Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds is an exhibition at the ifa Gallery Berlin and a festival at the Goethe-Institut in Exile. Both present a broad selection of works by artists who have found a safe haven in Germany with the support of the Martin Roth-Initiative. The exhibition and the festival are curated by former scholarship holders. Against the backdrop of the strengthening of authoritarian forces and a world increasingly characterised by crises, they explore questions of belonging, uprooting and new beginnings in unknown landscapes.

Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds is an exhibition at the ifa Gallery Berlin and a festival at the Goethe-Institut in Exile. Both present a broad selection of works by artists who have found a safe haven in Germany with the support of the Martin Roth-Initiative. The exhibition and the festival are curated by former scholarship holders. Against the backdrop of the strengthening of authoritarian forces and a world increasingly characterised by crises, they explore questions of belonging, uprooting and new beginnings in unknown landscapes.

Sara Ouhaddou's artistic practice explores the relationships between artisans and artists.  In her solo exhibition Display at the ifa Gallery Berlin, she explores how art and craft intertwine and blur the boundaries of classic ‘commissioning’. Unique Moroccan crafts such as ceramics, embroidery, glass design and jewellery were included in their diversity, commissioned or jointly produced.

School of Casablanca is a collaboration between ifa-Galerie Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) and ThinkArt (Casablanca). It started in 2020 and was realized with the support of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Goethe-Institute Morocco and Zamân Books & Curating. Formed as an interdisciplinary research-, residence-, exchange- and exhibition project, the participants of School of Casablanca, Bik Van der Pol, Céline Condorelli, Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa and Gilles Aubry, Manuel Raeder, Marion von Osten, Peter Spillmann, Abdeslam Ziou Ziou with Grocco-Trick 54, Sophia Attigui, Fatine Arafati, and Nassim Azarzar aim to further the legacy of the historical Casablanca Art School in contemporary thought.

"Breath Pieces (Part II)" 

Brazilian artist and researcher Camila Sposati, renowned for her interdisciplinary artistic oeuvre, presents her exhibition Breath Pieces at the ifa Gallery Berlin. The exhibition represents a renewed voyage into the profound intricacies of sound, the natural world and the symbiotic interweaving of culture, history, science and politics.
Curated by Bettina Korintenberg and Marcelo Rezende

"A Sacred Story at the Tree of Life" takes the form of an ephemeral installation centered on the inscription and significance of landscapes and spaces through memory and ceremony. The shade of the baobab, the sacred tree, becomes the gathering place where we commune with poets, rioters, storytellers, vocalists, players of instruments, and DJs. Over a period of six weeks the gallery transforms into a portal for the platform, Listening at Pungwe.

This project revolves around a theme central to Elisabetta Di Maggio’s art: the communication networks that serve to transmit information. Her works reveal the close ties that exist among webs, circuits, grids, structures, and meshes that belong to very different worlds, but are all part of the sphere in which we lead our everyday lives.

In the exhibition Chains of Interest, Isaac Chong Wai, Lizza May David, Wilhelm Klotzek, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika and Gitte Villesen continue their personal explorations of the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen art collection.

The gallery shows several performances in the city space and in the gallery. Isaac Chong Wai presents his performance Die Mütter (The Mothers) at Klosterruine Berlin. Adrien Missika activates MOTUS, a mobile exhibition display in the form of a bicycle in different public spaces. Ofri Lapid has developed a multilingual Language Tour. Full programme: https://untietotie.org/en/event/berlin-art-week-2022/

The historic idiosyncrasies and structures of the ifa art collection, and its composition specifically via the partial preservation of the collection that once belonged to the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) Zentrum für Kunstausstellungen all become opportunities for a collaborative artistic-curatorial investigation. The artists interrogate the collection based on their own “Spheres of Interest”, searching for overlaps, parallels, and omissions.

The second part of the exhibition "Gods Moving in Places. The Day Reader" will dive deeper into the relationship of  living landscapes to memories, histories and colonial trauma. Through the works of French-Guyanese artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc the exhibition will take the Amazonian forest of the Guiana Shield as a starting point to explore the interwoveness of times and place.

"Gods Moving in Places" is a two-part exhibition exploring the political potential of the Caribbean and Guyanese imagination. It presents the memories, narratives and histories that have shaped this imagination – including indigenous mythologies and the violent conquest of the South American continent – through what Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) calls the tropical night and the spirits and figures that weigh on the shoulders.

Pallay Pampa is a Quechua expression which describes the different areas of weave on Andean textiles: Pallay symbolises what is said, while Pampa symbolises the unsaid. The exhibition brings together artists and interdisciplinary researchers from Peru to reflect critically on the cultural contributions by Andean communities in the current context, given the many consequences of globalization and colonization.

ifa Gallery Berlin is presenting drawings by Joseph Beuys from the ifa art collection in a dialogue with the artistic positions of Andrea Acosta, Anne Duk Hee Jordan and Sara Ouhaddou. Both Beuys and the featured artists address overlooked, disregarded, handed-down forms of knowledge. Based on the relationship to found materials, they examine economic and ecological issues, initiating processes that have the potential to effect lasting societal change.