HEY UNIVERSUM – 2021

a (poster) exhibition in public space
EXHIBITION: November 8th – 21st, 2021Scroll down for interactive Map

ARTISTS
Rula Ali, Nacer Ahmadi, Miguel Buenrostro, Kristen Cooper, D’Andrade, Laura Fong Prosper, Christa Fülbier, Tirdad Hashemi, Ziyad Hawwas, Halim Karabibene, Nicolás Kisic Aguirre, Zoltan Kunckel, Sam Madhu, Irina Novarese, Ramin Parvin, Yaser Safi, Ruba Salameh, Özlem Sarıyıldız, Uli Westphal, Bora Yediel

HIER&JETZT:Connections (HUJ:C) extends its art space to the streets of Berlin with the group exhibition hey Universum. The show features posters designed by 20 cross-cultural artists displayed throughout the city’s urban spaces.

Posters are inserted into the everyday circumstance, utilizing commonplace advertisement poster walls as platforms to engage the public with offerings, messages and questions that speak to the artists’ viewpoints on an array of topics pertinent to the world today. The approach fosters opportunities for passersby to rethink and reenvision ‘our’ universe within the local landscape.

OPENING: Friday, October 29, 2021 – 18:00, Gisela Freier Kunstraum Lichtenberg (Giselastr. 12 · 10317 Berlin)

Map showing hey Universum poster locations throughout Berlin. Visit the alternative link HERE.

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ARTISTS


Rula Ali was born in a small city called Qamishli, in northeastern Syria, where there are many different ethnicities and religions. She finished English literature at Damascus University, then followed her passion in studying sculpture at an art institute in Damascus, followed by practicing sculpture art under the pioneering sculptor artist Hadi Obeid. After moving to Germany, Rula used textile and clothing conceptually to express her ideas to build the connection between the material and the concept and as a medium connected to her identity. Her interest in fabric as a rich material representing cultural heritage led her to experiment with different textile techniques.
Rula’s mother was the best textile teacher, where, as a child, got most of her knowledge about textile from her mother; but for her, using textile back in Syria was problematic, as it was in her mind connected with the stereotypical role of women. Rula participated in several exhibitions in Germany. She dedicated her artworks to highlight socio-political issues concerning discourse, communication between different cultures, and political borders created by human beings. At the same time, she focuses on the space taken and controlled by the power fluctuation of politics.

 


Nacer Ahmadi is an Iranian self-taught Graphic Designer who currently is living in Turkey as a refugee and has learned graphic design in Turkey during asylum. Nacer works as a freelance designer who has created many graphic designs for small to medium businesses and individuals around the world.


Miguel Buenrostro is a visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher working between the US-Mexico border and Los Angeles, California, and currently based in Berlin. His work often shows multiple perspectives between coloniality / decoloniality, migration, memory and architecture. His media include cinema and performative gestures in public space. His work has been presented in the Armory Center for the Arts (2017); Museo Numismático Nacional de la Ciudad de México (2018) Mexi-Cali Biennial (2019) and The New Bauhaus Museum, Weimar (2020); Miguel is co-creator of “Nuevo Norte” infrastructure for migrants, a practice which aims to rethink the cultural relationship between the city and migration. His recent performative work DISFUNCIONALISTA; On Coloniality and Architecture was part of the 100 years of Bauhaus celebration in Weimar, Germany.


Kristen Cooper is a conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. She has traveled extensively; collaborating with artists and co-curating exhibitions. Kristen received a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and a M.F.A. from the Dutch Art Institute, in the Netherlands. She is the Artist in Residency Program Director at MING Studios, Contemporary Art Center & International Artist Residency Program, located in Boise, ID, USA.


D’Andrade is a non-binary musician, poet and writer whose conceptual approach is oriented towards Afro-futurism and decolonial theory, as well as the development of investigative works, new and counter-narratives through sound design, coding, archives and encounters. It worked on a collaboration involving pedagogical processes, technology and mediation with a focus on facilitation. Her work research began with the Uncultivating Classes project, developed at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, which created a self-organized student movement to think new approaches to queer BPoCs in the academic context. D’Andrade co-curated the interdisciplinary festival Jardim Suspenso in Brazil, which builds a sustainable community healing process through sound, art and performance in the favelas. His work has been exhibited in international venues as well as in Berlin at Sophiensaele, Feld Fünf, and nGbk. In 2020, D’Andrade founded the solo project Noise Vivarium through the Durchstarten Berlin program, based on open workshops with sound experiments, decoloniality and nature. Her current research focuses on the project Onomatopia, developed for the master’s program Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts, through sound, poetry and digital games.


Laura Fong Prosper Her video installations and audiovisual essays explore the boundaries between the analog and the digital, as well as the meanings and placements of the contemporary, the historical, the old and the new. She addresses, mostly in an autobiographical way, questions of cultural belonging, longing, exile, displacement, identity, memory, ancestry and motherhood. Using different process-oriented techniques, she moderates a dialogue between media, time and stories. Her work is a mix of technologies and formats that bring glitch, color and image manipulation to her own style of observational documentation. While working with archival material, old photographs and analog video synthesizers she conducts her own research as a “found footage recycler”.
Laura Fong Prosper holds a degree in film editing from the International Film and Television School of San Antonio los Baños in Cuba (EICTV) and a MFA in new Media Art from the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. She has also participated in exchange programs with the Kunsthochschule für Medien (KHM) in Cologne, Germany, and the Tongji University in Shanghai, China. Her art has been exhibited in China, Panama, Germany, Costa Rica, Colombia, The United States and Brazil. She also has a long career as a film editor and VJ.


Christa Fülbier’s artistic practice combines objects, sculpture and photography into installation. She received a MA in art from Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe. In 2017, Fülbier co-founded the artist initiative HIER & JETZT: Connections. In her artistic practice she combines different techniques, objects, sculptures and sometimes photography in installations. In recent works she is focusing on the question of the origin of art and it’s role in the development of human social life, based on research about the prehistoric period.


Tirdad Hashemi is an Iranian artist whose drawings and paintings chronicle the presence of the intimate, familial, societal and political circumstances at work on her psyche. Hashemi’s candid autobiographical renditions interlace memory and fantasy while being subject to her immediate surroundings; being created within the means available at hand, both physically and socially.


Ziyad Hawwas Born in Egypt in 1983, Ziyad holds a BA in film making with a major in editing from the Higher Institute of Cinema, the Academy of Arts in Cairo. Since his graduation, he worked on several Egyptian film productions. In parallel, Ziyad was editing short films, documentaries and ads between Egypt and Lebanon.
During the 2011 revolution, Ziyad was a founding member of the independent media collective Mosireen.
In 2016, he moved to Berlin where he presented his first video-essay ‘Raw / Everything Interests Me But Nothing Holds Me’. Since 2020 he became a member of HUJ:C collective. 


Halim Karabibene was born in Bizerte (Tunisia). He came to recognition in the 1990s due to his unusually sarcastic yet masterfully executed collages and oneiric paintings. Karabibene ‘s work has been widely exhibited in private institutions, museums and art-fairs around the world, including: the ifa gallery Berlin, Barjeel Foundation AUE, KLF Fondation, Museo Vittoriano Rome, Zoom Art fair Miami USA, Institut du Monde Arabe Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne Algiers, Museo Pontevedra Spain, and the Dakar Biennale 18. Since 2007, Halim Karabibene has been pursuing a multidisciplinary performance in which he has been encouraging public authorities to inaugurate Tunisia’s first National Museum of Modern and contemporary Art (MNAMC). With a pressure cooker as symbol and form of the future Museum, Karabibene uses social networks, events and exhibitions to effectively launch this pseudo fictional museum until it sees the light. After the Tunisian revolution in 2011 the pressure cooker became the symbol of a country at boiling point and the uniform a symbol of the Don Quixote-esque committee of struggle for the protection of achievements and revolutionary dreams.


Nicolás Kisic Aguirre is a Peruvian architect and transdisciplinary sound artist who creates machines that explore and illuminate the social and political nature of sound in public space. In 2018, he graduated from the MIT program in Art, Culture and Technology. Informed by his background in architecture and a lifelong fascination with machines, Kisic Aguirre designs and builds sound instruments that explore the connection between public space, power, technology, and sound. His critical and aesthetic practice is open-source, collaborative, and deeply engaged with the public.


Zoltan Kunckel studied at the Moholy-Nagy University, Budapest and at the Institute for Art in Context UdK, Berlin.
Recent solo show: White Torture-Underground Poetry with Lorent Saleh, 1stEdition: The Global State of Human Rights, High level conference. Global Campus of Human Rights, Venice, Italy (2021). Recent group shows: GlasSpring III, Tér-Kép Galeria, Budapest, Hungary (2021), Museo de la Democracia, NGBK, Berlin, Germany (2021). He is an artist with a multicultural background, which has provided him to explore simultaneously the creative potential of diverse media and materials. Ranging from video art, photography and installations that address national and cultural identity, migration and the emergence of power structures; to sculptural works in steel and glass. 
The tangible experience of tropical colors and light appear in the sculpture series “Tropical Eggs”, reflection of the nature in which the artist grew up; inspired by the coloring of orchids, bromeliads and birds from the tropical forests of Venezuela.


Sam Madhu is a mixed media digital artist from India. By using a variety of 2D and 3D digital applications – her work combines dystopian futurism with Eastern symbology. Her work includes 3D/CG art, animation, VFX, art direction, installation, graphic design and illustration. Sam Madhu is hosted by HUJ:C as MRI (Martin Roth-Initiative) scholarship holder 2021.


Irina Novarese‘s work is comprised of installations, drawing, video, artist books and interdisciplinary collaborative projects both as artist and organizer. She received a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and a MA in Art in Context from UdK, Berlin. Her work has been presented in solo shows in Italy, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, and in the US and among other group exhibitions including: the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale (2006), the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in Haiti (2012) and the MOR Museo orgánico Romerillo during the 12th Havana Biennial (2015), BIENAL SUR (2021). Irina Novarese has lived and worked in Berlin since 2000. In 2017, she co-founded the artist initiative HIER&JETZT: Connections.


Ramin Parvin was born and raised in Iran. He studied cinema/direction, while painting on the side. His work has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions in Iran and USA, Sweden, Austria and Germany. Since 2013 Parvin works and lives in Berlin. Parvin’s work deals with themes of rituals of everyday life, the significance of objects through their use, and creating human connections through intimacy. In 2018 he was one of the artists part of the residency program.


Yaser Safi studied Fine Arts at the University of Damascus. Later, he taught at the college, before becoming a lecturer at the Institute of Print Engraving Adham Ismail in Damascus and a supervisor at the Sharjah Institute of Art in the United Arab Emirates. His work, specializing in painting and sculpture, has received numerous awards and has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions in cities such as Damascus, Beirut, Dubai, Kairo, Berlin, New York and Paris. Safi was one of the selected artists at HUJ:C in 2017.


Ruba Salameh is a visual artist born in Nazareth / Palestine. She obtained both B.A (2006-10) and M.F.A in Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem (2012-2014). Her work shifted from traditional Painting into Video works and Installations over the last few years. Through her work she questions notions of land, geographies, displacement, nationalism and in-between temporalities, in attempt for contemplating various scenarios of the daily life which in many cases lead to state of dystopia, using cynicism and irony as tools for political suspension points.
She recently works as a lecturer in the History of Art painting and practical classic painting at the Arab College in Haifa and conducts short term workshops at Bezalel academy. Ruba is currently working on a research film about the Palestinian cultural scene that appeared in Haifa in the last two years, its complex relation to self-organization / autonomy and how it is operating within the constantly changing environment


Özlem Sarıyıldız uses audio-visual materials as her main tools of research and praxis. Having engaged with subjects as diverse as gender, memory, music, migration, and commons, the main body of her work emerges at the collisions of the interest in the human condition and the curious excitement about the image. She searches for modes of practicing the possibilities hidden in micropolitics and strives to communicate with her audience through the direct beauty of the ruins of life as it is. She holds a BA in Industrial Design and an MS in Media and Cultural Studies, METU. She was a research assistant at University McGill and a fellow of la Fondation Jeanne Sauvé between 2004-2005, then started her Ph.D. research at Graphic Design, Bilkent University. She has been making films and videos since 2001, and her work has been presented in international festivals and exhibitions. In 2020 she started her collaboration as artistic director of HIER&JETZT: Connections.


Uli Westphal studied visual Arts at MICA, Baltimore, USA, the AKI, Enschede, Netherlands, and at the Institute for Art in Context UdK, Berlin, Germany. Recent group exhibitions include FOOD: Bigger than the Plate at the V&A, London, UK, ReShape at MU, Eindhoven, NL and Orly & Holubice at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia. He works at B.L.O. Ateliers since 2016. Uli Westphal’s work deals with the way humans perceive, depict and transform the natural world. He is especially interested in how misconceptions and ideologies shape our view of nature. In recent years he has focused on the portrayal and transformation of nature through the food industries.


Bora Yediel 
is a Berlin-based film-maker and video-artist from Turkey. His works deal with the subtle traces of the power-structures on everyday life, and cracks created through. He searches for inventing and using different storytelling possibilities, and constituting new collaborations in his practices. He studied Mathematics at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Since moving to Berlin in 2017, he’s been working on his children’s book-series “The World of BO”.