Public – Berlin Art Link

Being Weird in Public: Leigh Bowery at Tate Modern

Alison Hugill — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 12:42:43 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. The exhibition ‘Leigh Bowery!’ at Tate Modern charts the gloriously brazen, glitzy and gender-bent life of the eponymous icon of the 80s London club scene. Between Leigh Bowery’s signature sequinned gimp masks, the smutty postcards he sent to friends, fizzy party pics from the nightclub Taboo, and a spangling collection of artworks where he…

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Quiet Acts of Resistance: An Interview with Igor Grubić

Alison Hugill — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:17:57 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. My gateway into activist and artist Igor Grubić’s practice was equal parts jarring and cathartic. Croatian and Serbian voices shouting, gunfire and Missy Elliot’s 2001 hit ‘Get Ur Freak On’ blared across Berlin’s Nome gallery before I could see the source of the commotion. Grubić’s two-channel video ‘East Side Story’ (2006-08) portrays the…

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Spray Paint’s Long Legacy: ‘Graffiti’ at Museion Bolzano

Alison Hugill — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 12:19:45 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. Graffiti is an art form of the people. From the moment aluminum spray paint was patented in 1951 for use on steam radiators, the readymade canisters have been co-opted to create. It was communities of Black and Hispanic teenagers in the outer boroughs of New York City who formed the first epicenter for the medium; the young taggers targeted…

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Needs Are Not Scary: An Interview with Casino for Social Medicine

Alison Hugill — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:01:01 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. The Casino for Social Medicine is an experimental, collective and anti-capitalist bar and café that recently opened its doors in a former Spielhalle at Sonnenallee 100, in Berlin-Neukölln. Since its launch in October, it has been run by a dozen volunteers, self-described as a “porous group of anti-colonial migrants, activists, radical librarians…

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Techno-Reveries: Refik Anadol at Guggenheim Bilbao

Alison Hugill — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:52:09 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. The building of all empires requires art and, much like the global franchise that is the Guggenheim, Refik Anadol’s generative AI artworks arrive alongside a new form of empire. His popular, immersive installations use machine learning models to train AI image projections that continually reshape themselves in unpredictable ways…

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Biopolitical Ballet: An Interview with DANCÆ

Alison Hugill — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 09:27:56 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. DANCÆ, an evolving performance series, reimagines ballet through immersive, multidisciplinary collaborations. Their latest project, ‘Körperfabrik,’ premiered this month at Berlin’s Kant-Garagen, an industrial space that becomes integral to the work itself. Featuring choreography by Anthony Nakhle, Alvin Collantes and Ballet Sur_real…

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The Public Voice: An Interview with Samra Mayanja

Alison Hugill — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 12:49:07 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. Samra Mayanja is a performance artist, poet and curator responsible for the project space The Call Centre in Hackney Wick, London. Mayanja’s performances, often based on a character she has developed named Holiday, are searingly emotional, eye-wateringly hilarious and overwhelmingly generous. These theatrical works are also robustly participatory…

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Letter from the Editor: Public

Alison Hugill — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:09:00 +0000

This article is part of our feature topic Public. At some point or another, an exhibition text is likely to refer to the public—the audience, the visitor, the viewer. This amorphous category is given a lot of weight and critical responsibility, but what does it really entail? How can we make sense of this assemblage and does it always stand in opposition to, for example, the private or the…

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