JSC ON VIEW: MYTHOLOGISTS
WORKS FROM THE JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION

17 JANUARY 2021 – 19 DECEMBER 2021

Perceptions of truth are widely mediated through moving images. While they can be used by those in authority to exert influence, this exhibition explores the ways in which time-based media can connect political ideologies with the desire to create a world of one’s own. Borrowing from various cultural narratives, the works expound on their potential to serve as an incubator for social mythologies. 

Traditionally understood as narrations about gods, creation, and sanctity, myths are stories that are widely shared and factually ambiguous. They tell unverified truths, educate and entertain at the same time, and create archetypes from simple characters. JSC ON VIEW: MYTHOLOGISTS addresses the tensions created between facts and fictions through the production of personal as well as collective narratives. The works each grapple with various mythologies by reinterpreting histories, disrupting established behaviors, and imagining new visual and sonic worlds. What binds them together is that the limits between myth, fact, and fantasy are unclear—whether or not by the artist’s own making. Through everyday acts of pretending and performing, the works ask: What—if anything—can be trusted? How is meaning assigned to these stories? Who creates these myths and which ones will be carried into the future?

Wu Tsang’s video Wildness (2012), along with Mark Leckey’s works Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Parade (2003), examines the desire for a sense of belonging within cultural movements and subcultures. These works document particular milieus while examining the collective fantasies that drive their construction. Mike Kelley’s decade-long project, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais) (2011), probes and subverts popular American media tropes through nightmarish performances and relationships between cultural archetypes.

Through very different mediums and contexts, the enduring projects by the Guerrilla Girls and the work of Natascha Sadr Haghighian foreground myths specific to the art world through fictionalizing their own personal narratives and participation. In Klara Lidén’s videos Paralyzed (2003) and Grounding (2018), the artist uses her own ambiguously gendered white body to challenge and confuse established codes of behavior.

Lina Lapelytė’s Hunky Bluff Act 1–6 (2015) and Jamie Crewe’s Pastoral Drama (2018) borrow from historic mythologies as well as operatic arias to examine deeply entrenched narratives and gender roles. Similarly, Mika Rottenberg’s Chasing Waterfalls. The Rise and Fall of the Amazing Seven Sutherland Sisters (2006) and WangShui’s From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances (2018) use fables, commercial formats, and contemporary architecture as catalysts to open up questions around the production of identity. Laure Prouvost’s video work They Parlaient Idéale (2019), created for the French pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, established its own set of mythologies through the connection between language, image, and movement. Finally, Jacolby Satterwhite’s opulent digital tableaux present utopian science-fiction worlds that forge new relationships and hierarchies.

Text: Rachel Vera Steinberg

The third edition of JSC ON VIEW presents video and sound installations from twelve artists in the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, some of whom are being exhibited at JSC Düsseldorf for the first time. 

JSC ON VIEW: MYTHOLOGISTS is curated by Rachel Vera Steinberg, fellow of the JSC Curatorial & Research Residency Program (CRRP) 2019–2020.

ARTIST LIST

Jamie Crewe, Guerrilla Girls, Mike Kelley, Lina Lapelytė, Mark Leckey, Klara Lidén, Laure Prouvost, Mika Rottenberg, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Jacolby Satterwhite, Wu Tsang, WangShui

JEREMY SHAW
QUANTIFICATION TRILOGY

17 JANUARY 2021 – 19 DECEMBER 2021

Jeremy Shaw’s Quantification Trilogy consists of three parafictional short films: Quickeners (2014), Liminals (2017), and I Can See Forever (2018). The works are set in the future and explore how marginalized societies confront life after a scientific discovery has mapped and determined all parameters of transcendental spiritual experience. This is known as “The Quantification.” Employing aesthetics and outmoded media of the 20th century to depict the future, Shaw’s alchemical combination of cinema verité, ethnographic film, conceptual art, and music video invites the viewer to suspend their disbelief in the story, and provides a series of critical perspectives on systems of power. The Quantification Trilogy examines fringe culture, theories of evolution, virtual reality, neurotheology, esotericism, dance, the representation of the sublime, as well as the notion of transcendence itself.

Set five hundred years in the future, Quickeners presents the activities and testimonies of a small group of “Quantum Humans,” exhibiting symptoms of “Human Atavism Syndrome” (HAS)—a dormant genetic expression that awakens desire in the affected to seek out the abandoned spiritual meaning of their human predecessors. A species wirelessly interconnected to “The Hive,” Quantum Humans have evolved to operate on purely rational thought, thereby achieving immortality. In the video, Shaw meticulously reworks archival documentary footage of Pentecostal Christian snake handlers to depict the uncanny return of an outmoded system of belief. As the story unfolds, an authoritative Quantum Human narrator reports on what we witness: indecipherable testimonials, sermons, prayers, convulsive dancing, speaking-in-tongues, serpent handling, and ecstatic states known as “Quickenings.”

Liminals is presented as a recovered episode of a documentary series on marginal societies (Periphery Altruist Cultures) who respond to a widespread loss of ability for faith that threatens the extinction of the human species. A group named “The Liminals” believe that by injecting themselves with machine DNA and re-engaging abandoned spiritual rituals, they will be able to access a paraspace between the physical and the virtual where humanity can enter a new phase of evolution. Taking place three generations from the present and using a 1970s cinema verité aesthetic, Liminals depicts members of the group as they engage in varying cathartic behaviours—from whirling and kundalini yoga to modern dance and headbanging—in an effort to rupture their current reality and save humanity.

I Can See Forever is conceived as a television documentary series about “The Singularity Project,” a failed government experiment that aimed to create a harmonious synthesis of human and machine. Set approximately 40 years from today, the video employs mid-1990s fly-on-the-wall VHS footage to expose the story of 27-year-old Roderick Dale, the project’s only known survivor. Born with an 8.7% machine DNA biology, yet uninterested in the virtual-reality trappings of his time, Dale has committed himself to a life immersed in dance. It is during his unique virtuosic activities that he claims to be able to “See Forever”—a multilayered and contentious term that he defines as the ability to transcend to a digital plane of total unity while maintaining a corporeal physical presence.

The exhibition also presents a selection from Shaw’s series of reframed archival photographs: Towards Universal Pattern Recognition (2016­–20). These photographs feature subjects experiencing states of spiritual, hedonistic, or technological catharsis. They are framed under precisely faceted prismatic lenses designed by the artist to create multiple refracted images around a specific element within the picture. This mediation of the presented image not only appears to approximate the altered state of consciousness of the photographic subject, it heightens an awareness of the perspective of the camera, the beliefs or values of the original photographer, and those of viewer of the artwork.

Maxwell Stephens

Quantification Trilogy is part of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION and produced in cooperation with the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Esker Foundation in Calgary, Canada, and with the support of KÖNIG GALERIE and the Canada Council for the Arts. An extensive publication will be released in conjunction with the show.

ARTIST LIST

Jeremy Shaw

BEUYS 2021:
LUTZ MOMMARTZ
SOZIALE PLASTIK
SCREENING

17 JANUARY 2021 – 19 DECEMBER 2021

In conjunction with beuys 2021. 100 years of joseph beuys, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION will present the 16mm film Soziale Plastik (Social Sculpture, 1969) by Lutz Mommartz at the cinema of JSC Düsseldorf. The film is also available permanently in the Collection Catalog and in the JSC Video Lounge.

Joseph Beuys, one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, has had a strong impact on collective cultural memory. Soziale Plastik shows the familiar figure of Beuys, dressed in his signature outfit: white shirt, fisherman’s vest, and dark felt hat. He gazes from the screen at the audience for eleven entire minutes—without saying a word, steady and self-assured, looking directly into the camera.

In this rudimentary performance Beuys was following the director’s instructions. As stated in the opening credits, Mommartz merely asked Beuys to “comport himself in relation to the anonymous viewer.” This simple stage direction is typical for Mommartz’s films, as are the minimalistic setting, the interaction with the camera, and the lack of a script.

In Mommartz’s film, Beuys becomes that which he always propagated, and as the title suggests: a social sculpture that has a formative influence on society and even changes it for the better. By engaging our gaze through the medium of film, Beuys establishes a social space of interaction. He utilizes his vehement, iconic presence as a device that we as viewers cannot resist. Whether we hold Beuys’s gaze, avoid it, or turn away in boredom after a few minutes—we have to comport ourselves in relation to Beuys, just like he has to comport himself in relation to the “anonymous viewer.” Due to its lack of storyline, the film challenges our conventional ways of seeing while also allowing the viewer to engage in a dialogue with Beuys that can be experienced in an almost physical way. In this way, Beuys applies Mommartz’s instructions to the viewers themselves. The viewers become part of the performance, and in the spirit of Beuys’s conviction that every person is an artist, they become artists for the duration of the interaction.

It is precisely this sounding out of the relationship between the filmmaker, the medium of film, the protagonists, and the viewers as well as cinematic authenticity that interested Mommartz. Considered one of the most important representatives of German experimental film, Mommartz was part of a group of filmmakers who called themselves “Das andere Kino” (The Other Cinema) in the late 1960s. This independent experimental film movement, which included Werner Nekes, W + B Hein, and Klaus Wyborny, was a response to New American Cinema. In addition to their efforts to develop new cinematic possibilities of expression far from the mainstream and to establish film as a visual art, they were also concerned with finding alternative channels for film distribution.

Beuys’s concept of social sculpture and his statement that everybody is an artist also applies to Mommartz in a certain sense. He was the chief inspector at the Düsseldorf municipal planning office before he started making films as an autodidact in the mid-1960s. In his “second,” artistic career he was catapulted to sudden fame in 1967 when his 16mm short film was awarded a prize at the renowned experimental film festival in Knokke, Belgium. With the Filmgruppe Düsseldorf, Mommartz also founded the Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf (film workshop) in 1976 and established the first film class at the art academy in Düsseldorf. The film department, which Mommartz directed as a professor of film from 1978 to 1999, later became part of the department of art education in Münster (now the art academy in Münster).

Soziale Plastik, which is part of the exhibition beuys 2021, will be presented along with the feature film JUPP, WATT HAMWER JEMAHT? (Yikes, Whatever Have We Done?, 2019) by the filmmaker Jan Bonny and the artist Alex Wissel at the cinema of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf. Soziale Plastik will be shown every Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and JUPP, WATT HAMWER JEMAHT? will be shown every Sunday at 4:00 p.m.

In addition, Joseph Beuys’s metal sign Buttocklifting (Edition Staeck) from 1974 will be on permanent display at the collection entrance.

Lutz Mommartz (* 1934) lives and works in Düsseldorf. The work of the experimental filmmaker is currently being shown in a large retrospective at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

ARTIST LIST

Lutz Mommartz

BEUYS 2021:
JAN BONNY & ALEX WISSEL
JUPP, WATT HAMWER JEMAHT?
SCREENING

17 JANUARY 2021 – 19 DECEMBER 2021

In conjunction with beuys 2021. 100 years of joseph beuys, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION will present the feature film JUPP, WATT HAMWER JEMAHT? (Yikes, Whatever Have We Done?, 2019) by film director Jan Bonny and artist Alex Wissel.

The film, in which Joseph Beuys repeatedly appears as a spirit from the past, is a satire on the German art scene, Gerhard Schröder’s coalition government of Social Democrats and the Green Party, and the interrelationship of lies, morals, power, art, and politics. Bonny and Wissel originally planned to make a short film about Joseph Beuys, whose statement “Every person is an artist” was to serve as the starting point. While doing preliminary research, Bonny and Wissel became aware of the parallels between this dictum and the rise of neoliberal values in German society: according to these, everybody today has the potential for success in their own business if they work hard enough and are creative. Following this concept, Bonny and Wissel came across Helge Achenbach, who was once one of the most successful art advisors in Germany. They abandoned the first idea and instead focused on the more spectacular story of the rise and fall of Achenbach, whose patronizing entrepreneurship embodied everything that the neoliberal interpretation of Beuys’s dictum represented for them. Achenbach became rich from art consulting and selling art. He lost everything when it was revealed that he had manipulated invoices in his favor, including those for clients such as the Aldi discount supermarket heir Berthold Albrecht. In court, Achenbach referred to his falsified invoices as “collages.” In 2015 he was sentenced to prison for fraud.

Bonny and Wissel’s film is devised as a stage production based on the web series Rheingold, which was produced for the Volksbühne theater in Berlin in 2018. The actors perform in an expansive stage set that incorporates references to art history such as an oversize version of Beuys’s Capri-Batterie (Capri Battery) and Ottmar Hörl’s Euro-Skulptur (Euro Sculpture). Working in an experimental and improvised manner, the actors hold the script in their hands and recite the stage directions along with their dialogue. The location and time vary from scene to scene, ranging from the late 1960s to the 2000s. The story of the rise and fall of Achenbach, who is alternatingly played by Bibiana Beglau and Joachim Król, is a critique of the narcissistic self-marketing culture of the 2000s in Germany.

JUPP, WATT HAMWER JEMAHT? (Yikes, Whatever Have We Done?, 2019) is part of the exhibition beuys 2021 and will be presented along with Lutz Mommartz’s Soziale Plastik (Social Sculpture, 1969) at the cinema of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf. Soziale Plastik will be shown every Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and JUPP, WATT HAMWER JEMAHT? will be shown every Sunday at 4:00 p.m.

In addition, Joseph Beuys’s metal sign Buttocklifting (Edition Staeck) from 1974 will be on display at the collection entrance.

Jan Bonny (* 1979) lives and works in Cologne.

Alex Wissel (* 1983) lives and works in Düsseldorf and Munich.

ARTIST LIST

Jan Bonny & Alex Wissel

CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

25 APRIL 2021 – 19 DECEMBER 2021

Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) was one of the leading German-speaking artists of his time. He eliminated the borders between theater, film, television, literature, and visual arts with his politically subversive and often extreme happenings and projects. His death in 2010 left an artistic void that is still felt today, even outside of the German-speaking world.

Three institutions in Düsseldorf will join forces to feature Schlingensief’s work in the spring of 2021. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will present Christoph Schlingensief. Kaprow City, and the Filmmuseum will mount a Schlingensief film series and display photographs by his sound engineer and close friend Eckhard Kuchenbecker. The exhibition CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF: MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE at JSC Düsseldorf will, for the first time, bring together Schlingensief’s works from the Julia Stoschek Collection. The photo prints, videos, and mixed-media installations on display were created between 2003 and 2008. These works are fragments from Schlingensief’s performances and stagings that Julia Stoschek supported as a patron. “For me, Christoph Schlingensief is in line with great German artists like Beuys and Kippenberger. He always succeeded in directly influencing society. His works consistently and relentlessly reflect the contemporary,” the collector notes.

The cooperative project in Düsseldorf invites visitors to engage in an in-depth examination of Schlingensief’s art and makes it possible to experience the complex interdependencies of the works. “The loss of Schlingensief is painfully noticeable today. That is why it makes me very happy that more than ten years after his death we—along with the Kunstsammlung NRW and the Filmmuseum—are able to help his work receive greater recognition from institutions,” Stoschek states.

Christoph Schlingensief and Julia Stoschek had a long and close friendship that was accompanied by a lively exchange concerning his projects. They met in 2003 for the first time. One year later Stoschek attended rehearsals for the Bayreuth Festival with Schlingensief, who was staging the opera Parsifal. “Our friendship was deep,” Stoschek says today. “The four years in Bayreuth were quite formative for both of us. During that period Christoph became a member of my family.”

The collector later funded a number of his projects, including the long-term project The Animatograph (2005–07), a revolving stage construction that simultaneously provided a surface for action and projections. Variations of this project were shown at venues including Reykjavík, Iceland; Lüderitz, Namibia; and Neuhardenberg, Germany amongst others. The immersive installation consisted of the videos I want to destroy (2005) and Affenführer (Monkey Führer, 2005) and the photographs Affenbilder (Monkey Pictures, 2005), which are today part of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION.

Stoschek’s support of the happening Diana II—What Happened to Allan Kaprow? (2006) demonstrates that her backing of Schlingensief’s work was also based on idealistic support. The artist had originally planned a performance that was to take place during Frieze Art Fair in London. It was conceived as a continuation of the immersive multimedia installation Kaprow City (2006), which will be presented at K20 of the Kunstsammlung NRW from 24th April to 17th October 2021 in Dusseldorf. However, the performance was prevented due to the provocative nature of the subject, the death of the Lady Diana in a car accident—particularly provocative in combination with Schlingensief’s B-horror movie aesthetics. At that point he changed the concept of Diana II—What Happened to Allan Kaprow? With the aid of a portable altar taken from Catholic liturgy, Schlingensief visited sites around London that were associated with the Princess of Wales and Allan Kaprow, one of the pioneers of performance art. When funds ran low due to the project’s exclusion from the official part of the fair and belief in the project also waned, Julia Stoschek was able to help, as is documented by his dedication: “Diana II would not have been possible without your help. You were the only one who did not discourage me and instead gave me strength.” Diana Altar (2006) entered the collection the same year.

The mysterious work Message in a Bottle (2008) also has a personal connection. The object was a present from Christoph Schlingensief to Julia Stoschek in conjunction with the second major presentation of her collection—NUMBER TWO: FRAGILE—in 2008. The object consists of a rough wooden frame with two Plexiglas panels screwed onto it, between which there is a small package. Addressed to Schlingensief and bearing a canceled stamp, the package is reminiscent of Conceptual Art and Mail Art of the 1960s. Schlingensief was making reference to the approach of the Fluxus movement, which elevates everyday items to art objects imbued with an aura of mystery.

The story of the journey taken by this object, its contents, and the frame is clearly inherent I the art object. However, it cannot be grasped in concrete terms. It remains uncertain what information is actually contained in the message in the bottle. To find out more, the object would have to be broken open and destroyed. The artist and the collector engage in a direct relationship with each other that depends on mutual agreement on rules concerning the handling of art in general, making sure the message remains protected by its frame. On a personal level, it is about trust—accepting that things are left unsaid.

CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF IN DÜSSELDORF

In parallel, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen shows the installation Kaprow City at K20 (24.4. – 17.10.2021). The Filmmuseum Düsseldorf presents within the exhibition Christoph Schlingensief: Projektionen a film series and photographs by Eckhard Kuchenbecker (24.4. –  31.8.2021).

More information:

www.kunstsammlung.de

www.duesseldorf.de/filmmuseum

ARTIST LIST

Christoph Schlingensief

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
FILMS BY DOROTA GAWĘDA AND EGLĖ KULBOKAITĖ
SCREENING

7 JUNE 2020 – 6 DECEMBER 2020

Part One
7 June – 4 October 2020

Part Two
11 October – 6 December

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s multidisciplinary work includes live performances, immersive installations, sculptures, fragrances, and interventions in social media, all of which are rooted in feminist theory and fiction. In the second part of FILMS BY at JSC Düsseldorf, the new video work MOUTHLESS (2020) is presented together with the existing work YGRG14X: READING WITH A SINGLE HAND (2018), both related to the ongoing performance project YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (YGRG). Through YGRG, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė depict, examine, and contextualize the reading body, exploring the connections between text, the body, the environment, and technology. Through YGRG, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė aim to create a new sensibility toward reading as a form of embodied language and collective practice.

MOUTHLESS (2020) presents a fragmented folk horror narrative that explores history, ritual, myth, and the relationship between humans and nature, using witchcraft as a transhistorical and transcultural signifier. Based on historical events and mythic tales, the duo intertwine references of witch trials in and around the Fribourg area, Eastern European folklore, magical rites, and contemporary healing practices. In MOUTHLESS, the artists’ combine footage of performers collectively reading texts with animations of morphing organic shapes and landscapes, and scenes shot in the forest. The video can be considered a ritualistic chant or call to communicate with the deceased and the harmed whether they are human, animal, or tree. The video is accompanied by an olfactory installation that simulates the smell of wet soil, triggering a partly unconscious, visceral experience in the body.

The video YGRG14X: READING WITH A SINGLE HAND examines the solitary act of reading as an intimate and multisensory experience by drawing attention to the entire body and away from the gaze. YGRG14X is comprised of video documentation of an early performance of the YGRG Manifesto and Paul B. Preciado’s text Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture: From the Secret Museum to Playboy, in which Preciado demonstrates how female reading was confined to the space of domestic withdrawal and how both reading and sexuality were internalized. YGRG14X: READING WITH A SINGLE HAND explores an environment and set of gestures that point to the boudoir at the end of the eighteenth century, where reading produced what Preciado refers to as the modern “synthetically mediated” understanding of sexual experience, especially masturbation, “growing out of reading and extending to the non-organic world, to smell, vision, and touch.” In the text, the book—and in the case of the performance, the iPhone, which is used by the performers as a tool for reading, filming, and lighting—functions as an interface for the individual experience of subjective thought, physical pleasure, and imagination—a carrier of knowledge and a recording device.

FILMS BY DOROTA GAWĘDA & EGLĖ KULBOKAITĖ is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a polyvocal program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

ARTIST LIST

Dorota Gawęda, Eglė Kulbokaitė

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
FILMS BY MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI
SCREENING

8 MARCH 2020 – 3 MAY 2020

FILMS BY MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI presents three works by Iranian artist and activist Morehshin Allahyari that are part of the ongoing research project She Who Sees The Unknown. The project, consisting of video and VR works, lectures, and installations creates a fictitious archive of feminist narratives by a selection of female or queer figures. These figures are based on so-called “jinn”, which are regarded as supernatural creatures in Islamic mythology and theology. Employing processes of animation and 3-D modeling, the artist recreates these beings, whilst simultaneously embedding them in contemporary contexts. Allahyari defines this process—inspired by the theorists Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti—as “re-figuring”. In addition to the feminist appropriation of traditional narratives and myths from the Middle East, the archive deals with notions of cultural heritage, political injustice, environmental destruction, and digital colonialism. As part of horizontal vertigo, JSC Düsseldorf will present three of the five figures that have been completed by Allahyari: Huma (2016), Ya’jooj Ma’jooj (2017), and Aisha Qandisha (2018).

Each video begins with a spoken mantra-like manifesto about the meaning and purpose of She Who Sees The Unknown. Spoken by the artist herself, the introduction describes these mythic figures as monstrous “Others”, dark goddesses, and divided or ambiguous personalities. Allahyari dedicates an individual story to each figure, holding them responsible for bringing justice to global warming (Huma), the hardening of national borders (Ya’jooj Ma’jooj) as well as the sexual desires of women (Aisha Qandisha).

Allahyari regards She Who Sees The Unknown as a feminist intervention by taking on a field and space that is still principally dominated by white men and Western thinking—the digital realm. The artist also aims to strengthen the role of Women of Color with the help of her female/queer figures, who through their re-contextualization emancipate themselves from the stereotype of the male hero. In addition to the underrepresentation of women in digital professions, the concept of digital colonialism introduced by Allahyari critizes the prevalent hierarchies that define these infrastructures. She Who Sees The Unknown seeks to rethink and transform this new form of colonialism to engender a more just future.

FILMS BY MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a polyvocal program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

ARTIST LIST

Morehshin Allahyari

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
SOPHIA AL-MARIA
BITCH OMEGA

8 MARCH 2020 – 6 DECEMBER 2020

ARTIST LIST

Sophia Al-Maria

JSC ON VIEW II
WORKS FROM THE JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION

9 FEBRUARY 2020 – 6 DECEMBER 2020

The focus of this edition of JSC ON VIEW is on works from the JULIA STOCHEK COLLECTION that engage with sociopolitical topics. The exhibition in the Düsseldorf collection building presents seven video and film works and eight photographs by eleven international artists. In addition to time-based art, the emphasis is on the genre of photography, which is also well-represented in the collection.

The selected works not only look back thematically at past, political, and historical locations but also socially relevant events in the present age, which is characterized by political instability and violent conflicts. They also document current forms of territorial mechanisms of power and individual political resistance. Individuals and groups who are confronted with exclusion and separation take center stage in these works and are empowered through their diversity and differences. The works also present alternatives and unconventional havens for grappling with the political and social uncertainties of our time.

In addition, the works reflect on the medium itself: photography’s claim to authenticity in the digital and global age. The photographic and time-based works illustrate how images can be manipulated, staged, and distributed on the internet and through mass media. They thus reveal how the borders between fact and fiction blur, and how images become icons and find their way into our collective memory of images.

Badezimmer (Bathroom) (1997), which is probably Thomas Demand’s most well-known photograph, is a central work in the exhibition. Based on an image that was used on the cover of the German weekly magazine Stern for a feature on the suicide of the German politician Uwe Barschel in 1987, the body of the politician is absent in Demand’s photograph of his elaborately constructed paper model of the bathroom. Demand was less interested in the actual affair than he was in the fact that the case was determined by the medium of photography: the picture taken by the reporter who found the dead politician was reproduced on the cover of Stern to illustrate the alleged suicide for the first time. The photographs thus became icons that have been burned into the collective memory of Germans.

In APEX (2013) Arthur Jafa juxtaposes known images from jazz and pop culture with shots of marginalized culture. The video is a rapid sequence of found footage, starkly rhythmic and synchronized with the electronic techno beats of the Detroit DJ Robert Hood. The artist combines images of music icons such as Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley as well as fictional characters such as Mickey Mouse or Felix the Cat with disconcerting shots of murders, slavery, and discrimination of blacks. APEX addresses the history and present situation of black culture and the attempt to transfer the “power, beauty, and alienation”—in the words of the artist—of African-American music to film.

In November (2004) Hito Steyerl follows the various life phases of her friend Andrea Wolf, who joined the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) as a revolutionary and was killed fighting against the Turkish government in 1998. Using Wolf’s biography, November examines the diverse interrelations between territorial power politics and individual forms of resistance as well as the increasingly blurred border between fact and fiction in the global age.

Taryn Simon also examines reality and staging in her photo series The Innocents (2002). She created portraits of wrongly convicted perpetrators of violent crimes whose innocence was later proven by DNA tests; the portraits show them at the scene of the crime that was associated with their case. Turning away from photographic realism, Simon plays with the fluid borders between truth and construction, which are the basis of our verdicts in criminal trials—from the accusation to the defense—as well as in photography, in which even the most detailed likeness is never equivalent to reality. By focusing on the individual stories, the artist highlights the problematic constitutional system in which social differences result in inequality.

Tobias Zielony’s stop-motion video Maskirovka (2017) focuses on the protagonists of the young LGBTQI community in Kiev, combining these images with news reports on the Euromaidan Protests. The title of the series refers to the Russian tradition of waging war that is characterized by deception, camouflage, renunciation, and disinformation. Masks were also used by the protesters of the Maidan movement as a way to hide their identity, and in the Kiev party scene they are a favorite way of dressing up. In this way, Zielony’s piece creates a contemporary narrative based on the unconventional havens for queer identities of the Kiev techno scene, surrounded by a public that is characterized by violence, repression, and upheaval—the Ukraine in civil war.

ARTIST LIST

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Thomas Demand, Beatrice Gibson, Arthur Jafa, Sigalit Landau, Adam McEwen, Colin Montgomery, Taryn Simon, Hito Steyerl, Tobias Zielony

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
FILMS BY TRINH T. MINH-HA
SCREENING

28 NOVEMBER 2019 – 2 FEBRUARY 2020

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is pleased to present the film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (108’, 1989) by internationally renowned artist, theorist, and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. Produced during the “writing culture” debate of the 1980s, questioning modes of writing and representation in ethnography, Surname Viet Given Name Nam is a multilayered, transnational and postcolonial feminist work, in which Trinh reflects on acts of cultural representation and female identity, storytelling, the impossibility of translation, and the politics of documentary filmmaking.

Surname Viet Given Name Nam consists of reenacted interviews with women from various parts of Vietnam and the United States, talking about their everyday experiences and role as women in a patriarchal society. The stories they tell also address their experiences in the Vietnam War, subsequent displacement, and life in the diaspora. These reenactments are interspersed with found footage and photographs of Vietnamese life and culture, as well as historical references of influential Vietnamese poets—among them a revisionist reading of nineteenth century poet Hồ Xuân Hương, known for her non-conforming attitude toward societal norms.

The interviews in the film were excerpted from Mai Thu Van’s 1983 book Vietnam, un peuple, des voix, translated into English by Trinh herself, and reenacted by Vietnamese women living in the US. In the film, Trinh acknowledges the betrayal inherent to every act of translation because, as she explains, it fails to accurately capture either the “letter of the text, its spirit, or its aesthetics.” In a similar way, documentary film lacks accuracy in generating a supposedly objective image of its subject, and for Trinh, documentary is therefore located closer to fiction.

Trinh, who was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the US in the 1970s where she studied and has lived since, chose to focus on the marginalized voices of women in her country of birth to critique the nationalistic and misogynist representations of Vietnamese female identity and Western representations of the “the Other” common in ethnography, anthropology, and Western feminism. In its critique, the film pays homage to the multiplicity of stories and subjectivities of women of color.

Trinh’s writing and films on identity and representation, particularly her idea of “speaking nearby” inspired the structure of the year-long program HORIZONTAL VERTIGO at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION. The title horizontal vertigo is quoted from “Cotton and Iron” (1991), an essay in which Trinh foregrounds plurality and “non-totalness,” challenging systems of binary opposition and definitive categorizations.  In “speaking nearby” Trinh acknowledges the gap that remains in representation. Instead of “speaking about” someone or something and therefore defining them, “speaking nearby” recognizes both positions: the framer and the framed. Echoing this commitment, HORIZONTAL VERTIGO does not propose one overarching theme but thrives on the multiplicity of narratives and narrators at hand, exploring the inherent plurality of the entire program without prescribing a “right” way of reading it.

Sur Name Viet Given Name Nam (108’, 1989)

FILMS BY TRINH T. MINH-HA is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a polyvocal program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

ARTIST LIST

Trinh T. Minh-ha

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
FILMS BY ANNA ZETT
SCREENING

17 OCTOBER 2019 – 24 NOVEMBER 2019

Two films by Anna Zett are the focus of horizontal vertigo’s fifth screening program at JSC Düsseldorf. Zett’s interdisciplinary practice, spanning video, performance, installation, audio plays, and writing, combines dense historical research with personal associations and performative interventions. The video works featured here, This Unwieldy Object (2014) and Endarchiv (2019), examine how shifts in power and ideology are simultaneously inscribed in the body, psyche, and the earth. Zett asks: How do human bodies perform, come to terms with, document, and resist these shifts?

This Unwieldy Object is an essay film meets road movie through the US-American West. It is split into two parts. Part 1 focuses on the modernist idea of progress and part 2 centers around the aftermath of colonial violence. The turning point of the film is marked by a scene where Zett encounters a fragment of the Berlin Wall in Rapid City, South Dakota, as part of a monument for the US-American victory over socialism. For Zett, this wall fragment is both symbolizing the so-called “end of history” and serving as a biographical anchor for their personal presence in the film. This Unwieldy Object is the culmination of Zett’s long-term research into the genre of American dinosaur films and modern-day paleontology and how they both are intertwined with the myth of the Western frontier, the genocide of the indigenous populatation and the erasure of indigenous history.

In Endarchiv, Zett examines the symbolic process of disposal and forgetting while raising questions about how the material and emotional remains of the GDR still affect the environment, society, and individuals today. In the video, footage of the artist climbing large mounds of small rocks while spray painting short verses and questions onto their surfaces is interspersed with found footage of protesters painting on the east side of the Berlin Wall shortly after it was opened in November 1989. Endarchiv is part of the artist’s “DUMP” series, in which historical video material from the archive of the opposition to the GDR, founded by the Robert Havemann Society, is paired with contemporary interviews and performative explorations in an attempt to simultaneously uncover and work through past trauma.

This Unwieldy Object, 2014, 47’, HD video, color, sound.
Endarchiv, 2019,18’21‘‘, HD video, color, sound.

ANNA ZETT is a Berlin-based artist, writer, maker of films and radio plays. Their films have been screened at Serpentine Cinema, London; Whitney Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius; Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam; Rhizome.org; Human Resources, Los Angeles; SALT, Istanbul among others.

FILMS BY ANNA ZETT is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a polyvocal program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

ARTIST LIST

Anna Zett

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
FILMS BY SKY HOPINKA
SCREENING

6 SEPTEMBER 2019 – 13 OCTOBER 2019

FILMS BY SKY HOPINKA will feature Fainting Spells (2018) and Dislocation Blues (2017), two works that deal with indigenous life and history, landscape, and language. Filmed during the Standing Rock protests resisting to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline across indigenous lands, Dislocation Blues (2017) offers an incomplete and imperfect portrait of the demonstrations and the camp with reflections by two participants, Cleo Keahna and Terry Running Wild. In Fainting Spells (2018) Hopinka combines recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure by retelling an imagined myth of the Xąwįska, the Indian Pipe Plant used by the Ho-Chunk to revive someone who fainted.

FILMS BY SKY HOPINKA is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a polyvocal program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

ARTIST LIST

Sky Hopinka

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
A.K. BURNS
NEGATIVE SPACE

6 SEPTEMBER 2019 – 2 FEBRUARY 2020

NEGATIVE SPACE is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a polyvocal program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

PUBLIC PROGRAM

A.K. Burns & A.L. Steiner, Community Action Center (2010), 15–17 November 2019, 11:00 a.m. / 12:30 p.m. / 2:00 p.m. / 3:30 p.m. & 5:00 p.m. at the cinema of the JSC Düsseldorf (second floor)

ARTIST TALK

A talk with A.K. Burns and curator Lisa Long, 16 November 2019, 3:00 p.m.

STUDIO 54 FILM PROGRAM

Works selected by A.K. Burns, 12 December 2019, 7:30 p.m., Cinema of the JSC Düsseldorf

ARTIST LIST

A.K Burns

JSC ON VIEW I
WORKS FROM THE JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION

21 JULY 2019 – 22 DECEMBER 2019

JSC ON VIEW is the title of a new series of exhibitions focusing explicitly on the inventory of works in the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION. The series is being introduced by a tribute to three female artists who have recently passed away: Lutz Bacher, Barbara Hammer, and Carolee Schneemann.

The presentation will cover the entire ground floor of JSC Düsseldorf, comprising six key video works from the artists’ respective oeuvres, as well as the large-format photographic series Sex with Strangers (1986), one of Lutz Bacher’s key early works.

The U.S. American artist Lutz Bacher who, since the 1970s, had concealed her identity behind a male pseudonym used a deliberately unaccommodating approach in her frequently parodic art to forego it being categorized within a feminist context. She employs imagery and text from popular culture in her objects and time-based work, which by means of deconstruction and alienation broaches central questions concerning authorship, power, and the influence of mass media on society.
For the nine-part photographic series Sex with Strangers that, to date, has not been presented at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, she enlarged photographs of pages with illustrations together with captions from a book presenting itself as an informative sociological study of female psychology and deviant sexual behavior. However, it is in fact hard pornographic imagery that is on display, once again denying the viewer the opportunity of ascribing any specific classification to the work.

The filmmaker Barbara Hammer is one of the pioneers of queer cinema. Her experimental films evolved from the notion that conventional narrative film is too limited to be capable of representing homosexual reality in general and her lesbian one in particular. Her documentary and experimental films are regarded as one of the earliest and most wide-ranging representations of lesbian identity, love, and sexuality. The work Double Strength (1978), one of three works by Hammer in the exhibition, is a poetic study of the different stages of a lesbian love affair between Hammer herself and her then partner, the choreographer and female trapeze artist Terry Sandgreff. In a montage comprising film footage of both women swinging on the trapeze, Sandgreff performing acrobatic dance moves, and also including private photographs, the film traces the relationship from its intense beginnings, via alienation to the eventual end of their love. Hammer’s work is distinguished by its physical presence and expressivity, in which the camera enters into a relationship with its surroundings. Space and time become blurred, providing instead an insight into Hammer’s very personal experiential space.

Carolee Schneemann, in her performative, kinetic painting and experimental practice, opened the social discourse around physicality and gender roles earlier than many other female artists. She is considered as one of the most radical representatives of such a genre and, as she has stated herself, has always considered her practice to be that of a “painter who has left the canvas to activate actual space and lived time.”
Schneemann’s video Up to and Including Her Limits of 1975 is regarded as a direct response to Jackson Pollock’s physicalized painting process. “I am suspended in a tree surgeon’s harness on a three-quarter-inch manila rope, a rope which I can raise or lower manually to sustain an entranced period of drawing – my extended arm holds crayons which stroke the surrounding walls, accumulating a web of colored marks. My entire body becomes the agency of visual traces, vestige of the body’s energy in motion.”
One of her central works, Fuses from 1964-67, was created over several years, showing Schneemann with her partner, the composer James Tenney engaging in intimate sexual activities. The act, which she filmed herself, has been collaged with color overlays and burn marks that have been inscribed into the film over time. Fuses is the first part of her Autobiographical Trilogy and was based on the question of how and whether the sexual act itself differs from pornography and traditional art.

All three artists were pioneers in their respective fields. All three died this year, in their seventies. The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is proud to be able to offer an insight into the work of these three artists and their disparate interpretation.

ARTIST LIST

Lutz Bacher, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
FILMS BY CHELSEA KNIGHT &
SHANE ASLAN SELZER
SCREENING

30 JUNE 2019 – 28 JULY 2019

The third iteration of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO’s screening program at JSC Düsseldorf features three moving-image works by artist Chelsea Knight and one work by Knight and Shane Aslan Selzer.

When the Moon is Full (2007) and Lonely Planet (2018, a collaboration between Shane Aslan Selzer and Chelsea Knight) have both been shown internationally. My Ecstasy is Your Rapture and Teacher’s College, Columbia University (both 2019) will premiere at JSC Düsseldorf.

Spanning twelve years of Knight’s versatile and often collaborative video and performance- based practice, the works in this screening series reveal a strong sociological impulse, diving into the messy and sometimes uncomfortable spaces of social interaction. Part documentary and part fiction, Knight’s narratives are personal and intimate, critical reflections of the way people—including Knight herself, who appears in the works—perform their lives, professions, and emotional selves. Although the works differ in subject matter and style, When the Moon is Full and My Ecstasy is Your Rapture are connected by Knight’s use of the camera: it is never more than an arm’s length away. This very personal point of view facilitates intimacy but also a directness that suggests an unmediated form of experience.

In When the Moon is Full, Knight takes her family as a starting point from which to ask questions about the slippage of memory and performance within the home. Following a different type of performance, the visual essay My Ecstasy is Your Rapture weaves together phone camera footage of various musical performances seen both onscreen and onstage. Here, Knight ponders the social and cultural distance the use of screens allows, and how recording things and people is no longer exceptional. Lonely Planet was also shot entirely on a phone. A travelogue made by Knight and Shane Aslan Selzer in Costa Rica, the video includes footage of their daily routines and travels, interspersed with fragments of written and spoken text taken from conversations between them during and after filming. The process of editing is exposed through Knight and Selzer’s real and performed negotiations about what to hide and reveal in the video, and through the disjunction of image and sound throughout it. Lonely Planet, which touches on the artists sense of place in relation to feminism, mothering, nature, whiteness, fear, and privilege illuminates the layered performance inherent to the framing of any narrative.

Knight’s newest work, Teacher’s College, Columbia University, takes a formally different approach. Here, the audience listens to employees of Columbia’s Teacher’s College speak about their own experiences of life and labor as they interpret old photographs taken at the college decades ago. The work questions how institutional spaces, like a university, incorporate the voices of those who often go unheard or unseen.

FILMS BY CHELSEA KNIGHT & SHANE ASLAN SELZER is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a polyvocal program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

ARTIST LIST

Chelsea Knight, Shane Aslan Selzer

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
FILMS BY ARJUNA NEUMAN &
DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA
SCREENING

15 MAY 2019 – 23 JUNE 2019

“Imagine a world without time, measurement, and accrual or notions of value.”

Serpent Rain (2016) and 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2019) by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva are grounded in experimental and collaborative research on migration, displacement, resource extraction, and colonial legacies, as well as quantum physics, blacklight, and cloud subjectivity (a concept developed by Neuman in response to the resurgence of nationalist and racist claims on the sovereign body and state). The artist and philosopher are interested in the politics and poetics of the moving image, focusing on the tensions between what is seen and remains opaque, what seems solid but is in transition. Their films are an assemblage of fragments—visual, aural, material—of an imagined cosmos defined by a moment of total entanglement, or what they call, “Deep Implicancy,” which exposes the lethal abstractions of Western knowledge and rationale.

ARTIST LIST

Arjuna Neuman, Denise Ferreira da Silva

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO
JSC DÜSSELDORF / BERLIN

31 MARCH 2019 – 6 DECEMBER 2020

For the first time in its history, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION will present an ensemble of solo exhibitions, performances, and screenings of works not included the collection. Six exhibitions—three in Düsseldorf and three in Berlin—will open successively, beginning in March 2019 and running until December 2020.They will be accompanied by screening and performance programs, artist talks, lectures, and readings at both locations. Most of the artists featured in HORIZONTAL VERTIGO will show their work for the first time in Germany.

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO will feature commissions and new productions as well as existing works by a group of international artists whose interdisciplinary time-based practices share focused perspectives infused with feminist, queer, and decolonial critique, in resistance to restrictive concepts of identity, history, and representation. Each project deals with a specific context driven by the artist and what the artwork affords, creating a web of associations and stories over time that is both fluid and multivalent.

The curatorial framework for this programming is inspired by the writing of artist, writer, and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. The title is quoted from “Cotton and Iron” (1991), an essay in which Minh-Ha foregrounds plurality and “non-totalness,” challenging systems of binary opposition and definitive categorizations. Echoing this commitment, HORIZONTAL VERTIGO does not propose one overarching theme but thrives on the multiplicity of narratives and narrators at hand, exploring the inherent plurality of the entire program without prescribing a “right” way of reading it. HORIZONTAL VERTIGO ‘speaks to’ and not ‘about’ the participating artists, to quote Minh-ha, embracing dialogue instead of representation.

Curated by Lisa Long

SCREENINGS

The accompanying screening series at JSC Düsseldorf will feature artists or artist duos for a duration of six weeks. At JSC Berlin there will be a number of one-time screening events. Participating artists include: Morehshin Allahyari, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Sky Hopinka, Chelsea Knight, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Martine Syms, Eduardo Williams, and Anna Zett.

PERFORMANCE PROGRAM AT JSC BERLIN

Colin Self: SIBLINGS
31 May & 1 June 2019

Throughout the time, composer and choreographer Colin Self will present multiple performances related to his recently released album SIBLINGS.  Self’s program weaves music and dance performances, dialogue, workshops, and game formats together to tell stories of non-anthropocentric interdependence; stories that draw into the plurality and multiplicity of our common terra conundrum of survival. The artist’s interdisciplinary and collaborative practice aspires to expand consciousness, troubling binaries and boundaries of perception and communication.

ARTIST LIST

Sophia Al-Maria, Morehshin Allahyari, Meriem Bennani, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, A.K. Burns, Dorota Gawęda und Eglė Kulbokaitė, Sky Hopinka, Rindon Johnson, Chelsea Knight, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Colin Self, Martine Syms, WangShui, Eduardo Williams, Anna Zett

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
RINDON JOHNSON
CIRCUMSCRIBE

31 MARCH 2019 – 28 JULY 2019

In CIRCUMSCRIBE, Rindon Johnson’s first institutional solo show in Europe, the artist examines material and conceptual forms of circulation and containment in relation to capital and consumption, privileging language, images, bodies, and technologies. Alongside existing paintings and sculptures, the exhibition features new videos and virtual reality works, a site-specific livestream installation, and a soundtrack produced in collaboration with Milo McBride.

The meaning of the verb “to circumscribe” is manifold: it refers to restriction, to setting limits and keeping within bounds, as well as marking and framing, or to drawing a figure around another touching it at points. Both definitions imply spatial demarcation—gestures whose benevolence and violence depend on context and point of view.

Johnson’s inquiries begin with language and return to it through the titles of his works, each of which emerges through the constant triangulation of poetry, the video or object, and the viewer. For Johnson, language is not supplemental but an integral part of each piece—it is just one of the many found, appropriated, recombined, and composed materials he uses to ask questions about agency and power. In this collision of language, object, and viewer, Johnson explores complex hierarchies that structure our societies, challenging their legitimacy and legibility. He does so by introducing radical subjectivity and intimacy to the work and by indulging in moments of ambiguity and ambivalence. Through language, Johnson draws attention to the often invisible but acute violence that permeates his—and our—lived experience. Meaning, however, is obscured and continually deferred; each articulation is thereby also an act of refusal: a refusal to comply and a refusal to disappear. Instead there is a desire to overcome the binding states, the containers, and categories that define our current moment.

CIRCUMSCRIBE is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a polyvocal program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

PUBLIC PROGRAM

ARTIST TALK

with Rindon Johnson, Eduardo Williams & Lisa Long, 31 March 2019, 3:00 p.m.

STUDIO 54

Works selected by Rindon Johnson, 17 April 2019, 7:30 p.m.

Artists: Aria Dean, Sara Magenheimer, Eduardo Restrepo Castaño, Diamond Stingily, Jordan Strafer and Marina Xenofontos

READING

by Rindon Johnson, Hannah Black & Shiv Kotecha, 14 July 2019, 3:00 p.m.

ARTIST LIST

Rindon Johnson, Milo McBride

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
FILMS BY EDUARDO WILLIAMS
SCREENING

31 MARCH 2019 – 5 MAY 2019

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf.

PUBLIC PROGRAM

ARTIST TALK

with Rindon Johnson, Eduardo Williams & Lisa Long, 31 March 2019, 3:00 p.m.

ARTIST LIST

Eduardo Williams

NEW METALLURGISTS

7 OCTOBER 2018 – 28 APRIL 2019

For the first time, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is focusing on a new generation of Chinese contemporary artists in a show entitled NEW METALLURGISTS.

The idea for this exhibition was developed in collaboration with Chinese artist Cao Fei and scientist and curator Yang Beichen.

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION has been accompanying the work of Beijing-based artist Cao Fei since the early 2000s. In addition to her expansive installation Whose Utopia (2006), the collection also holds three of her other time-based works. The presentation of these works in the artist’s show at K21 in Düsseldorf (October 7, 2018 – January 15, 2019) coincides with NEW METALLURGISTS.

Starting with the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who described the production and processing of metal, so-called “metallurgy,”as a paradigmatic example of a nomadic art, the exhibition presents the artist as new metallurgist. According to curator Yang Beichen this is an obvious analogy, as metallurgists are not only guided by the specific properties of various materials and their processing, and indeed in their works also hybridize and meld a wide variety of contemporary themes.

“The work of the new metallurgists overcomes all the divides between knowledge and activity; these are transdisciplinary artists, who in their works defy their own physical existence. What the exhibition attempts to show is the working itself.” (Yang Beichen)

The result is an exhibition featuring 16 works by eight contemporary artists from China who reflect on their pluralistic and global worldview while simultaneously demonstrating that the view of classic China shaped by exotic Orientalism has become obsolete. Many of the works mirror this new reality by visualizing the multi-dimensional nature of time. For example, in his work Dream Delivery (2018), which was filmed in a Shanzhai amusement park, artist Zheng Yuan demonstrates the concept of temporality in a decelerated setting: In this artificial landscape, couriers who are normally in a permanent rush are transformed into statues. Through this deceleration the artist makes palpably clear his own view of society and visualizes the downsides of global capitalism.

In the piece Competition of Spokesperson (2017), Zhu Payne critically highlights China’s increasing economic clout. In his work the artist takes up a central topic of his: the means of production and communication typical of capitalism. Zhu Payne has produced a promotional film about a fictional sports brand, whose name LIKE is modelled on NIKE, to take a critical yet humorous swipe at the global player. He has designed a logo and sports clothing and has African immigrants act as brand ambassadors for the fictional brand, parodying the way African-American athletes feature in commercial advertising.

The artist Fang Di comments in his work Hit Me! (2013) on the influence of African-American culture on American society by having his protagonist, a black dancer, walk along a street and repeatedly break into an improvised dance. It is typical for the artist to embed contemporary topics in a new context. The dance, African-American culture, American society and history – none of this belongs to the culture of the artist’s native country.

The artworks featured in NEW METALLURGISTS point to a futuristic understanding of non-linear temporality and vitality. They reveal not only which marginal areas the artists operate in, but also how they strive to open them up.

ARTIST LIST

Fang Di, Liu Yujia, Shen Xin, Song Ta, Wang Tuo, Yao Qingmei, Zheng Yuan, Zhu Payne

GENERATION LOSS
10 YEARS JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION

10 JUNE 2017 – 9 SEPTEMBER 2018

After more than 15 exhibitions and eight international collaborative projects attracting over 100,000 visitors, JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is now celebrating its 10th anniversary in June 2017.

The anniversary exhibition titled GENERATION LOSS is being conceived in collaboration with British artist Ed Atkins.

As a singularly holistic technology, video has maintained its status as the most popular medium. In the last decade the distribution of video has become simpler in terms of access, and more complex as regards the mode of distribution itself.The technological advances that account for these changes pervade artistic practice particularly, pragmatically as well as conceptually: Not only new reflexively approached formats abound, but new modes of behavior, communication and forms of representation, forms that are able to decisively alter our perception. Unique among art forms, artist moving image has always been singularly driven by the medium, as it moves within the mainstream – cleaving, albeit critically, to the technologies’ processes of fidelity and capitalistic progress.

The term “Generation Loss” generally refers to the process of a qualitative loss in successively copied data. Everything that reduces the representative quality as copies of data are made, can be regarded as a form of ‘generation loss’. However, this holds true not just for data formats or material media, but also manifests itself in an ideological sense in politics, culture, nature, from one generation to the next.

The basic idea of the exhibition concept is to show the ways in which generations of artists affect one another; the discourses that awkwardly straddle technology-specific periods of artists’ moving image makers; how influence may auger revolt, revision, renewed accord; how artists’ moving image is a uniquely reactive, dependent medium whose intimacy with the vicissitudes of mainstream tech confers a kind of automatic collusion with the culture at large that is pretty much unique to it – to moving image works.

Formally, the exhibition will very visibly connect works, in a sort of straightforward, socially demonstrative way: projected works will be screened in choreographed sequences and in proximity to one another. This will be partially achieved using acoustic glass to divide the works and effectively block sound leaks, but allows you to see through to other spaces, works. We plan to pretty much do away with the preeminent, isolated black box of video installation. No work alone, all works in relation.

ARTIST LIST

Eleanor Antin, Ed Atkins & Simon Thompson, Charles Atlas, Lutz Bacher, Bernadette Corporation, Lynda Benglis, Johanna Billing, Dara Birnbaum, Hannah Black, Chris Burden, Matt Calderwood, Patty Chang, Ian Cheng, Jen DeNike, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Cheryl Donegan, Trisha Donnelly, Cao Fei, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Dara Friedman, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Hammer, Christian Jankowski, Joan Jonas, Jesper Just, Imi Knoebel, Mark Leckey, Klara Lidén, Gordon Matta-Clark, Paul McCarthy, Lutz Mommartz, Bruce Nauman, Jon Rafman, Lucy Raven, Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley, James Richards, Rachel Rose, Jack Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ulay & Marina Abramović, Steina Vasulka, Klaus vom Bruch, Hannah Wilke, Jordan Wolfson, Tobias Zielony

NUMBER THIRTEEN:
FACTORY OF THE SUN /
MISSED CONNECTIONS

15 OCTOBER 2016 – 26 FEBRUARY 2017

Under the title NUMBER THIRTEEN two exhibition concepts will be presented together at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf.

At the centre of the presentation will be the large-format video installation Factory of the Sun by Hito Steyerl, which was shown for the first time in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 with the support of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, and which now takes centre stage on the second floor of the exhibition. The filmmaker and author is considered a critical observer of our globalised world in the digital age. Her artistic practice precisely describes the fluidity and mutability of images – starting with their production and translation through to their interpretation and circulation.

In Factory of the Sun Hito Steyerl links the symbolically charged power of the sun with the enormous power of our current digitalised reality. In the installation, Steyerl uses the motif of sunlight allegorically to represent a complex exploration of everyday and surveillance technologies in order to tackle the dialectic of freedom and incarceration.

Parallel to this, but separated from it spatially, the artist Jennifer Chan curated the group exhibition MISSED CONNECTIONS on the first floor at the invitation of Hito Steyerl and in cooperation with the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION.

MISSED CONNECTIONS takes a critical look at the indulgences and excesses of our technocratic society. The exhibition takes its name after the “Missed Connections” forum on Craigslist, where people who have fallen in love with strangers can leave messages. Chan assumes that in the areas of technology and culture there are many missed opportunities for critical analysis of power and identity.

The exhibition comprises eleven works by six artists who, in their own visual vocabulary, attempt to detach themselves from the traditional narratives of our digital reality and pop culture. Chan’s approach deliberately calls into question the supposed conveniences that digitalisation brings with it. Thus the individual positions point to a subtle, postcolonial discourse on the intersections of ethnicity, gender and contemporary work conditions.

Furthermore the exhibition included an opening programme with the performance A Small Bird Will Drop Frozen (The Arc Bends Towards Justice) by Devin Kenny followed by a talk between artists Devin Kenny, Lawrence Lek, Hito Steyerl and curator Jennifer Chan, moderated by lecturer and writer Melissa Gronlund (in English).

ARTIST LIST

Morehshin Allahyari, Hamishi Farah, Devin Kenny, Lawrence Lek, Sandra Mujinga, Sondra Perry, Hito Steyerl

NUMBER TWELVE:
HELLO BOYS

13 FEBRUARY 2016 – 31 JULY 2016

NUMBER TWELVE: HELLO BOYS draws a line from the feminist video and performance pioneers of the 1970s to selected contemporary positions among female photographers and video artists.

The exhibition featuring works from the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION has borrowed its title from that of Hannah Wilke’s video performance Hello Boys (1975), which it also takes as the curatorial starting point for the perception and representation of female identity. A large number of female artists used video, which was then still a new medium, to document their performance-based works. In the process they elaborated a genuinely artistic approach and aesthetic. Eleanor Antin, Lynda Benglis, VALIE EXPORT, Barbara Hammer, Joan Jonas,  Martha Rosler, Gwenn Thomas and Hannah Wilke all advocated the expression of the female self from the point of view of their respectively unique approaches to corporeality, gender roles and perspectives.

In the contemporary photographs and video pieces by Lutz Bacher, Jen DeNike, Trisha Donnelly, Marie-Jo Lafontaine and Klara Lidén one can discern a change in the quality of contents perceived and how these are formulated artistically. These works have emancipated themselves from direct self-observation. From a more distanced viewpoint, femininity and masculinity are renegotiated in the media lifeworld, in filmic archetypes and in performance-based activities.

ARTIST LIST

Eleanor Antin, Lutz Bacher, Lynda Benglis, Jen DeNike, Trisha Donnelly, VALIE EXPORT, Barbara Hammer, Joan Jonas, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Klara Lidén, Martha Rosler, Gwenn Thomas, Hannah Wilke

NUMBER ELEVEN:
CYPRIEN GAILLARD

26 SEPTEMBER 2015 – 31 JULY 2016

The exhibition at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTIONwas dedicated to French artist Cyprien Gaillard (1980 born in Paris, lives and works in New York and Berlin).

Cyprien Gaillard often starts a new work by seeking out artefacts, monuments or architectural creations which seem to have lost their significance in the present time. His nomadic gaze takes in backdrops both urban and natural, manicured or wild, focussing on spots where beauty has evolved from decay or where violence has left scars on the landscape. Thus the artist vividly depicts the times and places where our present-day economic and cultural needs interact with architectural legacies or the cultural heritage of a region. Each of Gaillard’s film works orbits in its own ways the myths surrounding the various settings, describing how outworn utopian urges or belief systems collide with current social conditions and political realities.

The exhibition offered a concentrated overview of Gaillard’s films alongside works on paper in sculptural displays, from the mid-2000s to work purpose − made for the presentation at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION.

The exhibtion was accompanied by a public program consisting of lectures, as well as the monthly STUDIO 54 film program, for which Gaillard selected other film positions.

The highlight of the exhibition was the 3D film Nightlife (2015). For the first time the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION collaborated with an external institution to exhibit the work offsite. The large-format film was exhibited at the K20 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalenin Duesseldorf. Nightlife was on show there from 30 January to 3 April 2016.

ARTIST LIST

Cyprien Gaillard

WU TSANG
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF BLISS

15 APRIL 2015 – 2 AUGUST 2015

JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION presented the two-channel video installation A day in the life of bliss (2014) by American artist, performer and filmmaker Wu Tsang (born 1982, lives and works in Los Angeles) in its Düsseldorf collection building on the occasion of Art Cologne 2015. Wu Tsang is interested in the formation of identites and the coding of social communities. Her involvement in the queer and transgender scene locates her films and videos in the “underground” as a space of action for cultural resistance.

A day in the life of bliss tells the story of Bliss, a performer celebrated as a Pop star, in the style of a science fiction scenario. Bliss lives in the near future, in a world dominated by totalitarian surveilance systems. An artificial intelligence named Looks uses humanity’s obsession with self-promotion and self-presentation in digital networks to control society. Bliss has an ambivalent relationship with her own fame and leads a subversive double-life in the underground scene. Bliss is played by American performance artist boychild. Her androgynous physique and the expressive force of her dancing counters the overwhelming loss of the physical and the de-personalization of social contact.

The two-channel video installation is doubled by two large format mirror screens, one of which is a two-way mirror. These transmit the transitions between the layers of meaning from digital to “actual” reality into the exhibition space.

A day in the life of bliss is conceived as an ongoing film project by Wu Tsang and boychild and is directly linked to the performance Moved by the Motion by Wu Tsang, boychild and the musician Patrick Belaga carried out at JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in February 2015 in cooperation with Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

This performance is incorporated into the plot of A day in the life of bliss as a dream sequence. The dream represents protagonist Bliss’ different psychological conditions or alter egos and explores complex psychological patterns.

ARTIST LIST

Wu Tsang

NUMBER TEN:
TRISHA DONNELLY

7 FEBRUARY 2015 – 31 JANUARY 2016

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTIONis pleased to present, in its eighth year, its tenth exhibition with a selection of works by US-American artist Trisha Donnelly (born 1974).

The presentation comprises works from the collection ranging from moving image, photography, sound installation to sculpture. The ensemble is creating a space saturated with a potential for transformations and reconfigurations of the senses, of realities. In continually fluid interactions between the material and the immaterial Donnelly generates moments of absolute concentration.

ARTIST LIST

Trisha Donnelly

NUMBER NINE:
ELIZABETH PRICE

6 SEPTEMBER 2014 – 1 FEBRUARY 2015

This exhibition at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION was dedicated to British artist and 2012 Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price (born 1966 in Bradford, Great Britain, lives and works in London).

Since 2006, Elizabeth Price has mainly worked with digital moving images. The key focus of her conceptual, institution-critical works has been to examine the significance of cultural artifacts, collections and archives.

Each work initially arises from an idea on a place and its history. In an analytical approach to the location, Price then explores the broadest variety of different sources of material and devises dramas to occur in that location, which feature no direct human action. Instead historical artifacts, archival images and documents are used to enact social occurrences and play out collective fears and desires. Images, texts and sounds are composed in episodes that we migrate to through sections variously reminiscent of pedagogic lectures, cinematic melodrama or commercial advertising. In this process-based practice, categorizations and referential systems shed their original meaning, develop a life of their own, and expand in time and space through the rearrangement by narration in video.

An exhibition has been organized in close collaboration with Elizabeth Price, showing  works from the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION and one piece on loan from the artist. The scenography of the exhibition corresponds to the videos in that it unfolds in a special rhythmic sequence that includes the interiors and spatial elements of the installation. This exhibition offers the first in-depth overview in Germany of Price’s oeuvre to date.

PUBLIC PROGRAM

The show was accompanied by a comprehensive line-up consisting of STUDIO 54, a film program compiled by the artist, a multi-part concert series entitled The Architecture of Sound and a lecture by the artist (23 January 2015, 7:30 p.m.).

ARTIST LIST

Elizabeth Price

NATHALIE DJURBERG & HANS BERG
THE EXPERIMENT

8 APRIL 2014 – 1 JUNE 2014

To coincide with Art Cologne 2014, JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION presented Nathalie Djurberg’s three-channel video installation The Experiment in the Collection premises in Düsseldorf.

Djurberg (born 1978 in Lysekil, Sweden) creates animated films that fascinate, amuse, disturb and shock. In her work she looks at the dark side of the human psyche – running through the whole gamut of perversions, sexual violence, fear, arrogance and vanity in a way that is both full of irony and at the same time almost painful to watch. In her videos, which are aesthetically reminiscent of children’s films, clay characters made from Plasticine are brought to life in a stop-motion process.

The three-channel video installation The Experiment (2009), which consists of the videos Forest, Cave and Greed, was first screened in 2009 at the 53rd Venice Biennale. While Greed alludes with Biblical symbols to power, greed and sexual violence within the Catholic Church, Cave and Forest focus on issues of exhibitionism, voyeurism and sadism. At first glance, the colorful figures in painted scenery suggest a cute, funny scene. But the idyll is deceptive: Behind the facade, a world seemingly beyond good and evil comes to light, revealing the abysses of society in a brutally honest fashion. The Plasticine figures live out their sexual desires or are tortured with great brutality. In this way the scenes trigger in the viewer both a sense of fascination with something forbidden and at the same time kindle a sense of repugnance.

The video installation is accompanied by music and sound effects by musician Hans Berg.

Parallel to the special presentation at JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, Kölnischer Kunstverein presented recent work by the duo Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg under the title Maybe This Is A Dream. The exhibition was supported by Julia Stoschek.

ARTIST LIST

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg

NUMBER EIGHT:
STURTEVANT

5 APRIL 2014 – 10 NOVEMBER 2014

As part of the Quadriennale 2014, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION presented a solo exhibition of the work of American artist STURTEVANT (born 1930 in Lakewood, Ohio; died in 2014 in Paris). The exhibition was conceived in close collaboration with the artist and focuses for the first time in such detail on the artist’s media-based output.

Ever since her first show in 1965 at New York’s Bianchini Gallery, STURTEVANT has used the process of recreating artworks to question the traditional understanding of artistic creative processes along with the purpose, autonomy and authorship of art.

STURTEVANT’s radical, conceptually rigorous approach was often misconstrued. Her work did not center on the pure emulation or imitation of an artwork, rather she was using the power and heightened awareness that ensues from this differentiated “repetition”. STURTEVANT is interested in the thought process, in making the step from the representation in the image to the concept in the mind – she doesn’t simply depict things, but she gets to the bottom of them.

The artist was no stranger to controversy as early as the 1960s and 1970s. The works she recreated, including pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Joseph Beuys were later often considered iconic masterpieces.

In the age of the digital revolution, she first of all noticeably acts at one remove from the original. She feels the idea of handmade repetition is outdated. The inclusion of images from the mass media and her own filmed material have given rise to an increasing number of time-based works since 2000. With the aesthetic and formal possibilities offered by the World Wide Web she analyzes the origins of knowledge, art and culture, and addresses the question how they can be produced and shared. Presently the work is considered crucial and dynamic towards our present cybernetics world with its digital implications and the question of what constitutes the original in a cyber-reality characterized by simulacra.

For decades, she has commented on the art currents of that particular time, demonstrating to this day extraordinary farsightedness in both art-historical and philosophical terms. Her distinct contemporary approach represents the focal point of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION and, in keeping with the motto of the Quadriennale, extends “Beyond Tomorrow”.

Media-based works from the collection were on display in the show completed with loan works.

ARTIST LIST

STURTEVANT

NUMBER SEVEN:
ED ATKINS / FRANCES STARK

7 SEPTEMBER 2013 – 22 FEBRUARY 2014

As its NUMBER SEVEN show, JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION presented two artists in a dual exhibition: British artist Ed Atkins and US-american artist Frances Stark.

In their multi-disciplinary approaches, Ed Atkins and Frances Stark reflect the change in how artists define forms and the discourse of representation in the world of media images. The work of both artists, each of whom is also active in literature, is characterized by an exploration of the various interactions between image and text. By means of state-of-the-art computer technology they weave a complex fabric of signs, text fragments and autobiographical references that then enter their visual pieces as hypertext. The exhibition will focus on video installations, with collages, conceptual wall pieces and sculptural objects rounding out the selection.

The exhibition concept centers on sequences of individual rooms to broach a dialog between the two artists. The configuration of works highlights the transformation of the classical moving image into digital image production processing. The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is thus reiterating its emphasis on presenting contemporary time-based media.

High definition image technologies form the basis of Ed Atkins’ artistic practice. He primarily explores the one-sided focus on technical perfection in image quality as opposed to the fact that the media formats can no longer be grasped haptically. Given the consequent de-corporealization, in his installations Atkins seeks to develop an aesthetic of disappearance, taking as his leitmotifs illness and death.

For her art projects, Frances Stark relies on a self-created and multifaceted system of references that above all stem from questioning the notion of authorship and her own artistic creative process. Her work cuts across genres and expresses a tussle with words and their meaning. Short quotes, music, literature, pop culture, autobiographical notes and events all serve as the basis for her video installations, performances, sculptures and works on paper.

A monograph about Ed Atkin’s works was published in collaboration with Kunsthalle Zürich and the Kunsthalle Mainz (sold out).

ARTIST LIST

Ed Atkins, Frances Stark

NUMBER SIX:
FLAMING CREATURES

8 SEPTEMBER 2012 – 29 JUNE 2013

A “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” is how writer Susan Sontag described the concept of “camp”, which forms the red thread running through this exhibition from the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION. “Camp” is an exaggerated kind of perception that emerged in the course of aestheticism and dandyism. “Camp” first came into being at the turn of the 20th century and peaked in the 1950s and 1960s.

A key starting point for the exhibition, and one of immense historical importance, is the work of US underground artist, performer and filmmaker Jack Smith (born in 1932, died in 1989); his scandal-sparking film Flaming Creatures (1962-63) is the source of the title of the new presentation.

Jack Smith’s oeuvre strongly inspired an entire generation of artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Wilson, Cindy Sherman, John Waters and Mike Kelley. Without him, “Camp”, Punk and Pop-Postmodernism would be inconceivable, as would experimental theater. Flaming Creatures is a surrogate for something that manifestly materializes as an extreme, excessive and exuberant element in the positions taken by the individual artists. In this context, Jack Smith should be seen not as the source of the idea, but as a key position in a critical enquiry into reality and fiction, identity and gender.

An appropriation of fictitious realities or creaturely processes is common to all the works represented in the show. Pieces by Aura Rosenberg, Tony Oursler, Bruce Nauman and Paul McCarthy, serve to sharpen the exhibition’s focus on how each artist explores the self and self-alienation. By using disguise or clown-like exaggeration the artists involved create a new dimension, one not limited to film and instead also including a physical level.

Moreover, a conscious addressing of pop and trivial culture is a further connecting element. In particular, Ryan Trecartin, Ed Ruscha as well as Paper Rad, Mike Kelley and John Bock adapt these themes in their works, subjecting them to an ironic twist.

ARTIST LIST

John Bock, Lizzie Fitch, Birgit Hein, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Paper Rad, Peaches, Aura Rosenberg, Ed Ruscha, Jack Smith, Gwenn Thomas, Ryan Trecartin

NUMBER FIVE:
CITIES OF GOLD AND MIRRORS

2 JULY 2011 – 30 JUNE 2012

From 25 June 2011, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION presented selected works in a newly designed exhibition.

The show features 44 works by 35 artists in all, including many that have never been shown before, works acquired in the past few years and site-specific spatial interventions. Each work is presented in its own, carefully elaborated setting.

Rather than being organised around a single theme, the exhibition picked up on several content strands and reflects current themes in contemporary art.

Its title, CITIES OF GOLD AND MIRRORS, taken from a film by Cyprien Gaillard shown in the exhibition is a metaphor for the fact that the pieces on display explore socio-political questions relating to urban development, humankind’s relationship to architecture, and our own personal vanities and desires.

The first exhibition area presented artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Tobias Zielony, Cyprien Gaillard and Francis Alÿs, whose works reflect on the relationship between humankind and architecture.

With his spatial interventions, or “building cuts”, Gordon Matta-Clark was already opposing traditional concepts of space back in the 1970s, openly criticising urban planning and the conditions governing public life and private spaces. His films not only document his sometimes anarchic activities, they also map the city as an urban space in all its many facets and are all that remains of his processive interventions.

In his 2009 photo animation made up of 7,000 individual images, Tobias Zielony documents the Le Vele Di Scampia (2009) urban housing project, built by architect Francesco di Salvo in the 60s. This complex in a suburb of Naples has now achieved tragic notoriety as a mafia stronghold. Zielony’s animation presents the decayed, crumbling buildings and their inhabitants, recording the decline of the complex and the strange, mystical appeal it has come to possess.

The 16mm film which gave the exhibition its title, Cyprien Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009), places fictional elements from the Japanese-French TV series “The Mysterious Cities of Gold” alongside scenes of tourists on package holidays. Gaillard contrasts a Cancún hotel complex in Mexico built in the 1970s with the ruins of the once-mighty Mayan civilisation. Donning the hat of a documentary filmmaker rather than that of an archaeologist, Gaillard shows American students celebrating spring break with excessive binge drinking against the impressive backdrop of a hotel complex, which imitates Mayan pyramids – thus confronting viewers with the banalisation of culture.

Rehearsal I (Ensayo I) (1999–2001) is the title of a key piece by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. In the guise of a modern Sisyphus, a red Volkswagen Beetle repeatedly attempts to drive up a hill to the sound of a Mexican “Mariachi”-brass band. Just before it reaches the top the band stops playing and the car rolls back down the hill, meaning that it has to start all over again. The video is an existential metaphor for the political situation in Mexico and for the economic discrepancy between the country and its larger neighbour, the United States.

The second exhibition area marked a break from the dominance of filmic works. Here, pieces by Andreas Gursky, Mark Manders, Andro Wekua, David Claerbout, etc. exemplify the complexity of the forms of expression shown.

Andreas Gursky’s large-format photograph Untitled XII, No. 4 (2000) shows a page from Robert Musil’s epic novel The Man Without Qualities – page 769, it turns out. This section of the book addresses the relative scale of the human spirit, humankind and nature – indeed, humankind’s position within the cosmos. Yet, we learn, Gursky’s photograph is not a faithful copy; he has digitally altered several passages, replacing some words with others of his choosing. And these insidious changes are not obvious simply from looking at the page. The oversized reproduction of the photographed page also breaks with the conventional perception of art.

Mark Manders’ sculpture Large Figure With Thin Newspaper (2010) is part of his “Self Portrait as a Building” concept, begun in 1986. The unfinished project is Manders’ archive of his own experiences, thoughts and interactions with reality. The installations and sculptures that arise from this exploration of the self take on many different forms – they may incorporate objects from the artist’s everyday life; they may constitute installations that fill an entire room. His works constitute hermetic, self-referencing, humorous or profoundly poetic representations of an abstract version of his biography. They consist of various components and are resonant with deep emotion and melancholy.

Much like Manders, Andro Wekua stages his own imaginary biography in his video Never Sleep With A Strawberry In Your Mouth (2010). Wekua has his alter ego – a boy wearing a mask – set out in search of traces of his childhood within a nightmarish setting. Wekua’s imagery, borrowed from the Science Fiction and Horror genres, does not provide a coherent portrayal of his memories, but is rather a construct that incorporates elements of the past as it really happened and the past as remembered. At the same time, the work’s title carries a warning that develops an oddly seductive power through mere associative allusion. The video does not tell a straightforward story; its bizarre images and colours are more reminiscent of dream sequences. Wekua’s work is based on principles of dramatic composition; stages and spatial interventions are important elements that serve to further heighten the auratic impact of his installations.

David Claerbout’s work draws on the forms of representation used in cinema. In his two channel video installation American Car (2002–2004), Claerbout confronts the viewers with two projections they cannot see simultaneously. The first shows the interior of a car; two men seen from behind stare out of the window as rain drums on the windscreen. The second shows the car from the outside, standing all by itself in the middle of an unspecified landscape. The viewers visit the two rooms one after the other, so that the period of time between viewing the two screens reflects the time represented in the film. This allows viewers to leave the traditional perspective of the moviegoer behind and step inside the film. The illusionary movie space thus merges with real space, an effect that is subtly enhanced by the use of two audio channels, which unsettles the viewers, making them feel uncertain as to where exactly they are positioned. Claerbout throws a questioning light on the moving images of the film medium from the perspective of photography and by exploiting the editing options available to him. Screen 2 does not display an actual film, but a montage of digital photographs.

In accordance with the collection’s focus, filmic works were given prominence in the exhibition. At the same time, works like those of the described ones like Mark Manders or Andro Wekua, Simon Denny, Jon Kessler, Zilvinas Kempinas or Wolfgang Tillmans defy the strict definition of the medium and thus testify to the “contagious power” of the complex issues they explore.

ARTIST LIST

Francis Alÿs, Charles Atlas, Salvatore Bevilacqua, Johanna Billing, David Claerbout, Jane Crawford, Keren Cytter, Simon Denny, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Fiore, Cyprien Gaillard, Andreas Gursky, Nancy Holt, DAS INSTITUT, Zilvinas Kempinas, Jon Kessler, Mark Manders, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jessica Mein, Adrian Paci, Oliver Payne, Davide Pepe, Rob Pruitt, Nick Relph, Robin Rhode, Christoph Schlingensief, Jeremy Shaw, Robert Smithson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Andro Wekua, Christoph Westermeier, Tobias Zielony

NUMBER FOUR:
DEREK JARMAN
SUPER8

11 SEPTEMBER 2010 – 26 FEBRUARY 2011

The JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION e.V., in collaboration with James Mackay, and as part of the Quadriennale 2010 in Duesseldorf, presented the first comprehensive retrospective of the experimental film works of Derek Jarman from his Super8 archives. It represented the first solo exhibition of an artist in the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION.

The British painter, film maker, set designer and writer Derek Jarman (1942–1994) is best known to the wider public primarily as the director of stylistically influential feature films and music videos from the 1980s and early 1990s. Less well-known, but vital to his oeuvre, are the over 60 Super8 films that Jarman filmed from 1970 until his death in 1994. Taken from the subjective-personal perspective of his hand-held camera, the scenic arrangements mediate Jarman’s artistic approach in which life and art constantly connect with one another as a matter of course. The often autobiographical film documents, which he himself called a “cinema of small gestures”, are defined by spontaneity and lightness on the one hand and symbolism and mythology on the other.

The 24 digitalised films from the Super8 archive, complemented by a 16mm sound film and the BlueRay version of a 35mm feature film, are distributed over both floors of the exhibition space as well as in the basement cinema. To begin with the first floor contains 12 films covering the social and (sub)cultural world of Jarman and his circle of friends. The overlapping of documentation and staging is constantly fluid here and this is further reflected stylistically in the works. Two sound films, presented individually, break this sequence: in the first space TG: Psychic Rally in Heaven (1980), an early music-video experiment, originally recorded on Super8 for the British industrial-music group Throbbing Gristle, and in front of the second space, Imagining October (1984), which will be shown – not least because of its references to Sergei Eisenstein and Soviet film – in its original format, as a 16mm sound film.

On the second floor 11 films from the group of works covering rituals, mythology and landscape were on display. The works were deliberately presented in the completely open space surrounding the centrally placed, boxed projection of Art of Mirrors I-III (1973). Between them, the various works from 1971 to 1978 generate panoramically stylistic and content-based references.

The exhibition finally leads to the cinema room in the Basement, where Derek Jarman’s last elegiac feature film Blue (1993) was presented.

Simon Fisher Turner, who was responsible for the soundtracks of many of Jarman’s feature films from the 1980s onwards, has developed a special sound concept with atmospheric and space-specific soundscapes for the exhibition.

PUBLIC PROGRAM

On 12/08/2010 the art and film scholar Elke Kania gave a lecture on „Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio or Film as Alchemy“ in which she highlighted the „encounter“ between the two „revolutionaries“ Derek Jarman and Caravaggio.

Following the lecture, the movie Caravaggio was presented by Derek Jarman.

ARTIST LIST

Derek Jarman

NUMBER THREE:
HERE AND NOW

27 OCTOBER 2009 – 29 JULY 2010

From October 2009 to the end of July 2010, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION was dedicated to the subject of performance art.

Organised by MoMA/P.S.1., the PERFORMA in New York and the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, the exhibition 100 YEARS (VERSION #1, DUESSELDORF) will be accompanied by a series of live performances on the second floor of the gallery.

While the exhibition 100 YEARS (VERSION #1, DUESSELDORF) presents a retrospective of the last century in action and performance art, the event series NUMBER THREE: HERE AND NOW, is all about the live experience of the moment.

HERE AND NOW is about the sense of immediacy and the direct presence of the artist and focuses on the fleeting moment, the “here and now” that can never be adequately recaptured or repeated.

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION has invited 28 contemporary performance artists to contribute to the 10-month programme: dancers, choreographers, visual artists and musicians will be performing their pieces in solo or group shows. Some of the works have been developed especially for the programme.

PERFORMANCE PROGRAM

27 October 2009, Andrea Fraser

27 November 2009, Marina Abramović, Eunhye Hwang, Ragnar Kjartansson, Nico Vascellari

28 November 2009, WW in concert

12 December 2009, Andrea Zittel

18 December 2009, Dara Friedman

9 January 2010, Xavier Le Roy

22 January 2010, Bert Didillon, Stefan Ettlinger, Andreas Korte, Cornelius Quabeck, Sven Vieweg

6 February 2010, Christian Jankowski

27 February 2010, Jérôme Bel, Eva Meyer-Keller

13 March 2010, Sharon Hayes

26 March 2010, Keren Cytter, Michalis Nicolaides, Annette Sonnewend & Michael Strasser (Cie. Agar Agar)

9 April 2010, Jimmy Robert, Saskia de Keyser, Emma Hedditch, Ian White

24 April 2010, Jen DeNike

14 May 2010, Manuel Graf

28 May 2010, Joan Jonas

5 June 2010, Tino Sehgal

12 June 2010, Tino Sehgal

18 June 2010, Tris Vonna-Michell

19 June 2010, Tino Sehgal

26 June 2010, Tino Sehgal

3 July 2010, Allora & Calzadilla

10 July 2010, Allora & Calzadilla

16 July 2010, Simon Fujiwara

17 July 2010, Allora & Calzadilla

24 July 2010, Allora & Calzadilla

29 July 2010, John Bock

100 YEARS
(VERSION #1, DUESSELDORF)

10 OCTOBER 2009 – 29 JULY 2010

Starting in October 2009 the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION presented its first-ever exhibition in collaboration with P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York) and Performa, the international performance biennial (New York). The exhibition documents the past hundred years of performance art.

After beginning in Duesseldorf, the exhibition moved to New York’s MoMA/ P.S.1 in November 2009 and then to other institutions around the world. Conceived as a research project that would provide an overview of the most significant movements, events and performances of the past hundred years, the exhibition will take place within the context of this year’s Performa 09 and will honour the one hundredth anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto.

The content and number of exhibits will vary depending on the specific location. The exhibition will also establish connections to the local performance scene in each city.

The project is organised by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Performa 09, New York. Curator of this project is Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance and Chief Curiatorial Advisor at P.S.1 with RoseLee Goldberg, acclaimed Performa director and curator. Financial support for the research project comes from the JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION e.V. (Duesseldorf).

ARTIST LIST

Lida Abdul, Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Laurie Anderson, Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft, Jérôme Bel, Joseph Beuys, John Bock, Trisha Brown, James Lee Byars, Patty Chang, Christo und Jeanne-Claude, René Clair, Der Plan, Cheryl Donegan, VALIE EXPORT, Öyvind Fahlström, Simone Forti, Regina José Galindo, Dan Graham, Martha Graham, Anna Halprin, Sharon Hayes, Antony Hegarty, hobbypopMUSEUM, Rebecca Horn, Tehching Hsieh, Zhang Huan, Jamie Isenstein, Christian Jankowski, Joan Jonas, Martin Kippenberger, Yves Klein, Kraftwerk, Yayoi Kusama, Sigalit Landau, Klara Lidén, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ursula Mayer, Ana Mendieta, Klaus Mettig, Meyerhold, Laurel Nakadate, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Philippe Parreno, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Robin Rhode, Martha Rosler, Oskar Schlemmer, Christoph Schlingensief, Gerry Schum, Katharina Sieverding, Santiago Sierra, Smith/Stewart, Carolee Schneemann, Tony Tasset, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ryan Trecartin, Günther Uecker, Ulay & Marina Abramović, Francesco Vezzoli, Guido van der Werve, Mary Wigman, Aaron Young, Andrea Zittel

OUT OF SPACE 1:
CAO FEI
WHOSE UTOPIA

25 APRIL 2009 – 27 JUNE 2009

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is proud to present a new series of exhibition projects entitled OUT OF SPACE. These projects will take place at irregular intervals and, as the name suggests, will not be staged at the collection’s home at Schanzenstrasse 54. The first exhibition in the series puts the spotlight on Beijing-based multimedia artist Cao Fei and will open on 24 April 2009 as part of this year’s Art Cologne – the 43rd international art market – in Duesseldorf’s Gloriahalle at Belsenstrasse 20.

Cao Fei is one of the most important Chinese artists of her generation. Born in Guangzhou in 1978, she grew up in a world of advertising and electronic entertainment. Fascinated by the vibrant nature of consumer society, she developed an idiosyncratic visual language that playfully, ironically and humorously juxtaposes how we imagine, desire, criticise and enjoy reality, thus blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. In her diverse work, which ranges from photo series, films, performances and installations to prose and plays, Cao Fei seeks above all to investigate the rapid social and cultural changes revolutionising China as well as the new generation of Chinese teenagers.

WHOSE UTOPIA (2006)

The exhibition’s main feature, the extensive installation Whose Utopia, fathoms the lives of migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta in southern China. Produced as part of the Siemens Art Program, Cao Fei’s project entitled “What are you doing here?” actively involved employees at the Osram lightbulb factory in Foshan in the project’s realisation. Workers were interviewed individually about their secret dreams, career ambitions, goals and personal beliefs.

My Future is Not a Dream is set within the context of the factory and the “Osram” brand. Here Cao Fei exposes the underbelly of globalisation, which is changing both the Pearl River Delta and China as a whole, and investigates the implications for individuals and their role in society. In the interviews for “What are you doing here?” the employees also talk about the negative aspects of their lives as migrant workers. Additional to the video the photographs show their cramped, shabby apartments where there is almost no personal space as each worker is only allocated a space in a multi-tiered bunk bed.

I. MIRROR BY CHINA TRACEY (AKA: CAO FEI) (2007)

In her works I. Mirror and RMB City, Cao Fei explores the online phenomenon Second Life (www.secondlife.com).

Over 15 million users have signed up for this 3-D internet-based world since 2003 and each user has an avatar, a computer-animated digital alter ego that they can style and control, enabling them to visit existing environments in Second Life, talk with other users, earn virtual money and even start up a virtual business.

Represented by her avatar, which she named “China Tracy,” Cao Fei spent one year in Second Life researching all the possibilities offered by the role-playing game. She documented her adventures in Second Life by creating machinima films – animation films which convert the online game’s 3-D graphics into digital video animations.

I. Mirror is divided into three parts that portray both the beauty and excess of this virtual world. It traces the love story that develops between avatars “China Tracy” and “Hug Yue.” Despite the unlimited possibilities offered by Second Life, there is an air of loneliness and all-pervasive yearning about the video piece, due largely to the melancholy background music. The fantasy world ultimately seems a cold and lonely place.

The I. Mirror project came to an end in 2007 when the video trilogy was presented at the 52nd Venice Biennale in the Chinese pavilion.

RMB CITY (2007)

Whereas her first project was an investigative study of Second Life, Cao Fei’s second Second Life project involves the creation of RMB City – a beautiful, dreamlike metropolis within the virtual world.

RMB City (RMB is the abbreviation for the Chinese currency Renminbi) reflects the current wave of urbanisation sweeping China as well as the rapid social and cultural changes taking place there. RMB City’s architecture comprises a variety of communist, capitalist and socialist symbols, which are brought to mind using historical and contemporary Chinese icons as well as exponents of Chinese culture. China’s national symbol, the panda bear, appears alongside the new national stadium in Beijing as well as ironic and subversive objects like a sunken statue from Mao. The virtual construction of the city was completed in late 2008 and the buildings in RMB City (www.rmbcity.com) can be bought and occupied by cultural institutions for two years.

HIP HOP GUANGZHOU (2003)

Cao Fei’s earlier hip-hop project, on the other hand, does not focus solely on China. The project was mostly set in Chinese cities, but also included Berlin and New York City. In each city she transformed people from different national, social and cultural backgrounds into hip-hop dancers in an attempt to break down the rigid barriers between the media-dominated world of the younger generation and the everyday lives of the older generation. In Hip Hop Guangzhou Cao Fei plays hip-hop tracks to grocers and builders and introduces them to the basic dance steps, which are in fact reminiscent of the traditional formation dances performed by Chinese workforces.

ARTIST LIST

Cao Fei

NUMBER TWO:
FRAGILE

11 OCTOBER 2008 – 1 AUGUST 2009

The second exhibition of works from the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION bears the title NUMBER TWO: FRAGILE.

The exhibition focuses on corporeality in videos, installations and photography, an aspect of art that has been explored intensively since the 1960s and 1970s, in particular within the genres of Body Art and Performance.

The 54 works in the show were selected to shed light on the themes of self-dramatisation, pain, transformation, physicality in the sense of a plasticity that can be experienced as a real, external phenomenon, and also fragility in a literal way. Although the exhibition is unified by these overarching themes, it also allows viewers to discern the positions of the individual artists, since most of them are represented by several pieces.

Artistic self-dramatisation is perhaps the show’s most prominent theme. Thus Art-Make-Up No. 1-4 (White, Pink, Green, Black), documents a performance by Bruce Nauman in 1967-68 in which the artist’s body seems to be transformed into a sculpture.

The videos, which were originally shot on 16mm film are showing Nauman’s torso in full frontal position and was then overlaid with four different colours (white, pink, green and black) in a painstaking process.

Technological advances in film and video and the development of closed-circuit installations in the 1960s made it possible for artists to record their actions on film, to observe themselves in a mirror at the same time and even transfer the recordings in another room. Several other artists featured in the exhibition, such as Vito Acconci and Hannah Wilke, took advantage of the possibilities offered by this technology to expand the concept of sculpture.

Thus in one of her best-known performances, Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass, the artist performs a striptease behind Marcel Duchamps’ Large Glass in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In posing for the camera like a 1970s model, she exposes the stereotypical role of women in the art world of that day.

Women’s presentation of themselves as artists and simultaneously as art objects is also a central theme in Katharina Sieverding’s series of large-scale photographs from 1973, Die Sonne um Mitternacht schauen, and in Marina Abramović’s performance The Onion from the year 1996, in which she also suggests the experience of pain and explores the limits of her own physical endurance.

Painful and shocking in equal measure are the performances by Chris Burden, which document self-imposed ordeals verging on martyrdom in the cause of art. In his legendary work Shoot from 1971, Burden has someone shoot him in the arm; in Through the Night Softly (1973) the naked artist writhes his way out of a pile of broken glass with his arms tied.

A very special work featured in NUMBER TWO: FRAGILE is The Killing Machine by Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, completed in 2007. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony, the installation makes a statement on capital punishment that is at once critical and absurd. It is not film that takes centre stage here, as in the duo’s earlier works, but rather a torture instrument reminiscent of an electric chair. Displayed in a self-contained room and accompanied by screeching violins, the work turns viewers into spectators of a horror scenario.

In Happiness (finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization (after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier), an animated digital video installation in wide-screen format, Paul Chan takes up the thread of his ongoing radical confrontation with politics and society. In his apocalyptic vision, a seemingly naive concept of paradise mutates into a horror scenario in a video-game aesthetic derived from the imagery of cult artist Henry Darger.

Terence Koh’s installation Snow White was created specifically for NUMBER TWO: FRAGILE and is one of its highlights. The work’s main feature is a cube of neon tubes suspended from the ceiling; their bright glare makes entering the room virtually unbearable. A glass coffin, porcelain chrysanthemums and a live performance recorded in the same room complete the opera-inspired, fairytale-like scenario.

Cheese (2007) and Dough (2006) by Mika Rottenberg are being shown together for the first time. Viewers can see Rottenberg’s most recent work Cheese in a rough-hewn, walk-in “goat shed”. The main protagonists are six sisters with long, Rapunzel-like tresses who have magic powers and can make cheese with their hair. Much like Dough, Cheese deals with global themes such as the economy and working life in the post-industrial age. Using poetic imagery, Rottenberg repeats the production processes ad absurdum, incorporating the female body as a dynamic part of these processes and transporting viewers into a world that is at once comfortably familiar and bizarre.

ARTIST LIST

Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Peggy Ahwesh, Walead Beshty, Encyclopedia Pictura & Björk, John Bock, Chris Burden, Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller, Paul Chan, Patty Chang, Jen DeNike, Nathalie Djurberg, Cheryl Donegan, Encyclopedia Pictura & Björk, Kate Gilmore, Cao Guimarães, Terence Koh, Alex McQuilkin, Nandipha Mntambo, Lutz Mommartz, Bruce Nauman, Rob Pruitt, Adam Putnam, Pipilotti Rist, Torbjørn Rødland, Mika Rottenberg, Katharina Sieverding, Rosemarie Trockel, Hannah Wilke, Aaron Young

NUMBER ONE:
DESTROY, SHE SAID

18 JUNE 2007 – 2 AUGUST 2008

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is a private collection of contemporary art focused on media and video art, installations and photography.

The collection has found a new home in the former production facilities of the Conzen frame factory. The building, which celebrates its centenary this year, was redeveloped from top to toe by the architectural firm Kuehn Malvezzi to meet the particular requirements of the collection.

„The redistribution of space has created an entirely new building within the old shell: the higher roof and addition of skylights and a roof terrace combine to make a very clear statement. This more vertical organization supports the building’s new function as a live-in art warehouse and exhibition space. A large opening connects the two main exhibition rooms and a delicate stairway leads up to the spacious attic floor and roof deck, 23 metres above the ground. The way up and down is the key to the whole design – a building that is less an object to look at than a path to follow. It leads through dark and light spaces, from the little cinema on the ground floor, on through two different exhibition storeys and up to the top floor with its 12-metre ceiling.“ (Wilfried Kuehn, Kuehn Malvezzi)

Its new home provides the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION with two exhibition floors open to the public. For the opening exhibition, entitled NUMBER ONE: DESTROY, SHE SAID, Julia Stoschek has assembled approximately 40 creative statements from international artists on the subjects of construction/deconstruction and interior/exterior.Some may recognise the title DESTROY, SHE SAID from the novel of the same name by Marguerite Duras (“Destruire, dit elle“). However, the exhibition’s title actually owes more to the two-channel video installation Destroy She Said by Monica Bonvicini from 1998, which examines the role of women in auteur films of the 1950s to 1970s in a compilation of selected excerpts. It is remarkable to see how, even at the very zenith of the feminist movement, women were still being stereotyped as helpless creatures.

The pieces on show centre on extreme spatial, psychological and interpersonal situations. The two exhibition floors are also subdivided according to different questions and themes, both to highlight individual aspects of the works and open up the exhibition as a whole to explore further issues.

An exhibition entitled DESTROY, SHE SAID is, of course, immediately associated with the theme of destruction, and indeed, this is an aspect reflected in much of the art shown. Examples of works that centre on the destruction of interiors and structures are Shades of Destructors by Mark Leckey and Hammering Out (an old argument) by Monica Bonvicini. In the piece “Burn“ by artist duo Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley, the cosy hearth at home is the destructive element, creating an atmosphere that is at once frightening and absurd.

By contrast, Paul Pfeiffer’s Empire focused on the subject of construction and the efficiency of hierarchical organisations wasps by documenting the laborious three-month process of wasps painstakingly building their nests.

Tony Oursler’s three-channel installation near the entrance presented a dialogue between urban indoor and outdoor spaces so complex that conventional designations and rules of what is „inside“ and what „outside“ are completely thrown off balance.

There is something profoundly unsettling and disturbing surrounding the act of destruction in the pieces by Robert Boyd and Adam McEwen. In the four-channel video installation Xanadu, Boyd focused on the self-destructive impulses that characterise our society by condensing different elements of mass culture like news bites, documentaries, comics and pop music videos into a sequence of split-second images. The brutal and random interfaces reflect the media world we live in, where the boundaries between entertainment, information and horror have been virtually erased. McEwen’s A-Line then proceeds to literally turn the world upside down by showing us the corpses of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci strung up outside a Milan petrol station for all the world to see.

The central work on the second floor was Doug Aitken’s 3-channel installation Interiors. The seemingly incongruous stories of different people, which move the protagonists through various interiors and urban landscapes, are projected onto three translucent screens. The works of Anthony Burdin heighten this feeling of disorientation; the protagonist in his Desert Mix leads spectators through a series of bizarre places.

Spatial demarcations and marginalisation are another central theme of the show, exemplified in Thomas Demand’s Fence and Taryn Simon’s Calvin Washington. The work is from Simon’s The Innocents, a series of photographs taken in 2002 of innocent people condemned to death at the scenes of their alleged crimes.

A number of works in the show are dedicated to the theme Circular Moves: Marina Abramović’s “Relation in Movement“, “High Performance“ by Aaron Young, and Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone. McCall uses a 16mm film projector to direct light at a black surface; with the help of a smoke machine, the beam gradually becomes visible as a perfect cone of light. The space and the projection itself become a kind of sculpture that breaks down the traditional relationship between cinema viewers and the film projector.

ARTIST LIST

Doug Aitken, Francis Alÿs, Heike Baranowsky, Dara Birnbaum, Monica Bonvicini, Robert Boyd, Lonnie van Brummelen, Anthony Burdin, Jeff Burton, Paul Chan, Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Dara Friedman, Kate Gilmore, Douglas Gordon, Manuel Graf, Dan Graham, Jeppe Hein, Christian Jankowski, Joan Jonas, Mark Leckey, Klara Lidén, Gordon Matta-Clark, Anthony McCall, Adam McEwen, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Paul Pfeiffer, Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley, Pipilotti Rist, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Taryn Simon, Robert Smithson, Mathilde ter Heijne, Kon Trubkovich, Ulay & Marina Abramović, Bill Viola, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Aaron Young

A FIRE IN MY BELLY

6 FEBRUARY 2021 – 12 DECEMBER 2021

A FIRE IN MY BELLY is a large collection exhibition, featuring over thirty artists from different generations and backgrounds, who in a variety of mediums and contexts examine the ways in which experiences of violence and loss are enacted, witnessed, and transformed. Comprising film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, and poetry, the exhibition explores how artists negotiate and transcend these experiences through personal and political gestures of protest and resistance. The works included in A FIRE IN MY BELLY thus alternate between moments of tension, poetry, and release.

The title of the exhibition stems from the unfinished film A Fire In My Belly (Film In Progress) and A Fire In My Belly (Excerpt) (1986–87) by American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. In the face of a society permeated by social injustices and oppression on both an individual and structural level, Wojnarowicz’s film distils his anger and anguish at the polarized and violent milieu of the 1980s, specifically in the United States, where the AIDS epidemic and the so-called Culture Wars were decisive in the artist’s life.

Through a range of public programs consisting of screenings, talks, and workshops, JSC Berlin will establish a platform to engage with various aspects of the multifaceted works on view. These will address, among other things, representations of violence and how they circulate, as well as the role of viewers as witnesses who may or may not be complicit themselves. A FIRE IN MY BELLY also features many new acquisitions from the past three years, including works by Sophia Al-Maria, Cyprien Gaillard, Leila Hekmat, Barbara Hammer, and David Wojnarowicz.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a printed exhibition magazine with texts by a wide range of international writers, artists, and theorists.

Curators: Lisa Long and Julia Stoschek
Curatorial Assistant: Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung

ARTIST LIST

Sophia Al-Maria, Peggy Ahwesh, Monica Bonvicini, Bernadette Corporation, Paul Chan, Thomas Demand, Maria Anna Dewes, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Marcel Dzama, Trisha Donnelly, Tracey Emin, Brock Enright, Cyprien Gaillard, Barbara Hammer, Leila Hekmat, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, Rindon Johnson, Zoe Leonard, Klara Lidén, Adam McEwen, Ana Mendieta, Asier Mendizabal, Colin Montgomery, Nandipha Mntambo, Adrian Piper, Laure Prouvost, Rob Pruitt, Robin Rhode, Bunny Rogers, Marianna Simnett, Jack Smith, P. Staff, caner teker, Kandis Williams, David Wojnarowicz

JEREMY SHAW
QUANTIFICATION TRILOGY

5 SEPTEMBER 2020 – 29 NOVEMBER 2020

OPENING

3 September 2020, 4:00–9:00 P.M.

Jeremy Shaw’s Quantification Trilogy consists of three parafictional short films: Quickeners (2014), Liminals (2017), and I Can See Forever (2018). The works are set in the future and explore how marginalized societies confront life after a scientific discovery has mapped and determined all parameters of transcendental spiritual experience. This is known as “The Quantification.” Employing aesthetics and outmoded media of the 20th century to depict the future, Shaw’s alchemical combination of cinema verité, ethnographic film, conceptual art, and music video invites the viewer to suspend their disbelief in the story, and provides a series of critical perspectives on systems of power. The Quantification Trilogy examines fringe culture, theories of evolution, virtual reality, neurotheology, esotericism, dance, the representation of the sublime, as well as the notion of transcendence itself.

Set five hundred years in the future, Quickeners presents the activities and testimonies of a small group of “Quantum Humans,” exhibiting symptoms of “Human Atavism Syndrome” (HAS)—a dormant genetic expression that awakens desire in the affected to seek out the abandoned spiritual meaning of their human predecessors. A species wirelessly interconnected to “The Hive,” Quantum Humans have evolved to operate on purely rational thought, thereby achieving immortality. In the video, Shaw meticulously reworks archival documentary footage of Pentecostal Christian snake handlers to depict the uncanny return of an outmoded system of belief. As the story unfolds, an authoritative Quantum Human narrator reports on what we witness: indecipherable testimonials, sermons, prayers, convulsive dancing, speaking-in-tongues, serpent handling, and ecstatic states known as “Quickenings.”

Liminals is presented as a recovered episode of a documentary series on marginal societies (Periphery Altruist Cultures) who respond to a widespread loss of ability for faith that threatens the extinction of the human species. A group named “The Liminals” believe that by injecting themselves with machine DNA and re-engaging abandoned spiritual rituals, they will be able to access a paraspace between the physical and the virtual where humanity can enter a new phase of evolution. Taking place three generations from the present and using a 1970s cinema verité aesthetic, Liminals depicts members of the group as they engage in varying cathartic behaviours—from whirling and kundalini yoga to modern dance and headbanging—in an effort to rupture their current reality and save humanity.

I Can See Forever is conceived as a television documentary series about “The Singularity Project,” a failed government experiment that aimed to create a harmonious synthesis of human and machine. Set approximately 40 years from today, the video employs mid-1990s fly-on-the-wall VHS footage to expose the story of 27-year-old Roderick Dale, the project’s only known survivor. Born with an 8.7% machine DNA biology, yet uninterested in the virtual-reality trappings of his time, Dale has committed himself to a life immersed in dance. It is during his unique virtuosic activities that he claims to be able to “See Forever”—a multilayered and contentious term that he defines as the ability to transcend to a digital plane of total unity while maintaining a corporeal physical presence.

The exhibition also presents a selection from Shaw’s series of reframed archival photographs: Towards Universal Pattern Recognition (2016­–20). These photographs feature subjects experiencing states of spiritual, hedonistic, or technological catharsis. They are framed under precisely faceted prismatic lenses designed by the artist to create multiple refracted images around a specific element within the picture. This mediation of the presented image not only appears to approximate the altered state of consciousness of the photographic subject, it heightens an awareness of the perspective of the camera, the beliefs or values of the original photographer, and those of viewer of the artwork.

Maxwell Stephens

Quantification Trilogy is part of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION and produced in cooperation with the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Esker Foundation in Calgary, Canada. An extensive publication will be released in conjunction with the show.

ARTIST LIST

Jeremy Shaw

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
MERIEM BENNANI
PARTY ON THE CAPS

5 SEPTEMBER 2020 – 29 NOVEMBER 2020

OPENING

24 January 2020, 7:00–10:00 p.m.

ARTIST TALK

with Meriem Bennani, 24 January 2020, 6:00 p.m.

PARTY ON THE CAPS is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a year-long program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

PRESS PREVIEW 
A press preview of the exhibition by Meriem Bennani as well as of the presentation of the VR work by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg will take place on Thursday, 23 January 2020, 11:00 a.m. at JSC Berlin. Meriem Bennani and the curator of the exhibition Party on the CAPS, Lisa Long, will be present. Daniel Birnbaum, director of Acute Art, will also present the VR work by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg. Please register at: press@jsc.art

ARTIST LIST

Meriem Bennani

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
MARTINE SYMS –
INCENSE SWEATERS & ICE
ONLINE SCREENING

25 APRIL 2020 – 26 APRIL 2020

Join the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION for an online screening of Martine Syms’s first feature length film Incense Sweaters & Ice (2017), on Saturday, April 25, 2020, at 8:00 p.m. CEST.

The stream will be available at www.jsc.art/mediathek until midnight on Sunday, April 26, 2020.

In Incense Sweaters & Ice (2017), Martine Syms’s first feature-length film, the American artist examines the movement and performance of the black body in various environments and in relationship to the camera. Loosely based on a performance the Misdirected Kiss (2016), the film follows three characters: Girl, Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, and WB (“whiteboy”) through different phases of watching, being watched, and remaining unseen.

Scenes from Girl’s daily life, travels, and relationship with WB are interspersed with footage of Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White singing inspirational phrases about how to carry oneself in public, saying things like “have a positive attitude” and “you deserve to be seen.” Syms is interested in how the characters perform differently in each setting and when they are aware of being recorded, investigating a politics of representation between surveillance and self-promotion, documentation and broadcast.

The camera is a central character in the film. In each scene, the camera performs a different role such as the boyfriend, the audience, the surveillance camera, the documentary filmmaker, or the director, negating any neutrality the camera’s gaze is thought to have. This brings forth another set of questions concerning authority and control: What forms of subjugation emerge by the potentiality of being filmed at any given moment? And how does one navigate a reality where even your most intimate spaces—the home—is invaded by the camera on your phone?

Syms has called the kind of filmmaking she employs in Incense Sweaters & Ice “ambient cinema”: “If anything you do on camera is like a performance then you can expand that more broadly to think about the different types of surveillance that you’re subjected to, and how there’s an ongoing film being made,” she explains. “I’m just saying that we are all being recorded all the time and you can think about that as a kind of filmmaking.”

MARTINE SYMS (b. 1988, Los Angeles) uses film, video, installation, performance, and various digital technologies such as apps, augmented reality, and chatbots to investigate blackness and the conditions of contemporary image culture. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively, including presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, ICA London, New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. She has lectured at Yale University, SXSW, California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and MoMA PS1, among other venues. Recently presented exhibitions include BOON, Secession, Vienna; Shame Space, ICA Virginia Commonwealth University; Grand Calme, SCHQ; Big Surprise, Bridget Donahue Gallery; Contemporary Projects: Martine Syms, Serralves Museum, Porto; Projects 106: Martine Syms, MoMA; Fact and Trouble, ICA London. From 2007–11 she was the co-director of the Chicago artist-run project space Golden Age, and she currently runs Dominica Publishing, an imprint dedicated to exploring blackness in visual culture. She is a faculty member in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.

MARTINE SYMS  – INCENSE SWEATERS & ICE is part of horizontal vertigo, a year-long program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

ARTIST LIST

Martine Syms

STAN DOUGLAS / SPLICING BLOCK

1 NOVEMBER 2019 – 29 MARCH 2020

OPENING

30 October 2019, 7:00 p.m.

ARTIST TALK

1 November 2019, 6:00 p.m.

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is pleased to present an exhibition of works by the renowned Canadian artist Stan Douglas (*1960, Vancouver) in Berlin.

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has been creating films, photographs, and installations, as well as recently venturing into theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects, exploring the parameters of their respective mediums. The artist queries the past in his works, breaking through traditional narrative structures to blur fact and fiction.

The exhibition SPLICING BLOCK examines the relationship between music and society, and is at the same time a reflection on the media of film and photography. The works reconstruct and imagine the 1960s and 70s—an era distinguished by (de-)colonization and migration, but one equally permeated by jazz, underground disco, and Afrobeat.

On view are the early two-channel video installation Hors-champs (1992), the six-hour video Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), as well as large-format photographs from the series Disco Angola (2012). The artist shot Luanda-Kinshasa in a space modelled on the legendary New York recording studio The Church, while Hors-champs was filmed in a Parisian television studio. The photographs from the series Disco Angola stage “a costume drama in fragments” (Stan Douglas), set in post-industrial New York and post-colonial Angola, but shot in California.

A splicing block is a tool for the cutting and splicing, that is the joining, of both analog film and audio material. The precision of its operation is subject to the abilities of the actual cutter—once cut, the process cannot be undone. Stan Douglas is a master of such work, creating imperceptible transitions between different times and places. It is not just the attentive staging of the filming and photography, but above all the meticulous construction in the editing room, which effortlessly conveys the viewer through space and time. The title SPLICING BLOCK is therefore a metaphor for Stan Douglas’ particular working methods.

Stan Douglas is widely regarded as one of the most important representatives of time-based media art. His works are again being shown in a solo exhibition in Berlin for the first time since 2001.

Curated by Paola Malavassi, Head of JSC Berlin.

The exhibition STAN DOUGLAS / SPLICING BLOCK is part of the Culture Program accompanying Canada’s Guest of Honour presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2020. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada represented by the Embassy of Canada, Berlin.

ARTIST LIST

Stan Douglas

ACUTE ART AT JSC:
BJARNE MELGAARD / KOO JEONG A

12 OCTOBER 2019 – 12 JANUARY 2020

OPENING

11 October 2019, 7:00–10.00 p.m.

ARTIST TALK
An artist talk with Daniel Birnbaum, Julia Stoschek und Bjarne Melgaard will take place on October 11, 2019 at 6:00 p.m. at JSC Berlin.

JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION and Acute Art are delighted to present a new VR work by Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard alongside augmented reality artwork by Koo Jeong A, as part of their long-term collaboration.

Bjarne Melgaard’s new virtual reality artwork, My Trip (2019) takes the viewer on a journey to the farthest reaches of the dark web. Melgaard compares the experience to taking Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a naturally occurring drug, which is produced by a gland in the brain. DMT is considered the strongest hallucinogenic chemical substance and is found in almost every living organism on earth.

Melgaard’s work is influenced by authors Stig Sæterbakken, David Benatar and Paul Ehrlich; The Sofa: A Moral Tale, a 1742 libertine novel by Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon; and, Black Metal band, Darkthrone. Featuring characters that have recurred in the artist’s practice for over 25 years, including Lightbulb Man and Octo, in addition to new mutants and personalities created in collaboration with Acute Art,My Tripis a strikingly stimulating visualization of the illusions of a DMT experience.

Beginning with the idea of suicide as an existential question, new psychedelia, and the loss of the self within a DMT trip, this work asks questions regarding life and how we choose to live it whilst introducing Melgaard’s perspective on Anti-Natalism and over-population. The artist is raising the contradictory view that if we are to continue to exist, humans will have to cease to procreate, as a result of the carbon impact of producing new human life.
My Trip also explores the abyss of the technological underground, the endless information consumed every day and the feeling of apathy and dullness that this technology consequently produces.

Coinciding with this premiere, the project density (2019) by Korean artist Koo Jeong Awill materialise both at JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION and locations in the city of Berlin as part of an ongoing series presented internationally by Acute Art. Koo Jeong A’s AR work was previously shown at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and at the Beyeler Foundation during Art Basel in Basel, 2019.

BJARNE MELGAARD

Bjarne Melgaard is a Norwegian artist (born 1967 in Sydney, Australia), who lives and works in Oslo. Melgaard started out in the mid 1990ʼs with a neo expressionistic, frantic style of painting, sculpture and installation. Social, political and ideological issues are at the core of Bjarne Melgaard’s oeuvre. Dealing with the dark side of humanity, it often discusses, investigates and pushes the boundaries of societal acceptance. Melgaard has had more than forty-five solo exhibitions in leading galleries around the world. His work has been seen in numerous group shows and at international art fairs; he is a frequent curator and collaborator, has written more than a dozen novels, and produced seven films.

In 2011, Melgaard represented Norway at La Biennale di Venezia, 54th International Art Exhibition, Venice. He has twice participated in the Biennale de Lyon. In 2011, Melgaard was given a mid-career retrospective at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. In 2014, Melgaard participated in The Whitney Biennial and in January 2015 Melgaard was the focus of the first of six important exhibitions at the Munch Museum in Oslo. MELGAARD + MUNCH The end of it allhas already happened placed Edvard Munch’s oeuvre in direct dialogue with works by Melgaard.

KOO JEONG A

Koo Jeong A (born 1967 in Seoul, South Korea) lives and works everywhere. Since the early 1990s, Koo Jeong A has made works that are seemingly casual and commonplace, yet at the same time remarkably precise, deliberate, and considered. Her reflections on the senses and the body incorporate objects, still and moving images, audio elements, and aromas. Many of her works are conceived within site-specific environments that question the limits of fact and fiction, the imaginary and actuality of our world. Koo considers the connection of energies between a place and people, relying on chance to drive her encounters. Jeong A was named ‘2016 Artist of the Year’ by the Korean Cultural Centre UK. Recent solo exhibitions and commissions of her work include: ajeongkoo, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2017); Enigma of Beginnings, Yuz Project Room at Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2016); Koo Jeong A x Wheelscape: Evertro, Everton Park, Liverpool (2015) and Oussser, Fondazione La Raia, Novi Ligure (2014).

This year, the artist’s AR works have been exhibited by Acute Art as part of Electric at Frieze New York, in the My Art Guides Venice Meeting Point to coincide with the Venice Biennale, and will be presented in the garden of the Fondation Beyeler during Art Basel 2019.

ACUTE ART

Directed by Daniel Birnbaum, Acute Art collaborates with the world’s most compelling contemporary artists, providing access to cutting-edge technologies that allow them to translate their creative vision into new digital mediums – including virtual, augmented and mixed realities. A curatorial laboratory and research hub, Acute Art are committed to finding new ways to take digital artwork to the public, both physically, through exhibitions, and as a curated offer on the Acute Art website and free app.

Since 2017, they have collaborated with artists including Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Christo & Jeanne-Claude and Antony Gormley, as well as other talented and award-winning artists. Available through their website and app, the works can also be downloaded via the App Store or Google Play, as well as Steam and HTC Viveport.

www.acuteart.com

ARTIST LIST

Bjarne Melgaard, Koo Jeong A

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
WANGSHUI

12 SEPTEMBER 2019 – 15 DECEMBER 2019

WANGSHUI is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a year-long program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

ARTIST LIST

WangShui

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
COLIN SELF
SUBTEXT
PERFORMANCE

31 MAY 2019 – 1 JUNE 2019

Performers:

Lori Baldwin, Marie Gailey, Anna Fitoussi, Joey Hansom, Joshua Lerner, Alex Mara, Aaron Reeder, Maciej Sado, Harald Stojan and Melanie-Jame Wolf

SUBTEXT is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a year-long program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

ARTIST LIST

Colin Self

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO:
PAULINE BOUDRY / RENATE LORENZ
ONGOING EXPERIMENTS WITH STRANGENESS

26 APRIL 2019 – 28 JULY 2019

ONGOING EXPERIMENTS WITH STRANGENESS is Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s most comprehensive exhibition to date. Spanning the ground floor and first-floor cinema of the collection’s Berlin gallery, the show comprises four large-scale moving-image installations, stage elements, lights, and sculptural objects.

In their collaborative practice, driven by ongoing conversations about the subjects of performance and performativity, companionship, and resistance, Boudry / Lorenz excavate unrepresented moments and gestures in history, challenging accepted narratives and binary categories of identity and meaning. The moving-image works featured in the exhibition—Telepathic Improvisation (2017), Silent (2016), I Want (2015), and To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013)—all draw on musical scores, scripts, and speeches, adapted and interpreted by performers. Collectively, the artists and performers explore the works’ various political and sexual potentials, examining power relations among themselves and with the viewers.

Through their camera work, Boudry / Lorenz reflect the violent history of visualization, questioning who or what is seen and in return goes unseen or unheard. By including various stages and objects from their films in the gallery, the boundaries between the representational space of the film and the actual space of the gallery begin to dissolve. These on- and off-screen human and non-human encounters examine the limits of musical and filmic forms as protest and resistance, calling for an urgently desired future.

ONGOING EXPERIMENTS WITH STRANGENESS is part of HORIZONTAL VERTIGO, a year-long program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.

PUBLIC PROGRAM

ARTIST TALK

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz with Irene Revell and Lisa Long, 27 July 2019, 6:30 p.m.

ARTIST LIST

Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO
JSC DÜSSELDORF / BERLIN

31 MARCH 2019 – 6 DECEMBER 2020

For the first time in its history, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION will present an ensemble of solo exhibitions, performances, and screenings of works not included the collection. Over the course of a year, six exhibitions—three in Düsseldorf and three in Berlin—will open successively, beginning in March 2019 and running until April 2020. They will be accompanied by screening and performance programs, artist talks, lectures, and readings at both locations. Most of the artists featured in HORIZONTAL VERTIGO will show their work for the first time in Germany.

HORIZONTAL VERTIGO will feature commissions and new productions as well as existing works by a group of international artists whose interdisciplinary time-based practices share focused perspectives infused with feminist, queer, and decolonial critique, in resistance to restrictive concepts of identity, history, and representation. Each project deals with a specific context driven by the artist and what the artwork affords, creating a web of associations and stories over time that is both fluid and multivalent.

The curatorial framework for this year of programming is inspired by the writing of artist, writer, and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. The title is quoted from “Cotton and Iron” (1991), an essay in which Minh-Ha foregrounds plurality and “non-totalness,” challenging systems of binary opposition and definitive categorizations. Echoing this commitment, HORIZONTAL VERTIGO does not propose one overarching theme but thrives on the multiplicity of narratives and narrators at hand, exploring the inherent plurality of the entire program without prescribing a “right” way of reading it. HORIZONTAL VERTIGO ‘speaks to’ and not ‘about’ the participating artists, to quote Minh-ha, embracing dialogue instead of representation.

Curated by Lisa Long

SCREENINGS

The accompanying screening series at JSC Düsseldorf will feature artists or artist duos for a duration of six weeks. At JSC Berlin there will be a number of one-time screening events. Participating artists include: Morehshin Allahyari, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Sky Hopinka, Chelsea Knight, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Martine Syms, Eduardo Williams, and Anna Zett.

PERFORMANCE PROGRAM AT JSC BERLIN

Colin Self: SIBLINGS
31 May & 1 June 2019

Throughout the year, composer and choreographer Colin Self will present multiple performances related to his recently released album SIBLINGS.  Self’s program weaves music and dance performances, dialogue, workshops, and game formats together to tell stories of non-anthropocentric interdependence; stories that draw into the plurality and multiplicity of our common terra conundrum of survival. The artist’s interdisciplinary and collaborative practice aspires to expand consciousness, troubling binaries and boundaries of perception and communication.

ARTIST LIST

Sophia Al-Maria, Morehshin Allahyari, Meriem Bennani, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, A.K. Burns, Dorota Gawęda und Eglė Kulbokaitė, Sky Hopinka, Rindon Johnson, Chelsea Knight, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Colin Self, Martine Syms, WangShui, Eduardo Williams, Anna Zett

KW PRODUCTION SERIES
BEATRICE GIBSON & JAMIE CREWE

27 SEPTEMBER 2018 – 25 NOVEMBER 2018

KW PRODUCTION SERIES is a new commissioning project, organized in collaboration with the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION and OUTSET Germany_Switzerland. It is dedicated to artists’ moving image works and concentrates on two new productions per year. The project takes inspiration from KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s founding principles as a place for production, critical exchange, and thoughtful collaboration.

Within this ongoing series, KW seeks to identify and serve artists who are at a pivotal moment in their work and career—those who will benefit not only from the financial support and institutional visibility this opportunity provides, but also those who will be able to use KW PRODUCTION SERIES to significantly contribute towards the depth and rigor of their artistic practice.

KW PRODUCTION SERIES is produced by Mason Leaver-Yap, KW’s Associate Curator.

JAMIE CREWE: PASTORAL DRAMA

Over the course of a year, Jamie Crewe (born 1987 in Manchester, Great Britain) worked on Pastoral Drama every day. The piece comprises two parallel videos that use allegory and animation to think about progress. Through intricate drawings in ink and pencil, speckled clay, and encrusted plasticine, Crewe reflects upon the evolution of mythic narratives, (inter-) personal change, and collective political time. Pastoral Drama juxtaposes the ancient Greek legend of Eurydice and the Underworld with Agostino Agazzari’s Eumelio, a 17th- century opera composed for the male inhabitants of a Roman seminary. Eumelio’s titular male figure stands in for Eurydice, and so achieves a different fate. In its double telling, Pastoral Drama envisions the collapse of mythic pasts with the dangerous after-world of the present.

Pastoral Drama is a co-commission with Tramway, Glasgow (GB).

BEATRICE GIBSON:  I HOPE I’M LOUD WHEN I’M DEAD

Exploring ideas around gender, poetry, and disobedience, Beatrice Gibson’s (born 1978 in London, Great Britain) 16mm film, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, was developed with two of the USA’s most significant living poets—CAConrad and Eileen Myles. The filmmaker tersely distills material shot on the eve of the 45th presidential inauguration in January 2017 and blends moments of perilous public authority with more intimate scenes and tender portraits. The film uses poetry as a means to reckon with the present, and casts the figure of the poet as a guide in times of chaos. I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead is a co-commission with Camden Arts Centre, London, Bergen Kunsthall (NO), and Mercer Union, Toronto (CA).

KW PRODUCTION SERIES is made possible with generous support by the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION  and OUTSET Germany_Switzerland.

ARTIST LIST

Beatrice Gibson, Jamie Crewe

IAN CHENG
EMISSARIES

27 APRIL 2018 – 1 JULY 2018

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION was delighted to present the complete trilogy of the EMISSARIES (2015 – 2017) by us-american artist Ian Cheng for the first time in Germany.

Ian Cheng creates live simulations that explore the nature of mutation and our capacity to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design and cognitive science, the simulations are populated with characters programmed with behavioral drives, but left to self-evolve amidst otherworldly environmental conditions.

EMISSARIES is a trilogy of live simulations about cognitive evolution, past and future, and the ecological conditions that shape it. It is composed of three interconnected episodes, each centered on the life of a narrative agent – the Emissary – who attempts to achieve a series of narrative goals, only to be disrupted by the underlying simulation and deviate into new directions. In this way, EMISSARIES imagines stories that can break their classical determinism, and simulations that acknowledge the influence of inner fictions on how we act upon the external world: Stories shape an agent, an agent shapes the world, the worls shapes back.

The presenation included the computer-generated simulations Emissary Forks At Perfection (2015), Emissary In The Squat of Gods (2015) and missary Sunsets The Self (2017) as well as 64 drawings from the making of EMISSARIES. On display for the first time, the drawings offered a unique insight into how Cheng´s complex simulations arise.

ARTIST LIST

Ian Cheng

ARTHUR JAFA
A SERIES OF UTTERLY IMPROBABLE,
YET EXTRAORDINARY RENDITIONS

11 FEBRUARY 2018 – 25 NOVEMBER 2018

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is excited to present the work of the acclaimed US filmmaker, cinematographer and artist Arthur Jafa in his first exhibition in Germany, featuring Ming Smith, Frida Orupabo, and Missylanyus. The exhibition was developed in partnership with Serpentine Galleries, London and curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Amira Gad.

Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic, multidisciplinary practice ranging from films and installations to lecture-performances and happenings that tackle, challenge and question prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and race. Jafa’s work is driven by a recurrent question: how might one identify and develop a specifically Black visual aesthetics equal to the „power, beauty and alienation“ of Black music in US culture?

The title of the exhibition ARTHUR JAFA: A SERIES OF UTTERLY IMPROBABLE, YET EXTRAORDINARY RENDITIONS relates to the sense of absence that Jafa observes as haunting Black life. The word „rendition“ refers to the artist’s interpretation of the aesthetics associated with Black being, which are historically-inscribed in images, objects and artefacts. By re-performing these narratives in the present, Jafa imagines and constructs new possibilities for making them visible.

Jafa creates work that approximates the radical alienation of Black life in the West while seeking to make visible – or emancipate – the power embedded in modes of African expression. With reference points ranging from Fang sculpture to Mississippi juke joints, Duchamp’s urinal to jazz, he is a filmmaker with a unique understanding of how to cut and juxtapose a sequence to draw out maximum visceral effect.

Explaining his favourite medium, Jafa has said: „Film is one of the few things, particularly in the theatrical context, that takes up as much space as architecture but like music is fundamentally immaterial.“

ARTIST LIST

Arthur Jafa, Frida Orupabo, Ming Smith, Missylanyus

JAGUARS AND ELECTRIC EELS

5 FEBRUARY 2017 – 26 NOVEMBER 2017

Between 1799 and 1804 a young naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), visited the American continent for the first time, making two expeditions. The most adventurous section of his journey was the trip down the Orinoco to the Rio Negro in Venezuela. At the time, his report on this journey laid the foundations for a holistic way of looking at nature – one that was way ahead of its time. Von Humboldt was the first researcher to point out how the forces of nature, both animate and inanimate, work together. In 1853, these first chronicles of the New World were published in a special edition entitled „Jaguars and electric eels“, an excerpt from the „Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctical Regions of the New Continent“.

The largely media-based works in the collection of the same name on show at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Berlin described a reality that no longer distinguishes between naturalness and artificiality but sees things as a whole and as equals. Starting with the idea of the kind of ecology that focuses not only on natural circumstances but also on the economic and socio-political situation, as well as on technological progress, the exhibition investigated an alternative interpretation of anthropology and zoology.

Accordingly, the selection of works evidenced the search for our evolutionary roots, looking into questions of indigeneity, of hybrids and synthetic forms of life, the migration of the species, and that of our constantly changing perceptions of reality due to all kinds of different influences.

As the various artists’ contributions to the exhibition illustrate, our modern life science questions both the line between naturalness and artificiality and the ontology of objects of all kinds. The different complexes of subjects move within that intermediate space between nature and art, their various systems offering new approaches to interpretation and methods of classification.

ARTIST LIST

Doug Aitken, Kader Attia, Heike Baranowsky, Trisha Donnelly, Juan Downey, Encyclopedia Pictura & Björk, Cyprien Gaillard, Ryan Gander, Manuel Graf, Cao Guimarães, Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson, Donna Huanca, Martin Honert, Isaac Julien, Simon Martin, Nandipha Mntambo, Ana Mendieta, Paul Pfeiffer, Ben Rivers, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, STURTEVANT, James Richards & Leslie Thornton, Bill Viola, Guan Xiao, Anicka Yi, Aaron Young

WELT AM DRAHT

2 JUNE 2016 – 13 NOVEMBER 2016

WELT AM DRAHT was the title of the first presentation in the new JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION satellite at Leipziger Strasse 60 in Berlin’s Mitte district. In line with the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION’s insistence that it be contemporary, the exhibition was devoted to media-based pieces that address the influences and changes in our social reality, identity and environment since digitalisation.

In 38 main pieces by 20 international artists all drawn from the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, starting with large video installations, sculptural works, a performance, a monumental live simulation through to a purpose-made piece by artist collective K-HOLE the exhibition highlights current art strategies and a completely new artistic formal idiom first enabled by the latest technologies.

WELT AM DRAHT derives from the eponymous two-part 1973 TV movie produced by German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (born in 1945 in Bad Wörishofen, died 1982 in Munich). The plot is derived from Simulacron 3, a novel by US author Daniel F. Galoye dating from 1964.

Nothing is left to chance at the Institute for Cybernetics and Future Research. Ostensibly for research purposes, a private corporation uses a mainframe to create a computer-animated world where economic and social developments can be simulated in order to make forecasts and thus lay the basis for decision-making. This mainframe goes by the name of Simulacron 1 and is capable of perfectly simulating a section of reality with all the respective inhabitants. All the simulated persons have their own minds, but no idea that they are part of a virtual reality.

One of the central pieces in the exhibition was the live simulation by Ian Cheng (born in 1984 in Los Angeles, lives and works in New York) made in 2015. By means of the virtual animated real-time simulations that arise through the 3D videogame design Cheng enables viewers to experience the microscopic but essential mechanisms of the complex, multi- millennia-long process of evolution. The artist construes his real-time simulations as “neurological gymnastics” intended to familiarise the viewer with the experience of constant change and with states of confusion, anxiety and cognitive dissonance.

Artists such as Britta Thie or K-HOLE draw on ad images as the primary language for their works. The structure of consumer and product experiences in capitalist societies and the creative industries become the main theme of art.

By contrast, Jon Rafman, Wu Tsang, Hannah Blackand Hito Steyerl spotlight the inner turmoil of digital culture as expressed by changed gender roles, political bodies and the subculture of online communities.

Another aspect of the show was the definition of mortality, as is especially evident in the two video installations A Minute Ago and Palisades In Palisades made in 2014 by Rachel Rose (born in 1986, she lives and works in New York). Her subject matter and venues range from Philip Johnson’s Glass House to the American War of Independence and park layouts in the 19th century. The narratives overlap with one another, reveal different angles on death, and morph into a kind of deja-vu in the viewer.

The works in the exhibition shared in common a critical thrust that asks how digital technology should be limited and justified. In this regard, the individual art forms oscillate between the different genres. They radically cast into question traditional notions of the artwork and the original creation of pictures as the main task of art.

ARTIST LIST

Ed Atkins, Neïl Beloufa, Hannah Black, Ian Cheng, Loretta Fahrenholz, Cao Fei, Melanie Gilligan, Camille Henrot, Juliana Huxtable, K-HOLE, Josh Kline, Helen Marten, Jon Rafman, Rachel Rose, Timur Si-Qin, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Britta Thie, Wu Tsang, Amir Yatziv

KLARA LIDÉN
KASTA MACKA
LOOP FESTIVAL, BARCELONA PAVILION, SPAIN

16 NOVEMBER 2019 – 24 NOVEMBER 2019

PAVELLÓ MIES VAN DER ROHE, BARCELONA

IN COOPERATION WITH LOOP FESTIVAL

“Part of me is this poor architect dealing with the problem of existing structures in the city, part of me is this amateur dancer or performer who wants to return ideas of rhythm to the activity of building, or of reappropriating the built environment.”—Klara Lidén

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION presents video works by Swedish artist Klara Lidén in conjunction with Loop Festival. The venue for the solo exhibition KASTA MACKA is the building in Barcelona that is commonly known as the German Pavilion and was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the International Exhibition in 1929.

The exhibition includes a total of four video performances on monitors of various heights that are positioned in relation to the minimalistic pavilion architecture.

Through her work Lidén challenges the functions of private and public space. She often appears as a participant in front of the camera and oversteps both the implicit and explicit rules of the venues of her actions. The exhibition title, KASTA MACKA, means “skipping stones” in Swedish and refers to the children’s game of bouncing stones across a surface of water. The artist is seen playing this game on the shore of the East River in New York. Instead of small stones, Lidén throws stones and objects of increasing size into the water over the course of the video, soon reaching the limits of her own strength. The contemplative act is thus transformed into work as well as civil disobedience against the social norms that are associated with public space.

Klara Lidén, a trained architect, opposes traditional assumptions about architecture and public sphere through her work. She calls for viewers to reconsider the possibilities of urban space and to exercise its freedoms.

Project Management: Anna-Alexandra Pfau and Andreas Korte, JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION; Carolina Ciuti, LOOP Festival

ARTIST LIST

Klara Lidén

SAMSUNG x JSC
ART DÜSSELDORF

15 NOVEMBER 2019 – 17 NOVEMBER 2019

The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, in collaboration with Samsung, presents time-based art by Loretta Fahrenholz, Beatrice Gibson, Wu Tsang, and Tobias Zielony at this year’s edition of Art Düsseldorf. The four featured works grapple with current socio-cultural and socio-political issues and questions of identity.

In Maskirovka (2017) Tobias Zielony documents the young LGBTQI community in Kiev following the Euromaidan protests. In I HOPE I’M LOUD WHEN I’M DEAD (2018) Beatrice Gibson poetically condenses film material taken on the evening of Donald Trump’s inauguration, examining civil disobedience and questions of gender, written and presented by Eileen Myles and CAConrad. In Wildness (2012) Wu Tsang tells the story of the nightclub Silver Platter, which since the 1960s has served as a safe space and entertainment venue to the Latina transgender scene in Los Angeles. In Implosion (2011) Loretta Fahrenholz transfers Kathy Acker’s eponymous play, in which Acker combines figures of the French Revolution with the New York punk scene of the early 1980s, to the Manhattan of the egocentric Generation Y.

The works are shown on Samsung monitors in a video lounge that was created in cooperation with Walter Knoll.

Project manager: Anna-Alexandra Pfau, director of JSC Düsseldorf & Collection

With generous support from Samsung, Walter Knoll and Art Düsseldorf

ART DÜSSELDORF
Booth D01
Areal Böhler
Hansaallee 321, 40549 Düsseldorf

OPENING HOURS
Thursday, 14 November, 4.00–8.00 p.m. (Opening)
Friday, 15 November, 12.00–7.00 p.m.
Saturday, 16 November, 11.00 a.m.–7.00 p.m.
Sunday, 17 November, 11.00 a.m.–7.00 p.m.

Admission with a ticket to Art Düsseldorf only.

ARTIST LIST

Tobias Zielony, Wu Tsang, Beatrice Gibson, Loretta Fahrenholz

RHINELAND INDEPENDENT
ART DÜSSELDORF

15 NOVEMBER 2019 – 17 NOVEMBER 2019

KAI 10 | ARTHENA FOUNDATION

LANGEN FOUNDATION

SAMMLUNG PHILARA

JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION

AT

ART DÜSSELDORF

BOOTH D01

Areal Böhler
Hansaallee 321

40549 Düsseldorf

Foundations and collections of modern and contemporary art based on private initiative play a vital role in enriching the diversity of the cultural landscape of public museums, institutions, and artist-run spaces in the Rhineland. Driven by passion and a belief in social responsibility, private initiatives establish self-funded exhibition spaces, initiate art fellowships, make donations and provide loans, act as sponsors, and finance new productions. Alongside the concentrated creation of unique collections of emerging as well as established art, they support artists’ careers and pursue an archival mission.

With Rhineland Independent, four of these initiatives will merge for the first time to jointly present their multifaceted programs and conceive new projects. The strength of this cooperation lies above all in the diversity, respective specialisation, and individual agenda of the given players. In the end, the multifarious institutional and thematic focuses mirror the diversity of a dynamic artistic discourse.

The cooperation will kick off with a presentation of the Guerrilla Girls at Art Düsseldorf. The project comprises a selection of ten large format posters created by the feminist collective between 1985 and 2018. Such posters have played an important role in the group’s appearances in public ever since their founding in 1985. Using a combination of researched facts, provocative images and striking messages, the works address the issue of gender bias, ethnical discrimination and other asymmetries of power in the scope of institutions, art history and the art market. During their actions – targeting among others politics, the film industry and popular culture – the activists wear gorilla masks; none of the artists speak on their own behalf. Based on this anonymity the focus shifts toward the topics of their work: widespread mechanisms of segregation within the art world, contributing until today to an art and cultural landscape dominated by male protagonists.

Admission with a ticket to Art Düsseldorf only.

OPENING HOURS

Thursday, 14 November, 4.00–8.00 p.m. (Opening)

Friday, 15 November, 12.00–7.00 p.m.

Saturday, 16 November, 11.00 a.m.–7.00 p.m.

Sunday, 17 November, 11.00 a.m.–7.00 p.m.

TIME KILLS
SESC, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

21 MARCH 2019 – 16 JUNE 2019

TIME KILLS – MOVING IMAGE FROM THE JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION features a selection of works from one of the most important collections of time-based art, started in 2007 by the collector Julia Stoschek and based in Berlin and Düsseldorf, Germany.

The exhibition brings together works in film and video by seventeen artists, spanning over six decades of audiovisual production focused on themes such as cultural history, race, gender identity, circulation of images in the media, and the role of artists in contemporary society. Self-representation and its strategies, such as self-portrait and the fictionalization of life, emerge in various works, functioning as a potential guiding thread and uniting productions in the exhibition, as well as appropriation, collection, and montage of images from other sources. These are two possible thematic trends running through the exhibit, serving as useful conceptual cores to navigate it, but which do not exhaust the possibilities of interpreting the works displayed and the relationships between them.

Borrowed for the title from one of the phrases aired by Chris Burden in a 1970s TV commercial, “time kills” is a truism, a phrase that states an undeniable truth. Time kills simply by passing, and there is nothing we can do about that or the veracity of the phrase. Nevertheless, it serves to activate other senses in the context of the exhibition. Time-based art relates to works of art produced in video, film, audio, or computerized technologies that unfold to viewers over time, with duration rather than space as their main dimension, unlike painting and sculpture (although duration is also an element of those two- or three-dimensional art forms). To collect time-based artworks, one must compress time in analog and digital media. Therefore, exhibiting them requires decompressing those time frames and creating different forms of spatialization, generating displaysof different lengths occurring simultaneously in a group show. In the case of this exhibit, adding up to ten hours, thirty-one and forty seconds (which viewers break down and recombine at will).

Historically, the development of video as an art form occurs in tandem with the spread of the electronic image and its interlacing with everyday life, irreversibly altering our perception of time and space. As early as the 1970s, the artist Hermine Freed described the phenomenon in the following terms: “We may question the quality of the TV product, but not dispute that it has changed our knowledge of time and space.” In other words, the impact of electronic media on our lives goes beyond how we judge it. Even more so in a context in which it is continuously changing, making us anxious to keep up and directly influencing the way capitalism affects our consumer desires and drives. The virtualization of our world experience and increasing temporal (hence subjective) compression are the context the artists must deal with to create their work. Thus, time not only kills passively, it kills a little more every second.

The exhibition comprises three halls for large-scale installations on the fifth floor displaying works by Arthur Jafa, Rachel Rose, and Monica Bonvicini, immersive spaces that offer time-based experiences isolated from their surroundings. Despite their striking differences, these three works, which “anchor” the first part of the exhibition, are all created from specific cultural contexts. Jafa composes an epic collage based on the visuality of Afro-American culture; Rose examines the chronology of a region and its connection with several layers of history; Bonvicini creates a choreographed dual screening that relates notions like gender and nostalgia. Around these spaces, in the circulation areas, other works establish new relationships with one another. Two recordings of performances from the 1970s, by Eleanor Antin and Hannah Wilke, both featuring the artist’s face as a stage for complex events, are screened opposite each other in a mirror game. In twin rooms, Hito Steyerl and Ryan Gander investigate the potential of their own images as material for the creation of their works. The works by Ulay and Lutz Bacher deal respectively with stolen paintings and appropriated photographs, lending new meaning to icons of art history and mass culture.

On the sixth floor, works by Douglas Gordon and Cyprien Gaillard are screened in a kind of diptych, referring to the landscape of corporate architecture around the building and revisiting the narcissistic role of images in the construction of urban icons. To render the exhibition’s temporality more flexible, four screening areas have been programmed for the lobby, with films by Barbara Hammer, Charles Atlas, Dan Graham, and Jack Smith, in a historical film library of sorts created especially for the exhibition. Finally, on the building’s fa.ade, the Fischli & Weiss video opens out to the city and its passersby, offering a break in the fast pace of Avenida Paulista.

Manipulation of time is one of the features used by the artists to deal with images, from recording to screening, including, naturally, editing. The curator who exhibits these works enjoys the same prerogative when positioning them in space — and in time.

Curated by Rodrigo Moura.

ARTIST LIST

Eleanor Antin, Charles Atlas, Lutz Bacher, Monica Bonvicini, Chris Burden, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Cyprien Gaillard, Ryan Gander, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Barbara Hammer, Arthur Jafa, Rachel Rose, Jack Smith, Hito Steyerl, Ulay, Hannah Wilke

TURN ON
TIME-BASED MEDIA ART FROM THE JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION
TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

31 MARCH 2015 – 29 AUGUST 2015

From 31 March until 29 August 2015 on the occassion of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel key works from the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION were presented in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition constituted the largest presentation of time-based media works in Israel. The exhibition title is borrowed from Adrian Paci’s 2004 work TURN ON, allowing multiple, ambiguous associations with actions ranging from switching on, operating, and lighting to igniting, provoking, and titillating.

As a whole, the collection centers contemporaneity as an active engagement with the here and now. True to this emphasis, this exhibition focuses on the contemporary part of the collection. The works featured in TURN ON were created in the last decade, in which technology-based media have developed at a dizzying speed. This is reflected in an astonishing variety of media-based art, showcased in the exhibition via 22 works by 17 artists.

These range from performative and theatrical elements in the works to different means of narration. Many of the works relate to animation in all meanings of the word: Ed Atkins’ computer-animated, poetic avatars as alter egos in a fragmented, studio-inspired world, Nathalie Djurberg’s and Hans Berg’s animated and orchestrated manic puppetry.

More than half of the artists featured in the exhibition are women. This female presence introduces into the exhibition aspects concerning gender, sexuality, and female identity, while accentuating the existential questions underlying the works in the exhibition as a whole. Implicit subtexts of power struggles – between the sexes, between the individual and society, and between different creative traditions – are present throughout, resulting in an exhibition that is contemplative, seductive and reflective.

The works were displayed as installations that relate to the museum space as a sculptural sphere, presenting the video projections as distinct artistic experiences composed of image, movement, sound, space, and time. They present and reflect incommensurability and simultaneity as characteristics of our time, as well as revealing a museum space that accommodates itself to the unique qualities of the projected medium.

Curated by Ruth Direktor.

This exhibition was developed in close collaboration with the JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION e.V.

The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, Tambour LTD, Goethe Institute Tel Aviv, and marking 50 years of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany.

ARTIST LIST

Marina Abramović, Ed Atkins, Johanna Billing, Monica Bonvicini, Paul Chan, Keren Cytter, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Jesper Just, Klara Lidén, Helen Marten, Adrian Paci, Seth Price, Christoph Schlingensief, STURTEVANT, Mathilde ter Heijne, Andro Wekua

THE NEW HUMAN
MODERNA MUSEET, MALMÖ, SWEDEN
MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

14 MARCH 2015 – 4 DECEMBER 2016

THE NEW HUMAN – YOU AND I IN GLOBAL WONDERLAND

MODERNA MUSEET MALMÖ

14 MARCH – 18 OCTOBER 2015

THE NEW HUMAN – KNOCK, KNOCK, IS ANYONE HOME?

MODERNA MUSEET MALMÖ

27 FEBRUARY – 4 SEPTEMBER 2016

THE NEW HUMAN

MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM

21 MAY – 4 DECEMBER 2016

THE NEW HUMAN is a video-based exhibition project that artistically explores feelings of uncertainty, frustration, fear, bewilderment and confusion about the human condition today. It also gives a glimpse of some imagined scenarios of our future. The project has been made possible through a substantial collaboration between Moderna Museet Malmö and the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf. The work presented in the project has been produced since the turn of the last millennium and spans from seminal contemporary classics to very recent productions. At Moderna Museet Malmö, THE NEW HUMAN will be presented in two extensive chapters, each with a different focus and subtitle: YOU AND I IN GLOBAL WONDERLAND (2015) and KNOCK, KNOCK, IS ANYONE AT HOME? (2016). A further chapter will thereafter be presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2016).

YOU AND I IN GLOBAL WONDERLAND will focus on how we look at and interact with one another as human beings in a new world. We’ll get to share experiences of gigantic transformation and human migration brought on by war, climate change, and economic globalization. There will be works that explore the growing xenophobia, extremism and religious fundamentalism of our time, and others that remind us of the colonial past and how it continues to affect the way we live together as humans today. As an exhibition, YOU AND I IN GLOBAL WONDERLAND may convey a longing for something lost—perhaps an earlier life ruined by war—but it will also present us with feelings of bewilderment, tenderness, disorientation and comedy that arise from confrontations between different cultures, languages and lifestyles.

KNOCK, KNOCK, IS ANYONE HOME? will catapult us into a virtual universe of hyper-real avatars and parallel worlds. In this chapter we’ll encounter human-looking characters that appear to have mutated with communication technologies and capitalist strategies to become something Other, something that on the surface looks human but is fundamentally nonhuman. A number of works in this chapter seem to point towards a shift—perhaps a devolution of mankind, or a transformation into something new. We here enter worlds in which the semantic order seems to implode and we find that language no longer connects to what we see. Known categories dissolve and disparate objects and materials seem to fuse and melt into one another. New amalgamations are being formed and a future human existence appears fundamentally uncertain.

Curated by Joa Ljungberg, Moderna Museet Malmö.

ARTIST LIST

Ed Atkins, Trisha Baga, Yael Bartana, Robert Boyd, Loulou Cherinet, Ioana Cojocario, Cao Fei, Esra Ersen, Isaac Julien, Helen Marten, Santiago Mostyn, Adrian Paci, Tomáš Rafa, Mika Rottenberg, Frances Stark, Ryan Trecartin, Ferhat Özgür

HIGH PERFORMANCE
TIME-BASED MEDIA ART SINCE 1996
ZKM | ZENTRUM FÜR KUNST UND MEDIEN, KARLSRUHE, GERMANY

16 MARCH 2014 – 22 JUNE 2014

JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION presented key works from its collection of time-based media art at the ZKM | Karlsruhe in the exhibition HIGH PERFORMANCE. TIME-BASED MEDIA ART SINCE 1996. With large-format video works and films as well as multi-channel installations, the exhibition demonstrates conclusively how video art as an artistic medium has lost none of its power in the 50 years of its existence.

Inspired by the risky maneuvers of a Chris Burden, in his video piece HIGH PERFORMANCE (2000) artist Aaron Young documents a motorbike rider who engages his front brake and burns rubber with his back wheel onto the concrete floor of the studio. Clouds of smoke that rise up from the friction slowly blur the scene. In this creative, high-powered performance a destructive act melds with creative violence to form a threatening contradiction, with man and machine coming up against their limits to the point of complete disappearance. Painting, sculpture and sound are quite radically manifested in this admixture of roaring high speed and groaning standstill.

With over 50 key works from the fields of „Body and Soul“, „Public Space“, „Environment“ and „Virtual Reality“, the exhibition, which covers 3,500 square meters and thus the entire ground floor of ZKM | Medienmuseum offers a close look into the evolution of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION since 1996.

Moreover, there is also an extensive compilation of the most important performances that have taken place in the collection’s domicile in Düsseldorf.

With this extraordinary exhibition, the ZKM is continuing its tradition of major panoramic shows on video art.

Curated by Bernhard Serexhe and Julia Stoschek.

ARTIST LIST

Doug Aitken, Francis Alÿs, Ed Atkins, Allora & Calzadilla, Trisha Baga, John Bock, Monica Bonvicini, Robert Boyd, Matthew Buckingham, Paul Chan, Keren Cytter, Simon Denny, Cyprien Gaillard, Christian Jankowski, Jesper Just, Mike Kelley, Klara Lidén, Helen Marten, Tony Oursler, Mika Rottenberg, Mathilde ter Heijne, Ryan Trecartin, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Andro Wekua, Aaron Young, Tobias Zielony

I WANT TO SEE HOW YOU SEE
DEICHTORHALLEN, HAMBURG, GERMANY

16 APRIL 2010 – 25 JULY 2010

For the first time world-wide, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION was on show in a museum context and outside the private home of the collector in Düsseldorf. As of 16 April 2010 across a total space of over 2,000 sq. m. works by over 50 artists from this very young private collection were on display in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.

The exhibition title of I WANT TO SEE HOW YOU SEE is taken from the work of the same name by Pipilotti Rist (2003). The exhibition will focus on pieces on film and video, as is the case for the entire Julia Stoschek Collection. They are rounded out by sculptures (e.g., by Nandipha Mntambo), photographic works (e.g., by Thomas Demand, Taryn Simon, Thomas Ruff) and installations (e.g., by Jeppe Hein).

The exhibition takes up the Deichtorhallen tradition of presenting major collections. In this case, the collection is one of the most important sets of media-influenced art in Germany, something no doubt related to the age of the collector (34). At the same time, the show links back to the Fire, Earth, Water, Air exhibition, organized at the Deichtorhallen in 1993 as part of the Mediale and the first display of media-influenced art at the Deichtorhallen.

The exhibition at the Deichtorhallen will feature some classics of video art, such as Marina Abramovic’s Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful dating from 1975-6, Vito Acconci’s Openings (1970) and Chris Burdens Shoot (1971), but the majority of the works were produced since 2000. They range from more lyrical pieces such as Heike Baranowsky’s Mondfahrt via elaborately animated films like Björk’s Wanderlust in 3D through to marvelous installations such as those by Monica Bonvicini, Anthony McCall and Nathalie Djurberg.

ARTIST LIST

Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Pep Agut, Peggy Ahwesh, Doug Aitken, Eleanor Antin, Heike Baranowsky, Lynda Benglis, Walead Beshty, Björk, Encyclopedia Pictura & Björk, Monica Bonvicini, Robert Boyd, Chris Burden, Jeff Burton, Matt Calderwood, Paul Chan, Patty Chang, Thomas Demand, Jen DeNike, Nathalie Djurberg, Claus Föttinger, Douglas Gordon, Cao Guimarães, Andreas Gursky, Jeppe Hein, Christian Jankowski, Isaac Julien, Terence Koh, Klara Lidén, Gordon Matta-Clark, Anthony McCall, Adam McEwen, Alex McQuilkin, Nandipha Mntambo, Lutz Mommartz, Bruce Nauman, Carsten Nicolai, Tony Oursler, Paul Pfeiffer, Rob Pruitt, Pipilotti Rist, Aura Rosenberg, Martha Rosler, Mika Rottenberg, Thomas Ruff, Christoph Schlingensief, Carolee Schneemann, Taryn Simon, Wolfgang Tillmans, Steina Vasulka, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Franz West, Hannah Wilke, Aaron Young

RHINE ON THE DNIPRO
JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION/ANDREAS GURSKY
PINCHUK ART CENTRE, KIEV, UKRAINE

28 SEPTEMBER 2008 – 14 DECEMBER 2008

The fascination for the treatment of present-day reality in digital pictures and music is a binding force between the collector Julia Stoschek, the artist Andreas Gursky and the band KRAFTWERK, currently made up of Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz.

From 28 September until 14 December 2008 the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev presented an exhibition combining these three disciplines for the first time as part of Ukraine’s Deutsche Kulturwochen (festival of German culture).

Julia Stoschek, who opened her private collection of contemporary art focusing on new media last year, will be exhibiting 19 pieces that offer a cross section of her first exhibition in Duesseldorf, NUMBER ONE: DESTROY, SHE SAID.

Deconstruction/construction is the central theme behind the exhibition, which contrasts classical positions from the early days of video art, represented in pieces by artists such as Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman, with the work of contemporary artists like Christian Jankowski and Robert Boyd.

Andreas Gursky is known across the globe for his monumental photography in which he reconstructs reality using digitally manipulated images. The exhibition offers an overview of Gursky’s oeuvre to date, bringing together early pieces with his current work to create an exciting analysis of the contemporary world.

The musicians behind the German group KRAFTWERK are considered pioneers of electronic music and their work has influenced countless musical styles such as synth pop, electro funk and Detroit techno.

The festive opening of the exhibition, entitled Julia Stoschek/Andreas Gursky/KRAFTWERK took place on 27 September 2008 in the PinchukArtCentre, Followed by a live performance of KRAFTWERK in the Arena complex.

ARTIST LIST

Doug Aitken, Monica Bonvicini, Robert Boyd, Kate Gilmore, Manuel Graf, Christian Jankowski, Mark Leckey, Klara Lidén, Gordon Matta-Clark, Anthony McCall, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley, Robert Smithson, Aaron Young

VIDEO KOOP
KIT – KUNST IM TUNNEL, DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY

3 MAY 2008 – 27 JULY 2008

VIDEO KOOP was an exhibition project in the KIT which came into being through an invitation to Julia Stoschek. Julia Stoschek, the initiator of the JUST scholarship and founder of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, presents six artists in the VIDEO KOOP context, most of whom come from Duesseldorf and work chiefly with film, video, and installations.

Christiane Fochtmann, Andreas Bunte, Manuel Graf, Andreas Korte, Bianca Voss and Jan Wagner develop artistic positions that address the history of art and culture, everyday events and poetry in the media of film and music. The presentation of their works is in interesting contrast to the architecture of the KIT.

The entrée is provided by Bianca Voss with her work Seagulls (2008). With reference to the exterior of the KIT, it shows the seagulls that swarm past on the banks of the Rhine, plummeting greedily to earth to snap up the food the artist has strewn.

Christiane Fochtmann plays with a humorous interaction between image and sound. The work Flower Power (2006), for example, shows flower buds opening and closing in fast motion to the sound of snoring.

The Driver (2004) by Andreas Korte plays inside a parking building. A person facing away from the viewer is moving towards the exit. Camerawork and distorted sounds create an atmosphere of primeval fear, turning the viewer into an involuntary pursuer.

In La Fée Electricité, Andreas Bunter tells the story of electricity in a poetic, almost old-fashioned manner. The 16mm, black-and-white film has the aesthetic quality of the silent films from the beginnings of cinematic history.

Persistent ideas and the universality of the language of architecture are the themes in the work of Manuel Graf. 1000 Years are a Day (2005) shows an interior from the 1960s: a stylish record player in the foreground plays excerpts from the song of the same name by Udo Jürgens. A wild, colourful pictorial history of architecture begins to the rhythm of the music.

Jan Wagner’s two-channel installation Of the Soul Four (2005) is a precise staging that creates a spatial mood in the observer through sculptural elements and the use of rough cloth. In addition, small lines of text irritate the eye. Andreas Korte and Christiane Fochtmann will also each be presenting a new work, and five further artists are showing their works in a film programme in the KIT Blackbox.

To accompany the exhibition an issue (02/08) of the Lido magazine has been published.

ARTIST LIST

Andreas Bunte, Christiane Fochtmann, Manuel Graf, Andreas Korte, Bianca Voss, Jan Wagner