In Watte und Nadeln – Contours of Grief

Loss and grief are inevitable and universal experiences that nevertheless each of us encounter unexpectedly sooner or later. The exhibition “Contours of Grief” explores this tension and examines the different emotional states of mourning through various artistic media. We don’t know how we grieve until we grieve, notices Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Grief is a nonlinear process in which ambivalent emotional states collide. We feel detached and cut off from the world, with pressure on our chest and emptiness in our heart. At the same time, painful memories keep catching up with us, piercing through the indifferent protective layer like hot needles. Anger is followed by despair, loneliness by exhaustion, guilt by resignation. Even though each loss is unique, through sharing our pain we develop understanding for each other and can heal together.The time we need to grieve is the transitional period before we adapt to our new reality. In doing so, we can learn to understand grief not as an end, but as a process of transformation. Following this example, the exhibition aims to create a space for the ambivalences of grief. Curated by Dorothee Bienert, Yolanda Kaddu-Mulindwa, Nina Marlene Kraus & Beatris Wakaresko

Opening March 3, 6pm, exhibition from March 4 to May 18, 2023

Galerie im Körnerpark
Schierker Str. 8
D-12951 Berlin

#EMPOWERMENT. PLANETARY FEMINISMS.

The exhibition offers a geographically comprehensive overview of progressive artistic positions that stand for feminist concerns, demands and visions of the 21st century. In a global arc, the exhibition will present positions of feminist-oriented art under gender-critical and intersectional questions. Questions about postcolonial, anti-racist, ecological and planetary perspectives as well as the relationship between feminism and digital development gain central importance. These generate insights into current conflicts, but also formulate visions for the future. Curated by Regine Epp, Andres Beitin and Uta Ruhkamp.

Opening: September 9, 2022, 7 pm.

Wolfsburg Art Museum
Hollerplatz 1
D-38440 Wolfsburg

HEALING POWER

Healing Power, the spiritual search for balance. The exhibition Healing Power gives an insight into different forms of (spiritual) healing and shows the search for balance between body, soul and spirit. Six ritual specialists are presented. They are active in the fields of winti, vodun, shamanism, santo daime, mestizo and witchcraft. Contemporary art also occupies an important place. In fact, many well-known and lesser-known artists have been inspired by the theme of healing power.

Opening: october 14, 2022, 4pm.

Africa Museum
Postweg 6
6571 CS Berg en Dal

Project presentation: »Maison Gbébé, Togo«

This year’s festival focuses in particular on the artistic works and urban interventions of the 3 Dekoloniale Berlin Residents 2022, as well as biographies of significance to colonial migrants and places associated with them, which we will visit as part of a full-day, decolonial city walk on Saturday, September 3rd. On Friday, September 2nd, we will come together at the Mariannenplatz for the »Dekoloniale Africa Conference« with our guests from the former German colonies in Africa .

Part of the festival will be a project presentation of »Maison Gbébé, Togo«.
With the project partners »L’Union des Cultes Traditions du Togo«, University of the Arts, (UDK) Berlin, »L’Africaine d’Architecture«, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, architect and anthropologist, Mathilde ter Heijne, visual artist, professor and moderator, Anani Dodji Sanouvi, performance artist and others.
02.09.2022 | 17:00 -19:00

Dekoloniale Festival 2022
Sep 1, 2022 – Sep 4, 2022
Mariannenplatz, Luisenstadt, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg,
Berlin, 10997, Deutschland

Sometimes Time

Short film festival about loss, grief, and death.
Organized by the Mourning School, a curatorial project on grief, death, loss, and mourning,
that is active in Stockholm and beyond.
17-19 June 2022

School in Common
Johannesfredsvägen 26, Lgh 1
168 68, Bromma
Sweden

https://mourningschool.com/
https://www.instagram.com/mourning_school/

Abundant Futures: Works from the TBA21

Abundant Futures is a daring attempt to imagine worldmaking and ecological futures from the condition of abundance and fullness. The exhibition places a wealth of artistic visions into conversation, gesturing at the multiplicity of worlds humans and nonhumans cohabit from the principles of life itself: proliferation, inventiveness, beauty, and relationality. It creates spaces for a social, ecological, and artistic reserve capable of altering human interaction with the planet and allowing new forms of conviviality to emerge. Shaping abundant futures means supporting already existing worlding practices and learning from them. It means reorganizing work fairly, redistributing what is available across vast differences, giving up what is possible to promote more life, and decreasing our productivity and wastefulness for the benefit of the commons. In these ecologically desperate days, embracing the multiple ways of being in the world means not only experiencing but also enacting abundance.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Opening festivities on April, 1 and 2, 2022
Córdoba, Spain

Healing Power

Tropenmuseum Amsterdam
Stichting Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen
Tropenmuseum
Linnaeusstraat 2
1092 CK Amsterdam
Juli 2021 – 6 Juni 2022

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DREAMS OF FREEDOM. ROMANCE IN RUSSIA AND GERMANY

The installation Woman to Go is shown at the Tretyakov Gallery. An exchange of the Dresden State Art Collections with Russia’s largest museum of national art.
State Tretyakov Gallery
Lavrushinsky lane 12, Moskau

Opening April 22, 2021

The Videoart at Midnight Artists’ Cookbook

The Videoart at Midnight Artists’ Cookbook – Book Launch                                                               
Sunday, September 20, 2020, 4 – 6 pm 
Berlinische Galerie
Alte Jakobstraße 124-128
10969 Berlin

Transitions

The exhibition Transitions is part of the series Ortsgespräche, an initiative of the Donation Hoffmann Collection in cooperation with the Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Dresden.

26-27.09.2020
Offspace #Kaisitz
Kaisitz 3, 01665 Käbschütztal
www.offspace-kaisitz.de

Schule als Kunstform. Schule als down-to-earth der Kunst

A panel discussion organized by Avtonomi Akadimia about learning and teaching as an art form – with participants who themselves practice teaching as an art form, initiate schools, and take a collaborative and learning position as artists. Joulia Strauss in conversation with Brandon LaBelle, Marina Naprushkina, Mathilde ter Heijne, September 4, 2020, at 7 pm.

This panel discussion is part of:
Down to Earth, Climate, art, discourse unplugged
Where can we land? Taking Bruno Latour’s eponymous essay on climate change as a starting point, the multi-disciplinary project “Down to Earth” examines a system, in which our own actions have continually meshed with those of many other agencies: “the Earth with its thousand folds”. What can we observe and what happens, if we apply the proposals in Latour’s book to exhibition practice: by questioning and renewing the standard practices of our operating systems, by disclosing our emissions, consumption levels and by keeping them as low as possible? The four-week unplugged program “Down to Earth” at the Gropius Bau will bring together artists and experts in sustainability, and present visual art, live work, talks, workshops and spontaneous interventions on other forms of being—in the Latourian sense—worldly and grounded. Without electricity, loudspeakers, videos, screens, air travel or spotlights, but with daylight, heat, recycled materials, unplugged music, dance, exhibits on the themes of the ocean, Gaia, puddles, the living earth, a sawn-up Porsche and modern rituals, in the spirit of Latour, Margulis, Lovelock and the Shipibo. August 13–September 13, 2020

Martin Gropius Bau
Niederkirchnerstraße 7
10963 Berlin
Germany
www.berlinerfestspiele.de

Affected Words; Singing Signs

Language defines what is human. Our specific system of symbolic communication makes it possible to name the world, to exchange concepts, ideas and feelings as well as to provide, obscure or encode information. In the digital era, new technological tools have brought about a profound change in the way information, thoughts and emotions modulate communication and affect the way we think and comprehend reality. How has this emotion-oriented form of language created a fabricated reality and downgraded the importance of facts as the foundation of social and political debate in the construction of opinion and truth? Affected Words takes a critical look at how digital technology is being used to reproduce and disseminate power structures and calls for its emancipation, for critical resistance and self-determination on the part of individuals and the community. Curated and presented by María Morata.

The Voice as Performance, Act and Body, Valie Export, 2007, 11 min; Lament, Song for Transitions, Mathilde ter Heijne, 2014, 7 min ; Global Windshield, The Musical, Momu & No Es, 2018, 19 min; We Are the World, as performed by the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions Choirs, Samson Young, 2017, 5 min; Le jour a vaincu la nuit, Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2013, 28 min.

Xcèntric el cinema del CCCB, Barcelona
5 March 2020, 19.30

Time Present; Photography from the Deutsche Bank Collection

It is a journey through time in several respects. Encompassing over 60 works, Time Present at the PalaisPopulaire unfolds a panorama of contemporary photographic art. The exhibition presents a broad spectrum of international photography collected by Deutsche Bank over the course of four decades. Alongside well-known names such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gerhard Richter, and Mathilde ter Heijne, new acquisitions for the collection by Gauri Gill and Viviane Sassen will be on view.

PalaisPopulaire
Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin
20.6.2020 – 8.2.2021

Women Make History; Solidarity as a Means of Action

Much has been written on the subject of feminist solidarity, as a formative value that provides the political subject with a secure base from which to promote social struggles in various arenas. The concept of “solidarity,” in its various meanings, has served in recent years as a framework for discussions in the feminist community. The call for solidarity is based upon the demand to dismantle supposedly competition in relations between women. The need for change is based on the understanding that such competition expresses an essentially patriarchal belief, according to which power and control of resources can only be achieved by joining a powerful figure, that is, a man. Fundamental to this belief is the masculine identification.

Renowned feminist thinker Adrienne Rich defines competition between women as “internalizing the values of the colonizer.” Its meaning is that women place themselves beneath men, ignoring the qualities that they may themselves bring to the socio-political situation. The result is the acceptance of competitiveness, or the “polygamous condition,” as natural and unavoidable. The “polygamous condition” weakens women’s solidarity by means of a “divide and conquer” strategy. In the words of feminist activist and theoretician Bell Hooks: “We are taught that women are ‘natural’ enemies, that solidarity will never exist between us because we cannot, should not, and do not bond with one another […] We must unlearn [these lessons] if we are to build a sustained feminist movement. We must learn the true meaning and value of Sisterhood.”

Haifa Museum of Art
26 Shabbetai Levi Street
Haifa, 3304331, Israel
22.12.19 – 20.06.20
Opening: Saturday, 21.12.19, 20:00
Curator: Svetlana Reingold

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How beautiful you are!

In various forms of artistic expression, the exhibition examines the concept of beauty in the art world
and directs its focus towards art and artists in equal measure.
How beautiful you are! does not treat beauty as an evaluative category but instead takes the term as the point of departure for experiments,
commenting upon it from various perspectives: architectural designs by AAS Gonzalez Haase, sportswear by Sandra Dresp and a promotional by Sorgen International. Included in the painterly positions are works by Martin Eder, Norbert Bisky, Jens Heller and Frank Nitsche, among others.
Multiple-media works by Nik Nowak and Jonny Star encounter body-related, performative works by Yvon Chabrovski and Kirstin Burckhardt as well as sculptural works by Vera Kox and Albert Weis.

In accordance with the tradition of the legendary Bar Kosmetiksalon Babette, How beautiful you are! envisions itself as a network exhibition in which a multiplicity of artistic positions gives rise to the characteristic energetic charge. The exhibition is being curated by Maik Schierloh

Kosmetiksalon Babette zu Gast
KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art
Maschinenhaus M0
23. Februar – 8. März 2020

Atopia. Migration, Heritage, and Placelessnes

Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Curated by Daniela Zyman
FIESP–Centro Cultural in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Opening: February 28, 2020.

Trouble Diaries: Failure is the mother of success

The series of “Trouble Diaries” brings into account another perspective in the way in which artists employ strategies of performance while also appropriating traditional genres, to reveal how the female body becomes a political subject when exposed as a critical weapon. The core concept for these artists, whose work centers on the body, can be traced to Judith Butler who declared that gender is a cultural construct. Your body does not belong to oneself, but is subject to public scrutiny, and your personal diary becomes part of a public agenda