Tea Oval Session Encounter: Unveiling the Silence – Urging International Advocacy for Artists in Sudan with Ahmed Isamaldin
Date: Wednesday, September 25th
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
Zoncy wondered why NGOs, INGOs, UN organizations, and many EU embassies hesitated to help Myanmar artists at risk during the 2021 Spring Revolution. After arriving in Berlin in August 2022, Zoncy encountered global activism and felt she found possible answers there. Exploring the challenges faced by artists in authoritarian regimes underscores the crucial role of international advocates. What innovative actions can these artists inspire? This is not just a question for individuals or organizations, but for all of us. It demands our collective attention and action, now more than ever. Understanding the emerging themes of internationalism versus political will in promoting artistic freedom is vital. How do these themes contrast with preserving national interests? The artist and cultural activist Ahmed Isamaldin from Sudan will join the 5th Tea Oval to discuss the above mentioned questions. Wisdom holders and those with experience are equally welcome to join the oval discussion with the speaker.
BIO
Ahmed Isamaldin is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Khartoum, Sudan. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Khartoum and has studied graphic design, photography in Cairo, and visual communication at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. His work centers on themes of immigration, psychology, revolutionary processes, decolonial design, and technology.
This program is supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion Department of Culture fellowship program Weltoffenes Berlin.
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
The Shape of a Pocket Encounter: A column and a conduit: non-ruinous ruins and monumental time with Kandis Friesen
Date: Saturday, September 21st
Time: 15:00 -16:30h
Location: General-Pape-Straße 100, Tor 1, 12101 Berlin
To register for the event or for questions regarding accessibility, please email: the.shape.of.a.pocket.24@
This is a site-specific artist lecture, addressing two architectural instruments — one in Odesa and one in Berlin. Approaching both structures as hesitant monuments, the artist will speak about their divergent forms of scaffolding, states of disintegration, and qualities of resonance and muting.
The talk weaves between two structures: the crumbling architecture of the Odesa State Archives, first built as the Brodsky Synagogue, closed under Soviet law and given to the Rosa Luxemburg Jewish workers club, used as storage and offices by the Romanian and NS armies during the occupation and genocide, and turned into the official state archives in 1965, with a huge concrete bookcase built inside its interior resonant space; the building continues to be unsafe to work in, and should be returned to the community it was taken from, but, for a tangled web of circumstances, remains stuck in its current state, though still slowly moving. The second structure is the Schwerbelastungskörper, or Heavy Load-Bearing Body, a huge concrete column built by forced prison labourers, to test whether the wet Berlin ground could sustain the weight of the immense fascist complex proposed by head NS architect Albert Speer; the column continues its slow sinking, and is so large and solid that it cannot be removed. A column and a conduit will guide us through the interior and exterior spaces of the Schwerbelastungskörper museum complex, with the artist sharing images, histories, and sounds from both sites. Friesen will speak about both structures’ materialities, histories, and modes of use, leading to their status as hesitant monuments and non-ruinous ruins — structures in a state of ruin but in active and necessary use. Speaking to scaffolding, disintegration, and resonance, the lecture asserts existing infrastructures and unofficial forms of historical memory as vital sites of monumental transmission. At a time of incomprehensible destruction and loss, we will spend time with these two forms and their particular ways of holding.
BIO
Kandis Friesen works with diasporic language, dispersed translations, and disintegrating archival forms. Her recent work is anchored in the dispersed monumental, composing between the solidity of official memory and the dispersal of intimate, unofficial forms. She often works in modes of grafting and re-publication (making something public, again), amplifying specific histories and the structures which hold and transmit them.
Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum (Odesa, UA), CAFKA Biennial of Art in Public Space (Six Nations of the Grand River Haldimand Tract / Waterloo, CA), Galerie im Turm (Berlin, DE), Roman Susan Art Foundation, as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (Zhigaagong / Chicago, US), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory, CA), Le Festival International du Film sur l’Art (Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, CA), MIX NYC (NYC, Lenapehoking territory, US), and Jihlava International Film Festival (Jihlava, CZ), among others. Friesen has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, and she was the 2021 recipient of the CALQ Québec Studio at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Friesen is from Winnipeg and Montréal, and lives in Berlin.
Accessibility – further information on mobility accessibility will be available by writing to the email: the.shape.of.a.pocket.24@
– The event will be in English, and the artist can provide some context in French and German.
– There will unfortunately not be DGS or ASL interpretation.
– Part of the talk is not wheelchair accessible: one section will take place on the viewing platform (up four flights of stairs), and inside the column’s interio (a small space with with uneven floors and several steps)
– For further information on mobility accessibility, please write to the email above.
– Guide dogs are welcomed at the museum site; pets are not allowed.
– There are places to sit both inside and outside during about half of the talk.
Encounter: Boyhood with Vincent Hulme
Date: Thursday, September 12th
Time: 18:30 – 21:30
What does a fixation on the past cost?
Vincent Hulme (@chillback4eva) has been drawing from the substance and innocence of his boyhood and youth, using those formative years as a lens through which he positions himself between the figures that shaped his worldview and his current perception of it. The first influential figure in his life was his father. The second were the athletes, particularly baseball players, whom he admired. These explorations—or rather, interventions—into his past aim to reflect on or question how masculinity often fixates on the trajectory of the bygone. There is a pervasive need to return to a previous state or to re-establish a severed connection. Many authors have proposed various emancipatory solutions, but conservative or nostalgic counterarguments often appear more compelling. A divide is growing and the issue is often framed as a zero-sum game where only one side can prevail. On this evening, Vincent will reflect on his boyhood, his idols, and his investigative work into this past. How can we move it forward? How to engage with a differing perspective? How significant will the collective and individual efforts need to be?
BIO
His work has been exhibited at Alte Münze (Berlin, DE), Hopscotch Reading Room (Berlin, DE), Helmut Space (Leipzig, DE), ES365 (Düsseldorf, DE), Kaefer Klause (Dresden, DE), Treize (Paris FR), Mains D’oeuvres (Paris, FR) and the Czech Cultural Center (Paris, FR). Hulme is the founder and leader of Common Ground Studio (CGS), established in 2019. Common Ground Studio (CGS) operates as a para-Drucktutional initiative within the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), offering support and mentorship to artists-at-risk with migratory backgrounds living in Berlin. He has also curated numerous exhibitions with CGS and organized the 2015 edition of the Biennale Druck Berlin. Vincent has published an artist & poetry book with Outer Space Press and has also contributed writings to the Food& Publication in Berlin. Vincent He continues to engage with his community through artistic and curatorial projects.
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Image caption: courtesy of the artist
Encounter: The Shape of a pocket: For other revolutions taped and remixed at PANAF hosted by Pungwe Listening with Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri
Date: Saturday 31st August
Time: 16:00 – Film screening, duration 90 mins
18:30 – 21:00 Pungwe – Listening live mixtape performance
/Click/click/ click/A Black Mass/snap/snap/stick/click/
word/Pungwe Listening/ Our entire body is the ear/This full bodied account does not only specify corporeality/It is pinned on the spatial/Spiritual matters; the practice of making room(enough for everyone)/ Space prepared for us to pause/Play and m/o(u)r/n/ a history/Massing to light/Marching from darkness/A temporal mission were morning is turned into a collective adjective/Metaflow/flow
‘For other revolutions’ is a public gathering that presents Le premier festival culturel panafricain de Algiers (PANAF) staged as a film, excerpts of which will be versioned-in-other-forms, auditorily, for the collective exhibition. The PANAF film was directed at the height of the anti-apartheid movement in southern Africa. While there are several sequences of liberation movement representatives from the region in the street parades, it is hard to get a sense of their presence in Algiers. Yet the opening of the film commences with a powerful chant and song by Swapo freedom fighters: ‘Our country, our people, will be liberated by our own hands! Down with Imperialism, Down with Colonialism!’ ‘Colonialism, we must fight until we win! Imperialism, we must fight until we win!’ These impressions stay with the viewer until the fading chants are met with a rejoinder by Miriam Makeba, and Dorothy Masuka’s ‘Ntyilo, Ntyilo’, a pause to reflect, until the images and sound erupts again.
The film is a visceral rendition of music, poetry, theatre, street processions, dance, visuality, and improvisation. It is an arresting 90 minutes of a singularly intact archive of cultural revolution. It portrays a genealogy of PanAfricanist conferences and festivals, that spanned the entire black world, and resonated with the geopolitical moment of a generation that was. And argues for the ‘war of national liberation as a cultural act’. Our response is not a nostalgic bent that re-creates a void, and thereby linearity, instead we are interested in the paradoxes and contestatory grounds in the ambitions of the festival, of the era, as it proceeds as a disjuncture into our contemporary cultural and political moment.
And more: the film’s approach to audio/visual material, comics, logos, travelogues spliced, found footage, documentary film extracts and on site re-enactments juxtaposed, with fragmented and cacophonous music, re-doubles as a haunting, augmented artefact and mixtape. Our reply is to enact other forms, ‘versionings’, ‘a way of creating incompleteness and ongoingness at the same time’.
Pungwe Listening presents a live mixtape imagined by use of their record library, alongside excerpts from the PANAF film. The live recording of the session will be presented in the group exhibition at TIER from October.
Pungwe Listening:
Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri form the duo Pungwe Listening, founded in 2016. Their work centres Southern African aural histories and multi-media archives, and present relational art formats through performance, installation and collective curatorial practice in an extended play in public space.
Memory Biwa is a historian, and artist. Her research addresses anti-colonial resistance, genocide, memory and reparative processes in Namibia. Biwa’s practice pivots on aurality, historical production, and geographies.
Robert Machiri is a sound artist and hoarder of sound-related objects. Machiri’s work exists at the juncture of two streams of practice; curatorial concepts founded through the notion of conviviality and art as pedagogy.
Citation:
All phrases in the write-up inverted commas are from the film, except the last one, which is from William Pope.L (Artforum, December 28, 2023)
Image credit: The image (Poster series) is inspired by the official poster for PANAF, 1969. Drawing, and design by Robert ‘Chi’ Machiri.
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Encounter: The Shape of a pocket: Waking Dream: At the edge of the otherwise with Jessica Zïada Korp
Date: Sunday, August 25th
Time: 15:00pm – 17:00
As Walidah Imarisha reminds us, “We live in a quantum universe—the possibilities are endless. The way systems of power maintain themselves is to deny us that and to tell us there’s only one or two terrible options.”
Abolitionist practice calls us to dismantle the institutions and structures that enact violence and oppression. But that is not an end. The void that is left behind is also an open door into another time. The work of the present is to collectively imagine and begin to build that future.
Join us for an immersive guided abolitionist meditation, guided by an original soundscape, designed to disrupt the urgency and constant demands of pain and violence, especially for racialized communities. Together, we will enter a space for transformative dreaming. After this deep, reflective journey, we will ground ourselves in the present and explore what it means to bring our dream worlds to life. What does it take to practise our dreams into existence today?
QT*BPoC organisers and activists to the front.
We will meet at TIER, Donaustr. 84 at 15:00, and walk together to a green outdoor space about 15 minutes away. There is a public, wheelchair accessible bathroom in the vicinity. Further details will be shared upon registration.
The encounter is free & limited to 20 people, so sign up soon via this link (https://forms.gle/
BIO
I’m a mixed-race black indigenous mother & time traveller, organiser and vivid dreamer. My work centres abolitionism, transformative justice and decolonial aesthetics through the medium of sound. I consider sound to be the space where (colonial) language resigns and dreamspaces emerge. I see dreams as crucial to political and social organising, since it helps to imagine and practise a world beyond the cages and confines of the current carceral system.
Encounter: CONCERNING REVOLUTION. Session 1. Film screening + open discussion: R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity. Organised by Sarah Zeryab and Lama El Khatib
Date: Thursday, August 15th
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
Concerning Revolution is an invitation to gather around films, sounds, writings, and other formats. Taking these visual, sonic, or discursive contributions as entry points, each event of the series seeks to speak to the urgencies, questions, concerns, and confrontations that emerge from this moment’s heightened — and globally expanded — formations of mass killing, repression, and policing. Neighbours, comrades, and friends are called on to join, share, and disseminate. The first session hosts a screening of R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity by Mohanad Yaqubi. The screening will be followed by an open discussion moderated by the organizers.
R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity 71 min / Japanese, Arabic, English
R21 comes as an addition to and a reflection on a collection of 20 16mm films, safeguarded in Tokyo by the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine. It’s an undelivered solidarity letter written by a Japanese activist that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found throughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself during the film. R21 aka Restoring Solidarity acts as a catalog, the film as a time machine, the film as an archive. The themes that Reel no. 21 deals with, reveal themselves in the form of a montage essay. At the same time, the act of restoring these films brings out motives, aspirations, and the disappearance of a generation and its struggles, not only in Japan, but around the world.
BIO
Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah- based production house, Idioms Film. Yaqubi is one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films that focuses on militant film practices, also, a founding member of the Palestine Film Institute, that focus on supporting, promoting, and preserving Palestinian cinema, he is a resident researcher at The School of the Art (KASK) in Gent, Belgium since 2017. Image credit: Mohanad Yaqubi. Film Still from R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity, 2022
In collaboration with Archive Ensemble
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin