Inka Gressel and Susanne Weiß (ifa-gallery): Testing what is possible – revisioning a collection
Talks on Curatorial Practice
The talk will be about our artistic-curatorial excavation of the layers and narratives contained in the ifa’s extensive art collection which began in Fall 2021 with artists Isaac Chong Wai, Lizza May David, Wilhelm Klotzek, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika, and Gitte Villesen and ended with a third show in spring 2024.
How did the art collection of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) come to be? Which works were acquired when and by whom, and what can these decisions tell us about the socio-political conditions, trends, and protagonists of the time? How can we partake in and reconfigure collections like these from today’s perspective?
The historic idiosyncrasies and structures of the ifa art collection, and its composition specifically via the partial intake of the collection that once belonged to the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) Zentrum für Kunstausstellungen (ZfK) all become opportunities for a collaborative artistic-curatorial investigation. We invited this group of artists to interrogate the collection based on their own “Spheres of Interest”, searching for overlaps, parallels, and omissions.
The exhibition series shows these artistic and personal examinations together with the works from the ifa art collection. Some works have hardly been exhibited at all, remaining packed in their yellow ifa transportation crates until recently, while others are returning home from long exhibition tours with countless stops, and still others have only just been restored. Such are the varied paths these works have travelled to came together at ifa Gallery Berlin.
After activating and contextualizing selected works from the collection we continued the artistic-curatorial research process with performative and narrative approaches. The artists’ selections offered a critical and humorous look at the collection’s unique history. And they took the floor with newly developed works. We discovered and illuminated omissions and political entanglements, while also drawing numerous new connections between the selected artworks. The exhibition practice moved from phrase to image to thought all the way to action, connecting them all in a polyphonic score of voices.