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Gruppenbild 4: Ming Wong

Sep 28, 2010 – Nov 5, 2010


Showroom

Ming Wong (together with Karolin Meunier, Discoteca Flaming Star, Azin Feizabadi)

Curators: Kathrin Becker, Sophie Goltz


Gruppenbild is a five part exhibition series 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 took 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.


Based in the collective process of Gruppenbild, Ming Wong invited artists and curators from around the world who live in Berlin, and with whom he has collaborated to participate in a dance workshop with Verena Krajewski. The resulting new video work Kontakthope (2010) explores everyday gestures in the encounter between artists and curators, asking more generally: what takes place within us when we encounter one another? What history are we referring to? At the same time, he picks up German cultural and dance history with gestures borrowed from Pina Bausch’s dance piece Kontakhof (1978). The music was sung in the 1930s by the émigré Russian-Jewish music star in German, who in American exile would never find a musical home. While Bausch’s language of dance is universally legible, Wong films the specific in the micro-encounters to link them in post-production with the visual discourse on cultural globality at the start of the twenty-first century.



Ming Wong (*1971 in Singapore) lives and works in Berlin. He studied Chinese Art at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore and Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Art, University College London. Wong's artwork assembles language and identity and creates it's own “World Cinema”. His performance-videos show this “everyday life cinema” as a stage of queer politics of representation and combines with the story of a melodrama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, P. Ramlees or modern dance. Solo exhibitions (selection): Singapore Art Museum (2010); Singapore Pavilion, 53. Venice Biennial (2009); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008). Group exhibitions (selection): Gwangju Biennial, Sydney Biennial, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (all 2010); Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz (2009); ZKM|Zentrum für Kunst- und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (2008).