• Fri 06 04 2018 •
Akademie x Ebertplatz

With MP GOLD, INDER SALIM, MELISSA LOGAN & LATOYA MANLY-SPAIN & LEILA AKINYI

co-curated by Meryem Erkus

Cologne’s Ebertplatz is an urban development “problem zone,” but at the same time it functions as an open artistic space, one that was almost destroyed at the end of 2017 in a near coup. Sometimes labeled a “criminal hotspot” or a “no-go area,” Die Zeit sees it as a “setting for the zombie apocalypse” that has been taken over by “dealers, drug addicts, homeless people, alcoholics, and hooligans.” In drastic security measures, the authorities chose to give notice to the four alternative art spaces located in the plaza’s underground passage. This was a bitter irony, given that these are the spaces that have brought life to the concrete labyrinth at Ebertplatz for years, and the artists are the ones who all but carried out the location’s now much-discussed new design.

As we kick off the new season, the Academy stands in solidarity with the threatened art spaces at Ebertplatz and wants to return the support that Cologne’s independent art scene gave us following the massive budget cuts of the past year. The evening is also an opening event for the new program axis Sites at Stake, which engages artistically with the special characteristics of particular locations. What distinguishes a specific site? What meanings or conflicts is it charged with? How do local and international narratives overlap or clash there?

In his new performance Nothing Is Outside, Indian/Kashmiri artist INDER SALIM addresses what it means to live in a swathe of land that is being obliterated by irreconcilable territorial claims. India and Pakistan, between which Kashmir lies, have been fighting one another for 70 years. Salim examines the predicament of “being” in opposing worlds – a Kashmiri in India, a South Asian in the Western world, a performance artist in the neo-capitalist world order. Isolation versus openness, demarcation versus negative determination of in-between space: these not only define a charged territory that pulls itself in opposite directions but support its transgression into the unknown. As an intervention in space, Inder Salim positions his art practice against all forms of hegemonic endeavor.

Venue: Gold + Beton, Ebertplatzpassage
In English and German
Free admission

In cooperation with Gold + Beton