Julia Stoschek Foundation
“UNBOUND: PERFORMANCE AS RUPTURE”
14 Sep 2023 – 28 Jul 2024
P. Staff, Pure Means, 2021, two-channel HD video still, 4.min37s, color, sound. Courtesy: the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
Premised on a thesis that performance art eroded Western typological distinctions of art object, artist, and action, the group show “UNBOUND” chronicles how artists have called upon video and the body since the 1960s to unsettle oppressive ideologies, historical narratives, and concepts of identity. Ranging from historical works by the likes of peter campus, Senga Nengudi, and Katharina Sieverding to more recent videos by Lydia Ourahmane, Sondra Perry, and Akeem Smith, the exhibition lights up the byways of contemporary images economies and call to mind how bodies negotiated documented space.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Coco Fusco, “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island”
14 Sep 2023 – 7 Jan 2024
Coco Fusco, Message in a Bottle from María Elena, 2015, video still. Courtesy: the artist
The first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (*1960) seeks to trace the profound influence of her multidisciplinary work on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. Loosely structured along interconnected themes central to her videos, writing, and performance, including animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, and the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba, “Tomorrow” likewise encompasses a newly commissioned multimedia performance, Antigone Is Not Available Right Now , scheduled to debut in Berlin in early December.
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
“Frequently Asked Questions. Uferhallen 2023”
15 Sep – 24 Sep 2023
Adnan and Nina Softić, Ships With Goods and Fabrics Bump the Bibby Challenge With Their Waves, 2019, video still. © Studio Softić / n.b.k.
The group show “FAQ” is addressed to the politically negotiated future of the Uferhallen, a nodal complex of art studios, rehearsal and performance spaces, and the residencies of over 150 cultural practitioners that, like so much else, is imperiled by Berlin’s warp-speed gentrification. The install is accompanied by a robust, weekend-long program of screenings on labor, commodification, and migration; interventions on the sell-off of the city and global coexistence amid climate collapse; and open studio hours and a neighborhood festival.
Esther Schipper
Anicka Yi, “A Shimmer Through The Quantum Foam”
15 Sep – 21 Oct 2023
Anicka Yi, LñRþRL, 2023, acrylic, UV print, and aluminum artist’s frame, 122 x 162.5 x 4 cm. Courtesy: the artist, Gladstone Gallery and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Ever the biopolitical alchemist, Anicka Yi’s (*1971) first solo exhibition with Esther Schipper evolves her notion of the “biologized machine” through series of motif-full horizontal paintings and animated pod sculptures inspired, respectively, by dialogue with several machine-learning algorithms and two ancient species of zooplankton. Replete with glowing surfaces and a darkly shimmering scent commissioned from parfumier Barnabé Fillion, expect a queue at the door.
Monopol Berlin
“High Spirits”
13 Sep – 17 Sep 2023
Monopol Berlin, 2023
What is the point of art in (post-)modern, (post-)industrial societies? Likewise, what is the role of the pun in communicating curatorial purpose? The group show “High Spirits” opens a renovated, 130-year-old distillery by inviting elucidations of the ambiguous tensions between the art object’s age-old economic function and its inheritance through the semiotic ravages of secularization as a mark of the transcendental. With works by Martin Boyce, Etienne Chambaud, Franka Hörnschemeyer, Julian Irlinger, Isa Melsheimer, Jenna Sutela, Alain Urrutia, and Sandra Vásquez de la Horra.
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– To view the schedule in full, visit berlinartweek.de –