curating.org

Berlin-based American artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff have been working collaboratively since 2008. They have run several spaces over the past five years, including New Theater in Berlin (2013-2015), where they wrote and produced plays with large groups of artists, writers and musicians. Their work often focuses on the personal logics of community, collaboration, and the type of rules and systems that build shared space, including its representation, both visual and non-visual. Describing the lack of documentation on New Theater’s website, writer Isabella Zamboni says “this offers a telling illustration of their concern over the importance of presence, temporariness and of their distrust in slippery representational means. Working mainly with performance, photographs and texts, the duo reflect often on the conditions of artistic production and its constitutive emotional and interpersonal nature.”

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff will discuss their relationship to the production of space, performance, and fiction through their work at New Theater, and connecting it to their photographic work in which they document changing spaces in Berlin — startups, AirBnB apartments, and most recently the residence of the American Ambassador to Germany.