Summer program 2023

Klosterruine Berlin’s summer program 2023, curated by Juliane Bischoff, is dedicated to the built, discursive, and economic dimensions of public space as well as the historical traces that are inscribed into it. The public is understood here as a social and political process that is historically determined, but is also continually produced anew. Exhibitions, performances, and discussions take up questions around the interactions between built spaces and social life. What kinds of exclusions does public space enact? Which histories and experiences does it represent, and which ones are repressed? How does it structure the body, knowledge, and desire?

Past, present and potential futures of the Klosterruine in relation to its built and inhabited environments form the program’s point of departure. As one of the last remaining witnesses to Berlin’s founding history, the ruin of the former Franciscan monastery church reflects the multi-layered past of the city. With exhibitions as well as performative and discursive events, the summer program addresses spatial planning, forms of public communication, and modes of relation across human and animal life—and equally, the material realities that condition them. As a multivalent place that is simultaneously historical testimony, memorial as well as public space, the Klosterruine Berlin opens up the potential to consider the interactions between history, built space and society.

James Gregory Atkinson: 3 Songs for Marie Nejar, performed by Ahya Simone
Friday, April 28, 2023, 5pm
With 3 Songs for Marie Nejar, James Gregory Atkinson investigates music as a space of memory. Marie Nejar, born in 1930 in Mühlheim an der Ruhr, began performing as a singer under the name Leila Negra at the beginning of the 1950s. Her life was shaped by the racist exclusions of Nazi Germany and its continuities into post-war Germany. Detroit harpist Ahya Simone will interpret songs by Nejar, following Atkinson’s invitation. The performance takes up an expanded conception of archives, in which places, bodies and oral as well as performative practices are understood as historical carriers.*

Gerry Bibby: Lobby
May 6–June, 11, 2023
Exhibition opening: Friday, May 5, 2023, 6pm. In Gerry Bibby’s Lobby, dependencies are neither denied nor reified, but acknowledged as the foundation of any social fabric. Architectural elements, furniture, and text are blended together and brought into new constellations that suggest social interactions. By reinterpreting and reworking materials and the functions of objects, Bibby allows potential for protest, self-empowerment, and poetry to emerge. Here, a table cannot only function as a site of gathering, administration, presentation, or negotiation. Through rearrangement it also points to the frictions, ruptures, and gaps in the interstices of the public sphere.

Miriam Stoney with Robert Schwarz: Just to let you know
Tuesday, June 13, 2023, 7pm
Just to let you know engages with rhetoric as both form-giver of public speech and a means of social exclusion. Together with composer Robert Schwarz, Miriam Stoney probes the malleability of language as well as the affective power of sound. Stoney deploys the voice as an index to weave linguistic textures that refer to political speeches, formal address, as well as pop concerts and literary events. Strategies of public speaking that reproduce hegemonial roles are thus undermined, while counterpractices are taken up for their potential as forms of resistance. 

Shirin Sabahi: Out of Season
June 25–August 6, 2023
Exhibition Opening: Saturday, June 24, 2023, 6pm. For Out of Season Shirin Sabahi continues her investigation of material infrastructures in public spaces—such as parks, botanical gardens, swimming pools or recreational facilities. Through the use of motifs taken from built spaces, she creates a setting that brings different cultural references and temporalities into collision. By resituating the usual functions of objects, she proposes diverse possibilities of encounter with space, in pragmatic, communal and associative terms. 

Augustas Serapinas: Roof from Rūdninkai
August 19–September, 24, 2023
Exhibition opening: Friday, August 18, 2023, 6pm. Roof from Rūdninkai engages with the relationship between traditional architecture, building materials and modern sculpture. The starting point for Augustas Serapinas’s sculptural compositions is the elements of a deserted wooden house from a rural area in Lithuania. He acquires these buildings, often originating in the 19th century, from various villages by searching through popular advertisement portals. Serapinas uses the historical material to form sculptural compositions that in turn recall the formal language of minimalism. 

Intervention by Richard Frater
April, 28, 2023–April, 1, 2024
Over the course of the year, Richard Frater will develop a durational work that addresses aspects of the coexistence between living things through their different uses of a space. Through site-sensitive responses to the ruins and location of the former monastery, Frater’s work will draw attention to different worlds and experiences within the urban environment.

Further events, including city walks, performances and film screenings, will be announced on the website of Klosterruine Berlin.

From April 2023
New website: The beginning of the summer program 2023 will be accompanied by a relaunch of the website, designed by operative.space, including information on the program as well as a comprehensive media guide to the site of Klosterruine in history and in the present.

*A recording of the concert will be presented as part of James Gregory Atkinson’s contribution to Assembly, an exhibition of Portikus Frankfurt in public space, curated by Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts.

Management Department Art, Culture and History of the State of Berlin, Borough Mitte: Dr. Ute Müller-Tischler. Artistic Director: Juliane Bischoff / Program Coordination: Julius Kaftan / Communication: Joana Stamer.