I Want That Inside Me:Station of the (Im-)Portable Berlin

For Immediate Release:

Invitation to Open Studio at St. Agnes, Berlin, GermanyOpening Reception: Friday, December 11, 4-8pm

What does it mean to be removed from a familiar environment and to enter a new one? When inhabiting a new place, we undertake certain transformations through lived experiences. We undergo a process of adaptation and transformation that informs our daily lives – our habits, encounters, and movements that shape us physically and behaviorally. For many of us, Berlin’s unfamiliar spaces are read by us as uncharted, while its unfamiliar language falls musically to the ear. Immersed in a foreign environment like Berlin, we perceive things as already murmuring meanings – our artistic language has merely to extract itself from the most primitive beginnings.

What the place ultimately presents to us becomes an abstracted idea of form based on a more intuitive model of experience. And it is through this range of somewhat defamiliarized abstraction that we also become sensitive to personal and emotional triggers stimulated by inhabiting a new place. But we are not only receptive vessels that merely assimilated into the city’s history. We have grown accustomed to thinking of the importation of alterity as a one-way influence that merely transfers the external Other inwards. And yet, Berlin is actually writing itself through us – its story being written again and again through the eyes of the Other and of the Now; through our contact embodied in our experiences. The story is carried onward as we flow freely between nodes in the global space. Berlin is at once importable and portable.

Featuring video works, sculpture, photography and installation, New York University Berlin’s art department is pleased to invite you to our open studio, a collective autobiographical approach to our experiences here.

Text and image contributed by Audrey Tseng.

I Want That Inside Me: Station of the (Im-)Portable Berlin is a joint collaboration featuring artists: Andrea Christensen, Julia Crescitelli, Daniela De Costanzo, Zoe Dubno, Jade Gardner, Colette Harley, Allie Huddleston, Camila Kann, Gina Maskell, Jane Merrow, Devin Splaine, Sarah Steinhart, Lydia Terillo, Audrey Tseng, Beatrix Walter, and Ben Wolf.

St. Agnes, Alexandrinenstraße 118-121, 10969 Berlin, Germany

St. Agnes, Alexandrinenstraße 118-121, 10969 Berlin, Germany