Category: self-authored

spent the day with the lovely veronika hykova, a curator at temporary space berlin and a lover of contemporary art <3

first stop somos where we met/had discussions with three brilliant artists/curators doing their art residencies:

Suu Myint Thein, is a sculptor, performance artist, educator, and curator from Myanmar. As the deteriorating political situation is affecting artists greatly, Suu currently participates in a special artist at-risk residency, supported by SomoS and the Goethe Institute Myanmar, developing new performance work and paintings.

Nicole Beck is a Hong Kong-raised, Sydney-based curator. She is developing Take Two, an exhibition connecting local artists to explore the potential of reenactment as a way to reflect the past.

Isabella Chydenius (b.1988), is an interdisciplinary Helsinki-based Finnish artist investigating societal structures, with a focus on femininity as applied to all genders, and its relation to safety and violence.

so inspiring to dive into their art practice and work.

what stood out at the berlin biennale: exile is a hard job by nil yalter, maithu bùi’s mathuat – MMRBX, a video installation based on a virtual reality game, and asim abdulaziz’s 1941.

‘Asim Abdulaziz is a visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. His emerging practice explores the psychoaffective implications of living in a country ravaged by ongoing war. The photographic series Homesick (2020), for example, depicts Yemeni women in destroyed interiors, the title suggesting both a yearning to return to a time before the war as well as the morbid estrangement of living among the ceaseless ruins that are product of the conflict.

The short experimental film 1941 (2021) explores the sense of disorientation and alienation experienced by Yemenis. After learning that knitting was a significant way for women in the United States to participate in the war effort during World War II, Abdulaziz was struck by how, in contemporary Yemen, knitting as an act of solidarity in a time of war would seem entirely absurd. The repetitive nature of the hand movement guiding the needles and stitching the wool thread distracts one from pondering the past and future, locking the knitter into a timeless present. By staging the practice in Yemen, Abdulaziz draws an embodied metaphor around the quotidian experience of war—captive to the logic of survival—that inhibits projecting oneself into a future of self-realization. Moreover, in a gender role reversal that further accentuates the strangeness of implementing this action in Yemen, the artist cast ten men of different generations and filmed them knitting with red wool inside one of Aden’s historical landmarks: a Hindu temple long abandoned to decay. He disrobed them—the men are shirtless, a provocative gesture in a prudish culture, which underlines the act’s absurdity. 1941 is an eloquent and compelling poetic meditation on war’s prohibition of claiming agency over time and self.’

the venice biennale at the KW institute of contemporary art – photography and a long term relationship with a romani family, footage of the algerian liberation army from 1959-1962, music inspired by moroccan rug patterns, a performance by zuzanna hertzberg about the resistance of women during the shoah, african women, slavery, seeds and the need to plant/regenerate life, ‘vomit girl’ about the trauma of the vietnam war