In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving

Fluentum is pleased to announce the exhibition and project series In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving. Featuring a group exhibition as well as several solo exhibitions and in parallel a series of publications, the program marks the first time the institution will focus on the political, visual, and discursive dimensions inscribed into the historically charged architecture of Fluentum's premises. In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving is co-curated by Dennis Brzek, who will be guest curator at Fluentum from 2021 until summer 2022, and Junia Thiede, Head of Exhibitions and Programs.

As a historical site, the building is a testament to both the violent Nazi regime and the Western Allies’ democratic impetus, expressed in its ostensible architecture and the legacy of its respective uses. As the title suggests, In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving understands Fluentum’s engagement with the moving image to be continually embedded within these temporal pulls. Drawing on the building's indexicality, the exhibitions and publications use media to juxtapose historical periods and their monuments with specific moments of the present, and investigate how meanings, histories, and places are produced discursively.

Over the course of one year, In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving will be framed by a four-part series of publications dedicated to a concrete investigation of the building’s history. The series will form the first comprehensive treatment examining the site and will include essays, historical photographs and other archival materials, as well as artistic content. It compiles contributions by Noah Barker, Max Eulitz, Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter, Petra Kind, Anja Kirschner, Grit Lederer, Florian Weiss, and Florian Wüst, among others. Each publication has a thematic focus, such as the critical analysis of the institution’s National Socialist architecture, the influence of the U.S. Administration in Germany and West Berlin in particular, and cultural memory and film. The research and production of the publications will be carried out in close cooperation with public institutions such as the Allied Museum in Berlin-Dahlem, state archives and historians, as well as witnesses who share a personal connection to the building and its history.

Time Without End
with 13BC (Vic Brooks, Lucy Raven, Evan Calder Williams), Klaus vom Bruch, Keren Cytter, Loretta Fahrenholz, Margaret Honda, D’Ette Nogle, Richard Sides, Valerie Snobeck, Florian Wüst
April–July, 2021

The group show Time Without End presents works dedicated to the textures of time, history, and the moving image. Drawing from the friction between the numerous aesthetics and historical paradigms that form the substance of Fluentum’s premises, the works in the exhibition expose a parallelism of temporal states. In addition to video works and installations that make visible the encounter with historical material and its translation into contemporary processes, Time Without End presents new commissions, which take Fluentum’s multi-layered context as their concrete point of departure. The exhibition will be accompanied by a program of online events.

Anja Kirschner
September–December, 2021

In her films and video installations, Anja Kirschner attends to the phantasmatic and material anatomies of media practices. For Fluentum, she will develop a new immersive video installation in which virtual phenomena and latent pasts lead to an altered present.

Loretta Fahrenholz
April–July, 2022

Loretta Fahrenholz’s post-cinematic film works address the dynamics and anxieties of a technologized present. For her solo exhibition at Fluentum in the spring of 2022, the artist will realize a new video-based work. 


About Fluentum
Fluentum is a platform dedicated to collecting, producing, and presenting time-based art, in particular video and film, and was founded in 2019 by software entrepreneur Markus Hannebauer. Fluentum’s exhibition space is located in the imposing main building of a former military facility. Constructed between 1936 and 1938 during the era of National Socialism by architect Fritz Fuß as “Luftgaukommando III,” the building served a key infrastructural role for the German Luftwaffe. After World War II, U.S. forces utilized the building as their military and intelligence headquarters until the last GI departed in 1994.