KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents its autumn programme 2023, which once again explores the self and its representation. In her first major retrospective, Coco Fusco questions the institutional infrastructures that condition presentation, circulation and value creation in art and visual culture. Kameelah Janan Rasheed, winner of the Ernst Schering Foundation Prize for Artistic Research, uses the materiality and legibility of text to bridge the gap between politics and poetry. The exhibition SKIN IN THE GAME presents groundbreaking prototypes from the personal archives of Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Andrea Zittel, focusing on that initial moment of professional and existential emancipation when these artists threw their skin into the game and committed themselves fully to art.
Fig. above: Coco Fusco, Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, 2021. video still. Courtesy the artist.
Coco Fusco
Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island
14 September 23 – 7 January 24
Curators: Anna Gritz, Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant curator: Linda Franken
Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (*1960, US). For more than three decades, Fusco has been an important voice in discourses on representation, feminism, postcolonial theory and institutional critique. Through a broad selection of videos, photographs, texts, installations and live performances from the 1990s to the present, the exhibition at KW traces the significant influence of the artist’s work on contemporary art discourse in Germany and worldwide.
With her work, Fusco questions those institutional infrastructures that condition the presentation, circulation and creation of value in art and visual culture in general. In addition, she addresses the ongoing effects of colonial power and imperial forces, which makes this survey exhibition highly relevant, especially against the backdrop of current political and cultural debates in Germany. KW honours the complexity and multidisciplinarity of Fusco’s writing, activist and performative work with a varied public programme. Together with the ICI Berlin, they are organising a lecture series. In addition, Fusco is developing a new multimedia performance commissioned by KW, which will be performed in collaboration with the Sophiensaele in early December 2023.
Parallel to the exhibition at KW, a comprehensive monograph of the same name on Fusco’s work will be published by Thames & Hudson with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Anna Gritz, Jill Lane, Antonio José Ponte and the artist herself.
The exhibition is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. The Federal Cultural Foundation is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Media partner: ARTE
Prize for Artistic Research of the Ernst Schering Foundation 2022:
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
in the coherence, we weep
14 September 2023 – 7 January 2024
Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen
Assistant curator: Linda Franken
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (*1985, US) has been awarded the Ernst Schering Foundation’s 2022 Prize for Artistic Research.
Rasheed’s work explores the materiality and legibility of text, writing and language and the potential of intermedial translations. Rasheed searches for methods that allow us to grasp meanings anew and explores the question of how we read and how we ourselves want to be read and understood. To do this, they deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of literary and scientific texts by experimenting with factors such as syntax and punctuation, but also with the connotation and size of individual words. By constantly reworking text, Rasheed builds a bridge between politics and poetry in order to explore the inherent complexities and shifts in meaning of language and to reveal its scope of possibility.
The presentation of Rasheed’s works at KW is the artist’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Berlin. Both the exhibition and the accompanying publication are closely interwoven with Rasheed’s methodology. Both explore space as index, the practice of revision through annotation, and the associated blurring and layering of knowledge and learning.
The Ernst Schering Foundation Prize for Artistic Research evolved from the Ernst Schering Foundation Art Prize, which was awarded to international artists* every two years from 2005 to 2018. In 2019, the prize was redesigned in cooperation with the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. In 2022, the Ernst Schering Foundation Prize for Artistic Research was awarded for the seventh time in cooperation with KW.
SKIN IN THE GAME
Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Andrea Zittel
14 September 2023 – 7 January 2024
Curator: Clémentine Deliss
Curatorial assistance: Nikolas Brummer
Choreography of the exhibition: Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Clémentine Deliss
Metabolic Furniture: Diane Hillebrand
Programme Metabolic Museum-University: Christina Scheib
SKIN IN THE GAME presents groundbreaking prototypes from the personal archives of internationally renowned artists – from the 1970s to the present. On display are paintings, sculptures, banners, video performances, photographs, collages, drawings, books and concept notes. The works focus on that initial moment of professional and existential emancipation when these artists put their skin in the game and committed themselves fully to art. These prototypes can be understood as the generating organs of an ongoing body of work, like a series of unfinished explorations that recur and are further explored at various times throughout a lifetime. Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr and Joëlle Tuerlinckx add new productions to their early prototypes for the exhibition. In a choreography designed in collaboration with Joëlle Tuerlinckx, the installation takes place in leftover parts of the exhibition that preceded it on the third floor of KW. It focuses not only on the constructive dialogue between artists and their works, but also on the conditions of “neighbourly dislike”.
The accompanying programme NERVES, BREATH, MUSCLES, BLOOD implements the exercises and methods of the Metabolic Museum-University (MM-U), developed by Clémentine Deliss at various locations since 2015 (The Metabolic Museum, Hatje Cantz/KW, 2020). MM-U is a curatorial platform that experiments with existing collections as prototypes for open-ended investigations and transdisciplinary exercises. The programme takes place both within the exhibition and online (website launch in September). The publication SKIN IN THE GAME. Conversations with Artists on Risk and Contention (Hatje Cantz/KW) will be published in November 2023.
WHERE?
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin
