Winter/Spring program 2018

KW Institute for Contemporary Art launches its spring season 2018 with two comprehensive solo exhibitions by Judith Hopf and the architecture and design duo Trix & Robert Haussmann as well as the installation Super-8 Trilogy by the experimental filmmaker and artist Ericka Beckman, which initiates the season as part of the on-going series Pause.
 

Pause: Ericka Beckman
Super-8 Trilogy
January 18–21, 2018

The presentation of Ericka Beckman’s Super-8 Trilogy marks the first encounter with the spring program that investigates the human body and its ever-adaptive relationships to the advances in politics, technology, and architecture. Super-8 Trilogy consists of the films We Imitate; We Break Up (1978), The Broken Rule (1979) and Out of Hand (1981), which defy classical narrative structures and follow a choreography developed through the artist’s engagement with the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Piaget shaped research on the cognitive development of children, primarily in the field of developmental psychology, and took the view that cognitive development is accelerated by interaction with the environment. The three films explore the role of play in the process of memory formation and learning through the use of surreal, dreamlike film sequences, and abstract symbols as triggers for our organization of language, and structural thinking.
 

Judith Hopf
Stepping Stairs
February 10–April 15, 2018

Since the 1990s, the Berlin-based artist Judith Hopf has mastered an independent artistic language that unswervingly manages to stake out new ground, be it in the form of sculpture, film, drawing, performance or stage design. Her iconic works are deeply rooted in the use of everyday materials, like brick, concrete, glass, packaging, and easily graspable manufacturing processes, employing them to investigate the social dynamics of our built environment and their influence on behaviour, power dynamics and social codes. For her exhibition Stepping Stairs at KW, Hopf continues her engagement with the material bricks. The stone-masoned brick works occupy a curious intermediary position that fluctuates between sculpture and (exhibition)-architecture, both dividing and augmenting the exhibition space. The brick works will be presented alongside older works, including a reworked constellation of her laptop sculptures. Abstract figures in different everyday poses appear to be seamlessly merged with the laptops they balance on their waists and knees. Shaped by what appears to be an over-use of technology, the sculptures assume a hybrid form situated somewhere between laptop and human being.

Alongside the sculptural works, the exhibition at KW will include a new short film as well as an ambitious commission for the facade in KW’s courtyard. In these commissioned works, two historic artists have served as sources of inspiration: the American architect and architectural theorist John Hejduk (1929–2000), and the German artist Annette Wehrmann (1961–2010). Wehrmann’s installation of Serpentine Streamer Texts will be on view alongside an audio recording of her reading of the texts on the third floor at KW from February 10 until March 11, 2018. A comprehensive reader will be published with Verlag Walther König, featuring contributions by Hopf as well as by central companions of her work. The exhibition is curated by Anna Gritz.
 

Trix & Robert Haussmann
The Log-O-Rithmic Slide Rule: A Retrospective
February 10–April 29, 2018

The architecture and design duo Trix & Robert Haussmann may be counted among the most important Swiss architects of the 20th century. They have realized about 650 projects in their lifetime including the legendary Da Capo Bar, Shopville in Zurich’s main railway station, the boutique Weinberg, the famous Kronenhallenbar and numerous successful experiments in artistic and handcrafted furniture. Since founding their “Allgemeine Entwurfsanstalt” (General Design Institute) in 1967, Trix & Robert Haussmann have been pioneers in breaking with the premises of modern, canonical orders and concepts, reinterpreting playfully the linguistic dogmas of architecture theories. Evading the dictum “form follows function,” their designs pursue a “manierismo critico” (a critical Mannerism), permitting them to merge the old and the new, to generate dissent and work with ambiguity, contradiction, and chance. Their exhibition The Log-O-Rithmic Slide Rule: A Retrospective will be the first significant survey of their work in Europe and showcases the main works of the collection at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich, works of the estate by Peter Röthlisberger and actual compartments of interior design. The exhibition is curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen and is accompanied by interventions by Petra Blaisse, Liam Gillick, and Karl Holmqvist. The exhibition will travel to Nottingham Contemporary later this year.
 

K, A Year with P. Krishnamurthy
February 3–December 16, 2018
Venue K,: Ebersstraße 3, 10827 Berlin-Schöneberg

In February 2018, for the residency format A Year with …, P. Krishnamurthy will follow Will Holder’s completed 2017 residency, Prospectus: A Year with Will Holder, by opening the space called K, (“K-Komma”). Located outside of KW in Berlin-Schöneberg, this “workshop for exhibition-making” proposes a space between “studio and cube.” Framed by the work of the East German graphic designer Klaus Wittkugel (1910–85), K, will invite local and international artists, designers, and curators to actively consider the exhibition form anew through installations, talks, and pedagogical interventions. Krishnamurthy works at the intersection between art and design as a curator, designer, writer, and educator.

The exhibition Stepping Stairs by Judith Hopf is kindly supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) and Stiftung Kunstfonds. The permanent commission is supported and donated by OUTSET Germany_Switzerland. The exhibition The Log-O-Rithmic Slide Rule: A Retrospective by Trix & Robert Haussmann is supported by Pro Helvetia and Herald St., London.

Further information
Katja Zeidler
T +49 30 243459 41 / press@kw-berlin.de