Domestics

Tuesday, February 9 – Thursday, April 17
Stephanie Comilang: Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017

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 TIER.space for the duration, accompanied by a series of online encounters, and a video installation in the physical space of TIER.

Online performance lecture:
Paradise Lives in the Ruins of Colonial and Dictatorship Architecture
Tuesday, February 9, 17:00 Berlin/CET / 11:00 EST
Use this link to join: https://meet.jit.si/TheInstituteForEndoticResearch

In her lecture Stephanie Comilang will talk about her recent research and work into feminizing and decolonizing spaces of Colonial and Imperial architecture in Southeast Asia by way of a drone.

Exhibition:
Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017
Tuesday, February 9 – Thursday, April 17

Due to covid restrictions, please register for a professional visit in advance:
Make an appointment for Tuesday, February 9, 18:00-21:00 by clicking here.
Make an appointment for any Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com.

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.

Fermín Jiménez Landa: The Visits
Commencement: Saturday, October 24, 16:00-21:00
October 24 – January 9, Thursday-Saturday 14:00-18:00
Closed November 2nd-30th due to COVID-19

Fermín Jiménez Landa proposes a group of small interventions with the idea of exploring the notion of home, seeking to scrutinize the public dimension of the domestic, as well as the possibilities of touching, of meeting, of winking from the isolated. Jiménez is interested in the looks from a balcony, discrete meetings with neighbours, the smell of fried food, or the sound of a bad song. Invisible but perceptible elements, air currents that filter through the cracks, common airs, domestic spaces that are not so quarantined. The intention is to weave ubiquity into singularity, the political by repetition of the domestic. We work in the contiguous, the adjoining, with the walls, corners, baseboards, edges, sofas and mirrors in times of quarantines, gentrification, airbnb, uber, mass tourism and forced migrations.

At TIER, Jiménez Landa presents The palmist (2013-ongoing), an expanding collection of bars of soap, preserved at their last moment of use, won from the bathrooms of other people’s homes. Poor but precious objects, polished, transparent and fragile, these soaps have no economic value, but rather an intimate one: an extended effort is required to bring these fragile pieces into existence.

In conversation with this work, Jiménez Landa initiates a light bulb exchange with the neighbors of TIER. We ask them for their white light bulbs (to be installed in the space) in exchange for an equal but yellow one to be installed in its place, in their homes in rooms facing the street. If, when walking by the neighbors’, we see a yellow light in the window, we are witnessing the exhibition.

A third work is materialized in a smell. Every day of the exhibition, a plate of prepackaged ramen noodles will be heated. Depending on the position of the curtains of the neighbors across the street from TIER, the smell will be of vegetables or shrimp.

Making performances, public interventions or installations, Fermín Jiménez Landa works in equivalence, inversion and interchange processes that makes us see reality from an equidistant point between absurd and prudent, moving and iconoclastic, empirical and unverifiable. His work has been shown in MANIFESTA 11, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, CA2M, MAZ, Artium, 1646, La Casa Encendida, MUSAC, Travesía Cuatro, and Nogueras Blanchard.

********************************************

Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, new constraints are present. Our public program has grown from social closeness in the formats of encounters, workshops and interventions. We charted a course not to work with exhibitions, instead emphasizing the relations between art’s productive and reproductive elements.

With respect to everyone’s health, and abiding by current laws, we take a step back and look at exhibitions as the most convenient format at this moment. Exhibitions can be a powerful collective experience, but one of their constitutive powers is the contemplation of the artworks by the viewer, creating individual readings in shared constellations. It seems to be the best moment to use that capacity in times of necessary small gatherings. We welcome the format of the exhibition, which brings with it certain expectations. We look to the domestic sphere, which has become an especially important site of production in recent months, as a model for institutions, which always depend on reproductive labor. The domestic model also has many problematic aspects, such as exploitation and unrecognition of labor and rights. It is perhaps in the tension between its conflicts and possibilities where the power of the domestic lies. It is also where the possible paths for the reorganization of institutions can be uncovered.

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.

Hygienic measures (updated October 2020): The publicly accessible space of TIER is 35 m², allowing for maximum 5 occupants keeping 1.5 m distance and wearing masks that cover mouth and nose. Guests are requested to individually register for events in advance with the RSVP link (click here). Guests who arrive at events without an electronic reservation will be offered any remaining available reservations, and their contact information will be recorded before they enter the space. Personal data will be deleted after the required four weeks. Hand disinfectant is provided at the entrance. Thanks for helping us protect the health of everyone.

********************************************

Existing interventions viewable at TIER:

Luiza Prado de O. Martins, In Weaving Shared Soil, 2020–ongoing
In this long-term project, The Institute for Endotic Research will become home to a small garden of plants associated with revolutionary anti-fascist movements. In promoting this encounter, the garden means to nurture discussions around matters of decolonisation, care and affect, reproductive labor and community-building in times of extreme uncertainty and instability.

Josep Maynou, TIME, 2019
Hanging lamp in the workshop of TIER

Kanako Ishii, Re-Landscape, 2019–ongoing
Painting in four iterations. Intervention in the front window of TIER

Ana Alenso, green and yellow, boom and bust, 2018
Fountain with oil barrel. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Miguel Prados Sánchez and Pablo Ramón Benitez, Planting Concrete, 2018
Concrete planters. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Shannon Garden-Smith, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, 2019
Microplush polyester curtains. Intervention in the workshop shelves of TIER

Sofia Lomba, Spongy Bodies / Naked Bodies #2, 2018
Painting. Intervention in the bathroom of TIER

The Institute for Endotic Research, Broken Parliament, 2016
Seating and display infrastructure with painted surfaces at TIER

Sara Pereira, Pulso, 2018
Two-channel sound installation. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Tracey Snelling, Interiors, 2020
Intervention in the Manual Model Museum of TIER

Luís Berríos-Negrón, Wardian Table, 2018
Table, blackboard and portable greenhouse

Javier Bravo de Rueda, Ritual Containers, 2019
Ceramics for food presentation and other purposes

Stephen Kent, Were we never fish, 2019
Sculptural centerpiece of the TIER kitchen table

********************************************

Publications available for download:

• The Endotic Reader N.1
• Agropoetics Reader (collaboration with SAVVY Contemporary)
• Objects Before and After the Wall (collaboration with Tlaxcala 3)

Photos by Benjamin Busch

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju: Eve of Intuition
Commencement: Saturday, August 29, 16:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
Conclusion: Tuesday, October 13, 14:00-19:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
August 29 – October 13, Thursday-Saturday 14:00-18:00

Eve of Intuition is a process-oriented exhibition by Nigerian-American artist Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju. During her presence at TIER, she will use the exhibition space as a studio and casual meeting space to explore ideas related to intuition and uncover strategies to disrupt the flow of maintenance of oppressive systems, through interdisciplinary means. The exhibition space becomes a (re)production territory where the separation between the private studio space and the public qualities of the exhibition are blurred.

Within the period of the show the artist will work in correlation to her upcoming performance project at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Wayward Dust. This proposal for the museum is part of a larger project developed in collaboration with Decolonize Berlin and Philip Kojo Metz. The project takes up the difficult task of taking down an installation designed by Hans-Jürgen Buchert, a white German sculptor, in the 90’s that rendered an inaccurate representation of the inside of a slave trade cargo ship. The installation was situated within Lifeworld Ship, the Navigation and Shipping Department of the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, with the well-meaning intentions of introducing the history of the Brandenburg-Prussian slave trade and contextualizing the booming shipping economy within the framework of colonialism. The installation contains 82 life-sized figurines placed behind a metal cage, depicting representations of black people in humiliating and inaccurate ways. The installation was open to the public for 17 years and was publicly criticized for the last several years by a diverse set of voices. Yet, it closed officially just under one year ago, after Ilupeju successfully demanded its immediate closure upon the initiation of the project. Instead of elevating the image of the problematic figurines, Ilupeju is working with the dust that has accumulated in the installation for nearly two decades. While performing an act of maintenance by cleaning the dust, she questions the inherited values that shape the historiography promoted by the institution. She introduces a gesture of reproductive labor that has historically been performed by subaltern labor forces, and particularly women, in the promotion and expansion of capitalism. The process of cleaning also recalls Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1969 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, where she introduced a series of strategies for putting the reproductive labor of women at the center of the space of enunciation. And, as Mark Fisher writes, “Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.”

The main goal of the performance Wayward Dust is to make visible the physical and intangible particles and processes within dust and within the work of reality-building. Dust consists of sloughed off dead skin cells (among other particles like hair, clothing fibers, bacteria, dust mites, bits of dead bugs, soil particles, pollen, and microscopic specks of plastic), which covers the styrofoam figurines. Every time someone experiences the installation, they leave a piece of themselves behind. The dust is a residue that has been created by the visitors, employees, and workers—and many non-human agents—of the museum over the past 17 years. Next to this record of presence, it also represents the shapeshifting temporal nature of colonial practices. She will be using this dust collected at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin as one of the materials to develop her practice.

Leading from this act of maintenance is Eve of Intuition, Ilupeju’s process-oriented exhibition at TIER. Maintenance can be described as the act of causing something to exist or continue without changing. It is a process of preservation, but also of renovation. In socio-political contexts, the maintenance of white supremacy and other discriminatory systems partially depends on the weakening of our senses and collective intuition, exacerbated by an enforced lack of resources. Eve of Intuition is an attempt to recover intuitions and knowledges that have been compromised or corrupted by colonial, biopolitical and social control structures.

As part of her process-oriented exhibition and residency at TIER, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju is developing a site-specific, immersive installation for her upcoming show Hands Full of Air at Galerie im Turm (25.11.20 – 31.01.21). The multidisciplinary work will explore intuitive forms of collective reality-building based on shared fragilities, subversion, and queer forms of recognition. This project is part of the exhibition series My Working Will Be The Work curated by Linnéa Meiners and Jorinde Splettstößer, which investigates questions around labor, care and solidaric practices. More information soon at www.galerie-im-turm.net

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju is a transdisciplinary Nigerian-American artist and writer living in Berlin. Recurring points of interest in her work include the political processes of perversion, sexuality and intimacy in relation to desire, trauma, and body image, improvisation, intersectional anti-colonial methodologies, queer mechanisms in liberation pursuits, religion and spirituality, and memory, innocence, and the recovery of child selves. Her main concern as an artist, next to the catharsis of creation, is to look at the frayed edges and ruptures of constructed realities and locate spaces where healing, liberation, and (re)generation can take place.

Ilupeju graduated from New York University in 2018 where she studied Studio Art (Honors Studio) and Social and Cultural Analysis, the latter of which focused on the intersections of race and cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, sociology, and political science. The knowledge acquired in these fields continues to inform her practice today. She is also an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Class of 2018. In addition to her studio practice, Ilupeju has also done extensive curatorial and editorial work with SAVVY Contemporary and Archive Books, among others.
www.monilola.com

********************************************

Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, new constraints are present. Our public program has grown from social closeness in the formats of encounters, workshops and interventions. We charted a course not to work with exhibitions, instead emphasizing the relations between art’s productive and reproductive elements.

With respect to everyone’s health, and abiding by current laws, we take a step back and look at exhibitions as the most convenient format at this moment. Exhibitions can be a powerful collective experience, but one of their constitutive powers is the contemplation of the artworks by the viewer, creating individual readings in shared constellations. It seems to be the best moment to use that capacity in times of necessary small gatherings.We welcome the format of the exhibition, which brings with it certain expectations. We look to the domestic sphere, which has become an especially important site of production in recent months, as a model for institutions, which always depend on reproductive labor. The domestic model also has many problematic aspects, such as exploitation and unrecognition of labor and rights. It is perhaps in the tension between its conflicts and possibilities where the power of the domestic lies. It is also where the possible paths for the reorganization of institutions can be uncovered.

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.

Hygienic measures (updated October 2020): The publicly accessible space of TIER is 35 m², allowing for maximum 5 occupants keeping 1.5 m distance and wearing masks that cover mouth and nose. Guests are requested to individually register for events in advance with the RSVP link. Guests who arrive at events without an electronic reservation will be offered any remaining available reservations, and their contact information will be recorded before they enter the space. Personal data will be deleted after the required four weeks. Hand disinfectant is provided at the entrance. Thanks for helping us protect the health of everyone.

********************************************

Existing interventions viewable at TIER:

Luiza Prado de O. Martins, In Weaving Shared Soil, 2020–ongoing
In this long-term project, The Institute for Endotic Research will become home to a small garden of plants associated with revolutionary anti-fascist movements. In promoting this encounter, the garden means to nurture discussions around matters of decolonisation, care and affect, reproductive labor and community-building in times of extreme uncertainty and instability.

Josep Maynou, TIME, 2019
Hanging lamp in the workshop of TIER.

Kanako Ishii, Re-Landscape, 2019–ongoing
Painting in four iterations. Intervention in the front window of TIER

Ana Alenso, green and yellow, boom and bust, 2018
Fountain with oil barrel. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Miguel Prados Sánchez and Pablo Ramón Benitez, Planting Concrete, 2018
Concrete planters. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Shannon Garden-Smith, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, 2019
Microplush polyester curtains. Intervention in the workshop shelves of TIER

Sofia Lomba, Spongy Bodies / Naked Bodies #2, 2018
Painting. Intervention in the bathroom of TIER

The Institute for Endotic Research, Broken Parliament, 2016
Seating and display infrastructure with painted surfaces at TIER

Sara Pereira, Pulso, 2018
Two-channel sound installation. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Luís Berríos-Negrón, Wardian Table, 2018
Table, blackboard and portable greenhouse

Javier Bravo de Rueda, Ritual Containers, 2019
Ceramics for food presentation and other purposes

Stephen Kent, Were we never fish, 2019
Sculptural centerpiece of the TIER kitchen table

********************************************

Publications available for download:

• The Endotic Reader N.1
• Agropoetics Reader (collaboration with SAVVY Contemporary)
• Objects Before and After the Wall (collaboration with Tlaxcala 3)

Photos by Benjamin Busch

DULA: Tastes Like Home
Commencement: Tuesday July 7, 16:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
July 7 – August 8, Thursday-Saturday 14:00-18:00

Nourishment and connection; a new flavor; a different world; an old memory; an ancestral homeland. Food has always been a bastion of resistance, another form of oral history that connects us to our traditions, ancestors, and embodiment, through textures and flavors. For DULA’s first installation, we share a taste of our stories and our motherlands. An invitation to mindfully address displaced resources and bodies as we ingest history in the form of sweets. Can the act of consuming knowledge through taste prompt us to readdress our place in society, by a broadening of our capacity to empathize, to finally form thoughtful solidarity with one another?

DULA is a diaspora collective based between Berlin and Los Angeles, we believe that care and soft power are revolutionary tools. DULA is Ash Baccus-Clark, Black futurist, speculative neuroscientist, writer; Alexis Convento, Pilipinx-American cultural producer, taste artist; Ludmila Leiva, Guatemalan-Slovak-Canadian multidisciplinary designer, illustrator, storyteller; Chaveli Sifre, Puerto Rican artist focusing on scent as a medium. dula.world

******************************

Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, new constraints are present. Our public program has grown from social closeness in the formats of encounters, workshops and interventions. We charted a course not to work with exhibitions, instead emphasizing the relations between art’s productive and reproductive elements.

With respect to everyone’s health, and abiding by current laws, we take a step back and look at exhibitions as the most convenient format at this moment. Exhibitions can be a powerful collective experience, but one of their constitutive powers is the contemplation of the artworks by the viewer, creating individual readings in shared constellations. It seems to be the best moment to use that capacity in times of necessary small gatherings.We welcome the format of the exhibition, which brings with it certain expectations. We look to the domestic sphere, which has become an especially important site of production in recent months, as a model for institutions, which always depend on reproductive labor. The domestic model also has many problematic aspects, such as exploitation and unrecognition of labor and rights. It is perhaps in the tension between its conflicts and possibilities where the power of the domestic lies. It is also where the possible paths for the reorganization of institutions can be uncovered.

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.

Hygienic measures: The space of TIER is 100 m² total, allowing for maximum 5 occupants. Up to 2 guests and 3 staff are allowed inside simultaneously. For the events, please register a time to visit to ensure that you can enter the space (click here). We provide hand disinfectant at the entrance. Please keep the minimum distance and wear a mask that covers your mouth and nose.

Photos by Benjamin Busch

Irene Fernández Arcas: Stand By
Conclusion: Saturday, July 4, 14:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
June 6 – July 4, Thursday-Saturday 14:00-18:00

One of the elements that became quite fundamental during the recent period is the need for self-care. Since a long time, with Audre Lorde we have learned that self-care is an act of political warfare. This time of necessary confinement has shown again and in a new dimension the radicality of her words. The domestic space, as a conceptual and architectural framework, can be seen as a container for life. It is a domain that is demarcated by visible and invisible structures, by interfaces that regulate the flows of information and materials. It is also the inner space of the self, the space of rituals, morning routines, celebrations of joy, practices of health and the rhythms of the body. In her exhibition at TIER, Irene Fernández Arcas introduces installative elements into the space that institute a flow of ideas and resources related to the inner space of the home and the mind. Through a series of activations, including a durational plant cutting exchange that everyone is invited to participate in, the exhibition emphasizes different facets of her practice. She proposes this constellation of materials and affects as a laboratory to develop a domestic ritual, an invitation to create a space of one’s own, a holistic space to connect with processes of commoning. In this way, she recovers elements of joy and astonishment from the forgotten rhythms of life, and indeed before the institutionalization of the domestic space and rationalization of the body as a discrete element separable from the complex whole. Self-care as a counter-disciplinary ritual might be one of the ways the artist is researching to restore those rhythms.

HETY TENXDA is a project that emerged from the personal searches of it’s two members.
As a plastic artist, Luna Carlos Armengod was feeling somehow trapped in the categorisation of the different art disciplines, so in her search for new ways to express her work in a more complete way she decided to include music to her artistic practice.
Isasi Isasi, on the other hand, felt the need to dig deeper in to the artistic and conceptual world and look for new views and solutions to enhance his music production.

So one could say that this project is an attempt to merge both the musical and the plastic world as well as to overcome the boundaries of both.An ongoing search for ways to express what needs to be expressed in the moment, without worrying about it not fitting in.
Without worrying about it not belonging to a predetermined genre or art discipline.

For this particular event HETY TENXDA will show a short video of a house recorded concert. A small selection of the songs they are currently developing; a glimpse to their world and aesthetic.