1. Ich habe Knast

by Farkhondeh Shahroudi

An exhibition of social art actions at Spittelmarkt

Location: Leipziger Straße / Spittelmarkt Berlin 

Opening: September 10, 2022, with performance “sang zani”

Exhibition duration: September 11 → 18, 2022

Activations: 

Book reading for children; María Berríos reads In the Jungle There Is Much to Do (ES/DE), September 14, 2022, 11am

Gülüzar, Soup Kitchen for the Homeless and Those Who Are Hungry, September 16, 2022, 11am → 16 pm & September 17, 2022, 11am →16 pm

Gülüzar, Soup Kitchen for the Homeless and Those Who Are Hungry

Gülüzar is for the nomads who wish to be sedentary. Gülüzar is for those who do not have a roof over their head but who would like to have a mobile roof terrace in their head. Gülüzar is for those who desire flowers. Gülüzar is for those who travel from pasture to pasture and all those who have flowers to smell. For those who want to go to paradise, for the outsiders. →Farkhondeh Shahroudi

Farkhondeh Shahroudi’s works weave relationships between writings and images, bodies and narratives. Inspired by poetry, memories of her homeland Iran and of her everyday life in Germany, the artist’s works tell of language and speechlessness and evoke the unspoken. Her work addresses translocal movements of people who are at the mercy of others, uprooted or outsourced, moving between places and worlds as if in a play. Many figures in Shahroudi’s work are inspired by her early memories of traditional Iranian theater, “Ta’ziyeh,” in which actors, spectators and animals blur into one on the street. Images, bodies and narratives are transformed by the artist’s handwriting, sewing and weaving, using diverse materials to create a synthetic universe that oscillates between social and asocial, political and intimate, inside and outside and language and illegibility.

In the midst of Berlin’s urban space at Spittelmarkt, Shahroudi presents her new installation “Gülüzar” (2022). Gülüzar (Persian and Turkish for flower meadow) is a mobile caravan, covered with different carpet fragments, whose motifs refer to Persian paradise gardens. Over the course of the exhibition, the artist will operate this mobile garden as a heterotopian space, as a soup kitchen for the hungry and those in need. Next to the installation she presents her “Anti-Flag” (2022) as a warning against ideology, belonging and territorial demarcation.

For the exhibition site—Spittelmarkt—she has selected the phrase “Ich habe Knast,” a colloquial expression once common in East Germany meaning “I’m hungry.” This expression, which actually has nothing to do with “jail” (Knast in German), alludes to the scarcity of food in prison. By using this East German expression, the artist transforms her personal story—as a political asylum seeker in the 90s in Germany—and opens a space for the stories of other oppressed people. This is a collective memory space, which is perceived performatively and poetically through the interaction with Gülüzar.

It refers to the history of the Spittelmarkt as a quarter for wayfarers and craftsmen. The former “Siechenhaus,” originally established for those in need, later became the “Gertraudenhospital.” In the GDR era, Spittelmarkt was the urban center of East Berlin; since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has developed into a transportation hub and a neighborhood where different social milieus co-exist.

The exhibition opens with her performance, “sang zani” (Iranian for knocking stones) (2022), in which the audience and neighborhood residents are invited to knock two stones against each other to create rhythms. “sang zani” is a performative adaptation of the Shiite mourning ceremony “daste gardani” and the tradition of Iranian theater “ta’ziyeh,” in which people gathered to lament injustices.

As part of her social art actions, Shahroudi also invites young audiences to read the children’s book “En la selva hay mucho por hacer” (In the Jungle There Is Much to Do), written by Mauricio Gatti, who was imprisoned in 1971 for being a member of an anarchist resistance movement in Uruguay. The book tells of animals captured by a hunter and imprisoned in the city zoo, where they begin to plan their escape. It is an anarchist fable and a coloring book suitable for all ages. María Berríos, writer, curator and co-editor of the book, will conduct a public reading in both Spanish and German together with Shahroudi.

2. Rituals of Wasted Technology

by Marco Barotti

Location: Kuppelhalle, Silent Green
Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
Opening: January 11, 2023, at 6pm
Exhibition duration: January 12→15, 2023, from 12pm→7pm
Panel discussion: January 14, 2023, at 4pm
Speakers: aLifveForms (cared for by JP Raether), Dr. Asia J. Biega, Prof. Dr. Dorothea von. Hantelmann

In market-driven cycles of planned obsolescence, technological communication products are regularly replaced by better, faster and smarter successors. Televisions, satellite dishes, PCs, smartphones and antennas are produced and consumed before ending up in landfill mountains of abandoned tech waste. Marco Barotti disrupts this cycle by giving former satellite dishes and recycled Wi-Fi sector antennas a novel tech life. He creates post-apocalyptic landscapes in which the animal world exists as an electronic replica, as described by Philip K. Dick in his 1969 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In his installations, audio technology and e-waste form kinetic sculptures triggered by data inputs, which are analyzed and translated into sound. His works creates a “tech ecosystem” that plays with technology’s similarities to animals and plants. In minimalist bodies, data transcends the boundaries of visibility and manifests itself in alien yet somehow familiar kinetic beings.

In the domed hall of Silent Green, Marco Barotti presents an expansive sound installation consisting of APES & SWANS. Both species symbiotically relate to each other: APES are sound sculptures made of recycled Wi-Fi sector antennas. They are driven by algorithms showing dynamic counters of data consumption and cyber-attacks: from Facebook likes, Google searches, tinder swipes, internet energy consumed, and emails sent, to the adverse cyber events happening in real-time. By encoding these algorithms, his tower-mounted APES gain the ability to generate specific behaviour patterns, quasi-rituals. Barotti’s SWANs, on the other hand, “float” on an artificial pool in the domed hall. They are made of used satellite dishes. Two sound sources – a bass frequency and human breath- streaming through brass instruments give them their voice and set them in motion.

Driven by interdisciplinary research on data science, surveillance capitalism, cyber security, connectivity, human and non-human behaviour, and cryptology in cooperation with the scientists of CASA – Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Marco Barotti’s work questions whether we, as a society, are ready to act as intelligently as the machines we created. Can the new, digital evolution guide us toward a respectful and sustainable cohabitation with our fellow humans, the planet, and other species?

The exhibition “Rituals of Wasted Technology” will feature lectures by aLifveForms (cared for by JP Raether), Asia Biega, and Dorothea von Hantelmann, followed by roundtable discussions with artist Marco Barotti and exhibition curators Pauline Doutreluingne and Keumhwa Kim. They will ask how technologies affect the rituals of our everyday lives and how they influence artistic exhibition practices. For Byung Chul Han, “rituals are symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” Rituals strengthen community by facilitating collective experiences of closure, transition, celebration, and grief. On a neurological level, the repetition of ritual acts alters neurological processing, increasing human attention span and long-term memory. Our current epoch is marked by a decline in ritual behavior, as we have always known it. How can new collective rituals be created to better live in our contemporary, digital context?

3. The Unloved Ones

by Dan Lie

Location: Zwingli Church, Rudolfstraße 14, 10245 Berlin

Opening: May 13, 2023, at 6pm

Exhibition duration: May 13→ June 10, 2023

Tuesdays→Saturdays, from 12pm→7pm (except Thursdays)

Guided Tour with Daniel Lie, followed by Finissage: June 10, 2023, 5pm

Dan Lies work is inspired by the span of a lifetime and the duration and states of the elements—from the oldest and most affective memories, involving family and personal stories, to memories that objects transport across great distance and time.

In the interdisciplinary exchange between ecology, archaeology and ancestor worship, their work questions Western science and religion and the binary thought structures imposed by them. More recently, forms of mourning and commemoration have been added, as well as processes of collective healing.

With the expansive installation The Unloved Ones, Lie responds to the architecture and history of the Zwingli Church in Berlin, Friedrichshain, as part of the exhibition series Speaking to Ancestors. Founded in 1908, the church has undergone many transformations since the division and reunification of Berlin, from usage of temporary archives to youth clubs. Today, it functions as a social space where culture, neighbourhood and care is practiced, as well as a church where religious services and church festivities take place. These multifaceted connotations become reference points for the artistic reflection on political power structures and beliefs that can be found in sacred as well as profane spaces.

The Unloved Ones consists of sculptural units of turmeric-dyed fabrics recycled from Lie’s previous work, Grieving Secret Society (2022, 58th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art). This kind of recycling is an ongoing interaction in which Lie connects spaces and forms of mourning and remembering. Inspired by the Bronze Age offering well Lie encountered while researching indigenous rituals in Berlin, they explored healing and intoxicating pre-Christian rituals. The sacrificial well, which was discovered by archaeologists in 1958 in Berlin-Lichterfelde, is supposed to prove with its contents, traces of cultivated and wild plants on healing, intoxicating effect of the Bronze Age cultic events and its special connection to the transcendental.

Lie’s textile works float above the pews on a centered level. The knotted textile sculptures, sewn in various shapes, some filled with earth and medicinal herbs, contrast the rigidity of the altar and the patriarchal figures of the neo-Gothic church with their fluid, plural forms. The Unloved Ones is a choreography of abstract groups of figures far from pictorial representations, from forgotten myths and marginalized religions that were forgotten, repressed, and politically mystified (or misused) with the advent of Christianity.

By making visible materials that are always in transformation, conditioned by their performative properties – time, transience, and presence – Lie’s works underscore the intimate yet expansive coexistence of beings, and address our ongoing participation in the processes of living, dying, and decaying. The energy of these transformations unfolds through the scent of herbs, the smell of earth, and the changing natural color of turmeric when exposed to light. In this interplay, visitors and users of the Zwingli Church are invited to become part of the installation in which different entities and “The Unloved Ones” co-exist.

The Zwingli Church, built in 1908, is a listed building in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin. The church’s pictorial program refers to the Reformation: the chancel is surrounded by marble statues of the two patrons of the Reformation: the Swedish king, Gustav Adolf and the Elector Joachim II, who introduced the Reformation in Brandenburg; the six-meter-high altarpiece shows Christ striding on the sea. The church survived the Second World War almost unscathed and much of it is still in its original condition. After the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, the church was no longer used for church services. Between 1978 and 1993, the building served as an archive for the Berlin State Library. From 1993 to 1995, the church was renovated and used again by the Protestant community. Today the church belongs to the Protestant parish Boxhagener-Stralau of the church district Berlin Stadtmitte, it is used by the association KulturRaum Zwingli-Kirche for exhibitions and cultural events. They not only offer a cultural program but the church is also used as a place to host soup kitchen events for homeless people and regular meetings for the AA community. On Sundays, the church provides a platform for the African church community.

4. The Moment Before

by Shira Wachsmann

Location: transmediale studio

Urnenfriedhof Gerichstraße 35, 13347 Berlin

Opening: June 21, 2023

Exhibition duration: June 21 → July 9, 2023

Extended program: June 27, 2023, 7pm

Lecture by Prof. Johnny Golding followed by an Artist Talk by Shira Wachsmann

The exhibition is complimented by an augmented reality installation that is activated by visitors in the outdoor space of the Silent Green. A smile without a body keeps repeating eerily as a pattern in the landscape. Even though this digital fragment is foremost invisible, it is always present. The installation only fully reveals itself when it is seen by several viewers from multiple angles. Wachsmann’s works ask if there is a way outside of the explosion, or if  we can reshape the connection and relation in the “moments before the explosion” that take shape in correspondences. World War II, the destruction, the blood, the myth, the future climate catastrophe, Germany, Israel/Palestine. Trauma manifests itself as landscape in The Moment Before. In the real, in the virtual as well as in the interconnected collective space and like a Möbius strip, it has neither beginning nor end. 

In her work, Wachsmann explores trauma and its influence on the creation of knowledge production and reality. She presents trauma as a multi-temporal, non-linear network involving multiple human and non-human actors and shows how memories, fears, narratives, identity, and politics shape scars that appear in bodies and in languages as emerging landscapes. At the center of the exhibition is a video trilogy (2020-23) in which Wachsmann engages with three actors that have been and are being used to actively shape and reshape the Israeli-Palestinian as well as German narratives and history: a cactus (Sabra), a tank (SabraM60T), and a “Trümmerfrauen” monument.

A Dream (2020) presents a dialogue between a cactus and the artist in the moment before an explosion. As part of her research on plants intelligence and memory, the artist focuses on the Palestinian sabra (cactus) and its “incarnations” in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. The adoption of the Sabra by the Israeli as a name for Israeli-born Jews and its transformation in 2005 into a tank, namely the “Sabra M60T”. In the second film TankWoman (2021), Wachsmann makes visible a relationship between her and a tank. The materiality of the tank, the artist herself, and the memory of the body, the wind, the desert, and the sand that merge into multi-layered correspondences, revealing how memories develop in multiple perspectives. In her most recent film, The Moment Before (2023), Wachsmann takes up the iconography of the “Trümmerfrau” (women who, in the aftermath of World War II helped reconstruct the bombed cities of Germany and Austria). Using the sculpture made by Katharina Szelinski-Singer in Berlin’s Park Hasenheide, the memorial becomes a symbol of the myth of post-war reconstruction and a placeholder for a kind of personal memory and collective repression at the same time. In correspondence with the memorial, the artist’s disembodied mouth appears like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. Floating in the landscape, trying to speak and “possess” the sculpture of the “Trümmerfrau”.

The exhibition is complimented by an augmented reality installation that is activated by visitors in the outdoor space of the Silent Green. A smile without a body keeps repeating eerily as a pattern in the landscape. Even though this digital fragment is foremost invisible, it is always present. The installation only fully reveals itself when it is seen by several viewers from multiple angles. Wachsmann’s works ask if there is a way outside of the explosion, or if  we can reshape the connection and relation in the “moments before the explosion” that take shape in correspondences. World War II, the destruction, the blood, the myth, the future climate catastrophe, Germany, Israel/Palestine. Trauma manifests itself as landscape in The Moment Before. In the real, in the virtual as well as in the interconnected collective space and like a Möbius strip, it has neither beginning nor end.

5. Club Telesterion

by Viron Erol Vert

Location: Großer Wasserspeicher, Belforter Straße, 10405 Berlin

Opening: November 11, 2023, with live set by Headless Horseman  

Exhibition duration: November 11 → 20, 2023 

In his work, the German-Turkish-Greek artist Viron Erol Vert (*1975) investigates religious systems and cultural identities. He addresses the reciprocal relationships between inner spiritual spaces on the one hand and spaces constructed by societies on the other. In ancient places of worship, he finds references to mankinds early longings for transcendence and a supersensory connection to gods and ancestors, which retains its relevance today.

Vert transforms the Grosser Wasserspeicher with its circling corridors and barrel vault into a performative transcendence space. The exhibition Club Telesterion is his adaptation of the ancient  cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries into contemporary club culture, in which he himself has been working for 25 years. The Telesterion was a hall in the city of Eleusis where the cult of Demeter and Persephone took place for over 2000 years. Created around 1400 BC, the Sacred Way to the Greek city attracted thousands of people from all over the ancient world to performatively indulge in the idea of rebirth. Just as Persephone descends and returns to the land of the dead every year, it enabled people to experience other planes of existence and to live again/differently/newly.

Vert sees the parallels to club culture in the temporary immersion in another world where one can let go, lose oneself and open up to multiple identities and meanings of life.

The artist expansively spans an arc of light on which pieces of clothing from the Berghain Club’s collection are hung close together. The garments he has collected over the course of a year are human shells of the bodies that wore them. On the labyrinthine paths there, along the first rotunda of the former water reservoir, the visitors* encounter nine media installations in opened suitcases, showing celebrating groups of people of various religious, ethnic and cultural affiliations. Together with images of symbols and landscape fragments, they merge into a whole.

The videos were created in collaboration with Ali M. Demirel, a Berlin-based Turkish artist whose work is rooted in architecture, science and nature. The accompanying sound installation in the space was composed in collaboration with Berlin-based producer Headless Horseman. He combines his otherwise experimental and intense techno sets with sound spheres that invite you to lose yourself in the labyrinthine spaces. A live performance will take place on the opening evening. 

Grosser Wasserspeicher

Viron Erol Vert’s installation communicates with the water reservoir, which has its own sometimes dramatic history and becomes the architectural form, support and outer body of the installation. Berlin’s first public waterworks was built between 1852 and 1856. After 1914, the plant became uneconomical for the rapidly growing city and was shut down. In the spring of 1933, after the Nazis came to power, the basement rooms of the waterworks were used by the SA as a savage concentration camp, where people were interned and murdered without trial. From June 1933, the camp was transformed into the SA-Heim Wasserturm. In the autumn of 1934, the SA-Heim was disbanded and work began on transforming the site into a public park. Since then, the underground water reservoirs in Prenzlauer Berg have been empty and no longer used. In 1994, the Kulturamt Pankow and the Förderband Kulturinitiative e.V. joined forces to organise cultural events in the underground reservoirs. The spatial quality of the large water reservoir lies in the circular juxtaposition of rings with idiosyncratic acoustics.

6. View From Above

by Mariechen Danz

Location: Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Belforter Straße, 10405 Berlin

Opening: November 11,  2023  

Exhibition duration: November 12 → 20, 2023

The Irish-German artist Mariechen Danz (*1980) places the human body at the center of her practice. In sculptures, drawings, costumes and installations – often in collaboration with other artists or musicians – she explores the history(s) of media as data carriers, and questions the communicative capacity of language, common practices of mediating knowledge, hierarchies of signs and the primacy of Western notions of reason. Danz additionally activates her installations with staged vocal performances. In View From Above (a song from her sound album Clouded in Veins) at the Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Danz directs the gaze from the earth to the sky and vice versa. In her ongoing series of metal glyph structures (in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co.), punched-out, coded and printed aluminium plates are installed in various arrangements to convey knowledge and information across the boundaries of time and space. Patterns of vents meet punctuation marks and icons from digital communication; stylised planispheres meet anatomical representations from different cultures and eras. Like modular carriers of knowledge, they become a new vocabulary and serve in the exhibition as shadow-casting patterns and reflective media for light that create their own star maps.

The installation is surrounded by casts of human organs: brain, heart, liver, lung, kidney and intestine. Her series Fossilizing Organs consists of transparent and coloured organ models that are offset with stones and minerals. History, politics, culture and socialisation have literally left their mark on these organs. The natural „implants“ set off immanent fossilisation processes in the sculptures and connect the origin of each organ to different places in the world. In View From Above, Danz assembles a kind of three-dimensional fragmented atlas, that appears in the exhibition space like an operating theater in which subjective and objective, subaltern and historical knowledge is actively treated.

Her works Modular Glyphic System and Ore Oral Orientation: modular mapping system, on view in the exhibition, were each created in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co. who develop decolonising strategies for production processes in Silicon Valley.

Kleiner Wasserspeicher

Mariechen Danz installation communicates with The Small Water Reservoir, a round brick hall with masonry pillars and round arches, with its stage-like, visible centre. The smooth cement screed as a floor and the symmetrically arranged flights of stairs are further architectural features.

Berlin’s first public waterworks was built between 1852 and 1856. After 1914, the plant became uneconomical for the rapidly growing city and was shut down. In the spring of 1933, after the Nazis came to power, the basement rooms of the waterworks were used by the SA as a savage concentration camp, where people were interned and murdered without trial. From June 1933, the camp was transformed into the SA-Heim Wasserturm. In the autumn of 1934, the SA-Heim was disbanded and work began on transforming the site into a public park. Since then, the underground water reservoirs in Prenzlauer Berg have been empty and no longer used. In 1994, the Kulturamt Pankow and the Förderband Kulturinitiative e.V. joined forces to organise cultural events in the underground reservoirs.

7. Expedition Mani – Reverberations

by Sajan Mani

Location: NOME, Potsdamer Str. 72, 10785 Berlin 

Opening: February 10, 2024
Exhibition duration: February 10 → 17, 2024

Artist Talk: February 13, 2024, 6:30pm

Expedition Mani: a performative procession by Sajan Mani, February 10, 2024, start 3pm

Meeting point at the Sanchi Gate at Schlossplatz 5, Berlin→

Potsdamer Platz→ NOME Berlin (duration about 1.5 hours)

As the final edition of the exhibition series Speaking to Ancestors, the Dravidian artist Sajan Mani presents his exhibition Expedition Mani – Reverberations at NOME Berlin.
Sajan Mani (born 1981 in Kerala, South India) is an interdisciplinary artist coming from a family of rubber tappers in a remote village in the northern part of Kerala, South India. Performing with and centering around his own “Black Dalit Body,” Mani addresses the issues faced by marginalised indigenous communities in India under the oppressive environment long upheld through Brahmanic knowledge production.
Mani has spent years searching for traces of his ancestors in Western image archives, including the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. It contains a large number of photographs taken during the colonial era in the South Indian Malabar region. These photographs are evidence of anthropological expeditions such as Emil Riebeck’s in 1882 in the service of colonialism. In these early colonial photographs, indigenous communities were observed, measured, and inventoried through the European gaze.

The exhibition Expedition Mani – Reverberations is an interim report of Mani’s artistic research. At the centre of the exhibition is his “body” as a means of resistance – an interface between the past and present. He metaphorizes his body as a socio-political projection surface, confronting his audience with pain, shame, fear, and power. Through installations, videos, and drawings activated by his performance, Mani engages in an imaginary dialogue with his ancestors. He allows the contradictions of our present to reverberate under the weight of the colonial past.

Mani’s performance Expedition Mani (2024) is inspired by the ritual Gulikan Theyyam, a popular ritual dance in the Dravidian tradition from Kerala, where he comes from. In this ritual, human bodies of a lower-caste ceremonially transform into those of deities. Expedition Mani represents a physical and discursive challenge to the hegemonic thinking that western archives narrate. Through ritualised chants and dances, Mani invites the visitors to become a part of a performative procession from The Gate of Sanchi at Schlossplatz, Berlin to Potsdamer Platz and finally to NOME Berlin, where the exhibition will be inaugurated by his arrival. The artist is going to embody the demi-god Gulikan, a Dravidian power worshipped as one of the snake deities whose duty is to protect the Scheduled Castes and Tribes from environmental problems. In the exhibition space, Mani installed a neon sign showing a crossed C for Colonial Copyright (2024) right at the entrance. Alongside colourful drawings depicting hybrid humans and more-than-human species against the backdrop of magazines from the region Malabar reflecting their peoples own history, ritual music from Kerala, and the costume and the instrument he wore during the performance, the exhibition evolves into a resonance space echoing the resurrection of his ancestors’ own narratives.

Mani creates a “counter-gaze” on the European eye during the era of colonialism. His installation Gazing back (2024), a serigraph on natural raw rubber sheets, a medium with a deep connection with the artist’s family legacy of labor, depicts a series of enlarged eyes of his portrayed ancestors, who were then captured by Europeans as “foreign” and “different” for their inventory purposes. The silkscreened rubber sheets have been sewn together by the artist to form a collective memory confronting visitors to the exhibition. Also, the monitor included in his video installation Dream walks of a Haemodracon riebeckii (2024) is rubber-wrapped, surrounded by a pile of fresh soil and a stone. It shows the artist in traditional attire visiting the grave of Emil Riebeck (1853-1885) in Halle-Saale, Germany. Time, space, and history collide in this work, raising questions about what it means to encounter beyond ideologies, what it means to be dead or alive, who ultimately measures whom, and what colonialism has ultimately left behind in the present.