Inspired by…

Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in our new discursive format – a reading club, curated by Tuçe Erel (next to our new colloquium, curated by Regine Rapp).

Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce.

The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform in a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.

Guest Artist on 28 June 2022

Tina Ribarits

The third event of the Inspired by… will be an in-person meeting outdoors. Tina Ribarits will take us to a little walk and share her practice in one of the parks in Berlin.

The registration to the event is available on pretix.eu page. The selected text, further details, and meeting point will be shared with the registered participants via email five days before the event.

Tina Ribarits (*Vienna, AT) is a Berlin based artists who works in a variety of media on topics of ecology, decolonial and feminist histories, exoticism and non-anthropocentrism. Ribarits combines videos, photos, drawings and sculptural elements in installative environments. In these set-ups branches, stones and ropes map the exhibition space, gesturing towards a wilderness both unruly and interlinked. The framed watercolor drawings hint more towards a painterly aesthetics of 19th century naturalists. The viewers exoticizing gaze, however, is met by bird, snake and plant – challenging their own objectification. Similarly, conceptual photographs such as camera trap images seek to renegotiate who is watching and being caught. In these installations her video projections are windows into the far distant – glimpses in the over and understory of the forest, inquiring into an act of looking and retaining.

Her practice benefits from a combination of studio work, contemporary critical theory and on site investigation, such as her research trips to biological field stations in tropical rainforests (2016 Adolpho Ducke Forest Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon, 2018 La Gamba, Costa Rica). Ribarits conducts these trips as performative acts to collect visual material and thus investigate first hand the highly ambivalent history (and present) inherent to the scientific venture. Immersing herself in the figure of the female adventurer, she acts out this problematic state of feminist achievement in relation to the imperial mind-set. Interested in how this translates to vocabularies of literature, film and other (pop)cultural narratives, Ribarits tests for herself if the acknowledgement of these ambivalences may open up space for less harmful cosmologies, the possibilites of unclaiming territory and solidarity with more-than-human-beings.