Timeline

* CANCELLED * // OPENHAUS March 2020

(c) David Clark, 2020

ZK/U BerlinSiemensstr. 27, 10551, Berlin, Germany

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* Sadly, due to the COVID-19 situation, we have to cancel this event. However, our spirits are high that we will be able to celebrate an OPENHAUS together again shortly. Until then: stay healthy! *

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OPENHAUS, organised every other month, opens the doors of our residency and gives the public a chance to discover our residents’ artistic projects, discuss and exchange directly with them.

This edition of the OPENHAUS will present a variety of media such as sculptures, visual essays, video installations, photography and performances. 

The body as a site of resistance in crisis or of discursive practices will be explored through performance and photography. At the same time, a curatorial research project will focus on the desynchronization between body and society and its association with the politics of sleep and sleeplessness.

Video works will broach the subjects of generational trauma and manipulation of historical facts in relation to the Portuguese colonial past. Other works, as well as the results of a film workshop that took place in ZK/U , having architecture as their focal point, will examine Berlin as an urban space and the notion of ‘home’.  

Don’t miss the opportunity to come and meet the artists and researchers in residence, to discuss and to exchange ideas about ongoing projects and artistic practices.

 

Amina Handke

The site specific intervention RESGUEHAOSTIDENT NO.9, developed at ZK/U Berlin, calls the ghosts of the mobile age by use of remains and memories of Amina Handke's predecessors, contemporaries and some autobiographical fragments. Through a live connection to her origins, the artist as well as other phantoms of the Openhaus – will be Here and There simultaneously. RESGUEHAOSTIDENT NO. 9 also features working room of one's own contributions by ghost guests in Berlin and Vienna.

Ana Barata Martins

This ongoing work 'A world without America' is an essay-film composed with archived photographic material of the existent political murals after the end of the dictatorship in Portugal (1974) and photographs taken by the artist of the leftovers of such imagery still present in Lisbon. Those are intercalated by printed media material published during the Portuguese colonial war which don’t represent the social and ideological turmoiled lived during the conflict.The film tells personal narratives of generational trauma, war misadventures, and vain nostalgic tales about the former colonies of a dead empire.

Complementary to this work, the artist will present another work called 'Or the sky fell down or the earth has risen'. As this work contains organic materials and natural dyes, it is always changing and morphing. The pigments in this work are derived from fauna, flora,and found objects collected from urban green spaces and public parks in Berlin.The text is derived from folklore, songs, and vernacular traditions. It can be seen as a diary and a living archive of these places. The project criticises imperialist and romantic visions that portray nature as passive, easily overpowered, and subservient to human manipulation and hopes to disrupt the myths of nature as a bucolic backdrop and a guest in the human realm.

Anabelle Lacroix

(Non)Sleep as Social Practice is part of a curatorial project focused on the desynchronization between the body and society, the individual and the group.Interested in politics of sleep and sleeplessness, the project seeks to illuminate the way in which we understand wakefulness, productivity and control in contemporary times to rethink the binaries of day and night, effectiveness and inertia.For Openhaus, Anabelle Lacroix will present documentation of a 12h broadcast presented at ZK/U and elements of her research process. With attention to sound, the project investigates the potential for collective socialites to reclaim night time as a form of resistance against homogenizing forces, for listening (in) and for diverse forms of awakenings.

Buyngseo Yoo

This series of works is the extended version of a previous work that has been shown at ZK/U Openhaus January 2020 SAY NO TO DRUGS (2020) Protocol Act 1 and Act 2(2020). More specifically, this project is dealing with the concept of the protocol on institutional context to bring certain arguments. By welcoming the audiences to participate and by asking them to be part of the piece, the work is questioning the perceptions, towards the protocols.

Gul Kacmaz Erk

This is a one‐week practice-based workshop open to all who are interested in the relationship between architecture and cinema. No filmmaking experience is required. The target of the workshop is to make a short film not longer than 3 minutes within the boundaries of the city of Berlin. The theme of the workshop is 'urban memory'. As part of the CACity (Cinema and Architecture in the City) Collaborative Research Group activities, founded in 2014 at Queen’s University Belfast, and in partnership with ZK/U (Center for Art and Urbanism), architecture and film specialist Dr Gul Kacmaz Erk has devised Berlin 2020 for individuals interested in filming architecture and the city, in collaboration with Dublin-based filmmaker Paddy Cahill and Florida-based architectural historian Christopher S. Wilson. The resulting film and the information regarding the workshop's process will be presented in the Openhaus.

Melissa Rodrigues

It smells like mold, rot, blood. A past that is not past.It is present,it is now,there are more and more corpses drifting in the Mediterranean.
In 2019, Melissa Rodrigues and Miguel F visited and photographed the World of Discoveries - Interactive Museum and Theme Park in Porto.The similarities between this Museum and the first and second Colonial Exhibitions of the fascist regime are obvious and terrifying, promoting the manipulation of historical facts and the glorification of the Portuguese Colonial Empire. Mediterrâneo (2019) is a visual essay based on the dialogue and resignification of images from these three exhibitions.

Muhammad Salah

'Perhaps I was looking for something that refuses to be photographed. I was only chasing shadows, perhaps....I embrace the apocalypse.I can easily blame my mother and father for my obsession with meaning and purpose.' Santu Mofokeng 1956 – 2020. Homecoming is a safe space where Muhammad Salad is still exploring ‘home’ as a philosophical,spiritual,emotional and a physical space.

Nermin Er

Nermin Er's work was produced for a group exhibition on black theme. The artist explicitly researched the density of black spots on black ground.In general, she prefers controlled movements on more controllable surfaces.This time Nermin Er researched the movements in the liquid.The depth and diversity in one tone became the subject of this work.

Petra Klepcova

Generally, Petra Klepcova,in her previous paintings,presented prefabricated concrete buildings of the housing estate in Slovakia as a series of paintings. Regarding her project at ZK/U, she will do a research on local housing estates in East Berlin. In her work,she doesn't focus on enforcing her own visual language or the stigma of the creator. Contrariwise, her focal point is on realism, whilst she adopts techniques of the field of landscape art. Taking this into consideration, she creates traditionally "beautiful" paintings of concrete facades instead of romantic and contemplative sceneries.As an inhabitant of a housing estate herself, Klepcova is also interested in theory of urbanism in housing estates.In her works, she documents controversial parts of the city and also the history of architecture by concentrating on minimalism and the original color scheme of the buildings.

Valerie Potvin

During this Openhaus, Valerie Potvin presents her work in progress of the project Dissolution which is a sculptural research to create a new installation. With her sculptures, she also plans to do some experiments on matter and performances that will lead to photographic and video documents. In this project, she explores ways to reduce the ecological footprint of her art practice.Through her work, she explores themes related to current events, social and environmental issues and various human suffering while her work takes more and more a feminist direction. Combinations of fragments evoking the vegetal, human or animal order allow her to create objects with a certain strangeness and poetry and evoking paradoxes of humans. By the relations the artist establishes among them, she composes metaphorical, mysterious and ambiguous fables, from which comes personal and universal narratives.