The following is a selection of past projects to which contributions were made under varying contractual arrangements. Dates represent official openings, descriptions are taken from press releases. To learn about specific involvements, please get in touch via personal correspondence. Current projects will be listed here only some time after completion. To respect confidentiality not all past work is displayed on this website. All pictures are copyrighted, please refer to the imprint section of this website for a listing of the rights owners.
your’re doing amazing sweetie
Berlin ’24 | Silent Green
A three-day performance, conversation, screening, and exhibition programme features artists, thinkers, and practitioners to explore how language, relations, and political possibility become artifice through 100%, 24/7 access to content. Opening on January 31 at silent green, transmediale 2024 – you’re doing amazing sweetie – investigates the horror of content and its unusable politics. Inspired by the reality of reality tv, two seasons of day and night transmediale drama take place at silent green, followed by a one-day Reunion at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
WITH: Hexorcismos | Ale Hop | Kloxii Li | MengXuan Sun | Silvia Dal Dosso (Clusterduck Collective) | Eva Papamargariti | Winnie Soon | Rachel O’Dwyer | Noura Tafeche | Alex Quicho | Anna Engelhardt | Aleena Chia | Svitlana Matviyenko | bela | Kloxii Li | Alexis Fidetzis | AM Kanngieser | Sinthujan Varatharajah | Margarita Tsomou | Zoë Claire Miller
this is perfect, perfect, perfect
Berlin ’24 | Kunstraum kreuzberg
On platforms where anyone can have a voice, and in a time when anyone can be a star, our attachments and dependencies to the content of our screens have never been more real. Scrolling, swiping, and clicking – central to the business of our everyday – enact the perfect amount of political pressure, create the perfect political narrative. All while taking the perfect selfie.
Confronting how stories are crafted, commerce is lived, and the never-ending trail of distraction, the artists in the exhibition peel back this familiar shiny surface, scratching at our screens to look for answers, deconstructing the hyperbolic and sensational images and narratives that are generated there, as well as the fight, flight or freeze responses that they spawn.
WITH: Alice Brygo | Aram Bartholl | Avril Corron (withdrawn) | Jenkin van Zyl | Juan Obando & Yoshua Okón| Laura Lulika | Luke van Gelderen | Maria Guta & Lauren Huret | Ndayé Kouagou | Noura Tafeche | Sungsil Ryu
uncensored lilac
Berlin ’24 | transmediale studio
A group of goddesses and their assembly of familiars, pets, servants, and technologies are lounging. Separated from one another, they share a land but not a common ground. They have been invaded. They are pretty, hot, bothered, and bored. They are ready to destroy each other. They look deep into the camera and recite their deepest wishes, hopes, dreams, and fantasies. Meanwhile, temperatures are rising. They morph and grow and make their rage known. Quick to anger, their tempers rise with the heat.
Uncensored Lilac is an exhibition by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan that tells a story about revenge and desire. At the centre of the exhibition is a 30-minute film that follows a group of goddesses and their companions. Their land and ways of communication with each other have been destroyed by climate collapse, and as the temperature rises, strange forms of dissonant and dissident behaviour emerge between them. Set in a dreamlike hallucinatory landscape, the film features a series of monologues given by these mega-femme entities who have everything and nothing to say. They describe their hopes and desires, bicker, interact from a distance, and refuse to unite. In the cultivation of an economy where hotness equals power, this kind of global warming is no surprise – rising tempers and rising temperatures. Increasingly isolated from each other, they hold on tight to their apolitical, apathetic, consumer-driven dreams.
In the studio space, a series of 3D-printed sculptures, oversized cutouts, paintings, pearls, and flowers extend this world out from the screen. The brutality of these mega-femmes come to life: giant, veiny legs and a woolly sheep act as monuments disrupting the scale of the world built in the film and anchoring us to their climate-altered world. Contrasting the relationship between avatars and screens, and the feminine and the landscape – a common trope in feminist utopian literature – Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan question how we embody and are altered by climate collapse. Reflecting on the flatness of the screen, and their flattening of politics, they explore the impossibility and bureaucracy of being right in what can feel like the end of the world.
Liam Gillick – Filtered Time
Berlin ’23 | Pergamonmuseum
In a historical first, the Vorderasiatisches Museum (Museum of the Ancient Near East) and the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart (National Gallery of Contemporary Art) join forces on a trans-historical, site-specific presentation by artist Liam Gillick throughout the halls of the Pergamonmuseum. From Babylon’s iconic Ishtar Gate to the monumental sculptures of Tell Halaf, Gillick adds layers of sound, light and colour – creating an overlay to evoke connections across periods of the Pergamonmuseum.
out of scale
Berlin ’23 | city-wide
Distributed and embedded across eBay Kleinanzeigen, Tempelhofer Feld, transmediale warehouse, the U-Bahn, and Spätis, the exhibition features work from over twenty international and Berlin-based artists, who question our reliance on the technological organisation of the city, and generate new perspectives through inquiries into environmental ruin, bio-surveillance politics, anticolonial resistance, and other-than-human identities.
WITH: Xcessive Aesthetics | Jeanne-Ange Wagner | bela | Elio J Carranza | Nestor Siré | Joana Moll | Rosa Menkman | Lauren Lee McCarthy | McKenzie Wark | Lorna Mills | Suzanne Treister | Nazanin Noori | Tanat Teeradakorn | NúÚ P3A☭3 | Uma Breakdown | Wednesday Kim | Sabrina Ratté | Eva Papamargariti | Anna Ehrenstein | Nora Al-Badri | Patricia Domínguez
a map, a model, a fiction
Berlin ’23 | Akademie der Künste
From the spatial to the temporal, the intimate to the geopolitical – scale and its many technological manifestations have long been means for measuring and organising. As machine learning and automated tools become common, the scaling of images and representations fabricates and circulates realities. The politics of scaling contests established hierarchies of information by favouring certain representations over others. The 2023 transmediale festival will explore the scalar politics and tactics at stake, questioning how the instrumentalisation and affect of scale can be challenged.
The transmediale is one of the most important festivals of art and digital culture in the world. It is also part of a select group of outstanding German cultural institutions which receives special funding from the Federal Cultural Foundation. For more than 30 years, the transmediale has brought international artists, researchers, activists and thinkers together to develop new perspectives on our technological age.
WITH: so many
Or So It Seems
Berlin ’23 | Akademie der Künste
Or So It Seems is collaborative exchange between Alan Butler and Simone C Niquille that interrogates the technical and socio-political implications of computer-vision technologies. A simulation of an extreme weather report of a never-ending storm is interrupted by duckrabbit – the star of an animated TV series – who tells their queer coming-of-age story of self-discovery and their struggles with vision technologies. Roaming through California’s Yosemite National Park, the news reporter screams My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), an account of ‘nature writing’ by John Muir, in defiance of the storm, while duckrabbit ponders their desires for ambiguity in a world composited and remade with CGI assets. The exhibition features the premiere of two new video works by Alan Butler and Simone C Niquille.
WITH: Alan Butler | Simone C Niquille
documenta fifteen
Kassel ’22 | city-wide
Under the Artistic Direction of ruangrupa the fifteenth edition of documenta has built on the foundation of the core values and ideas of lumbung. As an artistic and economic model it is rooted in principles such as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation, and is embodied in all parts of the collaboration and the exhibition.
WITH: *foundationClass* collective | Agus Nur Amal PMTOH | Alice Yard | Amol K Patil | Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) | Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie | Arts Collaboratory | Asia Art Archive (AAA) | Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale | Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture | Black Quantum Futurism | BOLOHO | Britto Arts Trust | Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun | Centre d’art Waza | Chang En-Man | Chimurenga | Cinema Caravan & Takashi Kuribayashi | Dan Perjovschi | El Warcha | Erick Beltrán | FAFSWAG | Fehras Publishing Practices | Fondation Festival sur le Niger | Graziela Kunsch | Gudskul | Hamja Ahsan | Hito Steyerl | ikkibawiKrrr | INLAND | Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt | Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF) | Jimmie Durham | A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road | Jumana Emil Abboud | Keleketla! Library | Kiri Dalena | Komîna Fîlm a Rojava (Rojava Film Commune) | La Intermundial Holobiente | LE 18 | MADEYOULOOK | Marwa Arsanios | Más Arte Más Acción (MAMA) | Nguyen Trinh Thi | Nhà Sàn Collective (NSC) | Nino Bulling | OFF-Biennale Budapest | ook_reinaart vanhoe | Party Office B2B Fadescha | Pınar Öğrenci | Project Art Works | Richard Bell | Sada [Regroup] | Safdar Ahmed | Saodat Ismailova | Sa Sa Art Projects | Serigrafistas queer | Siwa Plateforme | Sourabh Phadke | Subversive Film | Taring Padi | The Black Archives | The Question of Funding | The Nest Collective | Trampoline House | Wajukuu Art Project | Wakaliga Uganda | Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh | ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics
this is not anarchy, this is chaos
Berlin ’22 | HKW
What possibilities can refusal open up? What limitations does it impose? As crises across economic and environmental spheres produce contradictions and gaps, what role might refusal play in negotiating and opening up new values of calculation and computation? Reflecting on the frictions that emerge between practices of refusal, This is Not Anarchy, This is Chaos is a two-day binge-watch of talks, lectures, and films featuring artists, theorists, and activists whose works refuse the seduction and desire of technological promises and logic.
WITH: Adam Bobbette | Antonia Hernández | Bassam El Baroni | Bassem Saad | Che Applewhaite | Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt, Sasha Shestakova) | Donal Lally | Imani Jaqueline Brown | MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr) | Paolo Gerbaudo | Robert Gerard Pietrusko | Sabine Gruffat | Tatjana Söding | Xenia Chiaramonte | Zach Blas | Ahmed Isamaldin | AM Kanngieser | Bahar Noorizadeh | Cindy Kaiying Lin | Dele Adeyemo | Elaine Gan | Elsa Brès | Gary Zhexi Zhang | Jack Halberstam | Magda Tyżlik-Carver | Mary Maggic | Maya Indira Ganesh | Max Haiven | Nishant Shah | Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò | Patricia Domínguez and Nicole L’Huillier | Samir Bhowmik | Timothée Parrique | Byung-Chul Han
abandon all hope ye who enter here
Berlin ’22 | Akademie der Künste
Referencing Dante’s Inferno, “abandon all hope ye who enter here” investigates the technological hellscapes and damage created by computational logics and extractive processes. Concluding transmediale’s year-long investigation into the socio-political agency of refusal, the exhibition traces the material, ecological, and ideological limits of refusal. From misanthropic narratives to the false promises of techno-solutionism, the exhibition confronts the realities constructed and mediated by technological and algorithmic forces. Reflecting on the modalities of power embedded in military-entertainment infrastructures that make up our everyday experiences and the aftermath of extraction, the works critique the nature of image production, consumption and technological infrastructures.
WITH: Annex | Ibiye Camp | Cihad Caner | Tianzhuo Chen | Stine Deja | Constant Dullaart | Lo-Def Film Factory | Alaa Mansour | The Underground Division
Haus der Geschichte NRW
Düsseldorf ’21 | Behrensbau
An anniversary exhibition marked the 75th anniversary of establishing the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The exhibition opened in August 2021. The opening constituted the founding of the House of History North Rhine-Westphalia, a modern museum that is dedicated to the contemporary history of Germany’s largest federal state. Set on Düsseldorf’s Rhine embankment and close to the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament, the museum is housed in the Behrens building. The Berlin based multidisciplinary design office gewerkdesign was awarded the tender to design and fully implement the 75th anniversary exhibition.
DIE INFORMALE
Buenos Aires ’18 | city-wide
Die Informale: Videoramas is an evolving 8-week program of video interventions in various public and hidden locations throughout Buenos Aires accompanied by screenings, talks, music and culinary events. Featuring pieces by artists from Berlin, Hamburg and Buenos Aires, Die Informale celebrates the “quality of the informal”: the free spaces and unexpected pockets of possibility within the urban landscape which serve as fertile ground and inspiration for artists of all kinds. The project seeks to acknowledge the liberty and raw energy emerging from those unsung heroes as the soul of cities, nurturing creativity and public discourse amongst residents and visitors alike.
WITH: A/A | Nevin Aladag | BALTIC RAW ORG | Aram Bartholl | Julian Charrière | Die Tödliche Doris | Uros Djurovic | Pauline Doutreluingne | Brad Downey | Peter Edinger | Kasia Fudakowski | Björn Gogalla | Vincent Grunwald | Perla Herro | Anne Duk Hee Jordan | Guido Ignatti | Christian Jankowski | Armin Keplinger | Felix Kiessling | Fabian Knecht | Luciana Lamothe | Jeewi Lee | Mischa Leinkauf | Carolina Magnin | Pablo Mazzolo | Kevin McElvaney | Björn Melhus | Carsten “Erobique” Meyer | Nicolas Monti | Konrad Mühe | Julian Rosefeldt | Corinna Schnitt | Sarah Schönfeld | Paul Speckmann | Nasan Tur | Wermke/Leinkauf | Ole Wulfers | Augusto Zaquetti
Horse Meat Disco
Berlin ’17 | Bauakademie
Inspired by the halcyon days of New York nightlife including Mancuso’s Loft, The Paradise Garage, Nicky Siano’s Gallery and late lamented DJ Adam Goldstone. All four resident DJs Luke Howard, Severino, Jim Stanton and James Hillard have built a reputation for their fantastic parties and high quality disco sets. It’s the queer party for everyone; homos and heteros, club kids, bears, fashionistas, naturists, guerilla drag queens and ladies who munch. Musically it’s a glittering disco behemoth of classics, italo disco, house, oddities, Afro and punk funk. Horse Meat Disco currently dj and run regular parties across the UK, Europe and the world over including a HMD Residency at Output in New York. Horse Meat disco Berlin is produced by THE PROP HOUSE.
SONOS Spirit House
Berlin ’17
Cornerstone Agency paired Sonos, the home sound system, with Gorillaz, the world’s most famous virtual band, to launch Sonos PLAYBASE. Real-life manifestations of the Gorillaz’s world came to life in New York, Berlin, Amsterdam and Shanghai offering fans the opportunity to dive deeper into the band’s world through exclusive music, visual + physical installations and projection mapping technology.
adidas EQT Loft
Berlin ’17
EQT Launch Event: dinner, workshops & hang out during Berlin Fashion Week. Concept, Set design & Executive Production by aboutkokomo.com