Program 2022

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce its program for 2022, which includes survey exhibitions by Peter Friedl, Rabih Mroué and Michel Majerus, new commissions, projects and exhibitions by Tobias Spichtig, BLESS, Oraib Toukan, Lydia Ourahmane, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Rachel Rossin and Atiéna R. Kilfa as well as the 12th Berlin Biennale curated by artist Kader Attia. 

A Year with BLESS
January 19–December 22
Curator: Anna Gritz
Assistant curator: Léon Kruijswijk

Since 2017, KW Institute for Contemporary Art has been hosting the residency format A Year with…, a program that generates an in-depth engagement with an artistic practice through a variety of inward and outward facing formats over the course of one year. In 2022, the duo BLESS will take over the program. More

Pause: Tobias Spichtig
Die Matratzen
January 19–23, 2022
Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Curatorial assistant: Linda Franken

KW has invited the artist Tobias Spichtig (b. 1982, Switzerland) as part of Pause Series to present his installation Die Matratzen. As the name suggests, the exhibition consists of various second-hand and different-sized mattresses laid out across the entire floor of KW’s main hall. They are covered with used bed sheets from the personal networks of the artist as well as the curator, functioning both as a support mechanism and as catalysts for stories. As such they are evocative of moments of intimacy. More

Peter Friedl: Report 1964–2022
February 19–May 1, 2022
Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Assistant curator: Léon Kruijswijk

Report 1964–2022 is Peter Friedl’s (b. 1960) most extensive institutional survey in Germany to date. Adopting a variety of genres, media, and forms of display, Friedl’s works seek to explore the construction of history and the concepts within our political and aesthetical consciousness. His artistic practice is aimed at creating new models of narration in which time, permanent displacement, and critical intimacy all play a central role. More

Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2020: Rabih Mroué 
Under the Carpet
February 19–May 1, 2022
Curator: Nadim Samman
Assistant curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen

Rabih Mroué (b. 1967, Lebanon) is the 2020 recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research. Mroué’s acclaimed body of work that span theatre, visual arts, and literature. Working at the intersection of personal and political history, media criticism, and concepts of authorship, his oeuvre is an interrogation of the ways we see and speak. Under the Carpet features eight newly commissioned pieces that are set within a constellation of works that spans 20 years. More

Oraib Toukan: What Then
February 19–May 1, 2022
Co-Curators: Krist Gruijthuijsen and Léon Kruijswijk

KW Institute for Contemporary Art invites artist and scholar Oraib Toukan (b. 1977, US) to present two new films stemming from her long-standing research on “Cruel Images”. Her research-practice has been committed to exploring the line between looking at and looking away from mediated images of violence. More

12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
June 11–September 18, 2022
Curator: Kader Attia

Kader Attia (b. 1970, FR) looks back on more than two decades of decolonial engagement. As an artist, thinker, and activist, he has been particularly engaged with the notion of repair—first of objects and physical injuries, and then of individual and societal traumas. Throughout his practice, repair has emerged as a mode of cultural resistance, a form of agency that finds expression in diverse practices and fields of knowledge. In his role as curator of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Attia makes this form of agency the starting point of a program that involves contributors and audiences in a critical conversation, in order to find ways together to care for the now. More

KW Digital: Rachel Rossin 
Digital commission
Date: September 14–18, 2022
Curator: Nadim Samman

Rachel Rossin’s (b. 1987, US) newest work, commissioned in collaboration with a KW partner institution, will employ novel technologies that the artist herself has created. They are the result of her research into embodiment in virtual reality, neural networks and DNA as code. With exhibits in Berlin and New York, the piece will consist of a multi-platform installation that seeks to bring together the physical and the digital domain. 

Pause: Lydia Ourahmane
From October 1, 2022 onwards
Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen

In fall 2022, Lydia Ourahmane (b. 1992, Algeria) will create a site-specific, permanent installation at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. This new commission is a continuation of the artist’s ongoing engagement with the emotional, psychological, and political correlations between material, body, and place. Comprising sculpture and performance, the work engages her relation to her own mortality, the act of ritual, and the notion of permanence, situated in her interest of remains and relics. More

Michel Majerus: Early Works
October 22, 2022–January 22, 2023
Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Assistant curator: Léon Kruijswijk

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to take part in a major tribute to artist Michel Majerus (b. 1967–December 2002, Luxembourg) with a multifaceted program all over the city of Berlin as well as Germany that demonstrate the late artist’s influence on his peers as well as the following generations. Twenty years after his sudden death, the tribute will commemorate Majerus by showing both his reflections on painting as a medium as well as his groundbreaking vision. One of a world in which popular culture, advertisement, and the virtual realms of TV, videogames and computers have infiltrated the very essence of everyday life, a process that is only intensified by the developments in the digital realm. More

Christopher Kulendran Thomas
in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann
October 22, 2022–January 22, 2023
Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Assistant curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen

Over the past decade, British-Tamil artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas (b.1979, UK) has been addressing the way contemporary art produces realities as well as negotiating the social and cultural interwovenness between the East and the West. He has been particularly invested in examining the relationships between technology, imperialism, citizenship, and the political economy, as seen through the prism of the cultural scene of his native homeland, Tamil Eelam, a scene that was quasi extinguished when the de-facto Tamil state in the north and east of today’s Sri Lanka was wiped out in 2009. More

Atiéna R. Kilfa  
October 22, 2022–January 22, 2023
Curator: Anna Gritz
Assistant curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen

The exhibition at KW is the first institutional solo exhibition of Atiéna R. Kilfa (b. 1990, France). Using installation, sculpture, photography, and film, Kilfa reflects on the role of artists in the production of contemporary subjectivity at a time when available models are rapidly collapsing. At her KW exhibition, Kilfa will be presenting a newly commissioned body of work centering in on the notion of the “model,” a term not only used to describe mannequins and maquettes but also standardized fictional and social roles. More

BPA // Exhibition 2022
December 3, 2022–January 22, 2023
Curator: Léon Kruijswijk

KW and BPA// Berlin program for artists founded their partnership in 2020. BPA// is a mentoring program that fosters exchange between emerging and established Berlin artists. Founded in 2016 by Angela Bulloch, Simon Denny, and Willem de Rooij, BPA// organizes studio visits, public lectures, and group exhibitions. KW serves as the venue for the BPA// exhibition, an annual exhibition of work produced over the course of the current BPA// program.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is institutionally supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin.