Opening: Friday August 18, from 7pm Exhibition: August 19 – September 17 visit by appointment: mailto@after-the-butcher.de or +49 178 3298 106
This exhibition brings together two artistic voices in an attempt to neither emphasise nor deny clearly existing differences in form and content. Romain Löser and Wendelien van Oldenborgh belong to different generations, and when it comes to measuring possible harmonies or dissonances between their artistic practices, it is easy to see that both work mostly in different media, each with their own themes, techniques and conceptions of the public. Nevertheless, their joint appearance at after the butcher does not merely reveal vague professional sympathies or interests. Anyone who takes a serious look at the works by both artists shown here in spatial interlocking, can see a comparability in the movements with which they treat the sharp complexities in the contradictions they each convey.
The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Clemens Krümmel:
During the opening on 18 August, Lina Campanella performed Clemens Krümmel’s text, producing hiphop and gabber beats that refer to van Oldenborgh’s film and the contrasts and polyphony of both artists’ works.
The exhibition ENCORE UN EFFORT _2023_ AN EFFORT AGAIN brings together various works from the two artists’ ongoing artistic processes.
Katharina Karrenberg’s work deals in depth with manifestations of structural and social violence. She reflects on these structures of violence as a fundamental condition of current, capitalist power, both multinational corporations and state power apparatuses such as the military, police and secret services…, they camouflage themselves, are permanently present, yet often invisible, are maintained biopolitically, then again visible by their disguises, uniforms and embody “the state-sanctioned, group-differentiated susceptibility to premature death” (after Ruth Wilson Gilmores). Structures of violence do not lie around somewhere inaccessible and unchanging, but actively intervene in our daily dealings with people, animals and things and are thus also actively changeable. With her works, Katharina Karrenberg develops a radical critique of these omnipresent relations of violence, of various –[un]visible, concealed but also performative approaches and forms of repression and open death violence. The exhibits simultaneously reflect their mutual otherness–their abstraction, their concretion and their respective specific materials, in which the hostile coldness of neo-capitalist relations becomes tangible.
Olivier Guesselé-Garai develops a very personal artistic language in which social questions are subtly negotiated. He examines an everyday object, such as the refrigerator, by disassembling and reassembling it, questioning its function and structural qualities, discovering abstract parts and forms that were previously hidden, so to speak. It is a playful process and at the same time Olivier Guesselé-Garai also understands the artistic work as a form of resistance, where the affirmation of being through consciousness and its quiet strength uses poetry, joy and love to invite us together and above all in otherness to reflect on our world.
after the butcher is a project space by artists for artists. Those invited to do a show will be asked to develop a work for this space. The showroom will be an opportunity and platform to present work of not so well-known artists. We are very much looking forward to a good collaboration with the artists and other cultural laborers in Berlin. [MORE]
Spittastr. 25, 10317 Berlin open by appointment or at events
After The Butcher, showroom for contemporary art and social issues, is happy to invite you and your friends to a performance of American artist Jeremiah Day, marking the 20th anniversary of the largest protests in human history on 15 February 2003.
Both the largest gathering of people in political action in one place, Rome, and as well the largest coordination of people internationally assembled in opposition to the US-plans to invade Iraq. 15 million people in the streets of 800 cities on every continent participated.
The World Social Forum and thousands of anti-war initiatives paved the way for this action, whose meaning cannot be limited to its usefulness.
The democratic protest against the US government and its war coalition did not prevent the war, which unfolded in violation of international law. This war marks a corner stone in recent political history. It has brought neither democracy to Iraq nor peace to the Gulf region; on the contrary, it has fuelled radical Islamism, increased social contradictions in the region and triggered new refugee movements. The seeming acceptance of this aggression also bears greatly on other violations of international law that followed in the years after, those today – as in Ukraine, and those potentially to come.
The Exhibition Aggregatzustände will be open after the Performance until 10pm
*Sharing as Caring is a project that reflects on the current conditions of nuclear presence in planetary perspective. The project began in 2012 with a series of small-scale exhibitions. It explores the political, economic, psychological and personal longings associated with nuclear presence.
Jamila Barakat, Mengna Tan, Eva Ďurovec and Nikita Kadan
Opening Friday, April 1, from 7 pm
Exhibition: April, 2 – May, 15 2022
Finissage: Sunday, May 15, from 3-6pm
Open by appointment: mailto@after-the-butcher.de or +49 178 3298 106 30 April, 6pm: Book Launch „New Mind Mapping Forms“ by Eva Ďurovec
In the exhibition rooms, please keep your distance and wear mouth and nose masks.
After the Butcher, Showroom for Contemporary Art and Social Issues is happy to present its next exhibition “String Figures” with artists Jamila Barakat, Mengna Tan, Eva Ďurovec and Nikita Kadan.
In Donna Haraways “Staying With The Trouble“, one figure is omnipresent: SF. This figuration seems to be more than just an abbreviation. It seems to be a subject that opens up different opportunities and methods, thought experiments and common practices of exchange and interaction. Cross-species practices that sometimes work, sometimes fail, are active and sometimes stay still. Like string figures, they propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth. Haraway describes the figure with the letters SF that can be: Science Fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far…
“I think of sf and string figures in a triple sense of figuring. First, promiscuously plucking out fibers in clotted and dense events and practices, I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times.” D.H.
By playing string figures, new patterns or images are formed that reveal new entanglements and interconnections.
In the exhibition “String figures” the artists are tracing SF by working, failing and exploring themes and contexts of speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science fiction and so far… A dialogue with each other begins, connections with each other emerge. While we prepare this exhibition the Russian regime under Putin launched its war against Ukraine. For this reason we decided to pick up another thread: we invited the Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan (he has to protect himself in Kiev against Russian bombing) to join the exhibition. We are happy to be able to show two of his wonderful charcoal drawings from the series „Minsk Masks“ in String Figures*). In this respect, SF may also be read as a sign against war: stay friends or seid friedlich (be peaceful) instead of Strike Forces.
*) Nikita Kadan writes: “I found these ‘masks’ in ornaments on the ceiling of the Minska station of the Kyiv Metro since I was six years old. They were really scary, and I felt that I could always find new ones. The ornamental composition “Tree of Life”, based on Belarusian folk ornaments, was created by the artists Stepan and Vasyl Khymochka in 1982, the year I was born. Much later I found out that Belarus was historically associated with a partisan movement – these associations can give new meaning to the camouflaged faces hidden among the floral motifs.” These drawings are very topical in that metro stations such as Minska station in Kiev at the moment serve as shelters from Russian shelling and bombardment….
