Mickael Marman, Dylan Spaysky and Sigmar Polke
Vulture

What are we looking for when we want to see art, even though we haven’t adequately finished our daily work tasks? Can art distract us without judging our limitations in pretending that a life with time for art is possible for everyone?

Art and life might be one, and it might offer a very free form of expression, and its appearance may empower our will and aspiration. In one way or another, we only enjoy art that builds bridges to our own skills and knowledge.

Exhibition Text
Floorplan

Kunst wie perfekte Kadaver (taz)

Re-Memorizing Black Lesbian Legacies

Panel Talk: Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Birgit Bosold
Friday 12 Sep.  8pm

Scherben invites you to the panel talk with Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Birgit Bosold “Re-Memorizing Black Lesbian Legacies” happening on Friday September 12 at 8pm at Scherben. 

As part of the exhibition series Lesbian Legacies, artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden and curator Birgit Bosold discuss ›Black Queer Genealogy‹ and the artistic engagement with and against the silence of the archives. The point of departure is McClodden’s current work Sleight of Figure [For Gladys] (2024), an impressive homage to the legendary performer Gladys Bentley, whose legacy has been largely erased. At the heart of the conversation is the concept of ›re-memorization‹ and the claim to a radical epistemic sovereignty of Black queer experiences, as called for by cultural theorist Tavia Nyong’o.

The panel talk is supported by Kemmler Foundation and part of the Art Week Berlin Featured Night program.

Harder Better
Angélique Heidler

In Angélique Heidler’s paintings, figures are set against a variety of backgrounds, media and motifs. Small add-ons and decorative elements frame, or adorn, them. They are appealing: glittery, fluffy, smooth, pink, shiny and small. Most of these objects were found in charity or 1-euro stores – perhaps cheapness and glamour do not exclude each other. Their placements are based on personal and ad hoc decisions, like a plot that never settles into a single meaning. On large-scale canvases, they sometimes interlock, then dematerialise again. Heidler approaches these visual moments in her compositions: in some paintings, the surface opens up; in others, it withdraws, revealing only hints without anticipating all scope for interpretation.

Exhibition Text (by Leonie Schmiese)
Floorplan

Die Leere im Warenglanz (Berliner Morgenpost)

The exhibition is funded by La Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques.

We invite you to our public program at Scherben during our exhibition Lesbian Legacie #1 Grace of Desire (1.5. – 8.6.2025, Claude Cahun, Florence Henri, Marta Hoepffner, Krista Beinstein).

18.5.2025  19 Uhr 
Dr. Claudia Reiche in conversation with Krista Beinstein: Artist Krista Beinstein (auf Deutsch)
22.5.2025  19 Uhr
Dr. Elisaveta Dvorakk (HU Berlin): Queere Sehnsüchte, fotografische Freiheiten – Annemarie Schwarzenbach im Spiegel der illustrierten Presse (auf Deutsch)

8.6.2025  19 Uhr
Dr. Thomas Love, (University of Missouri): „Egoism for Two: The Surrealist Muse through a Genderqueer Lens“ (in English)

The Kemmler Foundation is supporting the public programs of our exhibition series Lesbian Legacies.

Lesbian Legacies is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

Lesbian Legacies #1:
Grace of Desire – Rebellion, Surrealism, Photography
Claude Cahun, Florence Henri, Marta Hoepffner, Krista Beinstein

Lesbian Legacies presents a three-part exhibition series offering a fascinating perspective on art history. It highlights previously overlooked viewpoints and honors lesbian artists as both artistic and social avant-garde. The opening exhibition, “Grace of Desire“ (01.05.-08.06.) offers a reassessment of Surrealism through the lens of queer photographers.

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Ausstellungstext deutsch
Grace of Desire Floorplan

Press
TAZ
berlinartlink
Siegessäule

public program at Scherben:
18.5. 7pm
Dr. Claudia Reiche in conversation with Krista Beinstein: Artist Krista Beinstein (in german)

22.05. 7pm
Dr. Elisaveta Dvorakk (HU Berlin): Queere Sehnsüchte, fotografische
Freiheiten – Annemarie Schwarzenbach im Spiegel der illustrierten Presse (in german)

8.6. 7pm
Dr. Thomas Love, (University of Missouri): „Egoism for Two: The Surrealist Muse through a Genderqueer Lens“ (in english)

Supported by Kemmler Foundation [Kemmler Kemmler GmbH].

In connection to the exhibition Scherben hosted a conversation of Krista Montagna, the cousin of John Boskovich, and guard of the Estate John Boskovich who was involved in the production of his films and artist and curator John Neff, an early adopter and supporter of Boskovich’s work.

Krista Montagna and John Neff were in conversation about the life, work, and legacy of the late LA-based artist John Boskovich. Their discussion focused on the creation of Boskovich’s artwork-residence the Boskostudio and the challenges involved in preserving the project. 

Suspension
Burkhard Beschow

Exhibition Text

Burkhard Beschow’s video installation provides a viewpoint into the hidden interiors of abandoned buildings associated with the German railway network. Empty and decommissioned, these buildings are vacant properties where access is blocked to the public, and their operations have been disconnected from the grid. Still, somehow, they remain part of the transport network infrastructure—at night illuminated by railway lighting, only lightly restricted by fences or security.

In a state of disrepair, the abandoned buildings are often barricaded with heavy-duty steel sheets, perforated and reminiscent of the inner cities of East Germany during the 1990s and early 2000s. Not coincidentally, this was when Deutsche Bahn began commonly using perforated panels to conceal old buildings. For wanderers, urban explorers, and others seeking the dilapidated, the chances of encountering perforated panels today are highest at abandoned train stations and similar buildings along the German rail network. These are the sites that Beschow repeatedly visits to make his videos.

More than a portrait or document of an old structure, his video installation—composed of thousands of photographs of the insides of buildings—is an ongoing process that poses questions. Probing deeper than other explorers, his exploration goes beyond urbex clichés such as What’s inside? What remains? Look how old it all is! More than this, Beschow’s interest lies somewhere along the lines of Are these the remnants of another world we are looking into?

Beschow’s photographic process, in which a camera lens peeps from one world into another, hints at the 21st-century concept of the Backrooms. Quoting Wikipedia, the Backrooms are a fictional, impossibly large, extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting reality—actual or digital. The concept was born out of internet culture. We are reminded of a scene in The Matrix Reloaded. Neo exits the Matrix through a door and enters a dead-silent corridor that stretches endlessly. Revealed to him is the infrastructure of the designed world he has been living in. The infinite corridor is full of doors, and each door is an exit into another possibility within this fake world. No-clipping, it is called. You might remember a similar glitch in the Grand Theft Auto video game series when our unlawful character unexpectedly exits the settings of the game and endlessly falls through digital space. In all cases, the protagonist enters a liminal space usually kept hidden from them.

Beschow’s video installation is constructed from photographs taken with a small digital camera; the size of the lens conveniently fits the perforations in the sheets guarding the buildings. We see the occasional shadow or reflection of the photographer, but apart from that, no human figures are visible. The buildings are empty and ghostly. It resonates with the writings of the late Mark Fisher, for whom the eerie is a sense of absence—where something should be there but isn’t. Absence is something we witness in Beschow’s video installation, along with a feeling of the past and its synchronic fantasy about a different, foreclosed future. But unlike the sadness and desolation referred to in some of Fisher’s writings, Beschow’s video installation lacks the persuasive affect found in music or cinema. The video installation itself is silent; however, across the room, a superannuated transmitter emits sound. An audio effect suggesting progression echoes in the space, derived from recordings of Beschow’s footsteps walking through abandoned railway buildings. Also heard, concealed within a pair of headphones, is a probable voice-over that reads a timeline of the loss and sale of abandoned railway stations and the transition of listed buildings from public to private ownership.

Are we to take away that a lost past or an unrealised future is what Beschow is getting at? The installation is not immediately melancholic or forlorn; however, it does provide a space to reflect, without urgency, on our unsettled present.

John Ryaner

Press
Emergent Magazine

Millennial Hallway
Paul Levack, John Neff, Jasia Rabiej, Michel Wagenschütz, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Zoë Field, Shelim Alvarado, Albin Bergström

The side exhibition “Millennial Hallway” presents current works by young and established artists Paul Levack, John Neff, Jasia Rabiej, Michel Wagenschütz, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Zoë Field, Shelim Alvarado and Albin Bergström, alongside the exhibition “JOHN S. BOSKOVICH I appreciate my uniqueness”.

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Michel Wagenschütz’s performance He’s Got It was performed in two versions, one happened during the opening of the exhibition and the other before the Screening of Sandra Bernhards film Without you I’m Nothing at Babylon and organized by Scherben as part of the Exhibition John S. Boskovich, I appreciate my uniqueness. He’s Got It is a performance that interrogates creation myths and narratives of genius and talent in the arts, with a focus on musical theatre and its affect economy. Drawing on the works of Stephen Sondheim and Howard Ashman, the performance delves into queer realities, the AIDS crisis, and living with HIV.

Supported by the Stiftung Kunstfonds

Sources
Evelyn Plasch, Shelim Alvarado

What happens every day when you wake up? Sometimes, when I wake from sleep I come to realise that the brain has been temporarily disconnected from the receptors of consciousness and everything outside of my body. Waking up, the real world slowly comes back in. I soon realise what needs to be done. I consider the tasks of the day ahead. Usually I get out of bed and make a coffee to become stimulated immediately. Dormant communications come to my attention as I receive new correspondence. The body is now present. What will I wear? What style do I have? I often sit and think about waking up and what spending time in silence feels like. Contemplation. I come to realise I am inside domestic space. I think about its limits. The walls, like a shell, are a physical boundary. My body is enclosed. These physical proportions suit the shape and movement of my body, it facilitates a living being. Looking at the closed apartment door I try to think about scale: scales of matter that start from the sub-atomic. I am aware that energy, life, moves through molecular cell structures into amoebas, into evolution, into long periods of time of which we have no perception of. Of scale, a long perspective. But, what does scale really mean? Scales of time, the scale of the room, the scale of my body and how other bodies occupy similar spaces. What does your space look like? And when does space become geography? The geography of organs, of the landscape, of light that travels and the electricity that shoots down the cable, power in turn becoming entangled. A hat on top of the brain, layers of the onion, and what about psychology then? Hopes, fears, thoughts, personality traits, the things which make us who we are and why we connect with certain ideas, traditions and behaviours. Then it’s time for work. I move outside and every day the street is a reality: the logistics of life keep on going, the trash gets taken out, the weather, social life, transport, headphones in. What music I listen to is usually a conscious choice. What food should I eat? How much nutrition is taken into consideration, it’s sustenance. This is all based on the pretext that I am in control of my own life, my thoughts, my individuality and my perspective. I recently read that the idea of historical consciousness came about around the turn of the 19th century when Hegel said that the ways people orient themselves in time is bound by the historical and cultural contexts they inhabit. So, humans eventually formed themselves into civilisations and cultures as a larger development, leading to the perception of themselves as humanity – a subjectivity that can realise itself as something more complex and larger than individual human beings. Like how children don’t understand what it’s like to be an adult – the whole species of human beings forms a history with phases of development. They learn from their accumulated experiences about what they are and what is the world around them – coming-of-age, for ages. Hegel’s philosophical developments were likely connected to the onset of the steam engine which spurred the industrial revolution. Later, Marx said that change is the only constant in the modern world. Since then the speed of history accelerated, culture is disseminated back onto itself as inter-generational growth and time passes, rehashing moments as recurring symbols. War drives the need for speed. And there’s a direction to time and technology. Balancing out with physical resistance the bat as a weapon violently retaliates. Something brutal and primordial is at stake, a wolf in sheep’s clothing… there is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end. Good examples of interpretation only lead to more interpretation and an idea in the head can become very real – a strange obsession.
Freedom is an important idea for a lot of people: be the change etc. But actually, a lot of people have serious concerns about freedom, often to the point where it becomes ideological. One might see contemporary life as defined by our ideologies, even if we don’t really know what it means to be ideological. Different hats give access to various personalities: they communicate style and the desire to be fashionable. Even when we look around and see people all wearing the same things. Marc Jacobs said that “Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.” This seems like a statement that assumes individuality is a form of freedom, yet to look fondly on the idea – I imagine he’s asking us to respect and love each other as individuals rather than building hierarchies on style. Be it banal or unglamorous, it always seemed serious to me to think of the uneventful as enough. Not to call out what trivial concerns I might have as hysterical, but to attempt to become more aware of the multi-layered codes, communications and frequencies as sources detached from something much more immediate. After all, the phone is a mediation of reality and the “everyday” is its own frequency. A life less ordinary?
Right now, although I may later regret this, I can say I sustain a specific kind of freedom when becoming aware of the prosaic: a new perspective emerges where what might not have previously seemed important or meaningful suddenly gains value; or even better, it becomes a boring facet of reality. And that is something I often long for. In fact, I actively engage with boredom as if it were a civil right, where I obtain my own specific kind of freedom. This profound change in speed can allow me to temporarily withdraw from all the things that interfere. And in these moments of boredom I am able to really experience a frequency of nothing being worth my while and altogether beautiful. A profound source of relief.

– Richard Sides –

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Review (morgenpost)

Without You I’m Nothing
starring Sandra Bernhard 
directed by John Boskovich

20.10.2024  18:15 Uhr 
at Babylon
Location: Kino am Rosa-Luxenburg-Platz
Tickets on: https://babylonberlin.eu

“Without You I’m Nothing” is an American musical comedy from 1990 starring comedian and singer Sandra Bernhard. The film is based on material from her award-winning one-woman show of the same name, which was produced by Terry Danuser. The film recreates moments from the stage show, with Bernhard often dressed in crazy costumes reminiscent of the character she is portraying, without actually “becoming” that character. The show is repeatedly interrupted by fake interviews in which people such as Bernhard’s supposed manager appear.

Sandra Bernhard made headlines not only as Madonna’s ex-lover. With her bizarre off-Broadway show Without you I’m nothing, she drew the ire of many a big, offended artist such as Diana Ross. She parodies the “decals of American pop culture”, delivers ludicrous monologues and sings Israeli folk songs. “An astonishing performance in this bizarrely funny and prickly satire of pop culture”

The Screening was supplemented and introduced with What It Takes, a Performance by Michel Wagenschütz.