2022 program preview

Kestner Gesellschaft is proud to announce its 2022 exhibition program. 

The notion of tenderness as narrated by the writer and the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate Olga Tokarczuk acts as a model, a vector, an operating device, a dispositive for whatever occurs in the Kestner Gesellschaft 2022 (and beyond) exhibition program, its public events offer and the (tender) institution as a physical and a virtual site of encounter and exchange. “Tenderness, writes Tokarczuk, personalises everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed.” The author praises tenderness as the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities; (it) “is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy. It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self.’” Such a world, a world of tenderness asks for a new host, a new kind of narrator which Tokarczuk identifies as a “fourth-person” one, the one “who manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time.” Such a mysterious narrator is a tender narrator, the one who masters “a perspective from where everything can be seen. Seeing everything means recognising the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us. Seeing everything also means a completely different kind of responsibility for the world, because it becomes obvious that every gesture ‘here’ is connected to a gesture ‘there,’ that a decision taken in one part of the world will have an effect in another part of it, and that differentiating between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ starts to be debatable.” Tender narrator is a conscious homo empathicus, who practices critical intimacy and considers tenderness as a tool and “a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.”

Winter/spring
February 26–May 22, 2022

Helen Cammock: behind the eye is the promise of rain
Cammock (b. 1970, Staffordshire, England) gives unheard protagonists a voice and narrates their marginalised stories. Exploring complex, historical narratives and reflecting upon them through the medium of film, performance, and large-scale text-based prints, the artist interweaves different perspectives with her own understanding of history and confronts the viewer with the fragmentary and non-linear narratives that make clear that the history is never finished, but is always the foundation of—and thus part of—our present.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc: The Music of Living landscapes
Abonnenc (b. 1977, Cayenne, French Guyana) deals with colonial history and decolonisation in his research-based artistic practice. The artist takes the politically and culturally charged material as a starting point, tracing its meaning and shifts in significance, telling stories apart from dominant narratives. His videos, photographs, objects, and drawings revolve around the interplay of history, forgetting, and reinterpretation. In particular, Abonnenc questions the supposed scientific objectivity in the encounter with the colonial artefacts, for example by emphasising the subjective dimension of ethnographic research.

Vittorio Santoro: Rhinocéros / Bérenger 
at Project Space Shifting Present

Rhinocéros / Bérenger is the first institutional exhibition of conceptual artist Vittorio Santoro (b. 1962 in Zürich, Switzerland) in Germany. Santoro’s works—photographs, drawings, collages, videos, and installations—seem to be rooted in everyday observations, but go beyond them to reveal hidden historical, socio-political, and metaphysical realities.

FAMED: Until the End of the Circle
at Kestner Facade

Jongsuk Yoon: Gang
at Tender Buttons Café

Malte Taffner: A Fragment of Eden
at Goseriede Square

Summer
June 25–September 25, 2022

that other world, the world of a teapot. tenderness, a model
The exhibition that other world, the world of a teapot. tenderness, a model is a search for a tender narrator. As a manifesto of sorts, it is a portrait of tenderness as a desired, possible modus operandi for the world in an ontological crisis and doubt, its emergency alphabet of vulnerability, endurance and resilience. From Alice Neel, Francis Picabia, and Maria Lassnig through Valie Export, Cecilia Edefalk, Sharon Lockhart and Arghavan Khosravi down to Joana Escoval, Enrico David, Pamela Rosenkranz, and many others, this is a cross-generational poetic landscape of tenderness, perceived as a transgressive, polyphonic tool of change and reinvention, a “spontaneous and disinterested” agent of care and concern, a model for the radical ethics in precarious times of reduced immunity and mistrust. Art works, assembled within a relational architecture of this exhibition, conceived by an artist and exhibition designer Justin Morin, perform tenderness as a lyrical power of a political charge. From an approach to materials, through an elaboration of form and an application of color down to thematic take at human psyche and its fragility, here there is an investigation of surface sensations, an anatomy of caress and attention, an empathic journey through that other world, the world of a teapot Olga Tokarczuk dreamt of.

Joanna Piotrowska: Sleeping Throat, Bitter Thirst
at Project Space Shifting Present

In her photographic and cinematic practice, Joanna Piotrowska (b. 1985, Warsaw, Poland) portrays the intimacy of human relationships, expressed by everyday gestures and elementary behaviours. Here, the anxiety and psychological tension of the domestic space receives a performative quality rather than a documentary charge.

Diango Hernández: Bañistas (The Bathers)
at Tender Buttons Café

Autumn/winter
October 22, 2022–January 22, 2023

Paula Rego: Dream Realism
Dream Realism is the first in Germany solo exhibition of the Portuguese/British artist Paula Rego (b. 1935, Lisbon), a master of uncompromising vision and a peerless storyteller, heralded as a feminist icon, whose work tackles upon fascism, abortion, tragedy and the solidarity of women. Co-curated by Alistair Hicks and Adam Budak and architectured by Didier Fiuza Faustino, it will be conceived as an opera on a human condition, staged in a sequence of acts, and dramatised across a polylogue of narratives, centred around Rego’s 1990 masterpiece “Crivelli’s Garden”.

Paula Rego: Theatrum Mundi
at Project Space Shifting Present

Theatrum Mundi offers a unique insight into Paula Rego’s transgressive and grotesque world of theatrical imagination, celebrating the artist’s versatility and the magic of her storytelling.

Marinella Senatore: Remember the First Time You Saw Your Name
at Kestner Facade

Lucila Pacheco Dehne
at Future Scenarios

Supported by Förderkreis Kestner Gesellschaft and Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, prohelvetia, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Berliner Künstlerprogramm DAAD, Stiftung Niedersachsen, Kate MacGarry Gallery, Unter einem Dach