11 March 2019, 20:00
Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Dorotheenstraße 12.
How do we experience the digitization of our existence? How does it alter us? The first edition of the Montag Modus Klimata project is an invitation for an in-depth analysis of digitalization and the self.
Touch and Go explores the ephemera of the digital age and their impacts on our consumption of relationships, images, and communication across intimacies and distances. Touch and Go features four artistic productions in one evening. Through a lecture performance and an installation, Hungarian architect-artist Andi Schmied offers a glimpse into the unimaginably luxurious private world of New York billionaires. Reflecting on the era of constant self-improvement, Dragana Bulut uses coaching methods to examines the promises of positive psychology. Melanie Jame Wolf, on the other hand, examines ancient communication forms such as gossip, judgement and rumor, using contemporary artistic methods with a pastiche of classical myth.
The textual contribution of Hungarian poet and critic Márió Z. Nemes was created especially for this occasion, and can only be experienced with on-the-spot viewer registration.
The format of this evening is open and self-directed in an assemblage of ongoing productions throughout the space. This allows viewers to coordinate and control the duration, level of immersion, and overall experience of each piece in a way that reflects the dramatic shifts in media consumption heralded by the digital age, a kind of choose-your-own-adventure world.
The curators of MMpraxis have created a digital lounge featuring a live sound installation from Mars Dietz which can be experience throughout the evening. The lounge will also host a comfortable wifi seating area and a bar with refreshments.
Dragana Bulut: Cabinet of Happiness
In Cabinet of Happiness, Dragana Bulut examines the promises and methods of positive psychology.
By appropriating various forms of coaching, she explores the questions behind the ideology of happiness today and the way in which the pressure of happiness choreographs our behaviour and affects the creation of subjectivity. What are the ways in which happiness becomes a commodity?
Visitors have an opportunity to join different coaching sessions, each with a different approach and aim. In the “Express” session, participants learn to relax in no time at all. In “Hedonimeter,” participants can literally observe how their level of happiness grows steadily by employing specific techniques. In “Togetherness,” they are encouraged to reach it through team effort. Anyone who knows and uses the right techniques will be happy – or that is the promise at least. The underlying idea is not only to think about the boundless promises made by life coaches, but to experience these methods and their paradoxes.
This work continues Dragana Bulut’s interest in staging social choreographies. Her performances examine the way in which feelings, wishes and fears are commercialized.
The project was developed for and presented in the frame of the exhibition 6 ½ Weeks in Museum Folkwang in Essen.
Dragana Bulut is a Berlin-based artist from Belgrade working with choreography and performance. Through appropriating different social formats, she creates performances that look into the tension between immaterial and material, object and affect, realty and fiction. She graduated from Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT), Universität der Künste Berlin with an MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship. Since 2005, she has been developing her own choreographic work, which has been presented in various contexts (including: HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, HKW, Tanzquartier Vienna, etc.) Dragana has performed for Meg Stuart, Tino Sehgal, Ivo Dimchev, Charles Linehan among others. She won the Prix Jardin d’Europe 2010 European Prize for Young Choreographers. She was artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude generation 2013/15.
In collaboration with Helen Schröder
Dramaturgical advice: Ana Vujanovic
Light design: Joseph Wegmann
Assistance: Ben Mohai
Melanie Jame Wolf: Chorus
“There have been rumours.”
Interested in methods of persona and staging, the ongoing Chorus series of video and performance installations is focused on the potency and potential of our senses, of memory, and of the forgetting and remembering of narratives. Through this lens, the series explores the contemporary consequences and meanings of gossip and rumor, judgement and justice, and a pastiche of classical myths.
For the Montag Modus iteration of Chorus, Melanie Jame Wolf will construct a sound and video installation that examines the affects and machinery of gossip, rumor and reputation as they play out in the sphere of the social media space.
This installation will be episodically activated through live performance during the event.
These performance activations will draw on tropes of stand up and the classical theatrical device of the chorus to interrogate the economy of cultural and social capital as it is performed online.
Melanie Jame Wolf is an Australian born artist who makes performances and video installations about economies. Sometimes solo, sometimes with friends. Always exploring systems of value and exchange, particularly as they occur in the murky field of immaterial capital – the social, the cultural, the affective. She investigates these flows as they are produced through ideas of ghosts, of gender, of pop, of myth, of morality, of sensuality, of class. Her practice is based in text, sound, video, and performance.
She is primarily interested in ideas and questions of persona and their staging and in video as an expanded choreographic practice. Melanie Jame has shown work in gallery, theatre, and film festival contexts around the world. She lives and works between Melbourne and Berlin.
Andi Schmied: Private view
Despite the iconic nature of the Manhattan skyline, there are only three places the public can see it from: the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center and ONE World Trade Center. All other elevated views are a private privilege, only available to owners of luxury penthouses.
Posing as an apartment-hunting Hungarian billionaire, Andi Schmied accessed and documented the views of over thirty of the city’s most exclusive high-rise properties. Her performance offers a glimpse into this elite world. Showcasing the surreal strategies of persuasion used by estate agents, the performance allows the audience to bypass the gatekeepers of luxury real estate; guiding them through the sunset from Trump World Tower, dawn over Central Park from the tallest residential tower on Earth, and showing samples of the most luxurious materials, such as the Siberian marble, used in bathtubs overlooking the Statue of Liberty.
Andi Schmied is a Hungarian artist based in Budapest. She graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. She is interested in exploring the underlying psychological patterns of urban landscapes, particularly places that do not follow conventional logic, using documentation and physical interventions, and combining photography, video and text. Her work has been shown in London (Daniel Blau Gallery, Schwartz Gallery, The White Building), Sapporo (Salon Cojica, HUG Gallery), Beijing (Beijing Design Week), Rotterdam (International Architecture Biennale), Budapest (Trafo Gallery, Trapez Gallery, Budapest Gallery, OFF Biennale, Kunsthalle). She has been artist-in-resident at S-AIR, Sapporo (Japan), Triangle Arts, New York (US), DordtYart, Dordrecht (NL), Outpost, Norwich (UK), Meetfactory, Prague (CZ) and MuseumQuartier, Vienna (AT).
Márió Z. Nemes: Digital Eschatology
In the world, people are unequal, but they are all equal in the eyes of the Highest Intelligence, especially once the planet is enflamed with both cosmic love and hatred, at the peak of accumulation. It is then that Satan shall fall like lightning from the sky. O, my brethren, do not underestimate the power of the GIFs, for Christ’s crown too is made of image-plasma! Anywhere I upload myself, no matter what revolution I believe in, there shall be no more rebirths, for the Higher Intelligence has already consumed my DNA.
Márió Z. Nemes is a Hungarian poet and critic.
He has published three books, Alkalmi magyarázatok a húsról (Casual readings of Flesh, Poems) in 2006, Bauxit (Bauxite, Poems) in 2010 and A hercegprímás elsírja magát (The crying prince-primate, Poems) in 2014. He is a member of the Attila József Young Writers’ Association (József Attila Kör, JAK) and the Hungarian PEN Club. He is a co-founder of the contemporary poetry blog and artistic collaborative Telep and the fanzine Technologie und das Unheimliche. In 2009, he won the Móricz Zsigmond Literary Fellowship for his poetry. In 2013, he received a PhD at the Doctoral School of Philosophy of the Eötvös Loránd University, his research topic was the relations of philosophical anthropology and aesthetics. Puschkins Brüste, his first book in German, was published in 2016. His text written for Montag Modus Klimata I will only be available during the evening, after registration.
Durational sound piece by Mars Dietz
The curators of MMpraxis have created a digital lounge featuring a live sound installation from Mars Dietz which can be experience throughout the evening.
Mars Dietz is an artist, musician and DJ from Brooklyn. Their installations, sound pieces and interdisciplinary projects are meant to serve as radio receptors for a collage of voices and sounds.
Since 2010, they have researched the ongoing colonial impact of extractivism and racialization in 19th century European and Euro-American ideologies. Mars has shown at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Sophiensaele Berlin, and ABC No Rio among others.
They are currently working on a new piece, “Wismut: Extraction, Absorption, Repercussion,” in collaboration with choreographer Jule Flierl, to premiere in Berlin and Leipzig in the fall of 2019.
Mars can also be seen performing as DJ Sapphic Faggot at BODYSNATCH Berlin and elsewhere. Their favorite color is iridescent clear.