Dates
Wed, 18 August 21, 5–7 pm
Samira Ghoualmia with Arootin Mirzakhani
In German
Hybrid offer

Wed, 1 September 21, 5–7 pm
Barbara Campaner with Anja Saleh
In German
At KW

Wed, 15 September 21, 5–7 pm
Jeanne-Ange Wagne with Guilherme Coelho
In English
At KW

The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance at least five days ahead of the event at mediation@kw-berlin.de.

Accompanying the exhibition Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief by the artist Michael Stevenson, selected focus tours offer the opportunity to approach the exhibition by means of in-depth insights, different accesses and voids. In Stevenson’s work, questions of faith, technology, economy and play in a neoliberal present are linked in ever new ways. In analogy to Stevenson’s own artistic practice, this format aims to reassemble and digest his work through renewed views, forms of knowledge and experiences. On the dates, the art mediators Barbara Campaner, Samira Ghoualmia and Jeanne-Ange Wagne invite different conversation partners for an exchange.

Wed, 18 August 21, 5–7 pm
Do I want to know this?
Samira Ghoualmia with Arootin Mirzakhani

What would it mean if we looked at the exhibition structurally and at the same time substantially? Which layers lie between the information and the mediation of Michael Stevenson’s works? Deriving from that dynamic, how can the curation and the positioning of Stevensons’s practice lay bare, beyond what we can see? Is it possible to deduce information between the lines of the exhibition that is not part of the art? Together we want to find conditions that have made it possible for Stevenson to have developed these artworks and their aesthetics. There are also two spaces juxtaposed: one values knowledge and the other values belief. How do we deal with this setting when Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief already predetermines its intervention?

As a writer, visual artist, and educator Samira Ghoualmia addresses issues of identity and post-colonialism.

In Arootin Mirzakhani‘s everyday practice the focus lies in the use of art as a thinking-system to situate hegemonic conditions structurally within coming together.

Wed, 1 September 21, 5–7 pm
Walking with words
Barbara Campaner with Anja Saleh

Michael Stevenson has developed an artistic language that can be located at the interface of different disciplines. Between sculpture and installation universal systems and questions that always occupy society move. The walk through the exhibition follows a predetermined choreography that suggests associations and analogies. The encounter with forms and contents, physical and mental, leaves room for words. In this focus tour, creative writing methods are used to try to look at and question the performativity of art and exhibition design together.

Barbara Campaner is an art historian and art educator.

Anja Saleh is an artist, poet and author of Soon, The Future Of Memory.

Wed, 15 September 21, 5–7 pm

De/constructing and understanding (un)realities

Jeanne-Ange Wagne with Guilherme Coelho

A New York Times article from 2016, of course extremely provocatively, states that nowadays everything is wrestling, everything is constructed (un)reality. Michael Stevenson’s exhibition “Disproof does not equal disbelief” embodies a two-fold interplay of construction and deconstruction.His works are exemplary for such “world-making” (Norman Goodman) and exist as entities between modes of being, modern myths, disbelief, hyperbolic media spectacles and art making as a form of inquiring. At the same time, instructions found within the respective artworks may help deconstruct and better unterstand these pluriworlds. The focus tour would like to offer the room for such inquiry.

Jeanne-Ange Megouem Wagne is a German-Cameroonian creative and art historian.

Guilherme Coelho is an artist-researcher whose focus lies in exploring AI models and artefacts as quasi-objects and epistemic tools towards new considerations.

The installation Serene Serene Velocity in Practice: MC510/CS183, 2017/21 was commissioned by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki with commissioning partners the Biennale of Sydney 2018 and Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA Commission supported by the Contemporary Benefactors of Auckland Art Gallery, Chartwell Trust, Auckland Contemporary Art Trust, Auckland Art Gallery International Ambassadors, and Michael Lett, Auckland.