Fall 2021 season

Nicolas Party: Stage Fright
The artist Nicolas Party (b. 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland) has created a work that examines painting and its history and reception down to the smallest detail: How is light generated? How do colors or brushstrokes work together? In the exhibition Stage Fright, he extends his painting across the entire exhibition space with a monumental, site-specific installation: Party paints the walls and ceiling of the large domed hall and create a spectacular green grotto. His immersive mural refers to countless art-historical predecessors that depict underground caves. At the same time, it becomes a breathtaking and atmospheric spatial experience for visitors. In addition, the Kestner Gesellschaft will present a new series of nine portraits of Marlene Dietrich for the first time. The pastells pose currently relevant questions. Party’s fairytale-like, surreal imagery exists between the poles of likeness and representation, depiction and abstraction, observation and imagination.

Nicolas Party’s pictures make their art-historical influences implicitly visible, from medieval art to the Italian pastel painter Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757) to 19th- and 20th-century painters such as Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), and René Magritte (1898–1967): “If you decide to paint an apple, you enter into a dialogue with everyone who has ever painted an apple, and there are many,” says Party.  

His most recent portraits include the characteristic face of Marlene Dietrich. Party reduces the person to basic elements in order to test the limits of what is still recognizable as “Marlene.” In the 1930s, the actress corresponded to the type of a garçonne, the androgynous female type of the time, and was one of its most famous examples. The artist thus explores the spaces between person and representation, reality and fiction, and fundamentally questions the claim to depict reality.

Ericka Beckman: Fair Game
Long before the use of social media and virtual interaction, the video pioneer Ericka Beckman (b. 1951 in New York) began exploring these themes in her films in the early 1980s. The exhibition Fair Game at the Kestner Gesellschaft presents the animated multimedia installation Nanotech Players (1989) and two films by Ericka Beckman that play a central role in her work: her first 16mm film You the Better (1983) and her latest film Reach Capacity (2020), which will be shown for the first time in Germany. The films are separated by almost 40 years, and yet both deal with a current topic: the use of games as a means of structuring capitalist society. 

With the exhibition, which was created in cooperation with the M Museum in Leuven, Belgium, the Kestner Gesellschaft is presenting Ericka Beckman’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. The aim is to focus on this video pioneer who attracted attention early on in the 1970s with immersive video spaces and her criticism of capitalist and patriarchal structures.

Tim Etchelles: Let It Come, Let It Come
British artist Tim Etchells’ (b. 1962 in Stevenage, UK) work Let It Come, Let It Come. quotes two lines from the English translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s influential 1873 collection of poems Une Saison en Enfer (engl. A Season in Hell): “Let it come, Let it come. The time we can love.” His neon work on the facade formulates a bold demand for a future world worth loving.

Etchells’ neon and LED pieces often draw on his broader fascinations as an artist, writer and performance maker, exploring contradictory aspects of language—the speed, clarity and vividness with which it communicates narrative, image and ideas, and at the same time its amazing propensity to create rich fields of uncertainty and ambiguity. Through simple phrases spelt out in neon, LED and other media. Etchells strives to create miniature narratives, moments of confusion, awkwardness, reflection and intimacy in public and gallery settings. Encountering the neon sign works, in the streets of a city or in the space of a white cube gallery, the viewer becomes implicated in a situation that’s not fully revealed. 

Jongsuk Yoon: Gang
The artist Jongsuk Yoon (b. 1965 in Onyang, South Korea) realizes the 16-meter-long monumental painting Ihme  and the large-format work Maschsee for the Kestner Gesellschaft. She describes her abstract expressionist pictures, inspired by nature, as “mind landscapes”—inner landscapes in which color and shape, surface and gesture overlap and merge into a poetic narrative. The roots of her artistic practice lie in the Asian and European tradition—in expressionism, cave painting and Asian ink painting. About her work process, Jongsuk Yoon says: “The painting process is like a dialogue, a kind of communication between the picture and me. Ideas and thoughts are formulated while working. I work spontaneously and deliberately without a plan. I spend a lot of time looking and thinking until I get an idea of ​​what the picture needs.”

Malte Taffner:  A Fragment of Eden
The artist Malte Taffner (b. 1994 in Rinteln) is concerned with processes and infrastructures that enable the coexistence and exchange of plants, animals, humans and machines. To explore this coexistence, he develops the vision of a synthetic Eden: a large playground with living architectures made of plants and mycelium. Traffic routes made of electricity-generating floor panels. Huge glass domes that create artificial climates for a diverse variety of plants. Animals roaming around. Algae pools as large oxygen generators. Electronic gadgets writhing everywhere, fungi proliferating and insects frolicking, fertilizing each other and growing together. In the installation A Fragment of Eden, which will grow on the square in front of the Kestner Gesellschaft, a section of this utopian fiction will be brought into reality and made tangible. 

The new place to get together is the new Café Tender Buttons. The name comes from the collection of poems of the same name by the American author and art collector Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), which was published in 1914 and is considered a masterpiece of lyrical cubism. The new Kestner Cinémathèque permanently shows a film program curated by artists Nicolas Party, Ericka Beckman, Tim Etchells, Jongsuk Yoon, and Malte Taffner.

In the new Book Shop you will find an exclusive selection of international magazines and books curated with the cooperation partner do you read me?! from Berlin and the Antiquarian Bookshop Internationalism.