Masterclass with filmmaker and visual artist Assaf Gruber, moderated by Oksana Sarkisova
Thursday, February 26, 2026, 5:40 pm – 7:20 pm
For the masterclass at the Visual Studies Platform at CEU, Assaf Gruber presents two recent video works: Miraculous Accident (2025) and Never Come Back (2023), both commissioned by Steirischer Herbst, Graz. Together, they trace two interrelated strands in Gruber’s oeuvre: one rooted in the epistolary form and questions of address, memory, and transmission, and the other engaging with contemporary tensions between iconoclasm and iconophilia, where the absence of narrated storytelling itself becomes a protagonist shaping meaning. Interweaving archival footage with scripted scenes, Miraculous Accident (30 min, 2025) tells a transtemporal love story between a Moroccan student, Nadir, and Edyta, his Polish-Jewish teacher at the Łódź Film School in 1968. A discovery of a letter which resurfaces decades after the separation confronts Nadir with his own past.
08.01 19:00 Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
The event consists of a film screening followed by a discussion with the artist Assaf Gruber. The conversation is led by Monika Talarczyk, a film scholar and co-author of the book Hope is of a Different Color. From the Global South to the Łódź Film School. The discussion is held in English and centers on the artistic, historical, and institutional contexts surrounding the project.
24-30.11.25
Miraculous Accident at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin
Screening: Friday 28.11, 16:00, as part of Wars II
Venue: Maison Européenne de la Photographie
12-23.11.25
Miraculous Accident at the CINEMA AND CONTEMPORARY ART FESTIVAL
18.-23.11.2025
Miraculous Accident at the 42. Kasseler Dokfest
Screening:
Thursday, Nov. 20, 1:15 pm
#6 Sifting through Layers of Time
BALi Kino
07.11.–08.01.2025
Group exhibition Curated by Nina Tabassomi
Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tiroll
Once upon a time, our grandmother Mamanjoon told us that our father was one of her daughters …
The daughters of all sexes find themselves in a world that is being destroyed by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. While injustice, atrocities, war crimes, and genocide are live-streamed, new forms of fascism take over.
16.10-26.10.25
Miraculous Accident at the 25th Doclisboa Film Festival (Nominated for Best Short Film Award).
Part of New Visions Program
Screenings:
20.10.25 21:45
Culturgest - Pequeno Auditório
23.10.25 16:00
Culturgest - Pequeno Auditório
16.10-19.10.25
Miraculous Accident at the 23rd Annual Tallgrass Film Festival.
downtown Wichita, Kansas
Screenings:
Fri, Oct 17th, 2:45 PM @ BOULEVARD THEATRE 7
Sun, Oct 19th, 5:00 PM @ BOULEVARD THEATRE 3
What would a map of Paranational Cinema look like? And how would such a map be made? The prefix «para-» allows to question the subsumption of the varied aspects that cinema encompasses—industry, art, and culture, object of research and historiography—into nations and nation-states, as national cinemas in an international context, and often operating transnationally. The certainty of belonging and property, of territorial and historical coherence, of political, economic, and sociocultural organization that these entities provide comes with the price of exclusion and oppression. Cinema before or after the nation state, in opposition to or effaced by it, complicates and unsettles the certainty of easy categorization.
Sreening: 16.10, 18:00
With an introduction to MÉMOIRE 14 by Oussama Benayad (Humboldt University of Berlin) and a conversation with director Assaf Gruber.
MÉMOIRE 14
Ahmed Bouanani, MA 1971; 24' F/e
MIRACULOUS ACCIDENT
Assaf Gruber, D/AT 2025; 30' OV/e
The program prompts to revisit cinematic approaches and media practices associated with Soviet film from where the latter interpolates the present: the archive. Though often resting in the shadow of other institutions such as movie theater or film studio, the film archive occupies a decisive point in the chain between collective memory and imagination––the silences and overlooked legacies. Operations of image storage and preservation contribute to the dominant Russocentric approach in Soviet film studies and its masking of imperial continuities through ideological and aesthetic centralization. Within this homogenising framing, racialized and extractivist perspectives on bodies and lands of Central Asia, Transcaucasia, and Far North remain out of grasp for both Soviet film studies and contemporary filmmaking practices that reaffirm the respective political and aesthetic strategies. The reduction of Soviet film to its Russian legacy also leaves aside multiple threads that extended beyond the USSR’s borders, to socialist and non-aligned countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, through filmmaking practices informed by Soviet ‘educational aid’ after WWII.
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
03.10.2025–18.01.2026
The main exhibition of the 6th Kyiv Biennial 2025, titled Near East, Far West, is organized by a consortium of curators from L’Internationale, a European confederation of museums, art institutions and universities. It features seven new artists’ commissions, alongside works from the collections of member institutions of L’Internationale and a number of other loans.
The exhibition takes place in a time of ongoing wars, occupations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s brutal operation in Gaza, and the broader fascist turn in global politics. The title Near East, Far West points to the current geopolitical reality and calls for a reorientation of the notions of “East” and “West.” The exhibition traces interrelated histories across what the curators name “Middle-East-Europe,” a term encompassing Central & Eastern Europe, the former-Soviet Central Asia, and the Middle East. By questioning the (neo)colonial relationship between Europe and its so-called peripheries, the exhibition asserts that the fate of “Greater Europe” is now being forged in its eastern borderlands. The exhibition looks to interconnect the “peripheries” of the former West and open up a new perspective for the European project grounded in the experiences of Middle-East-Europe and its political complexities and historical entanglements.
17.07-27.07.25
Never Come Back at New Horizon Film Festival, Worclow as part of Happy Doom, a film programme dedicated to short films that qualified for the 2024 Austrian Film Award.
Screenings:
09.07-12.07.25
Miraculous Accident at Radom Freedom Film Festival (international competition).
Screenings at the main venue:
11.07.25 and 12.07.25
08.07-13.07.25
Miraculous Accident at the 36th FIDMarseille Film Festival (international competition).
Screenings:
10.07.25 18:30
La Baleine, Marseille
12.07.25 11:30
Artplexe Canebière, Marseille
13.07.25 13:30
Artplexe Canebière, Marseille
05.07.–12.10.2025
Group exhibition Curated by Nina Tabassomi
Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tiroll
Once upon a time, our grandmother Mamanjoon told us that our father was one of her daughters …
Let’s consider sons and daughters as (not necessarily sex-related) pieces within a patriarchal-capitalist board game.
The figure of the son plays the narcissistic individual, taking what they want and throwing the rest away after having squeezed out what they need. Such sons think they are free of all ties, apologizing for their past behavior even as they head out to extract from the next person, people, land … a repeating loop.
12.06.–22.06.2025
Festival
Kunsthaus Dahlem
New project by Gruber will be part of this year, Kunsthaus Dahlem's 10th anniversary:
10 YEARS – 10 DAYS! we have named the festival that will take place between 12 and 22 June this summer. Pop-up installations, performances, workshops, and much more are coming from the artists who have worked with us over the years, as well as numerous new national and international guests.
03.06-08.06.25
Miraculous Accident at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (international competition).
Screenings:
Fri, 06.06. 19:00 Uhr B-Movie
Sat, 07.06. 21:30 Uhr Zeise 1
14.03.–29.06.2025
Group exhibition curated by Joanna Warsaw
Centre for Fine Arts | Bozar Brussels
Familiar Strangers. The Eastern Europeans from a Polish Perspective is an exhibition of contemporary art reflecting on recent changes in Eastern Europe. It highlights the richness and complexity of representing multiple, hybrid identities in a region that was long considered to be culturally homogenous, even if this was never truly the case.
The exhibition focuses on the lives of diasporas and minorities, the feminist resistance, the impact of forced displacement and migration, and the long-lasting consequences of serfdom in the region. It explores tensions between the self and the other; between the local and the transcultural; between Eastern and Western Europe; tensions that forge hybrid identities.
Each gallery of the exhibition circuit is inhabited by the world of a different artist. Together they form a constellation of over 30 works, including paintings, sculptures, videos, films, installations, and textiles. These pieces tell the stories of "familiar strangers": from the Roma minority to the Vietnamese diaspora, from the Byelorussian and Ukrainian artists and activists in Warsaw to the history of the Polish-Jewish co-existence.
18.03.2025
19:00, Akademie Der Künste, Berlin
The Berlin Art Prize was established in 1948 by the city’s magistrate to commemorate the March Revolution of 1848. It has been awarded by the Akademie der Künste on behalf of the State of Berlin since 1971. Honouring artists in this way is intended to underline the special significance of the arts in a liberal society.
Tuesday, 18 February 2025 at 7pm
Soho House, Torstraße 1, 10119 Berlin
Filmmaker, photographer, sculptor too – Assaf Gruber’s art-making is a language of tensions between movement and stillness, spoken to pull apart the thick, opaque mass fusing people and culture to the institutions that might represent them.
Occasioned by the world premiere of his film Miraculous Accident at the Berlinale, his Soho House talk will score the ebb and flow of local and global social change across his work, as he tries to balance the weighty histories of art and cinema and the utter madness of life in 2025.
Q&A with Spike editor Christian Kobald to follow.
13.02-23.02.25
Miraculous Accident at Berlinale Forum Expanded
Screenings:
Programme 4 16.02.25 18:30 Arsenal 1
Programme 4 17.02.25 12:00 Silent Green
Programme 4 22.02.25 12:00 Arsenal 1
19.9.–13.10.2024
Group exhibition curated by curated by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, Gábor Thury, and Pieternel Vermoortel and created by the festival’s whole team.
Joanneumsviertel: Neue Galerie Graz, Austria
The 57th edition of steirischer herbst festival is titled Horror Patriae—a Latin title that places us at a crossroads between amor patriae, love to the fatherland, and horror vacui, the fear of emptiness. Why are homelands so horrific? Which gigantic void has caused the current rise of nationalisms, identitarianisms, and cults of roots and origins? These are being marketed by governments all over the world and normalized, even praised across the political and intellectual spectrum. Ethnicity-based nation-states are becoming the only frame of reference, while the growing polarization of societies is naturalized through the prism of “identity.” Community affiliations are expected to have a biological basis: blood and race. Mixed, hybrid, or displaced subjectivities are dismissed or openly rejected and stigmatized as discursive miscegenation or a betrayal of “one’s own.” New dissidents are emerging everywhere, and their words are silenced. That the left has succumbed to the same suicidal tribalism as the right is especially alarming.
Never Come Back at Filmfest Dresden (International Competition)
Screenings:
Wed, 17.04.24, 12:30pm/ Thu, 18.04.24, 10:30p/ Fri, 19.04.24, 5:30pm/ Sat, 20.04.24, 3pm
Never Come Back at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin
Screening: Tuesday 9 April - 9.30PM at the Auditorium of the HKW, Berlin with films by Jasmina Cibic and Ivan Argote.
Match Point at The Black Box, Wschód Gallery, New York
16.03.2024-23.04. 2024
136 Orchard St
10002, New York, NY
Wednesday – Saturday
1 – 6 pm and by appointment
You’re invited to witness a game of tennis being played. Or a game of billiards. Or snooker. Or pool. At a tennis stadium. Or perhaps a football arena. Match Point delivers a shot of confusion the very moment we encounter the film.
At a time when information flows seemingly seamlessly and we are quick to make decisions and judge, this early work of Assaf Gruber goes on to show how we transform ideas into language, language into images, and how images themselves mask the way we think and participate in our societies.
Never Come Back at Kassel Dokfest
Friday, Nov. 17 / 17:30 / BALi (KulturBahnhof, Rainer-Dierichs-Platz 1, 34117 Kassel)
Never Come Back at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin
4th of November, 8 pm at Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles In a programme with films by Jasmina Cibic and Ivan Argote.
24.- 29.10.2023
Never Come Back at the 30. dokumentART
Screenings:
Programme 5, Thursday 26.10, 17:00
Performative Lecture: Marcelo Rezende & Assaf Gruber
Tue Sep. 26, 2023, 6.00 pm, Kestner Gesellschaft , Hannover
This lecture aims to explore the concept of the avant-garde as a ghostly presence. Drawing on the definition of the ghost provided by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, we will highlight the ghost's elusive and ambiguous nature. The ghost exists in a state of undecidability, neither fully present nor absent. It represents an absence that paradoxically disrupts stable meanings and certainties, extending beyond conventional notions of spectral beings or supernatural entities.
23.09-29.09.23
Never Come Back at The International Cinematographers’ Film Festival “MANAKI BROTHERS”.
Screenings:
29.9.2023 | 17:00 | MANAKI CINEMA, Bitola, North Macedonia.
SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, Berlin, Wednesday, 12. Juli 2023 | 20:00
Triple Feature with Azin Feizabadi, Assaf Gruber, Laura Horelli and Philemon Sheya Kaluwapa.
How is trauma stored within archives? How do subjective and collective memories intersect? And how do historical changes in sovereign regimes impact family stories? To take a closer look at these questions, Knowledge Ties #5 assembles three cinematic pieces.
08.07-01.10.2023
Group Exhibition
The Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
With the exhibition The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor , the Kestner Gesellschaft traces the founding moments of its history and the avant-garde mission. Presented only seven years after the Kestner Gesellschaft’s establishment in 1916, the exhibition El Lissitzky was the very first institutional solo show of the Russian artist, marking his groundbreaking position as the announcer of the new vocabulary which revolutionised the formal language of art and well as his role as a constructor of an institutional thinking, based upon the scientific and experiential perception and innovative approach to exhibition’s architecture, strategies of display and a total understanding of artistic creation.
El Lissitzky, 1923, Proun, Sheet 2 from the 1st Kestnermappe (detail).
06.07-09.07.23
Never Come Back at Tabor Film Festival - International Competition.
Screenings:
Across The Border IC4 9th of July 19:30
02.06-17.09.2023
Group Exhibition
HKW Berlin
O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies is a research undertaking, an exhibition, workshops, and a series of performances that invite artists, activists, scholars, and people from other walks of life to imagine new forms of cultural and political resistance through diverse emancipation projects, past and present. The exhibition is narrated by many voices, starting from the quilombos (in Brazil), cumbes (in Venezuela), palenques (in Cuba and Colombia), cimarrones (in Mexico), maroon communities (in Jamaica and the United States), as well as other emancipatory spaces from around the world. Irrespective of the sizes of such spaces, the cultural, political, social, and economic tasks of liberation and affirmation have been imagined and put to work by artists, scholars, activists, storytellers, and other thinkers. This exhibition uses quilombos as a metaphor, but also deliberates on the intellectual and political implications of a philosophy and ideology based on the quilombos, mapping the spaces that have made them possible—whether in historical times, in the imagination of many, or in our multiple contemporary worlds.
Abdias Nascimento, “Oxunmaré Ascende” (detail).
01.06-06.06.23
Never Come Back at Vienna shorts at the national Competition.
Screenings:
On Stranger Tides Sunday 4 June 18:00 Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus
On Stranger Tides Monday 5 June 15:00 Milieukino
18.04-23.04.23
Rude Witness at the German Competition.
Screenings:
Thursday 20.04, 19:30
Saturday 22.04, 20:15
03.03-30.03
Screening daily 17:00-21:00 at Persons Projects
Lindenstraße 34-35, 10969 Berlin
Persons Projects’ latest Image to Image exhibition explores the conflicted relationship between humans and nature. For centuries, humanity has explored, exploited, destroyed, or modified their natural habitats according to their will. Vast land modification is being made to ecstatically please the eye or serve us for pure leisure or entertainment purposes. The ostensible superiority of humankind over nature has not only led to irreparable damage to ecosystems but also in some ways to an unnatural detachment. Assaf Gruber explores this shift in his video work Binding (2011).
25.01-05.02.23
Never Come Back at IFFR, Ammodo Tiger Short Competition.
Screenings:
Ammodo Tiger Short Competition 6 28.01.23 20:00 Pathé 6
Ammodo Tiger Short Competition 6 29.01.23 12:45 Pathé 2
Ammodo Tiger Short Competition 6 03.02.23 14:15 KINO 3
Short Film Marathon 04.02.23 10:00 KINO 1
Monday, 21.11.22 at 15:30 PM
Artist talk with an introduction by Gerhard Wolf
Two real events form the background to Transient Witness, by Assaf Gruber (The Right, Lo Schermo dell’Arte 2016): the donation of the extraordinary archive of the 20th century avant-garde by Egidio Marzona to the State Museums of Dresden (SKD) , and the stealing of the so-called Treasury of Saxony on the night of November 25, 2019 in Grüne Gewölbe, the Green Vault. This is one of the institutions that make up the Dresden museum complex, which at the end of the 18th century was the private cabinet and symbolic place of the unbridled collecting of its founder, Frederick Augustus (called The Great), also one of the first sovereigns who made his private collections accessible to the public, effectively giving life to one of the first modern museum models in Europe.
16.11.22–20.11.2022
Lo schermo dell'arte 15th Edition, Florence (IT)
The Focus of the 15th edition of the Festival is dedicated to Rosa Barba.
Opening night with Insurrection, Andres Serrano's film about the assault on Capitol Hill.
International art meets cinema in new productions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Éric Baudelaire, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Mitra Farahni, Theaster Gates, Assaf Gruber, Jumana Manna, and Gerard Ortín Castellvi.
Transient Witness at the 39th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival 15-20.11.22.
Screening 20.11.2022 4:00 PM KulturBahnhof Kassel BALi Kinos.
19.11.22–03.02.2023
Group exhibition curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz
Fundación Botín, Santander
Itinerarios XXVII will bring together the projects by the recipients of the 27th Fundación Botín Visual Arts Grants: Armando Andrade Tudela, Gruber Assaf, Lucía Bayón, Alfonso Borragán, Gonzalo Elvira, Seila Fernández Arconada, Joan Morey, and Ana Santos.
Wednesday, 26.10.22. 18:00
Artist talk at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig followed by a workshop.
In the past two decades, art production has come to be more and more based on facts and evidence. Just as in reality, we have witnessed more and more artworks engaging with found footage, technology and legal material as part of a forensic methodology of creation. In this artistic climate, what does artistic research mean? How can practitioners engage with subjective writing based on artistic research? How do we pave an artistic statement, a point of view based on fabrication after the age of self, when the blur between fiction and documentary has become a default definition for creation? Given these conditions, what does artistic collaboration mean today?
In this presentation, Assaf Gruber will attempt to shed light on these questions. Building on a long period of research conducted inside the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) – which has resulted in two films (Transient Witness, Rude Witness), a collaborative colloquium at the HKW (Stolen Gems Found Identities) and exhibitions in numerous contexts (The World is Round and People Meet in the Corners, Krieg Hassel) – Gruber will initiate a dialogue towards a workshop with the class of Expanded Cinema and their own research at the SKD. The Lecture and workshop are part of the lecture series „Arbeit & Beruf“ initiated by the Support Büro HGB.
23.09.22–12.02.2023
Group exhibition curated by Ekaterina Degot with David Riff, Christoph Platz, Mirela Baciak, Barbara Seyerl.
Joanneumsviertel: Neue Galerie Graz, Austria
Wars are inscribed into the history of steirischer herbst. The Cold War overshadowed its early years while later editions took place with the Yugoslav Wars right next door. Painfully activating faded memories of World Wars I and II, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is the newest entry to this long list of battles growling just around the corner.
Yet one still sometimes feels that in this cozy corner of Austria, like in many other snug places in Europe, wars and even conflicts are out of place. Outbursts of compassion towards individuals affected by wars happening “elsewhere” are sincere, no doubt, but at the same time, the world here is still safe and one simply “does not do war.” The frontline is put at a distance, unseen and unheard, until the repressed returns with a vengeance. This autumn, steirischer herbst’s dense program of exhibitions, performances, and discussions addresses this looming presence of battles mentally kept at bay.
With Gabriel Abrantes, Friederike Anders, Boris Charmatz [terrain], Keti Chukhrov, Josef Dabernig, Harun Farocki, Jannik Franzen, Aslan Goisum, Assaf Gruber, Emil Gruber, Flaka Haliti, Heinali (Oleh Shpudeiko), Yuriy Illienko, Iman Issa, Zhanna Kadyrova, Rajkamal Kahlon, Iosif Király, KwieKulik, Kateryna Lysovenko, Ekaterina Muromtseva, Henrike Naumann, Navaridas & Deutinger, Boris Nikitin, Igor Friedrich Petković, Nihad Nino Pušija, Mykola Ridnyi, Willem de Rooij, Augustas Serapinas, Theater im Bahnhof, Giacomo Veronesi, Ming Wong, Raed Yassin; herbst Cabaret with Verena Dengler, eSeL (Lorenz Seidler), and Les Trucs.
22.09.2022- 15.01.2023
Group exhibition curated by Marcelo Rezende
Galerias Municipais in Lisbon. Location: Pavilhão Branco
The exhibition explores the project envisioned by Portuguese philosopher and educator Agostinho da Silva during his years of exile in Brazil: a museum dedicated “to the fraternal capacity of intertwining the diverse” in a post-independence order. On display are works by 13 artists, ethnographic collections, as well as diverse documentation on emancipatory processes in African nations and publications that record the intellectual work of the Portuguese philosopher and educator Agostinho da Silva (1906-1994).
With Assaf Gruber, Charbel-joseph H.Boutros, Gisela Casimiro and Rodrigo Ribeiro Saturnino (ROD), Jacira da Conceição, Jonathan Monk, Juraci Dórea, Luisa Mota, Marcelino Santos, Márcio Carvalho, Maxim Malhado, Tenzin Phuntsog, Tuti Minervino, works from ethnographic collections, as well as publications by the Portuguese philosopher and educator Agostinho da Silva.
The Conspicuous Parts in the three-day performative conference UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2, part of the festival Goethe Morph* Iceland at Nordic House in Reykjavik on September 13th - 15th, 2022.
Transient Witness at Rencontres Internationales in Berlin
From 16 to 21 August 2022, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
05-11.07.22
Film Festival (Official Selection)
Screenings:
06.07 16:00 Variétés 2
07.07 16:30 La Baleine
08.07 10:00 La Baleine
16.06.2022- 17.07.2022
Group Exhibition
Gosset Site, Brussel, (HISK)
What's in an artwork? is the third in the series of HISK alumni exhibitions and highlights the versatility and diversity of the alumni. Curator Bert Ghysels titles the exhibition What's in an artwork? in analogy with the expression 'what's in a name'.
Louvre Museum, 08.05.2022 at 20:00 PM
Auditorium Michel Laclotte (Full programme)
Transient Witness at the Moving Image Art Prize
06.05-05.06.2022
Solo exhibition curated by Pieter Vermeulen
KRIEG? Hasselt
The World is Round and People Meet in the Corners is a result of Assaf Gruber’s ongoing investigation of how politics intersect with art and its institutions. It reveals the human stories and shifting ideological values at the “back-end” of cultural institutions. His exhibition at KRIEG? will consist of a video installation, a sculpture and a series of photographs...
24.03-18.04.2022
Group Exhibition
HKW Berlin
The Whole Life. Archives & Imaginaries reflects on archives as places for counter-narratives and illuminates the profound links between archives and society. During the three-day congress, artists and scholars will develop alternative narrative forms and research strategies in experimental formats. They demonstrate how comprehensively archives, as infrastructures of preservation, perpetuate hegemonic thinking. At the same time, we see what methods and practices are necessary in order to make archives usable as a resource for reflecting contemporary questions and for future knowledge production. In the exhibition, artists unfold their own strategies for dealing with archival material in eight installation-based case studies: Assaf Gruber’s docufictional film Transient Witness provides insight into a world-famous art collection from a dog’s perspective. Charlotte Eifler and Clarissa Thieme’s film installation relates digital technologies, witnessing and coming to terms with war trauma in the former Yugoslavia. Tony Cokes extracts fragments from historical reports of explicit violence and makes it possible to experience what this means for the politics of memory today.
25.03.2022 20:00
A Cumulative Colloquium
HKW Berlin, Free Admission
What role do displacement, loss, incorporation and mutual exchange play in collections and archives? What can be learned from this about the complex constellations of identity and memory, private and public, ideal and real value in the cultural realm? Based on the Hebrew/Aramaic folk song Chad Gadya, a counting story in which the character of each verse defeats the protagonist of the preceding stanza, the juxtaposition of destruction and restoration is understood in this event as an ordering principle that reveals the perplexing cultural successions and accumulations of memories in collections and archives. The polymathic and performative seminar is moderated by the Post Brothers. It is a collective investigation featuring a plot of dialogues, readings, performances, music, images and drama.
With Mieke Bal, Heide Rezepa-Zabel, Joshua Simon, Elena Vogman
Concept: Assaf Gruber, Post Brothers
18.03-15.05.2022
Group Exhibition curated by Anna Łazar
Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź
What a Fabulous Place We Are In are the words repeatedly spoken by Andrzej Mitan and Cezary Staniszewski during their performance in 1992. The title, with its message, is ironic. It signals, on one hand, the distance from the reality, and on the other the entanglement of artists in their aspirations to be elevated above everyday life. Geopolitical conditions are not without their relevance either - in the performance, the artists used a photo presenting the ‘architects’ of the 1945 Yalta conference, who established what would be the global spheres of influence after World War II, the issue which is coming back to us with all its impact now. The exhibition has been composed of the artworks donated to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź between 2008 and 2021.
Assaf Gruber receives the 2022/23 fellowship of the gkfd, a Berlin artistic research grant program for Edith 6∞.
