Spring program

Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind: As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night
March 5–July 2, 2023
Maschinenhaus M1
Curator: Kathrin Becker

The focus of Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s (b. 1973 in East Jerusalem / b. 1970 in Denmark, live in London) large-scale installation is the three-channel video work As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night (2022). The featured operatic aria, sung by soprano Nour Darwish, combines the Palestinian traditional song Al Ouf Mash’al with Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. The work deals with loss, collective trauma, and rituals of mourning.

In a song cycle that premiered in 1905, Gustav Mahler set to music poems that Friedrich Rückert wrote after the death of two of his children. In the lamentation Al Ouf Mash’al, a Palestinian woman mourns the loss of her lover, who was drafted into the Ottoman army during World War I. In the course of the opera aria, the two musical traditions increasingly merge. Film footage from the Imperial War Museum shows scenes from Palestine in the early British Mandate period and from battles against the Ottoman Empire. In the final scene, Nour Darwish embodies a traditional Palestinian custom of mourning by dyeing her light-coloured clothing indigo.

Rhys Hollis, Andrea Baker, Divine Tasinda & Kheanna Walker: OMOS
March 5–July 30, 2023
M1 VideoSpace
Curator: Kathrin Becker

OMOS (2022) celebrates contemporary Black performance and pays tribute to Black performers at the Scottish court in the 16th century, and connections to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The twenty-minute work is the first film work by cabaret artist Rhys Hollis, well known as an influential figure in London’s queer art scene, and was created in collaboration with opera singer Andrea Baker, dancer Divine Tasinda, and pole performer Kheanna Walker.

OMOS features a visual journey of performances through Puck’s Glen forest and Stirling Castle, Scotland, partly taking the format of a queer cabaret. The locations provide a link to William Shakespeare’s play as well as to a historical performance at Stirling Castle for King James VI and lesser known Black history in Scotland. At the performance a lion was supposed to pull a chariot through the castle’s main hall, but this was regarded as too dangerous. Instead, the chariot was pulled by an unnamed Black man—one of many Black people who featured in performances at the Scottish court. The film pays homage to this history, whilst reclaiming the story.

Friedrich Kunath: Coming Home Was As Beautiful As Going Away
March 26–July 30, 2023
Maschinenhaus M2
Curator: Magdalena Mai

Friedrich Kunath’s (b. 1974 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, lives in Los Angeles and Munich) artistic work is a melancholic, humorous remix of elements of German Romanticism and contemporary pop culture. In his conceptual paintings and drawings, installations, objects, as well as works in photography and film, he combines classic subjects such as interiors and landscapes with East German television, Hollywood kitsch, advertising slogans, and pop music to create shrewd reflections. Kunath appeals to universal feelings, only to then create distance with exaggerated alterations and irony. Where on the one hand the idyll appears as an expansive landscape, horizon, or palm beach, an ironic break reliably takes place through linguistic or symbolic expressions, which lends presence to both the transience and the futility of a search for fulfilment.

The exhibition Coming Home Was As Beautiful As Going Away ties in with various stations in the artist’s life between East Germany and the western extreme of California. It revolves around questions about distant wanderings and arrival, revealing moments of disorientation as well as reorientation. A central work is the installation All Your Fears Trapped Inside (2019–2023), a diorama of a private room that stands firm against the voyeuristic gaze as a time capsule, cabinet of curiosities, and compendium of things.

Mona Hatoum: all of a quiver
On view until May 29
Kesselhaus

Press contact
Denhart v. Harling, segeband.pr, dh@segeband.de / T +49 179 4963497