ADA cordially invites you to join us in celebrating the Rotterdam launch of our publication Pick up this book. With this publication we seek to address questions that emerged in the periphery of our collective practice, but became a pivotal interest, concerning hospitality and the documentation of our often ephemeral research based projects.

During the book launch youll have the opportunity to have a look at the book in our reading room. We will also screen the video a pottery produced by five potters at once (silent attempt), by Koki Tanaka, a work dealing with the topic of collective production. A masseur will be present for instant relief of muscle tension.

Pick up this book contains six texts written by ADAs members; focusing on a breakfast discussion we organised in Berlin, we set ourselves the task of writing from memory what happened on that day, resulting in completely different reports. These texts are complemented by the writer and artist Maria Barnas, whom we invited to respond to the event. The publication also includes work by two thinkers who have provided us with ideas, which profoundly shaped our thinking and formed a continuous presence during our working period in Berlin: the text Hostipitality by Jacques Derrida and Unbounded, Limit’s Possibilities, a lecture by Irit Rogoff, of which a transcription is included.

Pick up this book is thoughtfully designed by Dongyoung Lee. Throughout the book the reader will find instructional sentences on welcoming the guest and a series of bookmarks that can direct the use of the book as an object.

Game Group Reading Club by David Maroto

Artists’ creative process is usually a solitary enterprise carried out in the isolation of one’s studio. In David Marotos new project this process has been opened up by means of the organization of a Game Group Reading Club (GGRC), which integrates collective participation in the creative process itself. GGRC was formed by a group that has been engaging in discussions concerning games, art and literature, notions of playability, participation, fiction and identification.

Maroto’s project is formed by three interrelated pieces: a new Gamebook (The Wheel of Fortune), a collective game event (Decide Your Destiny), and a narrative installation (La Escala de la Vida). These pieces form a hybrid artistic experiment that unites both fields of his interest, games and narrative fiction. The gamebook will be published by Onomatopee (Eindhoven). This creative process becomes public with the collaboration of the Rotterdam-based organisations of ADA and PrintRoom, and will find continuation during its public presentation in Onomatopee Project Space.

For the fourth and last GGRC session, coinciding with The Wheel of Fortunes book launch in September, Maroto invites you to join him at ADA to discuss participation in art. The guest speaker Yoeri Guepin has selected the text The Emancipated Spectator by Jacques Rancière, which critically analyses relations between seeing and passivity, looking and knowing, externality and separation.

Afterwards, GGRC participants are invited to play Decide Your Destiny, a collective game event in which an actor reads The Wheel of Fortune out aloud. The audience votes for the direction to follow in the narrative, the actions to carry out, and the answers to give to other characters. Whereas reading a book is usually a solitary activity, in Decide Your Destiny, the fate of the protagonist, even her survival, is a matter of collective responsibility.

David Marotos artistic practice unfolds around two intersections: between literature and visual arts on one hand and the use of the game as an artistic method on the other, while distilling components from the purview of psychoanalysis as a tool for reflecting on the nature of subjectivity.

This project is supported by CBK Rotterdam and Mondriaan Fonds.

For more information go to:http://www.davidmaroto.info/

ADA participates in the exhibition If Mind Were All There Was at Kunstverein Göttingen, opening on Sunday 27 October at 11:30. The project is co-organised by AIR Berlin Alexanderplatz and includes work by former residents. The opening serves as an informal book launch for ADAs new publication Pick up this book, which was conceived as a follow-up to our residency in Berlin, last year.

With Pick up this book we seek to address questions that emerged in the periphery of our collective practice, but became a pivotal interest, concerning hospitality and the documentation of our often ephemeral research based projects. The publication includes work by two thinkers who have provided us with ideas, which profoundly shaped our thinking and formed a continuous presence during our working period in Berlin: the text Hostipitality by Jacques Derrida and Unbounded, Limit’s Possibilities, a lecture by Irit Rogoff, of which a transcription is included. Focusing on a breakfast discussion we organised in Berlin, we set ourselves the task of writing from memory what happened on that day, resulting in six completely different reports, meandering between facts, associative sidetracks and interesting notions that had come up during the event. These texts are complemented by the writer and artist Maria Barnas, whom we asked to be present at the breakfast and write her response to the event. The book is presented in the exhibition space at Kunstverein Göttingen and is activated by means of instructional sentences mounted onto the walls, which, drawing on the content of the book, spatially frame it. Pick up this book is designed by Dongyoung Lee.

“Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation”- James Turrell-

From the end of May till June, Cinema Sunset will be screening five must-see classics from famous cinematographers that applied revolutionary lighting techniques. The program consists of five films in which light plays an integral part in enhancing the movie’s overall imagery. Starting from the early 40’s up to the mid 70’s, several lighting techniques will be reviewed. The screenings will start around sunset after a short introduction. So bring your little candles and your friends to settle down for the evening…

program
17 May 2013 | 20.30 | Day of Wrath
24 May 2013 | 20.30 | Strangers on a Train
1 June 2013 | 20.30 | In Cold Blood
8 June 2013 | 20.30 | The Conformist
14 June 2013 | 20.30 | Mean Streets

17 May 2013 | 20.30  22.30
Day of Wrath
Release: 1943
Runtime: 97 min
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Director of Photography: Karl Andersson
Cast: Thorkild Roose, Lisbeth Movin, Anna Svierkier

Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag) follows a witch hunt in a Danish village in 1623. The parson’s wife, Anne, is trying to protect an old woman accused of witchcraft which doesn’t go without consequences for herself. At a slow and lingering pace the film sketches a harrowing account of individual helplessness in the face of growing social repression and paranoia. Dreyer characteristically combines measured pace, long, horizontal pans and close-ups of faces with high contrast lighting and intense acting. Day of Wrath is shot in 1943 in occupied Denmark. The film is often understood as an allegory of the fascist regime, although Dreyer himself has always denied this.

24 May 2013 | 20.30  22.30
Strangers on a train
Release: 1951
Runtime: 101 min
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Director of Photography: Robert Burks
Cast: Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker

Guy Haines, a well-known tennis star that wants to divorce his wife Miriam, meets a rich and strange young man Bruno Anthony on a short train trip. The psychotic Bruno confronts Guy with a theory on how two complete strangers can get away with murder. His plan is relatively simple: the two strangers each agree to kill someone the other person wants disposed of. Guy mockingly dismisses the plan, but has to deal with Bruno’s mad ravings when Miriam is found dead. Robert Burks, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work for Strangers on a train, was Hitchcock’s favorite cinematographer. Strangers on a train was their first joint project. From this developed one of Hollywoods most inspired collaborations, as well as a close personal friendship.

1 June 2013 | 20.30  23.00
In Cold Blood
Release: 1967
Runtime: 134 min
Director: Richard Brooks
Director of Photography: Conrad L. Hall
Cast: Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe

Two ex-prisoners break into a wealthy farmers home to rob the family of their money. When they find out there isn’t any, they kill the entire family to avoid identification. When the police trace the men down, they both seem to have a completely different memory of the crime they had committed. Pending their trial they confess their own version of the truth. The film In Cold Blood was based on a book by Truman Capote. Critics regard the book as a pioneering work of the true crime genre. The outstanding work of cinematographer Conrad L. Hall was nominated for an academy award.

8 June 2013 | 20.30  22.30
The Conformist
Release: 1970
Runtime: 111 min
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Director of Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda

The conformist is Marcello Clerici, who is aching to ‘fit in’ in 1930’s Rome. Marcello agrees to kill a political refugee, on orders from the Fascist government, even though the victim-to-be is his college professor. The film is a character study of the kind of person who willingly conforms to the ideological fashions of his day. The screenplay is based on the novel The Conformist by Alberto Moravia. The Conformist is the first film in which Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro collaborated, followed later by many noteworthy films such as Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor. Storaro is widely regarded as a master cinematographer. He is inspired by Goethes theory of colors, which focuses in part on the psychological effects that different colors have and the way in which colors influence our perceptions of different situations.

14 June 2013 | 20.30  22.30
Mean Streets
Release: 1973
Runtime: 112 min
Director: Martin Scorsese
Director of Photography: Kent L. Wakefield
Cast: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval

Mean Streets is set in the Seventies in New York’s neigbourhood Little Italy. Much of the film’s street-wise dialogue comes from Scorsee’s encouragment of improvisation. The storyline focuses on Charlie Cappa a small time collector for his Uncle Giovanni. Charlie has taken personal responsibility for Johnny Boy, an anarchistic simple-minded hothead who is in financial troubles. Meanwhile Charlie maintains a secret love affair with his epileptic cousin Theresa.The cinematographer Kent Wakeford shot the film using handheld camera techniques and using innovative lighting, both of which have been very influential afterwards in American filmmaking.

The Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-73) is probably best known for being a founding member of the CoBrA group (1948-51) and Internationale Situationniste (from 1957-1961). It is less well known that he also wrote over 1000 books, articles and other texts in which he discussed art theory, philosophy, architecture and many other subjects. Jorns writings were an attempt to develop a complete revision of the existing philosophical system from the perspective of an artist.

Hilde de Bruijn (NL, 1971), freelance curator, and a curator at the Cobra Museum for Modern Art, will introduce Jorn’s outspoken thinking that allowed permanent dimensions of irony, pragmatism, playfulness, craving for disruption, synthesis and free-association. This is the public platform for her curatorial research into Asger Jorn, exploring what Jorn’s boundless energy, his believe in art and creativity as integral part of life, his critical questions, underminings and suggested alternatives to the existing can mean to us today.

Smack in the middle of Rotterdams two annual international mega-events; the Film Festival and the Marathon, we host our very own screening marathon on the 5th of April, starting at 18:00 until around midnight.

The screening includes three recent films directed by three amazingly talented women from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. The films will be screened back-to-back.

Popcorn will be provided by the ADA-team, as well as the occasional game of table tennis for leg stretching.

We hope you can join us.

On Sunday the 24th of March, ADA hosted the open reading This Book is a Classroom. The afternoon was based on the publication We would like to learn and are working on a book& edited by Lucie Kolb, Romy Rüegger, HIT Studio Berlin and Passenger Books.

The publication asks questions about the conditions, politics, performativities and intersubjectivities of knowledge production in the art world. The publication is a continuation of a series of lectures, lecture performances and seminars that Lucie Kolb and Romy Rüegger have been organizing in the framework of With With since 2009 in Zürich.

For the reading in ADA we invited a small group of interdisciplinary readers to respond to four chapters of the book that reflect on forms of education, knowledge exchange and self-organised structures that support it. The responses could take any form such as writing, visual, performance, etc. Through these contributions our aim was to ‘re-read’ the publication and discuss its content and associated thoughts.

Some of the responses can be read and viewed here

On 9 December ADA organizes the third edition of Breakfast at Noon at L40 Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz eV in Berlin. Breakfast at Noon is a series of thematic encounters for which ADA invites guests to present and discuss their work with an audience around a breakfast table. The guests are invited for the specific position they take through their work and the way in which they structure their working processes.

Each breakfast session reflects on questions that come forward from the practice of the invited guests. For this session at L40, ADA will present their own practice next to the practices of the two, artist initiated, collaborative practices of Oda Projesi and ABA, Air Berlin Alexanderplatz. Each initiative will give a brief presentation about their group’s structure and practice as a collaborative endeavor and we will discuss notions of hospitality, ethics and otherness through looking at the multiple approaches that groups working together have adapted in their working processes.

Oda Projesi
Oda Projesi is an artist collective based in Istanbul and composed of three members, Seçil Yersel, Özge Açıkkol and Güneş Savaş, who turned their collaboration into an art project in 2000. The project members met in 1997 and decided to rent and share an apartment as a studio. Although not intended, the apartment they rented in Galata eventually evolved into a multi-purpose, private and public place. Oda Projesi works with different tools and strategies; working with “neighbours” and with people from different disciplines.

ABA
ABA is an‘artist-in-residency’ based in the centre of Berlin and offering very personal and time-intensive support to its residents. It was founded in 2009 by Susanne Kriemann and Aleksander Komarov. ABA has three team members whom all have had a wide variety of experiences in the field of artist-in-residency-programs.

Please Note: You are kindly requested to reserve a seat by mailing us before the 7th of December. The breakfast will take place at L40 Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz eV on Linienstraße 40. There will be a maximum of 25 people who can attend. Food and drinks will be served during the breakfast.

On 25 November ADA organizes the second edition of Breakfast at Noon at Kunstvlaai 2012. Breakfast at Noon is a series of thematic encounters for which ADA invites guests to present and discuss their work with an audience around a breakfast table. The guests are invited for the specific position they take through their work and the way in which they structure their working processes.

Each breakfast session reflects on questions that come forward from the practice of the invited guests. For this session at Kunstvlaai the two collaborative research based initiatives Public Space With a Roof and 98weeks will give a brief presentation of their work and we will discuss multiple approaches that groups working together have adapted in their working processes, as well as work ethics and the role of audience participation.

Public Space With a Roof (PSWAR) was founded in 2003 and started by organizing projects in their gallery space at Overtoom 301 in Amsterdam. The space was initiated as a research and a project space with the aim to enable artists to develop and present their ideas, realize collaborative projects and to engage in critical discourse. Since 2007 the gallery has been closed and PSWAR now develops new projects, which are hosted by different institutions in the Netherlands and abroad. The current members of PSWAR are Tamuna Chabashvili, Adi Hollander and Vesna Madzoski.

98weeks, founded by Marwa Arsanios and Mirene Arsanios in 2007, is an artist’s initiative running a non-profit project space in Beirut. 98weeks is conceived as a research project, that shifts its attention to a new topic every 98 weeks. Focusing on artistic research, combining both theoretical and practical forms of inquiry, their projects take multiple forms such as workshops, community projects and seminars, reading groups, publications and exhibitions.

Please Note: You are kindly requested to reserve a seat by mailing us. The breakfast will take place at the Conversation Corner during Kunstvlaai in Amsterdam. There will me a maximum of 25 people who can attend. There will be food and drinks served during the breakfast. Please note that you need to buy a ticket for the Kunstvlaai festival.

As part of its long-term investigation into collaborative and participatory practices, ADA will continue its research in Berlin in two parts. Firstly, by activating six reading sessions in which different texts will be discussed and secondly by organizing two, semi-public breakfast sessions with two members of ADA and selected participants from Berlin and abroad

During these six sessions, texts reflecting on artistic production, modes of communication, political positioning and the meaning produced will be jointly and actively explored in a friendly and relaxed environment. Each ADA member selected a text from a personal/ artistic position, which reflects on the subject of collaboration and collectivity. The texts were selected in dialogue with the other selected texts, resulting in a connected program.

During the residency we split up the group. This allows for the same text to be read at the same moment at two different locations. With this collective reading exercise, ADA also investigates possibilities of ‘remote collectivity’.

We kindly ask everyone who is interested in participating in the reading group to read the text in advance. Links to the texts can be found below.

Please note: The Reading Group sessions will be announced in more detail via ADA Facebook (Please make sure you like us, if you are interested). Each reading group will take place at a different location. Meeting point for the Berlin Reading Group is in front of the Haus des Lehrers, Alexanderstrasse 9, Berlin. The meeting point for the Rotterdam Reading Group is ADA, Delftsestraat 9, Rotterdam.

The Reading List:

20 September
Production Lines by Irit Rogoff
Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life by Hito Steyerl

11 October
Hostipitality by Jacques Derrida
Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality by Mark W. Westmoreland

25 October
The Gift by Marcel Mauss (selected pages)

15 November On Otherness
Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time
by Dikeç, Mustafa; Clark, Nigel and Barnett, Clive (book chapter)
On belief and Otherness a video lecture by Slavoj Zizek.

25 November
Violence by Slavoj Zizek (Chapter 2 Fear Thy Neigbour as Thyself!)

18 December | 18.30
The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman aka Joreen