Exhibition: 30. September 2022 – 22. January 2023
Opening: Opening, 29. September, 19:00
Press preview: Thursday, 29 September 2022, 11:00
ifa Gallery Berlin, Linienstraße 139/140, 10115 Berlin
Please register under: ifa-Galerie-Berlin(at)ifa.de
In the exhibition Chains of Interest, Isaac Chong Wai, Lizza May David, Wilhelm Klot-zek, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika and Gitte Villesen continue their personal explorations of the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen art collection.
Since Fall 2021, they have investigated the collection through their own artistic practices. In the preceding exhibition Spheres of Interest, the artists activated and contextualised selected works from the collection in performative and narrative approaches. Their selections offered a critical and humorous look at the collection's unique history. The artists discovered and illuminated omissions and political entanglements, while also drawing numerous new connections between the selected artworks.
Chains of Interest is the second part of this artistic-curatorial investigation intended to deepen the artists' relationships with the ifa collection. They take the floor with newly developed works of their own featuring various artistic languages, attitudes, and environments expressed in film, sound, language and playful performance. The exhibition moves from phrase to image to thought all the way to action, connecting them all in a polyphonic score of voices.
Motivated by the unused print drawer labelled "Asia" at the ifa depot in Stuttgart, Lizza May David decided to present the textual-visual works of Chinese-Filipino artist Elisa Tan in the exhibition, symbolically occupying this unfilled space. Tan's "containers for thought" show imagined, inscribed, dancing landscapes, recalling the linguistic terrains of Carlfriedrich Claus, which estrange the viewer from familiar ways of seeing, writing, and reading. David's paintings are surrounded by sonorous mmmms inspired by indigenous songs and myths from two distant Pacific coasts in Mexico and the Philippines.
Gitte Villesen has edited a new film entitled Strings and Berries. The film uses Hannah Höch's collage Seidenschwanz, the title of which refers to the Bohemian waxwing bird but literally translates to "silktail", as the beginning of a chain of associations. The waxwing is seen weaving through various gardens and times, touching on notions of gender roles and references to the two Black feminist writers Octavia Butler and bell hooks. In the course of the film, Villesen arrives at Hannah Höch's house and garden in Berlin's Heiligensee district, where she settled two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. Höch used the remote location to hide documents and artworks by her friends – artists banned by the NS regime.
In Willem Klotzek's work, unique encounters between language and space take place against the tragicomic backdrop of everyday life. His humorous approach creates a specific onomatopoetic language that he bends and stretches in different directions. The artist's practice is closely linked to that of Carlfriedrich Claus, who was part of the critical avant-garde in the GDR (German Democratic Republic). In the early 1990s the ifa compiled Denklandschaften, a touring exhibition of Claus' work that helped him reach an international audience. For Chains of Interest, Klotzek has selected several of Claus' transparent "language sheets", juxtaposing them with his photo film DHM (German Historical Mu-seum). The photographs from the archive of Peter Woelck and Christine Klotzek reflect his childhood in East Berlin and his adolescence during the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. His off-screen commentary describes how history is short-circuited in museum exhibits, contemporary art, and dreams.
For Spheres of Interest, Ofri Lapid initiated a complex chain of translations based on Joseph Kosuth's lexical work Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), which follows the itinerary of the touring exhibition Kunstraum Deutschland since 2000. Her polyphonic performance of the same name featured over 30 speakers. Drawing from within this linguistic chaos, she has created a new audio work for Chains of Interest. In a process resembling the "telephone game", Kosuth's terms are translated from one language into the next according to the Kunstraum Deutschland route, resulting in a deconstruction of the terms "meaningless", "purple", and "volume". This verbal estrangement provides a critical distance from Kosuth's black and white language-based works, while also offering glimpses of the languages spoken at over 30 different exhibition locations.
The Käthe Kollwitz sculpture Pietà shows a mother protectively holding her dead son. Moved by Kollwitz' self-portrait, Isaac Chong Wai considers its copy, four times the size of the original, at Berlin's Neue Wache, a historic edifice where the sculpture has served as a memorial to "Victims of War and Tyranny" since 1993. What is the effect of this increase in scale? How does the perception of the sculpture change when it becomes an expression of state mourning and remembrance? Retracing the sculpture with his breath, Wai creates a new installation in dialogue with the Kollwitz original (1937-1939), featuring a glass sculpture and a photograph that give form to the fragility of life.
Adrien Missika's MOTUS is a mobile museum on two wheels that both presents and activates his selection of Fluxus works in public. Missika connects Endre Tót's poetic series of Very Special Drawings with the mechanical musical instruments of Joe Jones. Surrounded by the two Fluxus artists' minimalistic sounds and drawings, Missika invites his audience to participate in a game of syllables played with dice. Like an oracle, the words and sentences conjured by the dice make predictions about the future.
In Chains of Interest, the invited artists reflect on the effects of the ifa's collecting practices, opening up a public conversation around German-German collections of art made in Germany.
The exhibition is curated by Inka Gressel & Susanne Weiß.
Press contact:
Corinna Wolfien, Books Communication Art, +49(0)175 5676046, mail(at)corinnawolfien.com
Miriam Kahrmann, +49 (0)7112225 105, presse(at)ifa.de
Press preview:
A press preview will take place on Thursday, 29. September 2022 at 11:00 at ifa Gallery Berlin. Please register at: ifa-Galerie-Berlin(at)ifa.de or mail(at)corinnawolfien.com
Press images are available in the press section of the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.
Exhibition
Exhibition: 30 September, 2022 – 22. January, 2023
Opening: 29 September, 19.00
19.30: Introduction
Gitte Zschoch, Generalsekretärin ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen
Inka Gressel & Susanne Weiß, Curators
Curators' Tours
Thursday 6 October, 10 November, 8 December 2022, 12 January, 2023
18.00 (German) / 19.00 (English) (Susanne Weiß)
Sunday, 22 January, 2023, 16.00 (Susanne Weiß & Inka Gressel)
Further information can be found on the website of ifa gallery Berlin: untietotie.org
Save the date
Conference on the history and actuality of the ifa art collection
Spheres and Chains of Interest
Saturday, 21 January & Sunday, 22 January, 2023
ifa's art collection
For six decades, ifa has cultivated worldwide connections from Stuttgart through the exhibition medium. The works it has acquired since the 1970s from the domains of art and design comprise the cornerstone of this exceptional collection. In 1991, in the course of German Reunification, a part of the collection of East Germany's Center for Art Exhibitions was merged with ifa's West German art collection. The history of the ifa art collection is closely linked with the concept of ifa touring exhibitions. Curators are invited to develop monographic exhibitions that present remarkable artistic positions from Germany. Another focus lies on socially relevant exhibitions projects that reflect contemporary artistic tendencies and currents from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As touring exhibitions, these are shown at international museums and cultural institutions, but also outside major metropolises. Currently, artworks are on display in 20 different exhibitions around the world, which have also been co-creatively conceived since the 2010s. A number of other works in the collection are on loan to museums.
ifa agora
The ifa agora is the central platform for the network, collection and archive of ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in the field of art. It is a place of transcultural exchange – just as the agora in ancient Greece was a city's most important meeting place and marketplace. It shows ifa's relationships and brings them together online. https://agora.ifa.de/en
Out of the box
Since 2020, the ifa Galleries in Berlin and Stuttgart have been cultivating encounters of dialogue among individual artistic positions and international contemporary artists. Out of the Box adopts a practice of reexamining individual works, which become part of anartistic/curatorial revision. This began with the exhibition Time Goes By featuring Rebecca Horn and Antonio Paucar. In 2021, this first show was followed by A Natural Order of Things with Lothar Baumgarten and Gabriel Rossell Santillán at ifa Gallery Stuttgart and Notes of a Seeress , which featured works by Joseph Beuys in dialogue with Andrea Acosta, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, and Sara Ouhaddou at ifa Gallery Berlin.
About ifa
ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen promotes a peaceful and enriching coexistence between people and cultures worldwide. ifa supports artistic and cultural exchange in exhibition, dialogue and conference programmes, and it acts as a centre of excellence for international cultural relations. It is part of a global network and relies on sustainable, long-term partnerships. ifa is supported by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the state of Baden-Württemberg and its capital Stuttgart.
Contact and opening hours ifa Gallery Berlin
ifa-Galerie Berlin
Susanne Weiß and Inka Gressel
Linienstraße 139/140
10115 Berlin
ifa-Galerie-Berlin(at)ifa.de
www.untietotie.org
@ifagalleryberlin
Tuesday – Sunday: 14:00 – 18:00
Thursday: 14:00 – 20:00
Admission free