Monthly Archive: March 2024

Re/Opening the DAAD Archives

IF THE BERLIN WIND BLOWS MY FLAG: ART AND INTERNATIONALISM BEFORE THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL AT DAADGALERIE, N.B.K., AND GALERIE IM KÖRNERPARK, SEPTEMBER 9, 2023 – JANUARY 14, 2024   

The exact aim of the large-scale, three-site exhibition, When the Berlin Wind Blows My Flag: Art and Internationalism Before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, is difficult to define. The first sentence of the exhibition’s introductory text promised to offer insight “into the history of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (Berliner Künstlerprogramm—BKP)” and through that “the art scene in West Berlin before the Wall came down.” Based on this promise, … Read more

Photography: The Lingua Franca of Performance Art?

As Michelle Henning points out in her book Photography: The Unfettered Image (2018), “from its inception, photography was a means to set images free, to allow them to go traveling, to transfer, to be projected, translated, fragmented, reconstituted and reversed, to be reimagined and re-embodied.”(Michelle Henning, Photography: The Unfettered Image (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. xi.) How does this perspective contribute to understanding the medium beyond its treatment in art museums, which usually emphasize uniqueness and authorship? How does highlighting the concept of images as “migratory, journeying, wandering and vagabond”(Henning, p. 8.) alter our approach towards … Read more

Personal Witnesses

Illiberal Lives, at Ludwig Forum Aachen, April 22, 2023 – September 10, 2023

The group exhibition Illiberal Lives contributes to a rich and provocative debate on art both as a subject and object of liberal market logic. It is curated by Eva Birkenstock, Anselm Franke, Holger Otten and Kerstin Stakemeier, with works by Pauline Curnier Jardin, Johanna Hedva, Ho Rui An, Blaise Kirschner, Jota Mombaça, Henrike Naumann, Melika Ngombe Kolongo, Bassem Saad, Mikołaj Sobczak, and Jordan Strafer. A unique aspect of this exhibition is that the artists, alongside the curators, have worked with the permanent collection and selected works that … Read more