Mapping the Archive

17.05.2023 – 11.06.2023

As part of the interdisciplinary event series, Common Ground, the hybrid installation Mapping the Archive presents for the first time a selection of digitized audiovisual works by former fellows as well as ephemera from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program archive by:

Corinne & Arthur Cantrill (Fellow Film 1985), Alvin Curran (Fellow Music 1964) with Cora (Emens) & Willem de Ridder, Stephen Dwoskin (Fellow Film 1974), Daniel Eisenberg (Fellow Film 1991), Joan Jonas (Fellow Visual Art 1982), Richard Kostelanetz (Fellow Literature 1981) with Martin Koerber, Ken Kobland (Fellow Film 1986), Clemens Klopfenstein (Fellow Film 1981), David Lamelas (Fellow Visual Art 1998), Michael Morris (Fellow Visual Art 1981), Shelly Silver (Fellow Film 1992), Vincent Trasov (Fellow Visual Art 1981), Lawrence Weiner (Fellow Visual Art 1975), Stephen Willats (Fellow Music 1979), Jane & Louise Wilson (Fellows Visual Art 1996)

Mapping the Archive brings together various viewpoints from collected image and sound materials and marks Berlin’s (non-)places on a map that were of particular interest to fellows during their stay in the 1980s and 90s. A continual focus of the project is on discovering the relationships, orientation, and movement of the fellows through Berlin.
Mapping the Archive charts a previously invisible chronicle of the city, creating a portrait of its residents through digitized images and sounds—during a time of political and social change.
At the daadgalerie, these contextual placements are juxtaposed in the exhibition space with the digitized archival copy of the film Time as Activity: Berlin by David Lamelas.

During Common Ground (May 17 – June 11, 2023) the audiovisual works will be contextualized with related analogue archival material including posters, invitation cards, publications, and documents, which are to be activated by an event program:

On June 8, 2023, following the screening of the film Persistence (1997), two former fellows and filmmakers, Daniel Eisenberg and Shelly Silver, will talk about their various experiences in the years immediately after reunification, the impossibility of collective (non-) remembrance and working with archives.

On June 1, 2023, Grażyna Roguski’s performative intervention will respond to the archival material with a contemporary interpretation and shift in perspective on Joan Jonas’s video performance He Saw Her Burning, which she performed as a fellow in 1982 at the former AEG factory building in Berlin’s Wedding district.

Curated by Natalie Keppler with Kaspar Aebi

The project was on view during the opening hours of the Common Ground event series. Mapping the Archive is part of the digital archive of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm and will result in an online platform at the end of 2023, where the digitized material will be made publicly accessible.

Graphic design: basics09

The digitization of the archive is made possible by the support of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and digiS.