist currently lives and works in Berlin.

Germania III
2018, Etching on paper, 180 × 240 cm

Tales, Lies and Exaggerations
2011, Video animation, 9 min

Jindrich Zeithamml

Bio

Jindrich Zeithamml was born on March 25, 1949, in Teplice. From the age of fourteen he studied at the Secondary School of Stonemasonry and Sculpture in Hořice. In 1967 he trained, for one year, as a wood carver in Prague and, at the same time, served as an intern in the Pilsen-based studio of Jiří Hanzálek. In 1968 he joined the Academy of Art in Prague, but was expelled from study just after a year. In 1968 to 1969 he made his living as a stonemason on the Charles Bridge. Then he moved to Pilsen and worked in Hanzálek’s studio. He made his living as a free-lance sculptor within the Czech Fund of Art. In 1972 he emigrated to Germany via Italy. In 1976 to 1982 he studied in Düsseldorf at the State Academy of Art with professor Krick. He had his first exhibition in 1980. In 1985 he was awarded the Gustav Poensgen Prize, next year he received the Hilly stipend. After the fall of communism he shuttled between Germany and the Czech Republic, in 1988 he moved to Prague. In 1995 to 2016 he was a professor at the Academy of Art in Prague.

Sonnenscheibe
2020, Mdf, gold leaf, 100 × 93 × 3.5 cm

Ireen Zielonka

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About the work

Left part 1: Headless, you let yourself be carried by what has happened.

Middle part 2: The inner strength is activated and makes everything around you tremble.

Right part 3: One grows beyond oneself. The head is placed back the shoulders. With one’s own courage, one stands firmly on the ground. It’s time to look courageously into the future.

There is hardly a drawing of Zielonka’s in which no philosophical thought is the starting point for an allegorical representation. Her work posits the interactions between society and the individual and the unelected arrested-being with conventions, traditions and origins. Reflection, inquiry and pursuit of knowledge are mandatory as the scouts to act confidently and maturely, she adds. Zielonka’ s work negotiates the divide between what she refers to as the Gesellschaftsspiel (Company Game) and the Gesellschaftsmaschine (Company Machine).

Those who play the machine and those who are played by the machine. Influence has a social dimension, the ratio the individual between the two poles of emancipation and manipulation varies when influence, both external and internal, is introduced and acknowledged. The collage and mirror techniques of the Dadaists and their application in literature by William S. Burroughs (cut-up and fold-in) point to a formal technique, the paradox, introducing the random and the automated as a counterweight to the creative author. She has applied her thoughts to a way of working which is a mixture of strict composition, precision craftsmanship and controlled chaos. Here is where Zielonka’ s work steps away, piece by piece, from the distraction of colour to become refined art, offering room for reflection. Her habit of abstraction provides thoughful content of a particular depth, the kind Max Klinger called the “true organ of imagination” confronting the art of belief in drawing.

The Shy Stag Beetle
2017, Pen and ink drawing triptych, ink and shellac ink on paper
(86 × 43 cm) + (86 × 86 cm) + (86 × 43 cm)