A Fire in My Belly
February 6–December 12, 2021, JSC Berlin
A Fire in My Belly is a large collection exhibition, featuring over thirty artists from different generations and backgrounds, who in a variety of mediums and contexts examine the ways in which experiences of violence and loss are enacted, witnessed, and transformed. Comprising film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, and poetry, the exhibition explores how artists negotiate and transcend these experiences through personal and political gestures of protest and resistance. The works included in A Fire in My Belly thus alternate between moments of tension, poetry, and release.
The title of the exhibition stems from the unfinished film A Fire in My Belly (Film in Progress) (1986–87) by American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. In the face of a society permeated by social injustices and oppression on both an individual and structural level, Wojnarowicz’s film distils his anger and anguish at the polarized and violent milieu of the 1980s, specifically in the United States, where the AIDS epidemic and the so-called Culture Wars were decisive in the artist’s life.
Through a range of public programs consisting of screenings, talks, and workshops, JSC Berlin will establish a platform to engage with various aspects of the multifaceted works on view. These will address, among other things, representations of violence and how they circulate, as well as the role of viewers as witnesses who may or may not be complicit themselves. A Fire in My Belly also features many new acquisitions from the past three years, including works by Sophia Al-Maria, Cyprien Gaillard, Leila Hekmat, Barbara Hammer, and David Wojnarowicz. The exhibition will be accompanied by a printed exhibition magazine, provided to all visitors free of charge. more
Artist list: Sophia Al-Maria, Peggy Ahwesh, Monica Bonvicini, Bernadette Corporation, Paul Chan, Thomas Demand, Maria Anna Dewes, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Marcel Dzama, Trisha Donnelly, Tracey Emin, Brock Enright, Cyprien Gaillard, Barbara Hammer, Leila Hekmat, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, Rindon Johnson, Zoe Leonard, Ana Mendieta, Asier Mendizábal, Colin Montgomery, Nandipha Mntambo, Adrian Piper, Laure Prouvost, Rob Pruitt, Robin Rhode, Bunny Rogers, Marianna Simnett, Jack Smith, P. Staff, caner teker, Kandis Williams, and David Wojnarowicz.
Curators: Lisa Long and Julia Stoschek
Curatorial Assistant: Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
JSC On View: Mythologists
January 17–June 6, 2021, JSC Düsseldorf
Perceptions of truth are widely mediated through moving images. While they can be used by those in authority to exert influence, this exhibition explores the ways in which time-based media can connect political ideologies with the desire to create a world of one’s own. Borrowing from various cultural narratives, the works expound on their potential to serve as an incubator for social mythologies.
JSC On View: Mythologists addresses the tensions created between facts and fictions through the production of personal as well as collective narratives. The works each grapple with various mythologies by reinterpreting histories, disrupting established behaviors, and imagining new visual and sonic worlds. What binds them together is that the limits between myth, fact, and fantasy are unclear—whether or not by the artist’s own making. Through everyday acts of pretending and performing, the works ask: What—if anything—can be trusted? How is meaning assigned to these stories? Who creates these myths and which ones will be carried into the future?
The third edition of JSC On View presents video and sound installations from 12 artists in the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, some of whom are being exhibited at JSC Düsseldorf for the first time. more
Artist list: Jamie Crewe, Guerrilla Girls, Mike Kelley, Lina Lapelyte, Mark Leckey, Klara Lidén, Laure Prouvost, Mika Rottenberg, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Jacolby Satterwhite, Wu Tsang, WangShui.
Curator: Rachel Vera Steinberg, fellow of the JSC Curatorial & Research Residency Program (CRRP) 2019-2020.
Jeremy Shaw
Quantification Trilogy
January 17–June 6, 2021, JSC Düsseldorf
Jeremy Shaw’s Quantification Trilogy consists of three parafictional short films: Quickeners (2014), Liminals (2017), and I Can See Forever (2018). The works are set in the future and explore how marginalized societies confront life after a scientific discovery has mapped and determined all parameters of transcendental spiritual experience. This is known as “The Quantification.” Employing aesthetics and outmoded media of the 20th century to depict the future, Shaw’s alchemical combination of cinema verité, ethnographic film, conceptual art, and music video invites the viewer to suspend their disbelief in the story, and provides a series of critical perspectives on systems of power. The Quantification Trilogy examines fringe culture, theories of evolution, virtual reality, neurotheology, esotericism, dance, the representation of the sublime, as well as the notion of transcendence itself. more
JSC Düsseldorf / Schanzenstrasse 54 / D 40549 Düsseldorf
T +49 (0)211 5858840
JSC Berlin / Leipziger Strasse 60 / D 10117 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 921062460
press [at] jsc.art
