Guided tour of the exhibition Chris Korda Artist’s Con(tra)ception with Ani Schulze, artist. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Guided tour of the exhibition Chris Korda Artist’s Con(tra)ception with Anna Heldmann, curatorial assistant. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Guided tour of the exhibition Chris Korda Artist’s Con(tra)ception with Ani Schulze, artist. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Führung durch die Ausstellung Chris Korda Artist’s Con(tra)ception mit Ani Schulze, Künstlerin. Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei, eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

Learning to Listen Special With Chris Korda Hosted by Hanna Bächer Artist’s Con(tra)ception (25.5.–14.7.24) is Chris Korda’s first exhibition in Germany. The show at the Kölnischer Kunstverein ranges from older works to works shown for the first time, in which the intertwining of Korda’s extraordinary activist, musical and artistic movements becomes visible. Korda gained an international reputation with the environmental activist organisation founded in 1992 and her music in the field of electronic music. Records have been released by Gigolo Records, Perlon, Mental Groove, Yoyaku and on her own label Kevorkian Records. A new record will soon be released on Slacker 85. The Kölnischer Kunstverein, together with the Akademie der Künste der Welt (ADKDW) and Kompakt, is pleased to invite Chris Korda to a Special within the Learning to Listen series. No gathering would be more fitting in Cologne than with the well-known record shop Kompakt and in an event series like this to learn more about Chris Korda’s musical thinking; her understanding of music that led to her complex musical inventions. Chris Korda is an internationally renowned multimedia artist, whose work spans thirty years and includes electronic music, digital and video art, performance and conceptual art, and culture jamming. Chris pioneered the use of complex polymeter in electronic dance music, and invented a unique MIDI sequencer in order to explore polymeter composition techniques. Chris composes and performs music in a variety of genres, and has released many albums on labels such as Yoyaku, Perlon, Mental Groove, and Gigolo Records. Learning to Listen Series In radio broadcasts, podcasts and live events, Learning to Listen deals with forms of listening and non-listening – and the knowledge that can be drawn from them. The main aim of Learning to Listen is to initiate didactic processes intended to help us understand why certain sounds, songs, and narratives are heard and others are not. Together we will reflect on our internalized ways of thinking, of learning to listen and to un-learn. An event by Kölnischer Kunstverein, Akademie der Künste der Welt (ADKDW) and Kompakt. Location: Kompakt Record Store, Werderstraße 15–19, 50672 Cologne. Free entry, no registration required.  

Exhibition tour with Chris Korda and Valérie Knoll, Director. In English Admission is free, no registration required.

Chris Korda live in Salon des Amateurs Entry from 10 pm, concert ca. midnight. Tickets only at the door, admission 10€. A cooperation between Kölnischer Kunstverein and Salon des Amateurs. Location: Salon des Amateurs, Grabbeplatz 4, 40213 Düsseldorf

Chris Korda
Artist’s Con(tra)ception
25.5.–14.7.2024

Kreisch! Chris Korda is in the house. Ungeheuerlich, unerträglich, unfassbar gut. Korda wurde 1992 von einem seltsamen Traum heimgesucht, in dem eine außerirdische Intelligenz namens „Das Wesen“ behauptete, in einer anderen Dimension für die Menschen zu sprechen. Es warnte vor dem Zusammenbruch des Ökosystems unseres Planeten. Als Korda aus dem Traum erwachte, sagte sie: „Save the Planet – Kill Yourself“.

Kordas Mission gründet auf der Überzeugung, dass der Mensch, ein egozentrischer Zerstörer, in seine Grenzen gewiesen werden muss. „Danke, dass sie sich nicht fortpflanzen“, lautet die an den guten Willen appellierende Empfehlung. Meine DNA reiche ich nicht weiter, ich steige aus dem Genpool aus. Schluss mit anthropozentrischer Hybris. Wer aus freien Stücken aus dem Leben scheiden möchte, soll das tun dürfen – und leistet nebenbei einen sinnvollen Beitrag. Die Möglichkeit der Abtreibung ist ein Segen. Sex ist wunderbar, solange er nicht der Reproduktion dient. Wer unbedingt Fleisch essen will, nur das der eigenen Gattung – man tötet keine anderen Lebewesen. Die Empfehlungen der 1992 in Boston von Reverend Chris Korda gemeinsam mit Pastor Kim gegründeten Kirche, der Church of Euthanasia, lassen vielen die Haare zu Berge stehen. Allein der Name der Glaubensbewegung führt zur Verkrampfung der Gesichtszüge. Die Empfehlungen zur Dezimierung der Art Homo Sapiens sind extrem, teilweise widersprüchlich und streitbar.

Schönreden muss man den Namen der Kirche nicht, aber im Hintergrund haben, dass die CoE auf Freiwilligkeit, einem anti-autoritären Ethos beruht.

Die CoE rief Korda ins Leben, da eine Kirche, anders als eine politische Partei, in der Lage ist, ethische Normen neu zu gestalten. Einige ihrer Taktiken sind verwandt mit denen der Situationisten und der Dadaisten: Auch Kordas Aktionen treten in offene Situationen, Strategien werden immer wieder überraschend geändert; die Zungen, in denen sie spricht, sind unversöhnlich und Widersprüche zugelassen. Gleichzeitig bleibt ihr provozierendes Tun immer spielerisch.

Was Chris Korda bereits Anfang der 1990er propagierte, weil sie die irreversiblen Entwicklungen menschlicher Umweltzerstörung erkannte, war ihrer Zeit voraus: vegan zu leben, die Grenzen des Wachstums zu respektieren und die Vielfältigkeit aller Arten zu proklamieren.

Korda ist aber nicht nur Reverend. Sie ist vieles und in erster Linie aktiv als Musikerin. Sie gilt als eine der eigensinnigsten und schroffsten Positionen des Techno. In Europa erlangte sie Ende der 1990er Jahre erstmals Präsenz durch DJ Hell aus München mit seinem Label International Gigolo Records.

Als Musikerin tritt sie gegen Monokultur und Standardisierung ein und ist immer auf der Suche nach Komplexität. Korda experimentiert mit polymetrischen Taktarten (unterschiedliche Taktarten in einem Stück, ohne Angleichung der jeweiligen Dauer der Takte) und ungewöhnlichen Harmonien. Dass sie Ende der 1970er Jahre als Jazzgitarristin begonnen und Musiktheorie studiert hat, beeinflusst ihre Musik.

1980 begann Korda Software zu programmieren, erst Grafikkarten, später Musiksoftware, die sie von Anfang an umsonst zur Verfügung stellte. Seit jeher erfindet sie Werkzeuge, um künstlerische und musikalische Praktiken zu entwickeln. Aus diesem Grund bezeichnet sich Korda auch als „Inventor-Artist“, Erfinder-Künstlerin. In erster Linie bin ich eine Technologin, sagt sie von sich selbst. Als solche verbindet sie Musik wie auch ihre digitalen Bilder mit Existentialismus und einem wissenschaftlichen Pragmatismus. Wie für Musik, baut sie auch für ihre Kunst Maschinen und kooperiert mit ihnen, um nicht zuletzt ästhetische Probleme zu lösen. Musik und digitale Bilder, wie auch ihre synästhetischen Arbeiten, entstehen seit einiger Zeit auch in sich ergänzender Zusammenarbeit mit künstlicher Intelligenz. Diese bringt Präzision und Geschwindigkeit, Korda die Intuition, Bewusstsein und lustvolles Spiel.

Artist’s Con(tra)ception, ein Wortspiel aus künstlerischem Konzept und künstlerischer Empfängnisverhütung, ist die erste institutionelle Ausstellung in Deutschland zu Chris Kordas ungewöhnlichem Schaffen. In ihr werden neue oder bislang ungezeigte digitale Bilder und audiovisuelle Arbeiten entlang einer Auswahl von Bannern, Fotografien, Zeichnungen und auch Platten der letzten dreißig Jahre zusammengebracht.

Weiter lesen.

Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt durch:

Mit besonderem Dank an/With special thanks to: Anthony Stephinson und Coralie Ruiz von Goswell Road, Paris; Matthias Sohr; Blandine Houtekins, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers; Alex Sinh Nguyen; Wolfgang Voigt, Veronika Unland; Hans-Christian Dany; Moch Figuren, Köln.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more.

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

The exhibition is supported by:

Exhibition Opening: Chris Korda – Artist’s Con(tra)ception

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

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

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

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

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

Read more.

The film program is supported by:

Film programme in the cinema of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, curated by Nicholas Tammens Opening: Friday, 12.4., 6 pm 6:30 pm Screening of films 7:30 pm Talk between Amanda van Hesteren and Nicholas Tammens 8:30 pm Repeated screening of films

Kölner Architekturpreis 2024
Tue., 9.4. – Sat., 14.4., 11 am – 6 pm
Sun., 14.4., 11 am – 4 pm
free entry
More Information

Guided tour through the exhibition Hoi Köln Part 3 with Valérie Knoll, Director. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Guided tour through the exhibition Hoi Köln Part 3 with Anna Heldmann, curatorial assistant. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Guided tour through the exhibition Hoi Köln Part 3 with Anna Heldmann, curatorial assistant. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Kölnischer Kunstverein will be closed over carnival, including Rosenmontag. We look forward to welcoming you again from Tuesday 13 February during our regular opening hours.

Der Kölnische Kunstverein bleibt über die Karnevalstage, bis einschließlich Rosenmontag, geschlossen. Wir freuen uns, Sie ab Dienstag, den 13. Februar zu den regulären Öffnungszeiten wieder bei uns zu begrüßen.

Opening: Friday, 2. February, 6 pm

Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Matthias Groebel, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Hamishi Farah, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Dominik Sittig, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi

Faced with this rectangular void, anything could happen. The horizon of possibilities seems open. At any moment, an idea could flicker into my consciousness, and I’d be able to get it all on the canvas. Still better, perhaps, the brush could just start moving and the painting, sleepwalker-like, paint itself without me. The void gleams auspiciously; but never for long. Whatever image I may have had in my mind’s eye, it is wrecked by the first brushstroke. Its utter fatuousness is exposed. And every additional brushstroke just makes it worse. If one seems weak, the next, which was supposed to strengthen it, has come straight out of the repertoire of cheap effects. This merry-go-round of recycled gimmicks revolves with a deadening regularity. What’s left for you to do when the dice were all cast in the last century? Hum and ha, paint small paintings, paint huge paintings, dive into abstraction and the morass of ambition, revive formalism, figuration, raise tornados of pigment, embrace minimalism, flirt with technology. Subjects and points of reference change, but their form stays stuck to the ground, as if it were covered with some repulsive, viscous liquid. Trembling, the emoji in oil tries to pull itself out of the morass, drawing long strands behind itself like chewing gum. Brushstrokes as identity crises, with filaments trailing from their lips like burst bubbles of gum.

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Curated by Valérie Knoll.

The exhibition is generously supported by:

Image: Paul Coker Jr.

Exhibition Opening Hoi Köln Part 3: Nightmare of Painting

Guided tour through the exhibition Hoi Köln Part 2 with Ani Schulze. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required. (In German)

Guided tour through the exhibition Hoi Köln Part 2 with Ani Schulze. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required. (In German)

Guided tour through the exhibition Hoi Köln Part 2 with Anna Heldmann, curatorial assistant. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required. (In German)

Der Kölnische Kunstverein bleibt vom 24. Dezember 2023 bis einschließlich zum 1. Januar 2024 geschlossen. Wir wünschen Ihnen schöne Feiertage und freuen uns darauf, Sie im neuen Jahr wieder bei uns zu begrüßen.

Guided tour through the exhibition Hoi Köln Part 2 with Valérie Knoll, Director. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required. (In German)

The Christmas Show – A Christmas evening with stories, music, puppets and theatre, by and with Claus Richter. Admission is free, registration is not required

Guided tour through the exhibition Hoi Köln Part 2 with Ani Schulze. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required. (In German)

Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Matthias Groebel, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Hamishi Farah, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi

Artificial intelligence is making great strides, generative systems are reaching new heights of image and text production. But what does it mean for painting if it can be produced by computing robots?

In the past, technological advances often marked the beginning of long periods in which art shed its skin in revolutionary transformation. Before these advances, human beings could still flatter themselves that the privilege of creating things was theirs alone. After them, when they suddenly found themselves overtaken by technology, they had to confront their own limitations. Impressionism emerged form art’s dialogue with the new invention of photography, while a great deal of postmodern painting was inspired by the experience of computers. Right now we stand at the dawn of another period of this kind, in which human-made art must struggle against its own reflection in technology. What are these machines capable of, and what are the limits of their capabilities? By posing the question of how they differ from machines, and by finding their own niche, human beings can engage with technology to achieve a better understanding of themselves.

Read more

Curated by Valérie Knoll

The exhibition in genereously supported by:

Photo: Mareike Tocha

Eröffnung: Freitag, 1. Dezember, 18 Uhr

Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Matthias Groebel, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Hamishi Farah, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi

Die Künstliche Intelligenz macht große Schritte, generative Systeme erreichen neue Ebenen der Bild- und Textproduktion. Was bedeutet es für die Malerei, wenn sie von rechnenden Robotern hergestellt werden kann?

In der Vergangenheit bildeten technologische Sprünge oft der Beginn langer Phasen revolutionärer Häutungen der Kunst. Vor den Sprüngen konnte sich der Mensch noch einbilden, er besitze das Privileg, etwas zu können. Danach, plötzlich überholt von der Technologie, musste er sich nach der Decke strecken. Der Impressionismus verdankte sich den Wechselwirkungen mit der Erfindung der Fotografie und vieles in der postmodernen Malerei wurde angeregt durch die Erfahrung mit dem Computer. Gerade scheint wieder der Beginn einer solchen Phase auf, in der sich die menschengemachte Kunst an ihrem technologischen Spiegel abarbeiten muss. Was können diese Maschinen und wo kommen sie an ihre Grenzen? Mit der Frage, wie er sich von ihr unterscheidet, und der Suche nach seiner Nische schaut der Mensch durch die Maschine auf sich selbst.

Weiter lesen

Kuratiert von Valérie Knoll

Die Ausstellung wird großzügig gefördert von:

Bild: Mareike Tocha

Opening: Friday, December 1, 6 pm

Marie Angeletti, BLESS, Milena Büsch, Peter Fischli, Sylvie Fleury, Ryan Gander, Lorenza Longhi, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Franz Erhard Walther, Nicole Wermers, Amelie von Wulffen, Barbara Zenner

For the 2023 Jahresgaben, orders can be made in writing from December 1, 2023 until December 17, 2023 inclusive. Should there be more orders than copies available, the decision will be made by lot. The lottery will be held on December 18, 2023. After the draw of the buyer(s), all interested parties will be informed in writing via email of the result of the lottery. All remaining Jahresgaben are still for sale after the lottery 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.

Photo: Lorenza Longhi

Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Matthias Groebel, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Hamishi Farah, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi

Artificial intelligence is making great strides, generative systems are reaching new heights of image and text production. But what does it mean for painting if it can be produced by computing robots?

In the past, technological advances often marked the beginning of long periods in which art shed its skin in revolutionary transformation. Before these advances, human beings could still flatter themselves that the privilege of creating things was theirs alone. After them, when they suddenly found themselves overtaken by technology, they had to confront their own limitations. Impressionism emerged form art’s dialogue with the new invention of photography, while a great deal of postmodern painting was inspired by the experience of computers. Right now we stand at the dawn of another period of this kind, in which human-made art must struggle against its own reflection in technology. What are these machines capable of, and what are the limits of their capabilities? By posing the question of how they differ from machines, and by finding their own niche, human beings can engage with technology to achieve a better understanding of themselves.

Read more

Curated by Valérie Knoll

The exhibition in genereously supported by:

Photo: Mareike Tocha

Exhibition Opening Hoi Köln Part 2: In the Belly of the Machine

Guided tour of the exhibition Hoi Köln with Valérie Knoll, director. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Guided tour of the exhibition Hoi Köln with Ani Schulze. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Guided tour of the exhibition Hoi Köln with Ani Schulze. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Guided tour of the exhibition Hoi Köln with Anna Heldmann, curatorial assistant. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Talk between Valérie Knoll (director Kölnischer Kunstverein) and Peter Fischli (artist, Zurich) about his curated show Stop Painting at the Fondazione Prada, Venice (2021).

Guided tour of the exhibition Hoi Köln with Ani Schulze. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

With Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Hamishi Farah, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Matthias Groebel, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi

Where I come from, “hoi” is what people say when they greet each other in the street. I’ve come to Cologne because I love painting, and can think of no better place to engage seriously with this medium. That’s why I’m welcoming my first exhibition here with an overview of the current state of one of visual art’s oldest genres. Painting is especially exciting right now, and this has nothing to do with my own passion for it; it is rather that a lot of people are painting again and that art’s questions are again up for negotation. This doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy for painting to find its way forward. Its own history casts a long shadow over its current flowering like an implacable judgement. However, its difficulties lie not so much behind as ahead of it. Since painting develops slowly, it needs to be able to imagine an enduring future, one where it can eventually hope to arrive by creeping along at its own modest pace.

Right now, it is not just that the future is clouded over – it has become hard to imagine at all. Are people painting in the hope that the future, currently hidden behind a fog of dystopias and disaster scenarios, will eventually reappear? To keep on painting while everything familiar seems to be crumbling around you could be seen as an expression of the “principle of hope,” a way of resisting a world that has embraced darkness through the determination to see a light at the end of the tunnel. In this case, painting would be a way of going against the grain, of rising above social conventions with a wan smile.

Read more

Curated by Valérie Knoll

The exhibition is generously supported by:

Image: Basel Tourismus/Peter Ziegler

Exhibition Opening Hoi Köln Part 1: Welcoming the Space Opening on 28. September 2023, 6 pm Speeches from 7 pm, by Thomas Waldschmidt (Chairman), Valérie Knoll (Director), and by Susanne Imhoff (Chairwoman Imhoff Stiftung). With Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Hamishi Farah, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Matthias Groebel, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi  

Guided tour of Marie Angeletti’s exhibition “ram spin cram” with Anna Heldmann, curatorial assistant. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free. (in German)

Führung durch Marie Angelettis Ausstellung „ram spin cram“ mit Anna Heldmann, kuratorische Assistenz. Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei.

clips with Marie Angeletti and Line Ebert

Monday, 19.06.2023, 7 pm

The event is part of Marie Angeletti’s exhibition “ram spin cram” with the artist and Line Ebert. It will be in English. The admission is free and registration is not required.

The event is part of Marie Angeletti’s exhibition “ram spin cram” with the artist and Line Ebert. It will be in English. The admission is free and registration is not required.

Guided tour of Marie Angeletti’s exhibition “ram spin cram” with Ani Schulze. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free. (in German)

Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017): “The Third World was not a place, but a project.” (Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, 2007). This was to be a utopian alliance where the Global South would reconfigure planetary leadership, ending Euro-American dominance. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) attempted to navigate a “third way,” but parallel participation in the Petrodollar-driven “Islamic bloc” by some member countries shredded fragile coalitions behind the scenes. Two Meetings and a Funeral explores a “pivot” moment between the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Algeria and the 1974 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Pakistan. The unraveling of old alliances began from a barely discernible venn diagram overlap between these two groups, one that would taken on world significance after the OPEC oil crisis, the Iranian revolution, and the invasion of Afghanistan. Traveling through the residues of transnational architecture (Niemeyer, Moretti, Le Corbusier) in New York, Algiers, and Dhaka, the film considers the erosion of the idea of the Third World as a potential space for decolonisation, and an always imperfect understanding of Socialism. Conversations between Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi, Atef Berredjem, Amirul Islam, and Zonayed Saki look at the contradictions of decolonization movements that never remembered to liberate their own leadership. The film is a midpoint for Mohaiemen’s loosely affiliated projects around the Non-Aligned Movement.

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“

Guided tour of the exhibition “ram spin cram” by Marie Angeletti with Nikola Dietrich, director and curator of the exhibition. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free. (in German)

Guided tour of the exhibition “ram spin cram” by Marie Angeletti with Ani Schulze. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free. (in German)

Bolling, Woolf, Ohanyan & Nisic Beatboxing ist die Kunst, mit der Nerses Ohanyan seine Zuhörer verblüfft. Der Hip-Hop hat diese uralte Perkussionstechnik neu erfunden. Nerses macht das eigentlich unmöglich wahr: eine Rhythmusmaschine mit Mund, Nase, Lippen und Kehle zu imitieren und so selbstbestimmt zu trommeln, während er dabei hochvirtuos Flöte spielt. Im Duo Nerses hat er sich mit dem Akkordeonisten Miroslav Nisić zusammengefunden, einem der beeindruckendsten Virtuosen seines Instruments. Miroslav ist auch Mitglied im Quartett Uwaga und hat damit 2021 die Zuhörer bei den Kammerkonzerten im Kunstverein in seinen Bann gezogen und zu Standing Ovations hingerissen. Die Zuhörer erwartet ein atemberaubend virtuoses Konzert, das absolut keine Grenzen der Genres kennt und meisterhaft seine ganz eigene Ausdrucksform findet. Neben großartigen Jazz-Werken wie Claude Bollings Suite und dem Concerto von Randall Woolf werden auch berühmte klassische Melodien und sogar ein AC/DC-Klassiker wie Thunderstruck höchst anspruchsvoll und unterhaltsam in Szene gesetzt. Karten sind auf KölnTicket erhältlich: www.koelnticket.de Aktuelle Infos & Link zum VVK unter: www.koelner-klassik-ensemble.de

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

ram spin cram Text

The exhibition is supported by:

We cordially invite you to the exhibition opening of Marie Angeletti – ram spin cram on Friday, March 31, 2023 at 7 pm.

Wir laden Sie herzlich zur Ausstellungseröffnung von Marie Angeletti – ram spin cram am Freitag, den 31.03.2023 um 19 Uhr ein.

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.

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!

Führung durch die Ausstellung “Game of No Games. Anleitung zu beschwingtem Gehen” mit Ani Schulze. Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei.

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,-

Fukio Saxophon-Quartett & Inna Firsova Seit seinen Anfängen im Jahr 2008 hat sich Fukio auf die Interpretation von Musik für Saxophon-Quartett und der Erarbeitung eines neuen Repertoires konzentriert. Das in Köln beheimatete Quartett hat sich an der HfMT Köln auf Neue Musik sowie am CNSMD in Paris auf Kammermusik spezialisiert und hat mit renommierten Komponisten wie Georges Aperghis, Fabien Lévy und Georg Friedrich Haas zusammengearbeitet. Bei den Kammerkonzerten werden sie zum ersten Mal ihr neues Programm als Quintett mit der Pianistin Inna Firsova präsentieren. Besetzung: Sopransaxophon: Joaquín Sáez Belmonte Altsaxophon: Xavier Larsson Páez Tenorsaxophon: José Manuel Bañuls Marcos Baritonsaxophon: Xabier Casal Ares Klavier: Inna Firsova Programm: Maurice Ravel: La valse, poème chorégraphique pour orchestre (Arr.: Alejandro Lidón) Leonard Bernstein: „Candide“ (Arr.: Alejandro Lidón) William Albright (1944-1998): Fantasy Etudes Ausführliche Informationen zum Ensemble: https://fukioquartet.com Preise: 19,50 Euro inkl. VVK Gebühr, ermäßigt (Schüler, Studenten, KölnPass-Inhaber) 12,- Euro inkl. VVK Gebühr, Kinder bis 14 Jahre haben freien Eintritt. Der Vorverkauf startet zur Zeit jeweils drei Wochen vor den jeweiligen Konzertterminen. Veranstalter / Aktuelle Infos: Kölner Klassik Ensemble Tickets kaufen Über die Konzertreihe: Die Musikmetropole am Rhein ist Heimatort zahlreicher international anerkannter Musikerinnen und Musiker. Mit ihrer Vielfalt und Qualität hat sich dabei die freie Kölner Kammermusikszene weltweit höchstes Ansehen erspielt. Die Kammerkonzerte im Kunstverein geben diesen Spitzenensembles aus Köln und NRW nun ein festes Schaufenster in ihrer Heimatstadt. Ab 2020 finden jährlich sechs Konzerte, jeweils Samstag Abends um 18 Uhr, im Riphahnsaal des Kölnischen Kunstvereins statt. Zentral am Neumarkt bietet der Riphahnsaal mit seiner offenen, schönen Architektur eine hervorragende Akustik für Kammermusik der internationalen Spitzenklasse. Die Verbindung von zeitgenössischer, bildender Kunst und der epochenübergreifenden Kammermusik setzt ein Symbol für die Einheit von Kunst, ihrer Vielfältigkeit und Aktualität und verspricht ein einzigartiges Ambiente.

Führung durch die Ausstellung “Game of No Games. Anleitung zu beschwingtem Gehen” mit Ani Schulze. Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei.

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:

Ort: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstraße 6 Eintritt: 12,- / 10, – € Mitglieder: 8, – €

Tickets kaufen

Slide talk and performance by John Russell Death Race, 2022 (Lecture hall) A review of the exhibition and recent holidays to spectacular seaside locations, in the style of Andrea Fraser. In English. Free admission to the exhibitions, events, and guided tours. The public program is supported by:

Children’s workshop with John Russell and Yoni Hong (Exhibition hall) For children from 6 to 14 years, registration required. Come to the kunstverein and paint on the floor of the main exhibition space – over the top of a floor print by John Russell. Paint sharks, fish, waves, dolphins, bubbles and photograph yourselves in the scene. Materials provided, no participation fee. In German and English. The public program is supported by:

Guided tour through the exhibition with Nikola Dietrich and John Russell In German and English.

Guided tour through the exhibitions of John Russell and José Montealegre with Ani Schulze Free admission to the exhibitions, events, and guided tours.

Guided tour through the exhibitions pf John Russell and José Montealegre with Miriam Bettin Free admission to the exhibitions, events, and guided tours.

Guided tour through the exhibitions of John Russell and José Montealegre with Ani Schulze Free admission to the exhibitions, events, and guided tours.

Führung durch die Ausstellungen von John Russell und José Montealegre mit Ani Schulze Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei.

Open Monument Day in Cologne “Die Brücke”, formerly the British Information Center, was built in 1949/50 according to plans by Wilhelm Riphahn and served as a meeting place. The angular building is designed like a Gesamtkunstwerk. After the Kölnischer Kunstverein moved into the listed building in 2002, it was able to adapt it as a model building of modernism in the spirit of Riphahn. Opening hours Sat, 10.09., 11 am until 6 pm Sun, 11.09., 11 am until 6 pm Free entry. Program Architecture tour 10.9.2022, 3 pm Dagmar Lutz M.A. (artist, art historian), duration 60 mins Meeting point: Foyer Kölnischer Kunstverein Unfortunately, the tour is already fully booked.  

A 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.

 

Guided tour through the exhibitions by John Russell and José Montealegre with Miriam Bettin in the context of DC Open

Opening hours Fri., 02.09., 11 am until 6 pm Sat., 03.09., 11 am until 6 pm Sun., 04.09.,11 am until 6 pm Free admission Further information here. Programm John Russell: Cavapool curated by Nikola Dietrich José Montealegre: Nervous System curated by Miriam Bettin Saturday, 3.9.2022, 4 pm Guided tour through the exhibitions by 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 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 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

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:

Guided tour through the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser with Miriam Bettin, Assistant Curator

Guided tour through the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser with Nikola Dietrich, Director

Children’s workshop Traces of Purple in the context of the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser with artist Ani Schulze from 6 years (optional in presence of parents), max. 10 children, participation fee 10 EUR In the children’s workshop with artist Ani Schulze, we explore the current exhibitions at the Kunstverein and make large collage paintings with many different materials, such as fabrics, chalk, adhesive tapes, paper, and silver foils. In the process, we explore what traces and patterns different things (stones, leaves, everyday objects) can leave behind.  

Children’s workshop Traces of Purple in the context of the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser with artist Ani Schulze from 6 years (optional in presence of parents), max. 10 children, participation fee 10 EUR In the children’s workshop with artist Ani Schulze, we explore the current exhibitions at the Kunstverein and make large collage paintings with many different materials, such as fabrics, chalk, adhesive tapes, paper, and silver foils. In the process, we explore what traces and patterns different things (stones, leaves, everyday objects) can leave behind.  

Guided tour through the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser on international museum day with Ani Schulze, Artist

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:

Guided tour through the exhibition of Loretta Fahrenholz with Ani Schulze, Artist

Film screening Loretta Fahrenholz Two A.M., 2019, 79 min (original English version) and a conversation with the artist (in German) Two A.M. Color, 79 min, 2019 With: Theadora Davies, Emile Clarke, Jim Fletcher, Sophie Fives, Annika Glass, Andrew Kerton, Paula Knüpling, Ilya Lipkin, Mira, Partecke, Emily Sundblad, Yuko Torihara, Helga Wretman and Michael Bornhütter, Klaus Kamptner, Leonie Kossi, Gerda Martin, Liv Moritz, Liana Saito, Julian Wadsworth, Jürgen Wolf, Min Yoon, Tate Zirner, et al. Cinematography: Till Megerle, Loretta Fahrenholz, Jan Mammey; Editing: Michael Fandel, Loretta Fahrenholz; Sound Design: Steffen Martin, Anders Ehlin; Assistant Directors: Angela Stiegler, Yulia Lokshina; Script: Jegg Nagy, Loretta Fahrenholz; Production Management: Sarah Schipschack; Producer: Loretta Fahrenholz; Executive Producer: Sarah Schipschack & Leif Magne Tangen, vitakuben; Sound: Simon Konrad; Costumes, Make-up: Marianna Serwa; Stunt Choreography: Michael Bornhütter; Colorist: Jorge Piquer Rodríguez; Music: Steffen Martin, Christian Naujoks, Anders Ehlin, Stephan Gschwendtner, Ivan Sobolew, Timo Ellis, Christoph Reiserer; Titles: HIT Two A.M. (2019) is a hallucinatory tale of coercion, control, and peer-to-peer surveillance on the fringes of present-day Berlin. Fahrenholz draws on Irmgard Keun’s 1937 novel, After Midnight, for her protagonist, Sanna. Where Keun’s young narrator turned a septic eye on the rise of the Nazis in prewar Germany, Fahrenholz’s Sanna is pitted against her own overbearing family of mind-reading ‘Watchers’, who use their powers to monitor the thoughts and feelings of their human counterparts. As a police state tightens its grip in the face of increasing social unrest, Sanna goes on the run from her volatile Watcher aunt and reconnects with her sister Algin, a blacklisted pop star. But when an escape from her claustrophobic past seems just within reach, events conspire against Sanna and her allies, in an unpredictable fever dream of desire, voyeurism, and political chaos.

Guided tour through the exhibition of Loretta Fahrenholz with Miriam Bettin, Assistant Curator

Schubert, Fauré & Blomenkamp Dekoriert mit den höchsten Preisen und Auszeichnungen (Wien, Melbourne, ARD, KLRITA) ist das Mor­genstern Trio auf den wichtigsten Podien der Welt zu Hause. Dazu zählen: Carnegie Hall New York, Kennedy Center Washington DC, Musikverein und Konzerthaus Wien, Kölner Philharmonie, Berliner Philharmonie, Concertgebouw Amsterdam und andere. Publikum und Presse feiern das Morgenstern Trio für höchsten kammermusikalischen und technischen Anspruch: Seine lange gereiften Interpretationen faszinieren in der Ausarbeitung feinster Nuancen. Bei den Kammerkonzerten im Kunstverein kann das Morgenstern Trio ganz seine kammermusikalischen Fähigkeiten ausspielen und präsentiert ein besonderes und abwechselungsreiches Programm. Neben Klaviertrios von Franz Schubert und Gabriel Fauré wird eine 2019 erstmalig uraufgeführte Suite von Thomas Blomenkamp zu hören sein. Besetzung: Catherine Klipfel, Klavier Stefan Hempel, Violine Emanuel Wehse, Violoncello Programm: Gabriel Fauré: Klaviertrio d-Moll, op. 120 Thomas Blomenkamp: Preludio, Prestissimo, Pavane und Precipitato für Klaviertrio (2019) #RepertoireNRW Franz Schubert: Trio B-Dur, D 898 Ausführliche Informationen zum Ensemble: www.morgensterntrio.com Preise: 19,50 Euro inkl. VVK Gebühr, ermäßigt (Schüler, Studenten, KölnPass-Inhaber) 12,- Euro inkl. VVK Gebühr, Kinder bis 14 Jahre haben freien Eintritt. Der Vorverkauf startet zur Zeit jeweils drei Wochen vor den jeweiligen Konzertterminen. Karten sind auf KölnTicket erhältlich: www.koelnticket.de Aktuelle Infos & Link zum VVK unter: www.koelner-klassik-ensemble.de Über die Konzertreihe: Die Musikmetropole am Rhein ist Heimatort zahlreicher international anerkannter Musikerinnen und Musiker. Mit ihrer Vielfalt und Qualität hat sich dabei die freie Kölner Kammermusikszene weltweit höchstes Ansehen erspielt. Die Kammerkonzerte im Kunstverein geben diesen Spitzenensembles aus Köln und NRW nun ein festes Schaufenster in ihrer Heimatstadt. Ab 2020 finden jährlich sechs Konzerte, jeweils Samstag Abends um 18 Uhr, im Riphahnsaal des Kölnischen Kunstvereins statt. Zentral am Neumarkt bietet der Riphahnsaal mit seiner offenen, schönen Architektur eine hervorragende Akustik für Kammermusik der internationalen Spitzenklasse. Die Verbindung von zeitgenössischer, bildender Kunst und der epochenübergreifenden Kammermusik setzt ein Symbol für die Einheit von Kunst, ihrer Vielfältigkeit und Aktualität und verspricht ein einzigartiges Ambiente.

Mariana Valencia Tulum, New York Video presentation and conversation with Mariana Valencia Wednesday, March 30, 2022 Online Zoom, 6 – 8pm CET (in English) Participation link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83878297992 Meeting ID: 838 7829 7992 reboot: responsiveness is pleased to premiere New York-based artist and choreographer Mariana Valencia’s latest video work Tulum, New York in its newly conceived multi-language versions in English, German, and Spanish. On March 30, 2022, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum Aachen invite to a screening of the videos and a subsequent zoom-conversation with Mariana Valencia to contextualize her practice in dialogue with Viktor Neumann, one of the three curators of reboot. All three versions of Tulum, New York will be on view at Kölnischer Kunstverein and Ludwig Forum Aachen on site afterwards. “Exploring the ‘pandemic screen’, Tulum, New York makes use of the video-chat function that’s been imposed onto us as a means to connect and transport during pandemic times. Here, Mariana Valencia retells her recurring dreams that feature her psychotherapist, during the beginning of the first Covid-19 lockdown. Her face fills the frame and moves in slow-motion, out of rhythm to the speaking and in a surreal incantation. Tulum, New York sits between the tropical and urban, wakefulness and dreams, loss and attachment.” Choreographer and performer Mariana Valencia works in the New York experimental field of dance and performance. Her commissions include Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project, The Whitney Museum, The Shed and Performance Space New York. Valencia’s work has toured in Korea, England, Norway, Macedonia and Serbia; her residencies include AUNTS, Chez Bushwick, New York Live Arts, ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Gibney Dance Center, Movement Research, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR). Valencia is an LMCC Extended Life grantee, a Whitney Biennial artist, a Bessie Award recipient for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer, a Bessie Award nominee for Best Production, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists grant recipient, a Jerome Travel and Study Grant fellow, and a Movement Research GPS/Global Practice Sharing artist. Valencia is a founding member of the No Total reading group and she has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence. She’s worked with artists AK Burns, Elizabeth Orr, Em Rooney, Fia Backstrom, Geo Wyeth, Guadalupe Rosales, Jazmin Romero, Juliana May, Jules Gimbrone, Kim Brandt, Lauren Bakst, Lydia Okrent, Morgan Bassichis, MPA, and robbinschilds. Valencia has published two books of performance texts, “Album” (Wendy’s Subway) and “Mariana Valencia’s Bouquet” (3 Hole Press). She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA with a concentration in dance and ethnography. reboot: responsiveness Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum Aachen 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 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 19^th century Sunday destination, NS parade site, a concentration camp, and, of course, Berlin’s airport during the Cold War Airlift. Fahrenholz’ photo series Gap Years depicts the flourishing of leisure activities and new hobbies during the pandemic, when the Feld became everyone’s cafe, gym, bar, club, pick-up spot and music venue. Recorded with strobe-like time-lapse photography that registers movement like in a frozen jelly, the works in the series show people in self-defence classes, playing ping-pong, roller-skating, or engaging in impromptu raves and remote-controlled car driving, open-air bondage and snacking. There is also a blurry close-up of tahini poured on one of the unpopular e-scooters (we are among irritable Berliners all right).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lars Bang Larsen

This exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

Pure Fiction Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths Performance program starts at 2.30 pm with Mark von Schlegell (feat. Arjan Stockhausen), Luzie Meyer and Erika Landström with Dana Munro 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 eponymous 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? The 2G rule applies. No registration required. The event takes place in the context of Show & Tell and is supported by:  

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.

Rory Pilgrim Is there a story that has helped you to recover? Informal public presentation of a two-day workshop, organized by the Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf Sunday, January 23, 2022, 7 – 8 pm Venue: Salon des Amateurs Grabbeplatz 4, 40213 Düsseldorf Free Admission. Please note that this is a 2G+ event. For admission, a negative daily (not older than 24 hours) rapid test result is required in addition to proof of vaccination or recovery. A booster vaccination replaces the test result. Please register at info@reboot-responsiveness.com. Can we recover, if the systems around us do not change? By storytelling, how might we recover those systems? Over the course of a two-day long workshop, artist Rory Pilgrim has invited people from Cologne and Düsseldorf to reflect through different forms of storytelling on what ‘recovery’ might mean today. This workshop results in this informal public event, giving the opportunity for participants to share stories developed in the workshop in whatever way comfortable for them. With recovery implying a return to a previous state of health, or even the retrieval of something stolen, can we instead rethink recovery as a way to imagine something completely anew with possibilities? Inspired by the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, who described the story as a ‘medicine bundle’, we will explore how we use storytelling to share what recovery might mean to us in our own lives. This might be personal or born out of wider political concerns. Reflecting on how we might share our own stories or the stories of others, we will work with different forms of storytelling that feels intuitive to each person and as a group, such as through speech, writing, recordings and nonverbal forms such as tableau making and movement. Through this, we will together explore how experiences of recovery become entangled with wider systems of care, bureaucracy and law. By sharing stories, we will find ways to reimagine what recovery might be and as a way to shape the narratives and change we hope to implement for ourselves, local communities and the wider world. Rory Pilgrim (UK/NL) is an artist and facilitator working across many different mediums including film, music, drawing, and live performance. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen, and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Working with others through different methods of dialogue, workshops, and collaboration, Rory is interested in how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens. If you would like to register as a participant for the entire two-day workshop, feel free to get in touch! Hermann Mueller info@reboot-responsiveness.com 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

with Nikola Dietrich, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein

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.

We are pleased to present our latest Jahresgaben on December 8, 2021 and would like to invite you to a tour of the Jahresgaben exhibition on December 9, 2021. Our director Nikola Dietrich will guide you through the exhibition. For your visit the vac­ci­nat­ed-re­cov­ered-rule (“2G-Regel”) ap­plies at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Please have proof of vacci­na­tion or past ill­ness and a valid iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment ready. The vac­ci­nat­ed-re­cov­ered-test­ed-rule (“3G-Regel”) ap­plies to chil­dren and teens un­der 18. Chil­dren up to the age of school en­try do not re­quire proof. Stu­dents un­der the age of 16 are con­sid­ered test­ed. Stu­dents 16 years of age and old­er are asked to pro­vide school cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Adults who can­not be vac­ci­nat­ed for med­i­cal rea­sons must pre­sent a neg­a­tive rapid test (max. 24 hours old) in ad­di­tion to a med­i­cal cer­ti­fi­cate.

We are pleased to present our latest Jahresgaben on December 8, 2021 and would like to invite you to a tour of the Jahresgaben exhibition on December 9, 2021. Our director Nikola Dietrich will guide you through the exhibition. For your visit the vac­ci­nat­ed-re­cov­ered-rule (“2G-Regel”) ap­plies at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Please have proof of vacci­na­tion or past ill­ness and a valid iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment ready. The vac­ci­nat­ed-re­cov­ered-test­ed-rule (“3G-Regel”) ap­plies to chil­dren and teens un­der 18. Chil­dren up to the age of school en­try do not re­quire proof. Stu­dents un­der the age of 16 are con­sid­ered test­ed. Stu­dents 16 years of age and old­er are asked to pro­vide school cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Adults who can­not be vac­ci­nat­ed for med­i­cal rea­sons must pre­sent a neg­a­tive rapid test (max. 24 hours old) in ad­di­tion to a med­i­cal cer­ti­fi­cate.

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.

Cally Spooner’s “A Lecture on Stagnation” read by Will Holder …for single mothers; followed by a conversation on Dead Time, between Cally Spooner and Hendrik Folkerts. Friday, November 19, 2021, 6 pm Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne Since 2007 Will Holder has orally published work authored by those who do not share all or any aspects of his white, male, heterosexual speaking body. The presence of these discrepancies are intended to highlight what our bodies DO have in common, and collectively undergo, rather than only speak of that which normatively divides us. Central to this series of publications is Alice Notley’s Doctor Williams’ Heiresses, (1980) and the poet’s expressed desire to synthesise a female, speaking voice within male poetic meters. Will attempts something comparable, with respect to a sense of Notley’s poetry, while reading Cally Spooner’s “Lecture on Stagnation”. Will’s reading is a way to lead into Cally Spooner’s ongoing project Dead Time. Over the coming three years, Dead Time will be periodically published with Will Holder, to test a thesis —- ‘dead time’ is an event that is chrononormatively-inactive and therefore holds the potential to restitute life. Dead Time (2018) is a 63 page performance score. It was composed by artist and writer Cally Spooner, in response to what she has coined to be ‘a global techno-temporal-performance culture’; a crime scene in which it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead. Since 2018 Spooner has been incrementally translating Dead Time into a number of works that can coexist under various conditions, and which will culminate in an Opera in the future. For now, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Spooner and curator Hendrik Folkerts discuss the present-tense condition of Dead Time, avoiding future-orientated speculation and chronological reminiscence. They will be accompanied by Melody Giron on cello. She will join the conversation from New York, to present Dead Time’s current work in progress. Typographer Will Holder makes books, and publishes the work of others, orally and in print. He likes to draw attention to an ongoing, shared authorship of meaning, co-produced in the gaps between bodies, their speech and the printed page. Since 2007, Holder edits F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading & writing and typography: the organisation and reproduction of language, published by uh books, Brussels. Hendrik Folkerts has curated numerous solo and international group exhibitions as well as collection presentations, new commissions, and public programs, anchored in the expanded field of performance and building on feminist, queer, and anti-colonial histories of art. He is a curator of Moderna Museet Stockholm. He previously held positions as Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017–2021); as Curator at documenta 14, Kassel/Athens (2014–2017); as Curator of Performance, Film, and Discursive Programs at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010–2015); and as the Coordinator of the Curatorial Program at De Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2009–2011). He frequently writes for art journals and magazines, as well as exhibition catalogues and artists’ monographs. Rooted firmly in her training in philosophy, Cally Spooner’s practice is generated through writing, unfolds as performance, then lands as film, sound, sculpture, drawings or scores. Her performances incorporate duration and rehearsal as acts of resistance to techno, temporal and performative climates in which it is hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead. Dead Time is co-produced with reboot:responsiveness; O-Overgaden, Copenhagen; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris. Deadtime is fully supported… … Organisationally and practically, by Rhea Dall of O-Overgaden, Copenhagen. Academically, by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; and the University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen. Financially, by Novo Nordisk Foundation, Hellerup. 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: responsivenessdevelops 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/   

Cally Spooners „Lecture on Stagnation“, gelesen von Will Holder …für alleinerziehende Mütter, 2021 gefolgt von einem Gespräch zu Dead Time zwischen Cally Spooner und Hendrik Folkerts. Freitag, 19.11.2021, 18 Uhr Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln Seit 2007 veröffentlicht Will Holder mündlich Werke, die von Personen verfasst wurden, die nicht alle oder keine Aspekte seines weißen, männlichen, heterosexuell sprechenden Körpers teilen. Die Präsenz dieser Diskrepanzen soll DAS hervorheben, was unsere Körper gemeinsam haben und kollektiv durchmachen, anstatt nur über das zu sprechen, was uns normativ trennt. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Reihe von Veröffentlichungen steht Alice Notleys Doctor Williams’ Heiresses (1980) und der ausdrückliche Wunsch der Dichterin, eine weibliche Sprechstimme innerhalb männlicher Versmaße herzustellen. Etwas mit diesem Bewusstsein in Notleys Lyrik Vergleichbares versucht Will Holder in seiner Lesung von Cally Spooners „Lecture on Stagnation“. Die Lesung leitet über zu Cally Spooners fortlaufendem Projekt Dead Time. In den kommenden drei Jahren wird Dead Time in regelmäßigen Abständen von Will Holder veröffentlicht werden, um die Hypothese zu testen, „tote Zeit“ sei ein Ereignis, das chrononormativ-inaktiv ist und daher das Potenzial hat, Leben wiederherzustellen. Dead Time (2018) ist eine 63-seitige Performance-Partitur. Sie wurde von Cally Spooner in einem techno-temporalen Performance-Klima komponiert, einem Tatort, an dem es immer schwieriger wird, zu unterscheiden, was lebendig und was tot ist. Seit 2018 übersetzt Spooner Dead Time schrittweise in eine Reihe von Werken, die unter verschiedenen Bedingungen koexistieren können und in eine Oper integriert werden könnten. Im Kölnischen Kunstverein diskutieren Folkerts und Spooner den gegenwärtigen Zustand von Dead Time und vermeiden zukunftsorientierte Spekulationen und chronologische Reminiszenzen. Begleitet werden sie von Melody Giron am Cello. Sie wird sich dem Gespräch aus New York anschließen, um das aktuelle Werk von Dead Time vorzustellen. Der Typograf Will Holder stellt Bücher her und veröffentlicht die Arbeiten anderer sowohl in mündlicher als auch in gedruckter Form. Er möchte die Aufmerksamkeit auf eine fortlaufende, geteilte Autorenschaft von Bedeutung lenken, die in den Lücken zwischen Körpern, ihrer Sprache und der gedruckten Seite entsteht. Seit 2007 ist Holder Herausgeber von F.R.DAVID, einer Zeitschrift, die sich mit Lesen, Schreiben und Typografie beschäftigt: mit der Organisation und Reproduktion von Sprache, herausgegeben von uh books, Brüssel. Hendrik Folkerts kuratierte zahlreiche Einzel- und internationale Gruppenausstellungen sowie Sammlungspräsentationen, neue Auftragsarbeiten und öffentliche Programme, die im erweiterten Feld von Performance verankert sind und auf feministischen, queeren und anti-kolonialen Kunstgeschichten basieren. Er ist Kurator am Moderna Museet Stockholm. Zuvor war er als Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art am Art Institute of Chicago (seit 2017-2021), Kurator der documenta 14, Kassel/Athen (2014-2017), Kurator für Performance, Film und diskursive Programme am Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010-2015) und als Koordinator des kuratorischen Programms am Kunstzentrum De Appel, Amsterdam (2009-2011) tätig. Er schreibt für Kunstzeitschriften und -magazine sowie für Ausstellungskataloge und Künstlermonografien. Cally Spooners künstlerische Praxis, die stark auf ihrer philosophischen Ausbildung fußt, entsteht durch Schreiben, entfaltet sich als Performance und wird schließlich zu Film, Sound, Skulptur, Zeichnung oder Partitur. Ihre Performances nutzen Konzepte wie Dauer und Probe als Akte des Widerstands gegen technologische, zeitliche und performative Klimata, in denen es schwer ist, zwischen Lebendigem und Totem zu unterscheiden. Dead Time ist eine Koproduktion von reboot:responsiveness; O-Overgaden, Kopenhagen; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris. Deadtime wird unterstützt… … Organisatorisch und praktisch von Rhea Dall von O-Overgaden, Kopenhagen. Wissenschaftlich von der Königlich Dänischen Kunstakademie und der Universität Kopenhagen. Finanziell von der Novo Nordisk Foundation, Hellerup. 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/ 

In conjunction with the exhibition of Melike Kara Nothing Is Yours, Everything Is You, a presentation of the publication WHERE WE MEET, 2021 (ed. Fabian Schöneich, graphics: Anne Stock, 83 pages) with film screenings, an installation, and an introduction by Fabian Schöneich will take place on Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 6 pm. Sponsored by:

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:

Cally Spooner: DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) Performance Thursday, November 4, 2021, 11 am – 6 pm Venue: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf Please note: Due to illness, tomorrow’s performance on November 6 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein unfortunately has to be cancelled without substitution. Saturday, November 6, 2021, 4 – 5 pm Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne Free admission. Please note, that a proof whether you have been vaccinated, tested negative or recovered from a past COVID-19 infection is required. In DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo), 2021, a dancer is shifting across a spectrum of heightened activity and waiting. Effectively an anatomy study for the 21st-century, the dance examines a technical and temporal performance climate in which the human body is imaged, both vital and corpse like. Equally it asks how this same, imaged body might evade capture, circulation and compression, by recasting itself as a preparatory and durational reality. In Düsseldorf DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) is shown sporadically throughout the day as a durational installation-performance. In Cologne the piece is performed to a captive audience for the first time. In this new capacity, DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) is joined by an additional work from Spooner’s DEAD TIME oeuvre: DEAD TIME (Narrator’s Script). In both locations the performance will be presented alongside Spooner’s work from 2018, Still Life. DEAD TIME is an ongoing project by Cally Spooner and a 63 page performance score she composed in 2018. Spooner has been incrementally translating it since, into a number of works that can coexist under various conditions, and which will, over time, integrate into an Opera. DEAD TIME (Narrator’s Script) first appeared in Spooner’s solo show, DEAD TIME, at the Art Institute Chicago in 2019. It was subsequently produced as a sound work for Common Guild, Glasgow, using a recording made at Camden Art Centre in 2020, organised and commissioned by Parrhesiades, London. The piano is Neil Luck, the Narrator is Jesper List Thomsen. DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) is choreographed by Cally Spooner with Magdalyn Segale Scenography and dramaturgy developed by Cally Spooner with Hendrik Folkerts Danced by Magdalyn Segale Commissioned by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Special thanks to Charles Billot for helping to make DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) remotely. reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of: reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

Ewa Majewska Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.  October 20, 2021 Online-Zoom, 6 – 8 pm CET (in English) Participation link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85942240996?pwd=TyswL2I5UHlCZXFPbzJjaTNkNUsvQT09  Meeting ID: 859 4224 0996 ID Code: 581273 While the Covid-19 pandemic has changed our lives to various degrees, it has also built a sense of global community, of embodied shared experience of being exposed to a virus that knows no borders. Paradoxically, a deathly disease re-established a sense of shared world and shared response-abilities. Now, as large parts of our lives get “back to normal”, we need to think about how to be together in the world, which can bring such global cataclysms, where the climate crisis knocks on our door, where the precarity, instability and economic inequalities shape our daily experience. The sense of being in this together will persist, although right now we are perhaps most focused on how to liberate ourselves from constraints, on how to be free in a world of so many obligations. Therefore, I believe it is a good moment to discuss the texts of Butler and Bifo – both interested in how we stay together in the trouble, yet with the autonomy and potency to transform the status quo. Please feel welcome to participate in the discussion, and to make some plans for the future. Co-hosts: Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann Texts: Judith Butler, „Creating an Inhabitable World for Humans Means Dismantling Rigid Forms of Individuality”, April 2021: https://news.yahoo.com/judith-butler-creating-inhabitable-world-110002078.html Franco Berardi „Bifo”, Freedom and Potency, in: e-flux, March 2021: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/116/378694/freedom-and-potency/ 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/ reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of: reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

With Naama Arad, Noa Glazer und Oren Pinhassi

Equality, Diversity, and Solidarity in the Art World Lectures and dialogues by and with Michael Annoff, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Madeleine Bernstorff, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Pary El-Qalqili, Ewa Majewska, Stephanie Marchal, Chus Martínez, Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, Bahareh Sharifi and Brigitte Sölch Thursday, 7.10.2021, 6 – 9 pm Venue: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf Friday, 8.10.2021, 10 am – 5 pm Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne >> You can download the complete program at the following link. Free admission, no pre-registration required Proof of a negative corona test or proof of vaccination or recovery is required for participation.  A cooperation between the Department for Art History and the Marie Jahoda Center For International Gender Studies (MaJaC), Ruhr-University Bochum and reboot: responsiveness, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf Organized by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann and Änne Söll It has been 100 years since women were admitted to state art academies, thus marking a milestone within the long struggle for professionalization of female artists in Germany. Femininity continues to function as one of many, often intersecting, hierarchizing and exclusionary categories that have always been established and constructed in transnational art institutions. While a continuous increase in the presence of women at German art academies can be noted from the 1950s onward, their discrimination in the art world persisted. In response, part of the 1970s women’s movement—along with its allies from other freedom movements—dedicated itself both theoretically and artistically to combating institutionalized gender inequality; from the beginning, Black women along with women of color underscored the intersectionality of structural mechanisms of exclusion. While studies show minimal changes in parity within the field of contemporary art since the 1990s, inequalities remain ubiquitous. To what extent the women’s or gender-equality officers intended in all German states can transform the art system remains an open-ended question. The persisting patriarchal, anti-social, and racist structures and resulting power imbalances only reluctantly destabilize the myth of the—white, heterosexual, cisgender, and ‘capable’—male genius in all areas of the field.The symposium will analyze causes of intersecting power structures and mechanisms of exclusion and discuss proposals to overcome them. How can the art world achieve an equality that considers factors such as migration and educational background, sexual orientation, and physical and neural difference from the very beginning? The event will kick off on October 7, 2021, at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. The temporal and thematic framework of the symposium will be introduced by a screening of the suffragette movement at the beginning of the 20th century, compiled and commented by Madeleine Bernstorff, as well as a keynote lecture by the feminist philosopher and author Ewa Majewska. Based on the Guerilla Girls’ actions for equality in art institutions, Majewska will present current strategies of resistance as tested and practiced by art institutions in Poland. She proposes to avoid simplistic conceptions of parity in favor of urgent intersectional and decolonial perspectives. The second part of the symposium will take place on October 8, 2021, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and will bring together lectures and dialogues between thinkers, artists, and cultural practitioners. The first block will be devoted to historical excursions on the processes, problems, and potentials of equality in the art world: Brigitte Sölch (University of Heidelberg) will shed light on the situation of female art historians around 1900 and present the DFG network “Women Art Historians before 1970.” Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck (University of Cologne) will provide insight into the holdings of the Central Archive of the International Art Trade. The artist Maximiliane Baumgartner will talk about exclusions from the canon and trans-temporal solidarizations. In a second block, Stephanie Marchal (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) uses the example of art criticism, while Chus Martínez (FHNW Basel) examines institutionalized inequalities based on artistic training, to consider art historical revisions and structural transformations. In a concluding block moderated by Gürsoy Doğtaş (University of Applied Arts Vienna), curator Michael Annoff, director Pary El-Qalqili, and Diversity Arts Culture program director Bahareh Sharifi describe how discrimination is interconnected, critically question the art system’s notion of diversity, and discuss the need for an institutional code of conduct and further structural changes. 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/   reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of: reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

with Nikola Dietrich, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein

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:

Ayelet Gundar-Goshens Lügnerin war 2019 das »Buch für die Stadt«, nun ist die israelische Autorin mit ihrem neuen Buch Wo der Wolf lauert (beide Kein & Aber) im Literaturhaus zu Gast. Psychologisch raffiniert erzählt der Roman von den Ängsten und Befürchtungen einer Mutter, ihr Sohn Adam könne am Tod eines Mitschülers schuldig geworden sein. Über die zerstörerischen Mechanismen von Rassismus und Schuld spricht die Autorin mit Moderatorin Antje Deistler. Aus der Übersetzung von Ruth Achlama liest Milena Karas. Es könnte perfekt sein: Lilach Schuster hat ein Haus mit Pool im Herzen des Silicon Valley, einen erfolgreichen Ehemann und das Gefühl, angekommen zu sein – fern von der Gefahr in ihrer Heimat Israel. Aber plötzlich stirbt ein Mitschüler ihres Sohnes Adam unter ungeklärten Umständen. Je mehr Lilach über den Tod des Jungen erfährt, desto mehr fragt sie sich, ob sie ihren Sohn überhaupt kennt. »Ein subtiles Eltern-Kind-Drama« (DLF), politisch aktueller denn je: Ayelet Gundar-Goshens neuer Roman nimmt den Leser mit in die Finsternis einer von Rassismus und Ausgrenzung geprägten Seele. Veranstalter: Literaturhaus Köln Veranstaltungspartner: Kein & Aber Corona-Hinweis Die Veranstaltung richtet sich nach den aktuellen Corona-Maßnahmen der Stadt Köln, Informationen finden Sie unter www.stadt-koeln.de Für Ihren Besuch denken Sie bitte an Folgendes:

• Es gelten die Pflicht zum Tragen einer medizinischen Maske sowie das Abstandsgebot.
• Der Einlass erfolgt gegen Vorlage eines tagesaktuellen Negativtestergebnisses oder eines entsprechenden Nachweises über eine vollständige Impfung oder Genesung in Verbindung mit einem amtlichen Ausweisdokument. Ein Test vor Ort ist nicht möglich.

Ort: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstraße 6 | Literaturhaus Köln virtuell Eintritt: 11,- / 9,- € | Mitglieder: 7,- € als Online-Veranstaltung: 5,- € Tickets ausschließlich erhältlich über Offticket.

with Miriam Bettin, Assistant Curator Kölnischer Kunstverein

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:

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Ewa Majewska Coronaseminar #3. Care labour in the Pandemic. Bring your kids! June 30, 2021 Online-Zoom, 6 – 8 pm CET (in English) with Nikola Dietrich, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne Participation link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87498627975?pwd=eGNxQjFHcHY2cU81R1FkUG5HZCtjQT09 Meeting ID: 874 9862 7975 ID Code: 275976 What can we become together? How and why do we care in the pandemic conditions? We will experiment with the children-on-zoom situation, as well as feminist views on the pandemic and precarization. The perspectives on care, affect and mothering have changed, over the years and with the pandemic, too. The gender divisions have also changed, as today more and more people declare they are non-binary, transgender or otherwise realize much more diverse gender identities than “man/woman”. This means it is necessary to discuss the gender division of labour in a broader sense of these identity transitions. Care is also racialized, class-wise divided and gendered, a flexible, intersectional approach would very much be needed. For some of us – the quarantine was an exposure to pain and loss, for some – to a more convenient, fulfilling life not scattered by travels and rush, for some other again – a painful reminder of the patriarchal and racialized distribution of obligations and inequalities. We all – while rebooting – want to take a break from what was problematic, at the same time – we might want to reflect on what the embodied, affective experience is today. Texts: Catherine Malabou, “To Quarantine from Quarantine, Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe and „I“”, 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/to-quarantine-from-quarantine-rousseau-robinson-crusoe-and-i/  Silvia Federici, Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint, 2008 https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/precarious-labor-a-feminist-viewpoint/  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 #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:

Genoveva Filipovic in conversation with Josef Strau on site at the Kölnischer Kunstverein on the occasion of the current exhibition Bridge of Sigh. This is a return invitation after the joint conversation at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf on the exhibition Spirits and Objects by Josef Strau last fall. 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). Under the title The Mephisto Hours, Josef Strau (*1957 in Vienna, lives in New York and currently in Cologne) presented an exhibition at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin in 2021. In 2020, he had a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and was included in the Busan Biennale 2020, curated by Jacob Fabricius. In recent years, Josef Strau’s work has been shown in a number of institutional solo exhibitions, including A Turtle Dreaming (… Echoes from an Encapsulated Space Exiled Sounds of Letters Requiring Symphonic Treatment) at Secession, Vienna (2015), The New World, Application for Turtle Island, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014), and A Dissidence Coincidence But WHCTLJS at the Malmö Konsthall (2008). The talk will be held in German. Admission: € 5,- / € 2,50 (reduced). Admission is free for members. Since the number of participants for the event is limited due to the corona restrictions, please register under the link below. Please note the current regulations and minimum distance. Presentation of a negative rapid test is not required. The exhibition of Genoveva Filipovic is supported by:

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:

https://zoom.us/j/91574222270

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!

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  In accordance with the Corona Protection Regulation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kölnischer Kunstverein will be closed from 03.11.2020 until at least 31.01.2021. During this time, no events will take place on site. Online events will be announced via our newsletter at short notice.  

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:

Aleksey Semenenko, the star violinist, will be performing together with the pianist Inna Firsova. Program: Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonata No. 6 in A major, op. 30 No. 1 Igor Stravinsky: Divertimento “Le Baiser de la fée – The kiss of the fairy Olivier Messiaen: Thème et Variations for violin and piano (1932) Gabriel Fauré: “Au bord de l’eau” op. 8; “Aprês un rêve” op. 7 Eugène Ysaÿe: Poème élégiaque, op. 12 Alexander Rosenblatt: Carmen Fantasy on themes from the opera by Georges Bizet After his Kennedy Center debut, the Washington Post wrote: “Semenenko (…) explored every corner of the composer’s imagination (…) a true triumph”. Since winning the prestigious Young Concert Artists Auditions in New York in 2012 and the Boris Goldstein Violin Competition in 2015, Aleksey Semenenko has become one of the world’s violinists’ elite and has performed extensively as a soloist and chamber musician in Europe and the USA. Aleksey Semenenko plays a Stradivarius violin from 1699, which was donated to him by the German Foundation Musikleben. Aleksey Semenenko forms a permanent duo with the pianist Inna Firsova. They have given concerts in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, at Schloss Elmau, at the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, among others. At the 67th Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2016 they won the Jury and Television Prize Orlando as “Best Concert” of the festival. Fees: 19,50 Euro incl. advance booking fee, reduced (pupils, students, KölnPass holders) 12,- Euro incl. advance booking fee Children up to 14 years have free admission. Ticket sales exclusively in advance via KölnTicket! Tickets are available at KölnTicket: www.koelnticket.de Information & link to the VVK under: www.kammerkonzerte.koeln About the concert series: The music metropolis on the Rhine is home to numerous internationally renowned musicians. With its diversity and quality, Cologne’s independent chamber music scene has earned itself the highest reputation worldwide. The chamber concerts at the Kunstverein now give these top ensembles from Cologne and NRW a permanent showcase in their home city. Starting in 2020, six concerts will take place annually, on Saturdays at 6 pm, in the Riphahnsaal of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Centrally located on Neumarkt, the Riphahnsaal with its open, beautiful architecture offers excellent acoustics for chamber music of the international top class. The combination of contemporary, visual arts and chamber music spanning all epochs is a symbol for the unity of art, its diversity and topicality and promises a unique ambience. This concert series is supported by: Kulturamt der Stadt Köln, Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft NRW and RheinEnergie Stiftung Kultur.

Guided Tour through the exhibitions Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile and Emma LaMorte – Aussicht  with Miriam Bettin, Curator of the exhibition by Emma LaMorte

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:

Konrad Elias-Trostmann, violin Prach Boondiskulchok, piano Vladimir Waltham, cello Program: Kaija Saariaho: Light & Matter Edvard Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 (Arr. Linos Piano Trio) Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Trio in F Major Wq. 01 No. 3 Johannes Brahms: Trio in C minor Op. 101 In 2015 Linos Piano Trio won the 1st prize as well as the audience award at the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition and is since then considered one of the most dynamic and creative piano trios in Europe. “Slow-burning and gripping” commented The Strad Magazine and the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “the trio fascinated right away”. The Linos Piano Trio performs worldwide in concert halls such as Wigmore Hall London, Melbourne Recital Centre, Holzhausenschlösschen Frankfurt and Muziekgebouw Eindhoven. CAvi-music released the first recording of the complete works for piano trio by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in early 2020. Since 2016, the project “Stolen Music”, which is very popular with listeners, has also been produced. Here the musicians arrange great orchestral works for their instrumentation in order to expand the repertoire for piano trio. Fees: 19,50 Euro incl. advance booking fee, reduced (pupils, students, KölnPass holders) 12,- Euro incl. advance booking fee Children up to 14 years have free admission. Ticket sales exclusively in advance via KölnTicket! Tickets are available at KölnTicket: www.koelnticket.de Information & link to the VVK under: www.kammerkonzerte.koeln About the concert series: The music metropolis on the Rhine is home to numerous internationally renowned musicians. With its diversity and quality, Cologne’s independent chamber music scene has earned itself the highest reputation worldwide. The chamber concerts at the Kunstverein now give these top ensembles from Cologne and NRW a permanent showcase in their home city. Starting in 2020, six concerts will take place annually, on Saturdays at 6 pm, in the Riphahnsaal of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Centrally located on Neumarkt, the Riphahnsaal with its open, beautiful architecture offers excellent acoustics for chamber music of the international top class. The combination of contemporary, visual arts and chamber music spanning all epochs is a symbol for the unity of art, its diversity and topicality and promises a unique ambience.

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:

 

Guided Tour through the exhibitions Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile and Emma LaMorte – Aussicht  with Miriam Bettin, Curator of the exhibition by Emma LaMorte.

Guided Tour through Cologne: Blaufärber*innen, Goldspinnerinnen, Zauberei. A guided tour by and with Irene Franken, historian and Alternative Honorary Citizen of Cologne. Accompanying the exhibition Meanwhile by Dunja Herzog, Cologne locations will be visited that touch on aspects of colour, craftsmanship, magic and gold. The theme will then be Dunja Herzog’s initiator, Prof. Maria Mies, who left many metres of her writings to the Women’s History Society – comparably productive as councilman Hermann von Weinsberg, who in early modern times wrote about 7,000 pages of diary and lived on the Blaubach. Finally, the fight for the self-determination of women over their bodies will also be dealt with. Start: Waidmarkt, Hermann-Josef-Fountain Duration: approx. 1 1/2 to 2 hours Max. 15 participants, mouth and nose protection or visor are a condition of participation (in German) The registration deadline is 02.10.2020 at 2:30 pm.

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:

 

With the studio fellows Sascha Kregel, Morgaine Schäfer, Stella von Rohden and Ellen Yeon Kim. No registration is required for this event, but there may be waiting times. Please respect the rules of distance and hygiene and the obligation to wear a mouth and nose mask. Further information under: Offene Ateliers Köln 2020

Guided Tour through Cologne: Blaufärber*innen, Goldspinnerinnen, Zauberei. A guided tour by and with Irene Franken, historian and Alternative Honorary Citizen of Cologne. Accompanying the exhibition Meanwhile by Dunja Herzog, Cologne locations will be visited that touch on aspects of colour, craftsmanship, magic and gold. The theme will then be Dunja Herzog’s initiator, Prof. Maria Mies, who left many metres of her writings to the Women’s History Society – comparably productive as councilman Hermann von Weinsberg, who in early modern times wrote about 7,000 pages of diary and lived on the Blaubach. Finally, the fight for the self-determination of women over their bodies will also be dealt with. Start: Waidmarkt, Hermann-Josef-Fountain Duration: approx. 1 1/2 to 2 hours Max. 15 participants, mouth and nose protection or visor are a condition of participation (in German) The registration deadline is 23.09.2020 at 3:30 pm.

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:

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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:

Guided Tour through the exhibitions Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile and Emma LaMorte – Aussicht with our Director Nikola Dietrich.

Führung durch die Ausstellungen Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile und Emma LaMorte – Aussicht  mit unserer Direktorin Nikola Dietrich.

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:

In her first institutional solo exhibition, Emma LaMorte takes on the architecture of the Kölnischer Kunstverein: With her textile works, performances, texts and installations, she reacts to given spaces and architectural structures in order to supplement, alienate or conceal them. In the Studio, a project room with an atrium on the second floor of the building, the artist produces an expansive quilted and sewn textile work. In reference to the location, she recreates elements of the real exterior space, integrates them into a fictional landscape backdrop and creates an inversion of inside and outside.

The four-part work series consisting of a total of eleven panels shows a rocky sea coast and a pastoral scene at four different times of day, varying in lighting mood and colour. Her motifs are based on a fascination for gothic, fantasy, kitsch, fetish, and nature romanticism. The series of works Aussicht (2020) dispenses with the figurative in favour of an allegorical landscape depiction in which the position of the viewer is that of a 360 degree perspective on an observation tower. The preoccupation with the view—the yearning look outside into the distance or the future—is a recurring subject in fine art and literature, especially at the time of German Romanticism, and immediately evokes the visual world of Caspar David Friedrichs.

The collages on stretcher frames borrowed from patchwork elude a simple classification as “textile art”: due to the rough and improvised processing, the variety of form language, haptics, and motifs as well as the nostalgic aesthetics appear exceptionally space- and timeless and are located in a dichotomy between absolute present and historicity. At the same time, the textile material is part of a craft traditionally associated with women. In her examination of economic issues, Emma LaMorte examines historically shaped gender-specific divisions of labor (emotional labor, caretaking, domesticity, household, motherhood on the one hand, monetary labor, career, profiling and prestige on the other) as well as the discrepancy between their respective values and recognition in society. Both in her medial and content-related work on traditional, reactionary gender roles, the artist looks at the mechanisms of public and private space that consolidate and maintain them: patriarchal infrastructures, discriminating labor economies, structural sexism and violence.

An artist book has been published in the context of the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein with texts by the artist Rosa Aiello and images of the exhibited works (graphic: Thomas Spallek). The text medium is an integral part of Emma LaMorte’s practice and expands the scenographic backdrop of improvised quilting techniques with narratives. The repetition of the wall panels can be found as a stylistic device in the texts of Aiello. The daily rhythm and sequence describe a domestic routine in which temporality is variably extended or shortened. Emma LaMorte questions how civilization and social structures are formed and shaped—and how they are destroyed again—and creates a vision of the future that can be promising or hopeless.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public program consisting of a reading, a lecture performance, a children‘s workshop, a tarot workshop, and a radio show by various guests, among them the artists Rosa Aiello, Bitsy Knox, Benjamin Marvin, the author Jessa Crispin and the musician Laura Sparrow.

Emma LaMorte (*1984 in Victoria B.C., Canada) lives and works in Berlin. She received a Master of Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. Recent solo presentations of her work have been shown at Galleri Thomassen in Gothenburg (2020, together with Anders Johansson), Gärtnergasse in Vienna (2019, together with Benjamin Marvin), Stadium (2018) and Ashley (2017), both in Berlin, as well as in group exhibitions at Polansky in Prague (2019), Braunsfelder in Cologne (2018), Sm in Marseille (2018), Hotdock in Bratislava (2018), INDUSTRA in Brno (2018) and Decad in Berlin (2018).

Curator: Miriam Bettin

The exhibition is part of Canada’s cultural programme as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2020. It is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada.

With kindly support of:

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Dear visitors and members, We are very pleased to welcome you to the opening of our two solo exhibitions Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile  and Emma LaMorte – Aussicht  on September 4, 2020 from 1:00 pm till 10:00 pm. The protection of our staff and visitors is very important to us. To ensure that the opening is in accordance with the current corona protection regulations, we will refrain from opening speeches and drinks. We will also regulate access to the building and the several exhibition rooms by security personnel. The number of visitors is limited and we would like to ask you to follow the instructions of the staff. Markings and the guidance system on the wall will also help you to find your way. Furthermore, we kindly ask you to stick to the following rules:

• It is obligatory to wear a mask throughout the entire building.
• Please keep a minimum distance of 1.5 metres to other visitors and staff.
• Please wash your hands frequently and thoroughly or disinfect them with our hand disinfectant, which is available at reception.

For further information and if you have any questions, please contact us. We thank you for your assistance and look forward to seeing you! Your team of the Kölnischer Kunstverein

Tony Conrad: Again and Again 
Online lecture by Tabea Lurk, Art historian, Basel (in German language)
with a welcome by Nikola Dietrich, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein

Inspired by the parcours of the TONY CONRAD exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the lecture will show monographic connections. References inherent in the exhibited works are explained. In addition, the US-American artist, who died in 2016, will once again have his say on the basis of his video works, statements and interviews.

Tony Conrad’s relatively late fame as a gallery or museum artist, which shaped his last years, does not seem to be waning even four years after his death. New ways of reading can still be found, the vitality of the late works still has a convincing effect, and the films of the late 1960s, the videographic works of the 1970s and 1980s, and the musical settings that permeate all phases of life still evoke an era that is partly past, partly continued by others. The artist’s video work forms the starting point for these reflections.

The lecture can be accessed via the following link and on our website.

Tabea Lurk studied art history and media theory and wrote her doctorate on Tony Cornad’s video work. After her traineeship at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (2004-2006), she worked at the Hochschule der Künste Bern from 2006-2015. Since August 2015 she has been head of the media library at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW Basel.

The public program and art education is supported by:

The exhibition TONY CONRAD is a collaboration between Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and MAMCO, Geneva, and is based on the touring retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2018/19).

With the kind support of:

6 – 8 pm

With the double presentation of The Flicker and Flaming Creatures, the Kölnischer Kunstverein is showing two films in the framework of the current exhibition, both of which were made as collaborations between Tony Conrad and Jack Smith in the early 1960s in New York and caused scandals. Under the title Flickering, Flaming, film theorist Marc Siegel will outline the unexpected production of the flicker film from Tony Conrad’s experience with Jack Smith.

In 1962, Conrad graduated from Harvard University and moved to New York City, where he associated primarily with experimental musicians and underground filmmakers. He even became roommates with the notorious filmmaker Jack Smith, who prompted Conrad to apply his musical experiments to making movie soundtracks. Conrad’s own career as a filmmaker began on March 5, 1963, when he, Smith, and Mario Montez, Smith’s muse, became entranced by the flickering light of an old projector. Conrad had learned in college about the effects of this phenomenon on brain waves, and so he attempted to make a mind-altering film of nothing more than black and white frames, based on “harmonies” between the frequencies of the flickering light—a procedure similar to his work with sound frequencies. Praised by critics for its structural qualities, audience reactions at the premiere of The Flicker at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on September 15, 1966, ranged from nausea to hallucinations.

Tony Conrad produced the soundtrack for Jack Smith’s legendary film Flaming Creatures. Smith’s films are characterized by an unusual low-budget aesthetic and innovations that immediately attracted the praise of the critics. But the open approach to sexuality led to censorship: in 1964 the film triggered one of the biggest scandals in film history and was banned. Soon after, Smith began to use the medium of film not as an independent work, but as a component of performances. Flaming Creatures, probably his most famous film, celebrates a tumultuous harem party with boundless erotic excesses in glamorous black-and-white images.

Marc Siegel is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. His book A Gossip of Images is forthcoming from Duke University Press. In 2014, he edited a special issue of the journal Criticism dedicated to Jack Smith. He is a founding member of the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP. In 2009 he co-curated a massive festival at the Arsenal-Institut für Videokunst and HAU in Berlin, called LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World, which had a spinoff version in Frankfurt/Main at Mousonturm and the MMK Museum of Modern Art in 2012. In this context, he worked with Tony Conrad.

The program is part of the exhibition TONY CONRAD at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

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6 – 10 pm
4-channel audio file, 240 min

NO! This sound piece is no sound piece. To listen to this sound piece, do not listen to it. Do not lie down on the floor to listen. Do not lie down on the floor, not to listen. Listen to the silence during the sound, do not listen to the sound during the silence. Do not think of an object while listening, the sound is the object. To lie down on this piece, become this piece, at least. YES!

The program is part of the exhibition TONY CONRAD at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung von:

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Opening: Friday, February 14, 7 pm
9 pm Film screening Tony Conrad “The Flicker”, 1966, 16mm film, b/w, 30 min

Tony Conrad (1940-2016) is an experimental artist and a key figure for media artists such as Tony Oursler or Mike Kelley. As a violinist, he was one of the co-founders of Minimal Music and a pioneer of drone music, together with La Monte Young and John Cale. As a central figure of the avant-garde and with a career lasting over six decades, his work radiates beyond America. With this exhibition it will be presented to the European audience, in all its complexity, after his participation at documenta 5. With his first movie “The Flicker” (1966) he created an icon of structural film. His musical work—in composition, performances, and self-made musical instruments—is inevitably associated with his work as a visual artist.

The Kölnischer Kunstverein is realizing the first large-scale exhibition, performance and music series in Germany honoring Tony Conrad’s artistic work. It succeeds a retrospective at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (2018/19). As a central figure of the avant-garde, Conrad didn‘t only gain recognition for his contribution to minimalist music and structural film in the 1960s, due to his pioneering role as violinist. Instead he also set the tone for various cultural fields, including rock music and public television. Conrad’s first film, “The Flicker” (1966), a stroboscopic experiment well-known for his assault on the cinematic medium and the senses of his audience, soon led to the projects in which he treated film as sculptural and performative material. In “Sukiyaki Film” (1973) for example Conrad brought shortly fried film on the screen and in in his “Yellow Movies” from 1972/73 he painted paper surfaces with cheap paint and presented them as slowly changing films. He paved the way for drone music and influenced the founding of Velvet Underground. At the same time, Conrad was a combative critic of the media and their monitoring tools. In the eighties, his ambitious films about power relations in the army and in prisons critisized what he would call emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment. His collaborative programs, created for public television in the 1990s, made him an influential voice within society (as can be seen in the installation “Panopticon” from 1988 or “WiP”, with films by Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley, 2013). Conrad was a master of “crossover”, the bridging and connection of various disciplines, making it seem impossible to think about the interdependence between art, film, music, and performance in contemporary art without including him. He also was a passionate pedagogue—his 40 years as professor at the Media Department at the University of Buffalo provoked and inspired generations of students until today.

The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

It is a collaboration between Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and MAMCO, Geneva, and is based on the touring retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2018/19).

The exhibition architecture at the Kölnischer Kunstverein was developed in cooperation with Milica Lopicic.

The reusable wall system has been made possible by the Imhoff Stiftung.

Weiterer Dank an Galerie Further thanks to Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York and Greene Naftali, New York

Artists: Martin Assig, Olga Balema, Gerry Bibby, Juliette Blightman, Enrico David, Bradley Davies, Simon Denny, Ayşe Erkmen, Michael Krebber, Mischa Kuball, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Morgaine Schäfer, Julia Scher, Gregor Schneider, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Rachel Whiteread

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Exhibition of the Jahresgaben: December 7 – 15, 2019
Opening: Friday, December 6 2019, 7 pm

We are pleased to present newly produced works for the Kunstverein together with earlier Jahresgaben, including unique pieces and limited editions. Many of the artist represented were recently participating in the group exhibition Maskulinitäten. A cooperation between Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Also part of this year’s Jahresgaben: Editions of the Salon Verlag to be acquired through the Kunstverein.

Changed opening times during the Jahresgaben exhibition: open throughout Mon – Sun, 11 am – 6 pm, free of charge

Friday, December 6, 2019, 7 – 11 pm and Saturday, December 7, 2019, 11 am – 7 pm
MICHAELA MELIÁN
Music from a Frontier Town
Sound and video installation

Friday, December 6, 7.30 – 8 pm
Michaela Melián in conversation with Prof. Anke Ortlepp

Re-education. 1,630 vinyl records from the remainder of the public library of the Munich Amerikahaus (1945–1997) are at the centre of Michaela Melián’s sound and video installation Music from a Frontier Town. Visitors are invited to personally select this find from the basement—a selection of jazz, spoken word, classical and new music LPs from the 1950s and 1960s, with which the USA presented itself as a pluralistic cultural nation—and to play it on a DJ console. The Munich artist, musician and radio playwright Michaela Melián, who has received many awards, is known for her often expansive multimedia exhibitions and concerts.

In collaboration with the Department of North American History of the Historical Institute of the University of Cologne.

Admission is free.

Friday, December 13, 2019, 6 – 10 pm
(Admission possible at any time)
REUNION AFTER CAGE
For modified chessboard and live-electronics (German premiere)

Chess players: Holger Lieff, Endre Tot, N.N.
Musicians: Peter Behrendsen, hans w. koch, Tobias Grewenig, Dirk Specht

Highlight at the end of the reiheM–Anniversary year 2019—With 4 hours of Reunion after Cage. This 114th event completes the circle of the very first reiheM event in January 2009: Variations on Variations after John Cage (also by and with Peter Behrendsen and hans w. koch).

John Cage’s REUNION for prepared chessboard and live electronics was first performed in Toronto in 1968: with Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Teeny Duchamp as chess players as well as the musicians David Behrman, Lowell Cross, Gordon Mumma and David Tudor. The distribution of sounds in space and their volume are determined by the positions of the chess pieces, not by the musical and taste preferences of the musicians. Even the chess players are not able to influence the music by certain moves or positions.
In the sense of Cage’s idea of an egoless, non-intentional music, winning or losing becomes secondary—”a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play”.
The chessboard used in this performance follows the original Lowell Cross constructed in assigning the fields to the inputs and outputs, but was equipped with modern technology (computer programming and MIDI).
The chess game is flanked by thematically relevant projections of works by the artists Takako Saito and Shigeko Kubota.

A project by Peter Behrendsen and hans w. koch.

Admission fee: 10,- / 8,-

Further information: www.reihe-M.de

Reihe M – Concert Series for Contemporary Music, Electronics and New Media – Cologne is organized by Mark e.V. and supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne and the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia.

An event as part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten.

Performance Lecture by Juliette Blightman featuring films from Maria Lassnig and Chantal Akerman amongst others. Followed by No Opening SS 2020 Collection with music by Anthony Silvester (Technology + Teamwork). Lecture starts 7.15 pm, Runway Show 7.45 pm.

The main theme of the artist´s work is the relationship between art and life. She creates her works like continuous diary entries which are articulated in various media. She films, paints and writes in a radical subjective way and makes the personal public.

Watch the video documentation of the performance here.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

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Guided Tours and Screening by Jonathas de Andrade O Peixe (the Fish)

Exhibition: Maskulinitäten. Eine Kooperation von Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischem Kunstverein und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Double Feature: The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin by Arwen Curry and Die Deutschen und ihre Männer by Helke Sander

An event as part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten.

A long night with night with Julia Scher (Professor, Academy of Media Arts Cologne) and guests including a screening of her 4-hour film Discipline Masters (1988) – a cathartic retelling of her youth, which informs Scher‘s interest in themes of surveillance and the notion of a sexualized and controlling gaze.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

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An event as part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten.

Eva Birkenstock, Michelle Cotton and Nikola Dietrich in conversation with Nelly Gawellek, Jürgen Klauke, Bea Schlingelhoff, Evelyn Taocheng Wang and other participating artists. (in English)

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An event as part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten.

The installation devised by Gerry Bibby for the exhibition takes the form of a flexible platform for readings with invited guests. This work offers visitors an insight into the artist‘s collection of notes and source materials that inform the artist‘s work and writing, and which form part of the performance.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

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Organised in collaboration by Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Maskulinitäten is an international exhibition with a series of events and accompanying publication project that explores the subject of masculinity via contemporary art. The tripartite presentation is premised by an interest in questioning how a feminist exhibition on masculinity could look.

Conceived within the context of prominent and reactionary manifestations of masculinity and with an irreverent, uncompromising critique of its hegemonic forms, the collaboration aims to destabilise patriarchal and heteronormative notions of gender. Including public artworks, performances, plays, readings, lectures, screenings, and workshops, the exhibition seeks to open up alternative spaces of agency and bring performative and transgressive conceptions of identity, sexuality, gender and the body to the fore.

The three institutions share a history in variously presenting radical, feminist and queer exhibitions. Whilst many of these focused on reclaiming femininity and female experience from a history of male authorship, this project turns its attention instead to the male subject. The exhibition and the accompanying programme explores shifting perspectives on the representation of the body, the associated politics of power and visibility, and how these are negotiated and deconstructed in art from the 1960s to the present. Encompassing artistic and art-theoretical perspectives from different contexts and periods, masculinity is encountered as a complex, evolving, social construct that remains in continual flux.

Curated by Eva Birkenstock, Michelle Cotton and Nikola Dietrich


Artists in the exhibition
Vito Acconci, The Agency, Georgia Anderson & David Doherty & Morag Keil & Henry Stringer, Lutz Bacher, Louis Backhouse, Olga Balema, Lynda Benglis, Judith Bernstein, Gerry Bibby, Alexandra Bircken, Juliette Blightman, Patricia L. Boyd, Anders Clausen, Keren Cytter, Enrico David, Vaginal Davis, Jonathas de Andrade, Jimmy DeSana, Nicole Eisenman, Hedi El Kholti, Jana Euler, Hal Fischer, Andrea Fraser, keyon gaskin with Samiya Bashir, sidony o‘neal and Adee Roberson, Eunice Golden, Philipp Gufler, Richard Hawkins, Jenny Holzer, Hudinilson Jr., Allison Katz, Annette Kennerley, Sister Corita Kent, Mahmoud Khaled, Jürgen Klauke, Jutta Koether, Tetsumi Kudo, Klara Lidén, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Robert Morris, Shahryar Nashat, D’Ette Nogle, Henrik Olesen, D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus, Josephine Pryde, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Carol Rama, Lorenzo Sandoval, Julia Scher, Agnes Scherer, Bea Schlingelhoff, Heji Shin, Katharina Sieverding, Nancy Spero, Anita Steckel, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Carrie Mae Weems, Marianne Wex, Martin Wong, Katharina Wulff


Bonner Kunstverein
Lynda Benglis, Judith Bernstein, Alexandra Bircken, Patrica L. Boyd, Jana Euler, Hal Fischer, Eunice Golden, Richard Hawkins, Jenny Holzer, Hudinilson Jr., Allison Katz, Mahmoud Khaled, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Robert Morris, D’Ette Nogle, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Bea Schlingelhoff, Anita Steckel

curated by Michelle Cotton


Kölnischer Kunstverei
Georgia Anderson & David Doherty & Morag Keil & Henry Stringer, Louis Backhouse, Olga Balema, Gerry Bibby, Juliette Blightman, Anders Clausen, Enrico David, Jonathas de Andrade, Jimmy DeSana, Jenny Holzer, Hedi El Kholti, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Shahryar Nashat, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Carol Rama, Bea Schlingelhoff, Heji Shin, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Carrie Mae Weems, Marianne Wex, Martin Wong, Katharina Wulff

curated by Nikola Dietrich


Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Vito Acconci, The Agency, Keren Cytter, Vaginal Davis, Nicole Eisenman, Andrea Fraser, keyon gaskin mit Samiya Bashir, sidony o´neal und Adee Roberson, Philipp Gufler, Jenny Holzer, Annette Kennerley, Sister Corita Kent, Jürgen Klauke, Jutta Koether, Tetsumi Kudo, Klara Lidén, Henrik Olesen, D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus, Josephine Pryde, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivio), Lorenzo Sandoval, Julia Scher, Agnes Scherer, Bea Schlingelhoff, Katharina Sieverding, Nancy Spero, Evelyn Taocheng Wang

curated by Eva Birkenstock


Program during the opening weekend:

Opening on Saturday, August 31, 2019

2.30 pm Bonner Kunstverein
5 pm Kölnischen Kunstverein
7.30 pm Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Saturday, 31 August
Legal Gender, Performance conceived by Anita Steckel
from 2.30 pm, Bonner Kunstverein

Parallel Lines, Performance by Gerry Bibby with Ellen Yeon Kim
from 5 pm, Kölnischer Kunstverein

Naked Self (Transitioning) (21 Months On Hormone Replacement Therapy), Nude Performance by Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo)
5.30 – 6.30 pm, Kölnischer Kunstverein
8 – 9 pm, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Sunday, 1 September
Tectonic Mnemonic, a platform with readings with guests, invited by Gerry Bibby
3 pm, Kölnischer Kunstverein

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Organized by Miriam Bettin

Under the title CAVE ECHOES, Stella von Rohden and Sascha Kregel present a new, process-oriented work in the studio space of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

In their artistic practices, they share an interest in becoming, especially the genesis of image and sound. The point of reference of the work shown here are the Metamorphoses of Ovid, in which the poet tells the story of the emergence of the world out of chaos through mythological stories of transformation. Based on the measure of the hexameter, sound fragments were created with synthesizers that, when mixed live, dissolve in a flat structure. The video images show the Prometheus Cave in Georgia, a scene of the Metamorphoses. Opposite is the goddess Athena. The figures quoted are Narcissus and Echó: Echó, who withers away from unrequited love for Narcissus until she is nothing but a voice. Narcissus, on the other hand, falls in love with his own reflection and is punished by Nemesis, the goddess of revenge.

What wave is, he considers body.

Stella von Rohden (* 1987 in Bremen) lives and works in Cologne. After studying Fine Arts at the University of Arts in Belgrade, she graduated at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig with Frances Scholz in 2018. Her work has recently been shown in a solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bellamartha in Grafrat (2018) as well as in group presentations at the Städtische Galerie in Hanover (2018), the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2017) and at Shoot the Lobster in New York (2017).

Sascha Kregel (* 1989 in Halle / Saale) lives and works in Cologne. In 2018 he graduated from the College of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. His works were shown in group exhibitions in the gallery Dechanatstraße Bremen (2018), at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2017), at Shoot the Lobster in New York (2017) and at the Museum of Photography in Braunschweig (2016), among others.

Both artists are current fellows of the studio program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are supported by:

With the kind support of:

5 pm Westend (D 2001) by Markus Mischkowski and Kai-Maria Steinkühler
89 min, 35 mm, b/w, German with English subtitles

6.30 pm L for Leisure (USA 2014) by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn
73 min, color, English

at 7 pm
Double Book Launch with Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda:
Letters (2019) and Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda x Teruo Nishiyama (2017)
accompanied by an artist talk with Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda in conversation with Nikola Dietrich, a reading by Jay Chung and a screening of the artists’ film She’s Gone (2009)

at 5 pm
Guided Tour through the exhibition The Auratic Narrative by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda with the director Nikola Dietrich

The artist books can be purchased at Kölnischer Kunstverein, and through the artists’ website: jcqtm.bigcartel.com

Scalalogia and The Wheel of Life (2019), Book Launch with Jasmin Werner and a lecture by Philipp Kleinmichel in combination with a concert by pogendroblem

Organised by Miriam Bettin

Watch the recording of the event here.

As part of the first edition of Show and Tell, Jasmin Werner and Miriam Bettin will introduce the publication Scalalogia and The Wheel of Life (2019), published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. On this occasion, philosopher Philipp Kleinmichel and the punk band pogendroblem will be presenting a dialogic lecture with a concert. Based on the leitmotif of the staircase, the evening is dedicated to the subject determined by capitalism, searching for happiness, freedom, and success somewhere between consumption, creativity, and spirituality, between competition and self-actualization.

Scalalogia and The Wheel of Life (2019) by Jasmin Werner has been released beginning of the year on the occasion of her first institutional solo exhibition in the Remise of the Kunstverein Braunschweig. In cooperation with the Friedrich-Mielke-Institute for Scalalogy, the exhibition catalog includes not only installation views and images of the individual works, but also texts that deal with aspects regarding the history of art and architecture in Jasmin Werner‘s practice as well as original texts by Friedrich Mielke. With contributions by Miriam Bettin (curator and editor), Jule Hillgärtner (director Kunstverein Braunschweig), Philipp Kleinmichel (Zeppelin Universität), Harry Thorne (Associate editor frieze), Sophie Schlosser (Friedrich-Mielke-Institute for Scalalogy, OTH Regensburg) and Chloe Stead (freelance writer and critic).

Jasmin Werner (* 1987 in Troisdorf) lives and works in Cologne. In 2016 she graduated from the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2018), Gillmeier Rech, Berlin (2017), MI / mi1glissé, Berlin (2016) and RM, Auckland (2014) and in group exhibitions at Braunsfelder, Cologne (2018), Saloon, Brussels (2018) and at the Folkwang Museum, Essen (2017). In 2017, Jasmin Werner completed a residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. Since this year she is a scholarship holder of the studio program of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

Philipp Kleinmichel studied philosophy, art, and media theory in Freiburg, Karlsruhe and New York. He is a graduate of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since January 2018 he is a research assistant at Zeppelin University and was previously a lecturer at the University of Gießen, the University of Hamburg and the UDK Berlin. His research is on the transformation of art and mass culture in the digital age.

so-called ‘pogendroblem’, the Enfant Terrible of the Deutschpunk, have made their way from the Bergisch Gladbacher province to the metropolitan area of Cologne, where they are equally lost between pubs and competence marathon on public transport and in private-political conditions to enjoy the bad life. Their chitchat is said to be a pinch 80s, a bit of Hamburger Schule, and a nose of garage, some pop cuteness. Four white, mostly asset-backed academic cis men have little to report here. The private is political, but the private can also be boring. But they really try hard and are enthusiastic. In 2018 they released their album Erziehung zur Müdigkeit.

Show and Tell is an ongoing, autonomous series of events with shifting formats. Inivited are various guest, among those artists, authors, and musicians.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are supported by:

With the kind support of:

Moulting, 2019

Public program of the exhibition
The Auratic Narrative

Tuesday May 14, 2019, 11 am – 6 pm

Opening on April 11, 7 pm
9 pm Moulting, a slideshow with the artists

When organizing an exhibition surveying an artist’s body of work, the convention is to frame it as a story. Usually this story includes the artist’s birth (“Born in rural Romania”), a pivotal moment in their career (“She then moved to Paris, where she continued her philosophical pursuits at the Sorbonne”), and a period of striving towards artistic, cultural or political achievements (“these identities have informed his work for more than 30 years”ⁱ). These accounts of individual development, despite being factually accurate, are constructed, which is to say generated and maintained, by arts professionals. In an interview about the societal effects of quantitative metrics, sociologist Steffen Mau alludes to this practice, stating that “fictional expectations” for an artist are established “by means of a story, in the style of an auratic success story that will be realized in the future.” He continues:

[In] the present-day artistic personality one looks for something that is still quite vague and speculative, but which in the future can determine whether he or she will attain a particular market position […] It’s a matter of the dynamic upward movement of a reputation, a positive vision. As always, telling this story requires the culture of experts, and thus professional critics, art marketers, or art educators and advisors.ⁱⁱ

Mau’s assessment echoes the work of sociologist Olav Velthuis, whose book Talking Prices is a study of the principles used to set prices for contemporary art. According to Velthuis, narratives of an archetypal nature (e.g. tragedy, success story, Bildungsroman)—as opposed to economic laws such as supply and demand—determine art market prices, the subject of these stories being both individuals and developments occurring in the field as a whole. Like Mau, Velthuis emphasizes that these narratives are collectively told and reiterated by those working with art, while also stressing their imaginary character. He writes: “The issue here is not whether this narrative, or, for that matter, the ones that will follow, is true to historical reality or not. In fact, its truth content is questionable to say the least.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Such narratives contribute to the intangible quality of uniqueness and authenticity perceived in both artworks and artistic personalities, or “aura,” as literary critic Walter Benjamin termed it. The experience of this phenomenon, abstract and impalpable by definition, is laden with contradiction and ambiguity. For instance, it is commonly accepted, on one hand, that contemporary art is an entirely professionalized field in which the creation of art, as well as a wide scope of related occupational activities, is undertaken for the sake of achieving specific attendant outcomes. On the other, it is equally assumed, though rarely stated outright, that visions of an artist’s current or future significance may not yet, or ever be, realized (as indicated by the phrasing “fictional expectations”^iv). Likewise, the distinctive qualities of an artist’s work and biography are referred to as the product of only a single individual, while it is seldom acknowledged that they are in fact bestowed upon the object or individual and as such are the collective expression of the shared beliefs, values, and lived experiences of art’s discursive community.

The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

The Auratic Narrative, an exhibition of works by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, is on view from April 12 to June 23, 2019.


i All parenthetical quotations from exhibition descriptions as of March 2019 on the website of MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, https://www.moma.org
ii Steffen Mau and Uwe Vormbusch, “Likes and Performance / A conversation between Uwe Vormbusch and Steffen Mau on the quantification of the social.” Texte zur Kunst 110 (June 2018), https://www.textezurkunst.de/110/likes-and-performance
iii Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices, Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton University Press, 2005), 145.
iv See also Jens Beckert, Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), 93: “The fictionality of literary texts, furthermore, is openly communicated, whereas it is hidden in the case of fictional expectations.”


With kind support of:

Additional support from Gaga, Mexico City and Los Angeles; ESSEX STREET, New York; Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich; Cabinet Gallery, London; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. We would also like to thank Andra Lauffs-Wegner for her support of the artists’ book Letters, published on the occasion of the exhibition.

Further information will be regularly announced on the website and via our newsletter.


Programme:

April 11, 2019, 9 pm
Moulting (2019), slideshow with Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

May 14, 2019, 11 am – 6 pm
Moulting (2019), slideshow by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

May 28, 2019, 7 pm
Show and Tell # 1
Scalalogia and The Wheel of Life (2019), Book Launch with Jasmin Werner and a lecture by Philipp Kleinmichel in conjunction with a concert by pogendroblem

Show and Tell is an ongoing, autonomous series of events with shifting formats. Various guests are invited to participate, among these artists, writers, and musicians.

June 6, 2019, 7 pm
Letters (2019) and Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda x Teruo Nishiyama (2017), Double Book Launch with Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

June 19, 2019, 7 pm
Screening of a film by the directors Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn

Public guided tours on Thursdays

April 25, 2019, 5 pm with Miriam Bettin
May 23, 2019, 5 pm with Lukas Flygare (in English)
June 6, 2019, 5 pm with Nikola Dietrich

Public guided tours on Sundays

May 19, 2019, 3 pm with Jasmin Werner
June 23, 2019, 3 pm with Jasmin Werner

Pure Fiction, a writing seminar at Frankfurt’s Städelschule lead by author Mark von Schlegell, will conduct an “open mike” writing workshop in the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Author Wu Ming joins as a special guest as members of the seminar perform texts and workshop them publicly. Audience members are encouraged to bring their own texts to workshop.

Wu Ming is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blisset community in Bologna. The collective is formed of writers active in literature and popular culture. The group authored several novels such as 54 and Manituana. For the open-mike-workshop Pure Fiction will be joined by Wu Ming 1.

From 2011-2018, students of Städelschule invited writer Mark von Schlegell to organise a fiction seminar in the school. Since then Pure Fiction has brought together current and former Städel students to examine and above all produce texts in the most diverse forms possible, from written artistic works and experimental writing to readings and performances that inevitably draw in other aspects of the diverse artistic practices of all the class members. The works of authors from Cervantes to Woolf form the pre–given raw material of the seminar. An engagement with the material and quasi-mystical properties of printed matter have led the class to produce numerous experimental publications, readings and performances on narrative or poetic footings.

The workshop will be conducted in English.

On the occasion of the exhibition Power of Print, the professor of history Bruno Feitler from São Paulo will present a lecture on the life and work of his aunt, the late Brazilian graphic designer Bea Feitler. Bruno Feitler is responsible for the archives of Bea Feitler, and in 2012 edited the extensive publication O Design de Bea Feitler.

Please note that the event will be filmed.

Opening on February 15th, 7 pm

Guided tours
Wednesday, February 21st 5 pm: Guided tour through the exhibition with Juliane Duft
Wednesday, March 7th, 5 pm: Guided tour through the exhibition with Nikola Dietrich
Wednesday, March 21st, 5 pm: Guided tour through the exhibition with Miriam Bettin


An exhibition in collaboration with Marte Eknæs and Nicolau Vergueiro

Power of Print is a comprehensive survey of the revolutionary work, and life, of the late Brazilian art director and designer Bea Feitler (1938–1982).

The exhibition features original magazines, books, video documentation and reproductions from Feitler’s meteoric career, spanning from the late 1950s until her death, and personal photos and artifacts that document her life and circle of friends, collaborators and peers. Best known for her work in Harper’s Bazaar, Ms., Rolling Stone and the modern Vanity Fair, Feitler left an indelible mark upon the face of American graphic design by offering a new approach to the magazine experience.

Feitler’s expressive freedom, evidenced by shifting standards to a female gaze, allowed her to renegotiate the commercial representation of women and to use the magazine as a mass vehicle to address social issues through her vibrant aesthetic. Power of Print threads some of her work’s recurrent themes – the human silhouette, centerfold as compositional device, collaging, innovative use of typography, solarisation and duotone, through which she reimagined the relationship between body, text and graphic design in both layout and sensorial terms. “A magazine should flow. It should have rhythm. You can’t look at one page alone – you have to visualize what comes before and after.”

Bea Feitler was born in Rio de Janeiro, after her Jewish parents fled Nazi Germany. She moved to New York to study at Parsons School of Design and briefly returned to Brazil in 1959 where she designed posters, covers and spreads for books and for the progressive literary magazine Senhor.

In 1961 Feitler moved back to New York and shortly thereafter, at the age of 25, became the co-art director of Harper’s Bazaar with Ruth Ansel following the legacy of their mentors at the magazine Alexey Brodovitch and Marvin Israel. During their 10 years at the magazine, they shaped the emergence of a new feminist popular editorial language. Attuned to the political and cultural changes of the 1960s, they created some of the most iconic editorials of the decade. Feitler and Ansel were ahead of their time: in 1965, with Richard Avedon, they used the first black model in a shoot for a major magazine, and in the same year, also with Avedon, they won the ADC medal for the April ‘space helmet’ Harper’s Bazaar cover. At the magazine, Feitler forged tight relations with photographers that lasted throughout her career; Avedon, Bill King and Diane Arbus, among others, were in her tight circle of friends. Her role as a main connector of the scene is portrayed in Power of Print through a collection of original artwork, personal photographs, postcards and letters from collaborators and friends, also including Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Ray Johnson, Tomi Ungerer, Candy Darling and Gloria Steinem. Her natural collaborative approach elevated the commercial editorial to an art form.

In 1972 Feitler joined Gloria Steinem to launch the feminist Ms. magazine. Here she created an experimental look using day-glo inks and mixtures of photography, illustration and typography compositions, activating the content of the magazine in both an accessible and critical way. Controversial messages were made more powerful through her masterful design, while feminist topics could enter into the mainstream. At Ms. Feitler had full control of visual content and a freedom that fueled her career. Today, the magazine is still pertinent and ahead of the curve and a hallmark of Feitler’s powerful, influential and unmistakable aesthetic.

Between 1974 and 1980 Feitler designed seminal books, such as The Beatles, Henri-Jacques Lartigue’s The Diary of a Century, Helmut Newton’s White Women, Vogue: Book of Fashion Photography. Reflecting her belief that the modern book should be 50-50 in terms of visuals and words, she negotiated to receive cover credit and royalty along the authors and/or photographers of the books she designed. She also art directed ad campaigns for Calvin Klein, Halston, Max Factor, Diane Von Furstenberg etc., record covers, as for the iconic Rolling Stone album Black and Blue, and posters and costumes for the legendary Alvin Ailey dance company.

In 1975, thanks to the insistence of Annie Leibovitz, Feitler started working for Rolling Stone, beginning her six-year association with the magazine which would lead her to redesigning its format twice. Feitler’s final project was the design of the premiere issue and overall concept of the revived Vanity Fair.

The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

It has been made possible with the generous help of Bruno Feitler. An exhibition of Bea Feitler was also presented at Between Bridges in Berlin and UKS in Oslo, both in 2017, co-curated by Marte Eknæs and Nicolau Vergueiro. We would like to thank Between Bridges for their generous loans and Eugen Ivan Bergmann for his exhibition design contribution. Furthermore, we thank The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh for their loan and The New School Archives & Special Collections, New York, as well as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York for providing additional material.

With kind support of:

Further information will be regularly announced on the website and via our newsletter.