Chains of Interest

Curated by Inka Gressel and Susanne Weiß.

With Chains of Interest, Isaac Chong Wai, Lizza May David, Wilhelm Klotzek, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika and Gitte Villesen continue their explorations of the ifa-Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen art collection. Since fall 2021, they have investigated the collection through their own artistic practices. In the preceding exhibition Spheres of Interest, the artists activated and contextualised selected works in performative and narrative formats, providing critical and humorous insights as well as illuminating omissions and political entanglements within the collection’s unique history. Chains of Interest presents newly developed works that reflect the artists’ research and correspond with works from the collection by Carlfriedrich Claus, Hannah Höch, Joe Jones, Käthe Kollwitz and Endre Tót in a polyphonic score of voices.

Lizza May David’s new painting depicts sonorous mmmms inspired by indigenous songs and myths from two distant Pacific coasts. Motivated by the unused drawer labelled “Asia” at the ifa depot, David decided to present the textual-visual works of Chinese-Filipino artist Elisa Tan to symbolically occupy this unfilled space. Tan’s “containers for thought” show imagined and inscribed landscapes, recalling the linguistic terrains of Carlfriedrich Claus, which estrange the viewer from familiar ways of seeing, writing, and reading.

Gitte Villesen has edited a new film entitled Strings and Berries. Hannah Höch’s collage Seidenschwanz forms the beginning of a chain of associations. The waxwing bird is seen weaving through various gardens and time periods, touching on notions of gender roles and references to Black feminist writers Octavia Butler and bell hooks. Over the course of the film, Villesen arrives at Höch’s house and garden near Berlin, where Höch settled two weeks after the outbreak of WW II. Höch used the remote location to hide documents and artworks by her friends – artists banned by the NS regime.

In the early 1990s ifa compiled a touring exhibition that introduced the oeuvre of avant-garde GDR artist Carlfriedrich Claus to an international audience. Wilhelm Klotzek’s affection for Claus’ interdisciplinary practice led him to select several of the latter’s transparent “language sheets” (Sprachblätter), juxtaposing them with his own photo film DHM (German Historical Museum). His humorous off-screen commentary reflects on his childhood in East Berlin and how history was written and erased during the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For Spheres of Interest, Ofri Lapid initiated a complex chain of translations based on Joseph Kosuth’s lexical work Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), which follows the itinerary of the ongoing touring exhibition Artspace Germany. This process deconstructs Kosuth’s terms meaningless, purple, and volume. Lapid’s resulting polyphonic performance featured over 30 speakers. Drawing from within this linguistic chaos, she has created a new audio piece. This verbal estrangement provides a critical distance from Kosuth’s works, while also offering glimpses of the languages spoken at over 30 different exhibition locations.

The Käthe Kollwitz sculpture Pietà shows a mother protectively holding her dead son. Moved by the history of Kollwitz’ self-portrait, Isaac Chong Wai considers its copy, four times the size of the original, at Berlin’s Neue Wache, a historic edifice where the sculpture has served as a memorial to “Victims of War and Tyranny” since 1993. Chong Wai retraces the bronze sculpture with his breath to create a new work in dialogue with Kollwitz’ original (1937-39). His installation consists of a glass sculpture and photograph that give form to the fragility of life.

Adrien Missika’s MOTUS is a mobile museum on two wheels that both exhibits and activates his selection of Fluxus works in public. For Chains of Interest, he connects Endre Tót’s series of Very Special Drawings with the mechanical musical instruments of Joe Jones. Surrounded by the Fluxus artists’ minimal sounds and drawings, Missika invites his audience to participate in a game of syllables played with marble pebbles. Like an oracle, the words and sentences conjured by the dice make predictions about the future.

Press contact: Corinna Wolfien, Books Communication Art mail [​at​] corinnawolfien.com