Lesen am See
Friday, August 18th at 6pm
Breaking the canon
with Alungoo Xatan, Dior Thiam, etaïnn zwer, Frances Breden
The reading will be held in English and German
Address: Strandbad Tegelsee/Zentrum für Kultur und Erholung
Schwarzer Weg 95, 13505 Berlin
Hosted by: Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit and Moabit Mountain College
The third part of Lesen am See focuses on the canon as a format that narrows our field of vision and simplifies our understanding of the world. The reading group Fran, Alungoo, Dior, and etaïnn have decided to select texts that are diverse not only in terms of form but also thematically. Starting with a text that engages with Marcel Duchamp’s canonical work, „Fountain,“ and proposes its queer interpretation, we will then ponder what constitutes the set of knowledge about the world that is led into the canon, and what consequences it may have for our collective imagination. How do we understand the essential bonds of community, love, and sex? What words do we use, and where do we draw patterns, to describe what we desire or what we fear? Breaking the canon can assist us in this.
In the frame of the cycle Lesen am See we would like to invite diverse reading groups and collectives to share their practices, related to the dialogical nature of text itself as well the community of readers & listeners. The cycle is curated by Agnieszka Kilian.
Lesen am See is a part of the two-year collaborative project Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses, Tools and Alliances conceived in collaboration with WHW, Zagreb, the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, and Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit, Berlin.
Alungoo Xatan (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, moving mostly between sculpture and installation. Often drawing from her biography, Alungoo intertwines intricate themes with polished aesthetics that play on childhood nostalgia. The familiarity of the symbols and elements act as bridges, inviting the audience to connect with the art on a personal level. Alungoo has been studying at UdK Berlin in Christine Streuli’s class since 2017. Her recent studies in California at CalArts, where she established connections with artists such as Shirley Tse, Harry Dodge, and Sharon Lockhart, among others, furthered her artistic engagement with issues of the Asian diaspora and queer-feminist discourses. She is a recipient of the Ursula Hanke-Foerster Prize for Sculpture (2022) as well as a Fulbright Alumna (2022-23). Alungoo’s works have been shown in houses and institutions such as the Märkisches Museum, Museum Fluxus+, Satellite Galery Nagoya, and Mint Studios in Los Angeles. In addition to her own artistic practice, Alungoo is a founding member of the artists of colour group INTERSPACE, which critiques and counteracts the underrepresentation of artists of colour in the Berlin art scene.
Dior Thiam is a multidisciplinary artist. Throughout broadly different mediums, she explores untold histories, exoticism and the specific historical knowledge held by social and individual bodies. Drawing inspiration from historical events and occurrences, from poetry, prose and personal experiences, her work raises questions around the localities of knowledge as well as memory and remembrance. Through a process-based approach of layering, interweaving, fragmenting, collecting and reassembling, she extracts and re/ arranges seemingly disparate pieces of research to form new frameworks of meaning. Among others, her work has been showcased in a number of international group exhibitions and publications, including two shows at the 14th edition of the Dakar Biennale in Senegal, a group show curated by Bonaventure Soh Beijing Ndikung at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in South Africa, multiple collaborations with Savvy Contemporary Berlin and a recent show at the Atlanta Museum of African Diaspora in the US.
a writer+artist, part of the queer collextive RER Q, etaïnn zwer (no pronouns/∞) believes in writing as political sweat and builds a discreet practice, cruising the transformative power of the poem as a radically tender technology to make more fuckable worlds come true. etaïnn has performed sung cried in bars squats schools festivals theaters galleries [TN (Brussels), La Bâtie (Geneva), Air de Paris (Romainville), Ausland (Berlin), Rond Point Projects (Marseille)], on the radio, at sex parties. and published in various magazines [Panthère Première, Phylactère, L’Incroyable] and anthologies [«Realitäten» (etece buch, 2022), «Lettres aux jeunes poétesses» (L’Arche, 2021)]. etaïnn first novel BLEU NUIT, BLOUSON ROSE will be published in April 2024 by les éditions du commun.
Frances Breden (she/her) is a curator and artist dedicated to community-based and collective art-making processes in digital and IRL spaces. She is one sixth of the queer-feminist art collective COVEN BERLIN, with whom she has collaborated since arriving in Berlin from Vancouver, Canada in 2014. Frances is a founding member of Sickness Affinity Group, a support group and art collective working on accessibility, disability and illness.
In 2023, Frances is curating the short film screening PRESENTS with RA Walden, which will be available online during Berlin Art Week (13.09.) and screening in person at HAU Berlin (20.10.) Her words have been featured in Radicalising Care (Sternberg Press), Kunstforum #279, Crip Magazine, and Arts of the Working Class.
The program is co-funded by the European Commission’s Creative Europe program and Foundation Between Bridges.
