Locations KW Institute for Contemporary Art Auguststraße 69 10117 Berlin tel. +49 30 24 34 59 info@kw-berlin.de
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CONTENTS
01 Foreword 03 Exhibitions 07 Interviews 21 Directions 23 Special Thanks
The 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art will take place June 9–September 9, 2018, at various venues in Berlin, Germany. It is curated by Gabi Ngcobo, who has invited Moses Serubiri (Kampala, UG), Nomaduma Rosa Masilela (New York, US), Thiago de Paula Souza (São Paulo, BR), and Yvette Mutumba (Berlin, DE) to collaborate with her as the curatorial team. The 10th Berlin Biennale will be imagined and shaped through their collective dreams and
actions. In conversation with artists and contributors who think and act beyond art, the curatorial process will confront the incessant anxieties which are perpetuated through the misunderstanding of complex subjectives. Facing the current widespread state of collective psychosis, and starting from the position of Europe, Germany, and Berlin as a city in dialogue with the world, the curatorial process will be selective, non-comprehensive and will not provide
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FOREWORD a coherent reading of histories or the present of any kind. The key starting points of the new curatorial team will be through strategies of self-preservation such as acts of dismantling the dominant structures and building from a non-hierarchical position. The 10th Berlin Biennale will propose a plan for how to face a collective madness. Find more info about the institution and past exhibitions online.
Geomerce: Turning Plants into Miners Naan Likovni Opening 6. 15. 2018 5PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Exhibitions Another Linen Cloth Hellen Rauschenburg Opening 6. 10. 2018 5PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art Faraway, So Close Klaus Tor Opening 6. 12. 2018 3PM König Galerie
Art of Everyday Life Jon J Kool Opening 6. 16. 2018 11AM Künstlerhaus Bethanien Le Petit Mignon: Cross Pollination Irene Florentine Opening 6.20. 2018 6PM König Galerie
Breaking Down Ulga Josef Opening 6. 16. 2018 12PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien
Migra(n)ti. Practical and Symbolic Experiments Shinza York Opening 6. 23. 2018 7PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Mental Atmosphere Lela B Njatin Opening 6. 17. 2018 11AM Künstlerhaus Bethanien
United Makers Dan Millerton Opening 6. 26. 2018 5PM König Galerie
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(Primal) chair Oscar Garg Opening 6. 27. 2018 5PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art After Utopia Tatum Yun Opening 6. 30. 2018 11AM König Galerie
Le Petit Mignon: Cross Pollination Irene Florentine Opening 7. 2. 2018 3PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art Faux Martini Samantha Bradshaw Opening 7.5. 2018 7PM König Galerie Studio Folder: The Unleashed Critical Editions Gorgin Chad Opening 7. 8. 2018 4PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien
Folded Laundry In Natural Habitat Stacy Jo Telluride Opening 7. 8. 2018 8PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art Unknown Beginnings With Unknown Endings Ork Landry Opening 7. 9. 2018 7PM König Galerie Alphabet Soup: 100,000 Letters Home Shin Park Opening 7. 11. 2018 5PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien Tawny Fools Jakob Xin Opening 7. 12. 2018 11AM KW Institute for Contemporary Art Shoes Tine Stuplle Opening 7. 14. 2018 8PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien
Strange Lovers Tatum Yun Opening 7. 17. 2018 11AM König Galerie Hop, Skip, Stop Ellen O Sue Opening 7. 19. 2018 3PM König Galerie Psycho Candy Sam Pan Opening 7. 21. 2018 7PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art Androgyny and Anonymity Dord Fagin Opening 7. 24. 2018 4PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien Hurry Up and Finish Working Natalie Kidd Opening 7. 25. 2018 5PM König Galerie Dirt, Rock, Lava, Space Peno Short Opening 7. 27. 2018 8PM König Galerie
Flower Stop Ozark Turken Opening 7. 30. 2018 7PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Don’t Tell Me When, Don’t Tell Me Why Rand Joni Opening 8. 1. 2018 5PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien Pearlescent Jelly Jakob Xin Opening 8. 3. 2018 11AM König Galerie Y3K: New Millennium and a New Generation Jakob Xin Opening 8. 5. 2018 11AM KW Institute for Contemporary Art What a Day, What a Week, What a Year Sophia Wu Opening 8. 17. 2018 6PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien
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Youth Among Fools KR Bonni Opening 8. 7. 2018 5PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien Only One Jame Lu Opening 8. 10. 2018 11AM König Galerie Briefcase. Wallet. Phone Pablo Tucker Opening 8.12. 2018 3PM KW Institute for Contemporary Ar8t Switching Places Yuku Lopton Opening 8. 13. 2018 7PM König Galerie Puzzle: Soaring Flether Sherz Opening 8. 15. 2018 4PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien What Kirk Orgenlorff Opening 8. 17. 2018 6PM König Galerie
Untitled Art Piece Vrokim Niro Opening 8. 18. 2018 8PM KW Institute for Contemporary Art Apples and Pears in a Reality of Squares Toulouse Applarg Opening 8.20. 2018 7PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien Big Dogs Denise Farley Opening 8. 22. 2018 5PM Künstlerhaus Bethanien
Gabi Ngcobo
The appointed curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018, Gabi Ngcobo, speaks about postcolonialism and the importance of revisiting history. Can we actually “rewrite” the past? Who is enabled to write history? There is a real responsibility to investigate how historical narratives have been written and constructed–especially when written from positions that glorify those who have historically caused great harm to others and their privileged roles as writers or speakers. CHR gave us a platform from which we insisted and owned the ways in which we understand our pasts in dialogue with the world, particularly the geographic locations and
experiences closest to us. There has never been a point when people have not been speaking and/or writing–it is important to take positions outside the narratives seriously and consider them as knowledge that we all need to make sense of the world. You speak about how to “decolonize ourselves” by a process of un-learning and creating new ways of curatorial practice. Can you give an example of this? I do think that when speaking about decolonisation, we need
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INTERVIEWS
to be clear that it is a project that sets out to change the order of the world but, to quote from Frantz Fanon, a thought leader and Afro-Caribbean, “it cannot come as a result of magical practices nor of the natural shock, nor of friendly understanding.” Decolonising means creating new configurations of knowledge and power —and that can be a very messy procedure. The curatorial process can be a space to reflect on these processes as well as to pose enabling questions for dealing with a world driven towards misconceived and dangerous wars. Postcolonialism is one of your core research topics. Can you be expected to focus on these theories for the next Berlin Biennale? I would like to believe that we are all reflecting (or should) on a world that still remains very post colonial. We are all
post colonial. Some contexts are more post colonial than others. We are still anticipating what it would mean for worlds’ economic powers, such as in Germany, to actively admit, acknowledge or engage their post coloniality—that is, their role in facilitating land dispossessions—brutal regimes that have murdered, dehumanised others for hundred of years. I live in South Africa, a so called “post-apartheid society”. Have you ever chosen to reflect on the so called “global South” or been involved in projects to promote a “SouthSouth” dialogue? I generally try to steer away from labels. Yet I know that not naming and/or claiming one’s point of view has a potential to make room for that very position to be infiltrated by people, institutions and ideas that are only thinking of our subjectivities as metaphors
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for something else. It is as necessary to guard terms such as “the South” as to be vigilant about how they are used to describe and/or discriminate against one. Which is the role of the arts in this particular period of time, such as the “now”? Our duty, as creative people, to paraphrase the late Nina Simone, should always be to reflect the times we live in. We do this also by challenging constructions of history that have and continue to favour the powerful as we fight for the future we want to see in the world, beyond our own physical existences. How do you understand your role as a curator for the Berlin Biennale in the current German socio political context, with the arrival of a large number of refugees and the rise of rightwing political parties?
As mentioned above, I believe it is imperative for a platform such as The 10th Berlin Biennale to take into cognizance urgent socio political contexts of the places from which they are staged, as well as in historical narratives that have shaped a place in relationship to the rest of the world.
Willem de Rooij discusses whether referentiality in art, if once polemical, has become an orthodoxy and if so, is there is a way out.
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Willem de Rooij
In 2002, Dutch-born, Berlin based artist Willem de Rooij began a series of projects in which he collaborates with florists to realize the floral sculptures. Some of de Rooij’s Bouquets have been visually elaborate, which incorporate numerous species of flowers and plants; others have been highly regimented, for instance juxtaposing bunches of black and white tulips—two varieties whose seasons only overlap for a short time in February. What other ongoing series are you working on? For the last six years I’ve been making hand woven tapestries. As many of my projects, this is a collaboration. The weaver, Ulla Schünemann, is based in
Potsdam in former Eastern Germany. She has been weaving by hand for 30 years, and some of her looms are over 300 years old. She is extremely skillful and knowledgeable— there was a strong tradition in hand weaving in East Germany, when the [Berlin] Wall was still up. The tapestries we produce are rather abstract. They are elaborations on color and on material. There are different parameters that I work with and different instructions that I give to the weaver. As with the flower works, her input is
of great importance, because weaving is a profession in itself, a particularly unique and very specialized skill. Making floral arrangements or making textiles through hand weaving—it sounds like you have an interest in these artisan or craft practices, and in presenting them in a fineart context. Would you say that there is something that connects them? A recurring and overarching interest of mine is different forms of cultural exchange, either historical or contemporary. The colonial project, or the complex of colonial projects, and their present-day incarnations and consequences are important aspects of this thematic strand in my work. Those interests can have political connotations. It can also be purely about form— but inter-cultural exchange, cultural clashes, and, let’s
say, cross-cultural misunderstandings are inspiring and productive to me. Especially the misunderstandings, yeah. Misreadings and miscontextualizations can sometimes be very painful for the different parties involved. The process of becoming exotic, when people, objects, or concepts move from one cultural sphere into another, getting misunderstood, getting lost. I think misunderstandings of all sorts are, for artists, very important… I think artists do well with confusion. Artists are there to produce problems, not to solve them —that’s my understanding of being an artist. Specific to Bouquet XI, how do you see that being realized? The flowers selected for your Bouquet XI, for instance, possess allergenic properties. Right, this work has the possibility of influencing the viewer on a physical level.
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Persons with allergies are at risk simply by being alive; going out on the street can cause allergic symptoms, I know this because I’m sensitive to pollen myself. It was really exciting for me to test this aspect of the material. We’re not supposed to touch art pieces. And because I’ve worked with sometimes very costly existing objects and artworks, I know very well what the reasons are for that. The idea of an art piece that one is not allowed to touch— but that in return might be able to touch you on a physical level—I thought that that would be very exciting. Plant allergy is a beautiful thing because it will make you aware of the natural world around you. It’s a lot easier to protect yourself from a rain shower than from pollen that drifts around in the air. So, it is quite an intrusive and natural phenomenon that really grabs you by the nose
and by the eyes. To get back to what you were saying earlier about cultural clashes and transcultural migration, there is some element of the piece that’s tied into the way that pollen travels the room. It could be taken kind of as a metaphor. Yes, pollen transgresses borders and comes in when you open the window. The Middle East obviously is a region of great cultural richness and diversity, as well as of confusion and conflict. This complexity would obviously be impossible to grasp in one work, but Bouquet XI reflects on certain aspects of it.
Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher is an American artist. Her medium includes painting, works on paper, film and video. Some of her pieces refer to issues of race, and may combine formality with racial stereotypes and depict “ordering principles” that society imposes. How did arrive at collaging paper into your paintings? I didn’t really come from a fine arts background, although I certainly went to museums as a kid. I came from a carpentry background. I worked in the saw yard where we built the molds that the cement was poured into. Basically, I built a box over and over again for months. So, when I went to art school, that was what I knew
how to do, and that’s the way I built my canvases. I built a latticework grid and, over that, laid down very thin plywood and stretched the canvas over that. That way, I could sit on the canvas as I began gluing down sheets of penmanship paper, from top to bottom, left to right. Then I began drawing and painting into the pages, after they’d all been laid down in a skin. They really became something that can be read both sheet-to-sheet and as an overall skin. The lines of the penmanship paper sort of line up and, from a distance, almost
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Above: “La Chinoise, (detail)” 2008. Pencil, ink, oil, watercolor and cut paper on paper. Left: “Pomp-Bang, (detail)” 2003. Plasticine, ink, and paper mounted on canvas
form a seamless kind of horizon line. But up close, you see that it’s a kind of striated, broken grid. So, there is this push and this pull between the watery blue of the penmanship paper lines and the gestural marks made inside and around them. Penmanship paper is the found material that I always see as a reference to how you make your letters—what height, and where you dot your i—so, it’s always been a sign of gesture I think for me.
I’ve collected archival material from some black photo journals from 1939 to 1972, looking at magazines such as Our World, Sepia, and Ebony. Initially I was attracted to the magazines because the wig advertisements had a grid-like structure that interested me. But as I began looking through them, the wig ads themselves had such a language to them— so worldly—that referred to other countries, Leshiba, this sort of lost past.
It seems like there’s a variation of this practice in the paintings from the eXelento show at Gagosian, especially in the use of the grid.
I started collecting the wig advertisements themselves. And then I realized that I also had a kind of longing for the other stories, the narratives they told—and also just wanting to bring them back into the paintings and wanting the paintings to function through the characters of the advertisements, to function as a kind of chart or a map of this lost, ever changing, and supremely diverse world...
The large works at Gagosian are made in a way similar to the earlier penmanship paper works: in that they are built from found material. The paper is more readable and narrative. The characters exist within the support itself, the page.
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There’s something poignant about figures stuck in time. I am certainly moved by the idea. There used to be a store that was called A&S on 42nd Street that I would go to, and collect these magazines before 42nd Street got all cleaned up. Among other magazines, there were Our World, Sepia, Ebony, and before about 1960, they’re pretty radical. They’re certainly not the Ebony magazine that I remember. There were interviews with Haile Selassie, and a Richard Wright article next to a slasher text—they were dense. There was a necessity to them as a press, a black press. They were entertainment, but they had a kind of urgency and a necessity to them. Also a worldliness— articles about drag queen balls in the Bronx, way before Jenny Livingston made Paris is Burning; nightclubs, such as Lucky’s, that were of mixed race. There
was this sense of loss that I felt, reading them, but also it was exciting, this collection of data and information. They seem radical compared to what I’m reading today. What excites you most about the process? Using paper as support for printed material has always been central to my work, from the earliest penmanship paper works to DeLuxe, the print project at Two Palms Press, where I’m working in collaboration with printmakers and people building alongside of me. What was exciting for me, here, was that which happens as whimsy in the drawings or as a decision made with an improvisational spirit—for example, when I would make a choice to blindfold characters or obliterate names underneath characters—would have to be structured, so that it could be
repeated twenty times. I would make these little squares, and they would then be hand cut and traced, so each sort of whimsical obliteration or recovery would be created into a kind of structure or language, back and forth. That was really exciting, in terms of looking at my work and my language and having it mean something even in its refusals to be completely readable. There’s this call and response that you actually feel directly as you are working in this kind of collaboration. I really get excited by this idea that a printed material can be so widely distributed. The black press was widely distributed and there is a great American history of manifestos. I was always jealous of writers because of how their story could be in so many different hands—it didn’t have to occur so solely only a gallery or a
museum. There is more of a possibility for distribution and for freedom. Is there anything about your work that needs to be debunked? What’s seen as political in the work is a kind of one-toone reading of the signs, as opposed to a more formal reading of the materials, how it’s made, or what insistences are made. I think people get so overwhelmed by the super signs of race when, in fact, my relationship to some of the more over-determined signs in the work is very tangential. What I think is more repeated than that, in the work, is a kind of mutability and moodiness to the signs. And that’s more what I think the work is about than a one-to-one reading of the signs, however over-determined they may be. You may think that’s what you’re
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supposed to be translating. In fact, it’s this other thing, which requires a kind of confidence that you have to enter that realm. And I think that’s where you can talk about race in my work—that idea of the abstract “I”—what it means to look at somebody who was eighteen in 1939, or whatever she was. That’s specificity. It’s impossible to know who that was. But try anyway to have some kind of imaginative space with that sign. I think that takes more balls than to just understand it as some kind of critique of black hairstyles. Talk about the elements of joy, pleasure, and beauty in your work. I think maybe it is hard for some people to look at a grid of wig advertisements or a group of women. They might be able to see the [Some Girls] album cover, but they don’t have the depth that [the artist]
had when he looked at that and thought those women were beautiful and altered them. Sometimes it’s hard for people who do not make things to understand labor, joy, attention, and whimsy. But it’s in the work—I don’t think it’s something I need to explain.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
KĂśnig Galerie
KĂźnstlerhaus Bethanien
König Galerie
Directions KW Institue for Contemporary Art Take Oranienburger Str. and Monbijoupl. to Spandauer Str. Follow Spandauer Str., B1 and Axel-Springer-Straße to Ritterstraße Continue on Ritterstraße. Drive to Alexandrinenstraße König Galerie
Head northeast on Alexandrinenstraße toward Franz-Künstler-Straße Turn right onto Ritterstraße Continue onto Reichenberger Str. At the roundabout, take the 2nd exit onto Kottbusser Str. Künstlerhaus Bethanien
SPECIAL THANKS Director Gabriele Horn
Curator Gabi Ngcobo
Curatorial Team Moses Serubiri Nomaduma Rosa Masilela Thiago de Paula Souza Yvette Mutumba Maziyar Pahlevan
Artistic Office Project Coordination Jeanette Gogoll Joseph Pleass
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Curatorial Assistants
Administration
Daniela Sellen Milena Maffei
Silke Krummel
Finances Head of Education
Kati Guhle
Mona Jas
Administrative Assistant Interns Jasa McKenzie Katie Bruton Katja Ullmann Mira Herrarte Susan Abu Baker
Press and Communications
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Maintenance Dieter Sielaff (to Aug 2017) Konrad Muchow
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Eva Marx Tina Wessel
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