Artists: Frauke Boggasch, Ursula Döbereiner, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Leon Kahane, Şener Özmen, Doireann O’Malley, Sabine Reinfeld, Maya Schweizer, Lerato Shadi, Rui Vilela, Philip Wiegard

Curators: Arkadij Koscheew, Michaela Richter

The exhibition These Are the Only Times You Have Known presents the work of 11 international artists who were awarded the Berlin Senate’s Visual Arts Grant in 2019. The range of artistic positions they represent reflects the diversity of artistic forms of expression in Berlin and includes the examination of different layers of time, hidden narratives, and issues of belonging and performativity. The search for meaning in the present is an element shared by all of the artistic works presented in These Are the Only Times You Have Known, whose spectrum ranges from paintings, photographs, prints, and video installations to virtual reality techniques.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the hit album Let Them Eat Chaos by British singer and lyricist Kate Tempest. In the opening song Picture A Vacuum, the protagonist travels from the abstract, timeless blackness of the universe to planet Earth, as if plunging into the present. Her line “These are the only times you have known” underscores the contemporaneity of the positions assembled in the exhibition, while at the same time pointing to the individual artistic achievements, each of which formulates questions about the present, past, and future in its own way.

Public Program

– The events were cancelled due to the situation regarding Coronavirus (COVID-19) –

Tuesday, March 17, 2020, 7 pm

On View: New acquisitions 2019 for the collection of the n.b.k Video-Forum

Screening with video works by John Bock, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Candice Breitz, Eduard Constantin, Antje Ehmann und Eva Stotz, Tomas Schmit, Hito Steyerl, Clarissa Thieme

Thursday, March 26 / April 16 / April 30, 2020, 7 pm

Love the idea of being live! #1–3

Performative activation of the installation Cars Land (2020) by Sabine Reinfeld (artist, Berlin)

Thursday, April 2, 2020, 7 pm

Recipes for Survival. A Village in the Backlands of Southern Brazil

Panel discussion with Maria Thereza Alves (artist, Berlin and São Paulo), Wilma Lukatsch (art historian and author, member of the DFG Research Training Group „Knowledge in the Arts“, Berlin University of the Arts) and Teodora Kotseva (cultural manager, curator and author, Berlin)

In English

Sunday, May 3, 2020, 7 pm

Moving Backwards

Performance and book presentation with Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz (artists, Berlin) and Werner Hirsch (performer, Berlin), concert by Aérea Negrot (musician and performer, Berlin)

In English

Free admission to all events

Publication

As part of the n.b.k. book series “Berlin”, a bilingual publication (DE/EN) is published by Walther König, Cologne, including an introduction by Klaus Lederer and Marius Babias as well as texts by Arkadij Koscheew, Michaela Richter, and Marlene Streeruwitz.