November 21. Encounter with Maayan Strauss: Untitled (Infrastructuring)
Wednesday, November 21, 19:00
Untitled (Infrastructuring)
Encounter with Maayan Strauss
The Container Artist Residency—a program that invites artists to work on board cargo ships along international trade routes, and The Service Room, a kitchen showroom-like infrastructure, designed to serve as a platform for communal service exchange, are two projects that Maayan Strauss will present in this encounter. Both explore quotidian infrastructures (of different scales and domains), creating new platforms by shifting familiar formats. Through the appropriation of space and the use of existing resources, the global network of maritime transport becomes a place for an artist studio, and the commercial design showroom is activated to become a shared facility—emulating the domestic modern kitchen interaction in the public sphere, to facilitate communal forms of professional exchanges.
Briefly tracing the emergence of these projects from previous installation, sculpture and video works, Strauss will discuss their evolution as a result of practical concerns, the consideration of contemporary artistic practice in itself and ultimately, the re-imagining of the constructs of art-making, their possibilities, and restraints.
Accompanying the encounter/presentation, an installation of new photographic work by the artist will be on view in the space. Underlying the approach to everyday life and their facilitation, the piece depicts the constant flow of objects, their consumption and exchange, as both fuel and subject matter.
Maayan Strauss is a multidisciplinary artist and architect based in New York and Berlin. Her practice examines commerce, infrastructures, and labor while reflecting on the conditions of contemporary artistic production. She is the founder and director of Container Artist Residency, a program that invites artists to work onboard cargo ships, conceived as a distributed artwork in the form of an institution and spatial intervention. The culmination of the project’s first edition was recently shown at Para Site in Hong Kong, with artwork by the seven participating artists-in-residence. She is the founder of Sushi Bar Gallery in Brooklyn (2013-2017) and is serving as an editor at Art Handler, a magazine dedicated to the behind-the-scenes practices of the art world. Recently, she realized the first chapter of her project The Service Room as an artist-in-residence at Recess, New York.
Strauss received her MFA in photography from Yale School of Art and a B.Arch degree from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including The Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; The Israel Museum in Jerusalem; The Haifa Museum of Art; Para Site, Hong Kong; Recess, New York; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Andrea Meislin Gallery and Louis B. James Gallery in New York; Shenzhen Biennale for Urbanism/Architecture. Previously, she was head designer for artist James Turrell, leading work on major retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
November 1. Encounter with Lauryn Youden. Sacred Serpent Sessions: The soul is quickened in her grave, the peacock’s tail shimmered
Thursday, November 1, 19:00, RSVP requested
Sacred Serpent Sessions: The soul is quickened in her grave, the peacock’s tail shimmered
Encounter with Lauryn Youden
Through lecture and guided meditation with accompanying music by Dylan Spencer-Davidson this ritual provides its participants the opportunity to learn and engage with the fifth operation of alchemy, Fermentation. Like the chemical process of the same name, it is a two-stepped process that begins with Putrefaction, the rotting and decay of a material, followed by fermentation, the growth of new life – this metaphorically referring to a dual process of ego death and the following resurrection of the soul.
Samhain, celebrated between Oct 31st and November 1st, is the celtic new year and festival of the dead. It is believed to be a liminal time, when the veil thins between this world and the Otherworld and this boundary can be more easily crossed by living beings, supernatural beings and the dead. Therefore, it is the time of the year to not only honor those who have passed but to also meditate on death itself; to come to terms with the mortality of our physical bodies, and to consider what death not only means to us personally but also on a communal, cultural and metaphysical level.
The lecture and meditation will follow with time for open discussion and conversation. Water kefir will be served.
Please RSVP to reserve a spot. Space is limited. theinstituteforendoticresearch
This event is kindly supported by the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.
Sacred Serpent Sessions: The soul is quickened in her grave, the peacock’s tail shimmered is a special Samhainian iteration of the alchemic ritual performed by Lauryn Youden previously at Very Project Space, Berlin as part of the exhibition Digesture.
Lauryn Youden (b.1989 Vancouver) is a Canadian artist based in Berlin. Her practice is a methodology of performative ceremonies. The objects, installation and writings found in her work are both traces left behind from these actions as well as tools for providing self-care. These derive from Youden’s lifelong research in and navigation through modern Western medicine and alternative healing practices for the treatment of her own mental illnesses. By publicly presenting her personal experiences, and an active and engaged feminist lens on the history of medicine and care, Youden’s work inevitably illuminates repressed, marginalized and forgotten practices and knowledge in medicine and care. As delicate and vulnerable as Youden’s visual language may seem, it is ultimately political at its foundation, questioning the loss of knowledge in our society. Youden was awarded the Berlin Art Prize in 2016 and is co-director of the project space Ashley Berlin.
Recent exhibitions and performances include: Group Therapy at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (USA), You Say I for me at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL) as part of the symposium Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Paradiso, Amsterdam (NL); 5X5X5 at Manifesta 12, Palermo (IT); May the Bridges I burn light the way at Exile, Berlin; Digesture at Very Project Space, Berlin (DE); Well::ness Bad::ass Festival by Orga Orga at Kunstverein Speyer, Speyer (DE); I am large, I contain Multitudes at Galerie Wedding, Berlin (DE); Beneath the Salt at Kinderhook & Caracas, Berlin (DE); Sacred Serpent Sessions with Reflektor-M, Frankfurt (DE); Silent Empire at Funkhaus Berlin, Berlin (DE); Salon Ghol at Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin (DE); This will never finish at Support, London (CA); and Dream Pool at Pushmi Pullyo, Toronto (CA).
Photos by Benjamin Busch
October 29. Stone Soup served by Daniel Salomon & intro to ‘Infratekture’ by TIER
Monday, October 29, 19:00
Stone Soup served by Daniel Salomon & intro to ‘Infratekture’ by TIER
Stone Soup based on transmediale Study Circles working group meeting
Where are the fluxes of affect to be located when thinking them as infrastructure?
The Institute for Endotic Research proposes a constellation of words as an extension of that question, proposed by the transmediale Study Circle ‘Affective Infrastructures’. This constellation is drawn from Infratekture, a made-up word to mirror the blurry edges of possible affects. We take hold of the prefix Infra-, meaning below but also within, to think about Perec’s Infraordinary and Duchamp’s Inframince. And we place it alongside the Proto-Indo-European root *teks-, the etymological mother of text, textile, techne, technique, tectonic, architecture, hypertext, pretext, context and texture. With this constellation, we sketch a fractured chart to navigate the hazy map of affect.
Daniel Salomon is a visual artist working with food. Through sense-awakening pop-up dinners, workshops, lecture-performances and installations, his aim is to question who we are as individuals and as groups with food as starting point.
Food as the source of nutrients to stay alive and healthy. Food as identity, as what we were given from our upbringing and what we will transmit to our children. Food as the best entry to understand another culture. Food we share around the same table. Food as a daily creative practice. Food as pleasure.
But also the lack of food. The bad food. The toxic food. Malnutrition because of poverty, or because of bad habits. Food as social marker. Obscene consumerism. Eating disorders. Addictions. Healthy diet fundamentalism. Intensive farming, animal abuse and so on.
Daniel is currently working on a series of dishes reflecting upon the great impact humans have on the planet and how likely it is it will bring us to the collapse of the world as we know it. Among other topics the plates talk about climate change, the oil peak, the exhaustion of resources, our financial system, geopolitics, inequalities, polluted oceans, drinking water, biodiversity and more. This project will take form in a series of dinners and a cook book.
Daniel has been a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Delfina Art foundation.
The encounter happens in cooperation with transmediale festival. It is the first event of a program which explores new forms of studying, learning and doing. With direct reference to transmediale 2019, it focuses on cultural emergence and emphasizes the affective capacities of artistic practices, methodologies and pedagogies that can assist in building a space of mutual knowledge and shared experience. As part of this endeavor, transmediale also inaugurates the ‘Study Circles’ format, that is working groups who come together before, during and after the festival. The Study Circle members working on Affective Infrastructures will be joining this introductory event for TIER’s program ‘Infratekture’, having had the first kick off meeting on the same date.
The Study Circles Partner Program is a collaboration with transmediale, supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Photo 3 by Benjamin Busch
October 15. Hands.on.matter: Mycelium and mushrooms. feat. Jessica Langley
Monday, October 15, 19:00
Hands.on.matter: Mycelium and mushrooms. feat. Jessica Langley
Bimonthly program organized by Sandra Nicoline Nielsen and Tim van der Loo
This event will take place at TIER.space and starts with the launch of the event series Hands.on.matter (Sandra Nicoline Nielsen, DK & Tim van der Loo, NL).
^^ Interdisciplinary artist and amateur mycologist Jessica Langley (Colorado, US) presents her work with mushrooms as material input in paper production and shares some of her insights into mycelial properties.
^^^ We will put our hands on mycelium by doing a workshop on how to easily grow our own mushroom culture from the mushrooms we buy in supermarkets. We will provide the needed material.
^^^^ Mushroom snacks will be served as part of the event.
Hands.on.matter is an explorative collective of multidisciplinary creatives focusing on the matter of material through a questioning of resources, consumption, sustainability and culture by generating bimonthly series of expositions, talks and workshops. Hands.on.matter believes in taking a step back and rediscovering the kosmos of matter. We will be building new structures by searching deeper into the essence of material, zooming in on compositions and zooming out on flows. We will discover how design for a more sustainable and circular future can be rediscovered. Hands.on.matter seeks to host thought provoking and desirable templates for design, art and architecture, in the context of everyday life by including local residents like neighbours, entrepreneurs, artists and designers. Every event will be composed of an assembly of expert presentations, hands-on workshops, design showcases as well as refreshments within the given topic of the month. On the 15th of October we will celebrate the decay followed by autumn’s coming by bringing our hands on mushrooms and mycelium. This will be the building block for discovering new materials, forms of assembly, autonomous cultivation and taste.
Jessica Langley (b. 1981, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers how cultural symbols of nature and certain representations of landscape are experienced both directly and through the mediated and sublimated image. Using foraged materials, fresco, digital print, sculpture, and collage she is exploring abstraction as a form which dehumanizes place and investigating how the analogous dichotomy of abstraction/representation and the objective/subjective perspectives complicate this relationship. Langley has recently relocated to Colorado where she is the treasurer of the Pikes Peak Mycological Society. She has exhibited her work internationally in such cities as Belfast, Berlin, Mexico City, New York, Reykjavík, and Santa Cruz, as well as being featured in the Pittsburgh Biennial and the Queens International. She has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Skaftfell Center of Visual Art in Iceland, Askeaton Contemporary Art in Ireland, the SPACES World Artist Program in Cleveland, and the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD-U in Toronto. She was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship and the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation Scholarship for research in Iceland, and she earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. She is an amateur mycologist, and her artwork and writings have been published in the New York Mycological Society Newsletter, New American Paintings, NPR, Hyperallergic, and Temporary Art Review. She is co-founder of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run-gallery in Brooklyn, NY; The Stephen and George Laundry Line, a project space in Queens, NY; and The Yard, a site for public art in Colorado Springs.
Tim van der Loo (b. 1991) is an experimental multi disciplinary designer located in Berlin where he is working in between the fields of textile, furniture and illustration. He studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven were he graduated in 2016 and is currently doing a master in Textile and Surface design at Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin. His work engages with sustainable material, contrast, and tactility to generate playful objects.
Sandra Nicoline Nielsen (b. 1988) is a Techno-Anthropologist (Msc.) from Aalborg University, Denmark. She explores how socio-material practices supports transitions into new economies, and has in her Master’s thesis been working with social structures of Circular Economy here in Berlin.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
October 12. Undoubtedly problematic. Private screening with Luiza Folegatti, Marzia Jamili/Brittany Nugent, Solomon Mekonen and Laura Na
Friday, October 12, 20:30
Undoubtedly problematic
Private screening with Luiza Folegatti, Marzia Jamili/Brittany Nugent, Solomon Mekonen and Laura Na
This screening program is curated by new Visual Anthropology graduates from the Freie Universität. The MA program especially raises questions about problems in representation of culture, what global digitalization means for cultures and societies and the significance of ethnographic films and photography for Social and Cultural Anthropology.
What should be the primacy of an ethical response from visual media and research in a time where everything is in flux, where demagogues take center stage and the role of the media is undoubtedly problematic. Visual Anthropology can serve as a proposition for not only documenting the world and depicting lived experience, but for modelling and envision futures and raising new questions. Self-reflexivity and collaborative methods lie in the core of the field, and the films are interwoven by these approaches in four hybrid pieces, that brings subjects like gender, performativity, belonging, racialized identity and decolonization to the forefront.
Please note this is a private screening, which requires a personal invitation. Please contact us for more information.
September 27. Luis Berríos-Negrón. Anarchive: memory #02 ‘A Crème de Menthe, a Rusty Nail. Why Intransitive?’
Thursday, September 27, 19:00
Luis Berríos-Negrón
Anarchive: memory #02 ‘A Crème de Menthe, a Rusty Nail. Why Intransitive?’
…will be an open reenactment and collective planting. I have asked performance artist Callum Harper to reenact with me a dialogue between video artist Paul Ryan and anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In doing so, we will then review with you the moment where Ryan and Bateson come to discuss Ryan’s notion of ‘intransitivity’, one I feel presents significant possibilities for ‘art as research’. We will set the enactment around a table I will be installing with Lorenzo and Ben (co-directors of TIER), using some existing materials and props from previous exhibitions by Lorenzo and TIER. The ‘intransitive table’ will become another social pedestal where, during the reenactment, we will plant seeds and cutlings of medicinal plants (datura, rosemary, brugmansia) harvested in the ANARCHIVE and place them unto the table. The table will therefore become a sort of ‘wardian case’ for new plants to be be incubated and grown at TIER to be later transplanted back to the ANARCHIVE in Denmark by caravan in the summer of 2019.
In regards to ANARCHIVE… Jacques Derrida states in Archive Fever that — “If repetition is thus inscribed at the heart of the future to come, one must also import here, in the same stroke, the death drive, the violence of forgetting, superrepression (suppression and repression), the anarchive, in short, the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition: the archon of the archive, the table, what carries the table and who carries the table, the subjectile, the substrate, and the subject of the law.”
I take forth this dimension of memory proposed by Derrida to be one of a series of works dedicated to the deposition of ‘greenhouse’, as display of natural history, and as superstructure to secure food and survival. Following works such as Earthscore Specularium (2015), Looming Greenhouse (2014), and Immediate Archæologies Two (2008), ANARCHIVE takes the form of a medicinal garden that I am growing in collaboration with my partner, curator Maria Kamilla Larsen and our daughter Freia Pilar from Aug.2018 to Oct.2019 in Denmark. ANARCHIVE, is about questioning the future of natural history. It is about forgetting and remembering global warming as spectral and physical trauma. It is not about dissociating an innovative future of ‘greenhouse’, but about remediating the superreppressed colonial memory within the greenhouse: as traumatic experiences we never lived nor desired; strengthening biodiversity; and resisting the counter-intuitive counter-intelligence that is now amongst us. ANARCHIVE is the final component of my doctoral work at Konstfack / KTH titled ‘Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures’ to be disputed and published in the fall of 2019.
Luis Berríos-Negrón (Puerto Rico, 1971*) explores unforeseen forms and forces of global warming through ‘social pedestals’. Most recent exhibitions include ‘Impasse Finesse Neverness’ (Museum of Ethnography and Archeology of Bahia, 2017), ‘Collapsed Greenhouse’ at ‘Undisciplinary Learning’ (District, Berlin, 2016) and ‘Earthscore Specularium’ (Färgfabriken Konsthal, Stockholm, 2015). Previous exhibitions include the 3rd Biennial of Art of Bahia (2014), the 10th São Paulo Biennial for Architecture (2013), as core-collaborator with Paul Ryan at Documenta13 (2012), and “Future Archive” at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2012). He is the founder of the Anxious Prop art collective and the Paramodular environmental design group. He is doctoral candidate and tutor at Konstfack and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Parsons New School, and a Master of Architecture from M.I.T. Berríos-Negrón lives and works between Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Berlin.
Callum Harper (Australia, 1993) works with notions around LGBT culture, and combines discourse around reality and online life to create dialogue around the disparate differences of communication IRL vs URL. Primarily working with text, video and performance, Harper travels to varied destinations of contrasting political values toward LGBT citizens, and internalises locals opinions and his personal experiences on acceptance and daily life. The amalgamation of this collected experiential information and research data informs the medium and personal responses to experiences within differing contexts. Harper holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Monash University in Caulfield, Australia, and a Master of Fine Arts from Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. http://callumharper.squarespace.com/
‘OUTCOMES of Anarchive: memory #01’ Herlev DK (2018)
‘Like Yeah…’ by Callum Harper (2015)
‘Immediate Archaeologies Two’ Dresden DE (2008)
‘Tear do Terreiro / Looming Greenhouse’ Salvador da Bahia BRA (2014)
‘Earthscore Specularium’ Färgfabriken Stockholm SE (2015)
‘Collapsed Greenhouse’ District Berlin DE (2016)
‘Impasse Finesse Neverness’ Salvador da Bahia BRA (2017)
