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POINTS of RESISTANCE IV:

Skills for Peace

 

OPENING: 7 April 2022 @ 6pm

EXHIBITION: 8 April – 1 May 2022

CONCERT by Sven Helbig: 17 April 2022 @ 7pm

PANEL DISCUSSION – Postponed

 

@ Zionskirche

Zionskirchplatz, Berlin

Opening Hours: During Church Opening Times
Monday – Saturday: 14:00 – 18:00
Sunday & Holidays before Easter: 12:00 –16:00
Sunday & Holidays after Easter: 12:00 –18:00

 

Initiated by:

MOMENTUM & KLEINERVONWIESE

 

Featuring:

Andreas Blank – Jonas Burgert – Tony Cragg – Wojtek Doroszuk
Nezaket Ekici – FRANEK – Asta Gröting – Sven Helbig
Stefan Höller – Olaf Holzapfel – Huang Jia – Nikita Kadan
William Kentridge – Ola Kolehmainen – Via Lewandowsky – Bernd Lohaus
Sarah Loibl – Boris Mikhailov – Fiona Pardington – Angelika Platen
Gerhard Richter – Stefan Rinck – Arsen Savadov – Katharina Sieverding – Vadim Zakharov

MORE INFO HERE ABOUT THE ARTISTS >>

 

Curated by:

Constanze Kleiner, Rachel Rits-Volloch, Stephan von Wiese, in cooperation with David Elliott and Daniel Marzona

 


 

HOW ARE YOU?
Ukrainian Video Program curated by Kateryna Filyuk:

Piotr Armianovski – Fantastic Little Splash – Oksana Karpovych – Dana Kavelina
Yarema Malashuk & Roman Himey – Oleksiy Radynski – Mykola Ridnyi

MORE INFO HERE ABOUT THE UKRAINIAN VIDEO PROGRAM >>

 

Skills for Peace EDITIONS:

To support Ukrainian artists and cultural workers who have become refugees or forced migrants fleeing the devastation of war in Ukraine, we offer visitors to our exhibition editions of video stills for sale, with all proceeds going to the artists.

 

Panel Discussion:
SKILLS FOR PEACE: “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”

Postponed – TBC

In cooperation with: Deutsches Institut für Gutes Leben & Female Vision

The subtitle of this discussion derives from the Motown anti-Vietnam War hit song, “WAR”, originally performed by The Temptations in 1969. If we have been singing about the futility of war since the 60’s, why must we learn this simple truth all over again today? As the song tells us, “War is the enemy of all mankind.” Sing it again!

 
 

Concert: SKILLS by Sven Helbig
On Easter Sunday, 17 April 2022 @ 19:00

Points of Resistance IV: SKILLS FOR PEACE takes its name from the new symphony – SKILLS – by the acclaimed German composer Sven Helbig.
His new symphony will premier on Easter Sunday, 17 April 2022, in the Zionskirche in Berlin, accompanying the exhibition.

 
 

About Skills for Peace:

Since the beginnings of human civilization, survival skills have evolved into craft and art. Here, the changes in aesthetics, ethics and morals are reflected. People describe this transformation in various ways: in culturally pessimistic dystopias or in posthumanist utopias. Out of this tension wars have been fought since the beginnings of culture about values of many kinds. What is new is the realization that war makes everyone a loser: those involved and even those not involved alike.

Points of Resistance IV: SKILLS FOR PEACE takes its name from the and still life SKILLS, by the renowned German composer Sven Helbig. Created in the style of baroque vanitas painting, it depicts, among other things, a vaccine vial, a skateboard, his iPhone, and the cables of his first computer under the neutered protective gesture of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, in addition to the common attributes of the still life genre. The central score features Strauss’s setting of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The deformed Hermes thereby reveals the dual questions: that of the divine idea, and that of the self-conquest of man without God as proclaimed by Nietzsche.

The question remains: what in today’s secular present can all people of this earth connect with after thousands of years of cultural history? It is peace, one should think. We should have the skills for it – after all that was.

SKILLS FOR PEACE lives in this field – between hymn and melancholy.

Points of Resistance IV: SKILLS FOR PEACE is the final exhibition in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche before the church closes for several years of renovations.

Ukrainian Video Program: In the context of the 4th edition of Points of Resistance – Skills for Peace, video works by Ukrainian artists will be shown in collaboration with curator Kateryna Filyuk. To support these artists, we present editions of video stills, with proceeds going exclusively to the artists.

– Constanze Kleiner

About POINTS of RESISTANCE:

POINTS of RESISTANCE is an exhibition series taking place in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche. Initiated during the pandemic lockdown in 2021 as a cooperation between MOMENTUM, Gallery Kleiner von Wiese, and David Elliott, the inaugural exhibition in April 2021 featured 54 exceptional international artists.

Click to View POINTS of RESISTANCE 1 > >

This series of exhibitions takes as its starting point the remarkable history of the Zionskirche as a crucial point of resistance. It was the place of activity of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who tried not only to stop the Nazi preparations for war, but also publicly denounced the persecution of the Jews. During the GDR era, the Zionskirche was a shelter for dissenters with democratic views.

Since Easter 2021, the initiators of POINTS of RESISTANCE have been inviting artists and thinkers from a variety of locations and perspectives to engage with the many possibilities and meanings of resistance in today’s complex world.

POINTS of RESISTANCE gives voice to humanist viewpoints necessary at a time when authoritarianism, nationalism and racism are steadily resurgent around the world. This is as much a disease of our times as the ongoing pandemic emergency. Each exhibition in this series brings together a multitude of human perspectives and artistic universes reflecting on the mistakes of the past and present in order to preserve the values which enable us to forge unity from diversity, and to live together in peace in the future. These skills are especially necessary in the context of Berlin’s painful history – and particularly in the face of the tragic return of war to Europe.

– Rachel Rits-Volloch


In a world in which wars and armed conflicts have become insidiously embedded as “normal,” and which again faces the threat of nuclear disaster, paranoid, self-seeking power vaunts its deficit of imagination, empathy, and compassion as “strength.” In this state of emergency action must be taken and skills for peace relearnt and mobilised. Reflecting this, the works in this fourth iteration of Points of Resistance link, in radically different ways, the nightmarish actions of past and present with harsh dreams about the future. Such forms of resistance set a clear sight on their targets: virulent, divisive nationalism; the manipulative self-interest of governments and corrupt (social) media barons; all those who attempt to subvert human freedoms and rights and who, in their desperate search for “enemies”, obliterate the possibilities of others for self-realization, truthful reflection and considered critique. This battle, and the encompassing war of which it is part, is comprised of multiple acts of resistance, all made in the cause of truth.

Confined in enclosed, irreconcilable worlds, impervious to the nuances or openness of truth, Russia’s current war on Ukraine reveals how distinctions between “soldiers,” or “freedom fighters” – or between “drug-fuelled neo-Nazis” and “terrorists” – may quickly become reduced to little more than “points of view.” The only possibilities of resolution remain either the complete obliteration of the “enemy,” or the unstable knife-edge of war-like co-existence. Under such conditions, skills for peace are desperately needed, not only in Ukraine and Russia but also in Ethiopia, Israel, Korea, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tibet, Xinjiang and Yemen. Yet, where life is governed by the realpolitik of brute force, effective, prolonged resistance cannot depend on the vicious cycle of counter-atrocity and counter-inequity, paid in the same currency as that of the aggressor. Instead, it should assume the reverse approach by adopting an autonomous, humane, moral position, akin, perhaps, to that of art.

In whatever form or medium it appears, the art in this exhibition confirms one essential truth: although it may be useless in the brute face of power, art possesses a discrete and subtle power of its own. It should never instruct, yet it holds knowledge; it should never moralize, yet it is unavoidably moral. Its function is to be nothing other than itself – which means that it must “do” nothing. Even though its palette may be the whole universe and the emotions that resound within it, this power is derived from its integral disinterest.

Because of its acuity, disinterest, commitment and humanity, all art, if it is any good, is inevitably a point of resistance; a small speck to be amplified – as an expression of vulnerability, as an embodiment of truths, and as a further step towards self-knowledge and peace.

– David Elliott

 

 
 

HAVE A 3D TOUR HERE


 

POINTS of RESISTANCE WEBSITE > >

 

KLEINERVONWIESE WEBSITE > >

 
 


 

Featuring:
(Click on the name to see the bio and the work description below)