Step Out of the Strange Light / Loretta Fahrenholz: A Decade that Exploded

Step Out of the Strange Light
Artists: Larissa Fassler, Raphaël Grisey in cooperation with Bouba Touré, Bettina Hutschek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Musquiqui Chihying, Mandla Reuter, Padraig Robinson, Setareh Shahbazi, Pauł Sochacki, Adnan and Nina Softić, Clarissa Thieme in cooperation with Charlotte Eifler
Curators: Krisztina Hunya, Melanie Roumiguière

With Step Out of the Strange Light, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein continues its series of group exhibitions with artists who have been awarded the Berlin Senate’s work stipends in the visual arts. The exhibition serves as a platform for diverse positions of contemporary art production in Berlin and reveals numerous connections between the various artistic and thematic focal points.

A new film by Adnan and Nina Softiæ, which addresses the link between national myth-making and the hegemonic disregard of victim perspectives in former Yugoslavia. The revision of historical narratives in public space is also considered in Larissa Fassler’s work, in which she observes the ongoing transformation and everyday use of the area around the new Berlin Palace, the site of the former Palace of the Republic. Musquiqui Chihying examines how colonial heritage is anchored in museum policies in a non-European context, using China’s economic and cultural expansion in Africa as an example.

Several artists in the exhibition use archives and institutional forms of remembering as a starting point to uncover shortcomings and critically intervene in existing mechanisms of power. Charlotte Eifler and Clarissa Thieme research the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and develop a filmic analysis that combines strategies of reenactment, translation, and abstraction to capture documents, memories, and testimonies from multiple perspectives. Based on his many years of cinegeographical research, Raphaël Grisey collaborates with Bouba Touré and the agricultural cooperative Somankidi Coura in Mali to create a “generative archive” consisting of archival material, photographs, and interviews. Rajkamal Kahlon grapples in her work with hegemonic systems, by manipulating the pages of historical publications through overpainting, appropriation, and addition. Her series presented in this exhibition focuses on a multi-part image collection from the 1950s depicting folkloric costumes of the “peoples” of former Yugoslavia. In his journalistic and cinematic work, Padraig Robinson explores ways of modifying existing narrative traditions and visual economies from a queer perspective. In addition to the reappraisal of gay rights movements, his works focus on the socioeconomic realities of homosexuality and its criminalization.

The work of Mandla Reuter takes the form of site-specific interventions in spaces and situations. They expose resource-oriented modes of functioning and dependencies, geographically linking disparate locations in utopian scenarios. Bettina Hutschek experiments with forms of storytelling and explores the transitions between science fiction utopias, alternative concepts of reality, mythology, and research. Combining humor with sober reality, the paintings of Pauł Sochacki depict figures that seem vaguely familiar, as well as absurd scenes commenting on the state of social values and identity politics. The artistic practice of Setareh Shahbazi is characterized by a playful approach to multiple references that unfold through conversations, collaborations, and visual notes. Shahbazi brings together the fragmented narratives and their different contexts, temporalities, and languages by first dissecting them in terms of their visual and thematic components and then reassembling them in an alternative order.

The title of the exhibition Step Out of the Strange Light refers to a line from the song Come to Life (1976) by Arthur Russell. It continues the n.b.k. tradition of associatively linking the presentation of the Senate fellows with a musical piece. The interdisciplinary approaches of many of the exhibited works will be reflected on in an online program that includes artist talks, discussions, and a video premiere. For more information please visit www.nbk.org.

Loretta Fahrenholz. A Decade that Exploded
Curator: Anna Lena Seiser

For her first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents a new film by Loretta Fahrenholz. Set in 2012 and 2020, A Decade that Exploded takes a non-linear, multi-perspective look at the lives of Harry, Sally and Mimi, three women living in New York. Comprised mainly of footage recorded on smart phones, the film is an intimate reflection on our times, on womanhood, and on friendship, framed against the backdrop of the art system and the social and technological transformations of the last decade.

All three of the film’s actors work in the New York art world; Thea Westreich is an art collector, Michele Abeles is a photographer, and Emily Sundblad is a visual artist, musician, and gallery owner. Playing across several screens we witness scenes of playful flirtation at a bar, a silent visit to an exhibition, and conversations about art and family interwoven with seemingly casual street scenes and monologues on grief, relationships, and illness. A Decade that Exploded rejects pre-determined divisions between identities, roles, and fixed points of view.

In Fahrenholz’s post-cinematic approach the boundaries between the performative and the cinematic dissolve into a simultaneity of overlapping layers, spaces, and times, mimicking the technological mediation of our everyday life. The iPhone 4, launched in 2011, was the first smartphone to allow high-definition video to be recorded spontaneously by consumer-devices—establishing new techniques of image-based self-expression and marketing that have since become commonplace. This hyper-present yet naturalized techno-cultural transformation is both an object represented in the film and the subject inscribing it.

In the first part of the film, we see the three women, usually together, moving about in New York City. In contrast, the second half of the film was shot during the 2020 lockdown and is composed of fragments of the protagonists everyday lives, recorded in isolation in their different spaces of retreat. The passage of time between the two periods is not depicted but can be traced through their recollections of personal developments and past events. The work opens up a space of resonance for both one’s personal experiences and more universal questions of our time—about life plans, about reproduction and death, art, and growing older.

The exhibitions can be visited from March 26 after prior online registration.
Go to www.nbk.org for more information or click here to schedule your visit.