GOSSIP GOSSIP GOSSIP Act 7: Damp Footnotes

26 & 27 November 2022 Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch

Through Silvia Federici's essay "On the Meaning of Gossip,” we now know that the word gossip originally stood for a close friend, not idle talk. Based on Federici's definition Damp Footnotes evolved out of the idea that one can remember, or at least picture, a good friend's toes.

At Kunstbrücke Wildenbruch, a former public toilet under a bridge, small groups will be led through 22-minute long performances –the length of a Friends episode–, exploring how friends infect, affect, and shape one another through the porous intimacy of friendship. This work is an ode to the way friends can bring us back to earth and ground us in the moment, allowing for at least short episodes of non-quantifiable coexistence and fluid streams of consciousness, free from the incessant ramblings of our "rational" minds.

Damp Footnotes materializes through and with friends; writer Victoria Camblin creates a text for the space, while Jessica Gadani, Leah Katz, and Rosalind Masson embody and create the work through performance.

Damp Footnotes is the last of five parts of the series The Devil's Radio, funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and co-conceived by Anja Lückenkemper and Sandra Teitge. This event has been additionally supported by Senate Department for Culture and Europe and Fund for Exhibition Fees for Visual Artists.

Documentation: Victoria Tomaschko

Women's History Museum The Massive Disposal of Experience

14 Sep – 5 Nov 2022 CCA Berlin

“I sell clothing for a living. I put up a backdrop and get into character. Will you buy my stuff? It is vintage and rare after all.”

Experience, the protagonist in Women History Museum’s latest film, The Massive Disposal of Experience, poses for the invisible camera in an array of outfits and in front of blown up, rotating  Psychology Today magazine covers.Viewers can  hear the old-fashioned clicking sound of the camera apparatus while Experience continues changing outfits – a seemingly aimless activity.

“Welcome. Thank you for browsing. Thank you so much for your support.”

A few minutes later, Experience is seen wandering around the streets of New York City, again in a new outfit. With new ones appearing at the onset of almost each scene, the outfits themselves emerge as the real stars of the video. Everything and everyone revolves around them.

***

CCA Berlin is excited to present the first solo exhibition of the New York-based duo Women’s History Museum in Germany. Their new two-channel film The Massive Disposal of Experience will be screened alongside costumes worn by the film’s protagonist, displayed on mannequins next to shopping bags and seats that resemble magazine stacks. Together, they set a scene evocative of abandoned retail spaces and malls extending the film set into the exhibition space. Women’s History Museum works with recycled materials, vintage clothing, and discarded textiles. The artist duo is interested in the untapped potential for subversion inherent in fashion, as well as its historical importance as an often dismissed site of mostly feminine consumption and creativity. For Women’s History Museum, fashion’s possible intersections and opportunities for critical engagement and feminist resistance informs their artistic enquiries. Their treatment of clothes involves collage, manipulation, and pastiche, echoing pivotal female art practices all the while marking a distinct authorship on each fashioned garment. At the same time, their work denounces the just-in-time logistics, wasteful overproduction, and labor exploitation symptomatic of the conventional fashion industry, but also that of the global art circuit. Alongside their artistic practice, Women’s History Museum runs an online vintage shop, giving fans and followers the opportunity to access otherwise unattainable designer items – a gesture that blurs and confuses established class divisions and attitudes. Sometimes, vintage clothes sales occur during an exhibition. At other times, the clothes-on-show are activated through performative fashion shows. The duo thus succeeds in engaging not only their immediate community and social network, but also broader publics. In Berlin, Women’s History Museum will engage with art and fashion students, fellow practitioners, as well as designers and editors so as to situate and expand on their practice.

Thank you to Company Gallery for the support.

CCA Berlin presents the second iteration of its musical evening series Four Seasons in collaboration with the Zwölf-Apostel-Kirche (Twelve Apostles Church) on Kurfürstenstraße, featuring live sets by Stine Janvin* as well as Billy Bultheel with Max Murray and Weston Olencki.

Vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her voice in relation to visual elements such as costume and lighting, as well as audio spatialization and the ways in which this can be used to channel physicality of sound, tangibility and trigger sensory response. Often inspired by electronic music genres, folk music and pop culture, Janvin creates audio visual works and live performances for a variety of spaces such as theaters, clubs and art galleries, and more recently websites and digital platforms. Since spring 2021 she has been touring with her latest live project Echoic Choir, co-created with choreographer Ula Sickle, which premiered at Wiener Festwochen and was recently presented at MACBA Barcelona, Mattatoio in Rome, Venice Biennial opening week and MUNCH in Oslo. Janvin has recently presented works at Performa Telethon, New York; Issue Project Room, NYC; Rokolectiv, Bucharest; Kunsthall Stavanger and MUNCH, Oslo; and Chords for Calling presented by Deutschlandradio Kultur and Berliner Künstlerprogramm. In autumn 2022 she will release a new book in collaboration with artist Cory Arcangel on the Brooklyn based publisher Primary Information. At the Twelve-Apostles-Church, Janvin will play a new piece for voice, Pop Coloratura, featuring echo and synth samples and paying homage to some of Janvin’s favorite pop songstresses.

CCA Berlin presents the second iteration of its musical evening series Four Seasons in collaboration with the Zwölf-Apostel-Kirche (Twelve Apostles Church) featuring live sets by Stine Janvin as well as Billy Bultheel with Max Murray and Weston Olencki.

Billy Bultheel is a composer and performance-maker based in Berlin and Brussels. Coming from a classical conservatory background and academic studies in the performing arts, Bultheel has developed musical performances that unfold spatially. He practices an extended notion of composition which includes performance, architecture and narrative as musical parameters next to harmony rhythm and timbre. His practice combines heavy electronics with medieval, baroque polyphony and performance. Bultheel has released on the record labels PAN and C-A-N-V-A-S. At the Twelve-Apostles-Church, Bultheel will present Shadow Tracks, a collection of compositions from 2021 written for brass quartet at the Ancient Amphitheatre of Epidaurus for the Satire Ichneutai (Trackers) by Sophocles. Here, rewritten for tuba, euphonium, organ and electronics adapted to the resonance of the Twelve-Apostles-Church in Schoneberg. The compositions intend to give an impression of the first music ever heard by Apollo, played by Hermes on his lyre, who is hiding underground. Dumbfounded and unable to grasp the idea of music, Apollo finds himself, ear against the surface of the earth, paralyzed. Musicians: Max Murray (Tuba), Weston Olencki (Euphonium), Billy Bultheel (Organ and Electronics)

Four Seasons 2 Stine Janvin ​Billy Bultheel

15 September 2022

Zwölf-Apostel-Kirche An der Apostelkirche 1 10783 Berlin On the occasion of Berlin Art Week, CCA Berlin is organizing the second iteration of its musical evening series Four Seasons with the Zwölf-Apostel-Kirche (Twelve Apostles Church) on Kurfürstenstraße, featuring live sets by Stine Janvin* as well as Billy Bultheel with Max Murray and Weston Olencki.

Vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin (NO) works with the extensive flexibility of her voice in relation to visual elements such as costume and lighting, as well as audio spatialization and the ways in which this can be used to channel physicality of sound, tangibility and trigger sensory response. Often inspired by electronic music genres, folk music and pop culture, Janvin creates audio visual works and live performances for a variety of spaces such as theaters, clubs and art galleries, and more recently websites and digital platforms. Since spring 2021 she has been touring with her latest live project Echoic Choir, co-created with choreographer Ula Sickle, which premiered at Wiener Festwochen and was recently presented at MACBA Barcelona, Mattatoio in Rome, Venice Biennial opening week and MUNCH in Oslo. Janvin has recently presented works at Performa Telethon, New York; Issue Project Room, NYC; Rokolectiv, Bucharest; Kunsthall Stavanger and MUNCH, Oslo; and Chords for Calling presented by Deutschlandradio Kultur and Berliner Künstlerprogramm. In autumn 2022 she will release a new book in collaboration with artist Cory Arcangel on the Brooklyn based publisher Primary Information. At the Twelve-Apostles-Church, Janvin will play a new piece for voice, Pop Coloratura, featuring echo and synth samples and paying homage to some of Janvin’s favorite pop songstresses. Billy Bultheel is a composer and performance-maker based in Berlin and Brussels. Coming from a classical conservatory background and academic studies in the performing arts, Bultheel has developed musical performances that unfold spatially. He practices an extended notion of composition which includes performance, architecture and narrative as musical parameters next to harmony rhythm and timbre. His practice combines heavy electronics with medieval, baroque polyphony and performance. Bultheel has released on the record labels PAN and C-A-N-V-A-S. At the Twelve-Apostles-Church, Bultheel will present Shadow Tracks, a collection of compositions from 2021 written for brass quartet at the Ancient Amphitheatre of Epidaurus for the Satire Ichneutai (Trackers) by Sophocles. Here, rewritten for tuba, euphonium, organ and electronics adapted to the resonance of the Twelve-Apostles-Church in Schoneberg. The compositions intend to give an impression of the first music ever heard by Apollo, played by Hermes on his lyre, who is hiding underground. Dumbfounded and unable to grasp the idea of music, Apollo finds himself, ear against the surface of the earth, paralyzed. Musicians: Max Murray (Tuba), Weston Olencki (Euphonium), Billy Bultheel (Organ and Electronics) *Stine Janvin’s contribution is supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Berlin.

CCA Berlin

GOSSIP GOSSIP GOSSIP Act 6: Stories, Bodies, and Ecstasis

27. & 28.08.2022 at ZK/U Container

Stories, Bodies, and Ecstasis is the starting point for Zuzanna Czebatul, FRZNTE, Mazlum Nergiz, Cemile Sahin and Leyla Yenirce to create a multi-voiced literary, musical, installative and performative storytelling about kinship, gender-based power structures, solidarity and gossip. Stories, Bodies, and Ecstasis takes up this understanding and considers gossip as a queer and feminist (counter-) strategy to an existing norm that feeds on multivocality and generates solidarity through (temporary) group formation.

Stories, Bodies, and Ecstasis is the fourth of five parts of the series The Devil's Radio, funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and co-conceived by Anja Lückenkemper and Sandra Teitge..

Documentation: Victoria Tomaschko

GOSSIP GOSSIP GOSSIP Act 5: Meditations, Sounds, and Devotions

20 & 21 August 2022 silent green

Meditations, Sounds, and Devotions is a performative weekend that rehearses an altered understanding of gossip – as the empowering experience of a (temporary) group. Silvia Federici once located the origins of the word gossip as meaning "the spiritual association with 'kin'" and describes how close communities of women have traditionally been a source of strength for the individual and the group.

With contributions by Moriah Evans, Agnese Menguzzato, and Zora Mann, Meditations, Sounds, and Devotions invites the public to listen, meditate, and observe together in order to experience gossip as a personal yet collective exercise that produces not only trust but shared knowledges, stories, and history(s).

Meditations, Sounds, and Devotions is the third of five parts of the series The Devil's Radio, funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and co-conceived by Anja Lückenkemper and Sandra Teitge.

Documentation: Victoria Tomaschko

Fedir Tetyanych Everywhere Is My Endless Body

9 Jul y –  3 Sep 2022 CCA Berlin

CCA Berlin, in collaboration with artist Nikita Kadan and Working Room*, presents a selection of works from the estate of Ukrainian avant-garde artist and philosopher Fedir Tetyanych (1942-2007) within a multi-layered display of prints, drawings, and objects. Concurrently, 17 works by young Ukrainian artists produced in the context of the Working Room residency will be exhibited at A:D: Curatorial.

Fedir Tetyanych was born in 1942 in the Kyiv region. From 1961 until 1966, he studied at the Kiev Art Institute, and quickly became a monumental artist. He carried out state orders to design public spaces—institute lobbies, factory checkpoints, facades of educational institutions, public transport stops—in the USSR and its political predecessor, the RSFSR. In the 1970s, he began to develop the doctrine of "Fripulia-infinity," an open system in which clothing could be an extension of the human body, houses an extension of clothing, and spaceships an extension of houses under constant transformation. The earth and everything that grows out of it in this system are a continuation of the soil that covers the artist's canvas, and the planets are depicted as the organs of his own body. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, elements of this system built up to the biotechnosphere; the recycling of all possible used materials, the reorganization of industrial production as a public spectacle (the idea of ​​a "theater factory"), and street actions in costume. In the late 1980s experimental works of the artist began to be publicly exhibited. In the 1990s and 2000s, he often appeared as a performer during the performances of independent alternative music groups, becoming a cult figure for a new generation of artists and musicians. 

Co-organized with A:D: Curatorial in collaboration with Nikita Kadan and Working Room to support contemporary artistic practices in Ukraine and protect Ukrainian cultural heritage. In cooperation with the Goethe-Institut. The Goethe-Institut's Ukraine Project Fund is part of a comprehensive package of measures for which the Federal Foreign Office is providing funds from the 2022 supplementary budget to mitigate the consequences of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Supported by the initiative Museums for Ukraine.

GOSSIP GOSSIP GOSSIP Act 4: Witches, Rituals, and Healing

18 June 2022 Floating University

Silvia Federici locates the origins of the word gossip as meaning "the spiritual association with 'kin'" and describes how close communities of women have traditionally been a source of strength. The pejorative understanding of gossip is a strategy that accompanied and contributed to the deterioration of women's social status: Already in the 16th century, the accusation of being a gossip (read: a witch!) became a reason for the persecution and punishment of women. At that time, gossip went from being a word of friendship and affection to a word of denigration and ridicule. How can we return gossip to its roots today or use it as a strategy to transform exclusion into community, alliance and friendship?

The works of COVEN BERLIN, Zoë Claire Miller, and Lauryn Youden, feed off an understanding of gossip as the solidarity that implies and generates (female) friendship. gossip is here an (ancient) form of female knowledge production. The multi-part performative evening Witches, Rituals, and Healing explores gossip as a shared ritual. All events are accessible for wheelchair users.

Witches, Rituals, and Healing is the second of five parts of the series The Devil's Radio, funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and co-conceived by Anja Lückenkemper and Sandra Teitge. Documentation: Daniel Seiffert

Steffani Jemison & Justin Hicks (Mikrokosmos) Another time, this time, one time 24 Jun – 2 Jul 2022

CCA Berlin  – Center for Contemporary Arts

Formed in 2016 as the collaborative platform of composer Justin Hicks and artist Steffani Jemison, Mikrokosmos mines the history of Black music. This ongoing project has manifested in many forms: workshop, study session, concert, listening session, book, prompt, score. The exhibition at CCA Berlin presents two related compositions inspired by Gil Scott-Heron’s  ambitious songbook. Another time, this time, one time (Aaliyah, Barbara, Brandy, Chaka, David, Erykah, Gil, Lionel, Loleatta, Mariah, Marvin, Stevie) tracks a small group of melismatic* gestures across bodies and time; it is a search for the "mother run." Another time, this time, one time, the first Mikrokosmos LP, uses Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s “We Almost Lost Detroit�� (1977) as the raw material for R&B songwriting. Like a game in which new words are formed from existing letters, these live compositions and recompositions take the form of musical studies, samples, and improvisations. Jemison and Hicks reflect upon a wide range of subjects, including Scott-Heron’s biography, police violence in the United States, and the nuclear catastrophe that threatened the city of Detroit in 1966. *Melisma (Greek: lit. 'song'; from melos, 'song, melody') is the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession. Music sung in this style is referred to as melismatic. An informal term for melisma is a vocal run.

Justin Hicks is a multidisciplinary artist and performer who uses music and sound to investigate themes of presence, identity, and value. His work has been featured at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Performance Space New York, The Public Theater, JACK, National Black Theatre, The Bushwick Starr, MoMA, Dixon Place, festival Steirischer Herbst (Graz, Austria), Western Front Society (Vancouver, BC), MASS MoCA, The Whitney Museum of American Art,  Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, UK), The Albertinum - SKD (Dresden, DE),  The Highline, and The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts among others. Hicks has collaborated with notable visual artists, musicians, and theater-makers including Abigail DeVille, Charlotte Brathwaite, Kaneza Schaal, Meshell Ndegeocello, Cauleen Smith, Helga Davis, and Ayesha Jordan. He was the Drama Desk-nominated composer for Mlima’s Tale by Lynn Nottage (The Public Theater 2018 dir. Jo Bonney). His practice with artist Steffani Jemison, Mikrokosmos, has deployed commissioned performances and exhibitions internationally.  Hicks was a member of Kara Walker’s 6-8 Months Space and holds a culinary diploma from ICE in New York City.  He was born in Cincinnati, OH, and is based in the Bronx, NY.

Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at JOAN Los Angeles (2022), Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati (2021), the Everson Museum (2021), the Stedelijk Museum (2019), Nottingham Contemporary (2018), Jeu de Paume and CAPC Bordeaux (both 2017), MoMA, New York (2015), RISD Museum, Providence (2015), and LAXART, Los Angeles (2013) among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the Guggenheim Museum (2021), the Whitney Biennial, New York (2019), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2019), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017). It is in numerous public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, and others. Jemison currently lives and works in Brooklyn and is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts.

*Steffani Jemison & Justin Hicks' ​Another time, this time, one time is part of CCA Berlin's Stirring Up Trouble, a program unfolding until the end of June, and which aims to host, restage, and think alongside four distinct artistic positions that foreground acts of listening and their manifold potentialities. Through their practices, invited artists engage listening as a method of witnessing unseeable formations of violence (Lawrence Abu Hamdan); an invitation to inhabit tropical geographies otherwise (Kent Chan); an everyday practice of place-making and communitarian belonging (Black Obsidian Sound System); and a regenerative archival portal into shared inheritances and histories of struggle (Steffani Jemison and Justin Hicks). By tuning in to organized sounds, accidental leaks, and enforced silences, they conceive modes of aesthetic experience that challenge common perceptions of artmaking, and trace roadmaps to resonant imaginaries. Stirring Up Trouble is generously supported by the foundation Between Bridges. Co-conceived with Edwin Nasr.

Four Seasons 1 (CCA Berlin) ​Benjamin Saurer, Frankie, and Kelman Duran

29 April 2022

12 Apostel Kirche An der Apostelkirche 1 10783 Berlin

Benjamin Saurer is a Berlin-based trained organist and visual artist. He practiced church music from 1997 to 2003 and received his MFA from Städelschule, Academy of Fine Arts Frankfurt am Main in 2008. In parallel to his painting practice, he writes music to accompany exhibitions of artist colleagues and regularly performs as an organist in similar frameworks. Most recently Saurer has composed and performed at Stadtgalerie Bern, Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthalle Basel, Portikus, and Kunstverein Oldenburg. At the Twelve Apostles Church, Saurer will play an excerpt of Die Fregatte/The frigate, a work by Thys/de Gruyter, 2008; The Elect, an ambient soundtrack for Yannic Joray’s exhibition of the same name at Stadtgalerie Bern, 2021; and Ich bin eine rufende Stimme [I am a Calling Voice], 2022, composition for organ.

Frankie is the solo music project of Franziska Aigner, consisting of a solo cello and vocal set combined with a hyper-emotional lyricism. Mostly working in choreography and performance, the past few years have continuously brought more and more music to her life. Aigner performed in and co-wrote the music to FAUST by Anne Imhof for the 2017 Venice Biennale, and joined the Holly Herndon vocal ensemble in 2019. She continues to work and perform with artists such as Anne Imhof, William Forsythe, and Austin Jack Lynch, and recently completed her PhD in philosophy. Frankie will perform songs from her newly-released EP, Styx, which can be purchased here.

Kelman Duran is a musician and artist born in La Ermita, in the countryside of the Dominican Republic, and raised in New York City. Prior to making music, he produced videos at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Through his music, Duran explores the legacy of the black rebellion during Haitian Revolution and today’s unbalanced racial climate, reinterpreting and propelling the parameters of Afro- rhythms like reggaeton and dancehall. His latest LP, Night In Tijuana, was released in 2021 on the label Scorpio Red, which he co-founded with artist Annie Mackinnon. Duran will close the evening with an ambient mix conceived for the occasion.

Co-conceived with Edwin Nasr.

GOSSIP GOSSIP GOSSIP Act 3: Fakes, Fictions and Forensics

27 – 29 May 2022 feldfünf

The term gossip evokes images of glossy magazines, schoolyard dramas, the chitchat of afternoon coffee dates with neighbors or amongst mothers. gossip has a bad reputation; not for nothing did George Harrison refer to gossip as „the devil‘s radio“. But gossip is also activism; it is an ancient tool of female knowledge production. And while therefore often political, gossip can also be fun, ferocious and seductive. Fakes, Fictions, and Forensics questions perceived normality(s) in this context and focuses on female identities – on the fakes and fictions, realities and perceptions that make it up. The works of Anna Ehrenstein, Nora Heinisch, Natalie Paneng, and Franziska Pierwoss develop a new understanding of gossip, to consider it not as “empty talk“ but as emancipatory reappropriation and cultural learning. As a powerful means of communicating information about rules of conduct, female (self-)presentation within the discourse around feminism and societal norms with subversive potential. In this reading, gossip strengthens bonds, shares knowledge and creates a multiplicity of female identities.

Fakes, Fictions, and Forensics is the first of five parts of the series The Devil’s Radio, funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and organized by Anja Lückenkemper und Sandra Teitge. Documentation: Victoria Tomaschko

Hanne Lippard The Myths and Realities of Achieving Financial Independence 19 March  –  16 April 2022

CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts

The Myths and Realities of Achieving Financial Independence (2013) is a sound installation by artist Hanne Lippard that playfully investigates the nondescript character of she in the well-known English tongue twister, “She sells seashells on the seashore…” By repeating it again and again, making mistakes, and diverting from the original text, Lippard attempts to approach herself to this mysterious she. Who is she? Why does she sell seashells – on the seashore? Throughout the narrative, reality blurs with fiction, shells turn into soaps, and heaven becomes a place “above sea level” whereas the protagonist’s pay is unfortunately “far beneath sea level”. In the end, she fossilizes into a seashell. Deploying a  mischievous and yet precise examination of language, its potentialities, and mysteries, Lippard turns the tongue-twister into an absurd and, sadly, realistic narrative for many shes. Ideas and dreams about financial independence evolve into a downward spiral of foreclosed options – and end in despair. The inspiration for this tongue-twister, which first was a song, is thought to be Englishwoman Mary Anning, a real seashell seller who also collected fossils and contributed important information about prehistoric life to the scientific community. Anning came from a working-class background and supported herself selling fossils to geologists and to tourists along the shore. Whereas it remains unclear what became of the semi-fictional folkloric figure of Anning, Lippard’s she ultimately ends up selling her seashell to the owner of the sea shore. As is typical in Lippard’s work, The Myths and Realities of Achieving Financial Independence critically employs language to make legible prevailing social and linguistic conditions and phenomena, never without an underlying spirit of feminist intervention. Supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Berlin.

gossip, fleeting moments, and performances 

29.11. – 26.12.2021 Vitrines at Ku’damm Berlin

Queerness, writes José Esteban Muñoz in Ephemera as Evidence, is often transmitted in secret: "Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances (...)." Appropriating the fleeting and implicating strategies of gossip allows those who are part of this sphere to interact with each other – while it evaporates when in contact with non-queer otherness. gossip, fleeting moments, and performances, act 2 of the research platform GOSSIP GOSSIP GOSSIP, places queer strategies in a series of video works in the public space along the commercialized Ku'damm – during the (shopping mad) pre-Christmas season –, and with them the "sousentendus, alienations, exaggerations, ironies, travesties" (Fichte) that characterize queer language. The artists Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Samantha Bohatsch, Anna Ehrenstein, Laure Prouvost, and Roseline Rannoch deal with gossip in up to 14 simultaneous vitrines that are otherwise reserved for advertising ��� expanded by a sonic activation in public space by Banu Çiçek Tülü and an audio tour by Flaneur Magazine. They all use the hidden and subversive strategies of gossip, which can be similar to the strategies of advertising, thus providing ephemeral evidence of affect, sexuality, and gender and interrupting the otherwise conventional and normative flow of advertising presented in the vitrines along Ku'damm. gossip, fleeting moments, and performances was part of the initiative DRAUSSENSTADT, funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Foundation for Cultural Education and Cultural Consulting. With the kind support of the Bureau des arts plastiques of the French Institute Germany and the French Culture Minister. Photo documentation: Victoria Tomaschko

Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners

– 3 billboards, 3 performative activationsSamantha Bohatsch, Pêdra Costa, Özlem Özgül Dündar

"Only gossip implies a certain degree of pleasure. Only gossip can have as a target people we love… and this gives gossip the possibility of becoming art. Not only gossip’s formal model or structure is suitable for artistic purposes; also the wide range of emotions that gossip is capable of embodying make of it an excellent artistic terrain."

(Ulises Carrión: Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, 1981)

For Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, artists Samantha Bohatsch, Pêdra Costa and Özlem Özgül Dündar explore Gossip as a queer strategy and tool of female knowledge production on three billboards and through three performative activations.

Calling something Gossip is a convenient way of ignoring less dominant voices, trivialising conversations or demands and maintaining the status quo of power relations and norms. But Gossip also carries productive potentials and is an effective means of conveying information and (temporarily) grouping peers to reflect on themselves and produce knowledge about their own history(s). By using artistic and subversive modi operandi of Gossip – 3 posters and 3 performative activations – the project Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners aims to show a joint counter-strategy characterised by diversity, fluidity and intersectionality. Exhibition dates 10 – 20 September 2021 at Görlitzer Park 3 billboards / entrance Skalitzer Straße Performative activation Sunday, 12 September, starting 3 pm at the former Pamukkale Fountain / Maps Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners is the first act of an exploration into Gossip by Anja Lückenkemper and Sandra Teitge. Act 2 will open at the end of October along the Ku'damm – stay tuned!

Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners was made possible by funding from Projektförderung Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain.

Wild Frictions

The Politics and Poetics of Interruption

June 26 – August 22, 2021

Wild Frictions: The Politics and Poetics of Interruption explores minor disruptions, surprising and unforeseen interventions, delays and repetitions and their potential to show alternative ways of existing and behaving. Rather than looking to heroic eloquent figures or stimulating united/ collective moments, this exhibition locates emancipation in subtle idiosyncratic forms of mischief-making, in the playful slippages or in the spaces in between sounds and syllables.

“…wildness as a provocation, a retreat from the conventional, an affront to the normal and the expected, and an environmental condition.” (Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire , 2020, p. 28)

The subversive artistic approaches/ actions/ acts simultaneously evoke feelings of alienation and loss of control, which in turn reflect anxieties and tensions associated with the pandemic and social uprisings of the past and this year – the personal gridlock, the numerous protests and repeated quarantines, as well as economic and social pauses. Through text, video, sound, installation, and performance, the artists of Wild Frictions employ strategies of interruption and blockage/ obstruction/ resistance to critique universal narratives, systems of oppression, and unconscious structural routines that characterize our everyday lives.

„Gesucht: die Lücke im Ablauf, das Andre in der Wiederkehr des Gleichen, das Stottern im sprachlosen Text, das Loch in der Ewigkeit, der vielleicht erlösende Fehler.“ (Heiner Müller, Shakespeare‘s Factory 1 , 1985, S. 13)

These disruptive artistic gestures may create discomfort or confusion, but simultaneously/ and therefore contain an immense potential: the ability to subvert and gently corrupt, to create cracks at the level of meaning and to open up new realities. Wild Frictions invites a poetic analysis and possible transgression of the boundaries that form universal modes of being, speaking and knowing today.

“When the facts change, I change my mind.” (Nora Turato, from the series “I’m on the verge of TOTAL VICTORY”, 2021)

Participating artists: Félicia Atkinson, Trisha Baga, Cameron Downey, Anna Ehrenstein, Nikita Gale, keyon gaskin, Birgit Hein, Steffani Jemison, Kahlil Joseph, Ani Kasten, Christine Sun Kim, Janette Laverrière, Ouecha, Laure Prouvost, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jimmy Robert, Pilvi Takala, Banu Çiçek Tülü, Nora Turato

Curators: Sandra Teitge and Amara Antilla Research and text editing: Linnéa Meiners, Jorinde Splettstößer Project management: Sofia Pfister Technical production: Kristoffer Holmelund Assistance: Dani Hasrouni, Markus Hemann Design: Louise Borinski

Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien is an institution of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg District Council. Director: Stéphane Bauer

–The project is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund and the Senate Department for Culture and Europe: the Fund for Municipal Galleries, and the Fund for Exhibition Payments for Visual Artists. –Wild Frictions is produced in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, where an iteration of the exhibition is on view April 9-September 19, 2021.

New Nature Vitrines is an exploration of all that lies - unknowably, irreverently, monstrously - beyond the human notion of “nature”. The series assembles audiovisual and sound works by contemporary artists, filmmakers, technologists, and scientists, foregrounding stories and scales that interrogate the inherent anthropocentrism of images, often by riffing on the codes and conventions of nature films, or subverting them altogether. The artists, based in Germany, Canada, Mexico, and the United States, propose intricate soundscapes, airborne and microscopic perspectives, images imprinted by lichen, dirt, fur, and bacteria. Their works excavate complex biological, interspecies, and computational systems, all in a constant state of becoming, flickering with realities beyond our consciousness and invoking idiosyncratic reinventions of our relationship to the natural world. The works are presented in the vitrines of exhibition spaces in three different Berlin neighborhoods – Berlin Weekly (November 16 – 22, 2020), feldfünf (November 23 – 29), and goeben berlin (November 30 – December 6) – as well as at the Goethe-Institut Montreal (November 16 until Dec 6, 2020) and Goethe-Institut New York (December 15, 2020 until January 8, 2021). 

Their placement in windows across the city diverts the restrictions of our COVID times to present decentralised and unexpected, emotional and visceral encounters with nature, springing forth from the quotidian facades of our cities. The public is able to watch the moving image works from outside all venues. Stereo sync audio is made accessible through the visitors’ smartphones. Please bring your own headphones!

Participating Artists: Lisa Jackson, Harun Farocki, Doireann O'Malley, Suzanne Kite, Lisa Rave, Florian Fischer + Johannes Krell, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Sasha Litvintseva + Beny Wagner, Ladan Siad + Aljumaine Gayle, Jenna Sutela, Emily Vey Duke + Cooper Battersby, and Joan JonasIn Berlin, selected works by Jenna Sutela are featured at feldfünf; Joan Jonas’ “Waltz” is presented separately to the works in the vitrines at goeben berlin.

The exhibitions will be framed by an (online) talk with curator Stefanie Hessler, artist Jenna Sutela, and scientist Markus J. Buehler on Sunday, December 6, 2020, 1pm (ET) and 6pm (Berlin). Together, Sutela, Buhler, and Hessler will discuss their respective work at the intersection of science, art, and technology. They will raise questions of how to sense the natural world and its intimacies with technology at a time when boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the material and the spiritual, are more fluid than ever.

Selected works by Jenna Sutela are featured at feldfünf; Joan Jonas’ “Waltz” is presented separately to the works in the vitrines at goeben berlin. New Nature Vitrines is a programme by the Goethe-Institut Montreal, curated by Samara Chadwick and Sandra Teitge, and produced by Retune.