Join us at 2220 Arts + Archives on Tuesday, June 27nd for a screening of works by visual artists and Villa Aurora 2023 fellows Annika Kahrs, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, moderated by Hamza Walker.

Annika Kahrs will show excerpts from three different projects: installation-stills from Le Chant des Maisons (2022), a video installation that shows a sonic and visual process of construction and deconstruction, performed by different musicians and multiple carpenters at the church of St. Bernard in Lyon, excerpts from her current work in progress, Gravity’s tune, which deals with the acoustic recording of the gravitational waves, and the lord loves changes, it’s one of his greatest delusions (2018) which is based on two iconic Julius Eastman pieces - "The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc" and "Gay Guerrilla" - and the observation that the latter is based on Martin Luther's chorale "Ein Fester Burg Ist Unser Gott," the ultimate protest song of the Reformation movement. As in almost all of Annika Kahrs' works, the aim here is to exploit as far as possible the extensibility of music and science - both factually and figuratively. The individual voice asserts itself within a staging in which all nuances between harmonic interplay and provoked dissonance must be tested and endured. It is always a matter of unlearning rehearsed habits and apparent certainties in order to renegotiate everyday situations.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani will present their 2020 film Appropriation Takes You on a Weird Ride which investigates the strange German enthusiasm for Native Americans in relation to contemporary racism and its deep colonial roots. This fascination, especially with regard to the construction of a german identity, has a rather frightening than impressive chronology: It begins with the first-century Germanic Cherusci chieftan Arminius and stretches to the adventure novels of Karl May and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows in the 1800s, through the ethnographic exhibitions (Völkerschauen) in zoos and circuses and the founding of “Indian clubs” at the turn of the twentieth century, onward to the appropriation of Indigenous identities by Nazi ideologists, up until the present day, when new right-wing groups have developed an unsettling identification with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.

The Berlin-based artists and filmmakers Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani have been collaborating on their interventional and situationist art practice since 1995. They reflect the rise and fall of modernity, and the intense relationship between our contemporary society and utopian projects that have driven the evolution of our history from the past to the future. Their work is a permanent pursuit of and negotiation with the transition of time. They have been awarded e.g. as Rome Prize Fellows at German Academy Villa Massimo, Stedelijk Museums in Amsterdam, Villa Kamogawa – Goethe Institute Kyoto, Tiger Short Award Winner, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Candidate for the European Film Award. International exhibitions they have participated in include 1st, 4th and 7th Gwangju Biennale, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, 13th Sydney Biennale, 10th Istanbul Biennial, 7th and 8th Media City Seoul Biennale, 2nd Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Manifesta 13, Marseille, Sharjah Biennial 15 and Solo exhibitions at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Berlinische Galerie – Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin, K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Maxxi Museum of the XXI Century Arts, Rome.

In October 2016, Hamza Walker became LAXART’s second director after twenty-two years as Curator and Director of Education at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. Under Walker’s leadership, LAXART has deepened its mission and exhibition program to include thematic group exhibitions, new work with historical figures, and institutional-scale projects with emerging and established artists.