Das Dritte Land

New Rituals of Healing / Summer Videoart Screening

Participating artists:
Nam June Paik (A Pas de Loup), Alisi Telengut, Isaac Chong Wai, Dew Kim, Marco Montiel-Soto, Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller, Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), Clemens Wilhelm & Jan Martinec.

The video art screening „New Rituals of Healing“ explores how rituals as symbolic acts and sources of inspiration are contextualised in different performative formats and practised as catalysts for inner healing in different cultural circles.

On 20 July 1990 in Seoul, Nam June Paik, the pioneer of video art who had already combined technology and spirituality in his artistic practice in the 1970s, staged the performance „A Pas de Loup“, which was conceived as a Korean shamanic ritual kut in honour of Joseph Beuys. She thus fulfilled an agreement between the two artists to perform a shamanic ritual together, which was no longer possible due to Joseph Beuys‘ death. Four years after Beuys‘ death, Paik single-handedly fulfilled his promise. Paik took a bowl of uncooked rice and sprinkled some of it over a photo of Beuys. In addition to the typical elements of the Kut – a table with food as an offering and an exorcism – he used a broken piano, a violin and 16 television housings to create a new Kut that would bring back the soul of Joseph Beuys.

The participation of Berlin and international artists such as Isaac Chung Wai, Alisi Telengut, Sara Sejin Chang, Horny Honey Dew, Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller, Clemens Wilhelm & Jan Martinec, Marco Montiel-Soto in the project takes up the central impulse of the action and creates not only a posthumous international dialogue between Beuys and his student Nam June Paik, but also a dialogue between the two artists and the young generation of artists currently working in the field of art.
This generation of artists finds in ritual and shamanism a critical projection surface for themes such as the environment, post-colonialism, society and identity.

Summer video screening
We after 1989

Participating artists:
Clemens Wilhelm, Mischa Leinkauf, Im Heung Soon, Choi Sung Rok, Henrike Naumann, Jeewi Lee, Anne Dukhee Jordan, Jeong Ka Hee, Kim Lyang, Young Ho Lee

Since the end of the Cold War, borders have never seemed more relevant than during the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, we have been confronted with a dystopian vision of the future in which not only political, but also social and societal borders have become more pronounced. As part of the network meetings („We after 1989“), which have been taking place since December 2019, German and Korean artists have been working together with historians and curators to explore borders as spaces of experience. As an interim result of this interdisciplinary exchange, we would like to organise a two-day screening in which artists from Germany and Korea will present their video art, which deals with visible and invisible borders as well as border demarcations under social, biological and political aspects.

The artists‘ garden „Das Dritte Land“ serves as an open platform for artistic explorations of the real and imaginary spaces between nature and borders. In the work of the two Korean artists Seok Hyun Han and Seung Hwoe Kim, plants from North and South Korea will grow together in the centre of the cultural forum from May 2019. Since 2019, „Das Dritte Land“ has been organising a series of performances that address the question of how artistic reflection on nature in border areas can influence social consciousness. As a growing, processual art in public urban space, the garden has developed into a stage on which the invited artists performatively explore the themes of border/defence, nature/environment, utopia/dystopia. Visitors to the garden are invited to interact and participate.

The project was realized in cooperation with SEMA: Seoul Museum of Art and with the kind support of the Charlotte and Hans Krull Foundation, the St. Matthäus Foundation and the Mobile Kino Berlin.

#4 ATSUSHI FUKUNAGA

For two days, Japanese artist Atsushi Fukunaga will present a sound installation as part of „The Nature of Action“ in the artists‘ garden Das Dritte Land. The installation consists of a multitude of onomatopoeic words that mimic the sounds of nature. For the garden, Fukunaga collected special sounds of insects and birds that live together in Korea and Japan, and had them imitated onomatopoeically by Koreans and Japanese in Berlin. Although it is the same bird, the onomatopoeia is different in each country because culture and language influence the perception of what is heard. Fukunaga’s theme is the invisible border between Japan and Korea, which seems to be getting tighter as a result of the trade dispute between the two countries. The artist constructs a soundscape in which Japanese and Korean nature sounds interact in the artist’s garden. He dreams of a utopia in which the political and social boundaries between the two countries dissolve into Das Dritte Land.

Atsushi Fukunaga (*1980 in Hiroshima, lives and works in Berlin) explores onomatopoeia in different cultures and the anthropology of language. He is interested in the variety of linguistic imitations of extra-linguistic sound events that people produce in their different languages, with the English word onomatopoeia having its roots in the ancient Greek word ὀνοματοποιία, meaning „word creation“. Atsushi Fukunaga invites people from different countries to reproduce the „sounds“ of the city and nature in their own language. He uses these sounds to create his own onomatopoeia, which he stages in sound installations, usually outdoors. Since 2015, he has also created a series of language installations that deal with people’s everyday lives by quoting words and composing new texts from them.

#3 Byung Chul Kim
In his performance „Frühlingsputz (eng: Spring Cleaning)“, Byung Chul Kim will walk from the South Korean embassy to the North Korean embassy in the style of a Buddhist pilgrimage „오체투지(五體投地)“. Buddhist monks go on pilgrimage by bowing step by step; through this physically very strenuous way of travelling they try to achieve spiritual goals and show themselves in a state of extreme humility. It takes about 3000 bows to cover the 3 km distance. This arduous path is intended to symbolise the difficult process of reunification.

Byung Chul Kim (*1974 in Seoul, lives and works in Essen) is a South Korean artist who has been working in Germany since 2004. He became known through his year-long work „Hotel Performance“ in Stuttgart and his „Humour Restaurants“, which he has been performing in Germany, Switzerland and the USA since 2014. Themes such as humour, happiness, home and food are existentially transformed through his participatory actions, which he stages in a sometimes rigorous, sometimes humorous manner. His storyboards, drawings and videos have been shown at Kunstverein Zürich, Wiensowski & Harbordin Berlin and the Richmond Art Centre in Richmond, USA.

Imitatori del Tempo (il tempo sussurrato)

The Italian composer and sound artist presents a sound performance with piano and three self-made glass horns. His sound is based on recordings of weather imitations from his project „The Weather Imitators, Il Coro delle Intemperie“, which he has been pursuing for two years in various countries: Francesco Cavaliere creates his own graphic notations based on the meteorological data of the places where he is, which he then sets to music and has recorded by choir groups: Singing and whispering, blowing and whistling imitate the endemic weather conditions of each place. With his project, the artist aims to create an anthropology of specific weather sounds.

Francesco Cavaliere (*1980 in Piombino, Italy) explores the relationship between sounds, materials and space. Accompanied by phenomena evoked by glass, minerals and narrative, his work captures the fleeting moment and invites the listener into an imaginative landscape. He lives and works in Siena and Berlin.

#1 DAVID SHERRY
Growing up on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the border was omnipresent for David Sherry and his family. In light of Brexit and the threat of a new hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, David Sherry presents a performance about his border experiences in „Das Dritte Land“.

The work of David Sherry, born 1974 in Northern Ireland, based in Glasgow, includes drawings, performances, videos, paintings, photography and sound installations, and he is interested in the big and small stories from his everyday life: such as happiness, work, respect. He transforms these into live performances, which have been a central part of his artistic practice for twenty years.