September 10. Sung Tieu, with a text contribution by Karen Fiss. Objects Before and After the Wall, Part 2

Tuesday, September 10, 19:00

How does the presence of a wall change the status of the things and the people on each side of it? Approaching this question, artist Sung Tieu reads the text written by Karen Fiss about her work.

Sung Tieu, born 1987 in Hai Duong, Vietnam is an artist based between Berlin and London. Her artistic practice spans installations, performances and public interventions. Forthcoming institutional solo exhibitions include Haus der Kunst and Nottingham Contemporary (both 2020), forthcoming group exhibitions include the David Roberts Foundation (2019) and Prague Biennale (2020), forthcoming performances include Tate Modern. She is part of several art collectives, among them TROI OI, Asia Art Activism, The Forest Curriculum and East London Cable.

Her work takes place at the intersection of transnational movement, global capitalism and the cultural incursions of dematerialised art traditions. Her practice contends with issues of social class divide through the lens of her personal narratives and cultural membership.

Karen Fiss is a writer and curator whose current research examines nation branding in relation to the neoliberal mechanisms of globalization in the contemporary art world and its accompanying exhibition economies. In particular, she focuses on how citizenship and historical memory are commodified and visually produced in postcolonial contexts.  Her past curatorial projects include Necessary Force: Art in a Police State (Art Museum of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2015, co-curated with Kym Pinder) and El cine de 1930. Flores azules en un paisaje catastrófico (Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid 2012). She is author of Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (University of Chicago Press, 2010), co-author of World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology and Modernity 1937-1942 (University of Pittsburg Press, 2015; with Robert Kargon, et al), and co-editor of Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture (with Russell Ferguson et al, MIT Press, 1990). She also contributes articles to a range of magazines on contemporary art, design and architecture. Fiss received her PhD from Yale University and her BA from Brown University. She is professor of Visual Studies and Graduate Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Prior to academic teaching, she worked in the curatorial departments of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and the New Museum in New York City.

Objects Before and After The Wall
This project analyzes the wall as an object from different angles: thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty-five years after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement and in the geopolitical framework that requires research in Mexico it’s border condition with Central America and with the United States. The wall as an ideological space and the relationship between objects and walls. The notion of the liminal, the crack, the border and other possible unfoldings.
This event is part of a collaboration between Tlaxcala 3 in Mexico City, The Institute for Endotic Research and Berlin Art Prize. Objects Before and After the Wall is a collaboration between Tlaxcala 3 in Mexico City and The Institute for Endotic Research in Berlin. It has the 2019 sponsorship of the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporéneo for theoretical and curatorial research.
The sixth Berlin Art Prize is supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds