The Art:Ist

Portrait William Pope. L: Peyton Fulford

Best known for his performance series "Crawls" since the 1970s, playwright, poet and artist William Pope. L uses satirically exaggerated performances, installations, writings, and drawings to address structural discrimination against marginalized societal groups based on skin color, gender, and class. His works generate discomfort and shame. For Berlin's Schinkel Pavillon, Pope. L conceived his installation-performance "Contraption" - a term that stands for a machine or device that seems unnecessarily complicated and is often poorly built or unsafe. This machine, ostensibly based on a simple construction drawing by Pope. L, shreds wooden architectural models referring to the Schinkel Pavillon, the Humboldt Forum, and the Neue Wache, while visitors can see through the window the original buildings that represent the imperial, colonial power aesthetics of Prussia and the German Empire, at a time when, in parallel to colonial oppression and a constructed claim to power, the ideal of humanism was being developed. At the same time, actors interoperate with the machine according to a prescribed storyline, related to the short story "Forlesen" by SciFi author Gene Wolfe, and read Pope. L´s poem "Between a Figure and a Letter": Of "Immigration ideas, crawled out of the asses of the contemporaries" and of the "docential" (portmanteau of docent and essentiell) posturing and "calculated ignorance" of the "Schinkelians."

Maxi Broecking (* 1969 in Berlin) works as a journalist for Die Zeit, Der Tagesspiegel, Taz, Faz, Kunstzeitung, Fono Forum, Jazzthing, Spex, The:Artist and RBB on jazz, improvised music and contemporary art with own book publications. Her column for Die Zeit was nominated for the Grimme Online Award. Broecking  was  a speaker for the symposium "Jazz in the Global Imagination: Music, Journalism and Culture"  at Columbia University, New York, for the international conference "Lost in Diversity - A Transatlantic Dialogue on the Social Relevance of Jazz" and "Vision, Perception, Friction: How Jazz Became Art And Attacked" at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. In 2013, Broecking presented her research on jazz, improvised music and art to the Berlin Improvisation Research Group. Maxi Broecking is co-founder and owner of Broecking Publishing | Creative People Books. Since 2021 she is the curator of the Jazz + Art series of the Enjoy Jazz Festival and the Unesco Cities of Music association. In the same year she hosted the intersectionality panel "Power and Identity" at Nationaltheater, Mannheim.  In 2022 she founded the platform THE ART:IST, a digital space for articles, blogs and artist interviews regarding art and art perception in relation to intersectionality, diversity and decolonization. The author lives in Berlin.