ARTISTS TALK

 

2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002


Saturday October 21, 8pm Komplot organised by Lise Nellemann and hosted by Sofie Lebech

Tuesday October 17, 8PM Chris Evans & Andrew Hunt Hosted by Saim Demircan

Tuesday September 26, 8PM Samuel Stevens Koken Ergun Hosted by Saim Demircan

Tuesday June 13, 8PM, Christian Niccoli and Warren Neidich with Armen Avanessian.

 

ALL FOLLOWING TALKS (if not mentioned seperately) ARE part of the 'open studio' series DOWDOS


Tuesday June 6, 8PM David Keating + Rommelo Yu +Dan Steiple for Homie Hosted by Saim Demircan + Joel Mu

Tuesday May 30, 8PM NewYorkRioTokyo Hosted by Catherine Griffiths

Thursday May 25. 8PM Johan Zetterquist in discussion with Judith Manzoni
Special Invitation by Patricia Reed on the occasion of The Momental

Tuesday May 23, 8PM Mungo Thomson + Martin Boyce Hosted by Henriette Bretton-Meyer

Tuesday May 16, at 8pm Christel Weiler + Barbara Gronau: Sonderforschungsbereich Kulturen des Performativen / Freie Universität Berlin (auf Deutsch) Special Invitation by Patricia Reed on the occasion of The Momental

Sunday May 14 Stephan Kurr + Jürgen Krusche: Walking the City, Special Invitation by Patricia Reed on the occasion of The Momental

Tuesday May 9, at 8 pm Mark Paterson: sensuousness and the everyday in measured space: Haptic Architectures Special Invitation by Patricia Reed on the occasion of The Momental

Tuesday May 2. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Original Fassung, Heimo Lattner, epram.org, host Catherine Griffiths

Tuesday April 25. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Whitney Program Revisited: Artists Discuss the Program's Relation to their Practice, Guests: Sophie Hamacher and Maryam Jafri. Host Henriette Bretton-Meyer

Tuesday April 18. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Suzanne van de Ven + Henrikke Nielsen, host Joel Mu

Tuesday April 11. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Norwich OUTPOST Gallery, host Saim Demircan

Tuesday April 4. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Åsa Sonjasdotter and Nils Rømer, host Michael Baers

Tuesday March 28. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Dan Rees & Catherine Griffiths for Home of lost Ideas + Lars Mathisen + Little Warsaw, host Catherine Griffiths

Tuesday March 21. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Mikala Dwyer + Claire Healy + Sean Cordeiro, host Joel Mu

Tuesday March 14. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Maki Takano + Franz Höfner & Harry Sachs, host Joel Mu

Tuesday March 7. at 8 pm ArtistTalk with Althea Thauberger + Kerry Tribe, host Henriette Bretton-Meyer

Tuesday February 28. Artist Talk with Fucking Good Art











Komplot
Saturday 21st Oktober 2006 at 20:00

Guests: Komplot, Messieurs Delmotte, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, Agnès Geoffray

Host: Sofie Lebech
(This evening's talks will be held in English)

'In the presence or the absence of the artists'
Komplot introduces the work of Messieurs Delmotte, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, Agnès Geoffray

This program is about talk: talking about, over and through art, self mythologizing and reinvention. How speech can be sized, appropriated, manipulated and spun by artists to create new works, recycle existing ones, whether it be their own creations, historical events or the discourse of an emphatic art critic. In those works traveling from Brussels, a Babel like vision of the perspectives, entanglements and clashes that discourse allows is never far away. But if 'art speech' may seem 'theirs' in all the meaningful distortions of it's practice, the purpose of this confrontation-cum-performance is precisely to make it 'ours'.

The video program will be augmented by a screening of sections from 'Sad In Country', a documentary by Kosten Koper (°1970, UK, lives in Brussels) & Catherine Vertige, on the subject of artist collectives in Belgium, featuring Club Moral (Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven & Danny Devos), Building Underwood (Simona Denicolai, Ivo Provoost, David Evrard) amongst others. Kosten Koper will introduce the video by a lecture.

Messieurs Delmotte (°1967, B, lives in Liège) created the four video's series 'Fränz ünd Köfon' (12 min) in non-german, non-english and french, in 2004, for VOLLEVOX, a project about the voice curated by Komplot. Delmotte, a self-declared poser, sneers at the institutionalized art world with his mischievous and surprising actions, trivial in content and simple in form. He takes the appearance of several archetypical cultural disciples – the American rock hero, the surly German artist, the DJ freak, the cultural politician – and he takes a stance between meaning and nonsense, between the identifiable and the surreal. The results are uncomplicated and unvarnished, but also pure and most of all irresistibly charming. Or, as Delmotte puts it himself: "Je le fais, je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais je le fais!".

Simona Denicolai (°1972, I, lives in Brussels) and Ivo Provoost (°1974, B, lives in Brussels) work together since 1998. Stating "We like the metaphor of the earthworm, and particularly its relation with its context, to talk about our way of working. The earthworm swallows its context, digests it and defecates it, in order to survive and move in its environment.", their working practice, like many collaborations, denies the intuitive artistic touch or the hand of the individual artist and involves discussion and re-discussion to arrive at the finished pieces. It is what happened after they presented the video 'TO BE HERE (HAPPY)' (19 min) at the occasion of the Belgian Young Painting Prize in 2005; they published the text 'Warning to a young painter ', as a telephone piece, that Marko Stamenkovic had written in reaction to the reception of their work.

Agnès Geoffray's (°1976, F, lives in Brussels) work often aims at infiltrating reality by questioning its narratives. Her last video 'Comment j'en suis venue à l'art' (2006, 15 min) starts in a conventional way as a regular interview with radio journalist Thierry Génicot: Talking about her work, and more specifically about her last exhibition at La lettre volée, Brussels, Geoffray evokes the way she appropriates a fictional universe, recycling elements of "unheimlich" ordinary life in her art works, before giving a splendid and staggering demonstration of this in the very interview that is being filmed.

Active in Brussels since 2002, KOMPLOT is a collective of curators who organize activities in the field of contemporary art with the principal at base of infiltration of public spaces and institutions. KOMPLOT works without a "fixed" space to exhibit artists works in order to expand the field of its action in various contexts and out of the established territories dedicated to art.
With the Support of the CGRI
http://www.kmplt.be

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Chris Evans & Andrew Hunt
Host: Saim Demircan
(This evening's talks will be held in English)



Chris Evans

Chris Evans deliberately muddles the roles of artist and patron, genius and muse. He often intitiates dialogues with company directors, institutions and aristocrats that result in artworks: anything from a chalky-looking sculpture of a rock to an audio piece or a sculpture park. His solo show earlier this year at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, 'Militant Bourgeois' featured a sculpture based on the thoughts of one of Holland's most significant patrons Jan Six. The sculpture, a wood-burning stove with eleven chimneys now features in a boot-camp style Existentialist Retreat designed for over-privileged artists that opened in September in the middle of the ring-road on the edge of Amsterdam.

Exhibitions this year include 'Radical Loyalty', a solo exhibition currently at Studio Voltaire; 'Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat', a solo exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; 'British Art Show 6' (Hayward Gallery touring exhibition), 'What Have I Done To Deserve This' (Chris Evans, Pawel Althamer, Mierle Laderman) at Cubitt Gallery, London, 'East International', Norwich, UK.

Forthcoming shows include solo exhibitions at REK (Annex space at Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin); International Project Space, Birmingham, UK; Chapter, Cardiff, UK; Outpost, Norwich U.K; STORE, London; ArtPace, San Antonio, USA; and group exhibitions at Gasworks, London and Van Loon Museum, Amsterdam (a/o).



Andrew Hunt

Andrew Hunt is a curator based in London and Birmingham. Since January 2006 he has been the Exhibitions Curator at International Project Space, Birmingham, UK. Recent exhibitions include 'Writing in Strobe', Dicksmith Gallery (2006), John Russell 'Geniess', Norwich Gallery, (2005) and 'Like Beads on an Abacus Designed to Calculate Infinity', Rockwell (2004)

Publishing includes the imprint Slimvolume, produced on a yearly basis since 2001. Also Reviews Editor at Untitled, a regular contributor to Frieze and a number of other journals.

Andrew will be curating Chris Evan's 'Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat' at International Project Space, Birmingham, UK in January 2007.

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Christian Niccoli

In his presentation Christian Niccoli will introduce his recent video works composing the trilogy Escalating perception and will talk about his new project entitled "Das Problem der Freiheit". In "Escalating perception" (2004-06) he investigates the phenomenon of visual perception on two parallel metropolitan escalators (one going up and the other going down) located within the public transportation system of Berlin, Montreal and Istanbul. In his new project "Das Problem der Freiheit" - wich will be developed during the Artist in Residence Program at Michelangelo Pistoletto Foundation in Biella, Italy - he will produce a video containing reflections of local teenagers about the concepts of Freedom, Safety, Religion, Sacrifice and Dogma. This Video shall function as a multiplicator for reflections and will be distributed in the schools of the region.

Christian Niccoli was born in 1976 in South Tyrol, a German-speaking minority, situated in the north of Italy. He lives and works in Berlin and Milan. He studied painting at the Academies of Arts in Florence, Milan and Vienna and in 2005 he was a fellow at Antonio Ratti Foundation in Como, Italy. Recent solo shows took place at Kunstraum Innsbruck, Kunsthaus Meran and Haus am L¸tzowplatz in Berlin. Recent group shows include Dolomiten Fenster at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Traccie di un seminario at Assab One in Milan and Das absurde Bekannte at Phnix Art - Harald Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg. Starting July 2006 he will be an artist in residence at Michelangelo Pistoletto Foundation in Biella, Italy.

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Artist/Theorist Warren Neidich in Conversation with Armen Avanessian.

Title: Restistance is Futile: The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness.

In Empire Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt elucidate what Foucault, in the last chapter of The Will To Knowledge, had already made explicit. They once again reiterate and delineate, in section 1:2, the different and evolutionary consequences of the '"disciplinary society' and the 'society of control' On one hand, the disciplinary society is constructed through a dissemination of social command by diffuse networks of "machinic assemblages" that regulate "each" subjects customs, habits and productive practice. Extensive culture, that culture that is characterized by Euclidean geometries, the assembly line, arboreal classification systems, operates upon the subject from the outside restricting his or her movements and choices along fixed and 'stable geometric points and quantitative logics. The society of control, on the other hand, operates within the domain of intensive cultural apparatti characterized by Riemanian spaces, rhizomatic logics working at non-linear junctures and folded temporality induced by the multiplicity of flows that characterize our global world post-internet. According to the authors, this transition from a disciplinary society to the society of control concerns the emergence of what they refer to as "Biopower" which regulates social life from within. "By contrast, when power becomes entirely biopolitical, the whole social body is comprised by power's machinery and developed in its virtuality". Since 1987 powerful new tools have emerged in Neuroscience which have altered our understanding of how these cultural systems, driven by new and sophisticated technologies, might sculpt the brain of the individuals that comprise that social body. In this artists talk, I would like to explore the possible mechanisms and sites through which we might understand the complex interactions for what I am now calling the "Neurobiopolitical"


Warren Neidich is currently visiting artist and research fellow at the Center for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths College, London 2006-2008. His art work has been exhibited internationally in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Ludwig Museum, Koln, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota just to name a few. Selected upcoming exhibitions in 2006 include The Expanded Eye, KunstHuas Zurich, Switzerland. Protections, Kunstmuseum Graz, Austria, Sweet Dreams:Contemporary Art and Complicity, Bayle Art Museum, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia,. Masquarade, Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles, California, NeuroCulture, , Wesport Art Center, Westport, Connecticut, Into Me/Out of Me, PS1, MOMA, Long Island City, New York City, New York and Multitasking, NBGK, Berlin, Germany. Author of seven books and catalogues he has recently produced a collection of essays called Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain published by DAP and the University of California, Riverside, 2003. Earthling, a collection of his photographs with an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist and an essay by Barry Schwabsky was recently published by Pointed Leaf Press. Recent awards include the following . Glenfiddich Artist Residency, American Representative, Summer, 2005., Arts Council of England Research Fellowship 2004-2005, British Academy Award, 2005 and ACE-AHRB Arts and Science Research Fellowships 2004. He is currently a finalist for the Creative Capital Award.

Armen Avanessian was co-editor of Le Philosophoire (Paris) from 2002 -2004 to which he also contributed articles and translations. He was recently the editor at the publishing house Berlin Press in London. He has worked as a journalist and political correspondent for Format and Falter - Viennese political and cultural weeklies. He studied philosophy, politics, and literature in Vienna, Paris (Jacques RanciËre) and Bielefeld (Karl Heinz Bohrer) and has taught politics and philosophy at the University of Vienna. He is currently writing his post-doc/Habilitation at the FU-Berlin (Winfried Menninghaus)

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Martin Boyce + Mungo Thomson
Host: Henriette Bretton-Meyer, independent curator
(This evening's talks will be held in English)

Martin Boyce is a Glasgow based artist currently spending some time in Berlin. He was invited as a Fellow of the UDK to work in Berlin for nine months, this fellowship finished in December 2005. Martin Boyce has exhibited internationally over the last 10 years. Forthcoming exhibitions include, 'Unlimited', Basel art fair, Solo shows at the Frac des Pays de la Loire, Galerie Johnen, Berlin, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva and Munster Sculpture Project.

Mungo Thomson is an artist based in Los Angeles and sometimes in Berlin. His work can currently be seen in a solo exhibition at REC. in Berlin and in the exhibition Eigenheim at Kunstverein Gottingen. Upcoming projects include Statements at Art Basel 37, a project for Creative Time in New York City this summer, and a residency and exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2007.

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Dr. Christel Weiler + Barbara Gronau

On the Consequences of a Performative turn for Theatre Studies

As a theatre researcher, one is confronted, more than in other "scientific" fields, with a set of rather elusive questions which embody the difficulties posed by our discipline in our investigations and theoretical reflections. Theatre is forever taking place in the moment of its performance; although it leaves residues, these can only serve to covertly describe its complex totality, and how it took place as an event. Through artifacts such as photos, costumes and video, only a partial and per-spectival position can be forged, reducing the intangible experience of the performance to fragments - mediating the actual instantiation into a virtual memory. How can we negotiate this "dilemma"? Is it a "dilemma" at all, or rather a chance for theatre studies to cope with its inherent modes, and seek to revise reductionist strategies of analysis. In the discussion, we will thus concern ourselves with the implications of this 'Performative' turn in theatre research, as well as extending it to the 'Performative' dimensions of space and on Interferences of Installation Art and Theatre.

Dr. Christel Weiler is a scholar at Institut for theatre science of the
Freie Universität Berlin since 1996, with focus on research and teaching in: Theory, aesthetics and analysis of contemporary theatre, theoretical and practical investigations for the work of the actor, in cooperation within the research platform "Cultures of the Performative" (working group "Aesthetics of the Performative"). Recent publications on Contemporary Theatre include: "Theater als öffentlicher Raum. Die Berliner Ermittlung von Jochen Gerz und Esther Shalev-Gerz", Berlin 2005, "Etwas ist dran.
Vorurteile zum Lehrstück" in: Erika Fischer-Lichte, Clemens Risi, Jens
Roselt, (Hg.) Kunst der Aufführung ­ Aufführung der Kunst, Berlin 2004, "Glaubensfragen ­ postdramatisch", in: Patrick Primavesi, Olaf A. Schmid, (Hg.) AufBrüche. Theaterarbeit zwischen Text und Situation, Berlin 2004

Barbara Gronau is a scholar at the Theatre Department of the Freie
Universität Berlin, where she is doing research on the Performativity of contemporary theatre and visual arts.

www.sfb-performativ.de

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Walking the City
Stephan Kurr + Jürgen Krusche
Sunday May 14 | 13:00 - 18:00

Jürgen Krusche will talk about his city-walks series in the context of his research through the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zürich. The city-walks, which operate between ethnographic urban research and conceptual art, will be presented; focusing on his image rich research from Berlin and Tokyo. Through his presentation contemporary spatial practices will be addressed. Firstly, it is the moment of moving that constructs space.
www.aestheticmanagement.com

Stephan Kurr will present his Erste Entscheidung (First Decision) project (Book Published 2004 by Revolver - Archiv für aktuelle Kunst) in which he performs a zigzag walk through the city (alternating between possibilities of turning left, then turning right). In contrast to the flaneur, each possible turn was taken, not only to investigate the city in the sense of its boundaries, but also to question the orthogonal position of the urban structure itself ­ to radicalize the urban plan under the weight of its own logic.
http://www.kurr.org

The two will then proceed to lead a city walk starting at Sparwasser HQ, with workshop participants - culminating in a video document which will be included within the exhibition "The Momental" which is currently on view in the gallery.

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ARTISTS TALK: Dr. Mark Paterson
Sensuousness and the Everyday in Measured Space: Haptic Architectures
Lecture and Film Presentation | Video chat from New York
Discussion in English

A film/text and public lecture. The sensuous, sensory body is kinaesthetic. As we encounter and experience built environments, the somatic senses (kinaesthesia, proprioception, the vestibular sense) are engaged. With the recent notions of 'haptic architecture' and design for sensory impairments, there is an increased interest in the material mechanisms, materials and technologies of sensory appeal. Sensory appeals based on textured spaces play with the motile body, invoking affective responses. Using particular materials and spatial ordering, bodily trajectories through multi-textured, multi-sensory spaces can start to reveal narratives, embodied spatial stories that come together through sensing and movement.

Dr. Mark Paterson is a lecturer in Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He completed his Ph.D. in Human Geography at the University of Bristol entitled 'Haptic Spaces' in 2002. His research involves the senses, especially touch, as everyday embodied experience, and the alteration of such sensory experiences through technology. He has also been an English teacher in Zimbabwe and Japan, and worked for non-profit organisations.

He is currently on Research Leave, writing a book entitled The Senses of Touch in Sydney, Australia, with a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Recent publications include: Consumption and Everyday Life (London: Routledge) 2005, "Seeing with the hands": Blindness, touch and the Enlightenment spatial imaginary', British Journal of Visual Impairment 2006, The Forgetting of Touch: Re-membering Geometry with Eyes and Hands', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2005.

www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/haptics


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"ORIGINAL FASSUNG"

Guests: Heimo Lattner, artist and epram.org

Host: Catherine Griffiths


For this evening's discussion the artist Heimo Lattner from Original Fassung and epram.org shall invite the audience to a presentation and study trip, which ventures from Sparwasser's HQ and out into it's surrounding neighbourhood.

Having tracked down and contemplated a large portion of Berlin's real existing animal sculptures, epram.org is currently focusing its attention on those that exist beyond our physical grasp, either in another time (past/future) or in the mind (planned/imagined), requiring a whole different approach, and posing a whole different set of questions.

Heimo Lattner, working with e-Xplo, has developed maps, routes, sound and film materials as reflections of a multifaceted investigation into location, context, social identity, landscape, and the public space of information.

Original Fassung have been invited by Catherine Griffiths, as part of her on-going research project mapping Berlin's artist-run spaces. The project aims to provide a network for the simultaneously diverse, sprawling and often less established project/artist-run/off- spaces that make up so much of Berlin's creative landscape. See www.youkunst.de.

Original Fassung is a series of talks and discussions usually based at the project space General Public in Berlin. They are based on an understanding of collaboration rather than competition motivated by the curiosity of strangers or visitors to tap into different fields, such as science, music, architecture, art, dance, choreography, theater, film, politics, design, media, economics, journalism. The project is organised by Geoff Garrison, Heimo Lattner, Oliver Baurhenn, Cecile Belmont and Angelika Middendorf.

General Public is an independent project space run by a group of cultural workers (visual artists, curators, among others) based in Berlin. General Public was founded in Autumn 2005 and has since produced a number of exhibitions, artist presentations, discussions, film screenings, and performances. Additional to its own program General Public occasionally serves as a host for related external activities and projects.

General Public aims to install and uphold a collaborative, process-related, informal platform for open thought, information exchange, spatial experiments, transdisciplinary approach and the reflection on contemporary visual and auditive culture. Although operating within an international network, General Public's activities are always informed by and related to its local context and situation. Currently the activities of General Public are structured into three distinct series DISK Sessions, LOGE and Orginalfassung (Original Version) and an irregular exhibition program.

For further information please see:

www.epram.org
www.e-xplo.org
www.generalpublic.de
www.youkunst.de

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"The Whitney Program Revisted: Berlin-Based Artists Discuss the Program's Relation to their Practice"

Guests: Sophie Hamacher, artist and critic and Maryam Jafri, artist

Host: Henriette Bretton-Meyer, independent curator

For this evening at Sparwasser HQ, artist and critic Sophie Hamacher and artist Maryam Jafri will be talking about their work, partly in relation to their participation in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Both currently based in Berlin, Hamacher and Jafri participated in the Whitney's Critical Studies Program and Studio Program, respectively.

After their individual presentations, the speakers are ready to engage in a discussion with the audience on questions relating to their practices, the influence of the Whitney Program on their current work and any other topics raised by the presentations.


Sophie Hamacher is an artist and critic from Berlin. She works primarily with
collage, reconfiguring images from major American newspapers into her own
painted protests by using documents and reclaiming them from their mere
informative quality. She has written extensively on the relationship
between art and document, and the unconscious or conscious witnessing of
historical events through photography and film. After completing the Whitney
Independent Study Program in 2005 she gave a lecture "On Walter Benjamin's
Thirteen Theses Against Snobs" at the Whitney Museum in New York. She is a regular contributor to Artforum.com and is currently co-curating an exhibition
titled "The Success of Failure - Fail again; Fail better".

Maryam Jafri is an artist working with video, performance and photo-collage. Her work focuses on the role of narrative in the construction of identity,
from the indivudal to the national. She is a 2000 graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden and Helsinki Konsthall, Finland. In May she will have a solo show in Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, called "Costume Party: Colony & Native."

Everybody's welcome, including past and future Whitney alumni!
The evening will be held in English.

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Henrikke Nielsen + Suzanne van de Ven
(This evening's talk will be held in English)
Host: Joel Mu, independent curator

When curating under the term: "independent", degrees of experimentation are generally presumed, whether rightly or not. This lingering association, which in reality may have less to do with curators and more to do with certain curatorial contexts, is nonetheless a possible feature of curatorial practice. These contexts, be they conventional or non-conformist, predicated by some situational context or produced 'neutrally' in either temporary or ongoing projects, forces one, when linking 'independent' with 'experimental', to critically link a relation between different exhibiting spaces and curating, in much the same the way.

In response to these and other issues, Berlin-based independent curator Henrikke Neilson and Amsterdam-based independent curator Suzanne van de Ven will, from the contexts of their of work, discuss recent, current and fore-coming projects vis-à-vis the curatorial and artist profession in general.

Henrikke Neilsen is an independent curator with current projects in Berlin and Copenhagen. She is also an art critic for Art Asia Pacific and Flash Art International as well as having teaching commitments at the Danish Art Academy, Jutland. In 2004, the exhibition, "The build, the unbuilt and the unbuildable" was exhibited at the Institute of Contempoary Art, Copenhagen, followed by the 2005 co-founding of the independent project space CROY NIELSEN in Berlin. For 2006, Henrikke Nielsen has been invited to guest curate "Was ware wenn #5" at JET in Berlin.

Suzanne van de Ven is an independent curator (e.g. The 24th Contemporary Artists Exhibition, Aksanat Istanbul, PORTAL I-II, Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel, and Cargo Series, Loods 6 Amsterdam) and writer (Metropolis M, Paletten, Art-Ist) based in Amsterdam. She holds a guest-professorship Exhibition Practice and Analysis at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, conducts and initially implemented the curating class of the University of Amsterdam in cooperation with the Sandberg Institute, and is an external advisor for SKOR, the Dutch foundation for art and public space. Van de Ven is presently working on an exhibition project in Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam that will transconnect with further locations, among which Diyarbakir (Turkey), and on a collaborative project in Tallinn (Estonian Art Museum).

TONIGHT'S TALK HAS BEEN KINDLY SUPPORTED BY THE ROYAL NETHERLAND'S EMBASSY, BERLIN

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OUTPOST gallery Norwich, Uk
Host: Saim Demircan, artist

(This evening's talk will be held in English)

In November 2003 Sparwasser HQ was invited, amongst others, to talk about artist-led galleries at an EASTdiscourse at Norwich School of Art & Design, before exhibiting 'Old Habits Die Hard' at Norwich Gallery in January 2004.

The discourse acted as a precursor for Outpost, an artist run gallery that opened a year later in November 2005 in Norwich, UK. Outpost operates through an open membership and exhibits 12 shows a year split between members and invited artists, as well as regular film screenings and external events.

For this talk Kaavous Clayton, Julia Devonshire, Jay Barsby, Sophie Marritt, Simon Liddiment and Neil Smallbone, all of whom live and work in Norwich and are co-founders and current committee members at Outpost, will introduce and outline the criteria of the gallery and it's exhibitions and events to date, as well as talk about their future plans and discuss the necessity of an artist run gallery for a local artistic community.

This talk is also an invitation for Berlin's artist-led community to find out about one of the UK's emerging artist run galleries with the aim of creating a broader awareness between them.

 

www.norwichoutpost.org

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Nis Roemer and Åsa Sonjasdotter
Host: Michael Baers, artist

(This evening's talk will be held in English)

Sparwasser celebrates the long-overdue arrival of spring with a program devoted to nature and agriculture. On Tuesday, April 4, artists Åsa Sonjasdottir and Nis Roemer will talk with Michael Baers about their respective practices as they relate to agriculture, ecology, and the juridical. Over the years, Sonjasdottir has engaged in numerous projects that blend the line between art, activism, and the investigation of public space. More recently she has explored agriculture, collaborating with Indian environmental groups and on her own hobby-farming projects. Roemer works with publications and public art. His work is often collaborative, and frequently explores the global, the local, and the environmental. Tuesday's talk will focus especially on the links between globalization, the environment, and agricultural practices within Europe and without. Look forward to a lively discussion about nature, art, and society. A special post-talk treat will be served.

Nis Roemer is a Copenhagen-based artist who works with public art in the city, on the web and in the newsmedia. With a playfull and interactive approach, he makes situations for change and reflection. He has a special interest in the social and political organization of space and in how processes of globalization affects the city and our natural environment. For further information, please see www.free-soil.org for more information.

Åsa Sonjasdotter is a visual artist living in Copenhagen and Berlin. Apart from numerous projects involving public space, she is also a founding member of the Danish feminist group, Women Down the Pub. Her current project is a research work involving the humble potato to be shown in Budapest and Amsterdam. For more information, see www.potatoperspective.org.

Michael Baers is an American artist, writer, and educator living in Berlin. He is currently in residence in Denmark as part of the Danish International Visiting Artist Program (DIVA).

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Artist group Little Warsaw, artist Lars Mathisen and introducing the book project 'Home for lost ideas' by Catherine Griffiths and Daniel Rees
Host: Catherine Griffiths, artist

(This evening's talk will be held in English)

Little Warsaw are an artist initiative from Budapest; they consist of two artists, András Gálik and Bálint Havas. They are currently showing a video installation in the Sparwasser exhibition "A complete guide to re-writing your own history 2". Little Warsaw simultaneously produce works of art and the peculiar systems of reference that stand behind them. The public sculpture is especially important as something that in its message and appearance seeks to be 'communal', the vehicle of ideas and aesthetic values whose tradition greatly relies on the notion of consensus, agreement on aesthetics and content. At the 2nd Berlin Biennale (2001) they appeared for first time in front of an international audience and have since presented an installation project for the Venice Biennale (2003) involving the over institutionalized Nefertiti bust in the Egyptian Museum Berlin ('Body of Nefertiti', 2003-05-26). At the end of 2004 Little Warsaw removed a Hungarian public statue and exhibited ('INSTAURATIO!') in the Stedelijk Museum. Parallel to their conceptual projects they have a permanent interest in artist initiated and critical approaches, a field which they have researched through several projects such as The Artwork of The Week (2001), The Last Biennale Memorial (2002), Monitor (2003), Tableau Vivant I-II. (2005) and Only Artists (2006).

Lars Mathisen, who lives and works in Copenhagen, is currently an artist-in-residence in Berlin. His video installations often employ language and theatrical stage settings along with shifts in the synchronization between sound and image to create a deliberate disorientation on the part of the viewer. Mathisen's selection as Denmark,s official representative in the 2004 São Paulo Biennial confirms his position as one of the most exciting and innovative Danish film and video artists. This evening he will screen a part of his video 'Document in the Past Perfect', which he initially screened at Sparwasser 2 years ago, and will revisit it tonight, also taking the opportunity to discuss the history of its making and his personal art strategies.

Catherine Griffiths and Daniel Rees will present their 'in progress' book project 'Home for lost ideas'. A project that invites conceptual artists to present the failed, incomplete, bad and impossible aspects of their practice. They hope to engage the audience to discuss a work in the making.

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Mikala Dwyer and installation artists Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
Host: Joel Mu, independent curator

(This evening's talk will be held in English)

In late 2005, artists
Mikala Dwyer, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro and independent curator
Joel Mu met for the first time in Berlin. On top of their own solo
projects, they have come together to collaborate on an art project for
April 2006, drawing on the mutual exchange and research of one
another's artistic and curatorial source material. This presentation
of previous works and current source material hopes to organize its
viewing public, by linking the discussions of 'tonight's talk'
with the contents of 'tomorrow's
exhibition'.

This collaborative art project, entitled "vonANGELSzuRIOTS", will be exhibited at the artists-run-space NewYorkRioTokyo from April 14 - May 5, 2006.

Mikala Dwyer is an artist with current projects in Berlin, Warsaw, New Zealand, New York and Sydney. Primarily working with sculpture, her work poetically mulls over ideas around experimental architecture and superstition. In 2003, her work was selected for a group show at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, entitled Face up: contemporary art from Australia, while her other group exhibitions have taken place at the Bonheurs des Antipodes, Musee de Picardie, Amiens, France (2000) and at the 4th International Istanbul Biennale (1995). In 2000, she was invited for solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. This year, Mikala Dwyer had been invited to take part in a touring group exhibition in Poland, which will travel to the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw and to the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius.

Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro are installation artists currently working on projects for Berlin, Copenhagen and Sydney. Dealing with issues of
architecture, urban development, social gentrification and space invasion, the couple continue to investigate these concerns, driven by
their own state of international homelessness. Current Australian
residents at the Kunsterhaus Bethanien, Berlin, the pair were also
founding members of the Imperial Slacks collective, an artist-run
initiative collectively organised in Sydney. Alongside other Australian Arts Council grants, the pair was awarded in 2006 the Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholarship for Visual Arts. Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro are now currently working towards a collaborative art project with the Swiss-based artists: Simone Fuchs and Martin Blume.

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Maki Takano and collaboration artists Franz Höfner & Harry Sachs
Host: Joel Mu, independent curator

(the evening will be held in English)

Maki Takano is an installation, video and photographic artist currently working in Berlin, supported by the Japanese Pola Art Foundation. Takano's work uses both social and gallery contexts to draw attention to the viewer's relation to things as they are located in art or from life in the everyday. Approached subtly, her work present's the phenomena of time and space as it is dependent upon the viewer's own perception, decisions and considerations. Her recent exhibitions include a site specific installation at the Liget Galeria in Budapest, a temporary installation at raum2 in Mannheim, and an artistic intervention into her own apartment in Berlin.

Franz Höfner & Harry Sachs's artistic collaboration has spanned over ten years, taking the form of installations, performance, video and public art projects. Based in Berlin, their artistic work critically approaches questions of residential living, as it is in-built within the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of the housing apparatus. In other works, social history and the activity of contemporary life is playfully disorientated in order to develop alternative experiences and new ways of seeing. Their recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at andreas wendt in Berlin and at faux mouvement, metz in France. Later this year, they also have an exhibition at the Kunstverein in Göttingen as well as the production of a Berlin public art project, supported by the Berliner Senat. In 2006, they were also awarded a Pépinières européennes grant for an artist residency in Budapest.

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Althea Thauberger and Kerry Tribe
Host: Henriette Bretton-Meyer, independent curator
(the evening will be held in English)

Artists Althea Thauberger and Kerry Tribe met in early 2003 and have worked together on nearly all of one another's projects since then. The talk will be an exploration of their collaborations and a chance to see their recent work.

Althea Thauberger's photographic, film, video, and performance works often incorporate collaborative structures and exist within the public domain. They invite critical and sympathetic reflection on alienation, community, and self-presentation. She recently presented a community project for inSite San Diego/Tijuana, and is currently exhibiting at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the Wolfsburg Kunstverein, and the Tracey Lawrence Gallery in Vancouver. She is currently the Canadian Artist in Residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.

Kerry Tribe works primarily with video, film and installation. Her large-scale projects explore relationships between subjectivity and representation, often by investigating the gray areas between the authentic and the scripted or the collective and the idiosyncratic. She regularly invites the participation of colleagues, actors, strangers and technical professionals to produce ludic philosophical inquiries through structurally rigorous forms. Tribe's work is currently included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, and Kunsternes Hus in Oslo. She is the 2005-2006 recipient of the Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in Visual Art at the American Academy in Berlin and is the American Artist in Residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

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Editors of Fucking Good Art, Nienke Terpsma and Rob Hamelijnck
Host: Michael Baers

(the evening will be held in English)

Michael Baers will talk with editors Nienke Terpsma and Rob Hamelijnck of the Rotterdam-based art magazine F ucking Good Art about research and methodology in their upcoming International issue. F ucking Good Art - International (Berlin edition) is their 12th issue, set for release in mid-March. It explores Berlin's cultural life and international aspirations in the arts in a mixture of articles, interviews, a crimi, reviews, and commissioned art works.

It is their opening salvo on greater Europe's culturati, taking aim, this time, at the incongruities, banalities, ongoing conversations, and internecine conflicts that make up an integral part of urban cultural life in Berlin. They do this no less with a unique mixture of brevity, wit, and hardball critique while displaying considerable elan. Nienke and Rob are artists/designers and have been in Berlin since October 2005 while in attendance at the Janowitzbrücke residency 'Project Studio Berlin' run by The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.

Michael Baers is an American artist/culture worker who lives in Berlin

(the magazine name had to be written with a free space between F and ucking, because of automatic censorship of this mailing program)

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Artists Discussion on the occasion of The Momental at Sparwasser HQ:

Proposals for Public Art | Uninvited Non-Monumentality
A Public discussion between Johan Zetterquist and Judith Manzoni on his Proposal Series + A Launching of a public work competition:
A Monument Expressing Our European Gratitude Towards the United States of America for Hosting the Puritans.

'I am for an art that does something other than sit on its as s in a museum'
Claes Oldenburg

On Zetterquist's Proposals
Rather than exhibiting in a gallery, Johan Zetterquist conquers it. Bright orange paint and intriguing black shapes cover the traditionally immaculate white walls. Inspired by the urban subcultures of punk, heavy metal and street art, the rectangular graphics dissolve in strong drippings and merge the gallery space with that of the city. The private sphere gets the look of the public domain and, in this manner, the artist intends to disrupt the sterilizing character of the 'white cube', the invisible contextual bubble that most rooms designed for the showing of art exercise over it. The gallery walls may be unavoidable, may be a surface somehow estranged from the rest of society, but are now at least deprived of its previous embedded assumptions of false institutional neutrality.

Against this background, Zetterquist presents his thought-provoking 'Proposals for Public Art': texts, illustrations and scale models that borrow official legislative language, and combine it with an appearance of absurdity to carry out a subtle but unashamed socio-cultural critique. His pieces remind of the kind of project presented to an administrative organism (with it's titles and subtitles and according visual material), but have the content of a Beckett scene and, even, a hint of joke written on a public toilet; the resulting displacement makes an art that could equally be defined as conceptual, postmodern and poststructuralist.
-Text Excerpted from Judith Manzoni 2005

Johan Zetterquist (1968, Arvika, Sweden) has been pre-occupied with a project entitled Proposals for Public Art for the last few years. The proposals are primarily without site specification and none with an official invitation, the proposals themselves are the end product. Recent solo exhibitions include: Invaliden 1 (Berlin), Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle (Munich), Julia Friedman Gallery (Chicago) and Display (Prague). Recent group shows include: Korridor (Berlin), Art Basel and Berlin North, Hamburger BahnHof (Berlin). Zetterquist is represented by Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich and Andréhn Schiptjenko Stockholm. He lives and works in Göteborg, Sweden.

Judith Manzoni (1980, Barcelona, Spain) obtained her degree in Journalism (BA in Mass Media and Communication) and a Master in art Criticism (MA in Contemporary Art, Criticism and Philosophy). She lives in Berlin and works as a freelance writer and collaborator for Invaliden1 Gallery (Berlin).

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The Momental
May 5 ­ June 10 | Sparwasser HQ | <http://www.sparwasserhq.de>http://www.sparwasserhq.de
Finissage June 9 | 19-23:00

Larissa Fassler
Ivana Franke
Germaine Koh
Stephan Kurr
Jeff Preiss
Asa Stahl

Kurator Pia Fuchs dt ID von Patricia Reed

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