A Home for Something Unknown / Les Levine / Isa Genzken

A Home for Something Unknown
Yalda Afsah, Taslima Ahmed, Douglas Boatwright, Yvon Chabrowski, Beth Collar, Armin Lorenz Gerold, Rosanna Graf, Line Skywalker Karlström, Mazen Kerbaj, Dina Khouri, Bob Kil, Bitsy Knox, Vera Lutz, Katharina Mercedes Marszewski, José Montealegre, Marcela Moraga, Christophe Ndabananiye, Lucas Odahara, Emeka Okereke, Mooni Perry, Shirin Sabahi, Romana Schmalisch & Robert Schlicht, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Paola Yacoub, Bassem Yousri, Sati Zech

Opening: Friday, March, 1, 2024, 7pm
March 2–April 28, 2024

Curators: Ines Borchart, Layla Burger-Lichtenstein, Susanne Mierzwiak and Katharina Schilling

With the exhibition A Home for Something Unknown, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) and Haus am Lützowplatz present works by 27 international artists living in Berlin who were awarded the Berlin Senate 2023 visual arts work stipend. The twofold increase in the number of artists receiving this scholarship, as well as the heightened international representation of recipients compared to previous years, underscore Berlin’s deep commitment to fostering and celebrating the visual arts within its vibrant cultural landscape. For the first time, the group show is spread across two exhibition venues, offering a diverse range of individual approaches to social phenomena and providing insight into Berlin’s contemporary art scene. Working with mediums such as video, sound, painting, sculpture, installation and performance, the artists reflect on various forms of coexistence, examining the underlying structures and narratives.

The collection of traces and signs—employing poetic, documentary, or archive-based practices—stands out as one of the exhibition’s overarching themes. It illustrates a shared desire to reveal fissures, ambivalences, and power imbalances in everyday life. The question of self-image holds central importance, as artists take on the role of historian, archaeologist, or mediator, shaping their reference systems through diverse disciplines and perspectives. What unites these artistic contributions is their deliberate unveiling of suppressed forms of knowledge, overlooked places, or marginalized voices. As the title A Home for Something Unknown suggests, the term “home” represents less a division between inside and outside or familiarity and otherness, but rather a longing to discover a space for sensations and ideas that might otherwise remain unnoticed.

Exhibitions:

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
Chausseestraße 128/129, 10115 Berlin

Artists: Douglas Boatwright, Yvon Chabrowski, Beth Collar, Dina Khouri, Bob Kil, Bitsy Knox, Vera Lutz, Katharina Mercedes Marszewski, Christophe Ndabananiye, Lucas Odahara, Emeka Okereke, Mooni Perry, Shirin Sabahi, Romana Schmalisch & Robert Schlicht
Curators: Layla Burger-Lichtenstein, Susanne Mierzwiak
Curatorial Assistance: Daria Koehler

Haus am Lützowplatz
Lützowplatz 9, 10785 Berlin

Artists: Yalda Afsah, Taslima Ahmed, Rosanna Graf, Armin Lorenz Gerold, José Montealegre, Marcela Moraga, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Line Skywalker Karlström, Mazen Kerbaj, Paola Yacoub, Bassem Yousri, Sati Zech
Curators: Ines Borchart, Katharina Schilling

The exhibition A Home for Something Unknown is a cooperation with Haus am Lützowplatz.

Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community

n.b.k. Showroom
Les Levine: Diamond Mind
Opening: Friday, March, 1, 2024, 7pm
March 2–April 28, 2024

Curator: Anna Lena Seiser

The conceptual artist and video pioneer Les Levine (*1935 in Dublin, lives and works in New York) is a seminal figure in the New York and international art scenes. Levine’s eclectic oeuvre spans installations, photographs, videos, performances, and publications, as well as posters and billboards in public spaces. He was one of the first artists to work with the Sony Portapak camera starting in the mid-1960s, and developed the first closed-circuit video installation, Iris, in 1968. Levine has deliberately avoided categorization or appropriation by the art market. His works share a common theme of critically examining mass media and pop culture phenomena and operations, and he distanced himself from the notion of art-for-art’s-sake.

Levine views art as a social system, which he repeatedly questions through ironic and provocative statements. After gaining international reputation in the 1960s for his large-scale installations, environments, and “disposable art” series, he shifted his focus toward electronic media and public space beginning in the 1970s. The exhibition in the n.b.k. Showroom presents two pivotal video works from the n.b.k. Video-Forum collection—I Am An Artist (1975) and Diamond Mind (1977)—alongside a compendium of prints. This is the first presentation of work by this exceptional artist in a German institution in over 15 years.

n.b.k. Billboard
Isa Genzken. Ohr
Opening: Friday, March, 1, 2024, 7pm
March 2–September 1, 2024

Curator: Lidiya Anastasova

Spanning five decades, the work of Isa Genzken is characterized by continuous processes of transformation, driven by her ongoing questioning of the notion of art. Her oeuvre encompasses diverse media, including sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, painting, and film. In the 1970s, Genzken cultivated a sculptural practice rooted in a critical examination of postwar German and American art as well as modernist architecture. Integral to Genzken’s artistic approach are references to realities conveyed through architecture, design, media, current sociopolitical issues, and the human body. In 1980, Genzken produced close-ups of human ears as “something organic, something coming from the inside out, from the head,” according to the artist. For the twelve-part photo series entitled Ohr (Ear), she worked with women she encountered on the streets of New York. The images capture a tension arising from what seems like a contradiction between the anonymity of the photographed subject and the traditional style of portraiture, which typically aims to depict a specific individual. Presented in the n.b.k. Billboard series, Ohr reflects Genzken’s longstanding engagement with art in urban spaces, often questioning the lines between public and private.

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein is supported by the Kriket Foundation.

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k. gGmbH is funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community.