KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin-Mitte is showing three parallel summer exhibitions until October 20, 2024 with works by the artists Luiz Roque, Pia Arke and Jimmy DeSana & Paul P.
Image above: Luiz Roque, White Year, Video still, 2013. Performer: Glamour Garcia. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo/Brussels/Paris/New York © the artist
Luiz Roque – Estufa
Estufa is the first survey exhibition of the work of artist Luiz Roque (* 1979, BR). Roque’s work moves between the poles of expanded cinema, visual art and critical theory. His artistic work combines an interest in the legacy of modernism with pop culture, queer (bio)politics and science fiction. This deliberately anachronistic approach culminates in timeless montages and environments that highlight the urgency of current socio-political concerns of certain groups and subcultures. His short, open-ended videos are speculative and draw the viewer’s attention to the diverse possibilities of alternative realities. Past, present and future merge into a timeless amalgam in each video.
Roque’s sculptural video installations explore the fine line between form, color and content, with the recording technique as well as the screening and presentation methods supporting the content statement. This expanded use of video as a medium is seamlessly integrated into the architectural spaces in which Roque’s works are presented. The artist’s aim is a thoughtful exchange between architecture and artwork, in which both maintain their independence and their respective boundaries never completely dissolve.
Estufa means “greenhouse” in Portuguese. The title of the exhibition goes back to an artwork of the same name that Roque created in 2004 together with the artist Letícia Ramos. A large greenhouse full of tropical plants and flowers is both the subject and the setting of the video. This earliest work shown in the exhibition forms the framework for a retrospective of exactly 20 years of artistic experimentation and production, development and growth. The artist’s first monograph will be published to accompany the exhibition.
Curator: Léon Kruijswijk
Curatorial assistance: Lara Scherrieble
Pia Arke – Arctic Hysteria
KW, in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (UK), presents the first solo exhibition of the artist Pia Arke (* 1958, GL – † 2007, DK) outside of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and the Nordic countries.
From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Pia Arke mapped the complicated relationships between time, memory, space, identity and myth in images of and from Greenland. As the daughter of a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, she incorporated biographical components of her own complex history. In Arke’s own words, her paintings are about the silence that surrounds the connections between Greenland and Denmark and how she herself was born into this silence. Arke consciously moves back and forth between the roles of artist, ethnographer and researcher, drawing on various historical, folkloric and archival sources. She is considered a pioneer of decolonialist discourse in the Nordic countries and the Arctic and continues to influence it today.
The title Arctic Hysteria is taken from an influential series of works by Pia Arke. The exhibition brings together photographic, sculptural, performative and literary works as well as works on paper by the artist. It explores the narratives in Arke’s works, which revolve around the colonial relationship between Greenland and Denmark, also to initiate a discussion about persisting colonial structures in general. Although Arke’s artistic practice emerged from the connection between the two countries, it unfolds as a structural feminist critique. Arctic Hysteria is dedicated to Arke’s methods mediated through the body, in particular her use of performative strategies such as montage, staging and restaging, with which she attempted to create a sense of belonging and critical self-reflection.
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive publication with new texts that discuss various aspects of Arke’s practice in an international discourse, focusing on voices from contemporary feminist research.
Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen
Research assistant and curatorial assistant: Aykon Süslü
The exhibition at KW is supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation.
Jimmy DeSana & Paul P. – Ruins of Rooms
Ruins of Rooms examines the genre of portraiture from the perspectives of Jimmy DeSana (* 1949 – † 1990, USA) and Paul P. (* 1977, CA). By staging their works in a series of interiors, the two artists are placed in a dialog for the first time.
The work of photographer Jimmy DeSana spans from the late 1960s to 1990, when he died as a result of AIDS. Growing up as a queer person in a suburb of Atlanta during the post-war period was an experience that shaped his early black and white series 101 Nudes (1972/1991). For these, he arranged his naked body and those of his friends in middle-class domestic settings. After moving to New York in 1973, he distributed his work through local mail art networks and published regularly in the magazine File, published by the artist group General Idea. An integral part of the New York punk and no-wave scene, as well as the queer fetish subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeSana was known for his portraits of the city’s avant-garde. For his colorfully lit series Suburban (1979-1985), he returned to staging nude models in everyday settings and continued his exploration of consumerism and S&M aesthetics. Following his HIV infection in the mid-1980s, he began to notice changes in his own body and turned to more abstract and experimental imagery, often depicting everyday objects, such as in Grill (1987) and Chair (1988).
Paul P. has been known for his melancholy drawings and paintings since the early 2000s. His mostly untitled portraits of young men are inspired by photos from gay erotic magazines. He found the material in the LGBTQ2+ archives in Toronto, particularly from the period between the beginning of the gay rights movement in the late 1960s and the emerging AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Paul P. is interested in the historical representations of homosexual desire and appropriates this explicit archival material in the coded imagery of late 19th century painters. His fragile works detach the sitters from their original context and shape their faces in such a way that they simultaneously recall hidden queer allusions of earlier times and foreshadow future tragedies. Most recently, Paul P. has begun to design sculptures in the form of furniture. The filigree wooden screens, desks and stools, which move between the functional and the sculptural, are inspired by the Victorian design reformer Edward William Godwin, the Art Deco designer Eyre de Lanux and the artist Scott Burton, a contemporary of DeSana.
Ruins of Rooms funktioniert wie eine Matrjoschka. Die Nebeneinanderstellung zweier Künstler verschiedener Generationen erweitert unser Verständnis des Porträts und ist denen gewidmet, die wir verloren haben.
Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Assistant curator: Linda Franken
The exhibition is realized with the generous support of KW Freunde.
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Saturday, July 6 – Sunday, October 20, 2024
Opening hours: Wednesday – Monday, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m., Thursday, 11 a.m. – 9 p.m.
WHERE?
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin
