is a five part exhibition series showing work by the artists Karolin Meunier, Discoteca Flaming Star, Azin Feizabadi, Ming Wong, and Shirin Homann-Saadat in the Showroom at Neuen Berliner Kunstverein. The participating artists all work with performance and installation, and over the course of the year will create this experiment in collaboration with curators Kathrin Becker and Sophie Goltz. With each new artistic intervention, existing installations will be varied and new elements added. From the individual contributions, a collective conceptual image emerges.

The show begins with the video installation Timing and Consistency (2010, 7:30 min) by Karolin Meunier, a performative monologue on the possibilities and limits of people’s statements about themselves. The second part continues with Discoteca Flaming Star showing the video work El valor del gallo negro (Buthe – Turm – Börse) (2010, 24 min), a performance for the camera which addresses the presence and absence of the body in the process of abstraction.

Azin Feizabadi takes Gruppenbild’s artistic and curatorial processes as the point of departure for his installation Felix, what will remain after all this? (2010) in order to link these to examples of collective resistance and thus to examine how an event affects the event that follows. This creates a tabula rasa situation for the forthcoming exhibitions by Ming Wong and Shirin Homann-Saadat: how will they transform Feizabadi’s work and how will they pick up on the works by Karolin Meunier and Discoteca Flaming Star? While Feizabadi takes the question of “Erinnerung / Memory” as an immaterial point of departure, from the curatorial perspective the aim at the end of the exhibition series is to generate a collective conceptual image in which all artists are visible in material terms.

Felix is the alter ego of Gruppenbild: fragments from the discussions that accompany every new exhibition are combined in a sound collage with references to a number of historical moments of resistance against various government systems. The question “What will remain after all this?” is directed to radical, political-aesthetic life worlds and their constant potential for change. What remains when an artwork becomes a memory for the viewer, what remains in the individual after the experience of a shared struggle? A pedestal made of posters recalls Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who in an interview with Robert Storr (1995) commented on this point: “I think more than anything else I'm just an extension of certain practices, minimalism or conceptualism, that I am developing areas I think were not totally dealt with. I don't like this idea of having to undermine your ancestors, of ridiculing them, and making less out of them. I think we're part of a historical process and I think that this attitude that you have to murder your father in order to start something new is bullshit.”

Azin Feizabadi (born 1983 in Tehran) lives and works in New York and Berlin. In his video works, performances, and installations, he works with transformation processes between collective/individual memory, visible/ invisible phenomena, and fiction/reality. Feizabadi is a co-founder and member of the network Reloading Images, together with artist and theoricians. In 2008, he co-published Damascus: Tourists, Artists, Secret Agents by The Green Box, New York. Exhibitions (selection): Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2010), Townhouse Gallery, Kairo (2010), Tarahan Azad, Silk Road Gallery (both in Tehran, 2009), Goethe-Institut, Istanbul (2006), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2006).