clans of berlin, 2023
car installation with video projection.
Video, 10'30", sound, color.
February 19, 2023, 5 pm onwards
Location: In front of Halle 3, Dragonerareal, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin.
Enter through Auto Klas.
“Clan crime, the distinct registration of racialized communities, leads to the ethnicization of crime and goes hand in hand with racist control practices as well as the undermining of common constitutional principles.”
Quote from clans of berlin (2023) by Anna Ehrenstein and Rebecca Korang, part of the car installation of the same name.
For CARPARK, Anna Ehrenstein, in collaboration with Rebecca Korang, produced the video work clans of berlin (2023), which is projected onto the front windshield of a dark blue Opel Astra. Located on a public parking lot near Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, the work investigates the presence and use of the term “clan crime” in German media and current political campaigns. The artists expose the targeted use of the expression and discuss its potential as a neo-colonial weapon to spread fear and resentment towards communities viewed as marginalized, as well as the general racialization/ethnicization of crime in Germany.
The artists apply a collage-like, Photoshop aesthetic to counteract and underline their subject with visual narratives—and, in some cases, even to pursue it ad absurdum. In their video essay, the artists play the role of the narrator, using their own bodies to visualize clichés in reporting on “clan criminality.” The commodification of Orientalisms as a Westernized canon of clichés is thereby reflected, appropriated, affected and exaggerated. Through the conscious appropriation of symbols read as Orientalist, Ehrenstein establishes personal references to the marginalization of her own diaspora. The images also highlight the intersectionality of existing forms of racism.
In Anna Ehrenstein’s transdisciplinary artistic practice, the reciprocal relationship between the representational and the self-conceptual is a leading motif. Ehrenstein uses found footage, personal video and photographic material, installation, and sculpture to mirror the intersections and divergences between popular and high culture and their socio-economic and political conditions. Rebecca Korang uses her own body to open up spaces for reappraisal, imagination, and co-determination in the collective, in the form of installative video works and contemporary choreographies.
ANNA EHRENSTEIN (b. 1993 in Berlin) lives between Berlin, Tirana, and the Cloud. She studied photography and media art and attended curatorial courses in Valletta and Lagos. She explores how technology and digitally informed material cultures reshape power relations, forms of knowledge, and their constructions through South-South collaborations and the redistribution of resources of the Global North. Her work foregrounds collaborative approaches and process-based artistic research and mediation. Among others, she has exhibited at: Office Impart, Berlin (2022); Screen City Biennial, Berlin (2022); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022); Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (2022); Stadt Galerie Saarbrücken (2022); Landesmuseum Francisco Carolinum, Linz (2021); KOW, Berlin (2021); Ural Biennale, Ekaterinburg (2021); Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (2021); C/O Berlin (2021). In 2022, she received the INITIAL grant for artistic mediation with Tools for Conviviality; in 2021, the research grant of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe; and in 2020, the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2020 for New Documentary Strategies.
https://annaehrenstein.com
REBECCA POKUA KORANG (b. in Berlin) is a multidisciplinary artist. She has been working in the field of performing arts since 2012. In 2017, she completed her Bachelor of Arts in dance at Kingston University, London. Her work includes: Sentimental Bits – This Magic Is In Spite Of Me with Gloria Höckner (2022); Patterns with Magda Korsinsky, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin (2022, 2019); Albanian Conference: Home is Where the Hatred Is with Anna Ehrenstein (2021); Hold a Ghost with Sunny Pfalzer (2020), and showed multimedia installations at Who Cares Art Festival, feldfünf, Berlin (2022). She founded the theater collective Thesmophoria in 2020. Until 2022, Korang directed the group Active Player, Act e.V.’s youth theater project at Heimathafen Neukölln, Berlin.
@beccy.korang
