Inclusive Break! Pop-Up! | When does creativity arise?

When and where does creativity arise? Which role does time play in artistic processes? And how do we actually experience reality in times of an increase in the digital, and in a pandemic situation where limits and possibilities between the here and now, closeness and distance are constantly shifting?

Choose a box, touch a material, or take a tool in your hand and be part of a game with time, part of an artistic intervention! The traces that you will leave, are traces of a temporal change, traces of interaction and confrontation, and at the same time they are expressions of your own creativity and your curiosity about the space, the time, about the atmosphere, the air, and the people around you.

After a year of intense intellectual and philosophical exchange, the Shanghai artists Kang Qing, Gao Shan and Zhou Yinchen as well as the Berlin artists Stella Geppert, Nicole Wendel and Saskia Wendland invite you to this artistic pop-up event that will take place somehow simultaneously, and somehow not quite at the same time at Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai, and at the HAUNT art space in Berlin.

At both locations visitors will find an identical collection of 66 boxes building a rectangular field on the ground. 36 of these boxes are filled with materials and tools that the artists have chosen to put in. These materials and objects are important and crucial for each of the artists, as well as for their individual artistic practises. The other 30 boxes are (still) empty.

It is the visitor’s choice, to get into contact with these materials and tools, to change them, to use them, to move them and to change their positions as if in a chess game. Yet, these moves, actions, and temporary transformations won´t remain unnoticed. They are captured by the lens of a video camera that transmits a live image to the respectively other place. By so doing, the traces of time in Berlin will also become visible in Shanghai, and the temporary changes in Shanghai will be noticeable in Berlin.

A brief snapshot – a little stopover in a long artistic dialogue guided by the Shanghai curator, and academic advisor Zhang Ting, and gaining profoundness through the intellectual contributions by the two philosophers Yang Junlei from Shanghai, and Iris Dankemeyer from Berlin. The slightly humorous title “Inclusive Break” reflects the relationship between work and (free) time, and questions different states of being, namely the break, the moment between inhale and exhale, the transition from now to then.