Exhibition | 48 Hours Neukölln Festival / Art Space Lab

Fri   24.06.2022: 19:00 – 00:00
Sat  25.06.2022: 18:00 – 00:00
— CANCELLED –Sun 26.06.2022: 17:00 – 19:00

Unfortunately, due to moving out of the space, we need to cancel our program on Sunday.

Farewells are always difficult for human beings. The relationship that humans establish with their location changes over time and their experiences of it, and through the daily activities they enact in it. The space extends to the memories humans share about it. The relationship established over time, changes and becomes part of lives. Leaving a routine that people are used to, sometimes takes the form of not being able to carry the burden of separation and changing as itself which we aren’t unable to accept it.

On a global scale, human relationship with the land is structured according to the decision-making of governments, property owners, institutions or organizations, individuals and structures independent from each other.
How is the position of human formed in the relation of place, time and space? How do the moment(um)s lived in this positioning to take form in our memory? When are we trying to maintain our mood and mental stability in the epidemic (Covid-19), how do we make our head (mind) sustain?

We are not able to sustain that! We’re going to eat our head off!

We, as TOP, were affected by the rent increase in Berlin, the gentrification of Berlin neighborhoods. Due to the sale of the property where our association is currently located, the only choice we are left with is to pay the triple amount of the rent that we are now paying or leave the physical location of TOP, the relationship TOP developed with the neighborhood, and the bonds we established within the area and find a new location. In consequence of this unexpected situation, we felt freaked out, helpless, shocked, dejected, annoyed and put our hands in a tied position but later on we decided to explain this circumstance in a different way.

As TOP, we want to do our best in this situation and share the existence of our space, what awaits us and our resistance against the eviction with the audience for the 48h Neukölln.

TOP is a place where humans and other organisms co-existed. In the exhibition, we will tell about the members of our community, who are inhabiting TOP with their own dynamics, backgrounds, unity and harmony, by turning our co-existence into an installation. We will present a narrative to the audience with a video collage of short interviews with our members explaining what TOP Transdisciplinary Project Space means to us and what we feel about this process of forced displacement, the ties and relations we have with the place and the neighborhood, and the way we express these aspects in our own work. We will speak about what resistance means to us, both visually and audibly. We will use our space’s front windows as an intervention area to tell our story. By doing this, questioning the facts that how we can express the weight of emotions we have to endure this process.
Our aim is to turn this into a platform where passers-by, people around and those who see and wonder what is going on and can convey their views on the situation what we are going through. We will also publish some part of the videos online.

In consequence of forced displacement, we want to do our best and turn into this a “Farewell Party” to share the existence of our space, what awaits us and our resistance against the eviction, the works in order to not going to eat our head off! Experiences, life-forms, friendships and work relationships, stories, art and objects will continue to resist through the collective participation, practices and memories we built in this space.

Farewell is a group exhibition:

Keith FeM e.V
KiezPilz – Fruiting Chamber Network
Alice Máselníková
Aslı Dinç
Yelta Köm
curated by Başak Tüsüz.

Farewell is kindly supported by the 48 Hours Neukölln Festival and Top Transdisciplinary Project Space.  

Special thanks to M.J Packo