Mess With Your Values / Eric Baudelaire. Walked The Way Home

Mess With Your Values

Artists: Yalda Afsah, Lars Bjerre, Jeremiah Day, Annette Frick, Katrin Glanz, Nadira Husain, Wilhelm Klotzek, Andréas Lang, Annika Larsson, Zoë Claire Miller, Katrin Winkler

Curators: Marenka Krasomil, Michaela Richter

The exhibition Mess With Your Values presents the wide range of topics and practices of eleven international artists, who were awarded the Berlin Senate work stipends in the visual arts in 2017. Numerous video artworks, expansive installations and performative works, paintings, prints and photographs offer an insight into Berlin‘s artistic diversity.

Mess With Your Values presents positions dealing with issues of change in society, the encounter and exchange of different social groups, the recognition and equality of all genders as well as forms of historiography. At the same time they question normative perspectives and use artistic means to deliberately create ruptures that can be experienced as spaces of opportunity.

The title of the exhibition Mess With Your Values resorts to the band Joy Division. In the song Candidate from their legendary album Unknown Pleasures the band sings in a laconic and haunting post-punk manner about the rebellion against existing circumstances and the dissociation from repressive systems.

The artists of the exhibition examine concepts of society, territories and narratives with a variety of approaches and ways of expression. Mess With Your Values sounds out habitual patterns of thought and deadlocked value patterns as to their flexibility and ambiguities. The deliberate blurring of borders and the creation of a “mess” serve as productive strategies that, in an expressive, subversive and humorous way, enable a new view on community.

Public program

Friday, March 9, 7pm
“Antimoderne Formen, gegen die Reproduktion unserer Gegenwart”
Discussion of Kerstin Stakemeier‘s book Entgrenzter Formalismus. Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik (b_books)
With Anselm Franke, Juliane Rebentisch, and Kerstin Stakemeier, moderated by Jenny Nachtigall
In German

Saturday, April 14, 7pm
Ode To
Performance by Jeremiah Day and Discoteca Flaming Star
Venue: Park am Nordbahnhof, corner to the playground (Gartenstraße 48, 13355 Berlin)

Friday, April 20, 7pm
“Spaces of Possibility in Art” (Möglichkeitsräume in der Kunst)
Panel discussion with Nikita Dhawan and Candice Breitz, moderated by Nuray Demir
In English

Sunday, April 29, 8pm
Molly Nilsson
Concert

Publication
As part of the n.b.k. book series “Berlin,” a bilingual publication (German/English) is published by Walther König, Cologne, including an introduction by Klaus Lederer and Marius Babias as well as texts by Fatma Aydemir, Marenka Krasomil and Michaela Richter.

n.b.k. Showroom
Eric Baudelaire
Walked The Way Home

Curator: Kathrin Becker

For his exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Eric Baudelaire created a new video work entitled Walked The Way Home, which is based on observations of the growing presence of armed soldiers in the urban space of various European cities as a result of terrorist attacks. The soldiers, filmed from varying angles, are shown immediately next to civilians, so that the contrast between the two groups of persons stands out clearly, creating a surreal atmosphere. Baudelaire employs slow motion and for the soundtrack of the video uses a disturbing composition by Rome-based American pianist and composer Alvin Curran, also the title is inspired by a Curran piece from 1973. Baudelaire made his first observations of military presence in the urban space on his way home from his studio in Paris and continued these observations in Rome, where he currently stays as part of a scholarship at the French Academy in the Villa Medici.

Eric Baudelaire (b. 1973 in Salt Lake City, living in Paris). Solo exhibitions (selection): Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2017); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2017); Ludwig Forum, Aachen (2015); Fridericianum, Kassel (2014); Bergen Kunsthall (2014); Beirut Art Center (2013); Gasworks, London (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010). Group exhibitions (selection): ISCP, New York (2017); MAXXI, Rome (2017); Whitney Biennial (2017); Biennale de Montréal (2016); Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2016); Sharjah Biennial (2015); Palais des Beaux Arts, Paris (2015); Yokohama Triennial (2014); Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2013); Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2013); MACBA, Barcelona (2013).