Category: GLEANING

with the collectives
POLIGONAL
spätispäti

Exhibition

10/11/2023 – 4/2/2024

Curated by Cleo Wächter, Joana Stamer, Julius Kaftan, Vanessa Göppner

“Addressing” is the fourth part of the annual exhibition programme GLEANING

Events

9/11/2023 from 6 pm
Beginning

4/2/2024 from 2 pm
End with swap market in the context of “Kill your Darlings!” and Performance by POLIGONAL, PLÜMMO and Candaş Baş (Constanza Macras / DorkyPark)

In the last exhibition of the annual program “Gleaning“, the Bärenzwinger turns its gaze inward as well as outward, to its social and cultural position in the urban environment. “Addressing” sees itself as an attempt to reflect on its own role as an art institution in the northern Luisenstadt.

The two collectives POLIGONAL and spätispäti were invited, on the one hand, to explore this urban environment artistically and urban sociologically and, on the other hand, to open up the Bärenzwinger more for neighbors, to make it more visible and to activate it as a place of participation.

POLIGONAL explores the interfaces between urban practice, urban communication and architecture with artistic and curatorial approaches. With the aim of opening up non-normative perspectives, the collective develops formats that communicate and discuss urbanistic and sociological topics in cross-disciplinary collaborations. These include performative city explorations, immersive audio walks, and curatorial projects on urban transformation, marginalization, and queerness.

www.poligonal.de

The staging of a city district from its (in)audible fragments, finds and set pieces draws attention to traces of urban transformations, connections and exploitations. The archival installation “B10179” in the Bärenzwinger brings together findings from the surrounding urban space and interweaves them with less visible and audible structures: statistics from the real estate industry contextualize anecdotes from residents; sounds and field recordings are reshaped by rent developments and social indicators.

The visitors themselves are the conductors of this production: at the center of the work is an 8-channel mixing console, with which the audience creates elastic sound configurations. In the course of the exhibition, voices, echoes and conjunctures of urban space overlap in ever new references.

The sound installation “B10179” is a collaboration between POLIGONAL and Nihad El-Kayed.

spätispäti is a human collective working at the intersection of architecture, theory, research, art and performance. It explores alternatives to a neoliberal, product- and constraint-based production of space through situated and process-oriented spatial interventions. spätispäti was founded in Berlin 2019 by Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux, Jonathan Heck, Antonia Lembcke, Jonas Illigmann and Corinna Studier.

https://spaetispaeti.eu/

“Kill your Darlings!”

The collective spätispäti was invited to make the site of the Bärenzwinger more accessible to the neighborhood through an artistic position. “Kill your Darlings!” refers to the pragmatic proposals rejected by the art institution to make the architecture of the listed building more barrier-free through spatial interventions. With which the collective had to part with its own “darlings” in the process. The title challenges the institution to critical reflection and poses the question of how open a pit- a prison – can be. What has to go and what can stay?
This “killing” of one’s own darlings ultimately makes room for other people’s darlings – and does so directly in the exhibition, asking the question, “What are we holding on to and why?”

The Bärenzwinger as an art gallery is now being converted by spätispäti into collective basement spaces that will be made available to visitors* for three months.

Dr. Christian Haid studied Urban Studies (UCL London) and Architecture (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) and received his PhD in Urban Sociology (Humboldt University Berlin). As co-founder of POLIGONAL, he develops communication formats at the intersections of urban practice, art and architecture. As a senior researcher at the Habitat Unit (TU Berlin), he writes, researches and teaches on international urbanism. His main interests are queer urbanism, urban informality, and postcolonial critique.

Lukas Staudinger studied architecture (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Berlin University of the Arts) and sociology (Goldsmiths, University of London). He is a co-founder of POLIGONAL. In his work as an urban mediator and curator of urban practice, he specializes in historical and contemporary urban planning, art in public space, and queer urban everyday life.

Nihad El-Kayed is a sound artist and sociologist. She received her PhD in urban sociology from Humboldt University, where she works as a researcher investigating spatial-social inequality processes and urban development dynamics in the context of migration. In her sound works she works, among other things, based on fieldrecordings and is interested in connections and voids between space, noise and perception. The experimental electronic music project PLÜMMO (with Katharina Hauke) uses computers, DIY synthesizers and analog instruments to explore the spectrum between structure, melody and noise.

https://pluemmo.bandcamp.com/

spätispäti is a human collective operating at the interface of architecture, theory, research, art, and performance.

Together, they investigate alternatives to a neoliberal, product- and constraints-based space production through situated and process-oriented spatial interventions. The collective’s first action was to open a trust-based, non-profit kiosk during the Making Futures School at Haus der Statistik Berlin which became a space in a space in a space: a space for open discussion, collective care, knowledge exchange and critical consumption.

Currently, they conduct a performative research project titled “Berlin ScarCity” funded by the Urbane Praxis Projektfond, in which they take the role of urban detectives unveiling gentrification processes triggered by large-scale real-estate development projects in Berlin.

spätispäti is based in berlin and was founded in 2019 by Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux, Jonathan Heck, Antonia Lembcke, Jonas Illigmann and Corinna Studier

Let go of ballast and become part of our exhibition:

spätispäti asking you about your darlings: do you have stuff in closets or back doors, in your head or basement, in attics or garages that are hard to part with?
Bring them by and be a part of the winter exhibit.

You can bring your darlings during the construction of the exhibition or directly to the opening.
We will carefully take them in and store them on site for three months. The darlings can either be retrieved at the finissage or be part of a swap meet in the garden of Bärenzwinger.

DISPOSAL:
When: November 1-4, 2023 between 9 am- 6 pm
or
at the vernissage on November 9, 20233 from 6 pm.
where: at the Bärenzwinger in Köllnischer Park (Rungestraße 30, 10179 Berlin)
what: Everything can be a darling! <3

Ps: You also have the possibility to bring your Darling by during the opening hours for the entire duration of the exhibition.

9/11/2023 from 6 pm

Free entry

On Thursday the 9 November 2023, from 6pm the Bärenzwinger Berlin invites you to the opening of the exhibition “Addressing“, with the collectives POLIGONAL and spätispäti.

As the last exhibition of the annual program »Gleaning«, the Bärenzwinger turns its gaze inward as well as outward, to its social and cultural position in the urban environment. “Addressing” sees itself as an attempt to reflect on its own role as an art institution in the northern Luisenstadt.

4/2/2024 from 2 pm

2 pm continuous
Swap Market in the context of “Kill your Darlings!”

4 pm
Performance by POLIGONAL X PLÜMMO X Candaş Baş (Constanza Macras / DorkyPark)

Free entry

The Bärenzwinger invites everyone from near and far to come together, exchange ideas and listen to each other at the end of the “Addressing” exhibition.

The last exhibition of the annual “Gleaning” programme has been running for the past three months. The Bärenzwinger looked both inwards and outwards and examined its social and cultural position in the urban environment. “Addressing” is an attempt to reflect on its own role as an art institution in the northern part of Luisenstadt.

The two collectives POLIGONAL and spätispäti were invited to explore the urban environment from an artistic and urban sociological perspective and to open up the Bärenzwinger to neighbours, make it more visible and activate it as a place of participation.

Swap your “darlings” at the swap market with spätispäti and enjoy the live mix and the accompanying performance by POLIGONAL, PLÜMMO and Candaş Baş (Constanza Macras / DorkyPark) on Sunday 04.02.2024.

2 pm continuous

Swap your darling!

What do you hold on to? What can you (not) part with? The spätispäti collective uses the former cages as collective cellar rooms and invites you to temporarily lock up personal objects, favourites, (darlings) there – personal objects become part of the exhibition. This collection brings the neighbourhood inside the gallery.

Over the course of the exhibition, a collection has emerged that reflects what is (un)important to the visitors.

The question of what we hold on to now becomes serious at the end of the exhibition: the owners can decide whether they can part with their favourite object in the long term and release it at the swap market during the finissage or whether they want to take it home again. Meanings and owners change. Bring your darling by! Swap it! Or pick it up again!

4 pm

Performance by POLIGONAL X PLÜMMO X Candaş Baş (Constanza Macras / DorkyPark)

The dystopic landscape of the Bärenzwinger becomes an acoustic space of movement: The archival installation “B10179” by POLIGONAL and PLÜMMO (on display since November 7, 2023) provides the framework and soundtrack for a dance exploration by performer Candaş Baş (Constanza Macras / DorkyPark) through the spaces of the former cage.

In the polyphonic live-mixed tapestry by PLÜMMO (Nihad El-Kayed) consisting of anecdotes from local actors, distorted field recordings from the surrounding urban landscape, sonified social data, and statistics from the real estate industry, urban transformation processes and capitalist exploitation dynamics translate into a vocabulary of movements.

Candaş Baş is a choreographer and performer originally from Istanbul who lives and creates in Berlin.

Her work consists of an investigation of human psychology through a socio-cultural perspective.

Her choreographic research is based on the boundaries of human anatomy, creation of raw movement and the exploration of its transformation through time and space.

The award winning choreographer has staged her work with international acclaim.

Helin Ulas
Sarah Oh-Mock

Exhibition

18/8 – 29/10/2023

Curated by Julius Kaftan and Joana Stamer

“Becomings” is the third part of the annual exhibition programme GLEANING

Events

17/8/2023 7 pm
Opening
Doors open for Kids & Family 5 pm

5/9/2023 3–6 pm
KGB Young Workshop
For children from 10–12 years
with Heather Purcell & Natasha Todd

Please register via email to visit@baerenzwinger.berlin

8/9/2023 7 pm
Soundperformance
Johanna Schütt x Micha Hoppe

9/9 & 10/9/2023
Open Heritage Day
Guided tour from 1 pm each day

15/9/2023 8 pm
Art Week Special
“infinity kiss”
Performance by Layton Lachman, Caroline Neill Alexander, Camila Malenchini, Kalil Bat and Samuel Hertz

The artists Helin Ulas and Sarah Oh-Mock share an aesthetic interest in the conditions and effects of the digital age, the overlaps and contradictions of human and machine existence. In the exhibition “Becomings”, they use the unique setting of the former bear enclosure to update the reflective horizon of our late-modern understanding of technology.

Helin Ulas’ video installation “Tides of Memories” shows a machine dreaming of becoming water and explores the complexity and vulnerability of human existence as well as the evolving relationship between technology and human identity. The artwork invites the audience to embark on a journey through the dreams of a fictional character simulated by an algorithm.

Sarah Oh-Mock’s “PHASO. Remaining Hybrids” designs an archaeology of the future and presents both old and new objects, drawings and installations from her long-term artistic project PHASO (Posthuman Archeological Studies Organisation). From the perspective of a fictitious posthuman organisation, legacies of an already extinct humanity are archaeologically examined and exhibited. Oh-Mock’s finds raise questions about the technical optimisation of the body, as well as the possibilities of bionics, and thus at the same time outline social and biopolitical prospects for the future of humankind.

Helin Ulas (b. 1990, Turkey) is a visual artist and designer based in Berlin. Her artistic practice involves using technology as a medium to create both visual and research-based projects.

Ulas conducts artistic research on the impact of socio-political changes on communities, with a particular focus on how technology shapes culture. Additionally, she investigates the role of technology in shaping collective social memory. Ulas is a member of Automaton, conducting research on the impact of technology on society and new media representation. She develops platforms that foster community building and facilitate knowledge sharing.

In addition to her artistic practice, Ulas is an artistic researcher and educator at HfG Karlsruhe, where she teaches real-time media creation and visual programming as a creative expression tool.

Ulas’s work has been exhibited internationally in various settings, including D’haus (2022), Lumen Prize (2020), Sonar+D (2019), Ars Electronica (2021-2018), and Wisp Lab (2019).

helinulas.info

Sarah Oh-Mock’s surrealistic video works, VR works, installations, objects, photographs and drawings address the relationships between culture, the artificiality of urban places, nature and the unconscious. The different media, analogue as well as digital objects are linked in a new way. She has received numerous awards and her work has been presented in various solo and group exhibitions and festivals in Germany and internationally.

She runs the oMo artspace with her partner Bongjun Oh, works at the weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and is a member of the Medienkunstverein and Saloon Berlin. Since 2014 she has been working on fictional dystopian posthuman exploration of the Anthropocene for the project PHASO.

sarahmock.de

17/8/2023 7 pm

Doors open for kids and family 5 pm

Free entry

On Thursday, 17 August 2023 at 7 pm, the Bärenzwinger kindly invites you to the opening of the exhibition “Becomings”

Doors will be open for kids and family from 5 pm

The artists Helin Ulas and Sarah Oh-Mock share an aesthetic interest in the conditions and effects of the digital age, the overlaps and contradictions of human and machine existence. In the exhibition “Becomings“, they use the unique setting of the former bear enclosure to update the reflective horizon of our late-modern understanding of technology. 

5/9/2023 3-6 pm

Gleaning: Audio-visual electronic workshop

with Heather Purcell & Natasha Todd

Participation free of charge

With sounds and forms from the exhibition “Becomings” together with the surroundings of the Bärenzwinger, we will produce our own film and music. With the help of iPads and various apps, the participants will use the immediate surrounding soundscape – be it construction sites, the sound of traffic or animals to create an animation and sound scape about imagined futures.

Workshop for kids and teens from 10 to 12

Registration via visit@baerenzwinger.berlin oder 030 9018 33482

kgberlin.net

In the framework of the KGB Art Week

8/9/2023 7 pm

by Johanna Schütt and Micha Hoppe

Free admission

Johanna Schütt is an artist living between Berlin and Rhein-Ruhr who works with text, sound and dramaturgy in a wide variety of contexts. She releases music under the name Justin and as part of the duo “Init.play”.  She is particularly interested in chronologies and textures and how these converge in the creation of sonic environments.

Michael Hoppe studied jazz piano at HMTM Hannover and works as a freelance musician in Berlin. He mainly works with the synthesis of electronic and analogue sources, which can occasionally be heard in theatre and performances, but mostly in concerts and on the internet. The spectrum ranges from very quiet to very loud. But mostly rather loud. Furthermore, the interest in music as a social and societal practice is academically unsecured.

Open Heritage Day

9/9 & 10/9/2023

Opening hours 11 am – 7 pm

Guided tour from 1 pm each day

Free admission

The Open Heritag Day, also known as Open Monument Day will take place in Berlin on 9 and 10 September 2023 under the motto “Full of Energy”. Since 1993, the Open Heritage Day has been held nationwide as part of the European Heritage Days.

The Bärenzwinger still bears numerous traces of its past use as the long-time domicile of Berlin’s heraldic animals, to which art responds with site-specific interventions and spatial installations.

Art Week Special

15/9/2023 8 pm

by Layton Lachman

created in consortium with: Arta de Mi, Camila Malenchini, Caroline Neill Alexander, Dan Immanuel Roth, Ethan Allison Folk, Kalil Bat, Nagi Gianni, Samuel Hertz, & wro wrzesińska. 

Free admission

“infinity kiss” transports us into skin-2-skin scenes of subsumptive cellular reproduction. One way or another, this archaic fundament will turn sexy. In the deep trenches of Bärenzwinger, proximal strangers become intimate and oddly attached in a roiling hole of sensualities. Come search the uneven grounds for unlikely merges and fusions of life; lives that we are accustomed to keeping separate. A complex, wild, and unexpected dance is conjured in the friction between wriggling bodies, which traverse a dense sonic and visual landscape, inviting contemplation on the interplay between individuality and the materiality of our interconnectedness. 

“infinity kiss” is the third performance in which our collaborative consortium attempts to disrupt notions of hierarchies of intelligences, anthropocentrism, and a static individualized sexual and reproductive identity. It offers an invitation into the ways in which our supposed individualized human livelihoods are already—and have been in the evolutionary epochs of the past—intertwined and symbiotic. 

Lynn Margulis says: “Symbiotic interaction is the stuff of life on a crowded planet. Our symbiogenetic composite core is far older than the recent innovation we call the individual human. Our strong sense of difference from any other life-form, our sense of species superiority, is a delusion of grandeur.”  

“infinity kiss” asks: what sort of new worlds are created if we consider all systems of reproduction –parasitic, symbiotic, self-replicating, self-devouring systems, or AI–as forms of inter-kingdom collaboration, and as such, a beautiful story of horizontal genetic exchange, an long-lasting intimacy between strangers? This question offers a speculative ecofeminist look at an inter-species celebration, a queer cruise: a primordial, biological ooze which inevitably merges with everything it touches.

Arta de Mi, heteronym of Dani Paiva de Miranda (also known as Mundo), is a performer and experimental artist. His work crosses diverse media and ecologies, exploring the transfiguring power of experience. Nowadays her objective is to synthesize the digital and the organic into formless matter.Arta de Mi investigates the horizontal relationship between matter and energy, denying the separation of matter into form and refraining from a linear sequence of time. This practice leads to questions about the dynamics of power and violence, challenging conventional notions. Employing light design, light installation, performance art (actions and happenings), sound and choreography, they channel an emotional and sensory experience. Website: https://www.cuntscollective.com/dpmiranda

Camila Malenchini  is an Argentinian choreographer and artist based in Berlin. Her artistic practice crosses diverse media; from choreography and sculpture to digital media and curating. Her work starts at the body and questions imagination as danger and possibility today. She completed her studies in Choreography at HZT. Her work has been presented at HAU, DOCK 11, Centro Cultural Konex, Arqueologias del Futuro among others.  She’s currently working in collaboration with artists Marga Alfeiráo, Layton Lachman and the T.E.N.T. collective.

Caroline Neill Alexander received her BA degree in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. For the past six years she has been living and working in Berlin, developing her own work as well as collaborating with other Berlin choreographers and T.E.N.T. Collective. In her own work, she deals with the space between person and persona and the blurred reality of reality. Caroline’s aesthetic is physical, horrific, comedic, beautiful and grotesque and always incorporating voice and text. These ideas were explored in her latest solo works Fear & Fantasy, The Oasis, Full Moonay, and Sharterlla: House of Desperation.

Dan Immanuel Roth is a vocalist and performer based in Berlin and Southern Germany. He studies stage and costume design at the TU Berlin and combines performing arts and visual arts. He uses dance and movement to understand space and is dedicated to creating scenic utopias of space and society. Dan Immanuel is a countertenor and uses classical arias for a critical illumination of the individualistic consumer society. He works in the context of stage, exhibitions, clubculture, video and photography.

Ethan Allison Folk is a Berlin-based director, cinematographer, and 3D animator whose work orbits intimacy and the absurd. Ethan co-founded Buttermilk Films in 2016 as a platform for work in the genre of “New Queer Cuisine”.

Born in France, with an Afro-Creole background, Kalil Bat is a freelance dancer and performer currently based in Berlin. Kalil has been training in Contemporary dance and pole-dancing for many years, as well as contortion and acrobatics. He is currently enrolled in a full-time dance education while still pursuing his artistic career and enriching his movement vocabulary through various projects in Berlin and Europe.

​​Layton Lachman is a choreographer based in Berlin. They create performances rooted in somatics, channeling experiential practices into immersive, sensorially complex worlds. Layton is interested in an art practice centered around group study and collective authorship — with the understanding that we are always collaborating with those who come before, after, and with us. Their practice includes staged works, films, one-on-one encounters, installations and audio/performative tours. In addition to artistic practice, Layton is an independent curator & teacher. www.laytonlachman.com

Nagi Gianni is a Swiss multidisciplinary artist. He develops a plastic language centered on the body as a means of transforming itself to probe other possibilities, to explore other bodies through its metamorphoses. In his performances, costumes and masks, gestures and movements are intended to convey to the audience the inner tension towards a multiplicity of existences, in opposition to the idea of a closed, unchanging identity. Through the mask he creates he questions the relationship to the identification of the self in the digital age, and develops in parallel a oneiric imaginary where the animal, the cyborg, the mythological and the ghostly converge. These figures of the uncanny are for him a means of opening up other relationships to the perception of reality through an approach that questions and displaces what is already known and clearly identifiable. 

Samuel Hertz is a sound-artist/researcher working with sound-sensing networks of environmental and climate science research. His work explores a material approach to sound that amplifies new ways of hearing the complex violences of climate and environmental change wrought by extractive practices. His artistic research has been exhibited and performed in locations such as the Ars Electronica Festival (AT), Palais de Tokyo (FR), Akademie der Künste (DE), Struer Biennial for Sound and Listening (DK), Pioneer Works (US), Fylkingen (SE), IMAX theaters, as well as deep ocean light installations, lunar radio transmissions, and aboard the International Space Station among others. www.samhertzsound.com

wro wrzesińska is a Berlin-based digital artist who works with new media and creative technologies. wro’s work lies at the intersection of art, technology and enchantment and investigates ways of pushing boundaries of the personal and embodiment in the digital environment. inspired by the process of becoming, spaces ‘in between’ and feminist ecologies, wro uses these lenses in a queer speculative storytelling to explore ways of manifesting physicality and identity in flux in the digital space.

Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu
Martin Toloku

Exhibition
26/5 – 6/8/2023

Curated by Malte Pieper and Maja Smoszna

“Heart Beats” is the second part of the annual exhibition programme GLEANING

Events

25/5/2023 7 pm 
Opening with Performance “NOT NOW” by Martin Toloku

26/5/2023 7 pm
Artist Talk with Martin Toloku and Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg

7/6/2023 6 pm
“Beyond Languages” 
Poets’ Corner in collaboration with Haus für Poesie 
Reading with Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Göksu Kunak and Rûveyda, 
hosted by Nina Kettiger

28/7/2023 6 pm
Curatorial Tour

5/8/2023 1–7 pm 
“Fire, everywhere”
Performance by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu

6/8/2023 4 pm
Artist Talk with Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Zippora Elders

“Heart Beats” presents the artistic explorations of two performance artists, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Martin Toloku, who both engage with the physicality of grief and trauma, inspired by their personal experiences and cultural backgrounds. The exhibition takes a closer look at the phenomena of bodily endurance in liminal conditions and its transgressive dimension, for instance in the realm of ritualized communal experience. 

Feelings of grief, shame, anger or joy manifest in the body and its metabolism. The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes the physical process of mourning as “crying with our muscles.” Here, the process of remembering happens not only in the mind but also in body tissue, muscles and bones. Which after-effects are felt of historical ownership in relation to the body and the land, on an individual and collective level? Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Martin Toloku have created new works for the exhibition that address the metabolization and transformation of fear, loss, or stigmatization they sense in the context of the communities in the global South and North that they live in. In doing so, they interact with the particular architecture of the bear enclosure, which carries the weight inherent to a history of colonial and ecological displacement.

Both artists work at the intersection of durational performance and installation, inviting the audience to relate, spend time and share space together. Employing video, sculpture and vocal recordings, the artists set a stage and leave remains, allowing the visitors to glean from the past and anticipate future live-performance in the space.  

Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu (Berlin & Istanbul) explores the physical/emotional boundaries, limitations and potentials of the body in their durational performances, videos and installations. Based on this corporeal approach, Darıcıoğlu is interested in chronopolitics and necropolitics from a perspective that focuses on the vulnerability and strength of marginalized bodies.

lemandaricioglu.com

Martin Toloku (Amsterdam & Kumasi) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice finds expression in various media from carving to installations, video works, long-term performances. He is fascinated by the materiality of the “process of decay”.

Toloku collects dead and rotting wood from rivers, streams, the sea, lakes, forests and his surroundings and tries to incorporate conceptual and performative compositions of life and death into his daily experiences.

tolokuart – Website

25/5/2023 7 pm 

with Performance “NOT NOW” by Martin Toloku

Free admission

Performance starts at 7 pm

Performance: Martin Toloku

Costume: Precious Debrah

Sound: Ibukun Sunday

“Not Now” is a project influenced by nightmares, the struggle and phobia associated with waking up in the middle of the night during a bad dream that causes sleep paralysis. Martin Toloku recalls about this work:

“I remembered clinging to my bed that faitful evening to compensate my body with  sleep. As my eldest always says to us: abavuvu me dia enya ne ame ooh – the best place to find peace of mind is in one’s bed.

After breathing in and out, a gentle teleportation massages the nerves and heals them from a long day’s work on the wheel of restful sleep. Overwhelmed by the comforts of rest, the body becomes entangled in the blanket, demanding an emergency landing in a strange world. Inevitably, I feared being trapped in my own death, unable to breathe, unable to run, unable even to wake up.

Gleaning from several occurrences of this incident, my experiences associated with hallucinations and spatial encounters activate Bärenzwinger with a live-performance in which my body resurrects from a graveyard.”

26/5/2023 7 pm

Artist Talk with Martin Toloku and Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg

The event will be held in English language.

In conversation in the Bärenzwinger‘s garden, Martin Toloku and Orlando-Maaike Gouwenberg will discuss Martin’s work to date, focusing on the installation and performance “NOT NOW”, which Martin is currently presenting as part of the exhibition “Heart Beats” in the Bärenzwinger.

Orlando-Maaike Gouwenberg is a curator and producer who works with artists on projects that often fall between disciplines or make cross-overs. She co-founded A.P.E (art projects era) and Deltaworkers, international residency in New Orleans, worked at If I Can’t Dance in Amsterdam, Performa in New York, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and was artistic director at Jester in Genk. She was co-curator for the Dutch pavilion at the 59th venice biennial, presenting melanie bonajo, and did many international projects as freelancer, amongst others for Melly (at the time Witte de With) in Rotterdam. At the moment she producers the opera Gorgon for Marianna Simnett, and works on future projects with international partners.

7/6/2023 6 pm

Poets’ Corner in collaboration with Haus für Poesie
 
Reading with Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Göksu Kunak and Rûveyda 

Hosted by Nina Kettiger

The event will be held mainly in English language.

Free entry

A visit to Bärenzwinger Berlin can feel like stepping onto an island: The original architecture includes two outdoor terraces and moats that used to be filled with water. The water kept the bears inside and visitors at a distance. Today, the spaces of the former enclosure are a communal gallery. The artistic programme aims to work with and against the violent legacy of the space.

As part of the second exhibition of the annual programme GLEANING, the two artists Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Martin Toloku will use the space of Bärenzinger to create site-specific installations that serve as a stage for performances. The performative exhibition aims to explore the “residual effects” of historical ownership in relation to the land and bodies in a global context. This is the point of connection: The poets share a performative practice with the two artists, exploring poetry across disciplines and (body) languages.

Kindly supported by: The project is funded as part of „Neustart Kultur“, the program of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and by Deutscher Literaturfonds e.V. The 24th poesiefestival berlin is a project of Haus für Poesie in cooperation with Akademie der Künste and is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

28/7/2023 6 pm
Exhibition tour

with the curators Maja Smoszna and Malte Pieper

Free Admission

“Heart Beats” is still on view for the next two weeks in Bärenzwinger. We will be very happy if you visit us in the coming sunny and rainy days.

The curators, Maja Smoszna and Malte Pieper, invite you to a curatorial tour of the exhibition on Friday, 28/7 at 6 pm.

This is a great opportunity to see the exhibition and enter into conversation with the Bärenzwinger curatorial team.

We speak English and German.

5/8/2023 1–7 pm 

Performance by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu

Free admission

Relaxed performance, drop-in and drop-out anytime possible

The performance contains English and Turkish spoken language

Seating available (cushions and benches), no pre-registration necessary

On Saturday, 5 August 2023 from 1 to 7 pm, Bärenzwinger invites you to the performance by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu. The site-specific installation “Fire, everywhere” (2023) by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu addresses the stigmatisation and resilience of queer communities from past to present. The performance draws lines between violence and empowerment through the symbolism of boxing/punching.
During the six-hour-long performance, Leman conducts a physical investigation into how to create a ground for taking care of oneself and the other in a demanding situation, such as a constant fight represented through the action/gesture of boxing/punching.

The act of boxing/punching is turning into an embodied research crossing the lines of queer shame, guilt, anger, vulnerability, strength, resilience, resistance, fighting/hiding. The live performance joins the constellation of three video performances, a sound piece and a set of latex sculptures already on view in the exhibition.

Andrea Acosta
Jelena Fužinato & Patricia Sandonis
KMRU
Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky
Ioana Vreme Moser

Exhibition
10/03–14/05/2023

Curated by Lusin Reinsch and Cleo Wächter

“Promising Premises” is the first part of the annual exhibition programme GLEANING

Events

9/3/2023 6–9 pm
Opening

21/3/2023 6:21 pm
Between Us and Nature –
A Reading Club*

13/4/2023 7 pm
“The Gleaners and I”
Agnès Varda
Filmscreening*

29/4/2023 4:30 pm
“RePlay”
An Audio Drift
with Iman Deeper and
Claudius Hausl*

13/5/2023 6–9 pm
Finissage

* Please sign up at visit@baerenzwinger.berlin to participate.

Details will be published online.

A broken glass bottle, bravely balancing itself upright. The sound of an ambulance wraps itself into a song. Wet glass pitches a frequency when touched. Rainwater, softly mixing with sand, slowly becomes more and more steady, until it has formed into concrete. A beech leaf, about to unfold, with many others about to follow.

The group exhibition “Promising Premises” presents different artistic approaches toward the concept of ‘gleaning’, touching upon the relationship between gathering and memory in urban-rural spaces.

‘Gleaning’, most simply put, is the act of gathering what was left behind on the land after the harvest. What is collected is what has slipped through the established structures. It is a practice that is hopeful, which takes on a considerate attitude, and in Western and Central European tradition it was done in groups.

Today, the practice has evolved and expanded in both its meaning and attitude, as can be seen in Agnès Varda’s documentary film “The Gleaners and I”. One picks up a potato, an object, or a thought and thinks: How can this be used? In times of (in)tangible scarcity, economic inflation, political uncertainty, and a deep climate crisis, perhaps we can reach for this practice to connect with our social and ecological environment. Sometimes it means leaving something behind, holding space.

Because ‘gleaning’ is first and foremost a way of perceiving, it means keeping your senses open and looking for the disregarded, something deemed unimportant at first glance. It balances between viewing and evaluating. When doing so we practice being attentive.

In five contemporary positions, the group exhibition takes the ideas of ‘gleaning‘ off the field and looks into their translations in the artistic realm. Through installations, sculptures, photographic, and sonic works the participating artists display a vast array of artistic ‘gleaning’: from scouring archives and adapting existing works to developing new (site-specific) ones, while reinterpreting, recontextualizing, and rerouting the recognizable.

They shift thematically between the urban and ecological, the archived and the present, the self and the collective, and rigid structures and the soft organic currents in between, all while engaging with space and place or ways to it, through it. The title “Promising Premises” alludes to the hopeful wandering through the (city)- landscape, inviting the audience to notice and re-evaluate the familiar: beech leaves, broken glass, murmurs, fluidics, and concrete. And thus, to enter spring as gleaners themselves.

Andrea Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores notions of nature and landscape and their interaction with the built environment. Her process-based practice combines fieldwork in natural and urban spaces with drawing, sculpture, installation and photography. Exploring the tensions between organic and industrial materialities and processes, she reflects on the constant transformation of matter, gaze and territories, and the stories we tell about them. Experimenting with the potential of fragments and remnants, she proposes speculative ways of thinking about the ecology of our everyday and its interconnection to broader narratives.

She holds a Master’s degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University in Weimar (DE) and has participated in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT postgraduate programme in Berlin. Her work has been shown internationally in Europe, Latin America and Asia, in institutions such as the Ifa Gallery in Berlin, the Gropius Haus in Dessau, the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (NL), the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris (FR), the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín (CO), Les Rencontres D’Arles (FR) and the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Seoul (KR). She has received the Uniandino Art Prize (Bogotá), a public art commission from Les Nouevaux Commaditaires (ES) and has been artist in residence at the Palais de Tokyo (JP), the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau and the Cite des Arts in Paris, among others. Acosta was born in Bogotá and now lives and works in Berlin.

www.andreaacosta.net

Jelena Fužinato works in drawing and installation media to explore authoritarian relations inside institutions such as family, schools, museums and states. Fužinato deals with real events but is using speculation and fiction in their treatment and presentation. The works and methods that she chooses are frequently in contraposition to central narratives and talk about marginal social positions of things and beings. Her layered approach brings together existing references and fabricated information to generate new metaphorical narration. 

Fužinato was born in Prnjavor, Bosnia and Herzegovina and is based in Berlin. Beside her artistic practice, she works on collaborative projects on feminist and educational subjects as artistic director and lecturer. Most recently she received the 2022 nGbK mediation scholarship (Berlin, DE), and won the Kunst am Bau competition for the Zillehaus with her work ‘O.T. gravuren’. 

jelenafuzinato.com

Patricia Sandonis’ conceptual, multimedia practice is primarily concerned with systems and spaces of collectivity – the social phenomena of our everyday environments. Her investigation, which often takes a participatory approach, unfolds through drawings, paintings, installations, and ready-mades that abstract and reconstruct memories, moments, and impressions from urban public spaces. Drawing on her own experiences and movements, Sandonis sifts through personal and contemporary as well as historical narratives to speculate on the possible aesthetics of collective memory and identity in the present, activating the role of art in everyday life.

Sandonis was born in Valladolid, (ES) and is based in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University UCM, Madrid (ES) (2007). In 2014, she graduated with a Master’s degree in Art in Context at the UdK University in Berlin, where she specialized in art in public space and participatory practice.

www.sandonis.com

KMRU is the alias of Joseph Kamaru, a Nairobi-born, Berlin based sound artist who is currently studying sonic arts in Berlin. His work is grounded on the discourse of field recording, noise, and sound art. His work posits expanded listening cultures of sonic thoughts and sound practices, a proposition to consider and reflect on auditory cultures beyond the norms’

He has earned international acclaim from his performances in far-flunglocales such as the Barbican, Berlin Atonal, CTM festival, Dekmantel, Le Guess Who, andhis profound releases on Editions Mego, Subtext, Seil Records, and Injazero. 2022 sawhim supporting Big Thief in the UK/EU and touring with Fennesz in the US. 

Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky is fascinated by cycles of growth, fertility and reproduction. In her artistic work, collecting, studying and examining plant parts is often the starting point. To explore the coexistence of different plants, parasites and symbioses, as well as the influence and use of plants by humans, she experiments with techniques of reproduction as well as with different photographic image carriers.

Kovacovsky was born in Bern and lives and works in Berlin. She studied Design at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel and  completed a bachelor’s degree in photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She has had solo exhibitions at, among others, Bäckerei Moabit, Berlin; Kunstfort (Vijfhuizen/NL); Aargauer Kunsthaus, (Aarau/CH); Galerie STAMPA,(Basel/CH); Malonioji 6, (Vilnius/LT). Her work has been shown in various group exhibitions, including. at C/O Berlin, Uckermark Festival, Kunsthall (Stavanger/NO), Fotografiska, (Stockholm/SE), Kunstmuseum (Thun/CH), FOAM (Amsterdam/NL).

She has been a guest lecturer at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the School of Arts – KASK in Ghent and the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. She is represented by Galerie STAMPA in Basel and in 2023 her artist book Fotogramme (working title) will be published by ROMA Publications.  Together with Sina Ribak, Eva-Fiore runs ‘Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club’.

www.kovacovsky.com

Ioana Vreme Moser is a Romanian sound artist engaged with hardware electronics, speculative research, and tactile experimentation.

In her practice, she uses rough electronic processes to obtain different materialities of sound. She places electronic components and control voltages in different situations of interaction with her body, organic materials, lost and found items, and environmental stimuli. From these collisions, synthesized sounds emerge to carry personal narrations and observations on the history of electronics, their production chains, wastelands, and entanglements in the natural world.

Amongst others, she has performed and exhibited at the National Gallery of Denmark (DK), Fonderie Darling (CA), Akademie der Künste Berlin (DE); Manifesta 14 (XK); SFX – Sound Effects Seoul (KR), Ars Electronica (AT), Bunkier Sztuki Gallery Krakow (PL); Simultan Festival (RO); Eigen+Art Lab – Transmediale, Berlin (DE).

www.ioanavrememoser.com

9/3/2023 from 6–9 pm

Hot drinks will be served.

On March 9, 2023 from 6pm to 9pm, the Bärenzwinger invites you to the opening of the group exhibition “Promising Premises” with works by Andrea Acosta, Jelena Fužinato & Patricia Sandonis, KMRU, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Ioana Vreme Moser. “Promising Premises” presents different artistic approaches toward the concept of ‘gleaning’, touching upon the relationship between gathering and memory in urban-rural spaces.

During the opening, between 8 and 9 pm, the artist duo Jelena Fužinato and Patricia Sandonis will continue concrete-sizing their installation ‘Hard Core Soft Edges’ on site. 

In preparation for the site-specific work, rainwater was collected from the Bärenzwinger to be mixed with the concrete. Together with collected objects (such as natural fragments and scattered trash found in and around the site), this fusion forms the base of solidification of their collaboration. 

21/3/2023 at 6:21 pm

Please sign up at visit@baerenzwinger.berlin to participate.

The texts will be read in English language.

The “Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club” invites attendees to read passages together out loud and share experiences and thoughts about the nature they live in. Each session creates a space to learn from and with bacteria, algae, fungi, soil and multinaturalist narratives, looking beyond disciplines from a mostly female* perspective.

“Cities are like the mitochondria in our animal cells – they are consumers, fed by autotrophs, the photosynthesis of a distant green landscape.”(1)

Meeting at sunset of the spring solstice, the reading is an invitation to gather practices of  gleaning and to speculate about the possibilities of interliving in more-than-urban environments.

In a sympoietic practice, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, artist, and Sina Ribak, researcher for ecologies and the arts, are running the “Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club” in Berlin since 2017 in collaboration with Zabriskie Buchladen für Kultur und Natur.

(1) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 2013, 195.

13/4/2023 7 pm

On gleaning

“‘G’ as in Gleaning

To glean is to gather after the harvest

A gleaner is one who gleans”

Screening of Agnes Varda’s film “The Gleaners and I” (2000)

The film will be shown in French, with English subtitles.

Entrance is free.

Please RSVP to visit@baerenzwinger.berlin

The Bärenzwinger is happy to invite you to a screening of Agnes Varda’s “The Gleaners and I”, on the 13th of April,  at 7 pm. Having been a central point of inspiration for the whole year-program, it will be shown within the framework of the current exhibition “Promising Premises”, which explores the notion of artistic gleaning and its possibilities on a urban-rural spectrum. 
Agnès Varda (1928 –  2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, photographer, and artist. Her pioneering work was central to the development of the widely influential French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Her films focused on achieving documentary realism while paving a feminist path in film addressing women’s issues, and other social commentary, with a distinctive experimental style.

“The Gleaners and I” (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse) is her first digital-shot film. It explores the origin of gleaning and its various facets in both meaning (for) and implementation (by) different social groups within Western Europe contemporary society. In an associative and curious approach, infused with empathy, Varda connects the takes of lawyers, chefs, artists, and teachers on the practice, humanizing whoever encounters her lens, this includes herself.

Before the screening, the curators of the exhibition, Lusin Reinsch and Cleo Wächter, will give a short introduction to the film, drawing connections to the exhibition. Afterwards the audience is invited to add their reflections to the film in the ‘basket’, in which we gather fragments and impressions to our program. 

29/4/2023 4:30 pm

An Audio Drift
with Iman Deeper and
Claudius Hausl

The audio drift takes approx. 1 hour. 

Meeting point at 16:30 at the Bärenzwinger. 

The activity is language and barrier free.

Please sign up at visit@baerenzwinger.berlin to participate.

As part of the “Promising Premises” exhibition, we invite you to delve into the sound worlds around the Bärenzwinger. In an immersive audio walk, we will collect sounds from the surroundings and produce a sound collage together.

Iman Deeper is a Berlin-based DJ and producer whose passion for house music was born on the bustling streets of Tehran. He honed his craft in Rome before settling in Berlin, where he has become a fixture of the underground music scene. Iman Deeper’s love for house music and techno is evident in every aspect of his work, from his live performances to his compositions and radio shows.

Claudius Hausl lives and works as a visual artist in Berlin and Brandenburg. In his work he combines artistic strategies of action art, pedagogical field research and sculpture with the phenomenon of play. His projects and workshops have been part of the Chaos Computer Club or Re:publica, funded by the Fond Soziokultur, Youth in Action, Berlin Draußenstadt and the Deutscher Künstlerbund, among others.

13/5/2023 6–9 pm

DJ-set by sans serif
from 7:30 pm

We warmly invite you to join us for the finissage of ‘Promising Premises’. We look forward to joining once more and celebrating the exhibition, and the height of spring. Come cheers to the works of Andrea Acosta, KMRU, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Jelena Fužinato, Patricia Sandonis  & Ioana Vreme Moser with a glass of Elderflower-Sparkling Wine.

Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, who has been working with the leaves of the common beech tree (Fagus sylvatica) for the project ‘Vernal Unfolding’ and the restart of photosynthesis in spring, will share her ice-making experiments with us. Early birds can enjoywill be served her fresh Beech Leaf-Sorbet.

Later on the lovely sin serif will provide us with a soft rhythmic and bouncy musical space, warming our bodies up with her DJ-Set, fusing beats and, breaks with dreamy rave sounds.

Lastly, the work ‘Hard Core Soft Edges’ by Jelena Fužinato and Patricia Sandonis, which was concretezised during the opening in March, has been fragmentized for the finissage. Its pieces will be “zu verschenken!” (to be gifted) – a final invitation for visitors to become gleaners and take something (physical) home.