Fall 2021 program

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce its program for fall 2021. This season investigates notions of self-narration that explore ways of being and becoming. As part of KW’s Pause series, choreographer Michele Rizzo delves into rave culture in order to embark on a journey through unison and transcendence, while artist Renée Green traces the power of cultural institutions and the notion of displacement. Inevitable Distances is one of Green’s largest exhibitions to date and includes rarely exhibited work spanning back to the early ’80s. In dialogue with Green, artist Iman Issa has been invited to reflect on her artistic practice through the perspective of a curated group exhibition titled Understudies: I, Myself Will Exhibit Nothing.

Pause: Michele Rizzo
REACHING
October 1–3, 2021
Curator: Léon Kruijswijk

Choreographer / Artist: Michele Rizzo
Composer: Billy Bultheel
Light Design: Theresa Baumgartner
Dramaturgical advise: Juan Pablo Cámara
Stylist: Leendert Sonnenvelt
Performers: Aaron Ratajczyk, Anna Rose, Arad Inbar, Carolina de Vega, Daniel Schabert, Dionisis Argyropoulos-Ioannou, Djibril Sall, Ewa Dziarnowska, Maria Metsalu, Matilde Bassetti, Max Göran, Milena Weber, Reza Mirabi, Snorre Hansen

In October 2021, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Julia Stoschek Collection collaboratively present a commissioned performance by Michele Rizzo (born in 1984, based in Amsterdam). The choreographer and multidisciplinary artist investigates rave culture and the significance of the moments and spaces in which it becomes palpable. Departing from the ecstatic attitude of his HIGHER xtn. (2019) performance, the trajectory of the artist’s research transitions in the liminal space of REACHING, through a slow-paced choreography, with 14 performers and a sound score by composer Billy Bultheel (born in 1987, based in Berlin and Brussels), and a light design by Theresa Baumgartner (born in 1990, based in Berlin).

Rizzo assesses and embraces multiple layers intrinsic to a journey of unison and transcendence, which comes into existence between and among moving bodies. REACHING unfolds the space hidden within and around the predominantly addressed emotions of ecstasy, euphoria, and acceleration by unveiling allusions to desire and the secret will of each individual, to evolve into an introspective yet rousing choreography of friction and coalescence.

A production by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Julia Stoschek Collection with generous support from Mondriaan Fonds, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Germany and Q-International, Quadriennale di Roma.

The Pause series is envisioned as a platform to punctuate the program by presenting singular artworks for a short period of time in order to bridge relationships between the past, present and future.

Renée Green 
Inevitable Distances
October 23, 2021–January 9, 2022
Curator: Mason Leaver-Yap
Assistant Curators: Kathrin Bentele, Sofie Krogh Christensen

Since the late 1980s, Renée Green’s multifaceted practice has imagined and expanded the ways in which art can surface and give form to underwritten histories, collective memory, and circuits of cultural exchange. Her writing, installations, films, digital media, and sound works continue to trace and interrogate the power of cultural institutions and their relationships with language, knowledge, and constitutions of selfhood, while at the same time indicating other ways of being and becoming.

Green’s work came to prominence and circulated within the social and political flows between the world and the Americas, a concept that includes the United States, Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Her work continues to investigate the distribution and relay of art and ideas, and how these are braided with histories of migration and legacies of displacement, and the aesthetic forms and poetics that stem from these.

Inevitable Distances, a comprehensive survey of Renée Green’s practice from the early 1980s until now, is simultaneously taking place at daadgalerie and KW Institute for Contemporary Art. In one of the largest exhibitions of her work since 2010, Inevitable Distances presents recent productions in conversation with some of Green’s earliest and rarely exhibited works. Indicating the encounters and distances travelled in a life’s journey, the exhibition puts her artistic production into a speculative and, at times, fictional constellation.

The exhibition Renée Green Inevitable Distances is made possible through support from the Capital Cultural Fund, supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program with funds from the Federal Foreign Office and presented with generous support from Marguerite Steed Hoffman Collection, Bortolami Gallery, New York and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin / Cologne.

Inevitable Distances is accompanied by a book of the same name, co-published by DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Hatje Cantz Verlag and KW. Designed by Carolina Aboarrage, the publication includes contributions from the artist Renée Green, Kathrin Bentele, Howie Chen, Emma Hedditch, Katherine McKittrick, Taylor Le Melle, Ima-Abasi Okon and others, and is edited by Mason Leaver-Yap. It will be available from the KW Bookshop in early 2022.

Understudies: I, Myself Will Exhibit Nothing
October 23, 2021–January 9, 2022
Curator: Iman Issa
Assistant Curator: Léon Kruijswijk

Featuring Latifa al-Zayyat, Geta Brătescu, Moyra Davey, Amit Dutta, Haris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Cramer, Iman Issa, Paul Neagu, Olaf Nicolai, Sergei Parajanov, Mohammad Rabie, Walid Raad, and Valeska Soares, as well as a loan from Museum Rietberg: Kunst der Welt in Zurich

Understudies: I, Myself Will Exhibit Nothing is an exhibition curated by the artist Iman Issa (born in 1979, Egypt), whose work often takes the form of displays featuring multiple elements and where text plays a central role. Understudies: I, Myself Will Exhibit Nothing is Issa’s first opportunity to reflect on her artistic methodology through the prism of a group exhibition. In order to unfold this introspective venture, the exhibition brings together works by artists, writers, and filmmakers, who each create their own parameters and universes within their practice. Many of the selected works touch upon notions of illustration, portraiture, and self-narration.

Ongoing
KW Digital: Open Secret
July 16–December 31, 21
Curators: Nadim Samman, curator digital sphere, in collaboration with Katja Zeidler, head of education & mediation

Featuring Nora Al-Badri, Maithu Bùi, Erick Beltrán, Tara Isabella Burton, Caroline Busta, Jennifer Chan, Wendy Chun, Joshua Citarella, András Cséfalvay, Inland (Ed Davenport), Constant Dullaart, Orit Halpern, Adam Harvey, Vladan Joler, Bea Kittelmann, Kateřina Krtilová, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Lukáš Likavčan, Jen Liu, Eva and Franco Mattes, Tom McCarthy, Lisa Messeri, Ramak Molavi Vasse’i, New Models, Lisa Rave, Rachel Rossin, Konstanze Schütze, Caroline Sinders, Dirk Sorge, Charles Stankievech, and others, as well as the AURORA School for ARtists, Jugendgremium Schattenmuseum, and MOTIF

Open Secret is a six-month long online program exploring the role of the hidden in our apparently “open” society. Information technologies are supposed to increase our access to knowledge, making the world more legible, while undermining ignorance and superstition. But sometimes the feeling prevails that we have entered a new dark age of black boxes, projections, and paranoia. Techno-culture is obsessed with the unseen, the inaccessible, the known-unknown. Open Secret pursues things that are obscured–through artistic commissions, a suite of essays by leading thinkers, and an intensive public program dedicated to critical reappraisal of the digital infrastructures that organize civic life. With new contributions released on a monthly basis, the Open Secret website will bring together art, technology, politics, and new patterns of exchange.

Open Secret was developed as part of dive in. Programme for Digital Interactions of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) with funding by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) through the NEUSTART KULTUR program.