Summer program 2024

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present its summer program of 2024, which continues to explore the complexities of (self-)representation, particularly through the lens of portraiture. It examines our relationship to looking and being looked at through the work of Luiz Roque, Pia Arke, Jimmy DeSana and Paul P.. This season marks the last under the directorship of Krist Gruijthuijsen.

Luiz Roque: Estufa
July 6–October 20, 2024

KW presents the first mid-career survey of the artist Luiz Roque (b. 1979, BR), whose practice inhabits a space between expanded cinema, visual art and critical theory. His artistic methodology fuses his interest in the legacies of modernism, pop culture, queer (bio) politics, and science fiction.

Roque’s sculptural video installations explore the fine line between form and content, in which filming techniques and methods of screening and presentation are as important as the subject matter they present. The exhibition at KW brings together a body of work spanning two decades—including new ceramics and a newly commissioned film installation.

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Pia Arke: Arctic Hysteria
July 6–October 20, 2024

KW, in collaboration with the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (UK), presents the first solo exhibition of works by artist Pia Arke (b. 1958, GL, d. 2007, DK) to be shown outside of Kalaallit Nunaat, also known as Greenland, and the Nordic countries.

From the late 1980s until the beginning of the 2000s, Pia Arke mapped the intricate relations between time, memory, space, identity, and myth in pictures of and from Greenland. Arctic Hysteria brings together her photographic, sculptural, performative and written work, as well as her work on paper. It aims to shed light on the narratives enclosing the colonial relations between Greenland and Denmark, as seen through Arke’s works, and to open it up to a discussion of continuing colonial structures at large. While Arke’s practice is born from the bind between the two countries, it unfolds as a structural feminist critique.

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Jimmy DeSana & Paul P.­: Ruins of Rooms
July 6–October 20, 2024

Ruins of Rooms looks at the notion of portraiture through the lens of Jimmy DeSana (b. 1949, d. 1990, US) and Paul P. (b. 1977, CA). With their works set in a range of different interiors, the artists are brought into dialogue for the first time.

Jimmy DeSana was a photographer whose portrayal of New York’s East Village scene in the early 1970s would prove to be highly influential later in terms of sensibility, playfulness and storytelling. DeSana’s portfolio is extensive, typified by contorted limbs, concealed figures, saturated colors, and surreal mise-en-scène. Contracting HIV in the late 1980s precipitated a radical change in his artistry: a shift towards abstract and otherworldly imagery that also reflected a shift away from the body as a subject, both as a result of the changes in his own body and the polarizing political climate of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Paul P. is an artist, known since the early 2000s for his melancholy drawings and paintings and, in recent years, for sculptures in the form of furniture. Employing mode akin to late 19th century portrait painters, his fragile and dreamlike works remove and liberate his subjects from their highly specific context and shroud them in timeless and seductive mystery. The artist’s more recent work has further developed an expression of beauty coupled with cultural tragedy, presenting his brooding subjects alongside atmospheric abstractions, crepuscular landscapes, and allegorical sculpture.

Ruins of Rooms functions like a matryoshka doll. It expands our understanding of portraiture through an overlapping conversation between artists of different generations and is dedicated to those lost.

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Press contact
Anna Falck-Ytter, press [​at​] kw-berlin.de
Please RSVP via press@kw-berlin.de to attend the press preview on July 5.

KW is institutionally supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. The exhibitions and projects within the Summer Program 2024 are in collaboration with and/or supported by: