A room with a life of its own. What if the furniture that inhabits our living room was tired of its fixed roles and tasks and decides to break free, move around, jump, transform, disassemble itself or join forces with other appliances? What if your bed, chair and bookshelf decided that they want to exist independent from their habitual context, on their own terms, free to become what they want, free to leave their fixed position and venture into the world.

In Living Room Clémentine M. Songe (aka Clément Layes) explores the dynamics of the living room, that place where we surround ourself with things that feel familiar, intimate, recognizable, safe. Transforming this room into a ‘living room’, a room that makes its own choices. In collaboration with the architect Morana Mažuran from the architectural office Ortner & Ortner Baukunst, the light designer Ruth Waldeyer and visual artist Jonas Maria Droste, Clémentine M. Songe bare the many interrelations that appear between our lives and this place, showing how much we take our habitual environment for granted, relying on it in order to feel ‘at home’ in the world. Read more...

Read the publication: 12 Years of Public in Private

Bar by bar, night by night, story by story, onward! departs from Allah 99, Hassan Blasim's cheeky debut novel in which a writer travels the world to collect the stories of 99 people from the Middle East: a DJ who used to work as a doctor in a Syrian hospital during the ISIS occupation, a man making money by selling dead flies, an Iraqi cab driver who can't stop crying while collecting all kind of illnesses.

From the Youtube Man to Ali Transistor: in every story the real is in the surreal, the banal in the tragic. It’s only one step between getting drunk, a blowjob and a car bomb. What is appearance, what is authentic? It is precisely this boundary that Enkidu explores in a scheherazade-like story marathon, in which three performers and a DJ try to get into the head and skin of the novel characters.   Read more... 

Trailer on Vimeo
 

Emre Hüner’s solo exhibition [ELEKTROİZOLASYON]: Unknown Parameter Extro-Record brings together new works created around a semi-fictional script. Hüner releases the script from its function and repositions it as a mediating device among different media, such as film, novel, and architecture, proposing an open method of production, a process of scriptwriting rather than reaching a conclusive outcome. The exhibition thus reflects a performative production process that relies on improvisation and moves across disciplines. Read more...
 

For his latest creation, director Mesut Arslan set to work with the magisterial Gilgamesh epic. Not as a tale of immortality, as it has been told for thousands of years, but as an epic about learning to die. In the collection of heroic stories, Gilgamesh who is often accompanied by his friend Enkidu, experiences mythological adventures. In addition, he confronts himself with existential questions concerning, among other things, the awareness of mortality. Together with Mesut Alp, archaeologist and expert on Mesopotamia, Mesut Arslan rewrote the epic and excavated a number of contemporary core themes from it. Arslan and Alp treat the encounter between Enkidu and Gilgamesh as one that puts nature against civilization, Homo Sapiens against Neanderthals, and time against space. Read more...