The screening is part of Naeem Mohaiemen’s exhibition Langer Tag, curated by Nina Möntmann, 14.-18.6. 2023 at Temporary Gallery.
Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: curatorial project of the DFG-Research Training Group „connecting – excluding. Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks“
For her first institutional show in Germany, ram spin cram, Marie Angeletti (*1984) is presenting newly commissioned works across the entire building of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.
Decisively articulated, each element — sculpture, photography, and video — receives equal attention. ram spin cram does not begin in the main gallery nor ends in the last room upstairs, it is all there at once. Each room can be read as a series of actions accumulated over time. The main gallery shows work made within the last two months. In the cinema, in the upstairs and basement gallery spaces, Angeletti has rearranged works from an unspecified period of time.
Thanks to Nikola, Stefan, Line, Gianna, Henrik, Gérard, Anne, Anna, Olga, John, Michele, Dora, Matt, Tonio, Jakob, Lucas, Richard, Annie, Daniel, Jordan, Seb, Medhi, Toni, Pippa, Tim, Marco, Varun, Sol.
Thanks Istal, Marseille, to have financed the production of the metal beams, and Quadrissimo, Marseille, for the prints on silver and Daniela Taschen for having hosted me in Cologne.
Marie Angeletti (*1984 in Marseille, lives in New York) has exhibited at museums such as the Centre d’edition contemporain in Geneva; Künstlerhaus Bremen; Musée de la ville de Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Kunsthaus Glarus; Kunsthalle Zürich; Treize, Paris; Castillo/Corrales, Paris; and in galleries including the Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin; Edouard Montassut, Paris; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York; Greene Naftali, New York.
Curated by Nikola Dietrich
The exhibition is supported by:
Due to carnival the Kölnischer Kunstverein will be closed from Thursday, 16.02. to Monday, 20.02. inclusive. We ask for your understanding and look forward to welcoming you again on 21.02. at the usual opening hours.
Game of No Games – Symposium
Samstag, 11.2.2023, 10–16 Uhr
mit Lisa Arndt, Nikola Dietrich, Andreas Fischer, Amelie Gappa, Charlotte Laubard, Kito Nedo, Susanne Pfeffer, Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, Falk Wolf, Susanne Zander
Weitere Informationen folgen!
Ewa Majewska Coronafuga. Fragments of online dating discourse from pandemic times Welcome and Introduction by Eva Birkenstock and Nikola Dietrich Book presentation and reading with Ewa Majewska and the performance artist Wojciech Kosma at the Ludwig Forum, Aachen
The event will be held in English.
At the conclusion of reboot: responsiveness, a presentation and reading of the latest publication by Polish cultural theorist and activist Ewa Majewska will take place at the Ludwig Forum Aachen in the presence of the author and performance artist Wojciech Kosma.
Coronafuga. Fragments of online dating discourse from pandemic times is an auto-theoretical negotiation of online dating discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic. The book combines theory and digital dating conversations into a literary account of discourses of intimacy during pandemic times. Media and other tools like dating sites, conversations in, around, and about digital flirting, and immediate entertainment are key elements of this book.
Ewa Majewska (lives in Warsaw) is a feminist cultural theorist, activist, and author. She has taught at the University of the Arts in Berlin, the University of Warsaw, and Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, the ICI Berlin, and the IWM in Vienna. She currently works at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. She has released six books, most recently Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common (2021), and publishes in journals and platforms such as e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies, and Jacobin, among others. Her current research focuses on archival studies, dialectics of the weak, feminist critical theory, and antifascism.
The publication is part of reboot:—a collaborative, cyclical, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue between performative and research-based practices, co-hosted by the Kölnischer Kunstverein and Ludwig Forum Aachen. The first cycle reboot: responsiveness provided infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around themes of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann.
Ewa Majewska Coronafuga. Fragments of online dating discourse from pandemic times Edited by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann English Cu-published by Ludwig Forum Aachen and Kölnischer Kunstverein with DISTANZ Verlag ISBN 97-3-95476-523-2
The book can be purchased at the Ludwig Forum Aachen as well as online at DISTANZ Verlag.
€ 16,-
This exhibition presents historical and contemporary works by artists who have received little attention throughout art history. Their participation in society and the art world has been limited—as a result of conservatorships, disenfranchisement, or discrimination, to name a few. This is closely associated with the lack of stable institutional footholds or larger (art) networks and support systems. Conventional categorizations, such as Outsider Art or Art Brut, along with the concurrent emphasis on their alleged distinguishing characteristics—which have so far often been read as narratives on the spontaneous vs. planned, innate vs. learned, naïve vs. sophisticated, or even primitive vs. modern—are currently considered outdated and must be critically challenged. Accordingly, this exhibition intends to encourage a different understanding concerning established ways of thinking in the art world, as well as consolidate an approach to exhibiting and representing different artistic practices that is more readily assimilated.
Through their works, the artists on view at the Kölnischer Kunstverein immerse themselves in self-alienating role-playing games. They can thus take on different identities and undergo a kind of metamorphosis—to the point of becoming animals. “I’m a frigging hunter, but I know that it causes trouble… I have to mask it [what is troublesome] so that I can continue to exist in society at all,” the artist Rabe perplexum declared (in Experimente, Der unbekannte Künstler, 1987). In both her works and life, she adopted a raven persona.
Our aim is not to place the exhibited artists and their artistic practices in the margins of society, nor to portray them as artists that unveil repressed realities or develop suppressed longings behind their apparent detachment from the world. Rather, this exhibition explores how they deliberately work with their dependencies. Adelhyd van Bender, for instance, designed a large and complex body of work that breaks the world into mathematical formulas. Intertwining these with biographical details in associative chains, his practice builds a new order. As a model for his drawings, which were copied and revised several times, he often used letters addressed to him from official authorities, which testified to his constant struggle against the prolongation of his conservatorship.
These artists have often positioned themselves within society, precisely in the non-places of art and interstitial spaces where a larger public could be found, so as to relate to this community and criticize it with a matter-of-factness that is peculiar to each of them. By leaving behind social conventions, norms, and dominant traditions, as well as undermining social or gender performances, these artists have frequently been met with a lack of understanding. This was certainly the case for Helga Goetze, who broke away from a conventional way of life in the 1970s and later advocated free love, sex, and female pleasure almost daily in front of the Memorial Church in Berlin.
The radical potential of the works gathered here resides in the fact that they insist on unfulfilled socio-political promises and, as Dietrich Orth hints at in one of his works that gives the exhibition its title, provide instructions and suggestions for a better, fairer way of treating one another. They manifest a profound longing directed toward the future—something that can also be understood as a critique of the present.
This exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich and Susanne Zander.
With works by Adelhyd van Bender, Klaus Beyer, Lee Godie, Helga Sophia Goetze, Margarethe Held, Dietrich Orth, Albert Leo Peil, Rabe perplexum, William Scott, Wendy Vainity, and August Walla.
Image: William Scott, Untitled, 2013, Courtesy of The Museum of Everything
The exhibition is supported by:
Further support: Jan Fischer, Entrepreneur and supporter of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and the NRW Kunstvereins landscape
with Rosa Aiello, Genoveva Filipovic, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Manfred Holtfrerich, Erika Landström, Luzie Meyer, José Montealegre, Dala Nasser, Daniela Ortiz, Thomas Ruff, John Russell, Jasmin Werner
Opening of the exhibition: Saturday, 12.11.2022, 7 pm
Orders for the Jahresgaben 2022 can be submitted in writing from November 12 up to and including December 04, 2022. If more orders are received than there are copies available, the decision will be made by drawing lots. The draw will take place on December 05, 2022. After the draw, all interested parties will be notified of the result by e-mail. All remaining Jahresgaben will remain for sale after the draw and can be purchased at any time.
The Jahresgaben and editions are an exclusive offer exclusively for members of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Other interested parties are entitled to purchase by joining the Kölnischer Kunstverein in the current calendar year.
Please note our ordering procedures and the general terms & conditions.
The exhibition is supported by:
Juri Andruchowytschs Radio Nacht (Suhrkamp, übersetzt ), in der Ukraine 2020 erschienen, ist nicht nur ein sprachliches Feuerwerk, sondern ein Gegenwartsroman von eminenter Aktualität.
Der Pianist Josip Rotsky muss in der Emigration in der Schweiz für den Diktator seines Landes spielen – und wird zum Attentäter. Juri Andruchowytsch liest aus der Übersetzung von Sabine Stöhr und spricht mit Uli Hufen über eine Zeit, in der die Hoffnungen auf radikale Veränderungen begraben werden. Wie auch über wichtige Erinnerungen im Rahmen der Reihe »Souvenir«. Mariana Sadovska begleitet den Abend musikalisch. »Ich habe immer davon geträumt, einen Roman zu schreiben, der klingt«, so Juri Andruchowytsch, Sänger und Vollblutmusiker, über seinen Roman Radio Nacht. Sein Protagonist, der Rockmusiker Josip Rotsky, unterstützt als »Barrikadenpianist« die Revolution in seinem Heimatland. Ins Exil gezwungen, verdient er seinen Lebensunterhalt als Salonmusiker und tritt in einem Schweizer Hotel vor dem Diktator seines Landes auf. Er wirft ein Ei nach ihm und tötet ihn versehentlich. Nach seiner Entlassung aus dem Gefängnis zieht sich Rotsky in die Karpaten zurück, wo er bald von Geheimdienstagenten verfolgt wird. Seine Flucht führt ihn bis nach Griechenland, treue Begleiter sind ihm dabei sein Rabe Edgar und seine Geliebte Animé. Schließlich landet er auf einer Gefängnisinsel auf dem Nullmeridian, wo er seine eigene Radiosendung moderiert: »Radio Night« – sein eigenes Label, mit dem er Musik, Poesie und gute Geschichten in eine sich verdunkelnde Welt sendet. Nach fast zwanzig Jahren legt Juri Andruchowytsch mit Radio Nacht seinen fünften Roman vor. Revolutionssaga, biografische Burleske und Agententhriller, das alles vor dem Hintergrund von Klimakrise, Pandemie und der unmittelbaren Bedrohung durch Russland. Der von der Musik inspirierte Autor zieht in seinem »akustischen Roman« alle künstlerischen Register, um den Ängsten und der realen Bedrohung die Souveränität der Fantasie entgegenzusetzen. Veranstalter: Literaturhaus Köln Veranstaltungspartner: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, literaturhaus.net, Suhrkamp VerlagOrt: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstraße 6 Eintritt: 12,- / 10, – € Mitglieder: 8, – €
Tickets kaufenA reading on the occasion of the exhibition by José Montealegre Nervous System in the context of DC Open
With texts by José Montealegre, Nat Marcus and Mikhail Wassmer, Narrator: Mark von Schlegell
There once was a young man, not aged even fifteen, who roamed the countryside in search of stories. His name was Hilario Martinez, and when he came across older folk, with creased eyes and leather skin that could point him in the way of some good old-fashioned stories, they batted him off like a summer fly. “Why you’re not even fifteen” they would say “run-off, go-along, back to your mother you go.” This made Hilario very disappointed, but still, he found the will to continue walking.
One day, as Hilario walked along a wooded path eating gooseberries from a gooseberry tree not far down the road he came across a tiny witch that had gotten stuck inside a plastic bottle. She clawed and clawed at the sides trying to pinch the plastic in order to bite it off and tear a hole so she could escape, but the plastic would not budge. He said to the witch picking up the bottle “Witch, you have gotten yourself stuck in a bottle”. The witch sighed and plopped herself on her ass in the bottom. “Well…” the witch said looking at the big eyes of Hilario as he held her encasement like a fireflies’ “are you gonna let me out or what?”
Hilario was not ready for that question, and wondered thinking of something witty to say.
“How can I let you out witch,” said he “for I know not, who put you there, perhaps you’re a deranged witch and as soon as I open the bottle you smite me a fool”.
“You already seem like a fool” sighed the witch as she flew up to the bottle’s neck.
“Or perhaps you’re the slave witch of a giant who will flick me a smudge on the ground when he finds out I liberated his fairy.”
“Well that’s a good story” said the witch as she hovered inside the suffocating throat of the teardrop shaped bottle, “but…..” she continued yet was interrupted by the deranged face that stared at her from the outside. Hilario’s eyes were fixed on her, like two crescent moons rising over the horizon. “Stoooooooriesss” Hilaro drooled “give me the stooooooriessss” he repeated transfixed by the witch’s hands that had by now understood the weakness of the foraging idiot.
Text: José Montealegre
Nat Marcus is a poet, vocalist and designer. Along with Zoe Darsee, she is co-editor of TABLOID Press, an imprint for poetry and art-books founded in Berlin in 2014. The publishing house maintains a focus on the public space of a poem and the poetics of a social body. Marcus’ poetry, art criticism and lyric journalism have also appeared in Arts of the Working Class, The Ransom Note, Edit, and Berlin Art Link.
Mikhail Wassmer (*1986 in South Surrey, B.C., Canada) studied photography at the Zurich University of the Arts and the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, and fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He has recently exhibited works in solo shows at RESPONSIBILITY (2020) and Harmony 100 (2022) in Basel. He self-published his poetry in Agitated Dairy (2020) and the end… (2021). He recited from the two pamphlets at RESPONSIBILITY in Basel, KOBO in Zurich, Harmony 100 in Basel, and Hopscotch in Berlin.
Opening hours
Fri., Sept. 02, 11 am to 6 pm
Sat., Sept. 03, 11 am to 6 pm
Sun., Sept. 04, 11 am to 6 pm
free entrance
For more information, click here.
Program
John Russell: Cavapool
cureated by Nikola Dietrich
José Montealegre: Nervous System
curated by Miriam Bettin
Saturday, 3.9.2022, 4 pm
Guided tour through the exhibitions of John Russell and José Montealegre with Miriam Bettin
Sunday, 4.9.2022, 5 pm (Cinema)
A Nervous Reading by José Montealegre with Nat Marcus and Mikhail Wassmer
There once was a young man, not aged even fifteen, who roamed the countryside in search of stories. His name was Hilario Martinez, and when he came across older folk, with creased eyes and leather skin that could point him in the way of some good old-fashioned stories, they batted him off like a summer fly. “Why you’re not even fifteen” they would say “run-off, go-along, back to your mother you go.” This made Hilario very disappointed, but still, he found the will to continue walking.
One day, as Hilario walked along a wooded path eating gooseberries from a gooseberry tree not far down the road he came across a tiny witch that had gotten stuck inside a plastic bottle. She clawed and clawed at the sides trying to pinch the plastic in order to bite it off and tear a hole so she could escape, but the plastic would not budge. He said to the witch picking up the bottle “Witch, you have gotten yourself stuck in a bottle”. The witch sighed and plopped herself on her ass in the bottom. “Well…” the witch said looking at the big eyes of Hilario as he held her encasement like a fireflies’ “are you gonna let me out or what?”
Hilario was not ready for that question, and wondered thinking of something witty to say.
“How can I let you out witch,” said he “for I know not, who put you there, perhaps you’re a deranged witch and as soon as I open the bottle you smite me a fool”.
“You already seem like a fool” sighed the witch as she flew up to the bottle’s neck.
“Or perhaps you’re the slave witch of a giant who will flick me a smudge on the ground when he finds out I liberated his fairy.”
“Well that’s a good story” said the witch as she hovered inside the suffocating throat of the teardrop shaped bottle, “but…..” she continued yet was interrupted by the deranged face that stared at her from the outside. Hilario’s eyes were fixed on her, like two crescent moons rising over the horizon. “Stoooooooriesss” Hilaro drooled “give me the stooooooriessss” he repeated transfixed by the witch’s hands that had by now understood the weakness of the foraging idiot.
Text: José Montealegre
Nat Marcus is a poet, vocalist and designer. Along with Zoe Darsee, she is co-editor of TABLOID Press, an imprint for poetry and art-books founded in Berlin in 2014. The publishing house maintains a focus on the public space of a poem and the poetics of a social body. Marcus’ poetry, art criticism and lyric journalism have also appeared in Arts of the Working Class, The Ransom Note, Edit, and Berlin Art Link.
Mikhail Wassmer (*1986 in South Surrey, B.C., Canada) studied photography at the Zurich University of the Arts and the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, and fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He has recently exhibited work in solo shows at RESPONSIBILITY (2020) and Harmony 100 (2022) in Basel.
He self-published his poetry in Agitated Dairy (2020) and the end… (2021). He recited from the two pamphlets at RESPONSIBILITY in Basel, KOBO in Zurich, Harmony 100 in Basel and Hopscotch in Berlin.
Friday, 2.9. until Sunday, 4.9.2022, every hour on the hour from 11 am to 6 pm, on Sunday until 3 pm (Cinema)
Film screening EARLEY, 2021/2022 by John Russell (Video, Sound, 58 min)
In the searing heat of rural France, in the summer of 2021, a group of artist and film-makers set about shooting ‘an updated version of Beckett’s absurdist post war vision, choreographed across the platforms of a train station’.
As a play on Beckett’s experiments with translation, the narrative is set in the small town of Earley, in the UK, but actually filmed in Arles, South of France. To amplify this conceit all signage on the platforms and trains was swapped from French to English.
During the course of their research for the film the filmmakers were warned about the myth of ‘Egghead’, or ‘Tête d’Oeuf’. The filmmakers chose to ignore these warnings and even incorporated reference to Egghead in the script.
Sweltering in the melting pollen, mosquitoes, coagulating ideology and dripping sweat, with the continuous background rhythm of cicada, an intense dialogue unfolds between the two protagonist-commuters, one taking the form of a Giacometti sculpture.
Text: John Russell
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).
Asynchronicity. A symposium-like gathering, hosted by Cally Spooner.
With Paul Abbott & Will Holder, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Taina Bucher, Elizabeth Freeman, Hendrik Folkerts, Irena Haiduk, Dana Luciano, Martina Roß-Nickoll, Cally Spooner with Sanna Blennow and Melody Giron, Mark von Schlegell, Jesper List Thomsen, Jackie Wang and films by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Frances Scholz.
Saturday, May 7, 2022, 8.59 am – 6.50 pm
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne
Free Admission, no registration required
Sunday, May 8, 2022, 11 am – 8 pm
Ludwig Forum, Aachen
Free Admission, no registration required
All contributions are in English. In Aachen, simultaneous translation into German is provided.
Asynchronicity is a symposium-like gathering of choreographies, lectures, sounds, screenings, and discussions assembled by artist Cally Spooner with reboot: responsiveness at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum, Aachen.
Asynchronicity takes as its backdrop the neoliberal paradigm of an always measurable performance. In this climate performance manifests at once as a regime of disciplinary power and a condition of everyday life, in which subjects constantly quantify, manage and stratify themselves until the social imagination and desire is deadened. Asynchronicity probes how such draining quests can be subverted by collectively fostering a resistance towards chrononormativity. Coined in 2010 by queer studies scholar Elizabeth Freeman (one of the gathering’s contributors), the term chrononormativity describes the prevalent use of time to organize human bodies toward maximum productivity.
Asynchronicity responds by unravelling the resistant potentials of becoming or remaining asynchronous. Over the course of two days, collaborators – artists, performers, musicians, theoreticians, dancers, curators and designers – are invited to unfold a diverse set of propositions for alternative, fugitive temporalities, affects and bodily practices that bend and subvert familiarity and which deliberately, or naturally, remain out of sync. Jointly introducing the notion of asynchronicity as an alternative, non-sequential mode of time, texts, movements, encounters and thoughts will collide across the partnering institutions in Aachen and Cologne.
Asynchronicity is part of Cally Spooners longterm research project Deadtime (since 2018) in which she finds and handles temporal structures beyond the Clock-Time standardizations that force labour, bodies, nervous systems, and digital technologies into a completely metric-orientated future. Conceived as the first of five assemblies hosted by the artist, that challenge the chrononormative order and the performance imperative implied.
While you may enter the symposium-like gathering in your own time – any moment or time span of preference – we suggest you experience its choreography in its entirety and in both cities, if possible.
Saturday, May 7, 2022, 8.59 am – 6.50 pm
Doors open from 8.30 am
Kölnischer Kunstverein
Hahnenstraße 6, 50667 Cologne
I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021 by Pierre Bal-Blanc, adapted from I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 1968 by On Kawara addressed to Dan Graham, is screened. Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle is read by Will Holder (vocals) and Paul Abbott (drums). Each reading comprises three fifteen-minute readings of three verses, to a maximum of six people. Deadtime, an opera in progress, is presented by Cally Spooner (lecture), Sanna Blennow (dance) and Melody Giron (cello) . Elizabeth Freeman introduces the audience to the concept of chrononormativity, with a historical frame. Mark von Schlegell reflects on his science fiction experiences with time travel. Taina Bucher engages in conversation on techno-dystopias, and ‘right time newsfeeds’. Jackie Wang examines how time is used as a technology of punishment inside prisons, then ends with a meditation on Black Quantum Futurism’s use of Afro-futurist sci-fi to create new political openings. Dana Luciano presents James McCune Smith, the 19th century physician, activist, who positioned geology as a site for the production of pleasure. Jesper List Thomsen reads FREEEee, a part lecture part folk song on dismantling representation. We conclude with Introduction To Feelings, Studio Feelings where Irena Haiduk casts from the year 2135 for 32 mins.
Timetable
08.59 am I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021, Pierre Bal-Blanc
10.00 am Dead Time, Cally Spooner, Melody Giron, Sanna Blennow and Jesper List Thomsen
11.00 am On Chrononormativity: Histories and Possibilities, Elizabeth Freeman
12.00 pm Carceral Temporalities and the Politics of Dreaming, Jackie Wang
1.00 pm Rosmarie Waldrop: “Lawn of Excluded Middle”, Will Holder and Paul Abbott
— Lunch Break
2.00 pm Algorithmic “right time” and Deadtime, Taina Bucher and Cally Spooner
2.30 pm Choromonautics, Then and now, Mark von Schlegell
3.30 pm FREEEee, Jesper List Thomsen
— Break
4.15 pm Freedom’s Ammonite: Blackness, Geomorphology, Worldmaking, Dana Luciano
5.00 pm Introduction To Feelings, Studio Feelings, Irena Haiduk
5.30 pm (A rehearsal for) Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins
6.00 pm Rosmarie Waldrop: “Lawn of Excluded Middle”, Will Holder and Paul Abbott
6.50 pm End
Sunday, May 8, 2022, 11 am – 8 pm
Ludwig Forum, Aachen
Jülicher Straße 97-109, 52070 Aachen
Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle is read by Will Holder (vocals) and Paul Abbott (drums). Each reading comprises three fifteen-minute readings of three verses, to a maximum of six people. Mark von Schlegell screens Frances Scholz’s YEAR OF THE WRITER, a time-capsule/fragmentary portrait of a sci-fi writer and the musical environment surrounding, in Los Angeles, 2004. Hendrik Folkerts presents the prologue to a symposium-like gathering on Duration in the spring of 2023, and an asynchronous lapse in this gathering. Jackie Wang analyzes the relationship between listening and power by examining the history of voice surveillance and voice printing technology. Elizabeth Freeman talks about chrononormativity and the asynchrony of personhood and collectivity during illness in the present day—COVID, and her own. Dana Luciano introduces Ellen Gallagher’s alignment with oceanic time, via ecologies formed from the corpses of whales—that might help us to imagine life anew. Biologist Martina Roß-Nickoll explains biodiversity and the temporality of meadows (lecture in German, simultaneous translation into English will be provided.) Irena Haiduk asks things to teach us how to live. Alex Baczynski-Jenkins presents a processual choreography that reflects on the relations of desire, dance, fragmentation, love (as communality) and time.
Timetable
11.00 am DURATION symposium in the spring of 2023; an asynchronous lapse, Hendrik Folkerts
12.00 pm Crip Asynchronies: COVID, Cancer, Climate, Elizabeth Freeman
1.00 pm Captured Voices: Prisoner Voiceprints and the Carceral Laboratory, Jackie Wang
2.00 pm Rosmarie Waldrop: “Lawn of Excluded Middle”, Will Holder and Paul Abbott
— Lunch break
3.00 pm Oceanic Time and Black Feminist Futures, Dana Luciano
4.00 pm A conversation on Meadows, Prof. Martina Roß-Nickoll
4.00 pm Rosmarie Waldrop: “Lawn of Excluded Middle”, Will Holder and Paul Abbott
4.30 pm Introduction to YEAR OF THE WRITER, by Frances Scholz, 2004, Mark von Schlegell
— Drink break
5.10 pm Prop Positions, Irena Haiduk
6.00 pm (A rehearsal for) Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins
8.00 pm End
reboot: responsiveness is the first cycle of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices, jointly presented by Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen.
reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys
reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:
reboot: responsiveness is supported by:
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 19th 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-20th 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.
Pure Fiction: Rosa Aiello (in collaboration with Dylan Aiello), Ellen Yeon Kim, Erika Landström, Luzie Meyer, Mark von Schlegell
Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths
An Exhibition at the End of Performance
Opening: Friday, February 11, 2022, 5 – 9 pm
Performances from 7 pm
Closing: Sunday, March 6, 2022, 11 am – 6 pm
Performances from 2 pm
The 2G rule applies. No registration required.
In the Sibylline cave near today’s Naples, the narrator of Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man finds a collection of prophecies scribbled on scattered oak leaves. These fragments conjure the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100’s, forever altering human history. Arguably the first science-fiction apocalypse, The Last Man touches on themes such as solitude, new forms of intimacy, repetition, and life on the edge of an epoch.
In Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths, members of the writing and performance group Pure Fiction—Rosa Aiello, Ellen Yeon Kim, Erika Landström, Luzie Meyer, and Mark von Schlegell—respond to the unpredictable cultural landscape of today by staging this strikingly relevant novel’s motifs in a shifting theatre of sound, installation, lecture, film and puppetry. Voices animate and prophesize; make presence out of absent figures and forces; translate from symbol to action and back.
In a time when coming together physically as a group seems near impossible; coming apart together is newly significant. Like the fragmentary prophecies of the Sibylline cave, works made specifically for the exhibition come to life at various stages, and in accordance with their own internal script and time-line. Through a careful interrogation to the where and who, their individual unfoldings seem to ask in discordant chorus: what is performance?
On the Kölnischer Kunstverein’s ground floor, a sound installation by Ellen Yeon Kim repeats while physically sprawling across the premises. Luzie Meyer’s new video work is accompanied by marionettes of the current Pure Fiction members, and in REAL BOOKS—a temporary book store of no set time or space—Mark von Schlegell offers the written word as time machine, for a price.
In the adjacent cinema, Rosa Aiello (in collaboration with Dylan Aiello) entangles herself in sibling ribaldry and the libidinal potentials of performance (on and off screen). Meanwhile, in the former broadcasting room on the second floor, Erika Landström stages a dream machine of cognitive labour and space exploration.
With live performances on opening night and closing day.
The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.
Rosa Aiello (*1987, Canada) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her works have been shown at various institutions and galleries, including Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main; Cell Project Space, London; Bureau des Réalités, Brussels; and Stadtgalerie Bern, among others. She has had recent solo exhibitions at DREI, Cologne; Arcadia Missa, London; Lodos, Mexico City, and Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge. Her writing has been published in Triple Canopy, Starship, CanadianArt, Art Papers, Public Journal, and F. R. David.
Ellen Yeon Kim (*1985, South Korea) studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in the class of Peter Fischli and Simon Starling, and graduated from Slade School of Art, UCL. Her aesthetically complex work unveils the absurdity of the multiple irreconcilable expectations which are placed on individuals by society and its institutions. It reveals ways in which trauma is passed on and perpetuated by individuals themselves. Kim’s practice involves various media, including theatre, stand-up comedy, installations and drawings. She was awarded The Peter Mertes Stipendium in 2021 and has been part of the studio program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein since 2019.
Erika Landström (*1984, Sweden) is an artist working in sculpture, installation and performance. She is a graduate from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York. Her most recent performance Holders premiered at the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, 2020. She has been published by Sternberg Press and Texte Zur Kunst, among others, and her writing ranges from poetry to art criticism. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Luzie Meyer (*1990, Germany) is an artist, poet, musician, and translator based in Berlin. She studied Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and graduated in Fine Arts from Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2016. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally. She was awarded the studio residency of the Hessische Kulturstiftung at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris in 2018. She has received a pre-doctoral fellowship of the DiGiTal fund Berlin in 2020, as well as a research grant from the Berlin senate in 2021 for her research project “Unthinking Metatheatre”.
Mark von Schlegell (*1967, USA) is a novelist, critic and artist, Cologne-based since 2005. His first novel Venusia (2005) was honor’s listed for the Otherwise Prize in science fiction. In English he is published by Semiotext(e) and Sternberg Press; in German by Matthes und Seitz and Merve Verlag. His visual art has been shown in the US (New York), South Korea (Seoul), Denmark, and throughout Germany. A founding member of the Pure Fiction collective since 2011, he has taught art and literature at CalArts in Valencia, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.
Supported by:
The exhibition Daniela Ortiz – Nurtured by the defeat of the colonizers our seeds will raise will be closed from 24 December 2021 to 03 January 2022.
We look forward to welcoming you back on 4 January 2022.
For your visit to the exhibition, please also refer to the current information.
Die Ausstellung Daniela Ortiz – Nurtured by the the defeat of the colonizers our seeds will raise bleibt vom 24. Dezember 2021 bis zum 03. Januar 2022 geschlossen.
Wir freuen uns, Sie ab dem 4. Januar 2022 wieder bei uns begrüßen zu können.
Bitte beachten Sie für Ihren Ausstellungsbesuch auch die aktuellen Informationen.
Artists:
Naama Arad, Inessa Emmer, Sabrina Fritsch, Stefani Glauber, Selma Gültoprak, Melike Kara, Ellen Yeon Kim, Rory Pilgrim, Nora Schultz, Cally Spooner, Katja Tönnissen, Mark von Schlegell
We are pleased to present to you this year’s Jahresgaben at the Kölnischer Kunstverein from December 8 to 19, 2021 during the regular opening hours and cordially invite you to a tour with the director Nikola Dietrich on Thursday, December 9 at 5 pm. Registration and presentation of a 2G certificate are required. Please note our information regarding your visit to our exhibitions and events.
Some of the young and established regional and international artists who are supporting the Kölnischer Kunstverein this year with an edition were represented in the 2021 annual program, are current studio fellows, or are connected to the Kunstverein in some other way.
Please find information about the artists and the available works under Latest Jahresgaben.
Orders for the Jahresgaben 2021 can be submitted in written from that date up to and including December 19. If more orders are received than there are copies available, the decision will be made by lot. The lottery will take place on December 20, 2021. After the draw, all interested parties will be notified in writing of the result. All remaining Jahresgaben are still for sale after the lottery and can be purchased at any time. Purchase only by members.
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.
Supported by:
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).
Supported by:
Ewa Majewska
Coronaseminar 4. How do we stay with the trouble?
Online-Zoom (in English)
with David Liver, artist
Participation link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86307280916?pwd=RG9hUTdDbmYvUzhPY3E2M2RPWFpaZz09
Meeting ID: 863 0728 0916
ID Code: 940123
In the current state of political and ecological dystopia, how do we avoid what Donna Haraway aptly called melancholia and techno-fixes? How do we stay with the trouble? How do we work our way through the darkness? Artists are known for their ability to be trouble; thus, we will interview one of them, David Liver, about the trouble and his own ways to stay with it. We plan to discuss the strategies of staying with the trouble together, and then we will move towards Haraway’s more specific takes on troubles of the Chthulucene. We will end this Coronaseminar session with another discussion – now concerning the role of art and art institutions in these troublesome times, when the pandemic is one of many troubles we need to stay with.
David Liver is known for his dematerialized art, and for his obscure imagery where he employs satire, gonzo-style autobiography, and black humor. Voice Over is his latest work, an online artist-run review published by the Council of Europe and KANAL – CENTRE POMPIDOU in Brussels. Liver is writing, producing, and directing with Urubu Films. His current film project is “Tuli Tuli Tuli, 1001 ways of being joyfully revolted,” a doc film about Beat hero and Fug Tuli Kupferberg, directed in collaboration with Canadian director Thomas Burstyn. http://www.the-david-liver.com
Text:
Donna Haraway, a Conversation about the book „Staying with the Trouble”, in: Artforum, 2016, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/donna-j-haraway-speaks-about-her-latest-book-63147
reboot: responsiveness
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices.
reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys
http://reboot-responsiveness.com/
Next date of the Coronaseminars – reboot: edition
Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
October 20, 2021
reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:
reboot: responsiveness is supported by:
After World War II, Die Brücke (The Bridge) was planned as a place of encounter and dialogue and built in 1949/1950 according to designs by Wilhelm Riphahn. The angular building, completely created in the sense of a synthesis of the arts, is characterized by its gracefulness. Each structure is shaped differently according to its function and characterized by the choice of different materials. When the British Information Center vacated the building in 2000, the Kölnischer Kunstverein moved in after the heritage-listed building had been adapted to its new use under the direction of architect Adolf Krischanitz.
Guided tour of the exhibition Guilty Curtain by the team of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Guilty Curtain is a site-specific installation conceived for the historic space of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and shown as part of the commemorative year 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany.
Duration: approx. 45 minutes
Max. number of participants: 10
Registration deadline: Thursday, 09.09.2021
Admission free
Artists: Etti Abergel, Naama Arad and Tchelet Ram, Julie Becker, Ursula Burghardt, Noa Glazer, Omer Halperin, Gizela Mickiewicz, Oren Pinhassi, Michal Samama, Nora Schultz, Noa Schwartz, Lior Shachar
Opening: Friday, 20.8.2021, 3 pm – 9 pm
Guilty Curtain is a site-specific installation made for the historical space of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Inside the long transparent exhibition hall, a group show will take the form of a glass house. The artworks on display all rely on surrealistic notions like covering and/or replacing. These gestures, performed by artists on various objects and materials, do not end at a cul de sac. The wrapping of a toaster oven in sheep’s wool uncovers an entangled relationship – instead of the sheep being placed in the oven, the oven is devoured by the sheep. This mixture of material, words and categories alludes to a symbiotic relationship between the body and the object. While the modernist attempt to dissolve separations between inside and outside only ended up emphasizing the divide, what is disclosed through the collection of all these bodily objects undermines the architectural structure of the Kunstverein itself; as one will experience space, in this particular glass house nature is no longer an exterior.
The extensive group exhibition and event series brings together artists mainly from Israel with others from Poland, Germany, and the USA. In close cooperation with the Israeli artist and curator Naama Arad, a local and active art scene, which has formed mainly in Tel Aviv, will be presented at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.
Curated by Naama Arad and Nikola Dietrich
Please note the information regarding your visit to the exhibition according to the Corona Protection Ordinance.
The exhibition is sponsored by:
With further support from:
Ewa Majewska
Coronaseminar #2. Pandemic intimacies.
June 9, 2021
Online-Zoom, 6 – 8 pm CET (in English)
Guest: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, artist and choreographer
Participation link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89666026766?pwd=cnJXVDNib2FGaVlQOWtpeTJ1L0lEQT09
Meeting ID: 896 6602 6766
ID Code: 462096
In this Coronaseminar we will discuss the basics of the pandemic being together – universality, breathing, intimacy, sex and the means of production and representation. Our Guest’s contribution, by the artist and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, will focus on mediating intimacies, suspended time and foregrounding infrastructures. We will also discuss the following texts:
Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe”, in: Critical Inquiry, 2020.
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2. https://queerartpractices.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/warner_berlant.pdf
Eng-Beng Lim, “Queer Coronasutra, or, How to have promiscuity in a Pandemic”, 2020,
https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2020/03/24/queer-coronasutras/
reboot: responsiveness
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices.
The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in.
reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys
http://reboot-responsiveness.com/
Further dates of the Coronaseminars – reboot: edition
Coronaseminar #3. On Motherhood. Bring your kids!
June 30, 2021
Coronaseminar #4. How do we stay with the trouble?
September 29, 2021
Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
October 20, 2021
reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:
reboot: responsiveness is supported by:
Ewa Majewska
Coronaseminar #2. Pandemic intimacies.
Online-Zoom (in englischer Sprache)
Gast: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Künstler und Choreograph
Teilnahme-Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89666026766?pwd=cnJXVDNib2FGaVlQOWtpeTJ1L0lEQT09
Meeting-ID: 896 6602 6766
Kenncode: 462096
In diesem Coronaseminar werden wir die Grundlagen des pandemischen Zusammenseins diskutieren – Universalität, Atmung, Intimität, Sex sowie die Mittel der Produktion und Methoden der Repräsentation. Der Beitrag unseres Gastes, des Künstlers und Choreographen Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, wird sich auf die Vermittlung von Intimitäten, die Aufhebung der Zeit und die Betonung von Infrastrukturen konzentrieren. Außerdem werden wir die folgenden Texte diskutieren:
Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe”, in: Critical Inquiry, 2020.
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/
Lauren Berlant und Michael Warner, “Sex in Public”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2. https://queerartpractices.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/warner_berlant.pdf
Eng-Beng Lim, “Queer Coronasutra, or, How to have promiscuity in a Pandemic”, 2020,
https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2020/03/24/queer-coronasutras/
reboot: responsiveness
Der Kölnische Kunstverein und der Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf präsentieren gemeinsam reboot: – ein kollaborativer, zyklischer, antirassistischer und queer-feministischer Dialog zwischen performativen und forschungsbasierten Praktiken.
Der erste Zyklus, reboot: responsiveness, geht von den Sehnsüchten, Ängsten und Hoffnungen aus, die durch die aktuelle Pandemie verstärkt werden. An zwei unterschiedlichen, jedoch miteinander verbundenen Orten, die sich gegenseitig unterstützen, ergänzen und herausfordern, bietet reboot: responsiveness Infrastrukturen für provisorische Inszenierungen, Proben, prozesshafte Choreografien und Begegnungen rund um Themen wie Präsenz, Intimität, Fürsorge und Verantwortung. reboot: responsiveness entwickelt Aktivitäten gemeinsam mit einem Kernkollektiv bestehend aus Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner und Mariana Valencia. Mittels verschiedener Formate und gemeinsam mit weiteren eingeladenen Gästen und dem Publikum in Köln und Düsseldorf werden diese Künstler*innen und Denker*innen Wege ergründen, einander Zeit zu widmen und zeitgemäß mit Zeit zu performen, alternative Vokabulare, Archive, Gesten, Bewegungen und Übersetzungen zu entwickeln, Ressourcen und Ideen zu teilen und weiterzugeben, und Modi des Widerstands und des Miteinanders als Antwort auf die aktuelle Situation, in der wir leben, zu finden.
reboot:
Konzipiert von Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich und Viktor Neumann
Kernkollektiv: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner und Mariana Valencia
Graphikdesign von Sean Yendrys
http://reboot-responsiveness.com/de/
Weitere Termine der Coronaseminare – reboot: edition
Coronaseminar #3. On Motherhood. Bring your kids!
30. Juni 2021
Coronaseminar #4. How do we stay with the trouble?
29. September 2021
Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
20. Oktober 2021
reboot: responsiveness ist eine Kooperation von:
reboot: responsiveness wird unterstützt von:
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices.
The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in.
http://reboot-responsiveness.com
reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys
Coronaseminar – reboot: edition
First session on May 12, 2021, 6 – 8 pm CET
The Coronaseminar by Dr. Ewa Majewska marks the first public meeting of reboot: responsiveness and will unfold over five sessions of reflexive being together in the second year of the pandemic:
For many of us, the last months have been those of fear, pandemic, danger, precarity and insecurity. The oppressive presence of the life-threatening virus changed our lives in every possible way, by means of fear most of us experienced, changes in the everyday routines, work, kinship and intimacy. Everything is different now, and yet – many things stayed intact. Solidarity networks still form, there is some hope for better addressing the ecological dangers, online formats have successfully replaced the in-situ presence in so many contexts that it might reshape our habits of traveling and consumption. However – distinctions, marginalization and exclusions not only stay with us throughout the pandemic, but also sharpen, at least in some important contexts.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic many theorists immediately jumped to their computers, ready to offer what Donna Haraway rightly qualified as “easy techno-fixes”, on the level of thinking. In Warsaw, we decided to open an online-space for thinking the pandemic together, and thus the first edition of the Coronaseminars opened in April 2020 already, conducted with the generous support of the MoMA Warsaw and the curator Natalia Sielewicz. In this online-space, we could be together in what proved to be one of the most stressful times, we were reading theory together, discussing it, sharing our strategies to survive the health risks, precarization and panic. It felt both comforting and strange to find such loads of intimacy and closeness in this highly-mediatized format (Zoom + Fb stream). Yet – for many of us this was not just a seminar, but also a safe space.
Now – opening the new series of the Coronaseminar – reboot: edition, we would like to open our space, support and need to connect with those who want to be together in the moment of the (hopefully) ending time of the pandemic. With this year’s main reboot: theme of responsiveness, we want to discuss the post-pandemic future, as in: a life we will be living, work-related changes, shifts and transitions of intimacy and kinship, new formats and distributions of care, and the questions of equality and redistribution. We would like to see to what extent the art institutions and culture producers can involve in such problems and whether we can bring some solidarity and change.
We invite everyone interested in such online-discussion format, with some prospects of meeting offline, if the situation allows. We will be reading some texts, usually available online, sharing our solidarity practices and solutions from the time of pandemic, challenging our assumptions, as well as practicing being together – despite the alienating modes of contemporary culture. Staying with the trouble – Haraway’s book title – is a motto of these sessions. Ewa Majewska’s concept of the weak resistance will be our welcoming context, then we will move further in the post-pandemic thinking and practice. We invite anyone who can join us.
—Dr. Ewa Majewska
Dates of the Coronaseminars – reboot: edition #1-5
Coronaseminar #1. How do we reboot?
May 12, 2021
Online-Zoom, 6 – 8 pm CET (in English)
Co-hosts: Ewa Majewska, Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann
Guest: Natalia Sielewicz, MoMA Warsaw.
Texts: Tithi Bhattacharia, “Social Reproduction Theory And Why We Need it to Make Sense of the Corona Virus Crisis” [Link]
Participation via the following link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88698404962?pwd=aVpPYmZHaC9NeUUxZGg0bUZiRFBOdz09
RSVP to register, before May 10: info@koelnischerkunstverein.de
Coronaseminar #2. Pandemic intimacies.
June 9, 2021
Coronaseminar #3. On Motherhood. Bring your kids!
June 30, 2021
Coronaseminar #4. How do we stay with the trouble?
September 29, 2021
Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
October 20, 2021
reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:
reboot: responsiveness is supported by:
reboot: responsiveness is the first cycle of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices, jointly presented by Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen.
reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys
Further information under the following link. All previous events can be viewed in the archive. Upcoming dates will be announced via our calendar.
reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:
reboot: responsiveness is supported by:
We are pleased to welcome you back. The exhibition is prolonged until July 4, 2021. Please note to the current applicable corona protection measures.
At the time of writing this text, it cannot be assumed that visitors will be able to enter the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Die Brücke, in the near future and that the exhibition Bridge of Sigh will find any audience at all. Genoveva Filipovic’s exhibition will possibly be seen only from outside.
“…If some ill luck forced him to speak, he managed to say only the most ridiculous things. Worse yet, he saw how absurdly he was behaving, and then exaggerated it still further; but what he did not see was the expression in his eyes; they were so beautiful and revealed such a fervent soul that, just as a good actor does, they gave charming significance to words that had none… he never said anything worth saying except when, distracted by some unforeseen event, he wasn’t trying to turn a well-phrased compliment.”
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Concept
I made cactuses and placed them in a row.
After this work was completed, I changed the facial expression of each cactus so that, I thought, it might elicit a sigh.
When that proved too difficult, I did this: I claimed that I was changing the facial expression of each cactus so that, I thought, it might elicit a sigh. But I inserted smiles instead.
Then I try to imagine how it would be to ‘act out’ this scene.
Very Ralph
The Artist wants no Erklärungsbrücken
The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.
Genoveva Filipovic (*1986 in Frankfurt am Main) lives in New York and currently in Cologne. She studied at the HfG in Offenbach am Main and at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (until 2013). Her works have recently been shown at Galleria Federico Vavassori in Milan (2019), Kunsthalle Zurich (2019), Goton in Paris (2018), Dead Ends in New York (2016), Vilma Gold in London (2016), and Neue Alte Brücke in Frankfurt am Main (2014).
The exhibition is supported by:
Modern Lovers
A screening on Valentine’s Day in the context of the exhibition THE KÖLN CONCERT
by Dorothy Iannone & Juliette Blightman with video works of both artists
Program:
Juliette Blightman
Girlfriend, 2009
Dorothy Iannone
The Story of Bern (Or) Showing Colors, 1970
Dorothy Iannone
Follow Me, 1977
Dorothy Iannone
The Berlin Beauties Or You Have No Idea How Beautiful You Are, 1978
Juliette Blightman
I Will Always Love You, 2019
Juliette Blightman
Diseaseeds and Pollutionation, 2020
Total running time: 80 min
The screening takes place via the internet platform Zoom. With the following link you can join the meeting via your browser: https://zoom.us/j/97358733748
For access via a zoom account:
Meeting-ID: 973 5873 3748
Hounds of Love
An evening zoom of music, performance and readings, with friends and heroes of Juliette Blightman and Lily McMenamy. The artists come together for the first time, both drawing inspiration from the world around them; as women, as friends and as cosmic dancers.
Tune in from 7 pm Köln time.
The conversation takes place via the internet platform Zoom. With the following link you can join the meeting via your browser:
For access via a zoom account:
Meeting-ID: 915 7422 2270
The event is part of the exhibition THE KÖLN CONCERT by Dorothy Iannone & Juliette Blightman and can be viewed here afterwards:
We are pleased to present the Jahresgaben 2020 (annual editions) online for now starting Tuesday, November 17. Works by both young and established artists exclusively produced or donated for the Kunstverein are available:
John Baldessari, Kenneth Bergfeld, Tom Burr, Hanne Darboven, Dunja Herzog, Dorothy Iannone, Emma LaMorte, Marcel Odenbach, Lena Anouk Philipp, Luc Tuymans, Jeff Wall
By purchasing a Jahresgabe, you are making an important contribution to the support of contemporary art and artists and to the work of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Thank you very much!
Orders for the 2020 Jahresgaben can be placed in writing from November 17, 2020 up to and including January 6, 2021. If more orders are received than copies are available, the decision will be made by lot. The lottery will take place on January 7, 2021.
Please note that the Jahresgaben can only be purchased by members of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. The complete ordering procedure can be found here.
Currently and until January 31, 2021, the Kölnischer Kunstverein will remain closed according to the Corona Protection Regulation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. As soon as we can open our doors again for visitors, the Jahresgaben will be on display in an exhibition on the 2nd floor.
We will keep you updated with news about the reopening and our program via our website and newsletter.
We look forward to seeing you soon again!
Leider muss die Ausstellung THE KÖLN CONCERT von Dorothy Iannone & Juliette Blightman im Kölnischen Kunstverein ab dem 3. November bis zum 30. November 2020 gemäß der Coronaschutzverordnung des Landes NRW schließen.
Trotz geschlossener Türen wird ein Großteil der Ausstellung weiterhin von der Hahnenstrasse aus durch die Fensterfront einsehbar sein. Schauen Sie gern einmal rein!
Eine Abholung der Vereinsgaben ist in diesem Zeitraum nicht möglich.
Mitglieder, die ihre Vereinsgabe 2019 noch nicht abholen konnten, erhalten diese nach der Wiedereröffnung noch bis zum 31.01.2021.
Über Neuigkeiten zur Wiederöffnung und zu unserem Programm halten wir Sie hier und über den Newsletter auf dem Laufenden.
Wir freuen uns auf ein baldiges Wiedersehen!
Ihr Team des Kölnischen Kunstvereins
Opening on Friday, 30.10.2020, 3 pm – 9 pm
‘Image higher than angels: The Köln Concert’
A text by Amelia Stein
Life has no outside, say the psyche-celestial Ladies of Liberty with their microphones, say the fulgent cacti fountains, says the blooming pussy flower with an unmistakable wink.
This is the pact The Köln Concert stages with its audience, among its works, between its artists, Juliette Blightman (*1980) and Dorothy Iannone (*1933), who draw down time into all-encompassing symbologies of love, sex, care, work, autonomy, joy and other selfhoods. When I say symbol, I mean images that speak broadly and concentrate personally, that are partly mnemonic and partly divinatory, in which breakfast lives alongside Art Nouveau and narrative takes the place of noses. In The Köln Concert, forms, figures, messages layer in counterpoint, a leitmotif of sorts, the coexistence of harmony and clash played by Blightman and Iannone so that they too may listen.
Not that everything is practice but that practice reticulates: Blightman made the fountains in her stepfather’s garage, perhaps with her young daughter’s help. It is possible to imagine their visit to the hardware store to select the paint, a lurid yet somehow utilitarian green. Here in the world of handy things, also misappropriation, high jinks, making do, the phalluses’ gentle eruptions rely on whatever energy they can gather via solar panels; when stilled, they earnestly hold court as choruses performing in the rounds of paddling pools. Something’s always growing, which is to say requiring tending, in Blightman’s work. Children and plants, but also limitations, perspective, desire, sense of self: care is a matter of patterning, of understanding subject and process as one and the same. ‘Daughter’ is a process; so is ‘body’, so is ‘home’. The pencil and guache works in Stages of Seed Development (2020) appear at first as windows until their serialized arrangement suggests something more vociferous, perhaps phrases, at once contingent and complete.
These works in particular speak, sing, move to their muse, (Ta)Rot Pack (2016/1968-69), Iannone’s ecstatic allegory of her life with Dieter Roth, which offers some phrases of its own: ‘This Card Brings a Brief Respite Maybe’, says a nude Roth wandering a trippy Swiss path; ‘This Card Brings What Everyone Wants’, say the adorned lovers in tantric embrace. Iannone has said that this ability—to bring things—is the only way her cards reflect the (other) tarot. I would venture another: that the (Ta)Rot Pack, like Blightman’s Stages, celebrates a sense of everyday consequence that is not without a cosmic sense of humor.
Which may have something to do with itinerancy, an underlying cadence here. These works spring from places both loved and abided, and from the need amid frequent departures to sometimes return—to the United States, for instance, where Iannone and her Ladies of Liberty were born, to Germany, where Blightman first raised, and first painted, her daughter, and to the Rhineland specifically, where Iannone lived with Roth and began the (Ta)Rot Pack in the late 1960s. Image is how to get there: The Story Of Bern (Or) Showing Colors (1970), originally an artist book, shown in The Köln Concert as a diaporama, tells that highly generative periods are often live with contention and struggle. And that at the end of it all, when we finally surface, we can know only through reflection that the triumphal arc stands somewhere in the distance.
The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.
In the course of the exhibition, a joint publication will be produced.
The presentation at the Kölnischer Kunstverein is a continuation of the exhibition Prologue at Arcadia Missa Gallery this year. A second version of the exhibition will open at Vleeshal in Middelburg, The Netherlands, in April 2021.
Thanks to: Air de Paris, Romainville; Arcadia Missa, London; Peres Projects, Berlin; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Collection Alexander Schröder, Berlin; Roger Hobbs; Kentaurus, Cologne
The exhibition is supported by:
Instagram Live: Tarot Conversation: The Tower by Jessa Crispin, independent writer and editor (USA)
Online Event, no registration required, access via our Instagram-Account“
A tower, hit by lightning or perhaps simply on fire, is nearing collapse. In many versions of the card, two figures fall from the top of the tower to the ground below. Rather than the self-destruction of the Devil, the Tower is destruction that comes from the outside. It is a shaking, a tumult, a calamity. What you have built up, the Tower takes down. It is perhaps the most dreaded card in the deck. It falls at number sixteen.” – Jessa Crispin, “The Tower”, in: The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life, New York 2016.
Feminist and astrology-affin writer and publisher Jessa Crispin takes us on a journey to the secrets and opportunities of tarot. In the context of Emma LaMorte‘s exhibition Aussicht, she talks about the destructive but also recovering qualities of the tarot card “The Tower”.
Jessa Crispin is an independent writer and editor based in Baltimore, MD. From 2003 to 2016 she was responsible for Bookslut, a monthly magazine and blog and has been hosting the podcast Public Intellectual since 2017. She frequently writes for The New York Times and The Washington Post covering politics, art, literature, film, pop culture, food, feminism, religion, and housing and is a columnist for The Guardian since 2019. Most recently she has published Why I am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto (2017), The Creative Tarot (2016) and The Dead Ladies Project (2015) and is currently working on her book-in-progress My Three Dads (planned for 2021). In collaboration with the artist Jen May she printed and distributed the Spolia Tarot Deck in 2018 and is giving tarot readings, lectures, and workshops on a regular basis.
Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:
Stan Brakhage: Anticipation of the Night, USA, 1958, 43 min, colour, mute, 16 mm
With an accompanying text by Emma LaMorte.
“The daylight shadows of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose bowl held in hand reflects both the sun and moon like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promissory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams becoming the amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning. The trees change colour and lose their leaves for the morn, they become the complexity of branches in which the shadow man hangs himself.” – Stan Brakhage
Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:
Broadcast: Something Like #21: The Continuous Present, with Bitsy Knox, Rosa Aiello, and Emma LaMorte, in-situ at the Kölnischer Kunstverein
Online Event, no registration required
≈≈ The show will air live on Cashmere Radio on October 8, 10 am – 1 pm. It will then be available on Something Like’s Cashmere page and on Mixcloud ≈≈
“. . . It’s at this moment that I decide to make a change, set up some rules, do something, because when the life of the living moves slow, it speeds the overall sense of time. It gives the impression that life goes by “In a flash,” “In a breath,” “Before you know it.” I decide: First, I will forbid the use of any such phrase, including, “Where has the day gone?” including “Already?”. Second, I will do all I can to avoid tradition, which speeds time. Like ritual speeds time. Like routine, which I cannot possibly avoid, speeds time. Third, and most important, because it is something I can control, I will adopt an exercise for slowing time: to place details in time, so to prevent the seamless fold from taking hold. . .” (an excerpt from Calypso Goes out of Favour by Rosa Aiello)
In this very special 21st episode of Something Like, Bitsy speaks with artists Emma LaMorte and Rosa Aiello about Emma’s exhibition, Aussicht, in-situ at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, late into the night. As they go on an ekphrastic exploration through Emma’s exhibition, they ask: what is the continuous present, and how do we move through it? What does the passage of time feel like for an artist—for a new mother—and how does this relate to care, to duty, to patience, to pleasure, to injustice?
Taking a page from Aussicht, this is an episode in four parts, and features an original score by LNS (Laura Sparrow), as well as excerpts from Rosa Aiello’s text for the exhibition, Calypso Goes out of Favour, an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Calypso’s Way.
Bitsy Knox (*1984 in Vancouver) is a poet, performer, and radio host based in Berlin. Bitsy has read poetry and performed across Europe, most recently at Haus am Lutzowplatz, Hopscotch, Horse & Pony, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, OHM, and Project Space Festival, Berlin; W139, Amsterdam; Une, Une, Une, Marseille; Feeelings, Brussels; and PEACH, Rotterdam. Her bi-monthly radio show on Cashmere Radio and CHFR Hornby Island, Something Like, traverses folk traditions and new age, experimental, and minimal composition through lenses of poetry and amateur musicology. Bitsy has collaborated with Brussels-based musician Roger 3000 since 2016. Their first LP as Bitsy Knox & Roger 3000, OM COLD BLOOD was released by Tanuki Records in 2018, and a forthcoming EP, The Heat Within, will be released by Tundra Records in Autumn 2020. Bitsy’s poems have been published by Tabloid, General Fine Arts, Arts of the Working Class, and Pure Fiction, among others. Her first chapbook, Meaningless Secrets, was published in 2020. She holds a MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.
Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:
Live Narration by Rosa Aiello, Emma LaMorte & Benjamin Marvin with music by LNS
With a book presentation of the publication accompanying the exhibition
Live Narration is a collaborative project with text by Rosa Aiello, visuals by Emma LaMorte and Benjamin Marvin and music by LNS. Using an overhead projector, images from light, shadow, and colour are created and projected on site, illustrating and commenting on the live mixed soundscape of music and language. The performance at the Kölnischer Kunstverein includes work details from Emma LaMorte’s exhibition Aussicht and a reading by Rosa Aiello from her text Calypso Goes out of Favour that is also part of the accompanying publication.
Rosa Aiello, born 1987 in Canada, is a writer and artist working with video, text, photography, sound, and installation. She often deals with the way language, narrative devices, domestic architecture, and other structural parameters are involved in socialisation. Her works have been shown at various institutions and galleries, most recently, Cell Project Space in London, Lodos Gallery in Mexico City, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbdrige, Bureau des Réalités in Brussels, Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main, and Kunsthalle Zürich in Zurich. Her writing has been published in Triple Canopy, Starship, CanadianArt, Art Papers, and F. R. David. Calypso Goes out of Favour is excerpted from her long-form fiction project Calypso’s Way, currently in progress.
LNS, originally from Calgary, CA, has since years been an integral part of buillding Vancouver’s underground music community, creating and DJing on point and under the radar events. Her DJing reflects a myriad of electronic influences, including the pioneering years of Detroit and UK Techno, IDM, and Electro. This style is mirrored in her musical production which has been featured on labels such as 1080p, Freakout Cult, Wania, and her own label LNS, of which there are two EP’s currently released.
Benjamin Marvin, born 1987 in Canada, is an artist living in Berlin. He received his BFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver and studied in the class of Christopher Williams at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Recent exhibitions include Exhibiting Paintings at Jack’s Flat Berlin, Development (Scarlet goes to the doctor) at Gärtnergasse in Vienna (together with Emma LaMorte), Close Your Eyes It’s all pretend at Sikås Art Center and How am I at Junge Museum in Bottrop.
*Please note that the time of the event has changed to 6 pm.
Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:
Sat, Sep 19, 2020, 7 pm – 9 pm
Show & Tell Closely interwoven: fabrics and cloths in capitalism, colonialism.
Discussion based on the artistic works by Dunja Herzog, Fatima Khan, Cate Lartey & Maryline Ogboko (in German).
Fabrics and cloths, the former luxury goods, have become commonplace. Nevertheless, as a craft practice they are still closely interwoven with social ideas. Fabrics are one of the few handicraft materials whose use by women is tolerated and even supported by society. However, the conditions of production and history of textiles are largely ignored. In a conversation about the theory, practice, and stories of various fabrics, the artists Dunja Herzog, Fatima Khan, Cate Lartey, and Maryline Ogboko make the connection between fabrics, capitalism, and colonialism.
Fatima Khan, born in Bhola in 1987, grew up in Cologne, is an artist, curator and presenter. She studied ancient languages and cultures – classical literature and German studies at the University of Cologne. She was the initiator and co-founder of q[lit]*clgn, the first feminist literature festival in Germany. Her artistic works capture banal everyday situations in a visual diary in which photos and videos merge to form documentary and art films. She produces and publishes through Instagram under @fatum.khan.
Cate Lartey is a design researcher from Düsseldorf. In her work she deals with notions of power relations and intersectional entanglements from a postcolonial feminist perspective. She explores these issues through film and photography.
Maryline Ogboko is a dancer from Düsseldorf and studies Textile and Clothing Management at the HS Niederrhein in Mönchengladbach. As part of her studies, she wrote a student research project that examines the Nigerian fashion industry from a traditional and contemporary perspective. Since 2019 she is one of the co-founders of the start-up initiative Ohemaa Green Housing, a concept that will build Tiny Houses in Ghana from recycled plastic.
The event is part of the exhibition Dunja Herzog MEANWHILE at Kölnischer Kunstverein.The series Show & Tell is supported by:
Film screening: I Am Not a Witch, 2017, Director: Rungano Nyoni, 94 min, OmU
In the presence of the artist Dunja Herzog
In her feature debut film I Am Not a Witch, Rungano Nyoni deals with modern percecution of witches in Zambia. The nine-year-old orphan Shula is accused of being a witch by a villager and sent to a witch camp in the desert. Under strict rules she lives there and has to undergo a ritual to internalize the rules of the witch’s life. I Am Not a Witch is both social satire, feminist criticism and surrealistic portrait of rural Zambia.
Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:
With the solo exhibition Meanwhile by Dunja Herzog, the Kölnischer Kunstverein is realizing a comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work, accompanied by a program of film screenings, artist talks, performance, children’s workshop and a guided tour of the Cologne-based Women’s History Society. Various elements and themes of different temporalities and backgrounds are brought together in a site-specific installation in which they coexist and relate to one another.
The exhibition is a continuation of the examination of the history of the copper trade, as it is dealt with by the artist in particular in the project Red Gold and its focus on the omnipresent systematic exploitation of the global capitalist project, furthering the investigation with new work produced for the exhibition. In doing so, she looks back to the more distant past: to the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, to the history of witch-hunting and copper production in Europe (e.g. by reproducing a 16th century woodcut by Georg Agricola depicting mines for copper mining, as well as a witches’ dance on the Blocksberg in the Harz Mountains). Alongside these are references to mechanisms of commercial profit in order to visualize today’s globally operating economic systems, and considerations of the role of women and reproduction in the transition to capitalism. Her personal background as a Swiss woman is essential in this context. Women’s voting rights in Switzerland, one of the last European countries to institute such rights, only became effective in 1971 (in the canton of Appenzell even only from 1990); another aspect is Switzerland’s role in the system of imperial exploitation.
Not least of all, the material copper is one of the most important global economic indicators with its main trading center in Switzerland since 2011; the five largest Swiss companies are active in raw materials trading. In a new video work by the artist, a geographic and temporal arc is drawn from the Copperbelt in Zambia (a region with the most important copper mining area in Africa, where the Swiss company Glencore also operates mines) to a copper mine in the Harz Mountains, where the largest copper deposit in Germany once existed. At a depth of 165 meters, a film has been produced in Harz, showing the ceiling of a tunnel illuminated by light whilst driving out of the mine—a retreat from the mine and the overexploitation of both nature and labor that was once practiced there. For the artist, questions of resources, mining, exploitation and trade are central: How did it come about that cultural history in Europe transitioned from a reverence for nature, to its exploitation, and then, in the “logic of exploitation”, was exported from Europe to the whole world?
A world where violence, foreign domination and profit prevail and our relationship to the earth, or how it is used and abused, is seen by the artist as synonymous with how bodies and their emotional “landscapes” are dealt with. The more resources, including copper—without which our contemporary digital world is inconceivable—are mined, the more the search for or connection to inner resources seems relevant.
These various themes and their associated stories, which almost always speak of violence, are not necessarily addressed directly in the exhibition or reproduced. Rather, they are kept present through the materials enlisted, by relating to their origin, their use, their historical relevance, their development and the trade routes that have shaped our society very physically over time. Thus, for the exhibition, baskets made of copper wire from electronic scrap have been created in collaboration with basket makers from the Republic of Benin in Lagos, a city that belongs to one of the largest electronic dumping sites in West Africa; not only to detach the material from one value chain and transpose it into another, but to simultaneously pay homage to the women of Nigeria and Zambia, who made significant contributions to the independence of both countries. These colonial legacies seem particularly relevant to the building of the Kölnischer Kunstverein itself, since it was the seat of the British Council – the so called “Die Brücke” (The Bridge)—in the enduring colonial period of the British, and its proposition of a “bridge” to the world after the Second World War.
The artist creates a space, in a certain sense a “third space”, in which a larger spectrum of stories and their complex interrelations with matter, material and their transformation and relationship to people can be experienced, and other perspectives made possible. From the materials and plants that are addressed, she extracts, in a way, the essence of their inherent energies and logics, makes them physically perceptible and thus ultimately also calls upon their nourishing properties.
The two editions Sea field and Death of Nature will be published on the occasion of this exhibition.
Dunja Herzog (*1976 in Basel, Switzerland) lived last year in Lagos, Nigeria, where she created some of the work presented at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Her works were shown at the Kunstverein Göttingen; Swiss Art Awards, Basel (both 2018); Lagos Biennale, Lagos, Nigeria (2017); BLOK art space, Istanbul; 1646, Den Haag (all 2016); New Bretagne / Belle Air, Essen and at MAXXI Museum, Rome (both 2015), among others.
The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.
With kindly support of: