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Christian Diaz Orejarena, re-existencia Hellersdorf, 2022 (film still) © Christian Diaz Orejarena & rampe:aktion
Realities Left Vacant
Mar 11, 2023 – May 7, 2023
Artists: Nadja Abt, Tekla Aslanishvili, Marianna Christofides, Silvina Der Meguerditchian, Christian Diaz Orejarena, Sofia Duchovny, Ahu Dural, Cornelia Herfurtner, Göksu Kunak, Isaiah Lopaz, Alina Schmuch
Curators: Layla Burger-Lichtenstein, Arkadij Koscheew
Realities Left Vacant presents works by the 11 international artists awarded the 2022 visual arts work stipend of the Berlin Senate. The exhibition shows the diversity of their individual artistic approaches while highlighting the broader social issues and contemporary image politics that shape them.
Realities Left Vacant brings together works that explore the infrastructures of seeing and experiencing. They critically examine habits of seeing that shape our perception, as well as material and immaterial structures that play host to both coexistence and conflict. For the artists of Realities Left Vacant, these conditions are always politically informed.
The artworks address questions of origin, belonging, and the relationship between collective and individual memory and investigate the influence of geopolitical conflicts and the global climate crisis on access to infrastructures. Drawing on documentary and investigative practices, archive-based research, biographical narratives, and the image politics permeating the mass media, they call for an engagement with power structures, colonial legacies, and mechanisms of value creation.
The title of this exhibition is borrowed from a line in the song The Question Is to See It All (2021) by the US band Darkside. Realities Left Vacant thus acts as a framework uniting the works of these 11 artists, who, while acting individually, nevertheless pursue a common understanding that reality can be manipulated.
Discourse program
Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 7 pm
Radical Futurisms. Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come
Book presentation and discussion with T.J. Demos (Professor in Art History and Visual Culture, University of California Santa Cruz)
In English
From Tuesday, April 4, 2023
Online panel discussion with Gustav Cederlöf (Environmental Geographer, Lecturer, University of Gothenburg), Sepideh Karami (Architect, Lecturer, The University of Edinburgh), and Ute Tellmann (Professor for General Sociology, Technical University of Darmstadt), moderated by Keller Easterling (Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture, Yale University, New Haven / USA)
In English
The exhibition as well as the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k. gGmbH are funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
