In Nazi Germany, at least 10.000 physically and mentally disabled children and adolescents, including orphans, misfits, and other ethnic groups were murdered as part of an ideology based on social Darwinism. For the first time in history physicians, nurses, and midwives killed by lethal injection, gas poisoning or starvation. It predated the genocide of European Jewry by approximately two years. A rehearsal for the planners of the final solution. NUMB is a study of the forgotten children of World War II.
French artist duo, Wolfsko, use mediums of expression such as photography, text, drawing, painting and collage. Their work is a long study in the world of unhappy childhood, exploring themes such as love, fear, and survival. Wolfsko currently live and work in Berlin.
Please join us for the research presentation of “The secrets of Lake Balkhash: community narratives, memories, and landscapes of past and futures” with author Aigerim Kapar.
Following the first launch in Bor, this event co-hosted by Slavs and Tatars will also serve as the Berlin launch of the publication As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future (Mousse/Rockbund Museum, 2022).
21 October 2022 from 6.30 pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
“The secrets of Lake Balkhash” focuses on the study of local values of Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan and how these values impact the everyday lives of local communities. Lake Balkhash is one of the biggest endorheic water bodies in the world and has a millennia-long history of sociocultural life, ecological traditions, and seminomadic management methods. The region also represents the position of the Kazakh Steppe, where the interests of China and Russia intersect. Today, the industrialization and militarization of the colonial Soviet period continue to prevail and frame the basin as a zone of ecological and social crisis. Lake Balkhash may disappear in twenty years and faces a similar situation to the drainage of the Aral Sea by the Soviet government in the 1950s for the purposes of agricultural production.
“The secrets of Lake Balkhash” aims to rethink the history of the region through a decolonial lens and study the future of the region reimagined by local communities. The research project is part of Artcom Platform’s Care for Balkhash initiative, and As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future, a long-term project and research inquiry that reflects on the Belt and Road Initiative and how it will alter the aesthetics and practices of everyday life in different local contexts of Ethiopia, Serbia, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, China, Kazakhstan. It was conceived and initiated by Biljana Ćirić in 2019 after conducting curatorial research in East Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Europe, where the project is now situated. The three-year project has been conducted via individuals, cells, organizations, and institutions: Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), What Could/Should Curating Do? (Belgrade), Artcom Platform (Astana/Almaty), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), and Public Library (Bor). The project does not attempt yet another critical investigation into Chinese colonialism, but rather seeks to unpack the complexities that certain regions are confronting within their current connections to the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as their established commonalities.
Aigerim Kapar (b. 1987, Kazakhstan) is an interdependent curator, interdisciplinary researcher, and a decolonial activist based in Almaty and Astana. Kapar founded Artcom Platform, a Central Asian community-based contemporary art and public engagement organization in 2015. She has also been organizing Art Collider, a school where art meets science bringing communities together since 2017. Kapar curates a hybrid reality project Steppe Space, an important space for contemporary art and culture of Central Asia, and initiated projects of care for lake ecosystems SOS Taldykol and Balqashqa Qamqor in 2020. Her key previous works include Re-membering: Dialogues of Memories (2019), an international intergenerational project in memory of survivors and victims of twentieth-century political repressions in Kazakhstan, and Time&Astana: After Future (2017–18), an urban art research and engagement project. Kapar is currently a resident at Slavs and Tatars’ program in Moabit. www.instagram.com/aigerimkapar
Photo courtesy of Mousse Publishing
As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future. Published by Rockbund Art Museum and Mousse Publishing, 2022 Edited by Biljana Ćirić
Contributions by Zdenka Badovinac, Aziza Abdulfatah Busser, Robert Bobnič, Biljana Ćirić, Marija Glavaš, Sinkneh Eshetu, Chen Liang, Salem Mekuria, Aigerim Kapar, Dragan Stojmenovič, Larys Frogier, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Robel Temesgen, Jelica Javanovič, Alex Ulko, Kaja Kraner, Tara McDowell, Оasphy Zheng, Enanye Kibret, Gebeyehu Desalew, Manuel Borja-Villel, Mabel Tapia, and Ocean & Wavz.
Please join us for the presentation of Simulacrum Magazine’s thirtieth anniversary issue het Reflectienummer with editors Mirna Vrdoljak and Kenneth Geurts.
14 October 2022 from 6.30pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 10997 Berlin
* Simulacrum is an arts and culture magazine based in Amsterdam. Since thirty years, it functions as an accessible and high-quality platform for students and experts from various fields to publish together. Simulacrum is a quarterly thematic publishing project that aims at fostering transdisciplinary connections among contributions that explore both historical and contemporary perspectives of the European cultural landscape.
On 14 October, Simulacrum is coming to Motto Berlin to celebrate the magazine’s thirtieth anniversary issue titled het Reflectienummer. For this issue the editors delved into the full archive and asked contributors to reflect on their submissions. These reflections offer insight into how art, culture, and historiography have changed over the course of thirty years. However, the eleven reflections bundled together do not only refer to the past. Reflection is an exercise with an eye to the future; it is a moment of standing still and thinking about how it was, how it is, and how it could be.
Editors Mirna Vrdoljak and Kenneth Geurts will hold a discussion on the blurring of boundaries across disciplines in the humanities, and the magazine’s role in adequately responding to the reciprocal influence between academic and artistic spheres. Bearing in mind the magazine’s primary focus on art historical research thirty years ago, we will speak from our own experiences with the diverging range of submissions, as well as the questions that arise with the use of new media platforms and digital modes of archiving. There will also be a moment to introduce Simulacrum’s freshly printed autumnal newspaper on documenta fifteen, The documenta Issue.
The evening will be moderated by Sergio Zevallos and Jana Nestler and it will be comprised of a performative reading by author Frau Diamanda / Héctor Acuña.
Thursday 6 October 2022 6.30–8.30pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
* Frau Diamanda / Héctor Acuña is a transvestite audiovisual artist of Peruvian origin living in Barcelona since 2016. She is a translator, writer, independent curator, cultural agent, dj, and actress, specializing in transgender art and multimedia performance. She completed the PEI Independent Studies Program of MACBA in 2018, and has for some years been developing a writing practice and neobaroque aesthetics from their position as a migrant sudaca transvestite.
Jana Nestler is an artist and organizer of various events on new media, film and art. Since 2017 she has been studying at the Münster Academy of Art and the Faculty of Spanish Philology, University of Münster. She lived and worked for three years in Barcelona, where she also studied art at the Facultat de Belles Arts, Universitat de Barcelona. Nestler is interested in gender issues and queerness, as well as in the sociolinguistic issues related to Catalonia. Katalanische Szenen (Escenas Catalanas) is her first translation into German.
Sergio Zevallos is a Peruvian visual artist. His work consists of drawings, collages, photographs, installations, and performances. Zevallos studied at the Escuela de Artes of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima from 1980 to 1982. He was a co-founder of Grupo Chaclacayo, active between 1982 and 1994, which belonged to the artistic underground. Since 1989, Zevallos has lived and worked in Berlin. In 2013 and 2014, the Museo de Arte de Lima and the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart exhibited his work under the title Un cuerpo ambulante / A roving body. He was a participant in documenta 14 at the Neue Galerie in 2017 and was awarded the HAP Grieshaber Prize in 2018.
Author: Frau Diamanda / Héctor Acuña Published by La Máquina, Barcelona, 2020
As a project of neobaroque transvestite writing, the work develops a form of sexual wandering and the political agency of a migrant subaltern body, whose sexual tool is the basis for an analysis and direct criticism of over-imposed heteronormativity. The editorial project presents the object in a book format, although the work has spanned many hybrid forms, such as performance, installation, video, and photography. It has also been sonically presented as a musical object with spoken word in a cassette format, including collaborations with Spanish and Peruvian sound artists under the label Nuevo Sonido Nacional Barcelona.
The book has previously been presented at the Casa Amèrica Catalunya, Biblioteca Nou Barris, LASA2021, Universidad de Barcelona, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, La Carnicería Vol. V at Proyecto AMIL Lima, Festival Zinegoak Bilbao, Traficantes de Sueños Madrid, MACBA, and Centro Cultural Albareda Barcelona.
Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh* is an ode to the infinite courage and resilience of the women of Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, who sat in protest for a 100 days and nights. A book of photographs, drawings, songs, letters and other material gathered as a record of the iconic protest, marks an extraordinary moment in the political and contemporary history of India. In December 2019, a small group of Muslim women from the working-class neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh came out of their homes and sat down in protest, occupying a stretch of one of Delhi’s busiest highways. They were protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was designed to strip the Constitution of India of its right to religious equality. This peaceful sit-in continued until the pandemic sent India into lockdown; the state used this as an opportunity to destroy and dismantle all traces of the protest. This book serves as urgent and crucial evidence of a time that is systematically being erased from our collective memory.
From the women of Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter, the Dandi March and Chipko Movement, to those at the front lines of India’s non-violent protests, this book is an act of remembrance that preserves the powerful legacy of women at the forefront of historic revolutions.
*Every Evening Belongs to Shaheen Bagh
Prarthna Singh is a photographer whose work explores questions of identity and gender, especially as they intersect with the fraught politics of nationalism in contemporary India. Her images reflect on the economic and political trajectory of the country, drawing connections between feminine precariousness and vulnerability on the one hand, and radical acts of strength and solidarity on the other. Her practice negotiates how the two sides are inextricably linked. After completing her BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, Prarthna lived and worked in New York City. Currently she is based in Bombay.
Sameer Kulavoor is a visual artist living and working in Mumbai, India. His work lies at the intersection of art, graphic design and contemporary illustration, and has taken the form of paintings, murals, books, zines, prints and objects. He is interested in why things look and work the way they do; constantly noting and understanding the impact that time, culture, politics and socio-economic conditions have on our visible and invisible surroundings. In this age of visual overload, his work involves filtering, dissecting, documenting and defamiliarising commonly seen subjects through the act of drawing, painting and design – often oscillating between instinctive and conceptual methods of making.
Zeenat Kulavoor is a typographer and graphic designer based in Bombay, India. She works with multiple Indian scripts and specialises in Urdu type, lettering and calligraphy. She believes that the Urdu script has endless creative possibilities and intends to change the perception towards the use of Urdu in India, which currently is widely perceived to be limited to religious usage. Using tongue-in-cheek humour and wit, combined with the use of scale, different mediums and varied print making methods, Zeenat is working towards reinventing possibilities of how the script can be a part of regular day to day life. Apart from her typography work, she is the creative director at Bombay Duck Designs, and runs a design store called Bombay Duck Shop that sells selected books, zines, prints and objects that blur the boundaries between illustration, art and design.
Artist and author Grace Ndiritu in conversation with art critic Pablo Larios
Tuesday 13 September 2022 6.30–8.30pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
6.30pm Gather 7.00pm Silent meditation 7.10pm Conversation and readings 7.40pm Silent meditation 7.50pm Conversation and readings 8.15pm Q&A 8.30pm End
*We ask every participant to commit to the entire duration of the event in order to not disrupt the meditation
Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Her writing has been published in her critical theory book Dissent Without Modification (Bergen Kunsthall, 2021); Documents of Contemporary Art: The Rural (Whitechapel, 2019) and Animal Shelter 4, Semiotext(e).
Pablo Larios is a writer based in Berlin. His work has appeared internationally in various publications, including Mousse, Frieze, 032c, Text zur Kunst, and Kaleidoscope. He is currently an editor-at-large at documenta fifteen.
Being Together: A Manual For Living
Edited by Grace Ndiritu, Pieter Vermeulen Copy editor: Sue Spaid Design: Vrints-Kolsteren
Contributors: Philippe Van Cauteren, Pieter Vermeulen, Grace Ndiritu, Rafaela Lopez, Roberto dell’Orco, Jana Haeckel, Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans, Nathalie Boobis, Shayla Perreault, Edward Ball, Guadalupe Martinez, Stacy Suy, Ezra Fieremans
Published by KRIEG
Being Together: A Manual For Living falls in the lineage of publications such as the Journal of the Society for Education Through Art, which throughout the 1960s provided British art schools a window into experimental education. By contrast, Grace Ndiritu’s experience in creating radical pedagogies arose from a connected, yet unorthodox system of ‘self education’. In 2012, she decided to spend time living in cities only when necessary. She thus lived in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities, while expanding her research into nomadic lifestyles and training in esoteric studies, which she began after graduating art school. This research led her to visit Thai and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, permaculture communities in New Zealand, forest tree dwellers in Argentina, neo-tribal festivals such as Burning Man in Nevada, a Scottish Hare Krishna ashram, and the Findhorn Spiritual Community in Scotland. Such lifestyles forever transformed her ideas of education and have proven critical for her art, whether conducting teaching experiments with students, peers and the general public; some of whose voices appear in this publication. Ndiritu posits, “What does (art) education mean today?” and specifically, “What does an embodied (art) education mean in a time of pandemics and social unrest?” Being Together: A Manual For Living attempts to answer these complex questions.
“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” ― Fred Moten
Please join us this Saturday, September 10, for an evening of outdoors readings/performances to mark the closing of Dark Advances: ‘Affect Aliens’ & Revolutionary Despair—an installation featuring works by Spiros Kokkonis, Candice Nembhard (okcandice), Kari Rosenfeld, Lou Lou Sainsbury and Kwamé Sorrell.
Dark Advances: ‘Affect Aliens’ and Revolutionary Despair tunes into the hum, tremble, or murmur by which everything now rises to the surface. Not a human song, but the perlocutionary utterance of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten speak of when they write of the movement of the earth against the world—an underground, black rhythm, chant or riot, that one “can’t join from the outside.” What does it want? Nothing, except perhaps to unground the ground—to reveal “the hole in the ontological project,” as R.A. Judy has it—by unearthing the bones that fire our great toxic machinery.
Dark Advances devotes its breath to this cosmic piece of anti-music, and to practices aimed at its amplification. To those ‘affect aliens’ who, faced with the ways of the world, promote neither the promise of utopia, nor despondent resignation, but the world’s collapsing: ‘unworlding’, or what one might describe as the ambivalent third way of revolutionary despair.
Please note: Lou Lou Sainsbury’s new video work descending notes and sound piece The Law of Desire is Fascist made with Kari Rosenfeld and commissioned by Gasworks London will be showing on the day. Visit the basement between 6-9 pm.
Motto Berlin Salitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
Lou Lou Sainsbury, descending notes, 2022. With Raffia Li and Ada M. Patterson. HD Video, 17:45 min.
*** Spiros Kokkonis was born in Athens, Greece, where he currently lives and works. He’s co-founder of the artist-run space Grace/ Athens. Operating in a very specific context—politically, socially, and culturally—the artist creates images both influenced by and dealing with aspects of contemporary life. Spiros’ work has been exhibited at Athens Conservatoire, Parko Eleftherias, Art Space Pythagoreion, Saigon Athens, SHED London, Grace / Athens and Onassis Cultural Centre.
okcandice (one word, all lowercase) is a writer, artist-curator, poet and musician based between Birmingham, England and Berlin, Germany. Their multi-disciplinary practice is explained as «i’m working on it», dealing with grief, love, queer identities, oration in Black cultures and archival materials. okcandice is a co-founding member of the collective poet & prophetess and founder of the queer film series ALL FRUITS RIPE. They host the experimental broadcast Bedtime Stories on Cashmere radio and work as a freelance curator, (song)writer and creative producer.
Kari Rosenfeld (b. Houston, TX) is an artist currently based in Berlin, Germany. Kari’s work is focused on ontology, political and social affect, religious and mythological narratives, image, genre, and attachment. They have degrees in American Studies and Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin and graduated from Dutch Art Institute Masters of Art Praxis in 2021. They were a co-founder and Artist in Residence at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Science—Alexandria where they facilitated courses in theory and visual media.
Lou Lou Sainsbury is a trans artist based in Margate, UK & Rotterdam, NL, working in live performance, video, writing, installation and textiles. She identifies as a time traveller, making things that unwrite histories of living beings into mythopoeic dreamscapes, informed by queer and ecological activisms.Recent performances and group exhibitions include: Whitstable Biennale (2022), Centre for Contemporary Arts Prague (2021); Yaby and La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Nottingham Contemporary; Tate Modern, London; Yaby, Madrid (all 2019); and Flat Time House, London (2018).
Kwamé Sorrell (b. 1990) is an artist, poet, researcher and writer. Kwamé is co-founder of BlackMass Publishing, an independent press focusing on re/de/contextualizing black and African social vernacular through image and text. He lives and works under the sun. His work is rooted in language and form, as a way to explore the gap between art and tradition, music and sound, space and time; constantly in transition. (this bio is subject to change)
Please join us for the presentation of Tables | Factories with author and artist Ho Rui An in conversation with Nut Srisuwan
Wednesday 7 September from 6.30pm
Motto Berlin Salitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
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Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working at the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, he probes into the ways by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Kunsthalle Wien; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; and Para Site, Hong Kong. In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
Nut Srisuwan is an independent researcher and curator based in Bangkok and Leipzig. His research examines the interrelations between subjects in transnational contexts, such as national identities, politics and migratory movements. As a co-founder of the artistic and curatorial collective “Charoen Contemporaries”, he also works together with other practitioners in finding new models for the art ecosystem in Thailand.
The process of preparing this book began with looking at photographs of large meeting tables around which Chinese and Singaporean public officials gathered during the many Chinese government study missions to Singapore throughout the 1990s. While such images might seem unremarkable today, the appearance of former revolutionaries of the Maoist era as sedentary technocrats marks the historic emergence of a distinct political imaginary in a time when “the economy” was displacing class struggle as the primary subject of governance in China.
It was at the table that these technocrats, having extricated themselves from the masses, devised the concept of the socialist market economy to frame the economic reforms that were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. As they insisted on the compatibility of the market economy with the prevailing socialist social contract, the reformers articulated their turn towards the market as a decision informed not by the “invisible” manner through which the market allocates its resources, but by the assumed transparency of its information flows, which they believed would make visible what the party-state had been previously unable to see.
Yet, to the extent that this process of “seeking truth from facts”, as the reformers put it, is founded upon a set of separations—the party-state from the masses, information from ideology, the economic from the political—what ultimately underwrites the total visibility apparently provided by the table is the concealment of that which must not be allowed to appear as information in order for the logic of the market to obtain: the exploitation of labour.
It is on this basis that the factory can be construed as the table’s forgotten origin and impenetrable interior, and the gate that circumscribes the compound the limit of the market’s capacity for making things visible. Designed to spatially contain industrial labour and hide their exploitation from the public sphere, the factory gate is as close as the technocrat would get, as seen during the factory’s opening ceremony, to the world of labour under a capitalist mode of production. In thus proposing a convergence between tables and factories and examining their respective regimes of (in)visibility across the contexts of Singapore and Reform-era China, this collection of images and texts seeks to understand how the seemingly disparate worlds centred around these two objects in fact call forth each other to produce our deeply unsettled contemporary condition—one where the recognition that accrues to visibility has replaced freedom from exploitation as the most that the people can ever demand after the revolution’s untimely end.
Please join us for a Book Presentation, Reading & Talk with Renée Thorne and Raimar Stange, at Motto Berlin.
Wednesday 27 July 2022 from 7pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
*Raimar Stange Born 1960 in Hannover, Raimar Stange studied literature and philosophy. He works and lives in Berlin as a freelance critic and curator. Stange contributes regularly to Kunst-Bulletin, Zurich; Monopol, Berlin; artmagazine.cc, Vienna; Artist, Bremen and has written catalogue texts on, amongst others, Monica Bonvicini, Peter Friedl, Thomas Hirschhorn, Michel Majerus, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Silke Wagner, Johannes Wohnseifer and Stefanie von Schroeter. He curates exhibitions on climate change and post-democracy.
*Renée Thorne Renée Thorne is an author and artist based in Basel, Switzerland. Her work spans from lyric essays and literary journalism to texts rooted in a performative practice. Renée recently finished an M.A. in Transdisciplinary Studies at Zürich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and will begin teaching Creative Writing at Franklin University in the fall.
Fusing essay, poetry and provocative prose, this hybrid work is an emotionally complex portrayal of loss and resurrection. The book ranges from memoir through myth to the overlapping lives of past artists in a fractal narrative traversing interior and exterior landscapes. In a brisk and unflinching account of the death of the narrator’s mother, the reader descends into the subterranean realms of grief as the loss unfurls into interconnected and unexpected stories of the underworld. From Eurydice’s indifferent return to Orpheus to a poet`s regret for the ghost that haunts him, each story is rich with the resonances in-between. Written in simple yet elegant prose, it is a story about emergence and the struggle to come alive. The result is a text as intense and urgent as the heartbeat the author is seeking.
The artist will talk about the book, its ideas, problems and solutions with Jan Ketz (Raum für Zweckfreiheit, Berlin/Münster).
Saturday 9 July 2022 from 7pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
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Ingo Gerken: OFFENES BUCH Texts by Eva May, Wolfgang Ullrich Published by Hatje Cantz
Brilliant Bibliophilia
Ingo Gerken’s monographic catalogue literally opens a new chapter in his series of works, Bibliosculptures. Images of open exhibition publications or art magazines become the object of investigation here. Seemingly randomly opened book pages create a play of forces or connections between text, object, and image compositions. By depicting these views of books in the book, the medium itself is both the object and subject of analysis – typical of Gerken’s artistic practice.
INGO GERKEN (*1971) completed his studies of Fine Arts at Muthesius University in Kiel and studied Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art. He lives and works in Berlin.
