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'.
28.05.2022- 13.08.2022
Group exhibition curated by Sophia Dekel Caspi
The Jerusalem Artists' House
The story of the exhibition “Chad Gadya” lies in the tragic cycle, which is at the core of our complex, controversial existence. A cumulative song, in which each verse adds another detail to the plot, the piyyut (liturgical poem) Had Gadya describes a chain of intensifying disasters. The exhibition does not seek to further illustrate the piyyut, but rather to try to extract the code—which recycles itself in events whose end is foretold—from the work of artists who experience the public and private manifestations of the horror cycle
23.05.2022- 09.09.2022
Group exhibition curated by Nirit Dahan
The Negev Museum
Dance is, for the most part, a wordless expression of an idea as well as an opportunity to discharge tension and find release. Similar to most performance arts, dance takes place in a specific place at a given time. In the exhibition “MOTION”, the artists chose to commemorate movement and dance resonating different eras, expressing ritual, conflict, and sacrifice. The tension between visual art and movement runs through the exhibit to link works in space and time.
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∞.
