June 17 – August 21. Sofia Lomba: Bondage Bodies
Exhibition:
Sofia Lomba: Bondage Bodies
Thursday, June 17 – Saturday, August 21
Commencement: Thursday, June 17, 16:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
Covid notice: For June 17, RSVP here. For later dates, please register for a visit on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch
bondage
/ˈbɒndɪdʒ/
noun
- the state of being a slave
- sexual practice that involves the tying up or restraining of one partner
- when someone belongs to someone else
- when someone or something controls your life
- the state of being under the control of a force or influence or abstract power play
- the state of being under the control of another person play
Sofia Lomba’s Bondage Bodies installation is a body-based research anchored in gender, identity, body transformation and the domestic.
“There are not two sexes, but a multiplicity of genetic, hormonal, chromosomal, genital, sexual, and sensual configurations. There is no empirical truth to male or female gender beyond an assemblage of normative cultural fictions” Paul B. Preciado “Testo Junkie”.
As a reaction to the violence witnessed in the world, early twentieth century modernist poet Yi Sang wrote “I believe that humans should be plants”, while Wohlleben (2016) considered the forest a social network similar to a human family in the way its trees communicate, share nutrients and support each other.
Luce Irigaray’s philosophical reflections on plant being as not self-centred, in an effort to deflect and rethink the anthropocentrism of western societies, also reverberate strongly with Yeong-hye’s (The Vegetarian by Han Kang) efforts to become a plant as a strategy to resist violence and patriarchal control.
Unfolding these thoughts, Sofia Lomba created a new series of drawings. Spongy bodies inside and outside of orifices. Bodies giving birth to themselves or others and having no clear differentiations between protuberances and invaginations. Bondage bodies, hugging bodies, bodies turning inside out.
Sofia Lomba (b.1984, Porto) lives in Berlin. Her artistic practice forms itself through drawing and performance. In a trance of repetition, she creates series of drawings around, inside and about body, producing images that are placed somewhere between flower studies and genitalia, between plants and flesh. Blurring autobiography and art, having her own body as the protagonist, she explores gender and identity issues, body transformations, pregnancy, sexuality and its representations.The way of presenting these artworks is always underlining the fragility of their subject matters. Further in their aesthetic, they would recall taxonomies of some kind. Her drawings have been shown at Bauhaus ReUse Berlin, General Public in Exile at Meinblau and TIER.space. She has been collaborating with Discoteca Flaming Star, performing live at District Berlin, FFT Düsseldorf, Ausland Berlin, Savvy Contemporary, Teatro del Barrio Madrid, Arthur Boskamp Foundation and in the film Ingrid (2003 – so far) presented in Friends with Books at Hamburger Bahnhof. Lomba has also collaborated with Graw Böckler for CTM Festival in Berghain and Wojciech Kosma as part of The Family at Galerie Kamm. She will be a fellow in residence in the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2022.
Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
April 19 – June 5. Pol Merchan: Pirate Boys, featuring Del LaGrace Volcano
Pol Merchan: Pirate Boys, featuring Del LaGrace Volcano
Commencement: Monday, April 19, 16:00-21:00
Conclusion: Saturday, June 5, 16:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
Monday, April 19 – Saturday, June 5. Thu, Fri and Sat 14:00-18:00 (appointment required)
Covid notice: Please register for a visit on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com. For June 5, RSVP here. Bring a negative rapid test (not older than 24 hours) or proof of complete vaccination (minimum 14 days since final dose), and an FFP2 mask. If you cannot come to the space, write us to request a private video link.
For those not in Berlin, we will host Pirate Boys at http://tier.space on the day of the commencement (April 19), and it will be possible to request a private viewing by writing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch
Kathy Acker’s writing, and a seminal portrait of her taken by intersex photographer Del LaGrace Volcano, provide a lens through which to explore trans subjectivity and the queering of cinema. Pol Merchan’s hybrid doc fluidly moves from the documentation of the punk era to a more performative exploration of gender.
The portrait entitled Twirl of the punk writer Kathy Acker (New York, 1947 – Tijuana, 1997) is the starting point for a conversation with the photographer Del LaGrace Volcano (California, 1957) about gender identity and body transformation. Kathy Acker’s work was associated with the anti-formalist movement and with the punk movement of the 70s and 80s. Her novels were constructed using the cut-up technique, pastiche, and appropriation, and were inhabited by outlaws, rebels, and pirates. The film uses experts of the novel “Pussy, King of the Pirates” published in 1996 by Grove Press.
Pirate Boys is a hybrid film shot with Super 8 and with a cast formed by transgender, intersex, and genderqueer subjects. The film is set in the Tuntenhaus (House of Faggots), a Berlin squad first occupied in 1981, inhabited by queer men. Searching for queer traces in the form and content of Kathy Acker’s writing, this film aims to present new ways of experiencing the plasticity of the literary and the filmic body. The physical presence of the celluloid is exposed in all its fragility, inviting the viewers to look at the film with a tactile eye.
Pol Merchan (Lleida, Spain, 1980) is an artist, filmmaker, and film programmer for the Xposed Queer Film Festival Berlin. His audio-visual work explores visual semantics and film practices, deconstructing techniques of conventional filmmaking. Merchan uses the camera as an extension of his eye and body, making intimate works that emphasize the body as its own language. Working across film, photography, and text, his art practice addresses transgenerational connections and the archiving of oral history. His film Pirate Boys was supported by the Xposed Queer Short Film Fund and nominated for the LICHTER Art Award, at Lichter Filmfest Frankfurt International. Merchan’s work has been exhibited internationally in art institutions and at numerous Film Festivals such as Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, Centre de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona, Centre d’Art La Panera, Azkuna Zentroa, Berlinische Galerie, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Anthology Film Archives NY, Los Angeles Filmforum, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Festival Internacional de Cine Guanajuato. His work is distributed by Hamaca Media & Video Art and is part of the collection of Leandre Cristòfol Foundation and Museu d’Art Jaume Morera.
The international photographer Del LaGrace Volcano has over a thirty-year period made a consistent subject of gender variance, sexual connectedness, and body mutations. Self named as a ‘part-time gender terrorist,’ and intentional mutation, Volcano’s
Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.
Due to covid restrictions, please register for a visit in advance for a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch
RSVP for the conclusion on June 5 by clicking here
Photos by Benjamin Busch
April 17. Conclusion: Stephanie Comilang: Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017
Saturday, April 17, 14:00-18:00
Conclusion: Stephanie Comilang: Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017
Due to covid restrictions, please register for a visit in advance for a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch
Stephanie Comilang’s exhibition at The Institute for Endotic Research takes a hybrid format, with the film Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017 being screened online at http://TIER.space for the duration, accompanied by a series of online encounters, and a video installation in the physical space of TIER.
Comilang’s two-channel video installation follows two protagonists whose histories interlace with Filipino nationalism and Spanish colonial rule. Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017 is a two-channel video projection installation. The two protagonists José Rizal and Lourdes Lareza Müller occupy a channel each; projected adjacent to one another, they inhabit the same space while remaining distinctly separate. José Rizal (1861-1896) was a Filipino nationalist, considered a national hero for his advocacy and thinking that led to the Philippine revolution against Spanish rule. While he worked as an ophthalmologist he was well known for his literary works. While living in Berlin he completed his book Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) in 1887, a book that many have credited for its proposition of nationalism and resistance to Spanish colonial rule through its formulation of the idea of an ‘imagined community’ in the Philippines. Lourdes Lareza Müller is the other protagonist in Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017. Having migrated to Germany in 1968, she worked as an archivist at one of Europe’s largest libraries, Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek, for 28 years. The thread that ties these two figures is their chosen life in Berlin, away from the Philippines. The disembodied feminine voice remains unidentified throughout but narrates from a distant future. She hovers and is distinctly non-human and speaks of inhabiting both Rizal and Lareza Müller in human form. Positioned as a third protagonist, she speaks of a connectedness through adaptation, bodies as archives, and entangled narratives of possible futurities. While this film speaks to a specific place, particular people, the role of the disembodied narrator, casts a wider net of questions around mobility, a rearrangement of geographic concepts of centre/periphery, and the disruption of historical linearity and continuity.
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Ghost : 2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, S.A.L.T.S Basel, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events addresses the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER). In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.
The online presentation and exhibition by Stephanie Comilang are presented in partnership with the Embassy of Canada as part of Canada’s culture program as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2021.
March 19. TIER.cast: The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Part 2
Online – Friday, March 19, 17:00 Berlin/CET
TIER.cast hosted by Aouefa Amoussouvi, Olivia Berkowicz and Sasha Engelmann with Sound Design by Sara Pereira
The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Part 2
Stream live at https://vimeo.com/526170611
Listen after at http://theinstituteforendoticresearch.org/wp/projects-current/tier-cast/
TIER.cast is a long-term series of sonic encounters creating a platform for interdisciplinary intimate, process rather than goal-oriented conversations and listening sessions beginning in February 2021. In each session, the guests are invited to discuss and present with voices and sounds their past and current projects, intellectual and personal inspirations, works-in-progress, work/production methodologies, and practices.
The aim is also to address and challenge the capitalistically and individualistically driven practices of knowledge and art production, as well as the myth of the isolated genius. The interdisciplinary encounter itself is an exercise of collective knowledge-based and practical exchange, and becomes an act of collective production itself.
The sonic and non-visual format is envisioned as a soft intrusion that infiltrates into the domestic spheres, forces self-imagination for the lacking esthetics and focuses on audio imprint of the conversations/speakers. It is a journey through voices, music, noise, sound and silence.
The Castle of Crossed Destinies – is 3-part sonic project with geographer Sasha Engelmann, curator Olivia Berkowicz and new artistic co-director of TIER, curator and biophysicist Aouefa Amoussouvi. They are currently fellows in residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, and will discuss tarot, radio, rituals, technologies, feminist narratives in science and art, as well as personal experiences and reflections on transgenerational memories & migrations. Each encounter focuses on one practice, Part 2 focuses on Engelmann’s project Open Weather and how it deals with earth sensing radio technologies and the histories of feminist divination practices.
This 3-part sonic project departs from the writer Italo Calvino’s book The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973). In the tale, a group of travellers meet each other in a tavern in the woods. Afflicted by a strange predicament that affects their capacity to speak, they turn to a stack of tarot cards to tell stories about one another. From a secluded room in Schloss Solitude, Amoussouvi, Berkowicz and Engelmann extend the invitation of Calvino’s story to reflect upon the use of divinatory tools, creative props and experimental techniques for collective knowledge making. Situated in pandemic times, the conversation conjures vocabularies, glossaries and sounds. Moving in a circular motion, three fellow travellers explore stories within stories within stories.
This episode of TIER.cast is made in collaboration with the Akademie Schloss Solitude and will be launched within the “Magical Cohabitations” – Live Online Event:
https://www.akademie-solitude.
Sound Design by Sara Pereira
Olivia Berkowicz is a curator, writer and editor. Her practice explores the intersection of critical visuality studies and contemporary art theory. She is interested in vocabularies and practices which challenge modernist-colonial principles of exhibition histories, art production, and collaborations. Together with Marianna Feher, she organises Tentative Transmits (2020-2022), a discursive radio project investigating the ”former East”, supported by the artistic research funding of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She is a current fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.
Sasha Engelmann explores interdisciplinary, feminist and creative approaches to environmental knowledge making. Her new book Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices (Routledge, 2020) traces the potential of artistic, community-driven experiments to amplify our sensing of air and atmosphere. Together with Sophie Dyer she leads the feminist radio project open-weather. She is Lecturer in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London and a current fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.
Sara Pereira is a visual and sound artist, working primordially in collaborative intermedia forms. Regular enrolment with group Discoteca Flaming Star, with whom Sara is performing and collaborating since 2010, engaging currently in the research project Hospital(y)tis. Since 2016 playing with Sofia Lomba, as AVA. Previously developing sound work within duo Gentileza and solo as Napa. Co-founder and former member of Altes Finanzamt Project-space (Berlin), Marvellous Tone CD-r collective (Porto) and PISO collective (Porto-Berlin). Sara is dealing with questions of self-organisation, through drawing and in musical improvisation.
March 11. Online conversation with Rosalia Namsai Engchuan and Stephanie Comilang.
Thursday, March 11, 15:00 Berlin/CET/ 21:00 Bangkok time/ 09:00 Toronto time
Use this link to join: https://meet.jit.si/
In this online conversation, social anthropologist and filmmaker Rosalia Namsai Engchuan will speak with Stephanie Comilang about her practice and in particular her work Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017, currently on view at TIER.
Exhibition:
Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017
Tuesday, February 9 – Thursday, April 17
Due to covid restrictions, please register for a visit in advance for a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch
Stephanie Comilang’s exhibition at The Institute for Endotic Research takes a hybrid format, with the film Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017 being screened online at http://TIER.space for the duration, accompanied by a series of online encounters, and a video installation in the physical space of TIER.
Comilang’s two-channel video installation follows two protagonists whose histories interlace with Filipino nationalism and Spanish colonial rule. Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017 is a two-channel video projection installation. The two protagonists José Rizal and Lourdes Lareza Müller occupy a channel each; projected adjacent to one another, they inhabit the same space while remaining distinctly separate. José Rizal (1861-1896) was a Filipino nationalist, considered a national hero for his advocacy and thinking that led to the Philippine revolution against Spanish rule. While he worked as an ophthalmologist he was well known for his literary works. While living in Berlin he completed his book Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) in 1887, a book that many have credited for its proposition of nationalism and resistance to Spanish colonial rule through its formulation of the idea of an ‘imagined community’ in the Philippines. Lourdes Lareza Müller is the other protagonist in Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017. Having migrated to Germany in 1968, she worked as an archivist at one of Europe’s largest libraries, Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek, for 28 years. The thread that ties these two figures is their chosen life in Berlin, away from the Philippines. The disembodied feminine voice remains unidentified throughout but narrates from a distant future. She hovers and is distinctly non-human and speaks of inhabiting both Rizal and Lareza Müller in human form. Positioned as a third protagonist, she speaks of a connectedness through adaptation, bodies as archives, and entangled narratives of possible futurities. While this film speaks to a specific place, particular people, the role of the disembodied narrator, casts a wider net of questions around mobility, a rearrangement of geographic concepts of centre/periphery, and the disruption of historical linearity and continuity.
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Ghost : 2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, S.A.L.T.S Basel, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Rosalia Namsai Engchuan is a social anthropologist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Southeast Asia. Her PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, looks at practices of community filmmaking in Indonesia, investigating how cinematic epistemologies produce and socialise knowledges. Her latest video work Complicated Happiness is a speculative research, pivoting around the Thai Park in Berlin, that aims to undo the underlying structures of colonialism, race, gender and class that shape the production of our worlds. Rosalia curates screenings and dialogical encounters with a focus on independent and experimental works from locales of the ‘epistemological’ South, often in collaboration with the Berlin based collective un.thai.tled. She is the 2021 Goethe-Institut fellow at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin with the ‘Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories’ project.
Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER). In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.
The online presentation, conversation and exhibition by Stephanie Comilang are presented in partnership with the Embassy of Canada as part of Canada’s culture program as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2021.
February 26. Lyrical Gravity with Matteo Marziano Graziano and Zoe Goldstein in conversation with Benjamin Busch
Online – Friday, February 26, 19:00
Lyrical Gravity with Matteo Marziano Graziano and Zoe Goldstein in conversation with Benjamin Busch
Use this link to join: https://icn-artem.zoom.us/j/83239626025?pwd=emY3alNFb1JvcmtINmN3dU8zNHpvUT09
LYRICAL GRAVITY is a multiplayer VR artwork for seven spectators that approaches Virtual Reality as a happening. By speculating on a fictional kind of gravity, it makes use of pop songs and their lyrics as psychoacoustic gates for triggering embodied memories and dormant affects, while leading the users on a sensorial somatic experience into the realm of instinct, intuition and desire.
Matteo Marziano Graziano and Zoe Goldstein—in conversation with Benjamin Busch—will discuss the aesthetics and intentions of the project, while simultaneously streaming sections of the VR environments. They will additionally address the analog energo-somatic methodology used to design the digital spaces of LYRICAL GRAVITY, working at the intersection between psychosomatic consciousness studies and practices utilising ‘systemic constellations’.
LYRICAL GRAVITY makes use of a contemporary western music dramaturgy to retrace the fundamental relational forces that move us as a collectivity as we strive for shared empowerment and political self-determination. Pop hits allow access to deeper affective states—joy, fear, surprise, disgust, anger, arousal, excitement, tranquility—redeeming affections, playfulness, touch and solidarities in the collective dreaming of post-pandemic sustainable scenarios. This return to collective affect opens up a performative field in which negotiations between body states, emotional scripts and cognitive processes arise from the embodiment of language through song inside of the VR space.
LYRICAL GRAVITY is a project with and by Matteo Marziano Graziano, Linards Kulless, Zoe Goldstein, Yuri Shimaoka, Matias Brunacci, Polina Zinziver, Michael Tane, Sabine Huschka, Jacqueline Wong, Samuel Hertz. Presented by TIER – The Institute for Endotic Research in collaboration with fabricated.life and gamelab.berlin – Humboldt University. It is funded by the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe. It is supported by the European Union under the House of Europe program.
Matteo Marziano Graziano is a transdisciplinary artist, whose body-based practice is rooted within contemporary performance and bridges to visual arts, video arts, digital spaces, and music theatre. Their practice deals with questions of embodiment in relation to consciousness, the shaping of social relationships, and affects. This leads to moving image making processes and explores the notion of subjectivity within spectatorship. Their artistic research is informed by bioenergetics, quantum physics, system theory, and deep ecology. Matteo is associate choreographer at BTT Balletto Teatro di Torino. Their work has been present a.o. at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Mostra del Cinema di Venezia, Schaubühne Berlin, Uferstudios Berlin, Stockhausen Foundation for Music, KOW Gallery.
Zoe Goldstein is a dancer and performer, with a background in medical anthropology. As a dance maker, her practice draws from Butoh, Body Weather, contemporary dance and improvisation. She works both independently and with the GᾹZ Collective with Noga Abramovitch and Helen Burghardt. As a performer, she has collaborated with diverse dance, theatre and visual artists, including Josh Rutter, Sherwood Chen, SIGNA, Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, Yuko Kaseki, Egle Budvytyte, and Matteo Marziano Graziano.
Benjamin Busch is an American visual artist and architect living in Berlin. Spanning art, architecture, curating, and writing, his work deals with the aesthetics/politics of space. His ongoing research considers spatial practice through processes of urbanization, self-organization, and the everyday, with regard to the growing role of computation across societies. He has co-directed The Institute for Endotic Research since 2018.