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Review

3hd 2021
Power Play

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Creamcake presents short films at the Berlinische Galerie

© Creamcake

There’s a biblical paradise at the root of Western convention and normative constructions. The myth of the binary starts with Adam and Eve—the illusory contradiction between pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ defined by their expulsion from God’s playground.

Creamcake’s “Garden of Eden” presents a selection of short films at Berlinische Galerie, as part of the festival „3hd 2021: Power Play”. It suggests an alternative to accepted reads on mainstream reality from a queer-feminist perspective. Contributions orbit questions of identity formation, the body and its imprint politically, socially and culturally, and the expression of gender and sexuality.

Creamcake is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary platform, negotiating the point of convergence in electronic music, contemporary art and digital technologies. Now in its seventh edition, Creamcake’s 3hd festival approaches the transgressive phenomenon of contemporary BDSM, kink and its varieties of exercises in force and control through art, music, performance and film. This year’s “Power Play”—happening at various venues across Berlin and on the internet—considers the perception of a sexuality that defines itself as ‚play‘.

Programme “Garden of Eden”

  • “Sequence 02” by Cristine Brache shows marginal women’s bodies and their reproduction as objects in circulation, across found footage of fetish porn and recollections of the gendered advice from her migrant grandfather. In complicating and questioning economic, political and sexual power relations as both oppressed and empowered, the artist questions the expectations of ‘otherness’ in the United States. 
  • “Delusional Crime and Punishment” by Lu Yang invokes notions of hell across religions. A 3D- scanned head mounted on a stock CGI body conjectures that if humankind was created by a God, our propensity to sin is preordained, and our road to perdition inevitable. 
  • “In the Reflection of Ancient Tides” by Keioui Keijaun Thomas addresses blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Through movement and matter, she deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing; eroticized and marginalized representations of black bodies in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of ‘thing-ness’. 
  • The SPIT (2020) collaborative project explores the balance between play and consent, where the ambiguous soft spitting between the two strangers becomes a flirting game.
  • “Shrines” by Jacolby Satterwhite deconstructs hegemonic visual cultures from Christian iconography and Western art history and replaces them with a Black reigned world of pleasure.

Online Streaming: 3hd.tv and Virtual Video Space
More information: 3hd-festival.com

Artists

Cristine Brache (New York) often takes her personal and family history as a starting point to explore shared histories and trauma, womanhood, and the inevitable power dynamics that accompany these themes. Brache received her MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, with recent solo exhibitions including those held at Fierman Gallery, New York, Miami’s Locust Projects, and Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles.

Lu Yang (Shanghai) has held exhibitions at UCCA and MWoods in Beijing, Shanghai’s Cc Foundation, and Spiral in Tokyo, as well as Fukuoka Museum of Asian Art, Berlin’s Société, and MOCA Cleveland. He has participated in several international biennials and triennials.

Keioui Keijaun Thomas (New York) creates live performance and multimedia installations that address blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas earned her Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA with Honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Thomas has presented work nationally and internationally.

SPIT (Berlin/Sweden) is a collective, including Natasja Loutchko, Marta Orlando and Clémentine Roy, founded in 2020. Working with video, performance and writing, they aim to challenge the vision of both the singularity and plurality, queering their collective frame towards expressing new forms of behavior.

Jacolby Satterwhite (New York) is celebrated for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality and fantasy through immersive installation, virtual reality and digital media. Satterwhite received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally.

3hd is made possible with the support of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

The programme in the IBB video space in the Berlinische Galerie is made possible with the support of Investitionsbank Berlin.