August 9. Amir George: Contorting Metaphysical Hijinks. Curated by GeoVanna Gonzalez
Thursday, August 9, 19:00
Contorting Metaphysical Hijinks
Encounter with Amir George
Curated by GeoVanna Gonzalez
A short film program featuring the work of Amir George. The films navigate the complexities of life through narratives of power, love, joy, trauma and self. The program is an amalgamation of spiritual stories juxtaposing sound and image, fragmented vignettes that conjure the secret life of objects both found and collected that reside in a world within a world.
Amir George is a filmmaker and curator, based in Chicago. George is the founder of The Cinema Culture, a grassroots film programming organization, and co-founder, with curator Erin Christovale, of Black Radical Imagination, a touring experimental short film series. As an artist, George creates spiritual stories, juxtaposing sound and image into an experience of non-linear perception. George’s films have screened at institutions and film festivals including Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Anthology Film Archives, Glasgow School of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Arts Los Angeles, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, Afrikana Film Festival, and Chicago Underground Film Festival, among others.
GeoVanna Gonzalez is a Berlin / Miami-based artist and curator. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design. Since 2014 she has collaborated with Coven Berlin, a queer feminist collective which produces exhibitions and events that focus on body politics, gender, labor, and art. As a curator, her most recent group exhibition is Augmented Sunrise Beneath The Skin, on view at Gr_und until August 12, 2018. She previously curated the international group show, A New Prescription For Insomnia at Horse and Pony Fine Arts in Berlin. In 2016, GeoVanna was the Project Manager for the Berlin Art Prize. She is also the Co-founder of READ WHAT YOU WANT!, a reading club established in 2014.
Video still by Amir George. Photos by Benjamin Busch.
July 29. Susan Ploetz: Xenosomatics Session/Playtest for “The Guild”
Sunday, July 29, 12:00-17:00
Susan Ploetz: Xenosomatics Session/Playtest for “The Guild”
This special somatics session and playtest is a continuation of the Xenosomatics series being offered at Martin Gropius Bau as a part of the “Welt Ohne Aussen” exhibition. The sessions use breath, observation, movement, and touch to explore the material intelligences of the bodymind/being, which is both our most primal, intimate experience and also sometimes our most alien. How can we develop an intimacy with the alien within/without, how can this re-shape how we think of ourselves as beings?
On July 29th, we focus on: interfacing/playtesting: I
Please wear something comfortable to move in, bring water/snacks, a blanket and/or yoga mat if possible, and be prepared for gentle movement and consensual non-sexual touch.
Suggested donation: 5-40 euros sliding scale (going to the instructor and also to help fund programming at TIER.space)
If interested (or if you have questions), Please RSVP at ploetzly@gmail.com
More information about sessions and the larp can be found on Susan’s website: www.susanploetz.com/
More information about the Martin Gropius Bau program here.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
July 20. Ana Alenso: green and yellow, boom and bust
Friday, July 20, 19:00-21:00
Ana Alenso:
green and yellow
boom and bust
Ana Alenso builds an allegorical cosmos showcasing the economic, social and ecological risks and disequilibria implicit in natural-resource extractive industries, with a particular focus on those pertaining to hydrocarbons. During the cultivation phase of TIER.space, she will create a sculptural intervention that combines plants, water and industrial elements. Objects such as an oil barrel and glass water bottles—familiar shell-like traces of destructive global consumerist traffic—are brought in conversation with living plants. Light, heat, growth, moisture, will transform the sculpture over the course of the following months.
The opening of this project will be accompanied by an installation of works: La enfermedad holandesa tropical and The future of oil, both of which are related to the speculative and metaphorical contents found within certain political economy phenomena, most specifically those associated with boom-and-bust cycles, the Dutch disease and the resource curse. Such phenomena occur predominantly in natural-resource-rich nations where corruption and violence become commonplace, paving the way for authoritarian regimes to rise to power. An example of this paradox manifests itself within the artist’s native country, Venezuela, which has the world’s second largest oil reserve, and yet is submerged in one of the worst humanitarian and economic crises of recent history.
More info: www.anaalenso.com
Photos by Benjamin Busch
July 17. Jacob Remin: *something is wrong on the internet* / *cloud flares*
Tuesday, July 17, 19:00
Jacob Remin: *something is wrong on the internet* / *cloud flares*
broken harddrives and broken bodies. shifting bits and crunching metals. jacob remin takes us through the infrastructures of “cloud computing” and “harvesting the rare earth”.
the internet runs on computers and therefore it can be redesigned. but when the network is internalised and the source code disappears, where do we turn when things get creepy?
change your system: be the turing complete user. quitting mainstream internet as a possible act of self care and resistance. tune in, phase out, get weird.
Jacob Remin’s practice is a critical meditation over technology and the power structures it creates. in a world based on technology, JR questions the norm and the natural, while creating spaces for conversation. his works are manifested in the meeting between light, space, composition and interaction.
JR lives and works in copenhagen, denmark.
Video stills by Jacob Remin. Photo by Benjamin Busch.
July 14. Elena Tejada-Herrera, Videos from This Woman: Performance Documentation 1997-2010. Book presentation by Florencia Portocarrero
Saturday, July 14, 19:00
Elena Tejada-Herrera, Videos from This Woman: Performance Documentation 1997-2010
Book presentation by Florencia Portocarrero
Elena Tejada-Herrera is a leading figure of feminist performance and video art that opened an area of inquiry and action almost unexplored throughout the history of Peruvian performance: the assertion of the artist’s body in its sexual, racial and social otherness or specificity as a vehicle to critically intervene in the public space and break the silence and fear imposed by the dictatorial regime in Peru in the late 90s. In 2001, awarded with a grant from the Virginia Common Wealth University, the artist moved to the United States. The immigration process profoundly affected her practice and led her to use video-performance as a solitary form of artistic and citizen affirmation.
Videos from This Woman: Performance Documentation 1997-2010 is the first critical and long-overdue revision of the work of Elena Tejada-Herrera and results from the exhibition of the same name that took place at Proyecto AMIL (Lima, Peru, 2016). Edited by Florencia Portocarrero, the publication compiles the work of Tejada-Herrera through an extensive portfolio specially created by the artist and includes unpublished essays by: Portocarrero; the artist Armando Andrade Tudela; and the curator Miguel A. López. The book also presents a dossier of texts by the artist (originally circulated as an independent edition in 1999) and a conversation between Tejada-Herrera; the visual anthropologist Karen Bernedo; the artist Claudia Coca; and the performer, teacher and cultural promoter, Lorena Peña. The design of Videos from This Woman: Performance Documentation 1997-2010 is the outcome of a collaboration between vm& estudio grafico and the artist.
Florencia Portocarrero is a researcher, writer, and curator based in Lima. She received her BA in clinical psychology at the Catholic University of Peru, where she also earned an MA in psychoanalytical theory. From 2012–13 she participated in the De Appel Curatorial Program in Amsterdam and in 2015 completed an MA in contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. Portocarrero’s writings on art and culture regularly appear in contemporary art magazines such as Atlántica Journal, Artishock, and Terremoto. During 2017/2018 Portocarrero was a grant holder of KfW Stiftung’s program ‘Curators in Residence: Curating Connections’ in collaboration with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. In Lima she works as a public program curator at Proyecto AMIL, and is a co-founder of Bisagra, one of the few independent art spaces in the city. She recently edited Videos From This Woman: Performance Documentation 1997–2010, a monograph on the work of the artist Elena Tejada-Herrera.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
June 17. Making Unsharp? An encounter with Studio Pararaum
Sunday, June 17, 13:00-15:00
Talk at 14:00, informal discussion to follow
Making Unsharp? An encounter with Studio Pararaum
Through an installation, talk and discussion, Studio Pararaum (Meng Li and Linda Zhang) speculate on 10 years of Making Unsharp. Their encounter at TIER.space focuses on the connection between two seemingly divergent technics: image making and casting. Revisiting the premodern technic of camera obscura, they explore the relevance of iterative image casting against today’s technologically mediated world and its potential in architectural perception.
Li and Zhang write, ‘We make architecture by Making Unsharp. To make unsharp is to question the distance between the viewer and what is perceived—without this distance, perception cannot exist. We experiment from within this distance to reveal the impossibility of appearance: of any precise beginning of end, in time or space. We think through making—with material and technology—to precisely make unsharp.’
Meng Li and Linda Zhang are doppelgängers. They both received their M.Arch I AP with distinction from Harvard University GSD as recipients of the James Templeton Kelley Thesis Prize and the AIA Henry Adams Medal and Certificate. Linda was a Harvard Dean’s Merit Scholar while Meng was a Frank Knox Fellow. They completed their B.Sc.Arch with honours McGill University SOA where Meng was recipient of the Clifford C.F. Wong and the Favretto Scholarships while Linda was a recipient of the Philip J Turner Prize and the McGill Alumnae 75th Anniversary Scholarship. Previously, they worked together for Studio Olafur Eliasson / Studio Other Spaces (Berlin). Prior to Pararaum, Meng worked for Diener & Diener (Basel), Hans Kollhoff (Berlin), and Valerio Olgiati (Flims) while Linda worked for Barkow Leibinger (Berlin), Christian Kerez (Zürich), and WOJR (Boston). Meng Li received the Lyceum Traveling Fellowship while Linda Zhang received the Harry der Boghosian Faculty Fellowship as well as a Fellowship at the ZK/U (Center for Art and Urbanistics). They have been published and exhibited internationally in Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
Meng Li, Assistentin bei Christ&Gantenbein DArch ETH, Zürich
Linda Zhang, Assistant Professor, Ryerson University RSID, Toronto
Photos by Benjamin Busch
