Program 2023

Kestner Gesellschaft’s 2023 program takes a risk of trespassing to set up, “the possibility of a path, the path of a sensible clearing,“ “far out into the unnavigated.”

When does the century begin? What is its movement, its trajectory? Anabasis is a phantasmagoria and a reverie; it indicates both the moment of embarking and the moment of returning. Upward and back, as the poet says, a re-ascent towards the source. The experience of the beginning and the sense of an end. A simultaneity—a contradiction; a paradox of time. The curve of a return.

From There and Back Again (Paula Rego) through Anabasis (Paul Celan) towards Between Past and Future (Hannah Arendt), these are the meta-narratives conditioned by the poignant imprisonment in the past and the imperative towards “the heart-bright future.” Anabasis is a habitat of a (delusionally unconditional) togetherness: future past as a kind of fraternal alterity; a confluence of legacy and projection: upward and back, a looped perception of time and history, a hyper-avant-garde and post-tradition mythology of the new times to come; a Janus’ story, the schizo-god of beginnings and of gateways, with two sets of eyes, one looking into the past and the other gazing towards the future. By seeing simultaneously what mortals do not see at all, Janus bridges the past with the future and the future with the past; he is the guardian of the trespassing “far out into the unnavigated.”

Spring: March 4–June 4, 2023

Klára Hosnedlová: To Infinity
For her first institutional solo show, Klára Hosnedlová (born 1990 in Uherské Hradiště, Czech Republic) metamorphoses Kestner Gesellschaft’s organic interiors into labyrinthian interiorities, laboriously modelling spatialities of voyeuristic surfaces—oblique mirrors of humanoid selves. Her monumental performative sculptures, suspended like clouds of opaque matter, are incubators of corporeal poetry, generous habitats for miniature images of a fragmented world at the brink of exhaustion. There it is: a mise en scene of the ecology of intimacy in a claustrophobic womb of overexposure.

Diedrick Brackens: everything I have ever touched
This is Brackens’ first solo show in a European art institution. Exploring the intersections of identity and sociopolitical issues, Diedrick Brackens (born 1989 in Mexia, Texas) creates intricate, handwoven tapestries and textile sculptures that reexamine allegory and narrative through material, autobiography, the broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history and memory.

Institute of Queer Ecology: Hysteria (Project Space)

Rodrigo Hernández: Flux of Things (Facade)

Gesellschaft: A parasite project by the students of the class Asta Gröting, HBK Braunschweig: Max Bergmann, Aleksandra Saša Jeremić, Charlotte Kremberg, Patryk Kujawa, Luis Kürschner, Eileen Raddatz, Luca Rohringer, Luisa Walther (Future Scenarios)

MJ Harper: Arias for a New World (finissage performance)

Summer: July 8–June 1, 2023

The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor. El Lissitzky: The Self-Portrait as the Kestner Gesellschaft (Group exhibition)
With this exhibition, the Kestner Gesellschaft traces the founding moments of its history and the avant-garde mission. Presented only seven years after the Kestner Gesellschaft’s establishment in 1916, the exhibition El Lissitzky was the very first institutional solo show of the Russian artist, marking his groundbreaking position as the announcer of the new vocabulary which revolutionized the formal language of art as well as his role as a constructor of an institutional thinking, based upon the scientific and experiential perception and innovative approach to exhibition’s architecture, strategies of display and a total understanding of artistic creation. The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor celebrates the centenary of this exhibition by paying a tribute to this significant fact in the Kestner Gesellschaft’s institutional history, a fact which planted a seed for a vast variety of experimental and progressive ideas, reflected in the future program and the institutional identity of the Kestner Gesellschaft.

Conceived as an institutional self-portrait of a prophetic artist, The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructorconsist of the archival materials and historical positions, set up in a confrontation with the deconstructive and revisionist reading of the modernist paradigm by the contemporary artists. With, amongst others, Fernanda Fragateiro, Florian Pumhösl, BEASTER, Susanne Sachsse, Marysia Lewandowska, and historical works by El Lissitzky, Lajos Kassák, László Moholy-Nagy, László Péri, Kurt Schwitters and many others.

Ella Walker: Scene Paintings (Project Space)

John Wood and Paul Harrison: Some Thing on the Front of a Building (Facade)

Marlena Kudlicka: one more than 1o (Tender Buttons Café Mural)

Paulina Ołowska: Slavic Goddesses and the Ushers (opening performance)

Fall / winter: November 4, 2023–February 4, 2024

Rebecca Ackroyd: Period Drama
Period Drama is the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by Rebecca Ackroyd (born 1987 in Cheltenham, UK). Exploring wild and domestic spaces, ruin and contraction, desire and disgust, Ackroyd’s practice assembles painting and sculptural works into dream-like landscapes. Rooted in both apocalyptic fantasies and a sense of reality, her work investigates the body, memory, femininity, sexuality and space, which she weaves together into a thick mesh of recurring patterns and symbols. Building bridges between past and present, she stages encounters with ubiquitous, innocuous objects that are steeped with a sense of the uncanny and experienced like remnants or flashbacks.

Samson Young: situated listening
At the core of this exhibition is Young’s new composition “Variations of 96 Chords in Space” (2023), a complex sequencing of music and images, sometimes ordered, sometimes haphazard, based upon the arrangement of notes and sounds in space and time, but also the choreography of “microphones” that “listen” to the sources of these sounds. Samson Young (born 1979 in Hong Kong) is a composer, sound and media artist, holding a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University. With a formal cross-cultural training in music composition, he draws from multicultural paradigms to weave a symphony of image and sound, touching upon the recurring topics of identity, history and literature.

Ian Cheng: Untitled (Project Space)

Philippe Parreno: Untitled (Facade) TBC

Casey Spooner (opening performance)