Thunder in Your Throat / Irena Haiduk / Nan Goldin

Thunder in Your Throat
March 4–May 1, 2022

Artists: Navild Acosta & Fannie Sosa, Catherine Biocca, Kamilla Bischof, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze & Tekla Aslanishvili, Anne Duk Hee Jordan & Pauline Doutreluingne, Theresa Kampmeier, Ezgi Kılınçaslan, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Jens Pecho, Matheus Rocha Pitta, Eva Seufert

Curators: Layla Burger-Lichtenstein, Michaela Richter

Thunder in Your Throat presents works by 11 international artists awarded the 2021 Berlin Senate’s work stipends in the visual arts. This joint group exhibition showcases their latest artistic productions, which engage in a dialogue providing insight into the diversity of their artistic perspectives and their potential for addressing current aesthetic and social issues.

What unites the featured artists is their preoccupation with contemporary culture, social grievances, the ongoing impacts of historical crimes, and emancipatory counter-movements while maintaining a highly unique artistic signature. Their work spans a wide range of media, including large-format paintings, sculptures, and objects, as well as immersive spatial installations, sound and video works, and performances. Together, they articulate a critical view of contemporary image politics, value creation mechanisms, economic inequality, and the exploitation of people and nature. Transcending disciplinary boundaries and formal conventions, the artists united in this exhibition raise fundamental discussions on history, language, consumption, and bodies—through visually powerful and atmospherically intense works that expose sociopolitical practices and put them up for debate.

Discourse program

Tuesday, April 12, 2022, 7 pm
“Prekarisierung, Sorge und queere Schulden” (Precarity, care and queer debt)
Lecture by Isabell Lorey (political scientist, professor for Queer Studies in Arts and Science, Academy of Media Arts Cologne)
In German

Thursday, April 28, 2022, 7 pm
“Chill Pill by Black Power Naps”
Performance by and with Navild Acosta (artist and activist) and Fannie Sosa (artist and activist)
In English

n.b.k. Showroom
Irena Haiduk: Frauenbank Berlin
March 4–May 1, 2022

Curator: Krisztina Hunya

With her long-term projects at the intersection of art, politics, and commodity culture, Irena Haiduk expands traditional models of art production. In 2015, she incorporated Yugoexport, a company that seeks to challenge and rethink economic relationships. The products she distributes, often in cooperation with art institutions—such as books, apparel, talks, or films—serve Haiduk in establishing divergent economies and anchoring forms of economic exchange based on solidarity in collective memory. Her exhibition in the n.b.k. Showroom is dedicated to the Frauenbank, founded in Berlin in 1910 and one of the first credit institutions run exclusively by and for women. Even before women were given the right to vote, the Berlin Frauenbank made it clear until its dissolution in 1916 that social emancipation could only succeed in tandem with financial independence.

“Economic infrastructure underpins all materials, labor, and products of artistic making. These infrastructures leave clear aesthetic marks. The struggle to empower, emancipate, and maintain economies for those who are deemed different, invisible, and disposable is ongoing. The explicit aggression of current political systems against multitudes, including women, female-inclined, LGBTQIA, and people of color is applied vastly through our economies. This exhibition is an occasion to remember the forgotten chapter of the German women‘s rights movement, and honor their part in economies that are to come.” (Irena Haiduk)

Discourse program

March 8, 2022
“Das Epos der Berliner Frauenbank” (The Epic of the Berlin Women’s Bank)
Narrated by Gilla Dölle (political scientist, co-founder of the Archive of the German Women’s Movement, Kassel) on the n.b.k. website.
In German

April 2022
Artist talk
With Irena Haiduk (artist, New York) and Darby English (Professor of Art History, University of Chicago), the date will be announced closer to the time on our website.
In English

April 30, 2022, 9 pm
"Yugoexport: Cabaret Économique"
Performance with Irena Haiduk (artist, New York), Dean Kissick (arist and editor, Spike Magazine, New York), Christian Schmitz (musician and composer, Berlin), among others.
Venue: Anita Berber, Pankstraße 17, 13357
Tickets on sale from April on our website.
Admission: 8pm / performance: 9pm

n.b.k. Billboard
Nan Goldin: The Crowd, Paternò
Music score: Soundwalk Collective
March 4–August 28, 2022

Curator: Lidiya Anastasova

Nan Goldin, one of the most important artists of her generation, has significantly influenced the art of photography with her intimate portraits of her personal life, friends and family. Since the 1980s Goldin documents in a frank and empathic way, friendships, love relationships, physical abuse, AIDS-crisis. She questions societal norms by making different lifestyles, gender identities, and sexualities visible. Her iconic work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slideshow originally conceived in 1983, was ground-breaking and shaped a new aesthetic. Goldin’s recent work includes the digital slideshow Memory Lost (2019–2021), which she considers one of her most radical and ambitious works yet. The photographs form an intense narrative, relating the darkest hours of a life dominated by drug addiction, and revealing the complexity of memory. This selection also includes the image The Crowd, Paternò (2004), which the artist specially adapted for the n.b.k. Billboard series. Accompanying it is a sound piece composed by Soundwalk Collective (Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli).

In 2017, Nan Goldin founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy group that raises awareness about the drug overdose crisis, particularly in the United States. Since 2018, the group has repeatedly staged protests in museums against their funding by the Sackler family, whose company manufactures the opioid OxyContin—its top-selling drug, which is considered a trigger for the opioid overdose crisis in the U.S. Subsequently, several major exhibition venues declined further financial support from the art patron family and have removed their name from their walls, among them the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Discourse program
In the summer of 2022, n.b.k. will present a screening of Memory Lost; the date will be announced closer to the time on our website.