Readings From Below

Artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Elom 20ce & Musquiqui Chihying & Gregor Kasper, Hao Jingban, Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Yuichiro Tamura and Yau Ching

Curated by Ariane Beyn

Times Art Center Berlin is pleased to announce the upcoming group show Readings From Below curated by Ariane Beyn. The exhibition explores how artists engage us in new readings of our complex present by making use of the virtual potentials of archives. While the traditional institution of the archive with its sense of permanence and timeless solidity, its physical location and architecture continues to exist, in today’s world of digitized information, archives are becoming radically temporalized, multimodal, and detached from any specific space in line with a dynamic user culture. Any materials retrieved from these heterogeneous archives can be reused, recontextualized, or restaged, with the possibility of reconfiguring them in any conceivable arrangement. Artists today, more than ever before, are working with archive documents, research, information, and data, processing their material in innovative ways and opening it up to our collective memory for retrieval and reinterpretation.

Readings From Below brings together works that offer less obvious, unconventional suggestions as to how to read our world, often starting with a subjective perspective, a daily environment, a particular location, or a contextual detail, only to engage us in broader social and political constellations. The themes that will weave through this exhibition focus on the impact of the future on the past, unresolved identities, narrated sound and performed language, and readability and unreadability, thus representing a free play with contradictions and polyphonic voices. Reading the world from below also means highlighting what is hidden, silenced, and suppressed in everyday life or in the archive, opting for a reflective mode, and attending closely to our surroundings.

The exhibition will combine existing work with new commissions. 

For Readings From Below, Times Art Center Berlin is collaborating with Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art on a film program that will be presented online on Arsenal 3 in November 2020 as part of the project “Archive außer sich”.

The exhibition is part of the Berlin Art Week (September 9–13, 2020).

Founded by the Guangdong Times Museum in 2018, Times Art Center Berlin is the first parallel institution set up overseas by an Asian art museum.

To ensure a safe environment, we kindly ask you to book your visit in advance via our website: www.timesartcenter.org/visit-us/

Press contact
Press [​at​] timesartcenter.org