Why Words Now: Calla Henkel og Max Pitegoff

For a discipline named after its engagement with the visual, there is an awful lot of words in the world of visual arts. In partnership with Art Hub Copenhagen, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Sculpture, invites international artists, critics, curators and art historians to discuss the role of language in visual art through their individual practices.

Why Words Now is curated by artist and academy professor Simon Dybbroe Møller, and independent curator and PhD student at Aarhus University Helga Just Christoffersen.

In this talk Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff will show their in-progress tv series Paradise while discussing fictions and alternatives within artist-run structures that reflect on performance, labor, language and collapse.

Calla Henkel born 1988 in Minneapolis and Max Pitegoff born 1987 in Boston, live and work in Berlin. Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff interrogate the logics of shifting public and private spaces, stages, and personal/political alliances. They have run a string of bars and theaters, where they staged over 40 collaborative theatrical performances.

These included plays at New Theater, which they opened in 2013, as well as a number of productions in the Grüner Salon of the Volksbühne, the “People’s Theatre”, Berlin’s iconic theatre located on Rosa–Luxemburg–Platz. Their latest project is called TV, a bar that, in its off-hours, functions as a film studio where Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff are currently shooting a sitcom titled Paradise.

Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.