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

  • Saturday
    Jun 25, 2022
    2:00 pm–9:00 pm

Curated by Hou Hanru

With the artist Wong Ping, and featuring a site-specific intervention by artists Anja Gerecke & Stefan Rummel, and a performance by Paper Tiger Theater Studio

Times Art Center Berlin presents the finissage of Wong Ping — Earwax 耳屎, curated by Hou Hanru, on Saturday, June 25, 2022, and says goodbye (for now) to its premises at Brunnenstraße 9.

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.

PROGRAM

4.30-5.30 PM | for ever by Anja Gerecke & Stefan Rummel
6.30-8 PM | Farewell, Once Upon A Time by Paper Tiger Theater Studio

for ever

In the site-specific intervention for ever, artists Anja Gerecke & Stefan Rummel are collaborating on a three-part work that relates itself to TACB’s outdoor spaces through sculpture and acoustics. 

Anja Gerecke and Stefan Rummel live and work in Berlin. Their practices revolve around the relationship of space, sound, architecture, and painting. Gerecke’s artistic practice focuses on the spatial relationship of paintings and architecture, and the potentiality of painting interventions. Rummel creates installation environments where sound is used as a material, as well as auditory experiences. He intentionally works with specific places or settings, always engaging intensively with them from historic, social and architectonic perspectives.


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

Paper Tiger Theater Studio is an autonomous artist collective founded in Beijing. For 25 years, the group has been engaged in recontextualising and transforming everyday life, regenerating social-aesthetical space through trans-contextual processes, and moving between theatre space and museum space, private and public, free scene and institution, languages and cultures. Paper Tiger moved to Berlin after 2019.

Finissage of Wong Ping: Earwax at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Paper Tiger Theater Studio, Farewell, Once Upon a Time (告别一个“时代”), performance at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Paper Tiger Theater Studio, Farewell, Once Upon a Time (告别一个“时代”), performance at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Paper Tiger Theater Studio, Farewell, Once Upon a Time (告别一个“时代”), performance at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Paper Tiger Theater Studio, Farewell, Once Upon a Time (告别一个“时代”), performance at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Paper Tiger Theater Studio, Farewell, Once Upon a Time (告别一个“时代”), performance at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Paper Tiger Theater Studio, Farewell, Once Upon a Time (告别一个“时代”), performance at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Paper Tiger Theater Studio, Farewell, Once Upon a Time (告别一个“时代”), performance at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Finissage of Wong Ping: Earwax at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang. 

Finissage of Wong Ping: Earwax at Times Art Center Berlin, 2022. Photo: Kun Liang.