About

bi'baxchange aims to showcase cross-border collaborations with cultural actors, project spaces and initiatives. Based on interdisciplinary and transnational cooperation projects, bi'baxchange seeks to exchange ideas, perspectives and know-how. In lecture performances, pop-up exhibitions, readings and presentations, bi'baxchange focuses on the decentralized, rhizomic connection between art, design, academics, participation, urban space and local activism.

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German-Turkish Film and Video Culture in Berlin

Concept by Can Sungu

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Common Visions Berlin

Common Visions Berlin is a free space dedicated to our friends and comrades. Through events such as film screenings, discussions and lectures, Sinema Transtopia is shared with organizations and initiatives whose work makes a similarly important contribution to the visibility of the transnational urban society in Berlin. It is only through cooperation and collaboration that we move forward. As a Turkish proverb says, “What can one hand do anyway? Only two hands make a sound.” It is precisely this sound that we tune our ears to through Common Visions Berlin – a space of solidarity and exchange that brings together, encourages and inspires.

Funded by the Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis in the frame of the project SİNEMA HERE N’ THERE

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Events

HINTERLANDS MAGAZINE RELEASE

hinterlands is a print magazine for rural realities and narratives from Europe‘s rural regions. In reports, essayistic prose and other narrative and photographic formats, the hinterlands magazine presents local rural reporting and coverage on a transnational level, to promote a transgressive understanding of rurality.

For the release of their first issue “Blue”, hinterlands brings the peripheries and rural realities right to the centre. At Haus der Statistik, you are invited to browse through the magazine, listen to its stories read by the authors and chat with the hinterlands team over drinks and snacks.

Please bring a face mask, keep a safe distance and stay at home if you feel ill.

18:00 Doors open, magazine exhibition
19:00 Readings: first round
20:30 Readings: second round
22:00 Closing

Editorial team: Hanna Döring, Freia Kuper, Maike Suhr
Graphic Design: Till Hormann
Illustration: Lasse Wandschneider
Contributing authors: Duygu Atçeken, Anita Back, Anna Barbieri, Federica Buzzi, Fabio
Davit, Hanna Döring, Ştefan Ionescu-Ambrosie, Marissa Klaver, Ola Korbańska, Irina
Lazarova, Daniel Mayr, Vasso Paraschi, Anna Quinz, Stefan Schocher, Jana Schütt, Evžen
Sobek, Maike Suhr, Mirishahe Syla, Hanne Trede
www.hinterlands.eu

Launch Gathering

awhām Issue #3

Awhām is launching their new issue at Sinema Transtopia on 28th of October! 

awhām is a Berlin-based annual print magazine invested in culture, aiming to increase the visibility of artists and talents with migrant biographies. 
Issue #3 theme is “Artists’ Critique.” Art and culture have always been powerful tools mobilized by oppressive regimes to whitewash its crimes and to enforce their agendas. The commodification of art and the value created around it promotes self-censorship and adaptation for the sake of selling, being granted funding, or receiving prizes. In capitalist realism, is there a space left for artists’ critique? If yes, in what form? And how does it survive? 

Our 3rd issue features Anadol, Akdar, Aude Nasr, Deniz Örs, Firas Shahdeh, Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla, Lexi Sun, Janset Genel, Ozan Tekin,Rami Shalati, Shahd Abusalama, Thoom, Yehudit Yinhar,Yelta Köm, Zeynep Yesim Ozkanca

Music by
C1ollective
Ozan Tekin 

A reading by 
Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla

The new issue of awhām is now available to pre-order on awham.bigcartel.com and will be available for purchase at the event. 

A gentle reminder that it is compulsory to wear a mouth-nose covering due to SARS-CoV-2-Infektionsschutz Verordnung.

Please bring a face mask, keep a safe distance and stay at home if you feel ill.

Followed by a performance with Pisitakun

Pisitakun

As Thai history currently unfolds under martial law following the military coup d’état on 22 May 2014 – the thirteenth since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 – Pisitakun’s practice represents a decisive break from many of his Thai peers: he questions fundamental and increasingly universal values without merely decrying the fact of corruption or offering neat palliatives. Pisitakun's works are based on political speculation and the external and internal frustrations artists are subject to.

Pisitakun is from Bangkok, Thailand. He started making visual arts and music in 2014 and is interested in music in different media environments. He uses a variety of inspirations in his songs, such as historical events, synthetic sounds, and musical instruments. In 2016, the album "Black Country" began to be prepared. In this album, Pisitakun is talking about a country full of dialogues between dark voices. Currently he is an artist-in-residency in Portugal.

OV with English subs

Major Feelings - Vier Kurzfilme aus der Asiatisch-Deutschen Diaspora

As part of the short film workshop Minor Feelings, ten participants from the Asian-German community created four short films. The workshop was led by Monica Tedja (Soy Division Berlin) and Dieu Hao Do (BAFNET).

As a cinematic exercise in the perception and representation of one's own subjectivity, the workshop week allowed participants to explore their identities in order to make their stories visible through simple cinematic means.

The workshop aimed to impart both technical and methodological knowledge for the creation of a short film and at the same time to enable the practical implementation of one's own short film idea. In doing so, the exchange and networking of the participants with the workshop leader as well as with each other was an essential part of the program.

COMMUNITY EVENT: The screening is a community event for people who identify themselves as BPoC or people with experiences of racism/anti-Semitism and their friends.

Director Isis Rampf Germany 2020

53 Min., OV with English subs

Followed by a talk with Isis Rampf

Allesandersplatz

Urbanization, concrete, stone. Next to the most central point of Berlin, Alexanderplatz – stands the building complex Haus der Statistik, which slowly withered into ruin over the past years. In a protest action, artists occupy the building in which the official statistics were made in the GDR. Artists, urban planners and the city of Berlin trying to transform the former GDR ruin into a place for new visions and concepts of city. A place where everything is different than before?

Book tickets

Isis Rampf born 1994 in Ulm studied literature, art and media studies at the Universities of Constance, Cork and Potsdam. Worked in several film production companies and as assistant to director Markus Imhoof. Since 2018 first own films, most recently the documentary “Allesandersplatz”. Since 2021 she studies at the international film school in Cologne.

OV with English subs

Under the Volcano – Fugues and Counter-montages

Short Film Programm, Mexico, ca. 75 min.

Curated by Javier Toscano

I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

This selection of short films and video works from Mexico ­stems out of a structure of collective reflections around the ideas of appropriation, political identity formations and the expanded common space on the digital field. The foundational idea behind the production of these pieces is the possibility of interconnecting interpretations and desires through different times and contexts, providing thus new readings of a shared reality. Along the production process —which has followed a common theoretical input with political implications— the authors of the pieces were confronted with the structure of their own cultural engagements. By recognizing their subjective agency, they propose visual fugues and other unconventional constructions to respond to their own cultural milieu, often traversed by different forms of violence, but also by inspiring motifs. 

Chiquitirockers
Omar Casillas, 2010, 21 Min. 

Nothingness Hurts
Mariana Trejo, 2021, 8 Min. 

Land
Jorge Pérez, 2021, 5 Min. 

Memory Game
Andrea J. Linares, 2021, 4 Min. 

Identity and self-representation. ID-objects
Javier Toscano, 2012, 7 Min.

Stream
Andrés Negrete, 2015, 3 Min.

Flight and Fall
Emil García, 2012, 4 Min.

Television Hero
Erika Loana, 2012, 2 Min.

Ana
Johnny Trujillo, 2011, 10 Min.

Narco Nation
Rodrigo Ramos, 2015, 10 Min.

Javier Toscano (born in Mexico City, lives and works in Berlin) is a visual artist, documentary filmmaker and interdisciplinary researcher in the fields of new media and political activism. His work has involved a continuous search to generate and collaborate with minorities, communities and groups with disabilities towards the production of alternative narratives of self-affirmation and vital exploration. He holds a PhD in philosophy and has been a post-doc researcher in media politics in Paris and Berlin.

Book tickets

OV with English subs

A LONG JOURNEY TO MOSCOW AND A SHORT ONE TO BRASILIA

Lecture and film programme by Erik Göngrich and Florian Wüst 

On the occasion of the Super 8 workshop Kino, Kaffee, Kompostol by Dagie Brundert, this programme created by Erik Göngrich and Florian Wüst offers a historical insight into the models, connections and misinterpretations of the two construction phases of the Karl-Marx-Allee. How did it develop from the Stalinist confectionery style - "democratic in content and national in form" - to a modern, functional systematic construction with industrial concrete slabs? How do we deal with it today? The second part of the evening takes the urban situation around Haus der Statistik as a starting point to show the artistic possibilities of depicting the modern city. Selected examples of documentary and experimental film will be shown, including film clips by Cynthia Beatt, Matthias Müller and Herbert Vesely, among others. 

Funded by the Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis within the framework of the project SİNEMA HERE N’ THERE

Erik Göngrich is an artist researcher, political architect, producer-curator, discursive draughtsman, public-spirited cook and performative publisher. With the projects MITKUNSTZENTRALE, which he initiated, and SATELLIT, he has been running a workshop/exhibition space since 2019, one that addresses material cycles and art in times of climate emergency.

Florian Wüst is a film curator, artist and publisher living in Berlin. His work deals with European post-war history and the social and ecological changes in the process of modernising the living world. Wüst is co-founder of the Berliner Hefte on the history and present of the city.

Book tickets

OV with English subs

“The gatekeepers exist to be overthrown”
  Amos Vogel – Repeats and Responses: Emigration

After the screening talk with Boris Lehman and Christoph Huber, hosted by Tobias Hering.

Symphonie 
Boris Lehman, Belgium 1979, 34 min., OV with german subtitles

Bruxelles – Transit 
Samy Szlingerbaum, Belgium 1980, 80 min., OV with english subtitles

After Amos Vogel had visited the Forum of the Berlinale in 1981, he wrote an article about it for Film Comment. It began with a description of the emotional Q&A that followed Bruxelles-Transit, “Samy Szlingerbaum’s film of his family in the Nazi period spoken entirely in Yiddish. Present-day, nightlit, and empty Brussels streets, stylized tableaux of lyrical power, and his mother’s unrehearsed, taped recollections served as poetic representations of a 
past no longer available.” Boris Lehman, who played Szlingerbaum’s father in Bruxelles-Transit, had already shot a film which is in many ways complementary, Symphonie. “The hero of the film is Jacob Rabinovitch. He is a Jew. In reality, he is Romain Schneid, and as the latter imagines his condition in 1942. At that time, Belgium was occupied by the Germans and Romain, a child of 12, had to live in hiding with a lady, Madame Stine, in Etterbeck, a suburb of Brussels, where the Resistance was forming.” (Lehman) Amos Vogel saw the two films as a double feature in the Forum. The trauma of a man suddenly declared a pariah and the instability of a family in exile must inevitably have reminded him of his own biography. Having fled from the Nazis in Vienna as a 17-year-old, Vogel came to the USA with his family in 1938. The act of emigration, his Jewish roots and the extermination of relatives and childhood friends in the concentration camps left an internal texture that Vogel never denied but also only revealed at seldom moments. These moments were often when he came into contact with post-war Germany, whose seeming convalescence he followed with interest but also a large degree of skepticism. This evening is an attempt to approach Amos Vogel’s relationship to his emigré biography, mirrored in the two films and by way of quotes and texts by him.

“The gatekeepers exist to be overthrown.”
 Amos Vogel – Repeats and Responses is a program of Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art and is curated by Tobias Hering. It was made possible by funding from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds. 

Additional support from Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa

Tobias Hering is a freelance film curator, who recently presented at bi'bak the programme Freundschaft auf Zeit (2019) on contract work and internationalism in the GDR. He is currently responsible for the archive project re-selected at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. In this context began a research around Amos Vogel which has yielded, among other programs, the three-part tribute “The gatekeepers exist to be overthrown” 
through which Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art honors its long and close relationship to this New York film curator.

Boris Lehman is a Belgian experimental filmmaker and was born in 1944 in a Jewish family. He has collaborated with several filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman, Samy Szlingerbaum and Henri Storck. He has directed and produced about 500 films and is considered an ‘unclassifiable’ filmmaker in the landscape of Belgian independent cinematography. 

Christoph Huber is a curator in the program department of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, where he has been involved in the conception of several major retrospectives and is co-curating the series, “Amos Vogel Atlas”. From 1999 to 2014 he was a film critic and culture editor at Die Presse. Huber is the European correspondent of Cinema Scope and writes for several international print and online magazines.

Book tickets

Director Nitin Bathla and Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou India/Switzerland/Germany 2020

70 Min., OV with English subs

Followed by a talk with Nitin Bathla and Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou

THINK&DRINK: NOT JUST ROADS

Not Just Roads is an ethnographic documentary film that narrates the story of a massive urban transformation underway in India. Highways are being constructed at an unprecedented rate of 23 kilometers per day under the Indian government's Bharatmala (‘Garland of Limitless Roads’) program. The program aims to open new territories for the emerging Indian middle class. Currently, the territory is inhabited by villages, working class neighbourhoods, and nomadic herders. It is criss-crossed by native trails and vital ecological commons. This film captures the story of one such highway outside Delhi, from the perspective of human and non-human actors. It journeys between working class neighbourhoods undergoing demolition, construction landscapes, protests sites, and the persuasive pitches by the real estate salesmen attempting to sell dreamscapes.

In cooperation with the Georg Simmel Centre for Metropolitan Studies and the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin as part of the Think & Drink Special Events 2021/22.

The Georg Simmel Centre for Metropolitan Studies and the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology invite you to the Think & Drink Series! The colloquium-style event offers an informal atmosphere for discussion and exchange between all who are interested in urban issues. The impulse for discussion is the weekly guest speaker of German or international urban sociology or a speaker of notoriety in a related field. After the talk– i.e. the “Think” – participants are welcome to continue the discussion with a drink.

Registration for the event via: gszbuero-at-hu-berlin.de

Nitin Bathla is an architect, artist, and educator currently pursuing Doctoral Studies at ETH Zurich. His work focuses on labour migration, landecology, and housing in the extended urban region of Delhi. Aside from academic writing, he work on films, community art projects, and social design projects. www.nitinbathla.com

Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou is a Greek/Mexican filmmaker interested in ethnography as a filmmaking methodology. His films and collaborations include 'The Seven Sisters Indoor Market' (2016), 'The Disappearance of Robin Hood' (2018), and 'Not Just Roads' (2020). He is currently based in Zürich, where he teaches ethnographic filmmaking at the urban scale at the ETHZ.

Director Zeynep Dadak Turkey/Germany 2020

85 Min., OV with English subs

Ah Gözel İstanbul (Invisible to the Eye)

İstanbul, the same route after three and a half centuries. Inspired by Istanbul-born Armenian intellectual Eremya Celebi Komurciyan’s travel diaries from the 17th century, Invisible to the Eye(Ah Gözel İstanbul) retraces his itinerary in today’s Istanbul. As a cinematic travelogue, the film explores Komurciyan’s farsighted relationship with the concepts of looking, seeing, and viewing on many different layers. In his book, History of Istanbul: Istanbul in the Seventeenth Century, Komurciyan talks to the reader as if he is holding a camera. When his “cinematic eye” is translated to a contemporary setting, an endless path through the multifaceted visual history of this long-standing city emerges.  

Zeynep Dadak holds a PhD in film from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her debut feature, The Blue Wave, premiered at the 64th Berlinale. Including Ah Gözel İstanbul (2020), her films in different formats and forms have been screened at festivals such as Rotterdam, Sheffield and Dokufest. A Medienboard and Berlin Senate fellow, Zeynep is based in Berlin where she teaches film classes while working on her new film.

Book tickets

OV with English subs

How Far Have We Come? - Community event in Memory of the Atlanta attacks on 16 March 2021

As of March 16th, it will be one year since the shooting in the area of Atlanta, Georgia, where eight persons lost their lives, six of them East- and South-East Asian women murdered for a racist and sexist motiv. YEOJA Mag will be hosting an event alongside other initiatives which will take a critical look at anti-Asian racism and xenophobia in relation to classism and sexism. The event will feature the work of five East- and South-East Asian artists from varying disciplines whose work directly confront the larger implications of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia both pre and post March 16th 2021 as well as since the Covid-19 pandemic. After the screening there will be a panel discussion where we investigate, amongst other things, how far we have come in a year and how far we still need to go?

This event is organized by YEOJA Mag in cooperation with bi’bak, korientation e.V. and Korea Verband. It is supported as part of the project MEGA by the BMFSFJ via „Demokratie leben!“ and the PartInt-Programm, Berlin.

Free entry. A fundraising will take place.

OV with English subs

Not to forget
Accompanied by the performance Despierta (Wake Up) by Rosmery Schoenborn and Melisa Sanchez and followed by a conversation with the two performers, the Colombian Truth Commissioner Lucía González and the directors Ana María Vallejo and Yasmin Ángel, moderated by Lorena Díez. 
 
El Canto de las Moscas – La repetición de la violencia
Song of the Flies – An Iteration of Violence
Ana María Vallejo, Germany/Colombia/Czech Republic 2021, 30 min. OV with English subtitles
 
Memorias de la Errancia 
Memories of Exile
Yasmín Ángel, Germany 2022, 24 min. OV with English subtitles
 
The two films and a performance by Colombian women living in Germany give a picture of the impact the armed conflict in Colombia has both on everyday life and the collective memory of the society inside and outside the country. The program begins with El Canto de las Moscas – La repetición de la violencia, a poetic animated dialogue about places in Colombia where the horror left its mark. Then, between the screening of the two films, the performance Despierta (Wake Up) stages a body in movement. Finally, we end up with a documentary testimony in Memorias de la Errancia. This program is a way to process and identify the conditions of existence that the exile brings, the ruptures, the uprooting, the silences, the losses and the empowerment.
 
The event is organized by Nodo Alemania with support of the Colombian Truth Commission and the German-Colombian Peace Institute - CAPAZ. The aim is to promote possibilities created by an audiovisual and performative space to make visible the reality of the Colombian armed conflict and life in exile, in a country like Germany.
 
​​Lucía Gonzales is a member of the Truth Commission in Colombia. She has extensive experience in the social and cultural field and worked with the High Commissioner for Peace’s office for empowerment for peace and for sensitisation for the peace agreement.
 
Rosmery Schoenborn is a director, actress and theater educator born in Cali. She is a member of Peace Brigades International and directs the workshop La forma de mi memoria with Nodo Germany in support of the Truth Commission - Colombia.  
 
Melisa Sánchez is an audiovisual creator and graphic designer from Medellín. She has made documentary productions in Colombia and Bolivia, of which Warmipura (Amongst Women) stands out. Since 2016 she has been an audiovisual creator for stage productions and actress in the theater collective Anamnésico in Medellín. 
 
Ana María Vallejo, born in Medellín, lives and works in Weimar, Germany. Director of experimental and analog animation. Since 2017 she has taught experimental animation at the Bauhaus University Weimar.
 

Yasmin Angel is a Colombian Film director and author based in Germany. She studied Film at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburgs and KHM in Cologne. Her documentary and fiction films have been presented at international festivals such as IDFA, Oberhausen and Max Ophus among others.

Lorena Díez is an artist and museologist, with an interest in the processes that activate the public space, relations with communities, the recovery of collective memory, and territorial tensions.

Book tickets

without dialogue

Rhythm and Memory

On a night focused on percussion and deep listening, Laura Robles and Huguette Tolinga will be in exchange of rhythms and journeys embedded in musical memory. Placing experimental percussion inspired by traditional Congolese rhythms from the 60s and 70s in tandem with a flow of „Temporalidades pluri-rítmicas de las Américas“, this performative session is intended to stimulate questions of liberation, migration, earth remembrance and dissolution of boundaries in music.

Huguette Tolinga Lola is a self-taught percussionist. She began her career as a percussionist in the contemporary dance company Jacques Bana and the Group Quartier Latin. In 2010, under the impetus and guidance of the Tam - Tam Company, she created her own group Huguembo, specializing in percussion instruments, particularly the Tamtam, and singing. Her shows thrill and carry away the audience by the way she plays the Tamtams and manipulates instruments such as horn, xylophone, calabash, combining them with her singing, dance, guitar, drums and saxophone.

Laura Robles is an improviser, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and researcher born in Swaziland and raised in Lima, Peru. She will unfold what she calls „anti-groove” deriving from many years of analysis of Folk rhythms with a strong focus on Afro-Peruvian folklore. The “anti-groove ”creates new possibilities of expression in modern jazz and improvised music.

Book tickets

STUDENTS MAKE ANIMATED FILMS

Followed by a talk with Julia Kapelle

Malaysian fairy tales

The Berlin team from "Trickmisch - das mobile Sprachlabor" made a digital stopover in Malaysia and organized a film competition. In this student project, students from 12 Malaysian secondary schools created their own cartoons by creating their own silhouettes and articulated figures, animating them using the stop-trick technique and then setting their texts to music themselves.

The project drew on old Malaysian traditions in form and content: on the one hand, the students illustrated and told the content of old Malaysian fairy tales. On the other hand, the form of the silhouettes is closely related to the old Malaysian narrative form - the shadow theater wayang kulit.

We are pleased that the project is our guest with a presentation.

A project by Trickmisch in coopertaion with the Goethe Institut Malaysia

Book Launch:  Aykan Safoğlu - I'll be your mirror

followed by a screening of Kırık Beyaz Laleler (Off-White Tulips), Germany/Turkey 2013, OV with English subtitles/OV with German subtitles

The publication „I'll be your mirror“ was created following Aykan Safoğlu's exhibition of the same name at Kunstverein Göttingen (October 17 - December 12, 2021). In their contributions, Linnéa Bake, Merve Elveren, Carlos Kong, Aykan Safoğlu and Vincent Schier move along Safoğlu's artistic work and into a thematic network based on migration, heroes from the past, memory work, history and friendships.