Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff
The Berlin-based artist duo Calla Henkel (b. 1988, US) and Max Pitegoff (b. 1987, US) have been working together for over a decade. Together, they found and run venues as catalysts for collaborative artistic work. Their expanded documentation of these spaces traces the economic, structural and often personal systems that build shared spaces, taking form through photographs, texts and narratives. From 2013 to 2015 they ran New Theater, a storefront in Berlin-Kreuzberg where they wrote and produced plays with artists, writers and musicians. In 2017/18, they led the artistic direction of the Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne Theater in Berlin, staging their own original plays and commissioning performances by artists. Since 2019, they have been running TV – a bar, performance space and film studio in Berlin-Schöneberg. Recent solo exhibitions include Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg (2020), Kunstverein Hamburg (2018), and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2016).
The Berlin-based artist duo Calla Henkel (b. 1988, US) and Max Pitegoff (b. 1987, US) have been working together for over a decade. Together, they found and run venues as catalysts for collaborative artistic work. Their expanded documentation of these spaces traces the economic, structural and often personal systems that build shared spaces, taking form through photographs, texts and narratives. From 2013 to 2015 they ran New Theater, a storefront in Berlin-Kreuzberg where they wrote and produced plays with artists, writers and musicians. In 2017/18, they led the artistic direction of the Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne Theater in Berlin, staging their own original plays and commissioning performances by artists. Since 2019, they have been running TV – a bar, performance space and film studio in Berlin-Schöneberg. Recent solo exhibitions include Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg (2020), Kunstverein Hamburg (2018), and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2016).
In their artistic practice, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff rely on their own experience of founding and running venues to investigate the nature of shared spaces: their inner structures, politics, and economics. Collaboration is central to their process — they involve a wide range of participants in creating their works, and explore the relations within these close-knit or newly formed communities. Using a variety of mediums, such as theatre, text, and photography, they reconsider the common scenarios from the life of these spaces and turn them into amusing and occasionally paradoxical spectacles.
For the Future Generation Art Prize 2021, Henkel and Pitegoff present their ongoing project Paradise, a TV series shot at their own bar, TV, in Berlin, cast with regulars, employees, and neighbours. The plot unfolds in the fictional bar Paradise in 2023, where the bartenders are forced to work as newscasters, following their absent boss’s desire to transform the place into a hyper-local news channel by reading prepared speeches to the bar’s customers via teleprompter. Over the course of the show, the employees attempt to take control over the bar’s narrative.
For the project, the artists collaborated with four Kyiv-based bars and clubs, which host monitors playing two episodes of Paradise on loop for the duration of the exhibition. As an act of sharing, pieces of furniture from these spaces have been swapped with furniture from TV, and are presented in PinchukArtCentre as seating for the screening of a trailer for Paradise.
