Oppelner Strasse –Summer in the City, 10997 BERLIN
Oppelner Strasse and its neighbourhood has its histories that wears on it in layers, vibrating to the contemporary tempo of the city in it and around it. Kreuzberg is based on settling, dynamism and remodelling. The city is ever changing and unique. In 2017, a collaboration between PremArts gallery and artists including Joe Hayes and Kwame Aidoo who found a new home in Berlin through the creative spark of its indegenes, started a conversation which has now become the seed project called Görlitzer Park Arts Festival. We look forward to an interactive, exploratory, educative and impactful festival where we can learn and have fun at the same time and breathe love into the city and inhale the beauty of humanity, interconnectedness and community.
MISSION AND VISION
On the topic of sustainability in global cities like Berlin, while addressing the prospects of change agents, we look at ourselves as artists, community members, children of the metrof the urban dynamics, makers, users of space, consumers, curators, bikers, merchants, food lovers, plastic waste collectors, etc. We focus on our direct and indirect responsibilities and how our body languages affect the things around us which in turn affect our anatomies. As such, the project will shine light on key sustainability issues, inclusion, and introduce us to change agents from a variety of disciplines.
PROPOSED DATES – AUGUST 2018
Kwame Aidoo – Inkfluent (Berlin, Paris, Accra)
Kenneth Balfelt – Kenneth Balfelt Team (Copenhagen)
Joe Hayes – Joe by Joe (New York)
Minnie Griffith, Photographer and PR (Berlin, West UK, Marseilles)
Elle Peril , Femina non Grata
PROJECT SPACE
PremArts Gallery, Oppelner Str 34, 10997 Berlin
Public Space: Oppelner Strasse 34- 15 (between PremArts and Streetfountain
Fountains – Strassenbrunnen Oppelner Str.,
THEME:
BODY LANGUAGE
Body language embodies the embedded reflections and silent choreographies of political agency In today’s reality of mass migration, voluntary and forced, where bodies resettle away from war and poverty to create diasporic public spheres where new identifications take place and new identities have to be negotiated. The governing maps of migration show that for refuge seekers, there are still key arbiters that define
who belong to the political community (e.g. citizens) and who remain outside (e.g. undocumented migrants). The affinities or rejections from nation states and local forces apropos to migrant bodies enforces codes of conduct that the settler has to adapt to, to survive. Bodies navigate a new language by losing the language their bodies already knew, new gestures and rhythms are engulfed on their anatomies which are also nonetheless ‘political sites’ Furthermore, migrant’s bodies are also sites of collective memory on which collective history, including colonialism, is written.
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DIE TORE DER WAHRNEHMUNG // THE GATES OF PERCEPTION
Die Tore der Wahrnehmung / The Gates of Perception / 1865 – 2018
by Bernard Bolter (San Francisco . 1974)
June 14th – June 24th, 2018
open daily 13:00 – 17:00 and by appointment
Vernissage | Thursday, June 14th | 19:00 – 22:00
Finissage | Sunday, June 24th | 15:00 – 18:00
Workshops | Learn how to transfer photos to canvas and other medium :
Saturday, June 16th | 14:00 – 17:00
Thursday, June 21 | 18:00 – 21:00
The Gates of Perception is a series of paintings that combine one photographs transferred to canvas and acrylic paint. The series portrays the gates of the Berlin Customs Wall, which existed from 1737 to 1860, with a combination of historical and present day photographs spanning the city of Berlin from the end of the 19th century to the present day. The gates of the Customs Wall were named after the cities one would travel to when leaving Berlin, in a very outward looking way, and to this day still define the city.
Bio :
Bernard Bolter is a contemporary American artist who works primarily between the mediums of paint and photography. Having grown up skateboarding in the streets to seeing the world by rolling through international streets, Cityscapes have been his inspiration and material throughout. Raised in the City, Bernard began as and continues to be a San Francisco artist. His work and person is inherently international, having attended art school in the Netherlands, co-founded a non-profit traveling arts organization in Brooklyn, and collaborated on projects in China. He currently works out of San Francisco and Berlin, filling in the betweens.
Storyboard Abossey Okai
EXHIBITION | OPEN STUDIO | PERFORMANCE
Prem Arts, Berlin (8-12 June, 2018)
SCHEDULE
Dates: 8-12 June, 2018
Open Studio: 12 PM – 8 PM each day
Performance: 11 June (6:30 – 7:30 PM)
DESCRIPTION
Storyboard Abossey Okai (Prem Arts, Berlin)
Map of the Gold Coast Railway. Showing Feeder Road and the Principal Agriculture and Mineral Areas. March 1922. Colonial Office photographic collection at The National Archives, UK as part of the Africa Through a Lens project.
Unearths the role that memory, community, evolution and continuity play in African storytelling and the construction of identity and consciousness reflected through a timeline of events. In contemporary discourse, a probe to dissect the methods of designing narrations by organising or disorganising spatial relationships. A contribution for rethinking urban mythology, navigating time travel and escapism while engaging the socio-political realities of global warming associated with an electronic waste site and salvaged auto parts market. A storyboard of thought-provoking visual poetry on diverse themes including migration, labour and global economy. A social commentary approach merging abstraction with street photography, collage, sound and poetic documentary.
BIOGRAPHY
KWAME AIDOO
(Ghana, 1986)
Kwame Aidoo is a Ghana-based writer, educator and artist whose text, visual, sound, installation and performance pieces are inspired by African oral folklore, cadence and symbolism to interrogate sociopolitical contexts. He is the founder of Inkfluent, Nkabom Literary Arts Festival and Afrovims; a journal on creative processes and projects from Africa and the diaspora. He makes social commentary music with Dearly Deported(GH), Lucked In(FR/US), Blood Drum Spirit(US), Break Ya Bones(FR) and Kwasaba(DK). He graduated from KNUST-Kumasi in biochemistry and biotechnology and has shown work at Chale Wote – Accra, Nasjonalmuseet – Oslo, Prem Arts – Berlin, FLUPP – Rio, among others.