Exhibition with current and past residents

12 Sep 2024, 7 – 11 pm / 13 – 15 Sep 2024, 3 – 8 pm

The ZK/U residency program is a monthly re-constituting community of participants from a wide range of backgrounds and qualifications. The art residency is in a constant state of information inquiry, data comparison and selection process. Travel arrangements meet visa requirements, anticipation is overshadowed by worries. For some, the residency becomes a platform, for others a place of retreat. The residency as a place is challenging; it requires care and empathy to make it possible to settle into and live within interwoven structures. In a constant state of unpredictability, the residency mediates internally and externally, creates a productive climate of exchange and thus a community – far beyond the stay. In the twelve years of its existence, the program has been a temporary home for more than 800 people. Each stay leaves its mark, some of which can be seen here.

The exhibition No Departures Without Arrivals is dedicated to the ambivalence between coming and going, but especially to what lies in between - lingering. Different forms of return are explored, with central locations in the building acting as symbolic links between current and former residents. The works on display are not the result of the stay and do not refer to each other, but instead exist side by side or overlap. In some cases, they reference everyday life in the residency or it becomes the core element of the work itself. The return of a resident from the opening year 2012 reflects this. In the reinterpretation of her performance, walking the wall of the Moabiter Stadtgarten over the course of twelve hours, she questions borders, movements and territories, as she did back then, and also examines her bodily changes over the course of time. A documentary video work, filmed with a hidden camera, describes the reality of borders and de facto states in the field of tension between the pursuit of autonomy and the lack of international recognition. The invisible is juxtaposed in another video work. From the ruins of a museum, the primary value – the art object – has been deliberately removed, exposing the role of the institution as a cultural construct. The attempt to encourage the art scene to engage in an open dialog about the financial dimension and to buy and sell works of art as if they were cars also tells of socially conditioned patterns of behavior in certain social circles and of unspoken rules in everyday environments. From trade to donation, another contribution calls for an examination of strategies for dealing with the estates of former Fellows. Meticulously and daily documented material provides an insight into a one-year residency. With a participatory work, the residency team invites alumni to use commonplace means of communication to carry out a form of archive and network work that reminds them of communal life. A multimedia installation deals with logistics networks in order to make Amazon's returns processes transparent using GPS tracking systems in order to highlight the associated impact on work and the environment. In the midst of social grievances and political tensions, a sound installation works with the ephemeral, in real time, and enables a direct exchange across spatial distances.

Alumni work in art residencies does not attempt to preserve encounters, but to keep them in transitory limbo in order to remain capable of acting beyond geographical anchoring and temporal fixations. How do we meet again and how can ongoing resonances be achieved? Generating new cross-connections is probably the most important challenge of sustainable residency work.