During Berlin Art Week, ifa Galerie Berlin shows several performances in the City space and in the Gallery. Isaac Chong Wai presents his performance Die Mütter (The Mothers) at Klosterruine Berlin. Adrien Missika activates MOTUS, a mobile exhibition display in the form of a bicycle in different public spaces such as Forecourt Neue Nationalgalerie, Monbijoubrücke and BAW Garden at Uferhallen. Ofri Lapid has developed a multilingual Language Tour for the exhibition and the results will be performed at the gallery.
Image caption: Spheres of Interest*, ifa Gallery Berlin, photo © Victoria Tomaschko
The exhibition Spheres of Interest*, in which six international and Berlin-based artists engage with the works from the ifa collection, enters its final week with Berlin Art Week and is on view until 18 September. The following exhibition Chains of Interest , which focuses on the individual research and contextualization by the six artists, opens on 29 September, 2022.
Berlin Art Week 2022
Performances, Lecture und Künstleringespräch
Wednesday, 14 September, 2022, 4:00-6:00 pm
MOTUS local pop-up activation, Adrien Missika
MOTUS feat. Endre Tót, Forecourt Neue Nationalgalerie
Adrien Missika’s MOTUS is a mobile exhibition display in the form of a bicycle, which the artist uses to present several Fluxus works as part of the exhibition and in public space. His pop-up show featuring work by artists such as Joseph Beuys and Nicolás García Uriburu, John Cage, Geoffrey Hendricks and Takako Saito take place at different locations – for this performance he places a poster by Endre Tót outside of the Neue Nationalgalerie. Inspired both by the humour an the socio-political critiques found in this work and action, Missika activates it in different way.
Wednesday, 14 September, 2022, 7:00 pm
Lecture Performance, A multilingual Language Tour
Ofri Lapid feat. Joseph Kosuth, Volume/Purple/Meaningless, ifa Gallery Berlin
Sprachtournee is an ongoing text-translation project by Ofri Lapid based on Joseph Kosuth’s photographic pieces: Art as Idea as Idea: Purple; Art as Idea as Idea: Volume; & Art as Idea as Idea: Meaningless from 1967-68. ifa purchased Kosuth’s works for the exhibition Kunstraum Deutschland/Art Space Germany that is touring the world for the last 22 years and ongoing. Lapid intiated a translation chain of a text based on the content of the lexical definitions depicted in Kosuth’s works. The text is translated by professional translators from one language to the next according to the route the exhibition took. The final result will be performed in the ifa gallery Berlin.
Thursday, 15 September, 2022, 6:00 pm
Artist Talk with Ofri Lapid
With artist and author Anna-Lena Wenzel, ifa Gallery Berlin
Ofri Lapid’s artistic practice poses questions about the role of social, economic, and scholarly processes of exchange and transfer in the construction of cultural heritage. With Anna-Lena Wenzel she discusses her intervention in the collection of ifa and examines the activation of archival material as well as the creation and dissolution of art collections.
Thursday, 15 September & Freitag, 16 September, 2022, 5:00-7:00 pm
Thursday, 15 September & Freitag, 16 September, 2022, 5:00-7:00 pm
Isaac Chong Wai feat. Käthe Kollwitz, Die Mütter, Performance, Klosterruine Berlin, Klosterstraße 73a, 10179 Berlin
Isaac Chong Wai has developed a performance referencing the woodcut Die Mütter (The Mothers) (1922-23) by Käthe Kollwitz, which portrays women and children marked by war. For Chong Wai, this image is a symbol of solidarity and resistance. His work surrounding collective bodies under politically repressive regimes has led to his interest in songs of lamentation. For the Art Week 2022 he performs the piece in the Klosterruine – a monastery ruin, now an outdoor cultural venue in Berlin’s Mitte district. A group of performers and singers opens up the protected space created by Käthe Kollwitz and fills it anew by reciting various hymns together.
Saturday, 17 September, 2022, 4:00-7:00 pm
MOTUS local pop-up activation, Adrien Missika
MOTUS feat. Takako Saito, Play Chess with the Sun
Chess tournament with special guests, Monbijoubrücke, 3:00-6:00 pm
Recalling the traveling nature of ifa’s touring exhibitions, MOTUS operates in public space and displays artworks selected by Adrien Missika from the ifa art collection. MOTUS aims to function as a social space and mutates into a chess club. Foldable stools can be carried around and the box can convert into a chess table anywhere. During the pop-up touring exhibition Adrien Missika encounters visitors and passers-by, activating with them the artworks by and reflecting on the ifa art collection. With her games of chess, Takako Saito expanded the classic rules and the traditional chess pieces of king, queen, knight or pawn with perspectives of everyday life.
Sunday, 18 September, 2022, 6:00 pm
MOTUS local pop-up activation, Adrien Missika
MOTUS feat. Dick Higgins, Joseph Beuys/ Nicolas Uriburu and Takako Saito.
Music for Dick : A performance by Adrien Missika in honor of Dick Higgins
BAW Garten, Uferhallen, Uferstraße 8, 13357 Berlin
The dates and further information can be found on the website of ifa Gallery Berlin or at ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.
Current Exhibition
Until 18 September, 2022
Spheres of Interest*
Isaac Chong Wai, Lizza May David, Wilhelm Klotzek, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika and Gitte Villesen feature works from the ifa art collection by Joseph Beuys/ Nicolás García Uriburu, John Cage, Carlfriedrich Claus, Wieland Förster, Zille Homma Hamid, Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Hannah Höch, Franz Klekawka, Käthe Kollwitz, Joseph Kosuth, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Simone Nieweg, Robert Rehfeldt, Takako Saito, Eran Schaerf, Endre Tót, Rosemarie Trockel, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.
*after Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt
Since 2020, the ifa galleries in Berlin and Stuttgart have been inviting contemporary artists to engage in dialogical encounters with individual artworks from the ifa collection. Out of the Box stands for this practice of re-evaluating individual works. For the exhibition Spheres of Interest*, which will be shown in the Berlin gallery from 24 June – 18 September, curators Inka Gressel and Susanne Weiß have asked six artists based in Berlin to approach the nuances and layers of the ifa’s unusual collection of over 23,000 works in an open process.
The historic idiosyncrasies and structures of the ifa art collection as well as its composition specifically via the partial preservation of the collection that once belonged to the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) Zentrum für Kunstausstellungen all become opportunities for a collaborative artistic-curatorial investigation
Preview and Save the Date
Chains of Interest
30. September 2022 – 22. Januar 2023
Opening, 29 September, 7:00 pm
Isaac Chong Wai, Lizza May David, Wilhelm Klotzek, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika and Gitte Villesen have been examining ifa art collection through their own artistic practices since the fall of 2021: The exhibition Chains of Interest extends their ongoing artistic-curatorial investigations. In the previous exhibition Spheres of Interest*, the artists activated and contextualized the selected works in performative, critical, narrative and humorous ways. The uncovered gaps, the artistic overlaps, the political entanglements and the relationships that have been established provide the starting point for the upcoming exhibition. Chains of Interest can be read as the second chapter of an open process that unearths artistic languages and approaches through words, gestures and sounds. The participating artists come to the fore presenting new works linked to the art collection.
With works by Isaac Chong Wai, Carlfriedrich Claus, Lizza May David, Dick Higgins, Wilhelm Klotzek, Käthe Kollwitz, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika, Takako Saito, Elisa Tan, Endre Tót, Günther Uecker, Gitte Villesen
Further dates in September
Thursday, 01 September, 2022, 6:00 pm
Artist Talk with Wilhelm Klotzek and Gitte Villesen
With artist and author Anna-Lena Wenzel, ifa Gallery Berlin
Saturday, 03 September, 2022, 3:00-6:00 pm
MOTUS local pop-up activation, Adrien Missika
Simone Nieweg, Joseph Beuys & Nicolas Uriburu
Netto, parking lot, Gerichtsstraße 60-61,13347 Berlin-Wedding
Thursday, 08 September, 2022, 6:00 pm
Artist Talk with Adrien Missika
With artist and author Anna-Lena Wenzel
ifa-Galerie Berlin, Linienstraße 139/140, 10115 Berlin-Mitte
