Cycles

Parlors

Papers

About

The PRAXES Parlors were live events, such as performances, discussions, film screenings, talks, and workshops, led by local and international voices from across the cultural field.

Last chance to dance at PRAXES! A warm thanks for joining us for the Grand Closing Party that completed the fourth Cycle and celebrated PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art before its closing as a Berlin venue.

Live music by:

Andrew Moss (live at 8:30pm)
Bossi&Herzi and DJ Zapzarap (live at 9pm)

DJ-sets by:
MASCHA (7pm)

The Triumphant Return of The Jazz Professor to Berlin (For the First Time Since Killin' It Way Back When!) (10pm)

Ping Pong Tittie (11pm)

Volkan T error (0am)

Free drinks was generously provided by Monkey 47 and Thomas Henry; additional beverages, barbecue, and other great food by Agnes Cafeteria.

After two years with four Cycles of high-intensity activities, dedicated to the artistic practices of Gerard Byrne, Jutta Koether, Judith Hopf, Falke Pisano, Christina Mackie, Matt Mullican, Chris Evans, and Rimini Protokoll, PRAXES closes its Berlin venue as founding Directors Rhea Dall and Kristine Siegel take the experiment on the road to develop PRAXES in the context of the art biennial as part of the Bergen Assembly 2016.

Read the press release (EN/DE) about PRAXES’s closing here.

Thanks for joining us, as writer Marina Vishmidt took visitors on a modified tour—inspired by the "freedom of negative expression" adapted into a technical principle—through Chris Evans’s final exhibition, Hat

5 June, PRAXES: Try-out of Rimini Protokoll’s Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, Volume 1 & 2.

Thanks for joining us for a workshop visit, a production talk, and an impromptu test with Rimini Protokoll's Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, related to the upcoming project Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, Volume 1 & 2. Concluding this Spring Cycle centered on Rimini Protokoll's practice, the current and third exhibition module, Chapter III, turns the exhibition space at PRAXES into a rehearsal studio, field office, and speculative diagnostic unit, tracing strategies of concurrent and future productions. This event focused on their next production opening in Fall. As a sequel to their prize-winning 2006 piece Das Kapital, Erster Band, their new documentary play thrives on interpretations of and subjective connections to Adolf Hitler's autobiography, released from copyright protection in Germany in 2015. Investigating what it might entail to set up a protocol and ponder the metrics of a play still in the making, this evening was a rare sneak-peak at the process, test-runs, and offshoots forecasting Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, Volume 1 & 2.

*More information on the play here.

Chris Evans, Parfums Echoes L’Arome, 2014. Airbrush painting on paper

Thanks for joining us for the opening of the third Hat, the final exhibition module within this Cycle considering Chris Evans's practice. The evening featured a musical performance by Evans and Benjamin Seror who, together with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, constitute the band Concert. For the event, they created a live musical accompaniment to a new text by Evans titled “Single File”. The event was the third in a series of performances with words set to musical accompaniment, following football reviews by B.S. Johnson and a lecture by Jason Dodge.

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Chris Evans, Sketch for Home Entertainment 8 metres, 2015

Marking the end of Chris Evans's second exhibition module Hat and evoking the five-month parallel module Uniform, on this afternoon writer, artist, and co-founder of The Serving Library Angie Keefer was commissioned to give a talk on commissions. Home Entertainment (2009-ongoing) is a serial artwork by Evans that doubles in size for each new commission, and that throughout PRAXES’s Uniform is considered as both prototype and future potential. Taking a description of the exponentially growing series as cue, Keefer examined the word “commission” and its connotations for recent generations of artists, athletes, politicians, rogues, and other inadvertent entertainers.

Rimini Protokoll, Sketch for Home Visit Europe, 2015

Drawing: María José Aquilanti.

Thanks for joining us for the opening of Chapter III, the final exhibition module by Rimini Protokoll. 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, traces the creation of the new production Home Visit Europe by Rimini Protokoll that opens in Berlin this May. Employing rather untrustworthy tools such as courtroom sketches, recorded testimonials, and casually collected objects, PRAXES's upper floor will gradually fill up to create an outline—as display and discussion—of the conditions of production, accumulated in both the early stages of preparation and in following the ongoing adjustments while “live on stage” with this Rimini Protokoll project.

Thanks for joining us for the opening of Rimini Protokoll’s second exhibition module at PRAXES. Following Chapter I, tracing different acts of involvement, assembly, and agency in four productions spanning more than a decade, the second exhibition. Chapter II, is dedicated solely to the work 100% City. At PRAXES, a selection of re-edited video documentation of 100% City is 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.

Chris Evans, Curse, 2015. Airbrush painting on paper

This Curse, a musical performance by artists Jason Dodge, Chris Evans, and Morten Norbye Halvorsen, followed by a reading by poet Matthew Dickman. coincided with the opening of the two-week installation of Evans’s piece The Rock & The Judge, responding to a pattern of call-and-response characteristic to Evans’s practice.

31 January 2015, Grand Opening, Chapter 1 of Cycle 4
Rimini Protokoll, World Climate Change Conference, 2014. Photo: Agnieszka Roguski

Opening Chris Evans’s second exhibition, Hat, the two week display of A Needle Walks into a Haystack (2014) was the first of three sequentials shows responding to a recursive pattern of call-and-response characteristic to the artistic practice.

A warm thank you for joining us for the Grand Opening of Cycle 4 inaugurating a half-year of consecutive exhibitions, Papers, and Parlors focusing on Chris Evans and Rimini Protokoll.