Category: KANTEN UND KNOTEN

with
Mirja Busch
Thesea Rigou Efstathopoulos
Anton Filatov
Sanne Vaassen
Claire Waffel
U8 Kollektiv (Laurence Ermacova and Neïtah Janzing) with Rabab Haidar

Exhibition

2/8 – 13/10/2024

Curated by Annika Reketat and Cleo Wächter

»By Way of Water« is the third part of the annual exhibition programme KANTEN UND KNOTEN

Events

1/8/2024 6 pm
Opening
7:30 pm Performance with Singen3000

3/8/2024 4 pm
Water Histories
Artist Talk

23/8/2024 5:30 pm
Eintauchen – ein Ausstellungsdialog
[in German]

13/9/2024 5:30 pm
Plunging in – an exhibition dialogue
[in English]

29/9/2024 1-7:30 pm
Day on and along the River

13/10/2024 4 pm
Finissage

1/8/2024 6 pm
7:30 pm Performance from Singen3000

Free entry

On Thursday, 1 August 2024, from 6 pm the Bärenzwinger invites you to the opening of the exhibition “By Way of Water”.

As beings whose bodies consist largely of water, there is no fixed boundary between us humans and this element. And yet we often perceive it as something alienating rather than unifying. ‘By Way of Water’, the third exhibition in our annual program KANTEN UND KNOTEN (Knots and Edges), takes inspiration from confluences – the points where different bodies of water meet – to dissolve rigid boundaries and categorizations in the ways we relate to each other and to our (urban) surroundings. The exhibition unites six artistic positions across various media to explore how space can be inscribed, read, and (re-)interpreted through the lens of hydro-cartographic and hydro-feminist approaches.

The exhibition will be accompanied by artist talks and exhibition tours and a special program on World Rivers Day (29 September 2024).

With artistic contributions by: Mirja Busch, Thesea Rigou, Anton Filatov, Sanne Vaassen, Claire Waffel, U8 Kollektiv with Rabab Haidar

3/8/2024 4 pm

Artist Talk

In English

Free Entry

The artist Sanne Vaassen and Alejandra Villa, doctoral student in ecohydrology at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), will enter into a dialog about what unites them: a fascination with the origins and transformations of water landscapes. Together, they will blur the boundaries between their disciplines and exchange their perspectives on the relationship between humans and water. The starting point of the dialog is Sanne’s installation Shaped by Water, a three-dimensional geochronology of the human-water-relationship made of glass, which can be seen in the atrium of the Bärenzwinger.

Artist Sanne Vaassen explores the fluid transitions in matter and phenomena, focusing on the water cycle, seasonal tree changes, and language evolution. Central to her work are themes of time and change, intersecting with ecology, geography, history, and anthropology. Her work has been exhibited at the Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht), SALTS (Basel), Unit 1 Gallery (London), and 601Artspace (New York). She was a resident at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in 2014-2015.

Alejandra Villa is a second-year PhD candidate at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB). In the Department of Ecohydrology and Biogeochemistry, she studies organic pollutants in the hyporheic zone, the boundary between river and groundwater. Her interest in water issues began in Colombia, where she earned a Bachelor’s in Geological Engineering. She pursued hydrogeology through work in a water resources company and academic institutions across Europe.

23.8.2024 17:30 Uhr

Eintauchen – ein Ausstellungsdialog

Eintritt frei

Ein Ausstellungsdialog zwischen den anwesenden Menschen und Organismen, den Kurator*innen und den teilnehmenden Künstler*innen. Dieses dialogische Format wurde von Thesea Rigou als Erweiterung ihrer künstlerischen Praxis initiiert. Es nimmt ihre ortsspezifische Installation stay with the trouble II als Ausgangspunkt, um Formen des Zusammenflusses in den Beziehungen zwischen Natur und Kultur zu diskutieren.

Anwesende Künstler*innen: Thesea Rigou und Claire Waffel

In deutscher Sprache

13/9/2024 5:30 pm

Plunging in – an exhibition dialogue [in English]

Free Entry

An exhibition dialogue between the people and organisms present, the curators, and the participating artists. This dialogical format has been initiated by Thesea Rigou as an extension of their artistic practice. It takes the site-specific installation stay with the trouble II as a starting point to discuss forms of confluence in nature-culture relations.

Artists present: Thesea Rigou, Laurence Ermacova (U8 Kollektiv), Rabab Haidar

In English

In her artistic practice, Sanne Vaassen (Heerlen, 1991) explores the fluid transition of matter and phenomena, such as the cycle of water, the transformation of trees during the seasons, and the evolution of language.

Central themes within her diverse works are time and processes of change. Thus, Vaassen’s work is at the interface with other disciplines such as ecology, geography, history and anthropology.

Her work has previously been shown in several group and solo exhibitions nationally and abroad, including the Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht), SALTS (Basel), Unit 1 Gallery (London), and 601Artspace (New York). She was also a resident at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in 2014-2015.

Claire Waffel is a visual artist based in Berlin. She studied Photography at the London College of Communication, where she was awarded the Sproxton Prize for her work. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in artistic research at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, where she engages with rising seas and the consequences arising from the changing border between water and land. 

Claire works with lens-based media, installation and storying in order to produce situated and embodied accounts of the spatialised phenomena of climate change. Key elements of her artistic research are to record, imagine and perform alternative and optimistic futures in person and collaboratively, therefore creating counter-narratives through active forms of participation.

By combining different approaches into a visual language, her artistic research reveals connections between place, coastal communities and climate change. She has exhibited her work at the Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin), Kunsthaus Dresden, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Berlin), Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus (Bremen) and MWW Wroclaw Contemporary Museum (Wroclaw), among others. She has been invited on artistic residencies by the Goethe-Institute in Prague, Košice and Jerusalem.

Mirja Busch’s artistic research explores the ontology and perception of puddles as an essentially anthropogenic, yet often overlooked element in the urban environment.

Over the past decade, she has experimented with diverse methods for documenting puddles, as well as innovative approaches to their visualization and interaction. These include artistic walks, classification systems, and linguistic explorations.

Thesea Rigou Efstathopoulos (*1997, Limassol) is an artist and gardener based in Pankow. Thesea is a graduate of the Weißensee-Kunsthochschule Berlin and currently works as an art educator in various institutions in Berlin.

Thesea’s artistic practice explores socio-ecological themes in installations, performances, art books and printmaking.

Anton Filatov (from Karelia, Russia) is a media artist and musician with more than 10 years of trajectory. He produced several music releases and live shows under three different monikers: 0g, Anton Filatov and Wind in Willows.

His music and artworks have been presented in venues from Baku to Berlin, with a distinctive connection with the Finnish avant garde and Ambient scene. His interest in the contemporary experimental music scene brought him to Berlin, where he has resided since 2017.

During this period he has collaborated with other local art collectives on sound and visual synthesis: including Lacuna Lab, Noiseberg, Automaton, as well as assistanting in light design for media installations and performances featured artists like Theresa Baumgartner, Chris Watson, Tony Myatt, Matt Lambert and Michèle Lamy. Currently his creative endeavors play across the digital, physical and oral mediums. This way, Filatov attempts to step into audiovisual experiments that involve a close relation to physical space.

The U8 Kollektiv is a poetry collective based in Berlin and founded in December 2021 by poets Laurence Ermacova and Neïtah Janzing.

Inspired by the U-Bahn line U8, which traverses Berlin from north to south and intermingles different areas, the collective aims to engage in dialogue with the city through public actions, believing that poetry has the power to transform places.

Laurence Ermacova writes poetry in French and German. In her literary work, she traverses the boundary between languages, creating breaches through which the words of one can smoothly slip into the other, thus discreetly practicing the art of smuggling.

Her texts have been published in literary journals such as Stadtsprachen, Manuskripte, Revue Fragile, and Revue Konfluence. In 2021, she received the Research Fellowship for Non-German Literature from the Berlin Senate. In November 2023, she was a guest at the House for Writers and Translators in Ventspils, Latvia. In April 2024, her first poetry collection, “États de mes lieux – gesammelte gedichte,” was published by Éditions du Bunker, Paris.

She is active in the network of French-speaking authors in Berlin and is a member of the artists’ collective Literatur für das, was passiert. In 2021, she co-founded the U8 Collective with poet Neïtah Janzing to organize poetic actions in public spaces.

Rabab Haidar, a Syrian Author and translator, writes in English and Arabic. Her texts, tales, and prose narrate the world during times of uncertainty, loss, and fear, exploring the strength that fragility holds.

Her works have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines in Europe and the Arabic world. In 2019, she received the Heinrich-Boell residency for Writers, relocated to Germany, and currently resides in Berlin.

For the exhibition “Nie wieder und jetzt” at Bärenzwinger Berlin, curators Lina Kröger and Julius Kaftan, together with artist Laura Fiorio, are inviting visitors to engage with their own family history.

The focus will be on the thematisation of National Socialism and how this legacy is dealt with in the family memories of the German population.

Based on her own family history, the Italian artist Fiorio explores the possibilities of transferring tabooed and repressed individual stories and memories from the private sphere into the public sphere and public discussion.

The Bärenzwinger also deals with its own history as part of the exhibition. The building was ceremonially opened in 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War, and functioned not least as a symbol of the Nazi regime’s mythological self-presentation.

How are these past stories connected and influence our present?

These and other questions will be addressed in the course of the exhibition.

You can contribute your own artefacts, family photos, letters or other documents and objects that can be linked to the National Socialist legacy. Copies of documents and objects can also be submitted. The materials should become part of the exhibition. Donations can be made anonymously or by providing a name. A form will be available to record the documents and objects (for later collection etc.).

The exhibition will be accompanied by workshops in which questions about individual and collective memory can be discussed together.

If you have any questions, please contact us at:

Lina.Kroeger@ba-mitte.berlin.de;
Julius.Kaftan@ba-mitte.berlin.de  

Where to drop off?
Bärenzwinger Berlin
Rungestraße 30
10179 Berlin
oder an: hello@laurafiorio.com

When to drop off?
5/4 – 28/4/2024
Tue-Sun, 11am – 7pm

29/4 – 7/5/2024,
11am-5pm

Exception: The bear kennel is closed on 1 May.

with
Laura Fiorio
Jakob Ganslmeier

Exhibition

9/5 – 21/7/2024

Curated by Julius Kaftan and Lina Kröger

“Nie wieder und jetzt” is the second part of the annual exhibition programme KANTEN UND KNOTEN

Events

8/5/2024 6 pm
Opening

1/6/2024 at 3 pm
Workshop with Laura Fiorio

19/7 and 20/7/2024 7 pm
„The untold story of Mohammad Peter“ (Theatre performance) Kollektiv Scheherazade

21/7/2024 4 pm
Finissage

The exhibition “Never again and now” deals with right-wing extremism. It examines the historical legacy and the social and political relevance of right-wing extremist ideas, the spread of National Socialist and neo-Nazi symbols and ideologies and how the difficult legacy of National Socialism is dealt with in the family memories of the German population. At the same time, it shows a possible space for coming to terms with the past: The exhibition sees itself as an attempt to initiate processes of reflection, in which the thematisation of individual and collective memories makes it possible to determine one‘s position and engage in selfcriticism.

The starting point of the exhibition is therefore a critical examination of the exhibition venue. Before its current use as a municipal art gallery, the Bärenzwinger was, as the name suggests, a bear enclosure for the amusement of Berliners – with more than just an ethically problematic history: The Bärenzwinger was opened on 17 August 1939, two weeks before the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, in the presence of Berlin mayor and National Socialist Julius Lippert and “numerous leading men from the state and party”, as the Berliner Morgenpost reported the following day. The im-petus for the construction of a bear kennel came from a suggestion by the town‘s residents. One important advo-cate was Wilfried Bade. Bade was an employee and, from 1940, a ministerial councillor in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under the direction of Joseph Goebbels and was also acquainted with him. He had published an appeal in the B.Z. am Mittag newspaper on 23 August 1937, in which he emphasised the need for a living symbol in the heart of the city. Lippert took up this suggestion favourably and arranged for the construction of a Zwinger. In the days leading up to its opening, articles appeared daily in the B.Z. am Mittag and other Berlin daily newspapers. An article from 9 August 1939 by Lud-wig Heck, zoological director of the Berlin Zoo and racial theorist and National Socialist, explained to readers that the bear was stronger than a lion, unpredictable, stubborn and very skilful. An explanation that could undoubtedly be understood as self-symbolisation and also fitted in with the political agitation and rhetorical armament of the Nazi regime shortly before the start of the war. The Bärenzwinger as a building thus has a significant National Socialist past.

Jakob Ganslmeier presents two works. The first work, “Haut, Stein” (“Skin, Stone”), is a photographic juxtaposition of the remaining, use and blurring of one-time National Socialist and neo-Nazi symbols from two perspectives: The colour photographs (“Skin”) in the atrium of the Bärenzwinger, which were created in collaboration with EXIT-Germany, show portraits of former neo-Nazis who, in the process of leaving the extreme right-wing scene, have also had the symbolic, often forbidden inscriptions in their skin, their tattoos removed or covered over. Swastikas, SS skulls, black suns and the like are sometimes still faintly recognisable. The tattoos belong to the bodies of former comradeship leaders, members of the NPD party, the neo- Nazi sub-group “Hammerskins” or the “Autonomous Nationalists”. However, the removal and tattooing process takes time and causes more than just physical pain. The critical examination of one‘s own history and the finality of leaving result in profound ruptures in the realities of individual lives. These ruptures are often accompanied by social ruptures. It is often the social environment that forms the ferment of radicalisation or facilitates it. Leaving the radical right-wing scene therefore always leads to a decisive break in friendly and/or family relationships. The EXITGermany initiative supports people in leaving the far-right scene and developing new perspectives. In this sen-se, the portraits bear witness to the possibility of enabling change through self-criticism and the problematisation of identityforming habits of action and thought. At the same time, the nudity and closeness of the portraits provoke an immediacy in which the absolute boundary between the viewer and the person portrayed is undermined. The black and white photos (“Stein”/”Stone”) in the trench – the second perspective – show historical Nazi symbols that have remained fragmentarily visible in numerous places in public space: in and on the architecture. Ganslmeier‘s pictures reveal these fragments and examine their wider spatial context. Yet today‘s use of the places often remains indifferent to the symbolism and their origins. And it is not in the least this indifference that normalises the existence of National Socialist symbols in public spaces. “Stein” (“Stone”) thus forms the contrasting programme to “Haut”, as the architectural details depicted stand for a silent conti-nuity, a lack of reflection – a continuity that is in turn undermined in “Haut” (“Skin”).

Ganslmeier‘s second work, in the central Zwinger, which he conceived and developed in collaboration with Ana Zibelnik, is a two-channel video installation in which historical (“Strong is beautiful”) is brought into dialogue with contemporary video material (“War Room”). The title “Public Enlightenment” is a reference to the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The collaged videos include sequences of historical propaganda films from the Nazi media machinery as well as excerpts from contemporary YouTube videos from the so-called New Right or global, often globally networked extreme right-wing movements such as the American Alt-Right movement, the Italian post-fascists, etc. “Strong is Beautiful” deals with the National Socialists‘ social-darwinist and cultural-aesthetic self-image: the struggle for existence was presented as a human condition and linked to ideas of military and physical defence, esprit de corps and racial cohesion. The misanthropy contained therein was in turn (supposedly) cancelled out by a display of cheerfulness and interpersonal intimacy. As in “Strong is beautiful”, the fundamental finding that radicalisation and ideologisation are mediated by the media also applies to “War Room”. Unlike during the Third Reich, however, today this is mostly more decentralised and takes place online – through the use and/ or alienation of images, symbols and memes. “War Room” explores the origins of the fascination with conspiracy theories, Nazi nostalgia and the relativisation of National Socialist crimes against humanity, while also showing that contemporary right-wing extremism appears in many different forms. However, the sometimes shocking stagings and depictions of violence do not merely serve to reproduce the material, but are intended as a reframing of their original purposes and horizons of meaning.

Laura Fiorio‘s work in the Bärenzwinger is part of her artistic project “My Fascist Grandpa”. Based on her own private family history, the project addresses Italy‘s often tabooed and concealed fascist and colonial past. To this end, she collects heirlooms from family archives, photos, letters, etc., and projects them onto fascist buildings as alienating and alienated interventions in order to reveal their historical background behind the façade. The continuation of the project in the Bärenzwinger is processual and participatory. The artist and the curators of the exhibition have issued a call to the local public to hand in materials related to German fascism: National Socialism. The materials were arranged sculpturally by Fiorio in order to place the individual and private stories and memories in a larger discursive context and bring them to the public. The project is designed in such a way that visitors can also submit materials during the exhibition and incor-porate some of them themselves. In this way, visitors are not only activated as participants, but are also included in the discourse and challenged to critically analyse their own family history. The exhibition is also accompanied by a workshop that offers the opportunity for further in-depth exploration. Fiorio‘s three-part intervention in the bear cage begins in the left cage. It is the silence and the backlog of reflection of the often shameful, repressed individual stories that are focussed on here. Two Leitz Leica slide projectors, built in the 1930s, project images of deceased fascists and National Socialists onto textile prints hung one behind the other with pictures of the same and other historical figures. The porosity and permeability of the prints and the resulting interaction between them in turn points to the interrelatedness of individual and collective histories. This also problematises the discrepancy between collective demarcation and individual reappraisal of the family‘s National Socialist legacy. According to the Remembrance Monitor (MEMO Germany), only 23 per cent of Germans consider their ancestors to be perpetrators, while 36 per cent state that their family members were victims of the Nazi regime. However, more than 30 per cent believe that they themselves would have actively resisted. According to estimates, however, the proportion was actually less than 0.3 per cent. In view of and in opposition to these glaring discre-pancies, Fiorio shows the first results of the appeal in the right-hand kennel. Here, materials (photos, letters, crockery, etc.) are installed in a floating sculpture. Their suspended state is representative of the fragile incompleteness and the necessity of a moral regulative in dealing with the National Socialist legacy. The image projections of the overhead projectors also cast shadows, i.e. blank spaces, on the wall of the Zwinger and thus shed light on the problem of historical transmission: what has been intentionally or unintentionally forgotten forever and how should this be dealt with from a political and social perspective? Furthermore, how can the instructional mentalisation of (un)knowledge about history be prevented? The discourse on the National Socialist legacy itself takes on a historical tone in the resonance of these questions. The third part of Fiorio‘s interventions is dedicated to this:

In the anteroom to the Bärenzwinger – which forms both the entrance and the exit – an expansive video installation can be seen in which the variability and historicity of historical and contemporary contexts of meaning are called up and carried out in real time and in an endless loop. To talk about trees, as Brecht‘s poem An die Nachgeborenen (To Those Born After) puts it, is no longer a concealment of crimes in the sense of historical development. Rather, it is a necessary part of the discussion about the consequences of climate change for social peace, the development of democracy and dealing with its greatest enemy, right-wing extremism. Not least against this background, right-wing extremism is a global problem.

8/5/2024 from 6 pm

Free Entry

On Wednesday, 8 May 2024, from 6 pm the Bärenzwinger invites you to the opening of the exhibition »Nie wieder und jetzt« („Never again and now“).

The duo exhibition brings together the artistic works of artists Laura Fiorio and Jakob Ganslmeier.

In four exhibitions under the title EDGES AND KNOTS, the Bärenzwinger explores lines as a fundamental element of networks in which knots stand for people or places and edges represent the relationships between them – based on graph theory, according to which knots represent individual points and edges the connections between them.

The second exhibition in 2024 examines which border negotiations and connections arise in the context of (right-wing) extremism.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a workshop by artist Laura Fiorio and a performance program by the Scheherazade collective.

Laura Fiorio (born 1985) is an artist working with photography, installation and relational practice. She lives and works in Berlin.

Her projects, developed through choral narratives, interact with existing archives and materials, questioning the power dynamics embedded in the editing process of images as memories, their institutionalized use and hence their critical and healing potential.

She has worked with participatory and multimedia photography in social projects, especially with imprisoned, disabled and homeless people.

Jakob Ganslmeier (born 1990) is a visual artist and photographer. He lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands. The focus of his works is to dismantle representations of radical ideologies by counteracting them through a participatory and artistic approach. This creates spaces and questions that break the closed ideological system.

His works have been exhibited in memorials and art institutions such as the Foam Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow – MOCAK, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and the Brandenburg State Museum of Modern Art in Cottbus and have been awarded prizes such as the European Photo Exhibition Award, ZOZ Academy Grant and the Lotto Brandenburg Foundation Grant.

Since 2021 he has been working together with the visual artist Ana Zibelnik.

When: 1/6/2024 at 3 pm with Laura Fiorio

When: 1/6/2024 at 3 pm with Laura Fiorio

Where: Bärenzwinger Berlin, Rungestraße 30, 10179 Berlin.

Registration required by 31.05.24, 3 pm at the latest via the following link:
docs.google

Due to the size of the venue, a maximum of 10 participants will be able to take part in the workshop. You will be notified by email. Thank you for your understanding!

Following the historian Ann Laura Stoler, an “aphasia” can be observed with regard to history in some contemporary discourses, i.e. an inability to speak about one’s own past, especially when it comes to tracing systemic violence and power relations.

Departing from her own family history and the involvement of her grandfather in the fascist regime in Italy as well as in the colonial war in Ethiopia, Fiorio developed a collaborative long-term project that uses participatory archiving methods to deal with histories that, given their intimate sphere of affection, demonstrate the normalization of ideologies.

How do those legacies influence our present?

This workshop invites the public to bring to the event items (pictures, objects, documents) or oral memories from their own family archives or to share family histories that can be considered a “difficult heritage”, specifically in connection with the NS-time in Germany.  The collected material will be activated to initiate a discussion at the intersection of public and private.

Creating a space for sharing and discussion, the aim is to weave connections through the multiplicities of personal stories, but also reflect on the many silences and hidden traces on our present everyday. Collectively unfolding narrations and narratives linked to loss of democracy and genocides, the workshop invites to reflect on the present.

The workshop addresses individuals interested in opening up their memories, unfolding together private archives and need a safe space and confident community to share them. The group will discuss the potentialities and ways of reusing the collected items and documents to rethink and rewrite personal and collective history. Aim is to exercise storytelling and shared methodologies to to counter revisionist intentions, one-sided, partly institutionalized narratives and the instrumentalization of history. The workshop is also an invitation to remember that every single stories counts and has a role in shaping history.

19/7 and 20/7/2024 7 pm

Free Entry

Registration required: Lina.Kroeger@ba-mitte.berlin.de

„The untold story of Mohammad Peter“ (Theatre performance) Kollektiv Scheherazade

The experimental play “The Untold Story of Mohammad Peter” sheds light on the phenomenon of right-wing extremism in the immigration society and tells the story of a teenager with a migration background who becomes a neo-Nazi.

Mohammad Peter – the son of two migrants struggling with the challenges of arriving in a foreign country – stops speaking. No one knows why he remains silent. Is it the bullying at school? Does he have mental health problems? Or is it because he simply no longer knows where he comes from and where he belongs?

Perhaps the many letters he writes will shed light on Mohammad Peter’s silence – love letters to Beate.

with
Rike Scheffler
Nail Doğan

Exhibition

16/2/2024 – 28/4/2024

Curated by Philipp Hennch, Joana Stamer

Coordination Annika Reketat

“in mir draußen” is the first part of the annual exhibition programme KANTEN UND KNOTEN

Events

15/02/2024 | from 6 pm
Opening
7 pm Sound Performance “Echoes from the Future” by Rike Scheffler
8 pm Reading by Nail Doğan

26/3/2024 | 7 pm
“Displayed Words”
Reading and Talk
Lou Ferrand, Rafael Moreno, Kinga Tóth

19/4/2024 | 9 pm
20/4/2024 | 9 pm
21/4/2024 | 9 pm
“Clinch”
Performance
by WILD ACCESS

28/4/2024 | 4 pm
Finissage
with readings by Rike Scheffler and Nail Doğan

The first exhibition in the 2024 annual program Edges and Knots is dedicated to storytelling as cultural practice, manifested in poetry.

The duo exhibition combines spatial-, video- and sound installations by poets Nail Doğan and Rike Scheffler. Words and verses interact with the architecture of the former animal kennel, whispers are hidden in walls; poetry as an installation takes up existing structural forms, flowing outside into the deep moats that once separated animals and humans.

Lyrical voices speak of connections and borders, ask about individual and collective, queer and changing identity. How do we live together? Who belongs to us? Who is included and who is excluded? What is it that divides us?

Semiotics and materiality create contradictions and bonds, languages mix or dissolve. The tension between poetry and space creates a field of possibilities »in mir draußen« (»in me outside«).

Rike Scheffler works transdisciplinary in the fields of poetry, performance, installation and music, frequently in collaboration with Ólafur Elíasson’s Institute for Spatial Experiments. For Scheffler, poetry is a space of possibility, a transformative social practice. Based on her poems, she develops performances, sound and video installations as well as spatial poetry and immersive ecosystems that challenge common perceptions.

Scheffler has received scholarships from prestigious institutions such as the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo, Casa Baldi and the Academy of the Arts Berlin, and won the Orphil Debut Prize for her poetry collection “der rest ist resonanz” (kookbooks, 2014). In her latest work, “Lava. Rituale” (kookbooks, 2023), Scheffler delves into speculative multispecies alliances and AI collaborations, unfolding new and tender ways of being.

Her global presence includes performances at renowned venues like Neue Nationalgalerie, Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Palais de Tokyo Paris.

Artist Portrait Louisiana Channel (2016)
https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/rike-schefflerpoetry-as-a-performance

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/rikescheffler/

Nail Doğan is a writer living in Hamburg. He was born in Augsburg in 1988 as the son of  a guesttaxidriver and a guestcleaninglady.

In 2020 he won the prize for poetry and the taz audience award at the 28th open mike – competition for young literature.

In 2023, his poetry debut “ausgeliehene suchtwörter” was published by Elif Verlag. He is also the author of several plays, which premiered at the Thalia Theater Hamburg.

15/02/2024 | from 6 pm

7 pm Sound Performance “Echoes from the Future” by Rike Scheffler

8 pm Reading by Nail Doğan

Free Entry

On Thursday the 15 February 2024, from 6pm the Bärenzwinger Berlin invites you to the opening of the exhibition “in mir draußen“, with Rike Scheffler and Nail Doğan.

The first exhibition in the 2024 annual program Edges and Knots is dedicated to storytelling as cultural practice, manifested in poetry. The duo exhibition combines spatial-, video- and sound installations by poets Nail Doğan and Rike Scheffler. Words and verses interact with the architecture of the former animal kennel, whispers are hidden in walls; poetry as an installation takes up existing structural forms, flowing outside into the deep moats that once separated animals and humans.

26/03/2024
7 pm

Reading + Talk
with Lou Ferrand Rafael Moreno Kinga Tóth

Displayed Words is CCA Berlin‘s literature project curated by Fabian Schöneich. It is an experiment in dealing with language, text and poetry through digital and public formats.

Who and what defines the space in which words are displayed and meanings are created? How does the perception of text change from one medium to another?

Displayed Words plays with the comprehensibility of text and its diverse representations; it poses questions about the context in which literature and poetry can be perceived and understood.

Finally, it asks how text is conveyed and in which language the dominant discourse and literature are communicated in a metropolis like Berlin.

What about languages that are considered minor and that are heard in everyday encounters in the city, such as Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Vietnamese or Spanish…?

The readings will be accompanied by a music / sound element, followed by a conversation with Lou Ferrand, a curator and writer based in Paris and Jeunes Commissaires Fellow with CCA Berlin in 2023.

Displayed Words is a collaboration between CCA Berlin and Bezirksamt Mitte, in cooperation with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, featuring works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Angélica Freitas, Hassan Khan, Otis Mensah, Rafael Moreno, Nazanin Noori, Nhã Thuyên, Kinga Tóth. All works on display can be seen also on displayedwords.org. The project will be accompanied by a series of reading events and a concert. Supported by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, project funds from Draussenstadt and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin

19/4/2024
20/4/2024
21/4/2024

9 pm

“Clinch”
Performance
by WILD ACCESS

WILD ACCESS is an interdisciplinary performance company that since 2021 has created site-specific productions for public spaces. Using dance, light, sound and storytelling, their immersive performances bring audiences together to experience urban locations through fictional landscapes and sensory worlds.

Beatrix Joyce
Michela Filzi
Lena Gätjens
Susanna Ylikoski
Savina Casarin
Imola Nagy
Sebastian Faust
Hannah Schillinger

Taking the history of the Bärenzwinger bear enclosure as a starting point, the interdisciplinary performance company WILD ACCESS explores animals in captivity and an encounter with “the wild”. In creating a fictional, immersive environment, the performers fall into a “CLINCH”; a grapple at close quarters between the human and the non-human, between claws and jaws. The audience is invited into an extended choreography that slips across territories of domestication and ferocity.

The weather forecast is not in our favour, so remember to wear weather-appropriate clothing! ☂️

28/04/2024
4 pm

with readings by
Rike Scheffler
and
Nail Doğan

On 28 April 2024, the Bärenzwinger invites you to the finissage of the exhibition »in mir draußen«from 4-7 pm.

The poets Rike Scheffler and Nail Doğan will read and the exhibition will be on display for the last time.