Events



Saturday, 25 June 2022, Kunstraum Ossastraße

Everything is Interesting #3
Exhibition and lecture performance

12:30pm: artist's walk with Benjamin Rubloff
2:00–6:00pm: Open Studio, exhibition by Benjamin Rubloff
6:00pm: Homage to the x, lecture performance by Toon Leën (60 minutes)

From 2:00pm until 6:00pmBenjamin Rubloff will present a new series of paintings at his studio that use traces of graffiti as starting points to explore place and memory. Just before that, at 12:30pm, he will take you on a walk exploring how his work relates to the environment around Reuterkiez.

At 6:00pm, Toon Leën will present a lecture performance, titled Homage to the x. This lecture investigates the gaps between images. While developing a subjective iconography of coups d’état, with the help of the Swiss artist Sarah Bal, the lecture tries to build bridges between politics and art, between the serious and the playful, and between reality and fiction. Before that, between 3:00pm and 17:45pm, you’re welcome to attend an experimental lecture exercise, titled Interruptions are Interesting. This lecture is an exercise in being interrupted. You are invited to come and go as you please, and you are more than welcome to interrupt the speaker. 

Language: the lecture performances will be in English

Find the event on Facebook: https://fb.me/e/1UC131Jpz

Address: 
Kunstraum Ossastraße
Ossastraße 38
12045 Berlin-Neukölln
 


Sunday, 7 July 2019, 3:00pm, Kunstraum Ossastraße

Everything is Interesting #2
Lecture Performance Marathon

Over the past decade, the lecture performance established itself as a fully fledged artform. As a genre, it suspends the separation between the artwork and the tools that we use to explain it. 

During Kunstraum Ossastraße’s second Lecture Performance Marathon, nine artists engage with the creative potential of this hybrid format. They present works that have been created or adapted for this occasion. There is no common topic, because everything is interesting. 

featuring:
Eddie Bonesire 
Lizza May David 
Nadine Hattom 
Toon Leën 
Franziskus Nakajima 
Robbert&Frank/Frank&Robbert
Stefan Römer 
Max Sudhues 














Saturday, 23 June 2018, 6:00pm, Kunstraum Ossastraße

Everything is Interesting  

Over the past decade, as the notion of “artistic research” became institutionally embedded, the genre of the lecture performance gained increasing popularity. It appears to be an ideal presentation format for artists who consider their work a form of knowledge production and seek connections to the academic world.

The lecture performance is a hybrid format. It is neither an artist talk nor an academic lecture. It floats somewhere in between those two, inviting the speaker or author to constantly reinvent its form and to reflect on the position from which he or she speaks. Lecture performances may involve an aspect of play, a subtle form of staging, or even a complete blurring of boundaries between facts and the imagination. They provide room for play that is the undefined space between reality and fiction, between knowing and not-knowing.

For the festival 48 Stunden Neukölln, Kunstraum Ossastraße asked artists and academics to engage with this format and to give lecture performances of ten minutes or less. Lectures that take longer are broken up into different chapters and spread throughout the evening. 

This will create a patchwork of different voices, stories, and positions, and may reveal unexpected connections despite the diversity of topics. With the ten-minute restriction and the emphasis on the form of the presentations, another ground for comparison will be offered in the way in which the performers or authors decide to stage themselves.

Participants include Jozefien Beckers, Lucas Blondeel, Raimund Krumme, Ellen Lapper, Toon Leën, Ying Sze Pek, Erik Porath, Jens Presser, Stefan Römer, Max Sudhues, titre provisoire, Kris Van Alphen, Ada Van Hoorebeke, Hanne Vogelaers, Nathaniel Whitfield and Frans Willems.   

The full program can be viewed below or downloaded here as a pdf.

Language: alternating between English and German



Frontispiece of William Beckford's "Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters" (1780)


Sunday, 24 June 2018, 5:00pm, Kunstraum Ossastraße

The Case of the Ridiculous Curator 
A Lecture Performance by Toon Leën  

In 2015, curator Ludovik Vermeersch published the book Personally, I’m Most Interested in the Shapes and Colours. The publication claimed to investigate the “continued potential of abstract art as a disruptive practice”. It was accompanied by a ninety minute lecture performance by Vermeersch himself, interweaving a theoretical reflection on the concept of “transfigurative recontextualisation with a personal account of his manipulative collaboration with six young artists based in Berlin.  

Vermeersch’s project, and particularly his lecture performance, raised interesting problems that deserve further analysis. Visual artist Toon Leën takes Vermeersch’s lecture as the starting point for a lecture performance of his own. He explores some of the issues at stake: the significance of authenticity for the attribution of agency to works of art and the dynamic between the self and the artist persona with regard to the appropriation of authorship and the establishment of authority. What destabilizing effects arise when deception is employed as an artistic strategy?

Language: English
Duration: 90 minutes




Narcissus Gazing at his Reflection, from a French manuscript of the "Roman de la Rose",
about 1405, by an unknown artist, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles