The closing night, a mosaic of formats, includes performative approaches to artistic research as well as sound and moving image interventions. In their manifoldness they navigate sensory and epistemological layers of interrelatedness. With contributions by Anta Helena Recke, Henrike Naumann, Anna Zett, Pary El-Qalqili, Murat Adash,
Marta Popivoda,
Holly Herndon, followed by music from Jessica Ekomane and Anton Kats.

Location: Sophiensaele
Time: 7 November, 7-10 PM (with a break)
Language: English, German

Tickets

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Pary El-Qalqili
Burning Earth The earth is burning in Gaza. Houses, schools, hospitals, tents are burning. Bodies are burning. Bodies remain under rubble. The dead who can be recovered are wrapped in white linen sheets. Many dead remain missing. A child carries the remaining body parts of his brother in a plastic bag. A mother finds her son’s skull. A mass grave is dug in the courtyard of a destroyed hospital. The bodies of the dead are in blue plastic bags. From a distance, we watch as our dead are buried. In our dreams, the dead speak to us: Look at us, look at the burning earth, look into our eyes.
The audience is invited to witness a burial ceremony and to take part.

WITH Salma Abudagga, Yazid Baker, Mohammed Barbakh, Adham Ihmaid, Safaa Moussa, Ghias Rafee, Mujahed Atallah Rafee, Awad Zoghra

AIKIDO TRAINING Masayo Kajimura, Homam Alabdullah BOX TRAINING Safaa Moussa ACTOR TRAINING Anna Schmidt TEXT Adham Ihmaid, Pary El-Qalqili SOUND COMPOSITION Dirar Kalash IMAGE Christiane Schmidt DRAWINGS Rheim Alkadhi STAGE ASSISTANT Ramzi Chaabane SUBTITELS Farahat Khalil CONCEPT & PRODUCTION Pary El-Qalqili

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Holly Herndon
In this listening presentation, Holly Herndon opens the process behind her ongoing collaboration with Mat Dryhurst – sharing group recordings, training materials, and vocal model outputs. Originally commissioned by Serpentine Galleries and developed during her fellowship, these sessions reveal how collective vocal gestures are transformed into datasets that teach machines to sing, forming the basis for a new body of work exploring voice, authorship, and the porous boundary between human and model. This body of work, along with the songbook development and a forthcoming LP are supported by the Berlin Artistic Research Program, and new training material created for Herndon’s current exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art and K21 Duesseldorf will also be previewed.

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Anta Helena Recke
One example of Artistic Research is running your practice by fellow artists in depth. To let your work simmer through them and theirs through yours, to use communal thinking as a vehicle for aesthetic knowledge. Anta Helena Recke performed by Cem Kaya will give an insight into her project OUT OF (THE) SUN and share glimpses into the filmic interventions that she uses to explore afropean virtuosity and language. 

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Marta Popivoda
In this cinematic intervention, Marta Popivoda explores how bodies, architectures, and ideas age and move differently as they pass through time together; how they remember, resist, and endure. It is a meditation on time and ideology, on how personal and collective histories intertwine and haunt the present. The intervention captures the glitch between two worlds: fading socialism and emerging neoliberal individualism. Unfolding as a spatial and temporal choreography of memory, it treats the body as an archive and movement as a form of historical thinking. In that fragile space of transition, Popivoda searches for gestures, both bodily and cinematic, that still hold the potential for collective imagination. 

WITH Sonja Vukićević CO-WRITER Ana Vujanović PRODUCERS Zsófi Lili Kovács, Jasmina Sijerčić, Marta Popivoda EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Jelena Angelovski CINEMATOGRAPHER Ivan Marković EDITOR Jelena Maksimović SOUND DESIGNER Vladimir Živković RE-RECORDING MIXER Simon Apostolou PRODUCED BY Fiskultura Films, Bocalupo Films, Theory at Work

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Murat Adash
A voice in the dark, a ghost in the image, a body drifting into light. Apparitions unfolds as a sequence of dis/appearances – text, projection, and movement – where iridescence and camouflage blur the boundaries of perception. Traversing altered states of corporeality, the performance traces a terrain of unstable presences and dissolving thresholds of subjectivity.

VFX Hugo Guerra SOUND Sophia Loizou COSTUME Monika Martynow ADVICE / HELPING HANDS Juljan Krause, Christian Fritzenwanker

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Jessica Ekomane and Anton Kats
Join us after the performances in the foyer for conversations, drinks, and music from Jessica Ekomane and Anton Kats.

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Anna Zett
The seating cushions A, N, G, S, T were developed in 2024 as a usable spatial installation in response to the video Afraid doesn’t exist (Anna Zett, 2023). In their default arrangement, they form legible letters; through their use as comfortable seating during the video projection of this “archive thriller,” their formal meaning dissolves. Anna Zett also employs the letters for participatory conversations – both in reference to the film and independently. 

SEWING & PRODUCTION ADVICE Marei Löllmann

Credits

CURRENT FELLOWS Bini Adamczak, Murat Adash, Jessica Ekomane, Pary El-Qualqili (Weltoffenes Berlin), Daniel Falb, Holly Herndon, Anton Kats, Dan Lie, Henrike Naumann, İz Öztat, Marta Popivoda, Anta Helena Recke, Konstanze Schmitt, Luise Schröder TEAM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Rike Frank, COORDINATION Mihaela Chiriac PRODUCTION SUPPORT ​​Gülşah Mursaloğlu COMMUNICATION & MODERATION Philicia Kraatz GKFD Kathrin Busch

This event is a collaboration between the Berliner Programm Künstlerische Forschung and Sophiensæle.
Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.