Halil Altındere: Space Refugee / Natascha Sadr Haghighian: onco-mickey-catch / Gerwald Rockenschaub: 751C064/045

Curator: Kathrin Becker

Halil Altındere developed the Space Refugee project for Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, which in the light of European fears of foreign infiltration and at some ironic distance proposes to use the cosmic space as a haven for refugees. One of the exhibition’s key features is a film about the former Syrian cosmonaut Mohammed Ahmed Faris, who in 1987 with the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz TM-3 went on a seven-day journey to the space station Mir. Today the former hero of the USSR and supporter of the democratic opposition movement against Assad lives as a refugee in Istanbul.

The exhibition Space Refugee aesthetically borrows from the art of Socialist Realism and refers to the heroic depictions of Soviet cosmonauts. So there is a kind of hagiography about Muhammed Ahmed Faris in the form of painted portraits, a realistically crafted silicone bust and a documentary video. The vision of a life in space for the refugees is substantiated with specially designed spacesuits from a fictitious “Palmyra”-space mission, a planetary rover and a virtual reality video.

Halil Altındere belongs to a generation of artists, who substantially took part in Turkey’s cultural awakening in the 1990s—as an artist, curator and publisher. His artistic practice is directed at the socio-political remodeling of Turkey, the promotion of an emancipatory process and an opposition to repressive and nationalist developments within state and society. His works also receive great attention for their direct and open criticism of the military apparatus and the government policy as well as of the patriarchal and nationalist structures within Turkey. The expectable protest from the state authorities Altındere deliberately takes into account. Migration, identity and gender, but also questions about the influence of Western contemporary art trends within Turkey’s contemporary art scene characterize his work.

Until October 8, 2016 and in parallel with the exhibition at n.b.k., the work Köfte Airlines (2016) can be seen, located in front of HAU Hebbel am Ufer. For Köfte Airlines Altındere, in cooperation with refugees living in Turkey, staged a photograph showing a larger group of people sitting on the back of an airplane.

Publication
With the exhibition and as part of the series “n.b.k. Exhibitions” there will be a publication by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, with a preface by Marius Babias and articles by Halil Altındere, Kathrin Becker, Marenka Krasomil, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ana Teixeira Pinto and Misal Adnan Yıldız.

Program art education

Thursday, October 20, 7pm
Artist talk with Halil Altındere (artist, Istanbul) and Kathrin Becker (Head of n.b.k. Video-Forum)
In English with Turkish consecutive interpretation

Thursday, October 27, 7pm
“Is Art Useful in the Context of Contemporary Politics?”
Panel discussion with Julieta Aranda (artist, Berlin / New York), Boris Buden (cultural theorist, author, Berlin), Fulya Erdemci (curator, author, Istanbul), Simon Sheikh (Programme Director Goldsmiths, University of London, Berlin / London), moderated by Ingo Arend (author, critic, Berlin)
In English

Sunday, November 6, 8pm
DJ İpek İpekçioğlu
DJ-gig

n.b.k. Showroom
Natascha Sadr Haghighian
onco-mickey-catch

Curator: Marenka Krasomil

Natascha Sadr Haghighian creates works that manifest themselves in large-scale installations, video and audio works, but also in performative interventions in public space or through texts, and thus make it possible to experience alternative forms of knowledge, political scopes and boundaries of action as well as social limitations. The investigation of both socio- and technoculturally conditioned viewing patterns and conventions as well as of the militarization of civil structures thereby are recurring motifs. With her exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Natascha Sadr Haghighian carries forward these interests by choosing a new application for image correction as her central subject of investigation. Whereas applications such as Skype entail the phenomenon of a parallax, in which gazes are missing each other, the application CatchEye detects faces within a video and aligns the eyes so that people seem to look directly into the camera. Developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), CatchEye is based on technologies that were developed in close connection with military research and have found their way into commercial use. In the laboratory-like exhibition space, the software operates on computer monitors that are implanted into a sculptural spinal taxidermy. Resembling the anatomy of an oversized mouse, the technomorphic form is evocative of genetically modified creatures such as the Vacanti mouse or the OncoMouse™. The OncoMouse™ (cancer mouse) gained notoriety as the first transgenic, patent-protected mammal. In this sense, onco-mickey-catch also embodies the dissolution of boundaries between the body and technology and, in a new way, puts up forms of human self-understanding and notions of social relations for discussion.

n.b.k. Facade
Gerwald Rockenschaub
751C064/045

Curator: Kathrin Becker

With Gerwald Rockenschaub’s work 751C064/045, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein continues its series of projects on the urban space, for which contemporary artists are asked to shape the facade of the building on Chausseestraße, using it as a space of intervention. Made of lightfast foils, the new work by the Austrian artist structures the surface of the facade in a color rhythm and can be seen for the period of one year.