Fall program 2018

Beatriz González
Retrospective 1965–2017
October 13, 2018-January 6, 2019
Opening: October 12, 2018, 7pm
Curators: María Inés Rodríguez, Krist Gruijthuijsen

Steve Bishop
Deliquescing
November 3, 2018-January 6, 2019
Opening: November 2, 2018, 7pm
Curator: Anna Gritz

Sidsel Meineche Hansen
Real Doll Theatre
November 3, 2018-January 6, 2019
Opening: November 2, 2018, 7pm
Curator: Anna Gritz

Tamara Henderson
Womb Life 
November 3, 2018-January 6, 2019
Opening: November 2, 2018, 7pm
Curator: Anna Gritz

KW continues its exhibition program this fall with a major survey of the work of Colombian artist Beatriz González. It marks the first presentation of this scale outside of Colombia and is produced in collaboration with CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. In the late 1950s, González established an artistic practice that was strongly influenced by icon paintings, art-historical motifs, and local styles. Since then, González’ work deals with scenes from everyday life in her native Colombia as well as public rituals of protest. The artist broke with Pop Art’s anonymous, impersonal style by addressing political events from the country’s recent history through personal and intimate matters. The exhibition features 60 years of González’ internationally acknowledged work and displays a selection of 120 works created between 1965 and 2017. A comprehensive monographic publication accompanies the exhibition.

Three monographic exhibitions by artists Steve Bishop, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, and Tamara Henderson will be presented alongside González’ exhibition. The three presentations include newly commissioned work and each of them reveals subtle connections to González’ work by tracing the relationship between the appropriation of imagery, body politics, and subjects taken from contemporary culture.

Steve Bishop focuses on creating complex, surreal spatial structures. He is invested in questions of memory, the possibility of preservation, and how architectural spaces can reflect interior states. The conjuring of subtle emotional worlds through more or less abstract, biographical, dream-like, and parallel worlds is a leitmotiv in Bishop’s artistic practice. The exhibition Deliquescing unfolds through interaction with an abandoned modern town in northern British Columbia and the restorative qualities of the Lion’s Mane mushroom, exploring the fragility of memory and the possibility of its preservation against the effects of time.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s practice focuses on the industrial complex that connects virtual and robotic bodies with human labor within the pharmaceutical, pornographic, and tech industries. For the exhibition Real Doll Theatre, Meineche Hansen continues this line of enquiry, with focus on the concept and marketisation of sex robots, as one derivative of automated reproductive labour. Along different but parallel veins, the exhibition also explores art’s consumption and the services that artists are expected to provide. 

Tamara Henderson’s creative process develops its own mythology out of the ongoing process of writing and drawing, notes on everyday objects and their movement patterns, as well as records of their appearance under hypnosis and in dreams. Her practice takes an instinctive approach and inanimate objects often become implicated in storytelling, shape shifting across different bodies of work, time zones, and spaces. For KW, a hypnotic encounter at Gatwick Airport forms the foundation for a new body of work entitled Womb Life, consisting of a film in six parts, a group of characters masked as items of furniture, and custom-made curtains enveloping the space.

Click here for further details on the program.

Press contact:
Karoline Köber
T +49 30 243459 41
press [​at​] kw-berlin.de

The exhibition by Beatriz González is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

The exhibition by Steve Bishop is generously supported by the British Council through Arts Council England, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Canadian Embassy, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

The exhibition by Sidsel Meineche Hansen is funded by the Danish Arts Foundation and co-produced by Kunsthal Aarhus, Gallery of Denmark – Statens Museum for Kunst, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

The exhibition by Tamara Henderson is generously supported by the Canadian Embassy and Kvadrat.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is institutionally supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.