Finissage von „Wong Ping: Earwax“ & Time(s) to Say Goodbye, for now

Kuratiert von Hou Hanru

**Mit dem Künstler Wong Ping, einer ortsbezogenen temporären Intervention der Künstler*innen Anja Gerecke & Stefan Rummel und einer Performance des Paper Tiger Theater Studio**

Times Art Center Berlin lädt herzlich zur Finissage von Wong Ping — Earwax 耳屎 am Samstag, den 25. Juni 2022 ein und verabschiedet sich von seinen bisherigen Räumlichkeiten.

Wong Ping, „blah-blah-blah“, 2022, copper sculpture and ping pong machines, commissioned by Times Art Center Berlin, courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin.

PROGRAMM

16:30-17:30 Uhr | for ever von Anja Gerecke & Stefan Rummel
18:30-20:00 Uhr | Farewell, Once Upon A Time von Paper Tiger Theater Studio

In der temporären Intervention for ever zeigen die Künstler*innen Anja Gerecke & Stefan Rummel in der Kooperation eine dreiteilige künstlerische Arbeit, die verschiedene Standpunkte im Außenraum skulptural und akustisch in Beziehung setzt.

Anja Gerecke und Stefan Rummel leben und arbeiten in Berlin. In ihren künstlerischen Arbeiten beschäftigen sie sich mit der Beziehung zwischen Raum, Sound, Architektur und Malerei. Gerecke befasst sich mit räumlichen Beziehungen zwischen Malerei und Architektur in ortsspezifischen Installationen und dem Potenzial malerischer Interventionen. Rummel entwickelt ortsbezogene installative Environments, in denen Klang ein wesentliches künstlerisches Material ist. Dem voraus geht immer eine intensive Beschäftigung mit den realen Räumen, aus historischer, sozialer und architektonischer Perspektive.

Farewell, Once Upon A ‚Time‘

The title connotes double-folded. Only does the pun become scorchingly realistic, when Times Art Center Berlin has to close, after its four-year operation in Berlin.

Different realities in a post-pandemic time meet and cross each other, foretokening a change that goes well beyond what politics have a solution for, or even a reassuring answer.

Smoke shelled out of a Time—our Time?—pervades all kinds of standing boundaries, being the good old lines East-West, Occident-Orient, National-Foreign, Land-Maritime, or Europe-outer-Europe. A new landscape is emerging.

In the past three years, the pandemic mobilized and realized a pan-human-population mRNA intervention. Various models of Digital Despotism are being actively experimented and tested.

The state of emergency justified by statistics and the promise of herd immunity (or state immunity) evolves into a state of limbo where the normality as previously known is gone and the V Day comes never upon—a Time hangs in suspension.

Meanwhile, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War makes an explicit announcement that the once irreversible globalization is reversed and that time assumed as norm is effectively terminated.

With all the symptoms and expressions of the Zeitgeist in sight, we are going to focus on bidding farewell to as well as speaking about the end of a specific art institution: Times Art Center Berlin. Sometimes a coincidence announces a time.

Coincidence lays Times Art Center Berlin’s finissage on the edge of a Time.

This concept misappropriates the farewell to Times Art Center Berlin’s Brunnenstraße site into a farewell to a Time, a gesture of romanticism and desperate ambition—a gesture dictated by the distance we keep ourselves from our Time yet within our Time, an effective and dynamic in-between space.

It is precisely this emotional intensity and this very ambition that answers to, and drives, the instinct and duty of an art institution, a critical discursive dynamic inherent to its footing.

We shall further reappropriate a viral sentence from the Shanghai in lockdown, pronounced by a determined and infuriated citizen: We are the last generation.

Once upon a time, the battle cries and the sentiments echoed each other and reinforced the time where they came, where they leave.

Paper Tiger, who opened its Berlin chapter the same year as Times Art Center Berlin did, joins the finissage, an evening that writes the Time, for the Center if not prognostically for our Zeitgeist. It is an act, in Paper Tiger’s chronicle, of continued collaboration of theatre and museum. The wheel of Fortuna turns. The evening belongs to nostalgia as well as celebration.

– Paper Tiger Theater Studio

Das Paper Tiger Theater Studio ist ein autonomes Künstlerkollektiv, das in Peking gegründet wurde. Seit 25 Jahren beschäftigt sich die Gruppe mit der Rekontextualisierung und Transformation des Alltäglichen, der Erneuerung des sozial-ästhetischen Raums durch transkontextuelle Prozesse und bewegt sich zwischen Theaterraum und Museumsraum, Privatem und Öffentlichem, freier Szene und Institution, Sprachen und Kulturen. Paper Tiger ist nach 2019 nach Berlin umgezogen.