XPOSURES

Grafik: Lilli Messina

XPOSURES is a two-day open-air exhibition and performance program curated by Dr. Marianna Liosi. The garden of the Schwartz Villa will be transformed into a stage for site-specific new art works. A variety of artistic expressions will be presented, including performances, video screenings, and sound installations.

Participating artists:
Farokh Falsafi • Asuman Kırlangıç • Philipp Khan • Jeremy Knowles • Alexey Kokhanov • Rebecca Pokua Korang • Ksenia Lapina • Maharu Maeno • Carlos Ricoy • Sepehr Talebi

The project emphasizes the power of collective action to awaken communities, generate new ideals, and defend, question, and reappropriate public space (both urban and natural). At the same time, it reflects on the politics of exhibiting and the related processes of renegotiating narratives and legacies.

Organizer: Dr. Marianna Liosi
Admission is free.

PROGRAM

Garden: Jeremy Knowles, Ksenia Lapina, Maharu Maeno
Ground floor: Alexey Kokhanov, Maharu Maeno, Farokh Falsafi
1. floor: Philipp Khan, Carlos Ricoy, Alexey Kokhanov, Maharu Maeno, Rebecca Korang, Sepher Talebi
2. floor: Asuman Kırlangıç

Saturday, 8th July 2023

• 2-8 pm Instant Wander vo gel, 2023 by Maharu Maeno, durational, and participatory performance
• 2-8 pm Im Tierpark Belauscht, 2023 by Jeremy Knowles, sound installation (loop)
• 2-5 pm Healing Stitches by Ksenia Lapina, participatory performance
• 2:30 pm Curatorial tour (in English).
• 3:30 pm Thoughts are free, 2023 by Alexey Kokhanov, music performance. Meeting point: atrium
• 5 pm Artits’ talk, moderated by Amirali Ghasemi

Sunday, 9th July 2023

• 10 am-6 pm Im Tierpark Belauscht, 2023 by Jeremy Knowles, sound installation (loop)
• 1 pm How-to instructions on reparation, and revisitation of the past. Disclosing is taking a position. Ksenia Lapina, Rebecca Pokua Korang, Alexey Kokhanov, Asuman Kirlangic, Sepehr Talebi in conversation with Marianna Liosi (English)
• 2–6 pm Healing Stitches, 2023 by Ksenia Lapina, participatory performance
• 2-8 pm Instant Wander vo gel, 2023 by Maharu Maeno, durational and participatory performance
• 2:30 pm Curatorial tour (English)
• 3:30 pm Thoughts are free, 2023 by Alexey Kokhanov, music performance. Meeting point: atrium
• 4:15 pm Im Tierpark Belauscht, 2023 by Jeremy Knowles, Listening session (15’)
• 5 pm On performing memorials, territories and cultural legacies: collective strategies of inhabiting, reclaiming and controlling spaces. Philipp Khan and Carlos Ricoy, Farokh Falsafi, Jeremy Knowles and Maharu Maeno in conversation with Marianna Liosi (English)

Alexey Kokhanov, Thoughts are free, 2023 (sound sculpture, bird cage, music performance with ten music boxes and ten musicians, 30’:00”).

Through his research into the Wandervogel archive, Kokhanov discovered the folksong Die Gedanken sind frei, from the 1805 Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection. The song is played here in the sculpture Thoughts are free by a music box locked in a birdcage, as an emblem of German resistance against the Nazi regime in the 20th century. In Kokhanov’s performance, the recorded deconstruction of Gustav Mahler’s 1898 interpretation of Die Gedanken Sind Frei overlaps with the original version of the song. The result is a process of aural decolonisation that aims to put into discussion, and therefore to undermine, the rules that western music compositions should respect.

Performance:
Lázara Rosell Albear, Beatty Maria, Tarik Burnash, Helga Grigoryeva, Ekaterina Kaliuzhnaia, Kristina Kean, Ingo Keil, Liza Petrova, Marie Patsyuk

Alexey Kokhanov (1981, Moscow, Russia) is a voice, sound, and performance artist based in Berlin. His work sits at the intersection of contemporary music and experimental performance. In particular, he explores the different aspects of voice — from its physiological signs to its aesthetics and politics.

Farokh Falsafi, Procedural Territories, 2023 (video installation)

Falsafi’s video installation Procedural Territories, which is presented in the atrium of Kulturhaus Schwartzsche Villa, explores power dynamics as operated through land control – for example, how European soldiers are trained to tactically navigate in other environments and landscapes through simulated military exercises. Such procedures are often made possible through processes of digital modelling and in the visualisation of schematic data. Through its exploration on the former U.S training site Doughboy City, which was situated in Lichterfelde on the border between West Berlin and East Germany, Falsafi’s video draws attention to the militarisation of urban territories in Berlin and beyond.

Farokh Falsafi (1986, Iran) is a research-based artist and architect. He lives and works in Berlin. Through his artistic practice, Falsafi explores and questions how power dynamics operate in contemporary society. Simultaneously, he investigates the relationship between strategies of land control, technology, and ecology.

Ksenia Lapina, Healing Stitches, 2023 (performance, tent, fabric, yarn).

Lapina’s performative artwork Healing Stitches is intended to create a safe and inclusive space in which visitors can embark upon a transformative, meditative, and deeply personal healing experience through the act of repairing clothes. Participants are warmly invited to bring to the tent their own damaged garments. they will then be taught the art of mending, and learn how to skilfully repair rips and holes with thread and needle. Through this tactile connection with fabric, participants are encouraged to embrace responsibility and tender care for their own emotional wounds.

Ksenia Lapina (1980, Birobidzhan, Russia) is a multidisciplinary creative whose work encompasses photography, embroidery, and writing. Through her background in linguistics, literature, and social work, Lapina‘s practice explores the intersections of feminist issues, migrations, and personal connections.

Maharu Maeno, Instant Wander vo gel / 即席ワンダーフォーゲル, 2023 (mixed-media durational performance, tent, portable printer, video, and artefacts)

Stemming from her research into the expansion and dissemination of the Wandervogel movement across Japan in the 19th century, Maeno’s installation and performance simultaneously explores questions of colonialism and forms of cultural appropriation. The artist consequently addresses how the ideals of the original Wandervogel movement, became transformed over the course of the First and Second World War. Alongside artefacts and interviews collected by the artist about the resulting Japanese Wandervogel, an immersive performative experience is offered to visitors.

Maharu Maeno (1994, Ibaraki, Japan) is a multidisciplinary artist and performer currently based in Berlin. Her work explores the interconnectedness of physical movement and nonhuman entities, drawing inspiration from the historical and cultural perspectives of East Asia.

Philipp Khan and Carlos Ricoy, SQUATKIT 3000, 2023 (installation, video, objects, variable dimensions)

SQUATKIT 3000 is presented as the ultimate package for claiming spaces. The installation is used to occupy the garden balcony of Schwartzsche Villa, a place that was claimed by different powers throughout its history until it became the cultural centre that it is today. Creating a dialog between the inner and the outside, and questioning traditional habits of inhabiting public and private spaces, the installation deals with the mechanisms of capitalism that are set in motion by the act of squatting.

Philipp Khan (1993, Saint Petersburg, Russia) is a multimedia artist with a background in event curation, cognitive studies, and sound- and videoart. Khan is engaged in artistic and activist practices that deal with social unrest and explore alternative visions of the future.

Carlos Ricoy (1996, A Coruña, Spain) is a multidisciplinary artist. Through his practice, Ricoy questions the structures of power that rule our society. Within this framework, his work deals with social contexts that develop in the urban space, and the policies that control it.

Rebecca Pokua Korang, Verwoben & Vergessen, 2023 (video installation, fabric)

In her new textile and video installation Pokua Korang addresses the relationship between necropolitics colonial history and its colonialities and embodied resilience. Pokua Korang juxtaposes imagery of original photography she has acquired, documentation of Black prisoners of war in camps, and Nazi propaganda films with sonic epistemologies and embodied movement research.

Rebecca Pokua Korang (1993, Berlin, Germany) is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural educator. Her artistic and educational practice is deeply rooted in community work, anti-racism and empowerment.

Sepehr Talebi, Fascinating Fascism: A Cinematic Perspective, 2023 (video, 5’:00’’ loop)

Inspired by Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’, Talebi’s video essay creates a journey through film and cinema to trace the origins of aesthetics typical to right-wing ideological movements. Following Sontag’s examination of the appeal of fascism within society – through obsessions with grandeur, spectacle, and the exploitation of people’s desire for power – and with a particular focus here on director Leni Riefenstahl’s 1973 photography project The Last of the Nuba, Talebi explores how relationships between humans and nature are defined within this aesthetic, as well as how the body is represented in German cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.

Sepehr Talebi (1987, Iran) is a Berlin-based artist. Through his work, he investigates moving images and the history of cinema.

Jeremy Knowles, Im Tierpark Belauscht, 2023 (sound installation, horn speakers, straps)

Im Tierpark Belauscht responds to the politicised history of Schlosspark Friedrichsfelde in Lichtenberg – the site of a former Nazi Arbeitserziehunglager that was later transformed into a zoo in 1954. The installation consists of three horn speakers, installed in a tree on the grounds of Schwartzsche Villa, that reproduce the sounds of birds recorded in captivity in Tierpark Berlin. Both the visual aesthetic of the speakers and the distinctive military-like sound they produce are reminiscent of places of power and hierarchy.

Jeremy Knowles (1992, Stevenage, UK), is an artist addressing issues such as urbanism, surveillance technology, public space, and environmental change. His projects range in expression from photography, sound, and video art to workshops, installation, and public intervention.

Asuman Kırlangıç, Arkhein, 2023 (book, ceramic tiles, fabric)

Through this book made from ceramic tiles, the artist aims to reflect upon the ambivalence of the archive as both an authoritarian and non-transparent structure, and yet also as an artefact itself made by human beings. This structure turns evidences into knowledge, and knowledge into power. Archives started as prosthesis of the power that simultaneously sustain the structure that it creates. The artwork questions critically the politics of production of knowledge, memory, and truths. Arkhein is a book that expects to be activated and shared with the aim of seizing fragments of truths.

Asuman Kırlangıç (1975, Istanbul, Turkey) is a Berlin-based artist with a background in Philosophy and Art History. Through her work, she currently explores topics such as cultural memory, aesthetic experience, and the notion of ugliness.