Closing Weekend “As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories” & “Exercises in Transformation—Sergio Zevallos”

12.1.2024

CLOSING WEEKEND
As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories &
Exercises in Transformation—Sergio Zevallos
Exhibitions, Film Programme, Performance, Discussions, Workshop, Guided Tours
Sat., 13 – Sun., 14 January
Free entry

HKW celebrates the closing of its two current exhibitions with an extensive programme on 13 and 14 January. Film screenings, discussions, a workshop, and guided tours offer the opportunity for an in-depth exploration of the themes of the group exhibition As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories. Fragments for a Geopoetics of Northern Eurasia. A performance that engages with the entire building and the geopolitical history of HKW concludes Exercises in Transformation—Sergio Zevallos.

Admission to both exhibitions and most of the events is free throughout the weekend.

Saturday, 13 January
15:00
A Walk Through the Exhibitions with Paz Guevara and Cosmin Costinaș (Exhibition Practices)
In English

18:00
afterlife
Listening Session & Record Launch with DJ ILYCH

Sunday, 14 January
12:00
A Walk Through the Exhibitions with Eva Stein (Cultural Education) and Paz Guevara (Exhibition Practices)
In English and German

15:00
Interactive Guided Tour with the Siribox
With the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee
In English and German

Adonis XIV & Sel’kincek
Finissage, Film Screenings, Discussion
Sat., 13 January, 16:00–18:00
Safi Faye Hall
Free entry

The two films Adonis XIV (1977) by Bako Sadykov and Sel’kincek (The Swing, 1993) by Aktan Arym Kubat represent two outstanding examples of Central Asian cinema before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Shot sixteen years apart from each other, these two shorts culminate in poetic film languages of the region—one reflecting a harsh reality through the prism of a slaughterhouse, the other diving into a coming-of-age story by revealing an intimate universe during the perestroika years.

The screening of the films is followed by a discussion with Aktan Arym Kubat, moderated by Saodat Ismailova.

More on the event

Sound Stories Silent Site
Workshop with Anton Kats
Sat., 13 January, 14:00–17:00
Haunani-Kay Trask Hall

Sound Stories Silent Site is a performative laboratory for improvised music and storytelling. Step into a sonic playground and set aside a formal understanding of sound, composition, performance, and writing. The workshop for participants 8 years old and up wonders how a collective ethics of a place sounds, especially when inspired by difference and contradiction. Embracing transmigration as a mode to dream and enact new semi-fictional identities, the laboratory collectively envisions narratives of the self, other, and the world.

The multiplicity of voices and lineages present in the exhibition As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories serves as a dynamic starting point for the ephemeral laboratory. By engaging with, reflecting on, and branching off from the artworks, you are invited to become part of a musical ensemble that experiments with sound modules, synthesizers, storytelling, and orchestration.

More on the workshop and tickets

In the Belly of Democracy: Large Divided Oval
Performance with Sergio Zevallos and Luisa Ungar
Sun., 14 January, 14:00–15:00
Meeting point: Miriam Makeba Auditorium
Free entry, limited number of participants

For the finissage of Exercises in Transformation, Sergio Zevallos, in collaboration with artist Luisa Ungar, invites the audience to engage in a performative act of communicating with HKW’s architecture as a site inscribed by political and geopolitical histories. The performance In the Belly of Democracy: Large Divided Oval on Sunday approaches the building as a body that is imprinted with symbols inherited from the Cold War.

By proposing a parkour through the building, a series of exercises make room to listen to and speculate on the present moment in an accumulation of reflections on failed democracies, freedom of speech, resistance to censorship, and their connections with Latin America histories, where both artists migrated from. The performance tackles the Henry Moore sculpture Large Divided Oval: Butterfly (1987), located in the Violeta Parra Pond and, as with many of Moore’s public works of the post-war era, regarded as an allegorical symbol of Western democracy. Through this engagement, the performance fosters various dialogues and clashes with the semiotics of political values and their historic and current manifestations.