CHRIS KORDA
Artist’s Con(tra)ception
25.5.–14.7.2024

Opening: Friday, 24.5., 6–9 pm, Speech at 7 pm

Holy Moly! Chris Korda is in the house. Outrageously, insufferably, unbelievably good. Back in 1992 she was haunted by a recurring dream in which an alien intelligence, known as “the Being”, claimed to speak for humanity from another dimension. It warned that our planet’s ecological system was on the verge of collapse. When Korda awoke from the dream, she found herself speaking the words “Save the Planet – Kill Yourself”.

Korda’s mission is based on the conviction that human beings are egocentric and destructive, and must be contained within their limits. With the exhortation, “Thank you for not breeding”, she appeals to our good will. I’m not going to pass on my DNA, I’m getting out of the gene pool. I’ve had it with anthropocentric hubris. Anyone who freely decides to end their life should be allowed to do so, for in so doing they are making a significant contribution. The option of having an abortion is a blessing. Sex is wonderful, as long as it never serves reproduction. Those who insist on eating meat should confine themselves to consuming their own species – killing other living beings is out of the question. The basic tenets of the Church of Euthanasia, which Reverend Korda founded in Boston with Pastor Kim in 1992, are enough to make many people’s hair stand on end. Even the name of the movement can make you wince. Its calls for the extermination of the human species are intemperate, strident and partly contradictory.

While there can be no glossing over the meaning of the church’s name, it is worth bearing in mind that the CoE is based on an anti-authoritarian ethos of non-violence.

Korda founded the CoE because a church is an institution better suited to reforming ethical norms than a political party. Several of its tactics are related to those of the Situationists and the Dadaists: Korda’s actions also aim at intervening in public situations, while her strategies are constantly changing in unexpected ways: she speaks in tongues that both are implacable and admit of contradictions. At the same time, her acts of provocation always remain playful.

By the early 1990s, Korda had already recognised that humanity’s destruction of the environment was irreversible. The issues she was raising then were well ahead of their time: they included calls to live a vegan lifestyle, to curb the limits of economic growth and to proclaim the diversity of all species.

However, Korda is not only a minister of a church. She is many things, foremost among them a musician. In the field of Techno, hers is considered one of the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising positions. She first achieved recognition in Europe in the late 1990s, when DJ Hell from Munich released her work on his label International Gigolo Records.

Read more.

Now available here:
Official Church of Euthanasia T-Shirt
ADAGIO FOR COLOR FIELDS Chris Korda, Publication by Goswell Road, Paris

The exhibition is supported by:

Amanda van Hesteren
If All This Was Fiction: Films 2016–2023

Film program in the cinema of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, curated by Nicholas Tammens

Opening: Friday, 12.4., 6 pm
6:30 pm Screening of films
7:30 pm Talk between Amanda van Hesteren and Nicholas Tammens
8:30 pm Repeated screening of films

Amanda van Hesteren – If All This Was Fiction: Films 2016–2023 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein is the first public presentation of films by Dutch film-maker Amanda van Hesteren (b. 1991, Amsterdam) in Germany. The program shows the development of van Hesteren’s methodology as a filmmaker over the past eight years through four film portraits focused on lovers, family, and friends.

Amanda van Hesteren began to make films at the age of 23, when she took a camera with her on holiday. “I took my camera because I wanted to find stories,” she says. “I knew that I would be able to go onto the street and find them”. In the eight years since, van Hesteren’s camera has come to substitute multiple perspectives: her own gaze, that of her subjects, and the gaze of a stand-in and outside witness.

Read more.

The film program is supported by:

Opening: Friday, 19.8.2022, 7 pm

In his first institutional solo exhibition Nervous System at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, José Montealegre continues his ongoing series of works from 2020 titled Páginas. The starting point for these sculptures is an extensive botanical archive of plant illustrations created in the course of the Spanish colonization of Mexico and published as Nova Plantarum Animalium et Mineralium Mexicanorum (1628). The archive saw the catalogization and re-systematization of hundreds of indigenous plants by the colonizers. In rich detail, Montealegre translates these botanical illustrations into copper sculptures and presents them on the second floor of the Kunstverein. In his artistic practice, which also includes writing, the artist tells stories that blur the line between origin and (mis)translation. Contrary to knowledge shaped by colonial powers, Montealegre allows marginalized perspectives to emerge thus challenging canonical history(ies).

The exhibition will be followed by the first publication of José Montealegre.


Methodologies I

One. Like a protagonist in a cartoon drawing entering the revolving snout of a concrete goosebump city like, for example, New York, my brass-buckled leather briefcase snaps unshut and all my papers fly away. Now I’m late. Now I’m poor. Now I have dreams. Now they fly away. 

Two. It is awfully obvious that any conversation about the methodologies of art begins and surely ends with life. Begins because it is the spring which taps the well. Ends because bloated goldfish are prey for hawks. 

Three. Document whirlwind. Papercut city. The nerve, the nerves, nervous nerve of steel. The page tornado scatters order and logic, thus rendering the business pitch to be delivered into an unintelligible levitation where bureaucracy has no grasp and the tendril tether fails to anchor root. A misfiring neuron is perhaps what you have. 

Four. Upon which I realize that what is sought cannot be accidental. The person who fails to hem the hole in their pocket is called a benefactor. 

Five. It is the spinning paper cyclone that so destroyed my life, the site of the worlds autolysis. Where the invisible is not only seen but transforms. The papers levitated are crumpled into orbs. They hold, hide, and corrupt information. It is to look down into the well and see the golden meniscus that refracts the light, it is the cast and wilting blossom that falls gently on the surface of the water and is blown about by the wind, it is the goldfish that swims clumsily if not in grace and the talon that breaks its peace and plunges into the water and takes that goldfish into another ecstatic world. 

Six. In May 2020 I downloaded a digital copy of the Nova Plantarum Animalium et Mineralium Mexicanorum (1628) from Biodiversitylibrary.org to a thumb drive. Then I took that thumb drive to a student printer. There I printed it in black and white on recycled paper. Leather bound front cover and all. The 1,104-page stack of documents has hundreds of drawings of plants and animals found in present day Mexico and Central America. Each drawing is accompanied by a Nahuatl name that has been scattered by the empires and a Latin name that has been reinterpreted by modern botany. Since printing this version of the ‘Nova Plantarum’ I have been going through the book almost every day. I look at the plants and sometimes, recognize them instantly. Other times it takes me months to realize that I have seen them in the past, but most remain unknown to me. When I google their name, nothing comes up. Familiar only through these drawings, I see faint possibilities in the landscape. When I feel like it and when I start to realize that I know them sculpturally, I make a sculpture of the drawing. So far, I have made around eighty plant sculptures. There are hundreds remaining. Every time I leaf through the black and white printer copy of this book I create a new order within it. The leather cover is now in the middle of the book with tons of scribbles and notations. Its order has become irrational and irrelevant. The page numbers jump by the hundreds. I have lost pages. I have crumpled them. I have stained them.


Text: José Montealegre


Methodologies II

One. Looking at
First look at the white walls, second look at the tiled floor. Looking around. Looking down. Get on your knees. Get closer. Discover. Repeat.

Two. Claiming
In 1517, during the Spanish colonization of the Americas, naturalist and physician Francisco Hernández de Toledo was sent to the first scientific and botanical expedition. The result of a seven-year expedition was an extensive botanical archive in the form of an illustrated manuscript with schematic drawings commissioned from Nahua painters. It was then stored in the Escorial Monastery, re-structured by the Italian medic Nardo Recchi, partly lost in a fire, and eventually published 100 years later under the title Nova Plantarum, Animalium, et Mineralium Mexicanorum historia in 1628.

Three. Knowing
Seeing, naming, knowing. The names of the plants in the book are both in Nahuatl and in Latin. Yet, since the references have been partially lost through appropriation, acquisition, and translation, attempts to find an equivalent in today’s botany are not always successful. As we walk through the city of Cologne, I see a strikingly dominant plant that has broken through the curb. “Didn’t you notice that paving stones in German cities are always in arches?”, he asked. Thinking through craft.

Four. Narrating
In 2013, I visited José Montealegre in his studio for the first time. He had just moved from Managua to Frankfurt am Main to start his studies at the Städelschule in the class of Willem de Rooij. I remember looking at, or rather observing, platforms of tiles on low pedestals on the floor displaying miniature jungle worlds in clay, at reliefs of tiny skeletons on the wall next to framed, seemingly historical book pages. It was with surprise when I found that those documents were fictional: digital prints on blank pages torn out of used books. Overwriting histories. Rewriting history. Reclaiming the narrative.

Five. Expanding
Montealegre’s works have the potential to extend beyond their edges. Like four rectangular cutouts of a larger environment, they seem to grow, to evolve, to reproduce. Outside, the mirroring surfaces of the plastic containers, used in Honduras to collect rainwater and hand wash clothes, reflect their surroundings. Stained-glass squares echo the influence of Catholic iconography and craft and the all-consuming European narrative. The Renaissance in Europe brought on not only the concept of perspective in art but also colonial expansion.

Six. Collapsing
What copper and nerves have in common is that they are both electrical transmitters. “Don’t trust me, I’m not telling you the truth”, he says. Trembling and shaking. Restructuring knowledge and power. Returning agency.


Text: Miriam Bettin

Curator: Miriam Bettin


José Montealegre (*1992 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras) lives and works in Berlin. He studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad Centroamericana de Managua, Nicaragua, and with Willem de Rooij at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Klosterruine in Berlin, Mountains in Berlin (both 2021), Convent Art Space in Ghent (2019), and in group exhibitions including Lantz’scher Skulpturenpark Lohausen in Düsseldorf (2021), Städelmuseum in Frankfurt am Main, Natalia Hug in Cologne (both 2019), Futura Gallery in Prague, Gillmeier Rech in Berlin (both 2018), and Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2017, 2014). Parallel to the solo exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, a group show curated by José Montealegre and Rebekka Seubert is on view at the Dortmunder Kunstverein (until 30.10.2022).

Supported by:

Opening: Friday, 19.8.2022, 7 pm


Hello … hello … woof woof woof!

My eyes are like watery ‘pools of love’, welling up, imminent to your arrival, as I stand here above you, waiting … woof woof! Looking down the stairs at you. … a coquettish mut.

“Heeeeello,” you say as you walk up the stairs, “Ooo you are a sweetie … what do you want us to do?”

And there is something in my gesture, implied in the half-turn of my body, in the appealing angle of my head, in the slight skewing of my stance, in the skilfully painted wetness of my nose, in the hand-tooled seduction of my curls and fur, even in the suggestion of a flirtatious smile playing at the corner of my jaw …

Woof woof!
Oh sly coercion!
Oh finely crafted insinuation!

And then, as I trot along beside you, your spirit animal, as we enter the main exhibition space, breathing in the perfume of pine and maybe the hint of sandlewood – cleaning fluid or maybe air-freshener. Woof woof woof! And the succulent shine underfoot of glassy concrete.

“O this is amazing!” you exclaim, as the light bursts in on you.

The ruptured gash, down through broken rock, a view of aquatic spectacle, a chasm into entangled swirls of waves, clouds, cliffs, skies, submerged architecture; baroque loops of liquid seduction, watery death and sunlit ripples. The horror of the ‘depictive’, coy perspectival fakery, the crude invitation of base representation for the sake of representation with its tricks and returns and re-animations, moving across the surface, the shine and glamour mixing desire and phantoms, as deluge or flood; ‘crafted with time-honoured technique and skill’ … woof woof! A proposal for glimmering surfaces and depths, doubled down and crowded with abstractions so clearly always only ever one millimetre thick; impishly critiquing the murderous ideology of ‘seductive surfaces and hidden depths’.

And all the while the gloss feels so strange on my paws. I yelp slightly and you all laugh, “O you adorable pup!”

And as we tip-tap across the floor of the of the former British Council building, where previously they used to present and promote Cold-War British high-art culture. O my doggy heart! On one level, this is a similarly trivial representational spectacle … but on another level … no … always this! Always only this!

“Ha ha ha ha,” you laugh as we make our way across the ravine. And on the far side, horizontally and vertically aligned, a row of fly sculptures spaced across the span – a row of punctuation marks, of black dots. One of them is perhaps, frozen mid-flight in front of a flower, as an ‘anti-bee’ … not the happy, furry, orange, ecological pollinator whose buzz delights but more like the symbols of death and decay from Dutch still life, or just the vermin that cluster in the dirt. Woof woof woof! Or on closer inspection … on closer inspection … Rorschach ink blots … maybe you can see the head of Max Wall, English music hall star, famous for his character Professor Wallofski, comedy piano routines and acting in Beckett plays.

Or maybe you can see me in the fly, can you pick out my adorable form mixed in … a Cavafloo? Or perhaps a charming Cavaflooloolooolooo to mimic the sound of a song bird perhaps. But anyway….

“Cavafloolooloo…” we cry out as we make our way out again.

As I am trotting by your feet. Eager. With a look of love when you look down. Now leaping down the stairs and at one point I stumble, a bundle of fur tumbling down. Then back on my feet. Too full of juice! Too full of life!

“Woof woof … follow me … down here” I cry. Such a cute docent. And downwards.

“O this is wonderful!” you cry.

And we walk down to the basement space, only partly accessible, roped off. A goat. Viewed from the raised foyer space. And another fly, sitting on the eyelid of the goat (an historical ecstatic fly! The same fly as sat on the eyelid of Margaret Thatcher as she died.)

The goat – most damned of creatures, not least in its repeated use in art. O cursed spawn how many more times must its carcass be reanimated in artistic context. Dragged out to metaphorical affect! And here we are again, observing its satirical form with initially sad expression, clambering across a rock outcrop, in the style of German medieval realism. Folds of fleece highlighted, rendered in oil and gloss varnish, possibly mocking the echo of William Holman Hunt’s famous ‘Scapegoat’ painting of 1892, or the mascot of Cologne FC who was, on one occasion, punched by the fans of an opposing team. Doubling down its religious schtick in its gaze out to the viewer (as implicated). Bloated with sin; as a scapegoat or indexing other formats of art-goats, or cultural goats, erotic, mythological, occult etc. As well as being just a goat. This is a specific goat indicative of its own specific potentialities. And the maggots (baby flies) on the goat’s legs and in the folds of its fleece.

Woof woof woof! “OK OK ! And where are we going now? Ha ha ha” We want to move on and there is a brief worry “Are we ghosts?” we all shriek. “Are we phantoms? Ha ha ha!”

Such fun! And ascending back up, spiralling back up. Upstairs past the posters; amalgamations of sales pitch, supermarket pitch and politics, where sits, on the wall, on the first floor, the painted portrait of the goat, rendered in bas relief and oil, in the style, or spirit, of ‘A picture of Dorian Gray’, where the subject remains youthful and beautiful and the painting deteriorates. That old goat is smiling happily at us in its whiskery decay.

And close by the goat painting, the painting of a crow, standing on a stump picking off ants on the ground below. The ants labour collectively but are snatched away by a force above them, greater than them.

“Woof woof … that old crow … if I get my teeth into his feathers! Ha! Then he would feel my force … if only for a few seconds as I shake him dead! Ha ha! Woof woof!”

“O darling so violent! Leave him … leave him … he isn’t worth it!”

“Woof woof … give me just one minute and I will stop him plucking at our collective labour! Ha ha! Woof woof!”

Woof woof! And finally, one more visit, one more leg on the trip, one more refrain, one last date, one last chapter, verse, prayer, homily, rapture, dream… Yes, to the cinema! The theatre of dreams! A sojourn in the darkness. In the shadows. Amongst the images projected on the screen. The crow features briefly and the ants … and the fly makes a fleeting appearance, drenched in the searing heat of rural France, the melting pollen, mosquitoes and coagulating history. Yes, you can sit back in the cushioned seats. I shall maybe trot up and down in the aisle. As we watch an ‘intense dialogue between two commuters, one taking the form of a Giacometti sculpture, choreographed across the platforms of a suburban train station’. As they search for the allusive Egghead.

Egghead wants his eggs back!

Egghead wants … woof woof!


Sweltering intensity, warm to the bones, into your flesh, into your skull and teeth. Woof woof woof woof!

And now in waves moving down. We flow outwards. And then lapping, flowing down the stairs and leaking out under the main doors, out into the street … joyous new cavapools in the street, across the pavement, in visions down through the concrete, under the paving stone. Gently lapping waters.

O joy!

Woof woof!


Text: John Russell

Curator: Nikola Dietrich


John Russell (*1963 in London) studied History of Art at Goldsmiths College of Art and Fine Art at Slade School of Art and Saint Martin’s School of Art. He was a co-founder of the artists’ group BANK, of which he was a member for ten years. Since leaving BANK in January 2000, Russell has worked both independently and collaboratively in producing exhibitions, curatorial projects, and artist books. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions including Bridget Donahue in New York (2021 and 2018), High Art in Paris (2017), Kunsthalle Zürich (2017) and in group exhibitions at Viborg Kunsthal, DK (2018), Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow (2018), Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris (2018), Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2017), Artists Space in New York (2014), The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK (2013), ICA in London (2011), Focal Point Gallery in Southend, UK (2011), The Grey Area in Brighton (2011), Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna(2011), Tate Britain in London (2010), and Tate St Ives in Cornwall, UK (2009).

Supported by:

Opening: Friday, 13.5.2022, 7 pm

Kölnischer Kunstverein is pleased to present Dala Nasser’s first institutional solo exhibition Red in Tooth, featuring her multi-media installation of the same title. Comprising a video work, patchwork paintings, and a commissioned sound installation in collaboration with sound artist Mhamad Safa, Red in Tooth is the point of origination for her ongoing examination of decolonial ecologies and human and non-human entanglement. It’s a grounding proposal of how to listen, smell, see and sense what has been tuned down/out and made invisible by the ongoing practices of extraction and protracted colonial erasure.

Building on her practice as a material and process-based artist, through abstraction and alternative forms of image making, she cultivates a necessary discomfort through a renewed trust in the land, its rivers, and its more-than-human inhabitants. The works trace the Al Wazzani River, which flows through southern Lebanon into Occupied Palestine. Along this splintered journey, Nasser is forced to abandon state road infrastructures that are built to keep us in their lanes, and follow the soil and its color and smell, the burble of water, and other inhabitants of these lands; the animals; through vast wild ‘virgin’ terrains of southern Lebanon leading us to the border defying Wazzani. This frontier, which breeds life in its natural resources and wildlife is only partially accessible to a few families who live in the immediate area – and under difficult conditions. The trial to bear witness to ongoing slow violence, dispossession, and other colonial practices under constantly shifting, changing, and morphing conditions is (nearly) impossible. Nasser’s insistence to be guided by other environmental signifiers in her ongoing exercise to consider other possible social and political imaginaries, begs the question of how we listen to more-than-human ecological knowledges around us. How do we re-calibrate our relationship to the land and its wildlife and other beings, to find a way to listen to their unuttered testimonies? How can we learn from them to navigate the cracks of rigid colonial structures; both material and those of collective memory(s), history(s), and archives?

Reverting to a seemingly ritualistic intuition, the paintings have been dug into the earth around the Wazzani, washed with collected rainwater and/or boiled in salt water, they smell of the wretched soil and carry accumulated matter within it. They are imprinted with an-other memory, reality, and futurity; years of erosion, degradation, loss of water, pollution, and increased salinity imbued with a history of natural life, extraction, death, blood, violence, and land grabs. It’s an attempt to listen to the soil, its ailments and hopes, through that which has truly witnessed and continues to survive there. The large patchwork piece has been reassembled for the lecture hall (Riphahnsaal), the paintings are suspended and cascaded down from the stage to the center where they disharmoniously meet the accompanying site-specific sound installation. The sound work, a collaboration with sound artist and architect Mhamad Safa, manipulates the temporality of the environment through time-based effects. It brings our attention to the crackles of the field recordings from the river and its surrounding area, the birds, the crickets, the wind. The result is an immersive abstracted visual, sonic, and olfactory conditioning that urges us towards a slower, more focused reading and sensing.

In the second space, the video work negotiates and reveals other possibilities of being and relating through learning from the intricate nuances and complexities of the genuinely decolonial species, terrain, and wildlife of the area. Narrated by the wildlife as witnesses whose testimonies have no words, the film transitions between moving shots of a road most traveled, human produced waste, constructed borders, political signage, existing topographical markers animated as imaginary lines, the inhabitant’s voices, dead and living animals, and long, beautiful, desolate imagery of landscapes of southern Lebanon and northern Occupied Palestine. Through a studied use of imagery and sound, Nasser, at times, paints an impressionist-like painting that transports us to and from an-other possible way of life and lived reality.

The exhibition demands a multisensorial presence and engagement as colonial practices and landscape are abstracted within the spaces on a material, olfactory, sonic, and visual level. Red in Tooth is a reminder that we have made the wrong decisions, we have trusted the wrong materials, we have been listening to the testimonies of those who have not witnessed for too long. It reveals to us an entrapped power dynamic between colonial structures, people, animals, plants, the river, and the soil, and invites us through Nasser’s subtle but radical language of abstraction to consider different forms of mobility and relationship to the land.

Text: Reem Shadid

The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

Dala Nasser (*1990 in Tyre, lives in Beirut, Lebanon) recently had solo exhibitions at VO Curations in London and Deborah Schamoni in Munich (2022, and 2021). She participated in a number of group exhibitions, including Centre Pompidou in Paris (2022), Villa Emplain in Brussels (2021), Beirut Art Center (2019); Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche in Paris (2019); Victoria Miro in London (2018); François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles (2018); and ACT2 of the Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017).

Opening of the exhibition: Friday, 18.03.2022, 7 pm

Gap year: a reprieve from work and responsibility, time off before time starts again – or a chunk of time that lands in your lap when society unexpectedly stops.

A vast and relatively unregulated space, Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld is built on ruptures reflected in its various historical incarnations, among other functions Germany’s first football training ground, a 19^th century Sunday destination, NS parade site, a concentration camp, and, of course, Berlin’s airport during the Cold War Airlift. Fahrenholz’ photo series Gap Years depicts the flourishing of leisure activities and new hobbies during the pandemic, when the Feld became everyone’s cafe, gym, bar, club, pick-up spot and music venue. Recorded with strobe-like time-lapse photography that registers movement like in a frozen jelly, the works in the series show people in self-defence classes, playing ping-pong, roller-skating, or engaging in impromptu raves and remote-controlled car driving, open-air bondage and snacking. There is also a blurry close-up of tahini poured on one of the unpopular e-scooters (we are among irritable Berliners all right).

The contemporaneity of the activities cannot hide the belle-époque quaintness of the motif of leisure, or what Fahrenholz identifies as its ‘kitsch’ aspect. We have no illusions about leisure activities. As carefully measured breaks in the regime of work they can be the next best thing to being stuck in a rut. And in an urban context the display of street skill and everyday virtuosity is already inscribed in a layered visual economy: Fahrenholz’ photos trail instagrammable styles of social-media self-consumption but also the heroics of sports photography. Still, the social collapse of the pandemic provided an opportunity for other rhythms, for social reorganization on a micro-level, thus creating a space in which it was possible to get in touch with both dystopia and utopia.

The film Happy Birthday (2022) emulates the perspective of a first-person shooter video game through a sole protagonist who wanders aimlessly across the Tempelhofer Feld. Little windows appear with snippets of mobile-phone-recorded birthday greetings. As the film progresses, darkness falls on the lonely social choreography, a non-celebration with long-distance missives from friends and family who should have been present. The birthday boy’s blank expression and the absence of action build up emotional pressure and expectation, as the air around him is perforated with songs, encouragements or scolding, shared memories, saucy messages, and existential musings.

What is left, where are we now? Where do we go from here? – These questions emerge from the darkness surrounding the figures in Fahrenholz’ two works. To Henri Lefebvre, the ‘rhythmanalyst’ is someone who studies rhythms as a structure for the experience of space and time – someone who listens to “all sorts of already known practices” but first of all “to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome.” What would Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst make of a pandemic time out of whack? Lefebvre’s notion of the body as a metronome takes on other signification, both when held against the digitally scripted movements of the Happy Birthday protagonist and Gjon Mili’s photographic experiments from the mid-20^th century that inspired Fahrenholz for her Gap Years series. New strobe technology enabled Mili to capture movement by arresting the human body in sequences in a single photographic image: Picasso making a drawing with light, a ballet dancer’s stride across the stage. Mili’s is a kind of portraiture in which psychology is reduced, or even effaced, in favour of speed.

In 1960s counterculture the spasmodic gestation of the strobe was employed to chop up time and dissolve the body. Tom Wolfe describes the dance floor of a 1960s ‘acid test’:

Ecstatic dancers – their hands flew off their arms, frozen in the air – a gleaming ellipse of teeth here, a pair of buffered highlit cheekbones there – all flacking and fragmenting into images as in an old flicker movie – a man in slices! – all of history pinned up on a butterfly board; the experience, of course.

The psychedelic sensibility for the non-human side of technology inspired the filmmaker Jonas Mekas to say that “since there is nothing but the white light in [the strobe], it represents…the point of death, or nothingness.” But it is not only visual shrapnel; there is a theoretical bent in the strobe, too, a crystalline ur-cinematic logic: “One could even say that it dramatizes the light itself.” On the thin line between emancipation and control, stimulus and trauma, the strobe summarizes the modern onslaught on the nervous system with instantly changing signals. In the 1950s, flicker technologies were used for electroencephalographic research documenting how changes in the electrical rhythms of the brain have diagnostic value. In the nerve-brain click-regime of our digital era such stimuli have plenty of exchange value, too.

“Writing in strobe” can invent “crazy speeds…where different themes connect up, and words form various figures according to the precipitous speeds of reading and association,” as Gilles Deleuze said about Hélène Cixous’ way of writing her way out of patriarchal regimes. In Fahrenholz, the icy strobe is no less of a poetics, a suitable aesthetic for our dreamless time. Departing from acceleration and Cixous’ call for “more body”, Fahrenholz instead presents meditations on the dissolution of normality and on caesuras in social time and space. Known rhythms of life begin to limp and falter as we are served up a new diet of (dis)embodiment, separation and togetherness, in the affective interstices between bodies and technologies. Maybe somewhere here, in a big blank space-time like the Tempelhofer Feld during the pandemic, we can find a way to acknowledge what happens – or what does not happen – as an event to be handed over to the future, so time can branch out into something new.

Lars Bang Larsen

This exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

Opening of the exhibition: Friday, 12.11.2021, 5 – 9 pm

Under the title Nothing is Yours, Everything Is You, Melike Kara presents new paintings in a site-specific installation made of photographs from her personal archive, which gathers family pictures as well as other sources. It serves as an unofficial historical documentation of the Kurdish diaspora that has neither the means nor the resources to preserve their own history. The bleach-treated and faded wallpaper in the Kölnischer Kunstverein’s studio captures rituals and traditions, memories and narratives passed down from generation to generation, resisting oblivion. 

Her paintings, on view as a triptych outdoors, are gestural-abstract compositions of hybrid forms and figures and borrow from the formal language of textile products of Kurdish tribes, including a special carpet-knotting technique. Kara interweaves the history of Western painting with influences from indigenous cultures and overcomes the outdated strict categorization of art and craft.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a presentation of the publication WHERE WE MEET, 2021 (Exhibit. Cat. Jan Kaps, Wiels Brussels, ed. Fabian Schöneich, graphics: Anne Stock, 83 pages) with film screenings, installation, and an introduction by Fabian Schöneich will take place on Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 6 pm.

The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

Melike Kara (*1985 in Bensberg, lives in Cologne) has had solo exhibitions at LC Queisser in Tbilisi (2021), Jan Kaps in Cologne (2020), Arcadia Missa in London, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (both 2019), Yuz Museum in Shanghai (2018), and group exhibitions at Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Belgrade Biennale (both 2021), Wiels in Brussels, and blank projects in Cape Town (both 2020), among others.

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Opening of the exhibition: Friday, 12.11.2021, 5 – 9 pm

In paintings, textile works, children’s books and installations, Daniela Ortiz develops anti-racist and anti-colonial narratives as counterpart to colonialisms that persist to this day. She confronts those players and power holders responsible for the institutional and structural racism that manifests itself, among other things, in the abusive and human rights-violating control of immigration and borders. The focus on craft media in Ortiz’s artistic practice stems from her increasing interest in shifting away from the aesthetics of Eurocentric conceptual art.

The presentation at Kölnischer Kunstverein is the first institutional solo exhibition of Daniela Ortiz in Germany and, under the title Nurtured by the defeat of the colonizers our seeds will raise, shows new, context-specific series of works together with existing works. The exhibition is accompanied by the artist book The Rebellion of the Roots, 2021 (ed. Kölnischer Kunstverein, graphics: Ronnie Fueglister with Yves Graber, 80 pages), which is available for the opening of the exhibition.

The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

Daniela Ortiz’ (*1985 in Cusco, lives in Urubamba, Perú) works have been shown internationally in solo exhibitions including La Virreina. Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona (2019), Las Ataranzas in Valencia, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in Middlesbrough (both 2017), Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2016), àngels barcelona in Barcelona (2014), as well as in group exhibitions at LUM – Lugar de la Memoria in Lima, KADIST art foundation in Paris, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna (all 2021), and Kunstverein Hamburg (2020).


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