KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present its Fall Program of 2023, which continues to explore the complexities of (self)representation. In her first major retrospective, Coco Fusco questions institutional infrastructures that condition the presentation, circulation, and value production of art, while Kameelah Janan Rasheed, recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, aims to bridge the gap between politics and poetry through the materiality and legibility of text. The exhibition SKIN IN THE GAME presents seminal prototypes from the personal archives of Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Andrea Zittel by focusing on the moment of professional and existential emancipation in which they threw their ‘skin in the game’, and gave their all to art.
For more information visit www.kw-berlin.de
Coco Fusco Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island
14 September 2023 – 7 January 2024
Curators: Anna Gritz, Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken
Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is the first major retrospective of CubanAmerican artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, US). For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on the contemporary art discourse in Germany and the world. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.
With her work, Fusco questions institutional infrastructures that condition the presentation, circulation, and value production of art as well as the visual culture at large. She further examines the ongoing effects of colonial power and imperial forces, which makes a large survey of her work highly relevant in light of timely political and cultural debates in Germany. KW honors the complexity and multidisciplinarity of Fusco’s writing, activism, and performative work with a varied public program. In addition to a series of talks organized together with ICI Berlin, KW commissioned Fusco to create a new multimedia-performance, which will be staged in collaboration with Sophiensaele early December 2023.
Parallel to the exhibition at KW, an extensive, eponymous monograph of Fusco’s work will be published by Thames & Hudson with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Anna Gritz, Jill Lane, Antonio José Ponte, and the artist herself.
The exhibition at KW is funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) is funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (German Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media). Media partner: ARTE
Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2022: Kameelah Janan Rasheed
in the coherence, we weep
14 September 2023 – 7 January 2024
Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, US) is the 2022 recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research.
In their work, Rasheed focuses on the materiality and legibility of text, writing and language as well as the potential of intermedial translation. They search for methods that allow us to grasp meanings anew and explore the question of how we read and how we ourselves want to be read and understood. To this end, Rasheed deconstructs and reconstructs the meaning of literary and scientific texts by experimenting, for example, with factors such as syntax and punctuation, but also with the connotation and size of individual words. By constantly reworking text, they bridge the gap between politics and poetry in order to explore inherent complexities and shifts within the meaning of language in order to reveal its scope of possibility.
3/4 The presentation of Rasheed’s artistic work at KW is their first major institutional solo exhibition in Berlin. Both the exhibition and its accompanying publication interlace with Rasheed’s methodology, which explores indexical space, revision through annotation, as well as its blurring and layering of knowledge and learning.
The Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research has grown out of the Schering Stiftung Art Award, which was awarded biannually to international artists between 2005 and 2018. In 2019, the award was redesigned together with the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community. The 2022 edition of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research is the seventh time that Schering Stiftung has collaborated with KW.
SKIN IN THE GAME
Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Andrea Zittel
14 September 2023 – 7 January 2024
Curator: Clémentine Deliss
Curatorial Assistant: Nikolas Brummer
Exhibition Choreography: Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Clémentine Deliss
Metabolic Furniture: Diane Hillebrand
Metabolic Museum–University Program: Christina Scheib
SKIN IN THE GAME presents seminal prototypes from the personal archives of internationally acclaimed artists, dating back to the 1980s and crossing over into the present. The exhibits include experiments never previously shown, from paintings to sculptures, to banners, video performances, photographs, collages, drawings, books, and concept notes. The works focus on that moment of professional and existential emancipation when these artists threw their skin in the game, and gave their all to art.
These prototypes become the generative organs of an ongoing body of work, a series of unfinished inquiries that return, and are explored, at different moments throughout a lifetime. Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, and Joëlle Tuerlinckx are complimenting early prototypes with new productions for this exhibition. A choreography devised in collaboration with Joëlle Tuerlinckx takes over remnants of the previous exhibition at KW on the 3rd floor, exploring not only the constructive dialogue between artists and their works but also conditions of “neighborly dislike”.
The Public Program NERVES, BREATH, MUSCLES, BLOOD implements exercises and methods of the Metabolic Museum–University (MM–U), developed by Clémentine Deliss at different locations since 2015 (The Metabolic Museum, Hatje Cantz/KW, 2020). MM–U is a curatorial platform that experiments with existing collections as prototypes for open-ended inquiry and transdisciplinary exercises. The program will take place both within the exhibition and online through www.mm-u.online (to be launched in September). The publication, SKIN IN THE GAME. Conversations with Artists on Risk and Contention (Hatje Cantz/KW) will be launched in November 2023.
