After its first year of experimentation through exhibitions and public programs, the Times Art Center Berlin (TACB) opens its permanent location at Brunnenstr. 9 in Berlin-Mitte. With the large thematic exhibition “Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman” and a two-day symposium “Floating Constellation: Border-Crossing Exchanges Within and Beyond Asia”, the institution will continue its long-term work approach at a new location. The move to Rosenthaler Platz also marks the institution’s commitment to expand and enhance intensified content-related networking with diverse practitioners in Berlin’s cultural landscape.
Image above: Times Art Center Berlin, Exhibition poster Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman, 28.09.2019 to 04.01.2020
When Trinh T. Minh-ha published her significant text Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism in 1989, some of the turbulent and transformative events of the world’s recent history were yet to happen, such as the end of the Cold War, the so-called East Asian Miracle, and the aggressive global expansion of identitarianism. But Minh-ha had already proposed a non-dualistic affirmation of women by writing that, “The idea of two illusorily separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), again, partakes in the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and-conquer tactics.” Her criticism of the paradigms of Western academic discourses reads as radical and prophetic in today’s milieu of sociopolitical divisions.
Inspired by Minh-ha’s belief in the empowerment of writing and storytelling, the exhibition concept of Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman departs from an imaginary encounter between three Asian women artists: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), and Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952) in Europe, and is informed by their works and archives. The stories of Yuliang, Theresa, and Minh-ha are exceptional stories about women who search for their voices as artists and struggle with their identity-impasse, while navigating through various cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. The exhibition questions whether one could venture to claim to be also Yuliang, Theresa, or Minh-ha, and whether there could have been empathy and resonance regardless of different personal trajectories, cultural identifications, ideological positions, and understandings of gender.
The current crisis of identitarian politics manifests the antagonistic dichotomy that haunts our relationship with the past, present, and future. By retracing the transnational journeys of various female protagonists through the colonial memories before and after the World War II and the regional chaos induced by ideological camps of the Cold War, we are able to see the reemergence of contradictory histories—through the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc as paradoxes beyond the East/West divide. The curators envision the exhibition as a conversation that merges “them” with “us,” to form polyphony of cross-border storytellers speculating beyond the categorization of gender and culture. Artists featured in this exhibition share a diasporic mode of living and working and respond to our questions with their own choices of conceptual personae, exploring new dimensions of subjectivity and interrelation.
Artists:
Chang Wen-Hsuan, Dachal Choi, Chitra Ganesh, Jane Jin Kaisen, Iris Kensmil, Sylbee Kim, Mai Ling, Laura Huertas Millán, Sara Modiano, Mai-Thu Perret, Thao Nguyen Phan, Arin Rungjang, Shen Xin, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Wang Zhibo, Luka Yuanyuan Yang & Carlo Nasisse, Mia Yu
Curated by Nikita Yingqian Cai (Chief Curator, Guangdong Times Museum) and Xiaoyu Weng (Associate Curator of Chinese Art, Guggenheim Museum, New York)
WHEN?
Tuesday to Saturday 11 am – 6 pm
WHERE?
Times Art Center Berlin
Brunnenstraße 9
10119 Berlin-Mitte
Tel + 49 30 24781038
COST?
Admission free
Instagram: timesartcenter
Times Art Center Berlin is an initiative by the Guangdong Times Museum. It is the first oversea parallel institution funded by an Asia-based art museum.
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