Oliver Ressler: Barricading the Ice Sheets / Sharon Hayes: What Do We Want?

Oliver Ressler: Barricading the Ice Sheets
June 4 – July 31, 2022
Curator: Marius Babias
With Barricading the Ice Sheets, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents a solo exhibition by the artist, filmmaker, and activist Oliver Ressler (b. 1970 in Knittelfeld, lives and works in Vienna). With Ressler’s multi-perspective approach to the climate crisis at its core, the exhibition investigates the complex links between economics, politics, the environment, and social change, illuminating the mechanisms and potential of worldwide protest actions. Ressler’s Barricading the Ice Sheets research project (2019–present) chronicles the mobilization of global climate movements with their activities, gatherings, and working meetings. In film projects, including several new productions, Ressler examines pivotal moments in climate justice and focuses on regional phenomena to shed light on systematic failures in global climate policy. Instead of aiming for apparent objectivity, he constantly reflects on his position as an involved participant and observer, thereby placing documentary and artistic strategies into dialogue with one another.


Online discourse program

From Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Oliver Ressler: Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart: Venice Climate Camp
Online screening
In English, Italian, and Spanish with German or English subtitles

From Thursday, June 30, 2022
Art Activism
Online discussion with Marco Baravalle (researcher, curator, and activist, Venice), iLiana Fokianaki (curator and author, Athens), Oliver Ressler (artist, Vienna), moderated by Ameli M. Klein (curator and researcher, Venice and Graz)
In English

From Friday, July 22, 2022
Toni Negri: “Singolarità, moltitudini: per una politica partecipata del comune” (Singularities, multitudes: for a participatory politics of the common)
Online lecture by Toni Negri (philosopher and political scientist, Paris)
In Italian with English subtitles


Sharon Hayes: What Do We Want?
June 7 – July 29, 2022
Curator: Anna Lena Seiser
Sharon Hayes uses photography, video, sound, and performance to explore the intersection of the personal and the political. Her multidisciplinary practice centers on the transformative power of language, which she explores in terms of historiography, collective subject formation, and political representation. As part of the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents a group of the artist’s works from various creative phases, and, with Ricerche: two (2020), one of her most recent works. The ongoing series Ricerche borrows its structure from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s famous 1964 documentary Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings), for which the director traveled for six months throughout Italy, interviewing people of all ages and social classes about conditions of sex, sexuality, and related political and economic possibilities. For Ricerche, Hayes takes up Pasolini’s interest in interviewing groups of people, but focuses on specific groups for extended interviews. In Ricerche: two, Hayes interviews 22 members of two women’s American football teams about the sport and its challenges. As the conversation unfolds, the group reveals the complex conditions that influence collective understandings of gender, sexuality, equality, and community, as well as intersecting identities on and off the field.