May–September 2018
KW on location
various locations in Berlin
Lynn Hershman Leeson
First Person Plural
May 19–July 15, 2018
Lynn Hershman Leeson
The Novalis Hotel
May 19–June 17, 2018
Olaf Nicolai
Hier wird heute Abend ein Mensch wie ein Auto ummontiert / Ohne dass er irgendetwas dabei verliert. Brecht in der Auto-Werkstatt
June 29–July 1, 2018
KW Production Series: Jamie Crewe and Beatrice Gibson
September 27–November 25, 2018
For the first time during the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, KW Institute for Contemporary Art will vacate its premises and shift its program into public space, with various events and exhibitions taking place across the city. Berlin has changed rapidly in the years since KW was founded in the early 1990s, and we have identified this upcoming season as an opportunity to test out new grounds and collaborations in order to experience new dynamics in the ever changing (cultural) landscape of a growing city.
KW’s on location season, which runs from May until September 2018, continues to investigate this year’s main focus on the body and its relationships to politics, identity, technology, and architecture with a site-specific project in a hotel room in Berlin-Mitte and an exhibition in a former warehouse in Berlin-Kreuzberg, both by American artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Hershman Leeson has made pioneering contributions to performance, conceptual art, new media, and film since the 1960s. Her visionary technological experimentation is matched by her daring deconstruction of gendered identity in a misogynist and technologically mediated world. The two projects affirm her position at the forefront of the debate around the use of media, innovation, and technology and their intrinsic relationship to the workings of society, employing her art over again as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression.
In Berlin-Kreuzberg, KW will present her exhibition First Person Plural, which brings together selected video works from the 1970s-90s as well as the installations Lorna (1979–83), and Venus of the Anthropocene (2017). In Berlin-Mitte, Hershman Leeson revisits her iconic installation The Dante Hotel in the form of a new commission entitled The Novalis Hotel. The installation presents an inversion of the historic project questioning how our understanding of identity is altered by forays in media technology and forensic science.
In June, KW will collaborate with the Berliner Ensemble and will present the performative play Hier wird heute Abend ein Mensch wie ein Auto ummontiert / Ohne dass er irgendetwas dabei verliert. Brecht in der Auto-Werkstatt by German artist Olaf Nicolai in a car workshop in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. This play will show the assembly and repair of a Mercedes-Benz Ponton, which once belonged to Helene Weigel, the former intendant of the Berliner Ensemble and Bertolt Brecht’s wife. At the same time, Brecht’s learning play Man Equals Man will be developed with actors.
KW continues its on location season in September with an exhibition of the first two moving image commissions of the KW Production Series by Jamie Crewe and Beatrice Gibson at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin-Mitte.
The work Pastoral Drama by Jamie Crewe comprises two parallel videos that use allegory and animation to think about progress. Through intricate drawings in ink and pencil, speckled clay, and encrusted plasticine, Crewe reflects upon the evolution of mythic narratives, (inter-) personal change, and collective political time. In its double telling, Pastoral Drama envisions the collapse of mythic pasts with the dangerous after-world of the present. Pastoral Drama is a co-commission with Tramway, Glasgow (GB).
Beatrice Gibson’s 16mm film, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, was developed with two of the USA’s most significant living poets—CAConrad and Eileen Myles—and explores ideas around gender, poetry, and disobedience. The film uses poetry as a means to reckon with the present, and casts the figure of the poet as a guide in times of chaos. I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead is a co-commission with Camden Arts Centre, London, Bergen Kunsthall (NO), and Mercer Union, Toronto (CA).
Furthermore, KW will continue to present its ongoing projects such as the project space K, A Year with P. Krishnamurthy, which is situated in Berlin-Schöneberg, as well as REALTY, a continuous investigation into the complexities of gentrification, which operates at various locations, both local and international and Bob’s Pogo Bar, which will find its temporary home at Tropez, located at Sommerbad Humboldthain in Berlin-Wedding.
Click here for further details on the program.
Press contact
Katja Zeidler,
T +49 30 243459 41, press@kw-berlin.de
KW Institute for Contemporary Art is institutionally supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
The exhibition space for Lynn Hershman Leeson: First Person Plural is kindly provided by THE SHELF by Pandion. Olaf Nicolai Hier wird heute Abend ein Mensch wie ein Auto ummontiert / Ohne dass er irgendetwas dabei verliert. Brecht in der Auto-Werkstatt is a collaboration with the Berliner Ensemble and is funded by the Schering Stiftung. KW Production Series is made possible with generous support by the JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION and OUTSET Germany_Switzerland. REALTY is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin.
