Parallel to Gallery Weekend Berlin, Fluentum presents Trash The Musical, a solo exhibition by Loretta Fahrenholz. The Berlin-based artist and filmmaker will develop a multi-part multimedia installation for Fluentum, consisting of objects, photographs as well as a new film that spans the entire two-story exhibition space.
Loretta Fahrenholz — Trash The Musical
Loretta Fahrenholz’s post-cinematic works address a present driven by the economies of digital images, in which media disruptions and social anxieties intertwine. For her exhibition Trash The Musical, Fahrenholz has staged a cinematic musical in collaboration with performance artist Alicia McDaid, whose eclectic scenes were shot in the ‘dream factory’ Los Angeles, among other places. The film and its multimedia elements become an investigation of the performative role images and bodies play in the construction of history. As a staging of narratives, places, and the authenticity assumed in them, Trash The Musical provokes tensions between its protagonists and the camera’s gaze, which erupt in feminist reinterpretations of history.
Recent solo exhibitions by Loretta Fahrenholz include Kölnischer Kunstverein, n.b.k., Berlin; Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Fridericianum, Kassel; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Kunsthalle Zürich. Loretta Fahrenholz lives and works in Berlin.
Trash The Musical by Loretta Fahrenholz is the third and final exhibition in Fluentum’s program series In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving (2021–2023). Consisting of new commissions, group and solo exhibitions as well as a multi-part publication series, In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving focuses on the methods and processes of remembering and storytelling in moving image works. The historical, political, and discursive levels of the building in which Fluentum operates today serve as the series’ starting point. In Medias Res: Media, (Still) Moving is curated by Dennis Brzek, Curator at Fluentum, and Junia Thiede, Head of Exhibitions and Programs.
In addition to the new film work, the exhibition is expanded by objects and image-based works such as Once Upon a Time in Enemy-Occupied France, a new series created using Artificial Intelligence, which translates Quentin Tarantino’s feature film Inglourious Basterds––originally filmed in what is now Fluentum’s exhibition space––into the style of historical war photography. Trash The Musical is about historiography as fiction, as performance, and about waste disposal.
Loretta Fahrenholz
Trash The Musical
April 26 – July 29, 2023
Opening: April 25, 2023, 5 to 9 pm
Solo exhibition – Sven Johne
The works of the Berlin-based photographer and filmmaker focus on the traces of political events in biographies, landscapes, and materialities. In his practice, Johne assembles images, texts, and films that often appropriate documentary aesthetics. By weaving in personal details and fictional elements, he deconstructs their claims to truth to paint the complex picture of a realism that is more than the sum of its parts. The specific significance East Germany carries in Johne’s work will enter into a dialog with the political history of the space Fluentum is located in today in his new work, which he will present in the fall of 2023.
Sven Johne, born in 1976 in Bergen on the island of Rügen, studied German Language and Literature, Journalism, and Photography. In 2008 he completed the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City. In 2016 he received the Art Award of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the Kunstsammlungen Jena, the 12th Berlin Biennale, the Ludwig Forum Aachen, Kunstmuseum Kloster Unserer Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Freiburg; Museum Villa Vauban, Luxembourg; mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg. Sven Johne lives and works in Berlin.
Sven Johne
Solo Exhibtion
September 14 – December 16, 2023
Opening: September 12, 2023, 5 to 9 pm
Current exhibition
The exhibition focuses on the specificities of film and video, bringing together artistic positions and filmmakers. Kino, which is divided into two parts, features new productions and premieres as well as existing works not previously shown in Berlin, the majority of which were created this year.
If film is the medium, then cinema is the cultural situation in which showing and viewing moving images becomes a shared social engagement. The group exhibition Kino (German for “cinema”) translates this framework of collective spectatorship into the context of an exhibition. It hereby follows the current interest of artists in probing the temporal and narrative possibilities of time-based formats, between video and feature-length film, associative image collage and narrative epic.
Until December 17, 2022 the group exhibition Kino is on view at Fluentum.
About Fluentum
Fluentum is a platform dedicated to presenting, producing, and collecting time-based art, in particular video and film, and was founded in 2019 by Berlin-based software entrepreneur Markus Hannebauer. The platform’s exhibition space is located in the imposing main building of a former military facility. Constructed between 1936 and 1938 during the era of National Socialism by architect Fritz Fuß as “Luftgaukommando III,” the building served a key infrastructural role for the German Luftwaffe. After World War II, US forces utilized the building as their military and intelligence headquarters until the last GI departed in 1994.
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