Temporary Communities
The Temporary Communities Program is a series of events at Stanford University in Berlin that is fostered to bring together program students with local peers around a shared experience, relevant practice, and engaged conversations. We gather around outstanding positions, artists, and artefacts as they emerge in the Berlin field of contemporary arts. Presented to a young and international audience, the Temporary Communities program offers explorations beyond the classroom.
The Riding Narrator with Theresa Patzschke
October 8, November 1 and 21, 2025, Writing Workshop on the Berlin Ringbahn
KW, a hike: Raoul Zöllner
April 27, 2025, KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Asad Raza: Haus Cramer, an invitation
April 11, 2025, H.G. Will Center, Performative Talk and Tour
Spike Art Magazine: Christian Kobald
February 7, 2025, Spike, Editor Talk
Ann Oren: Piaffe
January 31, 2025, H.G. Will Center, Filmscreening and Artist Talk
Rene Matić: As Opposed To The Truth
November 8, 2024, CCA, Curators Talk
Terms of Engagement: Sung Tieu
October 18, 2024, H.G. Will Center, Artist Presentation and Talk
Hélène Fauquet: FILES
May 8, 2024, H.G. Will Center, Exhibition Reception and Artist Talk
Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien: Offerings for Escalante
April 19, 2024, CCA, Preview and Artists Talk
Fluentum: Collector’s talk with Markus Hannebauer
February 2, 2024, Fluentum
The Cramer Collection
November 16, 2023, H.G. Will Center, Exhibition and Speeches
A Scheusal exhibition: Rosa Joly and Sebastian Wiegand
Friday, October 13, 2023, H.G. Will Center, Exhibition and Artists Talk
Claudia Skoda and Jenny Capitain: Materials in Meshes, Clothing as Style
May 12, 2023, H.G. Will Center, Student Fashion Show and Artists Talk
Michele Di Menna: ding dong ding dong ding dong
January 27, 2023, H.G. Will Center, Performance and Artist Talk
Nicolas Moufarrege: Mutant International
February 8, 2023, CCA Berlin, Curators Talk
Women's History Museum: The Massive Disposal of Experience
October 14, 2022, CCA Berlin, Curators Talk
Megan Francis Sullivan: Exercises and Reverences
November 11, 2022, H.G. Will Center, Exhibition and Artist Talk
RønholtKurz: Heart of Muthesia II
May 13, 2022, H.G. Will Center, Exhibition and Artist Talk
RønholtKurz: Heart of Muthesia
November 19, 2021, H.G. Will Center, Exhibition and Artist Talk
Asad Raza: Haus Cramer, an invitation
Friday, April 11, 2025, 11:45–13:15
Venue: Stanford University, Pacelliallee 18-20, 14195 Berlin
Performative talk and tour with students from Stanford, FU, UdK, and Code University
Artist Asad Raza’s practice is collaborative, emerging from settings that take and foreground their very environment for us to be experienced with all our senses. Genuinely interested in people, ecologies, and built structures, Asad creates poetic frameworks in which we cease to be just participants and start to become active co-creators of a ritual, a meditation, or of time shared together. Invited to Haus Cramer in Dahlem, he explores locales in giving form to existing elements and energies (such as the wind, sun, or electrical lights). Letting materials speak and make them perceived, including time itself, Asad develops organic dramaturgies in which we become guests and hosts alike. Previous works of Asad include the wordless dialogues of a ball game, the pairing of locals and visitors to a joint movement, convivial cooking, as well as earth care in an urban neighborhood. Drawing from intuition, courage, and a dedication to our lived and built environments, Asad nurtures his practice into a kind of social porosity, to discover and enrich transient communities. En passant, Asad suggests new roles for the artist in society.
Artist Asad Raza, b. 1974 in Buffalo, New York, lives and works in Berlin.
Moderation: Raoul Zöllner
Terms of Engagement: Sung Tieu
Friday, October 18, 2024, 11:45–13:45
Venue: H.G. Will Center, Stanford University, Pacelliallee 18-20, 14195 Berlin
Presentation and talk with students from Stanford, FU, UdK, and Code University
Architecture, design, and art are far from neutral. The Berlin-based artist Sung Tieu’s work critically reveals how physical environments shape reality and our sense of belonging, ultimately influencing the formation of subjectivities. Sung Tieu’s installations, encompassing video, sound, and sculpture, engage with spaces of control and empowerment alike. Drawing from her personal biography as the daughter of a GDR contract worker in East Germany, Tieu’s work interrogates institutional spaces such as immigration offices, housing complexes, and community spaces of the Asian diaspora, which emerged in Berlin after Germany’s reunification. Her installations are marked by their sleek and heavy materiality, often utilizing steel, concrete, and glass, reflecting on what Jellinek has described as the “normative power of the factual.” She juxtaposes these cold interiors with elements of tenderness, even fragility, such as intimate photographs from her childhood, imbuing her stark environments with personal narratives. In this way, Tieu creates vast settings in which glimpses of life are interwoven. Oscillating between being overwhelming and sparking vision, she reaches beyond the realm of the factual: the potential for reflection and transformation. How does Sung Tieu’s aesthetic relate to her recently sworn “Oath Against Minimalism” (the 2020 title of her catalog on exhibitions in Nottingham and Munich)? Can Stanford in Berlin’s site, a 1913 house designed by architect Hermann Muthesius as part of the Bourgeois Modernism concept, resonate with her spatial investigations? How does the international field of contemporary art, in which Sung Tieu’s work is gaining visibility, mediate constellations of belonging?
Sung Tieu, b. 1987 in Hai Duong, Vietnam, lives and works in Berlin.
Moderation: Fabian Schöneich (CCA Berlin)
A Scheusal exhibition by Rosa Joly and Sebastian Wiegand
Friday, October 13, 2023, 11:45–13:45
Venue: H.G. Will Center, Stanford University, Pacelliallee 18-20, 14195 Berlin
Introductions: Divya Ganesan, Laney Hughes, Noah Maltzman, Katherine Nolan, Annika Penzer
Moderation: Gregor Quack
The visual performing its social presence, transformed into works of art. If this is what can be found in both the œuvre of Rosa Joly and Sebastian Wiegand, their languages vary: light related, they materialize in the dimensions of painting, installation, and the time-based medium of film. With an interest in the US counterculture, the artists delve into questions of creative communities that reach beyond the imagination of a single individual as genius. Through colors, projections, and layers, Joly and Wiegand rather explore what fuels a context to grow creations through its committed members. Oftentimes decried as obsolete, painting and a 16mm film reappear in their exhibition, both reminiscent of a ghost-like past, and placed in today’s situatedness with indices of the present, like electronic devices. The intensity of Wiegand’s paintings reinvigorate the expressive and symbolist, while Joly’s installation plays, in a tilting effect, with figures, grounds, and their in-between. Linked by their interest in humans, the artists observe these from a dedicated distance, or reflect on them from within. Without staging a full narrative, their ornamental figurations, corporeal constellations, and props allude to a vast richness in meaning. Their source of energy, whether depicted as togetherness, a shared drink, the visitor’s gaze, as lovers, competitors, or a friendly companion, seems to be the light. Figuring as Scheusal at the H.G. Will Center, the artists alter their previous perspective: fostered as a site of expanded artistic practice, their Moabit space presents befriended international artists. Fueled with the ambiguous magic of social relations, Scheusal today emerges in our distinct space of the Berlin vernacular.
Berlin-based artists Rosa Joly (b. 1986, Luçon, France) and Sebastian Wiegand (b. 1987, Kiel, Germany) studied and met at the Hamburg Academy of fine Arts (Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, HFBK). Joly’s academic education also comprises the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon (ENSBA), where she completed her artist PhD in 2019. Wiegand has previously studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (2013/14) and at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2010/11). As the recipients of various stipends, New York City has become a regular work stay destination for the artists. In 2021, Joly and Wiegand founded the project space Scheusal in Berlin–Moabit. Solo exhibitions of Rosa Joly have been on view at La Maison européenne de la photographie (MEP), Paris (2023); MoM Artspace, Hamburg (2019); and Espace Pauline Perplexe, Paris (2016). Recent group exhibitions that presented Wiegand’s and Joly’s works include the Kunstverein Bielefeld (2023); La Traverse, Marseille (2022); XYZ collective, Tokyo (2021); DOC Paris (2019); and the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg (2017).
Gregor Quack (b. 1988, Germany) is a Berlin-based art historian and writer. He studied Art History and Philosophy at the Humboldt University, Berlin; continued for his Master at the Columbia University, New York City and the Stanford University, CA; to obtain his PhD at Yale University, New Haven, CT. He moderates this artist talk with students from Stanford, Free University, and University of the Arts.
