BERLIN.- KW Institute for Contemporary Art opened its summer program for 2019. Through the lens of Anna Daučíková, Heike-Karin Föll, and Image Bank, KW continues its investigation into the disintegration and constraints of the political, collective and published body—this time, by concentrating on the power dynamics of authorship and gender.

Schering Stiftung Art Award 2018:
Anna Daučíková
June 7–August 18, 2019
Curators: Anna Gritz, Cathrin Mayer
Anna Daučíková (born in 1950, Bratislava, SK) is the recipient of the Schering Stiftung Art Award 2018, bestowed by the Schering Stiftung in cooperation with KW. Over the last five decades, the artist has developed an expansive oeuvre encompassing painting, photography, collage, film, and sculpture. Her approach is characterized by an extraordinary sensibility for the way societal structures shape self-definition and personal expression. Daučíková negotiates a space where linear authorship and conventions no longer apply. In the late 1970s Daučíková moved to Moscow, where she remained for over a decade and began developing a practice that explored the concept of the “mental body.” This came as a result of her preoccupation with what she called “inbetweenness,” a term used to express her transgender identity. Her practice unfolded amidst the dissolution of Soviet modernism and was significantly shaped by a conceptual approach that documented the notion of abstraction as a way of finding something personal in abstract orders. Since the 1990s, the artist has turned her eye inwards, increasingly focusing on manifestations of her queer self-understanding within a rapidly changing society. The large-scale monographic exhibition at KW surveys work from the past four decades alongside a new commission that highlights the artist’s longstanding fascination with glass and its ambiguous status between materiality and immateriality, craft and concept. More

Heike-Karin Föll
speed
June 22– September 1, 2019
Curator: Maurin Dietrich
Heike-Karin Föll (born 1967 in Bad Cannstatt, DE) works on the materiality and mechanisms of drawing, writing, and painting. Her work interplays with everyday media realities and styles, analogue or digital texts, and displays. Föll works “post-post”—emerging from no longer solid, former postmodern strategies such as appropriation, quotation, and duplication. Drawing, and therefore also the line as its smallest unit, is prominent in this context. From here, different artistic formats unfold: a book page, a sheet of paper, a canvas, becoming seemingly translucent on digital screens. Föll lives and works in Berlin. She is Professor of Drawing at the Berlin University of the Arts. The exhibition at KW is Föll’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, and presents an overview of various groups of work. More

Image Bank
June 22–September 1, 2019
Curators: Krist Gruijthuijsen, Maxine Kopsa, Scott Watson
Image Bank was founded in 1970 in Vancouver (CA) by artists Michael Morris (born 1946 in Saltdean, GB), Vincent Trasov (born 1947 in Edmonton, CA), and Gary Lee-Nova (born 1943 in Toronto, CA). A model for a utopian system of art distribution operating outside institutions like the museum and the market, Image Bank engaged in an international mail exchange of images and correspondence. The participants in this ever-growing network included artists such as Dana Atchley, Robert Cumming, Dick Higgins, Geoff Hendricks, Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, Kate Craig, Willoughby Sharp, General Idea, and Ant Farm. Their use of gender-crossing Duchampian aliases and their appropriation of images and texts from mainstream media was both a subversive take on post-war individualism and consumer culture as well as a way of partaking in an accelerated flow of data. In collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, KW presents the most comprehensive retrospective of Image Bank to date. The show surveys the collective’s important projects that emerged from a moment of collaborative production, fundamentally questioning the boundary between art and life and anticipated contemporary topics such as networks, tagging/keyword indexing, collective authorship, and UGC (user generated content).