Co-founded by Rhea Dall and Kristine Siegel, between 2013 and 2015 PRAXES Center
for Contemporary Art presented four half-year cycles of exhibitions,
publications, and events—each revolving around two unassociated artistic practices—in Berlin.
Expanding its timeframe and moving this experiment to a new context, as part of
the triennial Bergen Assembly 2016 PRAXES developed a year-long episodic and
itinerant investigation centered on the work of two artists only: Lynda Benglis and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd.
31 January – 23 March
28 March – 6 April
11 April – 11 May
16 May – 14 June
Untitled (1)
Untitled (2)
Untitled (3)
Untitled (4)
From performance, pop poetics, and discursive direction to short films, music
videos, site-specific installations, and sculptures (spanning 3D prints, found
objects, and ceramics), Judith Hopf maintains a practice of growing diversity.
Paired with a tongue-in-cheek attitude and slowed working process—deliberately setting her own minimum quota for creative output to a single film
and a series of objects per year—her array of work presents a playful resistance to categorization and
requirements of artistic production. Often propelled by her immediate
environment, Hopf has repeatedly collaborated with other artists and worked
with many non-profit institutions in Berlin. Taking its cue from Hopf’s defiance of conventions and fast turn-overs as well as thriving on her
catalogue of collaborations—ongoing and new—Hopf’s Cycle at PRAXES fell in four uneven measures.
Articulated in a range of formats such as sculpture, performance-lectures, text,
and conversation, Falke Pisano’s work circulates and reformulates ideas, language, and forms. Her long-term
investigations—Figures of Speech (2006–2010), an exploration of the discursive potential of artworks, and
The Body in Crisis (2011– ), tracking changing conditions of
the human body in historical moments of crisis—are structured as series of sometimes subtle, sometimes confrontational
transfers from one work to another, from one context to the next. Following the
logic of a rehearsal, that is, testing how various parts of an anticipated
activity come together while simultaneously rethinking and rereading their
content and position, Pisano’s Cycle at PRAXES developed as a spatial, contextual, as well as collective
experiment. With a cannibalistic approach that is very much in line with the
artist’s practice, this Cycle conjoined two equally long periods of on-site
investiga-tions, entitled
Rehearsal I & II, and a longer stretch of simultaneously live and published
semi-public/semi-private reflections, entitled Rehearsal III.
Emphasizing deceleration to the point of deadpan stillness, Hopf’s first exhibition module at PRAXES centered on a flock of concrete sheep from
2013, grazing unimpressed on the (institutional) modernist layout.
Pisano’s first presentation at PRAXES, Rehearsal I, Take One: Parts That Do Not Go Together gradually unfolded between parts of works that belong to different systemic
presentations within the artist’s oeuvre.
Judith Hopf, installation view at PRAXES.
With a rotating sequence and tailored display, Hopf’s second exhibition module at PRAXES shifted into fast-forward, presenting a
comprehensive archive of the artist’s film works from the past two decades, captured in a ten-day screening program.
Created at the deliberately slow pace of one work a year, Hopf’s film production hints at a long-term engagement with the resilience of humor
and points of collective resistance.
Falke Pisano, installation view at PRAXES.
Rehearsal I, Take Two: Parts That Do Not Go Together continued to gradually unfold and amplify cross-readings and slow articulations
within the artist’s practice. Where Take One brought together collages and dismembered, fractured bodies of work, the
backbone of Take Two was the grand and swirling Structure for Repetition (not Representation). The sculpture of curtains and panels spinned a genealogy as it, in turn,
interfered with Pisano’s constructed narratives and blocked the spatial overview of the ground floor at
PRAXES.
Judith Hopf, installation view at PRAXES.
Pisano’s second Rehearsal, subtitled Heart Head Hold-up, opened with a question: What is the relationship between affect and aesthetic
knowledge when approaching an object?
Chillida (Forms & Feelings), a film from 2006 on display throughout this exhibition chapter, mapped Pisano’s reactions to a series of photographs by David Finn of public works by the
Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. Its suggestion of subtle links between
objects, representation, and personal experience is further emphasized in a
continuously changing installation of artworks, events, and support material.
Running through the end of this exhibition Cycle, Rehearsal II evolved as a spiral of association and accumulation of curtains, paravants,
hooks, screens, words, and works, hidden and emphasized in turn.
Judith Hopf’s third exhibition module at PRAXES took a closer look at a series of masks
sculpted from hard-drive and smart-phone packaging and recreated as 3D-prints.
The functionless, unemotional faces of everyday technology draw out the
complicated bond between humans and their tools.
For her fourth and final display, Judith Hopf created a brand-new installation
responding to the cyclical investigations at PRAXES. As if in evolution or
metamorphosis, things emerged and submerged into the polished concrete flooring—or through it entirely. Slowly sinking or about to rise, a landscape of
detritus, or objects under construction. Plus to minus, minus to plus, sun up,
sun down, (re)cycling. Turning points, how to adapt, how to risk, how to read
water levels, interest rates, housing prices, how to reemerge, how to
disappear.
Judith Hopf, installation view at PRAXES.
Hopf has exhibited extensively with recent solo presentations at Studio
Voltaire, London (2013), Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2013), Malmö Konsthall (2012), and Grazer Kunstverein (2012). Her work was featured in
several locations in dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). Born in Karlsruhe, Hopf has lived in
Berlin since the early 1990s and holds a professorship at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.
Pisano recently had solo exhibitions at The Showroom, London (2013) and De
Vleeshal, Middelburg (2012). Her work was included in the Istanbul Biennial
(2013), the Shanghai Biennial (2012), and the 53rd Biennale di Venezia (2009).
In 2013, she received the Prix de Rome. Originally from the Netherlands, Pisano
lives and works in Berlin.
In Spring 2014, two external curators were invited to contribute to the process
of collectively and critically addressing the featured artistic œuvres. Cecilia Canziani joined PRAXES Directors Rhea Dall and Kristine Siegel in
approaching Judith Hopf’s artistic practice.
Cecilia Canziani is Co-director of Nomas Foundation, Rome, where she has been invested since 2009 in an ongoing critical
analysis, reshuffling, and questioning of emerging artistic practices.
Moreover, Canziani is a co-curator of ZegnArt, a contributing editor of the
magazine Cura, and a PhD researcher at the Doctoral School of History, Archeology, and Art
History at the University of Naples.
In Spring 2014, two external curators were invited to contribute to the process
of collectively and critically addressing the featured artistic œuvres alongside PRAXES Directors Rhea Dall and Kristine Siegel. Elena Tzotzi
partook in curating the Cycle of Falke Pisano.
Elena Tzotzi is the Co-director of Signal Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden, a collaborative exhibition venue, committed to producing, presenting,
and contextualizing art. Previously, Tzotzi worked at the Rooseum Center for
Contemporary Art and Lunds Konsthall. She has curated numerous exhibitions as a
freelance curator and contributes regularly to publications and magazines.
PRAXES
Bergen Assembly
Østre Skostredet 5 – 7
Bergen 5017, Norway
PRAXES’s Berlin venue has closed. In 2016 PRAXES will open its new iteration in Bergen,
as part of the Bergen Assembly
