After Gallery Weekend Berlin is Before the Gallery Weekend Berlin, there are a lot of labor issues we gloss over in the art world, in the name of … well, admit it, the minute I said “labor,” you felt your art world pizzaz deflate. It is like Amazon and the word Union. We all aspire to an IN, the exclusive parties, the exclusive sales, exclusively being proclaimed a genius by someone with exclusive access to your Art, the museum board, the mega collector, the art critic. I can interchangeably use the terms exclusive and genius; they are both gatekeeping tools. Anyone could “make it” at any time (of course, not accurate), so we all tolerate the discrepancies, the elephants in the rooms, just in case we are in next. A fair amount of these insiders also end up in jail- just saying. Do some labor rights and laws get stomped over on the way? Who cares? We are in. There is, of course, no In and Out—just a system in place to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. The art market and artists have always made strange bedfellows. Like the slogan Stop Being Rich in the Art of the Working Class magazine right next to a BMW sponsorship or an ad for Peres Project Gallery. It is meta. 
 

And while I am confident some galleries offer extra compensation for working on Sundays and even on Labor Day, right? RIGHT? it is such an easy line not to cross; not to have art workers work on the one freaking day a year that celebrates the fight for workers rights. To sign the letter to Gallery Weekend, visit this link. You can also follow Art Workers Berlin on instagram. 

CORRECTION – Berlin based conceptual artist Adrian Piper is in fact the first black woman to win a Golden Lion at  the Venice Biennale in 2015. Artnet and Hyperallergic just did not bother fact checking (as usual). Or maybe it was that Piper “retired from being black”, in 2012, on her 64th birthday. * from the NYT: She did this by uploading a digitally altered self-portrait to her website, in which she had darkened her skin — normally café très-au-lait — to the color of elephant hide. It was accompanied by a news bulletin announcing her retirement.  “Henceforth, my new racial designation will be neither black nor white but rather 6.25% grey, honoring my 1/16th African heritage,” she wrote. “Please join me in celebrating this exciting new adventure in pointless administrative precision and futile institutional control!” (Through extensive genealogical work, she later determined that her African heritage is closer to one-eighth.) 

Speaking of fact checking that never happened, JK claimed in a recent interview with Berliner Morgenpost that his gallery survived the pandemic without claiming public funds. About that.

GUESTS: Caroline Breidenbach (wasserstories), Anna Lena Kronsbein (Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries), Wassertafel Berlin-Brandenburg, MODERATION and CO-CURATION: The Driving Factor (Elisa Bertuzzo, Daniele Tognozzi, Neli Wagner)
in-person event, Schankhalle Pfefferberg (Loft), in German language

 

a show with Sophie Meuresch curated by Friedrich Herz & Clemens Espenlaub
In her most recent video works Sophie Meuresch explores the phenomenon of the moon in a sometimes playful, sometimes meditative way. In doing so, she primarily raises questions of perspective and motion in relation to the other. For the Moon is not only the brightest celestial body of the night, it is also the only body that (like a photographer) circles around us showing its front only – as if we were the object of her desire.

with Theresa Rothe, Josefine Schulz, Johanna Seidel, Theresa Tuffner. Curated by Sandy Becker

DEAR DIARY

The multifaceted youth with its dreams and illusions is the theme of the four artists Theresa Rothe, Josefine Schulz, Johanna Seidel and Theresa Tuffner in the exhibition „DEAR DIARY“. Together they dedicate themselves to this special phase and deal with (personal) questions about identity, memories, love, friendships and the future. In addition, aspects and perspectives are opened up on how this time could perhaps be viewed with a certain distance. What can we learn from it and what should we definitely keep from it?

 

7 May 2022 – 18 Jun 2022

Oranienstr. 46
10969 Berlin

our carnival, our body, our fight

In AS* PAPANGUS, the Afro-Brazilian artist Bruna Amaro performs a carnival in its most queer-feminist and decolonial form, with more than 50 women* in São Paulo and Berlin. Under the Papangu masks, facial identities fade away and a collective body appears. This body is a battlefield for survival, resistance and rebuilding. Visit the multimedia exhibition at Oyoun Berlin until May 27, the video documentation of the carnival performance in São Paulo will be projected on the costumes and masks. The costumes from São Paulo are revived by 10 women* in Berlin this Saturday in an open Street Performance in the neighborhood of Oyoun. The procession on the streets of Berlin-Neukölln invites other FLINTA persons to join the walk. 

if you missed the opening, don't miss the show

"I Heard Talking Is Dangerous" by Lauren Lee McCarthy until May 14 at the Eigen Art Lab.
“After all, it‘s not just about the problems with technology, but how it makes us perceive: ourselves and other people.”
Excerpt from the press release by @philipphindahl

Exhibition views: @eikewalkenhorst
EIGEN + ART Lab

Torstraße 220
10115 Berlin

The exhibition Protection by Anna Anders shows artworks that deal with the theme of protection. She uses photographs and video artworks in situations where people find themselves in unsafe threatening circumstances, or in situations where they realize they should be protecting themselves. By juxtaposing familiar protection, familiar because it has been fashionably and stylishly changed and thus become the everyday norm, with a situation of defenselessness and the search for protection, she sensitively opens up a debate, a discussion about our cultural approach to threat and protection.

with Yalda Afsah, Julian Charrière, Albrecht Dürer, Francisco de Goya, Andreas Greiner, Jenna Sutela, Analisa Teachworth, Jol Thoms, Sung Tieu und Jonas Wendelin

The twelve artists explore how certain lives—human and nonhuman—are designated as alien, and the possibilities of forging relationships across the yawning chasm of self and other.

 

until 25 Jun 2022

Linienstraße 23
10178 Berlin

ADEOLU OSIBODU: FEELS LIKE HOME AGAIN  at thxagain 
A photo exhibition by Adeolu Osibodu from Lagos, Nigeria.
@adeoluosibodu ‘s engagement with photography started at the age of 18 out of the urge to manifest his thoughts. Using this media, he was able to preserve the energy of time plus convey a certain mood. Taking pictures of peculiar scenes, plants, clouds or sun rays coming though an open window, photography almost became therapeutic - and felt like home again.

until June 1th 

Quoting Diana Ross’ iconic hit It’s my house, Sangun Ho’s solo exhibition at soft power looks into the details that make up the surfaces of our everyday life. The romantic encounter of two pigeons on a sidewalk, an abandoned pillow comfortably resting on a window sill, a little dog peeking over the edge of the breakfast table, a bottle hiding out under the fridge – Sangun Ho captures lived and living moments that we all encounter every day. The artist collects and accumulates these fragments in a snapshot-like manner – halting their fleeting presence by giving each of them the focused attention needed to create his detailed hand drawings. As a body of work, the vast amount of these daily drawings seems to represent “the real world”, yet creating a world entirely of their own. Often captured in transit, on his way to the studio, coming home, leaving, Sangun Ho’s motives hint at the beauty inherent in the oddest of situations.

 Based on the worldwide correspondence of the renowned architect Helene Syrkus (1900-1982), the artist couple Maja Wirkus and Eric Pries develops installative-scenic units, i.e. moments of exchange translated into images and spatial structures, whereby the artistic medium is always photography and its extensions. To this end, a series of animated films, objects, photographs and text fare superimposed as constantly overwriting, constantly renewing knowledge spaces.

Floating through a soft mist. When dissolved by terraforming technologies it reveals strange signs of a more-than-human constructor. Smooth, near frictionless, close to perfect vacuum. It seems to be in a constant state of mutation. A stream of consciousness from the future, a text generator, a mad monolith, an ancient quantum computer, an alien life form, an archaeological artifact, a vessel, an erasure poem, an advertisement virus, a communication device, a weather machine, a planetary log, an algorithm, a bad dream, the diary of a bacteria, a lost thought, a contemporary artwork, an incubator?

24 Jun 2022

Oderbergerstrasse 56
10435 Berlin