Opening at the TA T in November 2022, DAOULA – SHEEN focuses on the natural formation and cultural history of wild silk obtained from caterpillars in West Africa and the multifaceted view of this unique material by microbiologists, material scientists, and architects from Germany.
DAOULA – SHEEN is a project of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded by the DFG. Curated by Laurence Douny, Karin Krauthausen, and Felix Sattler with a film installation by Thabo Thindi.
An exhibition of painting students of weißensee kunsthochschule berlin under the direction of Prof. Pia Linz and Petra Trenkel. Curated by the Kleine Humboldt Galerie.
Runtime: 10.09.2022 bis 01.01.2023 Location: ZAK – Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst auf der Zitadelle Spandau
The big city has long been considered a center of the avant-garde and a constant source of inspiration for artists. Its appeal is fed by extremes: Berlin as the epitome of coolness, recklessness and freedom. Living in a big city offers distraction and full days. However, the impressiveness of Berlin’s size and speed can also cause instability or insecurity. In addition to its sheer size, Berlin stands out for its diversity, expressed in its many smaller city centers, diverse population, and never-ending streets.
For one semester, students in Prof. Pia Linz’s and Petra Trenkel’s group at the Weissensee School of Art intensively explored precisely this multifaceted richness of the big city. Through excursions and guest lectures, they sharpened their view of the city and reflected the impressions and observations gained in their works. The resulting group exhibition at ZAK – Center for Contemporary Art was curated by the student initiative Kleine Humboldt Galerie.
The exhibition BIG CITY BABY now brings the big city into the small city, the Zitadelle in Spandau. In the sensitive interplay of the works, one experiences the city through the eyes of the young Berlin artists. Visual reflections on urban life grow here in various disciplines, are linked with other thematic areas and sometimes exaggerated to the point of absurdity. Thus, not only formal experiments are realized in the works, but also a wide range of themes – some of them autobiographically tinged – are touched upon and examined: Youthfulness in the city; the metropolitan area as an excessive demand as well as a place of retreat; the city as a home for the (self-chosen) family; exploration of urban nature and vacancy, et cetera.
The slogan-like title BIG CITY BABY offers space for the multitude of positions of this exhibition. It has no fixed meaning and yet everyone knows what is meant. It is not a quotation, but one nevertheless thinks to have heard it somewhere before. From a passing convertible on the Kudamm or at night on the subway track. BIG CITYBABY is a shout, a whisper, a vibe. You understand it, or you don’t. You can’t escape BIG CITY BABY, just like you can’t escape the big city.
Lars Unkenholz: It’s you I’m thinking of, 2022, Öl auf Leinwand, 170×140 cm
The exhibition of the research project “Viral Theatres” explores this question and makes its Living Archive accessible – a multifaceted collection that shows the new forms and themes of pandemic theater making and experience in interviews, video and audio documents and digital interactions. The opening of the exhibition will be accompanied by a symposium with workshops, a VR performance, and discussion panels on the future of hybrid theater work with international cultural practitioners and scholars.
Symposium 28. – 30. April 2022 Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin & Streaming
Exhibition 28. April – 3. June 2022 Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin Philippstr. 13, Campus Nord, Haus 3, 10115 Berlin Opening hours: Mo – Fri, 14:00 -18:00
In 1864, Rudolf Virchow published his “Darstellung der Lehre von den Trichinen, mit Rücksicht auf die dadurch geboen Vorsichtsmaßregeln, für Laien und Aerzte” (Berlin: Reimer, 1864). It is already clear from the title that Virchow was not simply presenting a scientific publication of research results. Rather, it is to be regarded as a handbook containing information and concrete instructions for policy-makers and society – including manufacturers and consumers of meat products.
In the same year, the Berlin company Schmidt & Haensch developed a microscope for the examination of meat for trichinae according to Virchow’s specifications. Starting from the trichina microscope as an epistemic object, the exhibition weaves threads to different themes and performers: The introduction of meat inspection, the trichinae controversy, colonial collecting, medicine as social science, etc.
The illustrator Jan Steins illustrates themes and figures on a magnetic wall, on which, depending on the constellation, these are sometimes in the center, sometimes at the edge. By physically shifting and exchanging the individual elements – in the context of a monthly round of talks – new focal points of meaning and relationships between the individual actors emerge.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
The exhibition in the Humboldt Forum deals with the interactions between climate change and biodiversity loss as well as the global crises of democratic principles of order. It draws on a wide array of voices from scientific research in order to address the effects of man-made changes to the global environment. The title of the exhibition refers in equal measure to both the destruction of species and ecosystems and the idea of “learning from nature”. The exhibition on the first floor of the Humboldt Forum encompasses a 150-square-metre foyer and a main hall of 600 square metres.
Admission to the Humboldt Lab is free. Time slots can be booked via the Humboldt Forum from 13th July.
Lexichaos From Understanding Misunderstanding to Misunderstanding the Understandable
Voices and alphabetic characters, wall panels, towers, and bells: over the course of ten days, Lexichaos takes over the Pierre Boulez Saal—this is the title of an expansive sound installation by American artist Stephan von Huene (1932–2000). The confusion of languages—god’s measure to scatter the peoples in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel—was written into von Huene’s biography, who was raised in California, the son of German parents, and lived in Hamburg from 1980 to his death. His installation, originally created in 1990 and today housed in the Helmholtz Center of Cultural Techniques at Berlin’s Humboldt University, reveals a very current issue: the verbal communication between people of different national and cultural backgrounds. Von Huene’s work treats language not only in terms of its symbols and sounds—it is also open to a metaphorical interpretation. In the artist’s own words: “Between languages, there is not only the meaning of words, the translation, there are entire worldviews.”
25 March – 6 April 2021 Barenboim-Said-Akademie, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33D, 10117 Berlin Event-Website
Digital launch of the book-as-exhibition zwischen körpern
On 19.03.2021 the Kleine Humboldt Galerie celebrates the launch and vernissage of zwischen körpern, the book-as-exhibition!
Via a livestream, visitors can immerse themselves in video works from 2 pm onwards, take part in guided tours by curators and graphic designers of the exhibition and publication, join a conversation with the Berliner K. Verlag, and much more.
Program 15.00 h / Q&A with the K. publishing house 16.00 h / Guided tours by curators 16.45 h / Video stream of Carolina Caycedo 17.15 h / Video stream by Marco Buetikofer and Lotte Meret 17.30 h / Video stream by Kirstin Burckhardt 18.00 h / Video stream of Theresa Schubert 18.30 h / Cocktails 🍸 19.00 h / Pub Quiz 20.30 h / Sin Maldita A/V Performance
Exhibition zwischen körpern An exhibition in the format of a book – from March 19, 2021 to April 30, 2021.
zwischen körpern negotiates the physical body as the starting and ending point into which society inscribes itself. Various mechanisms of control are examined, which affect diverse bodies in very different ways. The focus is on the impact and experienceability of control on and of the body: bodies are consciously or unconsciously modeled and also controlled by historical and social circumstances. The body is understood as a venue for political struggles, which is why emancipation strategies and self-empowerment processes take on a central role. To what extent are the carnal and new technologies interwoven and what role do intimacy and social constraints play? Eleven contemporary positions investigate these complex dynamics by means of sculpture, spatial installation, video, photography, and performance. As with the selection of artworks, corporeality is reflected and critically questioned from a decolonial and intersectional-feminist perspective.
Publication zwischen körpern / among bodies
How our bodies see, are seen, and behave with and among other bodies, is inevitably political. To move the body is also always to insist on meaning — just as meaning is always in movement.
The book-as-exhibition presents ten contemporary art positions that each explore the complex and intimate dynamics that expose our bodies to new technologies, social pressures, and desires for liberation. As curatorial experiment within the micro-architecture of the book, the project initiates singular relays from sculpture, installation, video, photography, and performance to paper that enable parallel engagements with decolonial and intersectional feminist perspectives.
Book concept by Kleine Humboldt Galerie Curatorial-editorial team: Franziska Dommers, Lotta Feibicke, Nikolas Geier, Eileen Kesseler, Patricia Kühn, Anna Latzko, Monique Machicao y Priemer Ferrufino, Sarah Marcinkowski, Katharina Ripea, Evelyn Sutter, Nicole Wittmann, and Yuanwen Zhong. With artworks by Kirstin Burckhardt, Marco Buetikofer, Carolina Caycedo, Stine Deja, Lotte Meret Effinger, Ester Fleckner, Yngve Holen, Luisa Krautien, Michael Liani, Theresa Schubert, and Zuzana Svatik; additional texts by Michaela Dudley, Felix Sattler, and others; and a glossary of terms by the curators. Design: K. Verlag with Ginny Rose Davis and Megan Ricca
German & English Wendebuch / turning book 196 pages 20 x 29.7 cm Black/white with purple Pantone spot color & full-color image section Softcover, Swiss binding ISBN 978-3-947858-22-4 https://k-verlag.org/books/zwischen-korpern-among-bodies
An exhibition is always a polyphony of things, works and media. At least as important as these are the diverse relationships they can enter into with each other. The digital dependency of the Humboldt Labor will repeatedly present new relationships of this kind. To begin with, however, the exhibition will be completed interactively in the form of a point-and-click adventure. Those who succeed in getting the exhibits to the right location can expect an unusual and exciting virtual tour of the Humboldt Labor.
From 2021 to 2023, an interdisciplinary team will conduct research at the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik / Tieranatomisches Theater, MARKK and the Kunstuniversität Linz in cooperation with other international scientists and artists. The project will conclude with exhibitions that will be shown at MARKK Hamburg (2022) and the Tieranatomisches Theater (2023), among others.
Numerous ethnographic and anatomical collections in Europe contain preparations, casts, X-ray images and photos of so-called “lotus feet”, the bound feet of women in China. The research and exhibition project BINDING BODIES takes these collections as the starting point for research into the discourse history of female body modifications. Already Hans Virchow (1852-1940) and his colleagues draw comparisons to lace dancing, high heels and corsets in their publications. The project attempts an “entangled history” of female body deformations between Europe and China. It examines the complex interactions of self-perceptions and perceptions of others, reconstructs exemplary object biographies and contextualises them against the background of colonial, gender, social and scientific history. Thus, the project is also part of the current controversy about the handling of ethnographic objects and especially human remains in scientific collections.
Curators: Prof. Dr. Jasmin Mersmann (project leader), Dr. Evke Rulffes, Felix Sattler Project Management Organisation: Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Partners: Museum am Rothenbaum. Cultures and Arts of the World (MARKK), Prof. Dr Barbara Plankensteiner, Dr Susanne Knödel, Gabriel Schimmeroth
