Everyone an Island After All? is an approach to public space based on the images that shape it. These images are, on the one hand, presented to us by the public space, but at the same time and through interaction, they are also the (world) images with which we enter such spaces. They are shaped by inclusion and exclusion, structures of power and violence, consumption, history(-ies) and representation. Since May 2023, Everyone an Island After All? as an exhibition, research, and series of talks, has been pursuing the images we can (could) imagine instead and thus also the self-critical question: which society for Current Art?
Ever since art in public space was anchored in Bremen in 1973 as a Senate program replacing art on buildings, it has been asking the question: What role does it play in public spaces and their social, political and planning contexts? The answers and the way they are dealt with are just as much in flux as the public space and are sometimes more, sometimes less (self-)critical. The projects that GAK has realized irregularly in, for and as public space since 1998 also refer to this with different emphases. In the first part of Everyone an Island After All? in May and June 2023, the focus was on No Man is an Island (2003), to which the title refers. In the current second part, contributions to A Lucky Strike. Art Takes Place (2005) complement the exhibition. In this way we approach the history of GAK, the city and how art can take place in it as a public practice.
In May and June 2023, as part of Part 1, the Berliner Hefte zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der Stadt were guests and spoke about the financialization of the city, about the gathering of knowledge, its sharing and publication, and which strategies for action can be derived from this in order to reclaim the city. Elena Ishchenko gave a lecture on colonial monuments and counter-monuments as a form of dealing with them. Art and its institutions as levers for concretely changing political concepts and the social and media judgments associated with them were the subject of Suzanne Lacy’s and Alistair Hudson’s exchange. In the exhibition we show excerpts from these contributions and continue with the events called Dialogue Series – see dates below.
The exhibition brings together five female artists who can be considered under the common keyword of representation which has already been mentioned above.
The series Blumensprengungen by Annette Wehrmann (1961-2010) was created in the 1990s. The title of the conceptual action, together with the photographic documentation, tells already everything. In her work between concept and action, Wehrmann humorously and performatively dealt with the city, society, its norms and its order.
Chris Reinecke (*1936, lives in Düsseldorf) has dealt with her surroundings, with social conditions and processes since the beginning. These principles also underlie her current works, in which she explores the image intensively, or rather the images, their emergence and their disintegration. Her work is always in process. She reworks, reorganizes, cuts up and reassembles them as cartographies of the perceived.
Sonia Gomes (*1948, lives in Sao Paulo) also assembles and interweaves in her works, but in a very different way: Each material tells its own story, the elements together then another, yet without fitting into a linear unity. The works, which are gathered here as a print edition, are based on books that can be leafed through and experienced in a materially diverse way, in which she interweaves fairy tales, for example Snow White by the Brothers Grimm, with her identity as a black, Brazilian artist.
For her sci-fi dystopia Loretta Fahrenholz (*1981, lives in Berlin) filmed with the Ringmasters Crew from New York. Their specific dance style of “flexing”, “bone-breaking”, “pauzing” and “connecting” determines the choreography developed by the crew in a post-catastrophic urban space: Hurricane Sandy had just hit New York and finds its way into the film as a literal, documentary reality along with an apocalyptic computer game aesthetic and everyday, violent experiences. In dialogue with the cinematic eye, the crew members raise questions about what memories and experiences move their bodies and lead to the equally fragile and brutal dance style.
Very different, but also based on dance, is the film Pivot by Tarona (*1985 Curaçao, lives in Rotterdam). In films, the gaze plays a specific role and often leads to a representation that is shaped and attributed in a certain way. This is where Tarona starts to develop a self-determined representation, a self-determined space and also a self-determined temporality: the video image slows down more and more over time.
The dialogues consist of private or public meetings and conversations between a group of artists from Bremen and external guests. Considerations that play a role in the design of these meetings are the relationship between host and guest, a shared strangeness and different forms of movement. Furthermore, the focus of each meeting is different. The GAK’s invitation to the artists was open and without expectation of an immediate output or product.
Exhibition: Loretta Fahrenholz, Sonia Gomes, Chris Reinecke, Tarona, Annette Wehrmann
Dialogues: Hodan-Ali Farah, Aria Farajnezhad, Anneli Käsmayr, Till Krause, Effrosyni Kontogeorgou, Bubu Mosiashvili, Nyabinghi Lab, Claudia Piepenbrock, Tim Reinecke, Dana Reina Téllez, Tropez, Doris Weinberger
Events
Thu, 07. 09., 18-21 h
Käsmayr, Krause & Weinberger
In the Bürgerpark
Walking, Talking, Eating, Listening
> Group size limited, registration at GAK required
Fri, 08.09., 19 h
Doch alle eine Insel? (Teil II)
Eröffnung
Thu, 21.09., 17-20 h
Hodan-Ali Farah & Dana Reina Téllez + Nyabinghi Lab (Saskia Köbschall, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro)
Weaving Roots: a loud and silent conversation/walk around (urban) space, colonial past, movement, decoloniality and the imaginal
> No registration required, please be at the meeting point on time
Thu, 28.09., 16-18 h
Sophie Boysen (Tropez, Berlin), Effrosyni Kontogeorgou, Doris Weinberger
Hal över Tropez
Conversation, movement and game on bathing place as heterotopia, body cultures, ruptures of everyday life and art as part of leisure
> Group size limited, registration at GAK required
Thu, 02.11., 18:30 h
Curator’s tour with Annette Hans
Support
Der Senator für Kultur der Freien Hansestadt Bremen