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Step Out of the Strange Light
March 26 – May 9, 2021
Registration required – please schedule your visit via our online form

Artists: Larissa Fassler, Raphaël Grisey in cooperation with Bouba Touré, Bettina Hutschek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Musquiqui Chihying, Mandla Reuter, Padraig Robinson, Setareh Shahbazi, Pauł Sochacki, Adnan and Nina Softić, Clarissa Thieme in collaboration with Charlotte Eifler
Curators: Krisztina Hunya, Melanie Roumiguière

With Step Out of the Strange Light, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein continues its series of group exhibitions with artists who have been awarded the Berlin Senate’s work stipends in the visual arts. The exhibition serves as a platform for diverse positions of contemporary art production in Berlin and reveals numerous connections between the various artistic and thematic focal points. At the heart of many of the contributions is an examination of real and imagined places, shaped both by ideological implications and collective practices. A further common aspect is the impulse to reveal and question structures that are inscribed in, yet often hidden behind, forms of emergence and transformation of the social condition.

The title of the exhibition Step Out of the Strange Light refers to a line from the song Come to Life (1976) by Arthur Russell. It continues the n.b.k. tradition of associatively linking the presentation of the Senate fellows with a musical work. The interdisciplinary approaches of many of the works in the exhibition will be reflected on in an extensive online program that includes artist talks, discussions, and a video premiere.

Online discourse program

Friday, March 26, 2021 – Sunday, May 9, 2021
Masquerades of Research
Screening (Padraig Robinson, Masquerades of Research: Part I, 30 min), followed by a conversation between David P. Keys (author and professor of criminal law, New Mexico State University) and Padraig Robinson (artist, Berlin)
In English

April 2021
Step Out of the Strange Light – Panel 1
With Charlotte Eifler (artist, Leipzig), Rajkamal Kahlon (artist, Berlin), Nina und Adnan Softic (artists, Berlin), moderated by Nataša Ilić (member of the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom / WHW; director of Kunsthalle Wien)
In English

May 2021
Step Out of the Strange Light – Panel 2
With Slavenka Drakulić (author and journalist, Stockholm and Zagreb), Šejla Kamerić (artist, Berlin and Sarajevo), Gülsün Karamustafa (artist, Istanbul), Olivera Simić (Associate Professor, Griffith Law School, Brisbane; Visiting Fellow at Transitional Justice Institute Belfast), Jasmila Žbanić (film director, screenwriter, and producer, Sarajevo), moderated by Lívia Páldi (curator, Budapest)
In English

Publication
As part of the n.b.k. book series “Berlin”, a bilingual publication (DE/EN) is published by Walther und Franz König, Cologne, including a greeting by Klaus Lederer, a preface by Marius Babias as well as texts by Krisztina Hunya, Alan Pauls, Michaela Richter, and Melanie Roumiguière.

n.b.k. Showroom
Loretta Fahrenholz. A Decade that Exploded
March 26 – May 9, 2021
Registration required – please schedule your visit via our online form

Curator: Anna Lena Seiser

For her first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents A Decade that Exploded, a new film by Loretta Fahrenholz. Set in 2012 and 2020, A Decade that Exploded takes a non-linear, multi-perspective look at the lives of Harry, Sally and Mimi, three women living in New York. Comprised mainly of footage recorded on smart phones, the film is an intimate reflection on our times, on womanhood, and on friendship, framed against the backdrop of the art system and the social and technological transformations of the last decade.

All three of the film’s actors work in the New York art world; Thea Westreich is an art collector, Michele Abeles is a photographer, and Emily Sundblad is a visual artist, musician, and gallery owner. Playing across several screens we witness scenes of playful flirtation at a bar, a silent visit to an exhibition, and conversations about art and family interwoven with seemingly casual street scenes and monologues on grief, relationships, and illness. A Decade that Exploded rejects pre-determined divisions between identities, roles, and fixed points of view.

In Fahrenholz’s post-cinematic approach the boundaries between the performative and the cinematic dissolve into a simultaneity of overlapping layers, spaces, and times, mimicking the technological mediation of our everyday life. The iPhone 4, launched in 2011, was the first smartphone to allow high-definition video to be recorded spontaneously by consumer-devices – establishing new techniques of image-based self-expression and marketing that have since become commonplace. This hyper-present yet naturalized techno-cultural transformation is both an object represented in the film and the subject inscribing it.

In the first part of the film, we see the three women, usually together, moving about in New York City. In contrast, the second half of the film was shot during the 2020 lockdown and is composed of fragments of the protagonists everyday lives, recorded in isolation in their different spaces of retreat. The passage of time between the two periods is not depicted but can be traced through their recollections of personal developments and past events. The work opens up a space of resonance for both one’s personal experiences and more universal questions of our time – about life plans, about reproduction and death, art, and growing older.

The Berlin-based artist Loretta Fahrenholz works in the mediums of film and photography. Her works draw from literature, film, and art history, anchoring them in the present day by relating them to current developments in society. Fahrenholz’s work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions at mumok – Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna (2018), Fridericianum, Kassel (2016), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016), and Kunsthalle Zürich (2015), as well as film screenings at Ann Arbor Film Festival (2019, 2020, 2021) Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2014, 2020), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2019), Image Festival Toronto (2016), Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2015), and Anthology Film Archives, New York (2015).

Please find more information on each exhibition as well as the program of n.b.k. on our website.