Credits
Kerstin Honeit in collaboration with:
Karin Honeit, Hannelore Honeit, Choir (Members of the Berliner Strassen Chor): Billy Becker, Waltraud Beukert, Xenia Brühl, Dean Mergen, Arcana Moon Schikora, Jessica Páez, Michaela Richter, Emma Cattell, Nadja Hermann, Ljupcho Temelkovski, Eren Aksu, Marlene Denningmann, Antto Logy, Max Schneider, Jochen Jezussek Polepositon d.c., Magda Tuzinkiewicz, Dorothea Tuch a.m.o.
Still: THIS IS POOR! Patterns of Poverty
With her new work, premiered at the KINDL – Center for contemporary Art Berlin, Kerstin Honeit continues her artistic exploration into the portrayal of hierarchies and their associated visual language through various media. The result is an experimental documentary video that weaves loosely connected individual sequences into a revue-like narrative. In
THIS IS POOR! Patterns of Poverty, the artist examines social structures that foster massive economic inequality through the lens of class discourse. In this poetic narrative of resistance, the artist collaborates with members of the Berlin Street Choir and her family, juxtaposing “decors of poverty” from her home interior with the architecture of the Steglitzer Kreisel in Berlin. This iconic victim of luxury real estate speculation was once a communal site as the seat of the district authority and a social welfare office.
Exhibition view – M1 Video Room at KINDL, Photo: Jens Ziehe, 2024
The artist delves into the recurring patterns of structural poverty, simultaneously exploring the formal aesthetics of the visual language of patterns and their potential as a form of resistance. Decors captured on videos and photos from Honeit’s family archive are deconstructed and reconstructed through a kaleidoscopic effect, generating new images that elude static interpretation. This visual strategy rejects simplistic portrayals of resistance as solely violent acts. The kaleidoscopic visuals and clips from the East German educational television programme English for you – which the artist was also able to watch as a child in West Berlin – are projected onto a screen, serving as the backdrop for a staged performance where the artist performs together with her parents.
Exhibition view – M1 Video Room at KINDL, Photo: Jens Ziehe, 2024
In THIS IS POOR! Patterns of Poverty, Honeit lays bare the production processes behind the staged performances – from the artist’s audible stage directions to the repeated rehearsals involving members of the Berlin Street Choir. For Honeit, the rehearsal itself becomes a stage for testing social concepts – practicing an uprising solely defined by gestures of solidarity and care.
Ed. by Kerstin Honeit / Fiona McGovern
With contributions by Dela Dabulamanzi, Kerstin Honeit, Benjamin Liberatore, Yasmine Modestine, Marc Siegel
The voice labours constantly. It is particularly a worker when it is silent and on strike.
Against the background of Kerstin Honeit’s artistic practice, this publication examines the (film) voice from the aspect of labour. It discusses vocal connections to structural exclusions, as well as resistant and emancipatory gestures: the voice as a worker. From different perspectives and working practices, it illuminates forms of (translational) labour that are applied to the disembodied voice of cinema and its mediated extensions. In doing so, the contributors devote themselves to the hidden processes of a ‘voice normalisation’ as it is practised in commercial film dubbing in a racialising or classist manner. Equally, this publication is interested in the queering potential that is inherent in the disembodied voice too. The production processes involved in creating coherences between bodies and voices are made visible here; as fluid and in relation to structures and politics, therefore condense ways of seeing and hearing into ambiguous, multiple resonances.
Via an augmented reality app, excerpts of Kerstin Honeit’s video work become accessible on film.
Contributions:
Dela Dabulamanzi; We don’t have to wait for Hollywood anymore / Es ist hinfällig, auf Hollywood zu warten
Kerstin Honeit; The Voice as a Worker / Die Stimme als Arbeiter*in
Benjamin Liberatore; Strike and Instrument / Sich verweigernde Stimmen und anschlagende Streiks
Yasmine Modestine; Un (acoustique) délit de faciès / (Akustisches) Racial Profiling
Marc Siegel; Dubbing and the Dandy / Dubbing und der Dandy
Editor of the publishing house: Michaela Wünsch (b_books)
Translation: bellu&bellu (English) / Daniel Belasco Rogers (Deutsch)
Copy editing: Michaela Richter (Deutsch) / Emma Cattell (English)
Graphic design: Anna Voswinckel
Photos, images and printer’s copy: Carsten Eisfeld (Eberle & Eisfeld)
AR-App: Carla Streckwall & Alexander Govoni – Refrakt
Supported by the Berlin Department of Culture and Europe
Credits
Jochen Jezussek / poleposition dc, Mat Hand, Sarah Thom
The work Why or Why not? was commissioned by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Lars Henrik Gass, the festival director, asked filmmakers during the lockdown in Germany to make a video contribution to negotiate the question: Can and should one make films now?
The challenge of producing a film without a crew in front of or behind the camera was less interesting to Honeit than examining the massive shift in perspective of one’s own actions in the face of a worldwide pandemic. That is why she reduced the question to Why or Why not?, which is less about the possibilities or impossibilities of continuing an (artistic) practice in a lockdown, but more about questioning in general a continuation of life ‚as before‘ in the age of the Capitalocene.
The camera, which was set up in the streets of Berlin during the first lockdown in March 2020, frames several tableaux vivants of the new Corona everyday life, commenting via analogue text panels that are held into the picture. Two opposing narratives are presented in uncanny familiarity.
In August 2020, the Goethe Institut Montreal invited video artists from Canada and Germany to submit their ideas on the topic „The City in Times of the Virus“: Will nature reconquer the inner cities? How do social rules and medical hygiene rules affect our bodies? How will we move in the urban space? How will we interact in the era of social distancing? – The eight selected videos will be projected after dark onto screens placed in the storefront windows of the Goethe-Institut Montreal on Boulevard St. Laurent until March 2021.
The Jurys’ statement: In pandemic times the „new normal“ shouts at society. Kerstin Honeit analyzes the imperatives of (post) Covid-19 logics by deconstructing the new reality through a (self)reflective work. A Filmmakers point of view which shows the ambiguity of daily affirmations that affect artistic creation (or not). Peter Haueis
Jury: Anna Lena Seiser, Anyse Ducharme, Miryam Charles, Peter Haueis, Annette Hegel
Video / Installation, Dur. 17:17 min, 4K colour, sound
Credits
Jessica Páez, Ben Brix, Emma Cattell, Mieko Suzuki, Jochen Jezussek / poleposition dc, Philip Whitfield / WEFADETOGREY, Seeley Questing, Laurie Young, Joshua Schwebel, Luc Dunberry, Nikolaus Heveker, Esther Fisher, Anthony Wayne Howell, Amélie Lampron, Jean-Bernard Vidal
[ˈzi:lo]5
Silo 5, once the largest granary in the world, was celebrated by architect Le Corbusier in 1927 as a glimpse towards a utopian modernity and an aesthetic future of architecture. Since the 1990’s Montreals gigantic silo complex has been an industrial ruin, far too big to be demolished. The abandoned granary, now an unintended monument to colonial global extractionism, marks as a place of storage the starting point for the video piece [ˈzi:lo]5. The work approaches different gestures and technologies of preservation and collection and therefore – simultaneously and inseparably – also questions of overwrite, delete or rewrite.
Seen from the perspective of a near (queering) future, collections expose themselves as accumulations of gaps and omissions. These voids become resonating bodies, having the potential to open up spaces for other practices of intermediate storage.
[ˈzi:lo]5 was supported by n.b.k. Berlin; Senatsverwaltung fur Kultur und Europa, Berlin; Goethe Institut Montréal;
Montréal, arts interculturels and La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Montréal
It was awarded by the 34th Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media with the Norman Award 2021. The Jurys’ statement: This movie really thinks inside the box. But inside that box is another box. And then another. And what is it that must be kept so well hidden? Shapeshifting objects, that can either be symbols of resistance or dominance, of cultural freedom or appropriation. It all depends on how we pack or unpack them. For a layered yet playful work dealing with colonial and patriarchal heritage the jury awards [‘zi:lo]5 by Kerstin Honeit.
Jury: Andrea Martignoni, Marlene Denningmann and Thomas Renoldner
„An astute as well as witty discourse analysis of sexist and colonial racist narratives that even a panda bear is not safe from.“
Şeyda Kurt
Credits
Katja Anzelewsky, Stefan Aue, Ben Brix, Hr. Brix, Emma Cattell, Marlene Denningmann, Surya Gied, Paula Godinez, Emma Haugh, Valentin Hertweck, Sophie Hilbert, Anne Hölck, Suza Husse, annette hollywood, Jochen Jezussek, Philipp König, Renate Lorenz, Fiona McGovern, Daniel Belasco New, Jessica Páez, Irene Pätzug, Mieko Suzuki, Yuyen Lin-Woywod, Johanna Zinecke
PANDA MOONWALK or WHY MENG MENG WALKS BACKWARDS
Video / Installation, Dur. 8:00 min, HD colour, sound
Panda Moonwalk or Why Meng Meng Walks Backwards premiered within the framework of an exhibition series at Baerenzwinger Berlin, held in a former public bear enclosure which now serves as a place for contemporary art investigating the intersections between humans and animals.
In Kerstin Honeit’s video work Panda Moonwalk or Why Meng Meng Walks Backwards, commissioned by the City of Berlin for this particular location, human and inhuman bodies actively and resistantly assert themselves in the context of social injustices.
Since 2017 the two Giant Panda Bears Meng Meng and Jiao Qing have been hired out by China to the Berlin Zoo for millions of Euros. Unfortunately for the Zoo this profit seeking attraction did not work out as planned – in fact it worked backwards. Meng Meng, the female Panda will only walk backwards – probably protesting against her imprisonment. Surprisingly the international press takes a different, sexist route and suggests that Meng Meng’s behaviour relates to the fact that she has not yet bred and is seeking attention. Kerstin Honeit’s video aligns Meng Meng’s protest with other performances of protesting bodies using movement in public space to address grievances.
Panda Moonwalk has been screened and exhibited at many festival and shows since November 2018 :
Video Art at Midnight, Berlin; Kasseler Dokfest; Stuttgarter Filmwinter; International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; IFFF International Film Festival for Women, Cologne; CAA Art Museum, Hangzhou; Videorama – Werkleitz, Halle; Paderborn trifft Oberhausen; Film Plus Festival for Film Montage Art, Cologne; KFFK Short Film Festival, Cologne; Blonde Cobra #2 Festival for Queer and Experimental Film, Cologne; Kurzfilmtage, Regensburg; Kunstverein in Hamburg; HMKV Dortmund; Filmfest Dresden
The Jurys’ statement: What to do if the animal investment does not behave as it is expected to? The media spectacle about a panda lady in captivity is the starting point for a complex, playful reflection, because what is not supposed to be is not allowed. The public, and those responsible, invent explanations for the behaviour of the bear in the Berlin zoo, allowing their own prejudices to become visible. Sexism and racism are directed unchecked towards the bear.
The piece, between film and art in public space, combines elements of found footage, reportage and music videos with brilliant queer re-enactments of interviews with passers-by in front of the Berlin Zoo to a counter narrative. Meng Meng’s walking backwards becomes an act of rebellion.
The film makes various references: from Chinese panda diplomacy to animal husbandry in zoos, to the mechanisms of media spectacles. A playful dance group reenacts connections for the medialisation of prisons. In all of this, “Panda Moonwalk” remains a visually captivating, political and humorous experimental film.
We are very happy to award Kerstin Honeit’s „Panda Moonwalk or Why Meng Meng Walks Backwards“ the Jury Prize of the Cologne Short Film Festival.
Video Installation, Dur. 15:00 min, HD colour, sound
Credits
Jessica Páez – Production / Research / Dramaturgy
Peter Friedrich, Gunter Teichert, Damian Rebgetz, Paul Hankinson – Performance
Ljupcho Temelkovski, annette hollywood – Camera
Emma Cattell – Costume
Philipp Fröhlich, Jochen Jezussek – Sound
my castle your castle features a television broadcast from within the skeleton of what is becoming the ‘new’ Berliner Schloss. In an act of post-socialist urban cosmetics, the Prussian imperial castle is re-emerging from the ruins of state socialism at the historical center of Berlin. In this arena of continued ideological overwriting, Kerstin Honeit reenacts a Cold War trope from West German popular TV: Der Internationale Frühschoppen ran from 1952 to 1988 as a morning talk show for political debate (almost simultaneously to the existence of the GDR). Juxtaposing architectural and television production, my castle your castle engages and critiques the building site as a stage for crafting ‘nationhood’ and (white) ‘masculinity.’
Interviewed by a talk show host, two construction workers evoke the spectre of the demolished counterpart to the Prussian castle through a language of structural materialness: In the early 1970s, Peter Friedrich worked on the construction of the modernist parliament building of the GDR, the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), established on the remains of the imperial castle. 40 years later, Gunter Teichert oversaw the dismantling of the same building that had become a monument to the political unrest of 1989–1990. In the wake of the end of the GDR and German re-unification, the building had been an important site for the protests of GDR citizens and for negotiations between state functionaries and oppositional forces.
In the matter-of-fact conversation between the maker and the breaker of the palace, their body of work – in other words, the architectures of political representation and memory – disintegrates in the builders’ jargon. At the same time, the vocabulary of the materials and machinery from the current building site around them resonates with the redistribution of property and the urban redefinitions of political meanings that have followed the disappearance of state socialisms in Europe. In short interludes that interrupt and re-contextualise the talk show, the male drag show master emphasises and queers this vocabulary. Transposed into different corners of the construction site ruins, the friendly moderator of the morning show performs refractions of the conflicting ideologies at play: While mounting a huge excavation machine or lounging between concrete moulds, the host lip-syncs antagonistic speeches for or against the imperial castle and for or against the socialist palace. In dandyish poses s*he makes dualisms crumble and reveals the uncanny lines of convergence between the adversaries around all too similar desires.
White fog envelops the set toward the end of the show. While the speakers disappear, the colonial spectre of the place materialises. With the fog, two cowboy figures enter to sing and dance on the grounds where the ethnographic collections of Berlin’s State Museums will find their new home upon completion of the castle. Anticipating this unquestioned re-centring of Germany’s legacies of colonial violence, the cowboys’ camp reenactment of the song ‘I saw my Castles fall today’ by Ray Price subversively quotes the hegemonic figure of the settler colonialist while celebrating – with glitter and high heels – the demolition of patriarchal Western fantasies of omnipotence.
Suza Husse exhibition and talks: Drag Kings, Phantoms, Mirrors, Hands. (one hundred years of dis-/appearances)
at SixtyEight Art Institute Copenhagen, 2017
The Jurys’ statement: Based on the debate surrounding the reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace, the film addresses the question of how meaningful historicisation in urban planning is. The result is a surreal and at the same time haunting tableau.
Regina Barunke, Dunja Bialas, Frieder Schlaich
Since 2017 my castle your castle has been screened and exhibited at many festivals and shows:
Whitechapel Gallery, London / Hammer Museum, LA / Project 88, Mumbai / Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm / Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila / International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen / Museum Folkwang, Essen / Fajr International Film Festival, Teheran / Recontres Internationales – New Cinema and Contemporary Art Paris, Berlin / Kunsthalle Rostock, Rostock / Berlinische Galerie, Berlin / SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen / MMOMA Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow / Video Art at Midnight, Berlin / Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel / Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart / KFFK Short Film Festival, Cologne / Musrara Mix Festival, Jerusalem / Kurzfilmtage Regensburg, Regensburg / International Short Film Festival São Paulo, São Paulo / Ruhrtriennale 2019, Bochum
3-Channel Video Installation, Dur. 13:00 min, HD colour, sound
Talking Business, Text by Marc Siegel
The drama begins with the script. In an overhead shot of a grey table, we see a woman’s hands lay down two scripts for Talking Business before she sits down on the table next to them. Her face is not visible. The sound of her actions and the highly amplified location sound of an empty room give way to the overblown music that typically accompanies dramatic moments on film or television. Black out. New scene, different screen. Same music. A medium shot now situates the table in a studio setting: green screen, prominent white lights, and a small portable projection screen in the back. The woman, perched on the table in blue violet overalls, faces away from the camera, while reading one of the scripts. She is accompanied by a second person, an elegant woman dressed in a dark suit with a thin black tie, sitting at the table, also reading the script. The music segues into a dialogue between two women; the sound quality of the recording suggests a film or TV soundtrack. An elderly female voice expresses uncertainty about how to greet another woman. “Mrs. Carrington” is the newcomer’s name as indicated by white text against the black background of the first screen, which serves as a kind of displaced subtitle/translation for the aural exchange. This text is progressively highlighted, Karaoke style, so we can speak or mouth along and thereby take part in the unfolding drama between the script and these women, between the written and the spoken word. By the time the third screen is activated and the studio setting returns, empty this time except for projected images of the women’s encounter on the rear screen, it has slowly become clear, that Kerstin Honeit’s three screen video installation Talking Business (2015) is much more about the business of talking than about the talk of business.
Talking Business turns on the tense initial meeting of Alexis Carrington Colby (Joan Collins) and Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans) in the first episode of the second season of the Reagan-era TV series Dynasty. But Honeit spares us the spectacle of the famous cat fights that marked the women’s relationship, secured the show’s ratings and guaranteed Alexis and Krystle a spot in the camp archive of drag impersonation. Instead, she cleverly subjects the scene of the women’s initial meeting to a series of displacements, from one screen to the other, from English to German, and–most strikingly–from on-screen pretense to off-screen investment.
The off-screen of Honeit’s Dynasty is peopled first and foremost by Gisela Fritsch and Ursula Heyer, the actresses who lent their voices to the characters of Alexis and Krystle for the German synchronized version of the show. Working closely with the two septuagenerian voice actresses–Gisela Fritsch sadly died during the course of their collaboration–Honeit teases out the tensions between speaking a part and playing it, between dubbing glamorous women and embodying them. At one point over the course of rehearsals with Honeit, Heyer reflects on the empowering act of employing Alexis’s turns of phrase in her daily life: “I thought if I use my own words, I won’t manage to engage people. But when I said a sentence like, ‚It’ll snow in hell before I see you again,‘ then people laughed.” “You were always so much more Alexis than I was Krystle,” notes Fritsch.
Talking Business is a further contribution to Honeit’s ongoing artistic investigation of the voice, embodiment, and the technologies of audio-visual synchronization. Think for instance, of her earlier installations On and Off (2010) and Pigs in Progress (2013). Whereas in these pieces, Honeit employs her own body as the site of synchronization – the space from which social and political discourse speaks – Talking Business focuses instead on the bodies of professional actresses known primarily for their voices. Honeit is, of course, still visible in Talking Business. She’s the elegant woman in the aforementioned shot, the dandy recognizable from her other work. In the studio setting, she even dubs herself from earlier rehearsal footage with the actresses. Throughout the piece, however, she functions more like a moderator, who enables Heyer and Fritsch to give voice not merely to the words written for famous TV stars, but to those describing their own conflicted relationship to female embodiment and mediated presence.
That said, Talking Business does not strive to present some kind of demystified real life that was obscured by the fictions of a script or the industrial and technological production of glamor. What Honeit’s after is rather a critical laying bare of “the technologies of gender,” to invoke a concept from film theorist Teresa De Lauretis. That becomes clear in one of the most powerful moments in this new work. We hear an audio recording of Heyer’s resonant voice as the affected Alexis, and at the same time watch archival footage of the actress‘ transformation into Joan Collins at the hands of a hair and makeup artist. We see as well–on another screen–an image of a spinning reel-to-reel audio player atop Heyer’s newspaper clippings about her life as Carrington/Collins. Honeit’s synchronization of sound and images across these screens brings into focus the mediated and discursive production of a split female subjectivity, one produced at the intersection of representation and self-representation, at the crossroads of social technologies, institutional and critical discourses, and media practices.
And the third screen? That one’s reserved for amateurs like us, to read along and engage in our own acts of synchronization, however invested or subdued they may be in the space of a commercial gallery. Honeit’s gesture towards interactivity does not necessarily implicate gallery visitors in talking business, but it certainly gives us a chance to experience how awkward, alienating and empowering it can feel to take a screen star’s words into your own mouth.
Marc Siegel, Berlin August 2015
Talking Business was awarded by Monitoring (an exhibition of time based media as part of the Kasseler Documentary Festival).
The Jurys’ statement: In Talking Business, Kerstin Honeit explicitly, yet elegantly, breaks through the hidden mechanisms of media presentation. Role playing is made obvious, re-staged, interpreted and recycled in form of artistic self-references. Icons are dressed down and cycled back into the whys and wherefores of everyday life. What do we mean when we speak the language of media – and who is speaking?
Gerhard Wissner, Wolfgang Jung, Gerd Mörsch, Tanja Langenbach
Since 2015 Talking Business has been screened and exhibited at many festival and shows:
Berlinische Galerie; Video Art at Midnight, Berlin; Kasseler Dokfest; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Off Biennale, Cairo; Projections – Rotterdam Art Fair.
Installation (monitor / projection, 30 text cards on 3 aluminium rails), dur. 1:35 min, HD colour and b/w, sound
The installation ich muss mit ihnen sprechen (I have to talk to you) is a constant raising and (re-)setting of the voice, which poses the question of speech acts and empowerment.
The starting point of the work is an artistic research on the politics of German film dubbing and, connected to this, an examination of the representation of ‚Blackness‘ and People of Color in German mainstream film and TV.
The background is the dubbing repertoire of the white German-speaking voice of Whoopi Goldberg, who has dubbed more than 40 other African-American and PoC actresses, thus representing a white idea of Black voice. Stereotypical invocations, which are often already used on the visual filmic level, are then additionally manifested on the sound level of German-language film and TV adaptations.
The work picks up on the act of speaking itself through its archive-like sequence of the same voice speaking from different bodies. The various characters talk about the raising of the voice and become as a collective a chorus of protest of their own voicelessness. The 30 cards, arranged analogously in the order of the appearing actresses, contain both the translation of the individual sentences back into the English original as well as the naming of the respective US actress and the cinematic source of the scenes.
ich muss mit ihnen sprechen was part of Kerstin Honeit’s solo show Talking Business which premiered at the Berlin Art Week 2015, presented by cubus-m, Berlin. Further the work participated in the group show Throwing Gestures -The Entangelment between Gestures, Media & Politics 2018 in Berlin.
2-Channel Video Installation
Dur. 07.25 min, HD colour, sound
The “game” Joint Property, a match between connotations and empowerment, starts when the two figures appear, like players entering an arena. The two figures face each other, projected onto two walls directly opposite themselves.
Both figures are performed by Kerstin Honeit.
Figure A first throws a prop to Figure B, who catches it, puts it on, and throws back a new prop to figure A, who then puts it on and throws another back, and so on. We see a continuing gestural dialogue between the players. During this match Honeit’s own body undergoes a transformation through a increasingly absurd mixture of costumes, including a plastic hood, high heels and gold metallic dress.
The audience, standing in between the two projections, has the illusion that the props fly from one figure to the other, as in a tennis match. Between each throw and catch, words such as “imitation”, “pleasure” or “economy” are announced by different voices which have been lip-synched by the artist. The word “economy” for example is called out in between the lipstick and tie props and refers equally to both figures.
After the throwing, catching of props and dressing up has reached its peak the two players leave the “arena”.
Credits Katja Anzelewsky / Daniel Belasco Rogers – Camera
Emma Cattell – Post production
Daniel Belasco Rogers – Coding
Joint Property was part of Kerstin Honeit’s solo show ’say it like it is’ which premiered at the Berlin Gallery Weekend 2013, presented by Gallery cubus-m, Berlin.
The video installation Pigs in Progress connects the issue of the current gentrification processes of Berlin, where long term tenants are moved out of the city centre to provide profitable housing space, with the experience that house owners in the wealthier suburbs have with wild boars in their gardens, the boars claming back “property” that has been taken away from them.
The tenants’ concerns about losing their homes and the house owners’ worries of being invaded by wild boars were audio-recorded and then later re-presented via the technique of lip-synching. Honeit performed this piece for video by sitting on a chair in between two actual wild boars in the forest on the outskirts of Berlin.
Credits with
M. Gericke Kotti & Co
Residents of “Am Eichkamp”
Camera
Katja Anzelewsky / Sarah Thom
Post production
Emma Cattell
Pigs in Progress was part of Kerstin Honeit’s solo show “say it like it is” which premiered at the Berlin Gallery Weekend 2013, presented by Gallery cubus-m, Berlin.