Exhibition of the District Studio Grant Artists 2010-2015

Zeljka Blaksic aka Gita Blak, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, Katharina von Dolffs, Hella Gerlach, Klara Hobza, Cooltūristės, Katrin Mayer, Miryana Todorova, Zorka Wollny

30 May, 4 June Performances

Taking its departure point from exploring the reciprocal relationships between artistic practice and the contexts of its realization, Satellite Affects and Other Lines of Flight presents the works of the eight artists and the artist collective, who since 2010 participated in District’s Studio Grant program. The studio inhabited by the artists for six months at a time is programmatically named the ‘Satellite’. In the frame of the exhibition the satellite serves as a metaphorical vehicle to link aesthetic border transgressions, nomadic temporalities, unleashed conceptions of space and resistant politics of the peripheral along an erratic orbit.

Satellite Affects transfers the reflective circular movements of artificial celestial bodies and planetary satellites on the approaches for research, tangency and materialization developed by the artists and District as an art space. Beyond dialectic and anthropocentric categories, the title simultaneously refers to social complexity of ambiguous scenarios populated by animated objects, embodiments of feeling technology and other inbetween subjects.

The exhibition presents contemporary artistic positions from the realms of performance, video, sculpting, installation, art in public spaces, collaborative and conceptual practices, graphic, choreography and sound by a younger generation of female artists. In her encyclopaedic work Grillion (2015), Katharina von Dolffs for instance fathoms the states of excitation of the techno-biological subjects from a new born planet to transfer these soundings into the possibilities of sculpting. In the immediate vicinity of Grillion, Klara Hobza explores the fluid depths of the European continent as well as the boundaries of her own body and citizenship in Diving Through Europe (2010-2040).

In her collaboratively developed sound installation, emerging from the performance Resonance Assembly. Composition for Factory (2014), Zorka Wollny materializes the defunct Malzfabrik as post-industrial resonance body for the gentle erosion of a place into an acoustic temporality. Hella Gerlach focuses on the relationship between body and space in her performative-sculptural practice. She inscribes the visitor as explorer, inhabitant and performer in her sculptural settings (Element XIII (bigbag), 2013). The same goes for Miryana Todorova who pushes the physical expansion of the personal space with her mobile-collapsing architectures transforming context-related (Expanded Objects, 2013-2015). In her performance Whisper-Talk-Sing-Scream (2013), specifically developed for public spaces in Zagreb, Zeljka Blaksic aka Gita Blak demonstrates how the complexity of the political struggles to reclaim the city translate into gestural and musical repertoires of a younger generation in the light of protest songs.

Katrin Mayer’s poster installation, addressing examples and strategies of youth resistance during National Socialism, appears like a guide to action and sort of historical prelude to Whisper-Talk-Sing-Scream and to Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo’s Past Present Tense. Past Present Tense (2014-2015) investigates today’s racism in Germany from the perspectives of those experience xenophobia in their own country and actively oppose against it. Moving in the satellitary orbit between centre and periphery and between resistance and cosmic imagination, the collective Cooltūristės in their newly created performance Rose (Mis)Appropriations (2015) re-appropriate marginalized monuments of Berlin against patriarchal structures.
The presented works have been created, initiated or continued during the District Studio Grant. Therefore the exhibition also enables a retrospective view on the programmatic correlations, collaborative processes and joint contexts between the artists and District.

The studio grant was initiated by Susanne Modelsee, District’s first Artistic Director, in 2010 and established in its current form with an independent jury by her successor Ulrike Gerhardt. Great thanks to both and to every one of the voluntary jury members for their engaged support and companionship:

Ulf Aminde (artist), Elena Basteri (independent curator), Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (curator, Savvy Contemporary Berlin), Sylvia Bonsiepe (gallerist, Klemm’s, Berlin), Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo (artist, New York, Berlin), Discoteca Flaming Star (artist collective), Kordula Fritze-Srbic (independent curator), Hella Gerlach (artist), Sophie Goltz (curator, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein), Christoph Gurk (curator, HAU), Suza Husse (artistic director, District), Klara Hobza (artist), Andrea Keppler (curatorial associate, District), Keumwha Kim (independent curator), Teena Lange (independent performance art curator, artistic director of grüntaler9), Katrin Mayer (artist), Henrik Mayer / REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT (artist collective), Perla Montelongo (NODE Center for Curatorial Studies), Lauren K. Reid (curator, insitu Berlin), Michaela Richter (independent art historian and curator), Lorenzo Sandoval (curator, artist), Jörn Schafaff (art historian, Freie Universität Berlin), Megan Marissa Steinman (independent curator, Berlin/ New York), Polina Stroganova (cultural scholar, Galeriedirektorin Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City), Miryana Todorova (artist, Sofia, New York, Berlin), Heike Tosun (gallerist, Galerie Soy Capitán), Zorka Wollny (artist)

The exhibition will be presented within the framework of International Sculpture Day.

Curators: Andrea Caroline Keppler & Suza Husse; Display: Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga.

30 May, 16 h

Rose Mis(s)appropriation
Performance by Cooltūristės
In the frame of Month of Performance Art Berlin

LOCATION: Rosa Luxemburg-Denkmal, Katharina-Heinroth-Ufer an der Lichtensteinbrücke

Kultūristė means bodybuilder in Lithuanian. For the anonymous feminist art collective Cooltūristės, founded in 2005 in Vilnius, critical bodybuilding means busisness, just like the coolness, (sub)culture and time-space exploration (tourism) resonating in their name. The performance Rose Mis(s)appropriation (2015) takes on forgotten, marginalized monuments, and places of her-story in order to bring them back to life through tender ritual and to activate them for the futuristic incorporation inside new, different relations. Continuing their performative invitation to queer public space and the trappings of collective memory, the Cooltūristės will make the Rosa-Luxemburg monument on Katharina-Heinroth-Ufer in Tiergarten speak. The „conversation“ between Rosa Luxemburg and the temporary community that Cooltūristės summon will be echoed far across the waters of the Landwehr Canal in the man-machine-apparition at the World Fountain in front of the Europa Center.

The script of the performance is available here.

4 June
Deep Sky Dinner
Performance + Three-Course-Menu
With the artists Cooltūristės, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, Hella Gerlach, Zorka Wollny and the curators Andrea Keppler and Suza Husse

The evening begins with the performative tour Cosmonautic Tour by the artist collective Cooltūristės, the current holders of the District Studio Grant. Designed by the artists themselves, the exquisite thematic Deep Sky Dinner, will take place in the exhibition Satellite Affects and will offer the opportunity to converse with the artworks, the artists, the curators, and other guests. The Deep Sky Dinner aims to connect artists, culture workers, and friends to art and, in doing so, get them involved in the District Studio Grant. The dinner benefits the production of the catalogue Satellite Affects.