Dr. Avi Feldman co-creates Erysimum (Wallflower) video and photography installation as part of Kunsthaus Dahlem 10 YEARS – 10 DAYS! festival

Guest instructor Dr. Avi Feldman has created a video and photography installation titled Erysimum (Wallflower) with Hinda Weiss, which explores architecture, sculpture, and the human figure within the specific history and context of the building of Kunsthaus Dahlem. As Kunsthaus Dahlem celebrates its tenth anniversary, the exhibition is part of the 10 YEARS – 10 DAYS! festival, running from 12-22 June, 2025.

Feldman is a curator and founder of the gallery Wannsee Contemporary in Berlin-Wannsee, as well as the founder of The Agency for Legal Imagination, an independent organization dedicated to exploring the connections between legal and artistic imagination and visual and legal activism. Feldman holds a PhD in curatorial practice and has been teaching since 2024 at Bard College Berlin.

The exhibition is a reflection on how a building, constructed for an artist working in service of Nazi propaganda, changes its purpose and significance through time. Architecture, as described by Jennifer O’Donnell, is never neutral. It establishes “order in the lives of humans and can be made complicit in the perversion of that order”. Like the Erysimum plant, able to grow and revel by sinking roots between brick and stones, the performative actions of our bodies are envisioned as an activist action creating cracks of new meanings in space.

The human figure and its range of gestures are a recurring theme within the space of Kunsthaus Dahlem – heroic to tragic, masculine to feminine, singular to part of a crowd. Drawing inspiration from these sculptural forms, their expressive postures, and their relation to the history of architecture, Weiss and Feldman investigate and engage in three forms of performative action. In and around the museum, Weiss’ body shifts between spectator and sculpture – contemplating the right to mobility, the presence of the feminine within masculinized spaces, and the illusionary quality of Trompe-l’œil. In video works disguised as a museum poster, they evoke reflections on the lives of former Dahlem residents. And in photographic works, in which Weiss’ rehearses sculptural gestures in front of classically inspired federal and academic buildings in New York City. These images are allowing a juxtaposition between a dark past and a horrifying present in which a reactionary US administration calls for a return to the past through Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture, and attacking scientific, academic, and artistic freedoms.

Feldman and Weiss will deliver three tours of the exhibition: A German tour on Thursday, 12 June; an English tour on Friday, 13 June; and a Hebrew tour on Saturday, 14 June. All tours take place from 15:00 – 16:00 and are free of charge; no ticket purchase required.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

Post Date: 05-26-2025