Digital Features in December: Xinyi Cheng and Video Talks on Performance Art

09.12.2020
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart

In mid-December 2020, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, which is currently closed due to the pandemic, will be offering audiences various forms of online content. The video series Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art presents talks by international artists, researchers and curators on the relationships between performance and community. From 14 December 2020, visitors can also explore artist Xinyi Cheng’s first ever solo exhibition in a major international institution.     

Video Series: Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art

Online from Thursday, 10 December 2020

Made up of 15 videos, this series presents 11-minute talks by international artists, researchers and curators on the relationships between performance and community: How can performative practices today embody histories, convey knowledge, and create communities? The participants explore these themes with reference to collecting, archiving and presenting performance art.   

The series was developed together with the Cluster of Excellence 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at the FU Berlin, is putting together an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof on the relationship between critical art-forms and forms of political protest in Southeast Asia and the West which is set to open in autumn of 2021. This is part of the research and exhibition project “Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories”, which was initiated by the Goethe Institute.  

Talks by: Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro (artist and curator, Berlin), Irene Campolmi (curator, Copenhagen), Stephanie Comilang (artist, Berlin/Toronto), Anna Ehrenstein (artist, Berlin), Rosalia Namsai Engchuan (anthropologist and film-maker, Berlin/Krabi), Christian Falsnaes (artist, Berlin), Anna-Catharina Gebbers (curator, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin), Ho Tzu Nyen (artist, Singapore), Tuan Andrew Nguyen (artist, Ho Chi Minh City), Grace Samboh (curator and researcher, Yogyakarta/Medan) and Stefanie Wuschitz (artist, Vienna).

Xinyi Cheng: Online Introduction to the Exhibition

Online from Monday, 14 December 2020

The Chinese painter and photographer Xinyi Cheng (born 1989 in Wuhan) was awarded the Baloise Art Prize in 2019. The award comes with a special exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, which was originally supposed to open on 10 December 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition had to be pushed back to the spring of 2021.

Next Monday, museum-goers can explore the artist’s first solo exhibition in a major institution online: in a virtual tour, Xinyi Cheng, together with Gabriele Knapstein, director of the Hamburger Bahnhof, and curator Sven Beckstette, present the highlights of the exhibition, which comprises some 30 paintings and 6 photographs. In her figurative paintings, Cheng keeps the relationships between the subjects ambiguous, suggesting them through tender gestures and intimate moments, but also through puzzling actions. The surroundings are also generally left undefined, consisting of textured, monotone backgrounds.

The exhibition publication has already been released by Wienand Verlag (1.12.2020, 48 pages, hardcover, English/German, ISBN 978-3-86832-614-7, €18) – one of the texts, by Sven Beckstette, is available online as an excerpt (PDF, 283 KB).

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Online Digital Content

An overview of all of the online digital content offered by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin is available at www.smb.museum/online-angebote.