projects

// The Reading Room (Collaborative project with artist Ciarán Walsh) 
The Reading Room is a project initiated in Berlin with the aim to maintain, archive and represent products of contemporary art practices evolving within printed and published formats. The collection focuses itself on these representations of practice that both utilise and interrogate the published form as their primary medium.
The Reading Room is based on former institutional "Reading Rooms" (such as the one of the British Museum in London), and functions as such: it will be open for public viewing, with those wanting to use it being required to make an appointment. The project takes its initial presentation location from the idea of the "Salon", gathering its printed matters under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host: visitors to the Reading Room ring the bell of a private apartment, climb up the stairs to it, and then are able to sit in a separate study room.  www.thereadingroom-index.com 
// Kaffee und Kuchen
An informal exchange between artists and other invited participants. Involving presentations of practices and research, situated dialogues, and open studios, it is organised around the traditional German social tradition of afternoon “Kaffee und Kuchen” (Coffee and Cake).
Kaffee und Kuchen is organised by Berlin-based artists Dominique Hurth and Ciarán Walsh.  www.kaffeekuchen.wordpress.com

 // Secret Service
1. intelligence-gathering activities conducted secretly by a government agency 2. Swedish pop / New Wave band, popular in the early 1980s 3. Cultural producers shifting through the fields of art mediation, interaction and interdisciplinary exchange in Berlin
Dominique Hurth was active in the team from February 2008 until June 2010 in Berlin (5th berlin biennale, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, C/O Berlin Forum for Visual Dialogues). The remaining team continues its activities.
www.secretserviceprojects.net

// Incongruous Site / 08
Essay in images and sound

Audio-visual collage of Interviews, texts, dérive, audio and video recordings about Kaliningrad’s urban fabric.

Incongruous:
not harmonious in character, inconsonant, unbecoming, lacking harmony

site:
the area or exact plot of ground on which anything is, has been, or is to be located

Realised 007/08 within the research programme EU Urbanism: Border Cities, at the invitation of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany

// Kaliningrad Identity Making / 08
DVD

Small trailer based on interviews with protagonists in Kaliningrad, from the fields of art, politics, urbanism, geography and architecture. The questions dealt with Kaliningrad’s own identity and its own gaps between Russia and the European Union.

Realised 007/08 within the research programme EU Urbanism: Border Cities, at the invitation of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany.

// Travel Route Boutique / 08
Participative Artistic Intervention, Kaliningrad, Russia.

This intervention in Kaliningrad that aimed to interrogate both the realities and dreams of the local inhabitants, who are facing the border-regulations and visa applications as an unfortunate but necessary step for going abroad.

The project surveyed both pattern and imagery of travel by using the bureaucratic questionnaire as research tool for intervening in the process of place construction that Kaliningrad is facing.

It resulted in an encounter that took form in a fictive travel agency and followed the frame of the visa questionnaires in the context of the local German Consulate. Archive and documentation were a further step for contextualising and reflecting upon the project.

for project’s website and archive click here

// Forced Sex-Labour in Nazi Concentration Camps / 07
exhibition, artistic research

Artistic Research, Concept and Realisation (Dominique Hurth, Irina Novarese, Sabe Wunsch, Zala Unkmeier) of the exhibition “Forced Sex-Labour in Nazi Concentration Camps” in the memorial of Ravensbrück.

Exhibited 2007 in:
Memorial of Ravensbrück
Memorial of Neuengamme
South-East History Foundation, Seoul, Korea

www.ravensbrueck.de

// Ein Steg für Ravensbrück / 07-08
on-site installation

Installation at the Memorial of Ravensbrück utilising natural material from the surroundings with additional sound installation based on interviews with inhabitants of the nearby town.
The construction of a temporary footbridge on the lake which divides and connects the former concentration camp to the town, stands for the ambivalences present in contemporary awareness of memory.

Collaborative work with Sabe Wunsch, Silke Bauer and Zala Unkmeier.

// Lebenswege / 06
exhibition, workshops, mediation

The pilot project “Lebenswege” took place in six different schools in Berlin. Teenagers from different backgrounds queried their parents and extended family about their paths of life, and questioned historical events within these biographical patterns.

Through several workshops, different objects were created by the teenagers in order to respond to the narratives they gathered. These objects have been shown in the exhibition at the Communication Museum in Berlin (Nov. 006).

Working Group (IFKIK, Udk Berlin):
Filiz Azak, Silke Bauer, Dominique Hurth, Dšrte Meyer, Viola Thiele, Sabe Wunsch und Xixin Wu.