João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva: Papagaio / Michael Müller: Who’s Speaking?

KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s winter program presents two solo exhibitions: Papagaio by the Portuguese artist duo João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, well-known for their conceptual and poetic analyses of reality, and Who’s Speaking?, the first institutional solo show by Berlin-based artist Michael Müller. Both of their practices confront the relation between artists and their surroundings, each from different perspectives.

Papagaio brings together over 20 16mm short films and two camerae obscurae by João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, all produced over the last ten years. These works are presented within a site-specific installation, complemented by the titular film Papagaio (Djambi)(2014). Since 2001, Gusmão + Paiva have continually produced new experimental arrangements that are poised on the verge between the visible world and its withdrawal, questioning the borders between the concepts of the human and the inhuman. Translating paradoxes through cinematic media, the artists defamiliarize the visitors from their quotidian gaze and produce a “time machine” experiment: the films slow down reality until they reveal the different qualities within the visible. Papagaio, co-produced with Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and Camber Arts Centre in London, is curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Vicente Todolí.

Who’s Speaking? by Michael Müller presents works from recent years with specifically developed new productions, which use various ways for investigating the question of artistic authorship. From Müller’s perspective, “Who is speaking?” also means “What is being said?”, “Who is listening?”, and “Why?” The exhibited works return time and again to the issue of how an artist becomes visible in his work. Each single piece stands at a pressure point between the application or transformation of historical and contemporary artistic codes, and the artist’s personal obsessions. 

For Who’s Speaking?, Müller has conceived new versions of two figures—Hermes and Hermaphroditos—who weave a web of references and connections between the individual works, accompanying the viewer throughout the exhibition as the voice in a new sound installation, the protagonist of a video, or as a figurative sculpture that reverses the relationship between work and viewer.

João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva: Papagaio is funded by Fürstenberg Zeitgenössisch and the Embassy of Portugal/Camões-Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua. 

With special thanks to Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf.

Michael Müller: Who’s Speaking? is funded by Michael Heins (Herzogenrath), Geraldine Michalke, Ángel and Clara Nieto, Stephan Oehmen, Peppermint Holding GmbH, Ernst Schering Foundation, and Romina Polley. 

The catalog is funded by NATIONAL-BANK AG.


Also on view at KW Institute for Contemporary Art:

Batia Suter: Sea of Ice
December 6, 2015–January 17, 2016
Venue: KW Projects

Batia Suter presents her new, site-specific installation Sea of Ice (2015). Its starting point is an old reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting Das Eismeer (Sea of Ice)(1823/24). Proceeding from this highly symbolic painting of the German Romantic era, the artist develops a fragmented image-landscape which intertwines the historical genre of landscape painting with its popular reproduction.

Batia Suter: Sea Of Ice is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Double Room #4
Carola Keitel/Hannes Seidl: So They Rattle
December 6, 2015–January 4, 2016
Venue: 3 1/2

To define means to draw boundaries: between strange and familiar, between important and worthless. Carola Keitel and Hannes Seidl make everyday control and exclusion mechanisms visually, physically, and acoustically perceptible. The artists developed their works in dialogue, employing different strategies of alienation and isolation. Double Room, the collaboration with the students program for Curatorial Studies of Goethe University and Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste—Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, continues with this new project.

The cultural programs of KW Institute for Contemporary Art are made possible with the support of the Governing Mayor of Berlin—Senate Chancellery—Cultural Affairs.