All posts by Thomas Kilpper

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ATB#88 Palimpsest – Reading between the Signs

Ciara Phillips | Jean-Ulrick Désert

Palimpsest – Reading between the signs

Ciara Phillips | Jean-Ulrick Désert

Exhibition: November 27, 2021 – January 30, 2022
Opening: Friday November 26, 2021, 7-11 p.m.
Finissage: Sunday, January 30, 2022 from 3-6 p.m.

Viewing by appointment only: ina@after-the-butcher.de or mobile: +49(0)178-3298106
Social distancing measures must be observed in the gallery spaces and wearing a medical mask is compulsory.

The exhibition Palimpsest / Reading Between the Signs develops a visual dialogue between the works of Berlin-based Haitian-American artist Jean-Ulrick Désert and Glasgow-based Irish-Canadian artist Ciara Phillips.

Jean-Ulrick Désert takes up in his work, developed for this exhibition, a political action at the Berlin Wall from 1978 by the filmmaker Wieland Speck (1992-2017 Director of the Panorama of the Berlin Film Festival) and the artist Per Lüke, which immediately triggered a surveillance investigation file called “The Harpist” (Der Harfenspieler) by the GDR’s State Security Police. For his installation Désert selected 12 sheets from the Stasi files, digitized them and burned them in linen to create ‘modern ruins’. The data from this Stasi surveillance and Désert’s research generated four astrological circular terracotta forms. They mark the star constellations and the astrological configurations taken from the 13 August 1978, 16:15, the day of the political action. Another disk marks the life span of the surveillance and yet another disk marks the collaborative dynamics of Per Lüke & Wieland Speck. Together with the picture panels they create a poetic palimpsest and a tension between personal and public, analogue and digital or physical and metaphysical realities.

For this exhibition, Ciara Phillips foregrounds clothing as a site of social engagement and meaning. Sewing has long been an artistic practice for Phillips, realized in parallel with her graphic print work. Printed textiles are often part of her complex spatial installations. Phillips explores the myriad ways in which print intersects with our daily lives, whether through media, advertising, banknotes, or clothing. Everywhere, print products act as important validators and signifiers. Phillips spent 4 weeks in residency at Lichtenberg Studios developing new works for this exhibition which draws on, among other things, the centuries- old history of textile and clothing manufacturing in Lichtenberg.

article about the exhibition at artlink

Ciara Phillips works mainly in print and her approach is both expansive and experimental. She often works collaboratively, transforming galleries into working printshops and inviting other artists, designers and local community groups to work with her. She has exhibited at: Tate Britain; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Benaki Museum, Athens; Hamburg Kunstverein; and Kunsthall Stavanger. In 2014 she was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in 2020 was awarded the Queen Sonja Print Award in Oslo.

Jean-Ulrick Désert works in different media: posters, actions, paintings, site-specific sculptures and video. In 2019 Jean-Ulrick Désert represented his native country Haiti at the 58th Venice Biennale in the same year he showed Unfinished Histories Vol.IV, at the Franziskanerkirche Monastery Ruins, Berlin. In 2013, Amour Colère Folie, Art Commission, Martinique Biennale, Martinique; 2015 Belgian Soliloquy, Platform 102, Brussels; Jean-Ulrick Désert, Espace d’art Contemporain 14°N 61°W, Martinique; 2018 Jean-Ulrick Désert, S12 Studio, Select World Project Gallery, New York. He was a participant in the 10th Havana Biennial, Cuba, in 2009. Désert founded his Berlin studio in 2002. www.jeanulrickdesert.com
Jean-Ulrick Désert is the first recipient of the Wi Di Mimba Wi :: AKB & SAVVY Contemporary Award: www.e-flux.com

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atb#87 The Few, The Many

Bernadette Van-Huy | Herman Asselberghs

The Few, The Many

Exhibition: 16. October – 14. November 2021
Opening: Friday 15. October 2021, from 7 p.m. on
Finissage: Sunday November 14, from 3-7 p.m.

With its upcoming exhibition The Few, The Many, after the butcher is delighted to present two contemporary artistic perspectives from New York and Brussels. For the exhibition at after the butcher, New York-based artist Bernadette Van-Huy produced a new twelve-part photographic drawing series titled Turn the Mirror Upside Down. The self-portraits, accompanied by a wall text in the form of a mirror-written instruction for action, are about an outlaw, a book, outer space, an Asian, and a homemade perm.

At the invitation of after the butcher Belgian film artist Herman Asselberghs made Now (After Empire Remix) (video, color, 16:9, English, BE, 2021, 18’), a remix version of his video After Empire from 2010. In After Empire, Herman Asselberghs suggested an alternative for the iconic image that collective memory has kept as the quintessential moment of recent history: the worldwide anti-war demonstration on the 15th of February 2003 instead of two towers collapsing on the island of Manhattan. Today, a decade, a commemoration of 9/11 and many marches all over the globe later, the filmmaker presents a remix version by providing part of the initial images with a new, contemporary soundtrack by Simon Halsberghe and Wiet Lengeler.

At the occasion of the exhibition, butchers blätter #3 will be published next to the online format as well as a print edition, with contributions by Dieter Lesage, Andreas Siekmann and Ina Wudtke.



Bernadette Van-Huy is a founding member of Bernadette Corporation. She has also been working artistically under her own name for several years and exhibits internationally. She lives and works north of New York, USA.

Film artist Herman Asselberghs (°1962) explores border zones between text, sound and image, world and media, poetics and politics. Over the past two decades, his film and installation works have been shown internationally. He teaches at the film department of LUCA School of Arts – Sint-Lukas Brussel and is a founding member of the Brussels production platform Auguste Orts (augusteorts.be). He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

With the kind support of:

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atb#86 Good Copy Bad Copy

Kaj Osteroth & Lydia Hamann | Xiaopeng Zhou

Good Copy – Bad Copy

Exhibition: August 22, 2021 – October 3, 2021

after the butcher is delighted to present the forthcoming exhibition representing two artistic perspectives whose work not only addresses fundamental social questions but also explores copying through drawing and painting as an artistic method.

Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth have worked together as an artist duo since 2007. They are currently working on their project Glamshots. Malerinnen in der Berliner Gemäldegalerie (Glamshots. Women painters in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), with the relationship between the art works of female and male artists from the permanent collection of the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. It is striking that out of 1000 paintings on display, only 6 are by women artists: Anna Therbusch, Marie Vigee-Lebrun, Angelika Kauffmann, Marie Latour, Anne Vallayer-Coster, Sofonisba Anguissola. The picture is no less problematic in the entire gallery holdings, where only 20 of the 3500 pictures are by women artists. Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth decipher the pictures by these women artists through a collaborative analysis of moments, gestures and viewpoints. The results are a sampling of details from 20 different pictures from the collection on display and in storage. Hamann & Osteroth are big fans of repetition and imitation, copying the paintings of other women artists. They imitate, recreate, interpret, fail, are confronted with their own possibilities and methods, understand, admire and surrender to the ecstasy of colour. In this way they move within a fascinating dialogue, in front of and with the originals. In conversion to canvas, they trust in their usual methods of incapacity, a cheerful copying, accompanied by inability and reluctance and the question of what makes a good copy or a bad copy.

The Chinese artist Xiaopeng Zhou has taught drawing to an elderly lady in Berlin for some time. In the beginning he taught her to draw flowers, trees, cacti and other plants in the Botanical Garden and in turn, drew her while she drew the plants. In doing so, he used reportage drawing as an important method of his artistic research. During the lockdowns, Zhou and the elderly lady met in her apartment to continue drawing and he learnt more about her interest in philosophy, literature, art history and feminism. The learning process became reciprocal and more intensive as Zhou improved his German language skills as well. At after the butcher, Zhou presents a video work documenting this joint learning and working process. He also shows some of the drawings that were made in this context, drawings from the Botanical Garden and her apartment in which conversations happened about emotional and physical work, illness, therapy and healing and their own different experiences of age, gender and culture.

The duo Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth question stereotypical attributions, dominant Eurocentric fictions and their own experiences of the scope of collective practice. Kaj Osteroth studied Art History and Ethnology at the Freie Universität and Fine Art at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Lydia Hamann studied Art History and Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University and Fine Art at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin. In 2020 they were awarded the Villa Romana Prize. They took part in the exhibition Histórias Feministas / Feminist Histories at MASP, São Paulo in 2019. In 2018 they published the book Racical Admiration and were part of the We don’t need another hero Berlin Biennale. In 2017 they took part in The Future is Female festival with a workshop at the Sophiensaele, Berlin. www.fleeingthearch.org

Xiaopeng Zhou studied at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee Berlin and at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. His most recent solo exhibitions are: Monochromatic Lottery Balls, Xining Contemporary, Xining, 2019 and Shape of Appetite, 2018, Empfangshalle München (in collaboration with Han Tang). Group exhibitions: BPA-Exhibition, 2021, KW Berlin; Interrupted Meals HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, 2020; An Impulse to Turn Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, 2020; Further Thoughts on Earthy Materials Kunsthaus Hamburg, 2019 and Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, (UABB), Shenzhen, 2017. www.xiaopengzhou.com

Funded by:


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atb #85 Cracks and reforms and Bursts in the Violet Air

Shannon Bool, Anton Bo Matzke, Kim Hankyul

Cracks and Reforms and Bursts in the Violet Air

Exhibition: June 18 – August 15, 2021

Cracks and Reforms and Bursts in the Violet Air presents a constellation of artworks by Shannon Bool, Kim Hankyul and Anton Bo Matzke that meditate on the status of artistic production within broader fields of social relations. The title of the exhibition borrows a line from T.S. Eliot’s, The Waste Land (1922), an influential early modern poem that makes use of numerous images and lines of text from other sources to describe a post-war landscape through affects, shifts in voice and fragmented narratives rather than through factual description. The allusion is fitting, considering the current sense of uncertainty in the wake of the pandemic, as well as an overall disillusionment with living for over 30 years under neo-liberalism and its social and economic failures. The artists have used the situation to mount a series of artworks that repurpose and redistribute means of production and interrogating systems for valuing everyday life.

Shannon Bool’s large-format tapestry, Crimes of the Future, appropriates a documentary photograph of an exhibit in the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris. The work proposes a complete rethinking of the materiality of images through perforating and exploding the symbolic language of photography as an artistic medium. The grid of pixels that make up the digital image are technically translated into a Jacquard weaving – resolution gets fuzzy in the process. Mannequins are elided and replaced by collaged images of signature brutalist buildings, echoing the digital, systemic control of information. Alongside a ‘digital’ sensibility in the artwork is as well an ‘analog’ one: the representation of the female body is revealed as a projection screen and cipher of a consumerist gaze. Bool resurfaces the generic silhouettes to present specific, high-modern dwellings of religious culture such as the Wotruba Church in Vienna by Fritz Wotruba, the Neviges Church in Düsseldorf by Gottfried Böhm, or the Second Goetheanum in Dornach by Rudolf Steiner. The modern myth of the sacred value of legibility of purpose, achieved by a balance of design and choice of materials, is upended by Bool, revealing a whole hierarchy of hidden bourgeois values that are ultimately designed to manage desire as well as the movements and labour of human bodies.

Kim Hankyul’s Serpent (2016) and Bird (2019) are two of his earlier kinetic and sonic sculptures that repurpose ordinary tools and materials to serve as substrates for new meaning. The works ‘perform’ absurd yet everyday movements and tasks that are either excessive or underwhelming in the mimetic sense, further taking advantage of the gap between sign and signified. Serpent moves excessively, the effect of the writhing and wild hissing of the ducting is manic and haunting – one is witness to an expenditure that begins from an electrical outlet and ends somewhere in the imagination. Bird features two pages of a book held by an armature that is animated by a drill that you can make out the gentle beat of its wings. The book – two of its pages – are transformed from a cognitive container of knowledge to an object of poetic reflection on the dream of flying. In this respect, the sculpture also tangentially evokes class associations: knowledge is power. This is the very key to their magic: the viewer is left to judge the effect of the work, and yet is repetitively returned to the mechanical slavery of its performance. In my eyes, the kinetic sculptures pose critical questions in terms of working class labour and its relation to contemporary artistic production – is labour unsightly? Is it too sweaty? Does it strive too hard for expression, for meaning? In this sense, the works are humorous and very effective in their easygoingness.

Anton Bo Matzke’s Melde (2021) and Hom(e)age (to stonemason Ekhof Platz) (2018) are sculptures that symbolically and materially draw their qualities from the environment of the exhibition space; they seem to precipitate the site in which they are presented. They are quiet objects that express the transitoriness of life in a manner akin to still-life painting. Melde is a clay sculpture whose form evokes that of contemporary architecture. The artist has planted ruderal seeds in the raw clay which he collected from a vacant lot in the Victoriastadt, nearby after the butcher. Over the course of the exhibition, the sculpture will be animated by the growth of vegetation, – it will take on a life of its own, so to speak; the seeds and their roots will slowly crack open its form and possibly cause the form to collapse: work in progress. Hom(e)age (to stonemason Ekhof Platz), is a sculpture in the form of a standing floor lamp, whose base of poured concrete and metre-long piece of rebar also present construction materials often discarded in vacant building lots. The unusual element is a marble lamp shade atop the rebar that is old and crinkled- looking as though one would smell cigarette smoke on it. The overall sensibility of the works is one of improvisation with materials at hand, and what they address are issues concerning gentrification, class and urban renewal – for better or worse.

Text by Maxwell Stephens

We look forward to your visit.

funded by:

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atb #84 | random access memories

CLASS OF ASTA GRÖTING

RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES

Andreas Baumgartner, Laura Dechenaud, Jan-Louis Gens, Leonardo Grüning, Pauline Hömmen, Juhi Hong, Gregor Kieseritzky, Charlotte Kremberg, Luis Kürschner, Johannes Möller, Jeroen Laessig, Sophie Pape, Lucila Pacheco Dehne, Camilla Schiegnitz, Stefan Schramm, Julika Teubert, Simiao Yu, Yuan Yuan, Hye Yun 

Exhibition: May 7-June 13, 2021

after the butcher, showroom for contemporary art and social issues is pleased to invite you to visit random access memories an exhibition with students from the class of Asta Gröting at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts.

Exhibition: 7 May – 13 June 2021

Opening hours: Fridays 5pm-10pm, Saturdays 12pm-8pm and Sundays 12pm-6pm. We kindly ask you to register for the visit by mail:

ina@after-the-butcher.de or call us on 0178-3298106 to get your personal time-slot.

Current rules to prevent the spread of C19 apply in the showrooms.

When we dream, we are in a place that seems to exist alongside our reality. A previously hidden conglomeration of unconscious impressions, fears and desires opens up to us. For the surrealists, the reality experienced during sleep was no less important than the waking state. André Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto of 1920:
“(…) why should I not concede to the dream what I sometimes deny to reality, namely that value of my own certainty which is not at all denied by me during the dream-span?”.

At least this effect directly experienced in the dream can hardly be evaded by anyone. Despite this, or precisely because of it, we often find it difficult to draw and comprehend the line between dream and reality. This is particularly noticeable in utopias and daydreams, which often speak of desires and ideals that do not seem attainable for us at all.

In the exhibition random access memories, the Gröting class asks how reality can influence our dreams, or rather how dreams influence our reality.

“We have actually met every week on Mondays since January to establish a common process. Continuity was especially important because we couldn’t meet in real life. We always try to shape and decide everything democratically and on a horizontal hierarchical level. This slows down the process, but it is important for our class cohesion.
We do this by looking at what topics interest and excite us at the moment and connect us all in some way. We decided on the topic of dreams because we see it as a nice option to connect the personal and the social.
To develop the concept together, we started doing dream experiments. We set ourselves a new task every week to see if we can influence our dreams together. For example, one week we all listened to the same song before going to bed to see what would happen. Another week we read an excerpt from André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, which is also about dreams, as the last action before going to sleep. We wrote down our daily routine and actively tried to control our daydreams. Through these experiments we got into conversation with each other about what dreaming means and how we dream.
What was strange about the process was that it is actually a very personal and individual topic, but the online conference naturally brought a certain distance into it. Sitting together and hatching together in our studio was sorely lacking! But I still think that the exhibition was just the right thing at this time to work on something together again and to plan something more concrete and to get into conversation. I think it was and still is very good and important for the class and its development process that there is this common “point” of the exhibition, the bringing together of the works. Maybe it will be the key when we look back later on this special, also difficult period of the pandemic, that we can still remember something beautiful that we worked on and experienced together…” from the communication between students and Asta Gröting.

We look forward to your visit.

funded by:

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atb #83 | Learning to Dwell otherwise within the ruins

Vermeir & Heiremans, Julia Cremers & PARALLAX Lab

Press Release

Learning to dwell otherwise within the ruins
Vermeir & Heiremans, Julia Cremers & PARALLAX Lab

Exhibition: March 19 – April 25, 2021

In its upcoming exhibition, after the butcher is pleased to present two artist positions whose work deals with buildings, ruins and questions of their value creation. At the same time, both positions approach the broad field of speculation and reclaim agency – new modes of action – against it.

The artist duo Vermeir & Heiremans will show the short film A Modest Proposal (in a Black Box). The film explores whether “financialization” can be repurposed as a tool for creating more just conditions. The artists propose a model to financialize public art collections, museum properties and/or their symbolic capital. This model aims to create a cycle of wealth that benefits not only investors and institutions, but also the creators of these assets, the original stakeholders – the artists and art workers.

As a case study in the film, Vermeir & Heiremans discuss the financialization of the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park, London with their lawyer. The gallery is located near Battersea Power Station, a former coal-fired power station from the mid-20th century, which after 40 years of vacancy is currently being converted into a luxury shopping center including luxury flats with the participation of “starchitects” such as Frank Gehry and Foster & Partners. The rising property values in its neighborhood will “pump up” the asset value of the gallery building. Introducing this into the artists’ global financial model will distribute surplus values for the wider art community.

Which part of this is ironic critique and which is longing for participation? In any case, the artists expose the social tensions and contradictions generated by speculation and profit maximization alongside the fundamental need for housing.

Julia Cremers and PARALLAX show their collective video and 3D works Ruin Figments and Reconstructed Memories. Both works are centred around an architectural site built in Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Palace Park in the year 1778, depicting the remains after the Roman siege of Carthage in 146 BC. This fake ruin, in line with landscaping fashions of the 18th century, was meant to manifest the power of the Habsburg Monarchy, claiming their imperial pursuits by identifying with the victorious Roman Empire: a speculation on cultural capital.
PARALLAX’ work is a further reimagining of this folly within the present. The ruin’s virtual counterpart is extracted through photogrammetric methods, then distorted and rematerialized. The resulting 3D printed sculpture calls attention to the implicit alterations at each reproduction stage, hereby questioning the cultural impact of imperial collapse and its appropriation by new power structures. The video essay is another uncovering of this layered entity, exposing the material resources and human efforts that are required for the construction of (virtual) spaces.
A third visual element are the photographs Ruins by Julia Cremers, which show military fortifications from the period of Nazi fascism and the German occupation in Bergen/Norway. Today, they serve as a backdrop for raves. The repurposing of these historically burdened sites for festive events can be seen as both problematic and liberating at the same time. It represents a form of reappropriation of charged places, overlaid with new narratives and cultural meaning, thus continuing to write history.

Beitrag ansehen

A Modest Proposal (in a Black Box) will be accompanied by a publication which brings together a series of essays that were presented in a symposium, organized by Vermeir & Heiremans at the Royal College of Art, London in 2018.

Film credits:
HD Video, 28′ 7″, sound & colour, UK-Belgium, 2018
with Luke Mason, Heike Langsdorf, Vermeir & Heiremans
Camera: Amir Borenstein
Sound: Justin Bennett

Production: Jubilee vzw, with the support of: The Flemish Community; Art et Recherche asbl; Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles; Pump House Gallery; Wandsworth Council; Enable Leisure and Culture; Art Council England; Cockayne-Grants for the Arts; The London Community Foundation

Ruin Figments and Reconstructed Memories 
Video essay and 3D printed sculpture 

Film credits: 
HD Video, sound & colour, Germany-Austria, 2021
Camera: Lena Kocutar, Daniel Viladrich Herrmannsdoerfer, Julia Cremers
Sound and Editing: Julia Cremers 
Research: Lena Kocutar, Daniel Viladrich Herrmannsdoerfer, Polina Nikoulitcheva, Julia Cremers

Ruins
Three digital prints, photography
by Julia Cremers 

Vermeir & Heiremans presented work at: 10th and 13th Istanbul Biennial (2007 & 2013), Arnolfini, Bristol (2009), Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin (2010), Viennale, Vienna (2011), 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial (2012), Manifesta 9, Limburg (2012), Argos, Brussels (2012), Extra City, Antwerp (2012), Riga Art Space (2013), Rotwand Gallery, Zurich (2014), Triennale Brugge (2015), Dojima River Biennale, Osaka (2015), Georg Kargl Gallery, Vienna (2015), Transmediale, Berlin (2016), Bucharest Biennale 7 (2016), Glassyard Gallery, Budapest (2018), The Atlantic Project, Plymouth (2018), Pump House Gallery, London (2018), Carico Massimo, Livorno (2019), Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg (2020).

Julia Cremers graduated with a Bachelor of Audiovisual Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam in 2016, and a Master of Fine Art at the University of Bergen Faculty of Fine Art in 2018. Julia presented work at: Dutch Design Week Eindhoven (2014), Van Nelle Fabriek Rotterdam (2015), Gallery Bart Amsterdam (2016), Eye Film Museum (2016), Bergen Kunsthall (2018), Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2019), Errant Sound (2020), Alte Feuerwache Köln (2020), Berlin School Of Sound (2021). Cremers has been a member of Errant Sound since September 2020.

PARALLAX Lab, Ruin Figments and Reconstructed Memories is a collaborative project initiated by artist Julia Cremers with students Daniel Viladrich Herrmannsdoerfer (Technomathematics, TU), Polina Nikoulitcheva (Architecture, TU) and Lena Kocutar (Lensbased Class, UdK). Produced as part of PARALLAX Lab, an initiative of the Berlin University of the Arts and the Technical University Berlin. With the support of FormLabs Berlin.

funded by:


 

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atb #82 | Stadt und Knete. Positionen der 1990er Jahre

Press release download

November 20, 2020 – March 7, 2021

artists: A-Clip, Gruppe Gummi K / MicroStudio Surplus (Alice Creischer, Martin Ebner, Christoph Keller, Ariane Müller, Andreas Siekmann, Nicolas Siepen, Josef Strau, Klaus Weber, Amelie von Wulffen), Jaaaa & Protzband Nicolas Siepen, Siegfried Koepf & Martin Ebner & Gunter Reski, Josef Kramhöller, NEID, Annette Wehrmann, Ina Wudtke, Amelie von Wulffen and others.

On Thursday February 18, 7 p.m. KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and after the butcher invite you to an Onlinetalk about the exhibition. Speakers are: Annette Maechtel, Thomas Kilpper, Ina Wudtke and Kathrin Bentele.

Exhibition: November 20, 2020 – March 7, 2021. Due to the current lockdown and until further notice, the exhibition can only be visited online: videowalk through the exhibition.

Production of an A-Clip, 1997, Photo: Katja Eydel

after the butcher presents the group exhibition Stadt und Knete. Positionen der 1990er Jahre, running in parallel with the solo exhibition by Amelie von Wulffen at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. A collaboration between KW and after the butcher, the show revolves around four collaboratively produced animation films: Infobox (1996), Wie eins zum anderen kam (1996), and Die Krumme Pranke and Egoland (both 1997). The work Infobox by the Berlin artists’ group Jaaaa & Protzband Nicolas Siepen, Siegfried Koepf & Martin Ebner & Gunter Reski, MicroStudio Surplus reads as a commentary of its time on the structural development of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. The work also refers to the so-called “Infobox” pavillion, which was installed from 1995 to 2001 at Leipziger Platz.

In 1996, the group Gummi K / MicroStudio Surplus produced the video work Wie eins zum anderen kam, which vitriolicly and ironically criticizes the major exhibition Nach Weimar at the Neues Museum Weimar, organized by Klaus Biesenbach and Nicolaus Schafhausen. The work addresses the structural relationships between the Neues Museum and the Gauforum, with the latter being built in the National Socialist era, as well as the resulting legitimization of fascist architecture as an exhibition space for contemporary art.

Die krumme Pranke, a video work by Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Josef Strau and Amelie von Wulffen performs in the lineage of the classic Derrick crime-series. Situated in Berlin, the visual vocabulary of this metropolitan thriller moves between documentary shots and fictional animation. Domestic politics and the development areas of the 1990s act as central motifs of this filmic montage, in which the artists shift from art practice to political activism and reverse.

Egoland from 1997, is a 55-second cinema spot from the A-Clip series. Collectively produced, the political messages of the A-Clips were first inserted by various cinema projectionists in Berlin in the commercial breaks before the main film.

Taking place in 1997 and 1998 in different cities in Germany and in Switzerland the “Innenstadtaktionen” were activities organized with significant participation by political activists from the art context. Katja Eydel, who was also participating, documented some of the Berlin actions at the time. For the exhibition, Ina Wudtke has put together the video Innenstadtaktionen (2020), consisting of Eydel’s photographs and new fragments of interviews with artists formerly involved in the activities. Kollektive Erinnerungen (collective memories) thus gives insight into the political context of the time in Berlin and is a significant testimony of the art production connected to it.

Hamburg based artist Annette Wehrmann (1961–2010) worked on a long-term project that explored urban space, titled Ort des Gegen. It followed the idea that the quality of a city depends on the number of undeveloped, freely available areas. She concluded that, under neoliberal conditions, the “Ort des Gegen” is able “to take the form of a thorough refusal of exploitation”. It becomes the “flipside” of utopia, “a place, where waste sediments and is not being disposed” (from Annette Wehrmann’s text Ort des Gegen, 2002). The exhibition includes five gouaches from the series as well as the foam sculpture Nein.

As one of the first to publish Annette Wehrmann’s Luftschlangentexte, the artist magazine NEID (1992–2004) also documented fragments of the “Innenstadtaktionen” in Berlin. The exhibition features issues of NEID #4 and NEID #7.

Further, Stadt und Knete presents a series of photographs depicting fingerprints on window fronts of luxury boutiques from 1995 by Josef Kramhöller (1968–2000).

Alongside Amelie von Wulffen’s collaboratively produced video works, the exhibition presents three photo collages depicting buildings in East Berlin reflecting her enthusiasm for the Soviet modernism and the remaining parts of a shop window installation from 1996. The plywood figures depict both found and invented logos of manual craft’s companies.

Photo- and video documentation: Ines Lechleitner

About the artists:

A-Clip, are political short films collectively produced by artists and activists for the cinema, in 1997 and 2000.

Jaaaa (Josef Strau, Amelie von Wulfen, Ariane Müller, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann) was founded in 1996 in Berlin to collaboratively produce animation videos.

Gruppe Gummi K (Alice Creischer, Martin Ebner, Christoph Keller, Ariane Müller, Andreas Siekmann, Nicolas Siepen, Josef Strau, Klaus Weber, Amelie von Wulffen) emerged from the group Jaaaa in 1997 and continued working on video animations.

Josef Kramhöller (1968–2000) was an artist and author. He studied painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich and at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. His practice spanned performance, photography, painting, drawing, and text.

MicroStudio Surplus was the name for a temporary studio in Burgstrasse, Berlin. It does not denote a fixed constellation of participants.

NEID was a queer-feminist magazine founded in 1992 by Hans-Christian Dany, Claudia Reinhardt, Heiko Wichmann, and Ina Wudtke at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. It was published by Ina Wudtke from 1995–2004.

Annette Wehrmann (1962–2010) was an artist and author. She studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg and at Städelschule in Frankfurt. Her work revolved around topics of urban space and forms of self-organisation.

Ina Wudtke, born 1968, is a conceptual artist living and working in Berlin. Her artist’s book The Fine Art of Living, which addresses issues of gentrification, was published in 2018 by Archive Books, Berlin.

Amelie von Wulffen, born 1966, lives and works in Berlin, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Her practice entails painting, collage, drawing, and installation. She was represented at the 50th Venice Biennale and Manifesta 5.

Funded by:

after the butcher would like to thank the Kienzle Art Foundation for the kind loan of Josef Kramhöller’s photographic works.

General

atb #81 | Invisibility Chronicles, Part One / Dubai Gold, Coir Kerala

Michael Baers & Sophie -Therese Trenka-Dalton

Exhibition: October 9 to November 8, 2020


Open upon appointment: ina@after-the-butcher.de or 01783298106. Please wear a mask in the exhibition space.
On October 11, 2020 at 4 p.m. we invite to an artist talk. The event will take place in the courtyard,
registration required at: after-the-butcher

Invisibility Chronicles, Part One


Why do some conflicts, situations, or events become well-known in Western civil society while others remain obscure? How does the mass media organize our understanding of the contemporary world? What social and cultural consequences occur when stories of international relevance fall out of the media’s hegemonic narratization of the world? What advantage accrues to powerful nation-states by heightening the visibility of some stories while relegating others to this zone of invisibility? What enters into media discourse and how it is framed is subject to a complex set of mechanisms, dictated in part by the geopolitical interests of powerful nations. Growing out of prior research on the unresolved conflict in Western Sahara, Invisibility Chronicles, Part One examines these mechanisms, focusing on a current situation where the international mass media news cycles has rendered a story with profound ecological implications invisible: the ongoing saga of the FSO Safer. Owned by the Yemeni state’s state oil company and occupied by the Houthi rebels since 2015, this floating storage and offloading vessel presently sits stranded off Yemen’s coast, its cargo of 1.1 million barrels of oil in imminent danger either of leaking or exploding—threatening the Red Sea with an environmental catastrophe that would affect the people and environment of the region for generations. Michael Baers’ examination of the FSO Safer story takes the form of a graphic essay detailing how the mass media’s treatment of the story has reinforced a prevailing view of the conflict, before whisking it away to that place where formerly urgent news stories go when they cease being “news.” In doing so, he forces the viewer to occupy, in the words of Avery Gordon, “that sad and sunken couch that sags in just that place where an unrememberable past and unimaginable future force us to sit day after day.” This work has been produced in a limited edition, available for free to the viewing public.

Dubai Gold, Coir Kerala

With the installation Dubai Gold, Coir Kerala, Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton presents three current video works created between 2017 and 2019 in the South Indian state of Kerala.

The two videos, Dubai Ports World Kochi (2018) and Dubai Gold and Diamonds (2018), focus on the connection between Kerala and the United Arab Emirates, a continuation of her long-term project Dubayyland (2009–2015). Through her trips to the UAE, the artist learned about the special relationship between the two regions. Since the 1970s, the Emirates and other Gulf States have been a main destination for labor migration from Kerala. Decades of exchange now shape both the personal biographies and economic structure of Kerala. The videos show places that refer to this connection, such as the container port of Kochi, operated by the Emirati company Dubai Ports World, or the numerous stores and advertising posters named after cities in the Emirates, which also often employ iconic motifs such as the Burj Khalifa.

The video work Coir Kerala (2019) documents how coconut fiber (Coir) is processed in small village workshops. Coir mats are an important regional product of tropical Kerala and are used both for domestic use and as geotextiles for land consolidation. The small enterprises are organized as cooperatives. Most employees are women, who earn a little money in addition to household supplies. However, due to the low wages, the coir trade lacks a new generation of workers. In recent decades, unionization has led to improvements in working conditions, but at the same time the coir sector has not been sufficiently modernized, as this would mean the loss of local jobs, with dire consequences for the economic balance of village life structures in Kerala.

The video works were realized with the support of the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore and the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

Michael Baers

(* 1968) is an American artist and writer based in Berlin who has exhibited his artistic work in Germany and abroad, including at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt am Main, the Van Abbemuseum, and Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz. He received his PhD from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien in 2014 from its dedicated artistic research department. Since 2010 much of his work has focused on the cultural outcomes of conflict irresolution in the Middle East and Africa. In 2014, he published a lengthy graphic novel/documentary, An Oral History of Picasso in Palestine, about the 2011 Picasso in Palestine project online with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It was released in book form by adocs verlag (Hamburg) in 2016. He has also published many essays on contemporary art and artistic research, cultural politics, and urbanism, contributing to a variety of book and publication projects and internationally recognized journals such as the e-flux journal, Vector – critical research in context, and Memory Studies. He is currently an affiliated researcher at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin.

Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton

(*1979 Berlin) works with installation, photography, and video. In long-term projects, she investigates cultural appropriation processes that arise in the course of the implosion, shifting, and new formation of power centers.

In 2016, she published her first catalog PALMS (Textem Verlag), which consists of works on the reception of ancient Mesopotamia, the recent history of Iraq, and the architecture of the United Arab Emirates. In 2017, she traveled to South India to trace the relationship between Kerala and the Gulf States. Currently the artist is working on the realization of the event series The Sky was the Limit – Art and Astronomy at the Archenhold Observatory, which will take place in the summer of 2021.

Solo and group exhibitions (excerpt):  Kochi Biennale Foundation, Kochi, India (2018), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2018), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2017 & 2006), Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (2017), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2015), Heidelberger Kunstverein (2014), Kunstraum Michael Barthel, Leipzig (2012), Serpentine Gallery, London (2011), Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York (2011), DEPO, Istanbul (2010), TÄT, Berlin (2009), Nice and Fit Gallery, Berlin (2008), Foundation d`Enterprise Ricard, Paris (2008), HarrisLieberman Gallery, New York (2008), Institute in the Glass Pavilion of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (2007).

Funded by:

Here you find a review by Norman Saadi Nikro,
Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Berlin.

General

atb #80 | Killing Me Softly / Passive Bewaffnung

Claudia Reinhardt & Cornelia Herfurtner

exhibition: September 5 – October 4, 2020

Due to the current situation no opening will take place. We invite you to visit the exhibition in the presence of the artists. Email after-the-butcher to request your visit. Please wear a mouth and nose protection mask when entering the exhibition space:
September 4, 6-10 p.m., September 12, 19, 26 and October 3, 3-6 p.m.
September 19, 7 p.m. Book Release: Witwen/Widows, Claudia Reinhardt, The Green Box, 2020

Sunday October 4, Finissage 3-8 p.m. 3D film screening at 6 p.m. of Flipping the Stationary Car, 2018 by Cornelia Herfurtner, David Iselin-Ricketts, John Allan MacLean (45min). Visit only by prior appointment until latest Sunday October 4, 11 p.m. at: ina@after-the-butcher.de

Passive Bewaffnung (Passive armament)

Legally speaking, we currently commit an offense with every organized gathering of people. Thanks to Covid-19, Germany is now passively armed,  masks and protective screens concealing our faces, obligated to disguise. What happened? After 1968, protesters in 1970s Federal Republic of Germany increasingly began to use face masks in order to protect their personal rights – after all, taking to the streets risked recognition and subsequent dismissal from work or school. Ever since the passing of anti-terrorist legislation in 1977, masked protestors are not only deemed to expect, but to provoke violence. With the birth of ‘passive Bewaffnung’ came the prohibition of masked protests.  Following Brokdorf and the anti-nuclear movement, laws were tightened: Anyone wearing protective gear in anticipation of police violence was now considered passively armed. Meanwhile, ever since the GSG 9 unit, their counterpart’s appearance has grown to resemble military expeditions against their own citizens with each May 1st protest – or the G20 summit. Protestors, on the other hand, are called to avoid helmets, goggles, protective gloves, mouthguards – and to best leave their keys at home if they are on their way to a protest. At present, the issue of active self-protection against potential threats is delicate to say the least: Who wears masks for the benefit of or protection against whom? Who or what constitutes the adversary? Cornelia Herfurtner’s sculpted reliefs are still lifes of a history of the FRG about uprising and repressive state power – a history to be continued.

Killing Me Softly

“To be nowhere, to stay nowhere. Diving, resting, moving without effort of force – and one day reflecting, reappearing, walking through a clearing […]. Start with the beginning.” (I. Bachmann, Undine leaves)

Suicide is a form of violence, but also of freedom. Between 2000 and 2004, Claudia Reinhardt photographically re-staged ten suicides of well-known artists* – personalities who fascinated her and whose work and life influenced her in her work. As a kind of personal tribute, Reinhardt allows fiction and reality to merge into one another, researching for each photo both in literature and in the archives what exactly drove those women* to say goodbye to life. The motives and methods are very different: there is the planned and precisely executed suicide, for example in the case of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, and there is the slow destruction of one’s own body, such as Ingeborg Bachmann’s addiction to pills and alcohol. Reinhardt chooses a thoroughly psychological approach to her role models by slipping into the role of the dying herself: she reenacts the ten deaths, the moment equipped in every detail and allows herself to be photographed. If that adjective were not in exact opposition to what is depicted here, the scenery could indeed be described as “alive” due to its filmic character. What caused these women* to oppose, to withdraw from life? Unfortunately, the possible reasons still seem to be present: patriarchal, physical violence, fascist systems, lack of equal rights and recognition of their works, to name but a few. Without wanting to glorify suicide, Reinhardt’s photographs therefore also capture a moment of greatest self-determination.

“But I can’t go like this. So let me say good things to you once again, so that you won’t get divorced like this. So that nothing gets divorced.” (ibid.)

Nadja Abt, Berlin, 2020

Claudia Reinhardt
(* 1964 in Viernheim/South Hesse) studied at the University of Fine Arts, (*1964 in Viernheim/South Hesse) studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. From 2000–2012, she taught as a professor in the department of photography at the National Art Academie in Bergen, Norway. Reinhardt became known, among other things, through her photographic work Killing Me Softly – Todesarten (Aviva Verlag, Berlin 2004), a series of photographs dealing with female artists who killed themselves. Reinhardt stages theses suicides using herself as a model. The work No Place Like Home (Verbrecher Verlag, 2005) is about the meaning of origin and identity. The work Tomb of Love (Verbrecher Verlag, 2016) again deals with the topic of suicide, staging couples who their own lives together. The work Widows and Widows is about mourning and remembrance, a documentary and conceptual photographic work, which will be published by The Green Box, Berlin, in 2020. Exhibitions: Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin (2018); Kunstgeschichtliches Museum, Osnabrück (2017); Galerie Malopolski Ogród Sztuki, Cracow (2016); Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin (2015); Corean Art Museum, Seoul (2015); Galerie F15, Moss, Norway (2015); Contemporary Art Museum, Roskilde (2015); Fotogalleriet Format, Malmö (2014); Meta House, Phnom Penh (2011); Kunsthalle Memmingen (2010); IDFX, Breda Photo Festival, Breda (2007); Micro Museum, Zurich (2009); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2004) and others.

Cornelia Herfurtner
(*May 8, 1987) is an artist and organized in the Interventionist Left. As part of the alliance Disarm Rheinmetall, she works against arms production, arms exports and Germany’s largest arms producer Rheinmetall. As an artist, she works under her civil name as well as with the artist group Michelle Volta and the publishing house and bookshop b_books. Her most recent projects include a series of photographs entitled freedom and control of others (including myself) (published in starship #19) and the collectively taught seminar Self-Organization and University (with Ernest Ah and Anastasio Mandel, Berlin University of the Arts). Her video essay Frauen verlassen das Museum (in collaboration with David Polzin) can be seen at the Mitte Museum in Berlin-Wedding until January 2021.

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General

atb #79 | KAUE KAUE

Julia Oschatz & Sonja Hornung

exhibition: July 31 – August 30, 2020

Due to the current situation no opening will take place. We invite you to visit the exhibition in the presence of the artists:
July 31, 6-10 p.m. and August 2, 3-6 p.m.
Email after-the-butcher to request your visit. Please wear a mouth and nose protection mask when entering the exhibition space.

THEY WANTED TO MOVE / THEY FOUND THEY COULD NOT MOVE / OR RATHER THAT MOVEMENT WAS ONLY POSSIBLE IN / THE PREORDERED DIRECTION, THROUGH SPACES ALREADY SHAPED TO ACCOMMODATE THEIR MOVEMENT / AT THE REQUIRED SPEED, IN THE REQUIRED MANNER / SO, AND NOT SO; / HERE, AND NOT THERE, ETC. / SO IN FACT, THERE WAS NO REAL MOVEMENT, ONLY REPETITION, MAYBE SLIGHT VARIATION, WITHIN THE GIVEN STRUCTURE. / AND IN THAT SENSE, THERE WAS NO REAL MOVEMENT, ONLY REPETITION, MAYBE SLIGHT VARIATION, IN THE PRE-GIVEN STRUCTURE.

Julia Oschatz’s work Unter Tagen is a video installation developed for after the butcher thematising both the everyday influence of space on human movement and action, as well as the attempt to change this dynamic.

Sperre III is the third in Sonja Hornung’s series of works departing from Varvara Stepanova’s (1894-1958) search for a ‘uni-form’ that would erase the gendered division of labour. Each iteration of Sperre consists of a singular garment arising from a specific urban context or crisis, and texts compressed into aquarelle drawings. Sperre III thinks through financialisation and its ‘collateral’ effects on urban spaces and bodies gendered female.

Julia Oschatz was born in Darmstadt in 1970 and lives in Berlin and Sandau an der Elbe. Alongside numerous exhibitions of her videos, drawings, paintings and installations – most recently at Artbox Dresden, Kunstverein Hannover, and Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett – she also makes set designs, currently for Hamlet at Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin.

Sonja Hornung was born in Birrarunga/Melbourne in 1987 and lives since 2012 in Berlin. Her installations, drawings, and collaborations – for example with COPS (Corporation of People’s Situations) and Kollektiv x-embassy – have been shown at, among others, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, District Berlin, and Forum Stadtpark (Graz). Currently she is an Artist-in-Residence at Q21/MQ Vienna.

Funded by: