Space/Time

Space/Time Berlin organizes for the first time its program of performance and video art, which will take place in the capital from in April 2016. 45 Berlin and international artists from Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, the USA, Israel and Greece present in cooperation with five different venues works that deal with elements of time and strategies of influence on the experience of the audience.

Formulated as early as 1944 by John Cage, these words have lost none of their relevance to this day; perhaps they have never been more urgent. In a time in which we are shaped by an unprecedented flood of information and permanent input, our vision, receptivity, patience and willingness to be bored have changed radically. These changes also affect our perception of art, our viewing habits, and our expectations of a work of art. Many works of art, however, demand contemplation; they want to be patiently viewed and absorbed. This is especially true of performance and video art. Due to their ephemeral and temporal character, they are among the most uncommercial art forms, but they are highly dependent on a viewing public: they require viewers who are actively present so that they can be actively present as works.

Space/Time Berlin, curated by Steffi Kowalski and Matt Wilson, is a new platform for video and performance art in Berlin that presents artists whose works require time, demand contemplation and want to create new spaces of experience. The result is a month-long program in which we will show performance and video together, and detached from exhibition contexts at TATWERK, Sophiensælen e.V., Flutgraben e.V., Projektraum Naunynstr.53 and Acker Stadt Palast.

We are interested in overcoming the separation between what is traditionally called a screening or a performance by presenting these works in the same space, in the same time frame and for the same audience. In this way, contemporary dance comes together with documentary video, video performance with multimedia experiments, experimental theater with short film series. By presenting these positions together, their unifying elements, especially their inherent element of time, can be experienced in a new way.

Artists such as Peter Clough and Jen Gustavson (New York), Irene Accardo and Claudia Garbe (Berlin), and Spyros Kouvaras (Athens) question our visual habits, actively influence our perception of time, and thus catapult John Cage's request, formulated so many decades ago, into 2016, a year driven by information overload and speed.