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 – 8 March
12 March – 19 April
23 April – 13 June
31 January – 13 June
Hat
Hat
Hat
Uniform
Chris Evans, Magnetic Promenade, 2006
Airbrush painting on paper
Rimini Protokoll, World Climate Change Conference, 2014
Deutsches SchauSpielHaus, Hamburg. © Benno Tobler
Teasing out the subplots and maneuvers permeating cultural production, Chris
Evans operates through fronts of affiliations and loose collaborations evading
decisive definitions of author- or ownership. Evans has incited diplomats to
work as draftsmen, police to recruit art students, and a commercial sponsor to
create a luxury adornment as an exhibit. Thriving in nebulous environments
where private or corporate patronage crosses the arts, the artist persistently
laces this badland with poetic notes beyond political motivation. Evans’s practice filters clouded backstories, social processes, or institutional
visions into a single object or gesture—a part for a whole—whilst producing spiraling narratives that simultaneously echo and pervert. At
PRAXES, Evans’s Cycle unfolded in four modules entitled
Hat, Hat, Hat, and Uniform.
Founded in 2002, the collective Rimini Protokoll has developed their very own
branch of experimental theater, documentary performance, film, installations,
and actions. Based at the theater HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, around the
corner from PRAXES, yet touring extensively around the world, the group
continuously test and augment audience relations. Neither a theater nor an
archive, PRAXES aimed to stage dialogues between placeholders, “Ich-Vertretern,” and other surprising experts of the everyday. Divided into various
Chapters, this Cycle presented the first extensive investigation of the practice of
Rimini Protokoll in an art institution, drawing on a carefully orchestrated
crash between exhibitions, live actions, auditions and tryouts, and the making
of a book.
Chris Evans, Magnetic Promenade, 2006/2015
Airbrush painting. Photo: Albrecht Pischel
Rimini Protokoll, Deutschland 2, 2002
Call for participation, ve audition videos, each 8 min. Photo: Albrecht Pischel
The initial exhibition module in this Cycle with Chris Evans, entitled Hat, summoned a gallery of airbrush works produced throughout the artist’s career, shown together for the first time. Proxies for (sometimes
non-existing) projects, posters, contributions to publications, as well as
singular paintings, this body of work—sharing crudely propagandistic yet dreamlike industrial aesthetics—was accompanied by a recreation of Magnetic Promenade (2006) on the façade at PRAXES.
On the heels of the World Climate Change Conference, a mammoth-scale participatory production inaugurated at Hamburg’s Deutsches SchauSpielHaus in December 2014,
Rimini Protokoll’s opening Chapter at PRAXES spanned an entire decade of work including Deutschland 2 (2002), Hauptversammlung (2009), and Situation Rooms (2013–ongoing), pointing towards radically different acts of involvement, assembly,
and audience agency.
Hat—Chris Evans’s second exhibition module in this Cycle was divided into three sequential
displays- Each employed a recursive pattern of call-and-response forecasting
objects that in turn shift the relationship between artist and commissioner, showing first A Needle Walks into a Haystack (2014), second The Rock & The Judge (2005/2008), and finally CLODS, Diplomatic Letters (2009-).
Rimini Protokoll, 100% Gwangju, 2014
Photo © Ahn Gab Joo
The second exhibition module, Chapter II, considering Rimini Protokoll’s practice was dedicated solely to the work 100% City. At PRAXES, re-edited video documentation from more than twenty different
editions of this itinerant production was screened together for the first time,
examining the project as a traveling, expanded investigation of globalized
urban patterns and a form of highly detailed group portraiture. Modeled on a
concept that lends itself easily to touring as well as customization—the production has been restaged in over twenty cities around the world from
Gwangju to San Diego—each iteration activates local networks of 100 residents. The protagonists are
recruited to mirror the demographic makeup of their habitat, giving the
statistics individual faces, voices, and votes. In a world bombarded with “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” this serial cross-section of disparate societies hinted at an idiosyncratic
representation of various geographies that goes well beyond pie-charts and
graphs.
Chris Evans, The Freedom of Negative Espression, 2007/2010
Mini-DV, 1:34 min, looped. Film still
Mini-DV, 1:34 min, looped. Film still
Following a retrospective of Chris Evans’s airbrush paintings that formed the initial exhibition module, Hat, the mechanisms of call-and-response—considered through consecutive presen-tations and live acts—comprised the second Hat. The third and final Hat shifted the focus to trailers, invocations, and forecasts of potential
productions, playing back the pilots of TV series
The Freedom of Negative Expression (2007/10), with the tagline “Betrayal is a Fine Art”, and The Fantasist (2007).
Rimini Protokoll, Sketch for Home Visit Europe, 2015
Drawing: María José Aquilanti.
Chris Evans, Home Entertainment 1 metre (Exception), 2015
Painted steel. Photo: Albrecht Pischel
Following Chapter I, looking at audience agency beyond the live performance, and Chapter II, cross-reading different editions of the single yet itinerant piece 100% City, Chapter III traced the creation of the new production Home Visit Europe by Rimini Protokoll that opened in Berlin in May 2015 via HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
Turning the exhibition space into a rehearsal studio, field office, and
speculative diagnostic unit, the investigation began with an on-site test-run
of Home Visit Europe. Employing courtroom sketches, recorded testimonials, and casually collected
objects, PRAXES's upper floor gradually filled up to create a display and
discussion of the conditions of production, accumulated in both the preparation
and the ongoing adjustments while “live on stage” with this project.
Chris Evans has recently exhibited at Project Arts Centre in Dublin, 2014;
Liverpool Biennial, 2014; Kunstverein München, 2014; Tate Liverpool, 2014; Witte de With in Rotterdam, 2012; Taipei
Biennial, 2010; and Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp, 2009. In 2011, Sternberg
Press & Westreich Wagner published the monograph Goofy Audit. Evans lives and works in London.
Rimini Protokoll has presented work—produced collectively as well as by the individual members, Helgard Haug, Stefan
Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel—in countless festivals and theaters internationally. Current productions include
World Climate Change Conference, Situation Rooms, and 100% City. The new production Home Visit Europe opened in Berlin in May 2015.
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
