Being Together: A Manual For Living

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.

Order the book here

“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.

Readings/Performances by: Sabeen Chaudhry (@sabeen.chaudhry), Francesca Flora (@francesca.flora) & Nobile (@nobile_nobile), Céline Mathieu (@cm.celinemathieu), Circular Ruins (@marijijn) ft. oxi pëng (@pennybirdy), Sarah Messerschmidt, Eric Peter (@surroundedbysun), Kari Rosenfeld (@karileighrosenfeld). 

Exhibited works by: Spiros Kokkonis (@8317k), Candice Nembhard (okcandice), Kari Rosenfeld (@karileighrosenfeld), Lou Lou Sainsbury (@loulousainsbury) and Kwamé Sorrell (@___kwame___ ). 

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. 

Curated by Lilly Markaki (@dustbreeding) and Felice Moramarco (@felice_moramarco)
Presented by DEMO

Saturday 10 September
from 6pm

Motto Berlin
Salitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

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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.

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Tables | Factories
Ho Rui An
Published by BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY

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.

Order the book here

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.

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Eurydice, Alive
Author: Renée Thorne
Publisher: art&fiction publications

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.

Order the book here

Please join us for the presentation of Ingo Gerken: OFFENES BUCH, at Motto Berlin.

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.

Order the book here

Dear friends,

Motto and Sans titre (2016) are pleased to invite you to the opening of

« Retro »
a solo show by Robert Brambora

Saturday 2nd July, 2022
from 6pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin


*The exhibition will be on view until 31.08.2022

Please join us to welcome artist duo and cultural association, HAWAPI, for a presentation of their publications and discussion with curator Harm Lux. 

Thursday 23rd June, 2022
from 7 to 9pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

7:00 until 7:45pm > HAWAPI introduce their work (intro by Harm Lux), followed by Audience Talk

7:50pm > Presentation of HAWAPI’s Publications

8:20pm > Open Discussion

*HAWAPI’S WORK PROCESS*

After some preliminary regional research, knowledge exchange and a get together, a concept grows and HAWAPI (Susie Quillinan & Maxim Holland) invite colleagues to participate in order to carry out artistic research and actions on site.

Two examples: In northern Peru, in the mountainous region of Sorochuco, lies the property of the weaver Maxima Acuna (family). The latter is now increasingly surrounded by Conga mining, a mining company that is not afraid to appropriate and privatise public water sources. Thirteen artists worked on site several times, and results were presented to the public.

In the “Pondores” project, 12 artists stayed – for longer periods of time – in the Colombian FARC transitional settlements to develop Empathy-building, playing and acting together with these young ex-combatants. 

We will also be presenting new publications from La Monja, books from Arequipa based artist- designer-theoretician, Sebastián Baudrand.

Order HAWAPI books here
Order La Monja books here

Please join us for a release party, listening session and conversation with Kristin Oppenheim, for her latest LP release, Voices Fill My Head, at Motto Berlin.

Friday 3 June 2022
from 6 to 9pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

7pm > Talk with Kristin Oppenheim and Adina Glickstein

8pm > Listening Session (musical selections from INFO and friends throughout the evening)

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Voices Fill My Head is Kristin Oppenheim’s second double LP release on the INFO label documenting her early sound works from the 1990s. Recorded between 1993 and 1999 in her Brooklyn studio this record features eight pieces composed solely of the artist’s voice. For listeners who were fond of Night Run Run, Oppenheim’s first release on the label, this record reveals yet another important chapter in Oppenheim’s oeuvre.

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Kristin Oppenheim is best known for installation art based in performance, film, and sound. She is represented by greengrassi in London and 303 Gallery in New York.

Oppenheim was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1959 and currently lives and works in New York City. Her work is included in public collections of the Art Foundation Mallorca Collection, CCA-Andratx in Mallorca; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the FNAC Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; the FRAC Des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; MAMCO Museum d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York.

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Order Voices Fill My Head (2LP) (PRE ORDER)
Order Night Run (2LP) (PRE ORDER)

Dear friends,

Please join us for the release of EVERYTHING LOOK BETTER WITH LOVE, artist book by MICHAËL SELLAM published by SALON DU SALON.

THURSDAY MAY 12th, at 7pm

In the presence of the publisher and friends.

MOTTO BERLIN
Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof
10997 Berlin

EVERYTHING LOOKS BETTER WITH LOVE

The protocol for the production of the book EVERYTHING LOOKS BETTER WITH LOVE published at Editions Salon du Salon is simple. There is a certain nonchalance, few gestures. These gestures directly question how a work is produced. The forms produced would have what Tristan Garcia calls an equal ontological dignity.

“We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things”. (Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 1.)

It is a question of experimenting with a whole system of possible operations carried out with an unfailing form of love for things, gestures and beings.

—Michaël Sellam, Paris

SALON DU SALON is a project dedicated to contemporary art and a publishing house based in Marseille, France. Since December 2013, SALON DU SALON work with artists, authors and curators invited to develop proposals. Forms and development of collaboration are based upon the projects themselves, and have included, residencies, research, performance art, exhibition, publishing, and more.

Order the book here

Dear friends,

Please join us for the presentation of

Nervous Fossils: Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether
with the author Mochu, who will be reading excerpts from the book.

May 3rd at 7pm
@ Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
10997, Berlin

Stationed around an art freeport megaproject in the Persian Gulf, and hopping across numerous locations real and fabricated, the book spins off into shadow-histories of synthetic colour production, abstruse citizenship schemes, nuclear warning signs, and syndromes leaking back from the future. During their idiosyncratic philosophical debates, the project employees gradually begin to sense a manic sensorium operating beneath their seemingly sterile financial and logistical systems. Troubles erupt while discussing works of art; futurist imaginaries of financialisation stumble upon the deep inertia of historical time preserved in museums and tombs. Monumental works of art pleasantly rotting in history enter into messy partnerships with volcanoes, hadopelagic planktons, and whimsical vibes of rich people. Stakes are endless while smiles are fake, as the debates swerve into the discreet horror of corporate gleefulness.

Mochu works with video and text arranged as installations, lectures, and publications. Techno-scientific fictions feature prominently in his practice, often overlapping with instances or figures drawn from art history and philosophy. Recent projects have explored mad geologies, psychedelic subcultures, and Indian Modernist painting. Mochu is a recipient of the Edith-Russ-Haus grant for Media Art and his practice has previously been supported by Ashkal Alwan, India Foundation for the Arts, and The Sarai Programme. Exhibitions include the 9th Asia-Pacific Triennial, Sharjah Biennial 13, 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and Transmediale BWPWAP. He currently lives in Delhi and Istanbul.

Published by Reliable Copy in collaboration with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.
Order the book here