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ARTIST SPOTLIGHTS

 
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POINTS of RESISTANCE III

Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

9 November 2021

The 32nd Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

11:00 – 13:30 & 18:30 – 23:00

At Zionskirche, Zionskirchplatz, Berlin Mitte

Curated by Constanze Kleiner & David Elliott

Morning Program – 3G rules apply: proof of vaccination, recovery, or negative test required.

11:00 – 11:30

Unveiling of the new monumental sculpture Why I Bear by Stefan Rinck

Stefan Rinck in discussion with David Elliott [in English and German]

11:30 – 12:00

Film Screening – Heart of Stone, by Sonja Baeger on the work of Stefan Rinck
[in German with English subtitles]

12:00 – 13:00
Panel Discussion – Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom [in English]

Moderated by David Elliott, with Tatiana Arzamasova, Thomas Eller, Dominik Lejman, Zsuzsanna Petró, Rachel Rits-Volloch

13:00 – 13:40
Film Screening – Allegoria Sacra by AES+F

Evening Program – 2G rules apply: proof of vaccination, or recovery required.

18:30 – 19:00

Unveiling of the new monumental sculpture Why I Bear by Stefan Rinck
[in English and German]

19:00 – 19:30

Film Screening Heart of Stone, by Sonja Baeger on the work of Stefan Rinck
[in German with English Subtitles]

19:30 – 20:30
Lecture – The Church, the Resistance and the Bear – Philosopher, historian, and publisher

Christian Posthofen addresses the Zionskirche as a heterotopia.
[in German]

21:00 – 22:00
Concert – TRES MOMENTOS by Sven Helbig, conducted by Wilhelm Keitel

To Buy Tickets for TRES MOMENTOS – CLICK HERE >>

22:00 – 22:40
Film Screening – Allegoria Sacra by AES+F

Symposium Concludes with a Drinks Reception

MORE INFO > >

Unveiling of the monumental sculpture Why I Bear by Stefan Rinck

Stefan Rinck in discussion with David Elliott

 

Stefan Rinck (1973). Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.


Stefan Rinck studied art history and philosophy at Saarland University in Saarbrücken and sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe. His work will be shown internationally: including in Madrid at the Arco art fair in 2020, at Art Basel Miami in 2019, and at the Jardin de Tuileries for FIAC in the same year. He will show his latest works, over 5m high, at FIAC in Paris this year. He is represented in the following public collections: CBK Rotter- dam (NL), Musée de la Loterie (BE), Krohne Collection (DE), FRAC Corse (FR). In 2019 Stefan Rinck was featured in the Thames & Hudson publication “2100 Sculptors of Tomorrow”. Stefan Rinck has been realizing public sculptures since 2008. Already during his participation in the Busan Biennale 2008 in South Korea, the granite sculpture “The Division of Woman and Man” was commissioned. In 2018, the work “The Mongooses of Beauvais” was permanently installed in the Beaupassage in Paris. Other monu- mental limestone sculptures were realized in France in 2010 and 2020. Recently, at the FIAC in Paris, he showed two new sculptures, more than 5 meters high, to learn more about the artist and the history of its creation.

Panel Discussion – Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom

Moderated by David Elliott
Curator, Writer, Art Historian, Museum Director (Oxford, UK / Berlin)

Tatiana Arzamasova
Artist from AES+F (Moscow, Russia / Berlin)

Thomas Eller
Artist and Curator, Artistic Director at Taoxichuan China Arts & Sciences, President of Randian Magazine, Director of THEgallery (Mürsbach, Germany / Berlin)

Dominik Lejman
Artist and Professor at the University of the Arts Poznan (Poznan, Poland / Berlin)

Zsuzsanna Petró
Curator at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, formerly at the Ludwig Museum Budapest (Budapest, Hungary / Berlin)

Rachel Rits-Volloch
Curator of Birds & Bicycles Berlin and Founding Director of MOMENTUM

The Birds & Bicycles exhibition adopts a metaphorical approach by examining ideas of freedom that focus on borders – mental and actual, physical and figurative – as characterized by the mechanical technology of the bicycle and the poetic symbol of birds in flight. This exhibition assembles the work of 12 artists from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, most of whom live in Berlin. In various ways, their work reflects on the analogy of flight in different paradoxes of rooted mobility.

The starting points for the Birds & Bicycles: Paradoxes of Freedom discussion panel, which takes place on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, are both historical and current issues concerning the crisis in democracy. The panelists, both artists, and curators will talk concretely about how they think art and culture express and reflect the truths of our time.
 

READ REFLECTIONS ON PARADOXES OF FREEDOM by DAVID ELLIOTT > >

Film Screening: Allegoria Sacra by AES+F

Lecture – The Church, the Resistance and the Bear
by Christian Posthofen

Philosopher, historian, and publisher Christian Posthofen discusses the historic Zionskirche in terms of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia – as a realized, actually built utopia on which social relations can be read in a special way. For their part, the three relational elements: church, resistance, and bear each possess a disturbing and empowering imaginative potential. Material and immaterial, mental-emotional structural elements meet here and create situations for special spaces of possibility in this place. Christian Posthofen lives and works in Berlin, and teaches philosophy at the ETH, Technical University, Zurich.

Concert – TRES MOMENTOS
by Sven Helbig, conducted by Wilhelm Keitel

Tres Momentos describes a section of the infinite spiral in which disorder and structure, the sacred and the profane, life and death are interdependent. The lightness of an inexplicable, fleeting idea or affection is followed by unconditional will. Mechanical habit turns first into compulsion and later into uncontrollable violence, which finally collapses and dissolves into a melancholic, whimsical waltz. German composer Sven Helbig created the work on commission from the Moritzburg Chamber Music Festival. With it, he leaves the previously preferred strict harmonics and also allows electronic parts to come more to the fore. For the concert on the occasion of the Birds & Bicycles Symposium on the 32nd Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sven Helbig collaborates once more with the conductor Wilhelm Keitel, who previously conducted the choral work “I Eat the Sun and Drink the Rain” by the composer and performed it among others at the Bolshoi Theater in Minsk.

Supported by a grant from the
German Federal Foreign Office
for the Expansion of Cooperation with Civil Society
in the Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia

In partnership with

 
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Symposium

How Culture Builds Cities: Berlin and Abu Dhabi

10 December 2016 @ 3 – 4:30pm

At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien

The Symposium is part of the Exhibition

Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates

At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien

9 – 22 December 2016

Presented In Partnership with the Etihad Modern Art Gallery
and Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize

MORE INFORMATION ON ART NOMADS HERE >>

SPEAKERS:

Janet Bellotto, Zayed University, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises
David Elliott, Art Historian, Curator, Writer, Museum Director, Judge of Sovereign Art Prize
Jeni Fulton, Editor-in-Chief of Sleek Magazine
Vanina Saracino, Curator

WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE SYMPOSIUM HERE:

SPEAKERS:

JANET BELLOTTO

Janet Bellotto is an artist, educator and curator from Toronto, who splits her time teaching in Dubai as an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University. She was the Artistic Director for the 20th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Dubai and engages in projects of cultural exchange. Water, documented events and personal narratives are elements that have shaped Bellotto’s sculpture/installation practice, including mediums of photography, video and performance, while exhibiting internationally in a variety of collective, group and solo exhibitions.

DAVID ELLIOTT

David Elliott sits on the Advisory Boards of both MOMENTUM and The Sovereign Art Foundation, and he served as one of the judges for the inaugural The Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize in 2016, selecting the three finalists shown in Art Nomads – Made In The Emirates. David Elliott is an English born curator and writer. He was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England (1976-1996); Director of Moderna Museet [The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art] in Stockholm, Sweden (1996-2001); Founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2001-2006); the first Director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art [Istanbul Modern] (2007); Artistic Director of The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival for a Precarious Age, the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2008–2010); in 2012 he was Artistic Director of The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art, the 1st International Kyiv Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011-12); he was Artistic Director of A Time for Dreams, the IV International Moscow Biennale of Young Art (2014). David Elliott was the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2008) and Visiting Professor in Museum Studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong (2008/11/13). From 1998 until 2004 he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums of Modern Art).

JENI FULTON

Jeni Fulton is Art and Editor-in-Chief of Sleek Magazine, a Berlin-based print publication covering all aspects of contemporary visual culture. She obtained an M.A. (Hons) in philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and is currently completing her PhD Thesis on “Value and Evaluation in Contemporary Art” at the Faculty for Cultural Theory at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung Berlin. Her PhD thesis examines how different systems of art evaluation (economic, symbolic and institutional) interact in the field of contemporary art to create a concept of contemporary artistic value. She has written catalogue texts for artists including Christian Jankowski. She is bilingual in German and English and is fluent in French.

VANINA SARACINO

Vanina Saracino is a Berlin-based independent curator. Since 2013 she is in charge the contemporary art program on the experimental, non-narrative TV channel ikonoTV and is responsible of external projects with museums and institutions; in 2014, she co-founded the curatorial project OLHO in Brasil, exploring the relationship between contemporary art and Cinema. Other projects include Un lugar habitable es un evento (former museum MAMM, Medellín, Colombia, 2012), Vertical World – approaching gravity (General Public, Berlin, 2012), and the environmental project Art Speaks Out, for ikonoTV (shown at Istanbul Modern, 2015, and COP22, Marrakesh, 2016). Graduated in Communication with a thesis in semiotics of the arts, she holds a masters degree in Arts Management (GIOCA, Università di Bologna) and in Philosophy and Art Theory (UAB, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona). She is a member of the IKT, international association of curators.

 
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BEYOND THE IMAGE: SOUND

MOMENTUM Carte Blanche program broadcast on

IkonoTV

3 June – 3 July 2015

Featuring:

Lutz Becker // Amir Fattal // Gülsün Karamustafa
Hannu Karjalainen // Janet Laurence

On screening also at LOOP Art Fair 2015 >>

 

Since the 70s, Berlin has attracted some of the most avant-garde musicians from around the globe, with a strong upsurge of experimental music in the 90s set within the rich atmosphere of possibility that marked the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, Berlin’s sound-scene continues to take a leading role on the international stage, with key yearly events such as Atonal, MaerzMuzik and CTM and permanent platforms such as N.K. Projekt, Ausland and Errant Bodies that stand at the forefront of their field. Sound in Berlin has maintained its status as a realm of emancipatory, political and artistic potential. Its current focus, however, has shifted from music to sound-art, though the line distinguishing these is thin and fluctuating. Increasingly, Berlin’s music venues offer installations and auditory experiments with space and new technologies, rather than what one might conventionally describe as a ‘concert’.

Within this backdrop and inspired by recent events in the city, as well as the rich discourse that they have engendered, for the past year MOMENTUM has been engaging more closely with sound. This has been marked by various new acquisitions to the Collection that redefine and expand our very understanding of time-based art. It has also entailed a revaluation of some of the older works in our Collection, in which the sonic elements have proven highly deserving of more focussed attention. In this sense, our explorations into sound are also exemplary of the way in which we engage with our collection; keeping it alive by continuously revisiting it from different perspectives and continuously questioning the nature and relevance of time-based art.

 

For LOOP 2015 and specifically within its strand Beyond the Image: Sound, MOMENTUM proposes a programme that represents 6 distinct artistic strategies is which sound takes on a decisive role. In them, the relationship of sound to the moving image is highly diverse, ranging from its imaginative or mnemonic potential in the absence of imagery, to sound as a powerful means to arouse empathy in direct relation to the moving image, to sound as the main content, superseding the primacy of that which is depicted on the screen. It is due to the rich diversity within its delimited focus that this programme is aimed to foment a critical reconsideration of the agency of sound within time-based art: an element that is often overseen or taken for granted, especially within the moving image, but that has immense emotive and even physical effects on the viewer/listener.

Artists and Works

 

Lutz Becker, After The Wall, 2000

CV – Website

Lutz Becker was born in 1941 in Berlin, Germany and now lives and works in London, UK. Lutz Becker is an artist, filmmaker, curator and film-historian. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where he graduated under Thorold Dickinson and became a distinguished director of political and art documentaries. A practicing painter, he is also a curator of exhibitions. He collaborated with the Hayward Gallery on The Romantic Spirit in German Art (1994), Art and Power (1995), and Tate Modern on Century City (2001).

Becker re-visits a sound installation commissioned for the exhibition After the Wall held at the Moderna Museet Stockholm in 1999 and subsequently in Berlin in 2000 at the Hamburger Bahnof, also curated by David Elliott. Its five constituent sound montages are based on original recordings made at the fall of the Berlin Wall. MOMENTUM presents the sound sculpture After The Wall in the context of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Wall 25 years ago, 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 the idealogical empire of Communism.

Amir Fattal, From the End to the Beginning, 2014

CV – Website

Amir Fattal was born in Israel in 1978, and is currently based in Berlin. Fattal graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009, and is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Fattal’s overarching concerns are the cultural connections between Germany and Israel – countries inexorably linked through their history, memory, culture, architecture, and the geographical diaspora which resulted in mass migrations, transposing cultures to new and different nations. The territory of Israel was once part of the Ottoman Empire, and then later administered by the British, yet the very creation of Israel is the legacy of the failed attempt to start the new Third Reich.

From the End to the Beginning is based on a live performance of Richard Wagner’s Vorspiel und Liebestod sequence played in reverse order. The video version of this performance was filmed in the big hall of the Berlin Funkhaus, built in the late 1950s as East Berlin’s new radio station, after musicians could no longer travel freely between the two sections of the city. Following the process of abstraction in music, theatre and light installation, this work is also a reflection on cultural taboos and historical memory. Wagner’s works remain banned from public performance in Israel and have become a symbol for the catastrophic ramifications that anti-Semitism can cause. Rewriting Richard Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’ line by line, fragmenting it to copy the last note as the first note, much as the Hebrew alphabet is read, the performance creates a new conceptual work challenging contemporary perceptions of historical and cultural readings to illustrate how culture is always an assemblage of the fragments of others.

Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet, 2000

CV – Website

Gülsün Karamustafa was born in 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. She lives and works in Istanbul, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. Her work addresses questions of migration, displacement and military dictatorship (during the 1970s she was imprisoned by the Turkish military). 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. Like a sociologist or anthropologist, Gülsün Karamustafa explores the historical and social connections of oriental cultures in her works, often using materials that express the hybrid character of different cultures and religions. Ostensibly reverting to historical lore, Karamustafa’s artistic comments oscillate actually between sensual meta-narratives and ironic-critical stories about the present situation, addressing themes of identity and migration, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism. Since the end of the late 1990s, she has often used already existing materials and images of oriental or occidental origin that she fragments, dismantles and reassembles in order to contrast ‘private’ with ‘public’ by referring to every-day life, culture, art history, and the media.

The four-part video Personal Time Quartet is concerned with the point of in- tersection between the artist’s own personal biography and the history of her home country. Having been invited to an exhibition of German domestic inte- riors from various periods in the twentieth century at the Historical Museum in Hanover, Karamustafa was inspired by what she saw there to take a closer look at the similarities between her own childhood reminiscences and these muse- ological German living spaces. The timeframe (or ‘personal time’) covered by these four video’s begins in the year of her father’s birth and ends in the early days of her own childhood. A video screen placed in each of the rooms shows the same young girl – the artist’s alter ego – engaged in various activities. We see her skipping with a skipping rope (dining room, 1906), sorting and folding laundry (kitchen, around 1913), opening cupboards and drawers (living room and parents’ bedroom, around 1930) and painting her nails (room from the 1950s).

Hannu Karjalainen, Nanjing Grand Theatre, 2012

CV – Website

Finnish-born, Berlin-based artist Hannu Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School. Woman on the Beach is a photograph activated into a subtle poetic motion, rewarding the viewer for taking the time to watch it unfold. In subsequent work Karjalainen uses the medium of the moving image to reflect back upon painting and the material qualities of paint. Colour is an elusive subject matter. It is intangible and abstract as much as it is coded, branded and harnessed for different purposes. Hannu Karjalainen is particularly interested in how meaning is attributed to a colour, and how this mechanism can be exploited by re-contextualization, using colour and its supposed meaning as a critical tool to investigate the world around us. In an ongoing series of works that turn classical portrait photographs into moving color palets, Karjalainen again mobilizes the traditionally still image. Looking at painting through photography, its role becomes reversed.

Nanjing Grand Theatre explores the memory inherited in an architectonic site. The Nanjing Grand Thetre, a western classical style building designed by Chinese architects originally housed western cinema in the 1930s Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution the building was dedicated to Beijing Opera and temporarily called Revolution Concert Hall. Now renamed Shanghai Concert Hall, the building is a prime location for classical music concerts. The massive construction plans in the Shanghai city centre called for the demolition of the building several times, as it was both in the way of a highway and a metro line. Finally a different solution was found: in early 2000s the building was moved from it’s original location by lifting the whole 5650 ton building up 3.38 meters and dragging the building to a new location some 70 meters southeast. The video work is shot on the original site of the concert hall, where an elevated highway now passes through the city. Passing lights and shadows take human forms as we hear snippets from the soundtrack of the very first film screened in Nanjing Grand Theatre, Broadway (1929). The film adaptation of the musical is now deemed lost in its original form, with only an edited version made from separate silent and talkie versions existing.

Janet Laurence, Vanishing, 2009/10

CV – Website

Australian artist Janet Laurence‘s work explores a poetics of space and materiality through the creation of works that deal with our experiential and cultural relationship with the natural world. Her work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. It occupies the liminal zones and meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Laurence’s practice includes both ephemeral and permanent works as well as installations that extend from the museum/gallery into both urban and landscape domain. Her work, centered on living nature, bleeds between the architectural and the natural world, physically and metaphorically dissolving these boundaries. Her spaces are immersive and reflective, creating a play between perception and memory. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underlying themes. Laurence’s work is represented in major Australian and international collections and has been included in many national survey exhibitions.

Vanishing is Janet Laurence’s first video work, made during a residency at the Toranga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. After working primarily in photography and installation, Laurence began an ongoing filmic study of animals both in the wild and in nature reserves. She has developed a filming technique in which she uses infrared night cameras – similar to those used by naturalists, as many animals are primarily active at night – in order to achieve a negative effect and distorted, ghostly coloration. Originally shown as a two-screen installation, this single channel version was specially released for the MOMENTUM Collection following the artist’s involvement on a MOMENTUM panel on art and science.

About IkonoTV

Founded by Elizabeth Markevitch, IkonoTV is a unique television channel broadcasting art and only art 24/7 on HD. Offering a pure visual experience, an ever-changing playlist of art films is produced in close collaboration with more than 400 international artists, over 200 collections, archives and the most important museums of the world. All productions are free from additional sound or commentary, allowing an international audience to be exposed to a completely new approach to the arts of all epochs, from antiquity to contemporary art. Your television screen is transformed into a lively painting, a window straight into the worlds leading museums and galleries.  In the conviction that everyone should have access to art in their homes, IkonoTV is viewable in more than 30 countries worldwide (average technical HD reach: 37 million households) through IPTV’s in Germany and France, through IPTV and ArabSat in the MENASA region, and internationally on our HD web stream.

Watch IkonoTV: www.ikono.tv

 
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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #12

Physical Ghosts and other Tales:
A Virtual Impromptu by David Medalla

David Medalla in dialogue with Shi Handao

17th MAY 2015

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

With work ranging from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation and performance, David Medalla constantly shifts between situationist, surrealist and conceptualist tactics. Admitted to Columbia University at the age of 12, he studied and performed alongside some of the most preeminent scholars, artists and critics of the twentieth century, including Marcel Duchamp, who once honored him with a “medallic” object. Medalla’s work has been included in such exhibitions as Harald Szeemann’s Weiss auf Weiss (1966) and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969), as well as 1972’s DOCUMENTA 5. Medalla has a longstanding history as a founder and director of various projects, ranging from the Signals Gallery in London in 1964, which exhibited international kinetic art, to the Exploding Gallery in 1967, an international group of multi-media artists highly influential in counterculture circles. While much of his work is deeply rooted in the underground, avant-garde scene in London, he became increasingly known for his series “Cloud Canyons”: thick bubbles that form random shapes and patterns against the light. Medalla additionally founded the Mondrian Fan Club in New York in 1994 with Adam Nankervis, co-curator for MOMENTUM’s joint exhibition A Wake, and founded and directed the London Biennale in 1998, a makeshift free arts festival concocted through word-of-mouth invitation. Medalla has lectured at the Sorbonne, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, MoMA, the University of the Philippines, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Warwick and Southampton and the Slade School of Fine Art, St. Martin’s. In 1997 he was awarded the DAAD artist grant to work in Berlin, and he has recently exhibited at the New Museum in New York, where the curator hailed his “Cloud Canyons No. 14” as an iconic sculpture of contemporary art. He lives and works in New York, London and Paris.

Shi Handao holds an MA degree from SAIC and is currently artistic director at Ray Art Center, as well as curator and critic.

WATCH THE TALK:

 
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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #11

Zuzanna Janin’s Poetics of Combat:
Beyond Victory and Defeat

Zuzanna Janin in dialogue with Lin Yu

19th APRIL 2015

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

Zuzanna Janin, born in 1961 in Poland, is a visual artist and former teen actor. Having at one time starred in the Polish serial Szalenstwo Majki Skowron (Madness of Majka Skowron), Janin now uses her theatrical background to create sculpture, video, installation, photography and performances. Her work has been shown in a variety of spaces, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Foundation Miro, Barcelona, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, National Gallery Zacheta, Warsaw, Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Jeu de Pomme, Paris, Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthalle, Bern, Hoffmann Sammlung, Berlin, and TT The THING, NY. Janin has also taken part in the Sydney Biennale, Istanbul Bienniale, Liverpool Biennale, and the 54th Venice Biennale.

Lin Yu is a writer and art critic, editor of ArtReview Asia. Since she starts to work with the British art magazine ArtReview in 2013, she has founded its sister magazine ArtReview Asia, a critical magazine distributed in pan-Asia area. Prior to this position, she was the founding editor of LEAP (2009-2012). Her practice ranges from writing, editing, art and culture criticism to curating. Her recent curatorial project ‘Timur Si-Qin: Biogenic Mineral’ is now on show at Magician Space, Beijing until 17 May 2015. She currently lives and works in Shanghai.

WATCH THE TALK:

 
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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #10

The Contemporary Jester
Humor, satire and role-play in Doug Fishbone’s politics of mass-media representation

Doug Fishbone in dialogue with Shen Qilan

22th MARCH 2015

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

Doug Fishbone, an American artist based in London, often uses satire and humor in his films, performances and installations to critically examine consumer culture, mass media, relative perception and context. His work frequently forces the viewer to confront his-or-her own interpretive backgrounds. By combining a variety of found images from Google Image Search, Fishbone illustrates and undermines his own confrontational, repulsive and funny monologues on contemporary media and its corollary, the underground and avant-garde. Fishbone is best known for his project 30,000 Bananas, a mountain of ripe bananas installed in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square and later given away to the audience for free. In 2004, his work was included in the British Art Show 6, a national touring exhibition held every five years in celebrate of the best of contemporary British art. Fishbone had his first major solo project at Gimpel Fils in London in 2006, and he performed at the Hayward Gallery in 2007. He has since performed live at the ICA, exhibited at Rokeby, London, Tate Britain, the 2008 Busan Biennale and in Switzerland, Japan and Korea. He was heralded as one of the art world’s “Future Greats” by Art Review magazine. Most recently, Fishbone has recently produced a feature-length action film, Elmina, that connects two vastly different audiences of the Western art world and the African home video market. Filmed in Ghana with major Ghanaian celebrities, the movie’s only artistic intervention is the insertion of Fishbone, a white American artist, as the lead role in a completely African production. The work fully adopts Ghanaian film making conventions, taking advantage of the shared language used and the low cost structure of the Ghanaian home video industry. In this new project Fishbone continues to examine the complex relationship between perception and reality and the politics of representation while simultaneously asking wider questions about race, globalization and notions of a shared visual language. (Rokeby Gallery, London). Born in New York in 1969, Fishbone earned an MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College in 2003 and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004.

Dr. Shen QilanD is an expert on arts and culture and a member of the editorial board of BOOKTOWN Magazine. She holds a master of philosophy from Fudan University and obtained her Ph.D. at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany. Prior, she was Director of the editorial department of Art World magazine (2010-2011), and later Chief Editor of Arts and Director of International Projects at Shanghai Insight Media (China South Publishing & Media Group). Qilan is dedicated to cultural projects between Europe and China and became chief advisor, editor, and co-author of Europe-China Cultural Compass — Orientation for Cultural Cooperation between China and Europe. She organizes events and gives lectures at different cultural institutions. Qilan was invited as “Kulturvermittler”, a scholarship awarded by the Goethe-Institute to visit Berlin, and was invited as a speaker to the 5th World Summit on Arts and Culture in Melbourne, Australia.

WATCH THE TALK:

 
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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #9

Un-forgetting History:
The Liminal Spaces of (Dis)Appearance in Kate McMillan’s Paradise Falls

Kate McMillan in dialogue with Wu Guanjun

15th JANUARY 2015

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

Kate McMillan has exhibited throughout Australia and overseas since 1997. In 2013 she relocated to London from Australia, where she has spent much of her life, to undertake a number of projects, which include the filming of four ambitious new works funded in part by one of two Creative Development Fellowships awarded annually across all artforms by the Department for Culture and the Arts, Western Australia. The work will be presented by Performance Space, Australia in Sydney, Tasmania and the United Kingdom in 2014 and will include a major monograph on McMillan’s practice. >McMillan is a Phd candidate at Curtin University under the supervision of Dr Anna Haebich (author of Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000). She has been funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award to complete her Phd which examines the forgetting of the history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island. She currently holds an Academic Post with Open University, Australia. Previous solo exhibitions include 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. She has been included in various group exhibitions over the last few years including at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Gertrude Street Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Govett Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand and the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney.

Guanjun Wu is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics at East China Normal University (ECNU), Shanghai, China. He also serves as Vice President of Department’s Academic Board and Executive Editor-in-Chief of ECNU Review. He is the author of a number of books including The Great Dragon Fantasy (2014), The Eleventh Thesis (2014), The Philosophy of Living Together (2011), The Hauntology of Love and Death (2008), The Perverse Core of Reality (2006), and Multiple Modernities (2002).

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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #8

SITE • BODY • ARCHITECTURE

Mobilizing The Still Image In Hannu Karjalainen’s Video Art

Hannu Karjalainen in dialogue with Hu Sang

14th DECEMBER 2014

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

Finnish-born, Berlin-based artist Hannu Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School. Woman on the Beach is a photograph activated into a subtle poetic motion, rewarding the viewer for taking the time to watch it unfold. In subsequent work Karjalainen uses the medium of the moving image to reflect back upon painting and the material qualities of paint. Colour is an elusive subject matter. It is intangible and abstract as much as it is coded, branded and harnessed for different purposes. Hannu Karjalainen is particularly interested in how meaning is attributed to a colour, and how this mechanism can be exploited by re-contextualization, using colour and its supposed meaning as a critical tool to investigate the world around us. In an ongoing series of works that turn classical portrait photographs into moving color palettes, Karjalainen again mobilizes the traditionally still image. Looking at painting through photography, its role becomes reversed.

Hu Sang is a Shanghai-based poet and critic. Currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy from Tongji University, Hu has published in various journals and books, including Shan Hua, Shu Cheng, Poetry Journal, Poetry Monthly, Shanghai Literature and Shanghai Cultural.

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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #7

RECOLLECTION • REPRESENTATION • REFLECTION

Fiona Pardington in dialogue with Zhang Hui

23rd NOVEMBER 2014

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Live-streamed with Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

Fiona Pardington was born in 1961 in Devonport, New Zealand, of āi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Scottish descent. She lives and works in New Zealand. She is recognized as the leading woman artist working with photography in New Zealand. Her work examines the history of photography and representations of the body, taking in investigations of subject-photographer relations, medicine, memory, collecting practices and still life. Fiona has been working in a still-life format within museums, recording taonga (Māori ancestral treasures) and other historic objects such as hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now extinct huia bird. In these works, she brings to a contemporary audience an awareness of traditional and forgotten objects. Re-examining the history of portraiture in more recent work, she addresses the New Zealander traditional idea of the photograph as a stand-in for an actual person – a way of looking at portraits that western minds associate with traditions of Maori animism that imbue photographs of loved ones who have passed away with their actual presence and characteristics. Applying this tradition to a still-life format, Pardington portrays ancestral Maori carvings alongside objects redolent of the colonial history of an island nation at the outer edges of empire.

Zhang Hui, PHD from University of California, Los Angeles, who is currently a lecturer in the Institute of Anthropological studies, School of Social Development at East China Normal University. Zhang’s research mainly focuses on cultural theory, intangible heritage protection, museum studies, anthropology of media and anthropology of education. Here’s a link of Zhang Hui at East China Normal University: http://faculty.ecnu.edu.cn/s/2770/t/29709/main.jspy

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Fragments of Empires Kunst Salon
 

26 October 2014
KUNSTSALON AND ARTIST WORKSHOP
 NATURALLY

 

SEE THE PHOTO GALLERY OF THE EVENT

 
Janet Laurence and Fiona Pardington

The artists develop ideas and frameworks for the upcoming project with MOMENTUM.

The workshop will follow the Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #6
More information HERE

 

THE PHOTO GALLERY OF THE EVENT
(photos by Camille Blake)

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Pandamonium Kunst Salon

29 May 2014

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

 
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FORM AS BEING

FINISSAGE WEEKEND

At MOMENTUM Berlin

Kunstquartier Bethanien 134
Mariannenplatz 2, Kreuzberg, 10997 Berlin

 

IN DIALOGUE with Omar Chowdhury &
Mark Gisbourne

Sat 4th Oct at 19:00 – 20:00

@ MOMENTUM Berlin

 

SEE THE PHOTO GALLERY OF THE EVENT

 
 

 
 

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

MOMENTUM is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Berlin of the lyrically cinematic video works of Australian-Bangladeshi artist Omar Chowdhury.

Made in a deep, two-year immersion into spiritual sites and spaces in Dhaka, this ambitious body of works explores the processes, materials, and theologies of spiritual practice in a formalist yet rhythmic accumulation of imagery, sounds and meanings.

Encompassing the places, rituals, music, lives, and beliefs of holy and lay-believers, the artist has created a complex, absorbing series of works that combine and re-purpose fictional, documentary, and experimental techniques to create a rich, philosophical and phenomenological enquiry into religious practice and its representation.

This exhibition originated at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, Australia, in May – August 2014 under the title of WAYS. With gratitude to 4A, the Keir Foundation, the Australia Council for the Arts, and the EMK Centre in Dhaka, MOMENTUM is very pleased to bring this stunning exhibition to Berlin, and to show for the first time in Berlin the work of this extraordinary emerging talent.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

In 2014 Omar Chowdhury has current and upcoming solo exhibitions at Shepparton Art Museum and Galleries UNSW. He is the recent recipient of a Bengal Foundation Commission (2014), a finalist for the John Fries Award (2014), received an Australia Council Skills and Development Grant (2014), an Edward M. Kennedy Grant for the Arts (2013), and an Australian Cinematographer’s Society Gold Award. He has shown works in galleries, institutions, and festivals in Australia, Asia, and Europe. He was born in 1983 and studied at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He currently lives and works both in Sydney, Australia and Dhaka, Bangladesh.

 

EXHIBITION CATALOGUES
 

READ THE CATALOGUE OF FORM AS BEING

READ THE ESSAY BY MARK GISBOURNE

 

ABOUT MARK GISBOURNE
In Dialogue with Omar Chowdhury on Oct 4th at MOMENTUM Berlin

MARK GISBOURNE: Stratford-on-Avon, in England (1948). Educated in Rome, and Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where he was a tutor. Lecturer Master’s Programme, Slade School of Art, University College, University of London, and Senior Lecturer Sotheby’s Institute, Masters Programmes (accreditation University of Manchester). A former President of the British Art Critics Association (AICA), and an International Vice-President who co-organised the World Congress of Art Critics, Tate Modern at its opening in 2000. He is an international curator of numerous exhibitions, and a writer of more than a dozen books and over two hundred and fifty catalogue essays, having been published in over twenty languages. His latest publications in 2013/14 include among others monographic essays and publications on Bosco Sodi (Berlin, Mexico City and New York, 2014), Adrian Ghenie (Berlin, London and New York, with Hatje Cantz, 2014), Markus Keibel (Berlin, Distanz Verlag, 2013), Philipp Fürhofer ‘Diaspheres’ (Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 2014), James Lee Byars: The Secret Archive (The Dieter Hacker Collection) (Berlin, Nikolai Verlag, 2014), Rayk Goetz (Kerber Verlag, 2014). In 2015, Jakob Straub: Rome Rotunda (Hatje Cantz, 2015). There are forthcoming monographs on the Leipzig painters Johannes Rochhausen, and Markus Matthias Krueger, and on the deceased American painters Patrick Angus (1953-92) and Alice Neel. He continues to curate the international Rohkunstbau (Brandenburg) international summer exhibitions (2004, XI to XXI, ‘Apocalypse’ June, 2015). His large touring museum exhibition publication I am a Berliner: Eighteen Positions in Berlin Painting (Zagreb HDLU, Tell Aviv Museum, and MASEDU, Sassari, Sardinia) appeared 2012-13. In Planning is a large exhibition of post-war and contemporary art to take place in Riga, Latvia, later this year 2015. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

 
THE GALLERY:

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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #6

ART • SCIENCE • IMAGINATION • MEMORY

Janet Laurence in dialogue with Hu Xudong

26th OCTOBER 2014

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Live-streamed with Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

Australian artist Janet Laurence‘s work explores a poetics of space and materiality through the creation of works that deal with our experiential and cultural relationship with the natural world. Her work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. It occupies the liminal zones and meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Laurence’s practice includes both ephemeral and permanent works as well as installations that extend from the museum/gallery into both urban and landscape domain. Her work, centered on living nature, bleeds between the architectural and the natural world, physically and metaphorically dissolving these boundaries. Her spaces are immersive and reflective, creating a play between perception and memory. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underlying themes. Laurence’s work is represented in major Australian and international collections and has been included in many national survey exhibitions.

Hu Xudong is a chinese poet, critic, essayist and translator. Born in Chongqing, lives now in Beijing. M.A. in Comparative Literature and Ph.D. in Chinese Contemporary Literature from Peking University, where he now is as an associate professor at the Institute of World Literature. He has published 7 books of poetry (From Water’s Edge, Juice of the Wind, Amor en los Tiempos del SARS, What Time Is It There？, The Strength of the Calendar, The Eternal Inside Man, Travel/Writing), 3 books of essays (Random Words of A Random Life, the Hidden Passion in Brazil, Random Thought after Random Eating), as well as a number of translations. In 2007 Hu Xudong was hailed as one of the ten present Top New Poets in China. He writes poetry and essays but also works as a columnist, translator and TV presentor. Xudong holds a doctorate in modern literature and lectures at Peking University. In his highly narrative poetic style he manages to put across elaborate stories couched in concise phrasing. Xudong is able to command a wide range of linguistic modes in his poems. He knows, for instance, how to incorporate provincial dialects but also how to include references to the Chinese literary classics or to the idiom of the world of advertising.

Janet Laurence in Dialogue with Isabel de Sena:

Janet Laurence screening and response by Hu Xudong:

 
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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #5

Sex・Politics・Cross-Cultures:
Hye Rim Lee’s Video Images and
Multidimensional Exploration

HYE RIM LEE in dialogue with ZHOU YI

12 OCTOBER 2014 at 15:00

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Video Screening:
Obsession/Love Forever (2007), Crystal Beauty Electro Doll (2006-08), Crystal City Spun (2008) and Strawberry Garden Lucid Dream (2011)

Followed By
Hye Rim Lee in dialogue with Zhou Yi

At Minsheng Art Museum
Address: bldg F, NO.570 West Huaihai Road, Shanghai

Live-streamed from Hye Rim Lee’s Studio in Auckland, New Zealand

Video arts have been impacting the modern high-speed movements of various kinds since its birth as well as reshaping the art history of 20 century with its moving images. To embark on an effective,open and updated exchange between the east and west seems to possess a great importance to accelerate and boost the contemporary video art. This time, with a lasting and fine cooperation with MOMENTUM Germany, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum will witness the Fifth Phase of “Time·Art·Impact” dialogue project: Sex ·Politics · Cross-culture: Hye Rim Lee’s Video Images and Multidimensional Exploration. Artist Hye Rim Lee and Yi Zhou would be invited to give the audience a talk upon the modern movement of video art, sexuality, and politics under a intercultural perspective. During this event, Hye Rim Lee’s video work Obsession/Love Forever (2007) from MOMENTUM Collection will be screened, along with three other works, Crystal Beauty Electro Doll (2006-08), Crystal City Spun (2008) and Strawberry Garden Lucid Dream (2011).

Hye Rim Lee’s work questions new technology’s role in image making and representation. Her work is consistent with recent international developments in contemporary art, e.g., reviewing aspects of popular culture in relation to notions of femininity and looking at the way fictional animated identities are propagated within contemporary culture. Her work has developed through the critical and conceptual evolution of her animated character TOKI, the principal component of her ongoing TOKI/Cyborg Project (2002-present). Lee has positioned her work at a progressive interface between East and West by exploring areas of computer gaming, cyber culture, contemporary myth-making and animamix. She has exhibited in major international exhibitions, including the Incheon Women Artists Biennale (2009), Glasstress, 53rd Venice Art Biennale (2009), Kukje Gallery, Max Lang Gallery NY, MoCA Shanghai, Millennium Museum, Beijing, Art Basel, and the Armory Show NY.

Yi Zhou is a Chinese media artist, film director, actress and speaker, who has lived in Rome from the age of ten and studied between London and Paris with degrees in Political Science and Economics. Since 2010 she has relocated back to China and founded her studio and production company in Shanghai. An image maker and muse, switching from the front to the back of the camera, Yi Zhou is a modern-day Chinese Hitchcock, Yoko Ono and Cindy Sherman, described by Vogue China. Currently, Yi Zhou is also Tudou.com’s(Chinese would-be YouTube) art-director and serves as art and fashion advisory member at Sina.com (which owns Chinese twitter), which owns Chinese twitter(Sina Weibo). Yi Zhou was also selected as part of the Women’s Forum and aspeaker at TEDxParis. Her work has been shown at Shanghai Biennale, Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival and Cannes Film Festival.
 

[Work Descriptions by Hye Rim Lee]

Obsession/Love Forever (2007)

Crystal Beauty Electro Doll (2006-08)

Crystal City Spun (2008)

Strawberry Garden Lucid Dream (2011)

Guest Translator: Jin Wen, associate professor of School of Foreign Language and Literaturein Fudan University, and doctor in Northwest University of America. Having been a teacher in the Departments of Comparative Literature and English of Columbia University since 2006, she mainly lectures upon courses in American literature, Asian American Literature, theories of Western culture and literature criticism.

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MOMENTUM together with present:

Xu Zhen: From Inside His Skin

A Presentation of Xu Zhen: The Catalog

In Dialogue with Chris Moore And David Elliott

With a screening of Rainbow and 8848-1.86 by Xu Zhen

SEE THE PHOTO GALLERY OF THE TALK

21 September 17:00

@ .CHB Collegium Hungaricum Berlin

Dorotheenstrasse 12, 10117, Berlin Mitte

This is an education program jointly presented by MOMENTUM, Randian and Collegium Hungaricum as an in-depth followup to the previous presentation of XU ZHEN in the PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL Exhibition on 1 – 4 May 2014

 

THE BOOK

Xu Zhen (b. 1977, lives and works in Shanghai) came to prominence at the 49.Biennale di Venezia with Rainbow (1998) a visceral video performance of his back being slapped, turning red, with hand marks visible but never the hands. Further actions including sawing off the summit of Mount Everest equivalent to his own height, 8,848-1.86 (2005) invading neighboring countries with radio-controlled tanks, ships and helicopters, 18 Days, 2006, the controversial The Starving of sudan (2008) and Untitled (2009), a vast house of poker cards in the form of the Potala Palace. With essays by David Elliott, Philippe Pirotte and Christopher Moore and an interview with Li Zhenhua, this is the first monograph concentrating on Xu Zhen’s practice, focuses on his early career until 2009, when he subsumed his identity within the corporate-collective “MadeIn” (in Chinese “No Roof”), and with a postscript on MadeIn’s recent adoption of a new brand “Xu Zhen.”

XU ZHEN

Xu Zhen (b. 1977, Shanghai) is a trans-medial conceptual artist based in Shanghai. Incorporating painting, installation, video, photography performance and even extending into curatorial practice, Xu’s work satirizes, exposes and reworks dominant rhetoric of the contemporary art-world. Currently working under his company name MadeIn Inc, a self-declared ‘multi-functional art company’, he appropriates the art-as-brand discourse to criticize it from within. A jester at heart, he plays on authorial conventions and expectations, creating pseudo-fictions replete with cultural clichés, wittingly challenging the pervasive longing for clearly delineated so-called cultural authenticity. An irreverent artist with a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media, Xu Zhen is the key figure of the Shanghai art scene and a foundational figure for the generations of Chinese artists born since 1970. Xu’s practice reflects the lingering concerns of an artist participating in the international art world while remaining deeply sceptical of it and its conventions, most immediately the label ‘Chinese contemporary art’. Working in his own name since the late 1990s, Xu Zhen is now producing new works under MadeIn Company’s newly launched brand ‘Xu Zhen’. Recent major exhibitions include his retrospective, “Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production”, at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014) and his Commissioned Artist exhibition at the Armory Show in New York (2014).

CHRISTOPHER MOORE

Christopher Moore is the publisher of randian 燃点 digital art magazine. From 2008-10 Christopher was the Shanghai correspondent for Saatchi Online. In 2012 Chris co-curated “Forbidden Castle” at Muzeum Montanelli in Prague, an exhibition of Xu Zhen’s pre-MadeIn work, and in April 2014 he curated Yan Pijie “Children of God” at orangelab Berlin. He is also the editor of the first monograph on Xu Zhen, to be published by Distanz Verlag this Spring, with contributions by David Elliott, Philippe Pirotte and Li Zhenhua.

DAVID ELLIOTT

David Elliott is an English born curator and writer. From 1976 to 1996 he was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, Director of Moderna Museet [The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art] in Stockholm, Sweden (1996-2001), founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2001-2006), the first Director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art [Istanbul Modern] (2007), Artistic Director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2008 – 2010) and Artistic Director of the 1st Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011-12), Artistic Director of the 4th International Biennale of Work by Young Artists in Moscow (2014-2014), Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2008) and Visiting Professor in Museum Studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong (2008/11/13). From 1998 until 2004 he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums of Modern Art). He is Hon President of the Board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London and on the Asia Advisory Board of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

THE PRESENTATION WILL BE ACCOMPANIED BY TWO WORKS BY XU ZHEN

 

8848-1.86
2005, 8:11 min

In August 2005 Xu Zhen and his team climbed the 8,848-meter high Mount Everest, which sits partly within China’s borders. They succeeded in slicing off the peak of the mountain—an amount equal to Xu Zhen’s own height—and taking it down. His video 8.848-1.86 (2005) documents the expedition, which included displaying the removed 1.86 metres of the mountain’s peak in a large refrigerated vitrine cabinet (now in the collection of Tate Modern). The video, among other allusions, is a subtle and humorous commentary on China’s nationalism but also on the ‘measure’ and perception of the individual within the mass. At the time, the work caused huge outcry in China because many people thought it had really happened, whereas the entire performance was actually a calculated confection.

Rainbow
1998, 3:50 min

Xu Zhen started out making videos that focused on the body and public space in a manner reminiscent of early Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci: the video Rainbow (1998) depicts the gradual change in color of an anonymous subject’s back. Using arhythmic shots and ominous slap sounds, the viewer never actually observes the assaults but waits to see the next inevitable blow. Rainbow was first exhibited at the 49. Venice Biennale 2001.

THE BOOK LAUNCH AT ART BASEL HONG KONG

 

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PICTURES FROM THE TALK
(photos by Marina Belikova)

 
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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #4

Instant Poetry:
Semantics and Politics Expression of Mariana Vassileva

MARIANA VASSILEVA in dialogue with LIU XUJUN

23 AUGUST 2014

13:00 at MOMENTUM Berlin

Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany

&

19:00 at Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai

Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #4 takes place simultaneously via live-stream between Shanghai and Berlin.

The discussion will be accompanied by the screening of Mariana Vassileva’s Morning Mood (2010), and the newest addition to the MOMENTUM Collection, Vassileva’s The Color of the Wind (2014).

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.

As her artist’s statement asserts, she “transforms objects, situations and manners, and presents them in another reference on a lyrical level. … In this process, one is animated toward a heightened sensibility of daily variations.”

Liu Xujun is a cultural critic and feature editor of ‘Art World’, mainly focussing on poetry, literature and film reviews and with a specific interest in the theories of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and in semiology.

Interpreter: Jinwen, Associate Professor of the School of Foreign Languages at Fudan University.

Mariana Vassileva in dialogue with Isabel de Sena:

Mariana Vassileva screening and response by Liu Xujun:

 
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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #3

Exploration and Hybridization:
Thomas Eller’s Experience and Practice of Embodiment

THOMAS ELLER in dialogue with HU JIEMING

19 JULY 2014

13:00 at MOMENTUM Berlin

Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany

&

19:00 at Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai

Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #3 takes place simultaneously via live-stream between the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai and MOMENTUM,Berlin. Bringing together the two groundbreaking artists Hu Jieming and Thomas Eller, the discussion will be accompanied by the screening of Thomas Eller’s THE white male complex (endgames), and the newest addition to the MOMENTUM Collection, Thomas Eller’s The white male complex, #5 (lost), both premiered in 2014 at MOMENTUM and Chronus Art Center’s collaborative exhibition PANDAMONIUM: Media Art From Shanghai.

Thomas Eller (b. 1964) is a German visual artist, curator, and writer based in Berlin. In 2004 he founded the online magazine Artnet China, and in 2008 was the artistic director of the Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin. Thomas Eller is the curator of Die 8 der Wege, the exhibition of contemporary art from Beijing which took place in on Berlin 29 April – 13 July 2014.

Hu Jieming (b. 1957, Shanghai) is one of the foremost pioneers of digital media and visual installation art in China, and a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. Hu graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the Shanghai Light Industry College in 1984. Since the 1980s he has used emerging technologies to create works which deconstruct time, historical strata and contemporary elements of Chinese culture. One of his main focuses is the simultaneity of the old and the new: a theme that he constantly questions in a variety of media ranging from photography, video works and digital interactive technology in juxtaposition with musical comments. Through his work, Hu strives to reveal the interconnected nature of the digital universe, imagining, as he describes it, “a kind of socialism of the future”. Hu Jieming is one of the founders of CAC | Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, where he is currently exhibiting with renowned media artist, Jeffrey Shaw. Recent exhibitions of his work include a solo-show titled Spectacle at the K11 Art Mall, in Shanghai (2014) and two group exhibitions at ShanghART in Beijing, both in 2014.

Interpreter: Jinwen, Associate Professor of the School of Foreign Languages at Fudan University.

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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #2

Public and Private Space: Map Office’s radical urbanization experiment

Map Office in dialogue with Li Xiangning

29th JUNE 2016

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Live-streamed with Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai

MOMENTUM and Minsheng Art Museum invite artists Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix (Map Office) and Professor Li Xiangning for the second phase of Time_Art_Impact. During this event, Map Office’s Runscape (2010, 24min 18sec, MOMENTUM Collection) will be screened, followed by a discussion on the space-time abnormity, the relations and strains between individual and various environments, and how humans subvert or adjust space. The soundtrack by Roller Control, a Hong Kong rock band, adds more violent aesthetics to the video, which make it possible for the audience to experience how this work defines and applies public space in a both visual and auditory way.

MAP OFFICE is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (b. Casablanca, 1966) and Valérie Portefaix (b. Saint-Etienne, 1969). This duo of artists/architects has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression that includes drawing, photographs, 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. Their projects have been included in major international art and architecture events, including: the 7th, 11th and 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2000, 2008, 2010), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), the 10th Istanbul Biennale (2007), the 15th Sydney Biennale (2006), and the 52nd Venice Art Biennale (2007).

Laurent Gutierrez is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design, where he leads the Environment and Interior Design discipline and the Master of Strategic Design as well as the Master in Urban Environments Design. He is also the co-director of SD SPACE LAB. Gutierrez is currently finishing a PhD on the “Processes of Modernization and Urbanization in China focusing on the Pearl River Delta region.”

Valérie Portefaix is the principal of MAP OFFICE. She received her Master of Architecture degree from the School of Architecture Paris-Belleville and a PhD in Urbanism from the Pierre Mendes University, France. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design.

Li Xiangning is Professor in history, theory and criticism at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, and guest editor of magazine Time Architecture. He is not only a young professor, but also an architecture scholar, architecture critic and curator. In recent years, he has been active in both academic and public circles and devotes himself to architecture design, both at home and abroad.

Interpreter: Ding Jun, Lecturer in the College of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Fudan University.

WATCH THE TALK:

 
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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #1

Mother of Performance Art:
Nezaket Ekici’s Worldwide Nomadic Performance

Nezaket Ekici In Dialogue With Dr. Lu Xinghua

25 MAY 2014

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

 
Videos, as an art impact, develop rapidly and influence all the other art forms. The existent and development of moving image has changed the history of art in 20 century. Therefore, communication between the East and the West in an open and modern manner is needed.

Time_Art_Impact Project is an academic exchange and corporation between Minsheng Art Museum and MOMENTUM. Artist Nezaket Ekici and professor Lu Xinghua are invited to Minsheng Art Museum as guests for the first talk, The Last Queen: Nezaket Ekici’s Worldwide Nomadic and Performance. Before the talk, there is a two-hour exhibition of Nezaket’s works, Veiling and Reviling and The Tube. With the exhibition and the talk, audience can understand the whole process and the art piece itself with their own emotion and intellectual, meanwhile, controversial topics and complex emotion behind art, which might be twisted and embellished, will be discussed.

Nezaket Ekici (Kirşehir, 1970) is a Turkish-born performance and video artist based in Germany, who holds a Master’s degree in Performance Art from the Marina Abramovic Institute. Through performances marked by a strong and crisp visual language, Ekici confronts culturally specific attributes of femininity, contesting their agency on the body. Diligently undergoing and/or withstanding the habits dictated by these objects, she questions the opposition between confinement and concealment, public and private, safety and repression. Through a practice largely grounded in durational performance and most distinctively in psycho-physical endurance and tenacity, Ekici’s work interconnects everyday elements to form a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk.
To read Artist Dossier click here: NEZAKET EKICI ARTIST DOSSIER

Lu Xinghua is Associate Professor in the department of Philosophy in Tongji University. He is an expert in French philosophy with a focus on political philosophy, aesthetics and art theory. He is proficient in English, French, and German, writing on art, politics and philosophy. Entering Chinese contemporary art circles in 2009, he has given numerous speeches at art galleries and museums, in addition to planning, organizing and participating in various contemporary art exhibitions and conferences.

Interpreter: Jin Wen, associate professor in the College of Foreign Languages and Literatures

WATCH THE TALK:

 
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TIME_ART_IMPACT

An Education Collaboration With

MINSHENG ART MUSEUM, Shanghai

25 May 2014 – June 2015

MONTHLY SCREENINGS & DIALOGUES
BETWEEN SHANGHAI AND MOMENTUM COLLECTION ARTISTS

Dialogue #1
with NEZAKET EKICI
Mother of Performance Art: Nezaket Ekici’s Worldwide Nomadic Performance
25 May 2014

Dialogue #2
with MAP OFFICE
Public and Private Space: Map Office’s radical urbanization experiment
29 June 2014

Dialogue #3
with THOMAS ELLER & HU JIEMING
Exploration and Hybridization: Thomas Eller’s Experience and Practice of Embodiment
19 July 2014

Dialogue #4
with MARIANA VASSILEVA
Instant Poetry: Semantics and Politics
Expression of Mariana Vassileva
23 August 2014

Dialogue #5
with HYE RIM LEE
Sex・Politics・Cross-Cultures:
Hye Rim Lee’s Video Images and
Multidimensional Exploration
12 October 2014

Dialogue #6
with JANET LAURENCE
Art・Science・Imagination・Memory
12 October 2014

Dialogue #7
with FIONA PARDINGTON & ZHANG HUI
Reconnection • Representation • Reflection
23 November 2014

Dialogue #8
with HANNU KARJALAINEN & HU SANG
Site • Body • Architecture
Mobilizing The Still Image
In Hannu Karjalainen’s Video Art
14 December 2014

Dialogue #9
with KATE MCMILLAN & WU GUANJUN
Un-forgetting History
The Liminal Spaces of (Dis)Appearance in Kate McMillan’s Paradise Falls
18 January 2015

Dialogue #10
with DOUG FISHBONE &
SHEN QILAN
The Contemporary JesterHumor,
satire and role-play in Doug Fishbone’s politics of mass-media representation
22 March 2015

Dialogue #11
with ZUZANNA JANIN &
LIN YU
Zuzanna Janin’s Poetics of Combat:
Beyond Victory and Defeat
19 April 2015

Dialogue #12
with DAVID MEDALLA &
SHI HANDAO
Physical Ghosts and other Tales:
A Virtual Impromptu by David Medalla
17 May 2015

ABOUT MINSHENG ART MUSEUM

www.minshengart.com

ABOUT THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION

READ THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION CATALOGUE

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nezaket Ekici (Kirşehir, 1970) is a Turkish-born performance and video artist based in Germany, who holds a Master’s degree in Performance Art from the Marina Abramovic Institute. Through performances marked by a strong and crisp visual language, Ekici confronts culturally specific attributes of femininity, contesting their agency on the body. Diligently undergoing and/or withstanding the habits dictated by these objects, she questions the opposition between confinement and concealment, public and private, safety and repression. Through a practice largely grounded in durational performance and most distinctively in psycho-physical endurance and tenacity, Ekici’s work interconnects everyday elements to form a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk.
 

Thomas Eller (b. 1964) is a German visual artist, curator, and writer based in Berlin. In 2004 he founded the online magazine Artnet China, and in 2008 was the artistic director of the Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin. Thomas Eller is the curator of Die 8 der Wege, the exhibition of contemporary art from Beijing which took place in on Berlin 29 April – 13 July 2014.
 

Doug Fishbone (New York, 1969) is an American artist based in London. He was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004 and has been heralded as one of the art world’s ‘Future Greats’ by Art Review. His practice is characterized by a critical and often humorous examination of consumer culture, mass media and the politics of representation. Synching found imagery from the Google Image search-engine to his tantalizing monologues, Fishbone plays on the pervasive gullibility and misplaced good faith of the media-consuming masses.
 

Zuzanna Janin (Warsaw, 1961) is a visual artist and former teen actor from Poland, currently based in Warsaw. Her practice encompasses a variety of media, including sculpture, video, installation, photography and performance. Janin works in a quasi-autobiographical, non-narrative mode in which she creates intricately montaged videos juxtaposing personal footage and fragments from the history of cult cinema. The stratified imagery of her high-paced films is acutely demanding of the viewer and manifests the complex nature of identity-formation as a both contrived and contriving process.
 

Hannu Karjalainen (Haapavesi, 1978) is a Finnish-born, artist based in Helsinki, who graduated from the Department of Photography at the University of Industrial Arts Helsinki and The Helsinki School in 2005. Through video and sound installations, Karjalainen reflects on the contiguous nature of still imagery in photography and painting. Predominantly focused on the age-old genre of portraiture and the highly coded though elusive meaning of colours, his increasingly conceptual practice is marked by slight differences and repetitions, obliging the viewer to look with the utmost deliberation and develop an eye for details and traces of facture.
 

Janet Laurence (Sydney, 1947) is an Australian mixed-media and installation artist based in Sydney. Often creating site-specific work in collaboration with landscape architects and environmental scientists, the material textures of her subjects – always derived from nature – reflect the artist’s focus on the point of intersection between science and art. After working primarily in photography and installation, Laurence began an ongoing filmic study of animals both in the wild and in nature reserves. She has developed a filming technique in which she uses infrared night cameras – similar to those used by naturalists, as many animals are primarily active at night – in order to achieve a negative effect and distorted, ghostly coloration. Laurence is one of Australia’s most senior woman artists, with works in every major museum across the country.
 

Hye Rim Lee (Seoul, 1963) is a Korean artist based in New York and Auckland. Working predominantly with 3D animation and adopting the newest digital technologies of visualization, Hye Rim Lee’s animations invoke the slick and polished aesthetics of cyber-culture. Featuring heavily computerized cosmetic imagery such as perfume-flacons containing designer body-parts bobbing around in a swarm of gel-pearls, Hye Rim Lee’s animations invoke our tendency to love and emulate our digital avatars, though consistently abstaining from adopting a nostalgic or judgmental posture.
 

Map Office is a multidisciplinary platform initiated by Laurent Gutierrez (Casablanca, 1966) and Valérie Portefaix (Saint-Etienne, 1969), currently based in Hong Kong. Gutierrez is associate professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as well as co-leader of Urban Environments Design Lab. He is currently doing a PhD on the ‘Processes of Modernization and Urbanization in China focusing on the Pearl River Delta Region’. Portefaix is a visiting assistant professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Their “project forms a critique of spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space”. Grounded in a rigorous understanding of literary history and post-structuralist theory, Map Office seeks to undermine the controlling mechanisms of capitalism by structurally sabotaging its urban structures.
 

Kate McMillan (Hampshire, 1974) is an interdisciplinary Australian artist based in London and holding an Academic Post with Open University, Australia. She is a PhD candidate at Curtin University, wherein she examines the forgotten histories of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island. Having undertaken numerous residencies in Tokyo, Switzerland, Berlin, Sydney, China and Hong Kong, McMillan incorporates sculpture, photography, film, sound and painting to explore the complex relationship between memory and place. With phantasmal figures appearing and disappearing in haunting landscapes, her works act as mnemonic devices, conveying site-specific traces of forgotten histories.
 

David Medalla (Manila, 1942) is an interdisciplinary Filipino artist based in London, New York and Paris. Having begun his studies of drama and literature at Columbia University at the age of twelve, he went on to establish a prolific career, including the chairing, founding and directing of various art initiatives, including the London Biennale, an entirely artist-run initiative of meetings and events. Medalla has lectured widely in universities around the globe and has received numerous prizes, including those from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation of America. Ranging from sculpture, kinetic art, painting, installation and performance, Medalla’s pseudo-surrealist, conceptual work is a poetic consideration on how the relationship between man, nature and machine becomes manifest through migratory motifs.
 

Fiona Pardington (Devonport, 1961) is a photographer of Ngai Tahu, Kati Mamoe (Maori) and Scottish descent, based in Waiheke Island, New Zealand and holds a PhD from The University of Auckland. Her work is concerned with the history of photography, most notably in its genealogy within still-life painting and its application as a tool to create (colonialist) scientific imagery, which itself has strong stylistic ties to the still-life genre. Her photographs demonstrate a mastery of analogue darkroom technique, and she is known for her deeply toned black-and-white images resulting from specialist hand printing. She has received many fellowships, residencies, awards and grants, including the Ngai Tahu residency at Otago Polytechnic in 2006, Frances Hodgkins Fellow in both 1996 & 97, Visa Gold Art Award 1997, and the Moet & Chandon Fellow (France) in 1991-92.
 

Mariana Vassileva (Dobric, 1964) is a Bulgarian artist whose practice spans a variety of media, including video, sculpture, installation and drawing. Vassileva graduated from the Universität der Künste in 2000 and continues to live and work in Berlin. Based upon her observation of daily life and with the curious gaze of a voyeur or an urban anthropologist, she inspects people and their surroundings in order to capture the poetry that lies beneath the quotidian and the routine. 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.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Tracy Yu is senior assistant director of Minsheng Art Museum and in charge of art projects, business operations and media promotion. Born in 1983, she currently lives and works in Shanghai. She graduated at the College of Fine Arts, Shanghai University with a Master’s degree in Art History in 2008. In her work, she devotes herself with passion to arts and professional knowledge. She founded many public education projects, which have had great impact for the public, such as: Poetry Comes to the Museum, Minsheng Theatre and Kids Museum.

Dr. Rachel Rits-Volloch is a contemporary art curator specialized in time-based art, and is the founding-director of MOMENTUM. She is currently based in Berlin, having previously lived and worked in the US, the UK, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sydney. She graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Literature and holds an M.Phil. and PhD from the University of Cambridge in Film Studies. She wrote her dissertation on visceral spectatorship in contemporary cinema, focusing on the biological basis of embodiment. Having lectured in film studies and visual culture, her focus shifted to contemporary art after she undertook a residency at A.R.T Tokyo. After founding MOMENTUM in Sydney in 2010, it rapidly evolved into a global platform for time-based art, with headquarters in Berlin. Through MOMENTUM’s extensive program of exhibitions, education programs, video-art in public space initiatives, residencies and a growing collection of time-based art, she is dedicated to providing a platform for exceptional artists working with time-based practices.

MEDIA PARTNER

 
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PANEL DISCUSSIONS & SYMPOSIA

POINTS of RESISTANCE III:
PARADOXES OF FREEDOM
Birds & Bicycles Symposium
At Zionskirche, Berlin
9 November 2021

HOMELAND in TRANSIT
Video Talk with Angelika Li, Kongkee and Yukihiro Taguchi
At MOMENTUM Berlin
3 October 2020

MUTOPIA 5
Exhibition Tour with Claudia Chaseling
At the Australian Embassy Berlin
11 September 2020

ARTIST TALK
With Shaarbek Amankul
At MOMENTUM Berlin
9 February 2020

ENCOUNTERS IN VIDEO ART IN LATIN AMERICA
Curator’s Talk with Elena Shtromberg
At MOMENTUM Berlin
18 July 2019

FAKE NEWS AND SUPERFICTIONS
Artist Lecture by Peter Hill
At MOMENTUM Berlin
16 December 2018

BREAD & ROSES
Symposium
At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin
30 September 2018

STATION PARADOX Explained
Artist & Curator Talk
At MOMENTUM Berlin
28 January 2018

BEATING THE MEAT
Artist Talk with Conceptual Cooking
At MOMENTUM
13 July 2017

THE INTERMEDIAL MOMENT
Andi & Lance Olsen in conversation with Cécile Guédon
At MOMENTUM
28 May 2017

[UN]SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD
Masterclass: Artist & Curator Talks
At MOMENTUM Berlin
29 January 2017

HOW CULTURE BUILDS CITIES
Symposium
At MOMENTUM Berlin
10 December 2016

LOVE, ACTUALLY…TALKS, ACTUALLY…
Artist & Curator Talks
At MOMENTUM
26 November 2016

HERO MOTHER
Symposium
At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin
12 June 2016

MIGRATING ARTISTS
HOW DOES IT IMPACT THEIR PRACTICE?
Artist Talk with Ma Li & Elana Katz
At MOMENTUM Berlin
29 February 2016

BALAGAN!!!
Symposium
At Hamburger Bahnhof
Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
16 December 2015

GERALDINE ONDRIZEK
Open Studio & Artist Talk
At Reinickendorfer Strasse 15, 13347 Berlin
29 November 2015

BALAGAN!!!
Lecture by David Elliott
At Brandenburger Tor Stiftung
22 November 2015

BALAGAN!!!
Lecture Series: Trickster Art
At ICI Institut for Cultural Inquiry Berlin
19 & 26 November 2015

FRAGMENTS OF EMPIRES
Symposium
At .CHB Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
8 November 2014

FORM AS BEING
Finissage Weekend
Omar Chowdury in dialogue
with Mark Gisbourne
4 October 2014

A PRESENTATION OF
XU ZHEN: THE CATALOG
In Dialogue with Chris Moore and David Elliott
At .CHB Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
21 September 2014

PANDAMONIUM SYMPOSIUM
China Through The Looking Glass:
Shanghai – What’s Next?
At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin
1 June 2014

PANDAMONIUM SYMPOSIUM
China Through The Looking Glass:
Shanghai Meets Beijing
At .CHB Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
4 May 2014

INTERSECTION
Panel Discussion for Cinema Total
At .CHB Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
10 February 2014

TRAJECTORIES
Artist Talk with MAP Office
At Chronus Art Center, Shanghai
1 March 2014

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES
Lecture by David Elliott
At Chronus Art Center, Shanghai
24 January 2014

CURATING PERFORMANCE ART
Where does theatre end and art begin?
At .CHB Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
22 September 2013

HOW TO COLLECT
AND EXHIBIT VIDEO ART
At .CHB Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
28 April 2013

DINNER BEHIND THE SCREEN
16 September 2012

MOMENTUM in discussion with Thomas Eller
At the Berlinische Galerie
12 September 2012

MOMENTUM ⎪ SYDNEY
Collectors Panel
13 May 2010

MOMENTUM ⎪ SYDNEY
Molecular Art Discussion
13 May 2010

MOMENTUM ⎪ SYDNEY
China Focus Panel
13 May 2010

MOMENTUM ⎪ SYDNEY
Re-imagining Panel
12 May 2010

MOMENTUM ⎪ SYDNEY
Moving Forward Panel
12 May 2010

 
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EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM
 
Click on the icons below to access our archive of Kunst Salons, Symposiums & Panel Discussions, and Artist Talks:
 

Education and discussion are a key aspect of MOMENTUM’s programming. Each Exhibition and Artist Residency at MOMENTUM is accompanied by a discursive program of Artist Talks, Symposia, Panel Discussions, Workshops or Kunst Salon events, which bring selected art professionals together with the general public to discuss the show and its broader implications. Time-Art-Impact Dialogues was a year-long program at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China, featuring artists from the MOMENTUM Collection. All discursive programming is documented on video and, along with the MOMENTUM Collection and Performance Archive, are archived and made available on our website and social media as an educational resource. MOMENTUM is committed to creating an educational exchange between the general public, cultural institutions, and the international art community by actively developing programming which shares its educational resources with the public in Berlin and beyond.

 
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DINNER BEHIND THE SCREEN

Dinner Behind the Screen is part of our Public Art Initiative, SKY SCREEN, bringing international museum quality video art to the streets and skyline of Berlin and beyond.

To announce MOMENTUM’s collaboration with the Streaming Museum and our plans to take SKY SCREEN global to 11 cities in 11 countries in 11 months, we launch our Dinner Behind the Screen series in partnership with USLU Airlines, our host for SKY SCREEN Berlin.

Dinner Behind the Screen brings together artists, art press, curators, and other art professionals for a unique view behind the screen explaining our program and creating new opportunities for SKY SCREEN.

This event took place in context of the MOMENTUM_InsideOut SKY SCREEN program: Running The Cities.

RUNNING THE CITIES

13 SEPTEMBER – 31 OCTOBER 2012

ZUZANNA JANIN – Pas de Deux (2001), The Fight (2001)

MAP OFFICE – Runscape Hong Kong (2010)

MARISA MAZA – Training Sculpture #1-4 (2008)

The current SKY SCREEN program coincides both with Berlin Art Week and the Berlin Marathon. Art Week brings the city alive in a mad rush from opening to opening, everyone running from gallery to museum to art fair, while the Marathon brings the city out to the streets to watch bodies in motion, in admiration of the endurance of the human body. In tribute to both these events, we curate a program of video art focusing on the body going beyond the limits of the everyday, pushing beyond its normal boundaries to transform athletics into a lyrical dance of motion. The body moves in space and time, it transforms its surroundings and is transformed by them.
 
 

 

ZUZANNA JANIN
Pas de Deux, 2001
Fight (ILOVEYOUTOO), 2001

ARTIST BIO/CV

 

Boxing involves direct physical confrontation – no complications, no excuses, no words. Mano a mano, here and now – boxing is combat in the abstract, stripped down to its bare essentials. This sublime distillate of combat is neutral and graciously embraces every projection. In The Champion boxing was a metaphor of the ruthless drive to succeed where each knocked-down opponent brings the hero closer to his goal : a glance into the dark side of the American Dream. Its flip-side was Rocky – by slugging away at slabs of meat in a slaughterhouse freezer its hero showed how determination, blood sweat and tears, and self-confidence can move mountains. As heavyweight Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Robert de Niro exposed the weakness latent within strength – if life is a struggle it always ends in defeat, because time is mercilessly working against the fighters. When the American Dadaist Arthur Cravan challenged the professional boxing champion of the time to an uneven contest, he was actually throwing down the gauntlet before the bloodless art of salons. Joseph Beuys also stepped into the ring, at documenta V in Kassel, donning gloves on behalf of direct democracy – using his fists to prove that socially committed art was not an aesthetic concept but a real-life struggle taken up by artists wanting to change the world….

In Zuzanna’s work, a woman and a man, the artist and professional boxer, are pitted against each other in identical white costumes and red training gloves. Their identical uniforms seem to suggest that both are on the same team. Zuzanna, a featherweight it would appear, is cast against a professional heavyweight boxer. The actual disproportion of strength does not matter: we are operating in arbitrary media space. A boxing champion is a TV celebrity, a semi-fictional character for most of us. Zuzanna likewise assumes the stance of a media heroine. Xena the Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lara Croft – pistol-packing daredevil, Trinity – Matrix martial-arts mistress, cybercop Motoko and other Grrrls have gotten us used to the idea that women in the pop culture know how to stand up for themselves. Size and weight are irrelevant – everyone’s a fighter here….

(Excerpts from text by Stach Szabłowski. Read complete text: click here.)

 

MAP OFFICE
Runscape Hong Kong, 2010

ARTIST BIO/CV

 
The City is growing Inside of us…
Runscape is a poetic act of resistance
Runscape is a politic act of defiance
of the urban authority
with its surveillance and restrictions on movement.
(Excerpt from film narration.)

RUNSCAPE (2010) is a film that depicts several young male figures sprinting through 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 and 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. In this action, invisible facades are constructed across a grid that spans the area between the codified signs of polished facades, an open-ended and performative notion of being-in-transit. (Robin Peckham)

For additional text by Melissa Lam: click here.

 

MARISA MAZA
Training Sculpture #1-4, 2008

ARTIST BIO/CV

 

Training Sculpture consists of four separate videos (two minutes each) that deal with the relationship between space and the body, in the context of sports. The first two videos, (gymnastics and diving), demonstrate how the space of a training hall is defined by the movements of the athletes’ bodies: Space is treated here as being static, like a “visual sculpture”. In videos (tennis & basketball), in contrast, the distance between the observer and the athletes’ bodies becomes dissolved: The camera is focusing closely on the athletes’ bodies that are moving in an out of the picture, the importance and presence of the surrounding space are lost. Soundtracks are composed by jayrope, Berlin, with original sound from Marisa Maza.

IMAGE GALLERY: FILMING RUNSCAPE BERLIN