EINLADUNG ZUR ERÖFFNUNG

Artistic Director of Biennale für Freiburg #2

01.12.2021 / Biennale für Freiburg

PAULA KOMMOSS TO BE THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR AND MANAGING DIRECTOR OF BIENNALE FÜR FREIBURG #2

The association Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V. is pleased to introduce Paula Kommoss as the new Artistic Director and Managing Director of the Biennale für Freiburg #2.

“I am looking forward to the next two years – to working with artists and partners, the people of Freiburg, and Freiburg itself,” says the art historian and curator. Paula Kommoss will take up the position in January 2022, with the Biennale taking place in 2023. She succeeds Leon Hösl, who directed the first edition of the Biennale.

“Paula Kommoss is the ideal person for the artistic direction of the second Biennale. She is familiar with the city of Freiburg and has solid experience in the art world on a national and international level. Her program will give an important impulse to contemporary art and the cultural life of Freiburg and will continue the success of the first edition curated by Leon Hösl,” says the board of Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V. consisting of Heinrich Dietz (Director, Kunstverein Freiburg), Julia Galandi-Pascual (Director, PEAC Museum, Freiburg), Yvonne Ziegler (Art Historian), Ben Hübsch (Artist and Professor, Hochschule Macromedia). Together with external advisors Maurin Dietrich (Director, Kunstverein München) and Hanne König (Academic Assistant Exhibition Design and Scenography, HfG Karlsruhe), the Board unanimously appointed Paula Kommoss as Artistic Director.

Born in 1989, the art historian and curator has been working at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2018. Alongside this work, Paula Kommoss has curated numerous exhibitions, and in 2021 founded the Frankfurt exhibition space ELVIRA. There she realized a successive, thematic exhibition program that brought together works by Claude Cahun, Isa Genzken, Judith Hopf, Atíena R. Kilfa, Shaun Motsi, Georgia Sagri, and Matt Welch, among others.

Paula Kommoss studied Art History and American Studies at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, at University College London, and at the Ruhr University Bochum. She was curatorial assistant at the Fridericianum in Kassel in 2016 and at the German Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, which won the Golden Lion with Anne Imhof's Faust (2017). During her time at the Städelschule, Paula Kommoss has been responsible for the coordination of the public program and worked most recently as research associate and in management.

Publications include the co-edited Städelschule Lectures 2 (2021) with contributions by Claire Denis, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Cauleen Smith, as well as Städelschule Lectures 1 (2019) with contributions by Lucy Raven, Martha Rosler, and Amy Sillman among others.

For press inquiries, feel welcome to contact presse@biennalefuerfreiburg.de.

Looking back

24.11.2021 / Leon Hösl

Dear visitors and participants of our physical and digital program,

as the exhibition has come to its end, I would like to invite you to look back on the first edition of Biennale für Freiburg (BfF#1):

Between May and September, 30 events took place, most of them within the framework of our studio program: workshops, performances, talks, lectures, as well as the symposium. They were connected by the idea of opening artistic processes to the public, experimenting with them, facilitating exchange, working and thinking collectively, and finding and using places in public space for this purpose. In doing so, artists met each other and the public, shared thoughts and work processes, and—at the same time—offered new perspectives on the city of Freiburg, its cityscape, its stories, and its contradictions. We welcomed more than 800 people to these numerous and very diverse events—a number I am particularly pleased with given the extraordinary circumstances of these difficult times of the pandemic.

In September, we opened the exhibition parcours. Across 8 exhibition venues, 23 artistic positions were shown, with many of the artworks having arisen directly from the studio program, while others complemented and expanded it thematically. With this exhibition, distributed throughout the city, we were able to reach around 5,000 visitors. My sincere thanks to all those who engaged with our program with interest and curiosity and took the time to do so. Time for the evening events, time to visit the exhibition venues or time for our workshops, which often took up whole or even several days. Thank you very much for the great interest in this first edition of the new Biennial, which thrived on your participation!

After the end of BfF#1, our website remains active, and I highly recommend paying a visit, as www.biennalefuerfreiburg.de also functions as an archive—both of the events (to be found in the left column) and of the artistic works in the exhibition. You can use the website to look back on the exhibition, see the installation views, read about the exhibited works in the accompanying texts, watch video recordings of the symposium “A COMMONPLACE IS NOT A CLICHÉ” held in July, or read longer articles and interviews in the blog. Some of the most recent blog posts are listed below.

I would also like to extend my thanks to all those who contributed to the success of the first edition. To the artists, to the speakers and to our cooperation partners. For their great and continuous support in terms of content and concept, I would like to thank the Curatorial Advisory Board of BfF#1, consisting of Christoph Chwatal, Aziza Harmel, Fanny Hauser, Magdalena Stöger, and Fritz Laszlo Weber. Thanks to Ronja Andersen and Marius Schwarz for the development of the visual identity and to Diane Hillebrand for the scenography. A big thank you to the entire team, especially to Catherin Schöberl, for her tireless efforts in running our program. Special thanks to the board of the association Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V., Heinrich Dietz, Julia Galandi-Pascual, Yvonne Ziegler, and Ben Hübsch, for the good cooperation and their trust in me during the conception of the Biennale for Freiburg as well as its first edition. Finally, a heartfelt thank you to our sponsors for their extremely generous support.

I now bid farewell to the Biennale für Freiburg and am particularly happy that this new format can continue thanks to the long-term support of the City of Freiburg. The preparations for the second edition are in full swing and, in a few days, the appointed artistic director of the second edition will already be announced. So, join me in looking forward to Biennale für Freiburg #2!

All the best and stay healthy!

Leon Hösl

Announcement of artists and cooperations

16.06.2021 / BfF #1

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AND CONTRIBUTORS:
Michel Auder with Michael Stickrod in collaboration with Julius Martin-Humpert, Maristella Witt, Ilja Zaharov and Franziska Rist; Patrizia Bach; Patricia Esquivias; Rahima Gambo and collaborators; Thomas Geiger in collaboration with Birgit Heidtke, Sévérine Kpoti, Oliver Matthes and Dietrich Roeschmann; Niklas Goldbach; Philipp Gufler; Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller; Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński; Vika Kirchenbauer; Sarah Lehnerer with Jackie Grassmann and Inka Meißner and with guest lecturers Keren Cytter and Johanna Hedva; Luiza Margan; Kriz Olbricht; Liesl Raff; Andreas von Ow; Young Boy Dancing Group; and more...

BIENNALE FÜR FREIBURG IS COOPERATING WITH THE FOLLOWING PARTNER INSTITUTIONS:
Dear White People Festival, DELPHI_space, Deutsches Tagebucharchiv, Feministische Geschichtswerkstatt, Here & Black, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Kunstverein Freiburg, Kunstkommission der Stadt Freiburg, Literaturhaus Freiburg, Macromedia Hochschule Freiburg, Museum für Neue Kunst, Pförtnerhaus, Stadtbibliothek Freiburg, Strassenzeitung FREIeBÜRGER.

BfF #1 will unfold in two phases: a Studio Program that started in early May, lasting until the end of August and a resulting Exhibition Parcours that will be on view in Freiburg from September 10 to October 3, 2021.

Conceived as a four-month-long phase for production, discourse and mediation, the Studio Program lays the groundwork for the subsequent Exhibition Parcours. Between May and August, the contributing artists will visit Freiburg extensively, providing insights into their production processes, organize workshops, and develop new works during their stay, many of them in collaboration with other artists and local participants.

In September, the Exhibition Parcours will unfold throughout Freiburg, with a rich program of installations, video works, painting, photography and performance. Allocated at art institutions, off spaces and other venues, the parcours guides the visitors through the themes and various artistic approaches of the Studio Program and refers these ephemeral processes back to the realm of the exhibition. More than a mere presentation of final results, the exhibition functions as an insight into networks of artistic collaboration, multilayered sets of thematic reference points and offers potential points of departure for future editions of the Biennale für Freiburg.

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Image credits: [1] Till Peter Otto, Illumina, 2000. [2] Fritz Laszlo Weber, Cracking Dis/Parities, 2021. [3] Michel Auder, May ‘68 in ‘78 (still), 1978. [4] Diane Hillebrand, Modell for scenography for Biennale für Freiburg, 2021. [5] Hanakam & Schuller, The Moist Cabinet (production photo), 2021. [6] Sarah Lehnerer, A Day‘s Work, 2021.

Exhibition dates of Biennale für Freiburg #1

18.05.2021 / BfF #1

The first edition of the Biennale für Freiburg (BfF #1) explores the various modes of artistic production, and how they manifest both inside and outside of the studio space. During BfF #1’s runtime, artistic processes and activities are transferred from the traditional setting of an artist's studio towards a number of collective contexts and situations. The public space is thereby transformed into a place of production and a subject for debate.

For its inaugural edition, the Biennale für Freiburg will take place in two phases:
Studio Program: Early May through end of August 2021
Exhibition Parcours: September 10 to October 3, 2021

Conceived as a four-month-long phase for production, discourse and mediation, the Studio Program lays the groundwork for the subsequent exhibition parcours. Between May and August, artists will visit Freiburg extensively, providing insights into their production processes, organize workshops, and develop new works during their stay. In September, the exhibition parcours will unfold throughout various locations in Freiburg, with a rich offering of installations, video works, painting and photography, amongst other things. Many of these artistic contributions directly result from the processes that were explored during the preceding Studio Program. Events and performances complete the program. The locations will be announced in the coming weeks, but the exhibition dates are already set! You are invited to visit the exhibition between September 10 and October 3, 2021.

The Biennale understands the studio as a non-fixed place—the absence of classical studio spaces is the key starting point for our considerations. Therefore, the majority of events during this first period will take place at changing locations throughout Freiburg’s environs. The merging of studio and urban space will consequently reflect and shape the content of the program. The focus is on Freiburg in particular and on the city in general; taking a look at methods through which the urban can be perceived, developed and utilized for the creation of a cityscape. There will be a chance to ruminate on the role of the surrounding Black Forest as a healing, moisture-retaining cabinet. Or to learn more about the dual nature of the public space, which can manifest in both the prominent representation of historical events or in the erasure of lesser-known stories from the collective consciousness. The program will make way for voices that skillfully and openly report on private matters, simultaneously understanding that this precious information is best protected through the obfuscation of fiction. A marble statue with missing body parts becomes the catalyst for a conversation. In addition to this, the Biennale für Freiburg invites the audience to participate in two distinct walks, exploring diary writing and the sound of key locks, respectively. The concept of the public sphere itself will be examined in a symposion that is equal parts artistic interpretation and scientific precision.

All program points converge in an intermediate area, where intimate situations of production and public moments of presentation meet. We will invite you to particular events, in which your active participation by writing, collecting, narrating and dancing would be met with great enthusiasm and appreciation from our side. For other events, we are happy to welcome you as audience guests. The general public will not know about certain program components until after they occurred, as there are events that will be protected by the studio. You will not miss out on anything, however: all the artistic processes find their way into the final exhibition, where they will be complemented by other artistic works.

We will provide information about the Studio Program in monthly newsletters. Due to the regulations surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, it is still unsure whether we can commence with a public program in May already. Regardless, we are optimistic that we will soon have the pleasure to invite you to events taking place from June onwards.

Stay healthy and see you soon!
Biennale für Freiburg #1

Studio Program
May – August 2021

Exhibition Parcours
September 10 – October 3, 2021

Contributing Artists:
Michel Auder with Michael Stickrod in collaboration with Julius Martin-Humpert; Maristella Witt; Ilja Zaharov and Franziska Rist; Patrizia Bach; Patricia Esquivias; Rahima Gambo; Thomas Geiger in collaboration with Birgit Heidtke, Sévérine Kpoti, Oliver Matthes and Dietrich Roeschmann; Niklas Goldbach; Philipp Gufler; Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller; Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński; Vika Kirchenbauer; Sarah Lehnerer with Jackie Grassmann and Inka Meißner and with guest lecturers Keren Cytter and Johanna Hedva; Luiza Margan; Kriz Olbricht; John Smith; Milica Tomić; Liesl Raff; Andreas von Ow; Young Boy Dancing Group

The Biennale für Freiburg #1 places the site of the artist’s studio at the center of its considerations in order to investigate the relationship between temporary exhibition, public space, and artistic forms of teaching and knowledge production. BfF#1 is divided into two phases: the Studio Program that began in May and the Exhibition Parcours in September. The Studio Program consisted of walks, workshops, readings, screenings, discussions, and lectures. Formats with very different approaches, connected by one question: How do artistic processes work?

This question was raised in numerous collective and participatory situations and related to the public sphere and urban space. Thus, the processuality and the creation of (semi-)public work situations determine the approach of BfF#1 and reference the genesis of the new biennial: the closure of the Freiburg branch of the State Academy for Fine Arts Karlsruhe and the accompanying—at least temporary—end of public art education in the city. This void seems to have stimulated reflection on the role of contemporary art in Freiburg on various levels, the closure of the branch office ultimately resulting in the founding of Biennale für Freiburg. During the conception of BfF#1, in which the curatorial advisory board was also significantly involved through numerous preparatory discussions, it was thus soon clear that this development—from the closing of the academy to a new biennial—should also be reflected in the concept of the first edition of the biennial.

In this context, BfF#1 understands the art academy as a place whose essential quality is to provide a space for the perpetual critique of the mechanisms and possibilities of artistic processes. The loss of Freiburg’s (academy) studios is therefore used as a metaphor for BfF#1 to highlight the immaterial qualities of a studio, which can also be understood as a classroom or study space:

A studio is a space of production, experimentation, and exchange. A studio can be a safe space for thoughts and actions to take place. A space for things in the making. A space for regular review. A space where actions are presented, tested, and reflected upon. A space to allow honest expression and doubt. A space to train, question and apply skills. A space for production and destruction, for deliberation and spontaneity. A space for suggestion.

If the studio walls fall away, the city itself becomes the studio; it determines the fields of work and proposes themes. The public space of the city of Freiburg is therefore crucial for this format, which, as a biennial for Freiburg, takes on local themes and issues and creates references between the city and artistic production. Places such as archives and libraries play an important role here, as they shape the canon of a place but can also produce hidden history(s). As do statues and monuments, which are meant to represent a specific historical image, but in doing so also omit much. In addition to exploring local narratives, the Biennale also looks at images created by the city, such as the cityscape of Freiburg’s inner city, picturesquely inserted into the surrounding landscape of the Black Forest. Some of the artists approach this as walkers, taking unusual perspectives and highlighting its ruptures.

The Exhibition Parcours extends over eight exhibition sites in different parts of the city and presents works developed for BfF#1, which were often created in the processual investigations of the Studio Program. These local-specific points of view are supplemented by artistic perspectives that transfer similar questions to other places, thus referring to global contexts. In addition to BfF#1’s initial reflections on artistic production processes, the Exhibition Parcours and the Studio Program also raise questions about the role of art in the experience of our surroundings and our community, and the possibilities of utilizing the city as an artistic working space.

Biennale für Freiburg is conceived and organized by Leon Hösl together with the curatorial advisory board consisting of Christoph Chwatal, Aziza Harmel, Fanny Hauser, Magdalena Stöger and Fritz Laszlo Weber.

Biennale für Freiburg (BfF) is a new platform for the presentation, development and mediation of contemporary art in Freiburg, Germany. It dedicates itself to artistically approaching urgent socio-political matters through means of varying thematic and conceptual frameworks. The aim is to establish a continuous connection to Freiburg and to provide a lasting contribution to the cultural and artistic life of the city. The Biennale envisions itself as a beneficial addition to Freiburg’s artistic landscape, juxtaposing an in-depth examination of local modus operandi with external perspectives, which are taken up by the participants. The choice for the commonplace acronym BFF and its meaning in popular culture, are quite intentional: a connection based on support and intimacy, conversation and honesty, combined with the genuine desire to never let this commitment end – Best Friends Forever.

The inaugural edition of the Biennale für Freiburg is overseen by Artistic Director Leon Hösl. The committee of the association Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V., that executes the Biennale, commissioned Hösl for the conception and realization of its first iteration.

SUPPORT

The Biennale für Freiburg #1 would like to thank all supporters!

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Team

Leon Hösl / Artistic Director

Catherin Schöberl / Project Assistant

Christoph Chwatal, Aziza Harmel, Fanny Hauser, Magdalena Stöger, Fritz Laszlo Weber / Curatorial Advisory Board

Arash Shahali / Press Advisor

Kathrin Heinrich / Editing & Translation

Marc Doradzillo, Alexander Frank, Robert Jaschke, Jonas Krauss, Karl Mainka, Martin Puchberger, Stefan Reisinger, Jan Steegmüller / Install, Technic and Logistics

Marie Klauder / Intern

Imprint

The Biennale für Freiburg is organized by Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V.

Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V.
Dreisamstr. 21
79098 Freiburg
verein@perspektivenfuerkunst.de

Committee:
Heinrich Dietz, Chairperson
Julia Galandi-Pascual, Vice Chairperson
Yvonne Ziegler, Treasurer
Ben Hübsch

Registration court: Amtsgericht Freiburg
Registration number: VR 702810
UST ID: DE331510618

Responsible for contents according to § 10 paragraph 3 MDStv: Leon Hösl (Director, address see above)

Graphic design: Ronja Andersen and Marius Schwarz
Programming: François Girard-Meunier
Typeface: Difficult Times

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© Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V., artists, photographers, authors, 2020

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PROGRAMM AM LETZTEN AUSSTELLUNGSWOCHENENDE

02.10.2021 – 03.10.2021 / All Venues

ABSCHLUSS DER BIENNALE FÜR FREIBURG #1

Der Ausstellungsparcours der ersten Biennale für Freiburg findet allmählich sein Ende. Bis kommenden Sonntag können die acht Ausstellungsorte ein letztes Mal besucht werden.

Am letzten Ausstellungswochenende bieten wir Führungen an, bei denen wir nochmals über die Ausstellung ins Gespräch kommen können. Am Sonntag können sich Kinder und Jugendliche im Besuchszentrum eine kleine Erinnerung an die BfF#1 knüpfen. Die letzte Tour durch den Ausstellungsparcours wird Dorothee Annette Kreuzer gemeinsam mit Leon Hösl führen und dabei den Fokus auf die Bereiche der Stadt richten, die zwischen den Ausstellungsorten liegen und die Frage aufwerfen: Wem gehört die Stadt? Abschließend laden wir zu einem informellen Ausklang der Biennale für Freiburg #1 am Sonntag ab 18 Uhr in und vor unserem Besuchszentrum am Münsterplatz ein.

PROGRAMM AM LETZTEN WOCHENENDE

Samstag, 02.10.21 / 14:00 Uhr
SPAZIERGANG DURCH DIE AUSSTELLUNG
Führung mit Marie Klauder durch die Ausstellungsorte Kunstverein und Kaiserwache, Treffpunkt: Kunstverein, Dreisamstr. 21
Dauer: ca. 1 Stunde

Sonntag, 03.10.21 / 12:00 Uhr
TOUR DURCH DEN AUSSTELLUNGSPARCOURS MIT DEM FAHRRAD
Führung mit dem künstlerischen Leiter Leon Hösl
Wem kein eigenes Fahrrad zur Verfügung steht kann gratis ein Frelo-Fahrrad mit der "Next Bike App" ein Fahrrad leihen (Stationen befinden sich in der Nähe der Ausstellungsorte). Gutscheincode: 654565.
Treffpunkt: DELPHI_space, Emmendingerstr. 21
Stationen: DELPHI_space, Stadtgarten, Pförtnerhaus, Kommunales Kino, Museum für Neue Kunst
Dauer: ca. 2 Stunden

Sonntag, 03.10.21 / ab 11:40 Uhr, Parallel zur Führung
BEST FRIENDS FOREVER: KINDER- UND JUGENDPROGRAMM
Freundschaftsbänder knüpfen mit Kindern und Jugendlichen im BfF-Besuchszentrum, Münsterplatz 6.
Dauer: ca. 2 Stunden

Sonntag, 03.10.21 / 15:30 Uhr
PARCOURSWALK "FLEXEN UND FRAGEN: WEM GEHÖRT DIE STADT?"
mit Dorothee Annette Kreuzer und Leon Hösl
Treffpunkt: Pförtnerhaus, Fabrikstraße (Brauerei Ganter)
Dauer: ca. 2 Stunden

Sonntag, 03.10.21 / ab 18:00 Uhr
AUSKLANG DER BfF#1 MIT BIER UND BREZELN
BfF-Besuchszentrum am Münsterplatz 6

OPEN STUDIO #4: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński

29.09.2021 / 19:30 / [...]

Wednesday, 29.9.2021, 19:30 Uhr
The event will take place online and in German language.
Zoom-Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87376371883

The OPEN STUDIO is intended as an invitation to collective reflection on artistic processes — it focuses on the unfinished and the processual. The 'opening' of the studio is not understood primarily as the physical opening of a private workspace, but rather as the unlocking of a space of thought that facilitates an exchange about artistic modes of production.

In the fourth and last OPEN STUDIO, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński will talk about her ongoing project LIBRARY OF REQUESTS, which is being implemented with the participation of collaborating individuals in different locations and with different thematic focuses. The sixth edition of LoR, created in collaboration with the curatorship of the Dear White People Festival for the Biennale für Freiburg, is about colonial continuities: How to deal with the ever-emerging re-articulations of colonial violence? How to grasp a past that does not seem to have passed? From the LoR, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński will bridge to her film work UNEARTHING. IN CONVERSATION (2017), which deals with the connection between knowledge production and colonial trauma.

LIBRARY OF REQUESTS #6:
Dagmar Yü-Dembsk: Chinesen in Berlin (2007), Resmaa Menakem: My Grandmother’s Hand: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies (2017), Cheryl Dunye: Watermelon Woman (1996), Emilia Roig: Why We Matter. Das Ende der Unterdrückung (2021), Robin Di Angelo: White Fragility (2018), Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), John Coates & Tina Hetherington: Decolonizing Social Work (2013), Volker Seitz: Afrika wird armregiert oder Wie man Afrika wirklich helfen kann (2009), Michael Lüders: Wer den Wind sät. Was westliche Politik im Orient anrichtet (2015), Trân Tô Nga: Ma terre empoisonnée (2016), Cathy Park Hong: Minor Feelings. An Asian American Reckoning (2021), Ocean Vuong: Auf Erden sind wir kurz grandios (2019), Sault: Untitled (Black is) (2020), Nashi 44: Asian Berlin Pussy Power (2021), Blick Bassy: 1958 (2019), Rodrigue Péguy Takou Ndie: Die Suchenden (2018), Mame-Fatou Niang & Kaytie Nielsen: Mariannes Noires (2016), Theater X: Verlassen wir dieses Europa!, Oyeronke Oyewumi: The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender (1997), Peace Adzo Medie: His Only Wife (2020), Chinua Achebe: Things fall appart (1958), Elizabeth Acevedo: Clap When You Land (2020), Yaa Gyasi: Transcendent Kingdom (2020), Ondjaki: Die Durchsichtigen (2015), Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: That Hair (2020), Leonor Teles: Ballade der Batrachia (2016), Azagaia: Só Dever (2019), Christina Sharpe: In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (2016), Grada Kilomba: Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism (2008), May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye & Dagmar Schultz: Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (2020), Katharina Oguntoye: Schwarze Wurzeln. Afro-deutsche Geschichte (2020), Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai & Sheila Mysorekar: re/visionen – Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland (2016), David Olusoga & Caspar W. Erichsen: The Kaiser’s Holocaust. Germany’s Forgotten Genocide (2010), Natasha Kelly: Schwarzer Feminismus
– Grundlagentexte (2019), Rainer Fassbinder: Angst essen Seele auf (1974), Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Pesche & Susan Arndt: Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland (2017), Karin Beese: Nelly und die Berlinchen (2019), Dayan Kodua: Odo (2019), Susan Arndt: Hornscheidt, Antje. Afrika und die deutsche Sprache – Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk (2018)

BELINDA KAZEEM-KAMIŃSKI was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1980. She lives and works in Vienna. From 2015 to 2018 Kazeem-Kamiński taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna where she completed her PhD-in-Practice on the performativity of Blackness in relation to Austrian coloniality in 2020. Currently she is a visiting professor at the KHM in Cologne. She received the Catrin Pichler Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2018) and was awarded the Theodor Körner Prize for Art (2016).

MONUMENT IN THE MAKING: ROSA LUXEMBURG

19.09.2021 / 11:00 – 20:00 / Siegesdenkmal, Europaplatz

Sunday, September 19th, 11 a.m. until approx 8 p.m.
Location: Starting at Siegesdenkmal (Europaplatz), ending at Stadtgarten

Freiburg’s Stadtgarten holds a multitude of monuments, none however to commemorate Rosa Luxemburg’s pacifist speech delivered here in 1914. A petition to that effect was refused by the municipality. In 2017 the municipality reconstructed the victory memorial at the nearby Europaplatz, commemorating a period of armed conflict between nation states that was overcome with the establishment of Franco-German friendship and the European Union.

This anachronism and inconsistency in public remembrance led artist Luiza Margan to consider the notion of representation, especially of women, in public space in Freiburg. Inspired by the photograph “The Fallen Goddess” by Willy Pragher from 1962 that shows the victory memorial’s goddess figure in one of the stages of relocation, Margan invites visitors to participate in a communal act of remembrance: the creation of a larger-than-life laurel wreath, using laurel leaves handpicked and imported from her hometown Rijeka in Croatia.

MONUMENT IN THE MAKING aims to break with the symbolical passivity of the laurel wreath as a ceremonial object and instead fosters community and exchange, encouraging participants to discuss issues of public remembrance and representation in public space as well as the politics of monumentality in the city of Freiburg. The made wreath will be laid on the spot where Rosa Luxemburg gave her speech on March 7, 1914.

No registration necessary, participants can join anytime.

LUIZA MARGAN, born in Rijeka (Croatia), lives and works in Vienna. Margan studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2009-2013). She received numerous scholarships and awards for her artistic projects. She showed works at Scope Berlin (2021), Donumenta Regensburg (2020), Kunsthalle Karlsplatz (2020), Viennacontemporary (2019), 21er Haus Belvedere (2018), Museum der Moderne / Generali Foundation, Salzburg (2017), Kunstforum Wien (2016) among others.

Young Boy Dancing Group

18.09.2021 / 20:00 / Hans Bunte Areal

Performance
Saturday, September 18
Entrance: 7 pm
Begin of performance: 8 pm
Location: Hans Bunte Areal, Hans-Bunte-Straße 16c

Admission free, with advance registration at anmeldung@biennalefuerfreiburg.de

Access only with 3G (proof of vaccination or convalescence), negative rapid antigen test.
Mask obligation applies.

The Biennale for Freiburg #1 is pleased to present a new performance by the Young Boy Dancing Group.

The materiality of bodies meets spherical light and piercing sound in the Young Boy Dancing Group’s (YBDG) intimate performances. Their objectives are always physical exploration instead of sexualization, exposure instead of exhibitionism, communal liberation instead of tamed isolation, object identification instead of commercialization, DIY instead of institutional polish.

In the process, the performance collective founded in 2014 collaborates with an ever-changing network of dancers from all over Europe, taking on new perfomers at each venue, with whom they connect mostly via the social media platforms Instagram and TikTok. The public performances and preparatory rehearsals in different cities and continents are thus also a physical meeting point for virtual networks.

YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP has performed at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2019); Ceremonia Festival, Toluca, Mexico (2019); Athens Biennial (2018); Baltic Triennial, Tallinn, Estonia (2018); Creepy Teepee Festival, Kutná Hora, Czech Republic (2018); Norberg Festival, Sweden (2018); Roskilde Festival, Denmark (2017); Yvon Lambert Gallery, Berlin (2017); Lithuanian Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2015); and Silencio, Paris (2014).

Workshop TOMIKO Archive

12.09.2021 / 14:00 – 18:00 / Kunstverein

WORKSHOP
2:00–4:00 pm

LAUNCH OF THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE
4:30–6:00 pm

For the workshop we ask for registration at anmeldung@biennalefuerfreiburg.de.

Private photo estates as a starting point for collective historiography?

The starting point for the workshop is the TOMIKO Archive, a collection of over 500.000 photographs from private estates.

In the workshop, we will open and view boxes of private photographic estate together; let them speak and awaken our own memories, share them or keep them silent. We will observe and retell what the images (don't) tell. Can a moment of truth be found in photographs at all, and to whom does that truth belong?

We will exchange boxes and individual photographs, learn what different moods and assumptions are inherent to them and how exactly those can be overwritten again with each individual re-viewing. Can we use these images to suggest a path to an alternative and collaborative historiography? And what might it look like to integrate this practice of seeing differently into everyday life and to pass it on? At the beginning of these questions are purely associative observation, but out of them we want to spin utopias that open up individual possibilities for the transmission of history in the present.

Starting at 4:30 pm, Patrizia Bach will present the digital archive of the collection as a website for the first time and invite participants to join in. Participation in this second part of the event is also possible without registration!

In the future viewable at www.tomikoarchiv.de

Opening Party

Slow Club Freiburg

10.09 / 20:00

Opening party with l'imunsystem and other DJ’s at Slow Club.

Conclusion of the Walk-Workshop

DELPHI_space

10.09 / 13:00

Public closing event of the one-week WALK-WORKSHOP by Rahima Gambo.

OPENING

10.09.2021 / 12:00 – 22:00 / All Venues

All exhibition venues are open on the opening day from 12 am to 10 pm.

SPEECHES AND DRINKS: 6 pm, in front of the BfF Visitor Center/Münsterplatz 6 (formerly Geschenke Hansen)
OPENING PARTY: starting at 8 pm, Slow Club

Biennale für Freiburg enters its final phase and invites you to the opening and program of the exhibition parcours!

Taking place in eight different locations, the exhibition parcours is distributed across Freiburg and gathers 23 international artistic positions. Issues arising from previous projects around public spheres, urban spaces, collectivity, and historical stratification are expanded through a sprawling exhibition, performances and interventions and, thus, read in global and political contexts.

In its initial deliberations, the Biennale for Freiburg #1 centered on the site of the artist’s studio to explore the relationship between temporary exhibition, public space, and artistic forms of knowledge production. After in-depth, site-specific, and often collective investigations of the city in walks, workshops, readings, screenings, discussions, a symposium, research, and working residencies, Biennale for Freiburg #1 now presents its final exhibition parcours!

ARTISTS:
Michel Auder with Michael Stickrod in collaboration with Julius Martin-Humpert; Maristella Witt; Ilja Zaharov and Franziska Rist; Patrizia Bach; Patricia Esquivias; Rahima Gambo; Thomas Geiger in collaboration with Birgit Heidtke, Sévérine Kpoti, Oliver Matthes and Dietrich Roeschmann; Niklas Goldbach; Philipp Gufler; Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller; Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński; Vika Kirchenbauer; Sarah Lehnerer with Jackie Grassmann and Inka Meißner; Luiza Margan; Kriz Olbricht; John Smith; Milica Tomić; Liesl Raff; Andreas von Ow; Young Boy Dancing Group

WALK-WORKSHOP

06.09.2021 – 10.09.2021 / DELPHI_space

NEST-WORKS AND WANDER-LINES by Rahima Gambo explores the architectures of the non-verbal and non-linear story by mimicking the process of wandering and bricolage mirrored in the moving paths and nest making activities of birds, cow herds, and termites, their nests, habitats, and moving pathways. Non-verbal communication such as movement, symbols, signs gesturing, tracing, and silence are expressed in the work as a liberatory mode of being, seeing, speaking, and writing. The work ponders on the inception of language and what it means to see spatially and communicate collectively as part of a larger ecological system.

For NEST-WORKS AND WANDER-LINES Rahima Gambo invites to a 5-day WALK-WORKSHOP in Freiburg (September 6–10). During this workshop Gambo’s installation for the Biennale für Freiburg will be developed in a participatory process. The artist takes the 7 participants to individual morning walks. During these walks, materials and objects will be collected. These could be stones, leaves, sound recordings, videos, pictures, objects or texts. The collected objects will become a part of the installation “Nest-works and wander-lines”, which will also include a jointly generated video as well as musical elements. During that time, DELPHI_space will become “A Walk Space,” Gambo’s open studio and presentation space where discussions, screenings, assembling and editing will take place.

Learn more about Rahima’s work on her homepage and on the Instagram profile @walkspace.

Registration for the Walk-Workshop will be open until August 31. The workshop will start every day with morning walks and ends with daily collective gatherings at DELPHI_space between 11–1 pm. Participation on all days is desired but not mandatory. We are looking forward to your registration via anmeldung@biennalefuerfreiburg.de

In advance of her work for the Biennale für Freiburg Rahima Gambo showed her new film “INSTRUMENTS OF AIR” at DELPHI_space on July 15th Afterwards, the artist talked with the curator and writer Aziza Harmel, member of the Curatorial Advisory Board of BfF #1, about her film as well as about her participatory project that will be realized in Freiburg in September.

Open Studio #3

26.08.2021 / 19:30 / Online

August 26, 7:30 pm
The event will take place online via Zoom:
Zoom-Link

Every last Thursday of the month, from May to September, the OPEN STUDIOS take place. Invited artists, curators, thoerists and writers will give fragmentary insights into their artistic practice during the event series. Be it loose thoughts, specific objects and their stories or conceptual reflections on works — the OPEN STUDIOS invite to continue thinking together in ‘intimate public’, to associate, to talk about processes and to reflect on conditions of production.

PATRIZIA BACH is a visual artist with a focus on drawing. She lives and works in Berlin and occasionally in Istanbul. Bach's works are mostly related to texts, without illustrating them in the conventional sense. She develops her projects over several years, incorporating other media along the way to create her spacious drawing installations. Interdisciplinary collaborations are as much a part of her regular working practice as solitary, remote drawing.

OPEN STUDIO #3 via Zoom with Patrizia Bach

Bust Talk–Illumina

23.07.2021 – 24.07.2021 / Stadtgarten

Till Peter Otto: Illumina, 2000, © Thomas Geiger

Thomas Geiger
Performance

Friday, 23 and Saturday, 24 July, 5 pm
Rosegarden in the Stadtgarten Freiburg

In the Stadtgarten Freiburg stands the statue “Illumina” by sculptor Till Peter Otto, a marble stele designed as a sundial with a female body. According to Otto, the work’s intention is to represent the diversity of the city's society; an anonymous Freiburg woman of Ethiopian origin stood portrait for the head of the statue. In 2014, the statue was damaged by unknown persons and remains in this condition today. Since then, the statue has been missing its head; the "Illumina" has become ‘the decapitated’.

As part of the Biennale für Freiburg, Thomas Geiger will lead a Bust Talk with the statue. The artist’s line of questioning aims to discursively fill the void of the missing head and to give voice to the different perspectives on this figure. In preparation for the discussion, possible answers of the statue to the artist's questions were found in collaboration with representatives of different Freiburg institutions and initiatives. These will now be expressed in the conversation between Thomas Geiger as ‘host’ and Illumina as ‘guest. During the approx. 30-minute performance, the statue will share its views and the perspectives with the audience in a frank negotiation of concepts such as (in)visibility, corporeality and the public in general.

In collaboration with Birgit Heidtke (Feminist history-werkstatt), Sévérine Kpoti (HereandBlack), Oliver Matthes (FREIeBÜRGER) and Dieter Roeschmann (Municipal Comission Art in public Space).

THOMAS GEIGER, born 1983 in Germany, is an interdisciplinary artist living in Vienna. In his artistic practice he uses performance, sculpture, and language in diverse combinations to create fragmentary stage-situations and playful scenarios. In recent years he has realized individual projects with Kunsthalle Wien, Wiener Festwochen, steirischer herbst, Ausstellungsraum Klingental (Basel), Kunstverein Langenhagen, Dehli Projects / Museum Tinguely (Basel), Despacio (San José, Costa Rica), Fondation d'entreprise Ricard (Paris) among others.

Cracking Dis/Parities

18.07.2021 / 11:00 / Bandstand, Rieselfeld

Workshop
Sunday, July 18th, 11 a.m.
Location: Bandstand at Rieselfeld

Duration: about 2 hours.
Please register here.
Free of charge.

Beginning with the Key of Bremen—featured prominently in the city’s coat of arms—this workshop is dedicated to the history of keys and movements of un/locking. It connects the coat of arms with the keys needed to enter a newly built real estate project in Freiburg Rieselfeld or in the future district of Dietenbach.

Keys and locks serve a symbolic purpose and as instruments of power, operating at a central, axiomatic point in a tale of societal security. Through a series of sound and listening exercises, the participants of the workshop explore the insecurities of these apparatuses. ‘Cracking‘ as a verb already indicates the acoustic dimension of this activity (‘to crack a lock’). Lock-picking, the final exercise in the workshop, attempts to imitate the movements that the key produces inside the lock. This creates an acoustic dialogue between the body and lock. Both the picking of locks and the unlocking of hegemonic narratives, necessitate careful listening.

Fritz Laszlo Weber studied at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and the Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Today he works interdisciplinary on his own and collective projects in artistic and filmic contexts. He was collectively involved in the tribunal "NSU-Kompelx auflösen" 2017 at Schauspiel Köln, and the "Society of Friends of Halit" at documenta 14 in Kassel. Currently, he is involved in the mobile exhibition project "Offener Prozess", among others, and is a member of the Curatorial Advisory Board of the Biennale für Freiburg.

Fritz Laszlo Weber during the Workshop "Cracking Dis/Parities"
Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Fritz Laszlo Weber during the Workshop "Cracking Dis/Parities"
Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Nest-Works and Wander-Lines

15.07.2021 / 20:00 / DELPHI_space

Film screening and discussion between Rahima Gambo and Aziza Harmel

Date: Thursday, July 15, 8:00 p.m.
Place: DELPHI_space, Emmendinger Str. 21
Admission free, event in English
Limited seating capacity due to the weather situation. For physical attendance please register register here.

The event also takes place online via the following Zoom-link:
us02web.zoom.us/j/88194869876

In advance of her work for the Biennale for Freiburg “Nest-works and wander-lines” we will show a new film by Rahima Gambo. Afterwards, the artist will talk with the curator and writer Aziza Harmel, member of the Curatorial Advisory Board of BfF #1, about her film as well as about her participatory project that will be realized in Freiburg in September. Afterwards, interested people can directly ask questions to Rahima Gambo and register for the collaborative workshop in September.

“Nest-works and wander-lines” explores the architectures of the non-verbal and non-linear story by mimicking the process of “wandering” and “bricolage” mirrored in the moving paths and nest making activities of birds, cow herds and termites, their nests, habitats and moving pathways. Non-verbal communication such as movement, symbols, signs, gesturing, tracing and silence are expressed in the work as a liberatory mode of being, seeing, speaking and writing. The work ponders on the origins of language and what it means to “see” spatially, and communicate collectively as part of a larger ecological system to weave together a moving psycho-spiritual-geographic narrative that is both interior, exterior and specific to the spaces Gambo and participants “walk” through.

In the 5 day Walk workshop to take place in Freiburg in September, Rahima Gambo wants to invite 7 participants to join her for a series of disparate morning strolls through the city. During the workshop participants will be engaged in picking up found things. This could be a rock, a leaf, sound, video, images, objects, texts. All of these materials will become a part of the “Nest-works and Wander-lines” installation that also contains a jointly created video work as well as musical elements. For that DELPHI_space will become “A Walk Space” Gambo’s open studio and presentation space where discussions, screenings, assembling and editing will take place.

Rahima Gambo was born in London, United Kingdom, in 1986. She lives and works in Abuja, Nigeria and London, United Kingdom. Gambo completed an MSc in Gender and Social Policy and in Journalism. She developed her artistic practice by working independently on long form trans media documentary projects. Gambo was named a Foam Talent for 2020 and was among the awardees of the CAP prize – The Contemporary African Photography Prize 2020.

NEST-WORKS AND WANDER-LINES at DELPHI_space

Symposion
“A Commonplace is Not a Cliché”

10.07.2021 / 10:30 – 17:30 / Basler Hof

PERSPECTIVES ON PUBLIC SPHERES, ASYNCHRONOUS COMMONPLACES, AND INFRASTRUCTURAL INTIMACIES

Date: Saturday, July 10, 10:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Location: Basler Hof, Kaiser-Joseph-Str. 167
The event is free of charge
Due to limited seating capacity, participation is only possible after registration: Registration here

As part of the symposion three workshops will be held on July 9, further information here.

Please find the VIDEO DOCUMENTATION of most parts of the symposion at the end of this page.

ABOUT THE SYMPOSION
Christoph Chwatal & Lisa Stuckey

In the wake of the anti-establishment movements of 1968, spatial production became increasingly associated with public bodily co-presence. On the one hand, this resonated with radical democratic theories, which challenged consensus-oriented notions of public spheres, as well as with related forms of artistic activism. On the other hand, this association was accompanied by an abandonment of the artist’s studio in favor of new workplaces and modes of production, such as those in social contexts or scientific settings, for example.

Conceptions of asynchronous temporalities and other genealogies are therefore of interest to the symposium, for instance via narrative montages and emancipative ways of referencing. Commonplaces are analyzed as the literal communal goods in addition to rhetorical places to which arguments refer. For, as Barbara Cassin states: "A commonplace is not a cliché, it is a bank, a stock, a tank of available arguments and a place in which to seek, find and invent arguments." Frequenting, standardizing, appropriating et cetera — which procedures and methodologies are grouped around commonplaces?

The figuration Best Friends Forever, which shares the acronym 'BFF' with the Biennale für Freiburg, may also appear as a cliché. "Friendship," Jacques Derrida wrote in the 1980s, "resembles an appeal because it makes a sign toward the future: be my friends." Insofar as this appeal currently bears a renewed urgency, it necessitates awareness of transforming commonplaces. Taking this idea further, the symposium illuminates present and future manifestations of infrastructural intimacies. The understanding of both practical and imaginary 'critical infrastructures' will be negotiated and recontextualized.

SPEAKERS:
Mirela Baciak, Christoph Chwatal, Elke Krasny, Sven Lütticken, Viktor Neumann, Karina Nimmerfall, Lisa Stuckey, Simon Strick, Karen van den Berg

CONVENED BY
Christoph Chwatal and Lisa Stuckey

SCENOGRAPHY
Diane Hillebrand

FILM SCREENING
Michel Auder, May ´68 in ´78 (1978/2019) EDITED BY Michael Stickrod
Reconstruction of the BLEACHER: Julius Martin-Humpert

COOPERATION
Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design

Download the full program brochure here.

Input presentation by Christoph Chwatal for Panel I.

Karen van den Berg, DAS STUDIO UND DIE PRODUKTION DER VIELEN

Sven Lütticken, IMAGINED ASSEMBLIES — BETWEEN CROWDS AND NETWORKS

Simon Strick, COMMON MEMES, COUNTERHISTORIES

PANEL II: Input lecture by Lisa Stuckey, THE THIRD CITY by Karina Nimmerfall (online), COMMON MEMES, COUNTERHISTORIES by Simon Strick.

Panel III: Input lecture by Mirela Baciak, INFRASTRUKTUREN DES SORGETRAGENS: ÖKOLOGIEN DES UNTERSTÜTZTSEINS by Elke Krasny and INFRASTRUKTURELLE INTIMITÄT VERSUS CHRONONORMATIVITÄT by Viktor Neumann.

Elke Krasny, Lisa Stuckey, Mirela Baciak, Christoph Chwatal and Leon Hösl (f.l.t.r.)

Open discussion following the first panel.

Program brochure on the symposion.
Graphic by Ronja Andersen & Marius Schwarz

Michel Auder, MAY ´68 IN ´78 (1978/2019) EDITED BY Michael Stickrod
Reconstruction: Julius Martin-Humpert

After the last panel: Fritz Laszlo Weber, Elke Krasny, Sascia Bailer, Fanny Hauser (v.l.n.r.)

Photos: Karolina Sobel

ARTICLE BY SASCIA BAILER

The curator Sascia Bailer was one of the participants of the symposion. For the art magazine artline.org she wrote an article about the symposion that you can read here (in German only).

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

Camera: Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun and Team
Editing: Stefan Reisinger

Note: Please make sure to agree to the use of cookies in order to be able to view the embedded videos below.

Begrüßung von Leon Hösl

Inputvortrag von Christoph Chwatal zu PANEL I. ÖFFENTLICHKEITEN UND VERSAMMLUNGSKRISE

Karen van den Berg, DAS STUDIO UND DIE PRODUKTION DER VIELEN

Sen Lütticken, IMAGINED ASSEMBLIES — BETWEEN CROWDS AND NETWORKS

PANEL II: Simon Strick, COMMON MEMES, COUNTERHISTORIES

Inputvortrag von Mirela Baciak zu PANEL III. INFRASTRUKTURELLE INTIMITÄTEN

Elke Krasny, INFRASTRUKTUREN DES SORGETRAGENS: ÖKOLOGIEN DES UNTERSTÜTZTSEINS

Viktor Neumann, INFRASTRUKTURELLE INTIMITÄT VERSUS CHRONONORMATIVITÄT

Workshops
“A Commonplace is Not a Cliché”

09.07.2021 / BfF #1

Date: Friday, July 9, 2021
The workshops will take place all day, exact times to be communicated.
Please register by July 06: here

Three workshops expand the symposion "A Comonplace is not a Cliché" with practical artistic, curatorial and feminist perspectives. They offer students the opportunity to engage and discuss already the day before the symposion. Connectingly, the workshops are dedicated to different forms of remembering as well as to the production of emancipatory narratives and signs.

The exploration of public spaces and the creation of new narratives around "infrastructural intimacies" will take place on a small scale on an applied as well as reflexive-theoretical level. No explanations or even keys to the symposion program will be offered, but rather spaces of encounter and experimentation will be designed together.

WORKSHOP I - (ENGLISH)
COLLECT AND EXHAUST: FREIBURG SPECIMENS
Ronja Andersen and Marius Schwarz invite you to go in search of traces in urban space. With a sharpened eye on the structure and nature of the environment, graphic designs will be developed.

WORKSHOP II
TUNNEL OF TIME: VON ERINNERUNGSRÄUMEN UND ZEITKAPSELN
With Lou von der Heyde and Daniel Vollmer, the neighborhood around the DELPHI_space will come into focus. Together and based on fictional and collective forms of memory, a temporary exhibition will be curated.

WORKSHOP III
BETWEEN US, IN ALL OF OUR DIFFERING EMBODIMENTS
Hanne König and Claudia Barth take lines of tradition of feminist practices as a starting point to test forms of confiding in each other through shared narration and local references.

Detailed information about the workshops is available here.

Following the workshops, the symposion "A Commonplace is Not a Cliché" Perspectives on Public Spheres, Asynchronous Commonplaces and Infrastructural Intimacies will take place on July 10 at the Basler Hof.

A Day’s Work:
Minerva and the miscarriage of the brain by Johanna Hedva

02.07.2021 / 20:00 / Kommunales Kino

Sarah Lehnerer, A Day‘s Work, 2021, glazed ceramic, ca 30 x 30 cm

Reading and video screening followed by Q&A

Date: Friday, July 2, 8 p.m.
Location: Kommunales Kino, Urachstraße 40
Event in English with German translation.
Free entry, limited seating capacity.
Registration here

As part of A DAY’S WORK artist Johanna Hedva will read from their new book Minerva: The Miscarriage of the Brain. The reading will be streamed parallel to recordings of a live underwater camera and Jackie Grassmann will read her German translation of the text afterwards. For the subsequent conversation and Q&A Johanna Hedva will be joining live via video. Johanna Hedva will talk to us about how permeability, mysticism, processes of artistic work, biographical and encounters with friends and strangers relate to their texts and art. What influence do political, familial, physical and psychological conditions have on our creative work, and how do we deal with them?

A DAY’S WORK is a project conceived by Sarah Lehnerer, in collaboration with Jackie Grassmann and Inka Meißner for Biennale für Freiburg. The project consists out of two workshops and subsequent guest readings as part of the Biennale’s studio program. The workshops interrogate forms of initially non-purposeful, intimate writing: drawing on research in the German diary archive in Emmendingen, the workshops examine (one‘s own) writing on the threshold between everyday notation and artistic production. Sometimes in the stoicism of writing down or drawing everyday life at the table in the evening, transforming what has been experienced into something that can endure, lies that peripheral act from which artistic work also emerges. The workshops will be accompanied by a site-specific installation by Sarah Lehnerer – a painted setting of room dividers and utilitarian objects, ceramic furniture and writing equipment. The spatial installation A DAY’S WORK will then make the installative elements as well as text fragments from the workshops accessible to the public during the exhibition of the Biennale. The workshops will be framed by two guest lectures as a subsequent evening program, for which Keren Cytter (18.6. Literaturhaus Freiburg) and Johanna Hedva (2.7. Kommunales Kino) will each stage a reading.

Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives between LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming/Wolfman 2020), and the novel On Hell (Sator/Two Dollar Radio 2018). They have released the albums Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House (2021), and The Sun and the Moon (2019).

The reading is preceded by a workshop by Jackie Grassmann and Sarah Lehnerer: ECHOES AS RESPONSE

The event is partially barrier-free, for more information please contact:
info@biennalefuerfreiburg.de

Johanna Hedva (Screen) during her reading "Minerva and the miscarriage of the brain" at the Kommunale Kino Freiburg.
Foto: Jennifer Rohrbacher

Johanna Hedva (Screen) during her reading "Minerva and the miscarriage of the brain" at the Kommunale Kino Freiburg.
Foto: Jennifer Rohrbacher

A Day's Work: Echoes as Response

02.07.2021 / 11:00 – 15:00 / Musikpavillon, Stadtgarten

With Jackie Grassmann and Sarah Lehnerer

To whom, for whom, and with whom do we actually write when we write? In the workshop we will explore what it means to refer to others, to appropriate, to dialogue, to repeat, to collect and to exchange. How does it feel to write when we become aware that we as writers are never alone, but are always already involved in a political and social fabric, describing it and being described by it? Using selected text fragments, we will try to read out which forces, echoes, objects or other elements beyond the author‘s ego are the driving force of writing. In small writing exercises we will experiment with the forms that emerge when we give these forces their own voice.

The workshop reflections have their origin in the collaborative project „Fireflies in the Dark. A Reading on Ambiguities“ by the two artists.

As part of the Biennale für Freiburg, artist Sarah Lehnerer, in collaboration with Jackie Grassmann and Inka Meißner, will realize the project A DAY’S WORK and hold two workshops as part of the studio program. They interrogate forms of initially non-purposeful, intimate writing: drawing on research in the German diary archive in Emmendingen, the workshops examine (one‘s own) writing on the threshold between everyday notation and artistic production. Sometimes in the stoicism of writing down or drawing everyday life at the table in the evening, transforming what has been experienced into something that can endure, lies that peripheral act from which artistic work also emerges. The workshops will be framed by two guest lectures as a subsequent evening program, for which Keren Cytter and Johanna Hedva will each stage a reading.

The workshops will be accompanied by a site-specific installation by Sarah Lehnerer – a painted setting of room dividers and utilitarian objects, ceramic furniture and writing equipment. The spatial installation A DAY’S WORK at the Kunstverein Freiburg in
September will then make the installative elements as well as text fragments from the workshops accessible to the public.

After the workshop the performative reading MINERVA AND THE MISCARRIAGE OF THE BRAIN will be given by Johanna Hedva.

July 2, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
Musikpavillon at Stadtgarten
Free entry, Limited seating capacity, Registration required: Registration here

The event is partially barrier-free, for more information please contact: info@biennalefuerfreiburg.de

Between the pavement, the beach! A slow walk for a green (Freiburg)

26.06.2021 / 11:00 – 17:00 / Musikpavillon, Stadtgarten

„Zwischen dem Pflaster liegt der Strand, a slow walk for a green (Freiburg)“, Workingprocess, 2021, © Andreas von Ow

We are happy to invite you for a special walk, where green becomes the red thread until the city map turns black! We will find a rich source: the green glass in all its nuances, the coveted raw material for what will ultimately become a color painting.

Starting from the meeting point at the Musikpavillon, participants will be sent to one area of Freiburg. Equipped with a citymap, a black pen (to blacken searched places), tweezers and plastic bags, we will all spread out in pairs.

The valuable blanks for the green pigments are taken from the surrounding area. The collected material is processed by Andreas von Ow to pigment in different grain sizes, enriched with binder and condensed on a picture carrier in several layers to a color painting, from the green in all its facets. The color receives a body, the green becomes “flesh”. Later on, this work will be presented as part of the exhibition of the Biennale that opens in September.

While walking and simultaneously removing the green from the cityscape, questions arise: How does one's own perspective on the land- and cityscape change when one focuses on "green"? What stories do the traces of green glass tell us about the place? What happens to our color vision and to our perception of the environment, before, during, and after walking? And finally, what does it mean to advocate for art in a society?

The found objects and (color) impressions will be brought together at 5 p.m. during a drink in the Stadtgarten, where conversations may take place and common reflections can be shared.

We would be happy to meet and walk with you on June 26! Already two days earlier, Andreas von Ow will talk about his artistic practice – for more information please visit: here.

With best regards and in great anticipation,
Andreas von Ow and the team of the Biennale für Freiburg

Date: June 26, Start: 11 a.m. at Musikpavillon inside the Stadtgarten.
Final color collection from 5 p.m. ibid.
The event is free of charge
Please register at: Registration here

Open Studio #2

24.06.2021 / 19:30 / Online

With artist Andreas von Ow and cultural anthropologist and architect Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe.

Date: June 24, 7:30 p.m.
The event will take place online via Zoom due to bad weather conditions, a link will be sent after registration.
The event is free of charge, Registration required: Registration here

A Day’s Work: Business Class
by Keren Cytter

18.06.2021 / 19:30 / Literaturhaus Freiburg

Performative Reading

For A DAY'S WORK, concept by Sarah Lehnerer in collaboration with Jackie Grassmann and Inka Meißner, artist Keren Cytter will stage a simulation of a rehearsal of her currently developing performance Business Class at the Literaturhaus Freiburg. In the process, Cytter will rehearse a specific excerpt from the performance with two non-professional actresses and follow the process of memorising and physically interpreting the written word until a reading emerges. Finally, the relevant section is presented as a recording of the original performance.

Woman: Once when I was in Paris I went to buy earrings for Isabelle, my then sister in law. It was a huge department store high ceilings and escalators. As I was walking and looking at the jewels, I see this cool-looking young woman, walking around the store. I smiled at her and she smiles back. She seemed so nice and friendly. I had to introduce my self to her. So I’m walking to her with my hand like that, and I bump my head in the mirror.... I ran away from the store. That was the last time I saw me.

In cooperation with German Diary Archive and Literaturhaus Freiburg.

Keren Cytter was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1977. She lives and works in New York, USA since 2012. Cytter studied Fine Arts at the Avni Institute of Art in Tel Aviv. Among others, she received the Baloise Art Prize in 2006 and the Ars Viva Prize in 2008. In 2014/2015 she was appointed professor of Fine Arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

The reading is preceded by a workshop by Inka Meißner and Sarah Lehnerer: ROOM WITHOUT WALLS

Date: June 18, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Literaturhaus Freiburg, Bertoldstraße 17
Participation only with current negative Corona rapid test (or evidence of recovery, or complete vaccination)
Free entry, The event is held in English
Limited seating capacity, registration required:
Registration here

The event is partially barrier-free, for more information please contact:
info@biennalefuerfreiburg.de

Inka Meißner (back), Laurie Mlodzik (front left) and Keren Cytter (right) at the performative Reading BUSINESS CLASS at Literaturhaus Freiburg.
Image: Marc Doradzillo

Laurie Mlodzik (left) and Inka Meißner (right) at the performative Reading BUSINESS CLASS at Literaturhaus Freiburg.
Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Inka Meißner, Laurie Mlodzik, Keren Cytter and Leon Hösl (v.r.n.l.) at the performative Reading BUSINESS CLASS at Literaturhaus Freiburg.
Photo: Marc Doradzillo

A Day's Work: Room without walls

18.06.2021 / 11:00 – 15:00 / Musikpavillon, Stadtgarten

This workshop is about starting and creating a writing process from scratch or from the absence of purpose. We will devote ourselves to the beginnings of our own writing: Drawing on material from the German Diary Archive, beginnings by others will be read, attempted ourselves, and then shared. Repetitive sequences of looking at, writing, reading aloud. Embracing the initial uncertainty then allows for reflection on writing itself and how even immediate, undirected forms can be understood as the starting point of a practice

With: Inka Meißner and Sarah Lehnerer

Following the workshop the performative reading BUSINESS CLASS will be given by Keren Cytter.

Date: June 18, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
Location: Musikpavillon at Stadtgarten
Free entry, Limited seating capacity,
Registration required:
Registration here

The event is partially barrier-free, for more information please contact:
info@biennalefuerfreiburg.de

Library of Requests #6

07.06.2021 / 16:30 – 18:30 / Stadtbibliothek Freiburg

The LIBRARY OF REQUESTS is a project by Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński and explores the formation of legitimised and marginalised knowledge and analyzes the inclusion and exclusion of certain groups. In the sixth edition of LoR, we approach the topic of colonial continuity: How to deal with the persistent re-articulations of colonial violence? How to comprehend a past, which does not seem to have stayed in the past? The act of reading together and the subsequent discussions stand in the foreground of the joint read-in for the release of the sixth edition of LoR.

As part of the Studio Program, this event draws attention to spaces that facilitate and initiate artistic processes. In addition to the public realm, such spaces also include public archives or libraries. The LIBRARY OF REQUESTS creates a framework in which the available canon of reading is expanded through the collectively selected publications. Shared readings and discussions are declared as an integral part of the reading process.

A cooperation of the Dear White People Festival and the city library of Freiburg with the Biennale für Freiburg. With the participation of the experts Akiko Rive, Andrea-Vicky Amankwaa-Birago, Alex M. Moepedi, Qùynh-nhu Nguyễn, Rufine Songue, Leonora Lorena and Valéria Fekete.

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is a writer whose work is inspired by the visual.

"DEAR WHITE PEOPLE..." LET'S BREAK THE SILENCE! is a festival that addresses marginalized issues such as the entanglement of colonialism and racism, the connection between ecological crisis and exploitation of the Global South, and the systemic structure of (multiple) discrimination in our society through workshops, panel discussions, performances, lectures, films, exhibitions or podcasts.

The Library of Request #6 is installed and can be visited at Stadtbibliothek Freiburg:

Library of Request #6, Stadtbibliothek Freiburg.
Display: Julius Martin-Humpert
Chair: Diane Hillebrand

List of publications of LIBRARY OF REQUESTS #6:

Dagmar Yü-Dembsk: Chinesen in Berlin (2007),
Resmaa Menakem: My Grandmother’s Hand: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies (2017),
Cheryl Dunye: Watermelon Woman (1996),
Emilia Roig: Why We Matter. Das Ende der Unterdrückung (2021),
Robin Di Angelo: White Fragility (2018),
Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972),
John Coates & Tina Hetherington: Decolonizing Social Work (2013),
Volker Seitz: Afrika wird armregiert oder Wie man Afrika wirklich helfen kann (2009),
Michael Lüders: Wer den Wind sät. Was westliche Politik im Orient anrichtet (2015),
Trân Tô Nga: Ma terre empoisonnée (2016),
Cathy Park Hong: Minor Feelings. An Asian American Reckoning (2021),
Ocean Vuong: Auf Erden sind wir kurz grandios (2019),
Sault: Untitled (Black is) (2020),
Nashi 44: Asian Berlin Pussy Power (2021),
Blick Bassy: 1958 (2019),
Rodrigue Péguy Takou Ndie: Die Suchenden (2018),
Mame-Fatou Niang & Kaytie Nielsen: Mariannes Noires (2016),
Theater X: Verlassen wir dieses Europa!, Oyeronke Oyewumi: The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender (1997),
Peace Adzo Medie: His Only Wife (2020),
Chinua Achebe: Things fall appart (1958),
Elizabeth Acevedo: Clap When You Land (2020),
Yaa Gyasi: Transcendent Kingdom (2020),
Ondjaki: Die Durchsichtigen (2015),
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018),
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: That Hair (2020),
Leonor Teles: Ballade der Batrachia (2016),
Azagaia: Só Dever (2019),
Christina Sharpe: In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (2016),
Grada Kilomba: Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism (2008),
May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye & Dagmar Schultz: Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (2020),
Katharina Oguntoye: Schwarze Wurzeln. Afro-deutsche Geschichte (2020),
Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai & Sheila Mysorekar: re/visionen – Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland (2016),
David Olusoga & Caspar W. Erichsen: The Kaiser’s Holocaust. Germany’s Forgotten Genocide (2010),
Natasha Kelly: Schwarzer Feminismus – Grundlagentexte (2019),
Rainer Fassbinder: Angst essen Seele auf (1974),
Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Pesche & Susan Arndt: Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland (2017),
Karin Beese: Nelly und die Berlinchen (2019),
Dayan Kodua: Odo (2019),
Susan Arndt: Hornscheidt, Antje. Afrika und die deutsche Sprache – Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk (2018)

Open Studio #1

27.05.2021 / 19:30 / Online

With scenographer Diane Hillebrand and artist duo Hanakam & Schuller.
Moderated by Leon Hösl and Catherin Schöberl.

Every last Thursday of the month, from May to September, the OPEN STUDIOS take place. Invited artists, curators and writers will give fragmentary insights into their artistic practice during the event series. Be it loose thoughts, specific objects and their stories or conceptual reflections on works — the OPEN STUDIOS invite to continue thinking together in ‘intimate public’, to associate, to talk about processes and to reflect on conditions of production.

Date: May 27, 7:30 p.m.
The event will take place online via Zoom
The event is free of charge
Registration required:
Registration here

Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller, The Moist Cabinet, 2021, Production Shot / Screenshot OPEN STUDIO #1

The Moist Cabinet

08.05.2021 / 10:00 / Macromedia Hochschule Freiburg

Workshop at Macromedia Hochschule Freiburg with artistduo Hanakam & Schuller

Ortsbegehung

24.09.2020 / Stadtgarten

September 24th, 7 pm
Stadtgarten, Freiburg

The studio of an artist or a class of art students does not necessarily depend on a physical space. A studio is primarily a place for production, experiment and exchange. A studio can be envisioned as a place of production, experiment and exchange: a protective space for thoughts and the actions taking place within it. A space for things in the making. A space of regular review, where actions are presented, tested and reflected upon. A space where honest opinions can be expressed and skills can be developed and applied. A space for construction and destruction, for consideration and spontaneity. A studio is a place where suggestions are made.

Ein weißes Blatt auf dem drei Bleistiftlinien gezogen sind. Zwei davon ziehen Schwünge und Kreise, die mittlere fast gerade. Die mittlere Linie beginnt an drei Punkten, die zu einer Linie zusammenlaufen, die untereste beginnt an einem Punkt und endet in drei seperaten Linien an deren Ende Pfeile gezeichnet sind. — Rahima Gambo, A Walk Map, 2019

Biennale für Freiburg (BfF) invites you to its first event. During the Ortsbegehung,(on-site visit) the conceptual and thematic approach of the inaugural edition will be presented, tested and discussed during a collective walk. This will be the first attempt to declare the public space as a work place and to create a temporary mobile studio. The event ends with the film “A Walk” (2019) by artist Rahima Gambo.

Participants:
Ronja Andersen and Marius Schwarz, Christoph Chwatal, Rahima Gambo, Aziza Harmel, Fanny Hauser, Leon Hösl, Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V. (Heidi Brunnschweiler, Heinrich Dietz, Julia Galandi-Pascual, Ben Hübsch), Magdalena Stöger, Fritz Laszlo Weber.

Michel Auder with Michael Stickrod

in collaboration with Julius Martin-Humpert, Maristella Witt, Ilja Zaharov, and Franziska Rist

MAY ’68 IN ’78

Venue: Kommunales Kino

Michel Auder, Michael Stickrod with Julius Martin-Humpert, Maristella Witt, Ilja Zaharov und Franziska Rist, Installation view Kommunales Kino Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, photo: Marc Doradzillo

In 1968, photographer and filmmaker Michel Auder documented the revolts in Paris, but lost the footage shortly after when he moved to the United States. Exactly ten years after the events, Auder restored these cinematic memories with MAY ’68 IN ’78 by entering into dialogue with Parisian artists, workers, a policeman, and a saleswoman, interviewing them about their personal memories of May 1968.

MAY ’68 IN ’78 paints a polyphonic portrait of the different roles and views the interviewees took during the protests and in retrospect. While some were actively involved themselves, others perceived the protests as a nuisance or simply classified them as insignificant. The conversations Auder initiated with people of different social and professional affiliations reenact the social encounters that, as one of his interviewees recounts, were also characteristic of the events of May 1968: “People were talking to each other, anybody talked to anybody, telling each other what had never been said before.”

Originally planned as a film screening in Jean Tinguely’s sculpture LE CYCLOP in Milly-la-Foret, which could not be realized for technical reasons, MAY ’68 IN ’78, 2019/2020 was shown for the first time at Beeler Gallery in Colombus, Ohio, in a sculptural setting by Michael Stickrod. A frequent collaborator of Michel Auder, Stickrod had screened, digitized, and edited the video footage for this exhibition.

For BfF#1, one element of Michael Stickrod’s installation was reconstructed: bleachers that refer to the theatricality of many of the events in May 1968, while at the same time occupying the gallery space like a barricade. On and next to the construction, four Freiburg-based artists show new works that emerged from their engagement with MAY ’68 IN ’78 and were developed in exchange with Michael Stickrod and Michel Auder. In the context of the symposium of the BfF #1 “A COMMONPLACE IS NOT A CLICHÉ”: PERSPECTIVES ON PUBLICITIES, ASYNCHRONE GENERALITIES, AND INFRASTRUCTURAL INTIMITIES on July 10, the film was shown as an important contemporary document and cinematic reflection of the commonplace “May 1968.”

MAY ’68 IN ’78, 1978/2019
Michel Auder video, edited by Michael Stickrod, BLEACHER, sculptural elements by Michael Stickrod.
Originally conceived for Beeler Gallery, Ohio, recconstruction by Julius Martin-Humpert.

“UNTITLED” (POUR CAUSE D‘INUTILITÉ), 2021
Ilja Zaharov
Offset print on paper, 16 x 42 x 59,4 cm (ideal height) [edition 800]

“UNTITLED” (POUR CAUSE D‘INUTILITÉ) comprises printed sheets reading CLOSED (DUE TO USELESSNESS) in French, recalling the protest posters of May ’68. The poster refers to the short-lived closing of the Musée d‘Art Moderne by students with the phrase written on a banner covering the entrance; an incident recounted by an interviewee in the film. Visitors may take the sheets, thereby individually determining their usage and revolutionary potency.

ÉCOUTE, 2021
Franziska Rist
Pillow, plaster, 55 x 40 x 70 and 38 x 33 x 45 cm

As I immerse myself in Stickrod and Auder’s work and prepare for the collaborative exhibition at KoKi, I confront myself with my most personal material to date in my studio work: my mother’s old pillows. Since the pillows still smell like her, I experience flashbacks to my childhood and develop a strong emotional connection to the work. When I include the sculptures in the collective installation, the reference changes, but my relationship remains. In dialogue with the film MAY ’68 IN ’78, they provide a glimpse into an individual history.

LAST NIGHT OF INSURRECTION, 2021
Julius Martin-Humpert
Paraffin wax, 30 x 20 x 25 cm

The work LAST NIGHT OF INSURRECTION relates to Tinguely’s quote stating that May ‘68 had no material consequence but led to a revolution of thoughts and attitudes. A jerry can of wax capturing the lack of gas in Paris during the strikes, synthetic paraffin wax turning the inside to the outside, creating an envelope for (destructive) potentials to develop. The climate between social upheaval and constant change, between riots and reforms, gas and fire, is temporarily solidified as a state of aggregation.

UNTITLED, 2021
Maristella Witt
Various materials and size

Civil disturbances stir up in the roles of public and private facilities. During protests, schools and universities were repurposed, the museum’s symbolism and raison d’être was called into question, the printing house was transformed into a poster printing factory. As people’s needs shift, certain spaces transform for coming together, planning, occupying, strategizing, forging out plans. As daunting as the protests appeared to some, they also evoked a piteous, puny impression among interviewees—like a bug that has fallen on its back.
I was interested in the theatrical connotation of the welding curtain material, due to its resemblance to a theater curtain, while also providing a connection to the mental image of forging and welding out a project, a plan, a weapon. ‘In my mind it was more like a fever, radical, inflamed’—the theme of inflamed theatricality served as the initial prompt for my sculpture making process.

MICHEL AUDER is an american-french videoartist living in Brooklyn, NY. Auder’s approach to video evolves out of the politics of May ‘68 as a witness to both sides of the cultural matrix, Auder counter-poises the political and the social in his work. For the last 30 years, Auder has used video as a means to, and extension of, his experience of the world.

MICHAEL STICKROD has exhibited his work in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Marseilles, Oslo, Copenhagen, Zurich, Brussels, Milan and Berlin. In 2008 he was awarded the Altoids Award and an exhibition at the New Museum in New York. His recent exhibition at Krabbesholm Højskole, GARDEN OF THE GODS, was his ﬁrst solo show in Denmark. He currently lives and works in New York City.

FRANZISKA RIST (born 1997) is a young artist who grew up in the Freiburg area. From 2017 to 2021 she studied sculpture at the Edith Maryon Kunstschule Freiburg and will continue her art studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden from fall ‘21. Her works are space-related sculptures and installations which are created from everyday materials and found objects, always in personal relation to the artist.

ILJA ZAHAROV, born in 1998 in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, studied at Hochschule Macromedia, Freiburg, where he received his B.F.A. in 2021. Zaharov's conceptual works deploy a reference based approach to artmaking by sampling oftentimes other artists' strategies. His practice concerns itself with the inquiry into current and developing tropes in contemporary art thereby probing the complex relationship between identity and iteration.

JULIUS MARTIN-HUMPERT, born 1993 in Freiburg, 2015–2018 carpenters’ formation, since 2020 studies of Fine Arts with focus on sculpture at Edith Maryon Kunstschule Freiburg. Based on crafts in which material determines a certain outcome, he is now focusing on the process of physical perception. His works try to explore the field, abandoning hierarchic, homogeneous thinking in favor of pluralistic, decentral, and cartographic thinking.

MARISTELLA WITT lives and works in Freiburg and has been studying Fine Arts at Macromedia University (former hKDM) since 2018. She deals with mixed media processes that undergo a kind of alchemical transformation. Stop-motion animations are used to manipulate realities in a surrealistic way, while hot glue and clay are used to explore and capture different states of aggregation. Through erratic associations, impulses are expanded on various levels beyond microcosm-macrocosm.

Julius Martin-Humpert, Franziska Rist, Michael Stickrod, Installation view, Kommunales Kino Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Ilja Zaharov, Michael Stickord, Installation view, Kommunales Kino Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Maristella Witt, Installation view, Kommunales Kino Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Ilja Zaharov, Installationsansicht, Kommunales Kino Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Michel Auder, MAY ’68 IN ’78, 1978/2019, edited by Michael Stickrod, Video still

Click here to read an interview with Michel Auder about May 68 in78.

Patrizia Bach

PAST, IN EACH OF ITS MOMENTS, BE CITABLE (USING ISTANBUL AS AN EXAMPLE)

Venue: Kunstverein Freiburg

Patrizia Bach, Archive Drawings, 2017–2021, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

ISTANBUL STADTPLAN by Patrizia Bach documents ongoing research since 2015, in which the artist traces the layers of history in extensive city walks—always focused on marginal phenomena and neglected aspects.

Guided by geographical clues in amateur photographs, Bach walked numerous streets of different parts of the city to find possible correlations of today’s places with the historical shots. The private photographs she used as a starting point for her 46 walks are part of the TOMIKO archive, in which the artist has been collecting, digitizing, and indexing photographs documenting private histories since 2006, with the intention of preserving them in their original bequests. In numerous projects, the artist uses her archive to investigate the mechanisms of historiography, its voids, and the archival entity.

Taking Walter Benjamin’s notes on the concept of history as a guideline, Patrizia Bach interweaves various stories with places in Istanbul. In addition to amateur photographs, she works with the brisk name changes of streets and entire neighborhoods, documenting their overwritings at different points in time since 2015. Her meticulous lists map this renaming process, which is an expression of changing political attitudes and images of history and can be understood as representative of the city’s transformation, its system of representation, and the presentness of history. (Mst)

ISTANBUL CITY MAP 1, 2015 (ongoing)
5 parts, each approx. 107 x 60 cm, pencil and colored pencil,
fineliner on paper

TRANSLATION DRAWINGS* (WORKING TITLE), 2016 (ongoing)
Height variable, width 40 cm each, pencil and colored pencil,
fineliner on paper
* for 46 city walks in Istanbul between 2015 and 2021

Archive Drawings*, 2017–2021
Pencil on paper, each 20 x 24 cm
*on the found photographs in Istanbul

PATRIZIA BACH is a visual artist with a focus on drawing. She lives and works in Berlin and occasionally in Istanbul. Bach’s works are mostly related to texts without illustrating them in the conventional sense. She develops her projects over the course of several years, incorporating other media in the process to her expansive drawing installations. Interdisciplinary collaborations are as much a part of her regular working practice as solitary, secluded drawing.

Patrizia Bach, Installationsansicht Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Patrizia Bach, ISTANBUL CITY MAP 1, 2015 (ongoing), Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Patrizia Bach, TRANSLATION DRAWINGS (WORKING TITLE), 2016 (ongoing), Biennale für Freiburg #1, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Patricia Esquivias

Film Program at Museum für Neue Kunst

Rahima Gambo

NEST-WORKS AND WANDER-LINES, 2021

Venue: DELPHI_space and Museum für Neue Kunst

Rahima Gambo with Maristella Witt, Michaela Tröscher, Andrea Mihaljevic, Marie Klauder, Installation view DELPHI_space, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

The installation NEST-WORKS AND WANDER-LINES by Rahima Gambo explores architectures of non-verbal and non-linear stories by mimicking the process of wandering and bricolage mirrored in the moving paths and nest making activities of birds, cow herds, and termites: their nests, habitats, and pathways. Non-verbal communication such as movement, symbols, signs gesturing, tracing, and silence are expressed in the work as a liberatory mode of being, seeing, speaking, and writing. The work ponders the inception of language and what it means to see spatially and communicate collectively as part of a ecological system.

The title of the work echoes the language used by experimental educator Ferdinand Deligny’s concepts derived from his writings and theories which Gambo is inspired by.

The installation was preceded by a 5-day WALK-WORKSHOP at the beginning of September in Freiburg. During individual morning walks, the artist and seven participants collected materials and objects: stones, leaves, sound recordings, videos, pictures, objects, or texts. A selection of these collected objects is a part of the installation NEST-WORKS AND WANDER-LINES. A psychospiritual-geographic narrative emerges that is both interior, exterior, and specific to the spaces Gambo and participants walked through. (AH)

More video and text material on the colletive installation can be found here.

NEST-WORKS AND WANDER-LINES, 2021
Collaborative installation, Freiburg
Artists: Rahima Gambo with Marie Klauder, Maristella Witt, Sarah Lehnerer, Michaela Tröscher and Andrea Mihaljevic

RAHIMA GAMBO was born in London, United Kingdom, in 1986. She lives and works in Abuja, Nigeria and London, UK. Gambo completed an MSc in Gender and Social Policy and in Journalism. She developed her artistic practice by working independently on long form trans media documentary projects. Gambo was named a Foam Talent for 2020 and was among the awardees of the CAP prize – The Contemporary African Photography Prize 2020.

Thomas Geiger

BUST TALK – ILLUMINA

Venue: Kunstverein Freiburg

Thomas Geiger, Scenography: Diane Hillebrand, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Part of his ongoing series of BUST TALKS, Thomas Geiger conceived of ILLUMINA for BfF#1: a conversation with the Illumina statue by sculptor Till Peter Otto in Freiburg’s Stadtgarten. According to Otto, the marble stele with a female body, designed as a sundial, was intended to represent the city’s diversity. An anonymous Freiburg woman of Eritrean origin posed for the head of the statue. In 2014, it was damaged by unknowns and has remained in this condition until today. Since then, the statue has been missing its head; “Illumina” turned into the decapitated woman.

Thomas Geiger aims to fill this void discursively in his BUST TALK, giving voice to different perspectives on the figure. In the run-up, the artist met with representatives of various Freiburg initiatives and institutions to exchange views on the role of the statue, its effect on viewers, and their own readings, for example feminist or critical of racism. This group consisted of Birgit Heidtke (Feministische Geschichtswerkstatt), Sévérine Kpoti (Here&Black), Oliver Matthes (Strassenzeitung FREIeBÜRGER) and Dietrich Roeschmann (Städtische Kunstkommission). Together, they found the statue’s potential answers to the questions developed by the artist.

The fictitious dialogue between Thomas Geiger and Illumina, who speaks to the viewers through the artist, expresses the different perspectives, including the statue’s own. In his critical-serious and humoristic-stubborn BUST TALK, the artist not only negotiates questions of (in)visibility, corporeality, and the public sphere in general, but also adds his own performative contribution to current debates about (historical) monuments in public space. (CS)

The full video can be found here.

BUST TALK – ILLUMINA
In collaboration with Birgit Heidtke, Sévérine Kpoti, Oliver Matthes and Dietrich Roeschmann
Performance and Video, color, sound, 25:22 min

Thomas Geiger, BUST TALK – ILLUMINA, Biennale für Freiburg, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Niklas Goldbach

AUFSTELLUNG: FREIBURG, 2021
ALBUM (CUT TOGETHER – CUTTING THROUGH) #3, 2021
SAND, 2021

Venues: Kunstverein Freiburg and Kaiserwache

Niklas Goldbach, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021

Niklas Goldbach’s work negotiates the relationship between architecture and necropolitics within its modernist traditions and postmodern manifestations. His works dissect architectural elements and concepts that serve both as backdrops and catalysts of (neo)liberal subject construction. In Freiburg, Goldbach presents his new photographic installation AUFSTELLUNG: FREIBURG, its title alluding to the therapeutic method of systemic family constellation that attempts to reveal unrecognized dynamics and traumas in a given family. A newspaper article about the expulsion of homeless people from a former nuclear protection bunker in Freiburg marks the starting point of this work.

Challenging the notion of public space in Freiburg and its surroundings, the installation explores contemporary forms of displacement, decay and liminality and consists of a series of photographs of abandoned spaces and infrastructures often providing shelter and protection for those rendered invisible by dominant society. While the individual images are extended through sleeping matts that serve as props, the unframed photographs precariously lean against walls and pillars—their delicate position reminding us of the inherent fragility of life.

Niklas Goldbach’s ongoing and ever-evolving video installation ALBUM (CUT TOGETHER – CUTTING THROUGH) #3 amalgamates every single image taken by the artist with various cameras since 2013 until the very day of its respective future installation. While his photographic series usually constitute a meticulously edited selection of images, the video installation inverts this practice: compiled chronologically for the duration of two frames per second, more than 85,000 images often evoke the illusion of stop-motion-techniques while revealing Goldbach’s artistic process of scanning architectures and urban environments. Presented in the premises of a former public toilet and cruising area, the images bare every facet of contemporary and queer life and renounce distinctions between work and leisure, the public and very private image, the documentation of excessive joy and intimate pain. Here, the uncensored stream of images activates a stream of consciousness on one’s own ordinary and not-so-ordinary moments, narratives, and images, one’s own celebrations of a time-bound and vulnerable life.

Goldbach further presents the first edition of SAND, a self-published monothematic photo essay dedicated to the portrayal of a single building. Reminiscent of street newspapers, SAND seeks to provide easy access to architecture photography and thus deliberately opposes the glossy photographs known from real estate websites. The first edition of SAND is dedicated to the abandoned building of the Schwarzwald Kurklinik Bad Rippoldsau-Schapbach — a former rehabilitation centre from the 1970s that was closed in 2011 and has been vacant since. (FH)

AUFSTELLUNG: FREIBURG, 2021
Photo print on alu-dibond, various materials, 10 x 100 x 67 cm

ALBUM (CUT TOGETHER – CUTTING THROUGH) #3, 2021
UHD video installation, silent, ca. 128 min

SAND #1: Schwarzwaldklinik Bad Rippoldsau-Schapbach
Newspaper, 2021
ColdSet print, Halb-Rheinisches Format (250 X 350 mm), 40 pages, color, 52 g/qm, ISO 69, Edition:1000

NIKLAS GOLDBACH lives and works in Berlin. His works were presented, among others, at the Berlinale, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Barbican Arts Center London, S.M.A.K. Gent, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum Ludwig Köln, Berlinische Galerie, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, documenta 14 public programs, Bergen Assembly 2019, Media Art Biennale Wroclaw 2021.

Niklas Goldbach, Installation view, Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, photo: Marc Doradzillo

Niklas Goldbach, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, 2021, Biennale für Freiburg #1

Kaiserwache, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Niklas Goldbach, ALBUM (CUT TOGETHER – CUTTING THROUGH) #3, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021

SAND #1: Schwarzwaldklinik Bad Rippoldsau-Schapbach, Newspaper, 2021

Download the full newspaper PDF here.

Philipp Gufler

QUILT#21 (Paul Hoecker), 2018
QUILT#23 (Wies Smals), 2018
QUILT#24 (C.), 2018
QUILT#25 (Ludwig II), 2019
QUILT#38 (Nino Cesarini)
LANA KAISER, 2020

Venue: Kunstverein Freiburg

Philipp Gufler, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Philipp Gufler’s ongoing series of QUILTS explores queer counter-images of existent narratives. The quilts negotiate the tensions between private and public life while addressing desires rendered invisible by dominant historiography and its institutions.

QUILT #25 features King Ludwig II, whose homoerotic friendships can be traced in his love letters that appeared in auction in the 1990s. The names of the addressees have been printed onto the quilt by the artist. The painter Paul Hoecker (QUILT #21) was forced to resign from his professorship at the Academy in Munich in 1898 for allegedly using a male sex worker as a model for his portrait of a Madonna. Later, he visited the poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen and his lover Nino Cesarini (QUILT #38) in Capri. Wies Smals (QUILT #23) founded De Appel in Amsterdam in 1974 and left a legacy of supporting independent artists. The sketches of the exhibition space used for the quilt were made by Smals’ life partner Marijke van der Wijst and are shown alongside photographs from her private archive. QUILT #24 further delves into the realm of the private and employs fragments of diary entries written by the quilt’s protagonist, C.

LANA KAISER pays tribute to the German entertainer mostly known to the public under her birth name Daniel Küblböck. Kaiser, who got famous in 2002 in the first season of German Idol, soon became a human projection surface for discussions around gender ambiguity. (FH)

QUILT#21 (Paul Hoecker), 2018
Silkscreen print on fabric, 2 layers, 93 x 177 cm
Courtesy Françoise Heitsch, München

QUILT#23 (Wies Smals), 2018
Silkscreen print on fabric, 3 layers, 94 x 166,5 cm
Courtesy BQ, Berlin

QUILT#24 (C.), 2018
Silkscreen print on fabric, 2 layers, 94,5 x 178 cm
Courtesy Françoise Heitsch, München

QUILT#25 (Ludwig II), 2019
Silkscreen print on fabric, 2 layers, 93 x 183 cm
Courtesy Françoise Heitsch, München

QUILT#38 (Nino Cesarini)
Silkscreen print on fabric, 180 x 95 cm
Courtesy BQ, Berlin

LANA KAISER, 2020
13 min, HD, 4 x 3 ratio
Music: Rory Pilgrim; director of photography: Julia Swoboda; color corrections: Theo Cook; sound: Nathalie Bruys
Courtesy BQ, Berlin und / and Philipp Gufler

PHILIPP GUFLER (born 1989, Germany) lives in Amsterdam and Munich and has been a member of the Forum Queeres Archiv München since 2013. Gufler studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Gufler was resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, and Delfina Foundation, London, had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Göttingen, Françoise Heitsch in Munich, BQ Berlin, and Kevin Space, Vienna, as well as group exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, among others.

Philipp Gufler, Niklas Goldbach, Installationsansicht Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Philipp Gufler, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Hanakam & Schuller

THE MOIST CABINET, 2021

Venue: BfF Visitor Center, Münsterplatz 6

The new film by Hanakam & Schuller was created during the studio program of BfF#1 between May and August 2021. THE MOIST CABINET takes the nature of the Black Forest and the long history of its numerous climatic health resorts as its points of departure. In the process, the art duo introduces artificial objects into shots of the moisture-retaining landscape and dining hall of the recently closed St. Blasien Sanatorium – a peanut-shaped air chamber, colorful artifacts, and color panels. They seem to move by themselves or are guided by performers. Special attention is paid to the surfaces: the damp moss, the structure of the marble, the reflecting brook, the brushstrokes on the landscape paintings of the painter Adolf Hillebrand. The 2-channel video intertwines these landscape and interior spaces.

THE MOIST CABINET is inspired by the literary genre of climate fiction. Through the voice-over of the film, we encounter poems by Bettina von Arnim and William Shakespeare, each in the original language. Hanakam & Schuller view these poems from the 16th and 19th centuries a prequel to cli-fi. Both poets seem to be in dialogue with each other, yet testify to different attitudes: in Shakespeare, the description of nature serves as a catalyst of sexual desire; in Arnim, the physical encounter with nature triggers a need to preserve the source of erotic experience: “Your silence, nature, do not break. / Not on rustling leaf / With stylus wake thee.” THE MOIST CABINET thus also describes the influence of literary narratives on the relationships between nature and humans, and the consequential actions. (LH)

The Moist Cabinet | Voice Over Anne Rab, Jim Libby | Cast Chiara Da Re, Alicia Oetjens, Estefania Martinez, Lena Reckord, Maristella Witt, Emina Suljkavnović | Production Assistance Catherin Schöberl | Produced by Biennale für Freiburg #1 with friendly support of BIA Black Forest Institute of Art, Land Kärnten Kultur, BMKOES Federal Ministry Republic of Austria Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport

HANAKAM & SCHULLER is an artist duo living in Vienna. As artists and explorers, Markus Hanakam and Roswitha Schuller redesign the rules of fine arts and create unconventional arrangements and new world designs in videos and objects as well as applied artforms. Their works have been shown in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MAK, Vienna; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; and the National Art Center in Tokyo.

Hanakam & Schuller, THE MOIST CABINET, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, photo: Marc Doradzillo

Diane Hillebrand

SCENOGRAPHY

Different locations and events

The scenography of BfF#1 creates an open structure of chairs, tables, and curtain elements which enables the creation of site-specific studio situations in public space. It picks up on the desire for spontaneous gatherings in outdoor spaces that has become visible during the pandemic. The camping chair, which has thus experienced a boom, can also be read as the outdoor equivalent of the museum stool. While the museum stool, however, is ergonomically designed to invite only brief lingering, the camping chair is suitable for occupying a place and forming camps. Such camps are created by the scenographic design—shielded and surrounded by curtain constructions as space-creating elements. Visitors are also invited to gather at tables that show traces of Hillebrand’s previous works as well as objects that have been reused in the respective workshops.

Parts of the scenography were produced in cooperation with Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design on occasion of the symposium "A COMMONPLACE IS NOT A CLICHÉ".

Production team of the scenography: Camping chairs: Lizzy Ellbrück, Lara Landbrecht, Corinne Riepert.
The camping chairs carry ‘connectors’, which were conceived in a workshop with students from the Karlsruhe University of Design: Giulia Bertolino, Flo Knöbl, Jule Köpke, Livia Emma Lazzarini, Alexander Scharf; Tabletops: Verena Zenker; Poster stands: Rolf Kniffki; Moveable walls: dp Showtechnik & Domitile Guinchard.

DIANE HILLEBRAND is a scenographer and artist. The focus of Diane’s work is on the design of conceptual spatial contexts in the exhibition complex, for conferences, and in the theater. Diane Hillebrand mostly works in collective groupings that address the norms of their discipline or institution from queer-feminist, design-theoretical, or sociological perspectives. Diane understands scenography as a critical artistic practice that experiments with the deformation of the museum space, obligatory contextualization, and the (reading) relationship between recipients, epistemic objects, and authors. Diane Hillebrand is interested in the ergonomic conditions as well as tactile, muscular, and instinctive needs of visitors.

Szenografie: Diane Hillebrand, Philipp Gufler, Installationsansicht Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Installationsansicht Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Scenography: Diane Hillebrand, Workshop „UNSTIMMIGKEITEN KNACKEN“, Fritz Lazlo Weber, Bandstand Rieselfeld, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Scenography: Diane Hillebrand, Symposion „A COMMON PLACE IS NOT A CLICHÉ“, Basler Hof Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Karolina Sobel

Szenografie: Diane Hillebrand, Studioprogramm, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Foto: Karolina Sobel

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński

LIBRARY OF REQUESTS #6, 2021
UNEARTHING. IN CONVERSATION, 2017

Venue: Stadtbibliothek

The LIBRARY OF REQUESTS by Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is a project that explores the formation of established and marginalized knowledge, and the inclusion and exclusion of certain groups. In doing so, it examines gaps and voids in libraries and seeks to close them through selected works. LIBRARY OF REQUESTS #6 addresses the issue of colonial continuities: How to deal with the ever-emerging re-articulations of colonial violence? How to grasp a past that does not seem to have stayed in the past? With the compiled reference library in the Freiburg Public Library, the artist approaches this topic and invites visitors to read it. In her film UNEARTHING. IN CONVERSATION (2017), Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński likewise examines the connection between knowledge production and colonial trauma: using the example of photographs from the present-day Republic of Congo by the Austrian-Czech missionary, author, and ethnographer Paul Schebesta, the film addresses the violent history of archival material as well as representational strategies and mechanisms of othering.

LIBRARY OF REQUESTS #6, 2021
A cooperation of the Dear White People Festival and the city library of Freiburg with the Biennale für Freiburg. With the participation of the experts Akiko Rive, Andrea-Vicky Amankwaa-Birago, Alex M. Moepedi, Qùynh-nhu Nguyễn, Rufine Songue, Leonora Lorena and Valéria Fekete. List of publications can be found at the end of the page.

UNEARTHING. IN CONVERSATION 2017
Video, 13min. Performer and Director: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Camera: Sunanda Mesquita, Sound & Light: Nick Prokesch, Director’s Assistant: Liesa Kovacs, Distributer: sixpack film, Vienna

Belinda Kazeem-Kaminński, Installationsansicht Stadtbibliothek Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Foto: Marc Doradzillo

Belinda Kazeem-Kaminński, Library of Requests #6, Display: Julius Martin-Humpert, Installationsansicht Stadtbibliothek Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Foto: Marc Doradzillo

List of publications of LIBRARY OF REQUESTS #6:

Vika Kirchenbauer

THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER, 2021

Venue: Kunstverein Freiburg

Vika Kirchenbauer, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

In her video work THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER Kirchenbauer develops a personal and self-reflexive form of artistic critique that considers contemporary art, in its forms of production and presentation, from a perspective of class. Alongside questions around the intersection of negative affect and political agency, the work problematizes notions of upward mobility that the field of contemporary art simultaneously produces and presupposes. Deploying an essayistic approach, the work reflects upon the manifold meanings of distance in both its subjective and social senses.

A return to the village where Kirchenbauer grew up after an absence of over ten years marks the point of departure for this work. Photographs taken on this journey are combined with scans of childhood drawings, CD booklets, family photos, and basketball trading cards as well as reframed scenes of an anime series outlining the life of Marie Antoinette through the story of a fictitious and gender-ambiguous guardsperson. Set against a foundational layer of imagelessness, these pictures and sequences come flashing in and out.

THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER, 2021
Video, color, sound
14:48 min

VIKA KIRCHENBAUER is an artist, filmmaker, writer and music producer based in Berlin. Recently, the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, has presented her first institutional solo exhibition. Her work has been exhibited in group shows and screenings at, among others, the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; the Berlin International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival.

Sarah Lehnerer with Jackie Grassmann and Inka Meißner

A DAY’S WORK

Venue: Kunstverein Freiburg

A DAY’S WORK interrogates forms of intimate notation, like those used in diary entries or in correspondences with familiar people. Sometimes, the stoic act of writing or drawing the everyday, sitting down at a table in the evening, of transforming it into something enduring, is also the peripheral act from which artistic work emerges. For BfF#1, Sarah Lehnerer, Jackie Grassmann, and Inka Meißner implemented a multi-part project over the course of the last few months. Drawing on research in the diary archive in Emmendingen, the only of its kind in the German-speaking realm, they developed two workshops Rooms without walls and Echos as response) which traced the threshold between everyday notation and artistic production in short writing exercises.

The first workshop, rooms without walls, was dedicated to beginning: starting to write from scratch, with or without a specific intention—affirming the initial uncertainty to make it productive as a form. The second workshop, echo as response, focused on the attempt to look at forces beyond the author’s ego that co-write the text. The exercises centered on forms that writing can take when one consciously relates to others in it and ascribes autonomy to these “voices.”

The workshops were accompanied by two evening lectures: Keren Cytter and Johanna Hedvagave insights into working, rehearsal, and writing processes and took up themes from the workshops, like the formalization or dramatization of a language taken directly from the everyday context of relationships and the question of missing addressees.

The installation exhibited here includes both research and workshops. It consists of mobile spatial elements, such as a screen, tabletop, and stool, and ceramics by Sarah Lehnerer. Text fragments from the workshops form the basis of a video work by Jackie Grassmann and the research in the diary archive is rendered visible in the form of a reader by Inka Meißner. The display is not a stage for the results. It is the assertion of a joint working and research process as an artistic act. In it, texts, images and spaces are treated equally and placed in a temporary, specific—and from the outside only fragmentarily comprehensible—context like the reading experience of a diary.

WORK DETAILS

Sarah Lehnerer:

Paravent (This House is not a Home), 2020
Ink on gauze, wood, ca. 450 x 250 cm

o.T. (chair), 2021
Series, 14 pieces, wood, metal

Spaceships, 2021
Series, glazed ceramics, dimensions variable, ca. 30 x 30 cm

A Day’s Work
Glazed ceramics, ca. 25 x 25 cm

A Day’s Work (QR-Code)
Glazed ceramics, ca. 20 x 30 cm
(QR-link: audio recording of the workshops, echo as response,
with Lena Reckord, Mirja Riggert, Farina Kremer, Lucia Hawes, Larissa Wallner, Laurie Młodzik, Bettina Reichmuth, Paula Wolf
and many others)

Jackie Grassmann:

She* she* she* echoes, 2021
Video, ca. 9:00 min, text fragments based
on the texts of the workshop participants,
room without walls and echo as response: Lena Reckord, Mirja Riggert,
Farina Kremer, Lucia Hawes, Larissa Wallner,
Laurie Młodzik, Bettina Reichmuth, Paula Wolf
and many others.

Inka Meißner:

That I as you (that haunts me)
5 booklets with a selection of diary entries. These diaries were the starting point of the research
for A Day’s Work and part of the readers for both workshops.

Source: Deutsches Tagebucharchiv Emmendingen (DTA). Signatur 1863, Tagebücher 1 + 2; Signatur 3803, Tagebücher 6 + 7; Signatur 238, Tagebücher 1 + 4; Signatur 1999, Tagebuch 14; Signatur 2601, Tagebücher 2, 3 + 8.

BIOGRAPHIES

SARAH LEHNERER lives and works as an artist in Berlin. She studied fine arts in Hamburg and München as well as critical theory in Vienna. The focus of her work, which combines painting, texts, and video works, is currently on the exploration of a feminist (science) fiction and its material tectonics within spaces, bodies, objects, and texts.

INKA MEIßNER studied art in Leipzig and art history in Vienna. She lives and works in Berlin, including at Galerie Lars Friedrich. Her practice is often collaborative, seeking forms of text and image in which contemporary production and
analysis converge.

JACKIE GRASSMANN uses auto-fictional strategies in her works and texts, which she interweaves with theoretical and socio-critical elements. For this purpose, she often collaborates with different artist colleagues. She studied Cultural Studies and Art in the Master in Critical Studies at the Academy in Vienna.

Sarah Lehnerer with Inka Meißner and Jackie Grassmann, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Jackie Grassmann, SHE\* SHE\* SHE\* ECHOES, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo — Jackie Grassmann, SHE* SHE* SHE* ECHOES, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Inka Meißner, THAT I AS YOU (THAT HAUNTS ME), Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Sarah Lehnerer, SPACESHIPS, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Sarah Lehnerer, A DAY'S WORK (QR CODE), Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Workshop (link: https://www.biennalefuerfreiburg.de/en/program/a-day-s-work-room-without-walls text: A DAY'S WORK: ROOMS WITHOUT WALLS), Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Jennifer Rohrbacher — Workshop A DAY'S WORK: ROOMS WITHOUT WALLS, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Jennifer Rohrbacher

Workshop A DAY'S WORK: ROOMS WITHOUT WALLS, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Jennifer Rohrbacher

Luiza Margan

RESTAGING MONUMENT

Venue: Kunstverein Freiburg

Luiza Margan, Installationsansicht Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Foto: Marc Doradzillo

In her nine-part photomontage series RESTAGING MONUMENT Luiza Margan intertwines two temporal levels: Archival photographs from the studio of sculptor Vinko Matković (1911–1973; Rijeka, Yugoslavia) are augmented by photographs that in turn show Margan in her studio.

Portrayed at work, Matković poses next to the in-progress larger-than-life sculpture, which today towers over Rijeka as an allegory of freedom flanked by two partisans on a 19-meter-high pillar. The Liberation Monument in Rijeka commemorates the anti-fascist legacy of the partisans during the Second World War. At this highest monument in the city, Margan carried out the action EYE TO EYE WITH FREEDOM in 2014, which is the conceptual starting point for RESTAGING MONUMENT. Participants were lifted with a crane to eye level with the allegory of freedom in order to initiate a literal change of perspective and draw attention to hegemonies of memory-political representations.

RESTAGING MONUMENT takes up aspects of the previous action by examining Matković’s black and white photographs from the 1950s in their historiographical context and collaging them with photographs from her own studio. Margan establishes a connection between her body and that of the monument’s female figure—the only figure in the group that is explicitly portrayed allegorically. In doing so, Margan points to the importance of gender in historical narratives while highlighting the performative nature of monuments and their relationship to social images of history. (MSt)

Further work by Luiza Margan for BfF#1:
MONUMENT IN THE MAKING: ROSA LUXEMBURG

RESTAGING MONUMENT, 2014
Series of nine photomontages, each 42 x 21 cm
Courtesy the artist and acb Galéria, Budapest

Kriz Olbricht

OP D’R ECK, 2021
THROW UP, 2021

Venues: Kunstverein Freiburg, public space

Kriz Olbricht, OP D’R ECK, 2021, Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, 2021, Photo: Kriz Olbricht

Kriz Olbricht’s sound installation OP D’R ECK links the exterior with the interior by marking the entrance area of the Kunstverein as a threshold between the noisy and busy street in front of the building and the exhibition space inside. Olbricht uses sensors that record movements at various locations, convert them into sound signals, and bundle them in one place. The signal tone which draws attention to the entrance of customers or visitors, thus, turns into a sound collage. Which movements activate the sensors remains hidden from the visitors.

On the one hand, the work refers to the ubiquitous kiosks in Cologne, the artist’s place of residence. By utilizing a certain type of automatic doorbell, they contribute to the soundscape of the city. On the other hand, Olbricht references the album On the Corner by Miles Davis, which collages sounds of the street with techniques of musique concrète and ideas by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

For BfF#1, Kriz Olbricht thus adds a new element to the Kunstverein, for which he already set up a bar which is used for events in 2018—a work titled BLIND PIG. Like the bar, reduced to its core components, OP D’R ECK also considers the fundamental, infrastructural elements of small-scale places that shape the social fabric of a city. Here, these elements are being transformed and situated in relation to the Kunstverein. (LH)

OP D’R ECK, 2021
Automatic doorbell

THROW UP, 2021
Paste, posters

KRIZ OLBRICHT, born 1986 in Freiburg, is an artist living in Cologne. Through sculpture, sound, photography, and painting, he explores the nature of architectural, public, and private space in relation to the body. His works develop only at the site of their execution, where he diverts the materials used from their intended purpose.

Kriz Olbricht, THROW UP, 2021, Photo: Kriz Olbricht

Andreas von Ow

GREEN (FREIBURG), 2021

Venue: Kunstverein Freiburg

Andreas von Ow, Installation view, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

The artistic exploration of color’s materiality and perception are at the heart of Andreas von Ow’s painterly practice. Based on his studies of painting, for several years he has been working increasingly with glass, which he grinds into color pigments in various grain sizes and, enriched with binder, condenses into multilayered color paintings onto the surface.

For these color paintings, the artist trawls urban space or his immediate surroundings for materials. By searching for green glass splinters or red fragments of car taillights, for instance, and then producing color pigments from this raw material, von Ow turns the production process of the works into a constituent of his art.

For BfF#1, the artist focused on the color green and took the participants of the studio program on a walk through various districts of Freiburg in search of green glass. While walking and collecting the green from the cityscape, questions were implicitly reflected on: How does one’s view of the cityscape and landscape change when focused on a single color? What do the traces of green glass tell us about a place? And what happens to our color vision and to our perception of the surroundings before, during, and after the walk? (CS)

GRÜN (FREIBURG), 2021
Mit Dank an / With thanks to:
Martha Martin-Humpert; Catherin Schöberl + Sarah Lorbeer; Andrea Mihaljevic + Stefan Hösl; Cornelia Hesse-Pilsak + Ivo Pilsak; Gudrun von Ow + Karl-Friedrich Fackler; Kadda + Alexander Kienzle; Lena Reckord + Sijin Jung; Dr. Gudrun Selz + Annette Merkenthaler; Agnes Dorwarth + Michael Behringer; Brigitte + Andreas Jaschke; Atai Kelle + Timothy Simms; Familie Dangel; Stefan Tolksdorf; Sabina Beck; Leon Hösl + Marc Doradzillo + Ulrich von Kirchbach + Martin Kasper + Ben Hübsch; Sabrina + Luci + Lönne + Emil + Sören + Niko; Christin Czuva + Fabian Fränzle + Grit Luchter + Rolf Kniffki; Albert-Ludwig-University: Herbert Ickler Geology; Dr. Hiltrud Müller-Sigmund Microprobe Analysis, Laboratory Management; Melanie Schrage, Rock Preparation, Thin Section Preparation; Glas Fischer Freiburg: info@glasfischer-freiburg.de

ANDREAS VON OW, born 1981 in Freiburg, studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe and lives and works in Berlin. Since then, his painting has been focused on color as a pictorial subject and its perception. His sensual-artistic research begins long before the actual painting process in the changing environments, in numerous working stays in Rotterdam or the Rhön, for example. In 2016 he received the Reinhold-Schneider-Förderpreis, in 2015 the Van Look Prize, in 2014 a scholarship from the Atelier Mondial for Rotterdam and in 2013 a working scholarship from the Stiftung Kunstfonds.

Andreas von Ow, Installation view, Kunstverein Freiburg, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

Liesl Raff

SCHWINDEL (VERTIGO)

Venue: Pförtnerhaus

Liesl Raff, Installation view, Pförtnerhaus, Biennale für Freiburg #1, Photo: Marc Doradzillo

In the world of fairy tales, myths, and popular legends, there is almost always a character with the special ability to completely transform themselves from one moment to the next. Whether the comedic archetypes Harlequin and Columbine or Trickster, Crook, and Shapeshifter—each of them holds up a mirror to society and undermines existing orders for a moment. Liesl Raff transfers these abilities to materials that, through her sculptural interventions, appear just as free and changeable and, like these characters, move between different states.

Her installation SCHWINDEL (VERTIGO), developed for the BfF#1 exhibition at the Offspace Pförtnerhaus founded in 2015, consists of two elements: a latex curtain held by cast-in ropes, which acts like a second skin, or a costume stripped off and hung up, and LASSO OF TRUTH 1–3. The aluminum castings of intertwined ribbons, also made of latex and ropes, show the material in various stages of transformation: Reminiscent of human skin or leather, it takes on antiphallic forms, changes over time, becomes brittle, begins to develop odor, and is finally cast in aluminum—destroyed and preserved at the same time. SCHWINDEL (VERTIGO) is to be understood as the material equivalent of the volatile and unruly shape-shifting characters that surprise us by their ability to unbalance both social and physical conditions. (LH)

TWO SOULS IN MY CHEST, 2021
Bamboo, latex, rope, string, silicon oil

LASSO OF TRUTH 1, 2, 3, 2021
Aluminium, bamboo, 110 x 28 x 21 cm,
83 x 45 x 20 cm, 137 x 35 x 22 cm

BACKDROP, 2021
Latex, rope, talcum

LIESL RAFF, born 1979 in Stuttgart lives and works in Vienna. Her practice is characterized by a semiotics of materials that begins where words supposedly fail. Through consistent experimentation and a great sensitivity to different materials, Raff’s sculptures negotiate, demonstrate, and make tangible the beauty and fragility of physical and non-physical coexistence.

John Smith

Film Program at Museum für Neue Kunst

Milica Tomić

Film Program at Museum für Neue Kunst

Young Boy Dancing Group

PERFORMANCE
18.9.2021, Hans-Bunte-Areal, 8pm

The Biennale for Freiburg #1 is pleased to present a new performance by the Young Boy Dancing Group in Freiburg. The materiality of bodies meets spherical light and piercing sound in the Young Boy Dancing Group’s (YBDG) intimate performances. Their objectives are always physical exploration instead of sexualization, exposure instead of exhibitionism, communal liberation instead of tamed isolation, object identification instead of commercialization, DIY instead of institutional polish.

BfF visitorcenter

Münsterplatz 6

Thu 12am–8pm, Fri–Sun 12am–6pm,
Mon–Wed closed
Map

DELPHI_space

Emmendinger Str. 21

Thu 12am–8pm, Fri–Sun 12am–6pm,
Mon–Wed closed
Map / Website

Kaiserwache

Kaiserbrücke/Schreiberstraße

Thu 12am–8pm, Fri–Sun 12am–6pm,
Mon–Wed closed
Map

Kommunales Kino

Urachstraße 40

Thu 12am–8pm, Fri–Sun 12am–6pm,
Mon–Wed closed
Map / Website

Kunstverein Freiburg

Dreisamstraße 21

Tue–Sun 12am–6pm, Thu 12am–8pm,
Mon closed
Map / Website

Museum für Neue Kunst

Marienstraße 10 A

FILM PROGRAM
Patricia Esquivias, Rahima Gambo, John Smith, Milica Tomić

With four cinematic works, selected by the Curatorial Advisory Board and the Artistic Director, the BfF#1 film program extends the thematic threads of the exhibition parcours onto the screen: Set across Europe and Africa, these video works explore ways of relating to urban space and the histories connected to a specific place or structure. While all employ the medium of video, some of the works document performative interventions or are an extension of multilayered artistic projects. In A WALK (2019), British-Nigerian artist Rahima Gambo employs walking, material collection, and poetry as strategies to translate the traumatic events of school attacks in Nigeria into (visual) language. BRAVE WOUNDED BLOWS (2019) by Venezuelan-Spanish artist Patricia Esquivias explores the closing of a former metal workshop to discuss neoliberal transformations in the city of Madrid, while BLIGHT (1994–96) by British filmmaker John Smith turns the demolition of residential houses in London for a motorway into a fictionalization around building materials, construction workers and residents. Drawing on the historical context of Belgrade, Serbian artist Milica Tomić’s ONE DAY, INSTEAD OF ONE NIGHT, A BURST OF MACHINE-GUN WILL FLASH, IF LIGHT CANNOT COME OTHER WISE (OSKAR DAVIčO) (2008–2009) connects the antifascist movement to the contemporary situation in Serbia and beyond. The film will be presented for the first time at BfF#1 as part of a curated film program, which is why the curators are keen to highlight its context in Milica Tomić’s artistic practice. While the four films each deal with very specific situations and local circumstances, they all point to an overarching, global sentiment of the present.

Patricia Esquivias, BRAVE WOUNDED BLOWS, 2019
Digital video, color, sound, 17 Min

Given the rapid transformation of Madrid, Patricia Esquivias wonders about that other city in which the work of artisans and artists was part of the urban landscape, and that is quickly losing its place. This reflection also leads her to dwell on the material nature of a new economic order in which crafts no longer seem to be viable and are merely preserved as heritage, set in the past, devoid of a present and turned into museum pieces, far from the everyday life to which they once belonged. Here, Esquivias explores the dismantled artistic foundry of the Barrera family in Calle Casarrubuelos in Chamberí, where three generations devoted themselves to artistic forging, as well as the universe of the blacksmith’s trade which decorated the city in which the guild trained and worked.

The work of Patricia Esquivias (Caracas, 1979) is mostly presented in video format. In her stories, architecture, history, and folklore are blended in a unique manner, stemming from the personal in order to reach the universal. She is a narrator that, in a deadpan manner, urges us to question given historical frames, re-signifying history and opening leads to a new way of reading modernity and its constructions. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Langenhagen Kunstverein, 2021, Centro Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, 2016; Kunsthalle Wintethur, 2013; Museo Arte Contemporaneo de Vigo, 2013; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2012; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2009; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis 2009, White Columns, New York, 2008. She has participated in residencies in Skowhegan, Madison, 2006; Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, 2010; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2011.

Rahima Gambo, A WALK, 2019
Digitale Video, color, sound, 14 Min

Can we walk as a response to this?
This is one of the first questions that Rahima Gambo asks in her film A WALK Gambo understands walking as a narrative mechanism and collects objects during her strolls that she integrates in her drawings and installations. The artist came to ideate her practice of walking when she was researching the rising incidents of suicide bombings in northeastern Nigeria. Not knowing how to face this horror, she starts to follow a path where she collects information found below the surface of what she can perceive with her own eyes. When the road becomes a site for memory and knowledge, the focus shifts and perceptions merge. The walk recognizes different spatial and temporal knowledge systems and is an attempt to heal, by putting things together like the artist does in her collages and assemblages. Just like in her photographs and video stills, there is something new and disjointed about these collages that differs from what it once was: “Not a woman, not a plant, not a picture, not a drawing, not a body, not a landscape, not a photograph, not a sculpture, not stillness and not movement.” (AH)

Rahima Gambo was born in London, United Kingdom, in 1986. She lives and works in Abuja, Nigeria and London, UK. Gambo completed an MSc in Gender and Social Policy and in Journalism. She developed her artistic practice by working independently on long form trans media documentary projects. Gambo was named a Foam Talent for 2020 and was among the awardees of the CAP prize – The Contemporary African Photography Prize 2020.

John Smith, BLIGHT, 1994–96
HD Video eines 16 mm Films, 14 Min, Farbe, Sound

BLIGHT was made in collaboration with the composer Jocelyn Pook. It revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by residents to protect their homes from demolition. The images in the film record some of the changes which occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people.
Although the film is entirely constructed from records of real events, BLIGHT is not a straightforward documentary. Addressing themes of memory and loss, the film constructs stories from unrelated fragments of sound and image, melding disparate reminiscences and contemporary events. Like much of Smith’s other work, BLIGHT exploits the ambiguities of its material to produce new meanings and metaphors, fictionalizing reality through framing and editing strategies. Scenes are frequently shown in close-up, creating a sense of mystery and anticipation through the withholding of visual information. The emotive power of music is used in the film to overtly aid this invention, investing mundane images with dramatic significance. A specific ‘real’ context for the depicted events only becomes apparent at the end of the film. What is presented is simultaneously fact and fiction.

John Smith was born in Walthamstow, London in 1952. He studied at North-East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, after which he became an active member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. Inspired in his formative years by conceptual art and structural film, but also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, he has developed a diverse body of work that subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary, fiction, representation, and abstraction. Often rooted in everyday life, his meticulously crafted films playfully explore and expose the language of cinema.

Milica Tomić, ONE DAY, INSTEAD OF ONE NIGHT,
A BURST OF MACHINE-GUN WILL FLASH,
IF LIGHT CANNOT COME OTHER WISE (OSKAR DAVIčO), 2008–2009
Video, color, sound, 10 Min

"Over a period of two months, in the autumn of 2009, I visited particular sites of successful anti-fascist actions that were carried out by the Yugoslav partisans and citizens of Belgrade against German occupation during the Second World War. The photos and videos taken during these repeated walks are documents of an intervention with the aim to create a non-material monument in places that are not part of the public memory. The video draws a connection between the different locations. Through the editing process an artificial landscape is created, a reference to the film making technique invented by the early Russian avant-garde filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1920s, where various locations, places and times appear to all occur in a continuous place at a continuous time. The walk is a continuity between places that share a loss of memory—no mark or sign refers to the history of successful uprisings by the People Liberation Movement. And the walk taking place in between the movement of day-to-day life in Belgrade, creates a continuity between the particular memory of the events of the past with a present situation. This opens a question of anti-fascism today and its erasure from public history and public memory, in this case in former Yugoslavian countries. However, this instance seems to be exemplary for particular histories that are not recognized from official sites and thereby do not enter the public space. But the stories are still present: the sound in the background of the video is composed from a series of interviews that I’ve conducted with protagonists of the anti-Fascist and Communist struggles in Yugoslavia, and that were part of the People Liberation Struggle. Today it is easy to recognize fascism in its excess forms, but what about the fascism that is all around us, which cannot be easily recognized at first sight, but which is built into the laws and administration? What about the events of the past and the present that are kept away from the public memory?" (Milica Tomić)

Milica Tomić, born 1960 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, lives in Graz and Vienna. Her artistic practice encompasses photography, installation art, and education. Her work focuses on exploring, visualizing, and initiating public debates that address political and economic violence, trauma, and social amnesia. She has participated in major international exhibitions, among them the Sao Paulo Biennale, the Venice Biennale, and the International Istanbul Biennial. Since 2014, she is head of the Institute of Contemporary Art (Faculty of Architecture) at the University of Technology Graz.

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Eine Dekade Schlaf

26.10.2021 / A Day’s Work:
Minerva and the miscarriage of the brain by Johanna Hedva

JOHANNA HEDVA
EINE DEKADE SCHLAF

Aus dem Nachwort von MINERVA – DIE FEHLGEBURT DES GEHIRNS (2020) von Johanna Hedva, erschienen bei Sming Sming Books. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Jackie Grassmann. Präsentiert im Kommunalen Kino als Teil des Projekts A DAY'S WORK im Rahmen der Biennale für Freiburg.

„Du musst nicht um die Toten trauern: Sie wissen schon, was sie tun“ - Clarice Lispector

ERSTENS
Ich schlafe 10, 11 Stunden jede Nacht, und das nicht wie die Toten, sondern als ob ich fortwährend sterbe, als ob ich wirklich lebe. Jedes Mal wenn ich einschlafe, seit ich mich das erste Mal erinnere als Kind eingeschlafen zu sein, wenn das klösterliche Schwarz hereinbricht, dieses Schwarz, wie ein Haus, ein Himmel, eine Fallgrube, denke ich, ich werde nie wieder aufwachen, das war’s, und dieses sein wird bald ein gewesenes sein. Ein Schock der Todesangst packt mich, manchmal fahre ich dann senkrecht nach oben, jahrelang habe ich laut ausgerufen „Ich will aber nicht sterben!“ und mich dann wieder hingelegt und tief geschlafen, mein Schlaf, der sich mit seiner eigenen queeren-intelligenz dahinwindet, ich, die erstickt wird von meinen Träumen, stelle mich ihren Streichen, bis zum Mittag des nächsten Tages, wenn das Erwachen mich findet und mich, wie eine glitschige Hand die ihren Weg durch schwarzes Wasser sucht, wieder aufrichtet, das Licht durchsickert, und dann, mit einem langen behutsamen Atemzug, ein Tag mit einem Ich darin geboren ist. Ich schlafe bis zum Mittag und nichts kann mich wecken. Den Leuten erzähle ich, dass ich morgens arbeite und dabei nicht gestört werden darf. Ich schlafe, ich arbeite. In meinen Träumen arbeite und arbeite und arbeite ich, die harte blanke Arbeit, die in diesem Bereich eben verrichtet werden muss. Ich habe ausschließlich Alpträume – wie ich bereits gesagt habe, harte Arbeit! Ich töte Leute mit meinen bloßen Händen, weil sie mich, oder diejenigen, die ich beschützen soll, bedrohen. Manchmal kenne ich die Menschen in meinen Träumen, die Bedrohungen, meine Schützlinge, mich selbst – und manchmal sind sie mir alle Fremde, und so zu gleichen Teilen mystisch aufgeladen (anagogic) und (bathetisch) abgedroschen – beides ist mir ein Begriff.
Manchmal lauert die Bedrohung nicht in den Menschen, sondern in der Luft. Der Himmel ist ein atmendes Grün, jedes Gebäude birgt ein Labyrinth, kein Bett entspricht meiner Größe, Tunnel, Badewannen, gehören nicht zu mir. Ich töte langsam und auf brutale Weise. Ich reiße Büschel an Haaren aus, bis sie nur den Schmutz der Kopfhaut zurücklassen, wie Unkraut, das man an den Wurzeln herauszieht. Ich fühle die Muskelstränge unter meinen Fingernägeln, wenn ich mich durch die Haut durchkratze, mich zum Inneren der Knochen durcharbeitend. Ich beobachte, wie Versionen von mir ertrinken, während ich in Körpern von Kindern stecke, deren Fleisch von Wellen zerfetzt wird, ihre kleinen Hälse gebrochen, wache ich über ihren zerschlagenen Körpern und überlasse sie dem Ertrinken, weil ich nur atmen kann, wenn ich mich von ihnen lossage. Ich koche die Knochen meiner Mutter in meinen Träumen, weil sie es mir so befiehlt; sie, ein schwarzes Loch hinter meinem Rücken, sagt mir, in mein Ohr flüsternd, dass ich es bin, die den Scheiß in unserer Familie aufräumen muss, ich die Stückchen von ihrem Fett wegwischen muss, die sich auf der Wand, an der Decke und dem Boden festgesetzt haben. In meinen Träumen bin ich mit drei Schwänzen gesegnet und ich benutze jeden einzelnen brutal und mit Präzision und mit wilden zielstrebigen Stößen, ich zerreiße Leute mit ihnen und lasse mich zerreißen. Unermüdlich bin ich in meinen Träumen auf Händen und Knien, ich falle immer aus großen Höhen. Ich liebe meine Träume dafür, dass sie so simpel und klar sind, für ihr Erbarmen.

Mein Schlaf behandelt mich gut. Ich behandle meinen Schlaf auch gut, behandle ihn wie eine Adelige, räume Termine aus dem Weg, um seine Ankunft zu erwarten. Ich bestehe auf meinen Schlaf, weil irgendeiner muss es machen. Professional gesehen, sozial gesehen, ist das schwer. „Könntest du dich schon früher treffen?“, „Die einzigen freien Termine sind morgens“ „Wir haben mittags geschlossen“. „Die günstigsten Flüge gehen am Vormittag“. Tut mir leid, sage ich. Ich kann nicht. Ich bin nicht verfügbar. Ich bin nicht verfügbar irgendetwas zu machen, bevor es mittags ist. Weil ich schlafe, weil ich arbeite, weil ich dann die bin, die ich am ehesten, am allermeisten bin und das werde ich für nichts aufgeben, und schon gar nicht für sowas imaginäres wie Zeit oder Geld.

Ich habe den größten Anteil dieses Buches, vielleicht sogar alles darin, im Schlaf geschrieben, was möglicherweise für alle meine Bücher gilt. Wer kann schon sagen, ob ich jetzt wach bin? Du etwa? Ich schreibe, sobald ich aufgewacht bin, aber erst durch das Schreiben werde ich richtig wach. Ich öffne meine Augen, spreche nicht und die Träume dieses Schlafes wehren sich mit allem was sie haben gegen eine unrechtmäßige Aneignung, sie gehen nicht einfach leise. Ich gehe an meinen Schreibtisch, ich spreche nicht, sodass sie sich vielleicht weiterhin wehren, und wenn ich irgendetwas anderes mache, als an meinen Schreibtisch zu gehen, meinen Schreibprozess zu beginnen, sind die Träume sehr schnell entthront mit einem brutalen Schnitt, der endgültig ist, zumindest bis zur nächsten Nacht. Ihr müsst verstehen, dass es nicht „mein“ Schlaf ist. „Ich“ gehöre „ihm“.

Johanna Hedva (Screen) während ihrer Lesung MINERVA UND DIE FEHLGEBURT DES GEHIRNS im Kommunalen Kino Freiburg.
Foto: Jennifer Rohrbacher

Ein Lyriker hat mich mal gefragt, wo ich mich während hypnagohischen Zuständen befinde, wer ich werde. Diese Frage geht davon aus, dass das „Ich“ woanders existiert, als jemand Anderes, dass das „Ich“ überhaupt existiert. Er fragte mich, wem ich währenddessen begegne, welche Geschöpfe mir erscheinen, und die Antwort ist, alle, die ich je gekannt habe, in diesem und in anderen Leben, nie erfahre ich aber ihre Namen. Namen haben keinen Stellenwert in Träumen, sie erweisen sich als genau das trügerische Ding, das sie sind.

Namen, Worte, Geld, Zeit.
Der Mond, Magie, meine Mutter.

Die Last der Wahrheit ist manchen gegeben, und manchen nicht. Das kommt natürlich auf den Ort an. An manchen Orten herrschen der Mond, Magie und meine Mutter, und sie sind ein Wunder und sie sind auch Nahrung, ganz gewöhnliche, nächtliche Nahrung.

Als Ann Carson, ihr Gedicht „Eine Ode an den Schlaf“ mit der Zeile „Stell dich dir ohne vor“ begann, muss sie in sich hineingegrinst haben, ein schmales Lächeln auf ihren Lippen. Sie kommt mir vor, wie eine Person, die oft in sich hineingrinst, ihr Schreiben ist von Leerstellen durchzogen. (Kannst du sie nicht sehen, lieber Leserin? Ann Carson, die auf meinen Schultern hockt, während ich das hier schreibe?). Stell dich dir ohne es vor. Der Witz an diesem Satz ist, ihn und sich selbst darin umzutauschen – stell es dir ohne dich vor – jetzt kommen wir der Struktur dieses Ortes schon näher, wie doppelzüngig er ist, ständig seine Form verändernd.

Es gibt viele Selbste, die ich in meinem Schlaf treffe, wie im Leben auch. Sie wandern über den inneren Bildschirm, tauchen kurz auf, oder sitzen still am Rand, die Formen im Hintergrund verschwommen. Ich mag den Gedanken, dass alles und alle im Traum eine Repräsentation der Träumenden sind. Ich bin nicht nur der riesige schwarze Wal unter der Oberfläche des schwarzen bedrohlichen Wassers, ich bin auch das Wasser. Ich bin das kleine Boot, das meine Körpergröße hat, das von den Wellen geschaukelt wird, und ich bin die Wellen. Was mich daran tröstet ist nicht, dass dies eine Welt nahelegt, die ausschließlich aus mir selbst besteht, wo ich im Überfluss vorhanden und viele auf einmal bin, sondern eher, dass mein Selbst mir fremd, es wimmelnd und unzählbar ist, dass mein Körper in unzähligen Fremden existiert, und auch als nicht-menschliches Wesen, als Ozeane, Objekte, Tiere – als das Wetter. Das ruft das Gefühl hervor, dass mein Selbst weit weit weg ist, stets unerreichbar, weiter als das Licht reisen kann. Bis das Licht meines Selbst die äußeren Satelliten meines Selbst erreicht, ist jeglicher Ursprung längst erloschen, und nur die Richtung – darauf zu oder davon weg – bleibt übrig und da der Nachthimmel bekannterweise ein Land der Geister von Sternen ist, ist alles was ich bin, was auch immer es da alles gibt, was ich bin, nur noch Leichenstaub, Planetengräber, und diese Entfernung ist absolut und ganz gewöhnlich, das schiere Faktum schwer und belastend. Darin bin ich verankert. Das ist kein großes Ding. Es sind einfach viele.

Minerva und die Fehlgeburt des Gehirns wurde nicht als ein Buch geboren, sie wurde gar nicht erst gezeugt. Mutterlos entsprang sie meinem Kopf; Sie ist mit den Geistern gekrochen und war eine Schule dieser Geister. 2015 habe ich bemerkt, dass manche Werke, die ich in den letzten Jahren gemacht habe, DNA teilen; 2016 fing ich an, einzelne Teile konzeptlos in einem Dokument zusammenzutragen, dass mir albern und grobschlächtig vorkam, wie eine Person, die ein Wort immer und immer wieder wiederholt, bis sie es schreit und die Bedeutung sowohl aus dem Wort schwindet, als auch aus der Entscheidung es zu schreien und die Luft mit dem Klang verbleibt - wahnsinnig nicht aufgrund seiner faktischen Existenz, sondern wegen der anarchischen Erkenntnis, dass das Existieren ein einziges Chaos ist. Sowohl das Dokument, als auch der Akt es zu konstruieren, haben sich so angefühlt. Es hat mich jung fühlen lassen. Eine Meisterleistung – in diesem Buch geht es darum, wie ich alt bin.

Das Buch, dass du in den Händen hältst, hat wenig Ähnlichkeit mit dem ersten Manuskript, abgesehen davon, dass der erste und letzte Teil nach wie vor als erstes und als letztes kommen, sie die Anker sind, alle Eingeweide in der Mitte ergriffen und liebkost und wieder in Besitz genommen wurden; ich finde nicht, dass es meine Verantwortung ist zu Wissen was es geworden ist, nur dass es ist, und dass es gewesen ist. Es gibt den Schlaf und Wahnsinn und Mystik, das Entsetzliche des Lebens, das transzendent und banal ist, immer beides unaussprechlich zusammen, und jeden Tag dazu aufzuwachen beschwört seine eigene Melodie. Der Körper ist immer da, aber die Frage ist, wie man ihn in den Hintergrund drängt, wie man ihn in Nebel verwandelt, und wie man damit umgeht, wenn das unweigerlich scheitert. Ich dachte, sie würde mein erstes Buch werden, etwas, für das ich mich schäme, wofür ich mir vergeben und was ich in der Vergangenheit gelassen hätte. Ich habe in Räumen geschrieben, ich habe meine Hand durch Wasser geschleift, ich habe geschlafen, geschlafen, geschlafen und geschlafen. Ich schreibe.

Der Lesung ging der Workshop (link: https://www.biennalefuerfreiburg.de/programm/a-day-s-work-echos-als-antwort text: ECHOS ALS ANTWORT) von Jackie Grassmann und Sarah Lehnerer voraus. Darin ging es darum, sich bewusst zu machen, dass wir als Schreibende nie alleine, sondern bereits immer in ein politisches und soziales Gewebe eingebunden sind, dieses beschreiben und von ihm beschrieben werden.
Foto: Jennifer Rohrbacher — Der Lesung ging der Workshop ECHOS ALS ANTWORT von Jackie Grassmann und Sarah Lehnerer voraus. Darin ging es darum, sich bewusst zu machen, dass wir als Schreibende nie alleine, sondern bereits immer in ein politisches und soziales Gewebe eingebunden sind, dieses beschreiben und von ihm beschrieben werden.
Foto: Jennifer Rohrbacher

In den 4 Jahre, in denen ich mich darum bemüht habe, dass sie veröffentlicht wird, veränderte Minerva ständig ihre Form und war nicht in den Griff zu bekommen und ich kann nicht sagen, ob ich Odysseus war und sie Penelope, oder andersherum. Wie Odysseus zog sie in die Welt hinaus, vielleicht um einen Kampf zu kämpfen, vielleicht um berühmt zu werden, vielleicht hatte sie sich auch nur verirrt, sie odyssierte durch zwei Verlagsabenteuer, die geplatzt sind und ich habe auf sie gewartet und mich danach gesehnt, dass sie ein Zuhause findet. Während dieser Zeit habe ich Leichentücher, andere Wörter und andere Bücher gewebt und ich habe mich beraubt gefühlt und war misstrauisch: als Minerva zurückkehrte, konnte ich nicht glauben, dass sie es war, ihr Gesicht hatte sich verändert, sie war so lange unterwegs gewesen. Oder war ich es gewesen, die das Zuhause verlassen hatte, sich durch das dunkle, weinfarbene Meer arbeitend, die von Sirenen verführt worden war, entführt von einer Hexenmeisterin, schiffbrüchig, bis ich endlich meinen Weg in ein Bett gefunden hatte, das sich nicht bewegte.

Bücher sind kleine Särge. Ein Professor von mir hat das mal zu mir gesagt und es ist wahr.

Ah – natürlich – ich war auch Homer.

Minerva hat mich verspottet. Ich habe Freunde um Rat gebeten, ist das überhaupt zu was gut? Es war nicht nur, dass sie weiterhin abgelehnt und als Weise zurückgelassen wurde, es war eher, wie jemandem dabei zuzuschauen, wie sie sich selbst auseinandernimmt, ein neues Gesicht aufmalt, und in Häute schlüpft, die viele Namen tragen, von denen keiner richtig war. Sollte ich Ehrfurcht vor dieser Fähigkeit haben, oder sollte ich ihr misstrauen? Vielleicht ist das das gleiche. Der Hauptgrund, warum ich wollte, dass Minerva veröffentlicht wird, warum ich sie immer wieder ausgesendet habe - was sich anfühlte wie ein Kind in eine Grube zu stoßen, die immer größer und länger wurde - war, dass ich die Zeit auslöschen wollte, die sie dokumentiert. Meine Dekade fing mit einer Scheidung von einem gewalttätigen Ehemann an und einer Fehlgeburt, ausgelöst durch eine Erbkrankheit, es segelte weiter zu einer unfreiwilligen Einweisung und endete mit dem Tod meiner Mutter. Ich wollte Minerva nie wieder sehen, wegen dem, was ich gesehen hatte, als ich hingesehen hatte.

„Ah ich verstehe“ sagte mein erste*r Verleger*in zu mir „du verstößt deine Arbeit in die Welt.“

ZWEITENS
Bataille sagte: "Ich halte die Gottesvorstellung ... für ein Hindernis in der Bewegung, die uns zu der undurchsichtigen Erkenntnis des Nichtwissens führt: einer Gegenwart, die sich in keiner Weise mehr von einer Abwesenheit unterscheidet.

Ich bevorzuge Worte, die mehr als eine Sache bedeuten. Wie das englische Wort apprehension: die Angst oder Befürchtung, dass etwas schlimmes passieren wird. und apprehension: verstehen und begreifen.

Beides meint das Gleiche.

DRITTENS
Viele Jahre hatte ich einen Teil in meinem Lebenslauf, der nannte sich Appearances, (Was im deutschen soviel bedeutet wie: Erscheinungen). Dort wurden Talks und Vorträge aufgelistet, die ich gehalten habe und Träume von anderen Leuten, in denen ich erschienen war. Es waren die Träume von Freund*innen, Texte und Emails, ihre eigenen Worte, jeder Traum von einer anderen Person:

„Ich hatte einen Traum letzte Nacht, in dem ich gesagt habe wie sehr mir Batman missfällt, und du hast meinen Arm berührt und gesagt „aber er ist krank“ und während dem Rest des Traumes habe ich über Batman und psychische Erkrankungen nachgedacht.“

„Ich habe von einem roten Faden geträumt, der vertikal durch den Traum verlief, als ob er sich gleich spalten würde.
Geht’s dir gut? Das ist schon der zweite Traum von dir und einem durchtrennenden Faden. Der erste Faden war in einem Walbauch.“

„Du hast ein Stück mit etwa 4-5 Leuten choreographiert. Einer der Tänzer machte so zeitgenössische Tanzbewegungen auf dem Boden (wie ich es immer gerne mache) und verwandelte sich manchmal in eine Schlange. Nicht so eine feine, schlängelnde Schlange, sondern eher so eine:“

„Letzte Nacht habe ich geträumt, dass ich dich in den Armen hielt, aber du warst bewusstlos. Ich schätze mal es war normal, dass man Puppen von den Leuten hat, die man kennt. Und ich habe dich herumgewirbelt und dann nah an mein Gesicht gebracht und gesagt „bist du da?“ und du hast gesagt „nein, aber das hast du schonmal in Amsterdam gemacht“ und ich hab gesagt „geht’s dir gut?“ und du hast gesagt „ja“.

„Ich habe letzte Nacht von dir geträumt. Es war nur eine Überschrift, die lautete: „nackte Performance Künstlerin klaut den Stift der Universitätsleitung und flüchtet aufs Dach.“

„Ich hab gerade geträumt, dass du dir die Haare abrasiert und einige von den Haaren als Schnurrbart implantiert hast. Du hast einen beigen Anzug getragen und hattest in etwa eine drei Meter große Blase um dich rum, die dein ganz persönlicher Schutzraum war. Wir waren auf einer Doppelbeerdigung/Grundstücksverkauf. Wenn du gelächelt hättest, hätte das deinen Schnurrbart beschädigt, also hast du es gelassen.“

„Gestern warst du in meinem Traum. Ich erinnere mich an nicht viel, außer dass es darum ging, in Fluren auf und ab zu laufen und Mäntel anzuprobieren, die wir brauchten, weil es kalt war. Es gab eine Mitfahrgelegenheit, um zu einer Oper zu fahren, die wir nicht verpassen sollten, aber der Flur schien einfach zu lang. Irgendwie warst du auch eine Sicherheitsbeauftragte für Autos.“

„Du hast rot getragen und hast eine super lange Metallstange gehalten, die so hoch war, dass sie aus meinem Sichtfeld herausragte. Ich konnte nicht erkennen, was auf der anderen Seite der Stange war, aber es kam mir so vor, als ob sie Teil so einer Art Struktur war, eine Struktur innerhalb derer wir uns beide befanden, die aber unsichtbar blieb für uns (entweder wirklich unsichtbar oder einfach sehr groß). Also, du standst da und hast die Stange gehalten und dann

Artistic Director of Biennale für Freiburg #2

Artistic Director of Biennale für Freiburg #2

Looking back

Looking back