#PARKEN IST BEWEGUNG

Friday 30.04.2021

16:00: Video-Tour

17:00: SHONA STARK

17:30: SHONA STARK

Saturday 01.05.2021

13:00: XENIA KOGHILAKI

14:00: BLAUPAUSE (Collective): LISA WALDER

15:00: BLAUPAUSE (Collective): LUCIA SALOMÉ GRÄNICHER + SULTAN ÇOBAN

16:00: PARKVERBOT (Collective)

Sunday 02.05.2021

14:00: ELLI BRANDAUER + SALLY VON ROSEN

15:00: AMADEUS VOGELSANG + AZUR ŠABIĆ performed by LENNART NIELSEN

16:00: ABIE FRANKLIN + FADI ALJABOUR + MOHAMAD HALBOUNI + IREN ISMAEL

17:00: BRAD NATH

18:00: [acta]ODEM - FINJA SANDER + DANIEL M.E. SCHAAL

The basic idea revolves around the borders and habits of memory and perception, which I approach through the morphology of the continental shelf. The shelf describes the part of the continental land mass submerged under water.

Drawing on this peculiar geographic feature of seaside landscape, I take up narratives handed-down by my grandfathers, who in World War Two were stationed in the English Channel and Normandy.

Because they were placed on the wrong, namely, the German, side of battle, their stories hide more than they reveal. While they buried their memories under sediments of silence, so to speak, they both were passionate about the songs they sang during the war years – which I harness to disclose parts of their otherwise unspoken past.

(Text: Om Bori)

Lynn Kelders was born in Luxembourg City in 1997 and grew up in the small Luxembourg town of Bettendorf. In rather quiet surroundings, she first encountered art as a profession in the last years of her school education. Drawing and observing as a child, she was taught pictorial design skills as well as basics in illustration design, typesetting and technical drawing on her way to (among other things) her A-levels in art.

It quickly became clear through the intensive specialisation during her school years that art should not remain just a hobby. Since the end of 2017, the young artist now lives and works in Berlin. The contrast between the bustling cosmopolitan city and the sleepy, conservative Luxembourg offers a lot of space for ideas and thoughts.

Lynn's art represents her view of the world: Observations, emotions, characters. People are often depicted - but the focus is not on perfection and realism, the depiction leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Strange poses, macabre themes that meet bright colours and supposedly harmless faces - this combination creates a tension that does not let go of the viewer. A bit of unease is supposed to remain, and it does. Nevertheless, this uneasiness does not necessarily have a negative connotation; it is more reminiscent of reflection. About oneself, about the perception of the self and the environment. Carried by contrasts and bright colours, the works develop a strong character of their own.

[Trigger Warning: Depression]

Lynn has been living with depression for several years. The illness determines her everyday life and has a great influence on her art. Her works serve as a projection screen for her own intrusive thoughts and help to displace the constant noise that accompanies her every day. At the beginning of the Corona pandemic, her illness continued to worsen. The world around her seemed to emulate her depression and she slipped into a phase of self-isolation. During this time she became more concerned with how the world around her perceived her illness and how she showed her condition to the outside world. This way of dealing with her depression is the main theme of her works.

(Text: Julia Szymik)

Xenia Koghilaki's Performance will be streamed as a Premiere via Youtube on 01.05. 

Headbanging is a practice that is most commonly associated with music cultures like punk, heavy metal, hardcore and more. As a gesture it is also part of many traditions throughout history. In that sense, headbanging is a point of recognition. It is a memory, personal and cultural.And thus, it constitutes an endless chain of reciprocity and exchange of time, affects, sweat, breathings, historical, cultural and political particles between bodies, which is never ever static. Instead, it is always in a turbulent circular moving. “Go ‘head baby!” puts up in negotiation any perception of stability concerning approaches of collective imagination that such a dance practice can resonate, especially in times where shared spaces of dancing in big groups are considered problematic, dangerous or even illegal.

(Text: Xenia Koghilaki)

Lukas Luzius Leichtle's works deal with the role of the individual in painting and our ever-changing society. With processes of digital distortion and techniques of classical oil painting, he creates works that clearly exist as analogue objects and yet are anchored in discourses around digitalisation. Skin and transparency as motifs and as the material reality of the paintings. Control in the painterly process as a reflection of the role of the artist and our social organisation.

The works will be shown in a solo exhibition in London at the time of the festival. Lukas Luzius Leichtle has installed them in advance in the KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Strasse, so that the absence of the objects is played with for the festival. This will result in a new fresco work created solely for the space and completed in one day, which will disappear again after the festival.

(Text: Jakob Urban)

As a creator, describing your own work in a few sentences is not easy - if it were, it would probably call my work into question. I see the images I create as a documentation of a search. At best, each one describes a small key moment towards a new insight. It would be desirable if at some point this would lead to a completed painting, but at the same time it would destroy what makes painting so appealing to me. I move in the realm of abstraction. The eye recognises figures, buildings, landscapes - but they are only grids for the application of paint, surfaces, lines and structures of a composition. Spatiality plays only a subordinate role in these works. Whether a surface is a figure or a background is ultimately decided only by our visual experience.

The desire for new impressions shapes the general memory of the last year. Subconsciously, I too have certainly given this urge a place in some works. Books, films etc. were involuntarily the inspiration for one or the other of my pictorial inventions, the basic framework of which is often an emotion evoked by the stories.

Living and working in Berlin as a "young" artist presents certain challenges. Being seen is the be-all and end-all, but exerts the pressure of being constantly present, even though there may be nothing to present at certain stages. The lockdown period has taken some of that pressure off, which I would cautiously describe as a blessing in disguise.

With the joint exhibition "Almost There", which I organised together with Isabella Bram last December in the project space 145, we tried to create a contact point for people interested in art, despite restrictions and the general restraint in terms of presence events. The title evokes parallels to the prevailing hope that the whole thing will soon be over - Almost There, almost done. This experience has shown that especially within a crisis situation, the need for stimulation is great. Discussions at various levels made it clear that art can also offer a form of support and orientation and is therefore indispensable for us. I hope that the exhibition Kunstraum Digital will also meet this need.

(Text: Tim Leimbach)

The work of Gabriela Lesmes López is playful, imaginative and a force to be reckoned with.

Transparent bodies hanging in the tree of a parking lot, flowing in the wind. Seemingly a work of disappearance and nothingness, yet just as the suns hits it: It is everything. Inflated with the breath of the artist, these objects come to life through their coexistence with the natural setting they inhabit for the time being.

The in situ nature of these installations overcomes boundaries of geographical location while reinforcing the physical presence of the work and the specificities of the space they exist in. Each time anew, sculptures change and reorient themselves, coexisting with their temporary homes.

In the gallery space, Gabriela Lesmes López is installing “The Backfire of Violence”, a giant slingshot, as if to represent the tensions we are all living through at this time. Coexisting with the work of other artists, this spatial offering anchors the digital festival and binds it to its physical origins.

Together the works that have been “parked” here, communicate between physicalities of light and heavy and between the materiality of air and stone.

(Text: Jakob Urban)

HYPERICUM

// St. John's wort

hyper eikona : against spirits

fallow land and dry slopes

small glands on the petals filled with essential oil

short black longitudinal lines cover the petals

they are filled with anthocyanin pigment

these oils + hyperidine are said to have a healing and pain-relieving effect

I break a dried up St. John's wort plant into two parts and drop them into the glass pot, I take the pot of boiling water and pour over the plant crumbs. I watch the swirl of leaves until it turns pink.

Now I can drink it, the demon repellent.

A painterly exploration of the search for a cure for the fears of my generation - "Have a sip, you'll feel better" - It is not sarcasm that is meant to come out when reading this prompt - naturopathy, this mumbo jumbo may be smiled down upon here and there, however, it is about a, in my view, quite literally 'natural' contemplation of nature. What is nature? Nature is the ecological environment from which humankind is peeling itself away in the Anthropocene, until at some point it will stand completely naked and helpless next to it.

To understand oneself, as a human being, as a component of nature is, as I experience it, a need of many.

Even without going into details, I think I can say that just as many feel disillusioned and weary in the wake of the crises of our earth and humanity, which seem to be replaced more often by the next dilemma than by a high.

The global pandemic is the salt that is now trickling onto this open wound.

Destructive?

Perhaps, but definitely a reality that will establish itself in contemporary art.

Questions about the future move us. They are about morality and responsibility.

Questions I don't want to answer in my work.

It is a way out of the world dilemma, the need for relaxation in this hectic time in a tense big city, which I would like to show and a hidden offer to try it and watch how the tea turns pink.

(Text: Helena Ommert)

The works are analogue photographs as individual works, some of which were further interwoven with video works for further abstraction and introduction to the theme. It is about nature and structures. Often structures are already naturally abstracted, depending on the point of view. By playing with the overlays, I try to defamiliarise them further and create a certain peculiarity and ambiguity.

I like to combine industrial with natural structures and supposed opposites of analogue and digital visualisation and thus intuitively find new forms.

Initially, I bound my photographs for this process in booklets, which I cut up further. I always liked the haptic aspect of this, as well as the fact that when I looked at the works, a certain use emerged that made the works seem more alive to me. Unfortunately, that is not possible at the moment. The current pandemic situation now demands more adaptation, so I came more and more to video last year. In the end, the medium allows for even more superimpositions than is possible in the purely analogue format. The dichotomy can be cancelled out to a certain extent when transferred to the same medium and makes it possible to make the analogy of my photographs digitally accessible.

For the industrial structures, I chose sections of [analogue] photographs of the Kunstraum Potsdamer Strasse to insert into the videos. The architecture of the Kunstraum is almost as stubborn as its function. The outer architecture may be almost antithetical to the inner function of the Kunstraum. Is it a parking garage? A gallery? I liked looking for and documenting the little peculiarities and waywardnesses. It shows the life that is in this space, as opposed to the expectation of this pandemic situation. Of course, the situation raises more difficulties, for example by making exchange and [analogue] exhibition possibilities more difficult and thus demanding more adaptations and creativity than before, but it also shows that art does not stand still.

(Text: Felicitas Schwägerl)

Sound. Sculpture. Sound-Sculpture. Installation. Video...

Shona Stark’s work is not necessarily tangible in nature and yet takes up every bit of space between itself and the viewer.

From the stern minimalism of her presentation formats to the heartwrenching emotional subtext that lies beneath, this complex body of work operates and oscillates at the intersections of the conceptual and the sensual.

Four new works will be shown in the context of the festival, coming together in one space for the first time. A video installation dealing with personal histories of love and marriage, an in situ work replicating the Instagram account of the artist’s father, installed on the brutalist ceiling of the parking garage and a sound piece exploring the multitude of open / closed emotional states within a romantic relationship.

The performance “I loved you”, filmed in the space, and the video installation "Family History" will be streamed as a Premiere on Friday 30.04.

The sound work Open/Closed will be shown in the space as part of the Festival

(Text: Jakob Urban)

Blaupause operates as a collective that cuts across various disciplines and locations. The works, which consist of installations, photographs, performances, sound and text experiments, are created by students from Basel, Berlin and Zurich and come together for the first time as physical arguments in the Kunstraum under the title Codes von Un:Menschlichkeiten.

Codes, understood as a product of subjugating, empowering, unifying, technocratic or natural consensus - omnipresent, sometimes subtle, sometimes droning - are generators and expressions of un:humanities. Within Blaupause, bringing together different disciplines and their perspectives is meant to reflect the collective reflection on codes of un:humanity. Fabulations about forms of being that move beyond the anthropocentric perspective as well as repressive structures and regimes thus become codes and coders: Invisibly acting viruses, planted clouds, plastic tulips, defensive architecture, screaming pronouns. All these heterogeneous beings find in their counterparts the possibilities of being un:humanity.

The potential to encode thus becomes an existence and a self-perpetuating process. The various forms of this reciprocity are developed, explored and made tangible in Stille Post: Codes von Un:Menschlichkeiten. The exhibition space thus becomes a laboratory of un:humanities, a place of decoding and recoding. A laboratory full of beings that react to each other, reference each other, argue and write new codes in their shared physical presence. The space itself becomes a game of telephone in which the final word is formulated again and again.

(Text: Blaupause)

Image: Blaupause

Nouns

with: Sultan Çoban

by: Lucia Salomé Gränicher and Sultan Çoban

Language as a tool to express oneself and to be able to communicate.

But to what systems and power structures is speech subject? Identity-creating pronouns such as "I" / "you" and "we" / "you" are subject to clear dualities, which in turn reproduce violence in their differentiation. Both words cannot exist on the same level. One of the two terms governs the other. By demarcating the I from the You, speakers create a clear separation from the supposed Other. The same goes for the use of the "we" or "they" based on collective experience. The question arises as to how another, a foreign language is appropriated in this confrontation. We borrow a language that is foreign to us in order to communicate, either because we want to or because we have to. But do we ever achieve the perfect appropriation of a language that has not organically formed itself into our mouths like our mother tongue? The performativity of this discourse is demonstrated in Nouns through the facial expressions of a pronoun-speaking face, for it is precisely there and at that moment that the search for identity on the one hand and the language inherent in violence on the other manifest themselves. The smartphone proved to be the most suitable medium for capturing and reproducing nouns, as it itself serves as a vehicle for the representation of supposed identities.

(Text: Lucia Salomé Gränicher)

Images: Lucia Salomé Gränicher + Sultan Çoban

Defensive architecture is architecture that expels groups of people - often homeless people - from certain places in public space. This form of segregation materialises in subtle means that the majority of the non-targeted people do not notice and are not supposed to notice.

Excessive armrests on benches serve as support for people and at the same time prevent those from being used as sleeping places. Blue light makes veins invisible. Classical music delights people waiting for their train and drives away others in search of nocturnal rest.

In their materiality and subtlety, objects of defensive architecture thus form a code of inhumanity that does not fight problems but codifies them and drives them into invisibility.

(Text: Hannes Kupfer)

Photos: Tabea Becker

Life in the Plastisphere - The vessel as a burial site and at the same time as a place of decomposition, rebirth and renaturation. a story without a linear timeline; full of beginnings, without endings. In a shell-shaped plastic sandbox, decontextualised objects become agents and blur any boundaries of possible interaction.

The speculation of what happens in a nature where memories stored on iridescent discs mix with the ground and digitally generated tulips of molten plastic one leaves behind remains unfinished.

(Text: Anaïs Nyffeler)

Images: Anaïs Nyffeler

Cloudscapes

"Cloudscapes" explores moments where codes / taxonomies / computers / machines and un:humanities / humanisation / appropriation meet and form an intersection. A cloudscape is described, stretching the conventional notion of the cloud. The research work resulted in a cloud catalogue in the form of an essayistic found-footage film.

This panorama of clouds begins with the Western gaze, which seems to recognise beings in the clouds, moves on to the scientific categorisation of "cloud species" and, starting from this humanisation, extends to 'manmade clouds' of all kinds [motor exhaust, industrial smoke, smog, military weapons, artificial cloud seeding and digital cloud]. In the process, the cloud becomes an ephemeral actor whose agency has long outstripped the weather situation.

(Text: Lisa Walder)

"Fundamenting" and "Blind/ing Perceptions" are two prostheses created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic of accelerated digitalisation. The brutality and ruthlessness with which physical processes have so far been transferred into digital space and how blindly this transformation is accepted and seen as necessary are at the centre.

"Fundamenting" is dedicated to space as a subject and attempts to understand what it means to partially deny its physical condition. The exhibition itself is a process of transformation that uses the possibility of digital reproduction to perpetuate its legitimacy. But what does this mean for the foundation: concrete, pipes, cables, utility and space itself? "Fundamenting" is itself a prosthesis that has been used in various experiments to approach space in order to negotiate it digitally in the context of this exhibition - or to fail at it, as the case may be.

The possibility of failure is also addressed with "Blind/ ing Perceptions", which understands failure as a mode of seeing. The pandemic is a fight against the invisible - an existence that takes us to the limits of what is humanly negotiable. How to fight something you cannot see, and what happens when you ignore the possibility of failure? Humans themselves have a natural blind spot in their field of vision, which is constantly filled speculatively by the brain. This spot is inevitable but a moment of human speculation that brings with it a possibility to negotiate the invisible. "Blind/ing Perceptions" is a tribute to this possibility and a prosthesis that makes this productive blindness tangible.

(Text: Nelson Wilhelm)

Photos: Nelson Wilhelm

We are still facing difficult times, and our relations and connection to one another are being challenged more than ever. The fact that even the physical space of the exhibition as a platform for interaction has been omitted stresses the necessity to reflect on the connection to ourselves, others, the society we live in, and to search for new ways of interconnectedness.

While the physical exhibition “Parkverbot” will be happening and documented, there will be no visitors allowed in the actual gallery space. Therefore the group of artists is creating inclusive emerging online channels to access the exhibition in various ways. Merging the physical and digital space. They are facing new challenges in working together, presenting their works and trying to interact with the viewer through a digital lens, finding ways of connecting in a hybrid format. Also, their works and forms of installations approach the concept of relation from different perspectives and are incorporating challenges faced while planning an exhibition during a pandemic. Inquiries are emerging surrounding the importance and dilemmas of intimate relations. The interactions between people, places, objects and emotions are continuously being subjected to the tests we all know too well by now.

Whilst being confronted with several constantly changing prohibitions we still need to find a way of moving within these restrictions. Parking is temporary, the concept of waiting to move forward but yet not standing completely still and the inevitability of proceeding elsewhere and eventually arriving.

(Text: Dana Rabea Jäger)

Poster Design: Lei Lei

Performance Programme streamed as Premieres as Streams via YouTube

Sunday 02.05.2021

14:00: ELLI BRANDAUER + SALLY VON ROSEN

15:00: AMADEUS VOGELSANG + AZUR ŠABIĆ performed by LENNART NIELSEN

16:00: ABIE FRANKLIN + FADI ALJABOUR + MOHAMAD HALBOUNI + IREN ISMAEL

17:00: BRAD NATH

18:00: [acta]ODEM - FINJA SANDER + DANIEL M.E. SCHAAL

At KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Straße, PS120 presents a (digital) group show "The Performing Object", a exhibition that asked the question of what happens when the performers are not present, does the remaining object carry their absence? The answer lies not in collaboration but in contamination. As each action performed contaminates the entire exhibition, and spills out across the objects and the others, both artist and audience alike.

Amadeus Vogelsang with Azur Šabić created "reenactment: Yentl" a staging of the iconic queer ballad "Papa Can You Hear Me"  performed in the film Yentl with Barbara Steinsand in male drag, but now with non-binary gender performance by Lennart Nielsen in front of a dripping underwear-cum-candleholder sculpture. This epic song partly a call and response to Daniel Topka's coupling and doubling of sculpture flower vases made from his and his boyfriend’s used Calvin Klein briefs dipped in resin.

[acta]ODEM - Finja Sander and Daniel M.E. Schaal endured 6 hours from morning till the night of wrapping the parking garage pillars with plastic stretch packaging foil used in transportation contexts, triangulating a large platform strong enough to walk on, over, and through. The duo Elli Brandauer and Sally von Rosen center staged a fashion-cum-boxing match, in a square roped off by golden Stanchion and red velvet that occupied the very core of the exhibition but grew and shrank with other happenings around it. A vase of tulips crashed to the floor and they throw a punch at each other and the object- a collective and social practice of fighting while creating.

In the ramp connecting above, where [acta]ODEM created their landscape theater, and below the ring, a ritual of healing and cleansing with sacred salt initiated by Abie Franklin, Fadi Aljabour, Mohamad Halbouni, Iren Ismael, over 15 minutes until all the material of salt was dissolved leaving a glowing yellow-green aquarium of wastewater or alternatively water that draws in holding an exorcism for our collective daemons.

(Text: Justin Polera)

„NEXUS“ (2021)

by [acta]ODEM - Finja Sander I Daniel M.E. Schaal

duration: 6 hours

material:  10.000 meters of stretch foil

Photo: Finja Sander - all Rights by Finja Sander and Daniel M.E. Schaal