Fiona Geuß

Im Zuge der politischen Proteste um 1968 suchten Künstler*innen das direkte Gespräch mit Museen, Kunsthochschulen und ihrem Publikum, um politische und soziale Inhalte zu diskutieren. 1981 gründete sich die Group Material, die das Gespräch als entgrenzendes Format an der Verbindungslinie von Kunst und Gesellschaft nutzte und damit einer öffentlichen gesellschaftskritischen Kunst in den USA und Westeuropa den Weg ebnete. Fiona Geuß untersucht diese Gesprächsformate in kollektiven Kunstpraktiken, Performances und künstlerischen Interventionen im deutschsprachigen Raum und veröffentlicht Material aus den Archiven des Museum of Modern Art in New York und des Fales Archive, New York University.

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Doctoral thesis published on refubium, the free access institutional repository by Freie Universität Berlin in July 2020

1-day Workshop and public talk at The Autumn School of Curating by Cluj Cultural Centre on the occasion of Art Encounters Biennial 2019 Timișoara, October 2019

Talk with artist Martin Ebner at Friends with Books, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, September 2019

Lecture at the conference Social Responsibility and Art since the 1960s at University of Essex in May 2015.
Program and website.

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A Public Library was not a public library. From January through December 2015, A Public Library was located at the Bona-Peiser-Bibliothek in Berlin Kreuzberg. It was a space for conversations, presentations, the sharing of resources, and for collective reading, viewing, and learning. It hosted an ephemeral collection of publications and other materials, which provided a foundation for, and expanded along with, a series of public programs, workshops, and classes organized in conjunction with The Public School Berlin as well as other collaborators.

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Lecture at the symposium When exhibitions become politics at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena in May 2014.
Program

On the occasion of [the EPONYM] artist Deborah Ligorio has selected titles inspiring her project that started with an internal workshop at Archive Kabinett in April 2014. The collection is meant to be shared for individual or collective reading and is also made available on AAAAAARG.

Conversation on self-organized spaces at the Centre for Ideas/Elizabeth Presa, Victorian College for the Arts, Melbourne in March 2014.

Workshop with Sean Dockray and Caleb Waldorf at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne in March 2014.

The workshop at Gertrude Contemporary assessed our (artists, writers, curators, academics, etc.) ongoing relationships with cultural institutions of varying scales. The focus was oriented towards how institutional frameworks impact and inform our practices in an ongoing manner, from the perspective of the day to day activities that comprise our work. The conversation departed from the opposition and the resistance mobilized against the Sydney Biennial’s funding by Transfield and the subsequent repercussions, both known and speculative. The desire was to connect the situation taking place in this context to a broader set of concerns facing many who work within, and rely on, contemporary cultural infrastructures.

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Alex Martinis Roe’s exhibition A story from Circolo della Rosa at Archive Kabinett in March 2014 continues her work on feminist genealogies. The film weaves together fragments from her recent oral history research with members of Libreria delle donne and her experiences of their collective activities, as well as her exploration of related spaces, archives and texts.

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Presentation of The Public School Berlin on the occasion of the exhibition Democracy 44 Years in the Making at nGbK (neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst in Berlin) in February 2013.

Revolution is also a Language, The Public School Berlin, October 2013

Initiated in Los Angeles in 2007 by Telic Arts Exchange, the project exists in several places world-wide and in Berlin since the fall of 2010. A school with no curriculum, The Public School is a framework that supports autodidactic activities: it is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. Hosted by PROGRAM for the first year all classes take place at Archive Kabinett in Berlin Kreuzberg since early 2012.

Article published in: BE-Magazine, No. 18, September 2011.

Essay published in: Ellen Blumenstein/Fiona Geuß (Ed.), Perform a Lecture!, Berlin 2011.

Panel at Proqm Berlin in November 2010, organized by Dorothee Richter, Postgraduate Program in Curating ICS/DKV Zurich.

The event space Salon Populaire in Berlin Schöneberg invited each week one or more guests to interpret its spatial appearance, experiment with formats and shape an audience. Its self-organized structure, the blurring of hierarchies between host, guest and audience as well as the flexible props created in collaboration with raumlabor berlin challenged the representative character of the former bourgeois representational space located at Kunstsaele Berlin. The events ranged from small conversation groups to open discussions, from cinema evenings to film installations, performances and concerts. Besides one-off events a number of series were devoted to individual themes over a longer period of time. The thematic dinner evenings Can you pass the Salt, please? developed in collaboration with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga experimented with the dinner party as a conversational format. In the course of discussions about the connections between Berlin institutions the series Bethanien Residents evolved in collaboration with Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

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Sound Performance at Eternithaus in Berlin Tiergarten in May 2011.

Steve Rowell’s “Hollow Earth” imports sounds from distant underground spaces to the Tiergarten. Utilizing the translucent glass box of the Eternithaus building as a resonant medium, Rowell displaces the listener by amplifying these recorded, remote room tones, thereby de-contextualizing the present, physical space. This experience – perceived shifting thresholds of hearing and imagined sound source location – is designed as a psychoacoustic exercise. The non-site of the event space becomes a mere reference point for other places far removed from the listener’s immediate experience.

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A series of Lecture Performances in 2010 by THE OFFICE (Ellen Blumenstein, with Katharina Fichtner and Fiona Geuß).

Artists. Dan Graham/Nicolas Guagnini, Pedro Marques, Ellie Ga, Erik Bünger, Olivia Plender/Romeo Gongora, Will Holder.
Conversations. Felix Ensslin, Eric de Bruyn, Solvej Ovesen, Clemens Krümmel, Christoph Gurk, Kim Einarsson, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Helmut Draxler.
Locations. Hufeisensiedlung/Eternithaus, Salon Populaire/Kunstsaele Berlin, ICI Kulturlabor Berlin, Radialsystem V, .HBC, Arsenal.
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.