Every year, we are able to make purchases with the help of the Friends of GfZK.
In 2022, we were able to purchase the work of Jota Mombaça Voices, Voices…Inexplicable Machinery!. The work consist of six drawings that were created as sketches for Jota Mombaça’s sound performance on 10.9.2022 in Clara-Zetkin-Park. The performance was dedicated to voices that have been extinguished or silenced, and an exhibition of the same name was shown in the display window of the new GfZK building.
Also in 2022, we acquired the work Atem-Tagebuch. Lungenmimik by Olga Sazykina. It is a series of 9 drawings. The Atem-Tagebuch. Lungenmimik is one of Olga Sazykina’s most comprehensive artistic projects. She began working on it in 1997 when she was invited to Switzerland. After a brief period of democratisation, the political decline became evident in Belarus in 1996, when symbols of the Belarusian Soviet Republic reclaimed the public squares.
In relation to what cannot be put into words, such as the subconscious, any language is a limitation. When the possibility of free expression is absent, existential and political silence sets in. Writing then becomes a means of maintaining inner freedom and connection with the outside world. Each time before the artist starts recording her lung movements, she meditates for a while. She then lets the rhythm of her inhaling and exhaling guide her to put a continuous wavy line on paper. The work was shown as part of the exhibition When The Sun Is Low – The Shadows Are Long.
In 2021, the Friends enabled the purchase of five works by artist Magret Hoppe from ASPN Gallery.
In 2020, we were able to acquire a video trilogy by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, made in the course of her work for the German Pavilion curated by Franciska Zólyom at the Biennale di Venezia 2019. In the three films, she traverses landscapes and seeks out specific locations, and these journeys can also be understood as a lead-in to the artistic contribution. Accentuated by compositions by Jessica Ekomane, Jako Maron and Tisha Mukarji, the shots link and bear witness to places such as anchor centres in Bavaria, tomato plantations in Puglia and the customs port of Trapani where a rescue ship is moored.
We were also able to purchase 12 silkscreens from the APRÈS series by Eric Baudelaire. An exhibition with a programme of events at the Centre Pompidou in Paris asked what insights can be gained from looking at past social designs. Each event was recorded and published the following day in the form of a public notice on the glass façade of the exhibition space. Using the keywords architecture, school, justice and others, the resulting 12 silkscreens take aim at institutions of public life and take up the medium of event protocols, which was already used during the French Revolution.