Artist Talk/Performance
Art und Weise: Gernot Wieland with Nuar Alsadir

Artists in Conversation: Past, Present, Present, Past

Mon, 06/24/2024
18:30 - 20:00 Goethe-Institut New York

"Then the animals decided they need help and went to a therapist in order to get the revolution straight again. The donkey having constant problems to make a distinction between the subjective and objective level, I remember that the therapist in the dream just wrote donkey, even with the other animals, and then I realised, the donkey is me, I am every animal, and the animals I was dreaming about had already transformed into a narration, or rather a regression or compression."  -Gernot Wieland


Please join us for the latest edition of our experimental artist talk series, Art und Weise. Artist Gernot Wieland will perform an adapted version of his 2019 lecture-performance, Past, Present, Present, Past. Following his performance, Wieland will be joined on stage by Nuar Alsadir, a poet and practicing psychoanalyst. Some audience participation may occur. 

Wieland's works are based on research, memory, and narration, primarily presented in film and lecture performance. The works bring together historical reports with personal recollections and scientific facts, fictional and real elements thereby develop stories between exciting sobriety and tragicomic incidents and develop a sense of the uncanny, mostly in ironic and absurd forms. Wieland's films and lecture performances are characterized by a gripping, poetic sobriety and follow associative narrative structures, which include, for example, stories about a parrot, a dancer, psychoanalytic sessions, the history of poverty, drones, depression in animals, political events, and childhood memories.



Gernot Wieland is an artist whose films, drawings, lecture-performances and installations comment on the idea of human belonging within inherited social, political and psychological contexts. His works have been shown, among others, at Argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Kindl - Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen, Germany; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Berlin; Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; BIENALSUR, 3rd Bienal Internacional, Buenos Aires; Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; Steirischer Herbst Festival/Kunsthaus Graz; Quartz Studio, Turin; 9th Norwegian Sculpture Biennial; Centre d´art Pasquart, Biel; Musée du chateau des ducs de Wurtemberg, Montbéliard and Museo Berardo, Lisbon.

Nuar Alsadir's most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press/Fitzcarraldo Editions), was a TIME Magazine must-read of 2022 and a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2022. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.