Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz
Main programme with exhibition and events, May – November 2021
Exhibition: 3 June – 15 August 2021
Exhibition opening: 2 June 2021
The Akademie der Künste and its Archives are a place of artistic memory work. On the occasion of its 325th anniversary, the Akademie is engaging in a new process of reflecting on its own institution as memory storage. In this context, artistic memory work is realized as an archaeological practice and a political act. It receives new urgency in the current dynamic between digital change, historical revisionism on one side and the beginning process of decolonising the established spaces of knowledge on the other. How and what a society remembers has becomes a key question at a time when self-perceptions are being re-negotiated and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are being questioned.
The extensive main programme revolves around a number of event series and a central exhibition: 13 commissioned works by contemporary artists will visualise the grammar of remembering and forgetting and put what has been preserved into new contexts. The power of narration and the presence of that which is absent are among the central themes that will be addressed in installations by Candice Breitz and Eduardo Molinari, film work by Robert Wilson, Cemile Sahin, Susann Hempel and Alexander Kluge, archive-based productions by Arnold Dreyblatt, Thomas Heise and Jennifer Walshe, literary investigations by Ulrike Draesner and Cécile Wajsbrot and sound work by Miroslaw Bałka and Matana Roberts. The exhibition will show the archive not only as resource, but also as artistic method.
Further information: www.adk.de/gedaechtnis
NOTHINGTOSEENESS void/white/silence
An exhibition by the Akademie der Künste in the context of the BERLIN ART WEEK
Exhibition: 16 September – 12 December 2021
Exhibition opening: 15 September 2021
The broad spectrum of meaning of the colour white, of void and silence in the visual arts, and the associated difference between materiality and immateriality, is at the focus of the exhibition and event project featuring international artists in the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg. The aim is to explore artistic/aesthetic practices from the 1950s/60s until the present day that have brought about critical and process-based artistic positioning at international level in selected circles. The focus is on the “question of seeing (...), the visual non-slipping” (John Cage, 1961). In addition to colour, material, void, and silence, the exhibition and the accompanying programme will reference themes of keeping silent and narration in literature, performance, music and architecture.
With Peter Ablinger, Absalon, Mirosław Bałka, Rosa Barba, George Brecht, Günter Brus, John Cage, Enrico Castellani, Rutherford Chang, Ulrike Draesner, Maria Eichhorn, Ulrich Erben, Ceal Floyer, Lucio Fontana, Sam Francis, Katharina Fritsch, Heinz Gappmayr, Jochen Gerz, Raimund Girke, Gotthard Graubner, Hans Haacke, Marcia Hafif, David Hammons, Oskar Holweck, Stephan Huber, Alfonso Hüppi, Pierre Huyghe, Isaac Julien, Ellsworth Kelly, Per Kesselmar, Astrid Klein, Yves Klein, Bernd Koberling, Christina Kubisch, Raimund Kummer, Mark Lammert, Henning Lohner, Inge Mahn, Piero Manzoni, Joseph Marioni, Sara Masüger, Reiner Maria Matysik, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Roman Opalka, David Ostrowski, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, Adrian Piper, Thomas Rentmeister, Bridget Riley, Robert Ryman, Karin Sander, Hanns Schimansky, Nina Schuiki, Jan J. Schoonhoven, George Segal, Qiu Shihua, Günther Uecker, Timm Ulrichs, Klaus vom Bruch et al.