About “Day 10”:
Fine Art Film
Exhibition | Performance Piece: NKW’s head is shaved by willing participants from the audience, while Day 10 is projected over, featuring prose text above a musical soundtrack.
March 26, 2022 Berlin, Germany
Curated by fünfter Löffel.
Find out more about the “Opening Hours” exhibition on the exhibition website:
"Day 10" is a moving image work joining all elements of the Performance Art Piece which took place during “Opening Hours”: a 12 hour exhibition by fünfter Löffel: an independent art initiative focused on creating multidisciplinary spaces and cinematic experiences between Berlin and Istanbul. | follow funfter loffel on instagram
During the performance, NKW worked alongside the collective, Berlin Blue Star, to create a Living Room space: a Queer Home Away From Home. The collective put together a timetable that represented things a person might do while in lockdown isolation. The aim of the exhibition was to repeat these tasks in the presence of friends and strangers; reconnecting with a time when the pandemic became synonymous with loneliness and changing the narrative. Creating a queer space. A safe space.
Alongside showing some artwork, NKW created an eclectic film, comprised of videos taken alone during the lockdown where they discovered a newfound love for dance and movement, and videos taken on a trip to Lanzarote with a friend of ten years and a friend made during lockdown. The juxtaposition of imagery expressing a need to be free and that freedom finally being achieved is then mixed with a clip of NKW shaving their own head.
During the first lockdown, it was a fellow member of their collective, Berlin Blue Star, who shaved NKW's head for the first time. Amidst tears, there was also an unstoppable smile. Thus, during the Opening Hours exhibition, NKW recreated this moment, being shaved by a new friend, by sitting in The Living Room in front of the screen whilst the Day 10 film was projected and inviting the audience to come, one by one, to shave the afro that had grown since that time.
The soundtrack is comprised of multiple different tracks, on top of which NKW recites words from the diary written on Days 10 - 13 of the first lockdown.
Words by fünfter Löffel:
"Opening Hours 16:00-03:00 is a curatorial approach to merge boundaries between private and public spaces. The interdisciplinary line-up aims to make visitors aware of the shift into a festival setting and to experience room structures in a temporary understanding, being open for eleven (the clocks changed, so eventually 12) hours. Visual arts, music, video works, site-specific installations and live performances bring the exhibition venue, the Treptow Ateliers e.V. in Schöneweide, to a dignified end before they are gentrified into individual apartments. It is an experiment, brings the exhibition space into a multidisciplinary structure, transforming it from a sculpture garden into a music stage, into an intimate living room, into a video room, the Pink. The viewer has the choice of how to anticipate the organic biotope of fünfter Löffel."