Realities Left Vacant, Sung Tieu, and Carrie Mae Weems

Realities Left Vacant
Nadja Abt, Tekla Aslanishvili, Marianna Christofides, Silvina Der Meguerditchian, Christian Diaz Orejarena, Sofia Duchovny, Ahu Dural, Cornelia Herfurtner, Göksu Kunak, Isaiah Lopaz, Alina Schmuch

Opening: March 10, 2023, 7pm
March 11–May 7, 2023
Curators: Layla Burger-Lichtenstein, Arkadij Koscheew

Realities Left Vacant presents works by the 11 international artists awarded the 2022 visual arts work stipend of the Berlin Senate. The exhibition shows the diversity of their individual artistic approaches while highlighting the broader social issues and contemporary image politics that shape them.

The artworks address questions of origin, belonging, and the relationship between collective and individual memory and investigate the influence of geopolitical conflicts and the global climate crisis on access to infrastructures. Drawing on documentary and investigative practices, archive-based research, biographical narratives, and the image politics permeating the mass media, they call for an engagement with power structures, colonial legacies, and mechanisms of value creation.

Discourse program
Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 7pm
“Radical Futurisms. Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come”
Book presentation and discussion with T.J. Demos (Professor in Art History and Visual Culture, University of California Santa Cruz)
In English

From Tuesday, April 4, 2023
“Critical Infrastructures”
Online panel discussion with Gustav Cederlöf (Environmental Geographer, Lecturer, University of Gothenburg), Sepideh Karami (Architect, Lecturer, The University of Edinburgh), and Ute Tellmann (Professor for General Sociology, Technical University of Darmstadt), moderated by Keller Easterling (Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture, Yale University, New Haven / US)
In English


n.b.k. Showroom

Sung Tieu: No Jobs, No Country
Opening: March 10, 2023, 7pm
March 11–May 7, 2023
Curator: Anna Lena Seiser

In video and sound works, installations, and objects, the German-Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu (b. 1987 in Hai Duong / Vietnam, lives in Berlin) explores connections between architecture and ideology, bureaucracy and power structures, and the effects of the Cold War. Tieu’s exhibition at n.b.k. focuses on the “Objekt Gehrenseestrasse,” one of the largest dormitory complexes in East Germany, built in the early 1980s in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg. The housing complex comprises nine identical Plattenbau structures made of prefabricated concrete slabs. From 1982 on, it was mainly used for housing contract workers, particularly from Vietnam, who lived under strict regulations and constant supervision with around 5 m2 of living space per person.

Tieu herself lived in one of the buildings at Gehrenseestrasse from 1994 to 1997. Many of her works deal with the role of contract workers in East Germany and the bureaucratic constraints imposed on them, both before and after German Reunification.

Find more information here.

n.b.k. Billboard

Carrie Mae Weems. Queen B
Opening: March 10, 2023, 7pm
March 11–August 27, 2023
Curator: Lidiya Anastasova

Since the 1980s, Carrie Mae Weems has consistently explored issues of gender, race, and class, as well as the asymmetry of sociopolitical power relations and their consequences, while constantly questioning the status quo. Her artistic practice spans photography, video, site-specific installations, texts, performances, and activist campaigns. Weems often uses visual quotations from historical, scientific, museum, and pop cultural contexts as an act of reappropriation and empowerment concerning the politics of representation in general, and of Black (hi-)stories and lived experiences in particular.

For the n.b.k. Billboard series, Weems adapted the photograph Queen B, which is part of an extensive series of images devoted to the R&B icon and actor Mary J. Blige. Weems produced the series in 2017. In context of the n.b.k. program, this work will be represented for the first time in the urban space. Here, it undergoes a temporal and spatial recontextualization to take on further narrative strands, for instance, with regard to current events surrounding the British monarchy.

Find more information here.