HAUNTINGS - Nour Sokhon & Yara Mekawei, sonic performances
2 February 2024 19:30 to 22:00, Free Entrance
Amidst moments of profound human loss and grief HAUNTINGS comes as a reflection on our collective consciousness. Stories that we buried under the soil, remain alive at the back of our head like white noise, refusing to be forgotten. Like all ghosts that have yet to be laid to rest, they return repeatedly, disrupting the present and continuing to remind us of another possible future.
When the voices that demand justice, equality, and freedom have been muted, we can only remind ourselves and others of the importance of holding space; to welcome and accommodate all. The ones that are here and the ones that are no longer with us, but only seen when we close our eyes, connect with them and listen carefully to their voices.
"What kind of life is this?" is an ongoing performative research by Nour Sokhon based on the many lives of migrants and asylum seekers who have disappeared at sea. News broadcasts, collected voice notes, objects related to home, live vocal loops and field recordings are the rippling elements that appear throughout the performance creating a cathartic ritual on stage. "What kind of life is this?" induces the audience to question the misinformation present within various media outlets, depending on their political agenda and how the value of human life is perceived. The work serves as a reminder to acknowledge the loss of life in our times, instead of devaluing it to mere numbers.
In the kaleidoscopic realm of Yara Mekawei's sonic vision, the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead emerges as a profound tapestry, woven with threads of mythic antiquity and resonances that transcend temporal boundaries. In her sonic pilgrimage, Mekawei draws inspiration from the venerable scrolls of this esoteric text, an ancient Egyptian funerary guide that illuminates the journey of the soul through the afterlife. The Book of the Dead, a sacred manuscript encapsulating wisdom and ritual, becomes a living repository for Mekawei's sonic alchemy, where the verses echo like whispers across the millennia.
Nour Sokhon is a Lebanese artist based in Berlin. Her creative practice is centered around exploring different methods of working with artistic research including interview material, field recordings, and recorded material from an organized site-specific intervention. The research is then translated into sound/music compositions, performances, interactive installations, and moving image work. Nour Sokhon has performed in Frankfurt, Berlin, Beirut, Athens, Hannover, Dubai, Paris, Amsterdam, Athens, Zurich, Bern, and in various festivals such as the Al Quoz Arts Festival (Dubai, UAE), the Other Worlds Festival (Blackpool, UK), This Is Not Lebanon 2021 (Frankfurt, Germany), Punkt Festival 2023 (Kristiansand, Norway).
Yara Mekawei is a scholar and sonic composer. Her creative odyssey delves into the profound realms of architectural philosophy, social historiography, and philosophical literature, weaving a sonic tapestry that effortlessly transcends into captivating visual incarnations. At the heart of Mekawei's artistic philosophy lies an interplay of time and space, an expansive bridge connecting antiquity and modernity. A forthcoming sonic opus stands as the culmination of this creative endeavor, a symphony intricately woven from the poetic narratives of Sufi philosophy and the methodological wisdom encapsulated within the Book of the Dead. Mekawei has performed and shown her work internationally at Silent Green Kulturquartier (Berlin, 2023), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, 2021), SHUBBAK Festival (London, 2021), Rote Fabrik (Zürich, 2019), Dakar Biennial (2018), Lagos Biennial (2017), among others.
HAUNTINGS is curated by Jorgina Stamogianni & Rachel Monosov and presented as part of Vorspiel for CTM & Transmediale. The entrance to the event is free.
Don't Worry, You Can Always Be Reborn As a Screenshot - Live performance and sound installation by Alienationist (a.k.a Philipp Rhensius) as part of Vorspiel CTM & Transmediale
3 - 5 February 2023
live performance: 3 February at 8pm
sound installation: on view 4 - 5 February from 3 to 6pm
The You is a compromise between I and the world. At night, when it sleeps, the I smuggles new binary tales with big abstract words under You's bed. In the morning, it always feels a bit woozy and blames it on the weather. Wondering how quickly time passes or how this or that politician could be elected.
Don't Worry, You Can Always Be Reborn As a Screenshot explores alienation with a sonic essay merging music, sonic fiction, poetry, and spoken word. An anonymous You that is unable to say „I“ lives in a parallel world called „Zero One Galaxy“ (ZOG), a pre-recorded universe whose recording device is itself.
The installation entails short sound-and-word vignettes informed by an affect of alienation, a condition in which one doesn't feel „at home“, often caused by a „low degree of integration or common values and a high degree of distance between individuals and the society“ it lives in. Yet, rather than hailing to a pastoral idyll of some kind of pure and un-alienated state beyond the ZOG, the You attempts to evoke a space of radical autonomy that celebrates alienation, not only as a default condition of being but as a springboard for a new world that might be already here and now but is still searching for its name.
Curated by Rachel Monosov & Jorgina Stamogianni
Alienationist (aka Philipp Rhensius) is a Berlin-based writer, musician, sound artist, poet, and editor. The project started with experimental writings scattered on the internet in 2015, before it crystallized into a multimedia art project at the intersection of poetry, ambient, bass-driven club music, spoken word, and queer theory. Most recently, he released the album "Don't Worry You Can Always Be Reborn As a Screenshot", a psychogeographic journey of a "you" through its ordinary life which eventually figures out alienation as a solution rather than a disease. In his curatorial role as editor and publisher of the community (of practice) Norient, Rhensius continuously collaborates with artists, musicians, thinkers, and writers from over 52 countries to promote (sub-)cultural diversity.
Rosanna Graf & Paulina Nolte - Renaissance Reflux
25 November 2022, 19:00 and 20:30
In Renaissance Reflux two women find themselves undergoing states of radical transformation in which the act of “Weirding” becomes a survival strategy. They are popping up in different realities as different characters with contrasting sensibilities and confronted with strange outcomes, while performing an alchemical experiment. Distilling ideas of human nature and the perils of Neoliberalism, Renaissance Reflux is a playful and observant take on an anti-human, bureaucratic and digitized future, whilst yearning towards a more interconnected, social and earthly in-between state; where roots are tugged on and the mycelium is tickled awake.
Divided into four acts (I: The Office, II: The Tower, III: Into the Garden and IV: Lady Mystic) the performance uses a pseudo film-script oscillating between self-written, surrealist storytelling, scientific jargon and found text fragments. A supposed Re-Renaissance is taking place, in which the cult of the individual — taken to its extreme — threatens to falter. Beliefs and elements of society that were suppressed during the first Renaissance are now re-emerging in new guises. Ghosts of the old such as rationality, linearity and individualism are challenged by an openness to irrationality, queerness, spirituality, cyclical concepts, and a new sense of collectivity.
Renaissance Reflux is a performative collaboration between the artists Rosanna Graf and Paulina Nolte.
Curated by Rachel Monosov & Jorgina Stamogianni
*The work will be presented on Friday 25 November in two consecutive iterations, starting at 19:00 and at 20:30. Capacity is limited, please arrive on time in order to secure a spot*
Rosanna Graf (*1988) studied at HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg and Goldsmiths, University of London. With an affinity for myths, psychoanalysis, the magical and the abysmal, Graf’s practice focuses on video and performance art with an emphasis on the creation of text. She has won several awards and scholarships including the annual stipend by the Society of Friends of HFBK Hamburg, e.V., the Hamburger Arbeitsstipendium für bildende Kunst and the Karl H. Ditze-Prize and was a participant of the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, Berlin. Her work has been shown at Galerie Conradi, Hamburg; Kunsthaus Hamburg; Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin; Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg; Kurzfilmfestival Hamburg, Videonale, Bonn, amongst others. Alongside her artistic work she has also created videos for theatre productions at Volkstheater München, Kampnagel Hamburg, Schauspiel Köln and Volksbühne Berlin. The artist is currently living and working in Berlin.
Paulina Nolte (*1992) studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich. Her work threads together a range of mediums and often ends as a performative piece. Her last solo show Persimone at Kunstpavillon in Munich was based on a soundpiece of hers, initially streamed by PlusX on Radio Cashmere and then released on New York tape label Decontrol. In 2022 she exhibited with artist Maria VMier in the two person show In Praise of the Dancing Bodies at Galerie Françoise Heitsch and was invited to create a performance for Intimacy Quarterly in 2022 and Ruine München at Lenbachhaus in 2020. She also performs in the band WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR? by Anna McCarthy and Manuela Rzytki.
Ana Pascu & Yen Chun Lin - Collecting Stones from Hypnagogia
7 August 2022, 6 - 10 pm
Centrum is excited to present Collecting Stones From Hypnagogia, an installation activated by a durational performance by Ana Pascu and Yen Chun Lin taking place on 7 August at 6 pm, as part of the Project Space Festival 2022.
Through experimenting with the hypnagogic state collectively, the artists wander between realities, between mental spaces, between bodies, between different states of consciousness, between dreamscapes, between sleeping and awaking. Residues of their visits melt into the installation. Fragments of slippery memories crystallized in the material matter, waiting to be reactivated. From 6 pm, the space will slowly wake up by the moon-rise leaking through small tunnels in the wall. Every hour, when the fingertip of the clock is touching its starting point, we will explore different regions of Hypnagogia through the presence and absence of body, sound and material.
Ana Pascu and Yen Chun Lin collaboration is the continuation of CTG collective 2021-2022 Staycation program. Curated by Rachel Monosov and the CTG collective.
Ana Pascu (b. 2000, Romania) is a Bucharest-based multi-media artist. Exploring a multidisciplinary approach, she creates spatial installations where the digital dimension interacts with material mediums. Her work has been recently shown in national and international group exhibitions such as Modulated Histories at National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Biennial exhibition, Mala stanica - National Gallery of R.N.Macedonia and Atmosphäre & Authentizität at Sehsaal Gallery, Vienna.
Yen Chun Lin (b. 1990, Taiwan) currently lives and works between states of falling, falling asleep, falling awake, falling (in) love, and falling unknown. Her works are mainly materialised in the form of installations that hold immersive soundscapes, sculptures, performances, collaborations, speculations, and soundust. Through artistic practices, he explores ambiguities and in-betweenness that are often devalued in assumed knowledge; situated between rational science and the classification of the unexplainable, supernatural, and ethereal. They wish to practice encountering and noticing quietly without disturbing all beings in surrounding environments, including those in multi-dimensional realities. It recently started a research project, ‘Here, a nut falls twice’ - a space holder for different practices to experiment with collective falling and alternation of sensuous perception (listening) as potentials for care with all beings.
Collecting Stones From Hypnagogia is realised with the kind support of CTG Collective, and Project Space Festival 2022.
Words From Our Bodies, Like Stones From The Earth - Performance by Linda Lamignan
4 February, at 8pm
Centrum is excited to present Words From Our Bodies, Like Stones From The Earth, an audio visual performance by Linda Lamignan, as part of Vorspiel program of the CTM and transmediale festivals 2022.
Through music, words, video and objects, the performance explores the notions of In-betweenness, Belonging, and Borders. Linda Lamignan uses beats and rhythms as tools for bringing the viewers on a journey. Singing becomes a way of storytelling.
Channeling ancient memories and imagining alternative futures, the words and stories that are being told draw inspiration from Gloria Anzaldua's book “Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza”. In this book, Anzaldua challenges the ideas around diaspora, race and identity, addressing the invisible boundaries that exist between different cultures, genders and sexualities. Anzaldua uses “Borderlands” as a term to identify a growing population that cannot distinguish between these invisible borders, and instead has learned to become part of both worlds. Another strong theoretical influence for this performance can be found in David Abram's book "Becoming Animal" which explores the relationship between humans and the other species with whom we share the planet, opening up new ways of understanding our own place in the world.
Several objects that are used in the performance are linked to the commodities from the industry of Norway and Nigeria and function as objects of divination, dramatics and desire. Lamignan’s interest lies in the link between the exploitation of nature and racism. Connecting the dots between the western extraction of West African natural resources and the history of colonialism, they relate the history of the industrial materials to the history of brown bodies.
Weaving projections and lights in, Lamgnan fills the space with fragments of memory, emotion and imagination. Altering surfaces with colored light and perceived depth, becomes a way to transform the room, and in turn transform ourselves.
Linda Lamignan is a visual and performance artist. Their works convey the sensation of being alien and of floating between dissimilar worlds. Through video, music, objects and performance, Lamignan explores notions related to wandering and diaspora, transformation and love. Taking an animistic approach, they are working with materials that are associated with industries in West Africa and Scandinavia. And by conjoining the history of these materials/raw articles to bodies with comparable experiences, Lamignan seeks to visualize new alternative frames of mind. Lamignan received their MFA degree at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2019 and their BFA degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo.
Words from our Bodies, Like Stones from the Earth is curated by Jorgina Stamogianni and realised with the kind support of Statens Kunstfond.
Xenogenetizing with Octopuses: An Occasion - Performative lecture by Anastasios Logothetis
20 & 21 November 2021, at 4 pm, *pre-registration required/ RSVP
“Being in harmony with the world through archipelagos means inhabiting this diffraction, while still rallying coastlines and joining horizons. They open us to a sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting, which is not the same as futility.”
The Archipelago Conversations, Edouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist
You are cordially invited to the first of a series of Occasions as part of Anastasios Logothetis’ ongoing book project “But I Will Also Go Back in Time”. At the core of the project is an engagement with the formal methodologies of speculative fiction, understood as a site of experimentation with space and time, through written and visual assemblages. The main premise of the book revolves around narratives that are feeding off a constant oscillation between things happening in real life, auto-fiction, and the production of a speculative virtual world. During this process, questions of sexual transformation, human extinction, planetary precariousness, and strange new kinships are negotiated and interwoven.
Octavia Butler’s term "Xenogenesis", as interpreted by the Otolith Group, is used as a point of departure by Anastasios Logothetis for his upcoming intervention at Centrum. “Xenogenesis", in this sense, is meant as a proposal for elaboration thought experiments that engage with forms of alien, or strange becoming. The term Occasion, which was first coined and used by the artist Isabel Lewis in her own practice, is here borrowed by Logothetis to describe a similar continuing interest in the kind of performative event or lecture that does not seek a clear end result. Rather, it takes away a great deal of the premeditated and the organized, making room for more contingency, for the unexpected, and a formless format to occur. A large amount of malleability and vulnerability is vital. Logothetis is here aiming for a becoming-less as to allow for more meaning to appear through the communal. A communal which inherently does not take advantage of other bodies, other creatures, others’ sorrows and feelings for a furthering of a cis-het male privilege. Instead it is very much about decentralising the idea of ownership of authorship inherent in the patriarchal system of today.
For this Οccasion, we will turn our eyes and bodies to the virtual world part of the narrative. In a post- Anthropocene setting, the only thing human that has survived is our avatars on a small desolate beach, surrounded only by water. Alien and weird things are taking place there. Through a lecture-style narration, interspersed with collaborative game-like exercises, you will be invited to the beach and become part of the narrative of the book. There, the post-Anthropocene is not treated as an event that might just happen, but as a reality that is already dawning on us. What kind of alien avatars have we become in this virtual world?
Through a large amount of play, Anastasios Logothetis asks us to search for nothing less than the beginning of a way out of our present highly precarious predicament, by looking at the future. What might happen if we let our future avatar’s personality seep into our own present reality, as in a feedback loop of becoming? Can we ask ourselves to de-patriarchize, re-sexualize, liquify our cyborg bodies and minds to find a different path forward in the now?
Xenogenetizing with Octopuses welcomes you to a sort of inter-human, intra-species cosmogony.
Anastasios Logothetis (b. Sweden, 1979) lives and works in Berlin. His interests are based on strategies of refusal, the figure of a trickster, and the shapeshifter. As such, the methodology of making art becomes central in the understanding of his practice; it spans various mediums while being strongly informed by that character, as much as the lack of character, that he has usurped for a specific project. After leaving his medical studies at Brandeis University, Boston, Logothetis graduated with an MFA in sculpture from The Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2008. His work has amongst others, been exhibited at Manifesta 11, Zurich; Färgfabriken, Stockholm; The Composing Rooms, Berlin; Andquestionmark, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. In 2021 Logothetis received the INITIAL grant from Akademie der Künste.
* PLEASE NOTE: Each Occasion is limited to seven participants. Participation is free, but you must RSVP in advance at centrumprojektraum@gmail.com. At the entrance, you will be asked to present proof of full vaccination or recovery from COVID-19.
Post-European Rage Room, 14 -17 October 2021
Performance & pop-up exhibition by UN P R 18T (Un.Processed Realities) in collaboration with Filippos Raskovic
*Performance & Soft Opening on Thursday 14 October, at 7 pm*
visiting hours: Friday- Saturday 6 to 9 pm, Sunday 2 to 5 pm
The various narratives of European philosophy and Reason, as well as the overwhelming efforts of constructing a geographically based European identity, are crumbling down. Our generation is facing the end of Ratio-Reason and Europe has missed its chance of creating the foundations for a better living. Closed borders, walls, a collapsing European Union, the targeting and marginalisation of states and social groups, with the outbreak of the pandemic as the peak: a rise in the utilisation of science for political reasons, encroachment of human rights, a culture in a coma are some of the examples of the political, economical and humanitarian crisis that Europe is experiencing. Furthermore, a crisis of collective fantasy and of our ability to think of a different future is unfolding.
The fossilised classic symbols of Europe remain unchanged, untouchable taboos carrying a stagnant meaning. Their historical legitimisation, resting on a pedestal that rises high above and far away from the present, obstructs any kind of dialogue with the present and the future.
Post-European Rage Room is a sculptural and sound installation that will be activated through a performative event on 14 October , and will remain on display until October 17. The installation functions as a representation of a structural element; a pillar with monumental aesthetics, historical references and transmutations. This element will be gradually transformed into archaeological debris, after the destruction of the pillar with the help of the visitors/participants.
After taking a short quiz, tokens in the shape of EU stars will be given to each visitor, which can be then exchanged for the amount of time and the tool that they want to use in order to destroy the pillar and the symbols which lay hidden inside of it. The design of the objects-symbols that constitute the installation, is the result of an automatic process of production of signified symbols without meaning, thus rendering design into a tool for the reproduction of stereotypical predetermined copies. The destruction of the objects-symbols becomes an organic procedure, as it takes place inside a space that is transformed into a “rage room”.
UN P R 18T (Un.Processed Realities) is a design studio, based between Athens and Tinos island, Greece. It was founded in 2018 by Niki Danai Chania, Dimitris Tampakis and Ioannis Dellatolas. Their motivation derives from common questions about the operation of the established system of production and exploitation of matter, around the culture of design, the consumer habits, the perception of reality, creation and destruction. Each of UN P R 18T’s works emerges as a ‘side-effect’ of the process, and not as an end in itself. It is a result of anthropological, sociological and geographical observation. Through their research, concepts, and visual communication, UN P R 18T aim to strengthen critical tools, both their own and each person’s engaged in their projects. unprocessedrealities.com
Filippos Raskovic (b. 1994, Athens) is a composer based in Athens. His work creates a sonic world; accidental and composed, recognisable and unexpected all at the same time. As a composer, he often creates interdisciplinary works in close collaboration with visual artists. In 2021 he co-produced the performative installation “Echo Chambers” in collaboration with artist Dimitris Tampakis, during FUGA residency in Spain. In 2019 he co-founded KRAMA music festival, bringing together free improvisation, contemporary classical and experimental electronic music. In 2020, he self-released his first album “gentle presence''. This autumn he will perform at Fylkingen, during Stockholm Jazz Festival 2021. raskovicfilippos.com
Please note: 2G rule applies to this event. At the entrance you will be asked to present proof of full vaccination, or recovery from COVID-19.
Hevea Act 2: Devil's Milk - Οutdoor Workshop by Bethan Hughes
Saturday 5 June 2021, at 1 pm
meeting point: Centrum, Reuterstr. 7, 12053 Berlin
duration: 2 hours, *Pre-registration required*
As part of the solo exhibition Hevea Act 2: Devil's Milk that takes place between 27.05 - 27.06.2021, Centrum welcomes participants to a workshop held by the artist and researcher, Bethan Hughes.
Exploring the botanical origins and material complexities of rubber – the substance that forms the focal point of Hughes’ ongoing research project, Hevea – participants are invited to participate in a two-hour outdoor workshop on Saturday 5 June, from 1 to 3 pm.
Meeting at Centrum, the artist will begin by introducing the research behind the project and the significance of the herbarium in their work. The group will then embark on a short walk through the surrounding areas of Neukölln to identify and discuss the botanical features of latex-producing plants and political, social, and cultural entanglements that lie behind rubber. The walk will conclude at the Prinzessinnengarten (Hermannstraße 99 - 105) where participants will be guided through a hands-on workshop in which the artist will share some of their production techniques, including basic methods of cutting and assembling sheet latex and latex dipping, before they have the chance to experiment with the materials and make their own creations.
The workshop is free to attend, but limited to 10 participants.
All materials will be provided. If you would like to reserve a place, please contact us at info@centrumberlin.com
Please note that this workshop is not suitable for children and persons allergic to latex.
Bethan Hughes (b. 1989, Wigan, UK) studied Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art and Media Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar. In 2020, she received a doctorate from the University of Leeds for her thesis, “Against Immateriality: 3D CGI & Contemporary Art”. Between 2019-20, she was a BS Projects fellow. Recent presentations include If Everything is Connected, Everything is Vulnerable at HBK Braunschweig, 2020; TAPPING, DRESSING, a duo exhibition with Laura Schawelka at Diskurs Berlin, 2020; Re-shift, Re-calibrate, hosted by Pavilion / Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds. She is currently a participant of the Goldrausch project for women artists (Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt).
www.bethanhughes.com
The exhibition Hevea Act 2: Devil's Milk by Bethan Hughes can be visited between 27.05 - 27.06.2021 in compliance with the known hygiene measures. Before your visit, we ask for a short pre-registration by following this link.
Devil’s Milk is commissioned by Centrum and curated by Jorgina Stamogianni.
The project is funded by the District Cultural Fund.
Un/natural Field Recordings//Natural Overdubs - Workshop by William “Bilwa” Costa
Saturday 14 March, 11– 5pm & Sunday 15 March, 11 – 6pm
Total participation cost for both days: 40€, registration required
Un/natural Field Recordings//Natural Overdubs is a workshop which utilizes urban, architectural, and natural urban spaces as a source for cultivating, processing, and over-dubbing sound. This workshop is open to artists of any medium (sound art, experimental music, performance, dance, visual art, etc.) who are interested in experimenting with sound. Participants will work individually and collaboratively, as an entire as well as in small groups.
GOAL
The goal of the workshop is to experiment with unorthodox methods of recording and processing sound; and to create personal sound palettes which can be used for experimentation, composition, and performance.
Un/natural Field Recordings//Natural Overdubs: Workshop is based on Bilwa's personal practice, Un/natural Fields, in which he cultivates human-made, digital, analogue, and mechanical sounds, as well as many other incidental sounds which make up a city’s soundscape. Bilwa has recorded in metros and other indoor and outside public spaces, throughout Europe, N. America, and E. Asia. These found sounds, which are referred to as un/natural field recordings, are over-dubbed (played back and re-recorded) in different locations, with various sonic qualities following time-based or site relative scores. This technique offers a means of effecting, or processing the original recordings as well as combining sounds which are unique to the different locations.
The result is a palette of complex sounds which contain various qualities as well as cultural references, combined by both choice and chance. These recording are arranged in multi-track sound palettes which, combined with sine-tones, are used for experimental compositions; employing techniques associated with Musique Concrète, electronic music, generative music, and auditory illusion including: phasing, oscillation, binaural beating, cancellation, etc. Using no plug-in effects, sound processing is achieved by multi-track playback and spatialization.
Un/natural Field Recordings
Audio recordings comprised of man-made, digital, analogue, and mechanical sounds, as well as many other incidental sounds, which make up a city’s soundscape in public spaces. This process can be done systematically, intentionally, or at random; using various quality levels of recording devices.
During the workshop participants will create and execute scores, structures, and choreographies for recording.
Natural Overdubs
Recordings are played back, in the same space as the original recording and/or in various spaces with different sound qualities, using the recording device, phones, and portable speakers; essentially “overdubbing” the recording with the sound event happening in the current space. We will experiment with recorder – speaker relationships, alternating the foreground and background sounds; as well as utilizing a spaces sound qualities (reverberation, reflection, echo, noise, etc.). This process can be looked at as a sound intervention/concert and/or a recording session which utilizes public spaces.
*The workshop culminates in a public concert during which participants will form small ensembles and perform scores, using palettes created during the process.
Un/natural Field Recordings//Natural Overdubs: Workshop began in Kaunas, LT and has since taken place at Kirtimų kultūros centras,Vilnius,LT Liepaja University, LV, and in Berlin, DE at Liebig12, Euphonia Festival, and Backsteinboot, Spandau.
DAY 1/ RECORDING
Participants will:
– walk to various locations around Neukölln
– record a series of Unnatural Field Recordings according to time and space-related scores and structures
– record a series of Unnatural Field Recordings using sine-tones from smart phones
– record a series of Natural Overdubs in spaces with interesting acoustic qualities and incidental sounds using
WHAT TO BRING:
– AUDIO RECORDER / Accessories /windscreen/small tripod/ sd card/etc)
– BATTERIES
– HEADPHONES (preferably over-ear, but if you only have earbuds, please bring them)
– METRO PASS day/week/or month pass for Berlin AB
– SMART PHONE / audio recording app / sound generator (sine waves)
– BOOK sketchbook /graph paper/ pens
To share (if possible): extra recorder, extra over-ear headphones, and batteries.
NOTE: We will spend most of the time walking and recording, so please bring ONLY what you need in a small rucksack. You will NOT need laptops, controllers, etc. on DAY 1.
DAY 2/ PALETTES AND SCORES
Participants will:
– share recordings and create a personal sound palette of recordings
– each build our “instrument”, or means of playing back the recordings in real-time
– experiment with playback options through loudspeakers, hand held speakers, phones, etc.
– create scores (graphic, time-based, thematic, etc.) based on research during the workshop
– experiment with ways of utilizing individual sound palettes to perform these scores
– Bilwa will explain his personal multi-track playback technique in Ableton.
WHAT TO BRING:
– LAPTOP/TABLET / audio software (i.e - Ableton, logic, audacity, quicktime, vlz)
– ACCESSORIES to transfer recordings from recorder/phone to laptop or tablet
– EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE / SD CARD READER
– ACCESSORIES controller/sound card/ + CABLES - mini to stereo jack or jack to jack (as you need)
– HEADPHONES (preferably over-ear, but if you only have earbuds, please bring them)
– BOOK sketchbook /graph paper/ pens
– AUDIO RECORDER / Accessories (BATTERIES /windscreen/small tripod/ sd card/etc)
– HEADPHONES (preferably over-ear, but if you only have earbuds, please bring them)
– SMART PHONE / audio recording app / sound generator (sinewaves)
– BOOK sketchbook /graph paper/ pens
– To share (if possible): extra recorder, extra over-ear headphones, Batteries, mini – jack cables.
William “Bilwa” Costa is an artist who works in the performing, sound, and visual arts contexts. His work includes: performance, installation, experimental / electro-acoustic music, sound art, field recordings, real-time composition, graphic scores and conceptual structures for sound and movement. Collaboration with other artists is essential to his work. He works internationally, generating research, labs, workshops, and performance projects, actively cultivating opportunities for artists to work together on new interdisciplinary experiments. Currently based in Berlin, Bilwa has performed, led workshops, and has lectured in N. America, UK, Europe, Asia, and Australia. soundcloud.com/bilwa | williambilwacosta.com
Artist Talk: Keegan Luttrell – For Joan, Thursday 5 December 2019, 7pm
On the occasion of her exhibition at Centrum, Keegan Luttrell was in conversation with curator Max Weiland. Keegan Luttrell (b. 1986 in Knoxville, TN) completed her MFA in sculpture at Mills College in Oakland, California in 2013. She graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in Art History, Theory and Criticism and a concentration in Photography in 2008. Luttrell has exhibited works in San Francisco, Oakland, Brooklyn, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Aix-en-Provence, Geneva, Berlin, Athens and Santorini. Working in various mediums, she explores themes of vulnerability, fear, protection, and ritual that emphasize the most fragile aspects of human existence and the reasons behind the urge to maintain a sense of security in a world so tenuous. She lives and works in Berlin.
Photos: Alexander Norton
Open Studios & Exhibition: GLAD TO BE HERE
Vincent Chomaz / Christian Perdix / Alberto Stievanin
16 + 17 November 2019: Saturday 2-8pm / Sunday 12-6pm
Opening: Friday, 15 November, 6pm
Vincent Chomaz is an artist and cultural operator interested in associative and informal forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Spanning installations, workshops, publications, formats of co-production, and interventions, his work focuses on listening as a social, political, and aesthetic practice – an associative and empathic tool to investigate collective dynamics as a network of subjective narratives and memories. / Christian Perdix creates works that address the way in which the internet has brought international politics and pop culture into such close proximity that they are often just a click away from each other. His hybrid paintings reflect our online experience and view of a world, where factual information, fake news and entertainment mingle and merge. / Alberto Stievanin questions the fundamental processes that define a discipline. During his studies in architecture and having worked as an architect both in a studio as well as in an academic context, Stievanin became interested in the interaction and the movement of people whithin domestic settings. Having moved on to study photography in 2016, Stievanin put the photographic medium at the heart of his research, questioning how the very act of taking pictures influences and shapes our contemporary spaces and society. In his practice he employs various image creating techniques including photo cameras, scanners, video, mobile phones and computers.
Installation views by Alberto Stievanin.
I wanted to live in this land – Mairer, Mourad, von Zimmermann
Talk & Presentation: Saturday, 19 October 2019, 6pm
organised and moderated by Christian Perdix
Sophia Mairer, Amalia Mourad and Rebekka von Zimmermann are young painters, who reflect differently on the medium of painting, digital experience, the history & future of women, ecosystems and poetry. They will talk individually about their work and give insight into their practice and exhibition history. There will be a simultaneous presentation of their paintings at Centrum.
48 Hours Neukölln Festival: 14 - 16 June 2019
Lecture and Artist Talk by Brinda Sommer: Saturday, 15 June, 5pm
Patricia Sandonis' exhibition Das Kiez Monument will be part of this year's 48 Hours Neukölln Festival, which under the title Future III aims to look back at a future which will already have passed. Using a grammatical structure which at first appears paradoxical and challenging in English, German, or any other modern language, Future III offers a way of asking, “how we will have been being in existence…” or “who we will have been being”.
On the occasion of 48 Hours Neukölln, historian and curator Brinda Sommer will be discussing alternative ways of representing collective memory in public space with a focus on models for future monuments. Following her presentation she will be in conversation with Patricia Sandonis about her exhibition at Centrum.
MAUVE with Titania Seidl & Lukas Thaler
Talk & Presentation: Wednesday, 24 April 2019, 7pm
organised and moderated by Christian Perdix
The Vienna-based artists Titania Seidl and Lukas Thaler run the curatorial project MAUVE, showing Austrian alongside international artists in Vienna and more recently in various locations across the globe. They have developed a consistent program since 2012 which now and then intersects with their own artistic practice. As guests at Centrum, we will talk about how different projects came artistically and economically into existence, what it means to work closely with artists over a longer period of time and how running an art space reflects back on their own working routine. There will be a simultaneous presentation of both of their works at Centrum.
Presentation by Livia Valensise (Ban Ying e.V.): Friday, 22 March, 7pm
On the occasion of KARMA's exhibition ODALISQUE, social psychologist Livia Valensise spoke about her work at Ban Ying e.V., a specialised counseling center combatting human trafficking and one of the oldest women’s projects engaged in this field in Berlin.
Open Studios and Exhibition: Vincent Chomaz / Alberto Stievanin / Christian Perdix
So much unlike itself and so complete
26 + 27 January, 2-6pm
Opening: Friday, 25 January, 6-9pm
On the 26th and 27th of January we will start the new year by opening Centrum's doors to present the work of our studio artists Vincent Chomaz, Alberto Stievanin and Christian Perdix in the form of a weekend-long exhibition and open studio event with the title So much unlike itself and so complete.
Vincent Chomaz is an artist and cultural operator interested in associative and informal forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Spanning installations, workshops, publications, formats of co-production, and interventions, his work focuses on listening as a social, political, and aesthetic practice – an associative and empathic tool to investigate collective dynamics as a network of subjective narratives and memories. / Alberto Stievanin questions the fundamental processes that define a discipline. During his studies in architecture and having worked as an architect both in a studio as well as in an academic context, Stievanin became interested in the interaction and the movement of people whithin domestic settings. Having moved on to study photography in 2016, Stievanin put the photographic medium at the heart of his research, questioning how the very act of taking pictures influences and shapes our contemporary spaces and society. In his practice he employs various image creating techniques including photo cameras, scanners, video, mobile phones and computers. / Christian Perdix creates works that address the way in which the internet has brought international politics and pop culture into such close proximity that they are often just a click away from each other. His hybrid paintings reflect our online experience and view of a world, where factual information, fake news and entertainment mingle and merge.
Installation views: Alberto Stievanin
Emma Waltraud Howes – Workshop – Twisted Buoys: Saturday, 22 September, 4pm
In the workshop Twisted Buoys, Emma Waltraud Howes presented practical exercises toward a method for supporting the agency and creativity of the individual, to explore the benefits of improvisation and adaptability as tools to keep oneself afloat in precarious times. She introduced practical exercises for maintaining a tether amidst the chaos, operating from the viewpoint that each persons embodied history offers important information for survival: exercises include a frame to work within, and an exploration of accumulative possibilities that occur when diverse individual skill sets encounter one another. Through variations on rhythm and gait, gravity and grace, this workshop aimed to offer participants a bucket of tools to build upon. No previous experience required.
Artemis Crowley – share with me?, 13 - 17 August 2018
@centrumberlin
@Free Your Stuff Berlin
If you would like to swap your stuff for something we have please check out our Facebook page where we are going to post some photos of unwanted objects. Get in touch and we will welcome you to Centrum where you can exchange your stuff. We will advertise objects on the Centrum Facebook page and the Facebook group Free Your Stuff Berlin. They are free to anyone who would like them. In return we only ask that you bring with you something you no longer want. This could be anything at all – there is no requirement to match the value of the object you want from us. We will document the transactions to keep track of the changing collection.
While it might seem a paradox to use Facebook as a platform, Artemis Crowley choses the Free Your Stuff Berlin group because of the values it endorses. In contrast to Facebook’s usual function, i.e. to siphon off people into like-minded social communities, Free Your Stuff Berlin connects people from different backgrounds and parts of the city with the potential to subvert the platform’s profit-driven and consumption-based ethos and undermine its ever-growing influence in politics and the media. At a time when we are stripping the world of resources it feels important to take as much responsibility as possible for our daily actions which involve the production and consumption of non-renewable resources. This project might help bring awareness to and revalue the stuff we own and use. Rather than ‘creativity’ – a fetishized concept – it will be about connection and celebrating how we can share and recycle our stuff.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetexts hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
Sybella Perry – Familiar Signals, 23 + 24 June 2018, 2 to 7pm
Opening: Friday, 22 June, 7pm
Centrum during 48 Hours Neukölln Festival 2018 presented Familiar Signals, an installation of sound and text works by Sybella Perry made together with her father and her sister, over a period of nine months whilst coming to terms with a traumatic accident that affected the family. The works draw on sounding and listening as a means to create and share spaces of intimacy and inter-subjectivity. The artist uses tonality to contrast familiar occurrences and unexpected events, both in music and in everyday encounters.
In twelve steps is a quadrophonic composition resulting from the repeated realisations of a score developed in collaboration with the artist’s father, a folk musician and accordionist. The score uses twelve pitches and twelve instructions for improvisation as a duo. In four poems in sororal stereo the artist and her sister read aloud poems describing moments of environmental change occurring in familiar places. The likeness and difference in tonality of their voices playing out across the stereo-field, the voices do not stay fixed, but move in position from left to right while each of the voices also mimics the nuances of the other.
For the installation at Centrum both works have been adapted to fit the particular acoustic qualities of the space. Four poems in sororal stereo can be listened to outside in the small courtyard garden, the voices intersecting with the ambient sounds of birdsong and conversations of the neighbours. In twelve steps in turn has been arranged to incorporate the existing reverberation of the tiled space into the composition, allowing time for the sound to build and decay, offering a different listening experience from each position in the space.
Zum Herunterladen des Pressetexts hier klicken. / Download the press text here.
A Room for Oneself – 16, 17 + 18 March 2018, 7 to 9pm
Irene Accardo & Heini Nukari with Maria Ferrara and Julia Ketzmerick
While life in the city of Berlin is hectic and fast-paced, the performance project A Room for Oneself by Irene Accardo and Heini Nukari is a means to decelerate and retreat. Visitors have to register and wait for their 10-minute individual, private performance. The performance is based on the paradox between intimacy and openness, passive reception and performativity, and creates a modern ritual at the centre of which is not the artist but the individual spectator and which promises them nothing but a moment and a room to themselves. Two Berlin-based performers, Maria Ferrara and Julia Ketzmerick, support the performance.
The title makes reference to Virginia Woolf's famous 1929 essay A Room of One's Own in which she argues that traditionally women – due the fact that they did not have a room in the house to themselves – were not given the same opportunity as men to retreat and work creatively. In their performance, Accardo and Nukari extend this idea to include and highlight the importance of the intended and actual recipient or addressee at the heart of creative work.
Syzygy – Centrum Open Studio, 20 + 21 January 2018, 12 to 5pm
Vincent Chomaz / Hans-Jörg Pochmann / Christian Perdix
On the 20th and 21st of January we started the new year by participating in Neuköllner Produktion. Under the title Syzygy we opened the doors to Centrum's studios and exhibition space to present the work of our co-workers, the artists Vincent Chomaz, Hans-Jörg Pochmann and Christian Perdix.
Vincent Chomaz is a cultural operator and artist who is interested in the possibility and the limitations of communication, translation and empathy. His practice employs a variety of media including audio, installation and writing to explore the complex and transient nature of identity, history and fiction. / Hans-Jörg Pochmann in his work aims to challenge the habituation to digital devices, i.e. the forgetting or the ignorance of the physical interface that presupposes digital immateriality. His works bring the computer into consciousness as an absurd object that escapes language. / Christian Perdix creates works that address the way in which the internet has brought international politics and pop culture into such close proximity that they are often just a click away from each other. His hybrid paintings reflect our online experience and view of a world where factual information, fake news and entertainment mingle and merge.
Kunst Film Fest #3, Part I: Found Footage - Friday 10 November 2017, 7pm
Leo Gabin / Callum Leo Hughes / Christian Nicolay & Ya-chu Kang / Molly Soda / Laura Yuile
Kunst Film Fest #3, Part II: Digital Video Art - Friday 17 November 2017, 7pm
Sandrine Deumier / Constantin Hartenstein / Gregory Kalliche / Benjamin Magot / Davide Mastrangelo & Francesca Leoni / Lu Yang
Kunst Film Fest #3, Part III: Experimental Video Art - Friday 24 November 2017, 7pm
Diego Agullo / Peter Burr / Dina Kelberman / Eliza Soroga / Rino Stefano Tagliafierro / Demelza Watts
Kunst Film Fest #3, Part IV: Post-Pop - Friday 1 December 2017, 7pm
Jocelyn Anquetil & Charles Harrop-Griffith / Petra Cortright / Keren Cytter / Jillian Mayer & Lucas Leyva / Hannah Perry / Jennifer Juniper Stratford / Matteo Zamagni
As in its previous two iterations the Kunst Film Fest #3 took the form of a series of screenings on four consecutive Fridays when Centrum presented video works by international artists. The screenings featured a selection of videos corresponding to the themes Found Footage, Digital Video Art, Experimental Video Art and Post-Pop.
Giving new life to pre-existing audiovisual material is neither new nor uncommon in the art world. Many artists appropriate found footage, be it for its realism, as historical reference or simply its aesthetic quality as a found object. Today, the ever-growing popularity of the internet and social media have changed the way that artists approach online reality. Lives lived online, intimacies and absurdities, futile tutorials and instructions for life improvement, extravagant internet personas; and as the list unfolds so does the list of possibilities for creatives to exploit the abundance of material the internet provides.
The invasion of digital technologies into daily life has irretrievably transformed social conventions and mainstream media, but has also prompted a radical shift in the creative industries and in art. Artists employ digital tools to facilitate immersive virtual installations and to create second lives, cyborgs and digital landscapes and visualise post-apocalyptic utopias inhabited by avatars. As technology has enabled a multidimensional cyber-universe, artists working in so-called digital art are at the forefront of exploring and criticising this influential and unpredictable part of our contemporary culture.
Art as experiment has always been about challenging traditional aesthetics, techniques and preconceptions about art. Standardised definitions of art have to be extended in order to find alternative routes to the creative process. Concerning the art of the moving image, various new ways of using the computer as a means to display art together with new possibilities in creating video paintings, web projects, offline, online as well as desktop performances have opened up vast and unexplored new playgrounds, where art can ceaselessly be reinvented.
Post-pop music can be broadly defined as following the end of pop music while paradoxically being unable to develop a new musical style independent from pop. This inadequacy has inspired many musicians to not only reinvent their stage performance but also their music videos for which they often borrow visuals and aesthetics from contemporary art. The visual arts on the other hand have been increasingly influenced by the rhythm and expressivity of pop, appropriating the visual vocabulary of popular entertainment and addressing the predominance of the body and sexuality in the music and advertisement industries. Artists adapt to the editing techniques of music videos and use cross-references to the pop legacy to explore the influence of technological and sensory manipulation on the human condition.
Bjarki Bragason / Thomas Hörl / Marte Kiessling – 52,4821056 + 13,4293293 = many, 28 - 29 October 2017
Artist Talk: Saturday, 28 October, 6pm
Opening: Saturday, 28 October, 7pm
We are very pleased to welcome at Centrum the artists Bjarki Bragason, Thomas Hörl and Marte Kiessling for their presentation of 52,4821056 + 13,4293293 = many. Over the duration of one weekend the three artists present an exhibition showcasing a range of new works, which they have collaboratively produced at the print workshop at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. They have furthermore each invited an additional artist from their respective country of origin, Iceland, Austria and Germany, whose works also features in the exhibition.
The three artists originally met while studying at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts in Listaháskoli and ever since have been meeting annually to work together on prints and multiples within the framework of a self-imposed theme. For this year’s project Bragason, Hörl and Kiessling meet in the week from the 23rd of October to experiment with the medium of aquatint and subsequently present their results at Centrum. The title 52,4821056 + 13,4293293 = many describes the geographical coordinates of Centrum’s location marking it as the starting point for their research and collaboration. Very much like starting out from a pin on the map the project is open to develop in any possible direction and into any form of presentation.
The project realised at Centrum is generously supported by the Iceland Academy of the Arts and Muggur fund.
Installation views: Ute Klein
Finissage & Film Screening – All That is Solid (2014) and Lettres du Voyant (2013) by Louis Henderson: Sunday, 23 July 8pm
Celebrating the end of the exhibition Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth, Centrum were very pleased to have been able to show two films by Louis Henderson: All That is Solid (2014) is a desktop-documentary and technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra and illegal gold mines of Ghana. Henderson constructs a mise-en-abyme as critique of the capitalist myth of digital technology's immateriality of – reconnecting the Cloud to its earthly origins in rare metals. The second film, Lettres du Voyant (2013) is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana that attempts to uncover some truths about a mysterious practice called "Sakawa" – internet scams mixed with voodoo magic. Tracing back the scammers’ stories to the times of Ghanaian independence, the film proposes Sakawa as a form of anti-neocolonial resistance. Henderson’s protagonist takes us on a voyage through a network of digitised mine shafts that lead the viewer to each of the film’s locations, a gold mine, an e-waste dump, a voodoo ritual or a discotheque, eventually revealing the colonial history of Ghana, of gold, and of technology.
Smell Transplant – Olfactory Workshop by Klara Ravat: Friday, 14 July 6-9pm
As part of an olfactory workshop – Smell Transplant – with artist Klara Ravat, we investigated how human interaction changes after you have swapped body odours with another person. By doing this, she hopes to understand to what extent your unique smell is part of your identity. If you were to suddenly smell like someone else, would you still really be you? Would people still behave the same way towards you? Next to this experiment Klara also gave a general introduction about the distilling of scents. The workshop was generously supported by the Amsterdam Fonds voor der Kunst.
Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth, 24 + 25 June 2017, 3-7pm
Kirstin Burckhardt / Jae Kyung Kim / Stefano Miraglia / Hana Sackler / Jonathan Vinel
During 48 Hours Neukölln festival, Centrum presented a prelude to the exhibition Shades of Today: Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth through a series of video and audio works and a light box installation: In Game Call (2017) Hana Sackler combines artificial and recorded everyday sounds with diverse video sequences that shift and gradually intensify in rhythm and quantity of audio and visual stimuli, creating an environment overloaded with contradictory information which emulates our media-saturated way of life. Stefano Miraglia's experimental film Anoche (2017) was produced in the UK in direct response to the Brexit vote, evoking the ancient myth of the Minotaur and the sensation of disorientation and anguish – ‘When Rome is dust the Minotaur will moan, once more in the endless dark of its rank palace’ (Jorge Luis Borges). In Martin Cries (2017) Jonathan Vinel confronts viewers with the emotional impact of loss, alienation, sadness, rage, and violence within a virtual game, questioning the authenticity of our closeness not only to each other but also to ourselves. Kirstin Burckhardt’s sound piece Imagination is a Powerful Tool (2016) is a fictitious ‘Ted Talk’ that draws attention to the fine line between experiencing and imagining and brings perceptions of truth and reality into play. 2+2=5 (2016) is the title of a project by Jae Kyung Kim featuring a light box, which shows collages of photos downloaded from Google Street View in which houses have been partially blurred due to Germany’s privacy policy and attempt to legally regulate the US-American technology company’s collection and use of geographic image data.
Joseph Craig – Home is Where the Hearth is, Publication launch & Readings: Sunday 23 April, 7-10pm
A new publication accompanied Joseph Craig’s exhibition Home is Where the Hearth is, which was launched with some readings of the artist’s text. The readings were the final enactment and were presented by Anna-Maria Hadorn, Inês Miguel, and Sebastian Rein.
Order a copy of the publication here.
Rob Blake – "Mantric Phonemes: an improvised collaborative choral exercise":
Saturday 28 January, 7.30pm
Mantric Phonemes is an improvised collaborative choral exercise which uses the sacred word “om”, and mobile phones. Participants created experimental choral and drone textures with the devices. Incanting the ancient sound and creating harmonious dialogue with each other and the phones via satellites, perhaps we aimed at reaching a higher plane of understanding and acceptance of our new digitally augmented environment. Mantric Phonemes took place on the occasion of Rob Blake's solo exhibition at Centrum and as part of the Vorspiel festival, a citywide programme of events before and during the transmediale and CTM festivals in January and February 2017.
Listen to an audio recording of the performance "Mantric phonemes".
Part I: Animation, Friday 4 November 2016, 7.30pm
Paolo Bandinu / Mariola Brillowska / Sam Finn / Amy Lockhart / Marte Kiessling / N’Doye Douts
Part II: Supercut, Friday 11 November 2016, 7.30pm
Katharina Arndt / Eli Cortiñas / Keren Cytter / Christian Jankowski / Matthias Müller
Part III: The Artist as Protagonist, Friday 18 November 2016, 7.30pm
Guy Ben-Ner / Hans Diernberger / Beth Dillon / Niklas Goldbach / Minsun Lee / Adrian Melis / Michael Meneghetti / Jodie Whalen / Ming Wong
Part IV: Videoessay, Friday 25 November 2016, 7.30pm
Allison de Fren / Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau / Ross Jardine / Kihlberg & Henry / Sonya Lacey / Hanne Lippard
On four consecutive Fridays in November Centrum saw the second edition of the Kunst Film Fest, a series of themed film screenings exploring a different genre from the realm of video art each night starting with animation. The second part of the Kunst Film Fest #2 was dedicated to a selection of supercuts. The term supercut was coined by blogger Andy Baio in 2008 as a 'genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliché from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.' Part three of the Kunst Film Fest #2 featured a selection of videos in which the artists take the lead role. As the fourth and final part we have been watching a selection of video essays on a variety of subjects. As a genre the video essay can be situated between documentary film and video art. As a practice it is simultaneously artistic, theoretical, and political. According to artist and theorist Ursula Biemann 'it is not about documenting realities, but rather a form of organising complexities.' We were excited and honoured to co-host the premiere of a new video essay I can't stop watching by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, which can be watched here.
Download the entire programme here.
Photo documentation by Ute Klein.
Project Residency by Oliver Walker, 24 September - 9 October 2016
Open Studio: Saturday 8 & Sunday 9 October 2016, 3-7pm
Oliver Walker’s new project engages with energy production, innovation, and power structures. Walker created a rudimentary wave-powered generator during a residency at Bank Art in Yokohama, Japan, earlier this year and continued developing the project while at Centrum. The artist’s idea is to further develop and improve the first prototypes to enable him to produce enough energy to sell it into the market. Finally, Walker intends to use the money raised to pay a lobbyist working in energy policy, although the final form of this investment is still to be decided.
With its familiar inventiveness, the project is easy for viewers to engage with, joining the artist in learning how to make something new. However, this path to a brighter future is somehow cut short by the prospect of rather dry political lobbying, trying to buy the ear of politicians to affect political change. Although technological inventions are necessary, they are useless without the political will to implement them. Can a focus on (individual) technological solutions even be detrimental in avoiding the main issue at hand – fundamental political, democratic, and economic change?
The project residency also offered the opportunity to continue interviews to find out more about the issues around renewable energy, and more specifically to address the gap between where we currently stand, and where we need to be, and understand what it is that prevents us from getting there. Visitors were welcome during the residency.
Madeline Stillwell – Prelude to Never Loving Again, Sunday 21 August 2016, 4 - 10pm
As this year's contribution to the PROJECT SPACE FESTIVAL, Centrum has invited the US-American artist Madeline Stillwell to show her new work Prelude to Never Loving Again for the first time in Berlin.
Prelude to Never Loving Again is a performed Video Collage featuring the artist singing and performing her version of Wagner’s first scene from Das Rheingold. Stillwell plays the roles of 3 river nymphs, a greedy dwarf, and Wagner himself. Collaging herself into the imaginary landscape of an urban construction site, the 'stage' becomes the street, and the props she uses seem to grow out of the space behind. The artist appears as though she is draped across a water tank, digging up treasures from under a compression pump, or floating above rows of arched water pipes while conducting an orchestra. The text serves as both a narrative of the opera itself, and a commentary that criticizes such long-standing love-story clichés. The work can be seen as a self-portrait, in which the artist explores simultaneously conflicting emotional states - being both in and out of love, both in and out of the process of making art.
Download the press text here.
Photo documentation by WhyAlix.
Film Stripping at Centrum: 25 + 26 June 2016, 3-7pm
On the occasion of 48 Hours Neukölln, Centrum in collaboration with Thais de Almeida Prado presents a weekend with short films selected from an open call.
TIMETABLE
Saturday · 25 June - 3pm / Sunday · 26 June - 6pm
Rob Blake / MEMES, 1:56 min
Minsun Lee / Superpower, 6:25 min
Christina Read / The brain, my brain, 2:21 min
Max Grau / «[...] craving for narrative», 23:48 min
Chrischa Oswald / THE WORLD, 3:14 min
Shusuke Nishimatu / The Crazy Tourist, 13:38 min
Saturday · 25 June - 4pm / Sunday · 26 June - 5pm
Ina Schoof & Ana Baumgart / I guess you don't know me 07, 15:41 min
Marte Kiessling / Ilse Kiessling – Decisions, 4:55 min
Maximilian Haslberger / Kill Bull, 9:25 min
Peter Barnard / 1914, 1:29 min
Joshua Reiman, Panoramique de l'immatériel / 22:08 min
Saturday · 25 June - 5pm / Sunday · 26 June - 4pm
Levan Manjavidze / Trees, 2:09 min
Paolo Bandinu / Meandro Rosso, 3:09 min
Rachel Alliston / Ruby Tinsley, 7:16 min
Thais de Almeida Prado / Exercice du Regarde, 8:23 min
Beate Spitzmüller / AMIGO, 3:27 min
Akio Yuguchi / Avec, 18:31 min
Saturday · 25 June - 6pm / Sunday · 26 June - 3pm
Christine Lucy Latimer / Still Feeling Blue About Colour Separation, 2 min
Peter Barnard / Promise of Life, 4:02 min
Sebastian Mez / Substanz, 14 min
Ulla Nolden / PURE MOVEMENT 1, environment 1, 1:23 min
Joshua Reiman / A Brief Inquiry, 3:55 min
Annique Delphine / ABUNDANCE, 3:12 min
Leyla Rodriguez / OPTIMISTIC COVER, 4:29 min
Peter Barnard / I Feel, You Feel, 9:18 min
Graphic design: Agnese Laguzzi
Photo documentation by Ute Klein
Centrum Open Studio with Lucia Simòn Medina, Thursday 16 June 2016, 7pm
In her work Lucia Simòn Medina is interested in pre-linguistic thought processes and in the role of movement as pre-lingual means of communication. For her Open Studio at Centrum Simòn Medina presents her latest project TO A RI E. To explore these and related questions, the artist has chosen a quasi-scientific, systematic approach developing complex math-based notations and collaborating with professional dancers and singers.
Inspired by mathematical, scientific, and democratic systems Simòn Medina in her work minimises her own subjectiveness and freedom of decision-making. Instead, the artist has developed a serial method combining and interconnecting different ‘democratic’ structures. Simòn Medina’s notations, compositions, and choreographies are based on a combination of two systems, twelve-tone serialism and prime numbers. In the notations the smallest unit, a square centimetre, represents a number and is interpreted as one second. While Notation #12 (for voice) reads horizontally from left to right, Notation #13 (for movement) reads vertically from top to bottom. In both notations, all of the contained prime and Goldbach numbers are highlighted in green or blue respectively. As a means to interpret the notations and help the singer and dancer translate them into sound and movement, Simòn Medina has produced another, secondary set of notations using the International Phonetic Alphabet chart to translate Notation #12 (for voice) into different vowel sounds at different pitches. Developing an interpretation aid for Notation #13 (for movement) Simòn Medina has worked with a chart of the human body enumerating different muscles from head to toe. Handing over both sets of notations to two professionals, the dancer Johannes Schuchardt, and the singer Rainer Killius, Simòn Medina’s project is complemented by their individual interpretations.
Download the press text here.
Emily Perry – Woman with Salad, 28 + 29 May 2016
Performances: Saturday 28 May 2016, 5.30pm, performances start at 6pm
Discussion: Sunday, 29 May 2016, 5pm
Emily Perry’s weekend-long exhibition and performance programme, Woman with Salad, reflects on the relationship between media images and appearances and the physical and social constraints that determine identity. Responding to identified forms of pressure and stereotypes seen through a gendered and cultural lens the artist uses humour to engage her audience in the moment, allowing them to consider issues around gender, sexuality, personality, and the experiences of other people.
For her performances at Centrum, Perry has transformed the exhibition space into a living sculpture garden. A recurring theme in Perry's recent work has been to show women perform pointless or unnecessarily difficult tasks, or for women to take on the role of an object. This form of humorous social critique is intended to mainly, although not exclusively, address the image of women in contemporary culture. Perry has approached this performance event at first considering ‘things women do in paintings’ thereby focusing on paintings by Jan Vermeer and other 17th century Dutch artists’ depictions of women, as well as results from Google images searching ‘women with …’ and ‘things women do in popular gifs’. By referring to modern representation and image format as well as to relevant examples in art history, Emily Perry’s Woman with Salad is an ironic comment on the role of women in contemporary society: Through the stereotypical actions, repeated in an ongoing loop, the female performers become first absurd reflections of themselves until finally turning into lifeless objects.
On Sunday the 29th of May, the artist and the performers met again for a round table discussion (without the table) inviting active participation from visitors for a lively exchange of ideas.
A special and warm Thank You to the committed performers Zahra Banzi, Camille Darroux, Stefanie Dietzel, Lauren Heckler, Kyra Jacques, Nicole Mahalla, and Daphne Rouillard Urruchi.
Download the press text here. / Zum Pressetext hier klicken.
Photo documentation: Stefanie Dietzel & Alexander Gehlsdorf
Centrum Open Studio with Martin Blake, Thursday 28 April 2016, 5pm
"My paintings are realized as fabrics that challenge the fixation of a defined material world. They hold objects and human figures depicted fundamentally within spaces created out of erratic processes. My recent work includes the human figure, which reflects myself, the people known and experienced by myself, and the idea of personification. Much of this idea comes from Titian’s painting 'Venus and Adonis' made during the 1550s, a portrayal of Ovid’s 'The Metamorphoses'. The conjoined figures within it embody the empathic nature of a Greek myth, which is translatable to a commonly understood human experience. The painting is a space that exemplifies harmony, inviting a continuous and meandering rumination upon the complexities of human emotion and struggle, but more importantly the simple but monumental ideas of life and action. Taking influence from this painting, figures have become vehicles of experience that can reflect the viewer, her associates, and her strangers."
Photo documentation by Ute Klein
Holger Pohl – 4 1/2 hours - manuscript of a tennis match
Exhibition & Artist Book Release, Tuesday 22 March 2016, 6 - 10.30pm
It had something of David versus Goliath, as Ivan Lendl and Michael Chang faced each other in the second round of the French Open on the 5th of June in 1989. On one side the 29-year-old Czechoslovakian Ivan Lendl, confidently leading in the world rankings, on the other side the 17-year-old US-American Michael Chang. After extreme physical and psychological strain on both sides, Chang finally won the match. His charge from below against an exasperated Lendl rendered the game legendary.
Holger Pohl has transcribed and translated the infamous match graphically. Manuscript of a tennis match documents the four and a half hour match in thirty individual images (acrylic on chromolux cardboard). The whole game is visualised in its temporal extent by using crosses representing one second of the match alternating with the referee announcements. 4 1/2 hours - Manuscript of a tennis match has been released as a publication by Textem Verlag in February 2016. On the occasion of the release Centrum will has hosted a 4 1/2 hour exhibition screening the infamous match from 6 to 10.30pm.
Read the press text here. / Für den Pressetext hier klicken.
Artist Talk: Rachel Alliston – Property of a Private Collection, Wednesday 24 February 2016, 8pm
On the occasion of her exhibition at Centrum Property of a Private Collection Rachel Alliston spoke about her three new works, products of the artist’s recent research into philanthropist, horticulturalist and art collector Bunny Mellon (1910-2014).
Rachel Alliston is an American artist based in Berlin. Her background is in art history (BA, University of Bristol, 2005), visual art (Hunter College New York, 2008-2011) and sculpture (MA, Slade School of Fine Art London, 2013). In recent years her work as an artist has become influenced and informed by working as organiser and programme curator at Decad, a not-for-profit art organisation, which she founded in 2012, and her experience as founder and editor of Press LMP, an art-book press she established in 2015.
To listen to the audio recording, follow this link.
MOMENTUM AiR Open Studio with Linda Carrara, Saturday 7 November 2015, 6 - 10pm
Centrum is very pleased to have been hosting the Open Studio of Linda Cararra, the Terna Prize Artist-in-Residence at MOMENTUM.
Linda Carrara’s painting is made of simple shapes and structures. That is to say, objects, insofar as they correspond to those features. Their representation mainly emphasises spatial dimensions, volumes and lines, with an economy of means that makes the interaction they have with each other sensitive, rather than their own constitution or appearance. In this, the main interest is not the object as a material thing, but the object as a taut space, connected to the related objects. This is a dynamic ecosystem, an organization of fullness and emptiness that offers the mind ways to perceive the world, without the world. Life without life. (Herve Ic)
During her Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Linda Carrara continues her research on architecture as the abstract space of thinking. She will go deeper into the question of projection of light on canvas, and she will analyze the relationship between the shadow and light of the canvas, the relation with the space that surrounds it and the enigma between the projection of light and light of the painting.
Lecture on Chance #1, Saturday 10 October 2015, 5pm
Agnieszka Anna Wolodzko (Leiden University) 'Thinking Against Chance or How Something New is Possible'
The notion of chance, although in the common understanding carrying a sense of that which might be unexpected, is linked to the concept of probability. Here lies a particular paradox: in order for chance to be perceived, there must be a holistic vision of events. Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko discusses how we can think about the new while keeping the notion of unpredictability and the non-linear understanding of causality. In this way, the problem of chance will be examined as the problem of creativity and experimentation.
Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn (Poland) and an MA in The Philosophy of Art History from Leiden University (The Netherlands). She is a PhD candidate in the cultural disciplines at Leiden University investigating ways in which art, by using living bodies as its medium, reveals overall cultural, social and political significance of affect in the contemporary understanding of biotechnologically manipulated bodies. In particular she is interested in how art comes with ethical concerns and responsibilities within its creative practice which in turn exposes the aesthetico-ethical implications for the new material meaning production. Her recent publication in English is ‘Materiality of affect. How art can reveal the more subtle realities of an encounter,’ in Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn (ed.) This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life, Rodopi: Amsterdam/New York, 2015.
To listen to the audio recording, follow this link.
Film Screening, Sunday 11 October 2015, 5pm
Screening of Przypadek (engl. Blind Chance), dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski (1987)
114min., Polish with English subtitles
with an introduction by Jagoda Kamola
Blind Chance (Polish: Przypadek), written and directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, presents three storylines, told in succession; the impetus to the storylines is when a medical student Witek (Bogusław Linda) tries to catch his train to Warsaw. This incident could influence the rest of his life; his political orientation, belief, career and whom he loves.
Lecture on Chance #2, Tuesday 13 October 2015, 7pm
Noam Libeskind (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam) on 'Coincidences in Nature'
The 20th century undoubtedly changed the way we think about most things from humanity to nature. In physics and astronomy this is particularly true as the classical clockwork world of Newton was turned upside down by the revolution triggered by Einsteinian relativity and Quantum mechanical uncertainty. Many of the great discoveries were a result of apparent coincidences, which ultimately revealed the modern view of the physical world.
Noam Libeskind studied theoretical physics at University College London and Mathematics at the University of Cambridge before completing his PhD in 2006 at the Institute for Computational cosmology, in Durham on the topic of galaxy formation. He spent his first post doc in Jerusalem and then came to Potsdam where he has been working in the "large scale structure group" at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics. His research is focused on the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe, Dark matter, black holes, and galaxies. Noam Libeskind has written more than 40 scientific papers including articles for the Scientific American. Currently he is about to move to Madrid, where he will take up a Ramon y Cajal position (junior professorship). Most recently, Noam Libeskind co-designed a chandelier together with his father which was built by Zumtobel (https://libeskind.com/work/el-chandelier/).
To listen to the audio recording, follow this link.
Centrum – Stage & Café, 27 + 28 June 2015, 2 - 7pm
On the occasion of 48 Hours Neukölln Festival, Centrum will transform into a stage and gar-den café for a weekend of artists' short films and performances, coffee and cake.
Artists' Short Films: 27 June, 4 - 7pm
Miriam de Búrca (*1972, Munich, DE): Meadow, 2009
Hans Diernberger (1983, Munich, DE): N like Nancy, 2012
Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau (1985, UK): Abjection, Transcendence, Desire & Disgust 2015
Adrian Melis (*1985, La Habana, CU): Surplus Production Line, 2014
Lucie Mercadal (*1987, Besançon, FR): l'histoire de Joseph et Anna, 2013
kate hers RHEE (*n.s. in Seoul, KR): (no) regrets, 2014
Rizki Resa Utama (**1982 in Bandung, ID): Happy Family, 2013
Performance Programme Feelings, Blockages, and Pots: 28 June, 5 - 7pm
- Chloe Cooper, Feeling Feelings, 2013-2015
In her performance, the artist Chloe Cooper (*1984, UK) invites visitors to participate in a feeling, a collective exploration of the affective presence and physiognomic appeal of objects in space.
- Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Acceptable Blockages, 2011-2015
Acceptable Blockages is a lecture about the official and unofficial vernaculars of spatial guidance. Ranging from the 'high' language of designed street furniture and signage, to the non-standard patois of gaffa tape, laminated paper and string, space is demarcated and people are guided by a multiplicity of visual languages in public spaces. This slide-show lecture will take us through the artist’s archive of different forms of 'acceptable blockage'.
A video recording of Acceptable Blockages is available here: https://vimeo.com/132331082
BODY / LANGUAGE – wrestling with gestures and words, 30 + 31 May 2015
Opening with Performances: Saturday 30 May 2015, 7pm (performances start at 7.15pm)
Screening and Artist's Talk: Sunday 31 May 2015, 5pm
curated by Yvonne Scheja
BODY / LANGUAGE – wrestling with gestures and words was a two-day project focussing on performance as artistic medium. The title reflects the essential components of performative works, and refers to the main means of communication that also constitute our identity: body, language, and body language. But what happens if they are wilfully manipulated or distorted, or if there is a lack of knowledge of codes and rituals of a language or of a certain cultural sphere so that communication becomes hindered or even completely impossible?
Bearing these questions in mind the artists Lucie Mercadal (*1987 in Besançon, France), kate hers RHEE (*n.s. in Seoul, Korea, raised in the USA) and Rizki Resa Utama (*1982 in Bandung, Indonesia) followed the invitation to approach the complex term BODY / LANGUAGE through performance. In 1, 2, 3 – Liebelei Lucie Mercadal plays with the expectations of communication partners and confronts them with these, while RHEE in her work Asians are the new Jews tackles the problem of Asians and Jews as so-called "model minorities" and generally ethnic discrimination within societies. Both artists will present their new works for the first time. In Today Utama asks to which extent the simultaneous use of different languages leads to an individual expression, characterised and intermingled by diverse cultural influences. On the second day, after a screening of their video works, the three artists will discuss the wrestling with gestures and words.
Fotos: Merve Terzi
For the press text, click here. / Für den Pressetext hier klicken.
Premiere: The Interval by Úna Quigley, 12 August 2014, 8pm
The visual script of The Interval was informed by an excerpt from an anchor literary work– Iris Murdoch’s 1978 novel The Sea the Sea. In this work the central character’s equilibrium is disrupted by an unbearable vision in the sea. He describes the interval of time needed to process his vision and questions the possibility of his eyes projecting images onto reality like a cinematic apparatus.
This work was grant-aided by Ealain na Gaeltachta Teo
Performed by: Hugo Seale and Natasha Bourke
Hallucination scene in collaboration with artist Kate Squires
Sound/Music: Loz Fitzgibbon
The premiere of The Interval by Úna Quigley was part of the PROJECT SPACE FESTIVAL 2014.
Foto documentation by Paul Henschel.
Sense and Non-sense – a Festival of Absurdism, 5 - 25 November 2013
The starting point for Sense and Non-sense - A Festival of Absurdism are the texts of Albert Camus and Søren Kierkegaard. The fundamental contradiction of purposelessness of the human condition to find meaning in life, this conflict leads to the absurd. Camus ascertains that the anxiety from the absurd is what drives artists to create. An absurd artist should be content with describing and highlighting personal aspects of life (within the world they inhabit) rather than hoping for anything more. Camus also writes about language, as a tool for explanation but an absurd writer would create a world through images rather than attempting to explain matters. Exhibition, reading, screening and performance take place in a festival aimed at unearthing Absurdism in current art practice with New Zealand based artist Matthew Crookes. Crookes will lead a reading group each Tuesday and every Friday different artists will contribute works.
Evening of Absurdism #1: Friday 8 November 2013, 8pm
Dave Ball presents 'A Curiously Unremarkable Journey'; alongside new works by Matthew Crookes.
Absurdism Reading group #1: Tuesday 12 November 2011, 7pm
Previous texts: Albert Camus's text Absurd Creation from his famous work The Myth of Sisyphus. The reading group is held in English. Download the text here. We will read the text at the beginning of the evening. The Reading Group starts at 7pm led by Matthew Crookes.
Evening of Absurdism # 2: Friday 15 November 2013, 7pm
Via Skype from New Zealand, Christina Read will present 'Being and Event' starting at 8pm.
From 9pm Hannah Murgatroyd will read her text: ‘Anatolia Sunrise’ from Hours Told. A collection of twelve short stories, one for each of the twelve hours of the day.
Absurdism Reading group #2: Tuesday 19 November 2013, 7pm
The second Reading Group text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty is taken from Freedom, pp 434-6 from Phenomenology of Perception, Forgotten Books 2012. The reading group is held in English. Download the text here. We will read the text at the beginning of the evening.The Reading Group starts at 7pm led by Matthew Crookes.
Evening of Absurdism # 3: Friday 22 November 2013, 8pm
Matthew Crookes will show his Sisyphean video work which he been filmed in collaboration with climbers at Humboldthain over some trips to Berlin. Una Quigley introduces her talk and performance on Antonin Artaud and the Absurd body, via Skype form the West of Ireland. Her live performance is based on a radio play by French playwright, and theatre director Antonin Artaud. Kate Squires has created a time based sculpture- performance based on the failiure of language, the will be performed live and then shown on a monitor.
Matthew Crookes is an Auckland based artist and writer. Born in the UK, he has lived in New Zealand since 2002. Since 2006 he has exhibited in Auckland, Wellington, Newcastle NSW and Melbourne. He has undertaken residencies at the LockUp Cultural Centre in Newcastle NSW Australia, Culturia in Berlin, and at the Institut fuer alles Moeglich in Berlin Wedding. Crookes was a contributor to Volume 1 (Clouds Publishing/Artspace Auckland) Francis Alys, and to Ack (Clouds Publishing/Artspace Auckland), an anthology brought out as part of New Zealand Artist Peter Robinson’s work of the same name. He contributed artist’s pages to edition 5.1 of Un Magazine, the Melbourne based art and critical review. He divides his time between Auckland, Newcastle NSW and Berlin and is currently researching The Purpose of the Absurd in Contemporary Fine Art Practice towards a DocFA at the University of Auckland.
Dave Ball studied at Goldsmiths College, London (MA) and the University of Derby, UK (BA). His work explores absurdity, irrationality and the interaction between sense and non-sense. It asks: how are our rational understandings of the world constructed? What are the consequences of these rational structures? In what ways can it be productive to deliberately avoid rationality? And what alternative understandings of the world can be generated through absurd practices? He often uses humour as a way of exploring these ideas, and his work is generally characterised by a philosophical playfulness. Ball works in video, performance, drawing, and photography, and has worked on participatory projects in collaboration with artists and experts from other fields. Ball has shown widely at venues including Oriel Mostyn, Wales; Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, Gdansk; NGBK, Berlin; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Iniva, London; Atelier 35, Bucharest; and Ha Gamle Prestegard, Norway. Residencies include Est-Nord-Est, Quebec, Canada; Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, Germany; and Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales.
Christina Read is an artist living and working in New Zealand. Themes central to Read’s practice are: the homemade and handmade; common anxieties; aspirations versus dreams; humour and pathos. Her solo exhibitions and awards include, Other Possibilities, Enjoy Gallery, Wellington, 2013; The Usual: some of the most interesting things in the world, Rm Gallery Auckland, 2012; 6 Ideas from the Database of Happiness, Headland on the Gulf, Waiheke Island 2011; The Psychologist’s Bookshelf, Newcall Gallery, Auckland 2009; The Barge and the Bear, Blue Oyster Dunedin 2008; and being the recipient of the New Zealand National Drawing Award, for her drawing “I should have been a detective,” 2006.
Hannah Murgatroyd is a writer and artist based in Germany and the UK. Her work hinges on explorations of narrative, in written and painted forms. Since 2009, she has been evolving an open visual narrative under the title of 'Lumpenstadt'. A novel of images, unfolding over paper and canvas rather than the pages of a book. She studied at the Royal College of Art, where she won the Man Drawing Prize in 2005.
Una Quigley was born in Dublin in 1974. She works mainly in film and video. She graduated with an MA in European Fine Art from Winchester School of Art in 2001. She has exhibited widely since then, such as at the Kassel film festival, the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Eva international, and most recently at Centrum Berlin and the Crawford Gallery, Ireland. Her work was part of the exhibition series and book "Cooling -out on the paradox of feminism' which took place in Ireland and Germany. She has recieved several wards from the Irish Arts council and Culture Ireland. Having recently relocated from Berlin to the West of Ireland, she is currently making new work on film. Forthcoming exhibitions include a screening at the Goethe Institute, Dublin.
Kate Squires was born in London in 1973 and currently lives in London and Berlin. She is an artist, arts consultant and curator and runs Centrum Berlin, an a project room for contemporary art and culture. Her recent installation, The Un-namebable Things, inspired by the Austrian architect Margerete Schütte-Lihotzky was shown at Das Raum, Berlin. She was part of the group show The Edge of The Real with Nicoll Ullrick, Angela Ender and Stefanie Sofort, her work has been shown at the Institute Cervantes, London and at the London Art Fair.
Kunst Film Fest #1: Rose Butler, Lines of Resistance, Friday 22 March 2013, 8pm
Lines of Resistance explores our interaction with memorials or sites of tragedy and how our navigation and consumption is mediated.
Rose Butler is interested in human behavior within particular sites or spaces if interest and how our encounter with societal structures for public engagement play out. Rose Butler has screened and exhibited work internationally, completing a residency at Centrum last year. She will broadcast audio work Ocarina as part of Reuse Aloud in the UK on Basic FM March 2013. Her video The Organ Grinder is touring internationally as part of One Minutes Volume 6. Rose received an award at the Becks Futures Student Prize 2004 for the multi-screen animation Platform. Her digital short BOX represented Western Europe in the One Minute Awards; Amsterdam and she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize for Moving Image. Rose is a Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Sheffield.
Kunst Film Fest #1: Bill Leslie, Pefect Geometry, with a live performance by Daren Pickles, Friday 15 March 2013, 8pm
In Perfect Geometry, structures revolve slowly in space. The objects are abstracted with the use of oblique angles, close-ups and variations in focus and lighting, creating a continual shift in scale, material and figuration. The work references Modernist 'utopian' artworks as well as 3D digital technology. Through Centrum, Leslie worked in collaboration with recording artist and sound designer, Daren Pickles (who gave a Sonic Lecture in 2012), to create an electronic soundtrack which was performed live with Pickles' collaborator Nick Peters (via Livestream).
Bill Leslie was a resident artist at Centrum already in 2010 when he developed experimental soundtracks and created new artwork. This new film was a continuation of this and he was able to come back to screen his film and continue the dialogue with artists and people that he met when he was resident here. Bill Leslie is concerned with the relationship between photographic media and the sculptural object. He makes objects that relate to historical artworks, architecture and film, especially from the canon of Modernity. They are then augmented or transformed through film with the particularities of analogue or digital media. Through this process of reproduction Leslie's work can be disorientating, questioning the object reality and creating an aesthetic which can be both futuristic and retrospective. Bill Leslie studied theatre, before turning to sculpture, film and photography, and receiving an MA in Visual Performance and time-based media at Darlington College of Art. He has had solo shows at the Permanent Gallery Brighton and the Arnolfini in Bristol, where he was associate artist. He currently lives and works in London.
Daren Pickles has worked with creative audio technology for over 25 years, as a recording artist with electronic music act Supercharger and as a composer for film and television. In 2003 he collaborated with David Arnold on the film '2 Fast 2 Furious'. Daren is a Senior Lecturer in Music Technology at Coventry University and is currently researching feedback systems in musical composition for his PhD.
Kunst Film Fest #1: Una Quigley, Gifted Water, Friday 8 March 2013, 8pm
Gifted Water is a psychodrama involveing one character who is constantly permeated by her shifting environment. The character evolved physically with the collaboration of dancer Sheena McGrandles, whose work is concerned with an attempt to disturb the body and the space it inhabits.
Úna Quigley works with video and film. She aims to deconstruct ideas of identity relating to questions of gender and difference. Along a narrative line, her work investigates the affective potential of the body and space in film. Una recieved an Artists Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2011 which enabled her to make this work. She recently screened new work at the Kino Central in Mitte, Berlin and will take part in False Optimism at the Crawford Art Gallery in Ireland this April.
Directed and filmed by Úna Quigley (2012)
Performed by: Sheena McGrandles
Voice: Úna Quigley
Sound/Music: Laurence Fitzgibbon
Camera and edit: Úna Quigley
Film screening, HD video and Super8 film, sound, 14 min.
Kunst Film Fest #1: Claire Waffel, Bužňa, Friday 1 March 2013, 8pm
Bužňa was a two-screen installation which showed a concert hall in Slovakia that, for ideological purposes, lost its former function as a religious building. The space was re-appropriated under Communism in the 50s and a lowered prefabricated ceiling introduced in order to hide the ornamental religious cupola of the former synagogue.
Claire Waffel is based in Berlin. She works with film, photography and drawing to develop installations and projects. The central themes in her work are memory and time and she examines the potential of different media to represent these. She often explores historic references, unearthing comparable time structures in people or places.
Sonic Lecture #8: The Folk of Digital Primitive, James Barrett, Sunday, 8 July 2012, 7pm
"This is not an urban avant-garde but a diffuse collection of people who came of age in a world were the image knows no boarder and sounds are free. Many live outside the major centres but communicate and publicise their work via the Net. Dowloading, uploading, forums and streamed media has created a global network of digital primitives who play the sort of folk music that few dreamed of 20 years ago. However, the present day bone and electricity groups follow in the footsteps of such luminaries as the Sun City Girls, The Flower Travelling Band, to name but two."
The lecture will explore how the Internet in the last decade has produceed a global network of music made by low-fi, at home, DIY groups and released on CDRs by tiny music labels. James looks in particular at a scene that has produced bands such as The Jewelled Antler Collective, Sunburned Hand of the Man and The North Sea have plied their sounds on labels such as Foxy Digitalis, Secret Eye, Manhand, Music Your Mind Will Love You and Fonal Records. From his personal experience as founding member of the group 6majik9 and the Music Your Mind Will Love You collective amongst others, Jim Barret will talk about the intersecting Internet communities of these bands, the sounds they make and the creative arts model they represent.
Album launch and live performance: Phil Morris – Tal Steady Kill - TSK, with artwork by Ross Walker, Friday 1 June 2012, 8pm
Phil Morris (aka Tal Steady Kill), makes serene and disquieting soundscapes using heavy and distorted analogue synth sounds influenced by John Carpenter, Brian Eno, Cluster and Vangelis. TSK is his first album release as a solo artist. He plays drums for Koeaddi Three and, Arc, he is from Southern England and lives and works in Berlin.
https://talsteadykill.bandcamp.com/album/tsk
Sonic Lecture #7: The beautiful heuristic: Brian Eno, the 'non-musician' and his systemic approach, Daren Pickles, Sunday 6 May 2012, 7pm
Brian Eno is one of the most influential and innovative producers in popular music but also one of the most unconventional. His forty-year career, which has included collaborations with artists such as Roxy Music, David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2 as well as his own musical developments, has permeated the sound of modern pop music. His motivations and working practices, however, are drawn from areas that have very little to do with music or conventional media. This lecture addresses these oblique influences and explores Eno's oracle like abilities to pick artists, musical genres and working systems that have become part of the mainstream continuum.
Daren Pickles has worked with creative audio technology for 25 years, from an apprenticeship as a sound engineer to a career in the music and film industries as a recording artist and sound designer. He has been a senior Lecturer in Music Technology at Coventry University since 2009 and is about to commence a PhD in musical feedback systems.
Sonic Lecture #6: So can music really change the world?, Nathalie Gravanor, Sunday 29 April 2012, 7pm
Nathalie Gravanor’s Sonic Lecture ponders the question with a sub title: rallying calls and anthems, pranks, opening alternative spaces and modes of distribution.
She covers both pro- and opponents of this thesis and questions whether either camp has any new ideas:“What exactly constitutes change? That seems to be a key question. This lecture will propose different possibilities for music to impact a larger group than just the singer and his entourage and thus hopes to offer some stimuli for a fresh discussion.”
Featuring the unavoidable protest singer pantheon Seeger-Guthrie-MacColl-Dylan-Baez, John Cage, James Brown, Beatles vs. Stones, Crass, Laibach, Plastic People of the Universe, a selection of election campaign songs, Ton Steine Scherben, Kraftwerk, M.I.A and others.
http://www.eyzmedia.de/
Sonic Lecture #5: German Thrash – Extreme Metal For A Divided Nation, Philip Freeman, Sunday 12 February 2012, 7pm (6.45 doors), rsvp
German Thrash – Extreme Metal For A Divided Nation - Philip Freeman will discuss the three most important bands of the early 1980s thrash metal scene in Germany – Destruction, Sodom and Kreator. All these bands emerged in West Germany in the early 1980s, performing songs with themes of violence, nuclear war, and other typical metal concerns, with Kreator probably the most politically engaged of the three. The lecture will refer to songs from early albums like Destruction’s Infernal Overkill and Eternal Devastation, Sodom’s Obsessed By Cruelty and Persecution Mania, and Kreator’s Endless Pain and Pleasure To Kill. Kreator was the first metal band to perform in East Germany following the Berlin Wall coming down.
Centrum Sonic Lecture #4: A Boom Bap Continuum, Laurent Fintoni, Sunday 22 January 2012, 7pm
Laurent Fintoni's's Sonic Lecture is entitled A Boom Bap Continuum and looks at the evolution and mutation of hip hop's 'boom bap' sound aesthetic from 1999 to 2009 and beyond. Exploring the sound's early mutations in the 2000s via the work of people like Dabrye, Machinedrum, Prefuse 73 and El-P through to the work of people like Flying Lotus, Hudson Mohawke, Ras G and Mike Slott. Using a chronological backbone, music selection and newly sourced input from some of the early pioneers, the lecture will show how terms like trip hop, glitch hop, IDM and later wonky were ultimately often attempts at pigeon-holing boom bap's mutations into more comfortable boxes and how its sonic evolution was influenced from the soul and funk of the 70s to electronic music, rave and video games which led to its revival and continued popularity. As Laurent says: "A Boom Bap Continuum seeks to trace what I see as the fascinating evolution of hip hop's most enduring sonic aesthetic and how it was influenced by technological evolution, cultural and geographical mutations as well as hip hop's original ethos of 'do what you want with what you have." (Laurent's website)
Centrum Sonic Lecture #3: Spectres of Sound Reproduction, Rachel O’Dwyer, Sunday 11 December 2011, 7pm
Using a variety of examples from early recordings, sonic arts, contemporary and popular music, this lecture will explore themes such as time, presence, preservation and decay in sound recording from the Victorian era through to recent digital recording and remastering, and examine how the spectre of the past continues to haunt contemporary listening practices, musical genres and in particular our understandings of analogue and digital sound reproduction. (Rachel O’Dwyer)
Rachel O’Dwyer, teaches at Trinity College, Dublin and is Editor of Interference (A Journal of Audio Culture). The third lecture in the series at Centrum, Spectres of Sound Reproduction focuses on an area of music described as 'Hauntology'. Centrum's programme has already included other 'Hauntological' artists and nights including the Wolpertinger nights and collaborations with Leyland James Kirby (last month) and Position Normal (June 2010) who performed here.
Rsvp to david@centrumberlin.com for a place.
www.interferencejournal.com/
Sonic Lecture #2: nothin' but a bit ole collage, Jonny Mugwump, Sunday 13 November 2011, 7pm
Jonny Mugwump (Exotic Pylon), talks through some of the music he has be championing through his radio/night/label, highlighting some of the common threads running through his music; - in particular the notion of ambient music as something that transfers you to somewhere distinctly different (drawing on David Toop's Ocean of Sound), and the use of surrealism in music, for instance unusual contexts and things sounding 'out of place'.
Keep updated on the blog: https://pyloncitysymphony.wordpress.com/
Kirsten Heuschen, Konstellation & Nacht Kunst Flohmarkt, Saturday 5 November 2011, 7pm
For the second year, Centrum will be hosting an Artist Flea Market for Nacht&Nebel (Neukolln's autumn arts festival) as part of which the artist Kirsten Heuschen presents her project Konstellation in which she uses an old photographic fine-arts process, by which she treats coasters with cyanotype chemicals to sensitise them. She then uses various glasses, cups and illuminated containers to create typical cyan shades reminiscent of planets or stars. The cyanotypes are attached directly to the wall of the exhibition space in a site-specific constellation.
In addition to Kirsten Heuschen's presentation an additional number of artists are invited to participate in the festival and we will have a performance stage called Die Palette with music, stand-up, poetry, political rants, dance plus open mic - so bring along your talents. Die Palette (our stage will be a storage pallet) mc'd by resident poet Matty Ben. Our stalls for this year's Kunstflohmarkt will include mobile art work, wall based art work, make-your-own photogram, be part of a collective sound drawing, choose a cake, look at silkscreen's, choose a neclace. Artists include: Matty Ben, Kirsten Heuschen, Silke Kästner, David Littler, Olivia Pils, David Rhodes, Silent Sleep, Dang Woody and many more. Centrum bar will be offering food snacks, and gluehwein.
Sonic Lecture #1: Ancient Futurism, Leo Zhao, 22 October 2011, 7pm
The first in a series of Sonic Lectures entitled Ancient Futurism is by ethnomusicologist DJ Zhao. He plans to explore the many connections and continuities between pre-modern ancestral sound traditions and some of the most innovative of contemporary musical movements.
"From limited available evidence we will draw interrelated lines which form pictures of undeniable genealogy, which includes both advancement and deterioration, and further challenge outdated yet persisting notions of progress and today's common and severely distorted views of world cultures". (Leo Zhao)
Fête de la Musique with Kiss Akabusi, Infinite Livez and Gold Panda, Tuesday 21 June 2011, 7pm
Fête de la Musique next Tuesday features the very special line up of Infinite Livez and Gold Panda, going under the moniker of Kiss Akabusi.
Infinite Livez (who we're earmarking for a future Centrum residency) is a MC and musician from Bethnal Green, London, who studied at Chelsea Art College. His wide range of influences comes from such diverse sources as P-Funk, Surrealism and continental philosophy. He has released several albums on UK's Big Dada imprint and currently lives and works in Berlin.
Gold Panda (from Essex UK) built his reputation as remixer for the likes of Little Boots, Telepathe, Bloc Party, Simian Mobile Disco, Health and The Field, before releasing three EPs of his own material in the summer to huge critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, Dazed and Confused, The Guardian, NME and beyond. This won't be Kiss Akabusi's first performance, but they are rare and so should be savoured - don't miss this!
In the Movies – we want to screen your home movie as part of 48 Hours Neukölln, 18 + 19 June 2011
In particular, we are interested in home movies shot outside the home, for example…
- on holiday
- out for a picnic
- in the park
- in the street
Please bring the film (on DVD, Super 8, 16 mm, video tape, etc.) to: Centrum, Reuterstrasse 7, 12053 Berlin
Or ring: 030 762 12 096 / email: katewsquires@yahoo.co.uk
All material will be returned. (Please attach your name /telephone number /email address /address/short film description. We will credit all works shown.)
Callum Cooper – The Constant and the Flux: live video performances, 4 - 7 January 2011
Between Wednesday 4 and Saturday 7 January Callum Cooper will develop a video performance at different sites in Berlin culminating in a screening at Centrum on the 7th January; curated by Carmen Billows in collaboration with Centrum.
Callum Cooper is an artist filmmaker who is interested in the production of film, he has used camcorder's and iPhone's as filmmaking tools. For this project he has created a particular structure with attached cameras and invites members of the public to take part, making spontaneous films with the process firmly at the centre of the outcome.
Times and meeting places for performance:
Wednesday: 11am Tempelhof Flughafen (close to St. Thomas Kirchhof) / 2pm Görlitzer Park (close to Spreewaldplatz) / 3pm Schlesischer Busch (next to the Watch Tower)
Thursday: 11am Arconer Platz / 12am Mauerpark / 2pm Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (on Bernauer Straße) / 3.30pm Bodemuseum (next to Monbijoustraße)
Friday: 11am Bundeskanzleramt / 12am Haus der Kulturen der Welt (on roof top terrace) / 2pm Holocaust Mahnmal / 3.30pm Sony Centre (Potzdamer Platz)
Saturday: 1pm Alexander Platz (close by the TV Tower) / 3pm Centrum / 7pm Finnissage at Centrum (performance, film presentation and installation)
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Spatial Relations – Ola Bielas / Miriam de Búrca / Elham Rokni / Kate Squires / Julia Kouneski & Michelle Williams Gamaker / Claire Waffel / Linda Weiss, Saturday 11 December 2010, 7.30pm (tour starts at 8pm)
A programme of video screenings and installations at Centrum and nearby offsite spaces; curated by Waffelfisch in association with Centrum
Nine international artist’s works present different approaches to observing the city: the connection between the body and architecture; rewriting roles and possible actions in the city and experimenting with new angles on familiar territory. The videos take place in Belfast, Berlin, Sao Paulo and Tel Aviv and are shown for the first time at Centrum and offsite spaces in Neukölln allowing the work to relate to it’s surroundings.
Dig: Phase 1 "Exhumation", Saturday 4 December 2010, 5pm
Harriet Clare, Anna Johnston and Emma Koster hosted an evening of exploring and unearthing strange creatures. Their installation/performance piece created an unexplored nature area at Centrum in which visitors were invited to dig up the weird artefacts and to place them in history and science.
WOLPERTINGER – Steve Williams & David Moynihan, Thursday 4 November 2010, 8pm
Hauntological music and spectral delights - found sounds and the works of experimental musicians were used to compose 'sound paintings'. These were played with projections of eerie moving images taken from Berlin and silent cinema. The night also included two performance pieces – a séance and a swansong, and an attempted séance to rid Centrum, a former brothel, of the spell of sex.
48 Hours Neukölln with Silke Kästner, 25 - 27 June 2010
Film Screening: Friday 25 June 2010, 7.30pm
Screening of Double Burial 2010, Dai Lake Kashmir made during Silke's journey with Art Karavan. Double Burial is part of an ongoing series with white-painted newspapers.
Artist's talk and Film Screening: Saturday 26 June, 7.30pm
Silke will present her work on the Art Karavan and the work she's been making at Centrum.
Open Workshop: Sunday 27 June, 3pm
Make work alongside the artist.
Screening: Wednesday 16 June, 8.30pm
Mr Freedom, dir. William Klein (1969), selected by Chris Bailiff at Centrum
Synopsis: Under the command of Dr. Freedom, crass superhero Mr. Freedom (John Abbey) goes to France to stave off the advances of the mysterious French Anti-Freedom (FAF) organization. He joins forces with the femme fatale Marie-Madeleine to lead his own anti-communist Freedom organization. The Freedom mission is complicated by the machinations of communist foes - the Stalinist Moujik Man and the ferocious Maoist Red China Man (portrayed as a giant inflatable dragon). France, refusing to see the FAF as a threat, rebuffs Freedom, leading to an escalation of Cold War tactics. In the end, betrayed, Mr. Freedom destroys himself trying to save the "unappreciative" nation.
LIVE: Centrum Centrestage, Monday 21 June 2010, 4 - 9pm
Fete De La Musique 2010 at Centrum with Position Normal, Anne Kathrin Greiner and NGOMA DJ Zhau, Wolpertinger; Position Normal will perform alongside photographic works by Anne Kathrin Greiner.
LIVE: Monday 14 June, 7pm
Centrum with AMP2 at Madame Claude
Lübbener Str.19, 10997 Berlin / U-Bahn: Schlesisches Tor/Görlitzer Bahnhof