Introduction

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce our participation in the fifth iteration of the Hallen Art Festival, held at the Wilhelm Hallen in Berlin. On view will be the video installation Bad People, Bad News by Cemile Sahin. In this work, different backgrounds, stories and issues relating to three Kurdish women are narrated and interwoven. They meet every year in a different presidential suite of a hotel to celebrate the death of ex-president and dictator Saddam Hussein. At the center is a box they always carry with them. It is an archive of drawings, texts and events that they created after his death. From this repository they draw details and keywords that set their stories in motion in ever new segments. In this way, an overall narrative is formed about nations, dictatorships, monuments, terror, and questions about power and interpretive sovereignty, original and fake.

Presented by the Fluentum, contemporary time-based art collection, will be Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut by Ari Benjamin Meyers. Shot in HD video, the nearly 18-minute work is centered on Marshall Allen, world-renowned free and avant-garde jazz musician and current leader of the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra, of which he has been a permanent member since 1958. For the film, Ari Benjamin Meyers composed two original scores for Allen to perform, inviting him to engage in an intimate conversation through music about the spontaneity of making music, the rigors of rehearsal and the potential of collaboration. The film combines documentary and fictional, even fantastical, elements.