Exhibition
Phoenix's Last Song
24 Sep 2022 – 4 Nov 2022
Regular hours
- Saturday
- 16:00 – 19:00
- Wednesday
- 16:00 – 19:00
- Thursday
- 16:00 – 19:00
- Friday
- 16:00 – 19:00
Address
- Am Flutgraben 3
- Berlin
Berlin - 12435
- Germany
Travel Information
- 265
- Schlesisches Tor
- S-Bahn Treptower Park
Taking and delving into questions of caregiving and future feminisms as a point of departure, this exhibition, along with workshops and a symposium/round table, seeks to interrogate the systems of domination that shape mothering practices and how to conceptualize change.
About
In the video installation Phoenix’s Last Song (2019) the viewer is presented with the legend of the paradisiacal bird who descends to earth in order to die. Whilst the sun sets fire to the pyre of twigs on which she lays, the phoenix sings a song to the child that will be born from her ashes. Her words are a call to think and live against the patriarchal, capitalist and colonial power structures that define the world as we know it. The text draws on the work of feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir and Emma Goldman, who each look at the ways in which institutions like the bourgeois family, state education, the legal apparatus inscribe the child within these power structures. Against this background, Phoenix’s Last Song opens up a space to imagine how a new world may arise out of a burning of the old.
(Original sound of the piece is produced and performed by Sami El-Enany, the voice-over by Emma Bennett.)
Dorine van Meel is an artist based between Brussels and Amsterdam who’s practice manifests as video installations, performances and collaborative projects. Her interest in discursive practices, feminist methodologies, and self-organised forms of collaborations is reflected within the collective projects she initiates. www.dorinevanmeel.com
The exhibition Phoenix’s Last Song takes place as a cooperation project and as part of the transnational exhibition Empowerment (10.9.22-8.1.23) by and at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.