These Are the Only Times You Have Known / Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz: The Right to Have Rights

These Are the Only Times You Have Known
March 7–May 3, 2020
Opening: Friday, March 6, 7pm
Artists: Frauke Boggasch, Ursula Döbereiner, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Leon Kahane, Şener Özmen, Doireann O’Malley, Sabine Reinfeld, Maya Schweizer, Lerato Shadi, Rui Vilela, Philip Wiegard
Curators: Arkadij Koscheew, Michaela Richter

The exhibition These Are the Only Times You Have Known presents the work of 11 international artists who were awarded the Berlin Senate’s Visual Arts Grant in 2019. The range of artistic positions they represent reflects the diversity of artistic forms of expression in Berlin and includes the examination of different layers of time, hidden narratives, and issues of belonging and performativity. The search for meaning in the present is an element shared by all of the artistic works presented in These Are the Only Times You Have Known, whose spectrum ranges from paintings, photographs, prints, and video installations to virtual reality techniques. The title These Are the Only Times You Have Known underscores the contemporaneity of the positions assembled in the exhibition, while at the same time pointing to the individual artistic achievements, each of which formulates questions about the present, past, and future in its own way.

A preoccupation with questions of temporality is an important aspect for many of the exhibited works. Two video essays by Maya Schweizer, for example, analyze images and spaces of forgetting, while Frauke Boggasch’s large-format paintings bring forth shadowy beings that emerge from the past to haunt a fleeting present. Leon Kahane layers texts, images, and documents from archives to draw connections between his family history and political upheavals of the 20th century.

How knowledge can be preserved and passed on, and how communities can be created, are questions at the center of Rui Vilela’s research-intensive practice, which brings to light the once forgotten sound archive of the state broadcasting corporation of Guinea-Bissau against the backdrop of Portuguese colonial rule. Lerato Shadi questions the framework of a society as articulated through its written constitution along with the inclusions and exclusions that accompany it as well as possibilities for political action. Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff investigate the genesis of temporary communities in the space between script and improvisation, play and authenticity.  

In addition, several works illuminate the connection between material, body, and form and associated movements of form-giving and loss of form. Ursula Döbereiner, for example, uses the technical properties of the scanner and printer as a dispositif to respond directly to the exhibition space with a brazen arrangement of inkjet prints. For his tableaux made of PVC modelling clay, Philip Wiegard assembles individual visual elements that have been cut out of three-dimensional objects which then become serially produced surfaces that reflect the specific possibilities of the material.

In her 3 channel video installation, Sabine Reinfeld deals with notions of surface and depth, staged worlds, and the emotions associated with them by reflecting on processes of de- and re-materialization as well as the pictorialization of the body in front of scenic landscapes. Doireann O’Malley uses virtual reality to create places that, while based on existing spaces, are reassembled through speculative techniques into a virtually experienceable world. The protagonist in Sener Özmen’s 3 channel video installation oscillates between pop-cultural references and political agenda, between Diyarbakır and Berlin, and disappears in his search for a past utopia.

The title of the exhibition These Are the Only Times You Have Known underscores the contemporaneity of the positions assembled in the exhibition, while at the same time pointing to the individual artistic achievements, each of which formulates questions about the present, past, and future in its own way.

Public Program

Tuesday, March 17, 2020, 7pm
On View: New acquisitions 2019 for the collection of the n.b.k Video-Forum
Screening with video works by John Bock, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Candice Breitz, Eduard Constantin, Antje Ehmann und Eva Stotz, Tomas Schmit, Hito Steyerl, Clarissa Thieme

Thursday, March 26 / April 16 / April 30, 2020, 7pm
Love the idea of being live! #1–3
Performative activation of the installation Cars Land (2020) by Sabine Reinfeld (artist, Berlin)

Thursday, April 2, 2020, 7pm
Recipes for Survival. A Village in the Backlands of Southern Brazil
Panel discussion with Maria Thereza Alves (artist, Berlin and São Paulo), Wilma Lukatsch (art historian and author, member of the DFG Research Training Group „Knowledge in the Arts“, Berlin University of the Arts) and Teodora Kotseva (cultural manager, curator and author, Berlin)
In English

Sunday, May 3, 2020, 7pm
Moving Backwards
Performance and book presentation with Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz (artists, Berlin) and Werner Hirsch (performer, Berlin), concert by Aérea Negrot (musician and performer, Berlin)
In English

Free admission to all events

Publication
As part of the n.b.k. book series “Berlin,” a bilingual publication (DE/EN) is published by Walther König, Cologne, including an introduction by Klaus Lederer and Marius Babias as well as texts by Arkadij Koscheew, Michaela Richter, and Marlene Streeruwitz.

n.b.k. Showroom
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. The Right to Have Rights
March 10–May 3, 2020
Opening: Friday, March 6, 7pm
Curator: Krisztina Hunya

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have had a decisive influence on contemporary art discourse with their performance-based films and installations. They strategically explore the ambivalences of visibility by precisely choreographing camera movements, viewers, and objects in space. Their artistic practice manifests itself in films, performances, songs, objects, and texts. They collaborate with dancers, choreographers, and visual artists with whom they share a long history of dealing with conditions of performance and violent hierarchies of bodies, but also of community, glamour, and resistance.

With the solo exhibition The Right to Have Rights, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein presents a new work by Boudry and Lorenz. In their room-filling video installation, the artists turn their attention for the first time to international law with an excerpt from the 1951 Refugee Convention. This agreement, made between 147 states, guarantees extensive rights for refugees and is still valid today. The performer MPA recites the text on the abandoned runway of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. While the spoken word and thus the written decree of this legally binding treaty gradually gives way to a musical composition (sound design: Rashad Becker), the work of Boudry and Lorenz negotiates the question: Who is seen as „human“ and who has access to political rights?