25 April 2018

By-Products of Love. An Exhibition with Works by
Elfi Mikesch, Rosa von Praunheim, and Werner Schroeter
Films, Performances, Talks
18 May to 12 August 2018

Invitation to the press preview:
Wednesday, 16 May 2018, 11 am

Exhibition halls open from 10:30 am
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin
Please register for the press event in advance: Tel. +49 (0)30 200 571 514 or presse@adk.de

With
Elfi Mikesch, photographer, cinematographer, director and curator of the exhibition
Rosa von Praunheim, film-maker, activist and curator of the exhibition
Claudia Lenssen, author, film critic and curatorial adviser to the exhibition
Eberhard Kloke, composer
Host: Cornelia Klauß, Secretary of the Film and Media Art Section, Akademie der Künste

The exhibition By-Products of Love focuses on three artists who were bound together by an intense, lifelong friendship: photographer, cinematographer and director Elfi Mikesch, film maker and activist Rosa von Praunheim and theatre, opera and film director Werner Schroeter (1945–2010). The title By-Products of love refers to Werner Schroeter's Poussières d'amour (1996), a film about the creation and transience of art, which pays great homage to opera.

The "poetess", the "activist", and the "aesthete" – as Rosa von Praunheim characterised them - have left a lasting impression on the canon of imagery of the artistic underground: all three of them cross borders between art forms. Mikesch, von Praunheim and Schroeter defiantly advocate divergent sexualities, whilst rejecting convention as life's principle and artistic standpoint. All three of them continually move between the artistic borders. Back in the sixties even, they addressed questions of gender, body politics and otherness, and the results are no less explosive and relevant today. So it's no coincidence that the exhibition opens on 17 May, the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. There's a performance at 6 pm at Pariser Platz in memory of the victims of Paragraph 175, which punished sexual acts between men when it was in force from 1872 to 1994.

The exhibition uses photographs, films, drawings, sound installations and documents to reveal for the first time the many-facetted aesthetic and biographical interacting relationships amongst them all. With all its tensions and contradictions, the artistic friendship is condensed into a single biographical motif, one which connects all five exhibition rooms with each other. By-Products of Love creates an arc extending across five decades up to the present with current works by Elfi Mikesch and Rosa von Praunheim.

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation

By-Products of Love. An Exhibition with Works by Elfi Mikesch, Rosa von Praunheim, and Werner Schroeter
Films, performances, talks
Exhibition opening: Thursday, 17 Mai 2018, 7 pm, entrance free
With Jeanine Meerapfel, Elfi Mikesch and Rosa von Praunheim
Music: Mona Mur & En Esch feat. Gerhard A. Schiewe
Exhibition: 18 May – 12 August 2018
Tue–Sun 11 am–7 pm, open on Whit Monday (21 May)
Entrance € 9/6, under 19s and Tuesdays from 3 to 7 pm free admission
Talks in the foyer, free admission
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin
Films € 6/4, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
www.adk.de/mikesch-praunheim-schroeter

Extensive press resources and press photos at www.adk.de/de/presse/pressematerial.htm

Press contact on behalf of Akademie der Künste:
rische & co pr, Claudia Rische, Tel. +49 (0)30 6792 8269, mail@rische-pr.de