Lecture

The Berlin Sessions:
Annika Eriksson on Charlotte von Mahlsdorf

Dates

Wed, 22.03.17

Admission

free

Venue

Bel Etage (1st floor) at the restaurant Max und Moritz, Oranienstr. 162, 10969 Berlin

Language

en

Annika Eriksson (born in Malmö, SE) is a pioneer of the artistic tendency to place real situations and social interactions at the center of project-oriented and performative art, which became more and more prominent in the 1990s. Besides the documentation of real occurrences, Eriksson employs for her film project more and more the mean of staging and narration. She thereby thematises often the public, urban space as a setting for social processes and upheavals, that reflects the conventions as well as differences and conflicts in the social interaction and in the idea of the collective. Ever since her one-year scholarship at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2002 she has been living here.

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was born 1928 as Lothar Berfeld in Berlin-Mahlsdorf and died during a Berlin visit in 2002. Her troubled childhood during National Socialism, her passionate collecting of rummage and furniture, among others in the ruins of post-war Berlin, and her role in the gay and lesbian scene in East-Berlin was documented in detail by Rosa von Praunheim in the film portraits Ich bin meine eigene Frau (1992) (engl. I am my own woman). Since the 1950s/1960s this courageous outsider and time-witness of the history of Berlin lived a trans-identity, and resistant, as well as controversial life during the GDR and developed into an expert for antiques from the German Gründerzeit period. In 1960 she opened a Gründerzeit museum in the Gutshaus Mahlsdorf that is nowadays open to public again. In 1997 von Mahlsdorf left Berlin presumably due to hostilities from neo-Nazis against her and temporary low cultural-political support for the museum. She moved to Porla Brunn in Sweden, where she opened another Gründerzeit museum.

The program of The Berlin Sessions in March 2017 is a collaboration of KW Institute for Contemporary Art and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

www.berliner-kuenstlerprogramm.de

www.daadgalerie.de

Part of project: The Berlin Sessions

Since February 2017, KW Institute for Contemporary Art organized a series of monthly public talks in collaboration with various institutions and organizations located in Berlin. The series entitled The Berlin Sessions explored the fabric of cultural producers in the city by inviting one Berlin-based speaker to give a presentation on another cultural producer that he/she/they find inspiring. The goal of the lecture series was to highlight the work of Berlin-based creatives from the perspective of their peers; to map connections between the various producers and fields and to strengthen the existing networks between locally based artists, authors, musicians, performers, researchers and other creative producers.