Courtney Asztalos

"I will be searching for leads, mysteries and portals into the psychological space at the intersection of artist and audience.  What does it mean to have a 'meaningful' connection with the artist during the exchange of an Openhaus ? How is 'the meaningful' defined and spoken about by Berliners now in contemporary society ? Through a performative exchange together they will explore this space. Surprises abound."

Caroline Goessling

Questioning of object and subject swell to form existential thought. We see and perceive, yet contradictions of language and semiotics only lead to surrealist tendencies. Absolutes fail us. The binary is obsolete. So we look back at the fragments left, memories included and say “thanks John Berger, you put it well.” We exist in half language, where we come to connect from our autonomous positioning. Wishful for the day we might spare our limbs to experience the universal, like particles of history in a long forgotten dream.

Brooke Goldman

She Puts Ideas in My Head

"Once stored, a memory may last for years or life, regardless if the memory took place. Studies show that the more sources of perceptual information people have about an event, the sight, sound, feel, or taste of an experience, the more likely they are to believe they actually experienced the event. The “realness” of a false memory results from the brain's ability to pull together information from unrelated experiences and wrongly reads it as a single, authentic memory. This source monitoring theory postulates that people misattribute perceptual information experienced in a different context to support a memory for something that never happened.

Prior to watching my family home videos, I had little memory of my childhood and the happy moments my parents shared while married. Watching these videos has brought back these positive memories, although has produced an anxiety in myself. I have based part of my identity off my issues with my family, now realizing that I may have been victimizing myself unintentionally. These videos initially produced an immense guilt for not being grateful for my relatively ideal childhood and induced a very strange grieving process for the loss of my childhood self, the love my parents once had for each other, and the relationship I had with my father. Recently, this guilt has subsided due to my realization that these videos are a selective medium, in that they only show positive moments, creating a false sense of what really happened aside from these times. These videos have convinced me of many falsities, for example, causing me to believe I was present at times and in locations I was not. The stitching together of different videos allows me to further manipulate my memories and create different relationship dynamics I see in my family today, as well as insert myself in situations I had not attended."

Megan Gorham

"I am drawn to the possibilities of uncertainty. My photographs act as an obsessive record of the small moments that are often hidden in the banality of everyday life. Traveling to cities, small towns and rural stretches, I try to find those detours, dead ends and deserted streets where the landscape becomes unpredictable. I’m attracted to the instability of these spaces. Seeking evidence of the constant flux and change in our surroundings, my work attempts to sort and coalesce this loose drifting material of life."

Daniela Kostova

(Untitled)

"Inspired by an idea popular in Berlin of converting bombed sites into playgrounds, I am developing a project that connects spaces of destruction – results of current events around the world – with the concept of creativity and play. I will present some sketches and collages from my ongoing research to engage in a conversation and exchange of ideas with the audience."

Cali D. Kurlan

(S)PACE

"(S)PACE is about a move towards the articulation of the experience we have when we are confronted by seeing what would normally be overlooked. Dealing with perception, my work investigates the way this moment of recognition can pack a visceral response. We may look to images of the world through our electronic screens, with the expectation of a mediated experience that in fact might reveal a more authentic aspect of life that we have unlearned or are no longer able to see."

Kyeung Hee Lee

Thin-layer/the basement of a fortress

"I focus on how emotional shocks can change people's life and how they can make people piled up for several years. In this project, I am working with the idea of security. This leads me to think about how to represent the fact of being exposed to danger. Therefore I built flows of elements which illustrates people flowing out of a fortress.These persons have now to fight for their lives."

Claudia Martinez Mansell

Mapping a Refugee Camp

How does a refugee camp look like when it has been in existence for 60 years? This short exhibit will explain the recent use of the cheap DIY technique of balloon mapping in Bourj Al Shamali, a sixty year old Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon. The work will be contextualized with reference to the rich and complex history of aerial photography.

Alyssa Miserendino

"Often I am researching human connection in an illogical manner. I am investigating in a non-judgmental means. However, I am human and fallible. What does the language or logic of the irreconcilable look and sound like? This is what I imagine in a physical sense. This is the artwork I create and the space I occupy – a space of paradox.

To be in a state of paradox means to rest in a space of self-contradiction. It is an irrational place, where we believe in the possibility of conflicting ideas at the same time. This is not about existing as an “either/or,” but rather about the existence of contradiction. Paradox is what makes us human – we are evil, we are good. I’m interested in propositions, such as this."

Sarah Moore

"My current work deals with the complexities of memory and vision. I utilize the mise-en-scène of daily life to create abstracted photographs and mesmerizing videos, weaving together nonlinear stories that have a psychological impact. I encourage my viewers to question how our vision influences not only what we remember, but also how we remember." 

Ng Hui Hsien

The Weight of the Air

"The Weight of Air continues a search for quiet. While I was walking though parts of Iceland last year, estranged from family and friends at the other side of the world, geologically active landscapes revealed themselves to constitute a living, breathing ecosystem with its own set of rules. I was led to contemplate on philosophical questions related to the relationships between oneself and the environments, and how one lives and loves.

Hidden emotions and thoughts surface, as one attempts to be still."

Yunju Park

Short Concept: 

- If you want to move on, you should be empty first.

- I was traveling with my old suitcase, the one that my grandfather has passed onto my father, which is worn off by long use. This suitcase has been used over 10 years, traveling from South Korea through USA to Europe, at least 150,000 miles by now. 

Luana Wojaczek Perilli

Song of Olimpia

Song of Olimpia is an in progress performative-lecture that aims to involve the public in the construction of a post-capitalistic narrative reinterpreting the antique political purpose of Carnival.

The piece is inspired by Aldo Leopold’s writings "A Criticism of the Booster Spirit’ of the 1920’s – his criticism of capitalism, written before capitalism came to be defined as such – and by the anti-bourgeoise tale “der Sandmann” by E.T.A. Hoffmann. The event will take the form of a performance-lecture blending with fictional storytelling, sound, dance, video, and puppet play.  

Song of Olimpia is a performative open ended introduction to Luana Wojaczek Perilli’s project LEOPOLD-O, with special sound design by Alberto Picciau. 

Lili Peper

Exploring the idea of the personification of spaces, the work is concerned with the development of nonlinear narratives through archival contexts and experiential associations. Using photography as a preliminary medium, the work is constructed of both found and authored images paralleled with the use of a textual archive. The spaces and paired histories create a visceral and nuanced understanding of home and family life. Where there used to be self-portraiture involved in the work, now the relationship of the spectator projected onto the narratives and manifested connotations which occur become the essential elements -- continuing this reflection on subjectivity through the collective other. Simultaneously deconstructing domesticity with language while giving agency to memory and objects. These pairings present a multitude of contradictions, all of which are meant to reflect those that arise within the human experience. The intangibility of the past versus the immediacy of the present, private internalizations and intimacies rendered public and exposed, voyeurism, the psychological unconscious, the unreliability of memory, and chance are all considered within these constructions. 

Ali Paydar

The Bardo

Ali´s current body of work, The Bardo, is concerned with the phenomenon of attunement and dissolving. By exploring the interdependence of beauty, fragility, connection, co-existence, and death, she reflects on the idea that nothing dies completely. She is interested in the imprint one object has on another and Timothy Morton’s claim that “the ego of an object is simply the record of the traumas that happened to it”. What does it mean that beauty is the attunement of one object to another? Through her work, Alexandra grapples with that question.

Bobby Smith

"In my piece I have chosen to include a series of seemingly contradictory elements in order to challenge the way we usually define space. I have perspective renderings that represent three-dimensional space placed alongside perspectiveless drawings, physical elements, and artificial light sources. In order to reinforce this disruption of space, I have placed the image in the corner of the room. By doing so, I am activating liminal space and in existing, three-dimensional perspective as a reference point for spatial awareness and depth. The image and its placement challenge our intuitive reaction of environment by integrating two-dimensional space and three-dimensional space; and thus emphasizing the overlap between our cognitive interpretations of those seemingly different dimensions."

Abigail Taubman

This work was inspired by Robert Smithsons 1960's essay, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey". This series similarly captures the banal, specifically rooted in the American suburbs' history, development and perpetuation.

This series, therefore, disorients in order to re-examine Traditional views of the American suburbs, particularly those in Southern California.

Verónica Troncoso

Resisting in Tongues

"I took a letter of Fernando Vergara, He was a revolutionary who struggled against the Dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), He was killed for the secret police in 1984.

I rewrote by hand the letter on a long paper. This action was a way to live again in a performative way the contents of the letter and the exhaustion of the resistance.

I conceive the action of writing as a form of resistance through producing organized counterculture, and the action of rewriting as a experience of reviving the past."

Andrea Welton

"My work consists of two modalities : my work in the studio and a practice of direct engagement with the landscape. The studio produces paintings and my direct engagement with the landscape produces photographs and drawings. One activity cultivates the other. Using these two types of practice I cultivate a sense of place. My painting practice allows access to landscape because my paintings function as a conduit even if not a direct representation. This happens because each painting is derived from a specific endeavor. An extension of myself, my paintings express my values and the adoration I have for the outdoors, relaying to the viewer both a physical landscape as well as the inner landscape of the artist."

Siying Zhou

Zhou searches for an in-between space or third cultural space. In her experience as a child of migrants in Australia, Zhou is constantly aware of the slippages between her parents’ home culture and the culture of the place of migration. Utilising photography, video and participative performance, Zhou will take Berlin’s multicultural society as a showcase and search for the symbols that indicate particular cultural/ethnic communities and the cultural ‘grey zone’ in Berlin. She will specifically investigate the food culture in Berlin and study how food in Berlin is used as cultural identity.

NomadicArt

ZK/U + M

NomadicArt is offering diverse creative and cultural acitivities, that empowers newly arrived citizens to enter the ‘public arena’ despite legal obstacles restricting their mobility and inclusion in social life. The workshops and events facilitated by NomadicArt are co-created by migrants and experts. They provide a safe space for exchange and action. Besides that, NomadicArt is connecting and including various stakeholders from society: migrants, refugees, activists, researchers, volunteers and other actors in the close neighborhood.