Since the late 2000s Clément Cogitore has developed his artistic practice halfway between Cinema and Contemporary Art. Combining film, video, installations and photographs, Cogitore questions the modalities of cohabitation between humankind and its own images and representations. Rituality, collective memory, figuration of the sacred, as well as a particular idea ...
Using a range of mediums, including animation, video, virtual reality, found footage, and drawing, Bianca Kennedy explores everyday relationships and routines, reflecting on human behavior, social norms, and expectations. In recent years, Kennedy's artistic focus has been on physical withdrawal, creating a series that examine the theatrics of bathing and the cultural coding of the unprotected, naked body. Through her works, she uncovers conflicts that exist within power dynamics and identity politics, and how they intersect within categories such as class, gender, privacy, and public space. Currently, Kennedy's work is centered around personal protest, featuring individuals who have grown disillusioned with the world and turned their anger inward [read on]
Adrian Paci (born 1969) in Shkoder, Albania lives and works in Milano, Italy. His oeuvre is an anatomy of political desire: from an account of dispossession and exile through a ritual of belonging and identification down to the mechanics of self-empowerment and emancipation. His films, drawings and paintings often overlap imagination and fantasy with the cruelty of political reality and the harshness of everyday life [read on]
Laure Prouvost’s artistic output consistently returns to themes of escape into unfamiliar worlds or imaginings of unexpected alternative environments. A strong narrative impulse propels her practice, resulting in immersive, transmedial installations with interwoven story lines that combine fiction and reality. Her videos, installations, paintings and tapestries unhinge commonplace and expected ...
Voices, Communities, Ecologies – Mikhail Karikis develops filmmaking strategies that undermine dominant frames of representation and employs listening as a form of activism. He works in sustained collaborations with individuals and communities located outside the context of contemporary art, often pushed into economic and socio-geographic fringes. This results in participatory film projects that highlight alternative modes of human existence, solidarity and action while nurturing dignity and tenderness [read on]
We are delighted to start our 2023 program with Annika Kahrs. In videos, installations and performances, she conduct research at the borders of what we generally call music, asking about the cultural and social function of music, its communicative aspects and its formal composition. She is interested in questions of when music starts, where does it emerge, what happens at the border of mere noise. In this context, the relationship between humankind and nature, the poetic and aesthetic dimension of natural science, as well as social and political structures in various contexts are important [read on]
On the occasion of the exhibition Forming Communities: Berliner Wege – 道法柏林，而游于外 (Dào fǎ bólín, ér yóu yú wài) at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art (curated by Thomas Eller 艾墨思 and Li Zhenhua 李振华), Videoart at Midnight is delighted to welcome Fan Popo 范坡坡, showing a bright selection of his filmic work [read on]
Film screening and exhibition opening: Omsk Social Club presents “Alienation and Charisma”, a new short film based on a Real Game Play developed in the frame of their GameChanger residency. In the frame of their two-month residency period for GameChanger, Omsk Social Club explored the soft underbelly of collective order, consensus and legitimacy through a Real Game Play set in a satirical possible near future scenario. Springboarding off the book “Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes” by Benjamin Zablocki, they dove into the manner in which alienation and charisma are generative in the emergence of collectivity [read on]
Cyrill Lachauer (born 1979 in Rosenheim, Germany) is a wanderer. One who prefers the nomadic life to the sedentary on principle, who is constitutively characterized by restlessness, unrest and longing, almost anachronistically, by a love of catching out - whether he on is rock climbing in the European Alps, or the big walls of Yosemite Valley or riding on the freight trains of North America. Cyrill Lachauer shows us a selection of his cinematic works, sometimes visually powerful, sometimes sensitive, sometimes oblique road movies through the USA and other countries, in the course of which Cyrill Lachauer has listend to landscapes in a very ambivalent way. More associative than clearly defined, more exploratory and questioning than assertive [read on]
Anna Ehrenstein lives between Berlin, Tirana and the cloud and works in various mediums in artistic or curatorial production, examining how technology and digital-material culture reshape power relations. She investigates varying forms of knowledge and their constructions through south-south collaborations and redistribution of global north resources. Photography, Text, Video, Installation, Performance and Sculpture are created through working in community and throughout process-based artistic and curatorial research and mediation. How are we as a society produced by the media and through lens-based realities? Networked processes are key in untangling capitalistic structures of greed in a world of ongoing crises [read on]
on the occasion of the Berlin Art Week 2022 and the celebration of the Award for Artistic Project Spaces and Initiatives 2022 by Berlin Senat Department for Culture and Europe we are thrilled to welcome Rosa Barba, who in her work repeatedly explores the concept of an anarchic organization of cinematic spaces - a working principle that aims to form a new way of thinking by destabilizing outdated structures of cinema - on a journey to an imaginary political trope for the cinema of the present day [read on]
As part of the 2022 Project Space Festival – The City of Project Spaces, XANADU invites selected Berlin initiatives to present moving image programs (artists' films and videos) that represent their own distinctive approach to the challenges and possibilities of presenting this medium outside the usual institutionalized contexts. Alongside 6x6 Project, ANORAK and XANADU themselves, Videoart at Midnight will show a program of recent works by Katarina Zdjelar, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnonc and Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz [read on]
We are thrilled again to welcome an internationally acclaimed artist of our time, Marianna Simnett. Simnett will give an introduction to her work, and show a selection of her outstanding films. Her immersive narratives centre around the overlapping and at times incongruous themes of vulnerability, autonomy, control, pain, metamorphosis, and care [read on]
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc deals with colonial history and decolonization in his works. In his research-based artistic practice, moments of political upheaval such as the independence movements in many parts of the African continent in the 1960s play a special role. For the artist, they mark the beginning of a complex relationship between the quest for independence and the construction of a new identity, reflected in the texts, images, and films of the period. Abonnenc takes this politically and culturally charged material as a starting point, traces its meaning and shifts in meaning and thus tells stories away from dominant narratives [read on]
With Vajiko Chachkhiani we welcome a master storyteller who's work operates somewhere between the outside world and the human psyche, bringing the shadowy aspects of our Conditio humanato awareness through subtle and intriguing visual poetry. Frequently based on performances or transformative actions, many of his works share an affinity to minimalism while at the same time being charged with narrative meaning. Through his sculptures, installations and films, he addresses psychological conditions such as loneliness, violence and angst, interweaving them with topics from religion, politics, literature, and poetry. Well-known in Berlin’s art scene thanks to a series of exhibitions and his studies with Gregor Schneider at the Udk, Vajiko Chachkhiani now lives back in Tbilisi, Georgia. We are therefore pleased to be able to present him at Videoart at Midnight and to show a selection of his films, not least with two Berlin premieres [read on]
On the occasion of the International Women's Day and 50 years after the infamous panel discussion »A Dialogue on Women‘s Liberation« in New York‘s Town Hall with Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Jacqueline Ceballos and Diana Trilling, Videoart at Midnight invites together with all participants to celebrate the Berlin premiere of RP Kahl's 'When Susan Sontag was Sitting in the Audience'. With Saralisa Volm, Luise Helm, Heike-Melba Fendel, Celine Yildirim, RP Kahl and Cynthia Buchheim, Stefanie Schuster, Mario Mentrup, Kirstin Warnke, Sonja Hilberger [read on]
On the occasion of his solo exhibition "Earwax" at the Times Art Center Berlin (04.03. - 26.06.2022, curated by Hou Hanru), we welcome Wong Ping presenting a selection of his hilarious video works as a prologue and contextual frame of his show. Through animation, sculpture, and immersive installations, Wong Ping creates disturbing and crude narratives that challenge conventional concepts of human desire, obsession, shame, isolation, and repressed sexuality [read on]
We are pleased to start our 2022 program with a cooperation: on the occasion of the exhibition "Abgründe, die durch das Leben unter borealen Bedingungen verursacht werden" (until January 28th, 2022) at the Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz we welcome the Finnish artist duo IC-98. Though their practice is essentially conceptual, IC-98 has been best known for animations, which combine classical drawing and digital effects, depicting landscapes shaped by long time durations, natural and human histories and climate. Mythical, material, factual and fictional elements are weaved together into visual stories, which – though deeply political and meticulously researched, scripted and executed – are presented as open-ended poetic narratives. The mood of the works alternates between a sense of crisis, melancholy, acceptance and resigned optimism [read on]
Complementing the first institutional exhibition of his photographic work at C/O Berlin (Dear Photography, Sep 11 – Dec 3, 2021), Videoart Midnight welcomes Peter Miller to present a selection of rarely seen 35 mm film works from the past 15 years, examining cinema as a phenomenon and addressing its constituent, irreducible elements: lens, light, film, audience and projection [read on]
Ahmet Öğüt's films and videos often contain a spark of humour, a positive light-heartedness towards one's own reality, which can be shaped in many ways. Behind the apparent serenity lies a thoroughly serious, analytical view of one's own political, social and cultural environment [read on]