Technics
Thursday, May 23, 19:00
Reality Is Post-Produced
Encounter with Shaunak Mahbubani
An encounter with curator-writer Shaunak Mahbubani excavating the effects of image access, creation, and circulation in contemporary South Asia. Inspired by the works of Hito Steyerl, the encounter builds on the proposition that images no longer simply capture the world around them but rather through their movements they are crossing the screen and affecting the spaces in which they become alive. In the age of the ubiquitous portable digital device, Shaunak thinks through the nexus of whatsapp groups, surveillance cameras, fake news, labour practices, open-air theatres, and the imaginary as political force.
Thinking alongside moving images, photography, and photobooks by:
Arko Datto
Himali Singh Soin
Prashant UV
Sohrab Hura
Video Volunteers
Shaunak Mahbubani is a nomadic curator, primarily pursuing projects under the series ‘Allies for the Uncertain Futures’ initiated in 2016. This exhibition series is focused on exploring the possibilities of socio-political, ecological and techno-evolutionary futures through the lens of non-duality. They are interested in complicating boundaries between artwork and the viewer through the deployment of participatory devices, diffusions, and the use of non-white cube spaces. They have received exhibition grants from apexart (New York) and the Inlaks Foundation, were part of the inaugural edition of CISA (Curatorial Intensive South Asia) initiated by Khoj International Artist’s Association and Goethe Institut Delhi, and the winner of the Prameya Art Foundation Art Scribes Award 2018-19. Previously they have curated exhibitions at Embassy of Switzerland in New Delhi, Kalakar Theatre, Mumbai Art Room, 1Shanthi Road, TIFA Working Studios and Gati Dance Forum. Mahbubani was Curator, Programming at The Gujral Foundation from 2017-18. See previous projects at: www.shaunak.co
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Saturday, May 18, 19:00
In the Ruins of Baalbeck Studios & E.D.L
Screening and Encounter with Siska
In this encounter Siska will be presenting and discussing two works, his latest film In the Ruins of Baalbeck Studios (Arabic title: Bayna Hayakel Studio Baalbeck) about the ruination of film heritage in Lebanon navigated through the country’s cinematic heydays of the late 60s and early 70s — a period that witnessed a rise of Egyptian producers and directors moving to Lebanon to make films partly due to Nasser’s nationalization of the Egyptian cinema. The story of this film project evolves around one of the biggest production studios in the Arab world, and its lost archive. Negligence by the Lebanese authorities has led to mold growing on parts of this archive inside the damp underground warehouses.
Siska’s video installation E.D.L transports us on a journey behind the modernist facade of Beirut’s electricity building. The video portrays Lebanon’s National Electricity building as an homage to a once modernist project linked to the very construction of Lebanon’s modern state. But till today Beirut suffers from a power cut up to 8 hours per day, thus this building remains a highly politicized subject.
Siska, Beirut-born (1984), lives and works between Beirut and Berlin. He holds an M.F.A. in Film-making from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA). Siska’s multidisciplinary work often questions the ruination of Arab cultural heritage and the conflicted interrelationship between individual rights and state duties, while stressing on sociopolitical gaps between the personal and the collective. His work was recently been shown in Centre 104 Paris, Mosaic rooms London, Beirut Art Center, Humboldt Forum Berlin and his latest film was premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Sunday, April 7, 17:00
Screening of Handsworth Songs (1986) by the Black Audio Film Collective
Encounter with
As a continuation of the research project “The ensemble of the senses and the ensemble of the social” Louis Henderson invites Kodwo Eshun to TIER to be in conversation about the film Handsworth Songs.
Handsworth Songs is a richly-layered documentary representing the hopes and dreams of post-war black British people in the light of the civil disturbances of the 1980s. It engages with Britain’s colonial past, public and private memories, and the struggles of race and class. The title refers to the riots in Handsworth, Birmingham during September 1985. The soundtrack is influenced by reggae, punk and the post-industrial noise movement.
Henderson and Eshun will discuss the role that the BAFC played in advent of a black industrial postpunk culture in the UK in the 1980s, bringing the film and its sound/image-tracks into relation with the music of Test Department, Throbbing Gristle, Jah Shaka and The Pop Group for example. They will discuss the film as an industrial-dub collage made in resistance to the racist police state of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
More about Handsworth Songs here: https://lux.org.uk/work/handsworth-songs
Handsworth Songs is being screened thanks to the kind permission of David Lawson.
The Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), founded in 1982 and active until 1998, comprised seven Black British and diaspora multimedia artists and film makers: John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, Edward George and Claire Joseph. Joseph left in 1985 and was replaced by David Lawson. The group initially came together as students at Portsmouth Polytechnic (their backgrounds included sociology, fine art and psychology), and after graduation relocated to Hackney in east London.
Kodwo Eshun is a British-Ghanaian writer, theorist and filmmaker. He studied English Literature (BA Hons, MA Hons) at University College, Oxford University, and Romanticism and Modernism MA Hons at Southampton University. He currently teaches on the MA in Contemporary Art Theory in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at CCC Research Master Program of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD (Geneva School of Art and Design). He is also a member of The Otolith Group: founded in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, the Otolith Group creates films, installations
, and performances that are driven by extensive research into the histories of science fiction and the legacies of transnationalism.
Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who is trying to find new ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Interested in exploring the sonic space of images, his work aims to develop an archaeological method in cinema, listening to the echoes and spirals of the stratigraphic. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theatre, song, slam, poetry and cinema. His work is distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Tuesday, March 19, 19:00
How to process Social Dissonance?
Encounter with Mattin
Mattin is an artist from Bilbao – living in Berlin – working with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental sonic artistic production through live performance, recordings and writing. Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ”freedom” and constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre. Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between performers and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert situation, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship. He has recently completed a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of Ray Brassier and Josu Rekalde. Along with Anthony Iles they edited the book Noise & Capitalism in 2009. In 2012 CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Uconsitituted Praxis, a book collecting his writing plus interviews and reviews from performances that he has been part of. Both books are available online. Mattin took part in documenta14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017.
www.mattin.org
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Monday, February 18, 19:00
Hands.on.matter: Re/upcycling and Textiles
Hands.on.matter invites you to the next event in the bimonthly series: Re/upcycling and Textiles.
Have you ever wondered what happens with the clothes that are thrown away into the recycling containers around town? The innate idea of reusing clothing is to be a helpful, positive act for lives that are in need. Instead of being burned on a wastemill, the clothes are recycled or upcycled to create new value in a new context. But is it really that straightforward?
This hands.on.matter event takes a different approach than the two prior events: We will zoom out on textile material flows and challenge how we can think textile waste. Textiles are surrounding us in our everyday lives, our bodies, furniture, transportation, we sleep in textiles, and at the same time it is difficult to detect where these materials come from, how they are made, and what happens to them after use.
The blurry difference between re- and upcycling in textiles will be explored through a presentation by Tim van der Loo who is currently working on the topic of recycling Denim into a new textile material by embroidering jeans fibers together. Followed by Rebecca Hiles and Stefanie Kenitz who will generously share what happens behind the scene in the textile sorting department at Berliner Stadtmission. Hereafter a creative intervention, where isles of various craftwork techniques will be available, sets to explore how we are thinking about textile waste and its opportunities to become something new.
The presentations and workshop are assisted by an exposition. Designers Tim van der Loo, Alberte Laursen Rosenborg and artist Elena Azzedín will exhibit works on textile waste, circularity in fashion and semantics. Scroll down to see more info about the participants.
We will provide the necessary materials, yet if you have an old favorite t-shirt at home or another piece of dearly beloved clothing you want to give a new life, you are very welcome to bring it. It can also be something old and torn you wonder what to do with, like a sheet or towel.
Everyone is welcome at the event, bring a friend, a neighbour, colleague or who might have an interest in learning more about the world of textile waste and hands on learning on how to turn trash into gold.
The event is for free, but voluntary donations are welcome.
BERLINER STADTMISSION: Berliner Stadtmission is a 135 year old charity organisation that sets to help the weaker groups of society with goods, shelter and food. A big part of the Berliner Stadtmission is the textile charity department based on clothing waste donations. Rebecca Hines and Stefanie Kenitz from Berliner Stadtmission are going to talk about post-consumer textiles and how they intervene with donated textiles that are not always useful. They research on how to collaborate and participate with designers and creatives to tackle their problems with textile waste.
ALBERTE LAURSEN ROTHENBORG: Alberte Laursen Rothenborg (DK) is a bridge-builder between design and sustainable strategies. Her passion is development and implementation of circular economy and sustainable strategies in design and fashion. Her MA dissertation, ‘Circular Fashion Transitions – the waste and value of design(ers)’, was made in collaboration with the Berlin-based consultancy, Circular.Fashion. Investigating how design and material strategies can strengthen and push forward the implementation of circularity in fashion. The Manufactum Module, a commercial collaboration with a German lifestyle brand (one jacket, one west), will be exhibited at the hands.on.matter event. Alongside Welcome to Wasteland, an activistic approach to design where Rothenborg collected her own waste over a two month period and made it into clothing installations. Rothenborg holds a MA in Sustainability in Fashion from Esmod Berlin, and a BA in fashion design from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She is currently based in Copenhagen working with the sustainable fashion brand Önling.
ELENA AZZEDÍN: Elena Azzedín (ES) is an artist and curator, currently belonging to the curatorial team of the international artistic platform AADK Spain. As an artist Azzedín has always been interested in urban interventions and relational art, responding to the need of making art as part of our daily life. Her latest body of work consists of weaving in fences located in the public sphere. The urban interventions of weaving fences is about its literal semantics as much as about the symbolic value of the action; the presence of the body in the public space magnifying a historical female repetitive labor which belonged to the private sphere. The weaving technique has become for Azzedín, a place for experimentation, creating sculptures with interwoven natural local fibers as well as using found objects as looms in which the contents and the container have a dialectical relationship, often ironic.
HANDS.ON.MATTER: Hands.on.matter is an explorative collective of multidisciplinary creatives focusing on the matter of material by a questioning of resources, consumption, sustainability and culture through a bimonthly series of talks, workshops and expositions.
PHILOSOPHY: Hands.on.matter believes in taking a step back and rediscovering the kosmos of matter one material at the time, zooming in on compositions and zooming out on flows. The aspiration is to build new structures and (re)discover designs for a more sustainable and circular future. Hands.on.matter seeks to host thought provoking and desirable templates in the interdisciplinary field between design, art and architecture.
Hands.on.matter is organized by Tim Van der Loo and Sandra Nicoline Nielsen
TIM VAN DER LOO: Tim van der Loo (NL) is an experimental multidisciplinary 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: Sandra Nicoline Nielsen (DK) 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 infrastructures of Circular Economy in Berlin. Nielsen is interested in how new technologies and social infrastructures can accelerate sustainability. She has been facilitating business development within organic, biodegradable materials through design thinking.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
January 25
18:30 doors, 19:00 start: The ‘Unambitious Stripper’ with Isabel Lewis
20:00: Introduction to ‘Wardian Table’ by Luís Berríos-Negrón
20:30: Screening by Mariechen Danz amid installed artworks
January 26
19:00: Performance by Daniel Salomon
19:30: Introduction to ‘Incommensurate States’ by Patricia Reed
20:00: Screening by Emilija Škarnulytė
‘Infratekture’
Where are the fluxes of affect to be located when thinking them as infrastructure?
The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) proposes a constellation of words as an extension of that question, inspired by the transmediale Study Circle ‘Affective Infrastructures’. This constellation is drawn from Infratekture, a made-up word which mirrors the blurry edges of possible affects. We take 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 root of text, textile, techne, technique, tectonic, architecture, hypertext, pretext, context and texture. With this constellation, we chart a course through the invisible links between the words, on the hazy map of affect.
Our approach with The Institute for Endotic Research sees the space as a text that is constantly written and rewritten, edited and reconfigured. Every intervention responds to the status quo of the space and transforms it. We invite artists, architects, and other practitioners to create interventions in the space, while we also produce our own architectural devices to give texture to the space. Both serve as a common infrastructure for the recombination of relations among people and objects. We ask the artists and researchers who are part of ‘Infratekture’ to respond to this context when applying their technique as part of a collectively unraveling text.
‘Infratekture’ will present works in the form of a two-evening event. It will be composed of a series of performances supported by interventions (both new and existing). The performances will explore notions related with the composition of the social body through the invention of its organs, its nourishment and its textures. This social body-text is readable and editable: it is the result of the accumulation of layers of socio-technical conceptualizations, as well as the affective infrastructures that bind them together. The necessary invisibility of the connections within and between the many words inside Infratekture will be used as a metaphorical device to explore affect.
Artists invited to Infratekture: Luis Berríos-Negrón, Mariechen Danz, Isabel Lewis, Patricia Reed, Daniel Salomon, Emilija Škarnulytė.
With existing interventions by: Ana Alenso, Plating Concrete (Miguel Prados Sánchez and Pablo Ramón Benitez), Sofia Lomba, Sara Pereira.
Luís Berríos-Negrón will introduce the ‘Wardian Table’, that was produced to serve as prop for the re-enactment of ‘Metalogue: A Crème de Menthe, a Rusty Nail. Why Intransitive?’ as the core performance of Memory #02 for the ANARCHIVE at TIER.space.
Mariechen Danz’s approach to a nonlinear historiography of both geographical and anatomical charts will be installed at TIER.space, as a way to question systems of knowledge production.
Isabel Lewis will present an iteration of her workshop titled ‘Unambitious Stripper’, which will use ideas and techniques related to movement for participants to reach a personal inner space by figuratively removing layers of social constructs and identity.
Patricia Reed will present the artwork ‘Incommensurate States’, where a camera maps the contours of the entire world in a loop, moving along the path of all nation-state borders following the logic of the ‘traveling salesman’.
Daniel Salomon will share his guts with the audience in the form of a long sausage based on his daily food intake.
Emilija Škarnulytė’s film and video work examining geologically transformed spaces of legacy and existing regimes of power will establish a visual continuity between concrete infrastructures and the haze of affect that animates them.
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A cooperation between transmediale and The Institute for Endotic Research. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.