On the occasion of their exhibition eyes without at SomoS, Berlin, one of the founding members of LILITU - a young independent curatorial project based in Berlin - reflects on their first year and at how the project renewed their hope in the art world. As a response to institutions’ closed doors and inaccessible cultures, LILITU searched for and fostered a supportive community, that quickly became a space for experiment in collaboration as well as an artistic practice.
APRIL 2023
We find ourselves in my apartment, Enzo and I. It is a weird time: we know a lot of incredible, talented artists who do not seem to manage to get past their small-scale, dead-end, and self-financed exhibitions. Actually, we ourselves are exactly as stuck. What we want to do is work in, and with, the arts; yet it feels like our paths did not bring us to the “right” people, to the “right” unpaid gallery internship, to the “right” assistant-of-an-assistant position in a minor museum. Berlin, where have all the opportunities gone? Were there even any to start?
On this evening, we look at each other with different eyes. “What do you want to do with your life?” I ask him. Enzo would like to be a gallerist - and, if you just talk to him for ten minutes, you would understand that he could be brilliant at it. He knows the right names. He recognizes quality. He has a pragmatic mindset. I, on the other hand, get excited thinking of what happens when several different elements are brought together. I want art to be what helps us connect.
MAY-JULY 2023
Yes, I must confess, the artists we worked with for our first show all belong to our circle of friends. Another confession: we did not have any budget.
Despite the material scarcity and instead of being discouraged we compensated by spending a lot of time with the artists, discussing how we can make this thing work and where we need to compromise. Through these encounters, it becomes clearer and clearer that the process is as important as the exhibition. We decided to produce a small catalog to collect our observations on the works, focusing on making the themes approachable for any audience we might encounter.
We want people to think with the works, to talk to them, engage with them, and not to see them as the end of the artistic experience but just the beginning. The more we worked on it, the more the publication became the means to shift the focus from the end product to the process: a process that started with the open call and which, at this point, sees no end.
We meet the artists one-on-one. We meet them all together. We organize to always have some artists present during the opening hours of the show so that whoever comes will always have a chance to ask them questions.
Enzo and I looked at each other; we wanted to be realistic: it is already a success if twenty people show up. From the 30th of June to the 2nd of July 2023, more than a hundred come to OpenTiny, in Neukölln, to see SEE IT THROUGH YOUR HANDS. Among a beautiful selection of works, people talk about the pieces, discuss artistic matters, and buy a catalog. As we finished the deinstall we hugged each other. It was a success, and we’d never felt so much satisfaction before. Never.
SEPTEMBER 2023
After a well-earned break, we sit down together and draw the lines of what we want to keep from this experience. Surely, we could not have done anything alone. Surely, we did something right. The more we talk about it, the more the communal aspects of the work gain importance. We want to share them and nurture them. We do not know how, but we decide that to start doing is our best chance. As OpenTiny offered us a home once, we decided to install a monthly appointment there, an open meeting for artists of different experiences. For us, it is a chance to open, offer, and hold the space for creative exchange. We set guidelines, discuss for hours how to set our egos aside and put ourselves at the group's disposal, to make a flyer, and start.
“Let us organize an exhibition,” I say. Eventually, Enzo agrees. In a few days, we wrote an open call that we spread around. By the end of the month, we have a selection of seven artists. We have a show. We have the curatorial duo LILITU.
Fig.1
OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2023
The meetings continued. LILITU was doing well, but we kept feeling the weight and pressure of the surrounding crises. The inflation challenged us. We still found it important to be able to keep LILITU an affordable service for the arts, meaning we could not rely on it economically. Then, the missed opportunity for cultural institutions to take a stand on important political issues pushed me to quit my job as a cultural worker. Instability was around the corner.
We wanted to start planning a new exhibition, but our own survival in this social unrest got in the way. We thought of applying for funding, but we could not help but feel disheartened by the way the city and the government were reacting to the genocide in Gaza. Despite the general social and political gloominess we kept the motivation to offer ourselves and others a chance to understand what role artistic production can have at this moment. Surely, it can help us open rooms for dialogue and it can bring people together. If we want that for artists and audiences, we need to allow a community to engender itself, and continue acting as facilitators. Then perhaps anything can be possible.
JANUARY-MARCH 2024
With the new year, some ideas start rolling and coming together. We release another open call. This time, we feel the need to talk about political, cultural, and social issues. How can we develop a topic that allows for such discussion? We start thinking of what makes us human, individually and collectively. If the personal is political, what role do our identity, and its signifiers, play in our contemporary society?
We wanted to depart from something visible, and simple. The face is what we decided to focus on. But not the face as a portrait’s subject matter; rather, the face as a category, under which many different aspects of our social structure fall. The face is the battleground of political, bureaucratic, cultural, personal, and ethical conflicts. The face, and how it gets instrumentalized, altered, and canceled by the powerful agents of our society. We look into how new media and polycrises change our perception of faces, particularly in these post-pandemic times of digital hyper-connectivity.
We receive more than three hundred submissions, from all over the world. How will we manage all of this? Once more, we have no budget, but also we have no platform. We decide we will do what we know, and work with the artists, not above them. We decided to rely on, and build upon, the community, and we began crowdfunding. That - we can say now - was a successful idea.
Fig.2
APRIL-JUNE 2024
We recognize how the absence of money brings big limitations. We are very careful before asking someone to travel to the city. The balance between what we offer and what we request is a delicate one, and there is enough exploitation in the art world as it is. We present our work, our vision, and our conditions. What we ask is for the artists to be engaged, to be willing to meet with us a few times before the exhibition, to be present, not only at the opening but sporadically over the duration of the show. What we offer is the exhibition, a symbolic artist's fee that our crowdfunding successfully allowed for, and, most importantly, the process, and its resulting catalog. We know it’s not much, and that the artists need to make a living as well, but against our expectations, everyone seems enthusiastic: about the idea, our interest, the engagement, and the care.
Most of the artists’ past group exhibitions felt impersonal and strictly functional, without even much of a chance to get to know other people. What we do is different, and all that we need is the artists’ commitment and support. Commitment because we want to really talk about their work, really get to know them, really understand and accommodate everyone’s wishes and needs. Following principles of transparency and horizontality, we take over the role of organizers, facilitating the making of collective decisions. Before deciding on the installation setting, we brought all the artists to the space, heard their opinions and wishes, combined them with the collective needs and presented them with our options.
To keep a big group together is tough, considering as well that we cannot afford to properly pay the artists, we need to adapt to their work schedules as well. Still, their enthusiasm is not only encouraging, but extremely fulfilling.
We present our project to SomoS, the international and non-commercial artists-run space on Kottbusser Damm. We find an enthusiastic response to our artists and our project: we have found not only a space but a collaborator.
As we proceeded with the preparations, everyone offered to help in the ways they could: some putting tech at our disposal, others connecting us to the right contacts, and, others gifting us their time and helping hands. Perhaps we lack the great economic means, but none of us seems willing to let the exhibition fall short because of that.
JULY 2024
A couple of weeks separate us from the show, eyes without, which will open at SomoS on July 23rd. We prepare for printing the catalog, fix the last details, and sort the last beverages for the vernissage. The excitement is rising, and the feedback we constantly receive from the artists is both heartwarming and encouraging. Our hands shake with anticipation as we prepare for the big moment.
But, truly, we do not only focus on the show; that is just one part of what we created. Every step of the way was a small artwork in itself that challenged us and forced us to recognize that there are different ways of doing things. Once more the catalog testifies to this. Throughout the process, where compromises and decisions were hard to make, there, the trust we received was more powerful than any monetary compensation. Through the fostering of connections, we overcame our economic shortcomings, and we actually saw the birth of something that will persist beyond the show itself: a community. Hopefully, the exhibition will open discourses that will resonate with its audience far beyond the show’s opening hours. Hopefully, the artists will have had trustworthy and sustainable rewards additional any any economic ones. The creation of a community not only brought to life something that would otherwise have been unimaginable, but it, as well, has generated room for shared agency and transparent discourses about different forms of rewards. We will continue to hope that working with more and more people will not only push the limits of collaboration against the limits of capital but that it will show progressively bigger audiences what we can do when we think outside of economic schemes and trust each other.
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LILITU is a non-profit, independent curation project based between Berlin and London. The project was founded by Nina Abba and Vincenzo Werner in 2023. Its next, show eyes without, will run from the 23rd to the 27th of July at SomoS, Berlin.
- Images
Cover: Collective brainstorming and gathering with the artists at SomoS before the setup to discuss and plan the disposition. Photo: Nina Abba / Michael Plessl.
Fig.1 Discussion of the performance during a visit to Brenner Havelka PLlessl’s atelier in Bärndorf, Austria. Photo: Michael Plessl.
Fig.2 Preparatory curatorial work with artist Amalie Smidth in Berlin. Photo: Nina Abba.
