Adrian Piper – Adrian Moves to Berlin

In the organizer's words:

Adrian Piper - Adrian Moves to Berlin

(2007, performance; 2017, video projection)

Adrian Piper's Adrian Moves to Berlin shows the artist dancing on Berlin's Alexanderplatz in 2007. At the time of the performance, she had just permanently turned her back on the USA, where she was born, grew up and had not only been artistically active since the 1960s, but had also taught at various universities as an analytical philosopher - due to the structural racism and institutionalized discrimination that she had criticized time and again since the 1970s. However, the title is not only a direct reference to this move, but also to the sound of the city to which people dance here: House music, as it was very present in the clubs of Berlin and, alongside other varieties of electronic music, provided the soundtrack for the encounter between East and West after the fall of the Wall - and which, for its part, owes much to a Black American club music that was incomparably more marginalized on the other side of the Atlantic. Music has repeatedly appeared in Adrian Piper's artistic work since the 1970s at the latest - as a marker of cultural differences and hierarchies as well as an expression of self-confidence and self-empowerment, but also as a means of creating cross-border common ground. In her performance Funk Lessons, which was performed for the first time in 1983, she taught her audience in a deliberately didactic manner how to dance to funk music, a music that originated in the Black working class, and teaches its history and context. At some point, the whole thing dissolves into a casual party and for a brief moment, boundaries seem to be suspended - a concrete exercise for a more open, tolerant society, fed by the power of music.

Adrian Piper (born 1948, USA) began in the 1960s with conceptual works, into which she soon introduced political themes such as questions of racism and gender roles. Parallel to her artistic work, Adrian Piper pursued an academic career as an analytical philosopher and taught at various universities in the USA until 2008, when her then employer, Wellesley College, terminated her professorship because she had refused to return to the USA from Berlin, where she has lived and worked since 2005, as long as she was on an official list of "suspicious travelers". Adrian Piper has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including the Golden Lion Venice Biennale in 2015, the Käthe Kollwitz Prize of the Akademie der Künste in 2018, of which she has been a member ever since, the Goslarer Kaiserring in 2021 and the Harvard Arts Medal in 2023. Her works can be found in numerous collections, including the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, and have been shown in several large-scale retrospectives, including at MoMA New York in 2018. Her most recent retrospective exhibition, RACE TRAITOR, opened at PAC Milan in March 2024.