All posts by Thomas Kilpper

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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.

Funded by:

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:

General

atb #78 | exemplarische kämpfe

Martin Haufe
Minze Tummescheit & Arne Hector (cinéma copains)

exhibition: May 29 – June 10, 2020

Due to the current situation no opening will take place. We invite you to visit the exhibition in the presence of the artists:
Sa June 6/ Su June 7 / Su June 14 / Fr June 19 / Su June 21, 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.

Since 2014 Martin Haufe has been working intensively on the topic of “friendship”. Within friendships we learn to act “morally right”, at the same time capitalist living conditions influence the form of our relationships. In Martin Haufe’s ongoing research, questions about the relationship and potential of criticism and friendship therefore play a central role. His research has resulted in various textile works for the exhibition exemplarische Kämpfe (exemplary struggles).

The 6-part interview chain “in arbeit” (2008-2018) by Minze Tummescheit and Arne Hector (cinéma copains) is a cinematic investigation of the conditions, possibilities and limits of collective action. The communicative process of research becomes the content of the film. A number of collectives are brought into contact with each other by members of one group travelling together with cinéma copains and holding a conversation with the next collective together. The result is a chain of interviews that paints a picture of cooperative practice in various European countries. The exhibition exemplarische Kämpfe (exemplary struggles) shows excerpts from the series, which is 285 minutes long in total.

  • video still cinéma copains
  • video still cinéma copains

Martin Haufe
(*1986 Großröhrsdorf) studied media art at the HGB Leipzig, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the MLU Halle (Saale) in the field of psychology. He received a scholarship from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and is currently a master student of Joachim Blank. Martin Haufe spent several working & research stays in Vietnam and was selected for a KdFS scholarship in 2019. In addition to his practice as a solo artist, he is involved in various commemorative cultural projects and is active as an artistic creator.

cinéma copains
Since 2000 Arne Hector and Minze Tummescheit have been working as cinéma copains in cooperation with copines and copains from all over the world. They are interested in economic topics, which they always understand as political and social issues. Their documentary work, which includes lectures, performances, installations and artistic documentaries, is based on long-term projects. At the interface between documentary film and art, with a visible political stance, they seek form for content.

Funded by:

General

atb #77 | Pourparler

Ines Lechleitner, Hans-Jörg Mayer

Exhibition extended: March 7 – May 17, 2020

She is someone who ferments fruit and vegetables, photographs and records them on video. He is someone who draws and paints and moulds.
She finds scenery and landscapes. He white canvas and blue beans. She depicts “Body Gestures” and strong women. He a woman-fox creature or statements like “Life is life” or “Everything has to be done by oneself”.
She goes to the heart of the matter and captures the rushing river Rhine in a “River Glass”. He brings a spinning disco ball to a halt with a brush. She applies “Scales” onto paper-maché. He rabbits on velvet. She explores the “Boundaries Of Music”. He tinkers at the edges of art history.
She works site-specifically. He hardly ever does.
And then they meet. And talk. And they decide to do something together. Pourparler.
And while they talk about lemons and onions and plums, something comes between them. It starts to hiss and there it is: the in-between, the inter-personal, and it chirps about in-between spaces. In nuances. And they both become curious.
For her it’s as if she’s picking out ingredients at the market. There are his next to hers, and she takes them boldly. Intuitively. He collects hectically. And prepares everything with care. To after the butcher they carry their ingredients. Without a recipe.
It remains a game, and on the surface, as they roll the dice, divide everything into cubes and mix it up in the old butcher’s shop. The work of the other becomes their own. And parts of it form a new whole. Tensely they lie in wait and observe. They let the ingredients do their job. Without questioning what is going on.
But you can talk about it. Pourparler. Talking in suspense.
She is Ines Lechleitner and he is Hans-Jörg Mayer.
Their joint exhibition runs from 7 March to May 2020.
Text by Nele Meissner

Ines Lechleitner (*1978 in Vienna) lives in Berlin. As an interdisciplinary working artist, photographer and cook, Ines Lechleitner combines media such as photography, drawing, sculpture, sound, film, cooking and scent in her installations, performances and artist books. She researches non-verbal communication and creates situations of dialogue with artists and scientists. She was a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, studied at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the NSCAD College for Art and Design in Halifax, and the San Francisco Art Institute. www.ineslechleitner.com

Hans-Jörg Mayer (* 1955 in Singen) lives in Berlin. Hans-Jörg Mayer is represented by the galleries Nagel Draxler, Berlin / Cologne, Christine Mayer, Munich, Gabi Senn Gallery, Vienna, Samuelis Baumgarte, Bielefeld, and M. LeBlanc, Chicago. Works are owned by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the mumok in Vienna, the Grässlin Collection in St. Georgen, the Brandhorst Collection in Munich, the Pat and Juan Vergez Collection in Buenos Aires, among others.

Funded by: