by Milena Bühring, Klara Kirsch & Enrico Bordieri, with Paulina Karam & Aylin Telli
Based on research into the relationship between female fear and patriarchal dominance culture, the multimedia performance Fighting 4 Fear explores martial arts as a means of transforming fear into strength. Is it possible to reclaim a historically male-dominated space as a woman and tell a story free from the binary con- cept of gender? Together with 16-year-old kickboxers Aylin Telli and Paulina Karam, artists Milena Bühring and Klara Kirsch set out on a quest in collaboration with dramaturge Enrico Bordieri. Between gym, TikTok, academic feminism and the reality of life for migrant teenage girls, the team struggles to find a way of dealing with fear that can withstand the ambivalence between fantasy and real threat. Will it come to a fight?
2024, live performance, 60min, Ballhaus Ost, Berlin
co-produced by Tatwerk Berlin. Funded by Einstiegsförderung of the Berlin Senate
photo credits: Sofia Maria Berg
Curation and production of performance night in collaboration with Anna Hofmann and Milena Bühring
Directly under the S-Bahn arches at Alexanderplatz, Berlin, a spiral staircase leads into the former City Casino. Shortly before the reconstruction, stripped of the entire interior, only remnants tell of its past - of the lure of fast money, of empty promises, triumph and abysses. 26 young artists are transforming this ruin on 7/7 from 7pm with performances, videos and artistic interventions into a parallel world that revolves around the tragedy, comedy and inevitability of winning and losing.
07.07.2023, former City Casino, Berlin Alexanderplatz
photo credits: Studio Replica
works depicted by Tin Wang (top left), Ale Borea & Diego Delgado, Maja Zagórska (top right), Elin Laut, Jonas Strecke (bottom right), Mayan Tuulia Frank & Lina Mayer, performance by Baby Marcel + Special Guest (bottom left)
Collaboration with Milena Bühring
Unsettled by the social, political and ecological crises of the present, people at least try to gain control over themselves by regulating their emotional world. The trend to see oneself as a "self-entrepreneur" and to strive for personal excellence functions as a perfect coping strategy in late capitalism. The performance WINNER deals with the ambivalence of self-improvement mechanisms in the context of a coaching session - between honest life questions and manipulative calls for self-exploitation. The performers are simultaneously coaches and "coachees", showmasters and assistants. Fragmentary statements are combined with emotionalized show elements from dance and martial arts.
2023, live performance (12min)
photo credits: Spoiler & Jasper Schulte, Anna Hofmann
Collaboration with Milena Bühring & Lisa Kaschubat
ECTORIDERS revolves around Mimi, a late-night saleswoman, Kay, a businesswoman, and Yv, a programmer, who find themselves in an endless game show due to unexplained circumstances. In a futuristic cab, they are led into parallel universes and have encounters that raise questions about solidarity and parenthood in a heteronormative, patriarchal, and capitalist society. Drawing on various feminist movements as well as personal experiences, the film combines aesthetic strategies from pop culture, commercial film, and media art. The video work is shown together with the prop of the cab, in which viewers sit in the seats of the three main characters. Within the immersive experience, levels of fiction and reality intertwine, allowing the audience to position themselves in relation to the film.
2022, single channel full HD video installation (20:00min)
Find out more (www.fff-filmproductions.com)
Apology videos have become their own subgenre in the world of youtubers and influencers. Since their success depends on their credibility and relatability, they have to act quickly after any misconduct is made public. It is not clear which mistakes Stacy is apologizing for in I will never let you down again!. Her statement wanders through 3 temporal levels and different emotional constitutions. It remains fragmentary and seems to anticipate any possibility of public accusation. The format of the apology video, which is usually meant to represent a „raw“, honest, often less glamorous version of its protagonists, becomes a universal apology for every possible misstep of the past and future.
2022, 3 channel Full HD video installation (5:58min)
In Intuition Money Love, Stacy is starting a new chapter. She reflects on her own spiritual journey through unstable times after a low point in her life. CGI clouds become her companions. As she floats through the desert-like spheres of her virtual world, the background and context of her newly learned practices remain undetermined. Her insights and affirmations become advertising messages. Her search for meaning becomes a promise of salvation.
2021, Full HD Video (6:34min)
In her follow-me-around, Stacy takes an extensive tour through the perfectly arranged rooms of her virtual home and presents the most important items that accompany her through her optimized daily routine. Drawing on the genre’s catalog of phrases, she leaves no object uncomment- ed. By putting her self-improvement at the center, an apolitical space is created between her and her imaginary followers that seems to shield her from social crises.
2020, Full HD Video (7:55 min)
Follow Stacy here
In their performance piece ‘Reminiscence of the Younger Enthusiastic Self’ Klara Kirsch and Milena Bühring deal with the topics of fan cult, youthful fantasies and idealization of famous personalities. As kids both of them were big fans of different bands: Klara admired the Killerpilze, Milena the Beatles. Based on personal diary entries as well as archive material and inspired by task-based performance practices, they develop their own artistic method. Together they explore in a double portrait their relationship to their own adolescence and the accompanying tension between shame and nostalgia.
2021, live performance (ca. 20 min)
Collaboration with: Milena Bühring, Jan Fleischer, Rocío Marano, Sugano Matsusaki, Louis Caspar Schmitt, Ana Eloisa Sommer- Madison
Never Look Back - The Truth about Orpheo is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration of 7 students from visual arts, stage design and choreography in the framework of Barocktage Festival at Staatsoper Berlin. Through the lens of popular tv formats the film tells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice from a postmodern perspective, in which information is democratized and there is no authority to sort information according to its relevance and truth. The different versions of the story that exist in Greek mythology are reinterpreted in the digital age and translated into contemporary formats such as reality TV, true crime documentaries, Youtube videos and TikTok clips. The parallels to the complexity and incongruity of the original myth point to its relevance in our time. All 7 artists take on multiple roles - both in front of and behind the camera. Conception, production and post-production were part of a collective process which results in collective authorship and deliberate textual overlaps.
2020, Full HD Video (24:33min)
