Page 54 - "he 2020 Guggenheim issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

11TH BERLIN BIENNALE C/O

ExROTAPRINT

View entrance corner tower, ExRotaprint (Gottschedstraße/Bornemannstraße),
Berlin, 5.9.–1.11.2020. Photo: Mathias Völzke

The 11th Berlin Biennale space at ExRotaprint—a tenant-run project
initiated by artists, bringing together work, art, and community—
has been a space for the 11th Berlin Biennale’s diverse experiences
since September 2019. ExRotaprint is a model for urban
development that rules out financial profit through ownership and
establishes a heterogeneous, open environment for all parts of the
community.
The former site of the Rotaprint AG printing press manufacturing
plant with its buildings dating from the 1950s is located in Berlin’s
Wedding neighborhood. In 2004 visual artists Daniela Brahm and
Les Schliesser formulated a concept for on-site tenants to take over
the property.
The goal was to develop the location to serve a heterogeneous mix
of uses for “Arbeit, Kunst, Soziales” [work, art, community] and to
achieve affordable rent for all. Since 2007, the tenant-founded, non-
profit ExRotaprint gGmbH has been dedicated to the restoration
and development of the 10,000-square-meter property. Today,
ExRotaprint hosts over one hundred social initiatives, businesses,
and spaces for independent artists and others working in the
creative sector.

ÂLUT K ANGERMIO

Âlut Kangermio, Sumi Sumullu? [Where and Where to?] Reproduction of the cover of the anti-colonial rockband Sumé’s
record Sumut from 1973 featuring a woodcut by Âlut Kangermio ca. 1860. Risograph print. Installation view, 11th Berlin
Biennale c/o ExRotaprint, 5.9.–1.11.2020 Courtesy Hospital Prison University Archive 2018. Photo: Mathias Völzke

In 1858 the skilled seal hunter Âlut Kangermio was too ill with
tuberculosis to go out in his kayak. Bedridden, he devoted himself
to recording the oral histories told by elders in his Green-landic
community of Kangeq through texts, drawings, woodcuts, and small
watercolors. It was in this domestic infirmary, crowded with his
similarly ill family, that he created the series K’avdlunâtsianik [On
the Norsemen and the Skraelings]. Skraelings was a term used by
the Norse to refer to the Inuit. The watercolors depict a massacre
of Inuk women and children, followed by the burning down of the
Nords settle-ment by the Greenlanders. A hundred years later the
series was presented with an introduction stating: “Greenland
publishes her counterpart to the sagas of the Norse era, a living
proof that the Skraelings remain the final victors of the struggle with
the Norsemen.” The Norse were predecessors of the Danish, who to
this day continue their colonial rule in the region.

54 WORLD of ART