Encounter: Casting a net between detail and survey with Josh Schwebel
Date: Wednesday, 27 November
Time: 19:00-21:00
Encounter: Casting a net between detail and survey with Josh Schwebel
Date: Wednesday, November 27th
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
In this encounter, Joshua Schwebel will describe recent artworks, focusing on long-form projects that have addressed contemporary art’s complicity with neoliberal and imperial capitalism. Less concerned with making objects, Schwebel is interested in art’s infrastructures and impacts, which demonstrate art’s compliance with capitalist values. Schwebel’s work takes multiple forms, including installations, redistributive transactions, performative public interventions, publications, and archival processes. Through his presentation, Schwebel invites us to think about what exactly we in the arts community are doing, whose interests we are serving, and in which ways art might be instrumentalized to benefit those whose political aims differ from our own.
BIO
Josh’s artistic practice stems from a deep need to understand the world through applied questions, coupled with an uninhibited allergy to authority. He does exhibit and publish his work internationally and within Canada with a variety of non-commercial structures, but these engagements are not the benchmarks of his practice. He sustains his relationship with art through a concern for the world as it could be, and in conversation with the work of others who need to engage with their world in similar ways.
Encounter: 7th Tea Oval: Vocabulary of Memory: Seven Terms for Discussing Art from Belarus with Olga Bubich
Date: Thursday, November 14th
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
The “triple crises” of mass conflict, uncontrolled COVID-19, and economic collapse in early 2021 have exacerbated suffering, resulting in dehumanizing treatment, lack of rights, extreme poverty, and pervasive anxiety in Myanmar. Meanwhile, Belarus is developing coping strategies and fostering a predominantly positive protest narrative to help navigate traumatic experiences amidst ongoing repression following the violent crackdown on protests in 2020.
On 22 September, Belarus Prime Minister Lukschenko and Myanmar Coup Leader General Min Aung Hlaing exchanged messages emphasizing the importance of implementing policies aligned with the interests of their citizens.
To commemorate this anniversary counterintuitively, the Belarusian memory researcher Olga Bubich will deliver a lecture with an engaging, participatory discussion. The session will not be a one-way lecture but a dynamic exchange of ideas. It will focus on seven specific words and their contemplated cultural significance and artistic relevancy, inviting every cultural practitioner to delve into the world of Belarusian art and artists, as well as the political dimensions of memory, censorship, hopes, and pains. This interactive approach will help us discover the art of (not) forgetting and how it can be a powerful form of resistance against global memory censorship, which is undoubtedly happening.
BIO
Olga Bubich, a versatile professional who works as an essayist, journalist, and artist, will lead the session. Her work delves into personal and collective memory themes, mainly focusing on the impact of traumatic historical events, censorship, and memory distortion enforced by repressive regimes. Olga has collaborated with various international media outlets in her journalism and writing career. She has been recognized with several awards, including an ICORN fellowship in Berlin (2023/2024) and the Tbilisi Data Fest (2022). In 2021, she released a photobook titled “The Art of (Not) Forgetting,” which has been acquired by over 20 prestigious institutions worldwide. Based in Berlin due to forced exile from Belarus, Olga’s research revolves around the collective memory of WWII and how European mnemonic institutions present it.
The Shape of a Pocket Encounter: The maws of emptiness with Shoufay Derz
Date: Sunday, November 10th
Time: 17:00 – 19:00
In this rare encounter, Shoufay Derz will offer an assortment of alien snacks (whatever that means?) alongside nibbles (small case studies) from her wider practice. The session will unfold in a mix of planned and improvised moments, allowing for a fluid and open-ended exploration of the themes central to Derz’s work. The conversation may include a special guest moderator, Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas, adding another layer of spontaneity to the exchange. As part of the evening, Derz will also screen her updated video work “Ritual of Eels: Loving the Alien”—an ongoing series since 2019—which has never been shown in its entirety in Berlin before.
Expect an intimate dive into the ineffable, the void, and playful uses of humour and improvisation, touching on themes of emptiness and thresholds between the known and unknown.
For those interested in the philosophical concepts underpinning the work, additional reading on emptiness (śūnyatā) and the maws of emptiness will be available at the event.
BIO
Shoufay Derz is an artist and curator of Taiwanese and German descent who was born in Sydney and now works between Berlin and Sydney. In June 2023, she earned her PhD for her research, Towards the Unknown: The Visual Poetics of the Ineffable. Since 2022, she has co-directed the Institute of Endotic Research in Berlin. Exhibiting internationally, her practice spans analogue and digital photography, moving image, textiles, sculpture, performance, and text, probing the limits of language and the ambiguities faced when articulating unknowns, particularly in relation to migration and cross cultural exchange. Her work engages silences, misunderstandings, social and geological voids, and, more recently, uses tactics of humour and improvisation to reflect on exclusion, create connection, and imagine possibilities for belonging and transformation.
The Shape of a Pocket Encounter: Intervention: Our Memories of Home in this Pot with hn. lyonga
Date: Saturday, November 9th
Time: 14:00 – 16:00
RSVP at the.shape.of.a.pocket.24@
“I share stories because the women in my family have instilled in me a deep appreciation for the power of food and the many memories it holds.” – hn. Lyonga
Our Memories of Home in this Pot is the performative part of the multi-media installation “Our Memories of Her in this Chest”. This sauce-making intervention seeks to activate the memories stored in our chests. It explores the profound and complex connections that exist within communities that make time for neighbouring and sharing. Furthermore, it seeks to acknowledge both the individual and collective responsibilities we have in the process of decolonizing nature, food, and ourselves while commemorating those whose hands cultivate sustenance for our bodies.
Set up three stones in a small triangular pattern. Throw some freshly cut wood and dried corn leaves into the mix. Light it up, then throw in some Coco-yams. Roast them until their rough skin turns smooth, brown, and rootless. Cut them into pieces and eat them with warm palm oil, a pinch of salt, and dried Mololo or salted Goat meat.
Cooking is strategic much like telling a story. Setting up a scene and or developing a story’s plot is like cooking. Granny, Sedina Nako Née Joké always told me to set up the stones, she said to place wood in a triangular manner between the stones and then light them up. Wood needs to be dry and light to catch fire. Wood must catch fire for food to be cooked. But wood had to be provided for in the same way an audience avails itself to a story. The vessel that carries a story is a pot that carries food. One beguiles the other. Hands create while mouths tell. People who gather around pots at night under the lights of a hovering half-moon, scooping soup, or porridge, exchanging gazes and pleasantries want to be inspired. They want to see and believe and food is an entryway into places beyond our imaginations. Cooking and eating together becomes a space/place of encounter, for knowledge exchange, for interrogation, and learning, and a way to nurture each other.
Questions:
When we contemplate the time spent in kitchens and the act of cooking, we evoke and revitalize certain memories.
With this encounter, I am posing the following questions; how can we securely access the memories of taste? Who is the beneficiary, and who is not? In what manner do locations for food preparation also serve as arenas for the generation of knowledge? Lastly, who do we encounter in these spaces, and how do they show themselves? Do they engage in dialogue?
This workshop is open to 10-15 people. In case you are interested in coming to sit, make sauces, and share a story or two, I welcome you to please send an email to the.shape.of.a.pocket.24@
BIO
hn. lyonga is a Black, Queer, interdisciplinary artist, poet and curator.
I live and work in Berlin. I have lived in other places – and they are still present in my body, my writings, and in my life in the diaspora. I have not come or arrived here on my own. I have arrived on the shoulders of others. My work focuses on writing, storytelling as a vital way of neighbouring, ways of being and existing in space, and migrational inquiries pertinent to historically colonized and marginalized communities. hn. lyonga is currently the co-coordinator of BARAZANI.berlin – Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand, and a member of the Field Narratives Collective, working on ideas of rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling.” hn .lyonga’s most current co-curation titled “Wor(l)ding Dreamers” was open at the Galerie im Turm, Berlin.
The Shape of a Pocket Encounter: The Contours of Absence in the Table Mountain Quarries with Tammy Langtry, Talya Lubinsky and Gabi Motuba
Date: Wednesday, November 6th
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
Stone from the Table Mountain quarries in Cape Town, South Africa was mined by enslaved people since the beginning of slavery in the Dutch Cape Colony in 1653. The quarries remain a present absence in the mountain, attesting to compounded legacies of extraction and displacement. They are the very substance from which the city is constructed, and shape the material, spatial and economic logics upon which it continues to operate.
In a roundtable discussion, visual artist Talya Lubinsky (present in person), curator Tammy Langtry and vocalist and composer Gabi Motuba (who will join us by video from Johannesburg), will discuss their approaches to articulations of absence through their engagement with the quarries of Table Mountain. They will each introduce their contribution to the collaborative project, The Sanctuary of the Appointed time, and situate their practices in a larger discourse on coloniality and enslavement and their attentive continuities in the City of Cape Town.
Developed through working with a contour map of one of these quarries, a tent-like structure acts as a temporary shelter, a place of listening, to literally and metaphorically be present to the erasures and silences embodied by the quarry. This is not to hark back to a time before colonialism and enslavement, when the mountain was whole, rather it gestures towards the impossibility of refilling the empty space in the mountain. We invite the audience to stand inside of the void, now made visible, in the shape of what is no longer there, and listen to the sound piece, titled ‘Sounds defined and forged by way of the hinterlands, borders and limitations’ composed and sung by Gabi Motuba.
BIO
Tammy Langtry, South African born, is currently working as an independent curator, art historian and cultural producer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She worked as an Assistant Curator (2017 – 2021) at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA). Cape Town and is currently director of a Pan-African artist residency – LAPA, a co-conceptualised project with the Goethe – Institut. She also contributes to the artistic collective, Art Meets and has presented their work at the 2022 VANSA Cultural Leaders Programme. She was awarded a bursary by the National Research Foundation to pursue an Honours degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Art History (2010).
Talya Lubinsky (b. 1988) is an artist from Johannesburg, currently based in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include Melting Stone, Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial, Flossenbürg (2022). Marble Dust, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2020), Floating Bodies, Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth, (2017) and If we burn, there is ash, Wits Anthropology Museum, Johannesburg (2016). Lubinsky received an MFA with distinction from University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. In 2019-2020 she was awarded a one year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, funded by the KfW Stiftung. She is a recipient of a NEUSTART Stipendium from the Stiftung Kunstfonds for 2022 and 2023.
Gabi Motuba is a South African award-winning jazz vocalist, composer and Wits Music School educator. Over the years she has produced several albums, ranging from jazz to avant-garde which include Tefiti-Goddess of Creation (her debut album released in 2018), Sanctum Sanctorium (A duo album which features Swiss pianist Malcom Braff released in 2015) and The Wretched (which is a sonic experimentation collab that focuses on the literary text The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon released in 2020). Motuba was selected for an 2023 Artist Fellow at the University of Western Cape as part of the Oscillations program and showcased her sound installation in Berlin in early 2024. She is currently the jazz voice and performance part time teacher at the University of Witwatersrand. Motuba recently released her second album, The Sabbath.
The Shape of a Pocket Encounter: Mining The Self: Act II: Purity Is Not An Option with Constanza Mendoza
Date: Saturday, November 2nd
Time: 18:00 – 20:00
RSVP at the.shape.of.a.pocket.24@
All are welcome.
Mining The Self: Purity Is Not An Option is a second act-performance that excavates the impact of colonialism, imperialism and dictatorship on Chilean history and my family. Through a multi-scalar approach, I delve into the engineered and sanitized rhetoric that shapes the physical environment, concealing the colonial dispossession of populations in local Sacrifice Zones from Tierra del Fuego to the Atacama Desert—where land and people are discarded for larger geopolitical and economic projects. Mining The Self is an attempt to embody a counter-transparent self that remains a relational and collective mode of resistance, despite the constant threat of silencing.
Act I: I Wish No One An Identity constructs a counter-narrative to colonial identity. Through the excavation of a personal discourse tied to the systemic violence of European settlers—violence that continues today—I excavate my maternal family’s history, originally from Poland and Italy, and their involvement in the dispossession and genocide of the Selk’nam indigenous people in Tierra del Fuego.
Act II: Purity Is Not An Option focuses on my paternal family and the national trauma tied to Chile’s copper industry during Allende’s presidency and Pinochet’s dictatorship. I continue to perform the self—rejecting the myth of purity in both the engineering of landscapes and identities.
BIO
Constanza Mendoza’s practice defies all categories and logic of the art business. She works with different collectives, and it is not about creating closed works, but rather about conversation and exchange. Whether in the form of a game with different roles or a method of institutional criticism, it remains open.
RSVP at the.shape.of.a.pocket.24@
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin