Technics
Together we will play records, talk and listen to versions of the work we have done and will do. The session will be somewhere amongst a spiral retelling and its planetary reverberations, an echo without a cause, a thunder-strike and its soundwave riding the ionosphere, a protest refrain, a knock warning, a Palestinian radio jingle, a dub, a peri-acoustics, a cease and desist siren, a new year’s broadcast. Tune in, stop by.
Link to the first broadcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-854660269-405465536/radio-earth-hold-colonial-voice
Radio Earth Hold is organised by Rachel Dedman, Lorde Selys and Arjuna Neuman, commissioned as a collateral project of Qalandiya International, and supported by the Serpentine Galleries.
It traces echoes between the anti-occupation movement in Palestine and anti-racism movements in the North American context. It examines British Mandate radio as a colonial instrument in Palestine, and Israeli control of Palestinian telecommunications as part of the architecture of occupation. It connects these to the birth of Mni Wiconi during the Standing Rock protests, radical midwifery practices, and the acousmatics of sound in the womb.
Broadening beyond political struggle to the phenomenon of ‘natural radio’, Radio Earth Hold’s research addresses how electromagnetic radiation functions at a bigger-than-planetary scale. How might natural radio and acousmatic sound—reverb without a cause, or echo without a source—offer a model for reorganising relationships between the individuals and the world? What solidarity emerges from the recognition of our participation in the transmission of planetary sound?
Radio Earth Hold is commissioned as part of the collateral program of Qalandiya International IV, and supported by the Serpentine Galleries, London.
Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who is currently 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. The working method is archaeological. Henderson has shown his work at places such as; Rotterdam International Film Festival, Doc Lisboa, CPH:DOX, New York Film Festival, The Contour Biennial, The Kiev Biennial, The Centre Pompidou, SAVVY Contemporary, The Gene Siskell Film Centre, Gasworks and Tate Britain. His work is in the public collection of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France and is distributed by Lux (UK) and Video Data Bank (USA).
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Sunday, December 2, 17:00 (doors), 17:30 (start)
Remote sensing
Encounter with Emilija Škarnulytė
Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987) lives and works in Berlin and Tromsø.
Emilija has been making films and videos for the last ten years mostly in places where contemporary political issues are staged, and in particular, issues between human and nonhuman worlds. Škarnulytė investigates the shifting boundaries between documentary and fiction, between ecological and cosmic forces: feeling out all kinds of nonhuman and posthuman scales, in the depths of space and time.
Škarnulytė has an MA from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art, based above the Arctic Circle. Most recently she was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019 and was awarded prizes including the Kino der Kunst Project Award, Munich (2017); Spare Bank Foundation DNB Artist Award (2017), and the National Lithuanian Art Prize for Young Artist (2016). Škarnulytė is also a founder of Polar Film Lab, a collective for 16mm analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway. She has upcoming shows: 1st Toronto Biennial of Art, Canada; 95% of the Universe is Missing, Science Gallery, London, UK.
Recent solo shows include: Mirror Matter, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2017); Manifold, Podium, Oslo (2017); QSO Lens, CAC, Vilnius (2015). She participated in the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art RIBOCA (2018); the Baltic Pavilion for the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2016) and Universe in Universes, w. Como Clube, 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014). Her work has recently appeared in film festivals and group shows such as: Hyperobjects, Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2018); The Future is Certain; It’s the Past Which Is Unpredictable, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2018); Bold Tendencies, London (2018); On Earth, Structure and Sadness, Serpentine Galleries (2018), If These Stones Could Sing, Kadist, San Francisco (2018); Baltic Pavilion, AA and RIBA, London (2018); Directing the Real: Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010s, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest (2018); Ex-ante, Artspace, Auckland (2017); The Future is Certain, Calvert 22 Foundation, London (2017); Agency of Living Organisms, Tabakalera Center for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian (2016); Random Rapid Heartbeats, Kunsthalle Tallinn (2016); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2015); Artists’ Film International – Season 7, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015) and International Short Film Festival OBERHAUSEN, International Competition (2013).
Photos by Benjamin Busch
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
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
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)
Saturday, September 1, 20:20-22:30 Berlin Time
1st International Encounter of Objects Without People
Live stream from Biquini Wax EPS (Mexico City)
TIER.space will be showing a video live stream of the 1st International Encounter of Objects Without People, from 20:20 Berlin Time. We are joining an array of spaces syndicating the Spanish-language broadcast (English translations will be available).
For the following information in Spanish, please visit: http://portavoz.tv/biquini-wax-eps-presenta-el-1er-encuentro-internacional-de-objetos-sin-personas/
The twenty-five objects will be found Saturday, September 1 at Biquini Wax EPS, an interdependent laboratory located in Mexico City. The objects will be presented as part of a collective research around the political stories of the objects. This meeting will be broadcast live at independent spaces in Berlin, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Guatemala City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Quito, Santiago de Chile and Tijuana.
Biquini Wax EPS operates a Temple of Subcritical Studies, composed of a series of study and reading circles on contemporary art, in which different matters related to art are discussed. During the months of June and July of 2018, Clara Bolívar and Biquini Wax EPS coordinated the study and reading circle entitled Political History of Objects.
During the nine sessions, the participants read and discussed philosophers, artists and writers who thought and conceptualized the objects from several angles; all of them developed their work throughout the 20th century. The readings allowed to trace the objects’ links between Mexico, Europe and Latin America. Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Cecilia Vicuña, John Berger, Sophie Calle, Bruno Latour, Melquiades Herrera, Patricio Pron, Artie Vierkant and Hito Steyerl accompanied the thoughts surrounding the objects. The sessions also included special guests who accompanied the readings: the sociologist Irene Álvarez, the historian Omar Olivares, the artist Juan Obando and the group of subcritical studies, the Yacuzis (with the curators Julio García Murillo and Roselin Rodríguez).
The circle, free and open to the public, had as its only requirement that the participants chose an object that they would investigate over two months. The object allowed different profiles to converge for those whom it is a topic of fundamental reflection: artists, curators, cultural managers, designers, architects and philosophers. The attendees thus participated in a collective investigation based on the following objects: bench, clay block, concrete block, masking tape, bed, chewing gum, skull, spoon, plastic dinosaur, Elegua, balloon, found IDs, syringe, book, sandpaper, light, bread doll, shovel, paper, umbrella, belly button lint, philosopher’s stone, toy gun, laser gun and chair.
This circle already had its first results; the intellectual and affective bonds began and continue to be woven between collaborators, national and international spaces where it will be transmitted. Spaces that will be open to receive the public are: Deslave (Tijuana), Casa Vidrio y Paos GDL (Guadalajara), NoAutomático (Monterrey), MANIFESTO – space (Guatemala City, Guatemala), Maleza proyectos (Bogotá, Colombia), Escuela C.A.P.A. (Santiago de Chile, Chile), 1st Small Art Salon of Buenos Aires (Argentina), Khôra (Quito, Ecuador) and The Institute for Endotic Research (Berlin, Germany).
For more details about the program and spaces (in Spanish), please visit: www.somoslosobjetos.com
Biquini Wax EPS is an interdependent laboratory located in Mexico City. Exhibitions of contemporary art, poetry encounters and discussions on economics, philosophy, aesthetics, politics, art history and other bioalchemical invocations are held. Four hundred people, a turtle and an alien work together as a team.