Fall program 2023

Noor Abuarafeh: Resistive Narratives
September 9–November 19, 2023

In her work, Noor Abuarafeh addresses the construction of memory, the politics of archiving, and that which is omitted within the dominant historical narrative. Through an examination of sub-narratives, the artist investigates different forms of remembering outside the linear conception of time, resisting the division of past, present, and future. Her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany presents a new video work alongside four existing films made over the past ten years.

Abuarafeh’s practice, which also encompasses installation, performance, and writing, draws on immaterial references and oral traditions in order to reflect the often corrupt dynamics of storytelling and devise a different kind of history. This also pertains to the works exhibited in Munich, all of which pursue a similar question: what are the material realities versus the constructed narratives of remembering? By questioning the possibility of representing past events while what can be referred to is, for the most part, immaterial, Abuarafeh explores how collective memory becomes the carrier of an imagined archive.

The artist’s new work, The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost (2023), is presented for the first time at Kunstverein München. The video marks the beginning of a long-term project that follows the case of seventeen exhibitions by Palestinian artists. Each of these exhibitions contained different artworks, the majority of which are considered missing today: caught in loops of administrative infrastructures that attest to political conflict, the works could not be returned to the artists and were instead moved from one storage facility to another. The video thus focuses on how the immateriality of missing objects affects our memory of them, indicating that it is not simply about the lost objects themselves, but about the stories surrounding that loss.

The exhibition also features Abuarafeh’s pivotal work Am I the Ageless Object at the Museum? (2018). Here, the zoo is explored as a collection of animals, which is historically congruent with the conception of the museum as a collecting or archiving institution: both relate to the discipline of history and maintain the asymmetry between the collector and the collected. As a practiced cultural technique, archives of various kinds continue to serve as articulations of so-called national heritage. With the works on view in Munich, Abuarafeh shows us that by poetically liberating historiography from its objecthood, more resistive narratives can emerge that extend beyond the mere construction of (national) subjecthood.

Park
Performance series in the Hofgarten
Through September 2023

The performance series Park in the garden adjacent to the Kunstverein concludes on Saturday, September 9, at 3pm, with its third iteration, how leisure always imitates labor, by Jan Kunkel with Alie O. and Vera Karlsson. The new piece supposes the co-presence of leisure and labor within each other—both contain and mirror one another through plays of imitation/substitution.

As a public park, the Hofgarten conveys a popular scene for wedding photography and is often utilized as a stage to enact the holy union of wedlock to ensure its material perpetuation. The performance exemplarily uses the institution of marriage to glance at its attempt to decorate labor as leisure in the name of love and mirages of the “self.” In doing so, it re-appropriates the baroque garden as a scenery for the German tragic drama, or Trauerspiel. It suspends modes of establishing and relinquishing the genre, remaining concerned with the un-realization of opulent violence as a form of continuous (dis)possession. how leisure always imitates labor thus examines performance as spectacle, disorganization, and collapse.

Previous iterations of Park presented commissions by Shade Théret and Magdalena Mitterhofer as well as Luisa Fernanda Alfonso. Following the conclusion of the series, an epilogue by Shola von Reinhold will be published.

Writers Residency
The Writers Residency takes up the tradition of the town chronicler and offers a temporary space for writing. The next fellow, from October through December 2023, will be writer and artist Erika Landström, whose writing ranges from criticism to poetry. During her stay, she will be working on a forthcoming publication of poetry. Landström follows Joshua Leon, a London-based poet, writer, and artist whose work explores, among other things, lament as a space of critical engagement. Previous residents have been Sarah Messerschmidt, Taylor Le Melle, Isabelle Sully, Quinn Latimer, Studio for Propositional Cinema, Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe, and Mahan Moalemi.

Director: Maurin Dietrich
Curator: Gloria Hasnay
Assistant Curator: Gina Merz

For further information, please contact our press office or visit our website.