Owned by
Others

Adam Kraft is an artist and an-architect from Stockholm working in urban loopholes across Europe. Adam produces hidden spaces in locations as versatile and unthought of like Copenhagen central station or a freight train travelling to the Arctic Circle. With experiments and interventions, Adam’s praxis denies borders and transgresses disciplines of craft, technology, architecture, design, art, and communication. His practice is deeply concerned with the idea of the public. His acclaimed installations and spatial interventions assemble critical commons by tending to the unattended—all together aiming to activate imaginations and futurabilities.

The painter duo Albrecht and Wilke is based in Berlin since graduating from Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig in 2019. In their collaborative paintings, German clichés are an ongoing theme as are home cooking, history of art, and the banality of the everyday. They deal with the emotional asylums and amenities of adventurous city dwellers portraying pleasure, desire, and craving without any reservation. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Salon am Moritzplatz (Berlin), Sprink Düsseldorf, and Syker Vorwerk (Syke).

Aliou Diack was born in 1987 in Sidi Bougou in the Mbour region of Senegal and currently lives and works in Dakar. Fascinated by his environment and the exploration of “mère nature” from an early age, his first encounter with art started at the age of ten, when he moved away from his family to Dakar, to study. To sate his nostalgia for the green flora, wild fauna– the nature near his village, he started to reproduce and create his own environment by drawings and paintings. From 2009 to 2014 Aliou studied fine art at École Nationale des Arts de Dakar (ENA). He creates multilayered land- scape by combining patches of color with concrete lines and scattering of pigments. The latter are made of dead plants and trees and are often used for medical purposes. Since 2014, Aliou has participated in numerous international exhibitions and art fairs and attends artist residencies, such as Villa Romana in Florenz (2018) and Thread from the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation (2016, 2017). He participated in exhibitions at IFA Gallery Berlin (2019), Le Manège Gallery from Institute Français Dakar (2019), Biennale of Contemporary African Art OFF (2018), Agit’art Laboratory Dakar and Art-Paris at Grand Palais (2017).

Andreas Gehrke was born in Berlin in 1975 and has been working as a freelance photographer since 1999. In addition to countless publications for renowned German and international magazines, he has produced complete book projects for the Boros Collection, Sauerbruch Hutton Architects and the Neufert Foundation, among others. Empty spaces, wastelands, peripheral areas and their transformation processes are recurring motifs in the works of Andreas. They have been exhibited in galleries such as Pierogi in Leipzig or PS1 in New York. In 2013, he founded the publishing platform Drittel Books, where he publishes his own monographs as well as exceptional photographic works by colleagues who are friends of his.

Andres Pereira Paz’s work is deeply influenced by his native Bolivia, the local folklore, and the continuing influence of colonization on Latin American culture. Working with traditional textiles, sound, and sculpture he explores the construction of culture as an ongoing process and distorts the Western perception of his home country, its inhabitants, and culture often with a cheeky wink.

Pereira Paz was born in La Paz, Bolivia, and is currently based in Berlin, Germany. Recently his work has been shown at brunand brunand (2021); 11th Berlin Biennale (2020); Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2019), Berlin; The Ryder Gallery (2018) Gasworks (2017), London; Crisis Galeria (2018), Lima; Museo Nacional de Arte (2018), La Paz; MALBA, (2014), Buenos Aires.

Aram Bartholl (*1972, Bremen) uses sculptural interventions, installations, and performative workshops to question our engagement with media and public economies linked to social networks, online platforms, and digital dissemination strategies. Aram’s work creates a sometimes bizarre confrontation with our own ignorance of global platform capitalism and renegotiates network activities as political forms of participation on an analog level, using the potential of public space. A purposeful contextualization of aesthetics, codes, and communication patterns that users are familiar with from YouTube, Instagram, and video games employs the logic of the Internet while at the same time undermining it. Bartholl has exhibited at MoMA in New York, Skulptur Projekte Münster, and Palais de Tokyo in Paris among many others. He is professor of art and digital media at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and lives and works in Berlin.

Arijit Bhattacharyya (*1994, Kolkata) is an artist and independent curator currently living and working in Weimar, Germany. His practice revolves around contentious narratives of resistance through social engagements, design interventions, and lecture performances. His artistic discourse is deeply rooted in the dissecting trajectories of sociopolitical history and its implications in cultural practices. As a curator, he is invested in artistic negotiations that investigate methods of social agitation. Arijit’s major works have been part of institutions like Khoj International Artists’ Association, Photo Kathmandu, Kochi Biennale, UNITAR Jeju, and Serendipity Arts Festival to name a few.

In his work, Fernando Sánchez Castillo (*1970, Madrid) analyzes the relationship between art, political power, and its propaganda. He often uses existing “traces” from the past as a starting point and transforms them into outlooks on the present through the media of film, sculpture, and performance. His work Guernica Syndrome from 2012, for instance, transformed dictator Francisco Franco’s leisure boat into prism-shaped objects devoid of any sentimental qualities but easy to stack, transport, or store out of sight. Fernando has participated in group exhibitions at Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York, and the 50th Biennale di Venezia and has also exhibited solo in Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (2019), Kunstraum Innsbruck (2016), Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Polanco (2016) amongst many others.

Guerilla Architects is a multi-disciplinary artist collective based in Berlin. By focusing their work on spatial interventions and socio-critical art projects, they approach urban development by being „guerilla“. This means that great value is not necessarily only created by building on a grand scale. On the contrary, by working with existing structures, it often only requires minimally invasive interventions in order to give new meaning to formerly invisible spaces. Guerilla Architects draw on the untapped potential of political, legal and spatial grey zones as well as the free resources which are available due to the abundance and overproduction of urban society.

Henok Getachew fostered an interest in science from an early age and studied physics for a number of years before joining Addis Ababa University’s Ale School of Fine Arts and Design. His background in physics influences his work still, often focusing on the process of creation while critically discussing consumers, climate change, and the impact of technology on society. Getachew is the co-founder of artist collective Netsa Art Village based in Ethiopia which is dedicated to engaging the community with local and international art practice.

His work has been exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof, Kühl Haus, Berlin; German cultural institute and Asni Gallery, Addis Ababa.

Jeewi Lee (*1987, Seoul) is a South Korean-German artist, based in Berlin. Her work predominantly deals with traces that question our visual perception. The trace bears witness to time while also reflecting its history and own production process. For Jeewi, it exist as residue of past lives, a visual allegory for lived experience, place, memory, and the body. The artist carries out intensive research on materials and their properties by transforming or combining them. This leads to her exploring the poetic context of the individual materials. Jeewi studied painting at the Berlin University of the Arts (UDK) and at Hunter College University in New York. She graduated in 2014 with a master in fine arts at the UDK and since 2018 holds an MFA from the postgraduate program Art in Context. She has received various grants and scholarships including Villa Romana in Florenz, CAA Berlin and from Kunstfond Foundation. In 2020 she received artist residencies, such as Thread from the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Senegal and Al Ma’mal Foundation in Israel. Jeewi has exhibited in numerous group shows and solo exhibitions and was part of the Festival of Future Nows at the Neue Nationalgalerie (2014) and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum (2017). Other exhibitions include Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Korean Embassy Berlin, Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart (2020) and sculpture park Schlossgut Schwante (2020).

K. Verlag is a Berlin-based publishing atelier advancing new forms of the “book-as-exhibition.” Since 2011 its editorial-curatorial work produces unique geographical and physical encounters in the context of art, science, design, and politics. Projects by K. have engaged themes of naturecultures, post/colonialism, geopolitics, contemporary history and feminism.
 (Co-)founded and managed by Anna-Sophie Springer, K. collaborates internationally with artists and institutions, developing singular volumes, whose materiality is never exhausted for the purpose of documentation alone. K. has published more than 20 publications, including Dora García’s On Reconciliation / Über Versöhnung. and, in 2020, was named a recipient of the prestigious German Publishing Prize (Deutscher Verlagspreis).

Kasia Fudakowski’s (*1985, London) sculptural practice provides a totally independent view of artistic production in a social context. Both her sculptures, which often hover somewhere between figurative and abstract, and her sculptural practice-related performances and videos refer to her interest in the theory and philosophy of humour. Kasia focuses on the immediate, tense relationship between artist and audience, on patterns of expectation, representational ideals, theatricality, and the interpretation of objects as identities. Her fascination for the tremendous critical potential for humour as a comment on human failure, especially when it comes to social systems, is a crucial feature. Kasia has exhibited internationally at venues such as Modern Art Oxford; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; 1646, The Hague; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Arnolfini, Bristol; GAK, Bremen; FUTURA, Prague; and Harburger Bahnhof Kunstverein, Hamburg. Upcoming projects include Made in Germany at Sprengel Museum, Hanover; and Bring Art into Life! at Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Kasia lives and works in Berlin.

Lutz Henke is a curator and cultural scientist (M.A.) from Berlin. He is head of cultural affairs at visitBerlin where he is developing innovative formats and programs since 2016. His studies at the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt (Oder), at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the University of California Berkeley, focused on urban studies, art, subculture and contemporary history. Henke has been awarded a grant from Olafur Eliasson’s “Institute for Spatial Experiments” at the University of the Arts Berlin and taught in the Masters program “Spatial Strategies” at the Berlin Weißensee School of Art. In 2011/2012 Lutz Henke worked for the Salomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum as programs manager of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. As the chairman of the Kreuzberg art organization „Artitude e.V.“ he directed the exhibition space and former secret reserve „Senatsreservenspeicher (SRS) Berlin“ till its demolition in 2014. He has been curating and managing art-projects which deal with art and the public domain since 2001. He has realized public artworks and interventions in Berlin and worldwide in close collaboration with the artists – including the “World’s largest Graffiti” (2012) in the Algerian desert or „Black Flag“ at the North and South Pole with Santiago Sierra. His curatorial practice as well as his research focuses on spatial practice and theory, memory and remembrance, aesthetical interventions and frontiers in their diverse appearances. Henke has been invited to give talks and classes on urban aesthetics, art, culture and history at various institutions such as the Harvard GSD or the University of Copenhagen. His writings on these subjects have been published in various books, catalogues or media like monopol or The Guardian.

Maciej Markowicz (*1981) was born in Poland and is currently based in Berlin. He is a photographer with an extraordinary camera. A self-built houseboat functions as a giant camera obscura, allowing Markowicz to photograph life from the water, slow-moving and immediate. He tacks a large sheet of color photographic paper on the inner wall of the boat, allowing it to be exposed to light through a camera lens when he opens the shutter. He is an artist that practically lives inside Camera Obscura, currently cruising rivers and canals of Europe. Previously he photographed New York City with an old Volkswagen van that he turned into a camera obscura. Markowicz’s work is included in the public collection of Museum of Photography, FR; Bundestag Art Collection, DE. He is also a founder of movingcamera.org Berlin-based non-for-profit organization that uses art and photography to ignite positive social change.

Marja Marlene Lechner is an artist (born 1989, Berlin). She studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the Listahaskoli of fine Arts Iceland from 2010-2016. She shows her works in exhibitions, on the radio, in concerts, on stages, in the park, on the internet, and in books. Among other things, she works with music, singing, and performance. She blocks out the audience completely during her performances. Sometimes she is met with anger and hatred towards her. She is very shy, if you speak to her, she collapses, trembling.

Miguel Buenrostro is a visual artist, documentarian, and researcher working between the US-Mexico border and Los Angeles, California, and currently based in Berlin. His work often shows multiple perspectives between coloniality / decoloniality, migration, memory and architecture. His media include cinema and performative gestures in public space. His work has been presented in the Biennale Architettura di Venezia (2016); Armory Center for the Arts (2017); Museo Numismático Nacional de la Ciudad de México (2018) Mexi-Cali Biennial (2019) and The New Bauhaus Museum, Weimar (2020); He has presented his lecture “Destruction of Memory” at Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, California, and San Diego State University. Miguel is co-creator of “Nuevo Norte” infrastructure for migrants, a practice which aims to rethink the cultural relationship between the city and migration. His recent performative work Disfuncionalista; On Coloniality and Architecture of repression was part of the Centenary Programme celebrating the anniversary of the founding of Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany.

Berlin born and based artist Mischa Leinkauf deals with the hidden possibilities of urban environments and various kinds of limitations of spaces through borders, rules, architecture, and barriers. By intervening in quasi-natural systems of order, he provokes situations that create temporary irritation and open up spaces for recoding. In particular, the border areas between public and restricted-access or non-public spaces serve Leinkauf as an extension of his artistic scope of action. His cross-media artistic practice includes performative interventions, video installations, films, and photographs. His works are shown worldwide at film festivals, museums, art spaces, and galleries such as: Berlinale, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Kunstmuseum Bonn, ZKM Karlsruhe, Manifesta 11, Moderna Museet Stockholm, or Helsinki Art Museum.

Nicolás Monti’s actions are often inspired by Argentine civil resistance. Together with his collaborators, frequently made up out of his friends from the queer scene, Monti calls attention to amongst others injustice, political corruption, and culinary hegemony. These actions disrupt urban life for instance by hanging a banner from bridges across the spree in Berlin while first parading in formation through Hauptbahnhof carrying black balloons. For Owned by Others Monti looks at the pineapple, a fruit with a rich colonial history that was desired and placed on a pedestal by the aristocratic elite in the 1800s. An enormous effort was made to cultivate this tropical plant in the cold conditions of Western Europe for their sweet taste and even sweeter symbol of status.

Njobati Sylvie is known for her ability to transform ordinary happenings into extraordinary stories that inspire action. She exploits the audiovisual medium to tell compelling stories that inspire people to take action and be at the center of change. Her work of arts does not only seek to educate and inform but to provoke discourses and critical reflections on several social issues. In recent years, she has focused on multimedia storytelling to provoke discussions on Post-Colonial education and the question of restitution. One of her prominent works is the Multimedia series on “The Restitution of Ngonnso”, an object of spiritual and cultural significance to the people of Nso where she hails from taken to Germany during the colonial times. Sylvie’s choice of aesthetics is rather an expression of self in the purest form than premeditated. When you hear of Sylvie, be ready for a taste of unflinching originality.

Peter Behrbohm (Berlin,1987) is a berlin based artist, designer, architect and film maker. His works dissect the infrastructures underlaying our physical surroundings – surgically intervene public in spaces and its routines or supply speculative societies and coming conflicts with obstacles and narratives. Radical fragments recuring from crashes that happened in other futures.

The drawer and sculptor Philipp König operates with symbols that refuse classification. König’s visual language appears archaic, sometimes brutal; he seems to refer to occult traditions as well as to fast-moving trends of social networks. Elements of the everyday, pop, and subculture are torn from their time and context. Isolated in this way, they find themselves – and we ourselves – confronted with an aesthetic of the total. This is a form of existence that continually manufactures and confirms itself in gestures of strength and power. What lies behind this masquerade, of course, is another matter. König lets us discover that chance has at least as big a part in our perception of art and the world as the world, the trained, and tradition.

In the process, anxieties of old and new kinds mix, as well as the perpetual hope for the simplest possible solution, mingle to create a driving rhythm in the installation and a materiality that we want to touch and that touches us.

Raul Walch is a visual artist living and working in Berlin. He studied sculpture at the
Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and completed his studies in Olafur Eliasson’s class at University of the Arts Berlin. Subsequently, he was a fellow at the Institut für Raumexperimente. He has exhibited internationally at venues such as Cinema Lada, Modern Art Museum, Addis Ababa (2015), Festival of Future Nows, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2017), Bait Tarkib, Baghdad, Iraq (2018), Zero Waste, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig (2020). Raul is a board member of the initiative Die Vielen e.V. and the Berlin artists’ association, bbk. Currently he is teaching at the international MFA-Program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Regina José Galindo is a visual artist and poet, whose main medium is performance. Galindo lives and works in Guatemala, using its own context as a starting point to explore and accuse the ethical implication of social violence and injustices related to gender and racial discrimination, as well as human rights abuses arising form the inequalities in power relations of contemporary societies.

Regina Schmeken has been working with photography as an artistic medium since 1976. For her early works, she received the Prix de la Critique at the Rencontres Internationales de la photographie in Arles in 1978. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York made her first acquisitions, and her works are now in private and public collections, such as the art collection of German Bundestag, Museum Lenbachhaus, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Since the early 1980s, Schmeken’s images have been exhibited; most recently, her large-format cycle of photographs on the NSU crime scenes achieved much attention. In 1996 the artist was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize. In 2021 she was a fellow of the Accademia Tedesca di Roma Villa Massimo. Currently, the German Consulate General in New York is showing her photo installation “ Manhattan Skyline“. Regina Schmeken lives and works in Berlin.

Robel Temesgen was born in 1987 received his MFA in Contemporary Art from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art and creative writing, University of Tromsø, Norway in 2015 and a BFA in Painting from ASFAD, Addis Abeba University in 2010. His practice focuses on painting and encompasses elements of performance, installation, video and collaborative projects. Since 2010, Robel works as a Lecturer at the Department of Painting, Ale School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University. His work has been exhibited in Ethiopia and internationally.

Santiago Sierra was born in 1966 in Madrid where he lives and works. Influenced by the formal language of the minimalist and conceptual art movements of the 1960s and 70s, Santiago’s work deals with global power relations and hierarchies of class as he vigorously examines the logics and futility of borders, work, or capitalism as a whole. He became well known for his performative actions in which marginalized individuals got paid to perform menial or pointless tasks. He has studied fine arts in Madrid, Hamburg, and Mexico City; solo exhibitions at Lisson Gallery, London (2008), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2013) among many others as well as a contribution to the Venice Biennale (2003) mark his successful and disobedient career.

Sol Calero’s environments are inspired by the colors and culture of her native Venezuela. Having moved away in 2011 she utilizes her experience as an immigrant reminiscing of her home country. Idealizing the image an outsider might have and scrutinizing cultural clichés is a central theme in her work. Painting, either on canvas, objects, or walls, is at the core of her work often featuring ‘exotic’ floral and fruit motives. This imagery features heavily in her ‘meeting places’, be it a patio, bus, or shopping mall, which function as a starting point for visitors to enter into conversation.

Calero is based in Berlin and has exhibited at Tate, Liverpool; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

TARKIB Baghdad Contemporary Arts Institute was founded in 2015 as an independent artist group at first. The organisation is committed to fostering creativity and excellence in the arts in Iraq, and to providing artistic opportunities for Baghdad’s diverse communities. It’s space, BAIT TARKIB creative arts centre, is the first of its kind in Iraq dedicated to contemporary arts. It aims to provide Baghdadi youth and women with a safe haven to express their ideas through exhibitions, public performances, training and workshops. Through TARKIB’s future-orientated and participatory character it serves to community capacity building. TARKIB is open to all who wants to make a change and relies on a network of committed volunteers.

Teresa Margolles (*1963, Culiacán) relentlessly works against violence on many fronts. The visual artist seeks forms to process the fatal effects of social exclusion. Since the early 1990s, she has also been involved in the forensic department of an autopsy center in Mexico City, where numerous, mainly anonymous victims of violent crime are delivered every day. In her often minimalist works, she has since 2005 primarily investigated the excess of violence in the northern Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez and the raging drug war there. Teresa has exhibited her work at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) as well as at Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016) and was also awarded a special mention at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019).

WEISE-GROßE are Ina Weise and Marcus Große. They predominantly work in the field of visual communication, art in public space and conceptual art. Weise and Große first met in Espenhain (Saxony) in 2018 during a residence, where they lived together in an east German Plattenbau building next to the federal highway B95 and artistically intervened to activate the former local bank (Sparkasse). WEISE-GROßE work at the intersection of art, architecture and urban space with a focus on the relation between society and space, its practice, idea and aesthetics. Based on artistic research, considering the respective historical, political and social context, WEISE-GROßE’s projects find their locations and often focus on details, which in turn refer to larger topics and contexts. By observing, deriving and interconnecting the familiar from different perspectives, WEISE-GROßE create new situations and open up spaces of perception.

Zoë Claire Miller is an artist and organizer based in Berlin, Germany. She co-founded the Berlin Art Prize in 2013 and the Society for Matriarchal World Domination in 2019. Much of her political work takes place within the framework of the bbk berlin (professional association of visual artists Berlin), for which she is a spokesperson. The bbk berlin focuses primarily on political issues pertaining to artists’ rights, working conditions and infrastructure on a local/national level, but is also engaged in related issues and struggles, for instance those of gender equality, antigentrification and antifascism. Zoë’s art in the media of sculpture, installation and performative drawing is primarily collaborative and engages with the female body, sensuality, tactility, feminist /queer theory and the combined use of negative and positive space. In past exhibitions she has explored themes such as female masturbation as a metaphor for creative production; the emancipatory potential of lost knowledge surrounding contraceptive and abortive herbs; the disintegration of the body as a pleasurable experience; and the water cooler as a site of resistance via gossip. Formally, she aims to produce new shapes or images that better reflect how entities, bodies and materials can be activated in a non-patriarchal manner: allowing things to drip, dribble, spread, pool, be a mist, or a smell, and showing bodies as sites of pleasure. She is interested in interspecies relationships and dissolving the boundaries of proprietary modes of production in order to negate the historical cliché of the lone creative genius / the contemporary spectre of neoliberal, competitive modes of production. Her collaborative work, most often with Brazilian sculptor Juliana Cerqueira Leite, is an experiment in reinterpreting “autocoscienza femminista” (after Carla Lonzi) as an act of creating artistic objects, situations and experiences together as a means of developing a truly feminist subjectivity.

Zuzanna Czebatul’s (*1986, Miedzyrzecz) work has as its core the structures and aesthetics of power embedded in political ideologies It examines power relations through artifacts and decor. As a sculptor, Zuzanna concentrates on the visual seductiveness of contemporary and archaic objects and architectural elements, as well as the language of interior and graphic design. Using comparative methodology, the artist reveals the kinships and conflicts between them. Her work is influenced by the aesthetics of ancient sculptures, modern forms of display, as well as the club culture of the nineties. Zuzanna lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Städelschule Frankfurt in 2013, and later attended the MFA Program at Hunter College, New York as Fulbright Fellow. Zuzanna has had solo exhibitions at GGM1 Municipal Gallery Gdansk; CCA FUTURA Prague; CCA Zamek Ujazdowski Warsaw; MINI/Goethe–Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, NYC and at the CAC Synagogue de Delme. This year her works will be included in group exhibitions at CAN Neuchâtel, Trafostacija Szczecin and PikDeutz Cologne; early 2021 she will have solo exhibitions at Exile Vienna and Kunstpalais Erlangen, and participate in the Athens Biennale. Currently she has a solo presentation at sans titre (2016) Gallery in Paris.