Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin 

November 2022 – Februar 2023
Curated by Sonja Lau

The group exhibition Guilty, guilty, guilty! Towards a Feminist Criminology undertakes a feminist assessment of jurisdictional power. The focus is on “women on trial”—female artists, “bad mothers,” women defendants and women plaintiffs on a rather lost cause. In this context, the courtroom does not only appear as a site of legal assessment, but primarily as a space in which a political or ideological image of women is always implicitly negotiated and constructed. What else, beyond the juridical paragraphs, is debated here? And how can we render this hidden discourse visible?

“The face of war is unwomanly” stated journalist Svetlana Alexievich in her a seminal book of the same title, and the same seems to apply to the juridical history of female delinquency, women’s lawbreaking, and “unlawful” resistance. As sociologist Carol Smart has argued since the late 1970s, there is striking lack when it comes to assessing a female criminology, and even more so if we dare to think of it as a feminist criminology. To fathom the latter is one of the aims of this project.

Utilizing a diverse range of methods and forms, including sound, film, collage, installation, research-based works, and activist practices, the artists will navigate through the juridical and bureaucratic sphere, consider alternative evidence, and reflect on double standards. They consider the trials of female concentration camp guards in postwar Germany (Dominique Hurth), the case of a Palestinian underage girl detained at the gateway of an Israeli settlement (Roee Rosen), the fatal stabbing of Marwa El-Sherbini at the Dresden court (Noa Gur), the hunting down of terrorist Patricia Hearst (Dennis Adams), and the precarious conditions of queer youth in American juvenile detention centers (Sam Richardson, Krystal Shelley and Shevaun Wright, conceived by Suzana Milevska). They also address legal constructs of femininity and motherhood (Barbara Breitenfellner, Susanne Sachsse), the distribution of guilt in divorce and child custody trials (Nika Dubrovsky, Ekaterina Shelganova), as well as the particular case of the Zwi Migdal transatlantic coerced prostitution mafia (Galit Eilat). They ultimately and importantly (Rüzgâr Buşki, İpek Duben) consider cases of killings in self-defense – and those who were not able to defend themselves.

The common grounds remain the respective attempt to relocate the conviction of “being guilty” in the social and political conditions. Guilty of murder, or guilty of being alive? Guilty of breaking the law, or guilty of breaking it “unwomanly”?

Guilty, guilty, guilty! Towards a Feminist Criminology responds to these questions in two ways. First, by providing access to a specific storage of “feminist knowledge” of the accused female that is usually excluded from view or silenced in dusty mountains of files. More importantly, by creating a sense of coherence and solidarity between otherwise parceled, uprooted, or assumingly singular incidents of female disobedience—as a major key to a feminist reading of the law.

Public programming

Thursday, November 24, 2022, 7pm
Rüzgâr Buşki in conversation with Yasemin Çakal and Nayuk (Nazlı Mayuk)
In the context of the International Day for the Eliminiation of Violence against Women
Kunstraum Kreuzberg

Thursday, January 12, 2023, 7pm
Dominique Hurth
Reading, Private handbags may not be carried to the field. Notes on the Aufseherin Uniform
Kunstraum Kreuzberg

Wednesday, January 18, 2023, 7pm
Roee Rosen, Kafka for Kids
German premiere of the film Kafka for Kids (Rosen, 2022, 111 minutes) in presence of the artist, moderated by Hito Steyerl, introduction: Sonja Lau   
HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU1)

Sunday, February 19, 2023, 7pm
Finissage
Buchpremiere / Catalogue Launch Guilty, guilty, guilty! 
Kunstraum Kreuzberg

Curated by: Sonja Lau
Curatorial Assistant: Shohreh Shakoory

Participating artists and theoreticians: Dennis Adams, Barbara Breitenfellner,Rüzgâr Buşki, İpek Duben, Nika Dubrovsky, Galit Eilat, Noa Gur, Dominique Hurth,Kwiekulik, Suzana Milevska in collaboration with Sam Richardson, Krystal Shelley and Shevaun Wright, Roee Rosen, Susanne Sachsse, Ekaterina Shelganova

In acknowledgement of, among many others: Marianne Bachmeier, Yasemin Çakal, Çilem Doğan, Patricia Hearst, Krestina, Angelina and Maria Khachaturyan, Marwa El-Sherbini, Nevin Yıldırım

 

Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien is an organisation of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg District Council.

The project is funded by Senate Department for Culture and Europe: the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF) and Exhibition Fund Municipal Galleries.

Made possible with the kind support of Institut Français, Berlin; Tarabya Cultural Academy, Istanbul; Danila-Freitag, Agency for the Performing Arts; and the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme.

re: von der poesie im recht

re on poetics within law

 

Studio Bethanien, Berlin

December 7, 2021, 6pm – 10pm

 

 

A performative event by :

Sonja Lau

With:

Nika Dubrovsky

Dominique Hurth

Susanne Sachsse

Ekatarina Shelganova

 

 

The project “RE: von der poesie im recht” takes its point of departure in the dynamics between women and law, between motherhood/female artisthood at court and on juridical trials.

“RE: von der poesie im recht” thus invests in a feminist inquiry into contemporary jurisdiction and the role the female subject and body is attributed therein. What is, actually, debated here beyond the realms of the juridical paragraphs, which hidden layers of meaning are to be drawn from the judgment and the public recpetion of “women at court”, what is lurking within the language of bureaucracy? Last but not least, how can we develop modes of expression, a.o. by means of public discourse, performance and other aesthetic gestures, that allow for a critical, collective evaluation, that can both generate knowledge and solidarity?

In order to do so, “RE: von der poesie im recht” will also refer quite precisely to a current phenomenon, that is rarely discussed in critical theory, but finds itself nevertheless in a tangible, sombre increase: divorce and child custody trials, which are grounded more than often in a juridical/political evaluation of the female subject. With “RE: von der poesie im recht”, we are looking closer at these scenarios, using both concrete experiences and “real”, personal cases as well as the artistic and intellecutal imagination, in order to turn the heremtics of the trial and the silence of the files into important material for the shaping of a new feminist critique.

 

 

Program

 

 

18h00

Sonja Lau (Host)

Und es wird regnen…. Eine Gerichts-Oper (Reprise)

Sound Performance

Aus Auszügen aus Gerichtsakten einer familiengerichtlichen Verhandlung ensteht ein Narrativ, das der juristische Apparat den „Eskalationsprozess“ nennt, dessen Gewalt aber über die involvierten Personen hinaus auch auf Ebene der Sprache und der teilnehmenden juristischen und bürokratischen Organe stattfindet. Eine Analyse von dem, was sich im Apparat der Rechtssprechung niederschlägt (aktenkundig wird), was als toter Rest übrig bleibt, wenn alles schon geschehen ist.

18h30 

Nika Dubrovsky

In Conversation with …….

Divorce Rights, Child Custody, and the Violence of Bureacracy

Zoom-Panel 

19h30

Dominique Hurth

Kinderszenen

Performance (Screening)

20h00

Ekatarina Shelganova

An alternate history of the lost son. 

Work presentation / Performed Essay

21h00

Sonja Lau

Outro

Und es wird regnen…. (Reprise)

 

 

 

 

III. Biographies

 

SUSANNE SACHSSE (*1965) ist Schauspielerin und Performance-Künstlerin. Sie hat in diversen Inszenierungen und Projekten, u.a. von Heiner Müller, Robert Wilson, Bruce La Bruce, Keren Cytter, Heinz Emigholz und Yael Bartana, mitgewirkt, und kollaboriert regelmäßig mit dem Musik-Kollektiv Xiu Xiu und dem Autor Paul B. Preciado. In ihrer Arbeit adaptiert SACHSSE Bilder weiblicher Stereotype ad absurdum (siehe „Serious Ladies“, Arsenal Living Archive). Im Rahmen der 17. Venedig Biennale war sie als „Helene Duldung“ maßgeblich an der Bespielung des Deutschen Pavillons beteiligt. https://www.adkdw.org/de/article/1381_original_sin_a_concert

 

DOMINIQUE HURTH (*1985 in Colmar) beschäftigt sich in den Formaten Installationen, Ausstellungen und Publikationen mit der Lesbarkeit von Objekten und historischen Ereignissen. Ihre Arbeiten wurden international in Museen und Galerien ausgestellt (u.a. Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin). Sie war Leiterin des Projektes «Bilder, Stimmen und Klischees: SS-Aufseherinnen des Frauen-Konzentrationslagers Ravensbrück», Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück (2020) und beschäfigt sich aktuell mit der Objektbiografie der weiblichen Uniform der Darstellung von Täterinnen. https://dominiquehurth.com/

NIKA DUBROVSKY (*1967 in St. Petersburg) ist Kuratorin, Theoretikerin, Herausgeberin und Aktivistin. Gemeinsam mit David Graeber gründete sie das „Museum of Care“, einer hybriden Institution, die sich für die Produktion sozialer Beziehungen einsetzt, und recherchierte zur Bürokratie als Gewaltform. Daraus entstand u.a. das Project „UPRISINGS“, das sich geschiedenen Frauen aus der ehm. DDR widmete, deren Entschädigungszahlungen mit der Wende eingestellt wurden. DUBROVSKY hat verstärkt zu genderbasiertem Unrecht geforscht, und auch eigene Gerichtserfahrungen gemeinsam mit Theoretiker*innen untersucht.

EKATARINA SHELGANOVA lebt und arbeitet in St. Petersburg als Fotografin und Videokünstlerin. 2018 gründetet sie die „Moving Gallery“, einer wandernden Ausstellungseinheit im öffentlichen Raum, die in Gestalt einer sozialistischen Umkleidekabine an verschiedenen Orten in St Petersburg auftritt. SHELGANOVA hat sich für ihre Arbeit mehrfach vor Gericht verteidigen müssen, was auch zu einer gerichtlich erzwungenen Trennung von ihrem Sohn geführt hat. Für die Ausstellung wird SHELGANOVA eine alternative Geschichte ihrer fotografischen Arbeit entwickeln, die die juristische Konfrontation subtil mit einschließt. https://cargocollective.com/ekaterinashelganova

Performative Exhibition
National Gallery of Arts, Tirana
September – October 2008
Curated by Sonja Lau and André Siegers

 

Curatorial Statement and Context

In 2008, the National Gallery – or so it was proclaimed – underwent its first substantial refurbishment since its inauguration by dictator Enver Hoxha in 1974. Clearly, this had not only technical reasons.

Amongst many refurbishment tasks, one significant alteration of the gallery was the whitening of the red walls, which until then had hosted the Socialist Realism collection. This investment was part of a general strategy of “modernization”, but the shift from red to white also spoke of something else. It proposed a move towards the historicizing of a collection, that seemingly wasn’t deemed distant enough. Whereas the red walls recalled a sort of “in situ” of the Socialist Realism collection, a somewhat haunting presence, the whitening of the walls came with the comfortable effect of stepping into a safe distance. The paintings of the Socialist collection would leave the building asone thing, and they would return to the site as something else. Some would, as we later learned, not return at all. To dedicate an exhibition to this transformation (and the pars pro toto this suggested for the society as a whole) became the crucial concern of the project “Re-Paintings”. It considered the “whitening” as a pragmatic part of renovation, but above all as a rendering of one art (hi)story into another one.

There were also several other concerns that lead to the project we developed from there. One being the very special circumstance, that when renovating a space, and when whitening walls, every artwork has to at least temporarily leave to building. We were very interested in the advent of a gallery devoid works, of the vacancy of the building. It suggested a moment in time when the ‘old’ institution had already left whilst the ‘new’ institution was still on await – providing a site in between, and therefore “off” powers. To “work together” with an institution that was literally absent, became an important undercurrent to the project.

Another preliminary thought was the ‘oddity’ of the color red itself. As we learned, the reddening of the National Gallery had been in fact applied during post-socialist times, in the context of Gëzim Qëndro’s astonishing but little known exhibition “Homo Socialisticus” (1997). It was an aesthetic, ‘fake’ red that was utilized to stimulate both fear, nostalgia, irony and critique. It was also in the “Homo Socialisticus” context that the Socialist Realism collection resurfaced – on red – for the first time since 1991. Qëndro had advised the gallery team to never clean the space again. The entire installation of “Homo Socialisticus” was devised to disappear under dust and oblivion: a “curatorial vision” that soon turned into a new “reality”. When visiting the gallery in 2008, facing the worn out, dusty red walls, we noted a slight memory of Qëndro’s project amongst the younger artists, but most visitors considered the red gallery as an ‘original’ element from Communist times. What had started as a curatorial critique, had turned once again into a site of discomfort and prolonged past. We were thus in a working context that was both fake and real, dead and alive, ordinary and highly cryptical. There was nothing but the coats, the walls and skins of the institution to address. This was how the project “Re-Paintings. An Exhibition on Coats” came into being.

 

“Re-Paintings”. The Project

In line with the considerations mentioned above, the project “Re-Paintings” took place deliberately during the heydays of the gallery’s renovation phase. It began once all artworks had left the gallery spaces, and it put a temporary pause, or freeze, on the renovation works themselves.

Within this context, we invited a number of painters, in most cases former official “people’s painters” back into the empty gallery space. We were looking for artists whose works had been part of the Socialist collection, those who had thus seen their works leaving the space. The general task was to choose one of the paintings from the past, and to dare a current, “free” interpretation of the work in response to the temporary “free” exhibition space: in short, to dare a “Re-Painting”. A “Re-Painting” could be identical to the previous painting, it could be utterly different, or it could be anything in between. Most important, those “Re-Paintings” were to be applied directly onto the gallery’s red walls, they were temporary paintings that would disappear once the renovation works continued. They were not safe in regard to the future, they were farewell works. But they were also utterly safe from another perspective, layered permanently – and up until today – under the new white coat of the institution, inside the metabolic system of the National Gallery, as part of its “institutional memory”. If the ongoing battle (or, complicity) between art and power often eradicates memory functions and specific positions, if transitions and transformations often go clandestine and without a clear visual expression, then “Re-Paintings” suggested to invent, stage, perform what would otherwise go missing.

During the entire time of the production, that is the painters’ work inside the gallery, the space remained open to the public. In this sense, the “exhibition” worked similar to an artist studio, a temporary squatting situation. It operated literally in reverse: starting with the first brush, then “opening” on the final day, that would equally announce the continuation of the renovation works, thus the approaching whitening and disappearance of the works.

However more than an artist studio situation, “Re-Paintings” was a stage situation, a project that believed in theatricality and theatrical means in order to render a complex situation tangible. In this sense, terms like “free” or “U-topos” are not to be confounded with curatorial naivety, but must be understood as a “stage directive”, something to react to, both as subject and as an actor performing one’s own subjectivity. This theatricality concerned the artists, the spectators, the (absent) institution and us as curators alike. If there was a title for this collective performance other than “Re-Paintings”, it could be best coined as a “Staged Messianism in the name of the White Cube”.

The conversations and artistic ideas, but also the political, personal and ideological tensions that occurred during the weeks of production, are what keeps the project relevant up to today. Aside from photography, they are not recorded or archived by other means, but have found the irreversible space of dwelling under the white walls of the National Gallery. Perhaps, they help to recall, from time to time, that “White” is not an innocent color.

 

Artists: Xsenofon Dilo, Agim Kadillari, Xheneta Kadillari, Skënder Kamberi, Sali Shijaku, ‘Taso’. With an artistic contribution by Heldi Pema. 

Supported by FAVA.

This website is currently under construction. Please return later

Performance
National Historical Museum, Tirana
July 2013
Curated by Sonja Lau

British composer CORNELIUS CARDEW (1936 – 1981) counts among the most influential musicians and, perhaps, “political activists” of the 20th century. However, only a few specialists have turned their attention to the very strands that lead from the composer’s work right into the heart of Albania. As a matter of fact, Cardew’s biography can be read like a blueprint of the Albanian recent history itself; both breaking at the same time with Russia, then in the 1970ies with China. None of his works has ever been performed in Albania.

TRY… AGAIN… BETTER was the first attempt to shed light onto this intrinsic relationship between Albania and the pivotal composer’s work. Interestingly, Cardew never visited the country himself. To eventually “premiere” the secret homage he left behind belatedly “on site”, and at the same time in a country that Cardew could not have foreseen, lied at the core of the project.

Staged at the heart of the National History Museum, once founded to display the progress of Communism as it does today exclusively display its terrors, TRY… AGAIN… BETTER read like a score of those irresolute historical narratives. The anachronistic performance of Cardew’s works played by an orchestra largely remote from the composer’s past ideals turned into a dithering listening experience, asking how a political shift may “sound” and what can still be retrieved from the phenomenon of “red music beyond the communist bloc”.

With: Christian von Borries, Prof Vasil S. Tole, and the Orchestra of the Academy of Arts

See E-FLUX announcement here 
Performance
National Theater, Tirana
July 29, 2013, 8pm
Curated by Sonja Lau

T.I.C.A. Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art and Jan Van Eyck are pleased to present FIEND, a unique collaboration between artist Armando Lulaj and pianist and AMM pioneer John Tilbury. The project owes its title to the very first Western covert operation behind the Iron Curtain “Valuable/Fiend,” carried out in Albania from 1949 to 1953 and notorious for its failure. In these present days of investigation into the Wikileaks disclosures and the Snowden trial, FIEND presents the first artistic (re)action by digging into those data.

A piece for one voice and a piano, FIEND essentially imbricates two parallel performances into one. Utilizing the stage of the National Theatre as an archaic structure of uttering truths by means of pathos and illusion, Classified Cables by Armando Lulaj takes a selection of 452 Wikileaks files for a monologue recitation. Facing a partially empty audience — half of the seats have been reserved for the officials in question — Lulaj departs from the present to fold in two decades of secret and confidential diplomatic communication on Albania, “classified” across categories of corruption, international relations, trafficking, politician portraits, and in the last instance art. Carefully edited, Lulaj’s performance resembles the mechanism of a “truth-generating machine,” persistently uttering segmented facts that remain necessarily incomplete, whilst producing an excess of “truths” that can no longer be fictionalized. As the reading progresses, the monological structure appears as a deception: instead, Classified Cables turns into an act of encroachment upon the (absent) state department, its (present) actors and the stage.

Simultaneously unfolding on stage, John Tilbury will add to, interfere with and oppose the artist’s reading with the 21 Seconds Piece, a new work for piano especially composed for this event. Sitting back to back with Lulaj, the pianist faces the dark void of the stage throughout the performance, drawing upon the artist’s voice as the only hook from which to develop his perpetually altering piece over the course of two hours. As with the selected cables (the 452 cables recall, among other, yet another degree of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel 451° Fahrenheit) the painstaking self-constraint of keeping with the 21 seconds reads like a “coding” in itself — one gradually collapsing out of recognition, as the code becomes perforated by in situ improvisation. Rather than providing an accompanying score, the coded piano performance acts like a multiplication of the “truths” proclaimed in the Classified Cables, adding each 21 seconds yet another layer, sound element, or sometimes: silence.

Armando Lulaj (born in 1980 in Albania) is a writer of plays, texts on risk territory, film author, and producer of conflict images. He has no desire to subject to the context of local belonging — rather, he is orientated toward accentuating the border between economical power, fictional democracy and social disparity in a global context. Exhibitions include the Prague Biennial (2003; 2007), Tirana Biennial (2005), the Albanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007), 4th Gothenburg Biennale (2007), and the 6th Berlin Biennial (2010). His recent project NEVER was featured at the 63rd Berlinale International Film Festival in the section Forum Expanded.

John Tilbury (born in 1936 in the UK) is an acclaimed British pianist and counts as one of the most distinct interpreters of Morton Feldman’s music. Since the 1980s, he has gained a special reputation as an improvisation musician in the context of the free improvisation group AMM and other collaborations. He is the author of Cornelius Cardew. A life unfinished, with whom he closely worked since the 1960s. Recordings include MIMEO. The Hands of Caravaggio (Erstwhile – 2002), Christian Wolff: Early Piano Music 1951-1961 (Matchless – 2002), John Tilbury Plays Samuel Beckett (Matchless – 2005), and Music for Piano and Strings by Morton Feldman (volume 1, with the Smith Quartet), a DVD series released by Matchless (2009).

[DANCE THEORY CRITICISM]
Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden
May 10, 2013 – May 11, 2013

As Joseph Vogl suggested in his essay “Über das Zaudern” (2007), the moment of hesitation is by no means a mere gesture of failure or indecisiveness, but it does “raise the potential of the act, it generates a zone of uncertainty between ‚yes‘ and ’no‘ (…), it opens up an in-between time”. By recognizing the abundance of possibilities lying ahead, the hesitating subject is rendered irresolute, while simultaneously remaining an agent of these possibilities. It is during this moment, or rather, this “act” of hesitating, where a potential that is at once disruptive and subversive is being revealed.

The two-day forum THE HESITATING BODY invited philosophers, cultural scholars, dancers and choreographers to reassess incidents of interrupted movement, standstill and other forms of inhibitions. On the basis of their “logics of motions”, the forum was keen to bring the physicality of the body back into the play. What does such a hesitating body look like, what other radical forms of “doing nothing” can be associated with it, (how) can it be performed?

With: [DANCE / PERFORMANCE] Jassem Hindi, Mala Kline, Jeremy Wade [THEORY] Kathrin Busch, Fabian Goppelsröder, Günter Heeg, Bojana Kunst, Patrick Primavesi, Eike Wittrock [ART / CRITICISM] David Assmann, Lana Cmajcanin, André Siegers, Rok Vevar 

Photos above: Oliver Killig. Photos slide show: Oliver Killig, Sonja Lau, Matija Lukic, Angelika Welebil

Zusammenhang Gesamtkunstwerk
November 20, 2015, 8pm

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Grabbeplatz 4
40213 Düsseldorf

Curated by Sonja Lau

 

With contributions by: Sasha Auerbakh, Stephan Dillemuth, Michael Dreyer, Jürgen Harten, Clemens Krümmel, Adrianna Liedtke, Dierk Schmidt, André Siegers, Thomas Trinkl. Performed by: Heisam Abbas, Konstantin Bühler, Thiemo Schwarz, Lutz Wessel (Ensemble Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus), Eve Kolb

 

In 1983, Harald Szeemann’s outstanding exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk headed toward its second destination, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. With it, a difficult and historically charged term reappeared on stage, leading to controversies both inside and outside of the institution. Although defined as a “tendency” (“Hang”) instead of a call for realization, the re-entry of the Gesamtkunstwerk and its utopian proposal of aesthetic and political fusion also ignited the need to debate the dangerous proximity between the total work of art and the totalitarian state anew.

The 1983 TV broadcast, featuring (amongst others) Joseph Beuys, Harald Szeemann and Bazon Brock during a tour through the exhibition and attending a subsequent debate, provides the point of reference for this 2nd edition of mit / von / über / nach: Zusammenhang Gesamtkunstwerk. Working along the original positions and core arguments of the discussion, different voices sneak in. They suggest re-actualisations of the performed script, and prompt the speakers on stage to choose again, more carefully and in situ, between the past and present tense of their recitals.

 

Zusammenhang Gesamtkunstwerk was part of the collaborative event „mit / von / über / nach (with / from / through / after)“, developed together with Petra Ponte. Made possible with the kind support of Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and „Follow Up“: Kunststiftung NRW / Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen / Mondriaan Fund / ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten / Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland / Verbands-Sparkasse Wesel / Stadt Hamminkeln.

Zusammenhang Gesamtkunstwerk
November 20, 2015, 8pm

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Grabbeplatz 4
40213 Düsseldorf

Curated by Sonja Lau

 

With contributions by: Sasha Auerbakh, Stephan Dillemuth, Michael Dreyer, Jürgen Harten, Clemens Krümmel, Adrianna Liedtke, Dierk Schmidt, André Siegers, Thomas Trinkl. Performed by: Heisam Abbas, Konstantin Bühler, Thiemo Schwarz, Lutz Wessel (Ensemble Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus), Eve Kolb

 

In 1983, Harald Szeemann’s outstanding exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk headed toward its second destination, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. With it, a difficult and historically charged term reappeared on stage, leading to controversies both inside and outside of the institution. Although defined as a “tendency” (“Hang”) instead of a call for realization, the re-entry of the Gesamtkunstwerk and its utopian proposal of aesthetic and political fusion also ignited the need to debate the dangerous proximity between the total work of art and the totalitarian state anew.

The 1983 TV broadcast, featuring (amongst others) Joseph Beuys, Harald Szeemann and Bazon Brock during a tour through the exhibition and attending a subsequent debate, provides the point of reference for this 2nd edition of mit / von / über / nach: Zusammenhang Gesamtkunstwerk. Working along the original positions and core arguments of the discussion, different voices sneak in. They suggest re-actualisations of the performed script, and prompt the speakers on stage to choose again, more carefully and in situ, between the past and present tense of their recitals.

 

Zusammenhang Gesamtkunstwerk was part of the collaborative event „mit / von / über / nach (with / from / through / after)“, developed together with Petra Ponte. Made possible with the kind support of Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and „Follow Up“: Kunststiftung NRW / Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen / Mondriaan Fund / ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten / Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland / Verbands-Sparkasse Wesel / Stadt Hamminkeln.

Permanent Abstraction. Epiphanies of a Modern Form.

Curated by Su Wei, co-developed by Sonja Lau

Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, 2016/17

 

We can see in “abstract” painting the imagination of the nation and the state and also private sensibilities, but despite this “abstract” painters are marginalized and sadly often not given a historical position. But this might only be the case if we perceive “abstract” painting from a modernist aesthetic perspective. From the 1930s onwards, revolutionary ideology, and from the 1950s onwards, the aesthetic ideology of mandatory realism, constructed a narrative that dominated Chinese culture. “Abstract” art was like a “present absentee” in these two societally and government-guided ideologies; “abstract” art experienced Chinese political and cultural history along with the rest of art, but it did not seem to exercise its political power or ability to construct history, its intrinsic perceptual power and long-standing inability to openly present its aesthetic sensibility meant it failed to claim its historical position. What we perceive as “abstraction” was repressed, broken, and without historical foundation; it existed in the shadows, scattered to all corners of history, so an aesthetic imagery form became an “abstract” structure.

Based on this focus on “abstract” structures, we might boldly infer that the history of “abstract” art as a canon does not give a full account of the history of the genre. This history compels us to look back and discover a new historical conclusion and interpretive space. Permanent Abstraction refers to a historical story that has not yet disappeared. “Abstract” methods move between the political and artistic realms, which are parasites of one another and move in ways that suit one another. Due to the differences in historical experience and aesthetic ideas brought about by spatial and temporal dislocation, Chinese aesthetic traditions and modernist transplantations did not emerge as the primary threads of this exhibition. We tended to intensify the disappearance of a totality that was absolute, which blurred the temporal and spatial transformations of history and coexisted with both the past and the present. Permanent Abstraction narrates a complex “eternal” attitude to time, drawing also on its absoluteness and authoritarianism. It is the „abstract,“ this modern identification of the everlasting but ever changing, a historical space-time transformation, but at the same time, it is also a kind of self-affirmation and self-mockery. On the basis of the interpretation of the metaphors of the images, the exhibition will use two narrative threads, „continuation“ and “repetition”, to stimulate the transformation, penetration and diversification of this artistic trope, as well as the unattainable desire that the authoritative and dominant narrative cannot illustrate.

 

With: Ding Yi, Eugen Popa, Li Jin, Liu Ding, K.M. Максимов, Ni Haifeng, Pang Xunqin, Triplicate Studio (Sui Jianguo, Zhan Wang and Yu Fan), Shi Zhenyu, Tang Jixiang and Yu Guohong, Wu Dayu, Wu Yinxian, Xie Nanxing, Yan Lei, Zhang Wei, Zhuang Yan