Academy


YOUNG CURATORS ACADEMY
sharing, listening, enabling, activating

WHAT

In the course of the 4. Berliner Herbstsalon, Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin invited over 30 participants to be part of the first edition of the Young Curators Academy in Berlin, initiated by Shermin Langhoff (director of Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin) and Ong Keng Sen (Artistic Director of TheatreWorks Singapore and Founding Festival Director of Singapore International Festival of Arts 2014 to 2017).

The Young Curators Academy will be hosted by Ong Keng Sen, Irina Szodruch and Erden Kosova and will serve as an artistic and activist platform for discovering alliances, exploring affinities, and consolidating solidarities. A central empowerment of this international gathering will be the sharing of acts of deterritorialization, enabling transformation and connecting with other multiplicities.

WHY

Over the period of two weeks, the Young Curators Academy intends to nurture public debate, focus artistic conversations, and act as an amplifier for resistance energies and intensities. The Young Curators Academy invited over 30 individuals, who work at the crossings of art and activism, often under challenging political, social and economic conditions, to share their knowledge, reflect on and deepen their own practices from parallel experiences, and empowering each other.

The Young Curators Academy explicitly welcomes makers - young artists, thinkers, program producers - who are both creating their own events and developing new forms of authorship and curation. In this context, the term young is understood as pioneering practice, the curator as individuals who are part of different communities and desiring to activate them. The Young Curators Academy is designed for those who are initiating transfers between different micro-contexts, and enabling relocations of the self as well as new lines of flight beyond patriarchal borders. The Young Curators Academy forms an intersectional narrative of sharing processes and alternative belongings.

HOW

In a public event, the Young Curators Academy Marathon, the participants will share a chosen project from their contexts, which enabled art and activism dealing with the topic of “De-heimatize Belonging”. The participants will discuss their local contexts where they are consolidating belongings, bridging affinities or forming alternative alliances.

Another public series, the Sundowners, are public talks that discuss alternative practices of activating communities.

In closed sessions the participants will be engaged in an intense dialogue with the hosts, international curators, Berlin based arts and activist organizations as well as featured artists of 4. Berliner Herbstsalon.

Finally, the Academy will close with open sessions on November 3rd 2019 where the public is invited to enter into an exchange with the participants.

WHEN

Young Curators Academy Marathon
Free Admission
Walk in/out any time
In English

SAT. 26.10. 8:30 PM Container
Afterwards Party with Sarah Farina and others

SUN. 27.10. 4 PM Container

MON. 28.10. 6 PM Container

Young Curators Academy Sundowner
Free Admission
In English

TUE. 29.10. 6 PM Lichtsaal
IMAGINARY EXHIBITION with Banu Cennetoğlu and Zehra Doğan hosted by Erden Kosova

WED. 30.10. 6 PM Lichtsaal
With Galit Eilat (Livestream)

THU. 31.10. 6 PM Lichtsaal
With Ong Keng Sen (Livestream)

SUN. 3.11. 6 PM Lichtsaal
With Tracey Rose (Livestream)

WHO

PARTICIPANTS
Soukaina Aboulaoula Riksa Afiaty Mona Benyamin Vladimir Bjeličić Rafika Chawishe Adela Demetja Aylime Aslı Demir Fatou Kiné Diouf Yuan Fuca Helia Hamedani Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas Thao Ho Huang Ding-Yun Lyse Ishimwe Nsengiyumva Liene Jurgelāne Rola Khayyat Sreyneang Khon Olivia Hyunsin Kim Lee Cheah Ni Zhazgul Madazimova Chepkemboi J. Mang'ira Donna Miranda Nhung Dinh Amila Puzić Aya Rebai Promona Sengupta Uygar Önder Şİmşek Sasapin Siriwanij Ida Ślęzak Aziz Sohail Corrie Tan Phoo Myat Thwe Arkadi Zaides

HOSTS
Ong Keng Sen, artistic director of TheatreWorks and the artspace 72-13 in Singapore, founded the Arts Network Asia and the international Curators Academy, focused on the synergy between contexts and curation in Asia. He created the nomadic, international artist residency, The Flying Circus Project. Ong is the Founding Festival Director of the all-new Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts.

Erden Kosova is an art critic based in Istanbul and Berlin. He has been in the editorial board of the e-journal red-thread.org. Kosova is currently working on a book on Cengiz Çekil, one of the pioneers of conceptual art in Turkey. He also contributes to a research project curated by Galit Eilat, which deals with eschatological thinking in the past and at the present time. He was in engaged in several editions of Berliner Herbstsalon at Maxim Gorki Theater.

Irina Szodruch was a dramaturg at the Schaubühne Berlin from 2006-2009, where she worked on Yael Ronen's Dritte Generation (Third Generation 2009). At Ballhaus Naunynstraße she was a co-initiator of the Voicing Resistance festival. In 2011 Szodruch co-curated the IN TRANSIT performing arts festival at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, under the direction of Jens Hillje. Irina Szodruch has been a dramaturg at the Maxim Gorki Theatre since the 2013/14 season where she worked with Yael Ronen on the award winnig plays Common Ground, The Situation and many others as well as with Hakan Savas Mican.

SUNDOWNERS
Galit Eilat is an interdependent curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Since 2018 she is the director of Meduza Foundation. Her projects seek to develop conditions that enable collective encounters and experiences, underpinned by a critical view towards the status quo. Deploying eclectic, site-specific projects, often in collaboration with grass root, politically active groups and individuals. Her current research trajectories are dealing with the Syndrome of the Present and Totalitarian Art vs Art under Totalitarianism.

and others

CLOSED YCA SESSIONS WITH
Shermin Langhoff is the artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theatre, which was chosen as theatre of the year in 2014 and 2016. Before coming to the Gorki, Langhoff founded the post-migrant theatre at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, whose concept and productions garnered attention around the world. Under her direction, the Gorki has also attained international acclaim: with a multilingual ensemble it tells stories of today’s heterogeneous society in both contemporary plays and radical new interpretations of established texts. Langhoff has received numerous honours for this work.

The Center for Intersectional Justice is an independent nonprofit organisation based in Berlin dedicated to advancing equality and justice for all by combating intersecting forms of structural inequality and discrimination in Europe. CIJ seeks to influence the public discourse and impact on policymaking through direct advocacy, research and policy advice, as well as publications on issues related to intersectional discriminations based on race, gender, class and all other systems of oppression which sustain inequality.

The Center for Political Beauty is an assault team that establishes moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness while aiming to preserve humanitarianism. The group’s basic understanding is that the legacy of the Holocaust is rendered void by political apathy, the rejection of refugees and cowardice. It believes that Germany should not only learn from its History but also take action.The Center‘s activist art works, exhibitions and plays were shown at Gorki Theatre, the 7th Berlin Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe and Steirischer Herbst, i.a.

Aljoscha Begrich studied art history, philosophy and cultural studies in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. He has worked as a set designer since 2003 at venues including Oper Dortmund, Columbia University in New York, and Staatstheater Stuttgart, as well as with independent group lunatiks produktion beginning in 2006. He began working as a dramaturg in 2009 at Schauspiel Hannover and with Rimini Protokoll. He is a Dramaturg at the Gorki Theatre Berlin since the 2014/15 season.

Çağla Ilk studied architecture in Istanbul and Berlin and works at the interface of art, urbanism and architecture. Since 2012 she works as an artistic consultant at Maxim Gorki Theater where she is in charge of Herbstsalon Festival . With her interdisciplinary and post migrant platform Bureau Milk she intervenes in public spaces with site-specific performances in Berlin, Munich and Istanbul. She is the head of Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst and a member at Rat für die Künste Berlin.

Regina José Galindo is a visual artist and poet, whose main medium is performance. Galindo lives and works in Guatemala, using its own context as a starting point to explore and accuse the ethical implication of social violence and injustices related to gender and racial discrimination, as well as human rights abuses arising from the endemic inequalities in power relations of contemporary societies. She has participated in the 49th, 53rd and 54th Venice Biennals and the Documenta 14 in Athens/Kassel just to name a few.

Marta Górnicka is a director and singer. With support from the Zbigniew Raszewski Theater Institute in Warsaw, she founded the Chorus of Women. Maxim Gorki Theatre presented her play M[other] Courage and coproduced Hymn to love and Jedem das Seine. On 3rd October 2018 she presented Grundgesetz (Constitional Law) in front of the Brandenburg Gate. She is currently founding the Political Voice Institute at Gorki Theatre.

Grada Kilomba, born 1986 in Lisbon, is based in Berlin. Her work was featured in numerous exhibitions including 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), documenta 14, Kassel (2017) and the 32. São Paulo Biennale (2016). She teaches at several international universities and was a guest professor for Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She participated in the last Herbstsalon and curated the event series Kosmos² at Maxim Gorki Theater.

Delaine Le Bas, born 1965 in Worthing. Her works have been presented at the Venice Biennale (2007, 2017, 2019), the Tate Modern (2017), and the Gwangju Biennale (2012). She is curator of the First Roma Biennale COME OUT NOW! (2018). At Gorki, Delaine Le Bas most recently designed the costumes for the production Rewitching Europe.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann studied dramatic writing in Berlin, and has been honored with both the Kleist prize for young playwrights and the audience prize at the Mülheimer Theater Days. Salzmann directed Studio Я from 2012-2015. For Gorki she dramatized her novel Außer Sich and staged Die Geschichte vom Leben und Sterben des neuen Juppi Ja Jey Juden (2017).

SAVVY Contemporary is an art space, platform for discourses - a place of shared hospitality. It is located on the threshold between concepts of the West and non-West in order to understand and deconstruct them. It has carried out a variety of projects - exhibitions, performances, film screenings, lectures, concerts, readings, discussions, dance. SAVVY Contemporary has built a participatory archive for German colonial history, a documentation centre for performance art, a library and a residency programme.