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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
