Where is the War?
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| 5 EUR, reduced 3 EUR |
| 12 years and older |
| English, German |
| Berlin Exhibition, 1st floor, Hall 5 Berlin Room |
What does war mean to you? As part of the BERLIN GLOBAL exhibition, the artist Masha Pryven invites the audience to the room “War” for an interactive performance.
Pryven’s intervention stems from her observation that the war in Ukraine has no place in the room “War” at BERLIN GLOBAL, creating a gap. This gap is dangerous: On one hand, it leaves room for misinformation and fantasy; on the other, it enables the societal suppression of a nearby catastrophe. Pryven seeks ways to forge a genuine emotional connection between those who live in peace and those who are at war. How does a war in Europe change your own understanding of peace? Can a brief encounter with another reality change your worldview?
The performance is based on Pryven’s ongoing art project with people living through the war in Ukraine. For this, Pryven regularly travels to her homeland and asks the question: If you had the opportunity to speak to people in Europe, what would you tell them?
The Berlin audience has the opportunity to become part of the performance and address the absence of the topic “War in Ukraine” at BERLIN GLOBAL.
After the performance, we invite you to a reading by the author Ewa Maria Slaska, followed by a discussion on how contemporary conflicts are handled in museums and institutions, featuring Daria Prydybailo (art historian and curator) and Daniel Morat (curator of the room “War”).
The performance will be held in both English and German, while the subsequent discussion will be conducted in German.
Participants
Masha Pryven, born in Ukraine, has been living in Berlin since 2014. Her artistic practice explores the relationships between the private and the political. In her work, she invites various social groups to radically participate, becoming co-authors of the artworks. One of her collaborative photography projects (See What I See) was published in Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, edited by Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and others, Thames & Hudson, UK, 2023. She is currently working on an ongoing Ukraine project with Marianna Prigozhina, a trained philologist involved in politically engaged art projects.
Born in Poland in 1949, writer, editor, publicist, blogger, project manager, translator, teacher and curator Ewa Maria Slaska also sees herself as a mediator between German and Polish realities. She fled to Berlin in 1985 as a political activist in the Solidarność movement and has been working in refugee aid ever since. She has been involved in many projects over the past 40 years, including the independent TV show “Magazyn Wyspa” (“Island”), WIR e.V. – Verein und Verlag zur Förderung der deutsch-polnischen Literatur and the German-Polish Poets’ Steamer. Together with Anna Krenz and Jemek Jemowit, she is co-author of the Open Space “Liberty, Equality, Solidarność” at BERLIN GLOBAL.
Philippe Kayser, aka Don Philippe, was active as a professional drummer in the 1980s and later as a pianist and guitarist. Since the 1990s, he has worked as a producer and composer in his own studio. He is a co-founder of the hip-hop group “Freundeskreis”, which has played an influential role in German hip-hop culture. Since 2015, he has released more than ten solo albums in the hip-hop instrumental genre with a global presence on Spotify and various independent labels.
Daria Prydybailo is an art historian and curator, living between Ukraine and Germany since 2016. She has worked at leading cultural institutions in Ukraine and Germany, including the National Art and Culture Museum Mystetskyi Arsenal and the National Museum of Contemporary Art Hamburger Bahnhof. She is the founder of the Temporarily Displaced Foundation, which is dedicated to developing intercultural dialogue, supporting independent artistic voices, and strengthening postcolonial discourse in the contemporary art world.
Prof. Dr. Daniel Morat is a curator at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) and teaches modern and contemporary history at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2016 to 2021, he was part of the BERLIN GLOBAL curatorial team.