With a discussion between Tom McCarthy and Clémentine Deliss

7 December 23, 7 pm

In English

Venue: KW, 3rd floor

Registration via reservation@kw-berlin.de

SKIN IN THE GAME. Conversations on Risk and Contention follows on from the acclaimed fieldwork diary The Metabolic Museum, published by KW and Hatje Cantz in 2020. In her new book, Clémentine

Deliss expands on how artists understand risk and contention both in their own work and in relation to historical, and often disputed, collections.

In a series of compelling dialogues, with contributions from Tom McCarthy, Henrike Naumann, Luke Willis Thompson, and many more, we discover the modus operandi of the Metabolic Museum-University (MM-U), a curatorial platform initiated by Deliss in 2015 and located at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin since 2020. Questions are raised on how to develop new transversal imaginaries and decolonial interpretations of collections that are able to cross-connect disciplines, cultures and periods in time. The concept of the “prototype,” which Deliss elaborates on throughout the book, ties the debates of the Metabolic Museum-University to the theme of her exhibition SKIN IN THE GAME that runs at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin until January 7, 2024.

Along with a text by Rosemarie Trockel and a visual reportage by Eva Stenram, the volume includes conversations with artists in the exhibition—Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Andrea Zittel. Each discusses their moment of “skin in the game,” when they took the decision to become an artist, to enter the Hades of an uncertain existence and the Heaven of aesthetic experiment.

Clémentine Deliss initiated the MM-U in 2015 and has directed different stations of the curatorial platform in Kyiv, Karlsruhe, Ljubljana and more recently at KW, where she has been Associate Curator since 2020. She is the curator of the exhibition SKIN IN THE GAME.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.