Charlemagne Palestine: GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt / Michael Portnoy: Relational Stalinism – The Musical / Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff: Foreword

Opening tonight! 

Join us for the opening of our three exhibitions on Thursday, January 28, 5–8:30pm.

Charlemagne Palestine 
GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt
January 29–May 1, 2016
Opening performance: January 28, 7pm

GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt, a solo exhibition with artist Charlemagne Palestine, presents a selection of works from the artist’s oeuvre, including early video works, sculptures, paintings, installations, and sound scores. Palestine’s works form a highly personal universe of rituals, intoxication, and shamanism. In the last four decades, the artist has created an extensive body of experimental musical compositions, bodily performances, and, in later years, visual art works that are inhabited by stuffed animals. To Palestine, teddy bears figure as powerful shamanic totems, which he fondly calls “Divinities.” Central to his exhibition are a grand piano, as the sounding heart of the show, and a new large-scale version of the so-called “God-Bear Museum Model,” a proposal for a new kind of museum where music and performance find a home just as easily as a painting would. Also part of the exhibition are Palestine’s extraordinary music or sound annotations, a collection of works on paper, which aim to translate sound into image. A new catalogue, co-published by Witte de With Publishers and Sternberg Press (on behalf of Kunsthalle Wien), will appear during the run of the exhibition.

Michael Portnoy 
Relational Stalinism – The Musical
6 weeks of world bending
January 29–March 6, 2016
Performances: Every Thursday/Saturday/Sunday
11 performances running across 2 hours
Each cycle starts on the hour at 2pm and 4pm 

Running across six spaces at Witte de With, Relational Stalinism – The Musical is an ambitious assemblage of new performances created by artist Michael Portnoy enacted and developed with a troupe of dancers, actors, singers, and improvisers. Many different registers of performance will simultaneously cohabit the institution, mixing inscrutable role-play scenarios, experimental sketch comedy, hyperactive spectatorship, melodramatic operatic interlude, prog-rock micro-dance, and teary-eyed theoretical soliloquy. Combining futurology with satire, this exhibition transmutes the seeds of prevalent approaches to visual arts performance as a form of generative critique. 

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff 
Foreword
January 29–April 10, 2016

Berlin-based duo Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff focus on shared fictions and the abstraction of community within entrepreneurial startups and models of creative labor. An excerpt from a novel-in-progress by New York-based writer Emily Segal (co-founder of the trend forecasting group and art collective K-HOLE and former creative director at Genius) will be released and installed in three parts over the course of the exhibition, framed by a configuration of colored benches and tables pulled from spaces run by Henkel and Pitegoff over the past five years in Berlin. These tables display Henkel and Pitegoff’s short story “Photography and Eating,” which explores the creative classes’ relationship to risk, profit, fantasy, and uselessness, drawing from their interviews and visits to startups in Berlin. The brightly coloured installation recalls both the aesthetics of the start-up offices they visited, and those of early 2000’s relational art practices, offering a non-work space in the ground floor gallery of Witte de With. 

Credits: 
Director: Defne Ayas
Curators: Natasha Hoare, Samuel Saelemakers 

GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt is co-commissioned by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and Kunsthalle Wien, and curated by Luca Lo Pinto, together with Samuel Saelemakers.

Relational Stalinism – The Musical is curated by Defne Ayas and Natasha Hoare and is a co-production of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and A.P.E (art projects era). Made possible with the support of Fonds 21, the city of Rotterdam, and the American Embassy.

Foreword is curated by Defne Ayas and Natasha Hoare and is supported by AMMODO.

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