Timeline

OPENHAUS 24/08/2017

open studios, installations and resident talks

The OPENHAUS is a regular public format that takes place every month in ZK/U, inviting audiences to connect with the hosted projects and to explore the process of its residency program.

The OPENHAUS in August will present projects of ZK/U’s fellows around the subject of social interaction. Experimental conversational methods attempt to discover diverse art works for you to engage with and contribute to. Concepts of being displaced and isolated in a new environment are questioning citizenship, freedom of movement and paper trails. Alongside artistic positions which aim to push boundaries of society towards creating more space for temporary refuge, critical reflection and empathy. You will have the chance to join different interactive works, workshops or one to one discussions all around the former train station including artists welcoming you in their studios.

Participating Artists: Jennis Li Cheng Tien, Jayoung Chung, Haeyoung Seo, Nayoung Jeong, Lamis Haggag, Mobasher Niqui, Yoana Buzova, Danielle Freakley, Robb Mitchell, Lore Smolders, Amy Suo Wu

 

Program:

19:00 - 22:30 Open studios, installations & delicious food

20:00 Guided tour

21:00 Performance by Jayoung Chung

 

Free Entrance

ZK/U - Center for Art and Urbanistics
Siemensstraße 27
10551 Berlin

Nayeoung Jeong

Personal Boundary, 2017

Home and boundary are connected to feelings of safety and comfort. When one feels alien or not at home, a grasp of territory is fleeting or even unstable. My artistic works attempts to provide environments of safety and comfort, and to push against feelings of unfamiliar isolation, providing opportunities to claim a stake in a new place. Those living in a new country either by choice or by having been forced to a new territory may seek familiarity and psychological security in my pieces.

Robb Mitchell

My First Big Book of  Social Icebreaker Designs

participatory activity -  work in progress

Hello! I am making an international visual collection of how art, design, and architecture can provoke new social interactions between strangers. And I need your help!   Please come and join this quick creative workshop.  In friendly small teams we will discuss, imagine, (and perhaps play with) different ways to bring people together.  No experience necessary – all welcome.

Lamis Haggag

How do I look on paper?

Lamis Haggag is inviting the audience to experiment and interact with her interactive installation. The installation is part of an experiential space that is yet to be created, where people are able to use all senses to experience the work. Things to touch, smell, walk through, contemplate, alternate or even watch grow, a changing minimal process rather than a finished piece.

Michael Schuster

„Excerpts of the missing masses“
Dr. Stuhlmann (Germany)

The first and only PATA´LYMPIC GAMES is a pataphor and dream-network, a series of clinamic connections, to embody pataphysics as a „thletic“ mind - corporelating contemporary a(n)t(h)ro-city. During the OPENHAUS, Dr. Stuhlmann will provide a glimpse into a bricollage of artworks of the past two years, a experimental manifestation of the past, theatric & spatial exercise, temporary culture, full-scale exercise, historical landmark of pataphysical being, anomalous to habituation models of cultural poetry. The teasing exhibits will present a runway of artworks and performance, equating participants into a multi-perspective viewpoint of pataphysics, to embody a story of imagination, mix of utopia, dreams, ascending impossibilities, and peripheral destruction that inspire and phantasize imaginary solutions for nonexistent problems. In doing so, in constant progress, the vistoric sculpture becomes a permanent picture of reality.

Yoana Buzova

The power outlet
* sooooooo unpoetic


With the proliferation of “smart cities” initiatives there seems to be less room for small-scale, spontaneous and decentralized self-powered initiatives.
Power outlets seem to have been left behind when it comes to their existence in public space and our critical engagement with them as an empowering platform. And despite being thickly surrounded by infrastructure, that very basic one seems to be incidental on our streets. Perhaps apart from 'innovative' energy practices employed in mobile phone and vehicle charging stations with a ‘futuristic’ light glow. And even though the aforementioned imply sustainability and conviviality, the solutions western societies are provided with are very much in line with an economic exploitation of public space.  
Can electrical power create discourse and construct situations that provide space for temporary refuge and critical reflection?

Jayoung Chung

Ich und Du ( 2016-2017 ) – audience participatory work


“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”― Martin Buber
I propose a literal definition of Empathy: “Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes.” When each audience hold my hand while putting other’s shoes, they will hear the silenced voices of people, and watch the hidden reality beyond the beauty through lighting.  The core of this project is an exploration of empathy and how individuals experience each other. I intend to investigate participation in the world – a key to social justice – through the philosophical prism of Matin Buber’s “Ich und du.”
 Here in Berlin, I became myself through the meeting with Eyas Adi Syrian, who gave me his words and shoes, now when you take off yours then put Eyas’ shoes, you will also become yourself through the meeting. All real living is meeting as Martin Burber states.

Lore Smolders

Meeting point


This site specific installation on the terrace of ZK/U guides you through the observations I did during my stay in Berlin.
It gives a comment on different ways of communication such as monuments, information signs, traces, icons, ... present in tourist areas in order to find a new way of guiding.

Amy Suo Wu

Shanzhai Passports


“One can safely argue that colonialism and imperialism provided the impetus for developing modern surveillance technologies. In the name of state security, surveillance emerged as essential for managing the population and territory.”
-Colonial oversight, Nov 2013, Elia Zureik
One such surveillance technology is that of biometrics used in ID’s such as passports to track, identify and control the movements of the colonial subject (e.g African american slaves, 19th-century colonised India) and unwanted racial migrant groups (e.g Chinese prostitutes denied by the US Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, muslim population affected by the Trumps ’muslim ban’ and the contemporary refugee).
Attempting to put into action the articulation of Iranian design researcher, Mahmoud Keshavarz, that passport forgery can be viewed as a ‘critical practice of making which momentarily interrupts the matching accord of body, citizenship and freedom of movement’, the project ‘Shanzhai Passports’ not only attempts to place questions of race and empire at the centre of the surveillance discourse, but also how this continues to perpetuate the construction of illegalised bodies from the ’third world’ and illegal counterfeit products made in Asia.

Haeyoung Seo

Would you be my model? in Berlin (2017)


The project is work where I created people’s portrait sculptures in order to communicate with them in Berlin where diverse races, languages, and cultures coexist. While making the sculptures, I try to talk with models and show their characteristics with diverse sculptural experiments. Throughout this process, I attempted to discover a beauty from the each expression of people who are living in different environments from where I live, and it was also an experiment to see if sculpture can function as a tool of communication that enables people to meet others without having a bias towards others.    

Mobasher Niqui

How to re-appropriate a temple then?

The work introduces an architectural proposition to tempelize a movable pigeon-house in which the droppings could be used as fertiliser for the community shared gardens.

Deconstruction and elemental reconstruction of an archaic temple explore stories that surround Tempelhof. The beloved Berlin airlift terrain in-dipole to the Volkshalle, also the state’s forces parade field that its suspended condition now, drains investors around and the skate kite surfers inside, as the void produces a lot of wind.

Nomadic Art

Moabit Stories

nomadicArt is currently researching and archiving  stories from a diverse range of Moabit neighborhood residents and listen to their family histories. For instance: when and how they first came to live in Moabit and how they live in Moabit now. They are generate an archive of stories and feelings of people who live in the same urban space. In so doing, nomadicArt is collecting  intangible heritage and memory from our neighborhood. More specifically, they would like to look for small anecdotes and daily stories which in the eye of the participant would feel like it represents best their neighborhood. In the upcoming Open Haus, nomadicArt will show the process of this art project with light and interactive installation.

More information in: nomadicart.org/CULTURAL-PROJECTS/Moabit-stories

Photo/Illustrations by Linh Nguyen

Danielle Freakley

I Anticipate Your Every Breath

Freakley is living with various conversational methods and digging into people's other internal character based methods of survival.