Various events hosted by Between Bridges
2014–2019

11 June 2017
Book launch & reading: Jonas Mekas „Ich hatte keinen Ort (Tagebücher 1944-1955)

Book launch & reading: Jonas Mekas „Ich hatte keinen Ort (Tagebücher 1944-1955)“ / “I had nowhere to go (Diaries 1944-1955)”, Spector Books, 2017 with Jonas Mekas and translator Heike Geißler

20 April 2017, 7pm
mono.klub #50, Launch of mono.kultur #43
Fatima Al Qadiri: Embedded Narratives ‘I want to be heard and not seen.’

The 50th edition of mono.klub series coincides with the release of mono.kultur #43, featuring Kuwaiti producer and artist Fatima Al Qadiri. We will celebrate the occasion with an exhibition, for one night only, of Al Qadiri’s series ‘Bored 1997’ at Between Bridges on 20 April 2017.

‘Bored’ dates from 1997, when Fatima Al Qadiri, age 16, photographed her younger sister Monira, 14, in their father’s ‘hunting room’ performing various male personas in his clothes. What could be seen as simple kids’ role play also marks a point in time to trace back to one of the central thematic concerns of Fatima Al Qadiri: ‘Gender performativity has been a link between my past and future, and throughout my career. It’s not an arbitrary element, it’s integral to my art and even music practice.’ The series is published for the first time in print with mono.kultur #43, featuring an extensive interview with Fatima Al Qadiri.

Fatima and Monira Al Qadiri will both be present a collection of photocopies of feminist T-shirts from binders located at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York.

http://mono-kultur.com/

17 March 2017
Year of the Cock, A Performance Lecture by Juliette Blightman

12 November 2016, 7pm
An evening of Born in Flames (1983) by Lizzie Borden

Introduction by Becca Albee and photocopies of feminist T-shirts from the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Organised by Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs.

The documentary-style feminist science fiction film Born in Flames by Lizzie Borden remains as prescient today as it was when it first came out in 1983. The film is set in New York City in an unspecified future, 10 years after a “Social Democratic War of Liberation.” But the socialist policies prove to be as inflexible and bigoted as those in capitalist times. Anger builds up among women from all backgrounds as they continue to endure harassment and discrimination. They come together to form an army and plot a revolution within the revolution.

Becca Albee is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been shown at 356 S. Mission Rd, Los Angeles; Art in General, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Cleopatra’s, New York & Berlin; ICA, Philadelphia. Albee is an Associate Professor of Photography at The City College of New York, CUNY. She will give an introduction to the film based on her first encounters with it in the 1990s. At the time Albee was active in a feminist punk music community in Olympia, Washington. As a member of the band Excuse 17, she released records on Chainsaw and Kill Rock Stars. Born in Flames was a source of influence in the context of feminist discourse, collaboration, non-traditional education, riot grrrl emergence, and activism.

For the front room Albee has invited Kelly Rakowski/h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y to select a collection of photocopies of feminist T-shirts from binders located at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York.

5 November 2016, 7–11pm
Starship Nr. 15, Magazine Launch

7 March 2016, 8pm
Book launch of Doppelleben – Kunst und Popmusik by Jörg Heiser

Was versprach sich Andy Warhol davon, als Produzent von The Velvet Underground im Musikgeschäft zu agieren, und was erhoffte sich umgekehrt die Band von diesem Produzenten? Warum setzte Yoko Ono ihre Fähigkeiten, die sie schon vor der gemeinsamen Zeit mit John Lennon in der künstlerischen Avantgarde entwickelt hatte, in der Popmusik ein – und was zog Lennon im Gegenzug in die Kunst? Warum nahm Joseph Beuys 1982 eine Single mit dem Titel Sonne statt Reagan auf? Und warum gingen Künstlerinnen wie Michaela Melián etwa um die gleiche Zeit in die Popmusik? Wie wichtig sind Utopien der Synthese zwischen Musik und Kunst für Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson oder Fatima Al Qadiri? Und welche subversive Dystopie, ausgedrückt in transgressiven Bildern und Noise, ließ aus der britischen Künstlergruppe COUM Transmissions Mitte der 70er-jahre die Band Throbbing Gristle werden?

Der Kontextwechsel zwischen Kunst und Popmusik – so argumentiert Jörg Heiser in Doppelleben. Kunst und Popmusik, seinem zweiten großen Buch nach Plötzlich diese Übersicht. Was gute zeitgenössische Kunst ausmacht (Claassen/Ullstein, 2007) – ist der Versuch, für Widersprüche, die in dem einen Zusammenhang auftauchen, Lösungen im anderen zu finden. Welcher Art sind diese Widersprüche, wann kommt der Kontextwechsel einer Suche nach Lösungen gleich und wann einer Flucht vor Problemen?

Jörg Heiser ist Co-Chefredakteur des internationalen Kunstmagazins frieze, Herausgeber von frieze d/e und Kunstkritiker u.a. für die Süddeutsche Zeitung. Er ist Gastprofessor an der Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Hamburg. In den Neunzigerjahren studierte er in Frankfurt Philosophie, war Mitgründer des Kulturmagazins Heaven Sent und schrieb u.a. für Spex und Texte zur Kunst. Musiker war und ist er auch: Texter und Sänger der Band Svevo, Tourgitarrist der Lassie Singers, heute Mitglied von La Stampa. Doppelleben. Kunst und Popmusik ist zugleich seine Dissertation im Fach Kunst- und Bildgeschichte an der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. 2007 veröffentlichte Heiser sein vielbeachtetes Buch Plötzlich diese Übersicht. Was gute zeitgenössische Kunst ausmacht (Ullstein/Claassen), das in dritter Auflage und in englischer Übersetzung (All of a Sudden Sculpture Unlimited II (Sternberg Press, hrsg. zusammen mit Eva Grubinger). Heiser kuratierte u.a. die Ausstellung Romantischer Konzeptualismus (Kunsthalle Nürnberg und Bawag Foundation Wien, 2007, Katalog). Er lebt in Berlin.

Kolja Reichert ist Kunstkritiker, Autor und Redakteur der Zeitschrift Spike Art Quarterly. Seine Essays, Kritiken und Interviews erschienen in Magazinen wie frieze d/e, art und Art in America sowie in Zeitungen wie Welt am Sonntag, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung und Der Tagesspiegel. 2012 erhielt Kolja Reichert den Preis für Kunstkritik der Art Cologne und der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Kunstvereine (ADKV). Zuletzt erschienen Beiträge zu den Werken von u.a. Franz Erhard Walther, Renzo Martens, Michael Schmidt, Ryan Trecartin, Lina Bo Bardi und Kraftwerk.

(Talk and discussion will be held in German language)

6 November 2014, 7–9 pm
Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller by Chloé Griffin
Book launch and reading, vintage photographs and videos

A selection of vintage photographs and film excerpts, edited by Chloé Griffin will be on show at Between Bridges

Quite possibly the best history of New York’s much-reprised ‘last avant-garde’ of the 1980s, Edgewise reinvents the inspired amateurism of Mueller’s work, and also creates unforgettable portraits of John Waters’s Baltimore and Provincetown in the 1970s, ‘when the water was still clean.’ — CHRIS KRAUS, author of I Love Dick and Summer of Hate

Cookie looked like Janis Joplin meets Jayne Mansfeld, a redneck hippie with a little bit of glamour drag thrown in. She never led a safe life, unsafe was her middle name. She lived on the edge, always. — JOHN WATERS (excerpt from EDGEWISE)

Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller by Chloé Griffin

Cookie Mueller (1949-1989) was an actress, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and an icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name as an actress in John Waters’s flms, including Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, and then as an art critic for Details magazine and a columnist for the East Village Eye, gaining a reputation as a writer of hilarious stories and a maven of New York’s downtown art world. Edgewise tells the story of Cookie’s life in the form of an oral history assembled from more than 80 interviews with the people who knew her, including John Waters, Mink Stole,Gary Indiana, Sharon Niesp, Max Mueller, Linda Yablonsky, Richard Hell, Amos Poe and Raymond Foye. The contributors take us from the late-1960s artist communes of Baltimore to 1970s Provincetown and New York, through 1980s Berlin and Positano. Along with the text, Edgewise includes artwork, unpublished photographs, and archival material and photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and others.

Further information: cookiemuellerbook.com