Laura Poitras: Circles / Dara Birnbaum: Talking Back to the Media

Laura Poitras: Circles
Curator: Marius Babias

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents the first European solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras. Her works expose state power by focusing on specific individuals confronting it. Circles includes prints from the ANARCHIST series (2016)—drone and satellite images hacked by the USA—and premieres two new video installations. Terror Contagion (2021) is an ongoing investigation by research agency Forensic Architecture and an accompanying film by Poitras. The work investigates Israeli cyber-weapons manufacturer NSO Group and the use of its Pegasus malware to target journalists and human rights defenders worldwide. Edgelands (2021), a collaboration with artist Sean Vegezzi, examines obscured nodes of New York City’s violent carceral and policing infrastructure: a 191-meter prison ship, and a covert surveillance unit to monitor political activity in the city. Together, the works in the exhibition expose how surveillance intersects with physical violence and psychological terror.

The work of Laura Poitras (born 1964 in Boston, lives in New York and Berlin) has deep connections to Berlin. In 2006, her film about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, My Country, My Country, premiered at the Berlinale.  Shortly after, the U.S. government placed Poitras on a terrorist watch list: for the next six years she was interrogated every time she crossed the U.S. border. In 2012, she relocated to Berlin to protect her sources, and was contacted by then-anonymous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The resulting film, CITIZENFOUR (2014), won an Academy Award and a German Film Prize. Her reporting on the NSA received a Pulitzer Prize and led to a German Parliamentary investigation into NSA mass surveillance in Germany.

Livestream: Artist talk
Friday, June 18, 2021, 7pm CEST

With Laura Poitras (artist), Eyal Weizman (director, Forensic Architecture), Shourideh Molavi (lead researcher, Forensic Architecture), and Sean Vegezzi (artist), moderated by Heba Y. Amin (artist, professor at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart). In English.

Dara Birnbaum: Talking Back to the Media
Curator: Arkadij Koscheew
n.b.k. Showroom

Dara Birnbaum is a pioneer of video art and has profoundly influenced its visual vocabulary since the 1970s. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the n.b.k. Video-Forum, founded in 1971, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) will host the first solo presentation of Birnbaum’s work in Germany in over 20 years. The focus is on works acquired for the collection of the n.b.k. Video-Forum since the 1980s. Birnbaum’s preoccupation with television, the mass medium of her time, manifests itself in her early works Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–1979) and Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (1979), which have become canonical works of video art. Her work Lesson Plans (To Keep the Revolution Alive) (1977), consisting of 30 image and text panels, premieres in Germany and relates Birnbaum’s early involvement with standardized cinematic techniques. The development of her own video aesthetic with the aid of visual effects is at the heart of her trilogy Damnation of Faust (1983–1987), which can be viewed on the n.b.k. website as an extension of the exhibition.

Dara Birnbaum (born 1946 in New York, lives and works there) is a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has taught at numerous universities, including the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main, Princeton University, and California Institute of the Arts in Valencia/California. Birnbaum participated several times at Documenta in Kassel (1992, 1987, 1982) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2003, 2001, 1995, 1984). Recent solo exhibitions include: Cleveland Museum of Art (2018); Serralves Foundation, Porto (2010); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); The Jewish Museum, New York (2003).

Artist talk
From Thursday, July 8, 2021
With Dara Birnbaum (artist, New York) und Stuart Comer (The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), moderated by Arkadij Koscheew (curator, Berlin). In English.